Second Contact

3

Under the summer sun, Jerusalem glowed golden. The local sandstone from which so much of the city was built looked far more impressive than the world’s usual run of gray rocks-so Reuven Russie thought, at any rate. Even marble would only have been silver to sandstone’s gold. Jerusalem was Reuven’s city, and he loved it with the uncritical, unquestioning adoration he’d lavished-for a little while-on the first girl with whom he’d become infatuated.

His childhood memories of other towns-Warsaw, London-were filled with fear and hunger and cold. His eyes went to the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When had snow last fallen there? Not for many years, nor was it likely to fall again for many more. He did not miss it. He had almost a Lizard’s love for heat.

But thinking of the Lizards made him think of the marvelous antiquities on the Temple Mount in a different light. The Dome of the Rock dated from the seventh century of the Common Era. The Western Wall, of course, was far older, having gone up before Jesus strode along the streets on which Reuven walked now.

Archaeologists would be working in Jerusalem for centuries to come, piecing together the distant past. But that past seemed less distant to Reuven Russie than it did to his father Moishe, and far less distant than it would have to the grandfather he did not remember. His grandfather had never known the Lizards. His father had been a grown man when they came, and thought of the earlier days as the normal state of mankind. To those Reuven’s age and younger, especially in lands where the Lizards ruled, they were simply part of the landscape.

One of them skittered past him, intent on some business of its own. “I greet you,” he called in its language.

“I greet you,” the male answered. By the Lizard’s body paint, he served with the radar unit on the hills outside of town. The Nazis had never tried lobbing a rocket in this direction. Russie wasn’t sure what would happen if they did. Having a little warning struck him as a good idea.

He glanced toward the Temple Mount again. Antiquities, he thought once more. So they were, by his father’s standards or his grandfather’s. Two thousand years was a long time, as the Earth had measured such things in the days before the Lizards came. Now…

Now two thousand years felt like merely the blink of an eye. The Lizards’ Empire had been a going concern for more than fifty thousand years, since the days when people lived in caves and quarreled with bears who wanted to do the same. The Lizards had added the Rabotevs and Hallessi to their Empire before people figured out how to read and how to grow crops. Two thousand years ago, they’d already been thinking for some time about conquering Earth.

Set against the vast sweep of Lizardly history, what were a couple of thousand years? Why had God decided to pay attention to Earth during a restricted stretch of time and ignored the worlds of the Empire? Those were questions to make rabbis tear their own hair and pull one another’s beards.

Reuven chuckled. “The Lizards should have moved faster, for once in their scaly lives,” he murmured. Had they simply sent out a conquest fleet without bothering to think and scout and plan, they would have smashed the Roman Empire flat, and Earth would have gone into the Empire without a fight.

But it hadn’t happened. And so, although the Lizards occupied Palestine, they had less control here than they would have liked. Freedom kept spreading almost under their snouts. Not enough males prowled the countryside for it to be otherwise. Jews intrigued with the Soviet Union. Arabs intrigued with the Soviet Union and the Reich. Both Jews and Arabs intrigued with the British and Americans. And, for good measure, Jews and Arabs intrigued with each other-and with the Lizards.

With more than a little pride, Reuven strode through the entranceway to the Russie Medical College, which sat in a square, Lizard-built building a little west of the base of the Temple Mount. The college was named for his father, the first human who’d asked the Lizards for the privilege of studying what they knew and what the finest Earthly physicians hadn’t begun to suspect.

For most of a generation now, bright medical students had flocked here from all over the world to learn what they could acquire in fullness nowhere else. Reuven also knew more than a little pride that he had been allowed to study here, for the Lizards played no favorites, picking those they would accept through grueling examinations. Jews and Arabs studied side by side, along with men and a few women from India, South America, South Africa, and other lands the Lizards ruled-and from the independent nations of the world as well.

As he slid into his seat in the genetics class, Reuven nodded to his fellow students. “Good morning, Thorkil,” he whispered. “Morning, Pablo. Good morning, Jane. Hullo, Ibrahim.” Among themselves, the students spoke English more than any other human language.

In came the instructor, a Lizard military physician named Shpaaka. Along with the rest of the humans, Reuven got to his feet, bent himself into as good an approximation of the Lizards’ posture of respect as his frame would permit, and chorused, “I greet you, superior sir.”

“I greet you,” Shpaaka said. He understood enough English to make sardonic comments when he caught his human students whispering in it. But the Lizards’ tongue was the language of instruction. It had the technical terms he needed to get his point across; English and other Earthly languages had borrowed a lot of them. His eye turrets swiveled back and forth. “Have you any questions on what we covered yesterday before we commence?” He pointed. “Jane Archibald?”

“I thank you, superior sir,” the Australian girl said. “When using a virus to bring an altered gene into a cell, what is the best way to suppress the body’s immune response to ensure that the gene does get to its intended destination?”

“This seems rather different in your species from mine,” the lecturer replied, “and it also leads into today’s subject. Perhaps it would be best if I simply went on.” He proceeded to do just that.

Back when Reuven’s father studied under the Lizards, they hadn’t wanted to stop for questions at all; that wasn’t their style among themselves. Over the years, they’d adapted to some degree, and so had people. No one had ever had the nerve to thank them for adapting; had they consciously realized they were doing so, they might have stopped. They did not approve of change of any sort.

Reuven scrawled notes. Shpaaka was a clear, well-organized lecturer; clarity and organization were Lizardly virtues. The male knew his material backwards and forwards. He also had, in the large vision screen behind him, a teaching tool that would have made any human instructor jealous. It showed what he was talking about in color and in three dimensions. Seeing wasn’t just believing. It was understanding, too.

Laboratory work meant shifting back and forth between the metric system and the one the Lizards used, which was also based on powers of ten but used different basic quantities for everything but temperature. More lectures followed, on pharmacology and biochemistry. The Lizards did not teach surgery, not having had enough experience with humans to be confident of the result.

By the end of the day, Reuven’s brain felt pounded flat, as it did by the end of almost every day. He shook his hand to work the writer’s cramp out of it. “Now I get to go home and study,” he said. “I’m so glad to live the exciting life of a student-a party every night.” He rolled his eyes to show how seriously he expected everyone to take that.

He got a few tired groans from his classmates. Jane Archibald rolled her eyes, too, and said, “At least you have a home to go to, Reuven. Better than the bleeding dormitory, and that’s a fact.”

“Come along and have supper with me, if you like,” Reuven said-a not altogether disinterested offer, as she was easily the best-looking girl at the medical college, being blond and pink and emphatically shaped. Had she come from the Reich, she would have been the perfect Aryan princess… and would, no doubt, have been horrified to get such an invitation from a Jew.

As things were, she shook her head, but said, “Maybe another time. I’ve got too much swotting tonight to spare even a minute.”

He nodded sympathetically; every student could sing that song almost every night. “See you in the morning,” he said, and turned to head back to his parents’ house. But then he paused-Jane was biting her lip. “Is something wrong?” he asked, hastily adding, “I don’t mean to pry.”

“You’re not,” she said. “It’s only that, every now and then, the idea of having a home where you’re comfortable strikes me as very strange. Over and above the dormitories, I mean.”

“I understood what you meant,” he said, his voice quiet. “Australia had a hard time of it.”

“A hard time of it? You might say so.” Jane’s nod sent golden curls bouncing up and down. “An atomic bomb on top of Sydney, another one on Melbourne-and we’d hardly even been in the fight against the Lizards till then. They just took us out and took us over.”

“That’s what happened here, too, more or less,” Russie said, “though without the bombs.”

He might as well have kept quiet. Jane Archibald went on as if he had, saying, “And now, with the colonization fleet here at last, they’re going to build cities from one end of the desert to the other. Bloody Lizards like it there-they say it’s almost as nice and warm as Home.” She shuddered. “They don’t care-they don’t care at all-that we were there first.”

Reuven wondered how much her ancestors had cared that the aborigines were there first. About as much as his own ancestors had cared that the Canaanites were in Palestine first, he supposed. Mentioning the subject struck him as unwise even so. Instead, he asked, “If you hate the Lizards so much, what are you doing here?”

Jane shrugged and grimaced. “Not a hope in hell of fighting them, not down in Australia there isn’t. Next best thing I can do is learn from them. The more I know, the more use I’ll be to the poor downtrodden human race.” Her grin was wry. “And now I’ll get down from my soapbox, thank you very much.”

“It’s all right,” Reuven said. He didn’t feel particularly downtrodden. Jews did better under the Lizards than anywhere in the independent lands except possibly the United States. That they did so well made them objects of suspicion to the rest of mankind-not that we weren’t objects of suspicion to the rest of mankind before the Lizards came, he thought.

“I didn’t intend to use your shoulder to cry on,” Jane Archibald said. “It’s not like you can do anything about the way things are.”

“It’s all right,” Reuven repeated. “Any time.” He made as if to grab her and forcibly pull her to the aforesaid shoulder. She made as if to clout him over the head with her notebook, which was thick enough to have lethal potential. They both laughed. Maybe the world wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t seem so bad, either.

Rance Auerbach awoke in pain. He’d awakened in pain every day for almost all the past twenty years, ever since a burst from a Lizard machine gun wrecked his leg and his chest and shoulder outside of Denver. The Lizards had captured him afterwards, and taken care of him as best they knew how. He had both legs, which proved as much. But he still woke in pain every morning.

He reached for his stick, which lay beside him on the bed like a lover and was far more faithful than any lover he’d ever had. Then, moving slowly and carefully-the only way he could move these days-he first sat and finally stood.

Limping into the kitchen of his small, grubby Fort Worth apartment, he poured water into a pot and spooned instant coffee and sugar into a cup. The coffee jar was getting close to empty. If he bought a new one the next time he went to the store, he’d have to figure out what else to do without. “Damn the Lizards anyway,” he muttered. His own voice held a Texas twang; he’d come home after the fighting stopped. “Damn them to hell and gone.” The Lizards ruled just about all the lands where coffee grew, and made sure it wasn’t cheap when it got to the free people who drank it.

He burned a couple of slices of toast, scraped some of the charcoal off them, and spread them with grape jelly. He left the knife, the plate, and the coffee cup in the sink. They had company from the day before, and some more from the day before that. He’d been neat as a pin in his Army days. He wasn’t neat as a pin any more.

Getting dressed meant going through another ordeal. It also meant looking at the scars that seamed his body. Not for the first time, he wished the Lizards had killed him outright instead of reminding him for the rest of his life how close they’d come. He dragged on khaki pants that had seen better days and slowly buttoned a chambray shirt he didn’t bother tucking in.

Slipping his feet into thong-style sandals was pretty easy. As he headed for the door, he passed the mirror on the dresser from which he hadn’t taken clean underwear. He hadn’t shaved, either, which meant graying stubble fuzzed his cheeks and jaw.

“You know what you look like?” he told his reflection. “You look like a goddamn wino.” Was that misery in his voice or a sort of twisted pride? For the life of him, he couldn’t tell.

He made sure the door was locked when he went outside, then turned the key in the dead bolt he’d installed himself. This wasn’t the best part of town. He didn’t have much to tempt a burglar, but what he did have, by God, was his.

His bad leg made him wish he could afford either a ground-floor apartment or a building that boasted an elevator. Going down two flights of stairs left him sweating and cursing. Going upstairs when he came home tonight would be worse. To celebrate making it to the sidewalk, he lit a cigarette.

Every doctor he’d ever met told him he didn’t have the lung capacity to keep smoking. “None of the sons of bitches ever told me how to quit, though,” he said, and took another deep drag on the coffin nail.

The sun beat down from a sky of enameled brass. Shadows were pale, as if apologizing for being there at all. The air he breathed was almost as hot and almost as wet as the coffee he’d drunk. Step by painful step, he made his way down to the bus stop on the corner. He sank down onto the bench with a sigh of relief, and celebrated with another Camel. Fine American tobaccos, the pack said. He remembered the days when it had said, Fine American and Turkish tobaccos. The Lizards ruled Turkey now, though the Reich next door kept things uncomfortable for them there. Turkish tobaccos stayed home.

A bus pulled to a stop in front of the bench. Auerbach regretted sitting, because that meant he had to stand up again. Putting most of his weight on the cane, he managed. He negotiated the couple of steps up to the fare box with only a couple of cuss words for each one. He tossed a dime in the box and kept standing not far from the door.

People pushed past him, getting on and off. He leered at a couple of pretty girls who went by; the clothes women wore these days offered a lot of flesh for leering. But when a bare-chested teenage boy with his head shaved and his chest painted to imitate a Lizard rank boarded the bus, Rance had everything he could do to keep from breaking his cane over the punk’s glistening, empty head.

That’s the enemy! he wanted to shout. It wouldn’t have done any good. He’d tried it a few times, and seen as much. To the kids who didn’t remember the war, the Lizards were as permanent a fixture as human beings, and they often seemed a lot more interesting.

His stop came only a couple of blocks later. The door opened with a hiss of compressed air. The driver, who carried Rance a couple of times a week, kept it open till he’d managed to descend. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder.

“Any time, friend,” the colored man answered. With another hiss, the door closed. The bus roared away, leaving behind a cloud of noxious diesel fumes. Fort Worth wasn’t a rich town. It wouldn’t be buying any stink-free hydrogen-burning buses for quite a while yet.

Auerbach didn’t mind diesel exhaust. It was a human smell, which meant he was going to approve of it till forced to do otherwise. He shuffled along, faster than a tortoise but not much, till he got to the American Legion post halfway down the block.

The post didn’t have a lot of money, either: not enough for air-conditioning. A fan stirred the air without doing much to cool it. A tableful of men with poker chips in front of them waved to Rance when he came inside. “Always room for one more,” Charlie Thornton told him. “Your money spends as good as anybody else’s.”

“Hell of a lot you know about it, Charlie,” Auerbach said, pulling his wallet out of a hip pocket so he could buy his way into the game. “I win money off you, not the other way round.”

“Boy’s delirious,” Thornton declared, to general laughter. His white mustache showed he was a veteran of the First World War, the last time people had had the privacy to fight among themselves alone. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Lizards’ conquest fleet had headed for Earth a bare handful of years after what people had called the War to End War ended.

Auerbach didn’t like thinking about Lizard fleets heading toward Earth. He didn’t like thinking about the one that was just arriving, either. He examined the first hand he got dealt. The five cards might never have met before. Disgusted, he threw them down on the table. Even more disgusted, he said, “Before long, we’re going to be ass-deep in Lizards.”

“That’s a fact,” said Pete Bragan, who had dealt Rance the lousy hand. Pete wore a patch on his left eye and had a walk even funnier than Auerbach’s. He’d been inside a Sherman tank that had the misfortune of coming up against one of the Lizards’ machines outside of Chicago. As such things went, he’d been lucky: all of him but that one eye and the last few inches of his right leg had got out. “Damn shame, you ask me.”

One by one, the veterans around the table nodded. Except for Thornton, the old-timer, they were men the Lizards had wrecked, one way or another. Among them, they had enough chunks missing to make a pretty fair meat market. Mike Cohen, for instance, never had to shuffle and deal because he couldn’t with only one hand. None of them held down a regular job. Had they held regular jobs, they wouldn’t have been playing poker early on a Tuesday morning.

After dropping out of another hand, Auerbach won one with three nines and then, to his disgust, lost one with an ace-high straight. War stories went around with the cards. Rance had told his before. That didn’t stop him from telling them again. After a while, he lost with another straight. “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna quit coming here!” he exclaimed, staring at Pete Bragan’s full house. “My pension doesn’t stretch far enough to let me afford many of these.”

“Amen,” Mike Cohen said, for all the world as if he were Christian. “It was decent money when they set it up, but things haven’t gotten any cheaper since.”

Grousing about the pension was as much a ritual as swapping war stories. Auerbach shook his head when that thought crossed his mind. Stories about making ends meet were war stories, stories of a quiet war that never ended. He said, “They don’t give a damn about us. Oh, they talk pretty fine, but down deep they just don’t care.”

“That’s a fact,” Bragan said. “They got what they could from us, and now they don’t want to remember who saved the bacon.” He tossed a chip into the pot. “I’ll bump that up a quarter.”

“Way things are going nowadays, seems like some folks wish the Lizards had won,” Auerbach said, and described the teenager on the bus. He put in a couple of chips. “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise another quarter.”

“World’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Bragan said. When it came round to him again, he raised another quarter.

Auerbach studied his three jacks. He knew what kind of hand he held: one just good enough to lose. He wished he hadn’t raised before. But he had. Throw good money after bad — the best recipe he knew for losing the good money, too. With a grimace, he said, “Call,” and did his best to pretend the chip he flipped into the pot had got there of its own accord.

Bragan displayed three tens. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Auerbach said happily, and raked in the pot.

“Don’t reckon anybody’d notice any special change,” Bragan said, which drew a laugh. The other wounded veteran shook his head. “Yeah, world’s going to hell in a handbasket, all right. Whose deal is it?”

As it did every day, the game went on and on. Somebody limped out and bought hero sandwiches. Somebody else went out a little later and came back with beer. Occasionally, someone would get up and leave. The poker players never had any trouble finding someone else to sit in. Most of them didn’t have much else to do with their lives. Rance Auerbach knew he didn’t. He’d never married. He hadn’t had a steady woman friend for a long time. His poker buddies were in the same boat. They had their wounds and their stories and one another.

He hated the idea of going back to his apartment. But the American Legion hall didn’t have cots. He cashed in his chips, discovering he was a couple of dollars ahead on the day. If he’d had more he cared to buy, he would have felt better about that. As things were, he took it as skill’s due reward-and coffee next time he went shopping.

When he got back to the apartment building, he checked his mailbox. He had a sister married to a fellow who sold cars in Texarkana; she sometimes wrote. His brother in Dallas had probably forgotten he was alive. When his leg and his shoulder started kicking in, he wished he could forget, too.

Nothing from Kendall. Nothing from Mae, either: Rance owed her a letter. But, amid the drugstore circulars and get-rich-quick ads for suckers to sell “miracle Lizard gadgets” door-to-door, he did come across an envelope with a stamp bearing the picture of Queen Elizabeth and another showing a tough-looking fellow in a high-peaked cap and the legend GROSSDEUTSCHES REICH.

“Well, well,” he said, looking from one of them to the other before starting the long, painful business of going upstairs. He smiled. His face almost hurt as it shifted into the new and unfamiliar expression. He might spend some of his time wishing he were dead. With any luck at all, the Lizards would spend more of theirs wishing they were.

Monique Dutourd sometimes-often-wondered why she had studied anything as far removed from the modern world as Roman history. The best explanation she’d ever found was that the modern world had turned upside down too many times for her ever to trust it fully. She’d been eleven when the Germans overran northern France and turned her native Marseille into an appendage of Vichy, a town previously known, if it was known at all, for its water. Two years after that, the Lizards had swept the south of France into their clawed grip. And two years after that, as fighting finally ebbed, they’d withdrawn south of the Pyrenees, handing the part of France they’d held back to the Germans as casually as one neighbor might return a borrowed roasting pan to another.

No, Monique had had enough and to spare of disasters and betrayals and disappointments in her own life. She did not want to examine them in more detail than she’d known while she was living through them. And so…

“And so,” she said, running a brush through her thick, dark hair, “I examine the disasters and betrayals and disappointments of people two thousand years dead. Ah, this is truly an improvement.”

It would have been funny, if only it were funny. Not a human university in the world taught a course called ancient history any more. The headquarters of the Lizard fleetlord in Cairo looked across the Nile at the Pyramids. They’d gone up more than four thousand years ago-about the time the Lizards, having long, long since unified their planet, having conquered two other neighboring worlds, began to look with covetous eyes toward Earth. To them, the entire span of human recorded history wasn’t ancient-it was more like looking back at the year before last.

A glance at the clock on the mantel-a silent, modern electric, not the loudly ticking model she had known in her youth-made her mouth pucker into an O of dismay. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late to the university. Were a male instructor late for his lecture, he would be assumed to have a lover-and forgiven. Were she late for hers, she would be assumed to have a lover-and liable to get the sack.

As always, she lugged her bicycle downstairs. She took modest pride in never having lost one to thieves. Having lived in Marseille all her life, she knew her fellow townsfolk were a light-fingered lot. Marseille had specialized in unofficial commerce since the Greeks founded the place more than five hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Gulls screeched overhead as she pedaled south along Rue Breteuil toward the campus, which had gone up on a couple of blocks wrecked during the fighting between the Lizards and troops from the Vichy government. Marseille was one of the few places where Vichy troops had fought, no doubt because they were at least as afraid of what the locals would do to them if they didn’t as they were of what the Lizards would do to them if they did.

A policeman in a kepi and a blue uniform waved her on across Rue Sylvabette. “Hello, sweetheart,” he called in the Provencalflavored local dialect he, like she, took for granted. “Nice legs!”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Monique answered with a derisive gesture. The policeman laughed uproariously. He knew bloody well he said that to all the girls. He wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe it got him laid once a year or so.

With unconscious skill, Monique threaded her way through the stream of bicycle, car, and lorry traffic. A sunburned blond fellow in a field-gray uniform pulled up alongside her on a motorcycle. Over the rumble of its engine, he spoke in German-accented Parisian French: “Are you going anywhere special?”

She thought about pretending she didn’t understand. With a true Parisian, she might have done that. With a German, she didn’t quite dare. If Germans wanted to badly enough, they could make unfortunate things happen. And so she answered with the truth: “I’m on my way to work.”

“Ach, so,” he said, and then, remembering his French, “Quel dommage.” Monique didn’t think it was a pity; she knew nothing but relief as the motorcycle zoomed away. A generation had resigned her to the Germans as masters of France, but hadn’t left her enthusiastic.

Then she rode past the synagogue on the east side of Rue Breteuil. Its windows were shuttered, its doorway boarded up, as it had been since the Lizards left and the Germans came in. Maybe a few Jews still survived here. If they did, it was not for lack of German effort. Monique shook her head, then had to brush hair back out of her eyes. No wonder so many Jews got on so well with the Lizards.

As if thinking of the aliens were enough to conjure them up, she saw one on the sidewalk in animated conversation with a Frenchman in a gray, collarless shirt. They might have been discussing legitimate business; some of that got done in Marseille, too. Monique wouldn’t have bet anything she didn’t care to lose on it, though.

She parked her bicycle at a stand on the edge of the campus (which looked more like a series of apartment blocks than a proper university), chained it in place, and tipped the guard so he wouldn’t steal it himself and say someone else had. Grabbing her briefcase off the jump seat, she hurried along to her classroom.

She had more students every semester. The large majority were Frenchmen and — women as disenchanted with the present as she was. The rest, who paid their fees to the bursar like everyone else, were Germans stationed around Marseille. Some of them had been stationed around the city long enough to learn to speak the local dialect with a guttural German accent rather than the standard French they would have been taught back in the Vaterland.

The students, French and Germans alike, were chattering among themselves when she walked into the hall. The Germans quieted down out of respect for her as a professor. The Frenchmen quieted down because they were eyeing her legs, as the flic had done. The Frenchwomen quieted down because they were pondering her culottes, a nice compromise between modesty and display for someone who rode a bicycle.

However she got quiet, she was glad enough to take advantage of it. “Today,” she said, “we shall continue to examine the consequences of Augustus’ failure to conquer Germania as Caesar had conquered Gallia.”

Using the Latin names for the areas in question made the event seem more distant than it would have had she called them Allemagne and France. She did that on purpose; she did not want to have the ancient world drawn into the sphere of modern politics. If her French students took especially careful notes on this material, was it her fault? If her handful of German students took especially careful notes… That, unlike the other, was something to worry about.

And, try as she would, she couldn’t leave out her own thoughts. “Augustus’ failure in Germania is one of those areas of history where inevitability is difficult if not impossible to discern,” she said. “Had the Roman Emperor’s abler commanders not died at inopportune times, had revolt not broken out elsewhere in the Empire, he would not have had to appoint Quinctilius Varus to head the German legions, and Arminius”-she would not say Hermann, the German equivalent of the name-“would not have been able to slaughter those legions in the forest of Teutoberg.”

A woman raised her hand. Monique pointed to her. She asked, “How would a Roman Germany”-she said Allemagne — “have changed the history of the world?”

It was a good, sensible question. Monique would have liked it even better had answering it not reminded her of walking through a thicket of thornbushes. Picking her words with care, she said, “A Roman Empire with its frontier on the Elbe, not the Rhine, would have had a shield against the nomads from out of the east. And Romanized Germans would surely have contributed as much to the Empire as Romanized Gauls did in the history with which we are familiar.”

That seemed to satisfy the woman. Other answers were possible. Monique knew it. The Goths and Vandals wouldn’t have sacked Rome. The Franks wouldn’t have invaded France and given it their name. There wouldn’t have been a Germany to invade our country in 1870 or 1914 or 1940. Because an answer was possible, though, did not mean it was safe to give.

She got through the rest of the lecture without treading on such dangerous ground. Watching the clock reach half past ten was something of a relief. “Dismissed,” she said, and put her notes back into the briefcase. She looked forward to going to her office. She finally had the references she needed to put the finishing touches on a paper tracing the growth of the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis during the first couple of centuries of the Christian era. It would, she hoped, raise some eyebrows in the small circle that cared about such things.

A tanned fellow about her own age in an open-necked shirt and baggy pants a fisherman might have worn approached the lectern. “A very interesting lecture,” he said, nodding his approval. “Very interesting indeed.”

He looked like a local. Monique had assumed he was a local. In the class roster, his name was down as Laforce. He wrote French as well as a local would have. When he spoke, though, he proved he wasn’t a local. He was a German. His countrymen in the class wore Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe uniforms. She wondered what he did, and hoped she wouldn’t find out the hard way. “Thank you,” she said, as if to a viper that had suddenly revealed itself among the rocks.

He laughed, showing strong yellow teeth, and lit a Gauloise. He smoked like a local, too, letting the cigarette hang insouciantly from the corner of his mouth. “You could have been much more inflammatory than you were with your Germania and Gallia,” he remarked.

Wary still, she studied him. “And would I have vanished into night and fog, then?” she asked. That was what happened to people who made the Reich unhappy because of what they said or what they were.

“Maybe,” he answered, and laughed again. “Maybe not, too. You can get away with more in a lecture hall than you could on a soapbox. If you like, take some coffee with me this afternoon, and we’ll talk about it.”

His approach could have been a lot less subtle. As an occupier, he hardly needed to make an approach at all. Because he had, Monique was bold enough to reply, “Tell me your real name and your real rank and I’ll decide whether we talk about it.”

He dipped his head in half a bow. “Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn, at your service, Professor Dutourd.”

“What sort of rank is-?” Monique stopped. Before she finished the question, she realized what sort of rank it was. Kuhn-if that was really his name-belonged to the SS.

“You can say no, if you like,” he said. “I don’t build dossiers on women who turn me down. I’d go through too many folders if I did.”

She thought he meant it. That was one of the reasons she smiled and nodded. The other reason, though, was the lingering fear he might be lying. She got very little research done after she did go back to her office.

Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson sat on top of a large cylinder filled with some of the most highly inflammable substances ingenious chemists could devise. If they exploded in any way but the one for which they were designed… He whistled softly. “If they do that, folks’ll be picking up pieces of me from Baltimore down to Key West,” he muttered.

“What’s that, Peregrine?” The radio speaker above his head in the cramped cockpit sounded tinny. Nobody’d bothered changing the design since the war. The old one worked, which was plenty good enough for military airand spacecraft. Johnson had a fancier, smoother speaker in his record player back home. That was fine, for play. When he heard squawks, he knew he was working.

“Nothing much, Control,” he answered. “Just woolgathering.” The blockhouse here at Kitty Hawk was a long way away from his rocket. If it blew up instead of going up, the bureaucrats and technicians would be fine. He, on the other hand… well, it would be over before he noticed he was dead.

“Cheer up, Peregrine,” the fellow on the distant other end of the microphone said. “You’ve been living on borrowed time the past twenty years anyhow.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Johnson said with a wry chuckle. He would have laughed louder and harder if the man back at the blockhouse had been joking. He’d flown fighters against the Lizards during the war, a job where pilots had life expectancies commonly measured in minutes. He’d been shot down twice, and managed to survive both times. One forearm had some nasty burn scars on it from his second forced landing. He wore long-sleeved shirts whenever he could.

If he hadn’t been on the shelf for a while with burns, he would have gone right back into action and probably been killed. As things were, he’d just returned to one of the last Marine air units still operating when the cease-fire came.

After the fighting ended, he’d tested a lot of the new planes that married human and Lizard technology-in some cases (luckily none of his) marriages smeared across heaven rather than made in it. Graduating to rockets when the USA went into space in the 1950s was a natural next step.

“One minute, Peregrine,” the blockhouse warned.

“One minute, roger,” Johnson said. Just a couple of miles from here, back when his dad was a boy, the Wright brothers had coaxed a motorized kite into the air. Johnson wondered what they would have thought of the craft he flew. Orville, like Johnson an Ohioan, had survived the Lizards’ occupation of his home state and lived on till 1948-only a handful of years too soon to see Americans going not only into the air but above it.

“Thirty seconds, Peregrine,” Control announced, and then the countdown the U.S. Air and Space Force had surely borrowed from the pulp magazines: “Ten… nine… eight…” When he’d proved he could count backwards on his fingers, the man in the blockhouse yelled, “Blastoff!” That also came straight out of the pulps. Johnson wished somebody somewhere would find a better name for it.

Then it seemed as if three very heavy men came in and sat on him. He stopped worrying about what people ought to call a rocket leaving Earth, for he was much too intimately involved in riding one. If anything went wrong that didn’t splatter him all over the landscape, he had some hope of getting back down in one piece; like the machines the Nazis flew, his upper stage doubled as an airplane. He pitied the poor Russians, who went into space in what weren’t much more than airtight boxes. Those were easier and cheaper to build, no doubt about it, but the Red Air Force used up a lot of pilots.

A fresh kick in the pants made him stop worrying about the Russians. “Second stage has ignited,” Control reported, as if he never would have known without the announcement. “Trajectory to planned orbit looks very good.”

“Roger that,” Johnson said. He could see it for himself from the instruments on the Peregrine ’s instrument panel, but he wasn’t allergic to reassurance.

“How does it feel, going from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli in just a few minutes?” Control asked.

“That’s what I get for coming out of the Marines,” Johnson said, laughing. “You never ride the real A and S boys this way.” Actually, he’d started a good deal northeast of the halls of Montezuma and he’d go over Africa even farther south of the shores of Tripoli, but who was he to trifle with a man’s poetic license?

Then another voice came over the speaker, one not using English: “U.S. spacecraft, this is the tracking station of the Race. Acknowledge.”

“I greet you, Dakar,” Johnson said in the Lizards’ lingo as the second-stage motor cut out and the one in the rear of his upper stage took over to finish the job of boosting him into orbit. He wasn’t over the radar or radio horizon for Dakar yet, but the Lizards’ orbital radar and satellite radio relays still beat the stuffing out of any merely human communications network. “Is that you, Hashshett?” As a Lizard would, he pronounced each sh and each t as a separate syllable.

“It is I. And you are Glen Johnson?” Hashshett turned the last syllable of Johnson’s name into a long hiss.

“I am. My trackers show me as good for my announced orbit. Do you confirm?” Johnson tacked on an interrogative cough.

“Confirming,” the Lizard answered after a pause that would have let him turn an eye turret toward his instruments. “Seeing a flight path in such conformity is good.”

As far as the Lizards were concerned, anything that conformed to the status quo ante was good. With four different powers owning orbiting nuclear weapons, people and the Lizards had grown far more punctilious than they’d once been about notifying one another of their launches. The Lizards had got very huffy very fast about wanting to be notified; persuading them that they needed to notify any mere humans of what they were up to had taken a lot more work.

Just then, on time to the second, the upper-stage motor cut out. Johnson went weightless. His stomach tried to climb up his windpipe hand over hand. He gulped and sternly told it to get back where it belonged. After a few nervous moments, it decided to listen to him. Puking while weightless did not win a pilot luckless enough to do it the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Once he’d decided he wasn’t going to redecorate the inside of his cockpit, Johnson checked his own radar. He hadn’t really expected to see anything that would make him use his attitude jets to evade, but you never could tell. Space was a crowded place these days, loaded not only with manned (or Lizarded) spacecraft but also with all manner of unmanned satellites, some peaceful, some not, and with a lot of junk: discarded protective shrouds and upper stages that had reached orbit after delivering their cargo. The Lizards never stopped grumbling about the junk; not even their fancy radars and even fancier computing machines could tell the garbage from camouflaged weapons quietly floating and waiting for orders. The weapons that weren’t camouflaged maneuvered frequently, too; the longer they stayed in the same orbit, the more vulnerable they got.

Having made sure he didn’t need to evade, Johnson studied the radar screen again. He hadn’t been up since the colonization fleet came in from Tau Ceti II. The targets the radar showed were not only distant-in relatively high orbits-but big. They looked like Christmas-tree lights on the screen. They were so big, he knew he could spot them with his Mark I eyeball as well as with his electronic senses.

He peered in the direction the radar gave him. Sure as hell, there they were, some of them bright as Venus-brighter. Being in a lower, faster orbit, he passed them, but there were more ahead. All the way around the world, there were more ahead, with Lizards, millions upon millions of Lizards, lying in them in cold sleep like steaks in cardboard cartons on icebox shelves.

Seeing the ships of the colonization fleet filled him with awe. He’d come a couple of hundred miles into space. The USA, the Greater German Reich, and the USSR had bases on the moon. Americans and Germans had walked on Mars (bemusing the Lizards, who couldn’t figure out why they wanted to visit such a useless world). Americans and Germans were out in the asteroid belt, too, seeing if it held anything worthwhile (the very existence of the asteroid belt bemused the Lizards; the solar systems with which they had been familiar were much tidier places).

“Going out to see asteroids up close-that’s not bad,” Johnson muttered. But the ships he was looking at hadn’t crossed millions, or even tens of millions, of miles of space. They’d come better than ten light-years-say, sixty trillion miles. If that didn’t make you sit up and take notice, you were dead inside.

What would it be like, crossing ten light-years? I’d pay a lot to visit Home, Johnson thought, and wondered if he’d sooner go as a tourist or as part of a fleet that would smash the Lizards’ home planet so flat, even cockroaches (or whatever Home had instead of cockroaches) couldn’t live there.

He sighed. It didn’t matter. If the U.S. government, or any other human government, had plans for a starship, he didn’t know about them-and he kept his ear to the ground where such things were involved. He sighed again. Even if some human government did have plans for a ship that could cross interstellar space, odds were it wouldn’t be built till the turn of the century, if that soon. He’d had his fortieth birthday a couple of years before.

“Too old to go to the stars.” He shook his head, wondering what his life would have been like if the Lizards hadn’t come, if the world had just kept moving along its normal, expected course. “Christ!” he exclaimed. “I might have been too old to go into space at all.” That was a really frightening thought.

As long as he could come up here, as long as he was up here, he had work to do. He also had work he hoped he wouldn’t have to do. Again like its German equivalents, the Peregrine carried missiles and machine guns. The clumsy Russian spacecraft mounted machine guns, too. Even before the colonization fleet came, though, the Lizards had had far more in space than all of humankind put together. If push came to shove, they could probably knock people back inside the atmosphere. His job, and that of the other Americans in the Air and Space Force, and also that of their Nazi and Red opposite numbers, was to hurt them as much as he could before he got killed.

The radio crackled. “Peregrine, this is Osprey. Over.”

“Hello, Gus,” Johnson answered. “Peregrine here.” Most of the ships that flew out of Kitty Hawk were named for birds of prey. “You’ve been up here a while. Anything going on with the colonization fleet? Over.”

“They’ve made a few flights down,” Gus Wilhelm said. “More the past couple of days than earlier. They’re trying to figure out the lay of the land, you might say. It’s not what they expected when they left Home, not even close.”

Johnson laughed. “I’ll say it’s not. Have you listened to some of the first radio transmissions between the colonization fleet and the ones who’re already on Earth? Bob Hope couldn’t be half as funny if he tried for a year.”

“That’s the truth,” Gus agreed. “Yeah, I’ve heard some of those. And now they’ll know we listen in on ’em.”

“Like they didn’t already,” Glen Johnson said. He and Gus both laughed then. He settled back onto his couch, a man on a routine mission ready to turn back into a fighter pilot in a heartbeat if the mission stopped being routine. “Over and out.”

Through most of the long Tosevite year, Fotsev thought well of the city of Basra, where he was stationed. Oh, it got chilly in the winter, but he didn’t think there was any place on the surface of Tosev 3 that didn’t get chilly during the winter. Summers were quite pleasant; the hottest days would have been warm back on Home, too.

Males who’d fought farther north, up in the not-empire that called itself the SSSR, had horrifying tales to tell about Tosevite winters. Fotsev hadn’t hatched out of the egg yesterday; he knew how people lied to make stories sound better and themselves more heroic. He had stories of his own from the conquest of Argentina, and he wasn’t above inflating them when they needed inflating. But some of the males produced videos to prove they weren’t lying. The mere idea of trying to fight in drifts of frozen water taller than a male was enough to make him glad he’d never had to do it.

“Remember that Ussmak?” said a male named Gorppet, who wore a stripe of body paint on his left arm that showed he’d served in the SSSR. “I always figured it was the cold that drove him to mutiny, by the Emperor.”

After casting his eyes down in the ritual gesture of respect, Fotsev swiveled his eye turrets every which way to make sure nobody else had heard Gorppet. The other male was doing the same thing, aware he might have said too much even to a friend.

“I never knew much about the mutiny,” Fotsev said. Virtuously, he added, “I never wanted to know much about it, either.”

“I cannot blame you for that,” Gorppet said. Both infantrymales shuddered, as if from the chill of the SSSR, though the local weather was perfectly respectable even by the standards of Home. Mutiny-rebellion against superiors-was vanishingly rare among the Race; males interested in such things had had to look for examples in ancientest history, long before the Empire unified Home.

Belying his earlier words (there was a horrid fascination to the subject, after all), Fotsev said, “I wonder what happened to Ussmak after he yielded himself up to the Russkis. He is probably living as comfortably as anyone could in a not-empire full of Big Uglies, like that shiplord over on the lesser continental mass.”

But Gorppet made a negative hand gesture. “No-oh my, no,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “I heard this from a male the Russkis ended up freeing from one of their captives’ camps-and he was nothing but scales and skeleton after that, too, let me tell you. He told me Ussmak died in one of those camps along with spirits of Emperors past only know how many other males. If we ever fight the Tosevites again, you do not want to let the Russkis or the Deutsche capture you-or the Nipponese, either, though we have knocked them down a good deal.”

Fotsev shuddered again. “I do not want any Big Uglies capturing me,” he said with an emphatic cough of his own. “They build factories to kill off their own-no wonder they kill us off, too, when they catch us.”

His eye turrets kept swiveling as he spoke. He and Gorppet were patrolling the market square of Basra. In the early days of the occupation, males had disappeared not far from here. The Race’s vengeance had been brutal enough to make that stop happening, but neither of the males wanted to give it a chance to start up again through lack of alertness.

In the square-an open area in a town of mud-brick buildings, most dun-colored, the fancier ones whitewashed-Big Uglies sold and bartered an enormous variety of goods, most of which Fotsev found distinctly unappetizing. Tosevite males wore robes and headpieces of cloth to shield themselves from the sun the males of the Race found so friendly, while the females swaddled themselves even more thoroughly. The Argentine Big Uglies, who lived in a harsher climate, wrapped fewer cloths around themselves. Fotsev had trouble understanding the reasons behind the difference.

When he remarked on that, Gorppet answered, “Religion,” and kept on walking, as if he’d said something wise.

Fotsev didn’t think he had. Religion and Emperor-worship were the same word in the language of the Race. They weren’t the same here on Tosev 3. The Big Uglies, not having had the benefit of tens of thousands of years of imperial rule, foolishly imagined powerful beings made in their own image, and then further imagined that those powerful beings had created them in their image rather than the other way around.

It would have been laughable, had the Big Uglies not taken it so seriously. As far as Fotsev was concerned, it remained laughable, but he did not laugh. As experience had taught the local Tosevites not to kidnap males of the Race, experience had also taught the Race not to try to alter the beliefs the local Tosevites held, no matter how absurd they were. If they thought they had to bow down five times a day to revere the Big Ugly they had writ large in the sky, easier to let them than to try to talk them out of it. Fotsev had come to Basra to reinforce the garrison here after riots from that very source.

Gorppet must have been thinking along related lines, for he said, “If they are going to have these absurd notions, why do they not all have the same ones, instead of arguing about who is right and who is wrong?”

“I do not think you can expect any two Big Uglies to have the same notion about anything,” Fotsev said. “They do not even have the same words for the same things. I had finally started learning some of the Espanol they speak in Argentina, and not a Big Ugly around these parts knows a word of it. Hardly seems fair.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. “And some of the Tosevites here speak Arabic, some speak Farsi. Untidy, that is what this whole world is.”

“Having them all mixed together like this, you mean?” Fotsev said. “It certainly is. We ought to do something about it.”

“Like what?” Gorppet sounded interested.

“I do not know,” Fotsev said in some exasperation. “I am just an infantrymale, same as you. I know what the Big Uglies would do: kill all the ones who spoke the language they did not want. Then they would not have to worry about them any more. Nice and neat and clean, isn’t it?”

“Very neat and clean-if you do not look at the blood,” Gorppet said.

Fotsev’s shrug wasn’t that different from the gesture a Tosevite would have used. The Big Uglies weren’t in the habit of looking at blood once they’d spilled it. Off to one side of the square, a crowd was gathering, mostly Tosevite males with a sprinkling of females. Fotsev pointed toward it. “Think we ought to have a look at that?”

“What? By ourselves, do you mean?” Gorppet made the gesture of negation again. “No, thank you. If that does turn into trouble, it will turn into more trouble than the two of us can handle.”

“Why should it turn into-?” Fotsev paused. A male Tosevite was clambering up onto some kind of platform. Fotsev was no better than most other males of the Race at telling one Big Ugly from another, but he did know the males were the ones who grew tufts of ugly hair on their faces. This one had long, gray tufts, which meant he was no longer young.

“I have always thought these Big Uglies look foolish with rags wrapped around their heads,” Gorppet said.

“Down in Argentina, the females wore lots funnier things than rags on their heads. Some of them looked like walking gardens.” Fotsev kept one eye turret on the old male Tosevite, who had begun haranguing the crowd. “What is he saying? That is Farsi, is it not? I cannot tell snout from tailstump in Farsi.”

“He is talking about the Race,” Gorppet said; he knew some of the language. “Whenever these males who preach start talking about the Race, it is usually trouble. And I think this is the one called Khomeini. He hates us worse than any of the other three put together. His egg was soaked in vinegar and brine before he hatched from it.”

“But what is he saying?” Fotsev persisted.

“It is trouble, may the purple itch get under his scales.” His friend cocked his head to listen. “He is saying the spirit these superstitious fools think created them did not create us. He is saying the other spirit they believe in, the evil one, created us. And-uh-oh-he is saying that if they get rid of all of us on Tosev 3 now, the males and females from the colonization fleet will not be able to land. He thinks they are evil spirits, too.”

Fotsev made sure he had a round in the chamber of his personal weapon, a full clip attached, and more magazines where he could grab them in a hurry. Even with Gorppet by his side, he suddenly felt very much alone. “I think we had better back away,” he said, swiveling his eyes so no Big Ugly could sneak up on him with a knife or a bomb.

“I think you are right.” Gorppet came with him. “I think we had better call for help, too-help and heavier weapons.” He spoke urgently into his radio.

From the crowd came a great roar. “Allahu akbar!” That cry was the same in Farsi and Arabic. It meant that the ridiculous spirit in whom the benighted Big Uglies believed was a great ridiculous spirit. It also meant that the batch of Tosevites shouting it was about to explode into riot. “Allahu akbar!”

“Here they come,” Gorppet said unnecessarily. Mouths open and screaming, the mob of Big Uglies surged toward the males of the Race. The preaching male named Khomeini stood on his platform, his hand outstretched toward those two lone males, urging his followers toward massacre.

Neither Fotsev nor Gorppet tried to talk the Tosevites into stopping or going back. They both opened up as soon as the closest Big Uglies got into range. At that range, against that crowd, they could hardly miss. Watching bullets chew comrades to rags made some of the Big Uglies hesitate. But others, a lot of others, kept coming.

“They think they will go to a happy afterlife if they die fighting us,” Gorppet said, reloading his weapon.

“The Emperors know their spirits not,” Fotsev answered, spraying more death into the mob. As he’d seen before, the Tosevites were recklessly brave. Soon one would get close enough to tear the weapon from his hands. Then it would be teeth and claws till the end. He hoped it would be quick.

But then, with a thuttering roar, a helicopter gunship zoomed up from the Race’s base outside Basra. It lashed the crowd of fanatical Tosevites with rockets and rounds from a rotating-barreled cannon. Not even the Big Uglies could stand up against that kind of firepower. They broke and ran, shrieking in fear where they had shrieked in fury.

The iron stink of blood filling the scent receptors on his tongue, Fotsev emptied a magazine at their fleeing backs. He hoped the gunship had put paid to that Khomeini, who’d stirred the mob as a male might stir a hot drink.

Before he could do more than hope, something rode a trail of fire from the ground and slammed into the gunship. It slewed sideways in the air, then crashed in the middle of the market square. Its rotors flew off and cut down a last few Big Uglies.

Fotsev stared in horror. “These Big Uglies do not know how to make antiaircraft missiles!” he burst out.

“No, but they know how to buy or beg or borrow them from the Tosevites who do.” Gorppet’s voice was thoroughly grim. “By the spirits of Emperors past, there will be an accounting for this. But now, while we can, we had better get out of here.” Side by side, they skittered away from the market square. Behind them, the helicopter gunship burned and burned.

“Allahu akbar!” A rock flew past Reuven Russie’s head. “Dog of a Jew, you suck the Lizards’ cocks. Your mother opens her legs for them. Your sister-aii! ” The Arab’s curses dissolved in a howl of pain. Reuven had found a rock of his own, and flung it with better effect than the scrawny youth who’d been abusing him.

Jerusalem seethed like a teapot left over the fire too long. Unlike a teapot, though, the city had nowhere the steam could escape. Lizard troopers and human police-mostly Jews-might come under fire from any house, any shop. So might any passerby.

For once, Reuven almost wished he lived in the dormitory with his fellow medical students. Getting to and from the college had seemed more like running the gauntlet every day since the Muslim riots broke out. So far, he hadn’t got hurt. He knew that was as much luck as anything else, though he never would have admitted as much to his parents.

A black swastika stared at him from a wall. Some of the Arabs who hated the Lizards but weren’t religious fanatics leaned toward the Reich, not least because Himmler loved Jews even less than they did. Along with swastikas, red stars also blossomed on the walls-some Jews, and some Arabs, too, looked to Moscow for deliverance from the Race. But the commonest graffiti were in the sinuous squiggles of Arabic script, the letters all looking as if Hebrew block characters had run in the rain. Allahu akbar! seemed to scream from every other wall.

Reuven peered round a corner. The next short block looked safe enough. He hurried along it. One more block and he was home. When he checked the last block, he spied a Jewish policeman carrying a British Sten gun, one of the countless weapons left over from the last big fight. This new round of turmoil wasn’t shaping up as anything so delightful, either.

The policeman saw him, too, and started to aim the submachine gun in his direction. Then the fellow lowered the barrel. “You’re no Arab,” he said in Hebrew.

“No.” Reuven sniffed. Smoke was in the air, more than could be accounted for from cookfires. “What a mess. We haven’t seen anything like this-ever, I don’t think.”

“Bloody balls-up,” the Jewish policeman muttered in English of a sort. He went back to Hebrew: “We’ll just have to go on knocking heads together till things simmer down, that’s all. We can do it.” As if to contradict him, something-a grenade? a bomb? — blew up not too far away.

“It’s the colonization fleet,” Reuven said. “Now that it’s finally here, people are realizing all over again that we can’t make the Lizards go away by holding our breath and wishing they would.”

“I don’t care what it is. It’s a bloody balls-up.” That was English again; Hebrew, for so long a liturgical language, was woefully short on curses. The policeman went on, “And it doesn’t matter what it is, anyhow. Whatever it is, we’ve got to put a stop to it-and we will.”

“I hope so,” Reuven said, and passed on.

When he got home, his mother and his twin sisters, Esther and Judith, fell on him with glad cries. Even he couldn’t always tell Esther and Judith apart, and he’d known them the entire twelve years of their lives. One of them said, “We heard the bomb a couple of minutes ago.”

“And the machine guns a little while before that,” the other one added.

“I don’t like machine guns,” they said together. They thought so much alike, Reuven sometimes wondered if they could tell each other apart, if each of them had to consider before deciding whether she was Judith or Esther.

To try to make them stop thinking about machine guns, he said, “I’m going to experiment on the two of you, to see if there really are two of you, or just one with a mirror.”

They pointed at each other. “She’s the mirror,” they chorused.

“Not funny,” Reuven said, although, when you got down to it, it was. He turned to his mother. “You didn’t send them out to school today, did you?”

“Do I look meshugge?” Rivka Russie asked. “You and your father are the crazy ones, to go out on the streets in times like these.” That held an unpleasant amount of truth, though Reuven didn’t want to admit it. His mother went on, “Houses aren’t safe, either, though. Bombs, bullets-” She made a face. “We saw too much of that during the war. We saw too much of everything during the war.”

Reuven had been very young then. He remembered the German invasion of Poland and the Lizard invasion of the world in scattered sharp, horrifying images, one not connected to the next: still photographs snipped almost at random from a motion picture full of terror. “Rome,” he murmured.

“What about Rome?” Esther and Judith asked together.

Neither their brother nor their mother answered. Rome was one of his memory snapshots; he’d been on the deck of a Greek freighter in the Tyrrhenian Sea when the Germans touched off an explosive-metal bomb they’d smuggled into the city. Now, with knowledge he hadn’t had then, he wondered how much radioactive fallout he’d been exposed to during the blast. He didn’t really want to know. He couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

Heavy booted feet pounded up the street past the house. The small windows that looked on the street were shuttered; like most houses in Jerusalem, this one preferred to peer inward onto its own courtyard than out at the wider world. Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. He’d been used to it most of his life. This once, though, he wouldn’t have minded seeing what was going on.

All of a sudden, he changed his mind. After shouts in Hebrew and Arabic, guns started hammering. A bullet slammed through a side wall, cracked past his head, and was through the other wall before his jaw got done dropping.

His mother had a better idea of what to do under such circumstances than he did. “On the floor!” she shouted. “Get down! Lie flat! The bullets will pass over us.”

When Reuven’s sisters didn’t move fast enough to suit her, she pushed them down and lay on them, ignoring their squawks. Reuven had just got down on the floor himself when a burst of fire gave the front wall some ventilation it hadn’t had before. Esther and Judith stopped squawking.

Out on the street, someone started screaming and didn’t stop. Reuven couldn’t tell whether the shrieks were in Hebrew or Arabic. Pain had no separate tongue; pain was its own universal language.

He got to his feet. “What are you doing?” his mother demanded. “Lay down again!”

“I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got to get my bag. Someone’s hurt bad out there. I’m not a doctor, not yet, but I’m closer to being one than anybody else around.”

He waited for his mother to scream at him. To his astonishment, she smiled instead: a strange, sweet, sad smile. “Your father did the same thing when the Lizards took Jerusalem away from the British. Go on, then. God watch over you.”

Reuven snatched his black leather bag out of his bedroom and hurried back to the front door. Predictably, his sisters wanted to do whatever he did. As predictably, his mother wouldn’t let them. He went out the door, certain his mother would lock and bar it after him.

Bullets still flew, though not so often now. An automobile burned at the end of the block, sending a pyre of stinking black smoke into the sky. All the flames were orange or yellow, none the almost invisible pale blue of burning hydrogen-an old motorcar, not one of the newer models on the Lizard pattern.

The screaming came from the other side of the motorcar. Feeling naked and exposed, Reuven came around the machine to do what he could for the wounded man. He’d just stopped beside him when, from behind, someone said, “What have we got here, son?”

“Hello, Father,” Reuven said as Moishe Russie got down on one knee beside him. The two of them looked very much alike there side by side-pale skin; dark hair; narrow, strong-cheekboned faces-save that Moishe was going bald. His son continued, “I haven’t even had a chance to look at him yet.”

“Don’t need any fancy Lizard tools for this diagnosis,” his father said. “A burst of three in the belly…” He pointed to the holes in the fighter’s shirt. They had some blood oozing from them, but the real flood of it came from the man’s back. Reuven gulped a little. Dissections in medical school were much neater than this, and the subjects didn’t scream. Moishe Russie spoke as if back in the classroom himself: “The entry wounds are fairly small. If you were heartless enough to turn him over, you’d see big chunks of meat blown out of the exit wounds. Prognosis, son?”

Reuven licked his lips. “He’ll keep hurting till he loses enough blood to lose consciousness, too. Then he’ll finally die.” He spoke without fear the wounded man would hear him; the fighter was lost in his private hell.

“I think you’re right.” His father rummaged in his own black bag, then pulled out a syringe. He injected the fallen fighter, then glanced over at Reuven. “Enough morphine to stop his pain. Enough to stop his heart and lungs in a couple of minutes, too.”

He waited for Reuven to say something about that. After some thought, Reuven remarked, “They don’t teach us when to do that in medical school.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” his father agreed. “For one thing, the Lizards take it for granted, much more than we do. And for another, it’s not something you can learn in school. When the time comes, you’ll know. If you’re ever wondering whether you should, the answer is simple: you shouldn’t. When you should, you don’t wonder.”

“How many times have you done it?” Reuven asked. As he spoke, the wounded fighter’s screams stopped. He stared up in dreamy surprise. Reuven wondered if he was seeing the men who knelt above him or only some interior vision. The man’s chest hitched a few more times, then respiration stopped, too.

“Morphine is a good friend and a dreadful master,” Moishe Russie murmured. Then he seemed to hear the question Reuven had asked. “How many times? I don’t know. A few. A man who does it too often isn’t wondering enough about whether he ought to. You aren’t God, son, and you never will be. Once in a while-but only once in a while-He’ll let you be His assistant.” He got to his feet. The knee of his trousers was wet with the fighter’s blood. “We’d better get back home. Your mother will be worried about us.”

“I know.”

Reuven wondered what he would have done had he come on the wounded fighter by himself. Would he have had the nerve to put the man out of his misery? He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t be sure. He also realized he’d never be sure now whether the ordinary-looking man had been a Muslim or Jew.