In the Balance

12

Ussmak cursed the day the Race had first discovered Tosev 3. He cursed the day the probe the Race had sent to this miserable world returned safely. He cursed the day he’d been hatched, the day he’d gone into cold sleep, the day he’d awakened. He cursed Krentel, something he’d been doing every day since the blundering idiot replaced Votal. He cursed the Big Uglies for killing Votal and then Telerep and leaving Krentel alive.

Most of all, he cursed the mud.

The landcruiser he drove was built to handle difficult terrain. On the whole, it did well. But Tosev 3, being a wetter place than any of the three worlds already in the Empire, had mixtures of water and dirt more thorough and more spectacularly gloppy than any of the Race’s engineers had imagined.

Ussmak was in the middle of one of those mixtures. As far as he could tell, it was most of a continent wide and most of a continent long. The Russkis only made matters worse by not paving any of their stinking roads. Once the rain soaked into what was allegedly a roadbed, the mud there was most of a continent deep, too.

He pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The landcruiser lurched forward. So long as he moved every little while, he was all right. If he stayed too long in one place, the machine started to sink. Its tracks were more than wide enough to support it on any reasonable surface. This gluey, slimy stuff was a long way from reasonable.

Ussmak accelerated again. The landcruiser plowed through the bog. Its tracks flung muck in all directions. Some of the muck-dead Emperors only knew how-splashed down onto Ussmak’s vision slit. He pressed a button. Detergent solution sprayed the armorglass clean. That was a relief. At least he wouldn’t have to unbutton and stick his head into the refrigerator outside.

Krentel had his cupola in the turret dogged down tight, too. A landcruiser commander was supposed to look out over the top of that cupola as much as he could, but Ussrnak, though he blamed Krentel for a lot of things, couldn’t blame him for not wanting to freeze his snout off.

At that, the driver thought, gunning the landcruiser forward once more, things could have been worse. He could have been driving a truck instead. The wheeled vehicles the landcruiser was supposed to be protecting had a much rougher time in this accursed bog than he did. He’d already used his towing chain to pull two or three of them out of places where they’d sunk worse than axle-deep. That the trucks had to be shielded just made them heavier and the sticking problem worse.

For that matter, Ussmak could have been one of the poor wretches in radiation suits who guddled around in the freezing Tosevite slime for the bits of radioactive material their detectors found. The radiation suits weren’t heated-no one had foreseen the need (no one had foreseen that the Big Uglies would be able to blow the 67th Emperor Sohrheb all over the landscape, either). The males in those suits had to labor in shifts, one group going back to a warming station while the other emerged to work.

Krentel’s voice rang in the intercom button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. “Maintain heightened alertness, driver. I have just received a report that Tosevite bandit groups may be operating in the area. Primary defense responsibilities fall on our glorious landcruiser forces.”

“As you say, Commander,” Ussmak answered. “It shall be done.” How he was supposed to be especially alert for bandits when he could see only straight ahead with the landcruiser buttoned was beyond him. Maybe Krentel ought to open up the cupola and look around after all.

He thought about saying as much to the landcruiser commander, but decided not to bother. The Race did not encourage lower ranks to reprove their superiors; that way lay anarchy. In any case, Ussmak doubted that Krentel would have listened; he seemed to think the Emperor had personally granted him all the answers. And finally, Ussmak’s own sense of isolation from everything going on around him had only grown worse since his two original landcruiser crewmales died. A good replacement for Votal would have taken pains to reforge the team. Krentel just treated him like a piece of machinery. Machines don’t care.

Machinelike, Ussmak kept the landcruiser out of as much trouble as he could. He’d found some better ground, where the grass, now yellow and dying rather than green and shiny with life, was still thick enough under his tracks to keep the landcruiser from sinking as fast as it had on barer terrain.

Ahead lay a stand of low, scrubby trees. Their bare branches groped for the sky like thin, beseeching arms. They’d dropped their leaves when the rains started. Ussmak wondered why; it seemed wasteful to him. Certainly none of the trees back on Home behaved in such profligate fashion.

He missed Home. Although the idea of turning Tosev 3 into another version of his own world had seemed good and noble when he got into the cold-sleep capsule, everything he’d seen since he came out of it screamed that it wasn’t going to be as easy as everybody had thought. Given the Big Uglies’ intractability, he wondered how the Race had succeeded so well on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1.

He also wondered why no one else seemed to have any doubts about what the Race was doing here. The males had just formed their own rather compressed version of society back Home and gone on about their business, changing original plans only because the Tosevites had more technology than anyone expected. No one worried about the rightness of what they were doing.

Even Ussmak had no real idea of what the Race’s forces ought to be doing now that they’d come to Tosev 3. He supposed the doubts he did have sprang from his own feeling of apartness from everyone around him, from having been wrenched out of his comfortable niche in the original landcruiser crew and thrust into the unwanted company not merely of strangers, but of pompous, inept strangers.

Behind him, the turret traversed with a whir of smooth machinery. The coaxial machine gun began to chatter. “We shall rout out any Big Uglies lurking among the trees,” Krentel declared with his usual grandiloquence.

For once, though, the commander’s tone failed to grate on Ussmak. Krentel was actually doing something sensible. Ussmak cherished that when it happened. Had it happened more often, he might have been content even on this miserable, cold, wet ball of mud.

Machine-gun bullets whined less than a meter above Heinrich Jager’s head. Had any leaves remained on the birch trees, the bullets would have shaken the last of them dow. As it was, he used the fallen leaves to help conceal himself from the Lizard-panzer firing from the open country ahead.

The wet ground and wet leaves soaked Jager’s shabby clothes. Rain beat on his back and trickled down his neck. He suppressed a sneeze by main force. A round ricocheting from a tree trunk kicked mud up into his face.

Beside him, Georg Schultz let out a ghostly chuckle. “Well, Major, aren’t you glad we never had to mess with this infantry shit before?”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” It wasn’t just the manifold discomforts of crawling around bare to the elements, either. Jager felt naked and vulnerable without armor plate all around him. In his Panzer III, machine-gun bullets had been something to laugh at. Now they could pierce his precious, tender flesh as easily as anything else they happened to strike.

He raised his head a couple of centimeters, just enough to let him peer out at the Lizard panzer. It seemed sublimely indifferent to anything a mere foot soldier could hope to do to it. All at once, Jager understood the despair his own tank must have induced in French and Russian infantry who’d tried and failed to stop it. The shoe was on the other foot now, sure enough.

One of the partisans who huddled with Jager might have been reading his mind. The fellow said, “Well, there it is, Comrade Major. What the fuck do we do about it?”

“For the time being, we wait,” Jager answered. “Unless you’re really keen on dying right now, that is.”

“After what I’ve been through the last year and a half from your fucking Nazi bastards, dying is the least of my worries,” the partisan answered.

Jager twisted his head to glare at the ally who would have been anything but a few months before. The partisan, a skinny man with a gray-streaked beard and a big nose, glared back. Jager said, “I find this as ironic as you do, believe me.”

“Ironic?” The partisan raised bushy eyebrows. Jager had trouble understanding him. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish, and about every fourth word made the major stop and think. The Jew went on, “Fuck ironic. I asked God how things could be worse than they were with you Germans around, and He had to go and show me. Let it be a lesson to you, Comrade Nazi Major: never pray for something you don’t really want, because you may get it anyhow.”

“Right, Max,” Jager said, smiling a little in spite of himself. He hadn’t fought side by side with any Jews since the First World War; he had no great use for them. But the Russian partisan band sprawled in the dripping woods with him was more than half Jewish. He wondered whether the Ivans back in Moscow had set it up that way on purpose, to make sure the partisans didn’t think about betraying Stalin. That made a certain amount of sense, but it was also likely to make a fighting unit less efficient than it would have been without mutual suspicion and, on the Jews’ side, outright hatred.

The Lizard panzer’s machine gun stopped spitting flame. It swung away from the woods; Jager envied the turret’s quick power traverse. If he’d had himself a machine like that, now, he could have accomplished something worthwhile. It was wasted on the Lizards, who, had hardly a clue about how to exploit it.

The tank wallowed forward through the mud. Jager had made the acquaintance of Russian mud the previous fall and spring. It had done its best to glue his Panzer III in one place for good; he was not altogether disappointed to watch it give the Lizards trouble, too.

His attention shifted from the tank to the trucks and soldiers it was guarding. The trucks, like any wheeled vehicles, were having a lot of trouble in the mud. The NKVD man back in Moscow had been right; they were unusually heavy. Every so often a Lizard soldier, looking even more alien than usual in a shiny gray suit that covered him from toe claws to crown, would go over and put something-at this distance, Jager couldn’t tell what-into the back of a truck.

I hope we don’t have to hijack a vehicle, he thought. Given the state of what the Russians, for lack of a suitably malodorous word, called roads, he wasn’t sure the band could hijack a Lizard truck.

From a position carefully camouflaged by tall dead grass, a German machine gun began to bark. A couple of Lizards fell. Others started to run, while still others, wiser or more experienced, flattened out on the ground as human soldiers would have done. The glass blew out of a truck’s windshield when a round or two struck home; Jager couldn’t see what happened to the driver.

The commander of the Lizard panzer needed longer to notice the machine gun had opened up than he should have. The Dummkopf had his cupola buttoned up, too; Jager would have demoted a man (to say nothing of blistering his ears and maybe his backside) for a piece of stupidity-or was it cowardice? — like that.

When the Lizard finally deigned to pay some attention to the machine gun nest, he did just what Jager had hoped he would: instead of standing off and annihilating it with a round or two from his cannon, he charged toward it, his own machine gun chattering.

The German weapon fell silent. That worried Jager; if the Lizard got lucky with his own machine gun, the partisan band might have to back off and come up with a new plan. But then the concealed machine gun started up again, now firing straight at the oncoming tank.

Save as a goad, that was useless; Jager watched 7.92mm bullets spark off the Lizard panzer’s invincible front armor and fly away uselessly. The popgun onslaught, though, was intended only as a goad, to make sure the enemy tank commander took the machine-gun nest too seriously to worry about anything else.

Georg Schultz let out a gleeful grunt “God damn me to hell if he isn’t taking the bait, sir.”

“Ja,” Jager answered absently. He watched the panzer slog through the mud until it was just past the edge of the woods. Then its main arnament did speak, a bellow that made Jager’s ears ring. Mud fountained up from just behind the German machine-gun nest, but the weapon kept returning fire.

Jager turned his head to glance over at Max. “Brave men there,” he remarked.

The muzzle of the cannon lowered a centimeter or so, fired again. This time, the machine gun was put out of action-a singularly bloodless term, Jager thought, for haying a couple of men suddenly made into mangled chunks of raw meat.

But Otto Skorzeny was already dashing forward from the birch trees toward the Lizard panzer. The enemy tank commander must have been looking straight through his forward cupola periscope, for he never saw the big SS man pounding toward him from the flank and rear. Muck flying from his boots as he ran, Skorzeny covered the couple of hundred meters out to the panzer in time an Olympic sprinter might have envied.

The big machine started to move just, as he came up on it. He scrambled onto the rear deck, chucked a satchel charge under the overhang of the turret, and dove off headfirst. The charge exploded. The turret jerked as if kicked by a mule. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment. An escape hatch in the front of the panzer popped open. A Lizard sprang out.

Jager took no notice of the alien enemy. He was watching Skorzeny leg it back toward the shelter of the woods. Then his gaze slid to Max again. “Fuck you, Nazi,” the Jewish partisan repeated. But even he saw that would not do, not by itself. Grudgingly, he added, “That SS bastard isn’t just brave, he’s fucking crazy.”

Since Jager had thought the same thing since he met Skorzeny in Moscow, he declined to argue. Along with everyone else in the band, he grabbed his rifle, got to his feet, and ran toward the Lizards of the salvage crew, shouting at the top of his lungs.

The heavy protective suits made the Lizards slow and awkward. They fell like ninepins. Jager wondered how safe it was for him to be tramping about with no more protection than his helmet, but only for a moment. Getting shot was a much more pressing concern.

“Come on, come on, come on!” he shouted, pointing toward the truck the German machine gun had shot up. It hadn’t moved since. When he got up to it, he found out why: one of the rounds that shattered the windshield had also blown out the back of the driver’s head. The blood and brains splashed over the inside of the cab looked no different from those of a human being similarly killed.

Having made sure the truck driver was in fact dead, Jager hurried around to the rear of the vehicle. The latch there was very much like the one on an earthly truck. The partisans already had it open. Jager peered into the cargo compartment, which was lit by fluorescent tubes that ran from front to back across the ceiling.

The mud-covered little misshapen chunks of metal that lay on the floor of the compartment seemed hardly worth the trouble to which the Lizards had gone to recover them. But they were what the raiders had come to steal: if the Lizards wanted them so badly, they ought to be worth having.

Along with his rifle, Max carried an entrenching tool. He scooped up several of those innocuous-looking muddy lumps, dumped them into a lead-lined wooden box a couple of the other partisans hauled between them. The instant he finished, they slammed on the lid. Three men spoke together. “Let’s get out of here.”

The advice was, to say the least, timely. The Lizards had another panzer off in the distance, maybe a kilometer and a halfaway. It started churning toward them. In the same instant, muzzle flashes sprang from the machine gun on its turret. Bullets cracked past the running men. One of them fell with a groan. Long-range machine-gun fire wasn’t much good for taking out any particular individual, but it could decimate troops caught in the open. Jager had fought on the Somme in 1916. German machine guns then had done a lot worse than decimating the oncoming British.

Unlike those brave but foolish Englishmen a generation before, the partisans were not advancing into barbed-wire entanglements but running for the cover of the woods. They were almost there when one of the men carrying the lead-lined chest threw up his hands and pitched forward onto his face. Jager was only a few meters away. He grabbed the handle the partisan had dropped. The box was astonishingly heavy for its size, but not too heavy to lift. Jager and the Jew on the other side ran on.

The sound of dead leaves scrunching wetly under his feet was one of the loveliest things he’d ever heard: it meant he’d made it into the woods. He and his fellow bearer dodged around tree trunks, trying to take advantage of as much cover as they could.

Behind them, the Lizard panzer kept firing, but it didn’t sound as if it was getting any closer. Jager turned to the partisan beside him. “I think the bastard bogged down.” The Jew nodded. The two men grinned at each other as they hurried away from the tank.

Jager felt surprising confidence build in him. He’d thought of this mission as suicidal ever since the NKVD man proposed it back in Moscow. That hadn’t kept him from taking part; suicidal missions were part of war and, if they served the cause, were often worth attempting. But now he began to think he might actually get away with this one. Then-well, he’d worry about then later. He began to think he’d have a later in which to worry about then.

A whirring thutter in the air brought all his fears flooding back. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it was dangerous, he glanced over his shoulder. The helicopter swelled in the split second he watched it. Its guns started to chatter. Mud wouldn’t slow it down. Left alone, it could hover over the bare-branched woods and lash the raiders with fire until they had to give up their mission.

Wham, wham, wham! From among the trees, a 2-centimeter antiaircraft cannon opened up on the helicopter. With its light mount, designed for mountain warfare, it had made up twenty-seven man-portable loads; Jager had hauled one of them himself. It was a German weapon, served by a German crew: part of the reason the Soviets had been willing to include Wehrmacht men along with their own partisans in this band.

The Lizard helicopter just hung in midair for a moment, as if disbelieving the guerrillas could seriously attack it. It was proof against rifle bullets, but not against the antiaircraft gun’s shells. Jager watched them chew it to pieces, watched chunks of metal fly from it at every hit.

Too late, the helicopter swung toward its tormentor. The 2-centimeter Flak 38 kept pounding away. Like a sinking ship, the helicopter heeled over onto one side and crashed.

The raiders’ cheers filled the woods. Max pumped his fist in the air and screamed, “Take that, you-” Jager couldn’t follow the rest of the Yiddish he called it, but it sounded explosive. The panzer major yelled himself, then blinked. Fighting alongside a Jew was one thing; tactics dictated that. Finding you agreed with him, finding you might even like him as a man, was something else again. If he lived long enough, Jager would have to think about that.

Otto Skorzeny came dodging through the trees. Even filthy, even in dappled SS camouflage gear, he managed to look dapper. He shouted, “Move, you stupid fools! If we don’t get away now, we never will. You think the Lizards are going to sit there with their thumbs up their arses forever? It’s your funeral, if you do.”

As usual, Skorzeny galvanized everyone around him. The Red partisans undoubtedly hated him still, but who could argue with a man who’d just singlehandedly wrecked a Lizard panzer? The raiders hurried deeper into the woods.

None too soon-again Jager heard the thuttering roar of helicopters in the air. He glanced back and saw a pair of them now. The Germans manning the antiaircraft cannon opened up at long range this time, hoping to knock down one in a hurry so they could fight the other on more even terms-and also hoping to draw both machines’ fire onto themselves and away from their fleeing comrades.

The helicopters separated, swung around to engage the antiaircraft cannon from opposite sides. Jager wished the gun were a big 88; it could have’ swatted the copters like flies. But an 88 was anything but a man-portable weapon-it had a barrel almost seven meters long and weighed more than eight tonnes. The stubby mountain antiaircraft gun would have to do.

One of the helicopters blew up in midair, showering flaming debris over the woods. The other bored in for a firing run. Jager watched tracers from the cannon on the ground swivel through a wild arc, then stab up at the second helicopter while tracers from its machine guns stabbed down.

The 2-centimeter Flak 38 suddenly fell silent. But the helicopter did not go on to pursue the partisans. A rending crash moments later told him why. The gunners had done their duty as well as they were able-better than anyone dared hope when the mission was planned.

The partisan carrying the lead-lined box with Jager was at the end of his tether, stumbling and staggering and gasping like a man breathing his last Jager scowled at him. “Get away from there and put somebody else on that handle before you ruin the mission and get us both killed.” Only after he’d spoken did he notice the order in which he’d put those two elements. He grunted. In case he hadn’t noticed, that would have told him he was a thoroughly trained soldier.

The raider nodded his thanks and reeled away. Georg Schultz hurried up. “Here, I’ll take some of that, sir,” he said, nodding to the burden Jager now held alone.

“No, let me.” It was Max, the foul-mouthed Jewish partisan: He wasn’t as big, probably wasn’t as strong as Schultz, but he’d shown himself to be wiry and tough. All other things being equal, Jager would have preferred his tank gunner beside him, but all other things were not equal. The mission might depend on cooperation between surviving Germans and Russians. Having two Germans carrying the precious whatever-it-was inside that chest might make the Reds think harder about selling them out.

All that ran through Jager’s head in a couple of seconds. He couldn’t afford to think very long; hanging onto the chest solo was hard work. He said, “Let the Jew do it, Georg.” Schultz looked unhappy but fell back a couple of paces. Max took one of the handles from Jager. Together, they started moving again.

Even as he trotted beside Jager, Max glared at him. “How would you like it if I said, ‘Let the fucking Nazi do it,’ eh, Mister fucking Nazi?”

“That’s Major fucking Nazi to you, Mister Jew,” Jager retorted. “And the next time you want to go swearing at me, kindly remember those flak men back there who stayed at their gun and got shot up to help you make your getaway.”

“They did their jobs,” Max snapped. But after he spat into a clump of brown leaves, he added, “Yeah, all right, I’ll remember them in the kaddish.”

“I don’t know that word,” Jager said.

“Prayer for the dead,” Max said shortly. He glanced toward Jager again. Now his gaze was measuring instead of hostile, but somehow no easier to bear. “You don’t know fucking much, do you? You don’t know Babi Yar for instance, eh?”

“No,” Jager admitted. “What’s that?”

“Place a little outside of Kiev, not far from here, as a matter of fact. You find a big hole in the ground, then line Jews up at the edge of it. Men, women, children-doesn’t matter. You line ’em up, you shoot ’em in the back of the neck. They fall right into their own graves. You Germans are fucking efficient, you know? Then you line up another row and shoot them, too. You keep doing it till your big hole is full. Then you find yourself another fucking hole.”

“Propaganda-” Jager said.

Without a word, Max used his free hand to pull down the collar of his peasant’s blouse and bare his neck. Jager knew a gunshot scar when he saw one. The Jew said, “I must have jerked just as the gun went off behind me. I fell down. They had bastards down in the hole with more guns, making sure everybody really was dead. They must have missed me. I hope they don’t get a fucking reprimand, you know? More people fell on me, but not too many-it was getting late. When it was dark, I managed to crawl out and get away. I’ve been killing fucking Germans ever since.”

Jager didn’t answer. He hadn’t gone out of his way to notice what happened to Jews in Russian territory taken by the Germans. Nobody in the Wehrmacht went out of his way to notice that. It wasn’t safe for your career; it might not be safe for you personally. He’d heard things. Everybody heard things. He hadn’t worried much about it. After all, the Fuhrer had declared Jews the enemies of the Reich.

But there were ways soldiers treated enemies. Lining them up at the edge of a pit and shooting them from behind wasn’t supposed to be one of those ways. Jager tried to imagine himself doing that. It wasn’t easy. But if the Reich was at war and his superior gave him the order… He shook his head. He just didn’t know.

From across the chest, less than a meter away, his Jewish yokemate watched him flounder. Watching Max watch him only made Jager flounder harder. If Jews could flip-flop from enemies of the Reich to comrades-in-arms, that just made massacring them all the harder to stomach.

Max’s voice was sly. “You maybe have a fucking conscience?”

“Of course I have a conscience,” Jager said indignantly. Then he shut up again. If he had a conscience, as he’d automatically claimed, how was he supposed to ignore what Germany might well have been doing? (Even in his own mind, he didn’t want to phrase it any more definitely than that.).

To his relief, the woods started thinning out ahead. That meant the most dangerous part of the mission-crossing open country with what they’d stolen from the Lizards-lay ahead. Beside the abyss whose edge he’d been treading with Max, physical danger suddenly seemed a welcome diversion. As long as be was putting his own life on the line, he’d be too busy to look down into the abyss and see the people piled there with neat holes in the backs of their necks.

The survivors of the raiding party gathered near the edge of the trees. Skorzeny took charge of them. From under the thick layer of dead leaves, he pulled out several chests which looked the same as the one Jager and Max carried but were not lead-lined. “Two men to each one,” he ordered, pausing to let the Russian partisans who understood German translate for those who didn’t. “We scatter now, two by two, to make it as hard as we can for the Lizards to figure out who has the real one.”

One of the partisans said, “How do we know the real one will go where it’s supposed to?”

All the worn, dirty men, Russians and Germans alike, nodded at that. They still had no great trust in one another; they’d fought too hard for that. Skorzeny said, “We have one from each side holding the prize. The panje wagon that’s waiting for them has one from each side, too. If they don’t try to murder each other, we’ll be all right, ja?”

The SS man laughed to show he’d made a joke. Jager looked over to Max. The Jew was not laughing. He wore the expression Jager had often seen on junior officers who faced a tough tactical problem: he was weighing his options. That meant Jager had to weigh his, too.

Skorzeny said, “We’ll go out one pair at a time. The team with the real chest will go third.”

“Who told you you were God?” a partisan asked.

The SS man’s scarred cheek crinkled as he gave an impudent grin. “Who told you I wasn’t?” He waited a moment to see if he got any more argument. When he didn’t, he swatted a man from the pair closest to him on the shoulder and shouted “Go! Go! Go!” as if they were paratroopers diving out of a Ju-52 transport plane.

The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled “Go! Go! Go!” again and Jager and Max burst out of the woods and started off toward the promised panje wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards’ tightest security zone. Jager wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn’t practical.

“I’m fucking sick of rain,” Max said, though he knew as well as Jager that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.

Jager said, “Right now I don’t mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn’t mind fog, either.”

“I would,” Max said. “We’d get lost.”

“I have a compass.”

“Very efficient,” Max said dryly. Jager took it for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at-what was the name of the place? — at Babi Yar, that was it.

Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him. He had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.

Jager twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn’t have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn’t pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he’d seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the Wehrmacht did.

He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, “You poor bogged-down bastards.”

“Fuck you, too, Max.” In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan’s expression changed shape as if he, like Jager, had to change some of his thinking.

Then both men’s faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no flak cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers’ charges against German panzers back when the war-the human war-was new.

But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn’t finished off all the raiders. The yarnmering resumed.

The sound from the helicopters changed. Jager looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: “Maybe they’re settling down so they can comb through the woods-if they are, they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”

Max was less sanguine: “Don’t count on them to be so fucking stupid.”

“They aren’t what you’d call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense,” Jager answered seriously. “They’re brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven’t planned out in advance and they start floundering around.” They’re even worse than Russians that way, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.

The strafing from the helicopters hadn’t slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.

“They have landed troops!” Jager exclaimed. “The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding.”

“And the likelier they’ll kill off my friends,” Max said. “Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your Kameraden?”

“I’m a soldier, not a butcher,” Jager said. He wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not… He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He’d need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jager think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing; Wehrmacht men couldn’t have stomached it. He added, “You Russians have butchers, too.”

“So?” Max said. “Does that make you right?” Jager found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, “I wish they’d sent me to the gulag in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn’t have had to see what I saw.”

Further argument cut off abruptly when Jager fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jager felt as if he were a hundred years old. A kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day’s march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.

He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land-raw terrain. Of that the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.

Jager abruptly cut off his disparaging thoughts about Soviet inefficiency. His head went up like a hunted animal’s. The tiny, atrophied muscles in his ears tried to make them prick like a cat’s. Lizard helicopters were in the air again. “We have to move faster,” he said to Max.

The partisan pointed to his own trousers, which were covered in mud up to the knees. He dismissed Jager’s suggestion with three sardonic words: “Good fucking luck.”

Rationally, Jager knew Max was right. Still, as the whirring drone from the sky grew louder, he wanted to drop the heavy chest and run. He looked over his shoulder. The driving rain veiled the helicopter from sight. He could only hope it helped hide him from the Lizards.

Off to the south, from the middle of this big open field, shots cracked; Jager recognized the deep bark of a Gewehr-98K, the standard German infantry rifle (no way to tell now, of course, whether it was borne by a standard German infantryman or a very definitely nonstandard Russian partisan). The helicopter that had been closest to him droned off to meet the fleabite challenge.

“I think some of the decoys just drew them away from us,” Jager said.

“It might be a Jew saving your neck, Nazi. How does that make you feel?” Max said. After a moment, though, he added in wondering tones, “Or it might be a fucking Nazi saving mine. How does that make me feel? You know the word verkakte, Nazi? This is a verkakte mess, and no mistake.”

A village-maybe even a small town-loomed out of the rain ahead. In instant unspoken agreement, both men swerved wide around it. “What’s the name of that place?” Jager asked.

“Chernobyl, I think,” Max said. “The Lizards drove the people out after their ship blew up, but they might keep a little garrison there.”

“Let’s hope they don’t,” Jager said. The Jewish partisan nodded.

If the village held a garrison, it didn’t come forth to search for the raiders… or maybe it did, and simply missed Jager and Max in the downpour. Once past the clump of ugly wooden buildings and even uglier concrete ones, Jager glanced down at his compass to get back onto the proper course.

Max watched him put it back in his pocket “How are we going to find the fucking panje wagon?”

“We keep on this heading until-”

“-we walk past them in the rain,” the Jew put in.

“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Jager said icily.

“I don’t. I was hoping you did.”

They pushed on, skirting another small patch of woods and then returning to the course the compass dictated. Jager had a piece of black bread and some sausage in his pack. Getting them out one-handed was awkward, but he managed. He broke the bread, bit the sausage in half; and passed Max his share. The Jew hesitated but ate. After a while, he pulled a little tin flask from his hip pocket. He yanked out the cork, gave the flask to Jager for the first swig. Vodka ran down his throat like fire.

“Thanks,” he said. “That’s good.” He put his thumb over the opening so the rain couldn’t get in, passed the flask back to Max.

Off to one side, somebody spoke up in Russian. Jager started, then dropped the chest that had become like an unwelcome part of him and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Then a German voice added, “Ja, we could use something good about now.”

“You found them,” Max said to Jager as the panje wagon came up through the muck. “That’s fucking amazing.” Instead of hatred, he looked at Jager with something like respect. Jager, who was at least as surprised as the Jewish partisan, did his best not to show it.

The horse that pulled the panje wagon had seen better days. The light wooden wagon itself rode on large wheels; it was low, wide, and flat-bottomed, so it could float almost boatlike across the surface of even the deepest mud. It looked as if its design hadn’t changed for centuries, which was probably true; no vehicle was better adapted to coping with Russia’s twice-yearly rasputitsa.

The driver and the fellow beside him both wore Red Army greatcoats, but instead of a shelm, a Russian cloth helmet rather like a balaclava, the man who wasn’t holding the reins had on the long-brimmed cap of a German tropical-weight uniform. The weather was anything but tropical, but the cap kept the rain out of his eyes.

He said, “You have the cabbages?”

“Yes, by God, we do,” Jager said. Max nodded. Together, they lifted the lead-lined chest into the wagon. Jager had grown so used to the burden that his shoulder ached when he was relieved of it. Max handed the flask of vodka to the driver, then clambered up over the side of the wagon. Jager followed him. Between them, they almost filled the wagon bed.

The fellow with the shelm spoke in Russian. Max turned it into Yiddish for Jager. “He says we won’t bother with roads. We’ll head straight across country. The Lizards aren’t likely to find us that way.”

“And if they do?” Jager asked.

“Nichevo,” the Russian answered when Max put the question to him: “It can’t be helped.” Since that was manifestly true, Jager just nodded. The driver twitched the reins, clucked to the horse. The panje wagon began to roll.

“It’s true,” Yi Min declared. “I floated through the air light as a dandelion seed in the little scaly devils’ airplane, and it flew so high that I looked down on the whole world.” The apothecary conveniently forgot to mention-in fact, he’d just about made himself forget altogether-how sick he’d been while he floated light as a dandelion seed.

“And what did the world look like when you looked down on it?” one of his listeners asked.

“The foreign devils are right, believe it or not-the world is round, like a ball,” Yi Min answered. “I have seen it with my own eyes, so I know it is so.”

“Ahh,” some of the men said who sat crosslegged in front of him, either impressed at his eyewitness account or astonished that Europeans could be right about anything. Others shook their heads, disbelieving every word he said. Foolish turtles, he thought. He’d had a lot of lies taken for granted in his time; now that he was telling nothing but the truth, half the people in the scaly devils’ prisoner compound made him out to be a liar.

In any case, his audience hadn’t gathered to hear him talk about the shape of the world. A man in a blue cotton tunic said, “Tell us more about the women the little scaly devils gave to you.” Everyone, believers and skeptics alike, spoke up in favor of that; even if Yi Min were to lie about it, he’d still be amusing.

The best part was, he didn’t need to lie. “I had a woman whose skin was black as charcoal all over, save only the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. And I had another who was pale as milk, even her nipples only pink, with eyes of fine jade and hair and bush the color of a fox’s fur.”

“Ahh,” the men said again, imagining it One of them asked, “Did their strangeness make them better on the mat?”

“Neither of those two was particularly skilled,” Yi Min said, and his audience sighed with disappointment. He quickly added, “Still, their being so different to look at was piquant, like pickle after sweet. If you ask me, the gods first made the black folk, but left them in the oven too long. Then they tried again, but took the white folk-the foreign devils most of us had seen-out too soon. Finally they made us Chinese, and cooked us to perfection.”

The men who listened to him laughed; some of them clapped their hands. Then the fellow in the blue tunic said, “From what oven did the gods take the little scaly devils?”

Nervous silence fell. Yi Min said, “To know that for certain, you would have to ask the little devils themselves. If you want to know what I think, my guess is that a whole different set of gods made them. Why, do you know they have a mating season like, cattle or songbirds, and are impotent all the rest of the year?”

“Poor devils,” several men chorused, the first sympathy Yi Min had heard for the Lizards.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “That’s why they took me up into their airplane that never lands in the first place: to see for themselves that real human beings could mate at any season of the year.”

His smile was very nearly a leer. “I proved it to their satisfaction-and to mine.”

He smiled again, this time happily, at the grins and laughter his words won. Being back among people with whom he could speak, back among people who appreciated his undoubted cleverness, was the greatest joy in returning to the ground after so long aloft.

Then a bald old fellow who sold eggs said, “Didn’t the little devils also kidnap that pretty girl who was living in your tent? Why didn’t she come back with you?”

“They wanted to keep her up there,” Yi Min answered, shrugging. “Why, I don’t know; they would not tell me. What does it matter? She’s only a woman.”

He was just as glad Liu Han remained with the scaly devils. she’d been a pleasant convenience to him, certainly, but no more than that. And she’d seen him sick and vulnerable while he floated without weight, a weakness he was doing his best to pretend had never happened. Now, with the prestige of his journey and the connections he retained with the little scaly devils, women both prettier and more willing than Liu Han were happy to share his mat. He sometimes wondered what the little devils were doing to her, but his curiosity remained abstract.

Bowing as he sat, he said, “I do hope I’ve held your interest, my friends, and that you’ll reward me for helping you pass an idle hour.”

The gifts the audience gave were about what he’d expected: a little cash, a pair of old sandals that wouldn’t fit him but which he could trade for something he wanted, some radishes, a smoked duck breast wrapped in paper and tied with string, a couple of tiny pots filled with ground spices. He lifted their lids, sniffed, smiled appreciatively. Yes, he’d been paid well for entertaining.

He gathered up his loot and walked back toward the hut in which he was living. Nothing was left of the tent he’d shared with Liu Han. He could not honestly say he missed it, either; with winter nearly at hand, he was glad to have wooden walls around him. Of course, the people in the camp had also stolen everything he’d accumulated before the scaly devils took him up into the sky, but so what? He was already well on his way to getting more and better. Getting more and better of everything, as far as he could see, was what the world was all about.

From the changes in the camp while he’d been flying, he had to conclude just about everyone agreed with him. Instead of several square li of flapping canvas, it now boasted houses of wood and stone and sheet metal, some of them quite substantial. None of the construction materials had been here when the scaly devils’ prisoners were herded into the wire-enclosed compound, but they were here now. One way or another, people managed. Sharp wire wasn’t enough to keep them from managing.

As he came up to his own shelter, Yi Min readied the key that he carried on a bit of string around his neck. Key and lock both had cost only a couple of pig’s feet; the smith who made them out of scrap metal was too skinny to have bargained hard. Yi Min knew they weren’t very good, but what did that matter? The lock on his door publicly proclaimed him a man of property, which was what he had in mind. It wasn’t supposed to keep thieves away. His close connections with the little devils took care of that.

On about the fourth try, the key clicked, the lock opened, and Yi Min went inside. He started a fire in the little charcoal brazier by his sleeping mat. The feeble warmth the brazier gave made him long for his old home, where he slept on top of the low clay hearth and stayed snug even in the worst weather. He shrugged. The gods dealt the tiles in the game of life; a man’s job was to arrange them into the best hand he could.

Sudden silence clamped down on chattering friends, shouting husbands, screeching wives, even squalling children. Yi Min instinctively understood what that meant: little scaly devils close by. He was already turning toward the door when the knock came.

He raised the inner bar (regardless of connections, no sense taking chances), pulled the door open. He bowed low. “Ah, honored Ssofeg, you do me great favor by honoring my humble dwelling with your presence,” he said in Chinese, then went on in the devil’s speech: “What is your will, superior of mine? Speak, and it shall be done.”

“You are dutiful,” Ssofeg said in his own language. It was polite formula and praise at the same time; the scaly devils were even more punctilious than Chinese about respect for superiors and elders. Then Ssofeg switched to Chinese, which he used with Yi Min as the apothecary used the little devils’ language with him. “You have more of what I seek?”

“I have more, superior of mine,” Yi Min said in the Lizards’ speech. One of the little spicepots he’d received for his talk of women and other marvels was full of powdered ginger. He took out a tiny pinch, put it in the palm of his other hand, and held it out for Ssofeg.

The little devil flicked out his tongue, for all the world like a kitten lapping from a bowl-although the tongue itself so much reminded Yi Min of a serpent’s that he had to steel himself to keep from jerking away. Two quick licks and the ginger was gone.

For a couple of seconds, Ssofeg simply stood where he was. Then he quivered all over and let out a long, slow hiss. It was the nearest approach to a man’s ecstatic grunt at the moment of Clouds and Rain that Yi Min had ever heard from a little scaly devil. As if he’d forgotten Chinese, Ssofeg spoke in his own language: “You can have no idea how fine that makes me feel.”

“No doubt you are right, superior of mine,” Yi Min said. He liked to get drunk; he enjoyed a pipe of opium every so often, too, though there he was very moderate for fear of permanently blunting his drive and ambition. As an apothecary, he’d come across and sampled a lot of other substances alleged to produce pleasure: everything from hemp leaves to powdered rhinoceros horn. Most, so far as he could tell, had no effect whatever. That didn’t keep him from selling them, but it did keep him from trying them twice.

But ginger? As far as he was concerned, ginger was just a condiment. Some people claimed it had aphrodisiac powers because ginger roots sometimes looked like gnarled little men, but it had never done anything to harden Yi Min’s lance. But when Ssofeg tasted it, he might have died and gone to the heaven Christian missionaries always talked about in glowing words.

The little scaly devil said, “Give me more. Every time I taste the pleasure, I crave it again.” His bifurcated tongue went out, then in.

“I will give you more, superior of mine, but what will you give me in return? Ginger is rare and expensive; I have had to pay much to get even this little amount for you.” Yi Min was lying in his teeth, but Ssofeg didn’t know that. Nor did the people from whom he got ginger know he was selling it to the scaly devils. They would eventually figure it out, of course, at which point competition would cut into his profits. But for now-

For now, Ssofeg let out another hiss, this one redolent of distress. “Already I have given you much, very much.” His tailstump lashed in agitation. “But I must know this-this delight once more. Here.” He took from around his neck something that most closely resembled the field glasses Yi Min had once seen a Japanese officer using. “These see in darkness as well as light. I will report them missing. Quick, give me another taste.”

“I hope I will be able to get any kind of price for them,” Yi Min said peevishly. In fact, he wondered whether the Nationalists, the Communists, or the Japanese would pay most for the new trinket. He had contacts with all three; the little scaly devils were naive if they thought mere wire cut a prison camp off from the world around it.

Such decisions could wait. By the way Ssofeg stood swaying slightly, he couldn’t Yi Min gave him another pinch of ginger. He licked it off the apothecary’s palm. When his pleasure-filled shiver finally stopped, he said, “If I report much more gear as missing, I shall surely be called to account. Yet I must have ginger. What shall I do.”

Yi Min had been hoping for just that question. As casually as he could, keeping any trace of a chortle from his voice, he said, “I could sell you a lot of ginger now.” He showed Ssofeg the spicepot full of it.

The scaly devil’s tailstump lashed again. “I must have it! But how?”

“You buy it from me now,” Yi Min repeated. “Then you keep some-enough for yourself-and sell the rest to other males of the Race. They will make up your cost and more.”

Ssofeg turned both eyes full upon the apothecary, staring as if he were the Buddha reincarnated. “I could do that, couldn’t I? Then I could pass on to you what they convey to me, my own difficulties with inventory control would disappear, and you would gain the wherewithal to acquire still more of this marvelous herb which I desire more with each passing day. Truly you are a Big Ugly of genius, Yi Min!”

“The superior of mine is gracious to this humble inferior,” Yi Min said. He did not smile; Ssofeg was a clever little devil, and might notice and start asking questions better left unraised.

No, on second thought, Ssofeg was unlikely to notice anything. He was caught in the gloom that always seemed to seize him when ginger’s exhilaration wore off. Now he shook as if from an ague rather than with delight. He moaned, “But how can I in good conscience expose other males of the Race to this constant craving I feel myself? That would not be right.”

He stared hungrily at the spicepot full of ginger. Fear bubbled through Yi Min. Some opium addicts would kill to keep from being separated from their drug, and ginger seemed to hit Ssofeg far harder than opium did its human users. The apothecary said, “If you take this from me now, superior of mine, where will you get more when you have used it all?”

The little devil made a noise like a boiling kettle. “Plan for tomorrow, plan for next year, plan for the generations yet to come,” he said, sounding as if he were repeating a lesson learned long ago in school. He resumed, “You are right, of course. Thievery would in the long run prove futile. What then is your price for the pot of precious herb you hold here?”

Yi Min had an answer ready: “I want one of the picture-taking machines the Race has made, the ones that take pictures you can look at from all around. I want also a supply of whatever it is the machine takes the pictures on.” He remembered how-interesting-the pictures the devils had taken of Liu Han and him were. Many men in the camp would pay well to watch such pictures… while he could give the young men and girls who would perform in them next to nothing.

But Ssofeg said, “I myself cannot get you one of these machines. Give me the ginger now, and I will use it to find a male who has access to them and can abstract it so it will not be missed.”

Yi Min laughed scornfully. “You called me wise before. Do you all at once think me a fool?” Hard bargaining followed. In the end, the apothecary surrendered a quarter of the ginger to Ssofeg, the rest to remain with him until payment was forthcoming. The little scaly devil reverently enclosed the ground spice in a transparent envelope, put that envelope into one of the pouches he wore on the belt round his waist, and hurried out of Yi Min’s hut. The devils’ gait always struck Yi Min as skittery, but Ssofeg’s movements seemed downright furtive.

Well they might, the apothecary thought. The Japanese had strict laws against selling equipment to the Chinese; since the little devils’ gear was so much better than that of the Japanese, it only stood to reason that their regulations would be harsher. If Ssofeg got caught by his people’s inspectors, he would probably be in even bigger trouble than he thought.

Well, that was his lookout. Yi Min had been certain almost from the day the scaly devils landed that they would make his fortune. At first he’d thought it would be as an interpreter. Now, though, ginger and-with luck-interesting films looked likely to prove even more profitable. He wasn’t fussy about how he got rich, as long as he did.

I’m on my way, he thought.

Sweat trickled through Bobby Fiore’s beard, dripped down onto the smooth, shiny surface of the mat on which he sat. When he got up to walk over to the faucet, his buttocks made rude squelching noises as they pulled free from the mat. The water that came when he pushed a button was warmer than luke- and had a faint chemical tang. He made himself drink anyhow. In heat like this, you had to drink.

He wished he had some salt tablets. He’d spent a couple of seasons playing ball in west Texas and New Mexico; the weather there hadn’t been a lot cooler than the Lizards kept their spaceship. Every team in that part of the country kept a bowl of salt tablets by the bat rack. He thought they did some good: without them, how were you supposed to replace what you sweated away?

The door to his cubicle silently slid open. A Lizard brought in some rations for him, and a magazine as well. “Thank you, superior of mine,” Fiore hissed politely. The Lizard did not deign to reply. It got out of the cubicle in a hurry. The door closed behind it.

The rations, as usual, were Earthly canned goods: this time, a can of pork and beans and one of stewed tomatoes. Fiore sighed. The Lizards seemed to pull cans off the shelf at random. The meal before had been fruit salad and condensed milk, the one before that chicken noodle soup (cold, undiluted, and still in the can) and chocolate syrup. After weeks on such fare, he would have killed for a green salad, fresh meat, or a scrambled egg.

The magazine, however, was a treat, even if it did date from 1941. When he wasn’t with Liu Han, he was here by himself and had to make his own amusement. Something new to look at would keep him interested for several meals. The title-Signal-even let him hope it would be in English.

He found out it wasn’t as soon as he opened it. Just what the language was, he couldn’t tell, his formal education having stopped in the tenth grade. Something Scandinavian, he guessed: he’d seen o’s with lines through them like these on Minnesota shopfronts in towns where everybody seemed to be blond and blue-eyed.

He didn’t need to be able to read the Signal to figure out what it was-a Nazi propaganda magazine. Here was Goebbels smiling from behind his desk, here were Russians surrendering to men in coalscuttle helmets, here were a rather beefy cabaret dancer and her soldier boyfriend. Here was the world that had been before the Lizards came. He clenched his teeth; tears stung his eyes. Being reminded of that world also reminded him how much things had changed.

One thing fifteen years of playing minor-league ball had taught him was how to roll with the punches. That meant eating pork and beans and stewed tomatoes when the Lizards gave them to him, lest his next meal be worse or fail to come at all. It meant looking at the pictures in the Signal when he couldn’t read the words. And it meant hoping he could see Liu Han some time soon, but not letting himself get downhearted when he had to stay in his cubicle alone.

He was washing molasses and tomato juice off his fingers and trying to rinse his beard clean when the door opened again. The Lizard that had brought in the cans now carried them away. Fiore looked at the Signal a while longer, then lay down on the mat and went to sleep.

The lights in the cubicle never dimmed, but that didn’t bother him. The heat gave him a harder time. Still, he managed. Anyone who could sleep on a bus rattling between Clovis and Lubbock in the middle of July could sleep damn near anywhere. He’d never realized how rough life was in the bush leagues until he found all the rugged things for which it had prepared him.

As usual, he woke slick with sweat. He splashed water over himself to get some of the greasy feel off his skin. For a little while, as it evaporated, he felt almost cool. Then he started sweating again. At least it was dry heat, he told himself. Had it been humid, he would have cooked long since.

He was glancing through the Signal again, trying to figure out what some of the Norwegian (or were they Danish?) words meant, when the door opened. He wondered what the Lizards wanted. He wasn’t hungry yet; the pork and beans still felt like a medicine ball in his stomach. But instead of a Lizard with canned goods, in walked Liu Han.

“Your mate,” said one of the Lizards escorting her. His mouth fell open. Fiore thought that meant he was laughing. That was all right He laughed at the Lizard, too, for not being able to mate.

He gave Liu Han a hug. Neither of them wore anything; they stuck to each other wherever they touched. “How are you?” he said, letting her go. “It’s good to see you.” It was good to see anyone human, but he didn’t say that aloud.

“Good also to see you,” Liu Han said, adding the Lizards’ emphatic cough to end the sentence. They spoke to each other in a jargon they invented and expanded each time they were together, one no other two people could have followed: English, Chinese, and the Lizards’ language pasted together to yield ever-growing meaning.

She said, “I am glad the scaly devils do not force us to mate”-she used the Lizards’ word for that-“each time we see each other now.”

“You’re glad?” He laughed. “I can only do so much.” He flicked his tongue against the inside of his upper lip as he blew air out through his mouth, making a noise like a window shade rolling up-and him with it.

He’d done that often enough for her to understand it. She smiled at his foolishness. “Not that I don’t like what you do when we mate”-again she used the Lizards’ emotionless word, which let her avoid choosing a human term with more flavor to it-“but I do not like having to do it at their order.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. Being a specimen didn’t appeal to him, either. Then he wondered what they ought to do instead. Besides their bodies, the only thing they had in common was that the Lizards had shanghaied both of them.

Since Liu Han plainly didn’t feel like screwing to pass the time, he went through the Signal with her. He’d decided a while ago that she was anything but stupid, but he found how little she knew of the world outside the village from which she’d come.

He couldn’t read the text of the magazine, but he recognized faces and places in the pictures: Goebbels, Marshal Petain, Paris, North Africa. To Liu Han, they were all strange. He wondered if she’d even heard of Germany.

“Germany and Japan are friends,” he told her, only to discover that Japan wasn’t Japan in Chinese. He tried again: “Japan fights”-that in pantomime-“America and fights China, too.”

“Oh, the eastern devils,” she exclaimed. “Eastern devils kill my man, my child, just before little scaly devils come. This Germany friends with eastern devils? Must be bad.”

“Probably,” he said. He’d been sure the Germans were the bad guys when they declared war on the United States. Since then, though, he’d heard they had done a better job of fighting the Lizards than most. Did that all of a sudden turn them back into good guys? He had trouble figuring out where loyalty to his own country stopped and loyalty to-to his planet, would it be? — started. He wished Sam Yeager were around. Yeager was more used to thinking in terms like those.

He also noticed, not for the first time but more strongly than ever before, that anything not Chinese was somehow devilish to Liu Han. The Lizards were scaly devils; he himself, when he wasn’t Bobbyfiore pronounced all as one word, was a foreign devil; and now the Japs were eastern devils. Given what they’d done to her family, he couldn’t blame her for thinking of them like that, but he was pretty sure she would have hung the same label on them no matter what.

He asked her about it, using multilingual circumlocutions. When she finally understood, she nodded, surprised he needed to put the question to her. “If you are not Chinese, of course you are a devil,” she said, as if stating a law of nature.

“That’s not how it is,” Fiore told her; but she didn’t look convinced. Then he remembered that, till he’d started playing ball and meeting all sorts of people instead of just the ones from his neighborhood, he’d been sure everybody who wasn’t Catholic would burn in hell forever. Maybe this devil business was something like that.

They went back to looking at the Signal. The high-kicking nightclub dancer in her skimpy satin outfit made Liu Han laugh. “How can she show herself, wearing so little?” she asked, forgetting for the moment that she herself wore nothing. Fiore laughed in turn. Except when he stuck to the mat, he often forgot he was naked, too. Amazing what you got used to.

Liu Han pointed to an advertisement for an Olympia typewriter. “What?” she said in English, adding the Lizard interrogative cough.

Fiore had more trouble explaining it than he’d expected. After a while, he figured out that she couldn’t read or write. He’d known a few ballplayers, mostly from the South, who had the same trouble, but it wasn’t something that automatically occurred to him.

Now he wished more than ever that the Signal was in English; he would have started teaching her on the spot. He thought about showing her the alphabet-despite crossed o’s and a’s with little circles above them, the ABCs didn’t change much. But if he didn’t understand what he was reading, how was she supposed to? He gave it up as a bad job and turned to the next page.

It showed a flight of German bombers over some Russian city. In spite of the sweltering heat, she shivered and pressed herself against him. She might not know what a typewriter was for, but she recognized bombers when she saw them. Fiore clicked his tongue between his teeth. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?

They came to the article about Marshal Petain. Fiore thought he was going to have trouble putting across what Vichy France was all about, the more so as he didn’t understand all the details himself. But as soon as he managed to convey to her that it was a German puppet state, she nodded and exclaimed, “Manchukuo!”

“That’s right, the Japs have puppets, too, don’t they?” he said.

“Puppets?” She had the concept, but the word eluded her. He resorted to pantomime again until she got the idea. He hammed up his dumb show as much as he could; she always enjoyed that. she did smile now, but only for a moment. Then she said, “The scaly devils have made puppets of us all.”

He blinked; that was as serious an idea as she’d ever gotten across. She was also dead right. If it weren’t for the Lizards, he’d be… doing what? The answer he arrived at brought him up short. If it weren’t for the Lizards, all he’d be doing was trying to keep a floundering minor-league career alive, getting an off-season job, and waiting for Uncle Sam to send him a draft notice. When you stepped back and looked at it, none of that was worth writing home about.

“Maybe we were already puppets before the Lizards came,” he said harshly. His voice grew softer as he added, “if they hadn’t come, I never would have known you, so I guess I’m glad they did.”

Liu Han did not answer right away. Her face was unreadable as she studied Fiore. He flinched from that quiet scrutiny, wondering how badly he’d just stuck his foot in his mouth. He knew she’d been through hard times, and it was a lot rougher for a, woman to have to lie down with a strange man than the other way around. He suddenly wondered exactly what she thought of him. Was he something good, or simply something better than she’d known in captivity before?

How much the answer mattered surprised him. Till now, he hadn’t asked himself what Liu Han meant to him, either. Sure, getting laid was fine, and he’d found out more about that from her than he’d thought he needed to learn until the Lizards brought him up here. But there was more to it. In spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to her, she remained good people. He wanted to take care of her. But did she want him for anything more than an insurance policy?

She never did answer, not in words. She put her head on his chest, smoothing away the hairs with her hand so they wouldn’t tickle her nose. His arms closed around her back. He could have rolled over on top of her, but it didn’t cross his mind, not now. They held each other for a while.

He wondered what his mother would say if he told her he was falling in love with a Chinese girl. He hoped he’d have the chance to find out.

Then he wondered how he’d say “I love you” to Liu Han. He didn’t know the Chinese for it, she didn’t know the English, and it was one place where the Lizards’ language helped not at all. He patted her bare shoulder. One way or another, he’d get the idea across.