In the Balance

3

The Kukuruznik’s engine complained about the thin air it was breathing; at four thousand meters, it was way over its proper cruising altitude-up near its ceiling, as a matter of fact. Ludmila Gorbunova’s lungs complained, too. The little biplane was not equipped with oxygen, and even sitting in the cockpit made her feel as if she’d just finished a twenty-kilometer run.

She would have gone higher if she could, though. At such a height, the U-2 was hardly more than a speck in the sky-but the Lizards were proving even more skilled than the fascists at spotting such specks and knocking them down.

Ludmila did not even try to fly directly over the new invaders’ base. Planes that did that quite simply never came back. The base, a giant ringworm on the smooth skin of the steppe, was visible enough even at the greater distance an oblique view gave.

She counted the huge flying towers that formed the perimeter of the base, shook her head, counted them again. She still got twenty-seven. That was four more than she’d spotted on her last flight, the day before yesterday. From four thousand meters, most things on the ground looked tiny as ants. The towers, though, still bulked large, their shadows darkening great strips of grassland.

They were large, too; from them poured the impossibly deadly planes and tanks that were wresting great tracts of land not only from the. Russians who owned it but from the Germans as well Ludmila still did not know how to feel about that. She hated the Germans with all her soul, but against them one could contend with hope of victory. How could mere men fight the Lizards and their marvels?

Mere men kept trying. Even now, if the radio was to be believed, Soviet tank columns were engaging the Lizards’ armor and pushing, it back in disarray. Ludmila wondered if anyone believed the radio any more. The year before, the radio had said the Germans were being pushed back from Minsk, then from Kiev, then from Smolensk…

Such thoughts were dangerous. Ludmila knew that, too. The purges of the thirties had swept through Kiev as they had everywhere else in the Soviet Union. One day a teacher would be there, the next day vanished. You learned not to ask where he’d gone, not unless you wanted to join him there.

Ludmila shook her head, as if to drive the worries out of it. She peered down at the ground again, squinted to sharpen her vision as much as she could. That plume of dust there in the distance-she squinted harder. “Yes, those are tanks down at the bottom of it, may the Devil’s grandmother run away with them,” she said.

The Kukuruznik had had a radio fitted when Ludmila went from night harassment to reconnaissance she did not use it. Aircraft that used radio around the Lizards generally did not last long afterward; her information, while she thought it important, didn’t seem worth dying for.

She banked away from the Lizards’ base. She wondered if her own base would still be there when she landed. The new invaders, like the old, pounded every airstrip they could find. But the so-called strip had been only a length of smooth steppe, and she could find another such strip at need. The U-2 didn’t need much room in which to set down.

Even when she got to the airstrip, she had to circle twice to be sure it was there. Camouflage nettings and sod roofs disguised the few buildings. A couple of kilometers away stood a strip camouflaged not quite so well. The Lizards had already bombed it twice. That was all right, or better than all right. The planes there were dummies, the buildings repaired every night but uninhabited.

Her teeth clicked together as the Wheatcutter bounced to a halt. Ludmila scrambled down to the ground while the prop was still spinning. The instant it stopped, groundcrew men threw grass-covered nets over the biplane and hauled it away to hide under still more nets which concealed earthen blast barriers.

Ludmila pulled up a corner of, the command shack’s camouflage net, hurried through the doorless entrance, let the net fall behind her. With netting over all the windows, the interior of the shack was gloomy. “I return, Comrade Major,” she announced.

“So you do, Comrade Pilot,” Major Yelena Popova said, returning her salute. “You are most skilled, or most fortunate, or both.” In the space of a sentence, she went from mild greeting to pure business: “Tell me at once what you saw.”

Ludmila obeyed. Major Popova scowled when she mentioned the four new flying towers on the ground. “These-creatures-swarm onto the soil of the rodina-the motherland-like locusts.”

“Yes, Comrade Major, and they consume all before them like locusts, too.” Ludmila described the column of tanks she’d observed.

The squadron commander’s frown, never pleasant, grew downright fearsome. “This is vital information. Those above us must learn of it at once. I shall use the radio. Repeat your statement to me, that I may be sure to report it accurately.”

As Ludmila obeyed, Major Popova wrote down what she said, then repeated it back. When Ludmila nodded to show it was right, the major went over to the radio. It and its battery were stowed in a wheelbarrow and covered with hay. Yelena took the wheelbarrow out through the door, started in the direction of the dummy airstrip. To anyone-say, a Lizard-in a plane, she looked like a peasant shambling along.

Ludmila watched her slow progress across the plain. Then the tiny shape that was she disappeared into one of the Potemkin sheds. She emerged a bare minute later, moving much faster than she had on the way over.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a rocket slammed into the empty shed. Flames leapt up from it. The deception team would have, a lot of work to do tonight, Ludmila thought. After the rocket hit, Major Popova slowed down again. Ludmila did not blame her. Weighted down by radio and battery, the wheelbarrow was heavy.

“The Lizards are very good at picking up radio signals,” the major said as she arrived at the real airstrip. She wiped her forehead. Her sleeve came away dark with sweat. But her eyes, narrow and black like a Tatar’s, gleamed in triumph.

Even though the breeze was chilly against his muzzle, landcruiser driver Ussmak preferred moving along unbuttoned when he could. The periscopes didn’t give him nearly the view he enjoyed with his head out. Besides, being cooped up in the driver’s compartment reminded him too much of the cold-sleep coffin in which he’d hibernated away the years between Home and Tosev 3.

He had an audio button taped to one hearing diaphragm. “Better get down, Ussmak,” said Votal, the landcruiser commander. “Airscouts report Big Ugly landcruisers ahead.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, and slid back down into his compartment. Even as he dogged the hatch over his head, he wondered why he was bothering. The Big Uglies, especially this set that used a red star as its emblem, had lots of landcruisers, but they weren’t very good ones or used very well. But his commander had given the order, so he obeyed. That had been ingrained in him since his hatching day.

Gunner Telerep said, “What do you want to bet we don’t even get in on the fun? Our air will probably take them out before they’re in range for us.”

“We may have some work,” Votal said. “The farther away from base we move the thinner our air cover gets. And-” His voice rose to a sudden shout. “Big Ugly airplane!” In his audio button Ussmak heard the commander dive down in the landcruiser s turret A roar overhead a couple of shells bouncing off metal and ceramic armor and the natives craft sped away its belly almost scraping the grass.

Two landcruisers in the formation fired missiles after it. However fast it was, they were faster. It tumbled to the ground; dust flew from the brown track it plowed through the green. Brave, Ussmak thought, brave but stupid. The Tosevites seemed like that.

“Tosevite landcruisers!” Telerep said. “Looks like you were right, commander.”

“I see them,” Votal answered. Ussmak still didn’t, being down low in the hull rather than up in the turret. That didn’t matter. Votal told him what to do: “Steer 22, Ussmak.”

Ussmak started turning from north to west. Yes, there they were. Being big and clumsy themselves, the Tosevites built big and clumsy, though these landcruisers didn’t have a bad ballistic shape compared to some others the crews had been briefed about. At least their turret armor sloped… not that that would help them now.

“Gunner!” Votal said loudly. He’d picked a target, then, one from among the several that sought to bar his path. A moment later, he added, “Sabot!”

“Sabot!” Telerep repeated. The automatic loader cranked a round into the breech of the cannon. Ussmak heard it not only in his audio button but also through his whole body-clang-clang! Another metallic noise announced that the breech had closed. Telerep said, “Up and ready.”

“Landcruiser-front!” That meant Votal had the target Tosevite in his sights.

“Identified.” Telerep saw it, too. Over Ussmak’s head, the gun tube swung slightly as it moved toward the enemy’s center of mass.

“Fire!”

Through his periscopes, Ussmak saw flame leap from the muzzle of the gun. Armor shielded him from the roar of the report. Recoil made the landcruiser seem to hesitate for an instant. The aluminum sabots fell away from the tungsten penetrator arrow. Ussmak did not see that, of course. A heartbeat later, he did see the turret leap off a Tosevite landcruiser. “Hit!” he yelled, along with Votal and Telerep.

Another Tosevite was killed, this one in a pyrotechnic display of exploding ammunition. The Big Uglies lost whatever formation they were trying to keep. Some of them stopped, as they had to if they hoped to fire accurately. Their eggs are broken now, Ussmak thought with cold glee. They were easy enough to kill on the move. Stopped… “Landcruiser-front!” Votal said.

“Identified,” Telerep answered.

As the automatic loader clattered into action, a Tosevite landcruiser spat fire. Ussmak’s jaw opened in a laugh. Another one down, he thought, and wondered which of the other landcruisers in his unit had scored the kill. Then-wham! Something smote the glacis plate like a kick in the teeth.

“Ussmak!” Votal said. “You all right?”

“Y-yes,” the driver answered, still more than a little shaken. “Didn’t penetrate, the Emperor be praised.” Or I’d be splashed all over the inside of the compartment, he added to himself. The Big Uglies were doing their best to fight back. Their best, fortunately for Ussmak, was not good enough.

He must have been too stunned to listen to the whole command sequence, for the big gun fired then. He had the satisfaction of watching the landcruiser that had almost killed him start to burn. He wondered if any of the crew got out. In a way, they were guildmates of his, and so deserving of respect. On the other hand, they were only Big Uglies, and knew not the Emperor’s name.

When most of the Tosevite landcruisers were dead, some of the survivors turned tailstump and started to run. Ussmak laughed again. They couldn’t outrun cannon shells.

A funny noise in his audio button, sort of a wet splat. Then a cry of disbelief and rage from Telerep: “Votal! Vo-They’ve killed the commander!”

Ussmak’s belly went strange and empty, as if he’d suddenly been dropped into free-fall. “How could they?” he demanded of the gunner. “We’re slaughtering their landcruisers. They’re hardly fighting back any more.”

“Sniper, or I miss my guess,” Telerep said. “They can’t meet us in honest battle, so they lie in wait instead.”

“We’ll make them pay,” Ussmak said fiercely. “The past Emperors have learned Votal’s name. He is with them now.”

“Of course he is,” the gunner answered. “Now shut up and drive will you? I’m going to conn this landcruiser and run the gun, too, so I’m too busy to chatter. I’m going to be busier than a one-handed male with the underscale itch, as a matter of fact.”

Ussmak drove. When he’d stepped into the starship and slung his gear down beside his cold sleep coffin he’d expected the Race to overrun Tosev 3 without losing a male. It wasn’t turning out to be so simple, not with the Big Uglies knowing more than anyone had suspected they did. But they didn’t know enough. The Race could still drive them as easily as Ussmak drove his landcruiser.

A pinng off the turret-“Steer 25, Ussmak!” Telerep shouted. “I saw the flash!”

The driver obediently turned due west. Another pinng, this one off the glacis plate. After taking a hit from a landcruiser cannon, Ussmak ignored the tiny nuisance. He tramped down hard on the accelerator. This time, he’d spotted the muzzle flash, too. He drove straight toward it. The Big Ugly fired again, uselessly, then turned and tried to run.

Telerep cut him down with machine-gun fire. Ussmak ran over the carcass, smashing it into the grass and dirt. His jaws opened wide. Votal was avenged. The landcruiser formation rolled on across the steppe.

Even the smallest noise or flicker of motion in the sky drew Heinrich Jager’s complete and concerned-he was too stubborn to admit to a word like fearful-attention. This time, it was just a linnet flitting past, chirping as it went. This time.

He had three tanks left, three tanks and a combat group of infantry. “Combat group” was the Wehrmacht way of describing odds and ends of military meat pressed together in the hope of turning out a sausage. Sometimes it even worked-but when it did, the sausage went right back into the meat grinder again.

Another motion across the sky turned out to be another bird. Jager shook his head. He could feel how jumpy he was getting. But the Lizards’ aircraft didn’t have to be right overhead to kill. The company had learned that, too, to its sorrow.

He managed something halfway between a laugh and a cough, leaned down into the turret. “I wonder if the Ivans felt this naked after we smashed so many of their planes on the ground last year,” he said.

“If they did, they hid it damned well,” his gunner answered. Georg Schultz wore the ribbon for a wound badge, too.

“So do we-I hope,” Jager said.

A squad of infantry was posted on a swell of ground a few hundred meters in front of the tanks. One of the foot soldiers turned and waved urgently. The signal meant only one thing-Lizard panzers, heading across the steppe. Jager’s testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. Schultz looked up at him. The gunner was dirty and unshaven. “We must try,” he said. “For the Fatherland.”

“For the Fatherland,” Jager echoed. Given that the alternative was bailing out of his tank and trying to foot it across the Ukraine through Lizards and partisans both, fighting for the Fatherland looked like the best bet he had. He leaned down into the turret, called to Dieter Schmidt: “To the prepared position.”

The Panzer III slowly rumbled forward. So did the other two survivors of the tank company. In slots dug into the reverse slope of the rise, they exposed only the tops of their turrets to the enemy. Jager stood up in the cupola, peered ahead with field glasses. He took even fewer chances than he had against the Russians. Shrubs tied to his leather headgear broke up his outline; he used his free hand to shield the binoculars so no sun reflected off their lenses.

Sure enough, there were the Lizards, eight or ten tanks’ worth, with more vehicles scurrying along behind to support them. Jager recognized the ones with small turrets as troop carriers, on the order of the German SdKfz 251 but far more dangerous-they could fight his panzers on largely even terms. And the Lizards’ tanks…

“You know what’s the funny thing, Georg?” he said as he lowered himself once more.

“Tell me anything funny about the Lizards, Herr Major,” the gunner grunted. “I will laugh I promise you.”

“They’re lousy tankers,” Jager said. He was a lousy tankman himself, but only in the literal sense of the word. No one who was lousy in the metaphorical sense could have lasted almost a year on the eastern front.

Sure enough, Schultz laughed. “They’ve been good enough to kick our ass.”

“It’s the panzers, not the crews,” Jager insisted. “They have better guns than ours, better armor, and God only knows how they make engines that don t smoke But tactics-pfui?” He curled his lip in disdain. “The Russians have better sense. They just motor along shooting at anything that happens to cross their path. They aren’t even looking this way, though it’s an obvious place for trouble. Stupid!”

“No doubt a run through the Panzer Lehr training division would improve their skill, Herr Major,” Schultz said dryly. “But if the tanks themselves are good enough, how good do the tankers have to be?”

Jager grunted. It was a cogent question. In Panzer IIIs, little Pimpfs from the Hitler Youth, boys too young to shave, could have taken out whole divisions of British tanks from the. Great War: the rhomboidal monsters were too slow to run and too lightly armed to fight. He’d thought the Panzer III a great tank until he ran up against his first Russian T-34, and a good tank even afterward. Now-now he might as well have been in one of those obsolete rhomboids himself.

“We do what we can, Georg,” he said. The gunner nodded.

Jager stuck his head out of the cupola again. The Lizards were trundling happily past his strongpoint, no more than five hundred meters away, without the slightest idea he was there. He glanced over to Ernst Riecke and Uwe Tannenwald, his other surviving tank commanders, and held up one finger. Both men waved to show they understood. Hanging around for more than one shot against the Lizards was an invitation to a funeral.

The company commander pointed to one of the troop carriers. “That one, Georg,” he said quietly.

“Ja,” the gunner said. He spoke to the loader. “Armor-piercing.”

“Armor-piercing,” Stefan Fuchs echoed. He pulled the black-tipped round out of the ammunition rack, loaded it into the five-centimeter gun, closed the breech.

The gunner traversed the turret a few degrees so it bore on the troop carrier. He took his eyes away from the gunsight for an instant to make sure Fuchs was clear of the recoil, then looked back and squeezed the trigger at almost the same time.

The cannon roared. Through his field glasses, Jager saw a hole appear in the troop carrier’s flank. “Hit!” he shrieked. The carrier slewed sideways, stopped. It was burning. A hatch came down in the rear. Lizards started bailing out. German foot soldiers opened up on them, picking them off as they emerged.

“Back!” Jager shouted. If he waited around to see how the foot soldiers did, one of those Lizard panzers would blow him to bits. Already, with terrifying speed, their turrets were traversing to bear on his position. Dieter Schmidt jammed the tank into reverse. It jounced down the low slope. So did Sergeant Tannenwald’s. Ernst Riecke was a split second too slow. Jager watched in dismay as the turret flew off his panzer and crushed an infantryman who was scrambling to get out of the way.

Later, Jager told himself, I’ll grieve. That assumed there would be a later for him. At the moment, the assumption looked bad. One of the things he’d learned fighting the Russians was to have more than one firing position available whenever he could. His second one was at the base of the rise.

“Maybe we’ll give ’em a surprise, Major,” Schultz said. He and Fuchs already had another AP round loaded and ready. The gun bore on the place where the Lizard panzers were likeliest to breast the rise.

A couple of foot soldiers dashed forward with satchel charges. That meant the tanks were close, then. Machine guns chattered furiously. An explosion sent up smoke and dirt, then another. Jager hoped the brave men hadn’t thrown away their lives for nothing.

Then he had no time for hope or fear, for a Lizard panzer nosed over the horizon right where he’d thought it would-the Lizards really were lousy tankmen. The Panzer III’s cannon roared as he drew in breath to yell, “Fire!”

Schultz was an artist with the long gun. He put the AP round right in the middle of the tiny bit of belly plate the enemy tank exposed as it came over the rise. The glacis plate laughed at even high-velocity five-centimeter shells. The belly plate, as on merely human panzers, was thinner. The shell pierced it. The tank stopped. They’ll have to take the driver out of there with a spoon, Jager thought.

Two Lizards popped out of the turret, one after the other. The hull machine gun from Jager’s tank cut them down.

Tannenwald’s tank had done almost as well as the company commander’s. Its first shot knocked the track off a Lizard panzer’s road wheels. The hit tank swerved, out of control. A foot soldier ran up to it, tossed a potato-masher grenade into the open cupola. Its small blast was followed an instant later by a big one as the panzer’s ammunition went off.

“Back again!” Jager told Schmidt. Already they’d hurt the Lizards worse in this engagement than ever before. That was important, but it would matter only so much if he wound up dead… as he probably would as soon as a Lizard panzer made it onto the reverse slope of that little rise.

A scream in the sky-Death would come even without the Lizards’ tanks, then. Their aircraft were just as deadly. Jager resigned himself. Bombs burst all around-the other side of the rise, the side the Lizards were still climbing.

“Stuka!” Georg Schultz screamed in the voice of a man who knows himself reprieved.

“By God, it is,” Jager said. He, by contrast, spoke softly, for he could scarcely believe he might yet live a while longer. The Lizards had taken as dreadful a toll on the Luftwaffe as on the Wehrmacht. But this pilot, somehow, had still got his dive-bomber into the air and still had the nerve to fly it straight down the Lizards’ throats.

More bombs went off in quick succession-he’d loosed the whole stick. Only a direct hit would take out a panzer, but even experienced tankers had to hesitate before advancing through that sudden storm of explosives.

The Stuka pilot couldn’t have been more than a hundred meters off the ground when he pulled out of his dive. Two of the Lizard panzers fired their guided rockets at him but the missiles shot harmlessly past his plane. He skimmed away, his landing gear just above the waving grass of the steppe.

“Get us out of here,” Jager told Dieter Schmidt. The Panzer III’s engine roared as the driver obeyed. Jager felt an itch between his shoulder blades. He knew that was stupid. If one of the Lizards’ shells got him, he’d be dead too fast to know it.

He looked back toward the rise. If his tank could make it over the next one before the Lizards climbed this one and spotted him, he really did have a chance to get away. He wouldn’t have believed it when the engagement started, but it was true. He felt a surge of pride. His troops had hurt the Lizards, and not many units could boast of that. Gott mit uns, he thought, we might even do it again.

Two Lizard panzers came over the rise. His own tank was only halfway up the next slope. A turret swung his way. His eyes went up to the sky, seeking, praying for, another Stuka. But God lives in only so many machines. The Lizards didn’t even need to slow down to fire.

Less than a heartbeat after the big cannon spat smoke and flame, Jager felt the mother of all kicks in the arse. His trusty panzer, which had served so well for so long, died under him. Smoke poured up through the engine vents of the rear deck.

“Out, out, out!” he screamed. He had almost been thrown out, on his head. Only two armored walls and the full weight of the engine had kept the enemy shell out of the fighting compartment. Once the fire got going, nothing would hold, that at bay.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the air around him as he pulled himself out of the cupola and dove into the tall grass. Other hatches came open. His crew began bailing out with him. A bullet struck home with a noise like a slap on a bare, wet back. Somebody shrieked.

The clean green smell of the weeds through which Jager scrambled filled his nostrils. He had two somewhat contradictory goals. He wanted to put the hulk of the killed tank between himself and the oncoming Lizards, but he also wanted to get as far away from that hulk-and from the Lizards-as he could. The ammunition in the Panzer III was going to start cooking off any minute now, maybe any second, and the Lizards were not likely to be well-disposed toward German tankmen, especially a crew that had managed to destroy one of their fancy machines.

Another shell slammed into the Panzer III. It went up with a roar. Stupid, Jager thought, stupid and wasteful. That tank was already dead meat. Meanwhile, though, machine-gun bullets probed the grass. They made tiny, whispering tic-tic-tic sounds as they clipped the leaves. Jager wondered what kind of sounds he would make if they clipped him.

The Lizards’ tank rolled majestically past, fewer than fifty meters off. Jager lay facedown and unmoving. If the enemy saw him, maybe they’d think he was already dead. Not only was it faster than both his Panzer III and a T-34, it was ghost-quiet to boot.

Somewhere a few hundred meters away, an MG-34 began to bark. Bullets ricocheted off the armor of the Lizard panzer. Its machine gun returned fire. The panzer itself turned toward the German machine-gun position.

As he crawled in the opposite direction, Jager almost bumped into Georg Schultz. After an instant of fright, the two men grinned at each other. “Good to see you, sir,” the gunner said, grin broad and white in his dirty face.

“And you,” Jager answered. “Have you seen Fuchs?” Schqltz’s grin slipped. “He didn’t make it out.”

“That was the shriek, then,” Jager said. The gunner nodded. Jager went on, “What about the two up front?”

“Don’t know.”

They found Dieter Schmidt a few minutes later. Klaus Bauer, the hull gunner, remained missing. “We both got out,” Schmidt insisted. “I don’t know what happened to him afterward.” He didn’t say nothing good, but the words hung in the air.

“Lucky we didn’t blow up when we were hit,” Jager said.

Schmidt surprised him by laughing. “Luck, hell, sir. We were just about dry of petrol, that’s all. We had maybe enough for another kilometer or two, no more.”

“Oh,” Jager said. He started to laugh himself, though it wasn’t really funny. Here he’d just fought what had to be one of the most successful small-unit actions ever against the Lizards, and to what result? Only the final destruction of his tank company. How many actions like that could the Wehrmacht take before there wasn’t any Wehrmacht any more?

For that matter, even this action wasn’t over yet. Lizard infantry had been moving up along with their armor. Jager had a pistol in his holster that he hadn’t fired in months. Schultz and Schmidt were both clutching their personal Schmeissers. Submachine guns were better than nothing, but they didn’t have the range to make proper infantry weapons.

“What now, sir?” Schultz asked.

“Now we get out of the sack,” Jager said. “If we can.”

Moishe Russie held up the Bible, read from the Book of Joshua in a loud voice: “ ‘And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.’ ”

The crowd of Jews behind him cheered. At his side, his wife, Rivka, beamed at him, her sweet brown eyes enormous in her thin face. Their son, Reuven, was even thinner, his eyes, so like his mother’s, even bigger. A starving child could not help rousing horror and pity in any adult who saw him-save perhaps in the Warsaw ghetto, where the sight had grown so common that even horror and pity failed at last.

“What now, Reb Moishe?” someone called.

“I’m no reb,” he said, looking modestly down at the ground.

“No reb?” several people exclaimed together in tones of disbelief. One added, “Who but you asked the Lord for a sign and was answered?” That tale had run through the ghetto almost be-fore the miraculous light in the sky faded. Every tale with hope in it spread even faster than typhus. With only hope to live on, the Jews made of it a banquet.

Someone else, a woman, said, “He’s no reb; he’s a prophet. Like Joshua whose Book he reads, he made the walls fall down.”

The Jews cheered again. Russie felt his ears grow hot. He hadn’t made the ghetto walls fall down, and he knew it. But the bombs that screamed out of the sky and smashed brick to powder seemed to have come from the same-people? monsters? — who’d touched off the light in the sky he’d taken for a signal from On High.

The only accounts of them in the ghetto came from garbled shortwave reports. By the rumors he’d heard, Russie knew the Lizards (a name he wondered about) were bombing fortifications all over the world. Nowhere, though, had their explosives done more than in Warsaw.

He wondered whether the Lizards thought the Nazis had an enemy under siege in the heart of the city (if so, they’d been right, though perhaps not in the way they’d believed). Whatever their reasons, they’d attacked the wall less than a week after they revealed their presence.

Russie remembered the German bombers dropping their endless loads of death almost randomly over Warsaw (although they had paid special attention to the Jewish districts). The Lizards’ raid was different. Even though they’d come at night, their bombs hit the wall and only the wall, almost as if they were aimed not by men-or even Lizards-but by the hand of the Almighty.

Rivka smiled at him. “Remember how we shivered under our blankets when the explosions started going off?”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Russie answered. Since Warsaw surrendered, the ghetto hadn’t known the sounds of real warfare. The dreaded crummp of bombs reminded everyone who had managed to endure since 1939 that more straightforward means of death than starvation, disease, and beatings were loose in the world. Russie went on, “And then, when the curfew lifted… Oh, when the curfew lifted!”

Bombs or no bombs, if he didn’t get to his sewing machine, he’d lose his job. He knew it, and sallied forth at the usual time. The streets had seemed to fill with amazing speed that morning. People moved along at their usual pace; no one who had work would risk losing it, and no one without would throw away a chance to find some. But somehow everyone managed to stop for a few seconds and gape at one-or more than one-of the holes torn in the wall that sundered the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw.

Russie stood in front of one of those holes now, a three-meter stretch where there was no wall. As he stepped into the bomb crater, the soles of his feet felt every sharp brick fragment through the rags that wrapped them. He did not care. Still holding the Holy Scriptures before him, he walked through the shallow crater and out of the ghetto.

Turning, he said, “Jericho’s walls could not hold the Hebrews out, nor can Warsaw’s hold us in. The Lord has set us free!”

The crowd of Jews cheered once more. He drank in the shouts of “Reb Moishe! Reb Moishe!” The more he heard them, the better they sounded in his ears. God had given, him the sign, after all.

Someone in the crowd, though, called, “The Lord may have set us free, but has He bothered to tell the Nazis?”

The word itself was enough to make people look this way and that in alarm, Russie among them. Even without walls, the Germans could have kept the ghetto sealed by posting machine guns in the streets around it. They hadn’t done so, which seemed to Russie another sign of divine intervention.

He took a short, fearful breath. As if thinking of German was enough to conjure them up, here came two. The crowd behind him started to melt away. “Moishe, get back here!” his wife said urgently.

Too late. One of the Germans, an officer by his peaked cap, pointed to Russie. “You, Jew, come here,” he said in peremptory tones. His companion, an enlisted man, had a rifle. If Russie ran, the fellow might shoot, and wasn’t likely to care whether he hit the man he was aiming for or some other fleeing Jew.

Russie took off his hat to the officer-an army man, he saw with relief, not a member of the SS. Some army men were decent. Still, omitting the gesture of respect the Nazis demanded was too dangerous to risk. If he’d been on the sidewalk, he would have stepped down into the street. As it was, he bent his head and said, “Yessir. How can I help you, sir?” in the pure German he’d learned in medical school: he also did not care to risk angering the man by making him try to follow Yiddish or Polish.

“What do you make of-this?” The officer-he was a major, Russie saw by his shoulder straps, which were embroidered but bore no pips-waved at the wreckage of the wall that had surrounded the ghetto.

Russie stayed silent for some time, considering the tone of the question. Germans were like any other folk in that some wanted to hear only that which agreed with what they already thought, while others asked in hope of learning something they did not yet know-and in that, the former type outnumbered the latter by a goodly margin. Safest to say nothing, and say it in a pleasing way.

Safest, yes, but he found all at once that he could not stomach simple safety, not any more, not with a German for once asking a question of a Jew and sounding as if the answer mattered to him. Russie held out the Bible he was carrying. “I take-this-to mean that God has not forgotten us after all.”

Under the outthrust rim of his steel helmet, the enlisted man’s ginger-colored eyebrows drew together in anger. The major, however, nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “You may be right. In truth, you would require the aid of God to escape from our hands.”

“That I know.” Russie did not bother to hide his bitterness. With the whole world turned topsy-turvy, somehow it did not seem wrong for the prisoner to speak his mind to his gaoler.

The German major nodded again, as if thinking along the same lines. He said, “Do you know, Jew, the Lizards who bombed these walls are not even human beings, but creatures from some other world?”

Russie shrugged. “How could it matter to us, trapped back in there?” He half-turned and pointed with his chin into the ghetto. “And why should it matter to you Germans, either? You named us Untermenschen-subhumans. What difference between sub-humans and creatures from some other world?” He repeated the major’s phrase without any real feeling for what it might imply.

“What difference? I’ll tell you what. By all accounts, the Lizards are ugly enough to be Untermenschen, but they fight like Ubernenschen, like supermen.”

“So do the Russians, by all accounts,” Russie said. Just standing on the far side of the ghetto wall was making him reckless.

He got away with it, too. The German enlisted man’s scowl got deeper, but the major accepted the gibe. With almost British understatement, he said, “The problem with the Lizards is rather worse.”

Good, Russie thought. If the mysterious Lizards ever showed up in person in Warsaw, the ghetto Jews would greet them with open arms. No matter how reckless he’d grown, though, he did not say that aloud. Instead, he asked, “And what, sir, do you make of this?”

“We are still deciding precisely what to make of it,” the major answered. “I have as yet no orders.”

“Ah,” Russie said. In combat, a German without orders was as deadly as one who had them, for German soldiers were endlessly trained to react and seize the initiative when and as they could. In matters political, though, Germans without orders were as helpless as so many unweaned babes, fearing to take a step in any direction. A strange folk, Russie thought, and all the more dangerous for their strangeness. He asked, “Then you have no orders to keep us from coming out of the ghetto, nicht wahr?”

“That is so,” the major admitted, in the hollow voice of a man who has had too much happen to him too quickly. “In any case, with the Lizards having established a base inside the Polish Generalgouvernement, the Wehrmacht has more to worry about at the moment than you Jews.”

“Thank you, sir,” Russie breathed. His own sincerity startled him. After a moment, it angered him as well: why should he thank this Nazi for deigning to allow him what should have been his by right?

And, indeed, the German tempered his own moderation: “You would likely do well to remember that the SS never has more to worry about than you Jews. Be careful.” Be very careful, the cold gray eyes of the silent enlisted man seemed to add. Be very careful… kike.

“We have learned to be careful,” Russie said. “Otherwise we would all be dead by now.”

He wondered how the major would react to that. The man merely nodded, as at any statement of obvious fact. His arm shot up and out in the German salute. “Heil Hitler!”

Russie could not bring himself to answer with the Nazi farewell. But the officer had talked to him as man to man, not as master to slave. He said, “God keep you safe from the Lizards, Major.”

The German nodded again, this time brusquely, did a military about-face, and strode away. The enlisted man stalked after him. They left Moishe Russie still standing in Polish Warsaw, outside the ghetto. “Moishe, are you all right?” his wife called from the other side of the fence. She had not fled, but Reuven was nowhere to be seen-a sensible precaution, for he was all they had left.

“I am all right,” he answered, wonder in his own voice. He repeated the words, louder: “I am all right.” Simply standing in broad daylight on what had been forbidden soil was as intoxicating as Purim vodka.

Timidly, Rivka picked her way across the bomb crater and joined him on the far side of the wall. “They spoke with you, and you took no harm.” She sounded as amazed as he had. “Maybe even they felt God working through you.”

“Maybe they did,” Russie said as he slipped his arm around her shoulder. An hour earlier, he had scoffed at the idea that he-a medical student who ate pork if his need was desperate enough-might somehow be a prophet. Now he too began to wonder. God had not actively interfered in the affairs of His chosen people since the days of the Bible. But when since those days had His people been in such peril?

And why, Russie thought, would God choose him? He shook his head. “Who am I, to question Him?” he said. “His will be done.”

“It is,” Rivka, said proudly. “Through you.”

The lights were off in the auditorium of the Mills and Petrie Memorial Center; power had been erratic ever since the Lizards’ airplanes started ranging over the Midwest. The gloomy auditorium was packed nonetheless, with youths and men from the village of Ashton and with refugees like Sam Yeager and Mutt Daniels.

Yeager was acutely aware that he’d been wearing the same clothes for several days, that he hadn’t washed either them or himself any time lately, that he’d done a lot of walking and running and hiding, in them. Seeing a good many men as grimy as he, and none of them taking any notice of it, was something of a relief.

A grim-faced, middle-aged man in khaki walked across the stage, stopped in the center. Crowd noises ceased, as abruptly as if cut off by a switch. “Thank you for being here this morning,” the man said. “I want you all to stand and raise your right hands.”

Yeager was already standing; the auditorium had more men in it than seats. He put up his right hand. The man in khaki said, “Repeat after me: ‘I’-state your name-”

“I, Samuel William Yeager,” Yeager repeated, “a citizen of the United States, do hereby acknowledge to have voluntarily enlisted the eighth day of June, 1942, as a soldier in the Regular Army of the United States of America for the period of four years or the duration of this war under the conditions prescribed by law, unless sooner discharged by proper authority; and do also agree to accept from the United States such bounty, pay, rations, and clothing as are or may be prescribed by law. And I do solemnly swear”-the echoing chorus grew, ragged for a moment, as a few men said affirm-“that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America; that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies whatsoever; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the Rules and Articles of War.”

An enormous grin stretched across Yeager’s face It had taken an invasion from Mars or wherever the hell the Lizards came from, but he’d made it into the service after all.

“When do we get our guns?” somebody in the crowd shouted Yeager quivered with that same hot eagerness; he hadn’t yet been to war, unless having his train strafed counted. But he hadn’t been able to shoot back then. Beside him, Mutt Daniels stood quietly. He wasn’t eager-he’d done this before.

Up on the stage, the dour recruiting sergeant-Schneider, his name was-raised his eyebrows to the silent heavens; “Soldier, we don’t have that many guns to give, or uniforms, or much of anything. We’ve been building an army to fight overseas since the Japs jumped us, and now all this shit lands in our own backyard-”

“Uh-huh,” Mutt Daniels said softly. “They did the very same thing in the last war, grabbed the men ’fore there was anything for ’em to fight with.”

“I want you to form two lines,” Sergeant Schneider said. “One line for Great War veterans, over this way, the other for everybody else over there. Move it, people, and remember you’re in the army now; lying isn’t just a joke any more.”

Daniels went “over this way,” toward a table manned by a younger man in khaki, a corporal; along with most of the men in the auditorium, Yeager went “over there,” a longer line toward a table behind which Schneider himself sat. He suspected that Mutt and the rest of the veterans would get first crack at whatever rifles became available. That was only fair. They had the best idea of what to do with them.

His own line moved much more slowly. He chatted with the men in front and in back of him. He’d come through the hamlet of Franklin Grove on his way to Ashton, and heard President Roosevelt’s defiant speech “from somewhere in the. United States of America.” “He sure can turn a phrase,” the fellow in front of Yeager said. “ ‘This Earth is ours, this nation is ours. No one shall take them from us, so help me God.’ ”

“That’s just what he said,” Yeager said admiringly. “How’d you remember it right on the button like that?”

“I’m a reporter-it’s a trick of the trade,” the man said. He was in his late twenties, with sharp foxy features, a hairline mustache, very blue eyes, and sandy hair combed down slick and close to his skull. He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Pete Thomsen. I’m with the Rockford Courier-Journal.”

Yeager shook the proffered hand, then introduced himself. So did the fellow behind him, a bald, muscular man named Otto Chase. He said, “I was just heading to the cement works in Dixon when they blew up in front of me. That’s when I got this here.” He gingerly touched a gash on the top of his head with a blunt forefinger.

At last Yeager stood before Sergeant Schneider. The sergeant paused to sharpen his pencil with a pocket knife, then took Yeager’s name and date of birth. “Married?” he asked.

“No, sir. Divorced,” Yeager said, and made a sour face. Louise had finally gotten sick of his nomadic ways, and when he wouldn’t settle down-

“Children?”

“No, sir,” he said again.

Schneider made a checkmark, then said, “Occupation?”

“Ballplayer,” he answered, which made Schneider look up from the form. He went on, “I play-played, I guess-for the Decatur Commodores. That’s my manager over there.” He pointed to Mutt Daniels, who’d already gone through his line and was jawing with several other First World War veterans.

The recruiting sergeant rubbed his chin. “What position you play? You a pitcher?”

“No, sir. Outfield-left, mostly.”

“Hmm. You throw pretty good, though?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing wrong with my arm,” Yeager said without false modesty. He wasn’t fast, he wasn’t the best fielder in the world, he was a sucker for a slow curve on the outside corner (or, worse yet, just off it), but by God he could throw.

“Okay,” Schneider said. “You’ll be able to chuck a grenade farther than most, I expect.” He scribbled a note, then pointed in Mutt’s direction himself. “You go over with those fellows. We’ve got some grenades and we’ll be bringing more in-if the Lizards don’t shoot up the trucks, anyhow. Go on, now.” The sergeant raised his voice. “Next.”

Rather hesitantly, Yeager walked over to the knot of men with Daniels. He was a rookie on this team; these men, many of them plump or balding or gray, had seen and done things he hadn’t. Suddenly what they knew was in demand again. His own taste of combat had been solely on the receiving end, running away from death in the sky like the hordes of bombed-out refugees in Europe.

Mutt helped some by introducing him around. One of the plump gray men there, a fellow named Fred Walters, turned out, to have played a few weeks of Class D ball back around 1912. “I couldn’t cut the mustard, and they turned me loose,” he said. “You been makin’ a living at it seventeen years? That s pretty fine.” His admiration also helped make Sam feel more at ease.

And, of course, they all had the war-or rather the wars-to talk about. “With the Lizards here are we still fighting the Germans and the Japs?” Yeager asked, adding, “But for Roosevelt’s speech, I haven’t heard much in the way of news till I got here yesterday.”

“Me neither.” Mutt Daniels ran a hand over his ragged pants and filthy jacket. “We been on the move the last few days, you might say.”

That got him a few wry chuckles. Several of the men standing there were a lot more bedraggled than he was. Fred Walters, by contrast, was clean and well-creased; he lived in Ashton. He said, “Fact of it is, nobody really knows what the hell is going on. I did hear tell, though, that a Jap fleet heading for Hawaii hightailed it back to the Land of the Rising Sun when the Lizards bombed Tokyo.”

“They hit Tokyo,” Yeager said. “First good thing I heard about ’em.”

“They hit Berlin, too,” Walters said, “and a lot of other places besides.”

“One thing this does,” said somebody whose name Yeager hadn’t caught, “is shoot Lend-Lease right in the head. With the damned Lizards right here in the middle of the United States, we don’t have enough for ourselves, let alone for anybody else.”

“Gonna be hard on the Limies and the Russians,” Daniels observed.

“We gotta worry about ourselves first,” the other man said. Heads bobbed up and down, Yeager’s among them. The fellow went on, “Plain fact is, we’re short, too. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be going through this folderol of separating out the ones who know how to fight to make sure they get guns first.”

“Sergeant Schneider over there as much as told me we don’t have enough guns for all the men who’re joining up here,” Yeager said.

“Plain fact is, gentlemen, we got trouble,” Daniels said. “That’s what the plain fact is, and nothing else but.” Heads bobbed up and down again.

Something moving swiftly through the air-Alarm coursed through David Goldfarb as he caught the motion. He whipped his binoculars up to his eyes, took a longer look, relaxed. “Only a sea gull,” he said, relief in his voice.

“Which kind?” Jerome Jones asked with interest. The events of the past few days had turned him into an avid bird-watcher.

“One of the black-headed ones,” Goldfarb answered indifferently; his interest in birds began and ended with poultry.

He sat in a rickety folding chair of canvas and wood a few feet from the edge of the cliffs of Dover, where England dropped straight down into the sea. An observer might have sat thus a quarter of a century before, with the self-same binoculars, maybe even in the self-same folding chair, peering toward Europe in hope of spotting zeppelins. Only the field telephone by the chair was of a model impossible in 1917.

Jerome Jones laughed when he said that aloud. “Likely is the same folding chair; the forms for a new one won’t have got to the proper office yet.” He laughed again, this time mirthlessly. “Like the bloody Pixie Reports.”

“I told you the flaw wasn’t in the radar,” Goldfarb said.

“That you did-and if you keep up with ‘I told you so,’ you’ll make some nice girl very unhappy one day,” Jones retorted. “Besides, don’t you wish you’d been wrong?”

Having taken two solid hits in as many sentences, Goldfarb answered only with a grunt. His eyes traveled back to what had been the radar station that had superseded observers armed with nothing better than field glasses. Nothing there now but rubble and a faint stench, as of meat gone bad. The only reason Goldfarb could sit out here looking at those ruins was that he’d been off duty when the Lizard rockets struck home.

Up and down the English coast, the story was the same: wherever there’d been an active radar, a rocket came along and took it out. That meant only one thing: rockets able to home in on radar beams, even the new shortwave ones Jerry still hadn’t figured out.

“Who’d have thought the Lizards could be so much smarter than the Germans?” Goldfarb said; no matter how much he loathed Hitler and the Nazis, he had a solid respect for the technical ability of the enemy across the Channel.

“Wireless says we knocked down a couple of their planes over London,” Jones remarked hopefully.

“Good,” Goldfarb said; any news of that sort was encouraging. “How many did we lose?”

“The commentator did not announce the full score of the match,” Jones said. “Military security, don’t you know?”

“Oh indeed,” Goldfarb said. “I wonder if their batsman made his century; no doubt it s a cricket score set against one footballers might make. God help us all.”

“They’ve not tried a landing here,” Jones said, still looking on the bright side.

“It’s only a very small island.” Goldfarb pictured a world globe in his mind, and realized all at once just how small England had to look from space.

Not small enough to keep them from bombing us Jones said bitterly. He and Goldfarb both shook their heads. They’d helped their country beat back the most savage air assault the world had ever known, then helped start paying the Germans back. Now they were under attack again. It hardly seemed fair.

“There’s something!” Goldfarb exclaimed, pointing. He and Jones both swung their field glasses toward, the moving specks in the sky. The specks-even through binoculars, they were little more than that-were southbound. “Ours, I think,” Goldfarb said, “bound for the Lizards’ lair in France.”

“Lizards and Frogs.” Jones laughed at his own wit, but quickly sobered. “I wonder how many of the poor brave buggers’ll fly back north again after their run. Worse than the flak over Berlin, they say.”

“I wonder if Jerry’s hitting back at the Lizards, too.” Something else occurred to Goldfarb. “If his planes and ours are both trying to hit them at the same time, do we shoot at each other, too?”

“I hope not,” Jones exclaimed. “Wouldn’t that be a balls-up?”

“It would indeed,” Goldfarb said. “I hope not, too.” He laughed, not altogether comfortably. “First time in donkey’s years I’ve wished the Germans anything but a fast trip to the devil.”

“The Germans, they’re human beings. Stack ’em against things from Mars and I know where my choice lies,” Jones said.

Goldfarb answered with a grunt. He was reluctant to concede anything to the Nazis; he agreed completely with Churchill’s quip that, should Satan declare war on Hitler, he would at least give the Devil a favorable mention in the House of Commons. But quips came easy. Now the whole world faced devils it didn’t know. Britain had allied with Red Russia when Germany invaded: Germany was worse. If the Lizards were worse than Germany, would alliances swing again?

He scowled. “I’m damned if I want to see us in bed with the Nazis.” He wondered again at the fate of his cousins in Poland.

“Would you rather end up in bed with the Lizards?” Jones demanded. Before it could turn into an argument, he added, “Me, I’d rather end up in bed with the barmaid down at the White Horse Inn.”

That sufficed to distract Goldfarb. “Which one?” he asked. “Daphne or Sylvia?”

“Daphne by choice. I’m rather keen on blondes, and she has more to hold on to.” Jones’s hands illustrated just which parts he had in mind. “But, of course, were Sylvia to smile at me in exactly the proper fashion-redheads are interesting because they’re unusual, what?”

“They both fancy pilots,” Goldfarb said morosely. Along with, no doubt, a great many other nonflying RAF men, he’d had his advances turned into retreats by both girls. For that matter, so had Jerome Jones.

The other radar man said, “Now there’s something to say for the Lizards, at any rate.” Goldfarb raised an interrogative eyebrow. Jones explained: “if they keep on as they’ve been doing, we’ll soon have no pilots left.”

“That’s not funny,” Goldfarb said. As if to contradict himself, he started laughing.

Then he choked on his laughter. Something screamed past overhead at just above treetop height. He grabbed for the field telephone, cranked as if his life depended on it while more Lizard planes streaked northwest above him. He shouted out his warning over the yowl of their engines.

“If it’s London again, the bastards will be there in a minute,” Jones yelled at the top of his lungs. He might as well have been whispering; Goldfarb had to read his lips.

Goldfarb did his best to sound hopeful: “Doesn’t take long to scramble the Spitfire squadrons.”

“Maybe not, but we can’t catch their planes even if we do manage to get ours up.”

“What’s worked best is loitering alongside, their return routes, then striking at them as they go past.”

“Dogging and pouncing,” Jones said, dropping his voice as the Lizard aircraft receded in the distance. Goldfarb raised that eyebrow again. His friend went on, “I did a bit of history at Cambridge along with the maths. The old Byzantines would let the Arabs into Asia Minor, you see, then wait at the passes for them to come out with their loot.”

“Ah,” Goldfarb said. “And did it work?”

“Sometimes. But even when it did, of course, Asia Minor took a bit of a hiding.”

“Yes. Well, we’ve had hidings before. I hope we can ride out another one,” Goldfarb said. “Not that we’ve much choice in the matter.”

Neither of them said much after that. Goldfarb dug a finger into one ear, trying to make it stop ringing. He had little luck-the Lizards’ engines were just too loud. He wondered if the RAF was having any luck, and wished he could be up in a Spitfire himself. His abilities didn’t lie there, though. He consoled himself with the thought that he’d done what he could by spotting the flight of bombers.

He peered south, out over the English Channel. The springtime air-almost summer now, he reminded himself-was sweet and mild and clear. The French coast was a low, dark smear on the horizon. He raised the binoculars to his eyes. France leapt closer. Three years ago, that coast had been England’s shield. Then, horribly, unexpectedly, the shield fell over, and it served as a base for a thrust at England’s heart.

And now-what? Another thrust at England’s heart, but one at Germany’s as well. Goldfarb wished the Lizards would leave his country alone and go after the Nazis with everything they had. The wish changed the situation about as much as wishes commonly do.

He sighed. “It’s a rum world, sure enough.”

“Aye, it is.” Jones looked at his watch. “Our reliefs should be here any minute now. When we’re off, shall we head over to the White Horse? What they call best bitter’s gone to the dogs since the war (gone through their kidneys, by the taste of it), but there’s always Daphne to stare at, maybe even to chat, up.”

“Why not?” Goldfarb intended to try Sylvia again-his own taste ran to redheads. She wasn’t a Jewish girl to bring home to his family (he’d thought a lot more about that since the war started), but he didn’t aim to marry her-however attractive some of the concomitants of that relationship might be.

He laughed at himself. The next interest in him Sylvia showed would be her first. Well, he thought, she can’t very well show interest if I’m not there to be interesting.

“Something else to thank the Lizards for,” Jones said. “If they hadn’t smashed up the radar set, we’d be spending all these idle hours fiddling with it instead of chasing skirt. Radar’s all very well, but next to skirt-”

“Right,” Goldfarb said. He pointed. “And here come Reg and Steven, so let’s be off.”

As Jones got up from his canvas chair, he asked, “Can you lend me ten bob?”

Goldfarb stared at him. He grinned back, cheekily confident. Goldfarb got out his wallet, passed over a note. “If you had the gall with Daphne that you do with me…”

“With ten bob in my pocket, maybe I will.”

“Come on, then.” There was a war on-there were, these last few crazed days, two wars on-but life went on, too. Goldfarb hurried through his report to the next watch crew, then hurried off with Jerome Jones toward the White Horse Inn.

I am flying toward my death. George Bagnall had had that thought every time the Lancaster made its ungainly leap off the tarmac for a run into Germany. Now, flying against the Lizards, it was much more tightly focused. Death lurked in the air over Germany, yes, but random death: a flak shell that happened to burst just where you were, or a night fighter coming close enough to spot your exhaust.

Going against the Lizards, death was not random. This was Bagnall’s third sortie into France, and he had seen that for himself. If the Lizards chose your plane, you would go down. Their rockets came after you as if they knew your home address. You couldn’t run; shooting at the missiles did no good to speak of; Bagnall wanted to hide.

He glanced over at Ken Embry. The pilot’s face was set, the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones, his mouth nothing but a bloodless slash. They were coming in low tonight, too low to bother with oxygen, so Embry’s whole face was visible. Going in high just made them better targets. The RAF had learned that lesson the hard way.

Bagnall sighed. “Pity we couldn’t have come down with a case of magneto drop or some such, eh?”

“You’re the engineer, Mr. Bagnall,” Embry said. “Arranging a convenient mechanical failure should be your speciality.”

“Pity I didn’t think of it as we were running through the checklists,” Bagnall murmured. Embry’s answering grin stretched his mouth wider, but did nothing to banish the look of haunted determination from his features. Like Bagnall, he knew what the odds were. They’d been lucky twice-three times, if you counted the wild melee in the air over Cologne on what everyone was starting to call The Night the Martians Landed. But how long could luck hold?”

Embry said, “Feels odd, flying out of formation.”

“It did seem rather like lining up all the ducks to be knocked over one by one,” Bagnall said. The first attack on the Lizards-in which, fortunately, his Lanc had not been involved-had been a failure horrific enough to make Bomber Command change tactics in a hurry, something the flight engineer hadn’t previously imagined possible.

And attacking low and dispersed did work better than pouring in high and in formation, as if the Lizards were nothing but Germans to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Bagnall’s bomber had made it back to England twice.

“Five miles to commencement of target area,” the navigator announced over the intercom.

“Thank you, Alf,” Ken Embry said. Ahead of them, streaks of fire began leaping up from the ground. Fully laden bombers exploded in midair, one after another, blazing through the night like great orange chrysanthemums of flame. They would have been even more beautiful bad each one not meant the deaths of so many men.

Bagnall waited for one of those fiery streaks to burn straight for his Lanc. It hadn’t happened yet, but-

Embry whooped, pounded his thigh with a fist. “Did you see that? Did you bloody see that? One of them missed. Somebody dodged it.” Sure enough, one of the rockets kept flying up and up, then went off in a blast not much more impressive than a Guy Fawkes Day firework Embry quickly sobered. “But there’s so many that don’t miss.”

From his glassed-in window in the bottom front of the Lanc’s nose, Douglas Bell said, “Coming up on something that looks like it belongs to the Lizards.”

That was good enough for Embry. “Commencing bombing run under your direction, Bomb-Aimer.”

“Very good,” Bell said. “Steer slightly west, toward that-bloody hell, I don’t know what it is, but it never came from Earth.”

“Slightly west; straightening my course on the object ahead,” the pilot acknowledged.

Peering ahead through the Perspex, Bagnall too saw against the horizon the great tower ahead. It looked more like a pregnant skyscraper than anything else he could think of, though even the Yankees’ famous Empire State Building might have shrunk by comparison, for the tower was still miles ahead. It assuredly did not belong in the French countryside, a good long way south and east of Paris.

It was not the only tower-spaceship, Bagnall supposed the proper word was-in the neighborhood, either. The Lizards kept setting down more and more of them. And to attack the spaceships themselves was certain death. Nobody had succeeded in knocking one out; nobody had come back from trying, either.

The bomb-aimer, while as brave a man as could be hoped for-he was up here, after all, wasn’t be? — was not actively trying to kill himself. He said, “Slightly more to the west, if you please, sir-three degrees or so. I think that’s the tank park we were told of in the briefing, don’t you?”

Embry and Bagnall both leaned forward to look now. Something big and orderly was going on down on the ground, that was certain. If it wasn’t German, it had to belong to the Lizards. And if it was German, Bagnall thought, well, too bad for Jerry. His eyes flicked over to Embry’s. The pilot nodded, said, “I think you’re right, Bomb-Aimer. Carry on.”

“Very good,” Bell repeated. “Steady course, steady…” His voice rose to a shout. “Commence bombing!” The fuselage rattled and groaned as bombs rained down on the target. Bagnall took a moment to pity the poor French peasants below. They were, after all, his allies, now suffering under the double yoke of the Nazis and the Lizards, and some of them were only too likely to die in the bombardment that was at the moment the only hope of getting them free.

The Lanc staggered in the air. For a dreadful instant, Bagnall thought it was hit. But it was only plowing through the turbulence kicked up by exploding bombs-the plane was usually two or three miles higher above them when they went off.

“Let’s get out of here.” Embry heeled the bomber over and swung its nose toward England. “Give us a course for home, Mr. Whyte.”

“Due north will do for now; I’ll fine it up momentarily,” the navigator said.

“Due north it is. I wonder how many will land with us,” Embry said.

I wonder if we’ll be lucky enough to land, Bagnall thought. He would not give the evil omen strength by speaking it aloud. Green-yellow tracers zipped past the windscreen, too close for comfort. Along with their rockets, the Lizards boasted formidable light flak. Embry threw the Lancaster into a series of evasive jinks and jerks that rattled everyone’s teeth.

The rear gunner called, “We’ve a fighter to starboard, looking us over”

Whatever spit was left in Bagnall’s mouth dried up as his eyes swung rightward. But the plane there, a deeper blackness against black night, was not a Lizard jet, only-only! — a Focke-Wulf 190. It waggled its wings at the Lanc and darted away at a speed the British bomber could not hope to match.

When he breathed again Bagnall discovered he’d forgotten to for some time. Then another Lizard flak battery started up below. With a sound like a giant poking his fist through a tin roof shells slammed into, the Lancaster’s left wing. Flames spurted from both engines there. To his subsequent amazement, the flight engineer performed exactly as he’d been trained. A glance at the gauges told him those Merlins would never fly again He shut them down, shut down the fuel feed to them, feathered the props.

Embry flicked a toggle, made a face. “Flaps aren’t responding on that side.”

“No hydraulic pressure,” Bagnall said after another check of his instruments. He watched the pilot fight the controls; already the Lanc was trying to swing in an anticlockwise circle. “Appears we have a bit of a problem.”

“A bit, yes,” Embry said, nodding. “Look for a field or a road. I’m going to try to set her down.” Still sounding calm, he went on, “Sooner pick my time for it than have the aircraft choose for me, eh?”

“As you say,” Bagnall agreed. The pilot’s couple of sentences told the same story as his own bank of instruments: the aircraft would not make it back to England. He pointed. “There’s as likely a stretch of highway as we’re apt to find. One thing for the war-we’re not likely to run over Uncle Pierre’s Citroen.”

“Right.” Embry raised his voice. “Crew prepare for crash landing. Mr. Bagnall, lower the landing gear, if you please.”

The right wheel descended smoothly; without hydraulics, the left refused to budge. Bagnall worked the hand crank. From the belly turret, a gunner said, “It’s down. I can see it.”

“One thing fewer to worry about,” Embry remarked, with what seemed to Bagnall to be quite excessive good cheer. Then the pilot added, “That leaves only two or three hundred thousand, unless I miss my count.”

“We could be trying this up in Normandy, where the hedge-rows grow right alongside the roadbed,” Bagnall said helpfully.

Embry corrected himself: “Two things fewer. You do so relieve my mind, George.”

“Happy to be of service,” Bagnall answered. Joking about what was going to happen was easier than just sitting back and watching it. A forced landing in a damaged aircraft on a French road in the middle of the night without lights was not easy to contemplate in cold blood.

As if to underscore that, Embry said, “Aircrew may bail out if they find that preferable to attempting a landing. I shall endeavor to remain airborne an extra minute or two to allow them to avail themselves of the opportunity. Had we suffered this misfortune a month ago, I would bail out myself and permit the aircraft to crash, thus denying it to the Germans. As you have seen this evening, however, that situation has for the moment changed. If you do intend to, parachute, please so inform me at this time.”

The intercom stayed silent until someone in the back of the plane said, “You’ll get us down all right, sir.”

“Let us hope such touching confidence is not misplaced,” Embry said. “Thank you, gentlemen, one and all, and good luck to you.” He brought the stick forward, reduced power to the two surviving Merlins.

“To us,” Bagnall amended. The road, a dark gray line arrowing through black fields, was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Embry brought the Lanc’s nose up a little, cut power still more. The bomber met the road with a bump, but Bagnall had been through worse landings at Swinderby. Cheers erupted in the intercom.

Then, just as the Lancaster slowed toward a stop, its right wing clipped a telegraph pole. It spun clockwise. The left landing gear went off the asphalt and into soft dirt. It buckled. The wing snapped off where the shells bad chewed it. The stump dug into the ground. The aircraft’s spars groaned like a man on the rack. Bagnall wondered if it would flip over. It didn’t. Even as it was spinning, Embry had shut off the engines altogether.

Into sudden silence, a second round of cheers rang out. “Thank you, friends,” Embry said. Now at last, when it no longer mattered, he let himself sound wrung out. He turned to Bagnall with a tired grin. “Est-ce que vous parlez francais, monsieur?”

“Hell, no,” Bagnall answered. They both laughed like schoolboys.