In the Balance

17

A Lizard threw open the door to the Baptist church in Fiat, Indiana. The people inside jerked their heads around in surprise and alarm; this was not a usual time for the aliens to bother them. They’d learned a basic lesson of war and captivity: anything out of the ordinary was frightening.

Jens Larssen started with the rest, though as he already faced the big double doors he didn’t have to spin toward them. He’d been standing around kibitzing a game of hearts. Sal the waitress was going for it-trying to take the queen of spades and all the hearts and stick all three of her opponents with twenty-six points each. He didn’t think she had the cards to make it, but you never could tell-she played like a barracuda.

He never found out what happened with the hand. The Lizard stalked into the church, automatic weapon at the ready. Two others covered it from the doorway. The creature hissed, “Piit Ssmiff?”

Larssen needed a second to recognize his alias in the alien’s mouth. As the Lizard started to repeat it, he said, “That’s me. What do you want?”

“Come,” the Lizard said, which might have come close to exhausting its English. A jerk of the gun barrel, however, was hard to misconstrue.

“What do you want?” Larssen said again, but he was already moving. The Lizards were not long on patience with captives.

“Good luck, Pete,” Sal called softly as he headed out toward the doorway.

“Thanks. You, too,” he answered. He hadn’t put a move on her, not yet; he still had hopes of making it home to Barbara. But day by day not yet was rising higher in his thoughts than hadn’t put a move on her And when he did (if I do, he halfheartedly reminded himself), he was pretty sure-no, he was sure-she’d come across. Once or twice, she’d put what might have been a move on him.

A couple of other people also wished him luck. The Lizard just waited for him to arrive, then fell in behind him. Outside the church, cold smote. His eyes filled with tears; he’d been inside the gloomy building so long that sun sparkling off snow was almost overpoweringly bright.

His guards marched him along to the store the Lizards used as their Fiat headquarters. As soon as he went inside, he started to sweat; the place was at the bake-oven heat the aliens enjoyed. The three who had brought him there hissed blissfully. He wondered how they escaped pneumonia from the drastic temperature shifts they endured whenever they went in or out. Maybe pneumonia bugs didn’t bite Lizards. He hoped they wouldn’t bite him.

The guards led him back to the table where Gnik had interrogated him before. The Lizard lieutenant or whatever he was waited there now. He was holding something Lizardy in his left hand. Without preamble, he said, “Open your mouth, Pete Smith.”

“Huh?” Jens said, taken aback.

“Open your mouth, I say. You do not understand your own speech?”

“No, superior sir. Uh, I mean, yes, superior sir.” Larssen gave that up as a bad job and opened his mouth; with guns all around him, he had no real choice.

Gnik started to reach up with the gadget in his-left hand, then paused. “You Big Uglies are too tall,” he said peevishly. Nimble as his Earthly reptilian namesake, he scrambled, up onto a chair, put the muzzle of the gadget into Larssen’s mouth, squeezed a trigger.

The Lizardy thing hissed like a snake. A jet of something stung Jens on the tongue. “Ow!” he exclaimed, and involuntarily pulled back. “What the devil did you just do to me?”

“Injected you,” Gnik answered; at least he didn’t seem angry about Jens’ retreat. “Now we will find out the truth.”

“Injected me? But…” When Larssen thought about injections, he thought about needles. Then he took a long look at Gnik’s scaly hide. Would a hypodermic pierce it? He didn’t know. The Lizards’ only easily available soft tissue was inside their mouths. Some sort of compressed gas jet must have forced the drug into his system. But what was it? “Find out the truth?” he asked.

“New from our base.” Goik was one smug Lizard. “You will not lie to me. You cannot lie to me. The injection will not permit it.”

Uh-oh, Jens thought. The sweat that sprang out on his forehead now had nothing to do with the hot, dry interior of the store. He felt woozy; he needed a distinct effort of will not to see double. “May I sit down?” he said. Gnik jumped off the chair he’d used. Larssen sank into it. His legs did not seem to want to support him. Why not? he thought vaguely. I always supported them.

Gnik stood and waited for a few minutes, presumably to let the drug take full effect. Larssen wondered if he’d throw up all the canned goods he’d been eating lately. His mind felt detached from his body; it was almost as if he were looking down on himself from the ceiling.

Gnik asked, “What is your name?”

What is my name? Jens wondered. What a good question. He wanted to giggle, but didn’t have the energy. What had he been calling himself lately, anyhow? Remembering was a triumph. “Pete Smith,” he said proudly.

Gnik hissed. He and the other Lizards talked among themselves for a couple of minutes. The officer swung his turreted eyes back toward Larssen. “Where you going when we catch you on that-thing?” He still couldn’t remember the name for a bicycle.

“To, to visit my cousins west of, of, Montpelier.” Sticking to his story wasn’t easy for Jens, but he managed. Maybe he’d already told it so many times that it felt true for him. And maybe the Lizards’ drug wasn’t as good as they thought it was. In a pulp science-fiction story, it was easy enough to imagine something one day, create it the next, and use it the day after that. Reality was different, as he’d found out time and again at the Met Lab: nature usually proved less tractable than pulp writers made it out to be.

Gnik hissed again. Maybe he wasn’t convinced the drug was everything it was supposed to be-or maybe he had been convinced Jens was lying through his teeth and had got a nasty shock when he didn’t come out with something new under the drug. Not only was the Lizard stubborn, he was sneaky as well. “Tell me more of the male of this grouping of yours, this cousin Osscar.” He put a hiss in the middle of the name, too.

“His name is, is Olaf,” Larssen said, scenting the trap just in time. “He’s my father’s brother’s son.” He quickly rattled off the names of the fictitious Olaf’s equally fictitious family. He hoped that would keep Gnik from trying to trip him up with them; it also helped fix them in his own mind.

The Lizards went back to talking to one another again. After a while, Gnik returned to English. “We still do not find this-these-cousins of yours anywhere about.”

“I can’t help that,” Larssen said. “For all I know, maybe it’s because you’ve killed them. But I hope not.”

“More probably because their neighbors do not tell us who they are.” Did Gnik sound conciliatory? Larssen hadn’t heard conciliation in a Lizard’s voice often enough to be sure. “Some of you Big Uglies do not care for the Race.”

“Why do you suppose that is?” Jens asked.

“It is a puzzlement,” Gnik said, so seriously that Larssen knew he really was puzzled. Are they that stupid? he wondered. But the Lizards weren’t stupid, not even slightly, or they’d never have been able to come to Earth, never have been able to make and drop their atomic bombs. They were sure naive, though. Had they expected to be welcomed as liberators?

Even under the mildly euphoric buzz of the not-quite-truth drug, Larssen worried a little. Suppose the Lizards decided to let him go and then followed him while he tried to find his cousins’ farm? That would be the best way to make him out a liar. Or would it? He could always point to a ruined one and claim Olaf et mythical cetera had lived there.

The Lizards were chattering back and forth one more time. Gnik cut off debate with a sharp motion of his hand. He swung his eyes toward Larssen. “What you say with the drug in you must be true. So my superiors have told me; thus, so it must be. And if it is true, you is-are-no danger to the Race. You may go. Take up the things that are yours and travel on, Pete Smith.”

“Just like that?” Larssen blurted. An instant later, he bit his tongue, which made him yelp-it was sore. But did he want the Lizard to change its mind? Like hell he did! His next question was distinctly more practical: “Where’s my bike?”

Gnik understood the word, even if he couldn’t recall it. “It will go to where you are being kept. Go there now yourself to take up the things that are yours.”

Along with the drug-induced euphoria, Jens now had his own genuine variety. He put his cold-weather gear back on, all but floated over the snow back to the Baptist church. Questions rang out “What happened?” “What’d they want with you?”

“They’re letting me go,” he said simply. He was still absorbing the magnitude of his own luck. Back in White Sulphur Springs, Colonel Groves-or was it General Marshall? — had told him the Lizards were worse than Russians for depending on their higher-ups to tell them what to do. Gnik’s higher-ups had told him he had a real live truth drug here, and as far as he was concerned, that made it Holy Writ. As long as the higher-ups were right, it was a good enough system. When they were wrong…

Half the people in the church came running forward to pound his back and shake his hand. Sal’s kiss was so authoritative, his arms automatically tightened around her. She molded herself to him, ground her hips against his crotch. “Lucky bastard,” she whispered when she finally pulled away.

“Yeah,” he muttered, dazed. All at once, he wanted not to leave… at least for one night. But no. If he didn’t get out while he could, the Lizards were liable to wonder why-and liable to change their minds. That did not bear thinking about.

He pushed through the friendly little crowd to get his belongings from the pew he’d come to call his own. As he slung his knapsack over his shoulders, he noticed for the first time the men and women who’d hung back from offering best wishes. Not to put too fine a point on it, they looked as if they hated him. Several-women and men both-turned away so he would not see them cry. He all but ran toward the doorway. No, even if the Lizards allowed it, he could not stay another night, not for Sal and all her blowsy charms. Even a few seconds of that envy and rage were more than he could stand.

The Lizards were efficient enough. By the time he got outside, one of them had his bicycle waiting. As he swung up onto it, he got a last glimpse of pale, hungry faces staring out from inside the church at the freedom they could not share. He’d expected to feel a lot of different things when he was set free, but never shame. He started to pedal. Snow kicked up from under his wheels. In bare seconds, the hamlet of Fiat vanished behind him.

After less than an hour, he stopped for a blow. He wasn’t in the shape he’d enjoyed before the Lizards put him out of circulation for a while. “Gotta keep going or I’ll stiffen up,” he said aloud. Unlike his wind, the habit of talking to himself came back right away.

When he came upon the signs announcing Montpelier, he skirted the town on the best paths he could find, then returned to Highway 18. For the next few days, everything seemed to go right. He rode around Marion as he had Montpelier, sailed right on through Sweetser and Converse, Wawpekong and Galveston. Whenever he needed food, he found some. Whenever he was tired, a hayloft or an abandoned farmhouse seemed to beckon.

Once, in a bureau drawer, he even found a pack of Philip Morrises. He hadn’t had a cigarette since he couldn’t remember when; he smoked himself light-headed and half-sick in an orgy of making up for lost time. “Worth it,” he declared as he coughed his way through the next day.

He saw few people as he rolled through central Indiana. That suited him fine. He saw even fewer Lizards, and that suited him better-how was he supposed to explain what he was doing a good many miles west of where he’d told Gnik he was going? Luck stayed with him; he didn’t have to.

The war between humans and aliens seemed far away from that nearly deserted winter landscape (although, of course, it wouldn’t have been deserted but for the war). A couple of times, though, off in the distance, he heard gunfire, the widely spaced barks of sporting or military rifles and the chatter of the Lizards’ automatic weapons. And, once-or twice, Lizard planes screamed high overhead, scrawling trails-ice crystals, the physicist part of him said-across the sky.

Somewhere between Young America and Delphi, a new noise entered the mix: intermittent explosions. The farther west he traveled, the louder they got. Maybe half an hour after he first noticed them, his head went up like a hunted animal’s when it catches, a scent.

“That’s artillery, is what that is!” he exclaimed. Excitement coursed through him-artillery meant people still fighting the Lizards on a level higher than bushwhacking. It also meant danger, since it lay in the direction he was riding.

The duel, he noticed as he drew near, was anything but intense. A few shells would come in, a few more go out. He rode past a Lizard battery. Instead of being towed, the guns were mounted on what looked like tank chassis. The Lizards serving them paid no attention to him.

Shortly after he passed the Lizard position, he started going by wrecked combat vehicles, most of them now just big shapes covered over with snow. The road, which had been pretty good, suddenly developed not just potholes but craters. The fighting hereabouts wasn’t intense now, but had been not too long before.

He got off his bike before he went headlong into a snow-filled hole. Frustration ate at him. After fairly flying through Lizard-held territory, was he going to get delayed by humans? He’d started believing he’d get home to Chicago again fairly soon. Getting hopes up and then having them dashed seemed cruel and unfair.

Then he came to the first belt of rusty barbed wire. It was like something out of a movie about World War I. “How am I supposed to get through that?” he demanded of an uncaring world. “How am I supposed to get my bike through that?”

A hiss, a whistle, a scream, a crash! Frozen earth flew through the air off to his left. So did fragments of steel. One tore through a couple of spokes of the bicycle’s rear wheel. It could have torn through Jens’ leg just as easily. All at once, the artillery duel turned real for him. It wasn’t just abstract shells flying back and forth on trajectories dictated by Newtonian mechanics and air resistance. If one of those shells hit a little nearer (or no nearer, but with an unlucky spray of fragments), he wouldn’t have to worry about getting to Chicago any more.

Another freight-train noise in the air. This time Larssen dove into the snow before the shell burst. It landed in the middle of the barbed-wire belt, and chunks of wire probably flew along with its own fragments. Getting hit by one sort of jagged metal would be about as bad as the other, Jens thought.

He cautiously raised his head, hoping the shell had cleared a way through the wire. A generation of young Englishmen who’d fought at the Somme-or, at any rate, the fraction of that generation which survived-could have told him he was wasting optimism. Tanks could crush wire, but shells couldn’t smash it aside.

How to cross, then? With shells still falling in the neighborhood every so often, he didn’t even want to get up and walk around to look for a path to the other side of the wire. He turned his head so he could see how far to the north and west the barrier ran. Farther than his ground-level Mark One eyeball carried, anyhow. Was it no-man’s-land all the way from here to Chicago? With his luck, it might well be.

“Okay, pal, don’t even blink, or you’ll get yourself some.30 caliber ventilation.” The voice came from the direction in which Larssen wasn’t looking. He obediently froze. Lying in the snow, he already had a good start on freezing, anyhow. “Awright,” the voice said. “Turn toward me, nice and slow. I better see your hands every second, too.”

Jens turned, nice and slow. As if he’d sprouted there like a mushroom, a fellow in a khaki uniform and a tin hat sprawled not fifty feet away. His rifle pointed right about at Larssen’s brisket. “Jesus, it’s good to see a human being holding a gun again,” Jens said.

“Shut up,” the soldier told him. The Springfield never wavered. “Likeliest guess is, you’re a God-damned Lizard-spy.”

“A what? Are you crazy?”

“We shot two last week,” the soldier said flatly.

Ice grew inside Larssen, to go with the snow all around. The fellow meant every word of it. Jens tried again: “I’m no spy, and I can prove it, by God.”

“Tell it to the Marines, Mac. I’m a harder sell than that.”

“Goddammit, will you listen to me?” Jens shouted, furious now as well as frightened. “I’m on my way back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Jesus, I talked with General Marshall while I was there. He’ll vouch for me, if he’s still alive.”

“Yeah, pal, an’ I was in Rome last week, for lunch with the Pope.” But the unwashed, unshaven soldier did move his rifle so it wasn’t aimed at Larssen’s midriff. “Awright, I’ll take you in. You can peddle your papers to my lieutenant. If he buys,what you’re pushin’, that’s his business. C’mere… No, dummy, leave the bike.”

Sans bicycle, Larssen came. He wondered how he was supposed to get through that impenetrable-looking mass of barbed wire. But a path was cut, with strands looking as if they were firmly attached to their support posts but in fact just hanging from them. He didn’t have much trouble crawling along after his captor, though he never could have navigated by himself. Although he tried to be careful, he got punctured a couple-of times. He tried to remember when his last tetanus shot had been.

More dirty faces peered out at him from the zigzagging trenches behind the wire. The lieutenant, instead of a British-style tin hat, wore a domed steel helmet that looked very modern and martial. He listened to Larssen’s story, reached into a shirt pocket, then laughed at himself. “I still want a butt to help me think, but I haven’t seen one in weeks. Hellfire, buddy, I don’t know what to do with you. I’ll bump you on up the line, see if somebody else can figure you out.”

Escorted by the soldier who’d found him-the fellow’s name turned out to be Eddie Wagner-Larssen made the acquaintance of a captain, a major, and a lieutenant colonel. By then, he expected to be kicked on to a bird colonel, but the lieutenant colonel short-circuited the process, saying, “I’m going to send you to General Patton’s headquarters, bud. If you say you’ve met Marshall, he’s the one to decide what to do with you.”

General Patton’s headquarters proved to be in Oxford, something like twenty miles west. The march there, starting at dawn the next day, ended near dark and left Larssen footsore, weary, and mourning his lost bike. Little by little, as he tramped along, he began to notice how many field guns were disguised as tree trunks with branches wired onto their upright barrels, how many tanks inhabited barns or crouched under haystacks, how many airplanes rested beneath nets that hid them from the sky.

“You guys have a lot of stuff built up here,” he remarked some time in the afternoon. “How’d you manage to do it right under the Lizards’ snouts?”

“Wasn’t easy,” Wagner answered, who’d apparently decided he might not be a spy after all. “We been movin’ it in a little at a time, just about all of it at night. The Lizards, they’ve let us do it. We hope to Jesus that means they ain’t really noticed what we’re up to. They’ll find out, they sure as hell will.”

Larssen started to ask what the Lizards would find out, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to stir up his guide’s suspicions again. Not only that, he could make a good stab at figuring it out for himself. Some sort of big push had to be in the offing. He wondered in which direction it would go.

General Patton’s headquarters was in a white frame house on the outskirts of Oxford (though the town, with fewer than a thousand people, was barely big enough to have outskirts). The sentries on the covered porch-like everything else military hereabouts, they were concealed from aerial observation-were well shaved and wore neater uniforms than any Jens had seen for a while.

One of them nodded politely to him. “We’ve been expecting you, sir: Lieutenant Colonel Tobin telephoned to say you were on your way. The general will see you at once.”

“Thanks,” Larssen said, feeling more draggled than ever in the presence of such all-but-forgotten spit and polish.

That feeling intensified when he went into the house. Major General Patton-he wore two stars on each shoulder of a sheepskin-collared leather jacket-was not only clean-shaven and neat, he even had creases in his trousers. The buttery light of a kerosene lamp left black shadows at the corners of his mouth, in the lines that grooved their way up alongside his nose, and beneath his pale, intense eyes. He had to be getting close to sixty, but Jens would not have cared to take him on.

He ran a hand through his short brush of graying sandy hair, then stabbed a finger out at Larssen. “I risked a radio call on you, mister,” he growled, his raspy voice lightly flavored by the South. “General Marshall told me to ask you what he said to you about the Lizards in Seattle.”

Panic quickly swamped relief that Marshall lived. “Sir, I don’t remember him saying anything about the Lizards in Seattle,” he blurted.

Patton’s fierce expression melted into a grin. “Good thing for you that you don’t. If you did, I’d know you were just another lying son of a bitch. Sit down, son.” As Larssen sank into a chair, the general went on, “Marshall says you’re important, too, though he wouldn’t say how, not even in code. I’ve known General Marshall a lot of years now. He doesn’t use words like important just for show. So who and what the devil are you?”

“Sir, I’m a physicist attached to the Metallurgical Laboratory project at the University of Chicago.” Jens saw that didn’t mean anything to Patton. He amplified: “Even before the Lizards came, we were working to build a uranium weapon-an atomic bomb-for the United States.”

“Lord,” Patton said softly. “No, General Marshall wasn’t kidding, was he?” His laugh could have sprung from the throat of a much younger man. “Well, Mr. Larssen-no, you’d be Dr. Larssen, wouldn’t you? — if you want to get back to Chicago, you’ve come to the right place, by God.”

“Sir?”

“We are going to grab the Lizards by the nose and kick ’em in the ass,” Patton said with relish. “Come over here to the table and have a look at this map.”

Larssen came and had a look. The thumbtack-impaled map had come from an old National Geographic. “We’re here,” Patton said, pointing. Larssen nodded. Patton went on, “I’ve got Second Armored here, other assets, infantry, air support. And up here”-his finger moved to an area west of Madison, Wisconsin-“is General Omar Bradley with even more than I’ve got. Now all we’re doing is waiting for a good, nasty blizzard.”

“Sir?” Jens said again.

“We’ve found the Lizards don’t like fighting in winter conditions, not even a little bit.” Patton snorted. “Like any pansies, they wilt when it’s cold. The bad weather’ll help keep their aircraft on the ground. When the snow flies, my forces move northwest while Bradley comes southeast. God willing, we join hands somewhere not far from Bloomington, Illinois, and put the spearhead of the Lizard forces attacking Chicago in a pocket-a Kessel, the Nazis were calling it in Russia.”

He shaped the movements of the two American forces with his hands, made Larssen see them, too. A real chance to hit back at the invaders from outer space… that made Jens catch fire, too. But a lot of people, all over the world, had tried to hurt the Lizards. Not many had much luck. “Sir, I’m no soldier and I don’t pretend to be one, but-can we really pull this off?”

“It’s a gamble,” Patton admitted. “But if we don’t, the United States is washed up, because we won’t get another chance to make troop concentrations like these. And I refuse to believe my country is washed up. We’ll be confused and scared in the attack, I don’t doubt it for a second, but the enemy’ll be more confused and scared than we are, because we’ll be taking the fight to him, not the other way round.”

A gamble. A chance. Larssen slowly nodded. A real victory against the Lizards would lift morale around the world. A defeat… well, humanity had known a lot of defeats. Why should one more be noticed?

Patton said, “You’ll have to stay here now, till the attack goes in. We can’t let you head through Lizard-held territory, not knowing what you do.”

“Why not? Their truth drug doesn’t work,” Larssen said.

“Dr. Larssen, you are a gentle soul and have led what is, I fear, a sheltered life,” Patton answered. “There are methods far more basic than drugs for extracting truth from a man. I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot afford the risk. In any case, hard fighting will start soon. You’ll be far safer with us than traveling on your own.”

Jens wasn’t sure about that, either. Trucks and tanks were far more likely to draw more fire than a lone man on a bicycle-or, now, afoot. But he was in no position to argue the point. Besides, just then an orderly brought in a tray with a roasted chicken and several baked potatoes and a bottle of wine along with it.

“You’ll take supper with me?” Patton asked.

“Yes, thank you.” Larssen had, all he could do not to grab the savory, golden-brown chicken and tear at it like a starving wolf. After cans in the church and a fast but hungry trip across Indiana, it looked wonderful beyond belief.

A little later, sucking the last scrap of meat off a drumstick, he said, “All I want to do is get back to my work, get back to my wife. Lord, she probably thinks I’m dead by now.” For that matter, he could only hope Barbara was still alive.

“Yes, I miss my Beatrice, too,” Patton said with a heavy sigh. He lifted his wineglass. “To snow, Dr. Larssen.”

“To snow,” Jens said. The glasses clinked together.

Moishe Russie had gone into the Lizards’ broadcasting studio a good many times before, but never at gunpoint. Zolraag stood beside the table with the microphone. “You may be doing this broadcast under duress, Herr Russie,” the Lizard governor said, “but you will do it.” He added the emphatic cough.

“You’ve brought me here, anyhow.” Russie was amazed at how little fear he felt. Almost three years in the ghetto under German torment had been a sort of dress rehearsal for death. Now that the time had come… He murmured in Hebrew: “Sh’ma yisroyal, adonai elohaynu adonai ekhod.” He didn’t want to die with the prayer unspoken.

Zolraag said, “You would not have even this last chance to make yourself useful in our eyes if you had not shown you truly knew nothing about the disappearance of your mate and hatchling.”

“So you have told me, Excellency.” Russie made his voice submissive. Let the governor think he was cowed. Inside, he exulted. Though he didn’t know everything of how Rivka and Reuven had vanished, he knew enough to endanger a lot of people. His tongue twitched at the memory of the Lizards’ gas jet in action. But in spite of their drug, he’d been able to lie.

Mere human nostrums all too often did much less than what they claimed; as a onetime medical student, he had some feel for how complex the human organsm was. He’d feared the Lizards had mastered it, though, especially when he went all dreamy after his dose. Somehow, though, he managed to withhold the truth. He wondered what went into the drug. Even if it didn’t work as advertised, it had promise.

No time to worry about that now. Zolraag said, “Read the script to yourself, Herr Russie, then read it aloud for our broadcast. You know the penalty for failure to comply.”

Russie sat down in the chair. It and the table in front of it were the only human-sized pieces of furniture in the room. One of the Lizard guards stepped up behind Russie, set the muzzle of his rifle against the back of the Jew’s head. Zolraag wasn’t playing games, not any more.

Moishe wondered who had typed-and probably written-the script. Some poor human, accommodating himself to the new masters as best he could. So many Poles, even so many Jews, had accommodated themselves to the Nazis as best they could… so why not to the Lizards as well?

The words were what he’d expected: sycophantic praise for the aliens and for everything they did, including the destruction of Washington. The Lizard studio engineer looked at a chronograph, spoke first in his own language and then in German:

“Quiet, all-we begin. Herr Russie, you speak.”

Russie whispered the Sh’ma to himself one last time, bent low over the microphone. He took a deep breath, made sure he spoke clearly: “This is Moishe Russie. Because of illness and other personal reasons, I have not broadcast in some time.” That much was on the paper in front of him. What came next was not: “I doubt I shall broadcast ever again.”

Zolraag spoke German well enough to realize he’d deviated from the script. He waited for the bullet to crash through his skull. He wouldn’t hear it; he hoped he wouldn’t feel it. It would disrupt the program, by God! But the Lizard governor gave no sign he noticed anything wrong. The bullet did not come.

Russie went on, “I have been told to sing the praises of the Race’s destruction of Washington to point out to all mankind that the Americans had it coming because of their stubborn and foolish resistance, that they should have surrendered. All these things are lies.”

Again he waited for some reaction from Zolraag, for the bullet that would blow his head all over the studio. Zolraag just stood there listening. Russie plowed ahead, squeezing as much as he could from the Lizard’s strange forbearance: “I told the truth when I said what the Germans did in Warsaw. I am far from sorry they are gone. To us, the.Jews of Warsaw, the Race came as liberators. But they seek to enslave all men. What they did in Washington proves this, for any who still need proof. Fight hard, that we may be free. Better that than subjection forever. Good-bye and good luck.”

The silence in the studio lasted more than a minute after he stopped. Then Zolraag said, “Thank you, Herr Russie. That will be all.”

“But…” Having prepared himself for martyrdom, Moishe felt almost cheated at failing to attain it. “What I said, what I told the world…”

“I recorded, Herr Russie,” the Lizard engineer said. “Go out tomorrow; your regular time.”

“Oh,” Moishe said in a hollow voice. Of course the broadcast would not go out tomorrow. Once the Lizards listened to it carefully, really understood it, they’d hear the sabotage he’d tried to commit. The shadow of death had not lifted from him. He would just have to wear it a little longer.

In a way, it might have been better had the Lizards shot him now. That would have been quick. Given time to reflect, they might come up with a more ingenious end for him. He shivered. He’d overcome fear once, to say what he’d said. He hoped he could nerve himself to do it again, but feared the second time would be harder.”

“Take him away,” Zobaag said in his own language. The Lizard guards led Moishe out to one of their vehicles parked outside the studio. As they always did, they hissed and complained about the few meters of frigid cold they had to traverse between the bake ovens they thought comfortable.

Back in his flat, Russie puttered around, read the Bible and the apocryphal tale of the Maccabees, cooked himself supper with bachelor inefficiency. He,did his best to sleep and eventually succeeded. In the mornmg he heated up some of the potatoes he hadn’t finished the night before. It wasn’t much of a last meal for a condemned man, but he lacked the energy to fix anything finer.

A few minutes in front of the appointed hour he turned on the shortwave set. He’d never listened to himself before; all his previous broadcasts had gone out live. He wondered why the Lizards chose to alter the pattern this time.

Music-a martial fanfare. Then a recorded tag: “Here is free Radio Warsaw!” He’d liked that, back when the city was freshly out from under the Nazis’ bootheels. Now it seemed sadly ironic.

“This is Moishe Russie. Because of illness and other personal reasons, I have not broadcast in some time.” Was that voice really his? He supposed it was, but he didn’t sound the way he did when he listened to himself from inside, so to speak.

He dropped that thought as he listened to himself go on: “I sing the praises of the Race’s destruction of Washington. I point out to all mankind that the Americans had it coming because of their stubborn and foolish resistance. They should have surrendered. For any who still need proof, better subjection forever than to fight hard, that we may be free. What the Race did to Washington proves this. Good-bye and good luck.”

Russie stared in blank dismay at the speaker of the shortwave radio. In his mind’s eye, he saw Zolraag’s mouth falling open in a hearty Lizard guffaw. Zolraag had tricked him. He’d been ready to give up his life, but not to live on to be used to another’s purpose. Suddenly he understood why rape was called a fate worse than death. Had his words not been raped, employed in a way he would have died to prevent?

Distantly, abstractly, he wondered how the Lizards had managed their perversion of what he’d said. Whatever recording and editing technology they’d used was far ahead of anything men could boast. And so they’d threatened him with what seemed a sure and grisly end, let him make his defiant cry for liberty, and then not only smothered that cry but held up the surgically altered corpse to the world and pretended it had life. As far as the rest of mankind could tell, he was a worse collaborator now than ever before.

Rage ripped through him. He was not used to feeling anything so raw; it left him giddy and light-headed, as if he’d drunk too much plum brandy at Purim. The shortwave set brayed on-more propaganda, this time in Polish. Had the fellow talking really said these words in this order? Who could tell?

Moishe lifted the radio over his head. It fit in the palm of one hand and weighed hardly anything-it was of Lizard make, a gift from Zolraag. But even had it been a heavy, bulky human-made set, fury would have fueled his strength and let him treat it the same way. He smashed it to the floor as hard as,he could.

The lies the Pole was squawking died in midsyllable. Bits of metal and glass and stuff that looked like Bakeite but wasn’t flew in every direction. Russie trampled the carcass of the radio, ground it into the carpet, turned it into a forlorn puddle of fragments that bore no resemblance to what it had been a moment before.

“Not half what the mamzrim did to me,” he muttered.

He threw on his long black coat, stormed out of his flat, slammed the door behind him. Three people along the corridor poked their heads out their doorways to see who’d just had a fight with his wife. “Reb Moishe!” a woman exclaimed. He stomped past without even looking her way.

Lizard guards still stood at the entrance to the block of flats. Moishe stomped past them, too, though he wanted to snatch one of their rifles and drop them both bleeding to the sidewalk. He knew just what the muzzle of a Lizard rifle felt like, jammed against the curly hair at the back of his head. What would it be like to hold one in his arms, have it buck as he squeezed the trigger? He didn’t know, but he wanted to find out.

Halfway down the block he stopped in his tracks “Gevalt!” he exclaimed, deeply shocked. “Am I turning into a soldier?”

The prospect was anything but appetizing. As a medical student, he knew too well how easy a human being was to damage, how hard to repair. In the German siege of Warsaw and since, he’d seen that proved too many times, too many horrible ways. And now he wanted to become a destroyer himself?

He did.

His feet figured it out before the rest of him knew. He found himself on the way to the headquarters of Mordechai Anielewicz before he consciously realized where he was going.

A light snowfall swirled through the air. Not many people were on the streets. Every so often, one of them would nod to him from beneath a black felt fedora like his own or a Russian-style fur cap. He braced himself for shouts of hatred, but none came. If only the rest of the world paid as little attention to his broadcast as the Jews of Warsaw!

Here came someone striding briskly toward him. Who? His spectacles didn’t help enough to let him be sure. His eyes had grown weaker lately; what had suited them in 1939 wasn’t good enough any more. He scowled. He’d been shortsighted a lot of different ways.

Whoever it was, the fellow waved vigorously at him. He recognized the motion if not the man. Fear flooded through him. While he’d gone looking for Mordechai Anielewicz, Anielewicz was lookmg for him too. Which meant Anielewicz if no one else hereabouts, had heard him on the radio. Which meant the fighting leader without a doubt had blood in his eye.

Which he did. “Reb Moishe, are you meshuggeh?” he yelled. “I thought you weren’t going to turn into the Lizards’ tukhus-lekher.”

The Lizards’ tukhus-lekher. That was what it had come to. Mortification almost gagged Moishe. “I haven’t. As God is my witness, I haven’t,” he choked out.

“What do you mean, you haven’t?” Anielewicz said, still loudly. “With my own ears I heard you.” He looked to right and left, lowered his voice. “Was it for this we made your wife and little boy disappear? So you could say what the Lizards wanted you to say?”

“But I didn’t!” Russie wailed. Anielewicz’s face was full of flinty disbelief. Stammering, almost sobbing, Russie told how he had gone into the Lizards’ broadcast studio expecting to die, how he’d hoped and intended to give one last cri de coeur before he did, and how Zolraag and the Lizards’ engineers cheated him out of a death that had meaning. “Do you think I want to be alive, to have my friends call me filthy names on the street?” He took a clumsy, unpracticed swing at Anielewicz.

The Jewish fighting leader easily blocked the blow. He caught Russie’s arm, twisted a little. Russie’s shoulder creaked like a dead branch about to fall off a tree; fire shot through the joint. He bit back a gasp.

“Sorry.” Anielewicz let go at once. “Didn’t mean to jerk it quite so hard there. Force of habit. You all right?”

Russie gingerly tested the injured member. “For that, yes. Otherwise-”

“And I’m sorry about that, too,” Anielewicz said quickly. “But I heard you with my own ears-how could I not trust my ears? Of course I believe you, Reb Moishe; don’t even think you need to ask me. You couldn’t have guessed the Lizards would do things to a recording. They outfoxed you; it happens. The next question is, how do we get our revenge?”

“Revenge.” Moishe tasted the word. Yes, it was right. He hadn’t found a name for it himself. “That’s what I want.”

“I’ll tell you something.” Mordechai Anielewicz laid a finger alongside his nose., “It may just be taken care of. You haven’t played a direct part, but all us Jews owe you a lot of what freedom we have. And if we hadn’t been free to move through Poland, none of what I’m talking about would have happened.”

“What are you talking about?” Russie demanded. “You haven’t really said anything.”

“No, and I don’t intend to, either,” Anielewicz answered. “What you don’t know, you can’t tell, and the Lizards may find better-more painful-ways of asking questions than that verkakte drug of theirs. But one fine day before too long, the Lizards may have cause to notice something for which you’ll be partly responsible. And if they do, you’ll have your revenge, I promise you.”

That all sounded very good, and Anielewicz was not in the habit of talking about what he couldn’t deliver. Nonetheless… “I want more,” Russie said. “I want to hurt the Lizards myself.”

“Reb Moishe, a soldier you’re not,” Anielewicz said, not unkindly but very firmly.

“I could learn-”

“No.” Now the Jewish fighting leader’s voice turned hard. “If you want to fight them, there are ways you can be more valuable than with a gun in your hand. You’d be wasted as a common soldier.”

“What, then?”

“You’re serious about this.” To Moishe’s relief, it was not a question. Anielewicz studied him as if trying to figure out how to field-strip some new kind of rifle. “Well, what could you do?” The fighting leader rubbed his chin. “How’s this? How would you like to tell the world how much of a liar the Lizards have made you out to be?”

“You could arrange for me a broadcast?” Russie asked eagerly.

“A broadcast, no. Too dangerous.” Anielewicz shook his head. “A recording, though, just possibly. Then we might smuggle it out for others to broadcast. That would make the Lizards blush-if they knew how to blush, that is. Only one trouble-well, more than one, but this you have to think about especially hard: once you make this recording, if you make it, you have to disappear.”

“Yes, I see that. Zolraag would not be pleased with me, would he? But I’d sooner have him angry than laughing as he surely is now.” Russie let his mouth hang open in an imitation of a Lizard chuckle. Then, in a sudden, completely human gesture, he stabbed a fmger out at Anielewicz. “Could you arrange for me to vanish into the same place where Rivka and Reuven have gone?”

“I don’t even know where that place is,” Anielewicz reminded him.

“But that’s more of your not knowing so you can’t talk in case you’re interrogated. Don’t tell me you can’t arrange to have me sent there without ever learning directly about that place, because I won’t believe you.”

“Maybe you should disappear. You’re getting too cynical and suspicious to make a proper reb any more.” But amusement glinted in Anielewicz’s pale eyes. “I won’t say yes to that and I won’t say no.” He waggled his hand back and forth. “For that matter, I don’t even know for certain if I can arrange for you to make this recording, but if you want me to, I’ll try.”

“Try,” Russie said at once. He cocked his head, peered sidelong at the Jewish fighting leader. “I notice you don’t say you’re worried about smuggling the recording out of Warsaw once it’s made.”

“Oh, no.” Anielewicz looked like a cat blowing canary feathers off its nose. “If we make the recording, we’ll get it out. That we can manage. We’ve had practice.”

Ludmila Gorbunova stared at her CO. “But, Comrade Colonel,” she exclaimed, her voice rising to a startled squeak, “why me?”

“Because your aircraft is suited to the task, and you are suited to be its pilot,” Colonel Feofan Karpov replied. “The Lizards hack all sorts of aircraft out of the sky in large numbers, but fewer Kukuruzniks than any other type. And you, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova, have flown combat missions against the Lizards since they came, and against the Germans before that. Do you question your own ability?”

“No, Comrade Colonel, by no means,” Ludmila answered. “But the mission you have outlined is not-or should not become, let me say-one involving combat.”

“It should not become such, no,” Karpov agreed. “It will be the easier on account of that, though, not the more difficult. And having a combat-proved pilot will increase its chances for success. So-you. Any further questions?”

“No, Comrade Colonel.” What am I supposed to say? Ludmila thought.

“Good,” Karpov said. “He is expected to arrive tonight. Make sure your plane is in the best possible operating condition. Lucky you have that German mechanic.”

“Yes, he’s quite skilled.” Ludmila saluted. “I’ll go check out the airplane with him now. Pity I can’t take him with me.”

Back at the revetments, she found Georg Schultz already tinkering with the Kukuruznik. “Wire to one of your foot pedals here wasn’t as tight as it could have been,” he said. “I’ll have it fixed in a minute here.”

“Thank you; that will help,” she answered in German. Speaking it with him every day was improving her own command of the language, though she had the feeling several of the phrases she now used casually around him were unsuited for conversation with people who didn’t have greasy hands. Feeling her way for words, she went on, “I want the machine to be as good as it can. I have an important flight tomorrow.”

“When isn’t a flight important? It’s your neck, after all.” Schultz checked the feel of the pedal with his foot. He was always checking, always making sure. Just as some men had a feel for horses, he had a feel for machines, and a gift for getting them to do what he wanted. “There. That ought to fix it”

“Good. This one, though, is important for more than just my neck. I’m to go on a courier mission.” She knew she should have stopped there, but how important the mission was filled her to overflowing, and she overflowed: “I am ordered to fly the foreign commissar, Comrade Molotov, to Germany for talks with your leaders. I am so proud!”

Schultz’s eyes went wide. “Well you might be.” After a moment, he added, “I’d better go over this plane from top to bottom. Pretty soon you’re going to have to trust it to Russian mechanics again.”

The scorn in that should have stung. In fact, it did, but less than it would have before Ludmila saw the obsessive care the German put into maintenance. She just said, “We’ll do it together.” They checked everything from the bolt that held on the propeller to the screws that attached the tailskid to the fuselage. The brief Russian winter day died while they were in the middle of the job. They worked on by the light of a paraffin lantern. Ludmila trusted the netting overhead to keep the, lantern from betraying them to the Lizards.

Bell above the center horse-the one in shafts-jangling, a troika reached the airstrip about the time they were finishing. Ludmila listened to the team approaching the revetment. The Lizards mostly ignored horse-drawn sledges, though they shot up cars and trucks when they could. Anger filled her. More even than the Nazis, the Lizards aimed to rob mankind of the twentieth century.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar!” she said when Molotov came in to have a look at the airplane that would fly him to Germany.

“Comrade Pilot,” he answered with an abrupt nod. He, was shorter and paler than she’d expected, but just as determined-looking. He didn’t bat an eye at the sight of the beat-up old U-2. He gave Georg Schultz another of those the-cut jerks of his head. “Comrade Mechanic.”

“Good evening, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Schultz said in his bad Russian.

Molotov gave no overt reaction, but hesitated a moment before turning back to Ludmila. “A German?”

“Da, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” she said nervously: Russans and Germans might cooperate against the Lizards, but more out of desperation than friendship. She added, “He is skilled at what he does.”

“So.” The word hung ominously in the air. Behind his trademark glasses, Molotov’s eyes were unreadable. But at last he said, “If I can talk with them after they invaded the rodina, no reason for those who are here not to be put to good use.”

Lucimila sagged with relief. Schultz did not seem to have followed enough of the conversation to know he’d been in danger. But then, he’d been in danger since the moment he rolled across the Soviet border. Perhaps he’d grown used to it-though Ludmila never had.

“You have the flight plan, Comrade Pilot?” Molotov asked.

“Yes,” Ludmila said, tapping a pocket in her leather flying suit. That made her think of something else. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, your clothing may be warm enough on the ground, but the Kukuruznik, as you see, is an airplane with open cockpits. The wind of our motion will be savage… and we will be flying north.”

To get to Germany at all, the little U-2 would have to fly around three sides of a rectangle. The short way, across Poland, lay in the Lizards’ hands. So it would be north past Leningrad, then west through Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, and finally south into Germany. Ludmila hoped the fuel dumps promised on paper would be there in fact. The Kukuruznik’s range was only a little better than five hundred kilometers; it would have to refuel a number of times on the journey. On the other hand, if travel arrangements for the foreign commissar of the Soviet Union went awry, the nation was probably doomed.

“Can I draw flying clothes like yours from the commandant of this base?” Molotov asked.

“I am certain Colonel Karpov will be honored to provide you with them, Comrade Foreign Comntissar,” Ludmila said. She was just as certain the colonel would not dare refuse, even if it meant sending one of his pilots out to freeze on the fellow’s next mission.

Molotov left the revetment. Schultz started to laugh. Ludmila turned a questioning eye on him. He said, “A year ago this time, if I’d shot that little hardnosed pigdog, the Fuhrer would have stuck the Knight’s Cross, the Swords, and the Diamonds on me-likely kissed me on both cheeks, too. Now I’m helping him. Bloody strange world.” To that Ludmila could only nod.

When the foreign commissar returned half an hour later, he looked as if he’d suddenly gained fifteen kilos. He was bundled into a leather and sheepskin flight suit, boots, and flying helmet, and carried a pair of goggles in his left hand. “Will these fit over my spectacles?” he asked.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, I don’t know.” Ludmila had never heard of a Red Air Force flier who needed spectacles. “You can try them, though.”

Molotov looked at his wristwatch. Just getting to it under the bulky flight suit was a struggle. “We are due to depart in less than two hours. I trust we shall be punctual.”

“There should be no trouble,” Ludmila said. A lot of the mission would be flown at night to minimize the chance of interception. The only problem with that was the U-2’s aggressively basic navigational gear: compass and airspeed indicator were about it.

As things happened, there was a problem: the little Shvetsov engine didn’t want to turn over when Georg Schultz spun the prop. In the seat in front of Ludmila’s, Molotov clenched his jaw. He said nothing, but she knew he was making mental notes. That chilled her worse than the frigid night air.

But this problem had a solution, borrowed from the British: a Hicks starter, mounted on the front of a battered truck, revolved the propeller shaft fast enough to kick the engine into life. “God-damned sewing machine!” Schultz bawled up to Ludmila, just to see her glare. The acrid stink of the exhaust was perfume in her nostrils.

The U-2 taxied to the end of the airstrip, bumped along the couple of hundred meters of badly smoothed ground as it built up speed-and at the end of one bump, didn’t come back to earth. Ludmila always relished the feeling of leaving the ground. The wind that blasted into her face over and around her little windscreen told her she was really flying.

And tonight she relished taking off for another reason as well. As long as the Kukuruznik stayed in the air, she was in charge, not Molotov. That was a heady feeling, like being on the way to drunk. If she did a tight snap roll and flew upside down for a few seconds, she could check how well he’d fastened his safety belt…

She shook her head. Foolishness, foolishness. If people-had disappeared in the purges of the thirties-and they had, in great carload lots-the German invasion proved there were worse things. Some Soviet citizens had been willing (and some Soviet citizens had been eager) to collaborate with the Nazis, but the Germans showed themselves even more brutal than the NKVD.

But now Soviets and Nazis had a common cause, a foe that threatened to crush them both, regardless, even heedless, of ideology. Life, Ludmila thought with profound unoriginality, was very strange.

The biplane droned through the night. Snow-draped fields alternated with black pine forests below. Ludmila stayed as low as she dared: not as low as she would have during the day, for now a swell of ground could be upon her before she knew it was there. Her route swung wide around the Valdai Hills just to cut that risk.

The farther north she flew, the longer the night became, also. It was as if she drew darkness around the aircraft… though winter nights anywhere in the Soviet Union were quite long enough.

Her first assigned refueling stop was between Kalinin and Kashin, on the upper reaches of the Volga. She buzzed around the area where she thought the airstrip was until her fuel started getting dangerously low. She hoped she wouldn’t have to try to put the U-2 down in a field, not with the passenger she was carrying.

Just when she thought she would have to do that-better with power than dead stick-she spied a lantern or electric torch, swung the Kukuruznik toward it. More torches came on, briefly, to mark the borders of a landing strip. She brought in the U-2 with gentleness that surprised even herself.

Whatever Molotov thought of the landing, he kept it to himself. He rose stiffly, for which Ludmila could hardly blame him-after four and a half hours in the air, she too had cramps and kinks aplenty.

Ignoring the officer in charge of the airstrip, the foreign commissar stumped off into the darkness. Looking for a secluded place to piss, Ludmila guessed: the most nearly human response she’d yet seen from Molotov.

The officer-the collar tabs of his greatcoat were Air Force sky-blue and bore a winged prop and a major’s two scarlet rectangles-turned to Ludmila and said, “We are ordered to render you every assistance, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunov.”

“Gorbunova, sir,” Ludmila corrected, only a little put out: the heavy winter flight suit would have disguised any shape at all.

“Gorbunova-pardon me,” the major said, eyebrows rising. “Did I read the despatch wrong, or was it written incorrectly? Well, no matter. If you have been chosen to fly the comrade foreigncommissar, your competence cannot be questioned.” His tone of voice said he did question it, but Ludmila let that go. The major went on, more briskly now, “What do you require, Senior Lieutenant?”

“Fuel for the aircraft, oil if necessary, and a mechanical check if you have a mechanic who can do a proper job.” Ludmila put first things first (she also wished she could have lashed Georg Schultz to the U-2’s fuselage and carried him along). Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Food and someplace warm for me to sleep through the day would be pleasant.”

“Would be necessary,” Molotov amended as he came back to the Kukuruznik. His face remained expressionless, but his voice betrayed more animation; Ludmila wondered how hard he’d been fighting to hold it in. Her own bladder was pretty full, too. Perhaps confirming her thought, the foreign commissar continued, “Tea would also be welcome now.” Not before, ran through Ludmila’s mind-he would have exploded. She knew that feeling.

The major said, “Comrades, if you will come with me… He led Ludmila and Molotov toward his own dwelling. As they kicked their way through the snow, he bawled orders to his groundcrew. The men ran like wraiths in the predawn darkness, easier to follow by ear than by eye.

The major’s quarters were half-hut, half dug-out cave. A lantern on a board-and-trestle table cast a flickering light over the little chamber. A samovar stood nearby; so did a spirit stove. Atop the latter was a pot from which rose a heavenly odor.

With every sign of pride, the major ladled out bowls of borscht, thick with cabbage, beets, and meat that might have been veal or just as easily might have been rat. Ludmila didn’t care; whatever it was, it was hot and filling. Molotov ate as if he were stoking a machine.

The major handed them glasses of tea. It was also hot, but had an odd-taste-a couple-of odd tastes, in fact. “Cut with dried herbs and barks, I’m afraid,” the major said apologetically, “and sweetened with honey we found ourselves. Haven’t seen any sugar for quite a while.”

“Given the circumstances, it is adequate,” Molotov said: not high praise, but understanding, at any rate.

“Comrade Pilot, you may rest there,” the major said, pointing to a pile of blankets in one corner that evidently served him for a bed. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, for you the men are preparing a cot, which should be here momentarily.”

“Not necessary,” Molotov said. “A blanket or two will also do for me.”

“What?” The major blinked. “Well, as you say, of course. Excuse me, comrades.” He went back out into the cold, returned in a little while with more blankets. “Here you are, Comrade Foreign Commissar.”

“Thank you. Be sure to awaken us at the scheduled time,” Molotov said.

“Oh, yes,” the major promised.

Yawning, Ludmila buried herself in the blankets. They smelled powerfully of their usual user. That didn’t bother her, if anything, it was reassuring. She wondered how Molotov, who was used to sleeping softer than with blankets on dirt, would manage here. She fell asleep herself before she found out.

Some indefinite while later, she woke with a start. Was that horrible noise some new Lizard weapon? She stared wildly around the Air Force major’s quarters, then started to laugh. Who would have imagined that illustrious Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, foreign commissar of the USSR and second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, snored like a buzzsaw? Ludmila pulled the blankets up over her head, which cut the din enough to let her get back to sleep herself.

After more borscht and vile, honey-sweetened tea, the flight resumed. The U-2 droned slowly through the night-an express train could have matched its speed-north and west. Snow-dappled evergreen forests slid by below. Ludmila hugged the ground as tightly as she dared.

Then, without warning, the trees disappeared, to, be replaced by a long stretch of unbroken whiteness. “Lake Ladoga,” Ludmila said aloud, pleased at the navigational check the lake gave her. She flew along the southern shore toward Leningrad.

Well before she got to the city, she skimmed low over the lunar landscape of the German and Soviet lines around it. The Lizards had pounded both impartially. Before they came, though, the heroism and dreadful privations of the defenders of Leningrad, home and heart of the October Revolution, had rung through the Soviet Union. How many thousands, how many hundreds of thousands, starved to death inside the German ring? No one would ever know.

And now she was flying Molotov to confer with the Germans who had subjected Leningrad to such a cruel siege. Intellectually, Ludmila understood the need for that. Emotionally, it remained hard to stomach.

Yet the Kukuruznik she flew had been efficiently maintained by a German, and, from what Georg Schultz had said, he and Major Jager had fought alongside Russians to do something important: either he didn’t understand exactly what or he was keeping his mouth shut about that or both. So it could be done. It would have to be done, in fact. But Ludmila did not like it.

As the shore of Lake Ladoga had before, now the Gulf of Finland gave her something to steer by. She began to peer ahead, looking for landing lights: the next field was supposed to be not far from Vyborg.

When Ludmila finally spotted the lights, she bounced the biplane in a good deal more roughly than she had at the last airstrip. The officer who greeted her spoke Russian with an odd accent. That was not unusual in the polyglot Soviet Union, but then she noticed that several of his men wore coalscuttle helmets. “Are you Germans?” she asked, first in Russian and then auf Deutsch.

“Nein,” he answered, though his German sounded better than hers. “We are Finns. Welcome to Viipuri.” His smile was not altogether pleasant; the town had passed from Finnish to Soviet hands in the Winter War of 1939-40, but the Finns took it back when they joined the Nazis against the USSR in 1941.

“Can one of your mechanics handle this type of aircraft?” she asked.

With an ironic glint in his eye, he scanned the Kukuruznik from one end to the other. “Meaning no disrespect, but I think any twelve-year-old who is handy with tools could work on one of these,” he answered. Since he was probably right, Ludmila kept her annoyance to herself.

The Finnish base had better food than Ludmila had tasted in some time. It also seemed cleaner than the ones from which she’d been fighting. She wondered whether that was because the Finns hadn’t seen as much action against the Lizards as the Soviets had.

“Partly,” the officer who’d greeted her said when she asked. His greatcoat, she noticed once they were inside, was gray, not khaki; it had three narrow bars on the cuffs. She wondered what rank that made him. “And partly, again meaning no disrespect, you may see that other people are often just generally neater about things than you Russians. But never mind that. Would you care to use our sauna?” When he saw she didn’t understand the Finnish word, he turned it into German: “Steam-bath.”

“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. Not only was it a chance to get clean, it was a chance to get warm. The Finns didn’t even leer at her when she went in alone, as Russians would have done. She wondered how manly they were.

Flying over Finland and then over Sweden, she thought about what the Finnish officer had said. Just looking down at countryside that war had not ravaged was new and different; flying past towns that weren’t burned-out ruins took her thoughts back to better days she’d almost forgotten in the midst of combat’s urgency.

Even under snow, though, she could see the orderly patterns of fields and fences. Everything was on a smaller scale than in the Soviet Union, and almost toylike in its tiny perfection. She wondered if the Scandinavians were neater than Russians simply because they had so much less land and had to use it more efficiently.

That impression grew stronger in Denmark, where even forest had all but vanished and every square centimeter seemed put to some useful purpose. And then, past Denmark, she flew into Germany.

Germany, she saw at once, had been at war. Though her flight path took her a couple of hundred kilometers west of murdered Berlin, she saw devastation that matched anything she’d come across in the Soviet Union. In fact, first the British and then the Lizards had given Gennany a more concentrated beating from the air than the Soviet Union as a whole had received. Town after town had factories, train stations, and residential blocks pounded to ruins.

For that matter, the Lizards were still pounding Germany. When Ludmila heard the roar of their jets, she flew doubly low and slow, as if her U-2 were a tiny gnat buzzing by the floor, too small to be worth noticing.

The Germans were still fighting back, too. Tracers spiderwebbed across the night sky like fireworks. Searchlights stabbed, trying to pin Lizard raiders with their beams. Once or twice, off in the distance, Ludmila heard piston engines racing. So, she thought, the Luftwaffe still has fighters in the air too.

As she flew farther south, the land began to rise. Her landing strip the fourth night of her flight, outside a little town called Suilzbach, was in what looked to have been a potato field. A ground crew dragged her plane to cover while a Luftwaffe officer drove her and Molotov to town in a horse-drawn wagon. “The Lizards are too likely to shoot at automobiles,” he cxplained apologetically.

She nodded. “It is so with us, too.”

“Ah,” said the Luftwaffe man.

Every so often, Pravda or Izvestia would describe the atmosphere in diplomatic talks as “correct.” Ludmila hadn’t quite understood what that meant. Now, seeing the way the Germans treated her and Molotov, she did. They were polite, they were attentive, but they couldn’t hide that they wished they didn’t have to deal with the Soviets at all. It was mutual, Ludmila thought, at least as far as she was concerned. As for Molotov, he was seldom more than civil to anyone, Russian or German.

Ludmila had to work hard to suppress a yelp of glee at the prospect of sleeping in a real bed for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long. Suppress it she did, lest the Nazis take her for uncultured. She also studiously ignored the Luftwaffe officer’s hints that he wouldn’t mind sleeping in that same bed with her.

To her relief, he didn’t get obnoxious about it. He did say, “You will, I hope, forgive me; but I would not recommend trying to fly to Berchtesgaden by night, Fraulein Gorbunova.”

“My rank is senior lieutenant,” Ludmiila answered. “Why would you not recommend this?”

“Flying at night is difficult enough-”

“I have flown a good many night attack missions, both against the Lizards and against you Germans,” she said: let him make of that what he would.

His eyes widened, but only momentarily. Then he said, “Maybe so, but those, I dare say, were out on the Russian steppe, not in the mountains.” He waited for her response; she nodded, yielding the point. He went on, “The danger is worse in the mountains, not only because of the terrain but also from gusts of wind. Your margin of error would be unacceptably low for a mission of this importance, especially since you will want to stay as low to the ground as you can.”

“What do you suggest, then? A flight by day? The Lizards are too likely to shoot me down.”

The German said, “I admit this. To protect you as you fly by day, though, we will sortie several squadrons of fighters-not to escort you, for that would attract unwanted attention to your aircraft, but to distract the Lizards from the area through which you will be passing.”

Ludmila considered that. Given the inequality between German planes and what the Lizards flew, some pilots would almost certainly be sacrificing their lives to make sure she and Molotov got through to this Berchtesgaden place. She also knew she had no experience in mountain flying. If the Nazis were willing to help her mission so, she decided she had to accept. “Thank you,” she said.

“Heil Hitler!” the Luftwaffe man answered, which did nothing to make her happier about working with Germans.

When she and Molotov went dip-clopping out to the airstrip next morning, she discovered the German ground crew had daubed the U-2’s wings and fuselage with splotches of whitewash. One of the fellows in overalls said, “Now you’ll look more like snow and rocks.”

Soviet winter camouflage was more thoroughly white, but snow drifted more evenly across the steppe than it did in mountains. She didn’t know how much the whitewash would help, but supposed it couldn’t hurt. The groundcrew man grinned as she thanked him in her accented German.

When she got a good look at the mountains toward which she was flying, she was glad she’d taken the Luftwaffe officer’s advice and not tried to make the trip by night. The landing field to which she was ordered lay not far outside the village of Berchtesgaden. When she set the Kukuruznik down there, she assumed Hitler’s residence lay within the village.

Instead, a long wagon ride up the side of the mountain-Obersalzberg, she learned it was called-followed. Molotov sat staring stonily straight ahead the whole way up. He said nothing much. Whatever went on behind the mask of his face, he kept it there. He glared right through the soldiers at two checkpoints, ignored the barbed wire that ringed the compound.

Hitler’s Berghof, when the wagon finally reached it, reminded Ludmila of a pleasant little resort house (the view was magnificent) swallowed up by a residence that met the demands of a world leader. Molotov was whisked away into the Berghof; Ludmila thought she recognized his German counterpart, von Ribbentrop, from newsreels during the strange couple of years when the Soviet Union and Germany held to their friendship treaty.

She wasn’t important enough to be lodged in the Berghof. The Germans escorted her over to a guesthouse not far away. As she stood in the splendid lobby, all she could think was how many workers and peasants had had their labor exploited to create it. She was primly certain no one in the classless Soviet Union cared to live in such unnecessary splendor.

Down the staircase came an officer in the natty black uniform and beret of the German panzer formations: a colonel, by the two pips on each braided shoulder strap. On his right breast he wore a large, garish eight-pointed gold star with a swastika in the center. He was lean and perfectly shaved and looked quite at home here close by his Fuhrer; just watching his smooth stride made Ludmila feel short, and dumpy and out of place. She swung the knapsack that held her few belongings over one shoulder.

The motion drew the natty colonel’s eye. He stopped, stared, then hurried across the parquet floor to her. “Ludmila!” he exclaimed, and went on in fair Russian: “What the devil are you doing here?”

She recognized his voice even if she hadn’t known his face. “Heinrich!” she said, trying hard not to pronounce it with an initial g as Russians often did. She was so glad to find someone she knew that, heedless equally of startled looks from her German escorts and, of what Molotov would think when the news got back to han, she gave Jager a hug he enthusiastically returned. “You’ve been promoted two grades,” she observed. “That’s wonderful.”

His grin was self-deprecating. “They offered me a choice: lieutenant colonel and the Knight’s Cross or colonel and just Hitler’s fried egg here.” He patted the gaudy medal. “Excuse me, the German Cross in gold. They thought I’d take glory. I took rank. Rank lasts.

“Hitler’s fried egg?” Ludmila echoed in delicious amazement. She noticed her escorts were ostentatiously pretending they hadn’t noticed that. She shook her head. “My, we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes we will.” For a moment Jager’s face assumed the watchful expression she’d first seen at the Ukraiman kolkhoz. Then the smile came back. “Yes, we will,” he repeated. “Quite a lot.”