Down to Earth

4

The train rattled east over the dry South African plain. Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers sat side by side, staring out the window like a couple of tourists. They were a couple of tourists; this was the first time they’d been out of Cape Town since the Lizards sent them into exile there.

“Looks like New Mexico, or maybe Arizona,” Rance said. “Same kind of high country, same kinds of scrubby plants. I went through there a couple of times before the fighting started.” He shifted in his seat, trying to find the least uncomfortable position for his bad leg and shoulder.

“New Mexico? Arizona?” Penny looked at him as if he’d gone out of his mind. “I never heard of antelopes out there, by God, bouncing along like they’ve got springs in their legs, or those big white plumy birds standing in the fields-”

“Egrets,” Auerbach supplied.

“Those are the ones,” Penny agreed. “And we saw a lion half an hour ago. You ever hear of a goddamn lion in Arizona?”

“Sure,” he said, just to watch her eyes get big. “In a zoo.” He wheezed laughter. Penny looked as if she wanted to hit him with something. He went on, “The country looks that way. I didn’t say anything about the animals.”

He might as well not have spoken. “Even the cows look funny,” Penny said; having grown up in western Kansas, she spoke of cows with authority. “Their horns are too big, and they look like those what-do-you-call-’ems-Brahmas, that’s what I want to say.”

“They look like longhorns to me,” Auerbach said. That wasn’t quite right, but it was as close as he could come; he knew horses better than cattle. With a chuckle, he added, “They used to have longhorns in New Mexico. Maybe they still do, for all I know.”

“Hot damn,” Penny said, unimpressed. She held out a peremptory hand. “Give me a cigarette.”

“Here.” He took the pack out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. After she lit one, he found himself wanting one, too. He stuck one in his mouth and leaned toward her so she could give him a light. He sucked in smoke, coughed a couple of times-which hurt-and said, “Just like in the movies.”

“How come all the little stuff is like it is in the movies and all the big stuff really stinks?” Penny asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Damn good question,” Rance said. “Now all we need is a damn good answer for it.” He stared out the window at what looked like a big hawk on stilts walking across the landscape. The train swept past before he got as good a glimpse of it as he would have liked.

He and Penny weren’t the only ones smoking in the railway car; far from it. Smoke from cigarettes and cigars and a couple of pipes turned the air bluer than Penny’s language. Everybody smoked: whites, blacks, East Indians, everybody. A couple of rows ahead, a black kid who couldn’t have been more than eight was puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette about twice the size of the store-bought one Rance was smoking.

His sigh turned into another cough. Everybody rode together, too. It hadn’t been like that back in the United States. Despite everything he’d already seen in South Africa, he hadn’t expected it to be like that here, either. But the only ones who got special privileges on trains in this part of the world were the Lizards, and they didn’t ride trains very often.

The car might have been the Tower of Babel. African languages dominated-some with weird clicking noises that seemed more as if they belonged in the Lizards’ speech than in anything human, others without. But Auerbach also heard the clipped sounds of the British-style English some whites spoke here, the harsher gutturals of Afrikaans, and the purring noises the little brown men and women from India used.

Every so often, the train would stop at a tiny, sunbaked town not much different from the tiny, sunbaked towns of the American Southwest. And then, at last, the conductor shouted, “Beaufort West! All out for Beaufort West!” He repeated himself in several different languages.

In spite of all the repetition, Rance and Penny were the only ones who got off at Beaufort West. It wasn’t a tiny town; it had advanced to the more exalted status of small town, and lay on the northern edge of the Great Karoo. Auerbach shrugged. He didn’t know exactly what a karoo was, but the country still put him in mind of west Texas or New Mexico or Arizona.

“Drier than Kansas,” Penny said, shading her eyes with her hand. “Hotter, too-even if it’s not as hot as it was on the train. Looks like the middle of nowhere. No two ways about that.”

“Well, that’s what we came for, isn’t it?” Auerbach answered. “We can rent a car or get somebody to drive us around and look at lions or whatever the hell else lives around here.” He wondered if he’d see one of those tall, funny hawks close up.

“Okay.” Penny shrugged and picked up their suitcases; she carried things better than Rance did. “Now all we have to do is find the Donkin House.”

It was only a block away: logically, on Donkin Street, which looked to be Beaufort West’s main drag, such as that was. It was hardly out of the motel class, which didn’t surprise Auerbach. He registered himself and Penny as Mr. and Mrs.; South Africans were even more persnickety about that than Americans.

Beef stew at a little cafe across the street from the Donkin House wasn’t anything like what Rance’s mother had made, but wasn’t bad. A bottle of Lion Lager improved his outlook on the world. “We’ll take it easy tonight,” he said, “and then tomorrow morning we’ll go out and see what there is to see.”

“Miles and miles of miles and miles,” Penny predicted.

“Miles and miles of miles and miles with lions and antelopes and maybe zebras, too.” Auerbach poked her in the ribs. “Hey, you’re not in Kansas any more.”

“I know.” Penny grimaced. “I’m not wearing ruby slippers, either, in case you didn’t notice.”

As things turned out, nobody in Beaufort West had a car to rent. The locals, even the ones who spoke English, looked at Rance as if he were mad for suggesting such a thing. The only taxi in town was an elderly Volkswagen whose engine coughed worse and louder than Auerbach. The driver was a middle-aged black man named Joseph Moroka.

“You speak English funny,” he remarked as he drove Rance and Penny out of town onto the karoo.

Auerbach thought the cabby was the one with the funny accent, but Penny said, “We’re from the United States.”

“Oh.” Up there in the front seat, Moroka nodded. “Yes, that is what it is. You talk like films I have seen at the cinema.” He got friendlier after realizing they weren’t native South African whites. That no doubt said something about the way things had been here before the Lizards came.

He found his passengers lions. They were sleeping in the shade of a tree. He found plenty of gemsbok and kudu-he almost ran over a gemsbok that bounded across the road. He found a fox with ears much too big for its head. And Auerbach discovered that his hawk on stilts was called a secretary bird; it had a couple of plumes sticking up from its head that looked like pens put behind a man’s ear.

“It is a good bird,” Moroka said seriously. “It eats snakes.”

Here and there, cattle roamed the countryside, now and then pausing to graze. “Need a lot of land to support a herd here,” Auerbach said. That was true in the American Southwest, too. Joseph Moroka nodded again.

“Shall we head back toward town?” Penny said.

Rance gave her a dirty look. “If you just want to sit around in the room, we could have done that back in Cape Town,” he said.

“Well, we can go out again tomorrow, if there’s anything different to see than what we just looked at,” she answered. Had they been by themselves, she likely would have told him where to head in. But, like most people, she was less eager to quarrel where outsiders could listen.

And compromise didn’t look like the worst idea in the world to Rance, either. “All right-why not? We’re going to be here a week. No point to doing everything all at once, I guess.” He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “You can take us back to the hotel, Joe.”

For the first time, the black man got huffy. “You please to call me Mr. Moroka. Most white men here, they never bother learning blacks have names until the Lizards come. Now they have to learn, and learn right.” He spoke with quiet pride.

It had been like that in the American South, too. Boy! would do the job, or Uncle! for an old Negro. Things were changing there; things had been forcibly changed here. Auerbach rolled with the punch. “Okay, Mr. Moroka.” His great-grandfather, a Confederate cavalryman, wouldn’t have approved, but great-granddad had been dead a long time.

Moroka looked back and grinned. “Good. I thank you.” If Auerbach showed manners, he’d show them, too. Rance supposed he could live with that. The cabby turned the VW around-there wasn’t any other traffic on this stretch of narrow, poorly paved road-and started jouncing back toward Beaufort West.

He topped a low rise and had just begun the long downgrade on the other side when Rance and Penny both cried out at the same time: “Wait! Hold up! Stop the damn car!” Auerbach added the last word that needed to be said, “What the hell are those things?”

“Dinosaurs,” Penny said in astonishment, and then, “But dinosaurs are supposed to all be dead. Extinct.” She nodded in satisfaction at finding the right word.

“They are dinosaurs,” Rance said, his eyes bugging out of his head. “A whole herd of dinosaurs. What the hell else can they be?”

They were bigger than cows, though not a whole lot. Their scaly hides were a sandy yellow-brown, lighter than those of the Lizards. They went on all fours, and had big, broad heads with wide, beaky mouths. As Rance took a longer look at them, though, he noticed that their eyes were mounted in big, upstanding, chameleonlike turrets. That gave him his first clue about what they had to be.

Joseph Moroka breaking into peals of laughter gave him his second. “The Lizards call them zisuili,” he said, pronouncing the alien name with care. “They use them for meat and blood and hide, like we use cattle. These things give no milk, but I hear they lay eggs like hens. They are new here.” He laughed again. “The lions have not yet decided if they are good to eat.”

“They don’t graze like cattle.” Again, Penny spoke with expert assurance. “They graze more like sheep or goats. Look at that, Rance-they don’t hardly leave anything behind ’em. They crop everything right on down to the ground.”

“You’re right,” Auerbach said. He could see from which direction the herd of zisuili was coming by the bare, trampled dirt behind them. “Wonder how the antelopes are going to like that-and the real cows, too.”

Moroka wasn’t worrying about it. He was still laughing. “But the Lizards, they do not use their cows to buy wives, oh no. They have no wives to buy. I should be like a Lizard, eh?” He found that funny as hell.

Auerbach hadn’t thought about the Lizards’ having their own domestic animals back on their home planet. He supposed it made sense that they would. They didn’t have trouble with much Earthly food, so… He tapped Joseph Moroka one more time. “Anybody tried eating these things yet?”

“We are not supposed to,” the cabby replied. Auerbach coughed impatiently. That wasn’t an answer, and he knew it. After a moment, Moroka went on, “I hear-I only hear, now; I do not know-I hear they taste like chicken.”

Atvar studied a map of the subregion of the main continental mass called China. “We make progress,” he said in some satisfaction.

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” replied Kirel, the shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto, the bannership of the conquest fleet. “We have taken Harbin back from the rebellious Tosevites, and this other city, this Peking, cannot hold out against us much longer.”

“I should hope not, at any rate,” Atvar said. “The Chinese have no landcruisers and no aircraft to speak of. Without them, they can still be most troublesome, but they cannot hope to defeat us in the long run.”

“Truth,” Kirel said again. He was solid and conservative and sensible; Atvar trusted him as far as he trusted any male on Tosev 3. Back during the fighting, Kirel had had his chances to overthrow the fleetlord, especially during Straha’s uprising after the Tosevites detonated their first explosive-metal bomb. He hadn’t used them. If that didn’t establish his reliability, nothing would.

Thinking of explosive-metal bombs in that context made the fleetlord think of them in this one as well. “These Big Uglies, the Emperor be praised, cannot lure a great part of our forces forward and then destroy them with a single blast.”

Kirel cast down his eyes. “Emperor be praised, indeed,” he said. “You speak truth again, Exalted Fleetlord: they are too primitive to create explosive-metal bombs. Some other Tosevite not-empire would have to provide them with such weapons before they could use them.”

Atvar swung both eye turrets toward the second most senior male from the conquest fleet. “Now that is a genuinely appalling thought. The Chinese must understand that, if they did such a thing, we would bomb them without mercy in retaliation. Unlike the independent not-empires, they could not hope to respond in kind.”

“Even so.” Kirel gestured in agreement. “We could destroy half their population without doing the planet as a whole severe damage.”

But the fleetlord remained worried. “I wonder how much they would mind. Along with India, which presents its own problems, China is the subregion that reminds me most urgently of how many Big Uglies there are, and how few of us. The Chinese Tosevites are liable to be willing to accept the loss of half their number in the hope that doing so would damage us more in the long run.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, when have you ever known Big Uglies to think of the long run?” Kirel asked.

“Well, that is also a truth, and a good thing for us that it is, too,” Atvar said. “Even so, you have given me something new to worry about. After so long here, I thought I had exhausted the possibilities.”

“I am sorry, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel bent into the posture of respect. “Do you think warning the independent not-empires against pursuing such a course would be worthwhile?”

After brief consideration, Atvar made the negative hand gesture. “I fear it would be likelier to give them ideas that have not yet occurred to them, although I admit that ideas of a troublesome sort very readily occur to Big Uglies.”

“So they do.” Kirel used an emphatic cough. “Still, though, in spite of the difficulties the Tosevites pose, we do make progress all over this world.”

“Some. Not enough,” Atvar said. Kirel had put him in a fretful mood. “I would give a great deal-I would give almost anything I can think of-to know, for instance, which of the not-empires did in fact attack the colonization fleet. That, by the Emperor, would be a vengeance worth taking.”

“Indeed it would.” Kirel sighed. “But, knowing the enormity of the crime they were committing, those Big Uglies took pains to conceal their footprints.”

“One day, we shall know. One day, they will pay,” Atvar said. “And that will be progress, too, a step we can measure.”

“Indeed it will,” Kirel agreed. “I was, I confess, thinking of smaller steps: for instance, it is good to taste the flesh of our own domestic animals again, after so long living on solely Tosevite rations.”

“I will not say you are wrong, for I think you are right. The thought of grilled azwaca cutlets makes my mouth water.” Atvar had always been especially fond of azwaca. He walked over to the window of his suite and looked west across the great river toward the pyramidal funerary monuments that passed for ancient on Tosev 3. In the green strips between the monuments and the river, azwaca were grazing, though without magnification he could not see them.

“I am more partial to zisuili myself, but the taste of every one of the beasts is a reminder of Home,” Kirel said.

“Truth. But do you know what?” Atvar asked. He waited for Kirel to make the negative hand gesture, then continued, “I have already begun receiving complaints from Tosevite agriculturalists and pastoralists to the effect that our domestic animals graze so thoroughly, no fodder is left for any of theirs.”

“I had not heard of such complaints, but they do not surprise me,” Kirel said. “Tosevite grazers have evolved in an environment of relative abundance. Because moisture is more widespread here than back on Home, so is vegetation. Tosevite animals can afford to leave some behind and still flourish. Our own beasts, by the nature of the terrain to which they are adapted, have to be more efficient.”

“Over the course of time, it will be interesting to see what they do to the ecosystems in which they find themselves,” Atvar said. “They may well make large stretches of this world resemble Home more closely than is now the case.”

“Do we have analysts examining the issue?” Kirel asked.

“I do not,” Atvar answered. “Reffet should: this is, after all, more properly an issue involving the colonization of this planet than its conquest. But what Reffet should be doing and what he is doing are too often not one and the same.” He scribbled a note to himself. “I shall send an inquiry.”

“He will resent it,” Kirel said.

“He resents everything I do and everything I do not do,” the fleetlord said scornfully. “Let him resent this, too. But if Tosevite ecosystems become more Homelike, that will aid in assimilating this world into the Empire, will it not? I can justify the query on those grounds.”

“No doubt you can, Exalted Fleetlord. Fleetlord Reffet will still resent it.” Kirel had long since made plain that his opinion of the head of the colonization fleet was not high. That had not failed to endear him to the head of the conquest fleet. He added, “Since you are rationalizing it as a conquest issue, perhaps our experts should also examine it.”

“Perhaps they should.” Atvar sighed. “We are stretched very thin. We have been stretched very thin-thinner than anyone ever imagined we would be-since we came to Tosev 3 and discovered the inadequacies of the data our probe sent us. Well, perhaps we can stretch a little thinner yet.”

“We have said that a good many times, and we have always succeeded in stretching up till now,” Kirel said. “We should be able to stretch once more.”

“So we should,” Atvar said. “I keep worrying that we will eventually snap and break, but it has not happened yet. Why it has not happened yet, I cannot imagine, given what this world is, but it has not.”

Before Kirel could answer, Atvar’s telephone hissed for attention. When he activated the screen link, his adjutant stared out at him. “What is it, Pshing?” he asked suspiciously. Pshing, being one of his principal links to Tosev 3, was also one of his principal sources of bad news.

“Exalted Fleetlord-” the adjutant began, and then broke off.

Atvar’s heart sank. This was going to be one of those times. Like an itch, the certainty burrowed under his scales. “You had better tell me,” he said heavily.

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. Yes, he was gathering himself. Yes, that meant he needed to gather himself. After a deep pause, he went on, “Exalted Fleetlord, there has been an attack on the desalination plants supplying fresh water to the new towns in this region.”

A map appeared on the screen beside his face. It showed the eastern coast of the peninsula the Big Uglies called Arabia that depended from the main continental mass. “Tell me more,” Atvar said. “How serious is this attack? Is it the work of the local Tosevites springing from their superstitious fanaticism, or are the independent not-empires using them as a cloak for their own larger designs against us?”

“Those two need not be inseparable,” Kirel pointed out.

Atvar made the hand gesture of agreement, but then waved the shiplord to silence; he wanted to hear what Pshing had to say. “One of the plants is destroyed, another badly damaged,” the adjutant reported. Red dots appeared on the map to show the affected desalination plants; the others remained amber. “Our defense forces have slain a large number of Tosevites, all of whom appear to be native to the vicinity. Whether they were inspired or aided by other groups of Big Uglies as yet remains to be determined.”

“They were surely aided in one way or another,” Atvar said. “They do not produce the weapons they use against us.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. “But whether the Deutsche or the Americans or the Russkis furnished weapons for this particular attack is another matter.”

“Indeed it is.” Atvar’s voice was grim. “Adjutant, were there, for example, rockets fired at these installations?”

“There do appear to have been some, yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied, “but only those of the common and primitive type manufactured in the SSSR and known as Katyushas.” He had as much trouble with the Tosevite word as Big Uglies did with the language of the Race.

“Those things.” Kirel spoke in disgust. “They are as common as sand, and are easy to carry on the backs of beasts. Even if they were supplied especially for this assault, the independent not-empires will be able to deny it and still seem plausible.”

“They have done that too often,” Atvar said. “We shall have to seek ways to punish them nevertheless.” He swung an eye turret back toward Pshing. “One plant destroyed, you said, and one damaged? How severe is the impact on the new towns in the area?”

“Production loss is about fifteen percent, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied. “The damaged plant will return to full operation in about forty days, as a preliminary estimate. That will reduce losses to about ten percent. Rebuilding the wrecked plant will take three times as long-assuming no more attacks from Khomeini’s fanatics.”

“Ah-you did not mention that maniac before,” Atvar said. “So these Big Uglies profess his variant of the local superstition?”

“They do,” Pshing said. “Those captured proudly proclaim it during interrogation.”

“We would be better off if he were dead,” Kirel said. “We have not been able to eliminate him, and rewards have failed to turn any Big Uglies against him.” Now he sighed. “The Tosevites will betray us whenever they see the chance. It seems most unfair.”

“So it does.” Atvar knew he sounded unhappy, but couldn’t help it. “I shall increase the size of the reward-again.”

With a long, resigned sigh, Monique Dutourd sat up in bed. She reached for the pack of Gauloises on the nightstand, lit one, and turned to Dieter Kuhn, who sprawled beside her. “There,” she said. “Are you happy?”

He rolled over and grinned at her, a large; sated male grin of the sort she found particularly revolting. “Now that you mention it, yes,” he answered. “Give me a smoke, will you?”

She handed him the pack and the book of matches. What she wanted to do after that was go into the bathroom and soak in the tub for an hour, or perhaps for a week: long enough to get the feel of him off her body. If he’d cared what she wanted, though, he wouldn’t have made her go to bed with him in the first place.

After a long, deep drag on the cigarette, he asked, “And how was it for you?”

Monique shrugged. It made her bare breasts bounce a little. His eyes went to them. She’d been sure they would draw his notice, and felt vindicated to find herself right. Now-how to answer the question? “Well,” she said, “it was, I suppose, better than being hauled off to the Palais de Justice and tormented, if that’s what you mean.”

“Your praise overwhelms me,” he said. He didn’t sound too angry. Why should he have? He’d got it in, after all. He’d had a fine time. And if she hadn’t-too bad.

He hadn’t deliberately tried to hurt her. She gave him that much. She’d dreaded worse when he made it very plain she could either come across or face another stretch of interrogation. If she’d let him have her because she liked him rather than acquiescing to a polite rape, she might have enjoyed herself As things were… well, it was over.

“Going to bed with me won’t get you any closer to my brother,” she warned. “If he finds out I did, it will only make him trust me even less than he does now, and he doesn’t trust me very far as is.”

“So you say. But blood, in the end, is thicker than water.” Speaking French as a foreign language, Kuhn was fond of cliches. They let him say what he wanted without having to think too much about it. He went on, “Your dear Pierre does stay in touch with you. We know that, even if we don’t always know what he says.”

“You never know what he says,” Monique replied, stubbing out her cigarette in the glass ashtray on the nightstand while wishing she could put it out on some of the more tender parts of the SS man’s anatomy. As long as Pierre stayed tight with the Lizards, they gave him gadgets that defeated the best electronic eavesdroppers mere humans could build.

But Kuhn’s smug look now was different from the one he’d worn after grunting and spurting his seed into her. “We know more than you think,” he said. Monique was inclined to take that as a boast to get her to tell the German more than he already knew. But then he went on, “We know, for instance, that he told you the other day he was going to eat a big bowl of stewed mussels for his supper.”

“Oh, I am sure that will help you catch him,” Monique said sardonically. Under the sarcasm, though, she worried. Pierre had mentioned the mussels. That meant the Nazis could unscramble some of what he said to her. Did it also mean they could unscramble some of what he said to other people, or to Lizards? She didn’t know. She would have to find a way to make her brother aware of the risk without letting Kuhn and his pals find out she’d done it.

“One never knows,” he said, giving her a smile she was sure he was sure was charming. She remained uncharmed. Kuhn got up on his knees and leaned across her to put out his own cigarette, which he’d smoked down to a very small butt.

Instead of drawing his hand all the way back, he let it close over her left breast. He twiddled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, as if he were adjusting the dial on a wireless. He probably thought that would inflame her. She knew better. His hand slid down to the joining of her legs. He rubbed insistently. He could have rubbed forever without doing anything but making her sore.

But, after a little while, apparently satisfied he’d done his duty, he drew her to him. She had to suck him before he would rise for his second round. She particularly hated doing that, and hated it worse after he laughed and murmured, “Ah, the French,” as he held her head down.

If he’d spent himself in her mouth, she would have done her best to vomit on him. But, after a while, he rolled from his side to his back and had her get on top of him. She hadn’t known an SS man was allowed to be so lazy. She did what he wanted, hoping he would finish soon. He finally did.

Afterwards, he got dressed and left, though “See you again soon.” wasn’t the sort of farewell she wished she’d had from him. Monique used the bidet in the bathroom, then did climb into the tub. She didn’t feel like a woman violated, if a woman violated was supposed to feel downtrodden and put upon. What she felt like was a woman infuriated. But how to get revenge on a Nazi? In long-occupied Marseille, that wouldn’t be easy.

Suddenly, Monique laughed out loud. Dieter Kuhn wouldn’t have been happy to hear that laugh, not even a little. She didn’t care what would make the SS man happy. She didn’t care at all. She had, or might have; connections to which the average woman of Marseille could not aspire.

She couldn’t call her brother from the flat, not when the Germans had proved they truly could hear some of those conversations. She didn’t dare. Even more than she didn’t want to see Kuhn again erect while lying down, she didn’t want to revisit the Palais de Justice. She didn’t think the Gestapo had learned much from its interrogation of her. But what she’d learned about man’s inhumanity to man-and to woman-made her certain she never wanted to see the inside of that building again.

Phoning from a telephone box was risky, too. She didn’t know whether the Nazis had their listening apparatus on her telephone (no-she didn’t know whether they had it only on her phone, for they surely had it there) or on Pierre’s line as well. She couldn’t write a letter, either; had the postman known her brother’s address, the Germans would have known it, too.

“Merde,” she said, and shifted so the water sloshed in the tub. Even with unusual connections, getting what she wanted-getting Dieter Kuhn’s naked body lying in a ditch with dogs and rats gnawing on it-wouldn’t be so easy, not unless she wanted to endanger not only herself but also whoever might try to help her.

She got her own naked body, which was beginning to resemble a large, pink raisin, out of the tub. She dried as vigorously as she ever had in her life, especially between her legs. However hard she scrubbed at herself, the memory of the German’s fingers and privates lingered. Maybe I feel violated after all, she thought.

Three nights later, Kuhn knocked on her door again. She enjoyed that visit no more than she had the earlier one, but not a great deal less, either-he didn’t turn vicious. He just wanted a woman, and instead of hiring a tart he got himself a politically suspect professor for free. That was not the sort of Teutonic efficiency about which the Nazis boasted, but it served him well.

The next afternoon, Monique stopped at a greengrocer’s for some lettuce and onions on the way back from the university. She was about to take her vegetables over to the proprietor when a woman a year or two older than she was-short and dumpy, with the distinct beginnings of a mustache-came into the shop. “Monique!” she exclaimed. “How are you, darling?” She had a throaty, sexy voice altogether at odds with her nondescript looks.

“Bonjour, Lucie,” Monique said to her brother’s lady friend. “I was hoping to run into you before too long. I have so much to tell you.” She did her best to sound like a woman getting ready to swap gossip with an acquaintance.

“I’m all ears, and I’ve got some things to tell you, too,” Lucie answered in like tones. “Just let me get some garlic and I’ll be right with you.” She chose a string of fragrant heads while Monique was paying for what she wanted. Monique went out to her bicycle and waited by it. She could speak more freely outside than anywhere indoors. Who could guess where the Nazis might have planted microphones?

Lucie came out a couple of minutes later, grumbling about the prices the grocer charged. They weren’t that bad, but Lucie liked to grumble. She reached into her handbag and took out a pair of sunglasses. Maybe she thought they made her look glamourous. In that case, she was wrong. Maybe, on the other hand, she just wanted to fight the glare. Even in early spring, Marseille’s sun could give a foretaste of what brilliant summer days would be like.

Monique looked around. Nobody was paying any more attention than what people usually gave a couple of women chatting on the street. A man riding by on a bicycle whistled at them. He was easy to ignore. Taking a deep breath, Monique said, “The Germans can tap your phone, at least when you and Pierre talk with me.”

“Ah.” Lucie nodded. “I knew that. I wanted to warn you of it.” She frowned. “The Nazis turn into bigger nuisances every day.”

“Oh, don’t they just!” Monique said. Lucie had given her the perfect opening for the rest of what she had in mind, and she proceeded to use it: “Everyone would be better off without one Nazi in particular, I think.”

“Dieter Kuhn.” Lucie spoke the name without hesitation and with great assurance: so much so that Monique wondered if Pierre and his friends-human and otherwise-had microphones in her flat, too. Lucie went on, “Perhaps that can be arranged. I do not say it surely can be, but perhaps. It depends on whether we can find a way that does not point straight back at ourselves.”

“If you can do it, that would be wonderful,” Monique said. “If not, I will try to think of something else.”

“Some people need killing,” Lucie said matter-of-factly. Monique found herself nodding before she wondered what she was doing associating with people who said things like that. She’d had no choice, but that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy her priest-not that she’d been to confession in a good long time. And besides, she was the one who wanted the German dead.

But she might not be the only one who wanted him dead. “If you could arrange for the Lizards to do the job…”

“It could be,” Lucie said. “They have not always the stomach for killing, but some of them do, without a doubt. They differ less, one from another, than people do, I think, but they are not all the same, either. I may know a male or two who would do better business without this nosy Nazi poking into their affairs.”

Just then, a Lizard came by on the other side of the street. Lucie shut up with a snap. Monique wondered if he was one of the males Pierre’s companion had in mind. Before she could ask, she stared at something else: the Lizard was walking a long-necked, four-legged, scaly creature on a leash, for all the world as if it were a poodle or a greyhound. Pointing toward it, she said, “For heaven’s sake, what is that thing?”

“It has a name. I’ve heard it, but I forget what it is,” Lucie answered. “The males of the conquest fleet were here to tend to business. The colonization fleet has also brought farm animals and pets like that one.”

“Ugly little thing, isn’t it?” Monique said.

“Which, the Lizard or the pet?” Lucie asked, and startled a laugh out of Monique. Her brother’s lady friend went on, “I do business with them, but that doesn’t mean I have to love them. Au contraire.” Monique nodded, and then looked thoughtfully at Lucie. That was the first confidence, no matter how small, she could remember getting from her. Was Lucie starting to trust her at last? And if Lucie was, what did that say about Monique? That she was the kind of person a drug smuggler’s woman would trust? She’d hoped she might think of herself as something better than that.

Like what? she jeered. A Nazi’s whore? She reached out and set a hand on Lucie’s arm. All at once, being her confidante didn’t look so bad.

With a hiss of glee, Nesseref strode into the new shop that had opened in the Race’s new town outside of Jezow. “Pets!” she exclaimed. “Now this truly makes me think I am back on Home!”

“I am pleased I am finally able to open,” replied the female in charge of the place. “The animals, of course, were almost all brought here as frozen fertilized ova. At last, we have been able to begin thawing them and letting them come to maturity.”

“One small step after another, we do advance on this world,” the shuttlecraft pilot said. “When I talk with males from the conquest fleet, they often seem amazed at how far we have come.”

“When I talk to males from the conquest fleet, I am amazed at how little those ragamuffins have done,” the other female declared. “They should have delivered all of Tosev 3 to us, not just patches of the planet. And this place!” Her eye turrets waggled in exasperation. “It is so chilly and wet, I might as well be back in cold sleep.”

“When I was first revived, I was furious to discover the conquest incomplete, too,” Nesseref said. “As I have come to see more of the Big Uglies and the things they can do, I have more sympathy for the conquest fleet.”

“I do not care to see more of the Big Uglies,” the female said, and used an emphatic cough. “I have already seen more than I like. Not only are they barbarians, they are dangerous barbarians. The only worthwhile thing this planet produces has been made illegal, and where is the justice in that?”

“Ginger, do you mean?” Nesseref asked, and the other female made the affirmative hand gesture. Nesseref said, “The stuff has been made illegal for good reasons. It tears up our society as nothing else has ever done.”

“When I taste it… uh, that is, when I did taste it”-the female in the shop was being cagey, not knowing exactly who Nesseref was-“I did not care about the society of the Race. All I care, uh, cared about was how good I felt.”

“Yes, I understand as much.” Nesseref decided to let it go. Pretty plainly, the female in the shop was still tasting, laws or no laws. As plainly, nothing Nesseref said would make her change her mind. Nesseref hadn’t come into the shop to argue about ginger, anyhow. She said, “I want to see your tsiongyu.”

“Most males and females are more interested in my befflem,” the other female replied. She was going to score points off Nesseref any way she could, for Nesseref had tried to score points off ginger.

Patiently, the shuttlecraft pilot answered, “Befflem need care every day. My work can take me away from here for days at a time. Tsiongyu are better at fending for themselves when their owner is away.”

The pet-shop keeper sighed. “I wish my work took me away from this frigid place for days at a time. I would love to go somewhere, anywhere, with decent weather.” She seemed to remember she needed to do business. “Come with me. You will have to walk past the befflem, I am afraid. I have them in front, because they are in greater demand.”

Befflem turned their eye turrets toward Nesseref as she went by. They wanted to be bought; every line of their small, sinuous bodies proclaimed how much they wanted to be bought. They opened their mouths and squeaked endearingly. Nesseref was tempted to change her mind. No doubt about it: befflem were more friendly, more responsive, than tsiongyu.

But a beffel without companionship from the Race would not be happy, and was liable to turn destructive. Nesseref did not want to come back to her apartment and find it torn to pieces by an animal with nothing better to do.

“Here are the tsiongyu,” the other female said, as if she didn’t expect Nesseref to recognize them without help.

Where the befflem were eager to make friends with any female or male who came near, the larger tsiongyu sat aloof in their cages. Each one was as proudly drawn up as if it were the Emperor. Nesseref pointed to one with striking red-brown stripes. “May I see that male, please?”

“It shall be done,” the proprietor answered, and opened the cage. When she reached for it, the tsiongi hissed in warning, as its kind had a way of doing. Had it tried to bite and scratch, Nesseref would have asked to see another. Even after so many millennia of domestication, about one tsiongi in four remained convinced it was by rights a wild animal.

After hissing, though, this one allowed the female to pick it up and take it out of its cage. When she set it on the floor, it stood there on all fours lashing its tail, as if to show how irate it was at being handled, but did not streak for the door, as many of its kind might have. Here and there back on Home, feral tsiongyu, no less than befflem, made pests of themselves.

Nesseref extended a hand toward the animal. It hissed once more, not so loudly as it had before, but again did not try to bite. Instead, it extended its tongue in the direction of the hand. Nesseref waited, knowing its scent receptors were telling it what to think of her.

“It seems to accept you,” the female from the shop said. By her tone, she might have wished the tsiongi had taken a bite out of Nesseref.

“So it does,” Nesseref said. “I will buy it, and I will need supplies for its care. At least it will not have parasites here, which will make things easier.”

“Truth,” the proprietor said. “You will need a leash, a container for its wastes, and absorbent for the container, at least until you train it to use your own waste-disposal unit. Will you also require a supply of food?”

“This would come from the flesh of Tosevite animals?” Nesseref asked.

“Yes, of course,” the other female replied. “Eventually, we will use our own beasts, as we do back on Home, but that time is not yet here-like the pets, the food animals are only now coming to Tosev 3.”

“I will feed it table scraps, then,” Nesseref decided. The pet-shop proprietor’s tailstump quivered in poorly concealed annoyance: she would get less from Nesseref than she’d hoped. Nesseref wondered how much she was spending on ginger, and how badly she needed more. Well, that, fortunately, was not the shuttlecraft pilot’s worry.

She picked up the tsiongi, moving slowly and carefully so as not to take the animal by surprise. It stuck out its tongue again and studied her with its large eyes, very much like those of the Race. She took it up to the front of the shop, past the befflem. They tried to leap through the bars of their cages; they did not like tsiongyu. The tsiongi eyed them with lordly disdain, as if to say it knew it could dispose of three or four befflem without working very hard.

“Here are the other things you will require,” the shopkeeper said. “If you will let me have your card, so I can make the charge against your account… I thank you. And here is the statement of what you have purchased.”

“And I thank you.” Nesseref examined it to make sure the other female hadn’t charged her for tsiongi food or anything else she hadn’t bought. Satisfied, she tucked the bit of paper into one of the pouches she wore on her belt. Then she set the tsiongi on the floor and fastened the leash onto its long, flexible neck. It endured the indignity of being leashed with the air of a prisoner enduring interrogation from the Deutsche or some equally fierce Big Uglies. But when Nesseref started out of the shop, the tsiongi trotted along at her heels.

When she got to the door, she turned back and said to the shopkeeper, “If I had bought a couple of befflem, they would already have tangled their leashes around my legs three different times.”

“Befflem are not hatched to be led on leashes,” the other female replied. “Their free spirits are what make them enjoyable.”

“Their free spirits are what make them nuisances,” Nesseref said. “If they had any brains and weren’t so friendly, they’d be Tosevites.” The female in the pet shop drew back, obviously insulted. Nesseref left before that female found anything to say. The tsiongi stayed right with her. The wild ancestors of tsiongyu had hunted in pairs, a leader and a follower. In domesticating them, the Race had in effect turned its own males and females into pair leaders.

Nesseref proudly led her new pet through the streets of the new town. Several males and females exclaimed over it; a couple of them asked where she’d bought it. She told them about the pet shop. The tsiongi, meanwhile, accepted the attention as nothing less than its due.

Its air of restrained nobility lasted till it caught sight of a feathered Tosevite flying creature, a plump beast with a metallic green head and a grayish body, walking along looking for, tidbits. The tsiongi turned an eye turret toward Nesseref, plainly expecting her to attack this thing that could only be prey. When she didn’t, when she just kept walking, the tsiongi gave what sounded like a male or female’s hiss of irritation. Then it sprang for the flying creature itself.

The leash, which Nesseref hung on to, brought the tsiongi up short. The Tosevite creature flew away with a whir and a flutter of wings. The tsiongi stared as if it couldn’t believe its eye turrets. Maybe it couldn’t; fewer animals flew back on Home than here on Tosev 3, and tsiongyu didn’t hunt flying creatures there. It had probably thought this one couldn’t do anything but slowly walk along. The feathered creature had given it a surprise, as all manner of Tosevite creatures had given the Race unpleasant surprises.

“Come along,” Nesseref told it. “I will feed you something, even if you could not catch that animal.” Still looking as if it thought it had been cheated, the tsiongi reluctantly followed.

Half a block farther on, it saw another bird. Again, it tried to attack. Again, the bird flew away. Again, the tsiongi seemed astonished. That happened twice more before Nesseref got back to her apartment building. By then, she was laughing at the tsiongi-all the more so because the beast’s native dignity seemed so frazzled.

She had got the tsiongi almost back to the apartment building when a beffel-naturally, not on a leash-ran past. The male to whom it more or less belonged called, “Careful there, Goldenscale!” Goldenscale didn’t feel like being careful. It infuriated Nesseref’s tsiongi in a way the birds hadn’t. And the beffel wanted to fight, too. Nesseref had to drag her pet the rest of the way to the entrance.

“You had better be careful,” she called to the male with the beffel. “Your little friend there will be someone’s supper if you are not.”

“Befflem do what befflem do,” the male answered with a shrug, which had some truth to it. He raised his voice: “Come, Goldenscale! Come!” Despite his emphatic cough, the beffel went on doing what it did, which in this case involved antagonizing Nesseref’s tsiongi.

The tsiongi tried to slam through the glass entryway door to get at the obnoxious beffel. It slammed into the glass instead, and looked even more bewildered than it had when the birds flew away. Nesseref took it to the elevator. Once the tsiongi couldn’t see the beffel any more, it regained its dignity. Even so, Nesseref wondered if she would ever be able to take it out on the street for a walk.

Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb was going through the motions, and he knew it. The Canadian consulate in Belfast had lost interest in having him as an immigrant once he proved unable to retire from the RAF. Officials at the American consulate hadn’t formally told him no yet, but they hadn’t shown any signs of saying yes, either.

And the Lizards, on whom he’d pinned such a great part of his hopes, had let him down. From what Cousin Moishe said, he’d done his best to get the fleetlord interested in the plight of an oppressed British Jew, but his best hadn’t been good enough. Goldfarb believed Moishe had indeed done his best. He just wished that best had been better.

Since it hadn’t been, he was left to keep an eye on the radar screens that watched the sky and space above Belfast. He was doing just that, and trying not to doze off inside the darkened room that housed the radar displays, when an aircraftman first class came in and said, “Telephone call for you, sir.”

“Thanks,” Goldfarb replied, and the enlisted man saluted. Goldfarb turned to Sergeant Jack McDowell, his partner on the shift. “Will you keep an eye on things, Jack? I doubt I’ll be long.”

“Aye, sir, I’ll do it,” McDowell replied in his rich burr. He didn’t look down his nose at Goldfarb for being Jewish-or if he did, he kept it to himself. He didn’t even have to do that; his place in the RAF was odds-on to be more secure than Goldfarb’s.

Not caring to dwell on such things, David tapped the aircraftman on the shoulder. “Lead on, Macduff,” he misquoted, and followed the youngster down the hall and into an office where a telephone lay with the handset off the hook. Goldfarb eyed it with the warm affection a bird gave a snake. It was, he feared, all too likely to be Basil Roundbush trying to get him into fresh trouble-as if he didn’t have enough already. With a sigh, he picked up the telephone. “Goldfarb here.”

“Hullo, old man,” said a cheerful voice on the other end of the line. Three words were plenty to tell Goldfarb the owner of that voice had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, and to one of the best public schools before that. Roundbush, his tormentor, had done all those things, but this wasn’t Roundbush’s voice. It wasn’t any voice with which David was immediately familiar. Its owner went on, “Haven’t seen you in a long time-not since we went trolling for barmaids together back in Dover, eh?”

“Jerome Jones, by God!” Goldfarb burst out. They’d worked side by side on radar sets through the Battle of Britain, and then during the onslaught of the Lizards-till radar-seeking missiles had taken out their sets and reduced them to using field glasses and field telephones right out of the First World War. “What the devil are you doing with yourself these days?”

“I’m in the import-export business,” Jones answered, and David’s heart sank. If that wasn’t a euphemism for smuggling ginger, he would have been astonished. And if Jones wasn’t going to try to use him some way or other, he would have been more astonished still. Sure enough, his former comrade went on, “I hear you’ve come on a spot of trouble lately.”

“What if I have?” Goldfarb asked tightly. Jerome Jones wasn’t in Her Majesty’s forces; David could tell him where to head in without worrying about getting court-martialed-not that he’d let that bother him when he’d finally told Roundbush where to go and how to get there. Even though Jones’ father had headed up a bank, dear Jerome would be hard-pressed to land Goldfarb in worse trouble than he’d already found for himself.

“Why, I wanted to lend you a hand, if I possibly could,” Jones said, sounding surprised David would have to ask.

“What sort of hand?” Goldfarb remained deeply suspicious. He knew the kind of answer he expected. If you need to put a few hundred quid in your pocket, Jones would say, you can take this little shipment to Buenos Aires for me. Or maybe it would be to Warsaw or to Cairo or even, God help us, to Nuremberg.

Jerome Jones said, “Unless the little bird I’ve been listening to has it altogether wrong, there are some people giving you a bit of difficulty about leaving the country.”

“That’s true.” Goldfarb kept on answering in monosyllables, waiting for the sales pitch. He remained sure it was coming. What would he do if good old Jerome promised to help him emigrate after he did his former pal one little favor that would, undoubtedly, turn out not to be so little? Also undoubtedly, good old Jerome had the clout, if he could be persuaded to use it.

“It’s bloody awful, is what it is.” Jones sounded indignant. How smooth was he these days? Back when Goldfarb had known him, he’d been distinctly callow. But he was a captain of industry these days, not a puppy still wet behind the ears. “You’ve done more for Britain than Britain wants to do for you. We’re still a free country, by God.”

“From where you sit, maybe,” David said. From where he sat himself, the United Kingdom tilted more toward the Greater German Reich with every passing day. With most of the British Empire in the Lizards’ scaly hands, with the USA still rebuilding after the fighting, and with the Reich just across the Channel, he supposed that tilt was inevitable. That didn’t mean he thought it was anything but disastrous.

“I also hear your superiors have taken unfair advantage of you. Officers are nasty that way-think they’re little tin gods, what?” Jones chuckled. “I always thought that. Back when I was wearing RAF blue, though, there was damn all I could do about it. Things are different now. If I ring the minister of defense, I expect he’ll listen to me. He’d damn well better; his son is married to my first cousin.”

“My God.” Goldfarb’s voice was hoarse. “You really mean it.”

“Well, of course I do,” Jones answered. “What’s the point of having influence if you don’t get to use it? I’d have rung you up sooner, but I only heard of your difficulties a few days ago.”

“That’s all right,” David said vaguely. Back when they’d served in the RAF together, he’d thought about Jerome Jones’ secure upper-class upbringing and his own roots in East End London. Then he’d thought the most he could aspire to was a little wireless-repair shop. After the fighting ended, staying in the RAF looked like a road to a better life. It had been, for a little while.

“I’ll ring you back directly I know something,” Jones told him. “Be good in the meanwhile.” He hung up. The line went dead.

Goldfarb stared at the telephone handset before slowly returning it to the cradle. The young aircraftman was long gone. Goldfarb went back to the radar screens by himself, his head whirling.

A few days later, he was watching the glowing green screens again. They showed a Soviet spacecraft passing north of the U.K. The Americans and Germans-and likely the Race, too-laughed at the craft the Russians flew; the Americans called them flying tin cans. Because of the limits to their craft, Soviet spacemen couldn’t do nearly so much up there as their counterparts from the USA and the Reich. But they were flying. Britain had no spacemen. Watching everyone else go by above his head, Goldfarb acutely felt the lack.

He was about to remark on it to Sergeant McDowell when a fresh-faced enlisted man stuck his head into the room and said, “The base commandant’s compliments, Flight Lieutenant, and he’ll see you in his office fast as you can get there.”

Taking the privilege of long acquaintance, McDowell asked, “What have you gone and done now, sir?”

“I don’t know,” David answered, “but I expect I’ll find out before long. Don’t let that Russian land in Belfast-people would talk.” Before the Scotsman could find a comeback, Goldfarb headed for Group Captain Burton Paston’s office.

Paston was doing paperwork when he walked in. The commandant’s face, normally dyspeptic, now grew less happy still. “Oh, it’s you, Goldfarb,” he said, as if he’d been expecting someone else-perhaps the Spanish Inquisition-instead.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Goldfarb said, coming to attention and saluting as he waited to discover what sort of new trouble he was in.

“Yes.” Distaste filled Paston’s voice, too. “Some little while ago, you attempted to resign from the Royal Air Force.”

“Yes, sir, I did, but I’ve performed my duties since to the best of my ability,” Goldfarb said. If Group Captain Paston thought he’d be able to hang a bad-conduct discharge on him, he had another think coming.

But Paston waved that away. “You seem to have friends as well as enemies in high places,” he remarked. “Why so many people would get themselves exercised over a flight lieutenant up from the ranks is beyond me, but that’s neither here nor there. The point of the matter is, I have been instructed in no uncertain terms to reconsider your resignation. Having done so, I’ve elected to accept it after all.”

“Have you, sir?” David breathed. No matter what Jerome Jones said, he hadn’t dreamt his old pal really did have so much clout, nor that he could work so fast. He also noted that Paston had tacitly admitted he’d been under pressure to reject the resignation before. Gloating would have felt good, but wouldn’t have helped; Goldfarb could see as much. All he said was, “Thank you very much.”

“I’m not nearly certain you’re welcome,” the base commandant answered. “You’re the most experienced radar operator we’ve got, and I’m damned if I know where we’ll come up with another one even half as good.”

If he’d put something like that on a fitness report, Goldfarb might have risen higher than flight lieutenant. On the other hand, he couldn’t do anything about being a Jew, so he might not have, too. He said, “I do appreciate this, from the bottom of my heart.” Now that he’d got what he wanted, he could afford to be gracious. He couldn’t very well afford to be anything else.

Burton Paston shoved forms across the desk at him. “I’m going to need your signature on all of these.”

“Yes, sir.” David signed and signed and signed.

When he was done, the base commandant handed him a copy of one of the forms. “If you take this to the Canadian consulate, it will serve to notify them that you have in fact separated yourself from the RAF, and that no impediment stands in the way of your emigration.”

“That’s splendid. Thanks.” Goldfarb reflected on what influence could do. Before, Paston would sooner have thrown him in the guardhouse than let him leave Her Majesty’s service. Now, he was practically laying down a red carpet to help speed Goldfarb out the door. So much cooperation got Goldfarb worried. “Suppose, sir, that the blokes who don’t like me so much have got to the Canadians. If they turn me down, will I be able to rescind this resignation? I don’t fancy being down and out with no hope for any job in sight.”

“If they and the Yanks turn you down, yes,” Paston answered. “Your friend already considered that possibility. You’re lucky to have so many people looking out for your interests.”

“I suppose I am, sir,” David said. He didn’t point out to Paston that, since he was a Jew, he automatically had a lot more people doing their best to give him a knee in the ballocks. The group captain wouldn’t understand that, and wouldn’t believe it, either. Goldfarb shrugged. He knew what he knew. And one of the things he knew was that he was getting out. At last, he was getting out.

One thing Johannes Drucker appreciated about his long service to the Reich: he had no trouble getting his hands on a firearm. Rifles and especially pistols were hard to come by for civilians in the Reich. Every officer, though, had his own service weapon. Drucker would have preferred a pistol not so easily traced back to him, but, with any luck, no one would associate Gunther Grillparzer’s untimely demise with him anyhow.

He tried to read a copy of Signal as the train rolled southwest toward Thuringia. By what the magazine said, everyone in Europe was delighted to live under the benevolent rule of the Reich and to labor to make Germany greater still. Drucker hoped that was true, which didn’t necessarily mean he believed it.

As usual, the compartment was tightly shut up against the outside air. The atmosphere was full of smoke from cigarettes and a couple of cigars. In the forward compartment of this car, there’d been a screaming row earlier in the trip. Someone-a foreigner, without a doubt-had had the nerve to open up a window. Everyone else had pitched a fit till a conductor, quite properly, shut it again and warned the miscreant he’d be put off the train if he opened it again.

The interior remained unsullied by fresh air until a conductor came through the car calling, “Weimar! All out for Weimar!” as the train slowed to a stop at the station. Drucker grabbed his carpetbag-all the luggage he had with him-and descended from the car.

Weimar’s station had a shabby, run-down look to it. As Drucker carried the bag out to the street to flag a taxi, he saw that the whole town looked as if it had seen better days. The Reich and the National Socialists did not love the place where the preceding unhappy German republic had been born.

Drucker discovered he didn’t need a cab after all. He could see the Hotel Elephant from where he was standing. He hurried toward and into it. A clerk nodded to him from behind the desk. “Yes, sir. May I help you?”

“I am Johann Schmidt,” Drucker said, using the voice an officer used toward an enlisted man to hide his nervousness. “I have a room reserved.”

That tone worked wonders, as it so often did in the Reich. The desk clerk flipped pages in the register. “Yes, sir,” he said, nodding. He handed Drucker a key. “You’ll be in 331, sir. I hope you enjoy your stay with us. We’ve been here on the Marktplatz for more than two hundred years, you know. Bach and Liszt and Wagner have stayed here.”

Not wanting to drop his air of lordly superiority, Drucker said, “I hope the plumbing is better now than it was in those days.”

“Oh, yes, sir, Herr Schmidt,” the clerk said. “You will find everything to your satisfaction.”

“We’ll see.” Having established a personality, Drucker played it to the hilt. “Oh. One thing more. Where is the central post office?”

“On Dimitroffstrasse, sir, just west of the square here,” the desk clerk answered. “You can’t miss it.”

That seemed worth another sneer. Having delivered it, Drucker climbed the hotel’s sweeping staircase to the third floor. Once he got there, he discovered the bath was at the end of the hall. He felt like going down and complaining. It would have been in character. With a shrug, though, he let himself into the room. Except for the lack of private bath, it seemed comfortable enough.

He changed into fresh shirt and trousers and as nondescript a jacket as he owned. The jacket’s one virtue was that it had big, roomy pockets. He put the pistol in one and a paperbound book in another, then went downstairs and headed across the square to Dimitroffstrasse.

For a wonder, the clerk had got it right: he couldn’t have missed the post office, for it lay only a couple of buildings away from the Gothic church that dominated Weimar’s skyline. The post-office building, on the other hand, was severely utilitarian. Drucker sat down inside on a bench that gave him a good look at the bank of postal boxes, pulled out the book, and began to read.

A Postal Protection NCO in field-gray uniform with orange piping strolled by and eyed him. The Postschutz was a branch of the SS, and had been since a couple of months before the Lizard invasion. Drucker kept on reading with a fine outward appearance of calm. The NCO paused between one step and another, then shrugged and walked on, his booted feet clicking on the marble floor. Drucker wasn’t a bum or a drunk. He didn’t look as if he intended causing trouble. If he felt like reading in a post office… well, there was no regulation against it.

Drucker kept a surreptitious eye on Box 127. He’d mailed Gunther Grillparzer-or rather, Grillparzer’s alias, Maxim Kipphardt-his first payment two days earlier; it should be reaching Grillparzer today. By the way Grillparzer had sounded, he wouldn’t let it sit around in the postal box for long. No, he’d spend it, either to keep a roof over his head or, perhaps more likely, on schnapps.

Maybe I should have worn a disguise, Drucker thought. But the idea of putting on false whiskers had struck him as absurd. And all the false whiskers he’d ever seen looked false. In the end, he’d decided that being what he was-an ordinary-looking middle-aged German in ordinary clothes-made as good a disguise as any. The ex-panzer gunner wouldn’t have seen him for more than twenty years, after all.

The Postal Protection NCO tramped past him again. Drucker not only pretended to be absorbed in his book-a study of what people knew, or thought they knew, about Home-but actually got interested in it. That was an acting triumph of which he hadn’t thought himself capable. The Postschutz man didn’t even bother pausing this time. He’d accepted Drucker as part of the landscape.

A fat man came up and opened a postal box. It wasn’t 127. When the fat man pulled out an envelope, he muttered something sulfurous under his breath. Drucker couldn’t see the envelope. Was it a past-due bill? A letter from an ex-wife? A writer’s rejection slip? He’d never know. Still muttering, the fat man went away. Drucker returned to his book.

When someone did come to Box 127, Drucker almost didn’t notice: it wasn’t Gunther Grillparzer but a blond woman-quite a good-looking one-in her mid- to late twenties. She took out an envelope-the envelope, the one Drucker had sent-and left the post office.

“Scheisse,” Drucker muttered under his breath as he got to his feet, stuck the book in his pocket, and went out after the woman. Things weren’t going as he’d planned. No plan survives contact with the enemy, he thought, all the while wishing Grillparzer hadn’t found a way to complicate his life.

He hadn’t been trained in shadowing people. Had the woman looked back over her shoulder, she would have spied him in the blink of an eye. But she didn’t. She stood at a street corner, waiting for the trolley. Drucker decided to wait for the trolley, too. What am I supposed to do now? he wondered. He had no qualms about killing Gunther Grillparzer, none whatever. But a pretty stranger who might not even know what she was carrying in her handbag? That was a different business.

Here came the streetcar, clanging its bell. She got on. So did Drucker. He didn’t know the right fare, and had to fumble in a pocket-not the one that held the pistol-for change. The trolley driver gave him a severe look. Feeling absurdly sheepish, he went back and sat down beside the young woman. She nodded politely and then ignored him. He marveled that she couldn’t hear his heart pounding in his chest.

The streetcar rattled along for several blocks, heading into as seedy apart of town as Weimar had. When it stopped, the woman murmured, “Excuse me,” and walked past Drucker and out. He didn’t get out with her. That would have been giving himself away. Instead, he stared out the window, hoping to see where she headed.

He got lucky. A lorry on the cross street blocked the intersection for fifteen seconds or so. No matter how angrily the motorman clanged, the truck didn’t-likely couldn’t-move. That let Drucker see the woman go into a block of flats whose brick front was streaked with coal soot.

He got out at the next stop and hurried back to the apartment building. In the lobby, as he’d expected, he found a brass bank of mailboxes. None said Gunther Grillparzer. None said Maxim Kipphardt, either. Before he started knocking on doors at random-a desperation ploy if ever there was one-Drucker noticed that the one for 4E did say Martin Krafft. In detective novels, people often used aliases whose initials matched their real names. Martin Krafft wasn’t Grillparzer’s real name, but he’d said he’d been using a false one for a while. Without any better ideas-without any better hopes-Drucker started up the stairs.

Panting a little, wishing the place had a lift, he stood in the fourth-floor hallway, which smelled of cabbage and spilled beer. There was 4E, opposite the stairway. Drucker slipped his right hand into the pocket with the pistol. He thought fast as he advanced on the doorway and used his left hand to knock.

“Who is it?” The woman’s voice. His knees sagged with relief: one right guess.

Drucker grimaced. Now he had to take another chance. “Telegram for Herr Krafft,” he said. If Grillparzer wasn’t there, life would get more difficult still. But, a moment later, the door opened and there stood the ex-panzer gunner, middle-aged and podgy fat and looking more than a little bottle-weary. He needed a couple of seconds to recognize Drucker, and that was a couple of seconds too long: by then, the pistol was aimed at his face. “Let me in, Gunther,” Drucker said. “Don’t do anything stupid, or you’ll never do anything at all ever again. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“You won’t get away with this,” Grillparzer said as he backed away. Drucker came in and kicked the door shut behind him. His former comrade went on, “I thought you’d be a smart boy and pay me off. When I denounce you-”

Drucker laughed in his face. He tapped one of the buttons on his coat. “You fool-the SS is listening to you run your mouth now, thanks to my transmitter here.” Grillparzer looked horrified. Drucker was horrified-at the bluff he was running. But, as Hitler had said, the bigger the lie, the better. “I am the SS, and you, my friend, have cooked your own goose-and your girlfriend’s, too.”

If the woman standing in back of Grillparzer had been his wife or his kid sister, Drucker wouldn’t have looked infallible, and he might have had to start shooting. But the ex-gunner only grimaced. “Christ, what a pack of lies you must have told to get yourself into the SS, you murdering bastard.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and you can’t prove I do-it’s your word against mine,” Drucker answered. “I do know, and I have evidence”-he tapped the button again-“that you’ve tried to blackmail me. Cough up the cash. You can’t use it, anyhow. The banks have the serial numbers of all the notes on their watch list. As soon as you spent one, it’d just be another nail in your coffin.”

He sounded convincing as hell. He would have believed himself. And Grillparzer believed him-or believed the pistol. Turning his head, he said, “Hand it over, Friedli. The son of a bitch has got us, dammit.”

The woman had only to reach onto the cheap pine table behind her to retrieve the envelope. Drucker took it by one corner with his left hand. “Both your fingerprints are on this now, of course,” he said cheerfully. The envelope had been opened, but still weighed about what it had when he’d posted it. Grillparzer and-Friedli? — hadn’t had the chance to do much plundering. “Remember, if you even think of giving me grief again, you’ll be sorrier than you can imagine.”

“Christ, why didn’t you just tell me over the phone you were a blackshirt along with being a spaceman?” Grillparzer asked. By the look in Friedli’s eyes, he was going to be sorrier than he could imagine even if Drucker had nothing to do with it.

Cheerful still, Drucker answered, “You’ll remember the lesson longer this way. Auf wiedersehen.” And out the door he went.