In the Balance

4

A metallic rumble echoed through 127th Emperor Hetto as the transfer craft’s airlock engaged with one of the bannership’s docking collars. A speaker chimed softly in Fleetlord Atvar’s office. “The Tosevite is here, Exalted Fleetlord,” a junior officer announced.

“Fetch him hither,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done.”

Atvar hung in midair as he awaited the arrival of the Tosevite official. He’d ordered the spin taken off the bannership when he began receiving natives. He was used to free-fall; while he did not particularly enjoy it, he endured it without trouble, as did his crew. The Tosevites, however, were without space travel. Finding themselves weightless might fluster them and put them at a disadvantage. Atvar hoped so, at any rate.

He let his jaws fall open in amusement as he remembered the unfortunate native from the empire called Deutschland who had lost all his stomach contents, luckily while still in the transfer craft. That poor befuddled Ribbensomething had been in no state even to try to negotiate his empire’s submission to the Empire.

The door to the office opened. An officer charged with learning the appropriate Tosevite dialect floated outside along with the native for whom he would interpret. The officer said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the emissary of the empire called the Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotzialesticheskikh Respublik-SSSR for short. His name is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.”

“Give him my polite greetings,” Atvar answered, thinking the Tosevite empire was too small to deserve such a big name. Like most Tosevites, though, the emissary himself was substantially larger than the fleetlord.

The interpreter talked haltingly in Molotov’s speech. Part of the problem was that Tosevite languages did not fit well in the mouths of the Race: to Atvar, all Tosevites sounded as if they had their mouths full of pap. Tosevite languages were also hard for the Race because they were so maddeningly irregular; they had not spent long millennia being smoothed into efficient rationality. And, even without those difficulties, the languages remained incompletely familiar to the officers assigned to learn them. Up until the actual landings on Tosev 3, they’d had only radio transmissions from which to work (the first convenient thing Atvar could see about the Tosevites’ possessing radio), and comprehension had emerged slowly out of those, even with the help of computers programmed to deduce probable word meanings by statistics.

Molotov listened to the fleetlord’s greeting, gave back one of his own. Unlike the Tosevite from Deutschland, he had sense enough to speak slowly so as not to overwhelm the interpreter. Also unlike that Tosevite, he gave no sign of discomfiture at being off his home planet and in free-fall for the first time in his life.

A viewscreen showed a hologram of Tosev 3 as it appeared from the 127th Emperor Hetto, but Molotov did not even deign to glance at it. Through the corrective lenses hooked in front of his fiat, immobile eyes, he stared straight toward Atvar. The fleetlord approved. He had not thought to find such singleness of purpose among these big barbarians.

Molotov spoke again, still slowly and without raising his voice. The interpreter turned both eye turrets toward Atvar in embarrassment; the fleetlord should have enjoyed the privilege of first address. But what could a Big Ugly know of proper protocol? Atvar said, “Never mind his manners. Just tell me what he says.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich-this is the polite way to address the Tosevites who speak Ruskii: by their own name and that of their father-well, never mind that; the Tosevite demands the immediate unconditional withdrawal of all our forces from the land and air belonging to the empire of the SSSR.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” The fleetlord let his jaws gape in a guffaw. “Remind him he is in no position to make demands. If he occupied Home, he might have the right to bend us to his will. But it is the surrender of the SSSR that is under discussion, not ours.”

Molotov listened to the interpreter’s translation without changing expression. To Atvar, the Tosevites he’d seen and met owned extraordinarily mobile features; his own facial hide and musculature were far less flexible. But this native might have been carved from stone. Still stubbornly ignoring his surroundings, he paused to think, then replied:

“We shall not yield. We have fought the Gitlerites [”By which he means the Deutsch Tosevites, exalted fleetlord,” the interpreter explained] to a standstill when they expected us to collapse. Our land is vast, our resources widespread. We are not to be easily overcome.”

“Tell him that his vast empire”-Atvar loaded the word with scorn-“would vanish almost without trace on any of the three worlds of the Empire.”

Molotov again listened, thought, answered: “All three of your worlds are not here with you, and you seek to conquer not just the SSSR but the whole of this world. Consider if you have not overextended yourselves.”

Atvar glared at the impassive Tosevite. The native might be barbarous, but he was no fool. A whole world-even a world with too much water like Tosev 3-was a big place, bigger than the fleetlord had truly understood until he began this campaign. He hadn’t expected to face industrialized opposition, either.

Nevertheless, he and the Race had advantages, too. He bludgeoned Molotov with them: “We strike you as we please, but you come to grief whenever you try to hit us back. Once all your factories are in ruins, how do you propose to hit back at all? Yield now, and you will still have something left for your own people.”

Molotov wore the same sort of bulky garments most Tosevites preferred. His face was damp and shiny with water exuded as a metabolic coolant; the 127th Emperor Hetto was at a temperature comfortable to the Race, not for natives. But he still answered back boldly enough: “We have many factories. We have many men. You have won battles against us, but you are far from winning your war. We will fight on. Even the Gitlerites have more sense than to yield to you.”

“As a matter of fact, I recently spoke with the foreign minister of Deutschland,” Atvar said. That Tosevite had also been too stubborn to yield until his empire was pounded flat, but Molotov did not have to know it.

The native looked intently at the fleetlord. “And what had he to say?” Since the SSSR and Deutschland were at war before the Race reached Tosev 3, it stood to reason that they had little reason to trust each other.

“We discussed the feasibility of Deutschland’s acknowledging the authority of the Emperor,” Atvar answered. On speaking of his sovereign, he cast down his eyes for a moment. So did the interpreter.

“Emperor, you say? I want to be sure I understand you correctly,” Molotov said. “Your-nation-is headed by a person who rules because he is a member of a family that has ruled for many years before him? Is that what you tell me?”

“Yes, that is correct,” Atvar said, puzzled by the Tosevite’s puzzlement. “Who else would rule an empire-the Empire-but the Emperor? The Tosevite named Stalin, I gather, is the emperor of your SSSR.”

So far as the fleetlord could see, Molotov still did not change expression. Nor was his voice anything but its usual mushy monotone. But what he said made the interpreter hiss in rage and astonishment, and even lash his tail stump back and forth as if in mortal combat. The officer mastered himself, spoke in Molotov’s language. Molotov answered. The interpreter trembled. Slowly, he mastered himself. Even more slowly, he turned to Atvar.

He still hesitated to speak. “What does the Big Ugly say?” Atvar demanded.

“Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter stammered, “this-this thing of a Tosevite tells me to tell you that the people-the people of his SSSR-that they, they executed-murdered-their emperor and all his family twenty-five years ago. That would be about fifty of our years,” he added, remembering his function as translator. “They murdered their emperor, and this Stalin, this leader of theirs, is no emperor at all, but the chief of the group of bandits that killed him”

Atvar was a mature, disciplined male, so he did not show his feelings with a hiss as the interpreter had. But he was shocked to the very core of his being. Imagining a government without an emperor at its head was almost beyond him. Home had been unified for scores of millennia, and even in the distant days before unity bad seen only the struggle between one empire and another. Halless 1 was a single empire when the Race conquered it; Rabotev 2 had been divided, but also among competing empires. What other way was there to organize intelligent beings? The fleetlord could conceive of none.

Molotov said, “You should know, invader from another world, that Deutschland has no emperor either, nor does the United-” The interpreter went back and forth with him for a little-while, then explained, “He means the empire-or not-empire, I should say-in the northern part of the small landmass.”

“These Tosevites are utterly mad,” Atvar burst out. He added, “You need not translate that. But they are. By the Emperor”-just saying the name was a comfort-“it must have to do with the world’s beastly climate and excess water.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter said. “It may be so. But what shall I tell the creature here?”

“I don’t know.” Atvar felt befouled at even contemplating speech with anyone, no matter how alien, who was involved in impericide-a crime whose existence he had not thought of until this moment. All at once, cratering the whole world of Tosev 3 with nuclear weapons looked much more attractive than it had. But the fleet had only a limited number of them-against the sort of fight the Tosevites were expected to put up, even a few would have been more than necessary. And with Tosev 3’s land surface so limited, ruining any of it went against his grain.

He gathered himself. “Tell this Molotov that what he and his bandits did before the Race arrived will not concern us unless they refuse to yield and thereby force us to take notice of it. But if need be, we will avenge their murdered emperor.” Thinking of a murdered emperor, the fleetlord knew the first pity he’d felt for any Tosevite.

If his threat frightened Molotov, the Big Ugly gave no sign of it; the native truly was as frozen of countenance as anyone of the Race. He said, “It is true, then, that when you speak of an empire, you mean it in the exact and literal sense of the word, with an emperor and a court and all the trappings of the outworn past?”

“Of course that is true,” Atvar answered. “How else would we mean it?”

“The enlightened people of the SSSR have cast the rule of despots onto the ash-heap of history,” Molotov said.

Atvar laughed in his flat face. “The Race has flourished under its Emperors for a hundred thousand years. What do you know of history, when you were savages the last time we looked over your miserable pest-hole of a planet?” The fleetlord heartily wished the Tosevites had stayed savages, too.

“History may be slow, but it is certain,” Molotov said stubbornly. “One day the inevitable revolution will come to your people, too, when their economic conditions dictate its necessity. I think that day will be soon. You are imperialists, and imperialism is the last phase of capitalism, as Marx and Lenin have shown.”

The interpreter stumbled through the translation of that last sentence, and added, “I have trouble rendering the natives’ religious terms into our language, Exalted Fleetlord. Marx and Lenin are gods or prophets in the SSSR.” He spoke briefly with Molotov, then said, “Prophets. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich knew this Lenin himself.”

Molotov said, “Lenin led the revolution which overthrew our emperor and established the rule of the people and workers of the SSSR. I am proud to say I assisted in this worthy task.”

Atvar stared at the Tosevite in disgust. He spoke to the interpreter: “Tell the bandit I have nothing further to say to him. If he and his murderers will not yield themselves to us, their punishment shall only be the harsher.”

The interpreter slowly, haltingly, turned the crisp words into the mushy native language. Molotov answered with one word. “Nyet.” The fleetlord glanced with one quick flick of an eye at the interpreter to see if that meant what he thought. It did.

“Get him off this ship,” Atvar snapped. “I am sorry he comes here under truce, or I would treat him as he deserves.” The idea of wantonly slaughtering an emperor-even a Tosevite emperor-gave him an atavistic urge to bite something: Molotov by choice, though the Big Ugly looked anything but appetizing.

The doorway out of Atvar’s office hissed open. The interpreter pushed off from the chair whose back he’d been holding and shot through it. Molotov followed more awkwardly, the graceless garments he wore flapping about him. As soon as he was gone, Atvar shut the door behind him. The rather sharp smell of his body remained, like a bad memory. The fleetlord turned up the air scrubbers to make it go away.

While it still lingered, he phoned Kirel. When the shiplord’s face appeared in his screen, he said, “You will come to my quarters immediately.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel blanked the screen. He was as good as his word. When he chimed for admittance, Atvar let him in, then closed the door again. Kirel asked, “How fare the talks with the Tosevites, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Less well than I had hoped.” Atvar let his breath hiss out in a long, frustrated sigh. “All their greatest empires still refuse to acknowledge the glory of the Emperor.” He cast his eyes down in the ritual gesture. He would not tell Kirel what he’d learned from Molotov, not yet; his own pain remained too raw to permit it.

“This is altogether a more difficult task than we looked for when we set out from Home,” Kirel said. The shiplord had tact. He forbore to remind Atvar that he had urged a surrender demand before actual ground combat got under way. After a moment, he went on, “It has been too many generations since the Race fought a real war.”

“What do you mean?” Atvar tried to hold sudden suspicion from his voice. Tactful or not, Kirel coveted the ornate body paint the fleetlord wore. Atvar continued, “We are trained for this mission as well as we could possibly be.”

“Indeed we are,” Kirel agreed gravely, which only made Atvar more suspicious. “But the Tosevites are not merely trained; they are experienced. Weapon for weapon, we far surpass them. In craft on the battlefield, though, they exceed us. That has hurt us, again and again.”

“I know. They are worse foes than I expected them to be even after we learned of their abnormal technological growth. Not only are they wily, as you say, they are stubborn. I was confident they would break when they realized the advantages we enjoyed over them. But they keep fighting, as best they can.”

“It is so,” Kirel said. “Perhaps already being locked in combat among themselves has given them the discipline they need to carry on against us. Along with being stubborn, they are well-trained and skilled. We can continue to smash them for a long time yet; one of our landcruisers, one of our aircraft, is worth anywhere from ten to twenty-five of theirs. But we have only so many munitions. If we cannot overawe them, we may face difficulties. In my coldest dreams, I see our last missile wrecking a clumsy Tosevite landcruiser-while another such landcruiser rolls out of a factory and toward us.”

Of themselves, Atvar’s clawed hands twitched as if to tear a foe in front of him. “That is a cold dream. You should have left it in your coffin when you awoke. We have set down our factory ships here and there, you know. As we gain raw materials, we shall be able to increase our stocks.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. He did not say-presumably because he knew Atvar knew it as well as himself-that the factories, even at top output, could not produce in a day more than a small part of the supplies the Race’s armed forces used during that day. Back on Home, no one had reckoned that the armada would use as much as it had.

As if to turn away from that unpleasant reflection, Atvar said, “For all the bluster the Big Ugly envoys show, they may yet prove tractable. The male from the empire called Deutschland, despite his sickness, showed some comprehension of our might.” All at once, he remembered that Molotov had said Deutschland was a not-empire. He wondered queasily if its emperor had been murdered, too.

Shiplord Kirel said, “Deutschland? Interesting. May I use your screen to show you an image a reconnaissance satellite caught for us yesterday?” Atvar opened, his hands wide to show assent. Kirel punched commands in the 127th Emperor Hetto’s data storage system.

The screen lit to show green land and grayish sea. A spot of fire appeared in one corner of the land, not far from a clump of big wood buildings. The fire suddenly spread and got brighter, then went out more slowly. “One of our bombing runs?” Atvar asked.

“No. Let me show it to you again, this time in slow motion with maximum magnification and image processing.”

The amplified image came up on the screen. Atvar stared at it, then at Kirel. “That is a missile he said accusingly as if it were the shiplord’s fault. He did not want to believe what he had just seen.

But Kirel said, “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, this is a missile, or at least was intended to be one. Since it exploded on its launching pad, we are unable to gain estimates of its range or guidance system, if any, but to judge from its size, it appears more likely to be strategic than tactical.”

“I presume we have eradicated this site,” Atvar said.

“It was done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed.

The shiplord’s doleful voice told Atvar what he already knew: even though this site was gone, the Race had no sure way of telling how many others the Deutsche possessed-until a missile roared toward them. And swatting missiles out of, the sky was an order of magnitude harder than dealing with these slow, clumsy Tosevite airplanes. Even the airplanes were hurting his forces now and again, because the Big Uglies kept sending them out no matter how many got knocked down. As Kirel bad said, their courage and skill went some of the way toward making up for their poor technology.

“We have to destroy the factories in which these weapons are produced,” Atvar said.

“Yes Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered.

Not, Atvar noted, “It shall be done.” From the air, one factory looked like another. Destroying all the factories in Deutschland was a tall order. Compared to the size of the planet, Deutschland was a small empire, but even small empires, Atvar was learning, covered a lot of ground. The other Tosevite empires had factories, too. How close were they to making missiles?

The fleetlord did his best to look on the bright side. “Their failure gives us the warning we need. We shall not be taken unawares even if they succeed in launching missiles at us.” We had better not be, his tone said.

“Our preparations are adequate,” Kirel said. He did his best to keep on sounding businesslike and military, but his voice had an edge to it that Atvar understood perfectly well: if that was the bright side, it was hardly worth looking for.

The train chuffed to a halt somewhere on the south Russian steppe; men in field gray sprang down and went efficiently to work. They would have been more efficient still, Karl Becker thought, if they’d been allowed to proceed in their usual methodical fashion rather than at a dead run. But an order from the Fuhrer was an order from the Fuhrer. At the dead run they went.

“The ground will not be adequately prepared, Karl,” Michael Arenswald said sadly. Both men were part of the engineering detachment of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora.

“This is true, of course,” Becker said with a fatalistic nod, “but how many shots are we likely to be able to fire before the Lizards descend on us?” They were sixty kilometers from the Lizard base. With aircraft, though, especially the ones the Lizards flew, sixty kilometers passed in the blink of an eye. Karl Becker was a long way from stupid; he recognized a suicide mission when he heard one.

If Arenswald did, too, he kept it to himself. “We might even get off half a dozen before they figure out what’s happening to them.”

“Oh, quatsch!” said Becker, a Berliner. He jabbed an index finger out at his friend. “You are a dead man, I am a dead man, we are all dead men, the whole battalion of us. The only question left unanswered is whether we can take enough Lizards with us to make our deaths worth something.”

“Sooner or later, we are all dead men.” Arenswald laughed. “We’ll give them a surprise before we go, at any rate.”

“With luck, we may manage that,” Becker admitted. “We-” He broke off and started coughing. The battalion had a chemical unit attached to it, to send up, smoke and hide, it from view from the air while it was setting up for action. Some of the smoke came from nothing more sophisticated than flaming buckets of motor oil. Breathing it was probably doing Becker’s lungs no good, but odds were it wouldn’t kill him before be died of other causes. He coughed again, then ignored it.

Men swarmed over the tram like ants Special tracks had been laid for the heavy artillery battalion, four gently curved arcs, each always a constant distance from its neighbors The inner two sets of rails were exactly twenty feet apart. Crews began moving specially built diesel construction cranes to the outer pair of tracks for aid in the upcoming assembly process.

Looking at all the purposeful activity, Arenswald laughed again. “Not bad, considering how understrength we are.” The smoke was already turning his face sooty.

“A lot of people we don’t need, considering we won’t be here long.” When Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora came into Russia, it was accompanied by a security unit that included three hundred infantry and secret police with dogs, and by a four-hundred-man reinforced flak battalion. Neither the one nor the other mattered now. If the Lizards chose to come this way, German infantry could not hold them off, and the flak battalion could not keep their planes away. Dora’s only hope of accomplishing anything was going into action before the enemy noticed it was there. And considering what Dora was…

Becker laughed, too. Arenswald gave him a curious look. He explained: “Keeping Dora a secret is like taking an elephant out of its enclosure at the Berlin Tiergarten and walking it out of the-zoo without the keepers’ paying you any mind.”

“Something to that.” Arenswald waved at the ever-denser smoke all around. “But you see, Karl, we have a very large pocket here.”

“We have a very large elephant, too.” Becker hopped down from the train and walked between the two center tracks, the ones that would have to bear Dora’s weight. The tracks were laid with closely spaced cross ties to help strengthen the roadbed, but the ground was not nearly so stony as it should have been. That would matter a great deal if Dora stayed here a long while. For the few shots it was likely to get off, the ground was less important.

The next few days passed in a berserk blaze of work, with sleep, snatched in odd moments, often under the train to give some protection in case Lizard aircraft did come by. The manuals said assembling Dora needed a week. Driven by the lash of fear for the fatherland, the heavy artillery battalion did it in four and a half days.

The two pieces of the bottom half of the gun carriage went onto the two central tracks and were aligned with each other. They rested on twenty rail trucks, again to distribute Dora’s mass as widely as possible. Becker was part of the crew that hydraulically leveled the lower mount.

The diesel cranes lifted crossbeams onto the lower mount, then placed the two-piece upper mount where it belonged. The top of the carriage held Dora’s loading assembly and the trunnion supports. It was joined to the lower mount by dozens of heavy bolts. Becker went down one side of the carriage and Arenswald down the other, checking that every one was in place.

They met at the rear, grinned, exchanged drawings, then went up the carriage to check each other’s sides. Everything had to work once the shooting started; things would go wrong soon enough after that.

Assembly went faster once the carriage was together. The trunnions, the gun cradle, the breech, and the barrel sections all were raised to their proper positions. When Dora was at last complete, Becker admired the monster gun through blowing smoke. Carnage and all, the 80-centimeter cannon was fifty meters long and eleven meters tall; its barrel alone was thirty meters long. Somewhere far above the smoke, Becker heard a Lizard plane whine past. His shoulders slumped; his hands made futile fists. “No, God,” he said, almost as a threat, “not now, not when we were so close.”

Michael Arenswald clapped him on the shoulder. “They’ve flown over us before, Karl. It will be all right; you’ll see.”

No bombs fell on them; no guided rockets exploded by the gun carriage. A crane lifted from a freight car a seven-tonne shell, slowly swung the great projectile, more than five meters long and almost a meter thick, onto the loading assembly. It didn’t look like an artillery shell, not to Becker. It looked like something more primeval, as if Tyrannosaurus rex had been reincarnated as artillery.

The breech received the shell, was closed with a clang that sounded like a factory noise. The whole battalion cheered as the gun barrel slowly rose, its tip no doubt projecting out of the smoke screen now. Laughing, Arenswald said, “It reminds me of the world’s biggest prick getting hard.”

“That’s one hell of a hard-on, all right,” Becker said.

The barrel reached an angle of almost forty-five degrees, stopped. Along with everyone else around, Becker turned away: from it, covered his ears, opened his mouth.

The blast was like nothing he’d ever imagined. It sucked all the air out of his lungs, shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. Stunned, he staggered, stumbled, sat down hard on the ground. His head roared. He wondered if he would ever hear anything through that oceanic clamor again. But he could still see. Sprawled in the dirt beside him, Michael Arenswald gave a big thumbs-up.

A radar technician on the grounded transport ship 67th Emperor Sohrheb stared at the screen in front of him, hissed in dismay. Automatic alarms began to yammer even before Breltan shrieked, “Missile incoming!” A warning had come down that the Big Uglies were playing with missiles, but he’d never expected to encounter one of their toys so soon. He raised both eye turrets to the ceiling in bemusement. The Big Uglies just weren’t like the Race. They were always in a hurry.

Their missile was in a hurry, too, chewing away the distance to the grounded ships. Breltan’s jaws opened again, this time in amusement. So the Tosevites had discovered missiles, had they? Well and good, but they hadn’t yet discovered that missiles too could be killed.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the radars showed missiles leaping up to smash the intruder. Breltan laughed again, said, “You’ll have to do better than that, Big Uglies.”

A missile, as a rule, is a flimsy thing, no stronger than it has to be-any excess weight degrades performance. If another missile-or even a fragment hurled from an exploding warhead-hits it, odds are it will be wrecked.

The shell from Dora, however, had to be armored to withstand the monstrous force that had sent it on its way. A missile exploded a couple of meters from it. The fragments bounced off its brass sides. Another missile struck it a glancing blow before exploding and spun away, ruined.

The shell, undisturbed, flew on.

Breltan watched the radar screen in disbelief mixed with equal measures of horror and fascination. “It can’t do that,” he said. But it could-the Tosevite missile shrugged off everything the Race threw at it and kept coming. Coming right at Breltan.

“Emperor save me,” he whimpered, and dove under his seat in the approved position for protection against attack from the air.

The shell landed about ten meters in front of the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. Just under a tonne of its mass was high explosives. The rest, in a time measured in microseconds, turned to knife-edged, red-hot fragments of every shape and size.

Like all starships of the invasion fleet, the 67th Emperor Sohrheb drew its primary power from an atomic pile. But, like most of the ships that landed on Tosev 3, it used a fair part of the energy from that pile to electrolyze water into oxygen and the hydrogen that fueled the Race’s air and ground vehicles.

When it blew, it blew sky-high. No one ever found a trace of Breltan-or his seat.

The fireball was big enough to be visible across sixty kilometers. When it lit up the northern horizon, the men of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora screamed with: delight, loud enough for Karl Becker to hear them even with his abused ears. “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he shouted, and danced in a clumsy circle with Michael Arenswald.

“Now that’s what I call an orgasm,” Arenswald yelled.

The brigadier commanding the heavy artillery battalion climbed up onto the immense gun carriage, megaphone in hand. “Back to it!” he bawled to his capering crew. “We want to hit them again before they hit us.”

Nothing could have been better calculated to send the battalion back to work at full speed. Unlike a tank gun, Dora could not traverse. A locomotive attached to the front end of the carriage moved forward a few meters, pulling nearly 1,500 tonnes of cannon and mounting along the curved track into its preplanned next firing position.

Even as the flagman brought the engine to a halt right at the mark painted on the track, Becker was dashing forward to make sure the gun carnage had remained level after the stress of the round and the move. The bubbles in the spirit levels at all four corners of the carriage hadn’t stirred a millimeter. He waved up to the reloading gang. “All good here!”

The long barrel lifted a degree or two. A crane was already lifting the expended shell casing out Of the breech. “Clear be-low!” the crane operator shouted. Men scattered. The casing thudded to the ground beside the gun carriage. That wasn’t the way the manuals said to get rid of such casings, but it was the fastest way. The crane swung to pick up a new shell.

Karl Becker kept an eye on his watch. Twenty-nine minutes after Dora spoke for the first time, the great gun spoke again.

Krefak felt the heat from the burning 67th Emperor Sohrheb, though his missile battery was posted a good ways away from the luckless starship. He was heartily glad of that; the blast when the ship went up had taken out several units closer to it.

Krefak also felt the heat from his own commander, who’d waxed eloquent over his failure to shoot down, the Big Uglies’ missile. He’d done everything right; he knew he had. The battery had intercepted the Tosevite projectile at least twice. Tapes from the radars proved it. But how was he supposed to say so, with only smoking rubble left where a proud starship had stood mere heartbeats before?

One of the males at a radar screen let out a frightened hiss. “The eggless creatures launched another one!” he exclaimed.

Krefak gaped in shocked surprise. Once was catastrophe enough, but twice-He couldn’t imagine twice. He didn’t want to imagine twice. His voice rose to a most-unofficerlike screech:

“Shoot it down!”

Roars from the launchers showed him that the computers hadn’t waited for his orders. He ran, to the screen, watched the missiles fly. As they had before, they went straight to the mark, exploded… and were gone. So far as the Tosevite missile was concerned, they might as well never have been fired. It proceeded inexorably on its ordained course.

Below the radar screen that marked its track through the air was another that evaluated the ground target at which it was aimed. “No,” he said softly. “By the Emperors, launch more missiles!”

“The battery has expended all the ones we had on launchers, superior sir,” the male answered helplessly. “More are coming.” Then he too took a look at where the Tosevite missile was heading. “Not the 56th Emperor Jossano.” His eye turrets quivered with fright as he stared at Krefak.

“Yes, with most of our nuclear weapons on board. To treachery with colonizing this stinking planet; we should have sterilized it to be rid of the Tosevites once and for all. We-” His voice was lost in the roar of the exploding missile, and in the much, much bigger roar that subsumed it.

The 56th Emperor Jossano went up in the same sort of blast as had taken the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. The fission and fusion weapons were stored in the very heart of the ship, in a strongly armored chamber. It did not save them. As the 56th Emperor Jossano blew to pieces and burned, the explosives that triggered the rapid joining of precisely machined chunks of plutonium began going off, as if they were rounds of ammunition in a flaming tank.

The bombs themselves did not go off; the triggering charges did not ignite in the precise order or at the precise rate that required. But the casings were wrecked, the chunks of plutonium warped out of shape and broken and, indeed, scattered over a goodly part of the Tosevite landscape as explosion after explosion wracked the 56th Emperor Jossano.

They were very likely the most valuable pieces of metal on the face of the Earth, or would have been had any human being known they were there or what to do with them. No human being did, not then.

More screams of glee rose from Dora’s firing crew. They did not waste motion dancing at the sight of this new flame on the distant horizon, but immediately set to work reloading the 80-centimeter cannon.

Michael Arenswald bellowed in Becker’s ear. “Six! Didn’t I tell you we’d get off six?”

“We’ve been lucky twice,” Becker said. “That’s more than I expected right there. Maybe we’ll go again-third time’s the charm, they say.”

For an instant too long, he thought the scream in the sky was part of the way his head rang after the second detonation of the monster gun. The locomotive had just finished hauling Dora to its next marked firing position. Becker started over to the gun carriage to see if it had stayed level yet again.

The first bomb blast, a few meters behind him, hurled him facefirst into that great mountain of metal. He felt things break-his nose, a cheekbone, several ribs, a hip. He opened his mouth to scream. Another bomb went off, this one even closer.

Jens Larssen’s apartment lay a few blocks west of the Union Stockyards. The neighborhood wasn’t much, but he’d still been surprised at how cheap he got the place. The incessant Chicago wind came from the west that day. A couple of days later, it started blowing off Lake Michigan, and he understood. But it was too late by then-he’d already signed the lease.

The wind blew off the lake the day his wife, Barbara, got into town, too. He still remembered the way her eyes got wide. She put the smell into one raised eyebrow and four words: “Essence of terrified cow.”

The wind was blowing off the lake tonight, but Larssen hardly noticed the rich manure stink. He could smell his own fear, and Barbara’s. Lizard planes were over Chicago again. He’d listened to Edward R. Marrow on crackling shortwave from England, listened to that deep, raspy voice and its trademark opening: “This is London.” Such was Murrow’s magic that he’d imagined he understood what being a Londoner in the Blitz was like. Now he knew better.

More planes screeched past; more bombs fell, some, by the way the windows rattled, quite close by. He clung to Barbara, and she to him, under the kitchen table. Chicago had no shelters. “Hitting the stockyards again,” she said into his ear.

He nodded. “Anything with rails.” The Lizards were inhumanly methodical about pasting transportation hubs, and Chicago was nothing else but. It was also close to the landing zone they’d carved out for themselves in downstate Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky. Thanks to both those things, the town was taking a heavy pounding.

Only a couple of candles lit the one-bedroom apartment. Their light did not get past the blankets tacked up to serve as blackout curtains. The blankets would not have contained electric lights, but the power had been off more often than it was on the past few days. It made Larssen glad for once that he had only an old-fashioned icebox; not a fancy electric refrigerator. As long as the ice man kept coming around-as long as the ice man still had ice-his food would stay fresh.

Antiaircraft guns, pitifully few and pitifully ineffective, added their barks to the cacophony. Shrapnel pattered down on rooftops like hot metal hail. Air-raid sirens wailed, lost souls in the night.

After a while, Larssen noticed he heard no more Lizard planes, though the rest of the fireworks display continued as gunners blazed away at their imaginations. “I think it’s over,” he said.

“This time,” Barbara answered. He felt her tremble in his arms; for that matter, he felt pretty shaky himself. One by one, sirens fell silent. His wife went on, “I don’t know how much more of this I can handle.” Like a tight-stretched wire, her voice vibrated with hidden stress.

“The English stuck it out,” he said, remembering Murrow again.

“God knows how,” she said. “I don’t.” She squeezed him even tighter than she had when the bombs were falling.

Being a thoroughly rational young man, he opened his mouth to explain to her how bad a beating London had taken, and for how long, and how the Lizards seemed, for the moment anyhow, to be much more selective than the Nazis about hitting civilian targets. But however thoroughly rational he was, the springy firmness of her body locked against his reminded him that he was young. Instead of explaining, he kissed her.

Her mouth came open against his; she moaned a little, deep in her throat, whether from fear or desire or both commingled he never knew. She pressed the warm palm of her hand against his hair. He rolled on top of her, careful even then not to knock his head on the underside of the table. When at last their kiss broke, he whispered, “Shall we go in the bedroom?”

“No,” she said, startling him. Then she giggled. “Let’s do it right here, on the floor. It’ll remind me of those times in the backseat of your old Chevy.”

“All right,” he said, by then too eager to care much where. He shifted his weight. “Raise up, just a little.” When she moved, he undid the buttons on the back of her blouse and unhooked her bra with one hand. He hadn’t tried that since they were married, but the ease with which he accomplished it said his hand remembered the backseat of the old Chevy, too.

He tossed the cotton blouse and bra aside. Presently, he said, “Lift up again.” He slowly slid her panties down her legs. Instead of pulling off her skirt, he hiked it up. That made her laugh again. She kissed him, long and slow. His hands wandered where they would.

So did hers, unbuckling his belt, opening his trouser button, and, with several delicious pauses, lowering his zipper. He yanked down his pants and jockey shorts, just far enough. They were both laughing by then. Laughing still, he plunged into her, leaving behind for a little while the terror outside the blacked-out apartment.

“I should have taken off my shirt,” he said when they were through. “Now it’s all sweaty.”

“It? What about me?” Barbara brought both hands up to his chest, made as if to push him vertically away from her. He raised up on his elbows and knees-and this time did catch the back of his head on the bottom of the kitchen table, hard enough to see stars. He swore, first in English, then in the fragments of Norwegian he’d picked up from his grandfather.

Barbara, whose maiden name was Baker and who had a couple of several-times-great-grandfathers who’d fought in the Revolution, always thought that was the funniest thing in the world. “You’re in no position to laugh now, wench,” he said, and tickled her conveniently bare ribs. The linoleum made moist squelching noises under her backside as she tried to wriggle away. That set him laughing, too. He grabbed her. They might have begun again, but the telephone chose that moment to ring.

Larssen jerked up in surprise-he hadn’t thought the phone was working-and, gave himself another crack in the head. This time he started out swearing in Norwegian. Trousers flopping around his ankles, he hobbled into the bedroom. “Hello?” he growled, annoyed as if it were the caller’s fault he’d knocked his brains loose.

“That is you, Jens? You are all right, you and Barbara?”

The accented voice on the other end of the line threw ice water on his steam. “Yes, Dr. Fermi,” he said, and made a hasty grab for his pants. Of course Fermi could not see him, but he was embarrassed even to be talking to the Italian physicist, a dignified man if ever there was one, with trousers at half-mast. “We came through safe again, thank you.”

“Safe?” Fermi echoed bitterly. “This is a word without meaning in the world today. I thought it had one when Laura and I came here four years ago, but I am wrong. But never mind that. Here is the reason I call: Szilard says-and he, is right-we must all meet tomorrow, and tomorrow early. Seven o’clock. He would say six if he could.”

“I’ll be there,” Larssen promised. “What’s up?”

“The Lizards, they are moving toward Chicago.”

The words seemed to hang on the wire. “But they can’t,” Jens said, though he knew perfectly well they could. What the devil was there to stop them?

Fermi understood what be meant. “You are right-they must not. If they come here, everything we do since we begin is lost. Too much time lost, time we have not to waste even against Germany, to say nothing of these creatures.”

“Germany.” Larssen kept his voice flat. He’d been relieved past all measure when the atomic bomb that exploded above Chicago proved not to have a swastika painted on its casing. He once more had no idea how far along the Nazis were on their own bomb program. It would be a hell of a note, though, for humanity to have to depend on them alone for a weapon with which to do the Lizards some real damage. He wondered if he would sooner see Earth conquered than Adolf Hitler its savior. Just maybe, he thought. On the line, Fermi cleared his throat. That brought Larssen back to the here-and-now. “I’ll be there,” he said again.

“Good,” Fermi said. “I go, then-many others to call while phones are working. I see you in the morning.” He hung up without saying good-bye. Larssen sat down on the bed, thinking hard. His pants slid back down to his ankles. He didn’t notice.

His wife walked into the bedroom. She carried a candle to light her way. Outside, fire-engine sirens rang through the night as their crews fought to douse the fires the Lizards had started. “What’s up?” Barbara asked. She tossed her blouse and underwear into the wickerwork laundry hamper.

“Big meeting tomorrow,” he answered, then repeated Fermi’s grim news.

“That’s not good,” she said. She had no real notion of what he was working on under Stagg Field; she’d been studying medieval English literature when they met at Berkeley. But she knew the project was important. She asked, “How are we going to stop them?”

“You come up with the answer to that one and you win the sixty-four dollars.”

She smiled at that, then set the candle in a silver stick-a wedding present Larssen had never thought they’d use-on top of the dresser. With both hands, she took off her skirt and threw it at the hamper. She glanced over to him. “You still haven’t pulled up your pants.”

“I did so,” he said, then had to add lamely, “They must have fallen down again.”

“Well, shall I put on a nightgown now, or not?”

He considered. The meeting in the morning was early, but if he poured down enough coffee, he’d get through it okay… and Barbara, naked in the candlelight, made him want to forget tomorrow anyhow. “Not,” he said.

“Good. This time, take your shirt off, too.”

Nothing was running the next morning when Larssen headed for the University of Chicago, not the buses, not the elevated, nothing. Only a few cars crawled cautiously along the street, inhibited not only by the gas shortage but also now by the risk of rubble.

A rifle-toting air-raid warden in a British-style tin hat and a Civil Defense armband nodded to Jens as he walked past. The wardens had flowered like weeds after a drought in the panicky weeks following Pearl Harbor, then disappeared almost as quickly when their services proved unnecessary. But these days, they really were needed. This one looked as though he hadn’t slept in a month. His face was covered with graying stubble; an unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. But he was going on as best he could, like everyone else.

An hour’s brisk walk got Larssen onto the university campus. While he supposed that was good for him, he also gave some serious thought to trying to get his hands on a bicycle. The sooner the better, he decided, before everyone got the same idea and the price went sky-high. He didn’t have two hours to spare every day going back and forth to work.

Eckhart Hall stood on the southeast corner of the Quadrangle. It was a new building, having opened in 1930. New or not, however, it didn’t boast air conditioning; the windows to the commons room were open, allowing fresh warm muggy air to replace the stale warm muggy air already inside. In deference to the hour, someone had put out a big pot of coffee and a tray of sweet rolls on a table set under those windows.

Larssen made a beeline for that table, poured himself a paper cup of coffee, gulped it down hot and black, then grabbed a roll and got a second cup. With the caffeine jolt kicking in, he drank this one more slowly.

But as he carried the coffee and sweet roll to a chair, he wondered how long such things would continue to exist in Chicago. The coffee was imported, of course, and so were some of the ingredients in the roll-the cinnamon, certainly. How long could commerce continue at even its wartime level with Lizard bases scattered over the United States like growing tumors?

He nodded to Enrico Fermi, one of the two or three men who had beaten him to the meeting. The Italian physicist was wiping his mouth on a paper napkin (the pulp from which it was made was yet another import, Larssen thought). “We’d best enjoy life while we can,” the younger man said, and explained his reasoning.

Fermi nodded. His receding hairline and oval face made him the literal embodiment of the word egghead, and also made him look older than his forty-one years. His smile now was sweet and rather sad. “My world has already turned upside down once of late. Another time seems somehow less distressing-and I doubt the Lizards concern themselves over my wife’s religion.”

Brought up comfortably Lutheran in a land where one could fairly comfortably be anything, Jens had never much concerned himself with religion. But Laura Fermi had been a Jew in fascist Italy. The Italians were not rabid on the subject like the Germans, but they had made matters sticky enough for the Fermis to be glad to get out.

“I wonder how far along this trail the Axis would be if Hitler only had the sense to leave some of his brightest people alone and let them work for him,” Larssen said.

“I am not to any great degree a political man, but it has always seemed to me that fascism and sense do not mingle,” Fermi said. He raised his voice to address a newcomer: “Is this not so, Leo?”

Leo Szilard was short and stocky, and wore a suit with padded shoulders which emphasized the fact. “What do you say, Enrico?” he asked. When Fermi repeated himself, he screwed up his broad, fleshy face in thought before answering, “Authoritarianism in any form makes for bad science, I believe, for its postulates are not rational. The Nazis are bad for this, yes, but anyone who thinks the American government-and hence its projects like our so-called Metallurgical Laboratory here-free of such preconceived idiocy is himself an idiot.”

Larssen nodded vehemently at that. If Washington had really believed in what the Met Lab was doing, it would have poured in three times the research money and support from the day Einstein first suggested the violent release of atomic energy was possible.

Nodding also helped Jens keep a straight face. Szilard was both brilliant and cultured, and expressed himself so. But the Hungarian scientist’s accent never failed to remind Larssen of Bela Lugosi’s in Dracula. He wondered if Szilard had ever seen the movie, but lacked the nerve to ask.

More people drifted in, by ones and twos. Szilard looked pointedly at his watch every few minutes; his attitude declared that being bombarded by creatures from another planet wasn’t a good enough excuse for missing an important meeting.

Finally, at about twenty-five after seven, he decided he could wait no more. He said loudly, “We have a question to face today: in light of the Lizards’ move on Chicago, what is our proper course? Shall we abandon our research here, and seek some new arid safer place to continue it, accepting all the loss of time and effort and probably also of material this would entail? Or shall we seek to persuade the government to defend this city with everything in its power for our sake, knowing the army may well fail and the Lizards succeed here as they have so many other places? Discussion, gentlemen?”

Gerald Sebring said, “God knows I want an excuse to get out of Chicago-” That occasioned general laughter. Sebring had been planning to go do some research back in Berkeley in early June-and, incidentally, to marry another physicist’s secretary while he was out there. The arrival of the Lizards changed his plans, as it did so many others’ (come to that, Laura Fermi was still back in New York).

Sebring waited for the chuckles to die down before he went on. “Everything we’re doing here, though, feels like it’s right on the point of coming to fruition. Isn’t that so, people? We’d lose a year, maybe more, if we had to pull up stakes now. I don’t think we can afford it. I don’t think the world can afford it.”

Several people nodded. Larssen stuck up a hand. Leo Szilard saw him, aimed a stubby forefinger in his direction. He said, “Strikes me this doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. We can go on with a lot of our work here at the same time as we get ready to pull out as fast as possible if we have to.” He found he had trouble baldly saying, if the Lizards take Chicago.

“That is sensible, and practical for some of our projects,” Szilard agreed. “The chemical extraction of plutonium, for instance, though it requires the most delicate balances, can proceed elsewhere-not least because we have as yet very little plutonium to extract. Other lines of research, however, the pile you are assembling among them-”

“Tearing it down now would be most unfortunate, the more so if that proves unnecessary,” Fermi said. “Our k factor on this one should be above 1.00 at least, perhaps as high as 1.04. To break off work just when we are at last on the point of achieving a sustained chain reaction, that would be very bad.” His wide, mobile mouth twisted to show just how bad he thought it would be.

“Besides,” Sebring said, “where the heck are we likely to stay safe from the Lizards anyhow?” He was far from a handsome man, with a long face, heavy eyebrows, and buck teeth, but as usual spoke forcefully and seriously.

Szilard said, “Are we agreed, then, that while, as Jens says, we take what precautions we can, we ought to stay here in Chicago as long as that remains possible?” No one spoke. Szilard clicked his tongue between his teeth. When he continued, he sounded angry: “We are not authoritarians here. Anyone who thinks leaving wiser, tell us why this is so. Persuade us if you can-if you prove right, you will have done us great service.” Arthur Compton, who was in charge of the Metallurgical Laboratory, said, “I think Sebring put it best, Leo: where can we run that the Lizards will not follow?”

Again, no one disagreed. That was not because Compton headed the project, nor because of his formidable physical presence-he was tall and lean and sternly handsome, and looked more like a Barrymore than the Nobel prize-winning physicist he was. But the rest of the talented crew in the commons room were far too independent to follow a leader simply because he was the leader. Here, though, they had all reached the same conclusion.

Szilard saw that. He said, “If it is decided, then, that Chicago must be held, we must convince the army of the importance of this as well.”

“They will fight to hold Chicago anyhow,” Compton said. “It is the hinge upon which the United States pivots, and they know it.”

“It is more important than that,” Fermi said quietly. “With what we do here, Chicago is the hinge on which the world pivots, and the army, it does not know that. We must send someone to tell them.”

“We must send some two,” Szilard said, and all at once Larssen was certain he and Fermi had planned their strategy together ahead of time. “We must send two, and separately, in case one meets with misfortune along the way. The war is here among us now; this can happen.”

Sure enough, Fermi spoke up again, as if with the next line of dialogue in an ancient Greek play: “We should send also native-born Americans; officers are more likely to hear them with attention than some foreigner, some enemy alien who is not fully to be trusted even now when the Lizards, true aliens, have come.”

Larssen was nodding, impressed by Fermi’s logic at the same time as he regretted the truths that underlay it, when Gerald Sebring raised a hand and said, “I’ll go.”

“So will I,” Larssen heard himself saying. He blinked in surprise; he hadn’t known he was going to volunteer until the words were out of his mouth. But speaking up turned out to make sense, even to him: “Walt Zinn can ride herd, on the gang of hooligans working on the pile.”

Zinn nodded. “As long as I can keep ’em out of jail, I’ll get along all right.” He gave away his Canadian origins by saying oat for out.

“Then it is settled.” Szilard rubbed his hands in satisfaction. Fermi also looked pleased. Szilard went on, “You will leave as soon as possible. One of you will go by car-Larssen, that will be you, I think. Gerald, you will take the train. I hope both of you get to Washington safe and sound-and I hope Washington will still be in human hands when you arrive.”

That sent a nasty chill through Larssen. He hadn’t imagined Lizards marching up Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House. But if they could move on Chicago, they could surely move on Washington. He wondered if the invaders from another world had figured out it was the capital of the United States.

Looking at Szilard’s smug expression, he realized the Hungarian had gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his devotion to democracy, Szilard had maneuvered the meeting like a Chicago wardheeler. Larssen chuckled. Well, if that wasn’t democracy, what was it? A question better left unanswered in Chicago, perhaps.

The chuckle turned into a guffaw that Larssen fortunately managed to strangle before it got loose. If you played with the letters in Dr. Szilard’s name just a little… Larssen wondered if Szilard himself had noticed, and how one said lizard in Magyar.

I can report one riddle solved, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

“That will be a pleasant novelty;” Atvar snapped; the longer he wrestled with Tosev 3; the testier he became. But he could not afford to irk Kirel excessively. All bowed to the Emperor, yes, but those below him competed. Even officers’ cabals were not unknown. And so Atvar softened his tone: “What new things have you learned of the Big Uglies, then?”

“Our technicians have discovered why the high-burst nuclear weapons of our initial bombardment failed to completely disrupt their radio communications.”

Kirel beckoned to, one of those technicians, who floated up with a captured Tosevite radio set. Atvar opened his jaws in mocking laughter. “Big and ugly and clumsy, just like the Tosevites themselves,” he said.

“You speak truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” the technician said. “Also clumsy and primitive. The electronics are not even solid-state, as ours have been through almost all our recorded history. The Tosevites use as clumsy makeshifts these large vacuum-filled tubes here.” He pulled off the back plate of the set to point to the parts he meant. “They are bulky, as you see, Exalted Fleetlord, and the amount of waste heat they produce is appalling-they are most inefficient. But exactly because they are so large and so-so gross, if I may use an imprecise word, they are much less susceptible to electromagnetic pulse than unshielded integrated circuits would be.”

“Thank you, Technician-Second,” Atvar said, reading the male’s body paint for his rank. “Your data are valuable. Service to the Emperor.” Hearing himself dismissed, the technician cast down his eyes in salute to the sovereign, then took back the radio set and pushed himself away from the fleetlord’s presence.

“You see, Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevites’ communications system retained its utility only because it is so primitive,” Kirel said.

“Their radios are primitive, and that ends up being useful to them. They don’t yet know how to make decent missiles, so they fling outsized artillery shells instead, and that ends up being useful. Now they are trying to build missiles. Where will it end, Shiplord?”

“In our victory,” Kirel said stoutly.

Atvar gave him a grateful look. Maybe the only reason Kirel was acting so loyally was that he did not want command of what looked like an effort that promised more in the way of trouble than glory. At the moment, Atvar didn’t care. Just having someone to whom he could complain worked wonders.

And complain he did: “When the Tosevites aren’t primitive, they hurt us, too. By the memories of all the ancient Emperors, who would have been mad enough to imagine making boats big enough to put airplanes on them? Who but the Big Uglies, I mean?”

Home, Rabotev 2, and Halless 1 all had free water, yes, but in the form of rivers and ponds and lakes (Rabotev 2 even had a couple of smallish seas). None of them was troubled by the vast, world-bestriding oceans of Tosev 3, and neither the Race, the Rabotevs, nor the Hallessi used their waters to anything like the extent the Big Uglies did. Having planes appear out of nowhere, as when they raided the base on the Chinese Coast, was a rude surprise. So were the ships with big guns that pounded bases anywhere near water.

Kirel waggled his fingers in a shrug. “Now that we know they fight from the sea, we can sink their big boats, and faster than they can hope to build them. The boats aren’t exactly inconspicuous, either. That problem will go away, and soon.”

“May it, be so.” But once Atvar got to worrying out loud, he wasn’t about to let himself be mollified so easily, “These missiles they’re trying to build-how are we supposed to shoot them all down? We came here intending, to fight savages whose only missiles came from bows. And do you know what the latest is?”

“Tell me, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, in the tones of a male who understands he’d better listen sympathetically if he knows what’s good for him.

“In the past few days, for the first time, jet planes rose against our aircraft from both Deutschland and Britain, They’re still badly inferior to ours-especially the Britainish ones-but not nearly so much so as the primitive crates with revolving airfoils we’ve been facing.”

“I-hadn’t heard that, Exalted Fleetlord.” Now Atvar really had Kirel’s attention again. After that moment of surprise, the shiplord continued, “Wait a bit. Deutschland and Britain were enemies to each other before we landed, am I right?”

“Yes, yes. Britain and the U.S.A. and the SSSR and China against Deutschland and Italia; Britain and the U.S.A. and China against Nippon; but not, for some eggless reason, Nippon against the SSSR. If the Tosevites didn’t keep coming up with new things to throw at us, I’d swear on the Emperor’s name they were all mad.”

“Wait a bit,” Kirel repeated. “If Deutschland and Britain were foes until we landed, it’s not likely they’d share jet plane technology, is it?”

“I wouldn’t think so, but who can tell for certain what the Big Uglies would do? Maybe it’s having so many different empires on so little land that makes them the way they are.” The scrambled, convoluted way the Tosevites played the game of politics made even the maneuvers of the imperial court tame by comparison. Dealing with any one Tosevite official made Atvar feel out of his league. As for playing them off against one another, as the manuals suggested, he counted himself lucky that they weren’t exploiting him.

But Kirel was still worrying over the jets: “Exalted Fleetlord, if they don’t share technology, that means they can only have each developed it independently. They are like a bad virus, Fleetlord; they mutate-not physically, but technically, which is worse-too fast, maybe faster than we can handle. Perhaps we should sterilize the planet of them.”

The fleetlord turned both eye sockets to bear on his subordinate. This, from the male who had urged giving the Big Uglies a chance to surrender before the Race choked off their communications? — or rather, failed to choke off their communications? “You think they represent so great a danger to us, Shiplord?”

“I do, Exalted Fleetlord. We are at a high level, and have been steady there for ages. They are lower, but rising quickly. We must smash them down while we still can.”

“If only the filthy creatures hadn’t hit the 56th Emperor Jossano,” Atvar said mournfully. If only we hadn’t kept so many of our bombs aboard one ship, he added mentally. But no, he was not to blame for that; ancient doctrine ordained entrusting large stores of nuclear weapons only to the most reliable shiplords. As an officer of the Race should, he’d followed that ancient doctrine. No one could possibly think less of him for that-except that in so doing, he’d suffered a disaster. The way ancient doctrine corroded whenever it touched matters Tosevite worried him even more than the fighting down on the surface of Tosev 3.

“We still have some of the devices left,” Kirel persisted. “Maybe the Big Uglies will be more willing to submit if they see what we can do to their cities.”

Atvar threw back his head in disagreement. “We do not destroy the world toward which a settler fleet is already traveling.” That was what ancient doctrine said, doctrine based on the conquests of Rabotevs and Hallessi.

“Exalted Fleetlord, Tosev 3 appears to me to be dissimilar to our previous campaigns,” Kirel said,’ pressing his superior up to the edge of politeness. “The Tosevites have a greater capacity to resist than did the other subject races, and so seem to require harsher measures. The Deutsche in particular, Exalted Fleetlord-the cannon that wrecked the 56th Emperor Jossano was theirs, even if it was on the land of the SSSR, and the missile the Big Uglies tried to launch, and now, you tell me, they fly jet planes as well.”

“No,” Atvar said. Ancient doctrine declared that new planets were not to be spoiled by radioactivity, which was apt to linger long after the war of subjugation ended. After all, the Race would be living here in perpetuity, integrating Tosev into the fabric of the Empire… and Tosev 3 didn’t have that much land to begin with.

But it did have hideously troublesome natives. Just moments before, the fleetlord had thought how poorly ancient doctrine worked when dealing with the Big Uglies. Moving away from it frightened him as he’d never been frightened before, as if he were cut off from the Emperor’s favor, adrift and alone. Yet would he deserve the Emperor’s favor if he led the Race to more disasters?

“Wait, Shiplord-I have changed my mind,” he told Kirel, who had begun to turn away. “Go ahead and use one on-what is the name of the place?”

“Berlin, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “It shall be done.”