Second Contact

15

Living in Texas since the fighting stopped, Rance Auerbach had heard a lot of horror stories about Mexican jails. The one in which the Lizards kept him didn’t live up to any of them, much to his surprise. It was, in fact, not a great deal less comfortable than his apartment, if a lot more cramped. The Lizards even let him have cigarettes.

Every so often, they’d take him out and question him. He sang like a canary. Why not? The only person he could implicate was Penny, and he couldn’t get her in any deeper than she was already, not when they’d caught her with lime-cured ginger in her fists.

One day-he’d lost track of time, lost track and stopped worrying about it-a pair of Lizard guards with automatic rifles opened the door to his cell and spoke in the language of the Race: “You will come with us at once.”

“It shall be done,” Auerbach said, and slowly rose from his cot. The Lizards backed away so he couldn’t grab their weapons. That was standard procedure, but he still found it pretty funny. However much he might have wanted to, he couldn’t have leapt at them to save his life.

They took him to the interrogation chamber, as he’d expected. Like the rest of the jail, it was well-lighted and clean. Unlike the rest, it boasted a chair built for human beings. Unlike people, the Lizards didn’t seem to go in for the third degree. That did nothing but relieve Rance; had they felt like working him over, what could he have done about it?

Today, he noticed, the interrogation chamber held two human-made chairs. That gave him hope of seeing Penny, which the Lizards hadn’t let him do since capturing the two of them. She wasn’t there now, though. Only the guards and his chief interrogator, a male named Hesskett, were. With Rance’s bad leg and shoulder, assuming the posture of respect was painful for him. He did it anyway, then nodded to Hesskett human-style and said, “I greet you, superior sir.” Politeness didn’t hurt, not in the jam he was in.

“I greet you, Prisoner Auerbach.” Hesskett knew enough to keep reminding him he was in a jam. Having done so, the Lizard pointed to a chair. “You have leave to sit.”

“I thank you,” Auerbach said. Once, he’d sat without leave. The next time, he hadn’t had a chair. Standing through a grilling came closer to torture than his captors perhaps realized. He’d minded his manners ever since.

As he sank into the chair now, two more guards escorted Penny into the chamber. She looked tired-and, without any makeup, older than she had-but damn good. He grinned at her. She blew him a kiss before going through the greeting ritual with Hesskett.

Once she was in the other chair-too far away to let Auerbach touch her, dammit-Hesskett started speaking pretty fluent English: “You are both found guilty of trafficking in ginger with the Race.”

“You can’t do that! We haven’t had a trial,” Auerbach exclaimed.

“You were caught with much of the herb in your possession,” the Lizard said. “We can find you guilty without a trial. We have. You are.”

Rance didn’t think a lawyer, whether human or Lizard, would have done him much good, but he’d have liked a chance to find out. Penny asked the question uppermost in his mind, too: “What are you going to do with us?”

“With a crime this bad, we can do what we want,” Hesskett said. “We can leave you in jail for many years, many long Tosevite years. We can leave you in jail till you die. No one would miss you. No one of the Race would miss either one of you at all.”

That wasn’t true. A lot of customers, from Kahanass on down, would miss Penny quite a bit. Saying so didn’t strike Rance as likely to help his cause. But he didn’t think Hesskett had brought them here so he could gloat before locking them up and losing the key. The Lizard wasn’t talking that way, anyhow. Auerbach asked, “What do we have to do to keep you from throwing us in jail for life?”

Hesskett’s posture was already forward-sloping. Now he leaned even farther toward the two humans. “You are guilty of smuggling ginger,” he said. “You know other Big Uglies involved in this criminal traffic.”

“That’s right,” Penny agreed at once. She really did. Aside from her, the only ones Rance knew at the moment were the plug-uglies he’d plugged back in Fort Worth.

“Do you know the ginger smuggler and thief called Pierre Dutourd?” Hesskett said the name several times, pronouncing it as carefully as he could.

“Yeah, I do. The big-time dealer in the south of France, isn’t he?” Penny said. Auerbach nodded so Hesskett wouldn’t get the idea-the accurate idea-that he didn’t know Pierre the Turd or whatever the hell his name was from a hole in the ground.

“It is good,” the Lizard interrogator said. “We have tried to end his business with the Race, but we have not succeeded. We believe the Deutsche are protecting him from us. We need his trade stopped. If you help us stop it, we will reward you greatly. We will not put you in jail for long Tosevite years. If you refuse, we will do to you what we have the right to do to you. Do you understand? Is it agreed?”

“How are we going to do anything to this fellow in France?” Auerbach asked. “We’re here, not there.”

“We will fly you to Marseille, his city,” Hesskett answered. “We will give you documents that will satisfy the Reich. You will deal with our operatives already in Marseille and with this Pierre Dutourd. Is it agreed?”

“I’ve got one problem-I don’t speak French for beans,” Penny said. “Apart from that, I’ll do whatever you say. I don’t like jail.”

“That is the idea,” Hesskett said smugly.

“I’ve got a little French and a little German,” Rance said. “They’re rusty as hell, but they might still work some. I’ll be able to read some, anyway, even if I can’t do much talking.”

“You Tosevites would be better off with one language for all of you instead of languages in patches like fungus diseases on your planet,” Hesskett said. “But that is not to be changed today. Do you both agree to aid the Race in putting out of business the smuggler Pierre Dutourd?”

Penny nodded at once. Auerbach didn’t. Going into Nazi-occupied France after a smuggler the Reich was propping up wouldn’t be a walk in the park. He wanted some reassurance he’d come out again. Of course, if he went into jail, he had Hesskett’s reassurance he wouldn’t come out again. That made up his mind for him. With a rasping sigh, he said, “I’ll take a shot at it.”

Things moved very quickly after that. Hesskett put Rance and Penny in a Lizard airplane from the air base near Monterrey to Mexico City. When they got out of the plane a little more than an hour later (it seemed much longer to Auerbach; his seat was cramped and not made for the shape of his rear end), more Lizards who fought ginger-smuggling took charge of them. Only moments after their photographs were taken, they got handed copies of U.S. passports that Auerbach couldn’t have told from the real McCoy to save himself from the firing squad. Stamps showed visas issued by the Reich ’s consulate in Mexico City. Auerbach knew they had to be as phony as the passports, but didn’t ask questions.

The next morning, after a Lizard-paid shopping spree to get them more than the clothes they’d had on when they were captured, they boarded the small human-adapted section of an airplane bound from Mexico City to Marseille. “Well, now,” Penny said, glancing over to Rance beside her, “you can’t tell me this worked out so bad. We got caught, and what did we get? A trip to the Riviera, that’s what. Could be a heck of a lot worse, if anybody wants to know.”

“Yeah, it could,” Auerbach agreed. “And if we don’t do whatever we’re supposed to do about this Dutourd guy, it’ll get worse, too. The damn Lizards’ll lock us up and forget about us.”

Penny leaned over and gave him a big, wet kiss. It felt good-hell, it felt great-but he wondered what had brought it on. She breathed in his ear. Then, very low to defeat possible (no, probable) listening devices, she whispered, “Don’t be dumb, sweetheart. If we can’t make the damn Lizards happy, we start singing songs for the Nazis.”

Rance didn’t say anything. He just shook his head, as automatically as if at a bad smell. In spite of occasional correspondence he’d had, the Nazis had been the number-one enemy before the Lizards came, the enemy the USA was really gearing up to fight. Oh, the Japs were nasty, but Hitler’s boys had been trouble with a capital T. As far as he was concerned, they still were.

The flight was far and away the longest one he’d ever taken. Sitting cooped up in an airplane hour after hour turned out to be a crashing bore. He necked a little with Penny, but they couldn’t do anything more than neck a little, not with Lizards strolling through every so often. The Lizards didn’t act quite so high and mighty as they had before the colonization fleet brought their females. He wondered how many of them had found a female who’d tasted ginger.

After what seemed like forever, water gave way to land below the airplane. Then came more water: the improbably blue Mediterranean Sea. And then the plane rolled to a stop more smoothly than a human aircraft was likely to have done, at the airport northwest of Marseille.

When Rance and Penny got off the plane and went into the terminal to get their baggage and clear customs, spicy smells filled the air: laurel, oleander, others Auerbach couldn’t name so readily. The sky tried to outdo the sea for blueness, but didn’t quite succeed.

Some of the customs officials were Frenchmen, others Germans. They all spoke English. They also all seemed interested in why Americans should have come to Marseille aboard a Lizard airplane. They went through the suitcases with microscopic attention to detail and even had them X-rayed. Finding nothing made the Germans more suspicious than contraband would have; the French didn’t seem to give two whoops in hell.

“Purpose of this visit?” demanded a customs man in a uniform that would have made a field marshal jealous.

“Honeymoon,” Auerbach answered, slipping his good arm around Penny’s waist. She snuggled against him. They’d concocted the story on the airplane. Penny had shifted one of her rings to the third finger of her left hand. It didn’t fit very well there, but only a supremely alert man would have noticed that.

This Aryan superman-actually, a blond dumpling who wore his fancy uniform about as badly as he could-wasn’t that alert. He did remain dubious. “Honeymoon in Mexico and Marseille?” he said. “Strange even for Americans.”

Auerbach shrugged, which hurt his bad shoulder. Penny knew when to keep her mouth shut. The customs official muttered something guttural. Then he stamped both their passports with unnecessary vehemence. He didn’t know what they were up to, but he wouldn’t believe they weren’t up to something.

Outside the terminal, a cab driver with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth stuffed their bags into the trunk at the front of his battered Volkswagen. He spoke in bad, French-accented German: “Wo willen gehen Sie?”

“Hotel Beauveau, s’il vous plait,” Auerbach answered, and went on in slow French: “It is near the old port, n’est-ce pas? ” If he’d impressed the cabby, the fellow didn’t let on. He slammed down the trunk lid-what would have been the hood on any self-respecting car-got in, and started to drive.

Getting to know her brother turned out to be less of a pleasure than Monique Dutourd had imagined it would. Pierre might not have planned to be a smuggler when he was young, but he’d lived in the role so long that it fit him tighter than his underwear. And all his acquaintances came out of the smugglers’ den of Porte d’Aix, too. Having met Lucie, his lady friend with the sexy voice, Monique came away convinced her voice was the best thing she had going for her.

Pierre spent much of his time cursing the Nazis in general and Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn in particular. “They are cutting my profit margin in half, it could be even more than in half,” he groused.

He seemed to have forgotten that the Lizards would have cut his life in half. Monique had more general reasons to loathe the Germans-what they’d done to France, for instance. Pierre didn’t care about that. He dealt with people all over the world, but remained invincibly provincial at heart: if something didn’t affect him in the most direct way, it had no reality for him.

Between Pierre and Sturmbannfuhrer Kuhn, Monique’s work suffered. The paper on the epigraphy relating to the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis remained unfinished. The SS man started asking her out again. “Dammit, you have my brother in your hip pocket,” she flared. “Aren’t you satisfied?”

“That is business,” Kuhn replied. “This is, or would be, or could be, pleasure.”

“For you, perhaps,” Monique said. “Not for me.” But not even the direct insult was enough to keep him from asking her to lunch or dinner every few days. She kept saying no. He kept asking. He kept being polite about it, which gave her no more excuse to lose her temper-not that losing her temper at an SS officer was the smartest thing she might have done under any circumstances.

Once more, she grew to hate the telephone. She had to answer it, and too often it was the German. Whenever it rang, she winced. And it kept ringing. One night, just as she was starting to make some fitful progress on the inscriptions, it derailed her train of thought with its insistent jangle. She called it a name unlikely to appear in any standard French dictionary. When that didn’t make it shut up, she marched over to it, picked up the handset, and snarled, “Allo? ”

“Hello, is this Professor Dutourd?” The words were in German, but it wasn’t Dieter Kuhn. For that matter, it wasn’t standard German, either; it differed at least as much from what she’d learned in school as the Marseille dialect differed from Parisian French.

“Yes,” Monique answered. “Who’s calling, please?” Her first guess was, another SS man from some backwards province.

But the fellow on the other end of the line said, “I’m a friend of some friends of your brother’s. I’m looking to do him a good turn, if I can.”

She almost hung up on him then and there. Instead, she snapped, “Why are you calling me? Why aren’t you bothering the SS?” Then she added insult to injury: “But don’t worry. They probably hear you now, because they listen on this line whenever they choose.”

She’d expected that would make the caller hang up on her, but he didn’t. He muttered something that wasn’t German at all, whether standard or dialect: “Oh, bloody hell.”

Monique read English, but had had far fewer occasions to speak it than she’d had with German. Still, she recognized it when she heard it. And hearing it made her revise her notion of who Pierre’s “friends” were: probably not Nazi gangsters after all. Not this batch, anyhow, she thought. “What do you want?” she asked, sticking to German.

He answered in that throaty, guttural dialect: “I already told you. I want to give him as much help as I can. I don’t know how much that will be, or just how I’ll be able to do it.” He laughed without much humor. “I don’t know all kinds of things I wish I knew.”

“Who are you?” she asked. “How do you know Pierre?”

“I don’t know him at all-my friends do,” the stranger answered. “Who am I?” That bitter laugh again. “My name is David Goldfarb.”

“Goldfarb,” Monique echoed. It could have been a German name, but he didn’t pronounce it as a German would have. And he’d cursed in English when provoked. Maybe his dialect wasn’t really, or wasn’t quite, German at all. “You’re a Jew!” she blurted.

An instant too late, she realized she shouldn’t have said that. Goldfarb muttered something pungent in English, then returned to what had to be Yiddish: “If anybody is listening to your phone…” He sighed. “I’m a British citizen. I have a legal right to be here.” Another sigh. “I hope the Jerries remember that.”

By the way he said it, Jerries had the same flavor as Boches. Monique found herself liking him, and also found herself wondering if he was setting her up to like him. If he really was a Jew, he was risking his neck to come here. If he was a liar, he was-no, not a smooth one, for there was nothing smooth about him, but a good one. “What do you want with my brother?” Monique asked.

“What do you think?” he answered. He did believe someone was tapping her line, then: he was saying no more than he had to.

She came to a sudden decision. “You know where I teach?” Without waiting for him to say yes or no, she hurried on: “Be there at noon tomorrow with a bicycle.”

He said something in the Lizards’ language. That, unlike French, German, or English, was not a tongue of classical scholarship. A generation of films had taught her the phrase he used, though: “It shall be done.” The line went dead.

When she finished her lecture the next day, she wondered if Dieter Kuhn would try to take her out to lunch. He didn’t. Maybe that meant the Nazis hadn’t been listening after all. Maybe it meant they had, and were seeing what kind of trouble she’d get into if they let her. She left her lecture hall, curious about the same thing.

That fellow standing in the hall had to be David Goldfarb. He looked like a Jew-not like a Nazi propaganda poster, but like a Jew. He was eight or ten years older than she, with wavy brown hair going gray, rather sallow skin, and a prominent nose. Not bad-looking. The thought left her vaguely surprised, and more sympathetic than she’d expected. “How does it feel to be here?” she asked.

She’d spoken French. He grimaced. “English or German, please,” he said in English. “I haven’t got a word of French. Fine chap to send here, eh?” He grinned ruefully. When Monique repeated herself-in German, in which she was more fluent than English-the grin slipped. He returned to his rasping dialect: “Coming here is bad for me. Not coming here would have been bad for me and my family. What can you do?”

“What can you do?” Monique repeated. She’d been asking herself the same thing ever since Sturmbannfuhrer Kuhn let her know Pierre was alive. Too often, the answer was, Not much. “You do have a bicycle?” she asked. He nodded, and then had to brush a lock of hair off his forehead. She said, “Good. Come along with me, then, and we’ll go to a cafe, and you can tell me what this is all about.”

“It shall be done,” he said again, in the language of the Race.

She led him to Tire-Bouchon, on Rue Julien, in a turn-of-thecentury building not far from her route home. A couple of soldiers in Wehrmacht field-gray were eating there, but they paid her no undue attention. To her relief, they paid Goldfarb no undue attention, either.

She ordered a garlicky beef stew. The waiter turned out to speak German. That wouldn’t have surprised her even if the Wehrmacht men hadn’t been in the place. After some back-and-forth, Goldfarb chose chicken in wine. He turned back to Monique as the waiter left. “This is on me. One thing I will say about my friends”-he gave the word an ironic twist-“is that they’ve got plenty of money.”

“Merci,” Monique said, and then, “So… What exactly do your friends want from my brother?”

“They don’t want anything from him,” the Jew from England answered. “They want him to go back into business for himself, buying some of the ginger he sells the Lizards from them and keeping them full of money. They don’t want him to be a German cat’s-paw.”

“I am sure he would like that very much,” Monique said. “The only trouble is, the Lizards will kill him if he stays in business for himself. They, or their leaders, do not want to put up with ginger now, not with what it does to their females and how it upsets their males. The Nazis can keep him in business and protect him. Can your friends do the same?”

She expected him to blanch at the blunt question. French opinions of England had not been high in the fighting or after it, and many Frenchmen laughed to see Britain fight so hard to retain her independence and then be shorn of the empire that made such independence genuine. But Goldfarb said, “I’m not sure. I think we’d have a better chance to get the Lizards to call off their dogs. I have a cousin with good connections-he’s even one of the fleetlord’s advisors every now and then.”

Monique’s wave of disbelief almost caught the waiter who was bringing them their lunches. After he’d set the food on the table and left again, she said, “You cannot expect me to think you are telling the truth.”

“Think whatever you want,” David Goldfarb told her. “My cousin’s name is Moishe Russie. Your brother ought to know it.” He cut off a bite of chicken. A smile lit up his lean, melancholy face. “This is very, very good.”

Monique resolved to remember the name; if Goldfarb was a liar, he’d been well prepared. The way he attacked his plate amused her. Tire-Buchon served hearty bourgeois fare, but surely nothing to cause such ecstasy. Then she recalled he came from England, poor fellow, and so no doubt had lower standards than hers.

After a bit, he looked astonished to have no more chicken left. “Is it possible for me to meet your brother?” he asked. “I’m staying at Le Petit Nice.” He butchered the name, but she understood it.

She also understood he was not a professional agent or anything of the sort. Someone more skilled would have been more careful about telling her where he was staying. His English associates must have chosen him for whom he knew, not for what he knew. But his very lack of skill at intrigue, oddly, made him more convincing. If he wasn’t what he said he was, he had to be something close to it.

“It could be that you might see my brother,” Monique said, picking her way through the German conditionals. “I do not yet know, of course, whether he would want to see you.”

“If he wants to get back into business for himself, I’m the best hope he has,” David Goldfarb said.

“I’ll tell him you said so,” Monique answered. “He will know better than I how far to trust you.”

Goldfarb paid for lunch with crisp new Reichsmarks. He stayed even more thoroughly a gentleman than Dieter Kuhn had, and seemed to have to remember to wave as he rode off on his bicycle. Unlike the SS man, he wore a wedding band, but experience had taught Monique how little the lack of one had to do with anything.

Once she’d got back to her block of flats, she sighed as she lugged her bicycle upstairs. Maybe, just maybe, she could get some work done. But when she opened the apartment door, she let out a gasp. Dieter Kuhn was sitting on the sofa.

“Bonjour, Monique,” he said with a pleasant smile. “Now, what did the damned kike have to tell you?”

David Goldfarb was astonished to discover how much he liked Marseille. He liked the weather, he loved the food, and the people-even the Germans-were nicer to him than he’d expected. What the Germans would have done to him had he been one of theirs rather than one of the Queen’s was a question on which he preferred not to dwell.

He hadn’t lived in such luxury as at Le Petit Nice before. It wasn’t even his money. That made him spend it less recklessly, not more, as it might have with a lot of men. He didn’t need to be extravagant to have a good time, and so he wasn’t.

Three days after he’d had lunch with Monique Dutourd-who was, without a doubt, the most interesting professor he’d ever met-the telephone in his room rang as he was trying not to cut his throat while shaving. “Hello?” he said, getting shaving soap on the handset as he held it to his mouth.

A man spoke in the language of the Race: “I greet you. Meet me tomorrow at midday behind the old synagogue. Do you understand? Is it agreed?”

“It shall be done,” Goldfarb said, and only then, “Dutourd?” He got no answer; the line was dead.

Maybe it was a trap. In fact, the odds were depressingly good it was a trap. That had nothing to do with anything. David had to stick his head into it. If he went home without doing whatever he could to get the ginger dealer out from under the Germans’ muscular thumbs, his family would regret it. Group Captain Roundbush hadn’t said so in so many words, but he hadn’t needed to, either.

With a camera slung around his neck, dark glasses on his nose, and a preposterous hat shielding his head from the Mediterranean sun, Goldfarb hoped he looked like a man on holiday. He walked along the hilly streets of Marseille, peering down at a city map to make sure he didn’t get lost.

When he found the synagogue on Rue Breteuil, he grimaced. Rank weeds grew in front of the building. The boards nailed across the door had been in place long enough to grow grainy and pale, except for the streaks of rust trailing down from the nailheads. More boards kept men without better homes from climbing through the windows. Vandals-or, for all David knew, Nazi officials- had painted swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on the bricks of the front wall.

Passersby gave Goldfarb curious looks as he kicked his way through the weeds toward the back of the synagogue. He ignored them. Not least because he proceeded as if he had every right to be doing as he did, the passersby stopped paying attention to him almost at once. In the Greater German Reich, no one questioned a man who acted as if he had the right to do what he was doing. Basil Roundbush had told him it would be so, and it was.

Other buildings huddled close on either side of the synagogue. In their shadows, the weeds did not flourish quite so much. Behind the closed and desecrated shrine, though, they grew even more vigorously than in front, growing almost as tall as a man. Anything or anyone might be lurking there. Goldfarb wished for a pistol. Softly, he called, “Dutourd?” For good measure, he tacked on an interrogative cough.

The weeds stirred. “I am here,” a man answered in the language of the Race. He did have a pistol, and pointed it at Goldfarb. Under his beret, his sad-eyed face was nervous. “Did anyone follow you here? Anyone at all? Germans? Males of the Race? Were you careful?”

“I think so,” Goldfarb answered. “I am not a spy. I am a soldier, and not so used to sneaking here and there.”

“Then you may well die before your time,” Pierre Dutourd remarked. He took from his belt a gadget probably of Lizard manufacture. After glancing at it, he relaxed a little. “I do not detect any electronics planted in or aimed at this place. That means-I hope that means-no one is listening to us. Very well, then-say your say.” Even speaking the Lizards’ language, Dutourd sounded like a Frenchman.

“Good,” Goldfarb said, though he wasn’t sure how good it was. “My friends back in Britain want to see if they can return you to doing business for yourself. They do not think you should have to subordinate yourself to the Reich.” The Race’s language was made for distinguishing subtle gradations of status. The relationship Goldfarb described was one of menial to master.

Dutourd caught the shade of meaning and grimaced at it. “They do not treat me quite so badly as that,” he said, then paused and shook his head. “They say they will not treat me so badly as that. Whether it proves true remains to be seen.”

“Anyone who trusts the Germans-” Goldfarb began.

“Trust them? Do I look like such a fool as that?” Pierre Dutourd sounded offended. “But I did and do trust the Race to kill me if I did not have the Reich protecting me. And so…” He shrugged. Still aiming the pistol in David’s general direction, he pointed with his free hand. “What can your English friends do to keep me going without the Germans and without getting myself killed?”

Goldfarb would have asked exactly that question had he worn Dutourd’s shoes. It was a question for which he had no good answer. He did his best to disguise that, saying, “They will do whatever proves necessary to keep you afloat.”

Dutourd’s lip curled. “As the Royal Navy did at Oran, when your ships opened fire on and sank so many of the ships of France? Why should I trust Englishmen? With the Germans and with the Race, one is always sure of what one gets. With the English, who can say? I sometimes think you do not know that yourselves.”

“We can give you money,” Goldfarb said. “We also have good connections with the Lizards. They can help take the pressure off you.”

“A likely story,” Dutourd said, unconvinced. “Next you will tell me of a tunnel from London to Marseille, so the Germans will not be able to tell what ginger you bring me. If these are the best stories you can tell, better you should go back to England.”

“These are not just stories,” Goldfarb said. Miserable frog, he thought. He’s lived under the Nazis so long, he’s used to it. Aloud, he went on, “My cousin in Jerusalem is Moishe Russie, of whom you may have heard. Did Monique tell you that?”

“Yes, she told me. And my cousin is Marie Antoinette, of whom you may have heard,” Dutourd answered. “More lies. Nothing else.”

Goldfarb pulled out his wallet and displayed a picture he carried in it. “Here is a photograph of Cousin Moishe and me. I should very much like to see a photograph of you and Cousin Marie.”

Pierre Dutourd bared his teeth in something close to a smile. “I must say that I have not got one with me. If you are a liar, you are a thoroughgoing liar. I know of this Moishe Russie, as who with a hearing diaphragm”-using the Lizards’ language could produce some odd images-“does not? I am surprised to find his cousin, if you are his cousin, working with the ginger smugglers, I must also say.”

“Why?” Goldfarb asked. “If you think I love the Race, you are mistaken. My empire might have beaten Hitler. Thanks to the Race, that did not happen. And Britain is not a friendly home for Jews any more.”

“It could be,” Dutourd said, “that you are telling the truth after all. Whether this matters in the slightest, however, remains to be seen.”

“How can I do more to convince you?” Goldfarb asked, though he had already come closer to convincing the Frenchman than he’d thought he would.

“By showing me that-” The ginger smuggler abruptly broke off, for the device on his belt let out a warning hiss. With surprising speed and silence, he disappeared back into the weeds.

That left David Goldfarb out in the open by himself as he listened to someone crunching through the plants by the side of the synagogue as he had done. He wished for a pistol more than ever. His hand darted into his pocket. It closed on the best single protection he did have: his British passport. Against certain kinds of danger, it was sovereign. Against others, though…

“Jesus!” a woman said in American English, “why in hell would anybody want to set up a meeting in this goddamn place?”

A man laughed hoarsely. “You just covered the waterfront there, Penny,” he said, pausing for breath every few words. “But I don’t reckon the Jews’d reckon you got ’em wet once.”

“Am I supposed to care?” the woman-Penny-asked. “The tracer gadget says that Frenchman’s in there, so we’ve got to keep going.”

“You’ll get yourself killed if you charge ahead like that,” the man remarked. His accent, while still from the other side of the Atlantic, was different from Penny’s. “Let me get out in front of you.”

He came out from around the corner with a soldier’s caution-and with a pistol in his hand. None of that would have kept Dutourd from spotting him, as David Goldfarb knew very well. Before any fireworks started, Goldfarb said, “Good day, there. Lovely weather we’re having, eh?”

“You must be the limey. We’ve heard something about you.” The man leaned on a stick, but the gun in his other hand remained very steady. “Don’t tell me you don’t have that Frenchman around here somewhere.”

The woman, a brassy blond, came into sight behind him. She also carried a pistol. Goldfarb didn’t think either of their weapons would do them much good if Pierre Dutourd opened up: he’d be able to get off at least a couple of shots before they realized just where he was.

For the moment, Dutourd stayed hidden. Goldfarb asked, “What do you want with him? And who are you, anyway?”

“Name’s Rance Auerbach-U.S. Army, retired,” the man answered. “This here’s Penny Summers. We’ll talk about what we want when we see Dutourd. And just whose side are you on, buddy? Come on, speak up.” He gestured with the pistol, a large, heavy weapon.

Goldfarb gave his name. “As for whose side I’m on, my own is the answer that springs to mind.”

“You can tell whose side he’s on, Rance,” Penny said. “He’s got to be hooked up with those British smugglers-probably that Roundbush fellow, the guy you wrote a letter to for me. Only thing they ever wanted was to keep more ginger going through to the Lizards.”

“You know Group Captain Roundbush?” Goldfarb asked in surprise.

“Yeah,” the American named Rance answered. “We used to do some business together, a long time ago. I haven’t been in that business for a while-I haven’t been much in the way of any business for a while-but we’ve sorta stayed in touch. I suppose he reckoned he could get some use out of me sooner or later.”

That sounded very much like Basil Roundbush, damned if it didn’t. “And what’s wrong with getting more ginger through to the Lizards?” David asked. He could think of several things offhand, but, much against his will, felt compelled to take the side of those from whom he was also compelled to take orders. He wondered if Dutourd spoke English. The Frenchman had given no sign of it, but that didn’t necessarily signify.

“Not a damn thing as far as we’re concerned-not personally, anyhow,” Auerbach said. “But we’ve got to do what those little scaly bastards tell us to do. And so…” He took a step forward.

Knowing the Lizards would oppose anything that had to do with ginger, Goldfarb got ready to throw himself to one side, with luck escaping the firefight bound to break out in a moment. Before anyone could start shooting, the back door to the synagogue burst open. Germans in SS uniforms with submachine guns stormed out and covered Goldfarb and the two Americans. Others aimed into the undergrowth. The officer who emerged behind them spoke in the language of the Race: “Come forth, Dutourd. If you do not, we will have to kill you.” Sullenly, Pierre Dutourd stood up and raised his hands high. The SS Sturmbannfuhrer nodded. “Very good. In the name of the Greater German Reich, you are all under arrest.”

Pshing came into Atvar’s private office. “Excuse me for interrupting, Exalted Fleetlord, but the Tosevite Moishe Russie is attempting to reach you by telephone. Shall I put him off?”

“No, I will speak to him,” Atvar answered. “The situation in India remains too muddled to offer any easy or quick solution. I am willing to put aside consideration of it for the time being.” He was, in fact, eager to put aside consideration of it for the time being, but Pshing did not have to know that. “Transfer the call to my terminal,” he told his adjutant.

“It shall be done,” Pshing said, and went out to do it.

Moishe Russie’s image appeared on the screen in front of Atvar. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord,” the Tosevite said. “I thank you for agreeing to hear of my troubles.”

“I greet you,” Atvar said. “Do note that I have agreed to nothing of the sort. If you prove wearisome, I shall return to the work in which I was previously engaged. Keeping that warning in mind at all times, you may proceed.”

“For your generosity, I thank you,” Russie said. Was that irony? Would the Big Ugly be so presumptuous while seeking a favor? Atvar could not be sure, even after long acquaintance with him. With a sigh that might have come from the throat of a male of the Race, Russie went on, “I have just learned that a relative of mine, a certain David Goldfarb, is a prisoner in the Greater German Reich. If you can use your good offices to help obtain his release, I shall be forever in your debt.”

“You are already in my debt,” Atvar pointed out, in case the Tosevite had forgotten. “And how did this relative of yours become a prisoner inside the Reich?”

While asking the question, he checked the computer. As he’d thought, Russie had no relatives living inside the Reich: only in Palestine and Poland, both of which the Race held, and in Britain, which retained a tenuous independence from both the Race and the Reich. Meanwhile, he turned his other eye turret toward the part of the screen on which Russie was saying, “The Germans arrested him in the company of two Americans named Auerbach and Summers. You will please recall, Exalted Fleetlord, that my cousin is also a Jew.”

“Then he was unwise to enter the Reich,” Atvar said. Yet Moishe Russie’s shot struck home. The Race remained appalled at the savage campaign the Deutsche waged against the Jews. And any opportunity to irritate this particular lot of Big Uglies was sweet to Atvar.

Furthermore, the names of the other two Big Uglies Russie had mentioned were somehow familiar. Not wanting to say them aloud, the fleetlord keyed them into the computer. Sure enough, a report about those two had come to his notice not long before. Officials over on the lesser continental mass had recruited them to help suppress the trade in smuggled ginger coming out of the Reich.

“Your relative was cooperating with these Tosevites, then?” Atvar asked. That would give him another reason for demanding this Goldfarb’s release and infuriating whatever Deutsch officials had to arrange it.

“He was caught with them, so how could he have been doing anything different?” Russie asked reasonably. “But they are not Jews, and so do not face the immediate danger in which he finds himself.”

“I understand,” Atvar said. “Very well: I will see what can be done. And what can be done, Dr. Russie, shall be done.”

“I thank you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe Russie said. “These Tosevites, for your information, were seized in the city of Marseille.”

“Yes, yes,” Atvar said impatiently. Russie didn’t know he already knew that: it was, at any rate, the city in which Summers and Auerbach (he gathered the female was more important, or at least more deeply involved in the ginger trade, than the male) had been sent. “I shall investigate, and I shall do what I think best in this regard.”

Russie thanked him again, then broke the connection. Atvar looked at the square on the screen, now blank, where the Big Ugly’s image had appeared. He hissed in slow, almost reluctant approval. A male of the Race could not have begged for a favor any more effectively than Russie had done. And Russie had known Atvar would be likely to give him what he wanted for the sake of irking the Deutsche.

After replaying his conversation with Moishe Russie to remind himself of the name of the doctor’s relatives, Atvar telephoned the Deutsch Foreign Ministry in Nuremberg. The image of the Big Ugly on the screen was less sharp than Moishe Russie’s had been; Tosevite video equipment did not measure up to that which the Race manufactured.

Despite the poor quality of the image, Atvar thought he saw surprise on the Big Ugly’s mobile features when the fellow got a good look at his body paint. “Are you familiar with the matter of David Goldfarb?” the fleetlord demanded, as if to a subordinate he knew to be none too bright.

Rather to his surprise, the Tosevite answered, “I am. In what way does this case interest the Race?”

“I want this Tosevite released-and,” Atvar added, “the other two Tosevites, the Americans, seized with him.”

“Three other Tosevites were seized with him,” the Deutsch male replied. “One of them was Pierre Dutourd, the notorious ginger smuggler. Do you want him released, too? He and the other three were, I repeat, all seized together.”

Moishe Russie hadn’t said anything about that. Atvar suddenly wondered whether this Goldfarb had been helping Auerbach and Summers or whether he’d been on the smuggler’s side. Still, the Tosevite’s question had an obvious answer: “Yes, give us this Pierre Dutourd, too. Ginger-smuggling is a wicked business; we will punish him.”

“Ginger-smuggling is not a crime under the laws of the Reich,” the Deutsch functionary observed.

“If it is not a crime, why is this Dutourd”-Atvar pronounced the Big Ugly’s name as best he could-“in a Deutsch prison?”

“Why?” The official’s face twisted into the expression that showed amusement. “He is in our prison because we say he ought to be there. We need no more reason than that. The Reich does not propose to let anyone who might be dangerous to it run around loose causing trouble.”

That made a certain amount of sense to Atvar: more sense than the bizarre and self-destructive policies of the snoutcounting Americans, at any rate. The fleetlord let out an angry hiss, anger directed at himself. If a Deutsch policy made sense to him, something had to be wrong with the policy or with him or with both.

He said, “I assure you, the Race will punish this smuggler as he deserves. You need have no doubts on that score.”

“You of the Race hardly know what punishment is,” the Big Ugly replied. “We will keep this male for ourselves. We do know these things. We know them in detail.” Though he spoke the language of the Race, gloating anticipation that seemed unique to the Tosevites filled his voice.

Atvar suppressed a shudder. The Big Uglies, and especially the Deutsch Big Uglies, exulted in the ferocity of the punishments they meted out. The fleetlord forced himself not to dwell on that, but to concentrate on the business at hand. This male had refused to release Dutourd, but had not said a word about the other prisoners. “Very well, then-you may keep this smuggler,” Atvar said. “But turn over to us the two American Tosevites, and also the British Jew, Goldfarb. They did not come to your territory with the intent of harming you.”

He hoped that wasn’t true of Auerbach and Summers, but could not be sure, and it made a good bargaining point. He hated having to try to get a Tosevite’s leave to obtain his desires. He hated even more the idea of having to admit that a Tosevite not-empire had territory to which it was entitled. And he hoped mentioning that Goldfarb was a Jew wouldn’t get Moishe Russie’s relative liquidated out of hand. He thought as well of Russie as he did of any Tosevite.

“If you want the Americans, Exalted Fleetlord, you are welcome to them,” the Deutsch official said. “We have no use for them, and giving them to you will help embarrass the United States. As for the Jew… You know that we aim to keep the Reich free of his kind.”

“Yes, I know that,” Atvar said, and did his best not to let his disgust with the policy the Deutsche pursued show. “If you removed him from your not-empire by sending him here to me, you would be keeping your not-empire as free of Jews as if you killed him.”

“He could still cause trouble for the Reich if we let him live,” the Big Ugly replied. “And the British would care very little about what happened to him: they are slowly coming round to our way of thinking.” But he did not reject the fleetlord’s request out of hand, as he might have-as Tosevites often seemed to take a perverse pleasure in doing.

Noting that, Atvar said, “If you kill him, the Race will care, whether the British Big Uglies do or not. Do you understand me?”

The Deutsch Big Ugly used his short, blunt, forkless tongue to lick his lips. That was a sign of cautious consideration among the Big Uglies, or so researchers had assured Atvar. After a pause, the official said, “You are taking an improperly high-handed attitude, Exalted Fleetlord.” Atvar said nothing. The Big Ugly licked his lips again. He made a fist and slammed it down onto the top of the desk behind which he sat. In any species, that would have been a sign of anger. “Very well,” he snapped. “Since you love Jews so well, you may have this one, too.”

Time had proved it was useless to point out that the Race did not particularly love Jews, that their Tosevite neighbors treated them so badly as to make the Race seem a better alternative. Since the Deutsche seemed unable to figure that out for themselves, Atvar had no interest in enlightening them. The fleetlord contented himself with saying, “I thank you. My subordinates will arrange to retrieve this Tosevite.”

“If he should ever enter the Reich again, he will be sorry he was ever hatched,” the Deutsch male said, which had to translate a Tosevite idiom all too literally into the language of the Race. “Farewell.” The Big Ugly’s image disappeared.

No male or female of the Race would have been so rude to Atvar. Big Uglies, though, had already proved they could be far ruder than this. The fleetlord telephoned Moishe Russie. “It is accomplished,” he said when the connection was made. “Your relative will in due course be returned to you.”

“I thank you, Exalted Fleetlord.” Russie added an emphatic cough.

“You are welcome,” Atvar said. Maybe Russie did not know this Big Ugly named Goldfarb had been involved in the ginger-smuggling trade-or more likely, maybe he did not know Atvar would know. But know the fleetlord did. And he also knew he would do everything he could to learn as much about the trade as Goldfarb could or would tell him.

“He should be here any minute now,” Dr. Moishe Russie said, peering out through one of the narrow windows that gave a view of the street.

“Father, you’ve been saying that for the past hour,” Reuven Russie pointed out with such patience as he could muster.

“The Nazis are punctual,” his father said. “The Lizards are also punctual. So I ought to know when he will be here.”

“We know it, too,” Reuven said, even less patiently than before. “You don’t have to keep reminding us every five minutes.”

“No, eh?” Moishe Russie said. “And why not?” His eyes twinkled.

Reuven smiled, too, but it took effort. He knew his father was joking, but the jokes had turned into what Jane Archibald would have called kidding on the square. His father was too worried about his distant cousin to be anything but serious behind those twinkling eyes.

Silent as a thought, a hydrogen-powered motorcar glided to a stop in front of the house. A door opened. A man in utterly ordinary clothes got out and walked up the short path to the door. He knocked.

Moishe Russie let him in. “Welcome to Jerusalem, Cousin,” he said, folding David Goldfarb into an embrace. “It’s been too long.” He spoke Yiddish, not the Hebrew the Jews of Palestine used most of the time.

“Thanks, Moishe,” Goldfarb answered in the same language. “One thing I’ll tell you-it’s good to be here. It’s good to be anywhere but a Nazi gaol.” His Yiddish was fluent enough, but had an odd accent. After a moment, Reuven realized the flavoring came from the English that was his relative’s first language. David Goldfarb turned toward him and stuck out a hand. “Hello. You’re a man now. That hardly seems possible.”

“Time does go on.” Reuven spoke English, not Yiddish. It seemed every bit as natural to him, if not more so. He hadn’t used Yiddish much since coming to Palestine. While he had no trouble understanding it, forming anything but childish sentences didn’t come easy.

“Too bloody right it does,” Goldfarb said, also in English. He was a few years younger than Reuven’s father. Unlike Moishe Russie, he still kept most of his hair, but it had more gray in it than the senior Russie’s. He must have seen that for himself, for he went on, “And it’s a miracle I’m not white as snow on top after the past couple of weeks. Thank God you could help, Moishe.”

Reuven’s father shrugged. “I did not have to go into a gaol after you,” he said, sticking to Yiddish. “You did that for me. All I did was ask the Lizards to help get you out, and they did it.”

“They must think a lot of you,” Goldfarb answered; now he returned to his odd-sounding Yiddish. If Jane spoke Yiddish, she’d speak it like that, Reuven thought. His cousin added, “They’d better think a lot of you now, after everything they put you through back then.”

Moishe Russie shrugged again. “That was a long time ago.”

“Too right it was,” Goldfarb muttered in English; he didn’t seem to notice going back and forth between languages. Still in English, he continued, “We’d all be better off if the buggers had never come in the first place.”

“You might be,” Moishe Russie said. “England might be. But me? My family?” He shook his head. “No. If the Race had not come, we would all be dead. I am sure of it. You saw Lodz. You never saw Warsaw. And Warsaw would only have got worse as the war went on.”

“Warsaw was bad, very bad,” Reuven agreed; he had no happy recollections of the city in which he’d been born. “But what the Nazis did with their killing factories is worse. If they’d stayed in Poland, I think Father is right: we would all have gone through them. Next to Hitler, Haman was nothing much.”

Goldfarb frowned. Plainly, he wanted to argue. As plainly, he had trouble seeing how he could. Before he found anything to say, the twins came out of the kitchen. The scowl disappeared from his face. Grinning, he turned to Moishe. “All right, they’re as cute as their photos. I didn’t think they could be.”

Reuven suppressed the strong urge to retch. The twins stretched like cats, being charming on purpose. As with cats, it struck Reuven as an act. “They’re miserable nuisances a lot of the time,” he said-in Yiddish, of which Esther and Judith had only a smattering: his father and mother often spoke it when they didn’t want the twins to know what was going on.

“Well, I have children of my own, and every one of them thinks the others are nuisances,” Goldfarb said, also in Yiddish. He eyed Judith and Esther, then switched to slow, clear English: “Which one of you is which?”

“I’m Esther,” Judith said.

“I’m Judith,” Esther echoed.

Reuven coughed. So did his father. David Goldfarb raised an eyebrow. He’d had practice with children, all right; his expression was identical to the one Moishe Russie used when he caught Reuven or Judith or Esther stretching the truth.

“Oh, all right,” Esther said. “Maybe it is the other way around.”

“You couldn’t prove it by me,” Goldfarb said. “But your father and your brother have their suspicions.”

“We came out here to say that supper was ready,” Judith said. “Who says that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“Not if it’s true,” Reuven said. Both his sisters sniffed indignantly at the possibility that he could doubt them. Having failed to doubt them a few times when he should have been wary, he bore up under their disapproval.

Supper was a couple of roasted chickens, with chickpeas and carrots and a white wine that made Goldfarb nod in what seemed surprised approval. “I don’t usually drink wine, except during Pesach,” he said. “This is good.”

“It’s not bad, anyhow,” Moishe Russie said. “When I drink anything these days, it’s mostly wine. I haven’t got the head for whiskey or vodka any more, and the beer you can get here is a lot nastier than what they made in Poland-in England, too, for that matter.”

“If you get used to drinking wine, you won’t want to drink beer, anyhow,” Reuven said. “Beer’s thin, sour stuff by comparison.”

“That only goes to show you’ve been drinking bad beer,” David Goldfarb answered. “From what your father said, I don’t suppose it’s any wonder.”

Rivka Russie brought matters back to the more immediate by softly saying, “It’s good to see you here and safe, David.”

“Omayn,” Moishe Russie added.

Their cousin-Reuven’s cousin once further removed-emptied his wineglass with a convulsive gulp less closely related to how much he enjoyed the vintage than to its anesthetic properties. “It’s bloody good to be here, believe me,” he said, and inclined his head to Reuven’s father. “Thanks again for pulling the wires to help get me out. You did more than the British consul in Marseille. You couldn’t very well have done less, let me tell you, because he didn’t do anything.”

“It was my pleasure, you believe me,” Moishe Russie said, waving away the thanks. Reuven had seen many times that his father had a hard time accepting praise.

“What was it like, there in the Nazis’ prison?” one of the twins asked.

“It was the worst place in the world,” David Goldfarb said. Esther and Judith both gasped. Goldfarb looked at his glass, as if regretting it was empty. Moishe Russie saw that glance and proceeded to remedy the situation. After drinking, Goldfarb went on, “The cell was only a cell, with a cot and a bucket. Not much different to a British cell, I shouldn’t wonder. They fed me-I got a little hungry, but not very. They asked me questions. They didn’t knock my teeth out or hit me very often or very hard. It was still the worst place in the world.”

“Why?” Esther asked, while Judith said, “I don’t understand.”

“I’ll tell you why,” Goldfarb said. “Because even though they didn’t do any of those things, they could have. I knew it, and they knew it, and they knew I knew it. Knowing it did almost as good a job of breaking me as real torture would have done.”

He’d spoken English; word by word, the twins couldn’t have had any trouble following what he said. But they didn’t understand it. Reuven could see as much. He did, or thought he did, though he was just as well pleased not to have had the experience that would have made understanding certain.

His mother asked, “What were you doing there in the first place?”

“Trying to help some of my British… friends,” Goldfarb said. “They did some of their dealings through a Frenchman who had been operating on his own, but they started losing money-or not making so much money, I’m not sure which-when the Germans got their hooks into him. So they sent me down to the south of France to see if I couldn’t persuade him to go back to being an independent operator. Why not?” His mouth twisted; he emptied the wineglass again. “I was just an expendable Jew.”

“Ginger is as bad for the Lizards as cocaine or heroin is for us,” Reuven’s father observed, “maybe worse. I wish you’d never got caught up in that.”

“So do I,” Goldfarb said. “Vey iz mir, so do I. But having dreadful things happen to my family would have been even worse, and so off I went.”

Moishe Russie reached for more wine himself when he heard that, something he rarely did. Nodding heavily, he said, “When I was having trouble with the Lizards in Warsaw, I had help getting Rivka and Reuven to a place where the Race couldn’t get their hands on them, so I understand how you feel.”

“We were in a cellar!” Reuven exclaimed, astonished at how the memory came back. “It was dark all the time, because we didn’t have many lamps or candles.”

“That’s right,” his father said. Reuven shook his head in astonishment; he hadn’t so much as thought of that hideaway for many years. His father looked across the table at Goldfarb. “And the Lizards were trying to put Dutourd out of business while you were trying to set him up again-and the Nazis caught their people, too.”

“If you stick your head in the lion’s mouth, you know there’s a chance he’ll bite down,” Goldfarb said with a shrug. “I gather you got the Americans out of their cells, too?”

“Yes, I managed that,” Moishe Russie said. “Getting them was easier than getting you, in fact. The Germans worry more about offending the Race than they do about offending England.”

“I can understand that, worse luck for me,” David Goldfarb said. “The only one who got left behind was Dutourd. He would have dealt with me, I think. I hope he doesn’t get into too much trouble for that.” He paused. “The Lizards started asking me questions the minute I got on their plane in Marseille. And do you know what? I answered every one of them. If my ‘friends’ back home don’t like it, too bloody bad.”

“Good for you,” Reuven said.

His father nodded and remarked, “My guess is that the Frenchman won’t. He’s useful to the Nazis-he’s not just another damned Jew.”

Goldfarb inclined his head. “As one damned Jew to another-to a whole family full of others-I thank you.” He poured more wine into his glass, then raised it high. “L’chaim!” he said loudly.

“To life!” Reuven echoed, and was proud to have answered a beat ahead of his father and mother and sister. He drank his wine; it went down sweet and smooth as honey.

Felless felt like a hypocrite as she accompanied Ambassador Veffani into the Reichs Ministry of Justice in Nuremberg. She also felt even smaller than she usually did while entering a building the Big Uglies had built to suit themselves. The Ministry of Justice, like a lot of public buildings of the Reich, was deliberately designed to minimize the importance of the individual, whether that individual was a Tosevite or belonged to the Race.

“They know not the Emperor, so they have to build like this,” Veffani said when Felless remarked on the style. “They hope false splendor will make their not-emperor and his minions seem as impressive to their subjects as generations of tradition have made the Emperor seem to us.”

“That is… a very perceptive remark, superior sir,” Felless said. “I have seen similar speculations, but seldom so pithily expressed.” For a moment, interest made her forget her craving for ginger-but only for a moment. The craving never left for long-and now she and Veffani were visiting the Deutsch minister of justice to plead for harsher treatment of a captured ginger smuggler. If that was not irony, the stuff had never hatched from its shell.

Deutsch soldiers in steel helmets stiffened as Veffani and Felless reached the top of the broad stone stairway leading to the entrance. They clicked their booted heels together, a courtesy rather like assuming the posture of respect. One of them proved to speak the language of the Race: “I greet you, Ambassador, and your colleague. How may I serve you?”

“We have an appointment with Justice Minister Dietrich,” Veffani answered, observing protocol. “Please escort us to him.”

“It shall be done.” The Deutsch guard’s about-turn had none of the smooth elegance a member of the Race would have given it, but possessed a stiff impressiveness of its own. Over his shoulder, the Big Ugly added, “Follow me.”

Follow him Veffani and Felless did, down corridors that dwarfed Big Uglies, let alone the two of them. Deutsch functionaries, some in the business clothes the Tosevites favored, more in the uniform wrappings the Deutsche used to show status in place of body paint (and, Felless realized, to overawe Tosevites not similarly wrapped), bustled here and there. As with the Race, they seemed to feel that the busier they looked, the more important they actually were.

Minister Dietrich had a doorway even larger and higher than any of the others. A Tosevite miscreant hauled before him would surely feel he had committed some crime for which he could never atone. Felless felt the Big Ugly architect had committed a breach of taste for which he could never atone. A great deal of Deutsch monumental architecture inspired the same feeling in her.

The guard escorting Felless and Veffani spoke back and forth with Dietrich’s secretary in the Deutsch language. Felless had picked up a few words of it, but could not follow a conversation. “It is all formality, of no great consequence,” Veffani whispered to her.

She made the hand gesture of agreement. The secretary spoke the language of the Race about as well as a Tosevite could: “Come with me, Ambassador, Senior Researcher. Minister Dietrich will be pleased to hear whatever you may have to say, although, of course, he cannot promise to fulfill all your desires.”

“I understand,” Veffani said. “As always, I look forward to seeing him.”

Veffani is a hypocrite, too, Felless thought. The ambassador’s hypocrisy, luckily for him, had nothing to do with the herb. He merely had to pretend the Big Uglies with whom he dealt not only were but deserved to be his equals. Felless still found that concept outrageous. She had come to Tosev 3 assuming the world would be altogether conquered, subservient to the will of the Race. That hadn’t happened, but she remained convinced it should have.

After more formal pleasantries, the secretary-who would also serve as translator-escorted the male and female of the Race into the presence of Justice Minister Dietrich. His gray hair and flabby face showed him to be an elderly male. “I greet you, Veffani,” he said in the language of the Race. His accent was far thicker than that of his secretary.

“I greet you, Sepp,” Veffani replied. Sepp, he had given Felless to understand, was a nickname for Josef. The Big Uglies, already possessed of too many names from the standpoint of the Race, added to the confusion by using informal versions of them whenever they felt like it. One more piece of Tosevite inefficiency, Felless thought. Veffani went on, “I present to you Senior Researcher Felless, who is also concerned with the problem ginger poses for the Race.”

“I greet you, Senior Researcher,” Dietrich said.

“I greet you, Justice Minister,” Felless answered; using his title let her avoid calling him superior sir, an honorific she did not care to give to any Tosevite.

Dietrich spoke in the Deutsch language. The secretary translated: “And are you intimately concerned with the problem of ginger, Senior Researcher?” He put undue stress on the word intimately. Both he and his superior let out the yips the Big Uglies used for laughter.

Failing to see any joke, Felless answered, “Yes, I am,” which seemed to amuse the Tosevites all over again.

“Shall we begin?” Veffani asked, and Sepp Dietrich, seeming to recall his manners, waved him and Felless to chairs. They were built for Tosevites, and so not comfortable to the male and female of the Race, but refusing would have been most impolite.

“So,” Minister Dietrich said, “we come again to the matter of this Dutourd, do we? The Foreign Ministry has already told the fleetlord that he shall not be surrendered.”

“So it has,” Veffani said. To Felless, his tone indicated strong disapproval. Whether Dietrich and his secretary understood that, she could not tell. The ambassador resumed, “That you seek to use him for your own purposes and against the interests of the Race is, however, not acceptable to us.”

“How can you say such a thing?” Dietrich asked. “We have him in prison. We are keeping him in prison for the time being. If he can do anything against you while in prison, he is a formidable character indeed, not so?”

“You are not keeping him in prison because of what he has done against the Race,” Veffani said. “You are keeping him in prison because he wanted to go on doing it on his own, and not for you.”

“He is in prison,” Dietrich said, not bothering to deny the assertion. “You cannot ask for more, since dealing in ginger is not a crime under the laws of the Reich.”

“Superior sir, may I speak?” Felless asked. When Veffani used the affirmative hand gesture, she turned both her eye turrets toward Sepp Dietrich. “Justice Minister, if under your laws it is not a crime to deal in ginger, we can and will revise our laws to make it no crime to deal in narcotics that appeal to Tosevites, and to make it legal and indeed encouraged to smuggle those narcotics into the independent Tosevite not-empires.”

As one of the ornaments on the wrapping around his torso, Dietrich wore a small silvery pin showing a Big Ugly’s skull with a couple of crossed bones behind it. His own features froze into an expression no more lively than that skull’s. “If you wish to play that game, we can play it,” he said through his interpreter. “No drug you can bring into the Reich will do as much to us as ginger does to you.”

“Truth.” Felless admitted what she could scarcely deny. “But you are already doing all you can to us with ginger.” She knew the truth in that to a degree Dietrich did not realize. “If you keep trying to do all you can to us with ginger, why should we do anything less to you?”

She waited until the interpreter put that into the language of the Deutsche. Sepp Dietrich’s jaw worked as he chewed on it both literally and metaphorically. He said, “This is not far from a threat of war.”

Veffani’s eye turrets slewed rapidly toward Felless. The ambassador was undoubtedly wondering what sort of trouble she’d got herself into. So was she, but she went ahead regardless: “Why is it a threat of war when we do it to you, but nothing of the sort when you do it to us?”

Dietrich grunted. “Perhaps you should be talking with the foreign minister and not with me.”

“Perhaps you should not evade your responsibilities,” Felless shot back. “This male Tosevite is in a Deutsch prison. An official from the Foreign Ministry has already refused to turn him over to the Race, as Ambassador Veffani said. That leaves him in your hands.”

“It also constitutes an act unfriendly to the Race,” Veffani put in. “From the actions of the Reich, someone might conclude that peace between your not-empire and the Empire does not matter to you. I think that would be an unfortunate and dangerous conclusion for anyone to reach. Do you not agree?”

Watching the Big Ugly squirm gave Felless pleasure approaching that of a taste of ginger. After coughing and wiping metabolic cooling water away from his forehead (a sign of distress among Tosevites, the experts agreed), Dietrich said, “I am not unfriendly to anyone. The Reich is not unfriendly to anyone except Jews and other racial inferiors, and Dutourd, whatever else you may say of him, is not a Jew.”

“He is an enemy of the Race,” Veffani said. “Keeping him in prison for a long time would be an act of courtesy to the Race.”

“I shall take what you say under advisement,” Sepp Dietrich replied. “The matter may have to be decided at a level higher than mine, though.”

“Who is higher than you, Justice Minister Dietrich?” Felless demanded. “If you cannot decide here, who can?”

“Why, Reichs Chancellor Himmler, of course.” Dietrich seemed surprised she needed to ask. She was surprised the head of the Deutsch not-empire would concern himself about the fate of a ginger smuggler. Dietrich proceeded to explain why: “The Reichs Chancellor yielded to the Race when he let you destroy an air base after the attack on your colonization fleet, though the Reich, he has insisted, was not guilty of that attack. To yield to you again might be taken as a sign of weakness, and we Deutsche are not weak. We are strong, and we grow stronger day by day.”

That was true. It was also, to the Race’s way of thinking, extremely unfortunate. From the point of view of the Reich, Dietrich’s words did make a certain amount of sense. Felless reluctantly admitted as much to herself.

But Veffani said, “Protecting criminals is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of criminality.”

“I did not agree to receive you to listen to insults,” Sepp Dietrich said. “Now I must bid you good day. And I remind you that this Dutourd has committed no crimes in the view of the Reich.”

“And I remind you that the Reich can also redefine crimes to suit itself,” Veffani answered as he rose from his chair. Felless imitated the ambassador, who added, “I shall report the substance of your remarks to the fleetlord.”

Dietrich made a sort of noise the interpreter did not translate. Felless followed Veffani out of the justice minister’s office. When she started to say something, he made the negative hand gesture. I am a fool, she thought. If the Deutsche are recording anywhere, they are recording here.

Only after the two members of the Race had left the Ministry of Justice could she say what she had in mind: “Congratulations. You showed them we are not to be trifled with.”

“And to you, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said, “for your able assistance.”