In the Balance

18

Atvar stared out at the assembled shiplords. They silently stared back. He tried to gauge their mood before he called the meeting to order. Nothing short of mutiny-maybe not even that-would have surprised him. Well past one of the Race’s years into a campaign expected to be a walkover, no one had yet turned one eye turret, let alone two, toward victory.

The fleetlord decided to confront that head-on: “Assembled males, I know we face new problems almost every day on Tosev 3. Sometimes we are even forced to face old problems over again, as in the Tosevite empire called Italia.”

The shiplord Straha stood, crouched, and waited to be recognized. When Atvar pointed to him, he asked, “How did the Deutsche manage to kidnap what’s-his-name-the Big Ugly in charge of Italia-”

“Mussolini,” Atvar supplied.

“Thank you, Exalted Fleetlord. Yes, Mussolini. How did the Deutsche manage to steal him when we shut him up in that castle away from everything after he had surrendered his empire to us?”

“How they learned where he was, we do not know,” Atvar admitted. “They are skilled at such irregular warfare, and I must concede the move has embarrassed us.”

“Embarrassed us? I should say so.” Straha added an emphatic cough. “His radio broadcasts from Deutschland negate much of the value we got from that Big Ugly from Warsaw, the one who spoke so convincingly against the Deutsche.”

“Russie,” Atvar said after a quick glance at a tickler file on the computer screen in front of him. The file also told him something else: “We’d reached the point of diminishing returns with that one in any case. His last statement had to be electronically altered to make it conform to our requirements.”

“The Big Uglies have not yet adjusted themselves to the idea that the Race will rule over them,” the shiplord Kirel said mournfully.

“And why should they?” Straha retorted, his voice dripping sarcasm. “As far as I can see, they have no reason to. This affair with Mussolini is but one more embarrassment in a long series. Now Italia seethes with sabotage, where before it was among the calmest of the empires under our control”

Feneress, a male of Straha’s faction, chimed in, “Moreover, it lets the Deutsche make a folk hero of this”-he checked his own computer for the name he sought-“this Skorzeny who led the raid, and encourages other Tosevites to try to emulate his feat.”

Kirel started to come to Atvar’s defense, but the fleetlord held up a hand. “What you say is true, Feneress,” he replied. “For his failure, the male in charge of the Big Ugly Mussolini’s security would normally have found himself liable to severe disciplinary action. As, however, he perished in the Tosevite raid, this has become impracticable.”

The assembled shiplords stirred and murmured among themselves. For the fleetlord to admit failure so frankly was strange and untoward. No wonder they murmured they had to be trymg to figure out what Atvar’s concession meant Did it signal a change in strategy? Did it mean Atvar would resign his post perhaps in favor of Straha? If so, what did that imply for each shiplord?

Atvar raised his hand again. Slowly, the murmurs died away. The fleetlord said, “I did not summon you to the bannership to dwell on failure, assembled shiplords. On the contrary. I summoned you here to outline a course which, I believe, will give us victory.”

The officers stirred and murmured all over again. Some of them, Atvar knew, had begun to despair of victory. Others still thought it could be attained, but the means they wanted to use would leave Tosev 3 a ruin unfit for settlement by the colonization fleet now traveling across interstellar space toward the planet. If he could prove them wrong and still make the Big Uglies submit, Atvar would be ahead indeed. And he thought he could.

He said, “We have been discomfited by the disturbingly advanced technology the Tosevites have demonstrated. Were it not for those advances-those causes we are still investigating-the conquest of Tosev 3 would have been routine.”

“And we all would have been a lot happier,” Kirel put in. Atvar saw shiplords’ mouths fall open. That they could still laugh was a good sign.

“We have been perhaps slower than we should in appreciating the implications of the Big Uglies’ technology,” the fleetlord said. “Compared to the Tosevites, the Race is slow. They have used that fact to their advantage against us. But we are also thorough. Compare our Empire, the Empire, to the ephemeral makeshift empires and irrational administrative schemes under which they live. And now we have found a flaw in their technology which we hope we can exploit.”

He’d grabbed their attention. By the way they stared hungrily at him, he might have been some powdered ginger in front of a crowd of addicts. (He made himself put that problem out of his mind for now. He had to dwell on advantages, not problems.) He said, “Our vehicles and aircraft are fueled by hydrogen and oxygen produced electrolytically from water with energy from the atomic engines of our starships. Getting all the fuel we need has never been a problem-if Tosev 3 possesses anything in excess, it is water. And, perhaps not surprisingly, we have evaluated the Big Uglies’ capabilities in terms of our own. This evaluation has proved erroneous.”

The shiplords murmured yet again. High-ranking members of the Race were usually less candid about admitting error, especially when it reflected discredit on them. Atvar would also have been less candid than he was, had the advantage he gained here not outweighed the damage he suffered for acknowledging previous wrong.

“Instead of hydrogen and oxygen, Tosevite aircraft and ground and sea vehicles run on one distillate of petroleum or another,” he said. “This has disadvantages, not least among them the noxious fumes such vehicles emit while operating.”

“That’s true, by the Emperor,” Straha said. “Go into one of the cities that we rule and your nictitating membranes will sizzle from all the garbage in the air.”

“Indeed,” Atvar said. “Pollutants aside, however, our engineers assure me there is no reason for petroleum-based engines to be less efficient than our own. In fact, they may even have certain minor advantages: because their fuels are liquids at ordinary temperatures, they don’t require the extensive insulation around our vehicles’ hydrogen tanks, and thus save weight.”

Kirel said, “Still, it is criminal to waste petroleum by simply burning it when it may be put to so many more advantageous uses.”

“Truth. When the conquest is complete, we shall phase out this profligate technology,” Atvar said. “I might note, however, that our geologists believe Tosev 3 has more petroleum than any of the Empire’s other planets, perhaps more than all three put together, in part due to its anomalously large percentage of water surface area. But this takes us away from the point on account of which I summoned today’s assembly.”

“What is that point?” Three shiplords said it together. In other circumstances, the blunt question would, have come perilously close to insubordination. Now, though, Atvar was willing to forgive it.

“The point, assembled males, is that even on Tosev 3 petroleum is, as the shiplord Kirel said, a precious and relatively uncommon commodity,” the fleetlord answered. “It is not found worldwide. The empire, or rather the not-empire, of Deutschland, for example, has but one primary source of petroleum, that being in the subordinate empire called Romania.” He used a hologram to show the shiplords where Romania lay, and where inside its boundaries sat the underground petroleum pool.

“A question, Exalted Fleetlord?” called Shonar, a male of Kirel’s faction. He waited for Atvar to recognize him, then said, “Shall we be required to occupy the petroleum-producing regions not already under our control? That could prove expensive in terms of both males and munitions.”

“It will not be necessary,” Atvar declared. “In some instances, we need not even attack the areas where petroleum comes from the ground. As I noted before, the Big Uglies burn not just petroleum in their vehicles, but rather distillates of petroleum. The facilities which produce those distillates are large and prominent. Identify and destroy them and we have destroyed the Tosevites’ ability to resist. Is this clear?”

By the excited hisses and squeaks that came from the assembled shiplords, it was. Atvar wished the Race had found this strategy as soon as the conquest began. Wish as he would, though, he could not blame anyone too severely: Tosev 3 was simply so different from what the Race had expected to find that his technical staff had needed a while to figure out what was important and what wasn’t. Now-he hoped-they had.

“By a year from now,” he said, “Tosev 3 shall be under our claws.” The males in the conference chamber gobbled and hooted. The Race’s applause filled Atvar with a warm glow of pride. He might yet go down in the annals of his people as Atvar the Conqueror, subduer of Tosev 3.

The shiplords took up a chant: “May it be so! May it be so!” At first, Atvar took that as an expression of confident expectation. After a moment, though, he realized it could also have another meaning: if the Race hadn’t conquered the Big Uglies within the coming year, how much trouble would it face by that year’s end?

Grinding through the air high above the Isle of Wight, George Bagnall thought he could see forever. The day was, for once, brilliantly clear. As the Lancaster wheeled through another of its patrol circuits, the English Channel, France across it, and England were in turn spread out before him like successive examples of the cartographer’s craft.

“Wonder how they ever made maps and got the shapes right back before they could fly over them and see the way they were supposed to look,” he said.

In the pilot’s seat beside him, Ken Embry grunted. “I wonder what it looks like to the Lizards. They get up high enough to take in the whole world at a glance.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” the flight engineer said. “It would be something to see, wouldn’t it?” He was filled with sudden anger that the Lizards had a privilege denied mankind. Under the anger, he realized, lay pure and simple envy.

“We’ll just have to make the best of what we’ve got.” Embry leaned forward against the restraint of his belts, pointed down toward the gray-blue waters of the Channel. “What do you make of that ship, for instance?”

“What do you think I am, a bloody spotter?” But Bagnall leaned forward, too. “It’s a submarine, by God,” he said in surprise. “Submarine on the surface in the Channel… one of ours?”

“I’d bet it is,” Embry said. “Lizards or no Lizards, somehow I don’t think Winnie is dead keen on having U-boats slide past the skirts of the home islands.”

“Can’t blame him for that.” Bagnall took another look. “Westbound,” he observed. “Wonder if it’s carrying something interesting for the Yanks.”

“There’s a thought. Lizards aren’t much when it comes to sea business, are they? I expect a sub’d be all the harder for them to take out.” Embry leaned forward once more himself. “A bit of fun to guess, eh? Most days we’d be all swaddled in cotton batting up here and not,have the sport of it.”

“That’s true enough.” Now Bagnall twisted around in his chair to peer back into the bomb bay-which for some time had housed no bombs. “Most days Goldfarb has a better view of the world than we do. Radar cares nothing for clouds: it peers right through them.”

“So it does,” Embry. said. “On the other band, given the choice of jobs, I’d sooner peep out through the Perspex on a scene like this-or even on the usual clouds, come to that-than be stuck in the bowels of the aircraft watching electrons chase themselves.”

“You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “None whatevet But then, I dare say Goldfarb’s a bit of a queer bird all the way around. Fancy spending so long mooning after that barmaid Sylvia, finally getting her, and then throwing her aside bare days later.”

The pilot laughed goatishly. “Maybe she wasn’t as good as he’d hoped.”

“I doubt that.” Bagnall spoke from experience. “Never a dull moment there.”

“I’d have thought as much from her looks, but one can’t always judge by looks, enjoyable as it may be to try.” Embry shrugged. “Well, it’s not my affair, in either the literal or figurative sense of the word, and just as well, too. Speaking of Goldfarb, however…” He flicked the intercom switch. “Any sign of our scaly little chums, Radarman?”

“No, sir,” Goldfarb said. “Dead quiet here.”

“Dead quiet,” Embry repeated. “Do you know, I quite like the ring of that?”

“Yes, rather,” Bagnall said. “One more mission from which we have some reasonable hope of landing? The flight engineer chuckled, “We’ve been living so long on borrowed time by now that I sometimes entertain hopes we shan’t have to repay it one day.”

“Disabuse yourselves of those, my friend. The day they took the limit off the number of missions an aircrew could be ordered to fly, they signed our death warrants, and no mistake. The trick lies in evading the inevitable as long as one can.”

“After you got us down safe in France, I refuse to believe anything is impossible,” Bagnall said.

“I was at least as surprised at surviving that as you, believe me: nothing like a bit of luck, what?” Embry laughed. “But if the Lizards choose not to stir about for another couple of hours, I concede we shall have had an easy time of it today. We are orcasionally entitled to one such, don’t you think?”

The Lizards did stay quiet. At the appointed hour, Embry gratefully swung the Lanc back toward Dover. The return descent and landing were so smooth that the pilot said, “Thank you for flying BOAC today,” as the bulky bomber rolled to a stop. No commercial passengers, however, ever deplaned so rapidly as the men who flew with him.

As Bagnall scrambled out of the cockpit and down onto the tarmac, one of the groundcrew men gave him a cheeky grin.

“ ’Ere, you must’ve heard they’ve got the power on again, you’re out an’ ’eadin’ for the barracks so quick.”

“Have they?” The flight engineer stepped up his pace from quick to double-quick. All sorts of delightful visions danced in his head: light by which to read or play cards, an electric fire, a working hotplate on which to brew tea or heat water for a proper shave, a phonograph that spun… the possibilities seemed to stretch as far as the horizon had up in the Lancaster.

One that had entirely slipped his mind was listening to the BBC. Several weeks had gone by since the barracks last had power while the Beeb was on the air: the Lizards kept plastering the transmitter, trying to silence the human broadcast. Just hearing the newsreader made Bagnall once more feel part of a world larger than the airbase and its environs.

It had a different effect on David Goldfarb. “By God,” he said, cocking his head toward the wireless set, “I wish I could talk like that.”

Having a pretty fair public-school accent himself, Bagnall took the broadcaster’s smooth tones for granted. When it was pointed out to him, though, he could see how they’d rouse jealousy in the heart of one from London’s lower middle class: he was no Henry Higgins, but his ear pretty accurately placed Goldfarb.

The BBC man said, “We now present in its entirety a recording recently received in London from underground sources in Poland. The speaker is Mr. Moishe Russie, hitherto familiar to many as an apologist for the Lizards. A translation will follow.”

The recording began. Bagnall had a little German, but found it didn’t help much; unlike Russie’s previous propaganda broadcasts, this one was in Yiddish. The flight engineer wondered if he should ask Goldfarb what Russie was saying. Perhaps not; the Jewish radarman was humiliated at having a quisling for a cousin. Goldfarb plainly had no trouble following Russie without translation. He stared at the wireless set as if he could see his relative there. Every so often, his right fist would come down thump on his thigh.

In the brief moment of silence that followed the end of Russie’s statement, the radarman exclaimed, “Lies! I knew it was all lies!”

Before Bagnall could ask what was all lies, the BBC newsreader returned. “That was Mr. Moishe Russie,” he said, his voice even more mellow than usual when heard hard on the heels of Yiddish gutturals. “And now, as promised, the translation. Here is our staffer, Mr. Nathan Jacobi.”

A brief rustle of papers, then a new voice, just as cultured as the one that had gone before: “Mr. Russie spoke as follows: ‘My last broadcast for the Lizards was, a fraud from top to bottom. I was forced to speak with a gun to my head. Even then, the Lizards had to alter my words to force them into the meaning they desired. I categorically condemn their efforts to enslave mankind, and urge all possible resistance. Some may wonder why I ever spoke on their behalf. The answer is simple: their attack on Germany aided my people, whom the Nazis were murdering. When a folk is being slaughtered, even slavery seems a preferable alternative, and an enslaver can be looked upon with gratitude. But the Lizards have proved murderers, too, not just of Jews but of mankind in its entirety. God help each and every one of us find the strength and courage to resist them.”

After more rustlings, the first BBC man came back on the air: “That was Mr. Nathan Jacobi, translating into English Mr. Moishe Russie’s repudiation of recent statements he has made on behalf of the Lizards. This cannot fail to embarrass the alien invaders of our world, who see even their seemingly loyalest associates turn against their vicious and aggressive policies. The prime minister, Mr. Chuithill, has expressed his admiration for the courage required of Mr. Russie in making this repudiation and his hope that Mr. Russie will succeed in escaping the Lizards’ vengeance. In other news-”

David Goldfarb sighed deeply. “Nobody here has any notion of how fine that makes me feel,” he announced to the barracks at large.

“Oh, I think we might,” Ken Embry said. Bagnall had been about to say something along those lines himself, but decided the pilot’s understatement did the job for both of them.

Goldfarb laughed. “The British way of speaking used to drive my father mad. He learned English quick enough after he got over here, but he never has fathomed how people can get along without screaming at each other now and again, whether they’re angry or happy.”

“What do you think we are, a pack of bloody fishwives?” Bagnall did his best to sound deeply offended. The restrained public-school accent didn’t make it any easier.

“I was talking about him, not me,” Goldfarb said. “I can read between the lines, you might say, and I know what you mean. You’re a grand lot of chaps, every bloody one of you.” He laughed again. “And I know that’s more than a proper Englishman ought to say, but who says I’m proper? I wish I could get some leave; it’s been too damned long since I got to go home and shout at my relations.”

What a bizarre notion, Bagnall thought. Family ties were all very well, but the aircrew had largely replaced his relatives at the center of his life. Only after a few seconds did he think to wonder whether Goldfarb had something he lacked.

Through his interpreter, Adolf Hitler said, “Good day, Herr Foreign Commissar. I hope you slept well? Come in, come in; we have much of which to speak.”

“Thank you, Chancellor.” Vyacheslav Molotov followed Hitler into the small living room which had been part of the German leader’s Berchtesgaden retreat before that was incorporated into the grander Berghof surrounding it.

Molotov supposed being ushered into Hitler’s sanctum sanctorum was an honor. if so, he would willingly have forgone it. Everything in the room screamed petit-bourgeois at him: the overstuffed furniture with its old-German look, the rubber plants, the cactus-good heavens, the place even had a brass canary cage! Stalin would laugh when he heard about that.

Strewn here and there on the chairs and couches were embroidered pillows, most of them decorated with swastikas. Swastika-bedizened knickknacks crowded tables. Even Hitler looked embarrassed at their profusion. “I know they aren’t what you’d call lovely,” he said, waving at the display, “but the German women make them and send them to me, so I don’t like to throw them away.”

Petit-bourgeois sentimentality, too, Molotov thought scornfully. Stalin would also find that funny. The only sentiment Stalin had in him was a healthy regard for his own aggrandizement and that of the Soviet Union.

But the twisted romantic streak made Hitler more dangerous, not less, because it meant he acted in ways that could not be rationally calculated. His invasion of the USSR had sent Stalin into several days of shock before he began rallying Soviet resistance. Compared to German imperialism, that of the British and French was downright genteel.

Now, though, the whole world faced imperialism from aliens whose ancient economic and political systems were joined with a technology more than modern. Molotov had repeatedly gone through the words of Marx and Engels to try to grasp how such an anomaly could be, but without success. What was clear was that advanced capitalist (even fascist) and socialist societies had to do everything in their power to resist being thrown catastrophically backward in their development.

Hitler said, “You may thank General Secretary Stalin for sharing with Germany the possible explosive materials which were obtained by the combined German-Soviet fighting team.”

“I shall do so.” Molotov inclined his head in a precise nod. As well he had long schooled his features to reveal nothing, for they did not show Hitler the consternation he felt. So that damned German tankman had got through after all! That was very bad. Stalin had intended proffering the image of cooperation, not its substance. He would not be pleased.

Hitler went on, “The government of the Soviet Union is to be commended for thinking this explosive too valuable to be flown to Germany and letting it come by the overland route where even you, Herr Foreign Commissar, traveled here by air.”

The sarcasm there was enough to raise welts, not least because Molotov loathed flying of any sort and had been ordered by Stalin into the horrible little biplane that brought him to Germany. Pretending everything was serene, Molotov said, “Comrade Stalin solicited the advice of military experts and then followed it. He is of course delighted that your consignment reached you safely by the plan he devised.” A thumping lie, but how was Hitler supposed to call him on it, especially since the courier had somehow beaten the, odds of the journey?

But Hitler found a way: “Please tell Herr Stalin also that he would have done better to fly it here, as then we should not have had half of it hijacked by Jews.”

“What’s that?” Molotov said.

“Hijacked by Jews,” Hitler repeated, as if to a backward child. Molotov concealed his irritation in the same way he concealed everything not immediately relevant to the business at hand. Hitler gestured violently; his voice rose to an angry shout. “As the good German major was traversing Poland, he was halted at gunpoint by Jewish bandits who forced him to divest himself of half the precious treasure he was bringing to German science.”

This was news, and unsettling news, to Molotov. He could not resist a barb in return: “Had you not so tormented the Jews in the states your armies overcame, no doubt they would have been less eager to interfere with the courier.”

“But the Jews are parasites on the body of mankind,” Hitler said earnestly. “They have no culture of their own; the foundations of their situation of living are always taken from those around them. They completely lack the idealistic attitude, the will to contribute to the development of others. Look how they, more than anyone else, have cozied up to the Lizards’ back-sides.”

“Look why they have,” Molotov returned. His wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, was of Jewish blood, though he did not think Hitler knew that. “Anyone drowning will grab for a spar, no matter where he finds it.” So the British joined us in the fight against you, he thought. Aloud, he went on, “Besides, has not the Lizards’ former chief spokesman among the Polish Jews repudiated them and gone into hiding?”

Hitler waved that aside. “Aliens themselves in Europe, they find their fit place toadying to the worse aliens who now torment us.”

“What do you mean?” Molotov asked sharply. “Have they turned over to the Lizards the explosive metal they took from the courier? If so, I demand that you allow me to communicate with my government immediately.” Stalin would have to know at once that the Lizards knew for certain human beings were working to duplicate their much greater weapons so he could apply yet another layer of secrecy to his project.

“No, not even they were so depraved as that,” Hitler admitted; he sounded reluctant to make any concession, no matter how small.

“Well, what then? Did they keep it for themselves?” Molotov wondered what the Polish Jews would do if they had kept the explosive metal. Would they make a bomb and use it against the Lizards, or would they make one and use it against the Reich? That question would have been going through Hitler’s mind, too.

But the German leader shook his head. “They did not keep it, either. They are going to try to smuggle it to the fellow Jews in the United States.” Hitler’s little toothbrush mustache-quivered, as if he’d just smelled something rotten.

Molotov wondered how many of those Jews would have fled to the United States had the Nazis not forced them out of Germany and its allies. The tsars and their pogroms had done the same thing in pre-Communist Russia, and the present Soviet Union was the poorer for their shortsightedness. Molotov was too convinced an atheist to take any religion seriously as far as doctrine, but Jews tended to be both clever and well educated, valuable traits in any nation that aspired to build and grow.

With a scissorslike effort of will, the foreign minister snipped off those irrelevant threads of thought and returned to the matter at hand. He said, “I need to inform the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of this development.” It wasn’t as urgent as if the Lizards had learned what Stalin was up to, but it was important news. America, after all, not Germany or Britain, was the most powerful capitalist state and so the most likely future opponent of the Soviet Union… assuming such concerns kept their meaning in a world with Lizards init.

“Arrangements will be made for you to communicate,” Hitler said. “The telegraph through Scandinavia remains fairly reliable and fairly secure.”

“That will have to do,” Molotov said. Fairly reliable he could deal with; nothing could be expected to work perfectly. But fairly secure! The Nazis were bunglers indeed if they tolerated security that was only fair. Inside, where it did not show, the Soviet foreign minister smiled. The Germans had no idea how thoroughly agents of the USSR kept Stalin informed about everything they did.

“The nefarious Jews came close to preventing our brilliant Aryan scientists from having the amount of explosive metal with which they needed to work,” Hitler said. Molotov made a mental note of that; it meant the Americans also probably had a marginal quantity of the material-and it meant the Soviet Union had plenty. Stalin had a right to expect results from his own researchers, then.

But Hitler wasn’t thinking about that; what he had in mind was vengeance. “The Lizards must come first,” he said. “I admit this. They are the greatest present danger to mankind. But after them, we shall punish the Jewish traitors who, true to their nalure, aligned themselves with the alien against the Aryan essence of true creative humanity.”

His voice rose almost to a screech in that last sentence. Now, abruptly, it turned low, conspiratorial: “And you Russians owe the Poles a little something, eh?”

“What’s that?” Molotov said, caught off guard and stalling for time. Even though he needed the interpreter to follow Hitler’s words, he could hear the control the German leader had over his tone. That made him a formidable orator-certainly more effective there than Stalin, who was not only pedantic but had never lost his Georgian accent.

“Come, come,” Hitler said impatiently. “You must have heard the Lizards’ Polish collaborators going on about the so-called massacre of their officers at Katyn, trying to discredit the Soviet Union in the same way the Jews paint the Reich with a big black brush.”

“I do not trouble myself with the Lizards’ propaganda broadcasts,” Molotov said, which was true; he had underlings listen to them for him. As for Katyn, he thought, the Poles had little to fuss about. After the Soviets reannexed the eastern half of Poland (which had, after all, belonged to Russia for more than a century before the chaos of the Revolution broke it loose and let Pilsudski establish his fascist state there), what were they to do with the reactionary officers who had fallen into their hands? Turn them loose and let them foment rebellion? Not likely! By Soviet standards, getting rid of those few thousand unreliables was but a small purge.

Hitler said, “Both your government and mine have reason to be unhappy with those who dwell in the anomalous territory of Poland. We were wise to divide it between ourselves once. When the Lizards are dealt with, we can join in punishing the inhabitants of that land to the full extent they deserve.”

“By which you mean with bombs of this explosive metal?” Molotov asked. Hitler nodded. Molotov said, “I cannot view this proposal favorably. Our scientists report the wind spreads poisons from these weapons over an area far broader than the site of the explosion itself. And since the prevailing winds are from west to east, the Soviet Union would be adversely affected by this, devastation, however much the Poles may deserve it.”

“Well, we can discuss it further at another time.” Hitler sounded casual but looked unhappy. Had he expected Molotov to cooperate in devastating his own country? Maybe he had; the Germans had even less use for Russians than they did, for Poles. But Russian scientists and engineers had already shown themselves better than the Nazis expected a great many times.

“No, let us discuss it now,” Molotov said. Hitler looked unhappier yet, as he had back in 1940 when Molotov demanded specifics on the workings of the German-Soviet nonaggression treaty. No wonder he’d looked unhappy then; he was already plotting the Nazi attack on the USSR. What was he plotting now? The Soviet foreign minister repeated, “Let us discuss it now. Let us assume, for example, that we manage to defeat the Lizards completely. What then will be the proper relations, what then will be the proper boundaries between the German Reich and the Soviet Union? Both I and General Secretary Stalin await your reply to this question with great interest.”

The interpreter stumbled a couple of times in translating that; perhaps he tried to shade its bluntness. Hitler gave Molotov a baleful stare. His German toadies did not talk to him like that (for that matter, had Molotov talked to Stalin that way, he would have vanished within days, perhaps within minutes).

“If the Lizards are completely defeated, we will then review our relations with the Soviet Union, as with all nations of the world,” the Fuhrer answered. “How they are defeated will obviously have a great deal to do with the nature of that review.”

Molotov started to complain that Hitler hadn’t really said anything, but left those words unuttered. The Nazi leader had a point. Who did what to beat the Lizards would play a role in what the world looked like after they were beaten… if they were beaten.

Not a complaint, Molotov decided-a warning. “You must be aware of one thing,” he told Hitler, who assumed an apprehensive expression, as if a dentist had just announced he needed more work. Molotov went on, “Your earlier remark indicated that you hoped to exploit Soviet ignorance of these explosive-metal bombs. This behavior is intolerable, and makes me understand how and why the Jews of Poland preferred the Lizards’ yoke to yours. We have need of one another now, but Comrade Stalin will never again trust you, as he did after August 1939.”

“I never trusted your pack of Jews and Bolsheviks,” Hitler shouted. “Better to be under the hissing Lizards than the red flag.” His whole body quivered. Molotov braced himself to endure a ranting speech like those that came hissing and popping out of the world’s shortwave sets. But then, with an almost physical effort of will, Hitler made himself be calm. “Living alongside the red flag, however, may yet be possible. As you say, Herr Molotov, we have need of each other.”

“Da,” Molotov said. He’d pushed Hitler hard, as Stalin had ordered, and the German still seemed to think cooperation-even if on his own terms wherever possible-a better gamble than any other.

“On one thing I think we can agree,” Hitler persisted: “when all this is done, the map of Europe need no longer be stained by what has been miscalled the nation of Poland.”

“Perhaps not. Its existence has sometimes been inconvenient for the Soviet Union as well as Germany,” Molotov said. “Where would you place the boundary between German and Soviet control? On the line our two states established in 1939?”

Hitler looked pained. Well he might, Molotov thought with a frosty smile. The Nazis had overrun Soviet-occupied Poland in the first days of their treacherous attack; their line ran hundreds of kilometers to the east when the Lizards came. But if they were serious about working with the USSR, they would have to pay a price.

“As I said before, precise details can be worked out come the day,” Hitler said. “For now, let me ask again if we agree in painciple: first the Lizards, then the Untemenschen between us?”

“In principle, yes,” Molotov said, “but as with all principles, details of implementation are critical. I might also note in passing-speaking of principles-that in times past German propaganda has frequently identified the people and Communist Party of the USSR as subhuman. This produces yet another difficulty in harmonious relations between our two nations.”

“When we announce that you and I have conferred, we shall make no such statements,” Hitler assured him. “You and I both know that what one advances for purposes of propaganda is often irrelevant to one’s actual beliefs.”

“That is certainly true,” Molotov said. The example that flashed through his mind was all the pro-German material his own government had pumped out in the year and ten months before June 22, 1941. The converse also applied, but he had no doubts about where the Nazis’ sincere feelings lay.

Hitler said, “You will of course take lunch with me.”

“Thank you,” Molotov said resignedly. The meal proved as abstemious as he’d expected: beef broth, a dry breast of pheasant (Hitler did not touch his portion), and a salad. The Fuhrer kept his personal life simple. That did not, however, make him any more comfortable to deal with.”

“I haven’t ridden on a hay wagon, since I got off the farm,” Sam Yeager said as the wagon in question rolled west on U.S. 10 into the outskirts of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. “And I haven’t been through here since-was it ’27? ’28? something like that-when I was in the Northern League and we’d swing through on the way from Fargo to Duluth.”

“Duluss I know, for we get off horrible boat thing there,” said Ristin, who huddled in the wagon beside him, “but what is-Fargo?” The Lizard POW made the name sound like a Bronx cheer.

“Medium-sized town, maybe fifty miles west of where we are,” Yeager’ answered.

Barbara Larssen rode in the wagon, too, though she sat as far away from him as she could. Still, her voice was casual as she asked, “Is there any place in the United States you haven’t been, one time or another?”

“I haven’t been up through the Northeast much-New York, New England. The towns there, they either belong to the International League or the bigs, and I never made it there.” Yeager spoke without bitterness, simply stating a fact.

Barbara nodded. Yeager cautiously watched her. After those frenzied couple of minutes in her cabin on the Caledonia, he hadn’t touched her, not even to help her in or out of a wagon. She hadn’t spoken to him at all the first three days they were on the ship, and only in monosyllables the fourth. But since they’d unloaded at Duluth and started the slow plod west, she’d traveled in the same part of the wagon convoy as he did, and the last couple of days in the same wagon. Yesterday she’d talked more with Ullhass and Ristin than with him, but today everything seemed-well, not quite all right, but at least not too bad.

He looked around. The low, rolling hills were white with snow; it also covered the ice that sealed northern Minnesota’s countless lakes. “It’s not like this in summer,” he said. “Everything’s smooth and green, and the lakes sparkle like diamonds when the sun hits them at the right angle. The fishing is good around these parts-walleyes, pike, pickerel. I hear they fish here in the wintertime, too, cut holes in the ice and drop a line down. I don’t see much sport in going out and freezing when you don’t have to, myself.”

“So much water,” Ullhass said, turning one eye turret to the left and the other to the right. “It seems not natural.”

“It seems not natural to me, too,” Barbara said, “I’m from California, and the idea of fresh water just lying around all over the place strikes me as very strange. The ocean is all right, but fresh water? Forget it.”

“Ocean is not natural, too,” Ullhass insisted. “Have seen pictures of Tosev 3-this world-from-what do you say-outer space, yes? Looks all water, sometimes. Looks wrong.” He emphasized the last word with the emphatic cough.

“Seeing Earth from space,” Yeager said dreamily. How long would it have been before men managed that? In his lifetime? Maybe.

On the north shore of Detroit Lake, a little south of the actual town of Detroit Lakes, stood a tourist camp with cabins and picnic benches and a couple of bigger resort hotels, all looking much forlorn half a year out of the season for which they were built. “This place just buzzes in July,” Yeager said. “They have themselves a summer carnival that won’t quit, with floats and swimming and diving, races for canoes, races for speedboats, bathing beauties-”

“Yes, you’d like that,” Barbara murmured.

Sam’s ears got hot, but he gamely went on with what he’d been about to say: “-and all the beer a man could drink, even though it was still Prohibition when I went through here. I don’t know if they brought it down from Canada or brewed it themselves, but the whole team got blitzed-’course, we didn’t call it that back then. Good thing the road back to Fargo ran straight and flat, or the bus driver would’ve killed us all, I expect.”

Though the cabins were intended for summer use, several of them were open now, with wagons pulled up alongside. Barbara pointed. “Some of those aren’t from our convoy; they’re in the group that came by way of Highway 34.”

“Good to see they’ve made it here,” Yeager said. The refugees from the Met Lab hadn’t traveled west across Minnesota all together, for fear such a large wagon train would bring Lizard aircraft down on them. In some places, though, the roads came together. Detroit Lakes was a scheduled layover point.

The wagon driver looked back from his team of plodding horses and said, “Look at all the firewood the people round about here got chopped for us. It’s like, if they’d known we were coming, they’d’ve baked a cake.”

When he got down from the wagon, Yeager discovered the locals had baked a cake. In fact, they’d baked a lot of cakes-though some, he noted, were made from potato flour, and none had any frosting. But such details were soon lost in a great profusion of eggs and turkey, steaks and fried chickens, legs of lamb… he lost track of what he was eating as he stuffed himself. “After so long living out of tin cans in Chicago, I almost forgot they made spreads like this,” he said to a Detroit Lakes man who carried around yet another platter of drumsticks.

“We’ve got more than we know what to do with, when it comes to livestock,” the fellow answered. “We used to ship all the way to the East Coast before the damned Lizards came. Now everything’s just bottled up here. We’ll run short of feed before too long, and have to really start slaughtering, but for now we’re still fat. Happy to share with you folks. It’s a Christian thing to do… even for those critters.”

With undisguised curiosity, the local watched Ristin and Ullhass eat. The Lizards had manners, though not identical to those of Earthlings. Their technique for eating a drumstick was to stab it with a fork, hold it up to their snouts, and then nibble off bits. Every so often, their forked tongues would come out to clean grease off their hard, immobile lips.

Wagons kept coming into Detroit City every fifteen or twenty minutes; they’d been widely spread out to minimize damage from any air strikes that did descend on them (so far, none had, for which Yeager was heartily grateful-coming under air attack once was a thousand times too many). The natives greeted each one as if it held the Prodigal Son.

When shelters were assigned, Yeager found himself with a double cabin that had been altered in advance for use by him and his alien charges. Each of the two rooms had its own wood-burning stove and a bountiful supply of fuel-by now, Ullhass and Ristin knew how to keep a fire going. The windows on the Lizards’ side had boards nailed across them to prevent escape (though Yeager was willing to bet they wouldn’t have tried to run away from their heater). The connecting door between the rooms opened only from his side.

He got Ullhass and Ristin settled for the evening, then went back to his own half of the cabin. It wasn’t luxuriously furnished a table with a kerosene lantern, clothes tree, slop bucket (better that, he thought, than going to an outhouse in the middle of the night-it’d probably freeze right off), cot piled high with extra blankets. So it isn’t the Biltmore, he thought. It’ll do.

He sat down on the cot. He wished he had something to read-an Astounding, by choice. He wondered what had happened to Astounding since the Lizards came; the last issue he’d seen was the one he’d been reading the day the train down from Madison got shot up. But science fiction wouldn’t be the same now that real live bug-eyed (or at least chameleon-eyed) monsters were loose on Earth and bent on conquest.

He bent down to untie his shoes, the only item of clothing he intended to take off tonight. He’d grown so used to sleeping in his uniform to stay warm that doing anything else was starting to seem unnatural.

He’d just grabbed a shoelace when someone scratched at the door. “Who’s that?” Yeager wondered out loud. It had to be something to do with the Lizards, he thought, but whatever it was, couldn’t it wait till morning? The scratching came again. Evidently it couldn’t. Muttering under his breath, he got up and opened the door. “Oh,” he said. It wasn’t anything to do with the Lizards. It was Barbara Larssen.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said again, and then, “Sure. You’d better, in fact, or all the heat will get out.”

There was no place to sit but the cot, so that was where she sat. After what had happened on the Caledonia and the way she’d acted since, Yeager didn’t know if he ought to sit down beside her. With the instincts of a man who automatically moved back a few steps to prevent the extra-base hit in the late innings, he decided to play safe. He paced back and forth in front of the stove.

Barbara watched him for a few seconds, then said, “It’s all right, Sam. I don’t think you’re going to molest me. That’s what I wanted to talk about with you, anyway.”

Yeager perched cautiously near the head of the cot, at the opposite end from Barbara. “What is there to talk about?” he said. “It was just one of those crazy things that happens sometimes. if you want to pretend it never did-” He started to finish with that’s all right. But it wasn’t, not quite. He tried a different phrase: “You can.” That was better.

“No. I owe you an apology.” She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the worn, grayish-yellow boards of the floor. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did afterward. I’m sorry. It’s just that after we-did it, I really realized Jens is, is dead, he has to be dead, and that all came down on me at once. I am sorry.” She covered her face with her hands. After a few seconds, he realized she was crying.

He slid down the cot toward her, put a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She stiffened at his touch, but then spun half around and buried her face against his chest. His arms could hardly help folding around her. “It’s okay,” he said, not knowing whether it was okay or not, not even knowing whether she heard him or not. “It’s okay.”

After a while, her sobs subsided to hiccups. She pushed herself away from him, then reached into her purse and dabbed at herself with a hanky. She ruefully shook her head. “I must look like hell.”

Sam considered that. Tears still glistened on her cheeks and brimmed in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any mascara or shadow to streak and run. If her face was puffy from crying, it didn’t show in the lantern light. But even if it had, so what? “Barbara, you, look real good to me,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”

“Have you?” she said. “You didn’t really let on, not until-”

“Wasn’t my place to,” he answered, and stopped there.

“Not as long as there was any hope Jens was still alive, you mean,” she said, filling it in for him. He nodded. Her face twisted, but she forced it back to steadiness. “You’re a gentleman, Sam, do you know?”

“Me? I don’t know anything about that. All I know is-” He stopped again. What had started to come out of his mouth was, All I know is baseball, and I’ve spun my wheels there for too damn many years. That was true, but it wasn’t what Barbara needed to hear right now. He gave another try: “All I know is, I’ll try to be good for you if that’s what you want me to do.”

“Yes, that’s what I want,” she said seriously. “Times like these, nobody can get through by himself. If we don’t help each other, hold onto each other, what’s the use of anything?”

“You’ve got me.” He’d been on the road by himself for a lot of years. But he hadn’t really been alone: he’d always had the team, the pennant race, the hope (though that had faded) of moving up-substitutes for family, goal, and dreams.

He shook his head. No matter how deeply baseball had dug its claws into his soul, this was not the time to be thinking about it. Still wary, still a little unsure, he put his arms around Barbara again. She looked at the floor and let out such a long sigh, he almost let go. But then she shook her head; he had a pretty good idea what she was telling herself to forget. She tilted her face up to his.

Later, he asked, “Do you want me to blow out the lamp?”

“Whichever way you’d like,” she answered. She was probably less shy about undressing with it burning than he was; he reminded himself she was used to being with a man. They got under the covers together, not for modesty but for warmth.

Later still, after they’d warmed themselves enough to kick most of the blankets onto the floor, they lay with their arms wrapped around each other. The cot was so narrow it gave them little choice about that. Yeager ran a hand down Barbara’s back, learning the shape and feel of her. There hadn’t been time for that aboard the Caledonia; there hadn’t been time for anything except raw, driving lust. He’d never known anything to match that, maybe not even the night he lost his cherry, but this was pretty fine, too. It felt somehow more certain, as if he could be sure it would last.

Barbara’s breasts slid against his chest as she leaned up on one elbow. She lay between him and the lamp, so her face was full of shadow. When she spoke, though, her words weren’t quite what he thought of as romantic: “Do you want to see if you can buy some rubbers tomorrow, Sam? This place seems in good shape; the drugstore may still have a supply.”

“Uh, okay,” he said, taken aback. She was indeed used to being with a man, he thought. He did his best to sound matter-of-fact as he went on, “Probably a good idea.”

“Certainly a good idea,” she corrected. “We’re all right about the first time-I know-and I don’t mind taking a chance now and again, but if we’re going to be making love a lot, we’d better be careful. I don’t want to be expecting going cross-country in a wagon train.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’ll try and find some. Uh-what happens if I don’t?” He wished he hadn’t said that. It would make her think he only wanted to lay her. He did want to lay her, but he’d learned you seldom got anywhere treating a woman like a piece of meat, especially not a woman like this, who’d been married to a physicist and had plenty of brains herself.

He was in luck-she didn’t get mad. Her hand wandered now, or rather moved, for she knew where it was going. It closed on him. “If you don’t,” she said, “we’ll just have to figure out something else to do.” She squeezed gently.

He couldn’t decide whether he wanted some Detroit Lakes drugstore to have rubbers or not.

Behind Mutt Daniels, the Preemption House was burning. His heart felt like breaking for several reasons. It was always sad to see history go up in smoke, and the two-story Greek Revival frame building had been one of Naperville, Illinois’, prides since 1834. More immediately, it was far from the only burning building in Naperville. Mutt didn’t see how the Army could hold the town-and there wasn’t a hell of a lot behind Naperville but Chicago itself.

And more immediately still, the Preemption House had been Naperville’s leading saloon. Daniels hadn’t been in town long, but he’d managed to liberate a fifth of good bourbon. He wore three stripes on his sleeves these days; just as kids had looked to him on how to be ballplayers, now he had to show them how to be soldiers. These days he borrowed his precepts from Sergeant Schneider instead of his own old managers.

Every half a minute or so, another liquor bottle inside the Preemption House would cook off, like a round inside a burning tank. Looking back, Mutt saw little blue alcohol flames flickering among the big lusty red ones from the burning timbers. He sighed and said, “Hell of a waste.”

“You bet, Sarge,” said the private beside him, a little four-eyed fellow named Kevin Donlan, who, by his looks, would probably start shaving one day fairly soon. Donlan went on, “That building must be more than a hundred years old.”

Daniels sighed again. “I wasn’t thinkin’ so much about the building.”

A whistling roar in the sky, growing fast, made both men dive for the nearest trench. The shell went off above ground level fragments hissed through the air. So did other things that pattered and bounced off the hard ground like hailstones.

“You gotta watch where you put your feet now, son,” Daniels said. “That bastard just spit out a bunch o’ little bombs or mines or whatever you want to call ’em. First saw those out around Shabbona. You step on one, you’ll walk like Peg-Leg Pete in the, Disney cartoons the rest of your days.”

More shells rained down; more of the little rolling mines scattered from them. A couple went off with short, unimpressive cracks, hardly louder than the screams that followed them, “They keep throwin’ those at us, we ain’t gonna be able to move around at all, Sergeant Daniels,” Donlan said.

“That’s the idea, son,” Mutt said dryly. “They pound on us for a while, freeze us in place like this, then they bring in the tanks and take the ground away from us. If they had more tanks, they’d’ve finished kickin’ our butts a long time ago.”

Donlan-hadn’t seen close-up action yet, he’d joined the squad during the retreat from Aurora. He said, “How can those things beat on us like this? They ain’t even human.”

“One of the things you better understand right quick, kid, is that a bullet or a shell, it don’t care who shot it or who gets in the way,” Daniels said. “Besides, the Lizards got plenty o’ balls of their own. I know the radio keeps callin’ ’em ‘push-button soldiers’ to make it sound like all their gadgets is what’s whuppin’ us and keep the civilians cheerful, but don’t let anybody tell you they can’t fight.”

The artillery barrage went on and on. Mutt endured it, as he’d endured similar poundings in France. In a way, France had been worse. Each of the Lizards’ shells was a lot more deadly than the ones the Boches had thrown, but the Germans had thrown a lot of shells, so it sometimes seemed whole steel mills were falling out of the sky on top of the American trenches. Men would go mad from that-shell shock, they called it. This bombardment was more likely to kill you, but it probably wouldn’t drive you nuts.

Through a pause in the shelling, Daniels heard running feet behind him. He swung around with his tommy gun-maybe the Lizards had used their whirligig flying machines to land troops behind human lines again.

But it wasn’t a Lizard: it was a gray-haired colored fellow in blue jeans and a beat-up overcoat running along Chicago Avenue with a big wicker basket under one arm. A couple of shells burst perilously close to him. He yelped and jumped into the trench with Daniels and Donlan.

Mutt looked at him. “Boy, you are one crazy nigger, runnin’ around in the open with that shit fallin’ all around you.”

He didn’t mean anything particularly bad by his words; in Mississippi, he was used to talking to Negroes that way. But this wasn’t Mississippi, and the colored man glared at him before answering, “I’m not a boy and I’m not a nigger, but I guess maybe I am crazy if I thought I could bring some soldiers fried chicken without getting myself called names.”

Mutt opened his mouth, closed it again. He didn’t know what to do. He’d hardly ever had a Negro talk back to him, not even up here in the North. Smart Negroes knew their place… but a smart Negro wouldn’t have braved shellfire to bring him food. Braved was the word, too; Daniels didn’t want to be anywhere but here under cover.

“I think maybe I’ll shut the fuck up,” he remarked to nobody in particular. He started to address the black man directly, but found himself brought up short-what did he call him? Boy wouldn’t do it, and Uncle wasn’t likely to improve matters, either. He couldn’t bring himself to say Mister. He tried something else: “Friend, I do thank you.”

“I’m no friend of yours,” the Negro said. He might have added a couple of choice phrases himself, but he had an overcoat and his basket, of chicken to set against Daniels’ stripes and tommy gun. And Mutt had, after a fashion, apologized. The colored man sighed and shook his head. “What the hell’s the use? Here, come on, feed yourselves.”

The chicken was greasy, the baked potatoes that went with it cold and savorless without salt or butter. Daniels wolfed everything down anyhow. “You gotta eat when you get the chance,” he told Kevin Donlan, “on account of you ain’t gonna get the chance as often as you want to.”

“You bet, Sarge.” The kid wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He took his own tack in talking to the Negro: “That was great, Colonel. A real lifesaver.”

“Colonel?” The colored fellow spat in the dirt of the trench.

“You know damn well I’m not a colonel. Why don’t you just call me by my name? I’m Charlie Sanders, and you could have found it out by askin’.”

“Charlie, that was good chicken,” Mutt said solemnly “I’m obliged.”

“Huh,” Sanders said. Then he scrambled up out of the trench and dashed away toward the next couple of foxholes maybe thirty yards off.

“Watch out for them little mine things the Lizard shells throw around,” Daniels yelled after him. He turned back to Donlan. “Hope he makes it. He keeps goin’ all around like that, though, his number’s gonna come up pretty damn quick.”

“Yeah.” Donlan peered over in the direction Charlie Sanders had run. “That takes guts. He doesn’t even have a gun. I didn’t think niggers had guts like that.”

“You’re under shellfire, son, it don’t matter if you’ve got a gun,” Mutt answered. But that wasn’t the point, and he knew it. After a while, he went on, “One of my grandfathers, I misremember which one right now, he fought against colored troops one time in the States War. He said they weren’t no different than any other damnyankees. Maybe he was right. Me, I don’t know anything any more.”

“But you’re a sergeant,” Donlan said, in exactly the same tone some of Daniels’ ballplayers had used in exclaiming, But you’re the manager.

Mutt sighed. “Just on account of I’m supposed to have all the answers, son, that don’t mean I can pull ’em out from under my tin hat whenever you need ’em. Hell, come to that, it don’t even mean they’re really there. You get as old as I am, you ain’t sure o’ nothin’ no more.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Donlan said. By the way things were going, Mutt thought, the kid didn’t have much chance of getting that old.

“No,” General Patton said. “Hell, no.”

“But, sir”-Jens Larssen spread his hands and assumed an injured expression-“all I want to do is get in touch with my wife, let her know I’m alive.”

“No,” Patton repeated. “No, repeat no, traffic about the Metallurgical Laboratory or any of its personnel save in direst emergency-from which personal matters of any sort are specifically excluded. Those are my direct orders from General Marshall, Dr. Larssen, and I have no intention of disobeying them. That is the most basic security precaution for any important project, let alone one of this magnitude. Marshall has told me next to nothing about the project, and I do not wish to acquire more information: I have not the need to know, and therefore should not-must not-know.”

“But Barbara’s not even with the Met Lab,” Jens protested.

“Indeed not, but you are,” Patton said. “Are you so soft that you would betray the hope of the United States to the Lizards for the sake of your own convenience? By God, sir, I hope you are not.”

“I don’t see how one message constitutes a betrayal,” Larssen said. “Odds are the Lizards wouldn’t even notice it.”

“Possible,” Patton admitted. He got up from behind his desk and stretched, which also gave him the advantage of staring down at Jens. “Possible, but not likely. If the Lizards’ doctrine is at all like ours-and I’ve seen no reason to doubt that-they monitor as many of our signals as they can, and try to shape them into informative patterns. I speak from experience, sir, when I say that no one-no one-can know in advance which piece of the jigsaw puzzle will reveal enough for the enemy to form the entire picture in his mind.”

Jens knew about security; the Met Lab had had large doses of it. But he’d never been subject to military discipline, so he kept arguing: “You could send a message without my name on it, just ‘Your husband is alive and well’ or something like that.”

“No; your request is refused,” Patton said. Then, as if reading Larssen’s mind, he added, “Any attempt to ignore what I have just said and inveigle a signals officer into clandestinely sending such a message will result in your arrest and confinement, if not worse. I remind you I have military secrets of my own here, and I shall not permit you to compromise them. Do I make myself quite clear?”

“Yes, sir, you do,” Larssen said dejectedly. He’d been all set to try to find a sympathetic radioman no matter what Patton said; he still didn’t believe such an innocuous message would have blown the Met Lab’s cover. But he couldn’t gauge how much outgoing, messages might endanger the offensive still building here in western Indiana. That had to succeed, too, or nothing that happened in Chicago would matter, because Chicago would belong to the Lizards.

“If it helps at all, Dr. Larssen, you have my sympathy,” Patton said.

In a gruff sort of way, he probably even meant it, Jens thought. He said, “Thank you, General,” and walked out of Patton’s office.

Outside, the ground was mottled with melting snow and clumps of yellowish dead grass. Thick low yellow-gray clouds rolled by overhead, The wind came from out of the northwest, and carried a nip that quickly started to turn Jens’ beaky nose to an icicle. It had all the makings of a winter storm, but no snow fell.

His thoughts as gloomy as the weather, Larssen walked on in Oxford, Indiana. Potemkin village ran through his mind. From the air, the, little town undoubtedly seemed as quiet as any other gasoline-starved hamlet in the Midwest. But concealed by houses and garages, haystacks and woodpiles, gathered armored forces plenty, Jens thought, to give the Nazis pause. The only trouble was, they faced worse foes than mere Germans.

Larssen stepped into the Bluebird Cafe. A couple of locals and a couple, of soldiers in civvies (nobody not, in civvies was allowed on the streets of Oxford-security again, Jens thought) sat at the counter. Behind it, the cook made pancakes on a wood-burning griddle instead of his now useless gas range. The griddle wasn’t vented; smoke filled the room. He looked over his shoulder at Larssen. “Waddaya want, mac?”

“I know what I want: how about a broiled lobster tail with drawn butter, asparagus in hollandaise sauce, and crisp green salad? Now, what do you have?”

“Good luck with the lobster, buddy,” the cook said. “What I got is flapjacks here, powdered eggs, and canned pork and beans. You don’t fancy that, go fishing.”

“I’ll take it,” Jens said. It was what he’d been eating ever since that wonderful chicken dinner with General Patton. He wasn’t as skinny as he had been when the Army scooped him up, but he’d long since sworn he’d never look a baked bean in the eye again if and when the war ever ended.

The only virtue he could find to the meal was that he didn’t have to pay for it. Patton had taken over the handful of eateries in town and incorporated them into his commissary department. Larssen supposed that was fair, without the supplies they drew from the Army, they’d long since have closed down.

The better to conceal his soldiers, Patton had also billeted them on the townsfolk. As far as Jens knew, he hadn’t asked anybody for permission before he did it, either. If Patton worried about that, he didn’t let on. Maybe he had a point, the Founding Fathers hadn’t anticipated an invasion from outer space.

But if you started fiddling with the Constitution and pleading military necessity, where would you stop? Jens wished he’d been in a better position to take that up with Patton. It might have made an interesting philosophical discussion if the general hadn’t been steamed at him for trying to get a message to Barbara. As things were, Patton would either roar at him or ignore him, neither of which constituted an enlightened exchange of views.

“Anybody got a cigarette?” asked one of the soldiers in civvies.

The only answer Larssen expected to that was a hoarse laugh, and the soldier got one. Then a civilian, a leathery fellow in a hunting cap who had to be pushing seventy, looked the kid over and drawled, “Son, even if I did have one, you ain’t pretty enough to give me what I’d want for it.”

The young soldier turned the color of the fire under the griddle. The cook solemnly sketched a hash mark in the air. Larssen whistled. The old-timer let out a dry chuckle to show he wasn’t all that impressed with his own wit, then returned to his cup of what the Army called, for lack of a suitable term of opprobrium, coffee.

High overhead, above the clouds, a Lizard jet flew by, its wail thin and fading with distance. Larssen’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He wondered how well the aliens’ sensors, whatever they were, could peer through the gray mass that shielded Oxford and the countryside around it from the sky and how well Patton had managed to hide the carefully husbanded gear here. He’d know soon enough.

In one corner of the cafe stood a broken pinball machine, the mournful word TILT permanently on display. Since that constituted the place’s entire potential for entertaimnent, Jens handed his plate and cutlery back to the cook and went out onto the street.

The wind had picked up while he ate. He was glad for his overcoat. His nose was also relieved at the fresh air. Full of soldiers as it was and without much working plumbing, Oxford had become an odorous place. If the buildup here went on a little longer, the Lizards wouldn’t need visual reconnaissance to find their human foes: their noses would do the job for them.

Something stung Jens on the cheek. By reflex he brought up his hand, but felt only a tiny patch of moisture. Then he got stung again, this time on the wrist. He looked down, saw a fat white snowflake melting away to nothingness. More slipped and slid wildly through the air, jitterbug dancers made of ice.

For a moment, he just watched. The start of a snowfall always took him back to his Minnesota childhood, to snowmen and snow angels and snowballs knocking stocking caps off heads. Then the present rose up and smote nostalgia. This snow had nothing to do with childhood’s pleasures. This snow meant attack.