Second Contact

20

Fotsev’s head came up sharply. His eye turrets swung now this way, now that, as he prowled through the streets of Basra. “Something is wrong here,” he said in a voice that came out flat because he forced all the nervousness from it. “Something does not taste the way it should.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets were moving unnaturally fast, too. That he thought something wasn’t the way it should be helped ease Fotsev’s mind. With the combat Gorppet had seen, he ought to have a knack for recognizing trouble before it became obvious.

“Everything seems quiet to me,” Betvoss said.

“I wish you seemed quiet to me,” Gorppet told him.

Betvoss liked to contradict for the fun of contradicting. Fotsev had seen that before. But, this time, the other male’s words helped Fotsev see where the trouble lay. “Everything does seem quiet,” he said. Gorppet gave him a reproachful look till he went on, “Everything seems too quiet.”

“Yes, it does.” Gorppet used an emphatic cough. “That is it exactly! Not many Big Uglies on the street, not even many of the cursed yapping creatures they use for pets.”

“Not many weapons, either.” Betvoss kept right on contradicting. “Usually the local Tosevites have about as much firepower as we do. If anyone thinks I am sorry to see something different for once, he is an addled egg.”

“If something is different, that is likely to mean something is wrong,” Fotsev said. His opinion sprang partly from the innate conservatism of the Race, partly from his own experience on Tosev 3.

Gorppet made the affirmative hand gesture. “If things go quiet all of a sudden, you always wonder what the Big Uglies are hiding. Or you should.”

“And it could be anything,” Fotsev said gloomily. “It could be anything at all. Remember the riots we had to put down when the colonization fleet started landing? If I never hear one more Big Ugly wrapped in rags screaming ‘Allahu akbar!’ I will be the happiest male on the face of this planet.”

Betvoss didn’t argue with that. Fotsev didn’t see how even Betvoss could have argued with that. Another male on patrol said, “Hardly any of the little half-grown beggars around today. And if that does not prove something is wrong, what would?”

“Truth,” Fotsev said. “They act like parasites-or they do most of the time. But where are they this morning?”

“Not at their lessons, that is certain,” Gorppet said with a nasty laugh. Most of the local Tosevite hatchlings had no lessons to attend. The ones who did receive what the locals considered an education learned to add and subtract a little, to write in their language, and to read from the manual of the superstition dominant hereabouts. Maybe that was better than nothing. Fotsev would not have bet anything he cared to lose on it.

When the patrol came into the central market square, he saw for himself that things were not right. On almost every day, the pandemonium in the market square outdid the rest of Basra put together. Not today. Today, hardly any merchants displayed food or cloth or brasswork or the other things they made. Today, males and females of the Race from the new towns out in the desert outnumbered Tosevites as customers.

“Too quiet,” Gorppet said.

“Much too quiet,” Fotsev agreed. He waited for Betvoss to weigh in on the opposite side, but the other male said not a word.

Horrible electrified squawkings burst from the towers attached to the buildings where the local Big Uglies practiced their superstition. “The call to prayer,” Gorppet said, and Fotsev made the affirmative gesture. “Now we shall see how many of them come out,” Gorppet went on. “If they stay home for this… well, they never have, not in all the time I have been here.”

Sure enough, robed Big Uglies emerged from houses and shops and streamed toward the mosques of Basra. “Praying is not the only thing they do in those buildings,” Fotsev said worriedly. “The males who lead them in prayer are also known to lead them in rebellion against the Empire.”

“We ought to go in there and make sure they say only things that have to do with their foolish beliefs,” Betvoss said. “Those males have no business meddling in politics. They should be punished if they try.”

“We have punished some of them,” Fotsev said. “Others keep popping up.”

“The other fork of the tongue is, they have no notion where their superstition ends and politics begins,” Gorppet added. “For them, the two are not to be separated.”

“We should instruct them, then.” Betvoss flourished his rifle to show what kind of instruction he had in mind. “We should go into those houses of superstition and kill the Big Uglies who preach against us, kill them or at least take them away and imprison them so they cannot inflame the others.”

“We tried that, not long after we occupied these parts,” Gorppet said. “It did not work: it created more turbulence than it suppressed. And so many of these Tosevites are experts in the fine points of their foolish belief that new leaders arose almost at once to replace the ones we captured.”

“Too bad,” Betvoss said, and there, for once, Fotsev couldn’t disagree with him.

With most of the Big Uglies worshiping, the patrol prowled down streets even more deserted than before. “Too easy,” Fotsev muttered under his breath. “Too easy, too quiet.”

His eye turrets kept on sliding now this way, now that, looking for places from which the Tosevites might ambush the patrol, and also for good defensive positions in case of trouble. That there was no sign of trouble except for things being calmer than usual did nothing to deter him. He felt like a hatchling still in the egg that trembled when it heard a predator’s footsteps. It could not see danger, but knew danger was there nonetheless. Fotsev thought it was here, too.

His telephone hissed. The sound, designed to get his attention, made him start with alarm, though danger on Tosev 3 was likelier to start with angry shouts from Big Uglies or with the frightened yappings of their animals. He put the phone to a hearing diaphragm, listened, said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and set the instrument back on his belt.

“What shall be done?” Gorppet asked.

“I knew trouble was stirring somewhere,” Fotsev answered. “The Big Uglies have captured a bus on its way into Basra from one of the new towns and kidnapped all the females who were riding in it. The suspicion is that they intend to hold them for ransom.”

“Clever of the authorities to figure that out,” Gorppet said with heavy sarcasm. “Lesser minds would have been incapable of it.”

“Why kidnap only females?” Betvoss said. “Males are more dangerous to them, for there are no female soldiers.”

“That is not how the Big Uglies think,” Gorppet said. “Females matter more to them, because they are always in season. And besides, females do not know how to fight back. If they captured males, they might capture a trained soldier, one who could harm them.”

“That makes sense,” Betvoss said-he was being unusually reasonable today. “If we can find them, we can probably earn promotions.”

“If we see some evidence that we are near these kidnapped females, of course we shall try to rescue them,” Fotsev said. “But we must not forget everything else while we search for them.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. “Otherwise, the Tosevites will make us regret it.”

“Onward, then,” Fotsev said.

Onward they went, through the narrow, winding streets of Basra. A breeze sprang up, sending new and different stinks onto their scent receptors. After a while, the Big Uglies came out of their houses of worship. Gorppet, who spoke their language, called out to some of them. A few-only a few-answered. “They deny knowing anything about these females,” he said.

“Did you expect anything different?” Fotsev asked.

“Expect? No,” Gorppet answered. “But you never can tell. I might have been lucky. The Tosevites have feuds among themselves. Had I found a male at feud with the kidnappers, he might have told us what we need to know.”

For a small stretch of time, the Big Uglies returning from their worship filled the streets. Then they might have disappeared off the face of Tosev 3. Everything grew quiet again-much too quiet, as far as Fotsev was concerned. Something simmered under the surface, though he couldn’t tell what. That sense of walking on uncertain ground gnawed at him.

The breeze picked up and swirled dust into his face. His nictitating membranes flicked back and forth, back and forth, protecting his eyes from the grit. “Weather reminds me of a windy day back on Home,” he remarked, and a couple of the other males made the affirmative hand gesture.

Then, all at once, the breeze blew him a scent that also reminded him of Home. “By the Emperor!” he said softly. He was not the only male in the patrol to smell those pheromones, of course. Everyone else started standing more nearly erect, too.

“She’s close,” Betvoss said hoarsely. “She’s very close.”

“She… maybe they,” Gorppet said. “The scent is strong.” His voice was hot and hungry, and he added an emphatic cough.

“I wonder if these are the kidnapped females.” Fotsev reluctantly reached for his telephone to report the possibility.

“Investigate with caution,” a male back at the barracks told him.

“It shall be done,” Fotsev replied. But that other male, that distant male, did not have a cloud of pheromones blowing into his face. When Fotsev relayed the order to the rest of the patrol, what he said was, “We have permission to go forward.”

A couple of males exclaimed in delight. Betvoss said, “It will probably be a couple of ginger-addled females from the new towns. But if they are ginger-addled, they will want to mate, and smelling them certainly makes me want to mate. And so…” He hurried in the direction the delicious scent led him. So did Fotsev. So did the whole patrol. They were investigating, but had forgotten all about caution.

Rounding a corner, Fotsev saw a couple of females at the dark dead end of an alleyway. The pheromones came off them in waves. He and his comrades rushed toward them. Only when he got very near did his lust-impaired senses note they were bound and gagged.

He tried to make himself stop. “It is a trap!” he shouted. The realization came just too late for him. Big Uglies concealed in houses on either side of the alley had already opened up with rifles and automatic weapons. Males fell as if scythed down. Fotsev screamed for help into his telephone. Then something struck him a heavy blow in the flank. He found himself on the ground without knowing how he’d got there. It didn’t hurt-yet.

The Tosevites swarmed out of their hiding places to try to finish off the patrol. “Allahu akbar!” they shouted. A male fired at them, and some fell. The rest kept shouting, “Allahu akbar!” It was the last thing Fotsev ever heard.

“Allahu akbar!” The cry echoed through Jerusalem once more. Reuven Russie hated it. It meant horror and terror and death. He’d seen that before. Now he and the city he loved-the only city he’d ever loved-were seeing it again.

In the most hackneyed, cliched fashion possible, he wished he’d listened to his mother. If he hadn’t gone in to the Russie Medical College this morning, he wouldn’t be worrying now about how he was going to get home in one piece. Things hadn’t been so bad this morning. He hadn’t wanted to miss the day’s lectures or the biochemistry lab-especially not the latter, whose equipment and techniques far outdid anything human technology could offer.

And so he’d come, and he hadn’t had too hard a time doing it. People had been shouting “Allahu akbar!” even then, and there were occasional spatters of gunfire, the pop-pop-pop s sounding like fireworks. But Reuven had gone through the empty market square without so much as seeing a man with a rifle or a submachine gun. The shopkeepers who’d stayed home and merchants who hadn’t set up their stalls, though, had known something he hadn’t.

The Race, as a matter of course, efficiently soundproofed the buildings it put up. Reuven approved; distractions were the last thing he needed when trying to keep up with a Lizard physician lecturing as quickly as he would have for students of his own species. He and his fellows never heard Jerusalem’s ordinary street noise, which could be pretty raucous.

But the noise outside today was anything but ordinary. Nearby small-arms fire and helicopters roaring low overhead provided constant background racket, now louder, now softer. Even the most efficient soundproofing in the world couldn’t keep out the deep, thunderous roars of exploding bombs. And some of those bombs burst close enough to shake the whole building, as if from an earthquake. Reuven had been through a few quakes. The shaking here wasn’t so strong as in a bad one, but he kept wondering what would happen if a bomb happened to hit the medical college square. It wasn’t the sort of thought that helped him pay attention to Shpaaka, the male of the Race who went on lecturing as if it were an ordinary day.

After a miss that sounded and felt nearer than any of the others, Jane Archibald leaned toward him and whispered, “This is bloody awful.”

“Oh, good,” he whispered back. “I thought I was the only one scared out of my wits.”

Blond curls flipped back and forth as she shook her head. “I don’t know how anybody stands it,” she said. “It takes me back to the days when I was a tiny little girl and the Lizards were mopping up Australia after they’d bombed Sydney and Melbourne.”

Reuven nodded. “I remember the fighting in Poland and in England and here, too.”

He might have known that Shpaaka would notice he wasn’t paying so much attention as he should. “Student Russie,” the Lizard said, “are you prepared to repeat back to me my remarks on hormonal function?”

Before Reuven could answer, another bomb burst even closer to the building. It almost threw him out of his seat. He had to fight the urge to dive for cover. In a shaky voice, he answered, “No, superior sir. I am sorry.”

He waited for Shpaaka to read him the riot act about insolence and insubordination. Instead, the male let out a very human-sounding sigh and said, “Perhaps, under the circumstances, this is forgivable. I must note, I find these circumstances unfortunate.”

No one argued with him. People who were liable to stand up and scream “Allahu akbar!” or even “Lizards go home!” were unlikely to enroll in the Moishe Russie Medical College. As far as Reuven was concerned, the Race did a better job of ruling its territory than the Reich or the Soviet Union did theirs. He glanced over toward Jane, which he enjoyed doing every so often any day of the week. She had a different opinion of the Lizards’ rule, but she couldn’t enjoy watching-or rather, listening to-Jerusalem going up in flames.

Shpaaka said, “I hope you will forgive me, but I really feel I must speak on something other than the assigned lecture topic for a little while. I trust I hear no objections?” His eye turrets swiveled so he could look at all of his students. Again, no one said anything. “I thank you,” he told them. “I merely wanted to state my opinion that, in view of the factional strife so prevalent among you Tosevites, the coming of the Race to Tosev 3 may well prove a boon to you, not the disaster so many of your kind perceive it to be.”

Reuven started to nod, then checked himself. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t agree: much more that he didn’t want Jane seeing him agree. He knew she wouldn’t, no matter how eloquently Shpaaka spoke. He didn’t blame her for having a view different from his, but wished she wouldn’t.

“I say this even if the Race should eventually incorporate all Tosevites into the Empire,” Shpaaka continued. “You value independence very highly: more so than any other species we know. But unity and security also have their value, and in the long run-a concept I admit seems alien to Tosev 3-that value may well prove greater. We have found it so, at any rate.”

Now Reuven wasn’t so sure he agreed. He was content to live under the Lizards’ rule because all other choices for Palestine looked worse. He didn’t think that was true all over the world, nor even in all parts of the world where the Race presently ruled.

He glanced over toward Jane again. She surely didn’t think that was true all over the world, either.

“Let us live in peace together, as far as we can,” Shpaaka said. “Let us learn in settings like this one to extend the boundaries of peaceful living, and let us-” He had to break off, for the lights flickered and the floor shook from another near miss.

“So much for peaceful living,” somebody behind Reuven said.

A telephone on the wall behind Shpaaka hissed for attention. He answered it, spoke briefly, and then hung up. Turning back to the class, he said, “I am told to dismiss you early. Armored vehicles are on the way to take you all back to the dormitory, which has a strong perimeter around it.”

Reuven threw up his hand. When Shpaaka recognized him, he said, “But, superior sir, I do not live in the dormitory.”

“You might be well advised to go there in any case,” the Lizard said. “Doing so will be far safer for you than attempting to traverse the city while it is in such a state of disarray. Assuming the telephone system is still operational, you may contact whomever you require from there.” He paused, then went on, “I do not have so many students as to be able to contemplate with equanimity the loss of any of them.”

“But my family…” Reuven began.

“Don’t be silly,” Jane hissed at him. “Your father advises the fleetlord. Do you think the Race will let anything happen to him?”

He started to answer that, then realized he couldn’t-she was right. The Lizards took such obligations far more seriously than most people did. And so, instead, he spoke to Shpaaka: “I thank you, superior sir. I will go to the dormitory with my fellow students.”

“It is good,” the male said. “And now, until the vehicles arrive, I resume my remarks on hormone functions…”

He did not get to lecture long. A male wearing the body paint of a mechanized combat vehicle commander burst into the chamber and called, “You Tosevites going to the dormitory, come with me at once.”

Along with everyone else, Reuven rose and hurried out to the entranceway. The air outside was thick with smoke, smoke nasty with the scents of burning paint and burning rubber and burning meat. He plunged into one of the waiting combat vehicles-not altogether by accident, the one Jane Archibald also chose. The seats in the back were made for Lizards, which meant they were cramped for humans. He didn’t mind being knee to knee with her, not at all.

A male scrambled in after them and slammed the rear doors shut. The mechanized combat vehicle rattled forward on its treads. It hadn’t gone far before bullets started slamming into it. Its own machine gun and males at the firing ports shot back. The noise inside was deafening.

Rioters kept shooting at the mechanized combat vehicle all through the short trip from the college to the dormitory. None of the hits penetrated, which Reuven took as a tribute to the Race’s engineering. One of the Lizards inside with him and Jane turned an eye turret their way and said, “We make them pay.”

He was talking about human beings, people like Reuven. They were, unfortunately, also people doing their best to kill him. He couldn’t work up much sympathy for them. What came out of his mouth was, “Good.”

The mechanized combat vehicle spun, backed, and stopped. The Lizard, who could see out, said, “We are just in front of your building. I will open the doors. When I do, you run inside.”

“It shall be done,” Reuven and Jane said together. The doors flew open. Ducking low to keep from banging their heads on a roof made for shorter beings, they jumped out and ran. No bullets smote them. As soon as they were inside the dormitory, students who’d got there before them slammed the building’s doors shut again.

“Are the telephones working?” Reuven asked. When somebody told him they were, he called his parents’ house. He got one of his twin sisters. “I’m at the dormitory. I’m going to spend the night here,” he said. “How are things around the house?”

“Quieter here than last time,” Esther or Judith-he thought it was Judith-answered. “Getting home wouldn’t have been easy for you, though, I don’t suppose. I’m glad you’re all right.” She said that last with the air of someone granting a great concession.

“I’m glad all of you are safe, too,” Reuven answered. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. Take care.” He hung up.

“We have no vacant bedrooms,” one of the dormitory workers told him. “I will set up a cot for you in the hall.”

Reuven hadn’t thought there would be any empty rooms. He’d dreamt of sharing a bedroom with Jane Archibald. By the way she’d kissed him every now and then, he’d dared hope he wasn’t the only one dreaming of such things. Whether he was or not, he wouldn’t find out tonight.

She handed him a chicken sandwich and a bottle of Coca-Cola. She had a sandwich and a soda of her own, too. “Thanks,” he said, realizing how hungry he was. He gulped down an enormous bite, then went on, “That’s… almost as good as what I hoped for.”

Her eyes widened a little; she could hardly misunderstand him. Then she said, “Not tonight, Reuven.” He nodded-he’d already figured that out for himself. But she was smiling, she wasn’t angry, and she didn’t say anything more. All of a sudden, the whole hellish day didn’t look so bad.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was normally perhaps the most self-contained man Liu Han knew. Today, though, he seemed as bouncy as a sixteen-year-old who imagined himself in love for the first time. “We have more weapons than we know what to do with,” he said jubilantly. “We have weapons from the Americans-thanks to you, Comrade.” He grinned at Liu Han. They weren’t lovers any more, but seeing that grin reminded her of why they had been.

“Thanks to the Americans, too, for trying till they got a ship-ment past the Japanese and the little scaly devils and their Chinese lackeys at the customs houses,” Liu Han said.

Nieh brushed that aside. His mind was on other things. “And we have weapons from our Socialist brethren in the Soviet Union,” he burbled. “Theirs got through, too”-which might have meant he’d been listening to her after all. “And with all these toys in our hands, we ought to find something worthwhile to do with them.”

“Something that will make the little scaly devils wish they’d never been hatched, you mean,” Liu Han said.

“Well, of course,” Nieh Ho-T’ing replied in some surprise. “What other worthwhile use for weapons is there?”

“The Kuomintang,” she said.

“They are a small enemy,” Nieh said with a scornful wave. “The scaly devils are the great enemy. So it was before the scaly devils came: the Japanese were the great enemy, the Kuomintang the small. They cannot destroy us. The scaly devils might, if they had the will and the skill.”

“Their will is considerable,” Liu Han said. “Never think too little of them.”

“They have not the dialectic, which means their will won’t endure,” Nieh said sharply. “And they have little in the way of skill.”

Liu Han could not disagree with that. Talking quietly over a couple of bowls of noodles in a neighborhood eatery on the west side of Peking, she and Nieh Ho-T’ing might have been deciding when to hold a party for a neighbor, not how best to visit death and destruction on the imperialist little devils. “What have you got in mind?” she asked.

He slurped up another mouthful of noodles with his chopsticks before answering, “The Forbidden City. I think we have a chance to take it, or at least to wreck it so the little scaly devils cannot use it any more.”

“Eee, wouldn’t that be something!” Liu Han exclaimed. “The Chinese Emperors kept the people out of it, and now the little devils do the same.” She’d seen some of the marvels at the heart of Peking when serving as an emissary to the little devils. Thinking of them in ruins hurt, but thinking of striking a blow against the little scaly devils made the hurt go away. She turned practical: “We should strike the little devils somewhere else first, so they will not be thinking about an assault on the Forbidden City.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded respectfully. “That is part of the plan, yes. You see things the way a general would.” As he was a general himself, that was not the sort of compliment he gave lightly.

“Good.” Liu Han nodded, too. “Now, you have talked the Muslims into joining the first attack, the one that won’t go anywhere?”

This time, Nieh stopped with a load of noodles halfway to his mouth. “I’ve dealt with the Muslims of Peking every now and then-you know that,” he said slowly, and waited for Liu Han to nod. When she did, he went on, “Why would you want me-why would you want us-to involve them now?”

“Ah.” Liu Han smiled. She’d seen something he hadn’t-she’d seen something the rest of the Central Committee hadn’t. “Because the Muslims farther west are rebelling against the scaly devils. If we have an uprising here, why shouldn’t our Muslims get the blame, or part of it?”

Nieh stared at her. The noodles, forgotten on the chopsticks, dripped broth down onto the tabletop. After a moment, he shook his head and started to laugh. “Do you know what a terror you would have been if you’d stayed a peasant in a little village?” he said. “You would be running that village by now-no one would dare sell a duck, let alone a pig, without asking what you thought first. And if you had daughters-in-law… Eee, if you had daughters-in-law, they wouldn’t dare breathe without asking you first.”

Liu Han thought about it. After a moment, she laughed, too. “Maybe you’re right. That’s what mothers-in-law are for-making life miserable for daughters-in-law, I mean. Mine did. But it hasn’t got anything to do with anything now. Will you talk to the Muslims, or won’t you?”

“Oh, I will-you’ve convinced me,” Nieh said. “I wish I’d thought of it myself, as a matter of fact. It’s good to have you back in China.”

“It’s good to be back,” Liu Han said from the bottom of her heart. “If you know some of the things they eat in the United States… But never mind that. Why wasn’t I involved in planning the attack on the Forbidden City as soon as someone got the idea?”

Suddenly, Nieh Ho-T’ing looked uncomfortable. “Oh, you know how Mao is about these things,” he said at last.

“Ah.” Liu Han did indeed. “He thinks women are better in bed than at the council table. Hsia Shou-Tao thinks the same way. How much self-criticism has he had to give over the years because of it? Maybe Mao should criticize himself, too.”

“Maybe he should-but don’t hold your breath,” Nieh said. “Now you have shown you deserve to help plan the attack. Isn’t that enough?”

“It will do, for now.” Liu Han leaned forward. “Let’s talk.”

Theirs was not the only talk that went into the plan, of course. They met with leading officials from the Party and the People’s Liberation Army, hammering out what they wanted to do and also how to keep both the little scaly devils and the Kuomintang from getting wind of it before the attacks went on. Liu Han helped organize a disinformation campaign: not one that claimed there would be no attack, but one that said it was aimed at a different part of Peking a week later than the real assault would be launched.

Nieh Ho-T’ing went several times to the Muslim quarter in the southwestern part of the Chinese city of Peking. He came back from one trip laughing. “I met with a mutton merchant,” he told Liu Han. “Across the street, an ordinary Chinese has set up as a pig butcher. The fellow painted a tiger in the front window of his shop, to frighten the Muslim’s sheep. The Muslim put a mirror in front of his own place, to make the tiger turn on the pigs, which the Muslim cannot eat himself. I thought it was a good joke.”

“It is a good joke,” Liu Han agreed. “Now, will the Muslims make their diversion?”

“I think they will,” Nieh answered. “The scaly devils oppress them because Muslims cause so much trouble in the west-you had a good notion there. That pig butcher is an example of this oppression: pigs offend Muslims, but the little devils let him open his shop in that district even so.”

“If they are fools, they will pay for being fools,” Liu Han said. “A pity we have to give the Muslims weapons to help them rise up. The ones who live may end up turning some of those weapons against us.”

“It can’t be helped,” Nieh said.

“I suppose not,” Liu Han admitted. “I wish it could. But the Muslims are less dangerous to us than the Kuomintang, much less than the little scaly devils.”

The chosen day dawned clear and cold, with a strong wind blowing out of the west. The wind brought with it yellow dust from the Mongolian desert; a thin coating of dust got everywhere, including between Liu Han’s teeth. That gritty feeling in the mouth and in the eyes was part of living in Peking. Liu Han quickly got used to it again, though she hadn’t missed it when she and Liu Mei went to America.

She stayed in her roominghouse with her daughter, waiting for things to happen. In a way, she wished she were carrying an American tommy gun or a Russian PPSh submachine gun, but she wasn’t an ordinary soldier any more. She was of more use to the cause of popular revolution setting others in motion than moving herself.

Right at the appointed hour, gunfire broke out south of the roominghouse. “It begins,” Liu Mei said.

“Not yet, not for us,” Liu Han replied. “If the Muslims do not draw enough scaly devils away from the Forbidden City, our fighters will sit on their hands and let the little devils crush this uprising. That will be hard on the Muslims, but it will save our men for another time when we can get better use from them.”

“We will give the Muslims to the Kuomintang if that happens,” Liu Mei said.

“Truth,” Liu Han answered in the scaly devils’ language. Returning to Chinese, she went on, “It cannot be helped, though. If we waste the substance of the People’s Liberation Army, we have nothing left.”

Before long, her practiced ear caught the rattle of the little scaly devils’ automatic weapons, a sound different from the one the Muslims’ rifles and submachine guns made. When she caught the rumble of tanks rolling through the narrow streets of Peking, she grinned at her daughter. Things were unfolding just as Nieh Ho-T’ing had planned them. Liu Mei didn’t grin back; that was not her way. But her eyes sparkled in an otherwise expressionless face, and Liu Han knew she was pleased.

Had the People’s Liberation Army been fighting the Kuomintang, the attack on the Forbidden City would have come after sunset. But the Chinese Communists had learned to their sorrow that the scaly devils had devices allowing them to see in the dark like owls. And so the assault on the moated walls surrounding the rectangle of the Forbidden City began in the early afternoon. American submachine guns smuggled one by one into the surrounding Imperial City opened up on the walls. So did heavy Russian mortars. The gates into the Forbidden City-especially the Wu Men, the Meridian Gate, at the south-would already be open, to let the soldiers of the little scaly devils and their fighting vehicles go forth to put down the Muslims. Teams of picked Chinese fighters were to rush in through them, to make sure they stayed open so more human beings could follow.

“If we take the Forbidden City, can we keep it?” Liu Mei asked.

“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “We can do a lot of damage. We can kill a lot of their officials and a lot of running dogs. And we can embarrass them, make them look like fools all over the world. It’s worth the price we’ll pay.”

“They do fight hard,” her daughter remarked. “They will slay more of ours than we slay of theirs.”

“I know that.” Liu Han’s shrug was not so much callous as calculating. “Mao is right when he says they can slay hundreds of millions of Chinese and still leave us with hundreds of millions to resist them. They cannot afford losses that match ours. They cannot afford losses that are the tenth part of ours. That is what this attack is supposed to tell them.”

Someone pounded on her door. She opened it. A runner, a man she recognized as one of Nieh Ho-T’ing’s junior officers, stood panting in the hallway. Half his left ear had been shot away; blood dripped down onto his tunic. He didn’t seem to notice. “Comrade-Comrades”-he corrected himself, catching sight of Liu Mei behind Liu Han-“I am to tell you that the Tai Ho Tien, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, at the heart of the Forbidden City is in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army.”

“So soon?” Liu Han exclaimed. The runner nodded. She shook her head in slow wonder. “I think we will conquer-I think we have conquered-after all.”

Except on the days when he felt worse, Mordechai Anielewicz bicycled through the streets of Lodz. It was defiance as much as anything else, a refusal to let the nerve gas he’d breathed twenty years before do anything more to his life than he could help.

When he saw Ludmila Jager hobbling along on a stick, he pulled to a stop beside her. Her broad Russian face bore a look of intense concentration; she was fighting pain as best she could, too. “How is it today?” Mordechai called to her.

She shrugged. “Today, not so good,” she answered. “When the weather is cold and wet, it hurts more,” she went on in her Russian-accented Polish. Then she eyed him. “But you know this for yourself.”

“I suppose so,” he answered, again feeling oddly guilty that the gas had done worse to her than it had to him.

She snapped her fingers. “Something I meant to tell you. Someone asked me yesterday where you live.”

“Nu? Did you tell him?” Mordechai asked.

Ludmila frowned. “I did, and now I wonder if I should have. That’s why I wanted to let you know: in case I was stupid.”

Anielewicz grew alert. “Why? Do you think he was a Polish nationalist? Or did he like a Nazi talk?” He smiled as he put on the German accent, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. He’d done the Greater German Reich a few favors during the fighting, but he’d done the Nazis any number of unfavors during it and since, not least refusing to let himself and Lodz go up in fire when the SS smuggled what was now the Jews’ explosive-metal bomb into the city.

“No.” Ludmila shook her head. “And no again. As a matter of fact, he spoke Polish the same way I do. Not as well, I don’t think.”

“A Russian?” Mordechai asked, and she nodded. Now he frowned. “What would a Russian want with me? I haven’t had anything to do with Russians… for a while.” Ludmila was his dear friend, but that didn’t mean she needed to know everything he did as one of the leaders of Poland’s Jews. She nodded again, understanding as much. He shrugged. “Isn’t that interesting? All right, I’ll keep an eye open for Russians. Can’t trust those Reds, after all. You never know what they might do.”

“No, you never know.” Ludmila, former Red Air Force senior lieutenant, smiled at him. “Reds are liable to do all sorts of foolish things. They might even decide they like living in Poland.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Mordechai said. They both laughed. He went on, “I wonder what the fellow wants with me. I know some Russians-some Russians in Russia, I mean-but if they need to get hold of me, they know how.”

Ludmila looked troubled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told him anything. But I didn’t think it could do any harm.”

“It probably won’t,” Anielewicz said. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t intend to.” He brought his feet back up onto the bicycle pedals and rode off. When he looked back over his shoulder-not the safest thing to do in the narrow, crowded, winding streets of Lodz-he saw Ludmila walking along with the same limping determination she’d shown ever since coming to the city. She never said anything more about the nerve gas that still tormented her than nichevo — it can’t be helped. Heinrich Jager had been the same way till the aftereffects of the gas helped put him in an early grave.

As Mordechai pedaled back toward his flat, he kept on pondering what Ludmila had told him. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Russians who dealt with him in official ways necessarily knew how to reach him. Those who dealt with him in unofficial ways, as David Nussboym had, could also get hold of him whenever they needed to. But he didn’t think he’d be seeing Nussboym, officially or unofficially, for a long time, if ever. By the word that filtered out of the Soviet Union, the NKVD was still being purged. Odds of Nussboym’s survival didn’t strike Mordechai as good.

“And I won’t miss him a bit,” he muttered as he stopped in front of his block of flats. But what did that leave? After a little while, he realized it might leave a Russian who had nothing to do with the government of the Soviet Union. That government was so allembracing inside the USSR, it was no wonder the thought had taken so long to occur to him. The wonder was, he’d come up with it at all.

When he got up to the flat, he asked his wife if anybody speaking Polish with a Russian accent had come around looking for him. “Not that I know of,” Bertha answered. She turned to their children, who were doing homework at the kitchen table. “Has anyone with a funny accent been asking for your father?”

Heinrich Anielewicz shook his head. So did his older brother David and their older sister Miriam. “Isn’t that peculiar?” Mordechai said. “I wonder who the fellow is and what he wants.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll find out, maybe I won’t.” He started to shrug again, then paused and sniffed instead. “What smells good?”

“Lamb tongues,” Bertha answered. “They’re usually more trouble than they’re worth, because it’s so hard to peel off the membrane-it comes away in little pieces, not in big chunks like a cow’s-but the butcher had such a good price on them that I bought them anyhow.”

David said, “I hear the Lizards have such sharp teeth, they can eat tongues and things like that without peeling them.” Heinrich and Miriam both looked disgusted, which had to be part of what he’d had in mind when he spoke up.

“If you remembered your Hebrew half as well as the things you hear on the street, you wouldn’t have to worry so much about your bar mitzvah next month,” Mordechai said.

“I’m not worried, Father,” David answered. That was probably true; he had an easygoing disposition much like his mother’s. Mordechai was worried, though. So was Bertha, even if she did her best not to let it show. They would go right on worrying till the momentous day had passed, too. Having a son who excelled at his bar mitzvah was a matter of no small pride among the Jews of Lodz.

Over the supper table, in between bites of flavorsome tongue (the lamb tongues might have been a lot of trouble to make, but turned out to be worth it), Heinrich asked, “Father, what’s an irrational number?”

“A number that drives you crazy,” David put in before his father could answer. “The way you do arithmetic, that’s most of them.”

Mordechai gave him a severe look and Heinrich a curious one. Mordechai knew something about irrational numbers; he’d studied engineering before the Germans invaded Poland and turned his life upside down. “You’re just barely nine years old,” he said to his younger son. “Where did you hear about irrational numbers?”

“A couple of my teachers were talking about them,” Heinrich answered. “I thought they sounded funny. Are they crazy numbers, or numbers that make you crazy, the way David said?”

“Well, they call them that because they used to drive people crazy,” Mordechai said. “They go on forever without repeating themselves. Three is just three, right? And a quarter is just.25. And a third is.33333… as far as you want to take it. But pi-you know about pi, don’t you?”

“Sure,” David answered. “They have us use three and a seventh when we figure with it.”

“All right.” Anielewicz nodded. “But that’s just close-you know what an approximation is, too, right?” He waited for his son to nod, then went on, “What pi really is, at least the start of it, is 3.1415926535897932… and it’ll go on forever like that, not repeating itself at all. The square root of two is the same kind of number. It’s the first one that was ever discovered. The ancient Greeks who found it kept it a secret for a while, because they didn’t think there should be numbers like that.”

“How did you remember all those decimal places for pi?” Miriam asked.

“I don’t know. I just did. I used to know a lot more, even though they’re pretty much useless after the first ten or so,” Anielewicz answered.

“I could never remember so many numbers all in a row,” his daughter said.

He shrugged. “When you play the violin, you remember which note goes after which even when you haven’t got the music in front of you. I couldn’t do that to save my life.”

“I know.” Miriam sniffed. “You can’t carry a tune in a pail.”

He would have been more offended if she’d been lying. “I can remember numbers, though,” he said. Miriam sniffed again. He could hardly blame her; set against musical talent, that didn’t seem like much. “Every once in a while, it comes in handy.” Having said that, he’d said everything he could for it.

After supper, the children went back to their books. Then Miriam practiced the violin for a while. David and Heinrich played chess; David had taught his brother how the pieces moved a few weeks before, and took no small pleasure in beating him like a drum. Tonight, though, he let out an anguished howl as Heinrich forked his king and a rook with a knight.

“Serves you right,” Mordechai told him. “Now you’ve got somebody you can play against, not somebody you can trample.” By David’s expression, he preferred trampling. He couldn’t unteach Heinrich, though. He was more than usually willing to go to bed that night.

“I’m not going to stay up, either,” Bertha said less than half an hour later. “I’m going shopping with Yetta Feldman tomorrow morning, and Yetta likes to get up at the crack of dawn.”

“All right.” Mordechai stayed put by the lamp in the front room. “I’ll finish the newspaper, then I’ll come to bed, too.” If the children were asleep and Bertha still awake, who could say what might happen then?

Before he’d finished the paper, though, someone knocked on the door. He was frowning as he went to answer it; ten past ten was late for visitors. “Who’s there?” he asked, not opening the door.

“Is this the flat of Mordechai Anielewicz?” It was a man’s voice, speaking Polish with a palatal Russian accent.

“Yes. Who’s there?” Mordechai asked again, his hand on the doorknob but still not turning it-this was an especially odd time to be receiving strangers. His eyes went to the pistol on the table by the door.

After a moment’s silence out in the hallway, he heard a faint click. His body identified the sound before his mind could-it was a safety coming off. He threw himself to the floor an instant before a burst of submachine-gun fire tore through the door at chest to head height.

Behind him, windows and a vase on the table shattered. Through and after the roar of gunfire, he heard people shouting and screaming. He waited till bullets stopped flying over him, then grabbed the pistol and pulled the door open. If the assassin was waiting around out there, he’d get an unpleasant surprise.

But the hall stood empty-for a moment. Then people poured out, many of them also carrying pistols and rifles. Behind him, Bertha exclaimed in horror at what the gunfire had done to the flat, and then in relief that it hadn’t done anything to Mordechai.

“Why would anybody start shooting at you, Anielewicz?” asked a fellow who lived across the hall from him.

He laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such a stupid question. “Why? I’m a Jew. I’m a prominent Jew. Poles don’t like me. The Lizards don’t like me. The Nazis don’t like me. The Russians don’t like me.” He ticked the answers off on his fingers as he spoke them. “How many other reasons do you need? I can probably find some more.” His neighbor didn’t ask for them. Anielewicz shivered. Why somebody had started shooting didn’t worry him so much. Who, now, who’d started shooting was a different story.

As he walked along High Street, Little Rock’s Embassy Row, Sam Yeager paused and gave a colored kid a nickel for a copy of the Arkansas Gazette. “Thank you, Major,” the kid said.

“You’re welcome.” Sam tossed him a dime. “You didn’t see that.”

The kid grinned at him. “Didn’t see what, suh?” He stuck the dime in a back pocket of his faded blue jeans, where it wouldn’t get mixed up with the money his boss had to know about.

Yeager went on down the street reading the paper. The Lewis and Clark was still front-page news, but it wasn’t the banner headline it had been a couple of days before. Everything seemed to be going just the way it should; the space-station-turned-spaceship would reach the asteroid belt faster than seemed possible. An acceleration of.01g didn’t sound like much, but it added up.

“Acceleration adds up,” Yeager muttered to himself. “It’s about the only thing that does.” He still couldn’t figure out why his own government had kept the Lewis and Clark so secret for so long. Sure, it had an atomic engine. But there were a lot more untamed atoms running around loose up in orbit than the ones that were pushing the enormous ship out toward the asteroids. The Lizards wouldn’t have pitched a fit if President Warren had told them what the USA was up to. They thought people were out of their minds for wanting to explore the rockpile that was the rest of the solar system, but they didn’t think it made people dangerous to them.

He sighed. Nobody’d asked his opinion. Somebody should have. If he didn’t know about the Race, who did? He sighed again. Whoever’d been in charge of that project had decided secrecy was a better way to go. Secrecy so blatant it put everybody’s backs up, Lizards and Nazis and Reds? Evidently. It made no sense to Sam.

Still chewing on it-he wasn’t particularly quick-witted, but was as stubborn a man as was ever born (if eighteen years in the low and middle minors didn’t prove that, what would?)-he walked past the Arkansas State Capitol and on toward what newspapers called the White House, even if it was built of golden local sandstone. President Warren hadn’t given him any details about why he’d been ordered out of California. If it didn’t turn out to have something to do with the Lizards, though, he’d be surprised.

The president wants to know what I think, Sam thought. But some damnfool general doesn’t care. He wondered if he could get Curtis LeMay and whoever LeMay’s boss was in trouble. He rather hoped so.

At President Warren’s official residence, a guard checked his ID and passed him on to a secretary. The secretary said, “The president’s running a few minutes late. Why don’t you just sit down here and make yourself comfortable? He’ll see you as soon as he’s free, Major.”

“All right,” Sam said-he could hardly say no. A few minutes turned into three-quarters of an hour. He would have been more annoyed if he’d been more surprised.

In due course, the flunky did escort him into the president’s office. “Hello, Major,” Earl Warren said as they shook hands. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Yeager answered. He’d long since learned not to pick fights where it couldn’t do him any good.

“Sit down, sit down,” Warren said. “Would you like coffee or tea?” After Sam shook his head, the president went on, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you to hop on an airplane and pay me a call.”

“Well, yes, sir, a little bit,” Yeager agreed. “I suppose it has to do with settling the Lizards’ feathers after the Lewis and Clark got moving, though.”

“As a matter of fact, it doesn’t,” the president said. “It hasn’t got a single, solitary thing to do with that. From what I hear, you kept looking in that direction till you got your ears pinned back for you.”

“Uh, yes, Mr. President.” Sam had kept looking in that direction after he’d got his ears pinned back, too. President Warren didn’t seem to know that. A good thing, too, Sam thought. No, he wouldn’t get LeMay into hot water. He was lucky not to be in hot water himself.

“All right, then. We’ll say no more about it.” Warren sounded like the prosecutor he’d once been letting some petty criminal off with a warning because taking him to court would be more trouble than it was worth. “Now, then: are you even the least bit curious why I did ask you to come back East?”

Presidents didn’t ask; they ordered. But Sam could only answer, “Yes, sir. I sure am.” And that was the truth. He was even more curious now than he had been before. While he was coming out from California, he’d thought he knew what Warren had on his mind. Discovering he’d been wrong piqued his curiosity.

“Okay. I can take care of that.” Warren flicked the switch on an intercom, then bent low to speak into it: “Willy, would you bring the crate in, please?”

“Yes, sir,” answered someone on the other end of the line. The crate? Sam wondered. He didn’t ask. He simply waited, as he’d sat in the dugout and waited out any number of rain delays.

A side door to President Warren’s office opened. In came a blocky little man-Willy? — pushing what looked like a metal box on wheels. An electric cord trailed after it. As soon as the fellow stopped, he plugged the cord into the nearest outlet. At that point, Sam’s curiosity got the better of him. “Mr. President, what the he-uh, heck-is that thing?”

Warren smiled. Instead of answering directly, he turned to the man who’d brought in the box. “Open the lid.” As the assistant obeyed, Warren gestured to Sam. “Go on over and have a look.”

“I sure will.” When Yeager stepped up and peered into the box, he had to blink because he was looking at a couple of bare lightbulbs that put out a good deal of light and heat. They illuminated a pair of large eggs with speckled yellow shells. Sam looked back at the president. “It’s an incubator.”

“That’s right.” Earl Warren nodded.

Sam started to ask a question, then stopped. His mouth fell open. He came closer to losing his upper plate in public than he had for many years. Only one kind of egg could account for his being summoned from Los Angeles to Little Rock. “Those… came from a Lizard, didn’t they?” he asked hoarsely.

President Warren nodded again. “That’s right,” he repeated.

“My God.” Yeager stared at the eggs. “How did we ever manage to get our hands on them?”

“How doesn’t concern you,” the president said crisply. “I am only going to tell you that once, and you had better get it through your head. It is none of your business. I hope you’ve learned your lesson about things that are none of your business.” He gave Sam a severe look.

“Yes, sir.” Sam wasn’t looking at the president as he spoke. His eyes kept going back to those incredible, sand-colored…

“All right,” Warren said. “How would you like to take those eggs back to California with you and raise the babies when they hatch? Raise them up like people, I mean, or as much like people as you can. Finding out just how much alike we and the Lizards are and how and where we differ will be very important as time passes, don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir!” Sam said-no polite acquiescence now but hearty, delighted agreement. “And thank you, sir! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!”

“You’re welcome, Lieutenant Colonel Yeager,” President Warren said, chuckling at his enthusiasm.

“Lieut-” Yeager stared, then snapped to attention and saluted. “Thank you again, sir!” He felt like turning handsprings. He hadn’t thought he’d ever see the oak leaves on his shoulder straps go from gold to silver. For somebody who’d started out as a thirty-five-year-old buck private, he’d turned out to have a pretty fair career.

“And you’re welcome again,” Warren answered. “You’ve done very well for us, and now you’re taking on another assignment that won’t be easy. You deserve this promotion, and I’m pleased to be able to give it to you. As a matter of fact…” He reached into a desk drawer and took out a jewelry box. “Here are your new insignia.”

Sam wondered how many lieutenant colonels had got their rank badges from the hand of the president of the United States. Not a whole lot, or else he was Babe Ruth. He paused, bemused. When it came to Lizards, he pretty much was Babe Ruth. His eyes slid back to the incubator. “How long till those eggs hatch, sir?”

Willy answered for President Warren: “We think about three weeks, Lieutenant Colonel, but we might be off ten days or so either way.”

“Okay.” Yeager knew a different sort of bemusement. “It’ll feel funny, being a new father again at my age.” President Warren and Willy both laughed. Then something else occurred to Sam. “Lord! I wonder what Barbara’s going to think of becoming a new mother again.” That was liable to be more interesting than he cared for.

But the president said, “This is for the country. She’ll do her duty.” He rubbed his chin. “And we’ll give her a civil-service promotion, too. You’re right-she’ll earn it.”

“That’s fair.” And Yeager thought Warren was right. Barbara would pitch in and help. Chances to learn about the Race like this didn’t grow on trees. Sam suddenly grinned. Jonathan would pitch in, too. He’d leap at the chance, where he’d run screaming from the idea of taking care of a human baby.

“You should have some fascinating times ahead of you-and busy ones, too,” Warren said. “In a way, I envy you. You’ll be doing something no one has ever done before, not in all the history of the world.”

“Yeah,” Sam said dreamily. But this time, when his gaze went back to the incubator, he turned practical again. “You’ll either need to fly that out to L.A. in a pressurized cabin or ship it by train. We don’t want to take any chances with those eggs.”

“No, indeed,” President Warren agreed. “And that has been taken care of. A military charter will get into Los Angeles an hour after your return flight. That should give you time enough to meet it and accompany the truck that will bring the incubator to your home.”

“Sounds good, sir,” Yeager said. “Sounds great, in fact. You’re a couple of steps ahead of me. Better that way than to find out you’re a couple of steps behind.”

“I don’t think anyone who serves the United States can care to an excessive degree about details-that is, there is no degree of care that could be too large,” the president said, with a precision of which Barbara would have approved.

“All right.” Sam didn’t want to leave the incubator even for a moment. He laughed at himself. After the eggs hatched, he’d be praying for free time. He remembered that from the days when Jonathan was a baby. He didn’t think two Lizards would be less demanding than one human had been.

After President Warren dismissed him, he left the new, not so white White House with so much spring in his step, he might have been walking six inches off the ground. A promotion, a new assignment that would keep him busy and fascinated the rest of his career if not the rest of his life… What more could a man want?

One thing looked pretty clear: once he got those eggs home, he wouldn’t have time to worry about the Lewis and Clark or much of anything else for quite a while. He paused and looked back toward the president’s residence. Could Warren have…? Sam shook his head and walked on down High Street, a happy man.

Glen Johnson had never gone to the moon. He’d never got out of close orbit around the Earth till he went up to have a look at the Lizard reconnaissance satellite and, not so coincidentally, the space station that had turned into the Lewis and Clark. Now, peering out one of the windows of the enormous, ungainly ship, he saw Earth and moon together in the blackness of space: matching crescents, one large, one small.

He couldn’t just float weightless by the window and gape to his heart’s content, as he might have done aboard Peregrine. Acceleration was ghostly; he couldn’t feel his effective weight of a bit over a pound and a half. But if he tried to hang in the air, he moved back toward the Lewis and Clark ’s distant motor-four inches the first second, eight the next, a whole foot the third, and so on. Up and down had meaning here, even if they didn’t have much. Papers needed to be clipped or held with rubber bands on any surface that wasn’t down in respect to the axis of acceleration… and on any surface that was, because air currents were plenty to send them fluttering off desktops under.01g.

The crew of the Lewis and Clark had already started inventing games suited to their unique environment. One involved spilling a stream of water at the top of a chamber, then hurrying down to the bottom to drink it when it finally got there. It took more skill than it looked; an error in judgment sent water droplets flying every which way, some in slow motion, others not.

One of those errors in judgment had sent water droplets flying into the Lewis and Clark ’s wiring. It had also sent a spate of orders flying from Brigadier General Healey. Their gist was that anybody who tried such a damnfool stunt again could see how he liked trying to breathe outside without a spacesuit. That hadn’t stopped the games, but it had made people more careful where and with whom they played them.

Somebody stuck his head into the compartment where Johnson was rubbernecking: Danny Perez, one of the radiomen who’d helped show the world a sardonic face while the space station stayed in orbit. “It’s pretty, all right,” he said now, “but I wouldn’t get real excited about it. It’s not like we’re going back.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what everybody’s been saying since we left,” Johnson answered. “I’ll be damned if I signed up to go rock-hunting a couple of hundred million miles from home, though.”

“Sir, when you came looking around, you signed up,” Perez said, snotty and deferential at the same time. “Now you’re here for the duration, just like the rest of us who really did volunteer.”

“Thanks a lot,” Johnson said, which only made the radioman laugh. “Christ, I still don’t see why you guys had to keep this place as secret as you did.”

“Don’t look at me. I just work here.” Perez grinned, his teeth very white in his swarthy face. “You want to know that kind of stuff, the only one who can tell you is General Healey.”

“I don’t think I want to know that bad,” Johnson muttered, at which Perez laughed again and zoomed away.

But, less than an hour later, the intercom blared forth the news that Healey wanted to see Johnson. One thing the crews that built the Lewis and Clark had done: they’d put handholds everywhere. Johnson swung along corridors the way Tarzan dreamt of swinging through the trees. And if he missed one hold, he didn’t have to worry about falling into a river full of crocodiles. All he had to do was let momentum carry him along till he latched onto another.

And so, much sooner than he wanted, he found himself back in the office to which Alan Stahl had guided him. Brigadier General Charles Healey, belted into a chair, looked no friendlier now than he had then. Fixing Johnson with a cold, gray-eyed glare, he said, “How are we going to make you useful, Johnson?”

“Sir, you already know I’ve got a lot of time in space,” Johnson began.

“So does everyone else aboard the Lewis and Clark,” Healey said.

“Yes, sir, but I’ve got piloting experience,” Johnson answered. “Most people”-including you, you son of a bitch — “are just passengers.”

Healey’s scowl got even chillier. “You have piloting experience with rockets, not under continuous acceleration.”

“Sir, I have piloting experience with aircraft under continuous acceleration-everything from a Stearman trainer up to an F-83-and on Peregrine, too,” Johnson said. “One more kind of piloting won’t faze me, not after better than twenty years of flying.” He fiddled with the belt on his own chair, across the desk from Healey’s.

“Lieutenant Colonel, I only wish there were some way I could make you spend your whole tour aboard the Lewis and Clark breaking rocks,” Healey said. “As best I can see, you came aboard this ship with the deliberate intention of spying on it. You had already attempted to gather information you were not authorized to have, and your visit was most likely more of the same.”

He was right, of course. Johnson was damned if he’d admit as much, though. “Sir, I can’t help it if Peregrine ’s motor picked exactly the wrong minute to go on the blink.” He’d said the same thing so many times, he needed a distinct effort of will to recall that he’d made the motor go on the blink.

“You’re a liar. Coincidences are never that convenient, not unless they’re arranged,” Brigadier General Healey said. Johnson said nothing at all. With any luck, Healey would have a stroke on the spot. He was certainly turning purple. Fixing Johnson with the evil eye again, he went on, “If I could prove you’re a liar, you’d go out the air lock, Lieutenant Colonel, and your next of kin would get your death benefits.”

He wasn’t joking. A chill went up Johnson’s spine. Maybe Healey would have been able to get authorization from Kitty Hawk or Little Rock for an unfortunate accident. Maybe he wouldn’t have bothered with authorization. Maybe he would have just… taken care of things.

He kept on looking at Johnson with deep discontent. “But I can’t prove that, dammit-so you get to keep breathing. And, since you get to keep breathing, you’re going to have to make yourself useful. Maybe you will end up in pilot training. I can’t say for sure yet. I still have to do some more checking on you.” By the way he said it, he’d end up knowing what Johnson had thought of his fourth-grade teacher.

“May I ask a question, sir?” Johnson asked.

“You may ask. I don’t promise to answer,” Healey said. “A lot of questions you’re probably thinking about, I almost promise not to answer.”

I won’t lose my temper, Johnson told himself. And he didn’t, though holding it wasn’t easy. He said, “Sir, all I want to know is, what are we really going to be doing out in the asteroid belt for the rest of our lives? Going out there is one thing. Staying out there… that’s something else.”

“Have you asked other people?” Healey demanded. “What have they said?”

“They’ve said to ask you,” Johnson answered, “and so that’s what I’m doing.”

For the first time in their brief, stormy acquaintance, Healey looked pleased. “Good,” he said. “You can see by this that no one here is much inclined to trust you any further than I do.”

“Yes, sir,” Johnson said with a sigh. He had seen that. He didn’t like it for beans. Again, he managed to forget almost completely that he had approached and boarded the Lewis and Clark intending to snoop. “And so, sir, I am asking you,” he repeated. “I’m not going anywhere now-it’s an awfully long walk home.” The images of crescent Earth and moon hanging together in space sprang into his mind again. How soon would they stop being crescents and turn into nothing but stars?

“We are going out to become a base for American prospectors, you might say, in the asteroid belt,” Healey told him. “You’ll have gathered that for yourself, I shouldn’t wonder. All sorts of useful minerals among the asteroids-all we have to do is find them. Ice, too, or so it seems, and where there’s ice, there’s hydrogen and oxygen-rocket fuel and stuff we can breathe. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

“Yes and no, sir,” Johnson answered. “Yes because I want us to go out into space as much as the next guy does. We need to be there, and this is an important step. I understand that. I don’t understand why we’re never going home, and I don’t understand why we kept the Lewis and Clark secret for so long. We could have told the Lizards what we were up to. They wouldn’t have tried to stop us. They would have just laughed. They’re not interested in anything but Earth.”

“You have a touching faith in them, Johnson,” Healey said. “Some of us are less trusting-of them, of you, of things in general.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Johnson said, as dryly as he dared. “Trouble is, the Lizards noticed it, too. So did the Germans and the Russians.”

“Hell with ’em,” Healey said. “Where we’re going, they’ll have the devil’s own time spying on us. As far as the Russians are concerned, we’re gone-they don’t have the capacity to come after us and look. The Lizards can, of course, but they won’t bother. You said it yourself: they think we’re nuts for going out there.”

Johnson wasn’t so sure he didn’t think the Lewis and Clark and her crew weren’t nuts for going out into deep space the way they were doing it, but he didn’t mention that. He did say, “The Lizards probably won’t send a piloted ship out to look at us, sir, but they could easily send a reconnaissance probe like the one I was looking over when my motor failed-I was in the neighborhood for a reason, you know.” He’d set it up that way. If he hadn’t set it up that way… If I hadn’t set it up that way, I’d probably be dead, he thought, and another chill went through him.

Brigadier General Charles Healey gave him a most unpleasant look. But this one, he judged, was aimed at what he’d said, not at him personally. “You have a nasty mind, don’t you, Lieutenant Colonel?” Healey said. “But you may have a point, too. We will have to keep an eye on outbound launches. And we’ll have to keep an eye on the Reich. The Germans could do something like this if they set their minds to it.”

“It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they did, would it, sir?” Johnson said. “If there aren’t enough asteroids to go around, we’re all in a lot of trouble, right?”

“I suppose so,” Healey said peevishly. “Asteroids.” Just for a moment, Johnson wondered if he cared so much about them as he’d seemed to a little while earlier. Then the commander of the Lewis and Clark said, “Well, the odds are the Nazis will worry about things closer to home. They have more to worry about than we do, and that’s the truth.” He pointed at Johnson. “Now-about you.”

“Yes, sir?” Johnson tensed and tried not to show it. The name-calling was over; he could feel as much. Whatever Healey was going to do with him or to him, he’d find out now.

“Pilot training.” The sour-faced brigadier general spoke as if the words tasted bad. “We’re already redundant there, but we can’t have too many backups. If the latest checks come back all right, maybe you can learn it. You have to learn something, that’s for damn sure. No drones here.”

“I don’t want to be a drone,” Johnson answered. “I’ve said that ever since I came aboard.”

“Talk is cheap,” General Healey said, and Johnson discovered the name-calling wasn’t over after all. But then Healey relented, ever so slightly: “If you work as hard now that you are aboard as you did to get aboard, maybe we’ll get some use out of you after all. Dismissed.”

Johnson saluted, unbelted, and flew out of the office-metaphor back on Earth, literal truth here. Healey would give him at least some of what he wanted, not least because he had no true choice… except putting him out the air lock. I’ll learn all I can, Johnson thought. Maybe I’ll even learn what the Lewis and Clark is really for.