In the Balance

15

An hour outside Chicago. Crouched behind an overturned drill press in a shattered factory building in Aurora, Illinois, Mutt Daniels reflected that this was about as close to the Windy City as he’d come since he fell out of the big leagues thirty years before.

The noise he made was half laugh, half cough. Steam swirled from his mouth, thick as cigarette smoke. Even in a sheepskin coat he shivered. Snow dnfted down on him through holes in the roof. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets. If he happened to brush them against the frozen bare metal of the drill press, he knew it would strip off his skin like a scaling knife getting a bluegill ready for the frying pan.

Clanking outside in the rubble-strewn street. A few feet away, sprawled in back of a lathe lay Sergeant Schneider. “That there’s a Lizard tank,” Daniels whispered, hoping Schneider would tell him he was wrong. But the veteran noncom just nodded. Daniels swore. We didn’t have to worry about these god damn things when we were Over There in the last war.”

“Too goddamn right we didn’t,” Schneider said. “And all the time then I thought things couldn’t get any worse.” He spat on the floor. “Shows what I know, don’t it?”

“Yeah.” Daniels’ shiver had only a little to do with the cold that snuck into his very bones. He’d read about tanks since the new war began, seen them in newsreels. But until, the Lizards turned the whole world upside down, he hadn’t really undertood what they did to fighting. It wasn’t just that they picked up big guns and put them on tracks. Worse still, behind their thick armor, the crews that served those guns were almost invulnerable to infantry.

Almost. Mutt scuttled forward on hands and knees. If that tank-if any Lizard tank-forced its way to the eastern bank of the Fox River, the job of defending Chicago would take another step on the road to impossibility.

The tank’s machine gun chattered, firing at one of the Americans defending Aurora or else at random to make humans keep their heads down. Combat here was house-to-house, concentrated; in fact, it reminded Daniels of the trench warfare he’d known in France. Aurora marked the western edge of the factory belt that spread out across the prairie from Chicago.

Fighting all the way into the big city would be like this-if anyone lived to retreat all the way into the big city. Mutt had his doubts about that. He’d had his doubts in 1918, too, but then he’d been on the side with more men and bigger guns. Now he was getting a taste of how the poor damned Boches must have felt as everything rained down on them.

The Germans had kept fighting like bastards right up till the Armistice. Mutt felt asimilar obligation to keep going as long as he could. The front wall of the factory had been bombed not long before he holed up in it; its bricks were part of the rubble through which the Lizard tank was forcing its way. He crawled toward what had been a window opening and was now just a hole a little squarer than most. Knife-sharp shards of glass tore his pants and his knees.

Ever so cautiously, he peered out. The tank was about thirty yards east of him. It had slowed to shove aside some burned-out trucks the Americans were using as a roadblock. The commander had nerve. In spite of rattling small-arms fire, he stood head and shoulders out of his cupola so he could see what was going on around him.

His back was to Daniels. Mutt had grown up hunting squirrels and possums for the pot. He swung the rifle up to his shoulder, exhaled, saw the front of the Lizard’s head explode in a red mist a split second before he threw himself away from his firing position.

“Nailed the son of a bitch!” he shouted through the din of gunfire and explosions. The other Americans sheltering in the ruined factory raised a cheer. Such a clear-cut cry of victory came their way too seldom. Had the Lizards had the numbers to match the might of their marvelous machines, Daniels knew the fight would have been long since lost.

Nor did he get more than a moment to exult in his successful piece of sniping. Bullets from the tank’s machine gun lashed the factory building. He huddled in back of another broken power tool, grateful for the heavy chunk of iron and steel that shielded him from flying death.

“Good job, Mutt,” Sergeant Schneider bawled. “You diverted him from the advance he was making. Taking us out doesn’t mean a thing strategically.”

Daniels wondered whether he’d be any less dead if he got killed in an action strategically meaningless. He didn’t think so. “Damn shame,” he muttered. He also marveled that Schneider could still think and talk like a professional soldier while being hosed down by machine-gun slugs.

Then there was a sudden hot yellow glare outside, as if the sun had come on in the middle of the street. The roar that accompanied it was loud, the wham-crash! of the shell from the tank’s big gun even louder. Chunks of brick rained down on Daniels; a timber that would have smashed him like a bug was instead smashed itself against the machine behind which he cowered.

The tank gave the factory two more rounds: flash, boom crash; flash, boom, crash. Mutt screamed for all he was worth, but couldn’t hear himself or anyone else. He wondered if he’d ever hear anything again. At the moment, it was the least of his worries. He realized he’d wet his pants, but he didn’t care about that, either.

When he tried to scramble away, his arms and legs shook so much he could hardly move. “Shell shock,” he said, feeling the words on his lips but not hearing them at all. He’d seen men like this in the trenches after a good German barrage. Other soldiers would jeer at them, but not too hard-it wasn’t as if the poor bastards could help themselves. He marveled at being alive.

“Hey, Schneider,” he called, “you think them Lizards are fucking diverted enough for now?”

He didn’t hear Schneider answer, but that was all right-he hadn’t heard himself ask the question. He glanced over to where the sergeant had been hiding. Any further jokes stuck in his throat. The veteran was nothing but splashed blood and raw meat ground not too fine.

Daniels gulped. “Jesus,” he whispered. Schneider was the best soldier he’d ever known-by a wide margin in this crazy war and, he thought, also better than any of the top sergeants he’d served under in France. One way you told good soldiers from bad was that the good ones lived to learn new things while the bad ones bought their farms in a hurry. Seeing a good soldier dead reminded you that you could end up the same way yourself. Mutt didn’t want reminders like that.

He smelled smoke, sharp and fresh. It was a reminder, too, a reminder there were nastier ways to die than getting chewed to pieces by a storm of shell splinters. Schneider, at least, never knew what hit him. If you roasted, you’d have plenty of time to regret it. All at once, Daniels’ shaky limbs worked, if not perfectly, then well enough.

He looked around the gloomy inside of the factory building-considerably less gloomy now that the Lizards had done some fresh ventilation work on the front-for the rest of the Americans who’d been in here with him. A couple of them weren’t going anywhere: they lay dead as gruesomely as Schneider. Three or four others, as lucky as he’d been himself, were getting away from the fire as fast as they could. And a couple of wounded men flopped on the floor like fresh-landed fish in the bottom of a boat.

Both Mutt’s grandfathers had fought in the War Between the States, and both, as old men will, told stories to the wide-eyed boy he’d been. He remembered Pappy Daniels, long white beard stained with tobacco juice, talking about the Battle of the Wilderness and how wounded men there had shot themselves before any of the little blazes all the musketry had started could wash over them.

That memory-one he hadn’t called to mind in years-told him what he had to do. He hurried forward, grabbed one of the injured soldiers, and dragged him away from the spreading flames over to a tumbledown wall that might shelter him for a little while.

“Thanks,” the fellow gasped.

“It’s okay.” Daniels quickly bandaged the worst of the man’s wounds, then went back to pick up his comrade. He had to sling his rifle; the other fellow had passed out, and was a two-hand carry. He’d just taken him onto his shoulders when a Lizard infantryman skittered into the factory.

He was sure he was dead. After what seemed an age but had to have been only a heartbeat, the Lizard pointed the muzzle of its rifle to the floor, gestured with its free hand: get your wounded buddy out of here.

Sometimes-far from always-the Germans had extended that courtesy in France; sometimes-just as far from always-the Americans returned it. Daniels never expected to encounter it from a thing that looked like one of the monsters in the serials his ballplayers liked to watch.

“Obliged,” he told the Lizard, though he knew it couldn’t understand. Then he raised his voice to the men hiding somewhere in the ruins: “Don’t shoot this one, fellas! He’s all right.”

Staggering under the weight of the soldier he’d lifted, he carried him back to the wall behind which he’d laid the other wounded man. At the same time, the Lizard slowly backed out of the factory building. Nobody fired at it.

The tiny truce held for perhaps half a minute. Mutt rolled the second injured soldier off his shoulder, discovered he wasn’t breathing. He grabbed the fellow’s wrist; his finger found the spot just on the thumb side of the tendons. No pulse. The soldier’s arm flopped limply when he let it fall. “Aah, shit,” he said dully. The strange moment of comradeship had gone for nothing, lost in the waste that was war.

More Lizards dashed into the building. They fired their automatic weapons from the hip, not aiming at anything in particular but making the Americans keep their heads down. Only a couple of rifle rounds answered them. The fellow who shoots first has the edge, Daniels thought. He’d learned that in the trenches, and it still seemed true.

All at once, he realized that with Schneider dead, he was the senior noncom present. He’d been in charge of more men than these as a manager but the stakes hadn’t been so high-nobody shot you for hanging a curve ball no matter how much people talked about it.

The first wounded man he d dragged to cover was still very much alive. “Fall back!” Mutt yelled. He started crawling away, dragging the hurt soldier after him. Stand up now and you’d stop one of those sprayed bullets just as sure as sunrise.

A beam crashed down behind him. Flames crackled, then roared at his back He tried to crawl faster. “Over here!” somebody shouted.

He changed direction. Hands reached out to help pull the wounded man behind a file cabinet that, between its metal and the reams of paper spilling from it, probably could have stopped a Lizard tank round. Mutt got in back of it himself and lay there, panting like a dog on a Mississippi summer day.

“Smitty still alive up there?” asked the soldier already under cover.

Daniels shook his head. “For all I know, he could’ve been dead when I picked him up. Goddamn shame.” He didn’t say anything about the Lizard who’d refrained from shooting him. He had the strange feeling that mentioning it would take the magic away, as if it were the seventh inning of a building no-hitter.

The other soldier-his name was Buck Risberg-pointed and said, “The fire’s holding the Lizards back.”

“Good to know somethin’ can.” Daniels made a sour face. He was turning cynical fast in this fight I’m gettin’ old, he thought, and then, Gettin’? Hell, I am old. But he was also in command. He dragged his mind back to what needed doing right now. “Get Hank here out of this mess,” he told Risberg. “There ought to be a medic a couple blocks north o’here, less’n the Lizards drove him out by now. But you gotta try.”

“Okay, Mutt.” Half dragging, half carrying the now-unconscious Hank, Risberg made his way out of the firing line. The burning beam helped light his way through the gloom, and also provided a barrier the Lizards hesitated to cross.

Shells screamed down on the factory and the street outside: not from Lizard tank cannon, these, but out of the west from American batteries still in place on Stolp’s Island in the middle of the Fox River. The gunners were bringing the fire right down onto the heads of their own men in the hope of hitting the enemy, too. Daniels admired their aggressiveness, and wished he weren’t on the receiving end of it.

The incoming artillery made the Lizards who were poking their snouts into the factory building stop shooting and hunker down. At least, that was what Mutt assumed they were doing-it was certainly what he was doing himself. But all too soon, even in the midst of the barrage, they started up again with nasty three and four-bullet bursts that would chew a man to rags. Mutt felt as inadequate with the Springfield jammed against his shoulder as Pappy Daniels must have if he’d ever tried to fight Yankees toting Henry repeaters with his single-shot, muzzle-loading rifle musket.

Then from in back of him came a long, ripping burst of fire that made him wonder for a dreadful instant how the Lizards had got round to his rear. But not only did the Lizards usually have better fire discipline than that, the weapon did not sound like one of theirs. When Daniels recognized it, he yelled, “You with the tommy gun! Get your ass up here!”

A minute later, a soldier flopped down beside him. “Where they at, Corporal?” he asked.

Mutt pointed. “Right over that way; leastways, that’s where they shot from last.”

The tommy gun chattered. The fellow with it-not a man from Daniels unit-went through a fifty-round drum as if he were going to have to pay for all the rounds he didn’t fire off. Another submachine gun opened up behind Daniels and to his left. Grinning at Mutt’s surprised expression, the soldier said, “Our whole platoon cathes ’em, Corporal. We got enough firepower to make these scaly sons of bitches think twice about messin’ with us.”

Daniels started to say, “That’s crazy,” but maybe it wasn’t. Out in open country it would have been; a tommy gun fired a.45-caliber pistol cartridge, and was accurate out to only a couple of hundred yards. But in street fighting or building-to-building combat like this, volume of fire counted for a lot more than accuracy. Since the U.S.A. couldn’t match the Lizards’ automatic rifles, submachine guns were probably the next best thing.

So instead of cussing the high command for a worthless brainstorm, Mutt said, “Yeah, some of the German assault troops in France carried those damn things, too. I didn’t much care to go up against ’em, either.”

The tommy-gunner turned his head. “You were Over There, were you? I reckon this is worse.”

Daniels thought about it. “Yeah, probably. Not that that was any fun, mind you, but it’s always easier bein’ on the long end of the stick. And this here fightin’ in factories-I didn’t used to think they made anything worse’n trenches, but I’m comin’ round to believe I was wrong.”

An airplane roared by, just above rooftop height. “Ours,” the tommy-gunner said in glad surprise. Daniels shared it; American planes were all too few these days. The aircraft pounded the advancing Lizards for a few seconds, machine guns bellowing. Then came another bellow, an almost solid wall of noise, from the ground. The airplane’s engine stopped screaming; the machine guns cut off at the same time. The plane crashed with a boom that would have broken windows had Aurora had any windows left to break.

“Damn!” the tommy-gunner and Daniels said together. Mutt added, “I hope he came down on top of a whole pile of the bastards.”

“Yeah,” said the soldier with the Thompson gun. “I just wish he could have got away so he’d be able to hit ’em again tomorrow.” Daniels nodded; he sometimes thought no American ever lived to fly more than one mission against the Lizards. Using up pilots as fast as planes was a losing way to do business.

The tommy-gunner squeezed off a burst in the direction of the Lizards. He said, “Corporal, I’ll cover you if you want to slide away from here. You ain’t much good in this fight with just your old Springfield.”

Had he left off the second sentence, Daniels might have taken him up on the offer. But he discovered he had pride left to flick. He could think of himself as old and he’d already thought of his rifle as antiquated, but he wasn’t about to let this punk kid tell him he couldn’t cut it “I’ll stick,” he said shortly.

“However you want it,” the tommy-gunner said, shrugging. Mutt got the idea that only his stripes kept the kid from tacking Pop onto the end of the sentence.

The Lizards skittered forward, firing as they came. The flames that leapt from the burning beam lit them up but also helped screen their movements. Daniels snapped off a shot. A skitter turned into a tumble. He raised a Rebel yell his grandpappy would have been proud of. “No good in a fight, am I?” The soldier beside him looked innocent “Did I say something?”

The kid got up on one knee to fire, then went over backward with almost the grace of a circus acrobat. Something hot and wet splashed Daniels. The flickering firelight showed red-streaked gray on the back of his hand. He violently wiped it against his trouser leg. “Brains,” he said, shuddering. When he glanced over at the tommy-gunner, the top of the youngster’s head was clipped off, as if by a hatchet. A spreading pool of blood reached toward him.

He didn’t have time to be as sick as he would have liked. As far as he could tell, he was the forwardmost American still fighting. He fired at one Lizard-a miss, he thought, but he made the little monster duck-then whirled through a quarter-circle to shoot at another.

He had no idea what, if anything, that second round did. He did know that if he had to keep using a bolt-action rifle against what were in essence machine guns, he was going to get his ass killed-and the rest of him with it. He snatched up the tommy gun. The kid lying dead beside him was carrying another couple of drums of ammo, so he could use it for a while.

It bucked against his shoulder like an ornery horse when he opened up. He sprayed bullets hose-fashion out in front of him. The prolonged muzzle flash nearly blinded him before he dropped back behind cover. Hell of-a way to fight, he thought-lay down a lot of lead and hope the bad guys walk into it.

It was, he realized, a hell of a place to fight, too: gloom-filled ruins lit only by fires and muzzle flashes, echoing with gunshots and screams, the air thick with smoke and the smells of sweat and blood and fear.

He nodded. If this wasn’t hell, what the hell was it?

The hospital ship 13th Emperor Poropss-the Merciful should have been a taste of Home for Ussmak. And so, in a way, it was: it was heated to a decent temperature; the light seemed right, not the slightly too blue glare that lit Tosev’s third world, and, best of all, no Big Uglies were trying to kill him at the moment. Even the food was better than the processed slop he ate in the field. He should have been happy.

Had he felt more like himself, he might have been.

But when the Big Uglies blew the turret off his landcruiser, he’d bailed out of the driver’s escape hatch into a particularly radioactive patch of mud. The detectors had chattered maniacally when males in protective suits got near him. And so here he was, being repaired so he could return to action and let the Tosevites figure out still more ways to turn him into overcooked chopped meat.

Radiation sickness had left him too nauseated to enjoy the good hospital food at first By the time that subsided, his treatment was making him sick. He’d had a whole-blood-system transfusion and a cell transplant to replace his damaged blood-producing glands. The immunity-suppressing drugs and the others that resuppressed triggered oncogenes made him sicker than the radiation had. He’d spent a good many days being a very unhappy male indeed.

Now his body was beginning to feel as if it might actually be part of the Race again. His spirit, however, still struggled against the most insidious hospital ailment of all: boredom. He’d done all the reading, played all the computer simulations he could stand. He wanted to go back to the real world again, even if it was Tosev 3 full of large ugly aliens with large ugly cannon and mines and other unpleasant tools.

Yet at the same time he dreaded going back. They’d just make him part of another patched-together landeruiser crew, another piece of a puzzle forced into a place where he did not quite fit. He’d already had two crews killed around him. Could he withstand that a third time and stay sane? Or would he die with this next group? That would solve his problems, but not in a way he cared for.

An orderly shuffled by, pushing a broom. Like a lot of the males who did such lowly work, he had green rings painted on his arms to show he was being punished for a breach of discipline. Ussmak idly wondered what he’d done. These days, idle wondering was about the only sort in which Ussmak indulged.

The orderly paused in his endless round of sweeping, turned one eye toward Ussmak. “I’ve seen males who looked happier, friend,” he remarked.

“So?” Ussmak said. “Last I heard, the fleetlord hadn’t ordered everybody to be happy all the time.”

“You’re a funny one, friend, you are.” The orderly’s mouth fell open. The two males were alone in Ussmak’s chamber. All the same, the orderly swiveled his eyes in all directions before he spoke again: “You want to be happy for a while, friend?”

Ussmak snorted. “How can you make me be happy?” Except by leaving, he added to himself. If this petty deviationist kept bothering him, he’d say it out loud.

The orderly’s eyes swiveled again. His voice fell to a dramatic half-whisper: “Got what you need right here, friend, you bet I do.”

“What?” Ussmak said scornfully. “Cold sleep and a starship ride back Home? And it’s right there in a beltpouch, is it? Tell me another one.” He nodded slightly while opening his own mouth: a sarcastic laugh.

But he did not faze the other male. “What I’ve got, friend, is better than a trip Home, and I’ll give it to you if you want it.”

“Nothing is better than a trip Home,” Ussmak said with conviction. Still, the fast-talking orderly stirred his curiosity. That didn’t take much; in the middle of stultifyingly dull hospital routine, anything different sufficed to stir his curiosity. So he asked, “What do you have in there, anyhow?”

The orderly looked all around again; Ussmak wondered if he expected a corrector to leap out of the wall and bring new charges against him. After that latest survey, he took a small plastic vial out of one of the pouches he wore, brought it over to Ussmak. It was filled with finely ground yellow-brown powder. “Some of this is what you need.”

“Some of what?” Ussmak had guessed the male was somehow absconding with medications, but he’d never seen a medication that resembled this stuff.

“You’ll find out, friend. This stuff makes you forgive the Big Uglies for a whole lot of things, yes it does.”

Nothing, Ussmak thought, could make him forgive the Big Uglies either for the miserable world they inhabited or for killing his friends and landcruiser teammates. But he watched as the orderly undid the top of the vial, poured a little powder into the palm of his other hand. He held that hand up to Ussmak’s snout. “Go ahead, friend. Taste it-quick, before somebody sees.”

Ussmak wondered again why the orderly was sporting green stripes-had he poisoned someone with the stuff? All at once, he didn’t care. The doctors had been doing their level best to poison him, after all. He sniffed at the powder. The smell startled him-sweet, spicy… tempting was the word that sprang to mind. Of itself, his tongue flicked out and licked the fine grains off the scales of the orderly’s hand.

The taste was like nothing he’d known before. The powder bit at his tongue, as if it had sharp little teeth of its own. Then the flavor filled his whole mouth; after a moment, it seemed to fill his whole brain as well. He felt warm and brilliant and powerful, as if he were the fleetlord and at the same time in the bosom of the Race’s deceased Emperors. He wanted to go out, hop into a landcruiser-by himself, for he felt capable of driving, gunning, and commanding all at the same time-and blast Big Uglies off their planet so the Race could settle here as it should. Getting rid of the Tosevites seemed as easy as saying, “It shall be done.”

“You like that, friend?” the orderly asked, his voice sly. He put the vial of powder back into the pouch.

Ussmak’s eyes followed it all the way. “I like that!” he said.

The orderly laughed again-he really was a funny fellow, Ussmak thought. He said, “Figured you would. Glad you found out it doesn’t have to be a mope in here.” He made a few haphazard swipes with his broom, then went out into the hallway to clean the next healing cubicle.

Ussmak reveled in the strength and might the Tosevite-herb, he supposed it was-had given him. He desperately wanted to be out and doing, not cooped up here as if he were being fattened for the stewpot He craved action, danger, complication… for a while.

Then the feeling of invincibility started to fade. The harder he clung to it, the more it slipped between his fingers. Finally, too soon, it was gone, leaving behind the melancholy awareness that Ussmak was only himself (all the more melancholy because he so vividly remembered how he’d felt before) and a craving to know that strength and certainty once more.

Dull hospital routine was all the duller when set against that brief, bright memory. The day advanced on leaden feet. Even meals, till now the high points on Ussmak’s schedule, seemed hardly worth bothering over. The orderly who took away Ussmak’s tray-not the same male who’d given him his moments of delight-made disapproving noises when he found half the food uneaten.

Ussmak slept poorly that night. He woke up before the daytime bright lights in the ceiling went on. He lay tossing in the gloom, imagining time falling off a clock until at last the moment for the broom-pushing orderly to return arrived.

When that moment came, however, he was not in his cubicle. The doctors had trundled him into a lab for another in a series of metabolic and circulatory tests. Before he tasted the Tosevite powder, he hadn’t minded being poked, prodded, and visualized by ultrasound and X-rays. None of it hurt very much, and it was more interesting than sitting around all day like a long-unexamined document in a computer storage file.

Today, though, he furiously resented the tests. He tried to get the technicians to hurry through them, snapped when they sometimes couldn’t, and had them snapping back at him. “I’m sorry, landcruiser driver Ussmak,” one of the males said. “I didn’t realize you had an appointment with the fleetlord this forenoon.”

“No, it must be an audience with the Emperor,” another technician suggested.

Fuming, Ussmak subsided. He was so upset, he almost forgot to cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. As if to punish him, the males at the lab worked slower instead of faster. By the time they finally let him go back to his cubicle, the orderly with the green rings on his arms was gone.

Another desolate day passed. Ussmak kept trying to recapture the sensation the powder had given him. He could remember it, and clearly, but that wasn’t the same as-or as good as-feeling it again.

When the orderly did show up at last, Ussmak all but tackled him. “Let me have some more of that wonderful stuff you gave me the other day!” he exclaimed.

The orderly put up both hands in the fending-off gesture the Race used to show refusal. “Can’t do it” He sounded regretful and sly at the same time, a combination that should have made Ussmak see warning lights.

But Ussmak wasn’t picking up subtleties, not at that moment “What do you mean, you can’t do it?” He stared in blank dismay. “Did you use it all up? Don’t tell me you used it all up!”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t” The orderly nervously turned his eyes this way and that. “Keep your voice down, will you, friend? Listen-there’s something I didn’t tell you about that stuff the other day, and you better hear it”

“What?” Ussmak wanted to grab the cutpurse or malingerer or whatever he was and shake the truth-or at least some more powder-out of him.

“Here, come on, settle down, friend.” The orderly saw-would have needed to be blind to miss-his agitation. “Well, what you need to know is, this stuff-the Big Uglies call it ginger, so you know that, too-anyhow, this stuff is under ban by order of the fleetlord.”

“What?” Ussmak stared again. “Why?”

The orderly spread clawed bands. “Am I the fleetlord?”

“But you had this-ginger, did you say? — before,” Ussmak said. Suddenly, breaking regulations seemed a lot less heinous than it had.

“The ban was in force then, too.” The orderly sounded smug. Of course, he had the green arm stripes to show what he thought of regulations be found inconvenient in one way or another.

Up until the moment his tongue touched ginger, Ussmak had been a law-abiding male, as most males of the Race were. Looking back on things, he wondered why. What had obeying laws and following orders ever gained him? Only a dose of radiation poisoning and the anguish of watching friends die around him.

But breaking a lifetime of conditioning did not come easy. Hesitantly, he asked, “Could you get me some even if-even if it is banned?”

The orderly studied him. “I might-just might, you understand-be able to do that, friend-”

“Oh, I hope you can,” Ussmak broke in.

“-but if I do, it’s gonna cost you,” the orderly finished, unperturbed.

Ussmak was confused. “What do you mean, cost me?”

“Just what I said.” The orderly spoke as if he were a hatchling still wet with the liquids from his egg. “You want more ginger, friend, you’re gonna have to pay me for it. I’ll take commissary scrip, voluntary electronic transfer from your account to one I have set up, Big Ugly souvenirs that I can resell, all kinds of things. I’m a flexible male; you’ll find that out”

“But you gave me the first bit of ginger for nothing,” Ussmak said, confused more than ever and hurt now, too. “I thought you were just being kind, helping me get through one of those endless days.”

The orderly’s mouth dropped open. “Why shouldn’t the first taste be free? It shows you what I’ve got. And you want what I’ve got, don’t you, friend?”

Ussmak hated to be laughed at The orderly’s arrogant assumption of superiority also angered him. “Suppose I report you to the discipline-masters? We’ll see bow you laugh then, by the Emperor.”

But the orderly retorted, “Suppose you do? Yeah, I’ll draw some more punishment, and likely worse than this, but you, friend, you’ll never taste ginger again, not from me, not from anybody else, either. If that’s how you want it, you go ahead and make that call.”

Never taste ginger again? The idea appalled Ussmak so much, he never wondered if the orderly was telling the truth. What did he know about ethics, or lack of ethics, among ginger sellers? Quickly, he said, “How much do you want?”

“Thought you’d be sensible.” The orderly ticked off rates on his claws. “If it’s just another taste you want, that’ll cost you half a day’s pay. But if you want a vial like the one you saw the other day, with enough ginger in it for maybe thirty tastes, that’s a tenday’s worth of pay. Cheap at the price, eh?”

“Yes.” With little to spend his money on, Ussmak had most of it banked in the fleet’s payroll accounting system. “Let me have a vial. What’s your account code, so I can make the transfer?”

“Transfer it to this code.” The orderly gave him the number, written down on a scrap of paper. “I’ll be able to use it, but the computer won’t pick up that it’s mine.”

“How did you manage that?” Ussmak asked, genuinely curious. Males could be bought, perhaps, but how did you go about bribing a computer?

The orderly let his mouth fall open again, but only a little: he wanted Ussmak to share the joke. “Let’s say there’s somebody who works in payrolls and likes ginger just as much as you do. I’m not gonna tell you any more than that, but I don’t need to tell you any more than that, do I? You’re a clever male, friend; I don’t have to draw you a circuit diagram.”

Well, well, Ussmak thought He wondered how long this clandestine trade in ginger had been going on, how widely its corruption had spread among the Race, and whether anyone in authority had the slightest notion it was there.

Those were all interesting questions. None, though, was as urgent to Ussmak as getting his tongue on some of the preious powdered herb. Like any compartment in a starship, his cubicle had a computer terminal. He used his own account code to access his payroll records, transferred a tenday’s salary to the code the orderly had given him. “There,” he said. “Now, when do I get my ginger?”

“Eager, aren’t you?” the orderly said. “Let’s see what I can do.”

Naive though he was, Ussmak belatedly realized the orderly might keep his money and give him nothing in return. If that happened, he resolved to tell the authorities about the ginger trade and take the cheater down into punishment with him. But the orderly, with the air of a stage magician producing a bracelet from someone’s snout, handed him a vial full of what he craved.

He wanted to pop it open and start tasting it right then. Somehow, though, he didn’t feel easy about doing it in front of the orderly: he didn’t want the fast-talking male to see what a hold he had on him. He knew that was probably foolish; how could the orderly not have a good notion of how much he desired ginger? He held back even so.

He wondered about something else. “Suppose I start running out of pay but still want more ginger? What do I do then?”

“You could do without” The cold, callous ring in the orderly’s voice chilled Ussmak. Then the fellow said, “Or you can find friends of your own to sell it to, and use what you make to buy more for yourself.”

“I-see.” Ussmak wondered about that. It might work for a while, but before too long, it seemed to him, every male in the invasion fleet would be selling ginger to every other male. He started to ask the orderly about that-the fellow certainly acted as if he had all the answers-but the male, having made his profit, left the healing cubicle without so much as a farewell.

Ussmak opened the plastic vial, poured a little ginger onto his palm as he’d seen the orderly do. His tongue flicked the precious powder into his mouth. And again-for a while-he felt powerful, clever, capable. As the wonderful sensation faded, he realized he’d do whatever he had to do to keep on having it as often as he could. Against that stark need, the careful planning that had been a hallmark of the Race for millennia suddenly was of small import. If getting more ginger for himself meant peddling it to his friends… he hesitated. After the disasters that had befallen his landcruisers, few friends were left alive. But if he had to, he’d make more friends and then sell ginger to them.

He nodded to himself, pleased. He could still plan after all. Deliberately or not, he turned both eyes away from the shape of his plan.

Liu Han looked down at her belly. It did not bulge, not yet, but it would. Her homage to the moon had failed. Her breasts would never be large, but they felt tight and full; a new tracery of veins showed just below the skin. Her appetite was off. She knew the signs. She was with child.

she didn’t think Bobby Fiore had noticed the absence of her monthly courses. She wondered if telling him she was pregnant was a good idea. She had no doubt the baby was his-given the way she was caged here, how could she? But she remembered how even her true husband had lost interest in her while she was carrying their child. If a Chinese treated her so, how would a round-eyed foreign devil react? She was afraid to have to find out.

Not too long after she began to worry, the door to her bare cubicle hissed open. Little scaly devils with guns escorted Bobby Fiore into the room. After so many trips where nothing untoward happened, she thought human guards would have fallen under the spell of routine. The scaly devils still acted as if they expected him-or her-to pull a gun out of the air and start shooting. They carefully backed out of the room, weapons at the ready all the time.

Liu Han got up from her mat, walked up to embrace Bobby Fiore while the door was still sliding shut. she’d long since resigned herself to the little devils’ watching, knowing everything she did. Besides, she was starved for even the simplest contact with another human being.

His arms closed round her back. He kissed her. One hand slid down to cup a buttock. His manhood stirred against her hipbone. She smiled a little. Knowing he still wanted her was always reassuring. His mouth might lie, or even his hand, but not that part of him.

The kiss went on. He pulled her tightly to him. When at last he had to breathe, he asked her, “Shall we now?”

“Yes, why not?” she answered. If she did decide to tell him, what better time than when he was lazy and happy after love? And besides, what else was there to do in here?

They lay down together. His hands and mouth roamed her body. He was, she thought as she closed her eyes and let herself enjoy what he was doing, a much better lover than he had been when the scaly devils first put the two of them in the same cubicle and made them couple. she’d found ways to show him some of what she wanted without hurting his pride while some he’d picked up on his own. All at once she gasped and quivered. Yes, he’d learned quite nicely… and the hair of his beard and mustache added a little to what his tongue could do, something she hadn’t imagined when she’d known only smooth-faced men.

He sat back on his haunches. “Again?” he asked her.

“No not right now,” she said after considenng for a few seconds.

“Well then,” he said with a smile. “My turn” she didn’t mind taking him in her mouth. He kept himself as clean as he could with only warm water for washing, and she could tell how much pleasure she gave him. A sudden thought flashed through her mind: he’d been teaching her while she was teaching him. she’d never noticed till now.

His breath caught as she pulled back his foreskin. He was hot in her hand. But almost as soon as her lips and tongue touched him, she started to gag and had to pull away.

“Are you all right?” he asked, surprised. “What’s the matter?”

Liu Han knew what the matter was. Just another proof she was pregnant, she thought. She hadn’t been able to please her husband that way, either, not until she gave birth. Maybe that was one reason he’d ignored her so much.

“What’s the matter?” Bobby Fiore said again.

she didn’t know how to answer. If she told him and he turned cold to her… she didn’t think she could stand that. But he’d find out before too long, anyway. She remembered how good having the initiative with Yi Min had felt, even if only for a little while (she also wondered, for a very little while, what the scoundrel was up to-something to his own advantage, she had no doubt). That memory helped make up her mind.

she didn’t know how to say “baby” in English or the little devils’ speech; she knew Bobby Fiore wouldn’t understand it in Chinese. She sat up, used her hand to sketch the shape her belly would take in a few months. He frowned-he didn’t get it. She pantomimed cradling a newborn in her arms. If that didn’t put the idea across, she didn’t know what she’d do.

His eyes widened. “Baby?” he said in English, giving her the word. He pointed to her, to himself, made the cradling motion.

“Yes, ba-bee.” Liu Han repeated the word so she’d remember it. “Baby.” she’d need to use it a lot in the months-in the years-to come. “You, me, baby.” Then she waited to see how he would react.

At first, he didn’t seem sure what to do, what to say. He muttered something in English-“Goddamn, who woulda thought my first kid would be half Chink?”-she didn’t completely follow, but she thought he was talking more to himself than to her. Then he reached out and laid the palm of his hand on her still-flat belly. “Really?”

“Really,” she said. She had no doubts. If she’d had any before (and she hadn’t, not in truth), choking on him blew them away.

“How about that?” he said, a phrase he used when he was thinking things over. His hand slid lower, down between her legs. “Will you still want to…?” Instead of finishing the question with words, he rubbed gently.

She wondered if he cared for her only because she gave him her body, but the worry that raised was more than balanced by relief that he did still want her. The other she could think, about later. For now, she let her thighs fall open. “Yes,” she said, and did her best to prove it when he climbed on top of her.

They separated quickly after he’d spent himself; the little scaly devils kept the chamber too hot for them to lie entwined when they weren’t actually joined. Bobby Fiore kept staring at her navel, as if trying to peer inside her. “A baby,” he said. “How about that?”

She nodded. “Yes, a baby. Not surprising, when we do”-she twitched her hips-“so much.”

“I suppose not, not when you think about it like that, but it sure surprised me.” Behind the hair that half masked him, his face was thoughtful. She wondered what was going on in his mind to make his eyebrows lower and come together, the slight furrows on his forehead deepen. At last he said, “I wish I could do more-hell, I wish I could do anything-to take care of you and the kid.”

When he’d gone through the usual backing and filling to make her understand, Liu Han looked down at the smooth gray mat on which she was sitting. she didn’t want him to see the tears that stung her eyes. Her husband had been a good enough man, but she wondered if he would have said as much. For a foreign devil to think that way… she’d known next to nothing about foreign devils before she was snatched up into this airplane that never, landed, and Bobby Fiore was making her see that most of what she’d thought she knew was wrong.

“What is it?” he asked her. “What’s the matter now?”

she didn’t know how to answer him. “We both have to find a way to take care of-” As he had done before, she set her hand in the space between her navel and the small patch of short black hair that covered her secret place.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ain’t that a hell of a thing? How are we gonna be able to do anything at all for Junior, cooped up here like we are?”

As if to underscore his words, the door to the cubicle opened. A little scaly devil set down opened cans of food, then backed away from Liu Han and Bobby Fiore. She wondered if he thought it unsafe to turn around in their presence. She found that ludicrous, the more so as she knew herself to be so completely in the little devils’ power. But the presence of armed devils in the doorway covering their comrade argued that they feared her kind, too. She thought that foolish, but the little devils always did it.

The food, as usual, was not much to her taste: some sort of salty pork in a square, dark blue tin, flavorless green beans, the little yellow lumps Bobby Fiore called “corn,” and canned fruit in a cloyingly sweet syrup. She missed rice, vegetables briefly steamed or stir-fried, all the flavorings she’d grown up with: soy sauce, ginger, different kinds of peppers. She missed tea even more.

Bobby Fiore ate methodically and without complaint. This meal, like most they’d received, came from supplies canned by his people. Liu Han wondered if the foreign devils ever ate anything fresh.

Then another, more urgent, concern suddenly replaced that idle curiosity: she wondered if the pork and the rest were going to stay down. She hadn’t been sick during her first pregnancy, but village gossip said every one was different. Saliva flooded into her mouth. She gulped. The tremor subsided.

“You okay?” Bobby Fiore asked. “You looked a little green there for a minute.” Liu Han puzzled at the idiom, but he explained it a moment later “You coming down with-what do they call it? — morning sickness?”

“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered faintly. “Please don’t talk about it.” While discovering that foreign devil women suffered from the same infirmity as Chinese was interesting, she didn’t want to think about morning sickness. Thinking about it might make her-

She got to the plumbing hole just in time. Bobby Fiore rinsed out the can the fruit had come in, filled it with water, and gave it to her so she could rinse her mouth. He put an arm around her shoulders. “I’ve got two married sisters. This happened to both of ’em when they were expecting. I don’t know if you want to hear that or not, but they say misery loves company.”

Liu Han did not understand all of what he said, which was perhaps just as well. she did appreciate the water, after she’d rinsed and spat a couple of times to take away the horrid taste, she felt much better. It wasn’t like throwing up when she was ill: now that her body had done what it needed to do, it seemed willing to let her alone for a while.

“I wish the Lizards had a priest up here,” Bobby Fiore said. “I want the kid to get brought up Catholic. I know I’m not the best Christian there ever was, but I try to do what’s right”

Liu Han hadn’t thought much of the Christian missionaries she’d seen in China. How to raise the baby was, however, the least of her worries at the moment She said, “I wonder what the little scaly devils will do to me when they find out I am with child.”

she did not think her fear was idle. After all, the little devils had snatched her from her village, then from the prison camp. While she was up here in the airplane that did not land, they’d made her submit to several men (and how relieved she was not to be carrying a baby by any of them!). They could do as they pleased with her, do whatever interested them… without caring in the least what she thought about what they wanted.

“Whatever they do, they’ll have to do it to both of us,” Bobby Fiore said stoutly. She reached out and set a hand on his arm, grateful he stood by her. She would have been more grateful had she thought his brave words bore any relation to reality. If the little devils decided to keep the two of them in separate cubicles, what could he possibly do about it?

He said, “You ought to try and eat some more. You’ve got company in there, after all.”

“I suppose so.” Dutifully-but also cautiously-Liu Han ate a little corn, some of the beans, and even the last mouthful of pork left in the tin. She waited for her stomach to give them back, but it stayed quiet: having emptied once, it now seemed willing to relent. She hoped it would keep on being so forbearing.

Then, too late, she realized the little scaly devils would not have to wait until her belly bulged to learn she was pregnant. she’d grown so resigned to the moving pictures they made of her-not just when she was coupling but almost all the time-that she’d almost forgotten about them. But if the scaly devils could sort through the mix of Chinese, English, and their own language that she and Bobby Fiore spoke with each other, they’d know at once. And what would they do then?

If they were human, they’d have known when my courses didn’t come, she thought. But the devils hadn’t noticed that. Bobby Fiore didn’t think they were devils at all, but creatures from another world. Most of the time, Liu Han remained convinced that was nonsense, but now and then she wondered. Could real devils be so ignorant of matters Earthly as her captors sometimes acted?

In the end, what they were didn’t much matter. They had her-and Bobby Fiore-in their power either way. Liu Han wondered if any of the other women they’d brought up to the airplane that never landed were also pregnant. If they’d been used as she was, some probably were. She hoped so. she didn’t want to face the ordeal alone.

She glanced over at Bobby Fiore. He’d been watching her; when her eyes met his, he looked away. Wondering if I’ll throw up again, Liu Han guessed. She smiled wryly. What did a man know about a woman who was with child? Not much, which was why she hoped some of the others up here shared her predicament.

Then all at once she clung to Bobby Fiore, man though he was, foreign devil though he was, as she had not clung to him since the first day when he astonished her with his kindness. He might not know much about expectant mothers, but he was a veritable Kung Fu-Tze when set alongside even the wisest of the little scaly devils.

Smoke and a blast of heat greeted David Goldfarb when he walked into the White Horse Inn. “Shut the bloody door!” three people yelled from three different parts of the pub. Goldfarb quickly obeyed, then pushed his way through the crowd to get as close to the fireplace as he could.

The crackling wood fire, the torches that blazed in place of electric lights dark for want of power, took the White Horse Inn a long step back toward its medieval origins. Shadows jumped and flickered like live things, and puddled in corners as if they might creep out and pounce at any moment. Goldfarb had never been afraid of the dark, but these days he better understood why his ancestors might have been.

The reek of unwashed bodies was another step away from what had been the civilized norm. Goldfarb knew he added to it, but what could he do? Hot water was impossible to come by, and bathing in cold invited pneumonia.

Besides, when everyone stank, no one in particular stank. After a few breaths, the nose accepted the smell as part of the background and forgot about it, just as a radar operator learned to ignore echoes from the countryside in which his set was placed.

Had been placed, Goldfarb corrected himself. Ground-based radars had saved Britain against the Germans, but not against the Lizards. His own nervous forays in the belly of Ted Embry’s Lanc continued. He hadn’t been shot down yet, which was about as much as he could say for the project. The boffins were still trying to figure out whether the aircraft-mounted radar, used as intermittently as it had to be, helped them shoot down more Lizard planes.

Sylvia snaked her way through the crush. Smiling at Goldfarb, she asked, “What’ll it be, dearie?” In the firelight, her hair glowed like molten copper.

“A pint of whatever you have,” he answered; the White Horse Inn had never yet run out of beer, but it never got in the same brew twice running any more.

As he spoke, Goldfarb slipped his arm around the barmaid’s waist for a moment. she didn’t pull away or slap his hand, as she would have before he started climbing up into the cold and frightening night. Instead, she leaned closer, tilted her head up to brush her lips against his, and then slid away to find out what more drinkers wanted.

Wanting her, Goldfarb thought, had been more exciting than having her was. Or maybe he’d just expected too much. Knowing she shared her favors with a lot of men hadn’t bothered him when he was on the outside looking in. It was different now that he’d become one of those blokes himself. He hadn’t thought of himself as the jealous type-he still didn’t, not really-but he would have wanted more of her than she was willing to give.

Not, he admitted to himself, that thinking of her bare under the covers didn’t warm him when he sucked in frigid, rubber-tasting oxygen at Angels Twenty.

Her white blouse reappeared from out of the dark forest of RAF blue and civilian tweeds and serges. She handed Goldfarb a pint mug. “Here y’go, love. Tell me what you make of this.” She took a step back and cocked her head, awaiting his reaction. He took a cautious pull. Some of the alleged bitters he’d drunk since the Lizards came made the earlier war beer seem ambrosial by comparison. But his eyebrows went up in surprise at the rich, nutty taste that filled his mouth. “That’s bloody good!” he said, amazed. He sipped again, thoughtfully smacked his lips. “It’s nothing I’ve drunk before, but it’s bloody good. Where’d our sainted landlord come by it?”

Sylvia brushed red wisps of hair back from her eyes. “He brewed it his own self.”

“Go on,” Goldfarb said, in automatic disbelief.

“He did,” Sylvia insisted indignantly. “Me and Daphne, we helped, too. It’s dead easy when you know how. Maybe after the war-if there ever is an after the war-I’ll start my own little brewery and put a pub in front I’d invite you there, if I didn’t think you’d drink up my profit.”

Goldfarb emptied the mug with a practiced twist of the wrist. “If you do as well as this, I’d surely try. Bring me another, will you?”

He kept staring after her once she’d disappeared among the acres of dark cloth. She was the first person he’d heard speak of what might be after the war since the Lizards came. Thinking of what to do once Jerry was beaten was one thing, but as far as he could see, the fight against the Lizards would go on forever… unless it ended in defeat.

“Hullo, old man,” said a blurry voice at his elbow. He turned his head. By the list Jerome Jones had developed, he’d taken on several pints of ale below the waterline and would likely start sinking at any monent The other radarman went on, “D’you know what I had with my spuds tonight? Baked beans, that’s what.” His eyes glittered in sodden triumph.

“Anything with spuds is reason enough to shout,” Goldfarb admitted. Britain was hungry these days, not only because the island could not grow enough to feed itself, but also because Lizard bombing of the railway net kept what food there was from moving around the country.

“So you needn’t feel so bloody smug about moving in with your bloody aircrew. Baked beans.” Jones smacked his lips, exhaled in Goldfarb’s direction. He didn’t smell like baked beans-he smelled like beer.

“I’m not smug, Jerome,” Goldfarb said, sighing. “It’s what I was ordered to do, so I did it.” He knew the other radarman resented not being chosen to take a seat aloft in the Lancaster; not only did he crave the duty (no one could fault Jones’ pluck) but, being stuck on the ground, he still had no luck with the White Horse Inn’s barmaids.

At the moment, he was probably too drunk to do either of them justice even if she performed a striptease in front of him and then dragged him into the bushes. He blinked, stared at Goldfarb as if he had no idea who his friend (former friend? Goldfarb hoped not, hoped his jealousy didn’t run so deep) was. Then his pale eyes focused again. He said, “We had electricity in the barracks yesterday.”

“Did you?” Goldfarb said, wondering where-if anyplace-the seemingly random remark would lead and wishing Sylvia would fetch him another pint so he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Power had been out at his own quarters for several days.

“Yes we did,” Jones said. “Electricity in the barracks. We had it. Why did I want to tell you that?” As if I knew, Goldfarb felt like shouting. But Jones, though his own mental railway net had taken some bombing, got his train of thought through. “I was listening to the shortwave, that’s it. Got Warsaw in clear as day, we did.”

“Did you?” The words were the same as before, but informed with a whole new meaning. “Was Russie on the air?”

“Not a word from him. Not a word.” Jones repeated himself with owlish solemnity. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. He’s some sort of cousin of yours, what?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. His grandmother was my grandfather’s sister.” No one had been more astonished than Goldfarb when his cousin surfaced as the Lizards’ human spokesman. Unlike his gentile comrades, he’d believed most of what Russie said about Nazi’ horrors in Warsaw, though he remained unconvinced life under the Lizards was as invigorating as Russie painted it. Then, a few weeks before, his cousin disappeared from the airwaves as abruptly as he’d arrived. The Lizards had blamed illness at first. Now they didn’t bother saying anything, which struck Goldfarb as ominous.

“Bloody traitor. Maybe the sod sold them out, too, and they put paid to him for it,” Jones mumbled.

Goldfarb drew back a fist to smash him in the face-no one, he told himself, former friend, friend, or not, talked about his relatives like that and got away with it. But Sylvia chose that moment to return. “ ’Ere now, David, don’t even think of it,” she said sharply. “You start the fight, you’re out of the pub for good-them’s the rules. And I won’t see you any more.”

The first threat was trivial. The second… Goldfarb considered, opened arid lowered his hand. Sylvia put a new pint mug in it. Jones just stood, swaying slightly, not knowing how close he’d come to getting his features rearranged.

“That’s better,” Sylvia said. Goldfarb wasn’t sure it was, but finally decided smashing a helpless drunk didn’t count toward upholding the family honor. He emptied the third pint with one long pull. Sylvia surveyed him with a critical eye. “That should be about right for you, unless you want to get as lost as he is.”

“What else have I to do?” Goldfarb’s laugh sounded thick even in his own ears as the potent brew swiftly did its work. But the question, despite its sardonic edge, was serious. Without electricity, radio and the cinema vanished as amusements and reading through long winter nights became next thing to impossible. That left getting out among one’s fellow men. And going up into the sky again and again to be shot at brought a need for the release only alcohol or sex could give. Since Sylvia was working tonight…

She sighed; it was not, Goldfarb thought, as if he were the first lover she’d seen who also had a need to get drunk-probably not even the first tonight. Resentment flared in him, then died. If he was out for what he could get, how could he blame her for acting the same way?

Jerome Jones nudged him. “Is she good?” he asked, as if Sylvia weren’t standing beside him. “Do you know what I mean?” His wink was probably meant to be that of a man of the world, but the beery slackness to his features made it fail of its intention.

“Well, I like that!” Sylvia said with an indignant squeak. She swung round on Goldfarb. “Are you going to let him talk about me that way?”

“Probably,” Goldfarb answered, which made Sylvia squeak again, louder. He waved his hands in what he hoped was a placating gesture. “You stopped a fight a few minutes ago, and now you want to start one?”

By way of reply, Sylvia stamped on his foot and then stamped off. He didn’t figure he’d see that next pint, let alone the inside of her bedroom, any time soon. Try and figure women, he thought. He was no knight in shining armor, and she was a long way from being a maiden whose virtue needed defending. But if he’d said that, he’d probably have got a knee in the family jewels, not a spike-heeled foot on the instep.

Jones nudged him again. “Fight? What fight?” he asked, sounding more interested than he had been in how Sylvia performed.

Suddenly the absurdity of it all was too much for Goldfarb. He forced his way out through the crowd that jammed the White Horse Inn, then stood on the sidewalk wondering where to go next. The first breath of frosty air in his lungs, the nip of night against his nose, loudly insisted leaving had been a mistake. But he couldn’t make himself go back into the pub.

The night was clear. Stars burned in the dark sky, more stars than he ever remembered seeing in the days before the blackout. The Milky Way shone like sparkling sugar crystals spilled across a black tile floor. Before the Lizards came, the stars had been friendly, or at worst remote. Now they felt dangerous, as any enemy’s homeland would.

To the south, the gray stone pile of Dover Castle concealed some of those stars from view. The Saxons had had a fort there. When Louis VIII failed to take the place in 1216, it likely staved off a French invasion of England. Henry VIII had added to it, and more brickwork had gone up against another feared French invader, Napoleon. Later in the nineteenth century, a turret with a sixteen-inch gun was added to ward the port from attack by sea.

But the turret designers never foresaw attack by air. Goldfarb’s own radar masts had done more to defend Dover, to defend all of England, from Hitler’s wrath than all the stone and brickwork put together. Against the Lizards, even the wizardry of radar seemed, if not futile, then surely inadequate.

A little red dot, fainter than a summer glowworm, came floating down St. James Street toward him. His hand twitched; he hadn’t had a cigarette in it for a long time. With imports even of food cut first by German submarines and then by Lizard aircraft, tobacco had all but disappeared.

During the Depression, people had scooped cigarette butts out of the gutter to smoke. Goldfarb was never reduced to that, though the scorn he’d felt the first time he saw it had dwindled first to pity and then to acceptance. But that scavenging sprang from a shortage of money, not a shortage of cigarettes.

Now Goldfarb called to whoever hid behind that seductively burning coal, “Here, friend, have you got another fag you can sell me?”

The smoker stopped. The lit end of the cigarette glowed brighter for a moment, then moved as its owner shifted it to the side of his mouth. “Sorry, chum, I’m down to my last three, and I won’t sell ’em: I couldn’t use the money on anything I’d sooner have. But you can take a drag off this one, if you like.”

Goldfarb hesitated; in a way, that struck him as worse than nipping up fag-ends. But the unseen smoker sounded kindly. Even if he wouldn’t give up what he had, he’d share a little. “Thanks,” Goldfarb said, and stepped quickly forward.

He held the single lungful of smoke as long as he could, let it out with real regret. The owner of the cigarette puffed again. In the faint crimson glow, his face was rapt with pleasure. “Bloody war,” he said on the exhale.

“Too right,” Goldfarb said. He coughed; however much he liked it, his body was out of the habit of smoking. “I wonder what we’ll run short of next. Tea, maybe.”

“There’s a horrible thought. You’re likely right, though. Don’t raise a lot of bloody tea in the fields of Kent, eh?”

“No,” Goldfarb said morosely. He wondered what he’d do when his morning cuppa ran out. He’d do without, was what he’d do. “What did we do before there was tea?”

“Drank beer, I expect.” The smoker carefully extinguished the cigarette. “That’s what I’m about to do now. Don’t want to go in there with this lit, though. I’ve heard of men knocked over the head for a pipe’s ’orth of tobacco, and I don’t fancy it happening to me.”

“Clever,” Goldfarb said, nodding. “There’s enough smoke inside already that no one will smell it on you.”

“My very thought.” Now the other man was just a voice in the darkness. He went on, “I might want to try and get close to that redheaded barmaid they have here, too-what’s her name?”

“Sylvia,” Goldfarb said dully.

“Sylvia, that’s right. Have you seen her?” Without waiting for an answer, the smoker added, “I’d spend a cigarette on her, I would.” He found the door to the White Horse Inn by ear, slipped inside.

Goldfarb stood out in the cold a few seconds longer, then started the long hike back to his quarters. He didn’t think Sylvia could be bought for a fag, but what did it matter? She wasn’t his now, and she’d never really been his. Slaking your lust was all very well-was, when you got down to it, better than all very well-but you had to be sensible about it. If that was all you were doing with a woman, stopping oughtn’t to be the end of the world.

Far away, like distant screams, he heard the shriek of Lizard aircraft engines. His shiver had nothing to do with the cold. He wondered who was up in the night sky with a balky radar, and whether the chap would make it back to the ground again.

Antiaircraft guns began their almost surely futile pounding. Goldfarb shivered again. Losing Sylvia was not the end of the world. Off in the distance, he could hear the sound the end of the world made.