In the Balance

7

Two or three times, in his travels through the bush leagues, Sam Yeager had had to dig in at the plate against every hitter’s nightmare: a fireballing kid who couldn’t find the plate if you lit it up like Times Square. Whenever he did it, he faced a deadly weapon. At the time, he hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms, but it was true. The worst sound in baseball was the mushy splat of a ball getting somebody in the head. He’d seen friends lose careers in an instant of inattention and bad lights. He knew it was only luck he hadn’t lost his the, same way.

All that helped now, against weapons more overtly deadly. When bombs and bullets flew, a tin hat seemed small protection. For that matter, a tin hat was small protection. Yeager had seen more than one man gruesomely dead, helmet holed or smashed in or simply blown right off. But he wore his gladly, as better than nothing. Come to that, he wouldn’t have minded wearing it, or even something that covered rather more, whenever he went to bat against a hard-throwing righthander.

He peeked up from behind the blackened pile of bricks which until recently had been the back wall of a dry-cleaning establishment; its sign lay fallen in the middle of Main Street. He ducked down again in a hurry. A Lizard autogiro was growling through the air toward him. The Invaders from Space (he thought of them that way, with the capital letters) were trying to push the ragtag American force of which he was a part out of Amboy and trap them against the Green River, where there’d be easy prey.

When he said that out loud, Mutt Daniels grunted and answered, “Reckon you’re right, boy, but we’re gonna have the devil’s own time stoppin’ ’em.”

A roar in the sky-Yeager automatically threw himself flat. He’d learned that even before he took the soldier’s oath, and had it reinforced when a fellow a few feet from him got smashed to a red smear for being a split second too slow to hit the dirt.

But the roar came from two piston-engined fighters that streaked west toward the autogiro. The machine guns of the P-40 Warhawks hammered. Yeager stuck his head up again. The autogiro was firing back, and turning in midair to try to flee. The Lizards’ jets far outclassed anything humanity could make, but their flying troop carriers were vulnerable.

The Warhawks whizzed past the autogiro, one to the right, the other to the left. They banked into tight turns for another firing pass, but no need. The Lizard machine, spurting smoke from just below the rotor, settled to the ground in what was half landing, half crash. The fighters darted away before anything more dangerous appeared over the horizon.

Yeager scowled to see live Lizards scuttling out of the autogiro. “They left too soon,” he growled. “It wasn’t a clean kill.”

Mutt Daniels worked the bolt on his Springfield to chamber a new round. “Means it’s up to us, don’t it?” Moving with a grace that belied his fleshy form, he scuffled forward.

Yeager followed. He also had a rifle now, taken from a man who would never need one again. Back on the farm where he’d grown up, he’d shot at tin cans and gophers and the occasional crow with his father’s.22. The military weapon he carried now was heavier and kicked harder, but that wasn’t the main difference from those vanished days. When he shot at tin cans or gophers or crows, they didn’t shoot back.

A heavy machine gun began to bark, up near the intersection of Main Street and Highway 52. Pieces flew off the Lizards’ autogiro and sparkled in the sunlight as they twirled through the air. As for the Lizards themselves, they took cover with the speed and alacrity of their small reptilian namesakes. One by one, they opened fire. Their weapons chewed out short bursts, not the endless racket of a belt-fed machine gun, but not single. shots, either.

Was that a flicker of motion, over there behind the ornamental hedge? Yeager didn’t care to find out the hard way. He threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired. He scurried away to a new position before he looked toward the hedge again. Nothing moved there now.

Another rumble in the air, this one from the southwest…Yeager fired at the incoming autogiro, but it stayed out of rifle range. Flame shot from under its stubby wings. With a cry of fear, Yeager buried his face in grass and mud.

The rockets burst all around him, lances of fire that lashed the American position. The heavy machine gun fell silent. Through stunned ears, Yeager heard the Lizards on the ground moving forward.

Then another roar announced that the Warhawks had returned. Their guns tore at the new autogiro. This time they did the job right. The aircraft slammed the ground sideways and became a fireball. Smoke rose into the blue sky. It was less, smoke than would have come from a human-built plane; the Lizards used cleaner fuel. But fuel wasn’t all that burned in there. Seats, paint, ammunition, the bodies of the crew… they all went up.

Cheering, the Americans moved forward against the Lizards. “Careful there, you God-damned fools!” Sergeant Schneider bellowed, trying to shout over battlefield din. “You want to stay low.” As if to underscore the advice, someone who hadn’t stayed low enough suddenly pitched forward onto his face.

The Warhawks came back to strafe the Lizards on the ground. Something rose on a pillar of fire from behind a boulder in the middle of a Main Street lawn that marked a spot where Lincoln had spoken. The P-40 fled, twisting with all the skill the pilot had. It was not enough. The rocket tumbled it from the sky.

“Damn if it didn’t look like a Fourth of July skyrocket, right down to the big boom at the end,” Daniels said.

“It flew like it had eyes,” Yeager said, thinking of the turning path the rocket had scrawled across the sky. “I wonder how they make it do that.”

“Right now I got more important things to wonder about, like if I’m gonna be alive this time tomorrow,” Mutt said.

Yeager nodded, but his bump of curiosity still itched. Writers in Astounding and the other pulps had talked about detection devices for as long as he’d been reading them, and likely longer than that. He’d discovered on the night the Invaders from Space descended on the world that living through science fiction was a lot stranger-and a lot more deadly-than just reading it.

A hiss in the sky, a whistle, a noise like a train pulling into a station-an artillery shell burst among the embattled Lizards, then another and another. Dirt fountained skyward. The enemy’s fire slackened. Yeager didn’t know whether the Lizards were killed or hurt or just playing possum, but he used the lull to slide closer to them… and also closer to where the shells were landing. He wished he hadn’t thought of that, but kept crawling ahead.

A Lizard plane shot past, heading east. Yeager cringed, but the pilot wasted no time on a target as trivial as infantry. No doubt he wanted that battery of field guns. The shells kept coming for about another minute, maybe two, then abruptly stopped.

By that time, though, Yeager and the other Americans were on top of the Lizard position. “Surrender!” Sergeant Schneider shouted. Yeager was sure he was wasting his breath; where would the Lizards have learned English? And even if they had, would they quit? They seemed more like Japs than any other people Yeager knew of-at least, they were small and liked sneak attacks. Japs didn’t surrender for hell, so would the Lizards?

One of them had got some English, God knew where. “No-ssrenda,” came the reply, a dry hiss that made the hair stand up on Yeager’s arms. A burst of machine-rifle fire added an exclamation point.

The burst was close, close. Yeager grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, lobbed it as if he were aiming for a cutoff man. It flew toward the concrete block fence behind which he thought the Lizard who didn’t want to surrender was hiding. He didn’t see it go over. By the time it did, he was behind his own cover once more. He hadn’t needed more than one or two bullets snapping past his head to learn that lesson forever.

The grenade went off with a crash. Before the echoes died, Yeager sprinted up to the gray fence. He fired over it, once, twice, blindly. If the Lizard wasn’t badly hurt, he wanted to rattle it as much as he could. Then, gulping, he vaulted over the fence into the alleyway on the other side.

The Lizard was down and thrashing and horribly wounded; its red, red blood stained the gravel of the alley. Yeager’s stomach did a slow, lazy loop. He’d never expected the agony of a creature from another world to reach him, but it did. The Lizard yammered something in its own incomprehensible language. Yeager had no idea whether it was defiance or a plea for mercy. All he wanted to do was put the alien out of its misery and make it be quiet. He raised his rifle, shot it through the head.

It twitched once or twice, then lay still. Yeager let out a whistling sigh of relief; he’d thought too late that it didn’t necessarily have to store its brains in its head. He wondered if that would have occurred to any of the men fighting around him. Probably not; science-fiction readers were thin on the ground. As things worked out, it hadn’t mattered anyway.

He bent over the scaly corpse, scooped up the machine rifle the Lizard had carded. He was amazed at how light it was. Somebody, he thought, would have to take it apart and figure out how it worked.

Sergeant Schneider yelled again: “Surrender, you Lizards! Throw down your guns! Give up and we won’t hurt you.”

Yeager thought he was wasting his breath, but the bursts of enemy fire quickly ceased. Schneider came out in the open with something white-it was a by-God pillowcase, Yeager saw-tied to his rifle. He waved toward the houses and stores in which the last few Lizards were holed up, then made a peremptory gesture no human could have misunderstood: come out.

From behind Yeager, Mutt Daniels said, “He oughta get the Medal of Honor for that.” Yeager nodded, trying not to show how shaken he was; he hadn’t heard his manager-no, his ex-manager now, he supposed-come up at all.

Sergeant Schneider simply stood and waited, his big feet splayed apart, his belly hanging over his belt. He looked as though he would have made three of the dead Lizard sprawled by Yeager; he looked hard and tough and quintessentially human. Seeing him defy the Lizards’ machine rifles, Yeager felt tears sting under the lids of his eyes. He was proud to belong to a people that could produce such a man.

After the hammering racket of baffle, silence seemed strange, wrong, almost frightening. The eerie pause hung in the balance for almost half a minute. Then a door opened in one of the houses from which the Lizards had been fighting. Without conscious thought on Yeager s part his rifle snapped toward it Schneider held up a hand, ordering the Americans not to shoot.

A Lizard came slowly through the doorway. He hadn’t dropped his weapon, but held it reversed, by the barrel. Like Sergeant Schneider, he’d fastened something white to the other end. The shape was familiar to Yeager, but he needed a moment to place it. All at once he bent double in a guffaw.

“What is it?” Mutt Daniels asked.

Between chuckles, Yeager wheezed, “First time I ever saw anybody make a flag of truce out of a pair of women’s panties.”

“Huh?” Mutt stared, then started laughing, too.

If the improvised white flag amused Sergeant Schneider he didn’t let on. He gestured again: come here. The Lizard came moving with careful deliberation rather than his kind’s usual quick skitter. When he got within about twenty feet of Schneider, the sergeant pointed to his machine rifle, then to the ground. He did it two or three times before the Lizard, even more hesitantly than before, set the weapon down.

Schneider made another come here gesture. The Lizard came. It flinched when he put an arm around it, but it did not flee. It came up to only the middle of his chest. Schneider turned to where the rest of the Lizards were holed up. “You see? No harm will come to you. Surrender!”

“Jesus, they’re really doing it,” Yeager whispered.

“Looks that way, don’t it?” Mutt Daniels whispered back.

The Lizards emerged from their hiding places. There were only five more of them, Yeager saw, and two of those were wounded, leaning on their fellows. The Lizard who had surrendered first called something to them all. The three with machine rifles set them down.

“What are we going to do with hurt Lizards?” Yeager asked. “If they’re proper prisoners of war, we have to try and take care of them, but do we yell for a medic or a vet? Hell, I don’t even know if they can eat our food.”

“I don’t know either, and frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Round and pudgy and filthy, Mutt made a most unlikely Rhett Butler. He shifted the plug in his cheek, spat, and went on, “It’s right nice, though, havin’ prisoners of their’n, not so much on account of what they can tell us but to keep ’em honest with all of our people they got.”

“Something to that.” Yeager wondered what had happened to the rest of the Decatur Commodores. Nothing good, he feared, remembering how the Lizards had strafed their train. The invaders could do whatever they pleased throughout big stretches of the United States. If holding prisoners-hostages-would help restrain them, Yeager was all for it.

Along with the rest of the Americans, he hurried forward at Sergeant Schneider’s waved command to take charge of the alien POWs. Having surrendered, the Lizards seemed abjectly submissive, hurrying to obey the soldiers’ gestures as best they could. Even to Invaders from Space, come along and this way were easy enough to put across.

Schneider seemed convinced the band he led-with everything from officers to weapons to organization in short supply, slapping a more formally military name than that on it was optimistic-had done something important. “We want to get these scaly sons of bitches out of here and back up to Ashton just as fast as we can, before more of ’em come along.” He told off half a dozen men: “You, you, you, you, you, and you.” Yeager was the fourth “you,” Mutt Daniels the fifth. “Get back to the bus that brought us here and take ’em away on it. The rest of us’ll dig in and hope we see more men before the Lizards decide to push harder. Good Lord willing, you can drop ’em off and head down this way again inside a couple of hours. Now get your butts in gear”

Flanked by men with loaded, bayonet-tipped rifles, the Lizards picked their way through and over debris toward the yellow school bus that had been pressed into service as a troop hauler. Yeager would have preferred the dignity of a proper khaki Army truck, but up at Ashton, a school bus was what they had.

The key was still in the bus ignition. Otto Chase looked at it with a certain amount of apprehension. “Anybody here able to drive this big honking thing?” the onetime cement-plant worker asked.

“I reckon Sam and I just might be able to handle it,” Mutt Daniels said with a sidelong glance at Yeager. The ballplayer puffed up his cheeks like a chipmunk to hold in his laughter. Alter half a lifetime bouncing around in buses, helping to repair them by the side of the road, pushing them when they broke down, there wasn’t a whole lot about them he didn’t know.

Mutt, moreover, had been bouncing around in buses essentially ever since there were buses. If there was anything about them he didn’t know, Yeager had no idea what it was. Daniels waited for the rest of the men to herd the Lizards to the wide rear seat, then started the engine, turned the bus around in a street most people would have thought too narrow for turning around a bus, and headed back to Ashton.

He stayed off Highway 52 and Highway 30, preferring the back-country roads less likely to draw attention from the air. Raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the motor, he said, “Reminds me of the country just back of the front line in France in 1918, right where the Boches got farthest. Parts of it are all tore, up, but you go fifty yards on and you’d swear nobody ever heard o’ war.”

The description was apt, Yeager thought. Most of the farms that sprawled among belts of forest between Amboy and Ashton were untouched. Men wearing wide-brimmed hats and overalls worked in several fields; cows grazed here and there, black and white splotches vivid against the cheerful green of grass and growing crops. By the calm way life went on, the nearest Lizard might have been ten billion light-years off.

But every so often, the bus would rattle past a bomb or shell crater, an ugly brown scar on the land’s smooth green skin. There were cattle by those craters, too, cattle on their sides bloating under the warm summer sun. And a couple of the neat frame farm buildings were neither neat nor buildings any longer, but more like a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks. Fat crows, startled by the bus’ racket, flapped into the air, cawing resentment at having their feasting interrupted.

Still, as Mutt had said, the eye could mostly forget the war whose border the bus had just left behind. The nose had a harder time. Yeager wondered if the faint reek of smoke and corruption simply clung to him, the other Americans, and the Lizards; if it came in through the open windows of the bus from the lightly damaged countryside through which they were driving; or if the breeze, which was out of the west, swept it along the front line.

The four unwounded Lizards did what they could for the two who were hurt. It wasn’t much; the humans had stripped them of the belts that along with their helmets were all they wore-no telling what deadly marvels they might have concealed inside.

Yeager had never thought about how Invaders from Space might feel if they were wounded and captured by humans who were as alien to them as they were to people. They didn’t look all-powerful or supremely evil. They just looked worried. In their shoes (if they’d worn shoes), he would have been worried, too.

He picked up one of the belts, started opening pouches. Before long, he found what looked like a bandage, wrapped in some clear stuff smoother and more pliable than cellophane. If it concealed a deadly marvel, he decided, he’d eat his helmet He pushed past the rest of the Americans-who still had their rifles leveled at the Lizards-and held out the bandage pack.

“What the hell you doing?” Otto Chase growled. “Who cares whether them damn things live or die?”

“If they’re prisoners of war, we’re supposed to treat ’em decent,” Yeager answered. “Besides, they hold a lot more of our kind than we do of theirs. Tormenting ’em might not be what you call smart.”

Chase grunted and subsided. The Lizards’ eyes swiveled from Yeager’s face to the bandage and back again. They reminded him of the chameleon he’d seen at the zoo in-was it Salt Lake? Maybe Spokane. Whichever, it was a long time ago now.

One of the Lizards took the bandage pack in its small hand. As it used its claws to tear open the wrapping, it hissed something at Yeager. It and all its companions, even the two injured ones, lowered their turreted eyes to the floor of the bus for a second or two. Then it deftly began to bandage a gash in a wounded Lizard’s flank.

“Paw through those belts,” Yeager said over his shoulder. “See if you can find some more bandages.” He was afraid the others would argue more, but they didn’t. He heard their feet shift. Somebody-he didn’t look back to see who-handed him another pack and then another. He passed them on to the Lizards.

By the time the bus pulled up in front of the Mills and Petrie Memorial Center in Ashton, the injured Lizards were swathed in enough gauze to make them look like something halfway between real wounded soldiers and Boris Karloff as the Mummy. Men in Army khaki, civilian denim and plaid flannel, and every possible combination thereof milled around in front of the stone and yellow brick building.

Through the open driver’s window, Mutt Daniels yelled, “We got Lizard prisoners in here. What the devil we supposed to do with ’em?”

That drew all the attention he wanted and then some. People converged on the school bus at a dead run. Some pushing and elbowing followed, as men of higher rank made those below them give way. The first officer who actually got into the bus was a full colonel, the highest-ranking fellow Yeager had seen in Ashton (when he’d joined up a couple of weeks before, Sergeant Schneider had been the highest-ranking soldier in Ashton).

“Tell me how you took them, soldier,” he said in a drawl almost as thick as Mutt’s. “They’re some of the very first Lizard captives we’ve managed to get our hands on.”

“Yes, sir, Colonel Collins,” Daniels answered, reading the name badge on the officer’s right breast pocket. He ended up telling only part of the story, though, for the rest of the men, Yeager among them, kept interrupting with details of their own. Sam knew that wasn’t showing proper military discipline, but he didn’t care. If this Colonel Collins, whoever he was, didn’t want to listen to Americans speaking their minds, to hell with him.

Collins listened without complaint. When the story was done, he said, “You boys had the luck of the devil-I hope you know that. Hadn’t been for those Warhawks takin’ out the enemy helicopters” (So that’s the right name for them, Yeager thought), “you could’ve had a mighty thin time of it.”

The colonel strode down the center aisle of the bus to get a closer look at the Lizards; like almost everyone else in the still free part of the United States, he hadn’t yet really seen any of them. He brushed past Yeager, studied the prisoners for a couple of minutes, then turned back to their captors. “Don’t look like so much, do they?”

“No, sir,” Yeager said, in chorus with the other Americans. Collins, he thought, looked like quite a lot The colonel was about Mutt’s age, but with that and their accents the resemblance between them ceased. Collins was tall, still slim, handsome, with a full head of silver hair. He didn’t keep a chaw in his cheek. Without the uniform, Yeager would have guessed him a politician, say, the mayor of a medium-sized and prosperous city.

He said, “You boys did somethin’ special here; I’ll see you’re all promoted for it.”

All the men grinned. Mutt said, “Sergeant Schneider, back there in Amboy, he deserves a big part o’ the credit, sir.” Yeager nodded vigorously.

“I’ll see that he gets it, then,” Collins promised. “Any time privates speak well of a sergeant when he’s not around to hear it, I reckon he’s some sort of special man.” As the soldiers chuckled, Collins went on, “Now the thing we have to do is get these Lizards someplace where they can be studied by people who have a chance of figuring out what they’re all about and what they’re up to.”

Yeager spoke up. “I’ll help get ’em there, sir.”

Colonel Collins fixed him with a cold gray stare. “You so eager to get out of the front line, eh, soldier?”

“No, sir, that doesn’t have a thing to do with it,” Yeager said, first flustered and then angry. He wondered if Collins had ever been in the front line. Maybe during the First World War, he admitted to himself. He didn’t know how to read the fruit salad of service ribbons on the colonel’s left breast.

“Why should I pick you in particular, then?” Collins demanded.

“Best reason I can think of, sir, is that I’ve been reading science fiction for a long time. I’ve been thinking about men from Mars and invaders from space a lot longer and harder than anybody else you’re likely to find, sir.”

Collins was still staring at him, but not in the same way. “Damned if I know what kind of answer I expected, but that’s not it. You’re saying you’re more likely to be mentally flexible around these-things-than someone chosen at random, are you?”

“Yes, sir.” Yeager hadn’t been in the Army long, but he’d learned in a hurry not to promise too much, so he hedged: “I hope so, sir, anyhow.”

Like managers, officers earn their pay by making up their minds in a hurry and then following through. After what couldn’t have been more than a ten-second pause, Collins said, “Okay, soldier, you want it so bad, you’ve got it. Your name is-?”

“Samuel Yeager, sir,” Yeager said, saluting. He could hardly keep the grin off his face as he spelled Yeager.

The colonel pulled out a little notebook and a gold-plated mechanical pencil. He was, Yeager saw, a southpaw. He put the notebook away as soon as he’d jotted down Sam’s name. “All right, Private. Yeager-”

Mutt Daniels spoke up: “Ought to be Co’poral Yeager, sir, or at least PFC.” When Collins turned to frown at him, he went on blandly, “You did say you were promotin’ us.”

Yeager wished Mutt had kept his mouth shut, and waited for Colonel Collins to get angry. Instead, the colonel burst out laughing. “I know an old soldier when I hear one. Tell me you weren’t in France and I’ll call you a liar.”

“Can’t do it, sir,” Mutt said with a wide, ingratiating smile that kept a lot of umpires from throwing him out of the game no matter how outrageously he carried on.

“You better not try.” Collins gave his attention back to Sam. “All right, PFC Yeager, you will serve as liaison to these Lizard prisoners until they are delivered to competent authorities in Chicago.” He took out his notebook again, wrote rapidly. As he tore out a couple of sheets, he added, “These orders give discretion to your superiors in Chicago. They may send you back here, or they may let you stay on with the Lizards if you show you’re more valuable in that role.”

“Thank you, sir,” Yeager exclaimed, pocketing the orders Collins gave him. They reminded him of Bobby Fiore’s brief tryout with Albany-if he didn’t perform right away, they’d ship him out and never give him another chance to show he could do the job. But he wouldn’t even get as long as Bobby’d had; they’d likely be in Chicago tonight, though God only knew who competent authorities were or how long it would take to find them. Still, he had to get on the Lizards’ good side in a hurry. One way to do that seemed obvious: “Sir, if there’s a doctor or medic out there, to see to the wounds on these two…”

Collins nodded crisply. He strode back to the door of the bus. As if that were a signal, all the lower-ranking officers waiting outside swarmed toward it Collins’ upraised hand did what King Canute only dreamed of: it held back the tide. The colonel stuck his head out of the bus and shouted, “Finkelstein!”

“Sir!” A skinny fellow with glasses and a thick head of uncombed curly black hair pushed his way through the crowd.

“He’s a Jew,” Collins remarked, “but he’s a damned fine doctor.”

Yeager would not have cared-much-if Finkelstein were a Negro. It didn’t matter one way or the other to the Lizards, that was for sure. Black bag in hand, the doctor scrambled up into the bus. “Who’s hurt?” he asked in a thick New York accent. Then his eyes went wide. “Oh.”

“Come on,” Yeager said; if he was going to be Lizard liaison, he had to get on with the job. He led Finkelstein back to the Lizards, who had sat quietly through the colloquy with Collins. He hoped the creatures from another planet recognized him as the man who had let them have the bandages to bind up their wounds. Maybe they did; they showed no agitation when he brought the doctor right up to them.

But when Finkelstein made as if to tug at one of those bandages, the unhurt Lizards let out a volley of evil-sounding hisses. One of them stood up from his seat, clawed hands outstretched. “How can you let them know I’m not going to do anything bad to them?”

Sam thought, How the devil do I know? But if he couldn’t invent an answer, somebody else would end up trying. He hoped for inspiration, and for once it came. He handed his rifle to Otto Chase, rolled up a sleeve. “Make like you’re putting a bandage on my arm, then take it off again. Maybe they’ll get the idea that that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Yeah, that might work,” Finkelstein said enthusiastically. He opened his medical bag, took out a paper-wrapped bandage. “Hate to waste anything sterile,” he muttered as he opened it. He wrapped it around Yeager’s arm. His hands were deft and quick and gentle. The Lizards watched him intently.

Yeager sighed and did his best to pantomime relief. He had no idea whether he got the idea across to the Lizards. Finkelstein undid the bandage. Then he tried moving toward one of the wounded prisoners again. This time, their uninjured companions, though they hissed among themselves, made no move to stop him.

The edge of a bandage came up easily. “It’s not tape,” the doctor said, as much to himself as to Yeager. “I wonder how it stays on.” He peeled it back farther, looked at the wound in the Lizard’s side. He let out a hiss of his own. “Shell fragment, I’d guess. Give me my bag, soldier.” He grabbed a probe. “Warn him this may hurt.”

Who, me? But this was what Yeager had asked for. He got the Lizards’ attention, pinched himself, did his best to imitate the noises the wounded captives had made. Then he pointed to Finkelstein, the probe, and the injury. He looked at that as briefly as he could; he found torn flesh to be torn flesh, whether it belonged to man or Lizard.

Finkelstein slowly inserted the probe. The wounded Lizard sat very still, then hissed and quivered at the same moment as the doctor exclaimed, “Found it! Not too big and not too deep.” He withdrew the probe, took out a pair of long, thin grasping tongs. “Almost there, almost there… got it!” His hands drew back; the tongs came out of the wound clenched on a half-inch sliver of metal. A drop of the Lizard’s blood fell from it to the floor of the bus.

All the alien prisoners, even the wounded one, spoke excitedly in their own language. The one who had threatened the doctor with claws lowered his weird eyes toward the ground and stood very still. Yeager had seen the captives do that before. It had to be a kind of salute, he thought.

The doctor started to replace the bandage, then paused and glanced toward Yeager. “Think I ought to dust the wound with sulfa? Can Earth germs live on a thing from God knows where? Or would I be running a bigger risk of poisoning the Lizard?”

Again, Yeager’s first thought was, How should I know? Why was a doctor asking medical questions of a minor league outfielder without a high school diploma? Then he realized that when it came to Lizards, he might not know a whole lot less than Finkelstein. After a few seconds’ thought, he answered, “Seems to me they must come from a planet that isn’t too different than ours, or they wouldn’t want Earth in the first place. So maybe our germs would like them.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I’ll do it.” The doctor poured the yellow powder into the wound, patted the bandage down. It clung as well as it had before.

Colonel Collins walked to the back of the bus. “How are you doing, Doctor?”

“Well enough, sir, thank you.” Finkelstein nodded at Yeager. “This is one sharp man you have here.”

“Is he? Good.” Collins headed up to the bus door again.

“I’m sorry, soldier,” the doctor said. “I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Sam Yeager. Pleased to meet you, sir.”

“There’s a kick in the head for you-I’m Sam Finkelstein. Well, Sam, shall we see what we can do for this other Lizard here?”

“Okay by me, Sam,” Yeager said.

Of all the places Jens Larssen had ever expected to end up when he set out from Chicago to warn the government how important the Metallurgical Laboratory’s work was, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, might have been the last. Staying at the same hotel as the German charge d’affaires hadn’t been high on his list of things to anticipate, either.

But here he was at the Greenbrier Hotel by the famous springs, and here-again-was Hans Thomsen. The German had been interned here, along with diplomats from Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Japan, when the United States entered the war. Thomsen had sailed back to Germany on a Swedish ship, lit up to keep it safe from U-boats, in exchange for Americans interned in Germany.

Now Thomsen was back again. In fact, he had a room right across the hall from Larssen’s. Down in the hotel dining room, he’d boomed, in excellent English, “I was worried going home, yes. But coming back here once more, on a dreadful little scow too small and ugly, God be thanked, for the Lizards to notice, then I was not worried. I was far too seasick to think for a moment of being worried.”

Everyone who heard him laughed uproariously, Jens included. Having Thomsen back in the United States was a forcible reminder that humanity had more important things to do than slaughtering itself. It still made Larssen nervous. As far as he was concerned, Germany remained an enemy even if it happened to be forced into the same camp as the United States. It was the same feeling he’d had about allying with the Russians against Hitler, but even stronger here.

Not everybody in White Sulphur Springs agreed with him, not by a long shot. A lot of important people were here, fled from Washington when the government dispersed in the face of Lizard air raids. Larssen had heard that Roosevelt was here. He didn’t know whether it was true. Every new rumor put the President somewhere else: back in Washington, in New York, in Philadelphia (W. C. Fields would not have approved), even in San Francisco (though how he was supposed to travel cross-country with the Lizards running loose was beyond Jens).

Larssen sighed, walked over to the sink in his room to see if he’d get any hot water. He waited and waited, but the stream stayed cold. Sighing, he scraped whiskers off his face with that cold water, lather from a hotel-sized bar of Lifebuoy soap, and a razor blade that had definitely seen better days. The resulting nicks tempted him to cultivate a beard.

His suits were wrinkled. Even his ties were wrinkled. He’d spent a long time getting here, and service at the hotel ranged from lousy on down. At that, he knew damned well he was lucky. No one in Washington or White Sulphur Springs had heard from Gerald Sebring, who’d headed east from Chicago by train instead of by car.

Larssen stooped to tie his shoelaces. One of them broke when he pulled at it. Swearing under his breath, he got down on one knee and tied the lace back together, then made his bow. It was ugly; but he’d already found out how badly picked over the Greenbrier’s little sundries store was: it had been plundered first by Axis diplomats and then by invading American bureaucrats. He knew the place didn’t have shoelaces. Maybe somebody in town did.

His nose wrinkled when he went out into the hail. Along with the brimstone odor of the springs, it still smelled of the dogs and cats the interned diplomats had brought with them from Washington. Really gives me an appetite for breakfast, he thought as he headed downstairs to the dining room.

Breakfast didn’t rate much of an appetite. His choice was between stale toast with jam and corn flakes floating in reconstituted powdered milk. Either one cost $3.75. Jens suspected he might have to declare bankruptcy before he got out of White Sulphur Springs. He’d been making good money by wartime standards-great money by the lean standards of the 1930s-but inflation headed straight for the roof when the Lizards landed. Demand stayed high, and they played merry hell with supply.

He ended up eating toast; one taste of the powdered milk had been enough to last him a lifetime. He left a niggardly tip, and begrudged even that. Escaping quickly, before the waiter could see how he’d been stiffed, Larssen got his car and drove five miles into town, to the Methodist church to which he’d been directed to report.

White Sulphur Springs was a beautiful little town. It had probably been even more beautiful before herds of olive-drab trucks fouled the air with their exhaust and honked at each other like bellowing bulls disputing the right of way. The antiaircraft guns which blossomed on every streetcorner also did little for the decor.

But even so, the rolling, green-clad slopes of the Alleghenies, the clear water of nearby Sherwood Lake, and the fuming springs that gave the place its name made it easy for Jens to understand why White Sulphur Springs had been a presidential resort in the days before the Civil War, when it was part of Virginia and no one had ever imagined West Virginia would become a separate state.

On the outside, the white-painted church with its tall steeple maintained the serenity the town sought to project. One step through the door told Larssen he had entered another world. The pastor retained half his office, but that was all. From everywhere else came the clatter of typewriters, the raucous chatter of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it, and the purposeful clomp of government-issue footgear on a hardwood floor.

A harassed corporal looked up from whatever he was typing. Seeing a veritable civilian before him, he dispensed with even military politeness: “Watcha want, mac? Make it snappy.”

“I have a nine o’clock appointment to see Colonel Groves.” Larssen looked down at his watch. He was five minutes early.

“Oh.” The corporal visibly shifted gears as he reassessed this civilian’s likely importance. A good piece of his big-city tough-guy accent disappeared when he spoke again: “You want to come along with me, sir?”

“Thank you.” Larssen followed the noncom through the pews on which more enlisted men were awkwardly working rather than praying, crabwise down a hallway pinched by mountains of file boxes that clung like clots to either wall, and into what had been the pastor’s sanctum. New plywood partitions restricted that worthy to a fraction of his former domain-the fraction thereof that lacked a telephone.

Colonel Leslie Groves sat behind a desk that held said telephone. He employed the instrument with vim and gusto: “What the hell do you mean, you can’t ship those tracks up to Detroit?… So the bridge is out and the road has a hole in it? So what? Get ’em on a barge. The Lizards aren’t blasting half the shipping they might, the stupid bastards. We have to get those tanks made, or we can kiss everything good-bye… I’ll call you tonight, so I can keep up with what you’re doing. Get it done, Fred, I don’t care how.”

He hung up with no more of a good-bye than that, fixed Larssen with an intense blue stare. “You’re from that Chicago project.” It was not a question. A flick of the colonel’s left hand dismissed the corporal.

“That’s right.” Larssen wondered how much Groves knew about it, and how much he ought to tell him. More than he wanted to; he was already sure of that. “After Berlin, sir, you have to know how important that project is. And the Lizards are advancing on Chicago.”

“Son, we all got troubles,” Groves rumbled. He was a big man with auburn hair cut short, a thin mustache, and blunt, competent features. He filled the pastor’s chair to overflowing and sat well back from the desk; a hefty belly kept him from getting any closer.

“I know it,” Jens said. “I mean, I drove here from Chicago, after all.”

“Sit down; tell me about that,” Groves urged. “I’ve been holed up here almost since the Lizards came. I ought to know more about the world outside than what I can find out over a phone line.” As if on cue, the telephone jangled. “Excuse me.”

While the colonel barked instructions to someone on the other end of the line, Larssen perched on the uncomfortable chair in front of the desk and tried to marshal his thoughts. Groves gave him the impression of a man who worked hard every waking moment, so he was ready when the handset went back into its cradle: “It’s not a trip I’m looking forward to reversing. Lizard planes are everywhere, and I had to take the side roads up into upstate New York to get around the Lizard pocket east of Pittsburgh.”

“They’re in Pittsburgh now,” Groves said.

Jens grunted. The news didn’t surprise him, but it was like a kick in the belly just the same. He made himself go on: “Gas is hard as the devil to get. I drove a few miles on a half gallon of grain alcohol I bought from a little old man I think was a moonshiner. My engine hasn’t been the same since, either.”

“You kept going, which is what counts,” Groves said. “The alcohol was a good dodge. One of the things we’re looking at is adapting engines to burn it, in case the Lizards hurt our refining capacity even worse than they have already. If the revenuers haven’t been able to put a stop to stills, damned if I see the Lizards doing it.”

“I suppose not,” Larssen agreed. But the colonel’s words brought home to him how bad things were. Somehow all the terror and trouble that had befallen him on the way from Chicago, all the horrors he’d edited out of his brief account to Groves, seemed to have happened to him in isolation; he could imagine other parts of the United States going on about their usual business while hell didn’t seem half a mile off for him. He could imagine it, yes, but Groves was warning him it wasn’t true. He said, “As bad as that?”

“Some places worse,” Colonel Groves said somberly. “The Lizards are like a cancer on the country. They don’t just hurt the places where they are-they hurt other places, too, because supplies can’t go through the territory they hold.” The phone rang again. Groves delivered a crisp series of orders, then returned to his conversation with Jens without missing a beat: “They cut off our circulation, you might say, so we die inch by inch.”

“That’s why the Metallurgical Laboratory is so important,” Larssen said. “It’s our best chance at a weapon that will let us fight them on something like equal terms.” He decided to push a little. “Washington could go the same way as Berlin, you know.”

Groves started to say something, but was interrupted by the phone once more. When he hung up, he did say it: “You really think your people will be able to make an atomic bomb in time for us to get some use out of it?”

“We’re close to starting up a sustained reaction,” Larssen said. Then he shut up; even saying that much trampled on the security he’d lived with ever since he became a part of the project. The times, though, were not what they had been before the Lizards proved atomic weapons didn’t belong just on the pages of pulp magazines. He added, “Speaking of Berlin, nobody here knows how far along the Germans are on their own special project.” No matter how things had changed, he couldn’t bring himself to say uranium to someone not in the know.

“The Germans.” Groves scowled. “I hadn’t thought of that. Nothing’s ever simple, is it? After Berlin, they have some kind of incentive to push ahead, too. Heisenberg wasn’t in the city when the bomb hit, I hear.”

“If you know about Heisenberg, you know quite a bit about this,” Larssen said, surprised and impressed. He’d taken Groves for just another man in a uniform, if one more overstuffed than most.

The colonel’s gruff laugh said he understood what Larssen was thinking. “I do try to remind myself I’m living in the twentieth century,” he noted dryly. “I spent a couple of years at MIT before I got my West Point ring, and took an engineering doctorate afterward. All of which and a nickel will buy me a cup of coffee-or would have, before the Lizards came. Costs more now. So you really think this gang of yours is on to something, do you?”

“Yes, I do, Colonel. We’re too far along to make it easy for us to move, too. The Lizards are advancing on Chicago from the west, and after my adventures coming east, moving that way looks just about as risky. If we’re going to go on doing our research, the United States has to hold on to Chicago.”

Groves rubbed his chin. “What we have to do and what we can do too often aren’t nearly the same thing these days, worse luck. Anyway”-he tapped the eagle that perched on one shoulder-“I don’t have the authority to order us to hold Chicago no matter what and forget about the other rune million emergencies all over the country.”

“I know that.” Jens’ heart sank. “But’ you’re the best contact I’ve made. I was hoping you would-”

“Oh, I will, son, I will.” Groves heaved his bulk out of the chair. The phone rang again. Swearing, Groves flopped down again, so hard Larssen half expected the seat to break under him. It held, and Groves, as he had several times already, crisply and authoritatively dealt with a new string of problems. Then he got up once more, and went on talking as if he’d never been interrupted: “I’ll run interference for you, best I can. But you’re the one who’s carrying the ball.” He stuck a fore-and-aft cap on his head. “Let’s go.”

Larssen had played football in high school. If he’d run the ball behind a lineman as huge as Groves, he’d have put so many touchdowns on the board that people would have thought him the second coming of Red Grange. The image made him smile. “Where are we going?” he asked as Groves pushed past him.

“To see General Marshall,” the colonel said over his shoulder. “He has the power to bind and to loose. I’ll get you in to talk to him-today, I. hope. After that, it’s up to you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Larssen said. George Marshall was Army Chief of Staff. If anyone could order Chicago defended at all cost, he was the man (although, against the Lizards, ordering something and having it come to pass were not the same thing). Hope rose in Jens. As he followed Groves out into the street, he drew in a lungful of air ripe not only with exhaust but also with the sulfurous reek of the springs.

Groves took a deep breath, too. A grin made him look years younger. “That smell always reminds me of walking into a freshman chemistry lab.”

“It does, by God!” Jens hadn’t made the connection, but the colonel was absolutely right. The very next breath brought with it memories of Bunsen burners and reagent bottles with frosted glass stoppers.

Colonel Groves literally ran interference for Larssen on the streets of White Sulphur Springs, using his blocky body to bull ahead where a thinner or less confident man might have hesitated. He had a good deal of muscle beneath the fat, and also a driving energy that made him walk with a forward lean, as if into a headwind.

Getting in to see the Chief of Staff wasn’t as simple as Groves had made it sound back in his office. The lawn of the house in which Marshall stayed was clogged with officers. Jens had never seen so many sparkling silver stars in his life. To generals, a colonel like Groves might as well have been invisible.

He did not stay invisible long. Sheer physical bulk got him near enough to the doorway to catch the eye of a harried-looking major inside. In a ringing voice that cut through the hubbub, Groves announced his name and declared, “Tell the general I have a fellow here from the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. It’s urgent.”

“What isn’t?” the major answered, but he ducked back inside. Groves peacefully yielded up his place to a major general.

“Now what?” Larssen asked. He could feel the sun pounding his head and his arms-he wore a short-sleeved shirt. He was so fair he didn’t tan worth a damn; he just burned layer by layer.

“Now we wait.” Groves folded his own arms across his broad, khaki-clad chest.

“But you said it was urgent-”

The colonel’s booming laugh made heads swing toward him. “If it weren’t urgent, I wouldn’t be here at all. Same with everybody else, son. As that major said, everything is urgent nowadays. But if he delivers that message, well, I expect we’re urgent enough, if you know what I mean.”

As seconds crawled by on hands and knees, Jens began to wonder. He also wondered where in White Sulphur Springs he’d be able to find calamine lotion to slather on his poor toasting arms and nose. As inconspicuously as he could, he moved into Groves’ massive shadow. He felt a stab of jealousy when the major returned to call out the name of a brigadier general. Groves only shrugged.

The major came out again. “Colonel, uh, Graves?”

“That’s me,” Groves declared; since no Colonel Graves rose up in righteous anger to dispute his claim, Larssen supposed he was right. More officers’ heads turned toward him as he surged forward with Jens in his wake. Envy and anger were the main expressions Jens saw-who was this mere colonel to take precedence over men with stars on their shoulders?

“This way, sir,” the major said. This way led to a closed door, in front of which Groves and Larssen spent the next several minutes cooling their heels. Larssen didn’t care; the hall was hot and airless, but at least he’d got out of the sun.

The door opened. The brigadier general came out, looking grimly satisfied. He returned Groves’ salute, gave Larssen a brusque nod, and strode away.

“Come in, Colonel Groves, and bring your companion,” General Marshall called from behind his desk. Jens noticed that he got the name straight.

“Thank you, sir,” Groves said, obeying. “Sir, let me present Dr. Jens. Larssen; as I told your adjutant, he’s reached us from the project at the University of Chicago.”

“Sir.” As a civilian, Larssen reached across the desk to shake hands with the Army Chief of Staff. The general’s grip was firm and precise. Jens’s first impression was that despite the uniform, despite the three rows of campaign ribbons, Marshall looked more like a senior research scientist than a soldier. He was in his early sixties, spare and trim, with hair going from iron gray toward white. Under a wide forehead, his face was rather narrow. He looked as though he seldom smiled. His eyes were arresting; they said he’d seen a lot and thought hard about every bit of it.

If not warm, he was gracious enough, waving Larssen and Groves to chairs and listening closely to Jens’ brief retelling of his trip across the eastern half of the United States. Then he put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Tell me the status of the Metallurgical Laboratory as you know it, Dr. Larssen. You may speak freely; I am cleared for this information.”

“If you’d like me to step outside, sir-” Groves started to get up again.

Marshall raised a hand to stop him. “That will not be necessary, Colonel. Security requirements have changed considerably since the end of May. The Lizards already know the secrets we are trying to extract from nature.”

“Do the Germans?” Larssen asked. Being a civilian had advantages; he could question the Army Chief of Staff where military discipline held Groves silent. “Do we want the Germans to learn them from us? I’d better know the answer to that, sir, not least because Hans Thomsen has the room across the hall from mine at the Greenbrier.”

“The Germans have an atomic research program of their own,” Marshall said. “It is in our interest to keep them fighting the Lizards, not least because, to speak frankly, they are doing a better job of it than anyone else at the moment They have their army and their economy already geared to war on a large scale, while we were still readying our resources when the Lizards came.”

Larssen nodded before he realized General Marshall hadn’t really answered his question. Being able to talk like a politician, he supposed, was one of the job qualifications for Army Chief of Staff.

As if thinking along, with him, Marshall said, “Before I tell you what you may say to the German charge, Dr. Larssen-and you may say nothing without direct authorization from me or someone at a higher level-I do need to know where the Metallurgical Laboratory presently stands in its researches.”

“Of course, sir.” But Larssen remained bemused as he mustered his thoughts. Who was at a higher level than General Marshall? Only two men he could think of-the secretary of war and President Roosevelt. Was Marshall implying he might meet them? Jens shook his head. It didn’t matter now. He said, “When I left Chicago, sir, we were assembling an atomic pile which, we hoped, would have a k-factor greater than one.”

“You’ll have to explain a bit further than that, I’m afraid,” Marshall said. “While I have studied your group’s report with great attention, I do not pretend to be a nuclear physicist”

“It means arranging the uranium so that, as atomic nuclei are split-fission, the term is-the neutrons they release will split more atoms, and so on. Think of it as a positive feedback cycle, sir. In a bomb like the ones the Lizards have, it happens in a split second and releases enormous energy.”

“What you are working toward is not a bomb in and of itself, then,” Marshall said.

“That’s right” Larssen eyed the older man with respect. As Marshall had said, he was no nuclear physicist, but he had no trouble drawing implications from data. Jens continued, “It is an essential first step, though. We’ll control the nuclear reaction with cadmium rods that capture excess neutrons before they strike uranium atoms. That will keep it from getting out of hand. We have to walk before we can run, sir, and we need to understand how to produce a controlled chain reaction before we can think about making a bomb.”

“And Chicago is the place where this research is going on?” Marshall said musingly.

“In the United States, yes,” Larssen said.

He’d hoped Marshall might tell him what, if anything, was happening elsewhere. The Chief of Staff, however, had taken security for granted longer than Jens had been alive. He did not even change expression to acknowledge he’d noticed the hint. He said, “We intended to fight for Chicago for other reasons. This gives us one more. Thank you for your courage in coming here to report on the Metallurgical Laboratory’s progress.”

“Yes, sir.” Larssen wanted to ask more questions, but General Marshall did not strike him as a man given to loose talk even in private circumstances, which these emphatically were not. Nevertheless, he blurted what was uppermost in his mind: “General, can we beat the damned Lizards?”

Colonel Groves shifted weight in his chair, making it squeak; Jens abruptly realized that wasn’t the way you were supposed to talk to the Army Chief of Staff. He felt himself flushing. He was so fair, he knew the flush would show. That only embarrassed him more.

But Marshall did not seem angry. Maybe the perfectly unmilitary question touched a responsive chord in him, for he said, “Dr. Larssen, if you find anybody who knows the answer to that one, he wins the prize. We’re doing everything we can, and we’ll go on doing everything we can. The alternative is to surrender and live in slavery. Americans won’t accept that-maybe your grandfather was one who helped prove it.”

“Sir, if you mean the Civil War, my grandfather was still back in Oslo then, trying to make a living as a cobbler. He came to the United States in the 1880s.”

“Looking for something better than he had over there, no doubt,” Marshall said, nodding. “That’s a very human thing to do. I’ll be frank with you, Dr. Larssen: in purely military terms, the Lizards have us outclassed. Up to now, no one-not us, not the Germans, not the Russians, not the Japs-has been able to stop them. But no one has stopped trying, and we’ve put most of our own conflicts on the back shelf for the time being, as witness Mr. Thomsen’s presence here-across the hail from you, didn’t you say?”

“That’s right.” Cooperating with the Third Reich still left a bad taste in Larssen’s mouth. “Didn’t I hear that Warsaw fell when the people there rose against the Nazis and for the Lizards?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Marshall said soberly. “From the intelligence we have of what those people were suffering, I can see how the Lizards might have seemed the better bargain to them.” His voice went flat, emotionless. The very blankness of his face convinced Jens he wasn’t telling all he knew there. After a moment, that blankness lifted. “On a global scale, however, it is a small matter, as are the Chinese uprisings against the Japs and in favor of the Lizards. But the Lizards have weaknesses of their own.”

Colonel Groves leaned forward. His chair squeaked again. “May I ask what some of those weaknesses are, sir? Knowing them may help me assign priorities in allocating materiel.”

“The chief one, Colonel, is their rigid adherence to doctrine. They are methodical to a fault, and slow to adapt tactics to fit circumstances. Some of our nearest approaches to success have come from creating situations where we used their patterns to lure units into untenable situations and then exploited the advantages we gained in so doing. And now, if you will excuse me…”

The dismissal was polite, but a dismissal nonetheless. Groves rose and saluted. Jens got up, too. He decided not to shake hands again; General Marshall’s attention had already returned to the papers that clogged his desk. The general’s aide took charge of them as they came Out of the office, led them back to the door by which they’d entered.

“I think you did pretty well there, Dr. Larssen,” Groves said, making slow headway against the tide of officers that flowed toward the entrance.

“Call me Jens,” Larssen said.

“Then I’m Leslie.” The heavyset colonel made an extravagant gesture. “Where now? The world lies at your feet.”

Larssen laughed. Till now, he hadn’t known any senior military men. They were different from what he’d thought they’d be-Marshall scholarly and precise, plainly a first-class mind (a judgment Jens did not make lightly, not after working with several Nobel laureates); Groves without the Chief of Staff’s unbounded mental horizons, but full of bulldog competence and just enough whimsy to leaven the mix. Neither was the singleminded fighting man evoked by the label “general” or “colonel.”

After a little thought, Larssen decided that made sense. The group, at the Met Lab weren’t the effete eggheads layfolk thought of when they imagined what nuclear physicists were like, either. People were more complicated than any subatomic particles.

He wondered what the Lizards made of people. If the invaders were as compulsively orderly as Marshall had said, mankind’s aggressive randomness likely confused them no end. He hoped so-every weakness of theirs, no matter how tiny, was a corresponding strength for humanity.

He also wondered what it would be like in one of their spaceships, cruising along far above the surface of the Earth, flying between planets, perhaps even between stars. They were the ones who could literally have the world under their feet. Cold, clear envy pierced him.

Despite his musings, he was only a beat slow in answering Groves: “Unless you’ve got FDR up your sleeve there, Leslie, I think you’ve done as much as any man could. Thanks more than I can say for all your help.”

“My pleasure.” Groves stuck out a hand. He had a grip like a hydraulic press. “You convinced me you and your group are on to something important, and my superiors need to understand that, too, so they can factor it into their calculations. As for Roosevelt, hmm…” He actually did look up his sleeve. “Sorry, no. He seems to have stepped out.”

“Too bad. If you do happen to see him”-Larssen had no idea how probable that was, but believed in covering his bets-“mention the project if you get the chance.”

“I’ll do that, Jens.” Groves glanced at his wrist again, this time just to check his watch. “I’d best get back to it. I’ve been away too long already. God only knows what’s stacking up on my desk. No rest for the weary, as they say.” With a last nod, he turned and headed back toward the Methodist church. Larssen hadn’t been able to park any closer than several blocks away. Watching Groves’ broad back recede, he concluded the colonel got results from those around him by working twice as hard as any of them. In that, he would have fit in well at the Metallurgical Lab.

The physicist looked at his own watch. Nearly noon-no wonder his stomach was sounding reveille. He wondered what epicurean delight the Greenbrier was offering for lunch. Yesterday it had been canned pork and beans, canned corn, and canned fruit cocktail. Wryly shaking his head, he wondered about the consequences of excessive tin in the diet.

Today’s menu, he discovered when he got to the hotel restaurant, was extravagant by current standards: Spam and canned peas. The peas were more nearly olive drab than green, but he ate them all the same, hoping they retained at least some of their vitamins. He also put down an extra buck and a half for a nickel bottle of Coke-that, nobody could snafu. The bottle, he noted, was closer to the color peas ought to be than the peas themselves were.

As he was chasing the last sad, soft, overcooked peas with his fork, there was a stir at the entrance to the dining room. A couple of people started to clap. Larssen looked up, saw a short, pale, bullet-headed man wearing a homburg, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a suit of European cut. That face had looked out at him from countless newsreels, but he’d never thought to encounter Vyacheslav Molotov in the flesh.

Something else occurred to him. His gaze flicked from table to table. Sure enough, there sat Hans Thomsen, also with a plate of Spam. The German charge d’affaires was affable, genial, a fluent English-speaker who’d worked hard to put the best face on the activities of the Nazi government until Hitler declared war on the United States. Larssen wondered how he felt to be in the presence of the Soviet foreign minister after Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Russia. He also wondered how Molotov would react to finding a Nazi representative here in the heart of the American government in refuge.

Nor was his the only such curiosity. The dining room grew silent for a few seconds as people stopped talking and suspended forks in midair to see what would happen next Thomsen, Jens thought, recognized Molotov before the latter saw him. Maybe Molotov would not have noticed him at all but for the Nazi party badge he wore on his left lapel.

The Russian had a face as impassive as any Larssen had ever seen. He did not change expression now, but he did hesitate be-fore proceeding into the dining room. Then he turned to the man beside him, a squarely built fellow whose suit was similar in cut to his own but much more poorly fitted. He spoke a single sentence of Russian.

From the explosive coughs that went up, a few people understood what he had to say in the original. The squarely built man’s function was then revealed; he translated Molotov’s words into elegant, Oxford-accented English: “The foreign commissar of the USSR observes that, having already entered into diplomatic discussions with the Lizards, he has no objection to speaking to serpents as well.”

More coughs rose, Larssen’s among them. His eyes swung back to Hans Thomsen. He doubted he could have been as politely insulting as Molotov, given what the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, all of humanity was supposed to be joining together to resist the invaders from another planet. If everyone kept remembering what was going on before the Lizards came, the united front would come crashing down. And if it did, that literally handed the Lizards the world.

Thomsen was a trained diplomat. If he noticed Molotov had given him the glove, he never let on. He was smiling as he replied, “There is in English an old saying about the enemy of one’s enemy.”

The interpreter murmured to Molotov. Now the Communist official looked straight back at the German. “It was on this basis, no doubt, that the imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States allied with the peace-loving people of the USSR against the Hitlerite regime.”

Watch out for this guy, Jens thought. He’s dangerous. Thomsen kept his smile, but it looked held in place by force of will Still, he had a counterthrust ready: “No doubt it was also on this basis that Finland allied with Germany after being invaded by the peace-loving people of the USSR.”

As if at a tennis match, Larssen turned his head to look at Molotov. The match here, though, he thought, used a live hand grenade for a ball. Molotov’s lips might have drawn back from his teeth a millimeter or two. Through his interpreter, the Soviet foreign minister replied, “As we have both noted, the principle admits of broad application. Thus I am willing to discuss our own differences at another time.”

The sigh of relief that filled the dining room was quite audible. Larssen didn’t consciously notice; he was too busy adding to it.