In the Balance

11

A shell screamed down and landed in the middle of the grove of larches south of Shabbona, Illinois. Mutt Daniels threw himself flat. Splinters of wood and more deadly splinters of metal whined past overhead. “I am getting too old for this shit,” Daniels muttered to no one in particular.

A flock of black-crowned night herons-“quawks,” the locals called them, after the noise they made-leapt into the air in panic. They were handsome birds, two feet tall or more, with long yellow legs, black or sometimes dark green heads and backs, and pearl-gray wings. Quawking for all they were worth, they flew south as fast as they could go.

Mutt listened to their receding cries, but hardly looked up to watch them go. He was too busy deepening the foxhole he’d already started in the muddy ground under the larches. In the generation that had passed since he’d got back from France, he’d forgotten how fast you could dig while you were lying on your belly.

Another shell burst, this one just east of the grove. The few quawks that hadn’t taken flight at the first explosion did at this one. From a hole a few feet away from Daniels’, Sergeant Schneider said, “They likely won’t be back this year.”

“Huh?”

“The herons,” Schneider explained. “They usually head south for the winter earlier in the year than this, anyhow. They come in in April and fly out when fall starts.”

“Just like ballplayers,” Daniels said. He flipped up more dirt with his entrenching tool. “I got a bad feeling this grove ain’t gonna be the same when they come north after spring training next year. Us and the Lizards, we’re kind of rearranging the landscape, you might say.”

He didn’t find out whether Sergeant Schneider would say that or not. A whole salvo of shells crashed down around them. Both men huddled in their holes, heads down so they tasted mud. Then, from east of the larches, American artillery opened up, pounding back at the Lizard positions along the line of Highway 51. As he had in France, Mutt wished the big guns on both sides would shoot at one another and leave the poor damned infantry alone.

Tanks, rumbled past the grove under cover of the American barrage, trying to push back the Lizard vanguard still moving on Chicago. Daniels raised his head for a moment. Some of the tanks were Lees, with a small turret and a heavy gun mounted in a sponson on the front corner of the hull. More, though, were the new Shermans; with their big main armament up in the turret, they looked like the Lizard tanks from which Daniels had been retreating since the Lizards came down from beyond the sky.

“The closer they get to Chicago, the more stuff we’re throwin’ at ’em,” he called to Schneider.

“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it’s doing us, too,” the other veteran answered. “If they weren’t spread thin trying to conquer the whole world at once, we’d be dead meat by now. Or maybe they don’t really care whether they get into Chicago or not, and that’s why they’ve moved slower than they might have.”

“What do you mean, maybe they don’t care? Why wouldn’t they?” Mutt asked. When he thought about strategy, he thought about the hit-and-run play, when to bunt, and the right time for a pitchout. Since he got home after the Armistice, he’d done his best to forget the military meaning of the word.

Schneider, though, was a career soldier. Though only a noncom, he had a feel for the way annies functioned. He said, “What good is Chicago to us? It’s a transportation hub, right, the place where all the roads and all the railroads and all the lake and river traffic come together. Just by being this close, and by their air power, the Lizards have smashed that network to smithereens.”

Daniels pointed to the advancing American tanks. “Where’d those come from, then? They must’ve got into Chicago some kind of way, or they wouldn’t be here.”

“Probably by ship,” Sergeant Schneider said. “Things I’ve heard, they don’t quite understand what ships are all about and how much you can carry on one. That probably says something about wherever they come from, wouldn’t you think?”

“Damned if I know.” Mutt looked at Sergeant Schneider with some surprise. He might have expected that remark from Sam Yeager, who’d enjoyed reading about bug-eyed monsters before people knew there were any such things. The sergeant, though, seemed to have a one-track military-mind. What was he doing wondering about other planets or whatever you called them?

As if to answer the question Mutt hadn’t asked, Schneider said, “The more we know about the Lizards, the better we can fight back, right?”

“I guess so,” said Daniels, who hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.

“And speaking of fighting back, we ought to be moving up to give those tanks some support.” Schneider scrambled out of his foxhole, shouted and waved one arm so the rest of the troops in the grove would know what he meant, and dashed out into the open.

Along with the others, Daniels followed the sergeant. He felt naked and vulnerable away from his hastily dug shelter. He’d seen more than enough shelling, both in 1918 and during the past weeks, to know a foxhole often gave only the illusion of safety, but illusions have their place, too. Without them, most likely, men would never go to war at all.

Westbound American shells tore through the air. Their note grew fainter and deeper as they flew away from Mutt. When he heard a rising scream, he threw himself into a ditch several seconds before he consciously reasoned that it had to spring from an incoming Lizard round. His body was smarter than his head. He’d seen that in baseball often enough-when you had to stop and think about what you were doing, you got yourself in trouble.

The shell burst a few hundred yards ahead of him, among the advancing Lees and Shermans. It had an odd sound. Again, Daniels didn’t stop to think, for more rounds followed the first. Cursing himself and Schneider both for breaking cover, he tried once more to dig in while flat on his belly. The barrage walked toward him. He wished he were a mole or a gopher-any sort of creature that could burrow far underground and never have to worry about coming up for air.

His breath sobbed in his ears. His heart thudded inside his chest, so hard he wondered if it would burst. “I am too old for this shit,” he wheezed. The Lizard barrage ignored him. He remembered that the Boche artillery hadn’t paid any attention when he cursed it, either.

The shells rained down for a while, then stopped. The one blessing about going through Lizard barrages was that they didn’t last for days on end, the way German pounding sometimes had in 1918. Maybe the invaders didn’t have the tubes or the ammunition dumps to raise that kind of hell.

Or maybe they just didn’t need to do it. Their fire was more accurate and deadly than the Boches had ever dreamed of being. When Daniels ever so cautiously raised his head, he saw that the field he’d been crossing was churned into a nearly lunar landscape. Up ahead, two or three tanks were burning, As he watched, smoke and flame burst from under another one. A tread thrown, it ground itself into the mud.

“How’d they do that?” Mutt asked the air. No new shell had struck the Lee; he was sure of that. It was almost as if the Lizards had a way to pack antitank mines inside their artillery rounds. Before the invaders came down from Mars or wherever, he would have laughed at the idea He wasn’t laughing now; the Lizards were nothing to laugh about.

A couple of feet in front of his new foxhole, half hidden in yellowing grass, lay a shiny blue spheroid a little smaller than a baseball. Daniels was sure it hadn’t been there before the shelling started He reached out to pick it up and see what it was then jerked back his hand as if the thing had snarled at him.

“Don’t fool around with what you don’t know nothin’, about” he told himself, as if he were more likely to obey a real spoken order. Just because that little blue thing didn’t look like a mine didn’t mean it wasn’t one. He was certain the Lizards hadn’t shot it at him out of the goodness of their hearts, assuming they had any. “Let a sapper screw around with it. That’s his job.”

Mutt gave the spheroid a wide berth as he started moving forward again. He didn’t go as fast as he wanted to; he kept looking down to see if any more of them had been scattered about. A flat bang! and a shriek off to his right told him his caution wasn’t wasted.

Ahead and to his left, Sergeant Schneider trotted westward, steady as a machine. Daniels started to call out a warning to him, then noticed that even though the sergeant was making better time than he (not surprising, since Schneider was both taller and trimmer), he was also carefully noting where he planted his feet. Soldiers in wartime didn’t necessarily live to grow old, but Schneider was not about to die from doing something stupid.

Farther up ahead, another tank rolled over a mine. This one, a Sherman, started to burn. The five-man crew bailed out seconds before the tank’s ammunition began cooking off. The rest of the American armor, fearful of meeting a like fate, slowed almost to a crawl.

“Come on!” Sergeant Schneider shouted, perhaps to the suddenly lagging tanks, perhaps to the infantrymen whose advance had also slowed. “We’ve got to keep moving. If we bog down in the open, they’ll slaughter us.”

That held enough truth to keep Mutt slogging forward after the sergeant. But he soon began looking for a good place in which to dig in. Despite Schneider’s indomitable will, the advance was running out of steam. Even the sergeant recognized that after another couple of hundred yards. When he stopped and took out his entrenching tool, the rest of the men followed his example. Trench lines began to spiderweb their way across the field.

Daniels worked for half an hour extending his hole toward the one nearest to him on the right before he realized the Lizards had halted the American counterattack without ever once showing themselves. That did not strike him as encouraging.

Atvar studied the situation map of the northern part of Tosev 3’s secondary continental map. “This does not strike me as encouraging,” he said. “I find it intolerable that the Big Uglies continue to thwart us in this way. We must do a more effective job of destroying their industrial base. I have repeatedly spoken of this concern, yet nothing seems to be accomplished. Why?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, the situation is not as black as you make it,” Kirel said soothingly. “True, not all the enemy’s factories are wrecked as completely as we might like, but we have damaged his road and rail networks to the point where both raw materials and finished goods move with difficulty if at all.”

Atvar refused to be mollified. “We ourselves are moving with difficulty if at all,” he said with heavy sarcasm as he stabbed a finger toward the representation of a lakeside city. “This place should have fallen some time ago.”

Kirel leaned forward to read the name of the town. “Chicago? Possibly so, Exalted Fleetlord, yet again we have rendered it essentially useless to the Big Uglies as a transport center. The deteriorating weather has not helped our cause, either. And in spite of all obstacles, we do continue to advance on it.”

“At a hatchling’s crawl,” Atvar sneered. “It should have fallen, I tell you, before the weather became a factor in any way.”

“Possibly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel repeated. “Yet the Big Uglies have defended it with unusual stubbornness, and now the weather is a factor. If I may…” He touched a button below the video screen in front of Atvar. The fleetlord watched as rain poured down from a soggy sky, turning the ground to thick brown porridge. The Big Uglies, evidently used to such deluges, were taking full advantage of this one. They’d destroyed a good many roads leading toward Chicago themselves, forcing the vehicles of the Race off into the muck. The vehicles didn’t like muck very well. The mechanics who tried to keep them running in it liked it even less.

“The same thing is happening in the SSSR, and against the Nipponese in-what do they call it? — in Manchukuo, that’s right,” Atvar said. “It’s even worse in those places than in the United States, because they don’t need to wreck their roads to make us go into the mud. As soon as it rains for more than two days straight, the roads themselves turn into mud. Why didn’t they pave them to begin with?”

The fleetlord knew Kirel could not possibly answer a question like that. Even if he could have answered it, responsibility still rested with Atvar. The Race’s landcruisers and troopcarriers, of course, were tracked. They managed after a fashion, even churning through sticky mud. Most supply vehicles, though, merely had wheels. Back before Atvar went into cold sleep, that had seemed sufficient, even extravagant. Against spear-carrying warriors riding on animals, it would have been.

“If this cursed planet were anything like what the stinking probes claimed it to be, we would have conquered it long since,” he growled.

“Without a doubt, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Should you care to use it, we still have one major advantage of the Big Uglies. A nuclear weapon exploded above Chicago would end its resistance once and for all.”

“I have considered this,” Atvar said. That he had considered it was the measure of his frustration. But he went on, “I am also obligated, however, to consider our occupation of Tosev 3 as well as our conquest of it. Chicago is a natural center of commerce for the region, and will be again when peace returns under our administration. Creating another such nexus after destroying this one would prove troublesome and expensive for those who come after us.”

“Let it be as you say, then, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied; he knew when to set a topic aside. In any event, he had plenty of other titbits with which to worry Atvar: “I have a report that the Deutsche launched two medium-range missiles against our forces in France last night. One was intercepted in flight; the other impacted and exploded, fortunately without damage worse than a large hole in the ground. Their guidance systems leave much to be desired.”

“What I would most desire is that they had no guidance systems,” the fleetlord said heavily. “May I at least hope we destroyed the launchers from which these missiles came?”

Kirel’s hesitation told him he could not so hope. The shiplord said, “Exalted Fleetlord, we scrambled killercraft and vectored them over the area from which the missiles were discharged. It is heavily forested terrain, and they failed to discover the launchers. Officers speculate the Deutsche used either launchers concealed in caves, portable launchers, or both. More information will become available upon subsequent firings.”

“More damage will become available, too, unless we are more careful than we have been,” Atvar said. “We have the capability to knock these things out of the sky; I expect us to live up to that capability.”

“It shall be done,” Kirel said.

Atvar relaxed, a little; when Kirel said something would be done, he meant it. “What other news of interest have you for me, Shiplord?”

“Some intriguing data have come in from the study we began when we learned the Tosevites were sexually active at all seasons of the year,” Kirel replied.

“Tell me,” Atvar said. “Anything that will help me understand the Big Uglies’ behavior is an asset.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord. You may recall that we took a fair number of Tosevites of each gender and had them mate with one another to confirm they did indeed lack a breeding season. This they have done, as you know. Even more interesting, however, is that several more-or-less-permanently mated male-female pairs have emerged from the randomly chosen individuals. Not all subjects in the experimental study have formed such pairs; we are currently investigating the factors which cause some to do so and others to abstain.”

“That is interesting,” the fleetlord admitted. “I remain not entirely sure of its relevance to the campaign as a whole, however.”

“Some may well exist,” Kirel said. “We have had instances all over the planet of Tosevites, some military personnel but others nominally civilians, attacking males and installations of the Race without regard for their own lives or safety. In those cases where the assailants survived for interrogation, a reason frequently cited for their actions was the death of a mate at our hands. This male-female bonding appears to be part of the glue which holds together Tosevite society.”

“Interesting,” Atvar said again. He felt faintly disgusted. When he smelled the pheromones of females in estrus, all he thought about was mating. At other seasons of the year-or indefinitely, if no females were around-not only was he not interested, he was smug about not being interested. Among the Race, the two words arousal and foolishness sprang from a common root. Trust the Big Uglies to build their societies based on a facet of foolishness, he thought. He asked, “Can we exploit this Tosevite aberration so it works to our advantage rather than against us?”

“Our experts are working toward this goal,” Kirel said. “They will test strategies both among our shipboard experimental specimens and, more cautiously, with select members of the populations of Big Uglies under our control.”

“Why more cautiously?” Atvar asked. Then he answered his own question: “Oh, I see. If the experiments down on Tosev 3 produce undesirable results, that might lead to situations where Big Uglies will seek to harm members of the Race in the manner you previously described.”

“Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “We have learned from painful experience that suicidal attacks are most difficult to guard against. We can much more easily protect ourselves against dangers from rational beings than from fanatics who are willing, sometimes even eager, to die with us. Not even the threat of large-scale retaliation against the captive populace has proven a reliable deterrent.”

Half of Atvar heartily wished he’d been passed over for this command; he’d be living in peaceful luxury back on Home. But he had a duty to the Race, and knew somber pride at having been chosen the male best suited to the task of fostering the Empire’s growth. He said, “I hope our experts will soon be able to suggest ways in which we can use the Big Uglies’ perpetual randiness against them. And speaking of using things Tosevite against the Tosevites, how fare we in turning the captured portion of their industrial capacity to our benefit?”

Kirel did not let the change of subject fluster him. “Not as well as we would have liked, Exalted Fleetlord,” he replied, earning Atvar’s respect for unflinching honesty. “Part of the problem rests with the Tosevite factory workers we must necessarily employ in large numbers: many are apathetic and perform poorly, while others, actively hostile, sabotage as much of what they produce as possible. Another issue involved is the general primitiveness of their manufacturing plants.”

“By the Emperor, they’re not too primitive to keep from turning out guns and landcruisers and aircraft to use against us,” Atvar exclaimed. “Why can’t we use some of that capacity for ourselves?”

“The only way to do so, Exalted Fleetlord, is to adapt ourselves-resign ourselves might be a better way to put it-to arms and munitions at the Big Uglies’ current technological level. If we do so, we forfeit our chief advantage over them and the contest becomes one of numbers-wherein the advantage is theirs.”

“Surely some of these facilities, at any rate, can be upgraded to our standards,” Atvar said.

Kirel made an emphatic gesture of negation. “Not for years. The gap is simply too wide. Oh, there are exceptions. A bullet is a bullet. We may be able to adapt their factories to produce small arms to our patterns, though even that will not be easy, as hardly any of their individual infantry weapons are automatic. We have had some success reboring captured artillery tubes to fire our ammunition, and could perhaps manufacture more tubes to our own specifications.”

“I have seen these reports,” Atvar agreed. “From them I inferred greater progress would also be possible.”

“I wish it were so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, repeating the gesture of negation. “You will notice the examples I cited were of unsophisticated weapons. As soon as electronics of any sort become involved, any hope of our using Tosevite facilities goes straight out the window.”

“But they have electronics, some at least,” Atvar said. “They have both radar and radio, for instance. Our task would be simpler if they didn’t.”

“True enough, they have electronics. But they have no computers whatever, and they know nothing of integrated circuits or even transistors. The vacuum-filled glass tubes they use in place of proper circuitry are so large and bulky and fragile and produce so much heat as to make them useless for our purposes.”

“Can we not introduce what we need into their factories?”

“Simpler to build our own, by, what the technical experts tell me,” Kirel answered. “Besides which, we run the risk of Tosevite workers learning our techniques from us and transmitting them to their unsubdued brethren. This is a risk we take with every venture that involves the Big Uglies.”

Atvar made an unhappy noise. None of the manuals from Home warned about that sort of risk. Neither the Rabotevs nor the Hallessi had been far enough along to be in a position to steal the Race’s technology and turn it against its creators. Therefore the planners, drawing on precedent as they always did, failed to envision that any race could do so.

The fleetlord should have thought of the danger for himself. But Tosev 3 presented so many unexpected difficulties, and the Race was so little used to dealing with unexpected difficulties, that not all of them became obvious at once. Precedent, organization, and long-term planning were splendid things within the Empire, where change, when it occurred, did so in tiny, closely supervised increments over the course of centuries. They did not prepare the Race to handle Tosev 3.

“We and the Big Uglies are both metals,” Atvar said to Kirel, “but we are steel and they are quicksilver.”

“An excellent comparison, Exalted Fleetlord, right down to the poisonous vapors they exude,” his subordinate answered. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Speak.”

“You are gracious, Exalted Fleetlord. I can understand the reasons for your reluctance to employ nuclear weapons against Chicago. But the natives of the United States continue to resist, if not with the skill of the Deutsche, then with equal or greater stubbornness and with far greater industrial capacity, even if their weapons are generally less sophisticated. They need to have the potential price of such resistance brought home to them. Their capital-Washington, I believe they call it-is merely an administrative center, with limited commercial or manufacturing significance. It is, moreover, not far from the eastern coast of the continent; prevailing winds would blow most nuclear waste products harmlessly out to sea.”

One of Atvar’s eyes swung across the map from Chicago to Washington. The situation was as Kirel described. Still… “ Results in the case of Berlin were not altogether as we anticipated,” he said, a damning indictment among the Race.

But Kirel said, “It had unexpected benefits as well as shortcomings. We gained the allegiance of Warsaw and its environs shortly after employing that first device.”

“Truth,” Atvar admitted. It was an important truth, too; the Race too often saw only hazard in the unexpected, even if opportunity could also hatch from it.

“Not only that,” Kirel continued, “but it will also create uncertainty and fear on the part of the Big Uglies who do continue to resist. Destroying a single imperial capital might be an isolated act on our part. But if we destroy a second one, that shows them we can repeat the action anywhere on their planet at any time we choose.”

“Truth,” Atvar said again. Like any normal male of the Race, he distrusted uncertainty; the idea of using it as a weapon was unsettling to him. But when he thought of it as inflicting uncertainty on the foe, in the same way that his forces might inflict hunger or death, the concept became clearer-and more attractive. Moreover, Kirel was usually a cautious male; if he thought such a step necessary, he was likely to be right.

“What is your command, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked.

“Let the order be prepared for my review. I shall turn both eyes upon it the instant it appears before me. Barring unforeseen developments, I shall approve it.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done.” Tailstump quivering with excitement, Kirel hurried away.

“This is Radio Deutschland.” Not Radio Berlin, Moishe Russie thought as he moved his head closer to the speaker of the shortwave set. Not any more. Nor was the signal, though on the same frequency as Berlin had always used, anywhere near as strong as it had been. Instead of shouting, it was as if the Germans were whispering now, in hope of not being overheard.

“An important bulletin,” the news reader went on. “The government of the Reich is grieved to report that Washington, D.C., capital of the United States of America, appears to have been the victim of a bomb of the type which recently made a martyr of Berlin. All radio transmissions from Washington ceased abruptly and without warning approximately twenty-five minutes ago; confused reports from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond speak of a pillar of fire mounting into the night sky. Our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, has expressed his condolences for the American people, victims like the Germans of the insane aggression of these savage alien invaders. The Fuhrer’s words-”

Russie clicked off the set. He did not care what Adolf Hitler had to say; he wished with all his heart that Hitler had been in Berlin when the Lizards dropped their bomb on it. The regime there had deserved to go tip in a pillar of fire.

But Washington! If Berlin represented everything dark and bestial in the human spirit, Washington stood for just the opposite: freedom, justice, equality… yet the Lizards destroyed them both alike.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabo-” Russie murmured the memorial prayer for the dead. So many would be dead, across the ocean; he remembered the posters the Germans had plastered all over Warsaw before the city fell to the Lizards… before the Jews and the Polish Home Army rose up and helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw.

No doubt that had been justified; without the Lizards, Russie knew he and most if not all his people would have died. That reasoning had let him support them after they entered Warsaw. Gratitude was a reasonable emotion, especially when as fully deserved as here. That the outside world thought him a traitor to mankind hurt deeply, but the outside world did not know-and refused to see-what the Nazis had done here. Better the Lizards than the SS; so he still believed.

But now- Booted feet pounded down the corridor toward his office, breaking in on his thoughts. The door flew open. The moment he saw Mordechai Anielewicz’s face, he knew the fighting leader had heard. “Washington-” they both said in the same breath.

Russie was the first to find more words. “We cannot go on comfortably working with them after this, not unless we want to deserve the hatred the rest of mankind would give us for such a deed.”

“Reb Moishe, you’re right,” Anielewicz said, the first time in a long while he’d given Russie such unqualified agreement. But where Russie thought in terms of right and wrong, the Jewish soldier almost automatically began considering ways and means. “We cannot simply rise up against them, either, not unless we want the bloodbath back again.”

“Heaven forbid!” Russie said. Then he remembered something he would sooner have forgotten: “I’m supposed to go on the radio this afternoon. What shall I say? God help me, what can I say?”

“Nothing,” Anielewicz answered at once. “Just the sound of your voice would make you the Lizards’ whore.” He thought for a moment, then gave two words of blunt, practical advice: “Get sick.”

“Zolraag won’t like that. He’ll think I’m faking, and he’ll be right.” But Russie had been a medical student; even as he spoke, his mind searched for ways to make false sickness seem real. He thought of some quickly enough; the punishment they’d inflict on him would also scourge him for letting the Lizards make him into their willing tool. “A purgative, a good strong one,” he said. “A purgative and a stiff dose of ipecac.”

“What’s ipecac?” Anielewicz asked. Russie made ghastly retching noises. The fighter’s eyes went big and round. He nodded and grinned. “That should do the job, all right. I’m glad they have you in front of the microphone instead of me.”

“Ha.” It wasn’t a laugh, only one syllable of resignation. But Russie thought such florid symptoms would convince Zolraag something truly was wrong with him. The epidemics in the ghetto, the endemic diseases from which all humanity suffered, seemed to horrify the Lizards, who gave no signs of being similarly afflicted. Russie would have liked to study at one of their medical schools; no doubt he would have learned more there than any Earthly physician could teach him.

“If we want this to work, we’re going to have to do something else, you know,” Anielewicz said. At Russie’s raised eyebrow, he elaborated. “We’re going to have to talk with General Bor-Komorowski. The Poles have to be in on this with us. Otherwise the Lizards will turn them loose on us and stand back and smile while we beat each other to death.”

“Yes,” Russie said, though he both distrusted and feared the commander of the Armja Krajowa. But he had other, more immediate concerns. “Even if I manage not to broadcast today, I’ll still have to go back to the studio next week. The week after that at the latest, if I take to my bed and swallow more ipecac in a few days.” His stomach lurched unhappily at the prospect.

“Don’t worry past this afternoon.” Anielewicz’s eyes were cold and calculating. “Yes, I can piece together enough uniforms, and I can find enough blond fighters or fellows with light brown hair.”

“Why do you need fighters with-?” Russie stopped and stared. “You’re going to attack the transmitter, and you want the Nazis to get the blame for it.”

“Right both times,” Anielewicz said. “You should have been a soldier. I just wish I had some men who weren’t circumcised. Humans would know the difference. The Lizards might not, but I hate to take the chance. Some Poles think the only thing the Germans did wrong was to leave some of us alive. They might rat on us if they get the chance.”

Russie sighed. “Unfortunately, you’re right. Send one of your fighters out for the ipecac and another for the purgative. I don’t want to be remembered for getting either one, in case the Lizards ask questions later.” He sighed. “I have the feeling I won’t want to remember the next few hours anyway.”

“I believe that, Reb Moishe.” Anielewicz eyed him with amusement and no small respect. “You know, I think I’d rather be wounded in combat. At least then it comes as a surprise. But to deliberately do something like this to yourself…” He shook his head. “Better you than me.”

“Better nobody.” Russie glanced at his watch (the former property of a German who no longer needed it). “But you’d better arrange for it quickly. The Lizards will be coming in less than three hours, and I ought to be good and sick by then.” He started going through the papers on his desk. “I want to move the ones that truly matter-”

“So you can puke all over the rest,” Anielewicz finished for him. “That’s good. If you pay attention to the small details in a plan, that helps the big pieces go well.” He touched one finger to the brim of his gray cloth cap. “I’ll take care of it.”

He was as good as his word. By the time the Lizard guards came to escort Russie to the studio, he wished Anielewicz had been less efficient. The Lizards hissed and drew back in dismay from his door. He could hardly blame them; the office would need an airing out before anyone wanted to work there again. A pair of good trousers weren’t going to be the same any more, either.

One of the Lizards ever so cautiously poked his head back into the office. He stared at Russie, who sprawled, limp as wet blotting paper, over his chair and befouled desk. “What-wrong?” the Lizard asked in halting German.

“Must be something I ate,” Russie groaned feebly. The small part of him that did not actively wish he were dead noted he was even telling the truth, perhaps the most effective way to lie ever invented. Most of him, though, felt as if he’d been stretched too far, tied in knots, and then kneaded by a giant’s fingers.

A couple of more Lizards looked in at him from the hallway. So did some people. If anything, they seemed more horrified than the Lizards, who did not have to fear catching whatever horrible disease he’d come down with and simply found him most unaesthetic.

One of the Lizards spoke into a small hand-held radio. An answer came back, crisp and crackling. Regretfully, the Lizard advanced into the office. He spoke into the radio again, then held it out to Russie. Zolraag’s voice came from the speaker: “You are ill, Reb Moishe?” the governor asked. By now his German was fairly good. “You are too ill to broadcast for us today?”

“I’m afraid I am,” Russie croaked, most sincerely. He added his first untruth of the afternoon: “I’m sorry.”

“I also am sorry, Reb Moishe,” Zolraag answered. “I wanted your comments on the bombing of Washington, D.C., about which we would have given you full information. I know you would say this shows the need for your kind to give up their foolish fight against our stronger weapons.”

Russie groaned again, partly from weakness, partly because he’d expected Zolraag to tell him something like that. He said, “Excellency, I cannot speak now. When I am well, I will decide what I can truthfully say about what your people have done.”

“I am sure we will agree on what you would say,” Zolraag told him. The governor was trying to be subtle, but hadn’t really found the knack. He went on, “But for now, you must get over your sickness. I hope your doctors can cure you of it.”

He sounded unconvinced of the skills of human physicians. Russie wondered again what wonders Lizard medical experts could work. He said, “Thank you, Excellency. I hope to be better in a few days. This sort of illness is not one which is usually fatal.”

“As you say.” Again, Zolraag seemed dubious. Russie supposed he had reason. When the Lizards broke into Warsaw, thousands of starving Jews in the ghetto had suffered from one form of intestinal disease or another, and a great many had died. The governor continued, “If you want, my males will take you from your office to your home.”

“Thank you, Excellency, but no,” Russie said. “I would like to preserve as much as possible the illusion of free agency.” He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Better if the Lizards kept on thinking of him as a willing cat’s-paw. He hoped Zolraag wouldn’t understand what he’d said.

But the Lizard did. Worse, he approved. “Yes, this illusion is worth holding to, Reb Moishe,” he answered, confirming that, as far as he was concerned, Russie’s freedom of action was an illusion. Even in his battered, nauseated state, he felt anger stir.

The governor spoke in his own hissing language. The Lizard who held the radiotelephone answered, then skittered out of Russie’s office with every evidence of relief. He and the rest of the aliens left the Jewish headquarters; Russie listened to their claws clicking on linoleum.

A few minutes later, Mordechai Anielewicz came back in. He wrinkled his nose. “It stinks like a burst sewer pipe in here, Reb Moishe,” he said. “Let’s clean you up a little and get you home.”

Russie surrendered himself to the fighting leader’s blunt, practical ministrations. He let Anielewicz manhandle him down the stairs. Waiting on the street was a bicycle with a sidecar. Anielewicz poured him into it, then climbed onto the little saddle and started pedaling.

“Such personal concern,” Russie said. The wind blowing in his face did a little to revive him. “I’m honored.”

“If I’d brought a car for you, then you’d have some business being honored,” Anielewicz said, laughing. Russie managed a wan chuckle himself. These days, gasoline was more precious than rubies in Warsaw: rubies, after all, remained rubies, but gasoline, once burned, was gone forever. Even diesel fuel for fire engines was in desperately short supply.

A few dry leaves whirled through the streets on the chilly fall breeze, but only a few; a lot of trees had been cut down for fuel. More would fall this winter, Russie thought, and buildings wrecked in two rounds of fighting would be cannibalized for wood. Warsaw would be an uglier city when the fighting ended-if it ever did.

Rain began falling from the lead-gray sky. Mordechai Anielewicz reached up, yanked down the brim of his cap so it did a better job of covering his eyes. He said, “It’s set. We’ll have a go at the transmitter tomorrow night. Stay sick till then.”

“What happens if you don’t take it out?” Russie asked.

Anielewicz’s laugh had a grim edge to it. “If we don’t take it out, Reb Moishe, two things happen. One is that some of my fighters will be dead. And the other is that you’ll have to go on taking your medicines, so that by this time next week you’ll likely end up envying them.”

Maybe the fighting leader meant it for a joke, but Russie didn’t find it funny. He felt as if the Gestapo had been kicking him in the belly. His mouth tasted like-on second thought, he didn’t want to try to figure out what his mouth tasted like.

Many of the Jews the Nazis forced into the Warsaw ghetto had left it since the Lizards came (many more, of course, were dead). Even so, the streets remained crowded. Adroit as a footballer dodging through defensemen toward the goal, Anielewicz steered his bicycle past pushcarts, rickshaws, hordes of other bicycles, and swarms of men and women afoot. No one seemed willing to yield a centimeter of space to anyone else, but somehow no one ran into anyone else, either.

Then, suddenly, there was space. Anielewicz stopped hard. A squad of Lizards tramped past on patrol. They looked cold and miserable. One turned his strange eyes resentfully up toward the weeping sky. Another wore a child’s coat. He hadn’t figured out buttons, but held the coat closed with one hand while the other clutched his weapon.

As soon as the Lizards moved on, the crowds closed in again. Anielewicz said, “If those poor creatures think it’s cold now, what will they do come January?”

Freeze, was the answer that immediately sprang into Russie’s mind. But he knew he was probably wrong. The Lizards knew more than mankind about so many things; no doubt they had some simple way to keep themselves warm out in the open. That patrol certainly had looked chilly, though.

Anielewicz pulled up in front of the apartment block where Russie lived. “Can you make it up to your flat?” he asked.

“Let’s see.” Russie unfolded himself from the sidecar. He wobbled when he took a couple of tentative steps, but stayed on his feet. “Yes, I’ll manage.”

“Good. If I had to walk you up, I’d worry about the bicycle being here when I got back. Now I can worry about other things instead.” Anielewicz nodded to Russie and rode off.

Had Moishe felt more nearly alive, he might have laughed at the way people in the courtyard started to come up to greet him, then took a better look and retreated faster than they’d advanced. He didn’t blame them; he would have sheered off from himself, too. If he didn’t look horribly contagious, it wasn’t from lack of effort.

He turned the key, walked into his flat; one perquisite of his position was that his family had it all to themselves. His wife whirled round in surprise. “Moishe! What are you doing here so early?” Rivka said, starting to smile. Then she got a good look at him-and maybe a good whiff of him as well-and asked a better question: “Moishe! What happened to you?”

He sighed. “The Lizards happened to me.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide in a face that, while not skeletal as it had been a few months before, was still too thin. “The Lizards did-that-to you?”

“Not directly,” he answered. “What the Lizards did was to treat Washington, D.C., exactly as they had Berlin, and to expect me to be exactly as happy about it.”

Rivka did not much concern herself with politics; the struggle, for survival had taken all her energy. But she was no fool. “They wanted you to praise them for destroying Washington? They must be meshugge.”

“That’s what I thought, so I got sick.” Moishe explained how he’d manufactured his illness on short notice.

“Oh, thank God. When I saw you, I was afraid you’d come down with something dreadful.”

“I feel pretty dreadful,” Russie said. Though drugs rather than bacteria induced his illness, his insides had still gone through a wringer. The only difference was that he would not stay sick unless it proved expedient.

His little son, Reuven, wandered out of the bedroom. The boy wrinkled his nose. “Why does Father smell funny?”

“Never mind.” Rivka Russie turned briskly practical. “We’re going to get him cleaned up right now.” She hurried into the kitchen. The water had been reliable since the Lizards took the town. She came back with a bucket and a rag. “Go into the bedroom, Moishe; hand me out your filthy clothes, clean yourself off, and put on something fresh. You’ll be better for it.”

“All right,” he said meekly. Shedding the soiled garments was nothing but relief. He discovered he’d managed to get vomit on the brim of his hat. In a horrid sort of way, that was an accomplishment. The rag and bucket seemed hardly enough for the job for which they were intended; he wondered if the Vistula would have been enough. Thoughts of the Augean stables ran through his mind as he scrubbed filth from himself. He hadn’t discovered Greek mythology until his university days. Sometimes the images it evoked were as telling as any in the Bible.

In clean clothes he felt a new, if hollow, man. He didn’t want to touch what he had been wearing, but finally bundled the befouled outfit so the filthiest parts were toward the middle. He brought everything out to Rivka.

She nodded. “I’ll take care of them soon.” Living in the ghetto had made stenches just part of life, not something that had to be swept away on the instant. At the moment, questions were more urgent: “What will you do if the Lizards insist that you speak for them after you’re better?”

“I’ll get sick again,” be answered, though his guts twisted at the prospect. “With luck, though, I won’t have to.” He told her what Anielewicz had planned for the transmitter.

“Even if that works, it only puts off the evil day,” Rivka said. “Sooner or later, Moishe, either you will have to do what the Lizards want or else you will have to tell them no.”

“I know.” Moishe grimaced. “Maybe we never should have thrown our lot in with them in the first place. Maybe even the Nazis were a better bargain than this.”

Rivka vigorously shook her head. “You know better. When you are dead, you can’t bargain. And even if we have to disobey the Lizards, I think they will kill only the ones who disobey, and only because they disobey, rather than making a sport of it or killing us simply because we are Jews.”

“I think you are right.” The admission failed to reassure Russie. He, after all, would be one of those who disobeyed, and he wanted to live. But to praise the Lizards for using one of their great bombs on Washington… better to die with self-respect intact.

“Let me make you some soup.” Rivka eyed him as if gauging his strength. “Will you be able to hold it down?”

“I think so,” he said after making his own internal assessments. He let out a dry chuckle. “I ought to try, anyhow, so I have something in my stomach in case I, ah, have to start throwing up again. What I just went through was bad enough, but the dry heaves are worse.”

The soup was thick with cabbage and potatoes, not the watery stuff of the days when the Germans starved the ghetto Jews and every morsel had to be stretched to the utmost. Though no one who had not known those dreadful days would have thought much of it, its warmth helped ease the knots in Russie’s midsection.

He had just finished the last spoonful when somebody came pounding down the hall at a dead run. A fist slammed against his front door. The somebody shouted, “Reb Moishe, Reb Moishe, come quick, Reb Moishe!”

Russie started to get up. His wife took him by the shoulders and forced him back into his chair. “You’re sick, remember?” she hissed. She went to the door herself, opened it. “What’s wrong? My husband is ill. He cannot go anywhere.”

“But he has to!” the man in the hallway exclaimed, as if he were a two-year-old convinced his word was law.

“He cannot,” Rivka repeated. She stepped aside to let the fellow get a look at Moishe, adding, “See for yourself if you don’t believe me,” which told Russie he had to look as bad as he felt.

“I’m sorry, Reb Moishe,” the man said, “but we really do need you. Some of our fighters are facing off with some Armja Krajowa louts up on Mickiewicza Street, and it’s getting ugly. They’re liable to start shooting at each other any minute now.”

Russie groaned. Of all the times for hotheaded Jews and prejudiced Poles to start butting heads, this was the worst Rivka was too far away to make him keep sitting down. He rose, ignoring her look of consternation. But before he could do anything more, the man in the hallway said, “The Lizards are already bringing heavy equipment up there. They’ll slaughter everyone if a fight breaks out.”

With another groan, Russie clutched his belly and sank back down. Rivka’s alarmed expression turned to real concern. But she rallied quickly. “Please go now,” she told the man. “My husband would come if he possibly could; you know that. But he really is ill.”

“Yes, I see he is. I’m sorry. God grant you health soon, Reb Moishe.” The fellow departed at the same breakneck pace at which he’d arrived.

Rivka shut the door, then turned on Russie. “Are you all right?” she demanded, hands on hips. “You were going out there, I know you were. Then all, of a sudden-”

He knew a moment’s pride that his acting had been good enough to give her doubts. He said, “If the Lizards are already there, I can’t let them see me, or they’ll know I’m not as sick as I let on.”

Her eyes widened. “Yes, that makes sense. You-”

“I’m not done,” he interrupted. “The other thing is, I don’t think our men are tangling with the Armja Krajowa Poles by accident. Think where the quarrel is-at the opposite end of Warsaw from the Lizard headquarters. I think they’re trying to draw troops-and maybe Zolraag’s attention, too-away from the studio and the transmitter. Mordechai said tomorrow night, but he works fast. Unless I miss my guess, this is a put-up fight.”

“I hope you’re right.” For most of the next minute, Rivka looked as intensely thoughtful as a yeshiva student following a rabbi’s exegesis of a difficult Talmudic text. A smile broke through like sunrise. “Yes, I think you are.”

“Good,” Russie said. He did feel better with the warm soup inside him. He hoped he wouldn’t have to spew it up again, but carried another vial of ipecac in a coat pocket.

He got up and walked over to the battered sofa. Springs poked through here and there and the fabric was filthy, but just owning a sofa was a mark of status among Warsaw Jews these days. The Nazis hadn’t stolen it in one of their ghetto sweeps, and the family hadn’t had to break it up and burn it to keep from freezing the winter before. As he lay down on it, Russie was conscious of how lucky that made him.

Rivka draped a threadbare blanket over him. “How can you look sick if you’re not covered up?” she asked.

“I seem to have managed,” he said, but she ignored him. He let the blanket stay.

About the time he came close to dozing off, Reuven started banging on a pot with a spoon. Rivka quickly hushed the boy, but the damage was done. A few minutes later, a new, more ominous racket filled the flat: the distant rattle of guns. “Where is it coming from?” Russie asked, turning his head this way and that. If it was from the north, the Jews and Poles might really have opened up on each other; if from the south, Anielewicz’s fighters in German uniform were hitting the radio transmitter.

“I can’t tell, either,” Rivka said. “The sound is funny inside a block of flats.”

“That’s true.” Russie settled himself to wait. The shooting and explosions lasted only a couple of minutes. He’d nearly forgotten the echoing silence that followed gunfire, though he’d heard it almost daily before the Lizards seized Warsaw from the Germans.

Half an hour later, another knock came at the apartment door. Rivka opened it. Without ceremony, a Lizard walked in. He fixed both eyes on Russie. In hissing German, he said, “I am Ssfeer, from the governor Zolraag’s staff. You know me now?”

“Yes, I recognized your body paint,” Moishe answered. “How can I help you? I fear I cannot do much at the moment; I was taken ill this morning.”

“So the prominent Zolraag learned,” Ssfeer said. “He-how say you? — he gives permissions to you to get well more slow. Bandits from Deutschland just now they-how say you? — shoot up radio, maybe to keep you quiet, not let you speak. We need maybe ten days to fix.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Russie said.

The Lancaster rumbled down the runway, engines roaring. The plane bounced and shuddered as it gained speed; Lizard bomblets had cratered the runway the week before, and repairs were crude. George Bagnall knew nothing but relief that they weren’t trying to take off with a full bomb load. Bombs were delicate things; once in a while, a bump would set one off… after which, the groundcrew would have another crater, a big one, to fill in.

The bomber fairly sprang into the air. In the pilot’s seat next to Bagnall’s, Ken Embry grinned. “Amazing what lightening the aircraft will do,” Embry said. “I feel like I’m flying a Spitfire.”

“I think it’s all in your head,” Bagnall replied. “The radar unit back there, can’t be a great deal lighter than the ordnance we usually carry.” The flight engineer flicked an intercom switch. “How is it doing, Radarman Goldfarb?”

“Seems all right,” he heard in his earphones. “I can see a long way.”

“That’s the idea,” Bagnall said. A radar set in an aircraft several miles above the Earth could peer farther around its curve pick up Lizard planes as they approached, and give England’s defenses a few precious extra minutes to prepare. Bagnall shivered inside his flight suit and furs as the Lanc gained altitude. He switched on his oxygen, tasted the rubber of the hose as he breathed the enriched air.

Goldfarb spoke enthusiastically. “If we can keep just a few planes in the air, they’ll do as much for us as all our ground stations put together. Of course,” he added, “we also have a good deal farther to fall.”

Bagnall tried not to think about that. The Lizards had pounded British ground radar in the opening days of their invasion, forcing the RAF and ground defenses to fight blind ever since. Now they were trying to see again. The Lizards were not likely to want to let them see.

“Coming up on angels twenty,” Ken Embry announced. “Taking station at the altitude. Radioman, how is our communication with the fighter pack?”

“Reading them five by five,” Ted Lane replied. “They report receiving us five by five as well. They are eager to begin the exercise, sir.”

“Bloody maniacs,” Embry said. “As far as I’m concerned, the ideal mission is one devoid of all contact with the enemy whatsoever.”

Bagnall could not have agreed more. Despite machine gun turrets all over the aircraft, the Lancaster had always been at a dreadful disadvantage against enemy fighters; evasion beat the blazes out of combat. The knowledge made bomber aircrew cautious, and made them view swaggering, aggressive fighter pilots as not quite right in the head.

From back in the bomb bay, David Goldfarb said, “I ought to be able to communicate directly with the fighter aircraft rather than relaying through the radioman.”

“That’s a good notion, Goldfarb,” Bagnall said. “Jot it down; maybe they’ll be able to use it on the Mark 2.” And maybe, if we keep on being luckier than we deserve, we’ll live to try out the Mark 2, he added to himself. He didn’t need to say it aloud; Goldfarb had known what the odds were when he volunteered for this mission.

Bagnall wiped the inside of the curved Perspex window in front of him with a piece of chamois cloth. Nothing much to see out there, not even the exhaust flames from other bombers ahead, above, below, and to either side-reassuring reminders one was not going into danger all alone. Now there was only night, night and the endless throb of the four Merlins. Consciously reminded of the engines, the flight engineer flicked his eyes over the gauges in front of him. Mechanically, all was well.

“I have enemy aircraft,” Goldfarb exclaimed. Back in the bomb bay, he couldn’t see even the night, just the tracks of electrons across a phosphor-coated screen. But his machine vision reached farther than Bagnall’s eyes. “I say again, I have enemy aircraft. Heading 177, distance thirty-five miles and closing, speed 505.”

Ted Lane passed that word on to the Mosquitoes that lurked far above the radar-carrying Lancaster. The twin-engine planes not only had the highest operational ceiling of any British fighters, they were also, with their wooden skins and skeletons, harder for radar to acquire.

“Rockets away from the Lizard aircraft,” Goldfarb yelped. “Bearing-straight for us. Speed-too bloody fast for my machine here.”

“Shut it down,” Embry ordered. He threw the Lanc into a violent, corkscrewing dive that made Bagnall glad for the straps that held him in his seat. His stomach felt a couple of thousand feet behind the aircraft. He gulped, wishing he hadn’t had greasy fish and chips less than an hour before the mission started.

An excited yell from Joe Simpkin in the tail gunner’s turret echoed in his headset. The gunner added, “One of those rockets flew through where we used to be.”

“Well, by God,” Ken Embry said softly. The pilot, who made a point of never letting anything impress him, added, “Who would have thought the boffins could actually get one right?”

“I’m rather glad they did,” Bagnall said, stressing his broad “a”s to show he also took such miracles for granted. The engineers down on the ground had been confident the Lizards would attack a radar-carrying aircraft with the same radar-homing rockets they’d used to wreck the British ground stations. Turn off the radar and what would they have to home on? Nothing, Down on the ground, it all seemed as inexorably logical as a geometric proof. The boffins, however, didn’t have to test their theories in person. That was what’ aircrews were for.

“Shall I start it up again?” Goldfarb asked over the intercom. “No, better not, not quite yet,” Embry said after a moment’s thought.

“It does us no good if it isn’t running,” the radarman said plaintively.

It does us no bloody good if it gets us shot down, either, Bagnall thought. But that wasn’t fair, and he knew it. For someone whose only time in the air had been practicing for this mission, Goldfarb was doing fine. And not only was it natural for him to want to play with his toy, he had a point. A radar set that had to shut down as soon as action started to keep from being destroyed was better than no radar set at all, but not much. Along with letting Goldfarb talk directly with the fighters his radar directed, the boffins would have to come up with a way to let him keep the set operating without getting it and its aircraft blown out of the sky.

Ted Lane let out an ear-piercing Red Indian whoop. “A Mosquito just took out one of their planes. Bounced him from above, almost head-on-couldn’t very well come up on him from behind, could he, what with the Lizards’ being the faster aircraft. Says he saw the enemy break up in midair, and then he was diving for the deck for all he was worth.”

Everyone in the Lancaster cheered. Then Ken Embry said, “What about the rest of the Mosquitoes?”

After a moment, the radioman answered, “Er-several of them do not respond to my signal, sir.” That dashed the moment of exultation. The RAF was slowly, painfully learning how to hurt the Lizards. The Lizards already knew only too well how to hurt the RAF. Bagnall hoped the fighter pilots had managed to bail out. Trained men were harder to replace than airplanes.

From his station in front of the now-dark radar screen, Goldfarb said, “The chaps on the ground have been listening to us, too. With a bit of luck, they’ll also have hurt the Lizards: at least, they’ll have had the advantage of knowing a bit sooner from which direction they’re coming.”

“Fat bloody lot of good it’ll do them,” Embry said. Like any pilot, he pretended to disbelieve flak crews could possibly hit anything with their guns. If that attitude made flying seem safer for him, Bagnall was not about to complain. A calm pilot was a smooth pilot, and a smooth pilot was likeliest to bring his aircrew home again.

Goldfarb repeated, “May I turn the set on again, sir?”

Embry took his right hand off the stick, pounded a closed fist up and down on his thigh. Bagnall didn’t think he knew he was doing it. At last the pilot said, “Yes, go ahead; you may as well. As you’ve noted, that is the purpose of our being up here on this lovely fall evening.”

“Really?” Bagnall said. “And all the time I thought it was to see how fast the Lizards could shoot us down. The groundcrew have formed a pool on it, I understand. Did you toss in your shilling, Ken?”

“I’m afraid not,” Embry answered, imperturbable. “When they told me someone had already chosen twenty seconds after takeoff, I decided my chances for winning were about nil, so I held onto my money out of consideration for my heirs. What about you, old fellow?”

“Sorry to have spoiled your wager, but I’m afraid I’m the chap who took the twenty seconds after we left the ground.” Bagnall was not about to let the pilot outdo him in offhandedness, not this time. “I admit I did wonder how I’d go about collecting if I happened to win.”

The radar set, like any human-built piece of electronic apparatus, needed a little while to warm up after it went on. Bagnall had heard rumors that Lizard gear taken from shot-down planes went on instantly. He wondered if they were true; from what he knew, valves (tubes, the Americans called them) by their very nature required warm-up time. Maybe the Lizards didn’t use valves, though he had no idea what might take their place.

“Another flight incoming, same bearing as before,” Goldfarb announced. “Range… twenty-three miles and closing too bloody fast. Shall I shut it down now?”

“No, wait until they launch their rockets at us,” Embry said. Bagnall wondered if the pilot had lost his mind, and. even wondered if there really was a groundcrew pool and if Embry was trying to win it. But Embry proved to have method in his madness: We’ve already seen we can evade the rockets that track us by our own radar. If we shut down before they fire those, they may get closer and shoot rockets of a different sort at us, ones we can’t evade.”

“Their tactics do tend to be stereotyped, don’t they?” Bagnall agreed after a little thought. “Given a choice, they’ll do the same thing over and over, regardless of whether it’s the right thing. And if it’s wrong, why give them the excuse to change?”

“Just what was in my-” Embry began.

Goldfarb interrupted him: “Rockets away! Shutting down-now.”

Again the Lancaster spun through the air; again Bagnall wondered if the fish and chips would stay down. And again, the Lizards’ rockets failed to bring down the British aircraft. “Maybe this isn’t a suicide mission after all,” Bagnall said happily. He’d had his doubts as the Lanc rolled down the runway.

Ted Lane listened to the surviving Mosquitoes as they made their runs at the attackers. “Another hit!” he said. This time, though, no one in the Lancaster shouted for joy. The aircrew had realized the price the fighter pilots were paying for every kill.

Then the radioman told Embry, “We are ordered to break off operations and return to base. The air vice marshal remarks that, having been lucky twice, he’s not inclined to tempt fate by pushing for a third bit of good fortune.”

“The air vice marshal is a little old woman,” the pilot retorted. He added hastily, “You need not inform him of my opinion, however. We shall of course obey his instructions like the good little children we are. Navigator, if you would be so kind as to suggest a course-”

“Suggest is the proper word, all right,” Alf Whyte said from his little curtained-off space behind the pilot’s and flight engineer’s seats. “What with some of the twists you put the aircraft through, I thought the compass was jitterbugging to a hot swing band. If we are where I think we are, a course of 078 will bring us to the general neighborhood of Dover in ten or twelve minutes.”

“Oh-seven-eight it is,” Embry said. “Turning to that course now.” He swung the bomber through the sky as if it were an extension of himself.

George Bagnall watched the neatly ordered phalanx of gauges in front of him as intently as if they monitored his own heartbeat and breathing. In a very real way, they did: if the Lancaster’s engines or hydraulic system failed, his heart would not go on beating for very long.

“I have contact with the airfield,” the radioman announced. “They read us five by five and report no damage from the Lizards this evening.”

“That’s good to hear,” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The landing would be rough enough as it was, what with the hasty repairs to earlier repairs from the sky. The Lanc wouldn’t be coming in with combat damage or unexpended bombs, as it might have from a mission over Germany or France, but its fuel tanks were much fuller than they would have been on the return flight from such a mission. The petrol the plane burned made a more-than-satisfactory explosive when things went wrong.

Bagnall stared out through the Perspex. He tapped Embry on the arm. “Isn’t that the ocean approaching?”

Embry looked, too. “Sod me if it’s not. Alf, we’re coming up on the bloody North Sea. Are we north or south of where we want to be? I feel like a blind man tapping down the path with his stick, all the more so with that radar set back in the bomb bay. It ought to be able to find our way home for us all by its lonesome.”

“I dare say it will do precisely that one of these days,” the navigator answered. “I suggest you bear in mind, though, that the Lizards doubtless monitor every sort of signal we produce. Do you really care to guide them to the runway as you set down?”

“Now that you mention it, no. Ha!” Embry pointed down into the darkness. Bagnall’s eyes followed his finger. He too spied the red torch winking on and off. He flicked on the Lancaster’s wing lights, just for a moment, to acknowledge the signal.

Other torches, these white along one side of the runway and green along the other, sprang to life. Embry pointed. “Looks like a bloody aircraft carrier flight deck down there. I thought this was the RAF, not the Fleet Air Arm.”

“Could be worse,” Bagnall remarked. “At least the runway’s not pitching in a heavy sea.”

“There’s a cheerful thought.” Embry lined up the Lancaster on the two rows of torches, went into the final landing descent The hasty touchdown was less than smooth, but also less than disastrous: about par for a landing under war conditions, Bagnall thought. Along with the rest of the aircrew, he got out of the Lanc in a hurry and sprinted across the tarmac-now blacked out again-for the Nissen hut whose corrugated metal walls were surrounded by sandbags to protect against blast.

A tent of blackout curtains in front of the hut’s doorway let people go in and out without leaking light for all the world-and for unfriendly visitors from another world-to see. The glare of the bare bulbs strung from the Nissen hut’s ceiling smote Bagnall’s dark-accustomed eyes like a photographer’s flash.

The aircrew hurled themselves onto chairs and couches. Some, drained by the mission, fell asleep at once in spite of the glare. Others, Bagnall among them, dug out pipes and cigarettes.

“May I have one of those?” David Goldfarb asked, pointing to the flight engineer’s packet of Players. “I’m afraid I’m all out.”

Bagnall passed him a cigarette, leaned close to give him a light off the one he already had going. As the radarman inhaled, Bagnall said, “I expect you’ll be off to the White Horse Inn after the boffins get done grilling you over how things went tonight”

“What’s the point?” Goldfarb said, more in resignation than bitterness. “Oh, I expect I’ll drink there, but the girls-as I say, what’s the point?”

Bagnall also knew about the barmaids’ preferences. Now he stuck his tongue far into his cheek. “I think staring into the radar screen must have a deleterious effect on the brain. Did it never occur to you that you’ve just returned from flying a combat mission?”

The end of Goldfarb’s cigarette suddenly glowed a fierce red.

His eyes glowed, too. “I knew it only too bleeding well when those Lizard rockets homed on us. I confess I hadn’t thought of it in other terms, though. Thank you, sir.”

Bagnall waved a hand in a parody of aristocratic elegance. “Delighted to be of service.” Service it had been, too-in an instant, he’d made the radarman forget all about the fear he’d just endured. He wished he could perform the same service for himself.