Down to Earth

9

Glen Johnson peered out through the spacious glass canopy of his hot rod. That was the name that seemed to have stuck on the little auxiliary rockets the crew of the Lewis and Clark used to go exploring in the neighborhood of Ceres. He had radar and an instrument suite almost as complete as the one aboard Peregrine, but the Mark One eyeball was still his instrument of first choice.

Just for a moment, he glanced toward the shrunken sun. It showed only a tiny disk, barely a third the size it would have from Earth’s orbit. Lots of pieces of rock in the neighborhood looked bigger.

He watched the rocks and he watched the radar screen. At the moment, he was out ahead of Ceres, and moving away from it. Most of what he had to worry about was stuff he was approaching. He’d have to be more careful on the return trip, when he’d be swimming against the tide, so to speak. Hot rods were built to take it, but he didn’t want to put that to the test.

From the back seat, Lucy Vegetti said, “That dark one over to the left looks like it ought to be interesting. The one that looks like a squash, I mean.”

To Johnson, it looked like just another floating chunk of rock, with a long axis of perhaps a quarter of a mile. He shrugged. “You’re the mineralogist,” he said, and used the hot rod’s attitude jets to turn toward the little asteroid. “What do you hope we’ll find there?”

“Iron, with luck,” she answered.

He chuckled. “Here I am, alone with a pretty girl”-all the women on the Lewis and Clark looked good to him by now, even the sour assistant dietitian-“and all she wants to do is talk about rocks.”

“This is work,” Lucy said.

“Well, so it is.” Johnson glanced to the radar screen. He grunted in surprise, looked out the canopy, and grunted again. “What the devil?” he said.

“Is something wrong?” Lucy Vegetti asked.

“I dunno.” He looked down at the radar screen again. “The instruments are reporting something my eyes aren’t seeing.” He scratched his chin. “As far as I can tell, the set’s behaving the way it’s supposed to.”

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Either it’s misbehaving in a way I don’t know about, or else my eyes need rewiring,” he answered.

Lucy laughed, but he wasn’t kidding, or not very much. He didn’t like it when what his eyes saw didn’t match what the radar saw. If the instrument was wrong, it needed fixing. If it wasn’t wrong… He rubbed his eyes, not that that would do a whole lot of good.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to try to find out what’s going on,” he said. “No offense, but your rock isn’t going anywhere.”

“Go ahead,” Lucy Vegetti said, though she had to know he’d asked her permission only as a matter of form.

Ever so cautiously, Johnson goosed the hot rod toward what the radar insisted was there but his eyes denied. And then, after a bit, they stopped denying it. “Will you look at that?” he said softly. “Will you just look at that? Something’s getting in the way of the stars.” He pointed to show Lucy what he meant.

She nodded. “So it is. I see it, now that you’ve shown it to me, but I didn’t before. What do you suppose it could be?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” As Peregrine had back in Earth orbit, the hot rod mounted twin.50-caliber machine guns. He had teeth. He didn’t know if he’d need to use them, but knowing they were there helped reassure him. He slowed the hot rod’s acceleration-whatever this thing was, it didn’t seem to be under acceleration itself.

“No wonder we couldn’t see it before,” Lucy breathed as they got closer and the mystery object covered more and more of the sky. “It’s all painted flat black.”

“It sure is,” Johnson agreed. “And that’s a better flat black than anything we could turn out, which means…”

The mineralogist finished the sentence for him: “Which means the Lizards have sent something out to take a look at what we’re up to.”

When the hot rod got within a couple of hundred yards of the spacecraft, Johnson stopped its progress and peered through binoculars. From that range, he could see the sun sparkling off lenses here and there, and could also make out antennas aimed back toward Earth-much smaller and more compact than those the Lewis and Clark carried.

“What are you going to do about it?” Lucy asked.

Johnson’s first impulse was to cut loose with the machine guns the hot rod carried. He didn’t act on that impulse. Pulling a sour face, he answered, “I’m going to ask Brigadier General Healey what he wants me to do.” He didn’t like Healey, not even slightly. The commandant of the Lewis and Clark had hauled him aboard for the crime of excess curiosity, a crime that had just missed being a capital offense.

He had no trouble raising the Lewis and Clark; he would have been astonished and alarmed if he had. But convincing the radioman he really did need to talk to the commandant took a couple of minutes. At last, Healey said, “Go ahead, Johnson. What’s on your mind?”

His suspicions about the pilot had eased, but hadn’t gone away. Johnson got the idea Healey’s suspicions never went away. Well, he was going to feed one that had nothing to do with him. “Sir,” he answered, “I’ve found a Lizard spy ship.” He explained how that had happened.

When he was done, Healey let out along, clearly audible sigh. “I don’t suppose we ought to be surprised,” the commandant said at last. “The scaly sons of bitches have to be wondering what we’re up to out here.”

“Shall I shoot it up, sir?” Johnson asked. “That would give ’em a good poke in the eye turret.”

To his surprise, Healey said, “No. For one thing, we don’t know if this is the only machine they’ve sent out. They’re suspenders-and-belt… critters, so odds are it isn’t. And if you do, they’ll know what’s happened to it. We don’t want to give them any excuse to start a war out here, because odds are we’d lose it. Hold fire. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir. Hold fire,” Johnson agreed. “What do I do, then? Just wave to the Lizards and go on about my business?”

“That’s exactly what you do,” Healey answered. “If you’d opened up on it without asking for orders, I would have been very unhappy with you. You did the right thing, reporting in.” Maybe he sounded surprised Johnson had done the right thing. Maybe the radio speaker in the hot rod was just on the tinny side. Maybe, but Johnson wouldn’t have bet on it.

He asked, “Sir, can we operate in a fishbowl?”

“It’s not a question of can, Johnson,” Brigadier General Healey answered. “It’s a question of must. As I said, we shouldn’t be surprised the Lizards are conducting reconnaissance out here. In their shoes, I would. We’ll just have to learn to live with it, have to learn to work around it. Maybe we’ll even be able to learn to take advantage of it.”

Johnson wondered if his superior had gone out of his mind. Then he realized that Lizard spaceship he was next to wasn’t just taking pictures of what the Lewis and Clark and its crew were up to. It also had to be monitoring the radio frequencies people used. Maybe Healey was trying to put a bug in the Lizards’ ears-or would have been, if they’d had ears.

If that was what he was up to, Johnson would play along. “Yes, sir,” he said enthusiastically. “They can look as much as they please, but they won’t be able to figure out everything that’s going on.”

Brigadier General Healey chuckled, an alien sound from his lips. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“No, sir,” Johnson said. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” Behind him, Lucy Vegetti snickered. He turned around and gave her a severe look. She laughed at him, mouthing, You can’t act for beans.

“Anything else?” Healey barked. When Johnson said there wasn’t, the commandant broke the connection. That was in character for him, where the chuckle hadn’t been-hadn’t even come close.

“So we just go on about our business?” Lucy asked. “That won’t be so easy, not for some of the things we’ll need to do sooner or later.”

Johnson shrugged; his belt held him in his seat. He’d spent his adult life in the service; he knew how to evaluate military problems. “Yes and no,” he said. “If you know the other guy is watching, you can make sure he only sees what you want him to see, and sometimes you can lead him around by the nose. What’s really bad is when he’s watching and you don’t know he’s there. That’s when he can find out stuff that hurts you bad.”

“I can see how it would be.” The mineralogist sounded thoughtful. “You make it seem so logical. Every trade has its own tricks, doesn’t it?”

“Well, sure,” Johnson answered, surprised she needed to ask. “If we hadn’t had some notion of what we were doing, we’d all be singing the Lizard national anthem every time we went to the ballpark.”

She laughed. “Now there’s a picture for you! But do you know what? Some of the Lizard POWs who ended up settling in the States like playing baseball. I saw them on the TV news once. They looked pretty good, too.”

“I’ve heard that,” Johnson said. “I never saw film of them playing, though.”

“More important to worry about what they’re doing out here,” Lucy said. “And whatever it is, they’ll have a harder time doing it because you were on the ball. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” he said in some confusion. He wasn’t used to praise for what he did. If he carried out his assignments, he was doing what his superiors expected of him, and so didn’t particularly deserve praise. And if he didn’t carry them out, he got raked over the coals. That was the way things worked. After a moment, he added, “I never would have spotted it if you hadn’t sent me out this way, so I guess you deserve half the credit. I’ll tell General Healey so, too.”

They spent the next little while wrangling good-naturedly about who deserved what, each trying to say the other should get it. Finally, Lucy Vegetti said, “The only reason we did come out here was to get a look at that asteroid shaped like a zucchini. Can we still get over there?”

Johnson checked the gauges for the main tank and the maneuvering jets, then nodded. “Sure, no trouble at all.” He chuckled. “Now I can’t stop halfway there and say, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but we just ran out of gas on this little country road in the middle of nowhere.’ ”

They were in the middle of nowhere, all right, far more so than they could have been anyplace on Earth. The very idea of a road, country or otherwise, was absurd here. Lucy said, “I didn’t figure you for that kind of guy anyway, Glen. You’re not shy if you’ve got something on your mind.”

“I’ve got something on my mind, all right,” he said.

“Maybe I’ve got something on mine, too,” she answered. “Maybe we could even find out-after we give this asteroid the once-over and after we get back to the Lewis and Clark.”

“Sure,” Johnson agreed, and swung the nose of the hot rod away from the Lizard spy craft and toward the asteroid that interested Lucy.

Vyacheslav Molotov had disliked dealing with Germans longer than he’d disliked dealing with Lizards. On a personal level, he disliked dealing with Germans more, too. He made allowances for the Lizards. They were honestly alien, and often were ignorant of the way things were supposed to work on Earth. The Germans had no such excuses, but they could make themselves more difficult than the Lizards any day of the week.

Paul Schmidt, the German ambassador to Moscow, was a case in point. Schmidt was not a bad fellow. Skilled in languages-he’d started out as an English interpreter-he spoke good Russian, even if he did always leave the verb at the end of the sentence in the Germanic fashion. But he had to take orders from Himmler, which meant his inherent decency couldn’t count for much.

Molotov glared at him over the tops of his reading glasses. “Surely you do not expect me to take this proposition seriously,” he said.

“We could do it,” Schmidt said. “Between us, we could split Poland as neatly as we did in 1939.”

“Oh, yes, that was splendid,” Molotov said. Schmidt recognized sarcasm more readily than a Lizard would, and had the grace to flush. Molotov drove the point home anyhow: “The half of Poland the Reich seized gave it a perfect springboard for the invasion of the Soviet Union a year and a half later. How long would we have to wait for your panzers this time? Not very, unless I miss my guess.”

“Reichs Chancellor Himmler is prepared to offer an ironclad guarantee of the integrity of Soviet territory after this joint undertaking,” the German ambassador told him.

He didn’t laugh in Schmidt’s face. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said: some vestige of bourgeois politesse, perhaps. “In view of past history, the Soviet Union is not prepared to accept German guarantees,” he said.

Schmidt looked wounded. Like any Nazi, he thought a wave of the hand sufficed to relegate history to the rubbish bin. A miracle the Americans haven’t gone Nazi, Molotov thought. But Schmidt said, “Surely you cannot say you like having the aliens on your western border.”

“I do not,” Molotov admitted. The German ambassador brightened-until Molotov added, “But I vastly prefer them to the Reich. They form a useful buffer. And what do you suppose they would do if we were rash enough to fall on their colony in Poland? They would not sit quiet, I assure you.”

“I think they might,” Schmidt said, and then qualified that by adding, “Reichs Chancellor Himmler thinks they might. They have no adjoining territory. Once lost, Poland would be difficult for them to regain. What could they do but acquiesce to the fait accompli?”

“Drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union and the Reich till both countries glow for the next thousand years,” Molotov answered. “In my considered opinion, that is exactly what they would do at such an outrageous provocation.

“Chancellor Himmler believes otherwise,” Schmidt said. This time, he didn’t say anything about what he believed. Molotov nodded to himself. He’d pegged the ambassador for an intelligent man. He might present Himmler’s proposal as part of his duty, but that didn’t mean he thought it was a good idea.

“If Chancellor Himmler believes otherwise, he is welcome to launch this attack against Poland by himself,” the Soviet leader said. “If he succeeds, he is welcome to all the spoils. I will congratulate him.” I will also begin fortifying our western frontier more strongly than ever.

“Our two great nations have cooperated before, first in rectifying the frontiers of eastern Europe in 1939 and then in the struggle against the Lizards,” Schmidt said smoothly. “What we have done once, we can do again.”

“We have also fought each other to the death in the interval between those times,” Molotov said icily. “When your predecessor, Count Schulenberg, announced that your nation had wantonly invaded mine, I asked him, ‘Do you believe that we deserved this?’ He had no answer. I do not believe you have an answer, either.”

He had never had a worse moment in his life than when the German envoy announced the start of hostilities on 22 June 1941. Stalin had never thought that day would come, which meant no one under Stalin had dared think it might come. Had the Lizards not landed, who could guess which of the two giants in Europe would have been left standing when the fighting was done?

Schmidt did his best, as his masters in Berlin would have wanted him to do. Voice still smooth, he said, “That was twenty years ago, Comrade General Secretary. Times change. Both of our governments view the Race as the greatest menace facing humanity these days, would you not agree?”

“The Race is the greatest enemy facing humanity, yes. I would agree with that.” Molotov shot out a forefinger to point at the German ambassador. “But the Reich is without a doubt the greatest menace to the peace-loving people of the Soviet Union.”

“Chancellor Himmler does not think the Soviet Union is the greatest menace to the Reich,.” Paul Schmidt told him. “That is why he invited you-”

“To share in his own destruction,” Molotov broke in. “Do you know what would likely happen even if the Reich and the USSR did succeed in wresting Poland from the Race?”

“You have expressed your view on the matter with great clarity,” Schmidt said.

Molotov shook his head. “The view I expressed was, as you say, mine. If anything, it was also unduly optimistic. If we ousted the Lizards from Poland, they might conclude we were drawing ahead of them technically. Do you know what they might do if they came to that conclusion?”

“Respect us. Fear us,” Schmidt answered. He might be a decent enough fellow. He might be a clever fellow. But Nazi ideology had corroded his thought processes, sure enough. Too bad, Molotov thought.

“They might indeed do those things,” he said aloud. “Most especially, they might fear us. And, if they fear us enough, their ambassador here in Moscow has made it clear that they will seek to destroy us altogether so we cannot possibly become a menace to the Empire as a whole. Has not the Lizard ambassador in Nuremberg conveyed a similar message to your leaders?”

“If he has, I am not aware of it.” Schmidt looked thoughtful, an unusual expression to find on a German’s face.

Here, Molotov believed him. Regardless of the warnings the Race might have given the Nazi bigwigs, they were unlikely to take them seriously. In their arrogance, the leaders of the Reich, like so many spoiled children, still thought they could do whatever they wanted simply because they wanted to do it. Unlike spoiled children, though, they could wreck the world if they tried.

Schmidt licked his lips. “I think I had better send that message back to Nuremberg with some urgency. If it has already been communicated to my superiors, it will do no harm. If it has not, it may do some good.”

“I hope so,” Molotov said. “Considering the adventurism your government has displayed up to this point, though, I would not bet any sizable sum on that, however. Perhaps you had better go attend to it at once-unless, that is, you have any less reckless proposals to lay on the table before me.”

“I have made the proposal I came here to make,” Schmidt said. He rose, bowed, and took his leave.

Molotov’s secretary looked into the office. “Your next appointment, Comrade General Secretary, is-”

“I don’t care who it is,” Molotov said. “I need to consult the foreign commissar. Have Comrade Gromyko come here at once.”

“But it’s Marshal Zhukov!” the secretary wailed.

“I don’t care,” Molotov repeated, though he cared very much. But he had to do this for the safety of the country. “Give him my regrets, say the matter is urgent, and tell him I will see him as soon as it is convenient. Go on, Pyotr Maksimovich. He won’t eat you.” Though if he is unhappy enough, he may eat me.

By the look on the secretary’s face, he was thinking the same thing. But he said, “Very well, Comrade General Secretary,” and disappeared. Molotov might not be more powerful than Zhukov-he feared he wasn’t-but he could still tell his secretary what to do. Silently, he cursed Lavrenti Beria. If the NKVD chief hadn’t tried to overthrow him, he wouldn’t be beholden to the Red Army now.

But Zhukov didn’t choose to eat Molotov, at least not then. And Gromyko got to the Soviet leader’s office inside ten minutes. Without preamble, the foreign commissar said, “And what has gone wrong now?”

Molotov appreciated Gromyko’s style, not least because it came so close to matching his own. “I will tell you what has gone wrong, Andrei Andreyevich,” he said, and recounted the exchange he’d just had with Paul Schmidt.

“Bozhemoi!” Gromyko exclaimed when he was through. “The fascists are serious about this?”

“I would say so, yes, unless they are merely trying to lure us to our own destruction,” Molotov answered. “But surely even the Nazis could not reckon us so naive. My question for you is, how do we respond, beyond rejecting the proposal?”

“One obvious thing we could do is tell the Lizards what the Reich has in mind,” Gromyko said.

“We could indeed do that. Whether we should is one of the things I wanted to ask you,” Molotov said. “The question, of course, is whether the Lizards would believe us. We and the Germans spend a good deal of time spreading misinformation about each other. That could prove a nuisance now.”

“So it could,” the foreign commissar agreed. “But I think that, in this case, the effort would be worthwhile. The Nazis are surely contemplating the use of nuclear weapons here: they could not hope to conquer Poland without them. This is not a trivial matter.”

“No, indeed,” Molotov replied. “I warned Schmidt about what Queek has told me: that the Race may seek to exterminate mankind if we present a large enough danger to them.”

“And how did he respond?” Gromyko inquired.

“With surprise,” Molotov answered. “But who can truly say what goes on inside a German’s head? Who can truly say if anything goes on in a German’s head? Your view is that we should inform the Race?”

“Yes, I think so,” Gromyko replied. “I think we should also be conspicuous about not moving troops into areas near Lizard-held Poland. They must not think we are trying to deceive them and preparing our own surprise attack.”

“A distinct point, and one I shall have to raise with Marshal Zhukov,” Molotov said. And if he fusses, I will ask him how well prepared he is for a nuclear exchange with the Lizards. With a little luck, I may be able to begin to exert a little control over the Red Army after all. He nodded to Gromyko. The foreign commissar nodded back, and even managed something of a smile. He probably knew what was on Molotov’s mind.

“I really do not see why you require my presence here, superior sir,” Felless said to Veffani as the motorcar that carried them pulled up in front of the residence the not-emperor of the Greater German Reich used as his own.

The Race’s ambassador to the Reich turned an eye turret toward her. “Because he is a Tosevite,” Veffani answered. “Because you are alleged to be an expert on Tosevites. I want your views on what he says and on how he says it.”

“And you want to continue punishing me for the incident in your conference room,” Felless added.

Veffani was unabashed. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. Count yourself lucky that I let you remove the green bands denoting punishment: I do not wish to advertise your disgrace to the Deutsche. Now come with me. The matter over which we visit the Deutsch not-emperor is, or at least has the possibility of being, of considerable importance.”

“It shall be done,” Felless said miserably, and got out of the heated motorcar and into the chilly atmosphere that passed for summer in Nuremberg.

Up the stairs she went. The not-emperor’s residence, like most official architecture in the capital of the Reich, was on a scale designed to dwarf even Big Uglies, to make them feel insignificant when measured against the power of their leaders. It trivialized males and females of the Race even more effectively. So did the immensely tall Deutsch sentries at the head of the stairs.

A shorter, unarmed Big Ugly stood between the sentries. “I greet you,” he said in the language of the Race, and favored Veffani with the posture of respect. “And your colleague is…?”

“Senior Researcher Felless,” Veffani answered.

“Very well,” the Deutsch male said, and inclined his head to Felless. “I am Johannes Stark, Senior Researcher. I shall interpret for you with the Reichs Chancellor. He will be able to see you shortly.”

“He should see me now,” Veffani said. “This is the time set for our appointment.”

“The meeting he is currently attending is running long, the Big Ugly said.

“Delay is an insult,” Felless said.

Stark shrugged. “Come with me. I will take you to an antechamber where you can make yourselves comfortable.”

Felless doubted she would be able to make herself comfortable in any Tosevite building, and she proved right. The chamber was chilly. The seats in it were made for Big Uglies, not for the Race. A servant did come in with refreshments, but they tasted nasty. Felless endured. What choice had she?

After what seemed like forever, the Big Ugly named Stark returned and said, “The Reichs Chancellor will see you now. Please follow me.”

The Big Ugly named Himmler sat behind a desk so large, a starship might have landed on it. On one wall of his office was an enormous hooked and tilted cross, the emblem of his faction. On the other wall hung an equally enormous portrait of another Tosevite, this one with the hair on his upper lip cut in a pattern different from the one Himmler chose. Felless gathered that was his predecessor as not-emperor of the Reich.

Against all that immensity, Himmler himself seemed strangely shrunken. Even for a Big Ugly, he was unprepossessing, with a round, flat, soft-fleshed face with corrective lenses in front of his immobile eyes. He spoke in the guttural language the Deutsche used among themselves. Johannes Stark translated: “The Reichs Chancellor greets you and inquires why you have requested this meeting.”

“I greet him as well,” Veffani said. “I asked to see him to warn him and to warn this whole not-empire against taking any course that would jeopardize the long-standing truce on Tosev 3.”

Stark translated that, too. Felless wished she had some ginger. It would have made time pass more quickly. Of course, it would also have made Veffani mate with her on the spot, which might have entertained the Tosevites but would not have advanced diplomacy. Listening to Himmler and the interpreter drone on in their own language made it hard for her to care. At least she wouldn’t have been bored.

Himmler said, “On behalf of the Reich, I must tell you that I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“On behalf of the Race, I must tell you that that had better be so,” Veffani answered. “Any movement against Poland, any attack on Poland, will lead at once to the harshest and most stringent retaliation.”

“I deny that the Greater German Reich intends any attack on Poland,” Himmler said.

“Do you deny proposing to the SSSR a joint attack on Poland, your two not-empires to divide the region between you?” Veffani asked.

“Of course I do,” the Big Ugly replied.

Felless spoke up: “But you would deny it whether it was true or not, because it is in your interest to do so. Why should the Race take your denials seriously?”

Behind the corrective lenses, Himmler’s eyes swung her way. She had dealt with him before, but not often. Only now did she get the strong impression that his stare said he wished she were dead, and also that he wished he could arrange her death. Considering the policies of the Reich, he doubtless meant that literally. Had she been subject to his whimsy, she would have been terrified. Even as things were, that measuring gaze disturbed her.

“I repeat: I deny it,” Himmler said. “And I speak the truth when I tell you this.” His features moved very little as he spoke; for a Big Ugly, he showed scant visible expression.

“Do you also deny troop movements toward the frontier between the Reich and Poland have taken place?” Veffani demanded.

“I do not deny that there have been such movements, no,” Himmler said. “I deny that there is anything in the least aggressive about them, however. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS conduct exercises as best suits them.”

“They would be well advised-very well advised-to conduct them elsewhere in the Reich,” Veffani said.

“You cannot give me orders,” Himmler said. “The Reich is a sovereign and independent not-empire.”

“I am not giving you orders. I am giving you a warning,” Veffani said. “Here is another one: if you attack Poland, the Race will destroy you.”

“If you attack the Reich, we will also destroy you,” Himmler said. “We can wreck this world, and we will do it.”

“He means what he says, superior sir,” Felless whispered to Veffani. “The ideology of this faction-perhaps of all the Deutsche-is full of images of battle destroying both sides.”

“I also mean what I say,” Veffani answered. He swung his eye turrets back toward the Tosevite leader. “That does not matter. If we are destroyed to ensure your destruction, we shall pay the price.”

“It would be the end for you. Do you not understand that?” Himmler said.

“No, it would not,” Veffani made the negative hand gesture. “It would be a setback for us. It would be an end for us on this world. But the Empire would continue on its other three worlds. For you Tosevites, though, it would indeed be the end. Please carry that thought in your mind at all times.”

“If we could reach your other worlds, you would regret this arrogance and insolence,” Himmler said. “That time may come, and sooner than you think.”

“The better the chance you have of reaching our other worlds, the likelier it is that we will find it necessary to destroy you first,” Felless said.

Indeed, Himmler wished her dead. He said, “We are the master race, and not to be trifled with.”

“We crossed the space between the stars to come to Tosev 3,” Veffani said. “You cannot match that. Who then are the masters?”

Felless thought-hoped-that would make Himmler lose his temper. She had read of the spectacular rages that would seize the not-emperor’s predecessor, and had viewed video of a couple of them. Even across species lines, they were appalling in their intensity and ferocity.

But the present Reichs Chancellor seldom seemed to get very excited about anything. Through his interpreter, he answered, “You have a much longer history than we do. We had almost caught you by the time you came here. We are closer now than we were then. Before long, we shall surpass you. If this is not the mark of the master race, what is?”

His certainty was in its way as frightening as his predecessor’s volcanic wrath. And he raised good points, alarming points. Where would the Tosevites be in a few hundred years? All over the Empire, was the thought that sprang into Felless’ mind. And if they came to Home or to Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, they would come as conquerors. The thought chilled her worse than the weather on Tosev 3.

But Veffani said, “Have you not listened to a word I told you? If you are on the point of becoming a menace to the Empire as a whole rather than merely to this planet, we will destroy you and ourselves here rather than allowing that to happen.”

To Felless’ dismay, Himmler yawned. “By the time you perceive the threat, you will not be able to destroy it. We will have gone too far ahead of you by then. You of the Race had best bear that in mind and behave accordingly. Your time is passing away. Ours is coming.”

Before Veffani could speak, Felless did: “Then the best thing we could do would be to destroy you now, while you cannot hope to prevent us from doing it.”

That got through to the Big Ugly. Himmler fixed her with a glare that warned he did know rages like his predecessor’s, even if he didn’t show them on the outside. He said, “If you try, we shall have our vengeance on you.”

“And yet, despite your knowledge of the ruin that would fall on your not-empire, you planned an attack against the Race,” Veffani said. “You need to consider very carefully the likely consequences of your actions.”

“I have already denied your allegations,” Himmler said. “I deny them again.” But his tone when he spoke his own language carried no conviction, and neither did the interpreter’s in the language of the Race.

“See that your denial becomes and remains a truth,” Veffani said, rising from the uncomfortable Tosevite chair. He assumed the posture of respect, then straightened. “I bid you farewell.” He left the Reichs Chancellor’s office, Felless following him.

“Will he listen?” Felless asked when they had returned to the comfortably heated motorcar and begun the return journey to the Race’s embassy.

“Who can say? You are the expert on Big Uglies,” Veffani replied, which was disingenuous; having come to this world with the conquest fleet, he had more experience with Tosevites than she did. But then he went on, “You did well there, Senior Researcher. Your remarks to me were germane, and, while you irked Himmler, you did so without attempting to be deliberately inflammatory.”

“I thank you, superior sir,” Felless answered. “What point to being inflammatory? You would not let me leave even if I were.”

“High time you begin to realize such things,” Veffani said in what sounded more like approval than anything she’d heard from him since disgracing herself with him and the visiting males from Cairo. Maybe his measured praise should have made her pleased at doing her duties well. To a degree, it did. But thinking about her disgrace also made her think about how much she wanted another taste of ginger.

“I greet you.” Gorppet waved to a female walking down a Baghdad street toward one of the markets that had recently been declared safe for the Race once more. “How would you like a taste of ginger?”

He felt like mating, even though it wasn’t the proper season. Here and there in Baghdad, females had been tasting ginger. He could smell the pheromones: not strongly enough to drive him into a frenzy, but enough to leave an itch at the back of his mind, almost like the itch he had for ginger. Maybe that was the way Big Uglies worked all the time.

Whether it was or not, though, it wasn’t the way the female worked. “I do not use that illegal herb,” she declared, and went on her way with her tailstump quivering in indignation.

“A pestilence take her,” Betvoss muttered. He raised his voice and called, “Your pheromones probably stink, anyhow!” The female’s tailstump quivered harder, but she did not turn back.

Gorppet laughed. “There you go.” This time, he was glad to see Betvoss disagreeable, because the other male’s venom wasn’t aimed at him.

Betvoss said, “I hope the Big Uglies in the marketplace cheat her out of all her money.”

“So do I,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets hadn’t once stopped their wary swiveling, even while he was talking to the female. He wasn’t sure how much good it would do; swaddled in robes as they were, the local Big Uglies had little trouble concealing weapons. Still… “I would rather patrol the marketplace than collect coins at a house of superstition.” He used an emphatic cough.

“Truth!” Betvoss used another one. “That is one duty I too am just as well pleased to escape. Here in the marketplace, at least, I am a moving target.”

That made Gorppet laugh again. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Betvoss had probably spoken a truth. Gorppet said, “The other thing being on the edge of wanting to mate all the time does to me is, it makes me mean. I want to claw something or bite something or shoot something.”

“Plenty of Big Uglies around,” Betvoss said. “Go ahead. I will not mind. None of your other squadmales will mind.” He lowered his voice a little. “Of course, that could be ginger talking, too.”

And he was right again. Twice in one day, Gorppet thought Who would have imagined it? Wanting to taste ginger made a male-or a female-jumpy. And when a male tasted ginger, he did things before he finished thinking about them, which also led to trouble.

Biting a Big Ugly, or even shooting one, felt tempting right now. After the riots and uprisings he’d helped quell, after the hatred the local Tosevites showed whenever they had to pay to enter their houses of superstition, he wished he could go off somewhere that had no Tosevites for a little while-say, for the next couple of hundred years.

A mechanized combat vehicle moved slowly and carefully through the market square. It had speakers mounted above it. Through the speakers came the recorded voice of a Tosevite. His voice boomed forth in the local language: “Come reverence the spirits of Emperors past! Next offering of reverence in one hour’s time. Come reverence the spirits…”

“Be ready,” Gorppet warned the males in his squad.

The warning was hardly necessary. Whenever the Big Uglies heard the recording, they pelted the combat vehicle with rocks and fruit and rotten eggs. Sometimes they did worse than that: sometimes they started shooting. That didn’t happen so often as it had, though, not when the Race hit back so hard.

“I wonder where the Big Ugly who made that recording is hiding,” Gorppet said. “If his fellow Tosevites ever find out who he is, his life expectancy is about as long as an azwaca rib’s at a feast.”

“What I wonder is why we bother with the combat vehicle,” Betvoss said. “How many Big Uglies come to reverence the spirits of Emperors past in this part of the world? How many of them live to come give reverence more than once?”

“Some,” Gorppet said. “Not many. Not enough. But our superiors say we have to keep trying.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the radio on his belt hissed for attention. “Report to the shrine to the spirits of Emperors past,” said the male on the other end of the line. “We have heard there may be disturbances above and beyond the ordinary there today.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said resignedly, and passed the order on to his squad. “We have to keep trying,” he repeated.

“Waste of time,” Betvoss grumbled. “Liable to be a waste of us, too.” But he obeyed Gorppet, as Gorppet had obeyed the dispatching officer. Gorppet wondered what would have happened had he told that officer he was sick of Big Uglies and would sooner go to Australia. He sighed. Either he needed another taste of ginger or his wits were addling from all the tastes he’d already had.

The shrine for giving reverence to the spirits of Emperors past was a bit of Home dropped down not far from the center of Baghdad: a plain cube of a building, looking achingly familiar against the masonry and mud brick of local Tosevite architecture. But the razor-wire perimeter around the building did not come from Home; it was an effort to keep hostile Big Uglies far enough away so they couldn’t use truly large weapons against the building.

Despite what Betvoss had said, a few Tosevites had passed through the perimeter and were heading toward the shrine when the squad got there. Many more, though, crowded up against the wire, aiming curses and abuse and occasional bits of offal at those who presumed to follow the ways of the Empire instead of their own preposterous superstition. It was, in fact, a pretty typical day.

“I wonder what the males heard to make them think there would be extra trouble here,” Gorppet said.

“For all we know, it may be a drill,” Betvoss said. “They like to keep us half addled all the time.”

“It could be,” Gorppet agreed. But, though he didn’t waste time arguing with Betvoss, he doubted it. A lot of males had come from all over Baghdad and were prowling along the perimeter. It didn’t have the feeling of a drill, though Gorppet supposed that could have been intentional on the part of the officers who’d called it.

He watched not only the males from the conquest fleet but also the Big Uglies. He wanted to have every chance he could of shooting first if this wasn’t a drill-or even if it was and things got out of hand.

His squadmales were doing the same. “All these cursed Tosevites look alike,” Betvoss complained.

“Not alike, exactly,” Gorppet said. “But certainly similar.” Males of the Race had always had trouble telling one Tosevite from another. That male with the gray hair growing out of his face, for instance, looked a good deal like the badly wanted preacher named Khomeini, but how likely was he to be the fearsome Big Ugly male in fact?

Gorppet stopped. That male looked very much indeed like Khomeini. Gorppet had a photograph of Khomeini with him. He examined it, then turned an eye turret toward the male. No, he thought. Impossible. But the higher-ups had had a warning of trouble, and so.

He hissed to his squadmales-not a hiss with words in it, in case any nearby Big Uglies understood the Race’s language, but one to draw their attention. Once he had it, he gathered the males together so he could speak in a low voice: “By the Emperor, I think that fellow there in the black robe with the white head rag is the accursed Khomeini. We are going to seize him. We are going to hustle him into the shrine. We are going to shoot any Tosevite who tries to stop us. Have you got that?”

“What if that is not the fearsome Khomeini?” Betvoss asked.

“Then our superiors will turn him loose,” Gorppet answered. “But if it is, we are all heroes, every one of us, and we do the Race a great service by stopping his poison. Now come on. Back me.”

After making sure he had a round in the chamber of his rifle and the safety off, he hurried up to the gray-whiskered Big Ugly. In Arabic, he said, “You are under arrest. Come with me.”

“What?” The tufts of hair above the Tosevite’s eyes were still black. They leaped upward, a sign of surprise or alarm. “I have done nothing.”

“You will be questioned. If you have done nothing, you will be freed.” Gorppet went back to the language of the Race: “Seize him-and then on to the entranceway.”

Before the Big Ugly could move, the squad of soldiers swarmed over him. Though he was bigger than any of them, together they hustled him toward the guarded entry. A couple of Tosevites who’d been with him shouted and made as if to try to rescue him, but Gorppet and the other males pointed their rifles at them and they fell back.

“What is this?” asked a trooper at the entranceway.

“I think it is Khomeini,” Gorppet answered, which made the other male’s eye turrets jerk in surprise. “We will find out. This building is secure, not so?”

“Considering what it is and where it is, it had better be,” the trooper said. “Everyone in this city wants to destroy it, but it is the most secure building here.”

Gorppet waited to hear no more. “Come on, you,” he said in Arabic, and gestured to the males in his squad to get the Big Ugly moving again. As they hurried him down the covered way toward the shrine, cries of fury rang out among the Tosevites beyond the razor-wire barriers. They made Gorppet begin to hope he really had seized Khomeini. Would the Tosevites have got so excited for anyone less?

The shrine, Gorppet discovered, had an armored door. In spite of that, peace flowed through him when he walked in and saw the tiny holographic images of all the Emperors who had reigned since the unification of Home. The interior was Home, or felt like it, and the presence of a few Tosevites didn’t change that.

A male came hurrying up to the squad. “You should not enter this place bearing weapons,” he said, as if to a half-trained hatchling.

“We would not have, superior sir, did I not believe this Big Ugly here to be the agitator named Khomeini,” Gorppet replied.

As it had at the entrance to the perimeter around the shrine, that name worked wonders. Several males came hurrying forward. They took charge of the Tosevite. Very much as an afterthought, one of them added, “You soldiers wait here while we attempt to identify this fellow.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets flicked from one Emperor’s image to another. So many Emperors to enfold and cherish his spirit when it finally left his body.

And then the males came back, far more excited than they should have been inside the shrine. “It is!” one of them exclaimed. “We were almost certain ourselves, and then one of our Tosevite converts positively identified him for us. It is Khomeini.” Awe of a new and different sort washed over Gorppet. He’d never been a hero before, nor thought he wanted to be. Now he discovered it wasn’t so bad.

Over the weeks since fleeing from Peking, Liu Han had discovered how much she’d forgotten about farming and about farming villages since leaving her own village near Hankow. What she’d forgotten mostly involved two things: how uncomfortable village life was and how much work it involved.

She’d thought she remembered, but she was wrong. Memory had failed to warn her about how exhausted she would be, staggering home from the fields at sunset every evening. Maybe that was because they grew wheat and barley and millet in these northern lands, not the rice that had sprung up in the paddies around her old village. Maybe, but she doubted it. More had to do with memory’s being like opium and blurring how bad things had been. And more still was her being twice as old as she had been back then. Things she could have done easily in those days left her stiff and sore and aching now.

Living in a straw-roofed stone hut didn’t help her recover. She and Liu Mei had more space to themselves than they’d enjoyed back in the Peking rooming houses in which they’d lived, but that was the only advantage she could see. A dirt floor meant everything was filthy all the time. The well was far away. The water that came from it was unpurified, too. It had given her a flux of the bowels, and had given her daughter a nastier one.

But worse than all that was the feeling of emptiness, of disconnectedness, she had. Ever since she’d come to Peking, she’d been at the center of the revolutionary struggle against the imperialist scaly devils. News from all over the city, from all over China, from all over the world, had flowed in to her. Now she heard nothing but village gossip. One other thing her memory had failed to hold was how boring and picayune village gossip was.

To her annoyance, Nieh Ho-T’ing seemed to drop into the narrow world of the village as if he’d never seen Peking a day in his life. He was older than she, and came from a wealthier family than she did. But he fit right in, and she didn’t.

He laughed at her when she complained. “You have lived among the bourgeoisie too long,” he said. “A little reeducation will do you good.”

“Oh, yes, it will be splendid-if I live through it,” Liu Han answered. “I don’t want my bones to end up here, where nobody knows or cares who I am. And I certainly don’t want Liu Mei to have to stay here for the rest of her life to tend to my grave. She would be buried here even more than I was.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Nieh said. “When things calm down, we’ll be moving on. We’ll get in touch with the others who got out of Peking, too, and with the ones who weren’t in Peking at all, and we’ll start up the struggle again. We don’t need to hurry. The dialectic is certain.”

“The dialectic is certain,” Liu Han repeated. She believed that, as she’d believed in the endless gods and spirits of the countryside back when she was nothing but a peasant. But the gods and spirits of the countryside had failed against both the Japanese and the little scaly devils, and the dialectic, however much she believed in it, did not seem to be holding its own against the little devils. She said what was in her heart: “Losing Peking hurt.”

“Of course it did,” Nieh said. “The People’s Liberation Army has been hurt before, though, and worse than this. Chiang and the Kuomintang reactionaries thought they’d destroyed us a generation ago, but we made the Long March and kept fighting. And we will keep fighting here, too, till we win, however long it takes.”

“However long it takes.” Liu Han repeated that, too. She saw time stretching out as a river before her, a river longer than the Yangtze. Where along that river lay the port named Red Victory? Was there such a port at all, or did the river of time just flow into the sea called Forever? She wondered if she’d live long enough to find out.

She didn’t share the conceit with Nieh Ho-T’ing. He might accuse her of trying to set up as a poet. That she could deal with. But he might also accuse her of defeatism, an altogether more serious business.

Next morning, just before sunrise, a motorcar rolled into the village. Music, both Chinese-style and the raucous noise the little scaly devils enjoyed, blared from the speakers mounted on top of the car. A man’s voice-a recording, Liu Han realized after a moment-called out, “Come see how much we are all alike, little scaly devils and human beings! Come see! Come see!”

“This is a new sort of propaganda,” Liu Mei observed, spooning up the last of her barley porridge.

“So it is.” Liu Han sipped tea, then sighed. “I suppose we’d better go find out what kind of new propaganda it is.”

She set down her cup and stepped out of the hut where she’d been living. Liu Mei followed. The motorcar, Liu Han saw, was of the scaly devils’ manufacture, and was of a make she knew to be armored. It carried several little devils with body armor and rifles, and one who came out unarmed.

“I greet you, people of this village,” that one said, speaking Chinese as well as Liu Han had ever heard a little scaly devil do. “For too long, your kind and mine have been enemies. Part of the reason we have fought, I think, is that we have believed we are more different than is so.”

“A very new sort of propaganda,” Liu Mei murmured. Liu Han nodded. The scaly devil reminded her of the fast-talking merchants of Peking, who all did their best to sell people things they neither wanted nor needed. But what was this little devil selling?

He didn’t leave her in suspense for long. “You Chinese people reverence your ancestors,” he said. “Is it not so?” Here and there in the crowd that had gathered around the motorcar, people nodded. Liu Han found herself nodding, too, and made herself stop with a grimace of annoyance. If only she hadn’t been talking with Nieh Ho-T’ing the day before. The scaly devil went on, “We, too, give reverence to the spirits of our Emperors, our Emperors dead. Their spirits comfort us when we die. They can comfort your spirits when you die, if only you will also give them reverence while you are still living.”

Having thought of Nieh, Liu Han looked around for him. There he was, looking like a peasant who was starting to get old. She caught his eyes. One of his eyebrows rose a little. She’d known him a long time, and understood what that meant-he was taking seriously what the scaly devil said.

“We have big shrines in big cities,” the little devil went on. “But in a village like this, we do not need a big shrine. A small one will do. We have one here.” He gestured to the armed scaly devils. Two of them opened the motorcar’s boot and took out what looked like a large, polished-metal headstone for a Christian grave. The little devil who spoke Chinese said, “Where is the village headman?”

No one said anything. No one came forward. Liu Han took that as a good sign. Had the village headman admitted who he was, his next step at collaboration might have been to tell the scaly devil Communists were hiding there.

“I mean no harm to anybody,” the scaly devil said. When silence stretched, he continued, “Somebody, anybody, then, please tell me, where can we plant this shrine in the ground in the village without angering anyone? We do not wish to cause anger. Our spirits and yours should be together.”

Liu Han had never heard language like that from a little scaly devil. It was good propaganda, very good propaganda. If they’d used propaganda like that from the moment they came to Earth, many more people would have been reconciled to their rule. She stared around the crowd with worry in her eyes.

To her vast relief, people still stood silent. The little devil who spoke Chinese gave a very humanlike shrug. He said, “All right, then, if you do not tell me, we will place it here, near the edge of this little square. As I say, we do not mean to anger anyone. I will also tell you one other thing. We will know how you treat this shrine. We will know if you offer to it. You do not have to do that, but we wish you would. We will know if you harm it, too. If you do that, we will come back and punish you. You need to understand that.”

He turned an eye turret to the males holding the shrine and spoke in his own language. A couple of the males took the shrine over to one edge of the square, where it would be visible but would not get in the way. The one who spoke Chinese had chosen well. The other two planted the shrine in the ground. Then all the little scaly devils got back into the armored motorcar and drove away.

As soon as they were gone, villagers crowded around Liu Han, Liu Mei, and Nieh Ho-T’ing. “You come from the city,” a woman said to Liu Han. “Can it be true, what the ugly scaly devil told us? If we take down that piece of polished metal and smash it, will the little devils know?”

“I don’t know if they will, but they might,” Liu Han admitted reluctantly. “They are very good at making tiny machines that tell them all sorts of things.”

A man asked, “Are they putting up one of these shrines in every village?”

“How can I know that? Am I in every village?” Liu Han knew she sounded irritable, but she couldn’t help it. Yes, she felt cut off from the world, here in a village without even a wireless set or a telegraph line. And she was worried. If the scaly devils had put up a shrine in one no-account village, they were surely putting up shrines in a lot of them if not in all.

Another man said, “The scaly devils are strong. Their ancestors must be strong, too. How can it hurt if we burn paper goods in front of their shrine, the way we do for our own ancestors? Maybe the spirits of the little devils will like us if we do that. Maybe they will help us if we do that.”

“You will be doing what the little devils want if you make offerings to the spirits of their dead,” Liu Han said. Listening, she heard her daughter and Nieh Ho-T’ing saying the same thing, saying it ever louder and more stridently.

But the villagers didn’t listen. “If we do this, the little devils are more likely to leave us alone,” one of them said. Before long-even before people went out to the fields-automobiles and big houses and liquor bottles and other offerings, all made of paper, went up in smoke before the metal shrine.

Sick with defeat, Liu Han went out to grub away weeds in the millet fields around the village. She tore them from the ground with savage ferocity. Her ancestors got no offerings, but the dead Emperors did. Where was the justice in that?

And if the villagers made offerings to the dead Emperors, wouldn’t that lead them toward accepting the little scaly devils as their rightful rulers? The scaly devils had to think so, or they wouldn’t have come out with all these shrines. They had a long history of oppressing and co-opting people-or rather, other kinds of devils-they’d beaten in war. Liu Han knew that.

The dialectic said the little devils were doomed: progressive forces would overwhelm them. “But when?” Liu Han asked the millet waving gently in the breeze. “When?” She got no answer. The millet would be there regardless of whether people or little scaly devils ruled the land. Cursing, Liu Han got back to work.

These days, the Russies had to pay only a pound to admit the whole family into services on a Friday night or Saturday morning. “See, it is cheaper now,” said one of the Lizards collecting the fee at the door. “Nothing to get upset about.”

Moishe Russie went past the male without a word. Reuven, younger, was more inclined to argue. “It isn’t right that we should have to pay anything,” he said. “People should be free to worship any way they please.”

“No one stops you,” the Lizard answered in hissing Hebrew. “You worship any way you please. But if you do not go to the shrine to Emperors past, you have to pay. That is all. It is a small thing.”

“It’s wrong,” Reuven insisted.

“It’s wrong to block the door,” someone behind him called. “That’s what’s wrong.” Muttering, Reuven went into the synagogue.

As usual, he and his father sat together in the men’s section. As usual, lately before services, conversation centered on the worship tax. Someone asked, “Has anybody actually gone to see what sort of shrine the Lizards have for their Emperors?”

“I would never even look,” somebody else said. “I wouldn’t go to a church, I wouldn’t go to a mosque, and I don’t see how this is any different.”

That drew several nods of agreement, Moishe Russie’s among them. But the man who’d asked the question said, “The Lizards never persecuted us, the way Christians and Muslims have. If it weren’t for the Lizards, a lot of us in this room would be dead. If that isn’t different, what is it?”

“It isn’t different enough,” insisted the other fellow who’d spoken. That started a fine, almost Talmudic, discussion of degrees of difference and when different was different enough.

With the argument going on, services seemed almost irrelevant. And, sure enough, as soon as they were done, the discussion picked up again. “Confound it, Russie, you’re supposed to be able to fix tsuris like this,” somebody said to Reuven’s father. “Why haven’t you gone and done it?”

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” Moishe Russie said. “I’ve talked to the fleetlord. And I’ve talked even more to his adjutant, because Atvar is sick of talking with me. All I can tell you is, the Lizards aren’t going to change their minds about this.”

“Does anybody actually go to the shrine they built here?” someone else asked.

“I’ve seen some people do it,” Reuven said. “A few Christians, a few Muslims… a few of us, too.”

“Disgraceful.” Three men said the same thing at the same time.

“I don’t think the world will end,” Reuven said. “I wouldn’t care to do it myself, though.”

“The world may not end if a few Jews go to this shrine,” Moishe Russie said heavily, “but we haven’t got so many Jews that we can afford to waste even a few.” Reuven had a hard time disagreeing with that.

And then, the next Monday, he’d just got into his seat at the medical college when the Lizard physician named Shpaaka said, “You Tosevites here are an elite. You have the privilege of learning from us medical techniques far more sophisticated than any your own kind would have developed for many years to come. Is this not a truth?”

“It is truth, superior sir,” Reuven chorused along with the rest of the young men and women in his class.

“I am glad you concede this,” Shpaaka told them. “Because you are an elite, more is expected from you than from other Tosevites. Is this not also a truth?”

“It is truth, superior sir,” Reuven repeated with his classmates. He wondered what the Lizard was getting at. Most days, almost all days, Shpaaka simply started lecturing, and heaven help the students who couldn’t keep up.

Today, though, he continued, “Because you are privileged, you also have responsibilities beyond the ordinary. Another truth, is it not so?”

“Another truth, superior sir,” Reuven said dutifully. He wasn’t the only one puzzled now. Half the class looked confused.

“One of the responsibilities you have is to the Race,” Shpaaka said. “In learning our medicine, you also learn our culture. Yet you do not participate in our culture as fully as we would like. We are going to take steps to correct this unfortunate situation. I realize we should have done this sooner, but we have only just reached consensus on the point ourselves.”

Jane Archibald caught Reuven’s eye-not hard, because his gaze had a way of sliding toward her every so often anyhow. What he talking about? she mouthed. Reuven shrugged one shoulder. He didn’t know, either.

A moment later, Shpaaka finally got around to the point: “Because you are privileged to attend the Moishe Russie Medical College and learn the Race’s medical techniques, we do not think it unjust that you should also learn more of the Race’s way of doing things. Accordingly, from this time forward, you shall be required to attend the shrine in this city dedicated to the spirits of Emperors past at least once every twenty days as a condition for attending this college.”

Shpaaka insisted on decorum in his lecture hall. Normally, he had no trouble getting it and keeping it. This was not a normal morning. Instead of holding up their hands and waiting to be recognized, his human students shouted for attention. Reuven was as loud as any of them, louder than most.

“Silence!” Shpaaka said, but he got no silence. “This is most unseemly,” he went on. The racket just got louder. He spoke again: “If there is no silence, I shall end lectures for today and for as long as seems necessary. Are you more attached to the pursuit of knowledge or to your superstitions?”

In answer to that, Reuven shouted loud enough to make himself heard through the din from his fellow students: “Are you more attached to teaching your knowledge or to teaching your superstitions?”

Shpaaka drew back behind his lectern, plainly affronted. “We teach the truth in all matters,” he declared.

“How many spirits of Emperors past have returned to tell you so?” Reuven shot back. “Have you ever seen one? Has anybody ever seen one?”

“You are impertinent,” Shpaaka said. He was right, too, and Reuven wasn’t the only one being impertinent, either-far from it. The Lizard went on, “Anyone refusing to give reverence to the spirits of Emperors past shall not continue at this college. I dismiss you all. Think on that.”

He left the lecture hall, but the clamor didn’t die down behind him. Some of the students, the ones without much religion of their own, didn’t care one way or the other. Others did care, but cared more about what would happen to them if they were forced from the medical college.

Reuven and the Muslim students seemed most upset. “My father will kill me if I go home to Baghdad without finishing my medical studies,” Ibrahim Nuqrashi said. “But if I bow before idols, he will torture me and then kill me-and I would not blame him for doing it. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”

No one would kill Reuven, or torture him, either, if he went to the shrine the Lizards had built here in Jerusalem. Even so, he couldn’t imagine such a thing, not for himself. The Nazis had wanted to kill his family and him for being Jews. He couldn’t slough that off like a snake shedding its skin.

He made his way over toward Jane Archibald. She nodded to him. “What are you going to do?” she asked, seeming to understand his dilemma.

Except it wasn’t a dilemma, not really. “I’m coming to say goodbye,” he answered. “I’m not going to stay. I can’t stay.”

“Why not?” she asked-no, she didn’t understand everything that was on his mind. “I mean, it’s not as if you believe everything that’s in the Bible, is it?”

“No, of course not,” he answered. He bit his lip; he didn’t know how to explain it, not so it made rational sense. It didn’t make rational sense to him, either, not altogether. He tried his best: “If I went to the Lizards’ shrine, I’d be letting down all the Jews who came before me, that’s all.”

Jane cocked her head to one side, studying him. “I almost feel I ought to be jealous. I can’t imagine taking the Church of England so seriously.”

“So you’ll go to the shrine, then?” Reuven asked.

“Why not?” she said with a shrug. “If I don’t believe in what I grew up with and I don’t believe in this, either, where’s the difference?”

That was perfectly logical. Part of Reuven wished he could see things the same way. Part of him was relieved he hadn’t got intimately involved with Jane. And part of him-a bigger part-wished he had. He said, “Good luck to you.”

When he said no more, she nodded as if he’d passed a test, or perhaps as if he’d failed one. She found another question for him: “What will your father say when be finds out about this?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I’ll find out when he gets home tonight. But I don’t see how I can do it. And even if I don’t finish here, I know more about medicine than anyone who just went to a human university.”

Jane nodded again, then hugged him and kissed him, which had to drive every male student in the class wild with envy. “I’ll miss you,” she said. “I’ll miss you a lot. We might have-” Now she shook her head. “Oh, what’s the use?”

“None,” Reuven said. “None at all.” He left the lecture hall, he left the cube of a building that housed the medical college named for his father, and he left the razor-wire perimeter around the building.

One of the Lizard sentries at the perimeter said, “It is not time for you Tosevites to be leaving your classes.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” Reuven answered in the language of the Race. “It is time for me; in fact, it is past time for me.” The sentry started to say something to that, then shrugged and waved Reuven out into the world beyond the perimeter-the real world, he thought as he headed home.

His mother exclaimed in surprise when he walked in. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You should be in class.” He laughed a little at how much she sounded like the Lizard. But then he explained. His mother’s face got longer and longer as she listened. After he finished, she let out a long sigh. “You did the right thing.”

“I hope so.” He went into the kitchen, took a bottle of plum brandy off a pantry shelf, and poured himself a good dose. He didn’t usually do that in the middle of the day, but it wasn’t a usual day, either.

“Your father will be proud of you,” Rivka Russie said.

“I hope so,” Reuven repeated. He hefted the bottle of slivovitz. His father wouldn’t be proud of him if he drank himself blind, which was what he felt like doing. Instead, with a sigh, he put the bottle away.

The twins also exclaimed when they got home from their school and discovered Reuven there ahead of them. He made his explanations all over again. Judith and Esther’s faces grew unwontedly serious by the time he was through.

And he explained one more time when, his father came home. “No, you can’t do that,” Moishe Russie said gravely. “Or you could, but I’m glad you didn’t. Till we see what else we can arrange, how would you like to help me in my practice?”

“Thank you, Father!” Reuven let out a long sigh of relief. “That would be very good.” As good as staying at the college? He didn’t know. He had his doubts, in fact. But it would do.