Second Contact

6

David Goldfarb studied the radar screen with something between admiration and horror. He’d known how immense the Lizards’ colonization fleet was, of course; he’d been seeing the echoes of those ships since they first began going into orbit around the Earth. But he’d grown used to them up in high orbit: they made a sort of background noise on his set. When they started dropping out of orbit, one detachment at a time, they actively impinged on his awareness once more.

“Will you look at the bloody things?” he exclaimed as yet another squadron, bound for Poland, passed over his station in Northern Ireland. “How many Lizards have they got packed in each of those ships? Enough so they’ll be stepping on each other’s toes, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Aye, no doubt you’re right, sir,” Sergeant Jack McDowell answered. “And if they aren’t stepping on their own toes, then they will step on the Nazis’.”

“That breaks my heart,” Goldfarb said. The sergeant chuckled; no, he didn’t hold Goldfarb’s being a Jew against him. If only the same held true for Goldfarb’s superiors, he would have been a happier man. With Britain ever more closely aligned to the Reich, though, that wasn’t in the cards. At least he hadn’t been booted out of the RAF and into a concentration camp.

“They’ll be low over German territory before they land, too,” he said with a certain sardonic satisfaction. “Here’s hoping Heinrich Himmler’s hiding under the bed.”

McDowell nodded. He wasn’t too far from Goldfarb’s age: old enough to remember the Blitz, to remember the days when the Nazis were the worst enemies the British Empire had. To new recruits, the Greater German Reich might always have been the big, strong brother on the Continent. They had no sense of the past, or of what a nasty fellow the big, strong brother still was.

Of course, a fair number of the new recruits were as taken with the Lizards as they were with the Germans. Goldfarb let out a sigh. It hadn’t been that way when he was a kid joining the RAF. He sighed again. For how many generations had people been complaining about the younger set? Enough for formidable antiquity even by Lizard standards, no doubt.

McDowell said, “They’re right where they ought to be, right where they said they’d be. The Germans haven’t any excuse for throwing a rocket at them.”

“Except bloody-mindedness,” Goldfarb said. “Never forget about sheer bloody-mindedness, especially when you’re dealing with Germans.”

“They’ll pay dear if they get gay this time,” McDowell said. The Lizards had made that very plain to the Reich, the USSR, and the USA: any attack on the ships of the colonization fleet as they landed would start up the fighting that had lain dormant for eighteen years. Goldfarb didn’t think they were bluffing. His opinion counted for little. By all the signs, though, Himmler and Molotov and Warren agreed with him.

The Lizards hadn’t bothered publicly warning either Britain or Japan to leave their colonization fleet alone. They didn’t formally treat with either island nation as an equal, even if they had got their snouts bloodied when they invaded England.

Goldfarb followed the track of the ships from the colonization fleet till the curve of the Earth hid them from the prying eye of his radar. “Doesn’t look like the Reich will give this lot any trouble,” he said.

“Good, sir. That’s good,” McDowell said. “If the fighting starts up again, there won’t be anything left of any of us when it’s over.”

“Truth,” Goldfarb said in the Lizards’ language. McDowell nodded; he understood those hisses and pops and coughs. For him, as for Goldfarb, learning them meant being able to do his job better. A lot of people half their age liked the Lizards’ language for its own sake. No accounting for taste, Goldfarb thought.

After the alert caused by the descent of the detachment from the colonization fleet, the rest of Goldfarb’s tour at the radar screen was uneventful. He preferred days like that; he’d had enough excitement when he was younger to last him a lifetime. He made his report to the flight lieutenant who replaced him at the radar, then escaped with a sigh of relief.

A cigarette in the pale sunlight outside took the edge off his tension. A pint of bitter, he knew, would do an even better job, or maybe Guinness from the Irish Republic. He was heading for his bicycle so he could let a specialist administer the proper dose-and perhaps even repeat it-when a shout made him whip his head around: “Goldfarb!”

He stared in surprise. A good many years had gone by since he’d seen that handsome, ruddy face, but the only change in it he could see was that the handlebar mustache adorning the upper lip was streaked with gray. He stiffened to attention and saluted. “Yes, sir!” he said loudly.

“Oh, in the bloody name of heaven, as you were,” Basil Roundbush said, returning the salute. “I want to buy you a bloody pint, not put you on report.”

“Thank you, sir,” Goldfarb said, and extended his hand. Roundbush shook it; he still had a grip like a bear trap. Goldfarb eyed the four stripes on each sleeve of his gray-blue uniform. “Thank you very much, Group Captain.”

Roundbush waved airily, as if the rank-the RAF’s equivalent to colonel-meant nothing to him. Maybe it did mean nothing to him. He had the right accent; he’d gone to the right public school and the right university-Goldfarb couldn’t recall if it was Oxford or Cambridge, but which hardly mattered. And, smiling his film-star smile, he said, “You’ve done rather smashingly well yourself, Flight Lieutenant.” He didn’t add, For a Jew from the East End of London, as he might have done. He didn’t even look as if he thought it, which was rather remarkable. Instead, he went on, “That’s why I came over here to chat you up.”

Goldfarb’s eyes widened again. “You came to Belfast to… see me, sir?” he said slowly, wondering if he’d heard straight.

“I did indeed,” Roundbush answered, for all the world as if traveling to Northern Ireland to talk with a Jewish junior officer were the most normal thing in the world. “Now-I’ve got a motorcar laid on, and you know this town, which I bloody well don’t. Go fling your bicycle in the boot, and then tell me where we can get a pint.”

“Protestant pub or Catholic?” Goldfarb asked. “It doesn’t matter much to me, but…” He let his voice trail away. Maybe, after so long, Roundbush needed reminding about his faith.

He didn’t. “I know what you are,” he said. “If you weren’t, you’d not have caught that lovely lady of yours. I might have caught her myself, as a matter of fact.” He’d always had phenomenal luck with women. Goldfarb glanced at his left hand. He still wore no wedding band. Maybe that didn’t signify, but maybe it did, too: could a tomcat change his stripes? He grinned at Goldfarb. “I’m not fussy. Whichever you think is the best place.”

“There’s the Crown Liquor Saloon on Great Victoria, sir, not far from the university, or Robinsons next door. Robinsons has the finest Guinness in town, I think.”

“Robinsons it is, then.” Roundbush spoke with decision befitting a senior officer. “Guinness comes close to justifying the existence of Ireland, and I can’t think of many other things that do. Come on, old man.”

Once ensconced in a snug with a pint of stout in front of him, Goldfarb asked what he knew was the obvious question: “And now, sir, what’s all this in aid of?”

“Twisting the Lizards’ nasty little tails-what else?” Roundbush answered, sucking foam out of that perfectly waxed mustache. “One of the things we do on the sly, you know, is encourage them to stick their tongues in the ginger jar. A drugged Lizard is a long way from being a Lizard at his best.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would be,” Goldfarb agreed, “but-is it cricket?”

“Fine old tradition,” Basil Roundbush said. “Goes back to the Opium Wars, you might say. It worked then, and it’s working now. Oh, it’s not working perfectly; we’ve had a spot of trouble with someone over in the States, but I do think that’s being fixed. And we have hopes of getting some of our own back from Grand High Panjandrum Atvar and his scaly chums.”

Goldfarb didn’t say anything at all to that. As far as he was concerned, Britain’s survival was miracle enough. Dreams of resurrecting the old British Empire could only be just that: dreams. He did ask, “How do I fit into this, sir?” If he sounded cautious, it was because he felt cautious.

“You’ve got connections in Poland, and you’ve got connections in Palestine, too,” Roundbush replied. “We’ve had a couple of shipments go awry lately-this is apart from that business in the USA, mind you. Anything you can do to find out why would serve Queen and country, and might line your pockets quite nicely, too.” He made money-counting motions and then, as if suddenly noticing his glass was empty, signaled to the barmaid.

“Right away, dearie,” she said, and put something extra into her walk. Goldfarb shook his head in bemused amusement; whatever the group captain had had, he still retained it.

But that was beside the point. “Is this RAF business, sir, or is it private business?” he asked. “I’ve been happy enough here-more than happy enough. I’m not dead keen on turning my life upside down and inside out.”

“Of course you’re not, old man,” Roundbush said soothingly. “Of course you’re not. That’s why there’d be a little something special-or maybe more than a little something special-in it for you if you’d look into the matter for us. We do take care of our own; you needn’t fret about that.”

The barmaid brought back fresh pints. Goldfarb paid her; Roundbush had bought the first round. Goldfarb always tipped generously-he couldn’t afford a reputation for meanness. But despite scooping up his coins, the barmaid had eyes only for his companion.

“Cheers,” Roundbush said after she finally swayed away, and raised the new pint to his lips.

“Cheers,” Goldfarb echoed. He stared across the cramped little snug at the senior officer. “Who exactly is ‘we,’ sir?”

“My colleagues,” Roundbush said: an answer that was not an answer. “My notion was, a chap in your situation can use all the help”-he made that money-counting motion again-“and all the friends he can find.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Goldfarb said. Oh, yes, Roundbush remembered he was a Jew, all right, and knew just how tenuous things were for Jews in Britain these days. “And what would you want me to do?” he asked.

“Nose about a bit, see if you can find out how those shipments went wrong,” Roundbush answered. “It’s safe as houses.”

Goldfarb hadn’t asked if it was safe as houses. Half a lifetime in the RAF convinced him that, if anyone told him it was safe as houses without his asking, it was most unlikely to be anything of the sort. If someone looked him up after some years to assure him it was safe as houses, it couldn’t possibly be.

He took a pull at his Guinness. “No, thank you, sir,” he said.

“Tut, tut,” Basil Roundbush said. “That’s the wrong answer. Believe you me, old man, whatever might happen to you if you say yes, something worse will happen to you if you say no. And you wouldn’t want it to happen to your lovely family, too, now would you? That would be very sad.”

A nasty chill of alarm ran through Goldfarb. Roundbush and whatever friends he had were ideally placed to wreck his career if they wanted to badly enough. And if they wanted to play other sorts of games, how much help from the authorities could Goldfarb count on? The answer seemed only too plain. He gulped down the rest of his stout in a couple of swallows. “I think I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

“Ah, capital.” Roundbush beamed. “You won’t regret it.”

“I regret it already,” Goldfarb said. The other RAF man laughed, just as if he’d been joking.

These days, Monique Dutourd was concentrating more on carved stones than on the Lizards’ colonization fleet. She couldn’t do anything about the fleet. If she pieced together enough interesting inscriptions, she could finally finish that paper on the cult of Isis hereabouts. She did look forward to reactions when it saw print. It was a more thorough synthesis than anyone had tried before, and might eventually lead to a promotion.

She was glad her field of specialization centered on the Mediterranean provinces in the early days of the Roman Empire rather than, for instance, the Germanic invasions. No matter what a French scholar had to say about the Germanic invasions, the modern Germanic invaders were only too likely to decide it was wrong. And the Germans were not in the habit of giving those with whom they disagreed a chance to revise their opinions.

Her mouth twisted in annoyance as she pulled out a photograph of an inscription from up near Arles. She’d taken the photograph herself, but it wasn’t so good as it might have been. Had she waited a couple of hours longer, the sun would have filled the letters with shadow instead of washing them out. She bent low over the photo, doing her best to make sure she’d correctly inscribed the inscription.

The telephone rang. She jumped. “Merde!” she said; she hated interruptions of any sort. Muttering, she went to the phone. “Allo?” Whoever it was, she intended to get rid of him as fast as she could.

That proved harder than she’d hoped. “Bonjour, Monique. Ici Dieter Kuhn,” the SS man in her Roman history class said in his good if formal French. “Comment ca va?”

“Assez bien, merci,” she answered. “Et vous?” He’d taken her out for coffee several times, to dinner and a film once. Had he been a Frenchman, she likely would have slipped into using tu with him by now. But she was not ready-she wondered if she would ever be ready-to use the intimate pronoun with a German.

“Things go well enough for me, too, thanks,” Kuhn said. “Would you care to drive down by the seaside with me for lunch?” He also used vous, not tu; he hadn’t tried to force intimacy on her. She hadn’t had to wrestle with him yet, as she almost surely would have after going out several times with one of her own countrymen. She wondered if he was normal, or if perhaps he squired her about to give the appearance of normality.

A lunch he bought-he always had plenty of cash-would be one she didn’t have to pay for. She liked the idea of soaking the SS. Still… “I am working,” she said, and cast a longing eye he couldn’t see back toward her desk.

She sounded halfhearted even to herself. She wasn’t a bit surprised when Dieter Kuhn laughed and said, “You sound like you could use a break. Come on. I will be there in half an hour.”

“All right,” she said. Kuhn laughed again and hung up. So did she, shaking her head. Did he know she was afraid to say no? If he did, he hadn’t used it to his advantage. That was another reason she wondered how normal he was.

He knocked on her front door exactly twenty-nine minutes after getting off the phone. His timing always lived up to every cliche about German efficiency. “Does Chez Fonfon suit you?” he asked.

It was one of the better seafood bistros in Marseille. Monique only knew of it; she couldn’t afford to eat there on her pay. “It will do,” she said, and smiled a little at the regal acquiescence in her tone.

Kuhn held the door open for her to get into the passenger side of his battered green Volkswagen. She’d known he drove one of the buggy little cars since she’d thought him a Frenchman named Laforce. She hadn’t thought anything of it; Volkswagens were the most common cars through the Reich and the territories it occupied.

The automobile rattled west toward the sea, past the basilica of St. Victor and Fort d’Entrecasteaux, which had helped guard the port back in the distant days when threats had to be visible to be dangerous. Kuhn drove with as much abandon as any Frenchman, and drove two wheels up onto the sidewalk when he parked near the restaurant. Seeing Monique’s bemused expression, he chuckled and said, “I follow the customs of the country where I am stationed.” He hopped out to open the door for her again.

At Chez Fonfon, she ordered bouillabaisse after a waiter fawned on them at hearing Kuhn’s German accent. The fellow gave them what had to be the best table in the place, one overlooking the blue water of the Mediterranean.

“Et pour moi aussi,” Kuhn said. “Et vin blanc.”

“It does have mullet?” Monique asked, and the waiter’s nod sent his forelock-alarmingly like Hitler’s-bouncing up and down on his forehead. He hurried away. Monique turned her attention back to the SS man. “The Romans would have approved. But for the tomatoes in the broth, people were eating bouillabaisse here-maybe on this very spot-in Roman days, too.”

“Some things change very slowly,” Kuhn said. “Some things, however, change more quickly.” He looked to be on the point of saying more, but the waiter came bustling up with a carafe of white wine. Monique was not used to such speedy service. The SS man took it for granted. Why not? she thought. He is one of the conquerors.

Some wine took the edge off her bitterness. She did her best to relax and enjoy the view and the meal-which also came with marvelous promptness-and the company in which she found herself. But the food claimed most of her attention, as it should have. “Very good,” she said, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “Thank you.”

“It is my pleasure,” Kuhn answered. “I do not suppose they would cook the mullet alive in a glass vessel here, to let us watch it change colors as it perished.”

She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You have been studying too much.”

“I believe it is impossible to study too much,” he said, serious as usual. “One never knows when a particular piece of information may be useful. Because of this, one should try to know everything.”

“I suppose this is a useful attitude in your profession,” Monique said. She did not really want to think about his profession. To keep from thinking about it, she emptied her wineglass. The waiter, who hovered around the table like a bee around a honey-filled flower, filled it again.

“It is a useful attitude in life,” Kuhn said. “Do you not find this to be so?”

“It could be,” Monique answered. Had anyone but the SS man suggested it, she would have agreed without hesitation. She drank more white wine. As she drank, she discovered the wine had taken the edge off her caution, too, for she heard herself saying, “One piece of information I would like to have is what you think you see in me.”

Kuhn could have evaded that. He could simply have refused to answer. The idea that she could force anything from him was absurd, and she knew as much. He sipped at his own wine and looked out at the Mediterranean for a few seconds before saying, “You have a brother.”

Now she stared at him in frank astonishment. “I may have a brother,” she said. “I don’t even know if I do or not. I haven’t seen Pierre in more than twenty years, not since he was called to the front in 1940. We heard he was captured, and then we never heard again.” Excitement flowed through her. “For a long time, I have thought he was dead. Is this not so?”

“No, it is not so,” Dieter Kuhn said. “He is not only alive, he is living here in Marseille. I was hoping-I admit I was hoping-you would be able to lead me to him. But everything I have learned about you makes me believe you are telling the truth, and have no contact with him.” He sighed. “C’est la vie.”

“And what has my brother done to make you want to find him?” Monique inquired, before she could ask herself whether she really wanted to know.

“This town-it is not an orderly town,” the SS officer said, his voice stern with disapproval. “Parts of this town might as well be thieves’ markets, such as they have in the Arab towns of Africa.”

“It is Marseille,” Monique said. Where Kuhn was stern, she was amused. “Marseille has always been like this, in France but not of it. The folk of Marseille have always traded where and in what they could get the best bargains.”

That had sometimes-often-included people. During and right after the fighting, Jews with money and connections had made it out of the Reich by the thousands from Marseille. Jews had a hard time of it nowadays, but other contraband still came in and went out. No one but the smugglers knew the details, but everybody had a notion of the broad outlines.

“You are familiar with the Porte d’Aix?” Kuhn asked.

“I don’t think anyone is truly familiar with the Porte d’Aix, not with all of it,” Monique answered. “It is a souk, a marketplace of sorts like those in Algeria, as you said. Everyone goes into the edges now and then. I have done that. Why?”

“Because your brother, my dear Professor Dutourd, is the uncrowned king of Porte d’Aix,” Kuhn told her. “It is my duty to attempt to arrange his abdication.”

“And why is that?” Monique asked. “Is it not that whoever takes his place will be no different? If you ask the opinion of anyone who has studied history, he will tell you the same, I think.”

“It could be,” Kuhn said. “But it could also be that whoever takes your brother’s place will be more inclined to remember he is a human being and less inclined to be so friendly to the Lizards.”

Monique’s first impulse was to drop everything she was doing and try to get hold of the brother she had not seen for so long, to warn him of his danger. Her second thought was that that was exactly what the SS man would want her to do. He would let her do the hunting, and then snatch Pierre once she’d guided him to his quarry. Doing nothing was not easy, but it was the best thing she could do if she wanted to go on having a brother, even one she did not know.

No. She could do one other thing, and she did it: “Please be polite enough to take me back to my apartment. Please also be polite enough not to call on me again. And please have the courtesy no longer to attend the class I offer at the university.”

“The first, of course,” Kuhn said. “I am not a barbarian.” Monique held her tongue, which was no doubt just as well. The SS man went on, “As for the second, it shall also be as you wish, although I have enjoyed your company aside from any, ah, professional considerations. The last-no. Even if I learn nothing about your brother, I do learn about the Roman world, which interests me. I shall continue to attend-without, of course, making a nuisance of myself.”

Monique could hardly order him to stay away. Recognizing as much, she shrugged and got to her feet. Kuhn slapped banknotes on the table-he was not such a boor as to make her pay for her own lunch. As they went back out to his illegally parked Volkswagen, she thought she knew what was in his mind: as long as he stayed close to her, he might get a line on her brother. You won’t, she thought fiercely, but at the same time she wondered how she would ever be able to keep from looking for Pierre now that she knew he dwelt in Marseille, too.

These days, the Communist Party hierarchy did not usually meet inside Peking, but out in the country. That lowered the risk of the little scaly devils wiping out the whole central committee at one stroke. The first time a meeting in a small town northwest of the city was called, Liu Han had eagerly looked forward to it, thinking it would take her back to the days of her youth and let Liu Mei see how she had lived then.

She’d ended up disappointed. Peasants hereabouts knew nothing of rice paddies like the ones she had tended near Hankow. They raised wheat and barley and millet, and ate noodles and porridge, not bowl after endless bowl of rice. The land was dry, not damp: a desert in summer, with yellow dust always in the breeze, and a frozen wasteland during the long winter.

Only one thing was the same among these peasants as among those with whom she’d grown up: their toil never ended.

Ducks and chickens and dogs and children made a racket in the narrow, dusty streets of Fengchen as Liu Han and Liu Mei came into the town in the foothills to talk with their comrades. “Eee, my feet are weary,” Liu Han said. “I feel I have walked ten thousand li.” She knew that would have taken her almost all the way across China, but wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to exaggerate.

“And mine, Mother,” Liu Mei said dutifully. She looked around. “I see no scaly devils here in Fengchen.”

“No, and I do not think you will,” Liu Han said. “There are not enough little devils for them to garrison every town. They have the same trouble the Japanese had before them, and they rule the same way: they hold down the cities and they control the roads from one city to the next. All they do-all they can do-in the countryside is raid and steal.”

“Now that they have ships landing, though, there will be more of them.” Liu Mei spoke seriously, as she usually did. When she spoke of the little scaly devils, she spoke even more seriously than usual. She rarely smiled, but her frown was fierce and stormy.

A middle-aged man came out of one of the buildings on the main street: a tavern, by the pair of drunks who snored in front of it. The man was not drunk. Though dressed in a peasant’s dark blue tunic and trousers, he carried himself with a soldier’s erectness. “Welcome,” he called. “Welcome to you both.”

“Thank you, Nieh Ho-T’ing,” Liu Han said. Liu Mei nodded a greeting.

“It is good to have you here,” Nieh said. “Mao has been asking after you. There are a couple of points on which he will be glad to have your views.” He hesitated, then went on, “And I am glad to see you, too.”

“I am always glad to see you,” Liu Han said, more or less truthfully. They had been lovers for several years, fighting the little scaly devils side by side till Mao sent Nieh Ho-T’ing to the south to command resistance against the imperialism of the scaly devils there and Liu Han stayed behind to help radicalize the proletarian women of Peking. They’d both found other partners since.

Nieh smiled at Liu Mei. “How lovely your daughter has become,” he said.

Liu Mei cast down her eyes in fitting modesty. Liu Han studied her. Her nose was too big, her face too long and narrow, her hair too wavy for her to conform to perfect Chinese standards of beauty: all tokens of her father. But Nieh was right-in her own way, she was lovely.

“So Mao is here?” Liu Han said, and Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded. “Who else?”

“Lin Piao and Chu Te from the People’s Liberation Army,” Nieh answered. “Chou Enlai has not been able to get out of the south; the little devils are being very difficult down there.” He paused, grimaced, and added, “And Hsia Shou-Tao is here with me.”

“Wherever you go, you have to bring your lapdog?” Liu Han asked, acid in her voice. Hsia Shou-Tao was a tireless and able revolutionary. He was also a tireless drinker and womanizer. He’d once tried to rape Liu Han; she still sometimes wished she’d cut his throat when she had the chance.

Nieh Ho-T’ing pointed. “We are staying at the inn yonder. They have a room waiting for the two of you.”

“Good,” Liu Han said. “When will we meet?”

Nieh chuckled. “You have not changed much, have you? Business first, everything else afterwards.” Liu Han did not answer; she stood there in the street, arms folded across her chest. Nieh shifted from foot to foot, then finally said, “We will meet tomorrow morning, early. Mao is always up early; he never sleeps well.”

“Yes, I know,” Liu Han said. She turned to her daughter. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of room it is.”

It turned out to be about what she’d expected: well away from the main hall of the lodging house (what better did women deserve?), small, dark, but with enough blankets and with plenty of fuel for the kang, the low, thick, clay hearth on which they could lie to take greatest advantage of its warmth.

“It will be good to see Mao again,” Liu Mei said. “It has been a few years.”

“He will be glad to see you, too,” Liu Han said. She wondered just how glad Mao would be to see her daughter. He had-and, she knew, deserved-a reputation for being attracted to young girls. He was especially fond of young, ignorant peasant girls, though: to them, as leader of China’s hopes, he was the next thing to a god, or maybe not the next thing. Liu Mei had had the best education Liu Han was able to give her. She might admire and respect Mao, but she did not and would not worship him.

Liu Han had gone through a spell of worshiping Mao. She was glad she’d got over it. Some never did, not even after Mao cast them aside. Liu Han hadn’t had the sort of education she’d got for her daughter, but her own hard core of common sense had never quite deserted her: or not for long, anyhow.

Next morning, she and Liu Mei came out to have breakfast. Sitting in the main hall, chatting up a serving girl, was Hsia Shou-Tao. He scowled when Liu Han came in. He’d been subjected to stiff self-criticism any number of times, but his habits never changed.

By the way he looked at Liu Mei, he was imagining her body under her clothes. By the way he looked at Liu Han, he realized she knew what he was doing. His smile was half embarrassed, half afraid. Liu Han wished it were all afraid, but it would have to do. With it still on his face, Hsia said, “Good morning, Comrade… er, Comrades.”

“Good morning,” Liu Han said before Liu Mei could reply-she did not want her daughter speaking to the lecher. “Take me to the meeting place.”

She spoke like one who had the right to give orders. Hsia Shou-Tao obeyed as if she had that right, too. Since Liu Mei would not be at the meeting, he couldn’t try to do anything with her-or to her-for a while. And he knew better than to bother Liu Han.

“Behold the palace of the proletariat,” he said sourly, pointing to a barn that had seen better days.

Inside, sitting on a mat on the dirt floor, were Mao Tse-tung, Chu Te, Nieh Ho-T’ing, and Lin Piao. After brief greetings, Mao came straight to the point: “We have not received most of the weapons our comrades in the Soviet Union have promised us. Molotov tells me this is because the little scaly devils have intercepted several caravans lately.”

“That is very bad,” Hsia Shou-Tao said: for once, a remark of his with which Liu Han could not disagree.

“It is worse than very bad,” Mao said, running his hand through his hair. He was close to seventy; it had receded in front, leaving his forehead looking high and domed. As if to make up for that, he let his hair grow fuller in the sides and back than most Chinese men wore it. He went on, “Molotov is lying to me. Most of those caravans were never sent.”

Liu Han exclaimed. That was news to her, and very bad news. By the horrified reactions of all her colleagues save Lin Piao, it was news to them, too. Lin said, “As Lenin asked, what is to be done?”

“We must have weapons,” Mao said, to which everyone nodded. Without weapons, the fight against the imperialist scaly devils would surely be lost. The Chinese revolutionary leader went on, “The USSR seeks to curry favor with the little devils so they will not punish the Soviet Union for the attack on the ships of the colonization fleet. In my view, the USSR should have attacked these ships regardless of the cost, but Molotov is too much a reactionary to agree.”

“He betrays the international solidarity of the workers and peasants,” Hsia Shou-Tao thundered.

“So he does.” Mao’s voice was dry. “And all we can do about it is… remember.” He shook his head. “No. That is all we can do to the USSR. But we must get weapons, whether Molotov supplies them to us or not.”

“That is the truth,” Chu Te said. He looked like an aging peasant, but he held the People’s Liberation Army together no less than Mao did the Communist Party. If he said something military was so, then it was.

“Where else can we get weapons now?” Nieh asked. “The Japanese?” He made a face to show what he thought of that. “I do not want to give the eastern dwarfs a toehold in China again.”

“Nor I,” Mao said. “They probably would not help us, though. They are not like the USSR or the USA or the Reich. They have no explosive-metal bombs. The scaly devils tolerate their independence, but do not admit they are equals. Dreadful things could happen to Japan very quickly, and the Japanese can do relatively little to resist.”

“In any case, if they helped anyone in China, they would help the Kuomintang,” Lin Piao said. “Reactionaries love reactionaries.” Everyone nodded. Along with battling the scaly devils, the Chinese kept fighting among themselves. Liu Han thought Chiang Kai-shek would sooner have surrendered to the little devils than to Mao.

“We must have weapons,” Mao repeated. “None of the three independent powers can truly want to see China altogether lost to the little scaly devils. The USSR will not help us for now. The Reich is not well placed, and is the most reactionary of the three; Hitler aided the Kuomintang during the 1930s. That leaves the United States.”

“America would sooner help the Kuomintang, too,” Hsia Shou-Tao said.

“Probably,” Mao said, “but that does not mean America will not also help us. We had U.S. help in the fight against Japan. We have had some quiet help in the fight against the little devils, too. Now we need more.”

“How are we to get it? Japan and the islands Japan rules block us off from the USA.” Liu Han was proud she knew that. Back in her days in the village near Hankow, she hadn’t even known the world was round.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, we must send an envoy to beg,” Mao said. “Against the Lizards’ imperialism, the U.S. capitalists will aid even revolutionaries-if we humble ourselves enough. In the cause of revolution, I have no pride.”

“A good example for us all,” Chu Te murmured.

Mao’s gaze swung toward Liu Han. “You, Comrade, not only are you a woman, and thus likely to appeal to bourgeois sentimentality, but you have an American connection none of the rest of us can match.”

For a moment, Liu Han did not understand what he was talking about. Then, all at once, she did. “My daughter!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, Liu Mei and her American father, now conveniently and heroically dead,” Mao agreed, as if Bobby Fiore had had no more importance in Liu Han’s life than his present convenience. “If I can arrange the ways and means, I will send both of you to the United States with begging bowls. Do you remember any English?”

“Not more than one or two words,” Liu Han answered. The scaly devils had taken her into space. She’d survived that. If Mao sent her to America, she would go. “I will see how much I can learn before I leave.”

Johannes Drucker was glad to be back in space, not only because that meant he’d managed to free his wife from the specter of a Jewish grandmother lurking in her family tree but also because he-unlike a good many-enjoyed weightlessness and because he could better serve the Greater German Reich here than anywhere else-certainly better than in Gestapo detention.

An abrupt signal came into his ship: “Spacecraft of the Reich! Spacecraft of the Reich! Acknowledge at once, spacecraft of the Reich!” That was a Lizard talking, and he wasn’t bothering to speak any human language.

“Acknowledging,” Drucker said. “Go ahead, male of the Race.”

“I have information for you, and a warning,” the Lizard said. “You will obey, or you will regret.” He gave an emphatic cough.

“Go on,” Drucker said. “I cannot say what I will do until I hear what you have to tell me.”

“Information: the Race is punishing the Reich for the murder of the males and females aboard the destroyed ships of the colonization fleet,” the Lizard said. “A warning: any attempt to interfere with the punishment will have the most severe consequences. Do you hear? Do you understand? Do you obey?”

“I hear. I understand,” Drucker answered. “I cannot say whether I obey until I speak to my superiors. I shall do that now.”

“If your superiors are wise, they will obey. If they are not wise, we shall teach them wisdom.” The Lizard broke the connection.

After checking his position, Drucker radioed a German ship in the southern Indian Ocean and relayed what the Lizard had told him. “I have not heard them sound so determined since we were fighting,” he finished. “What are my orders?”

He was as near certain as made no difference what the answer would be. The Reich could not keep its independence by knuckling under to the Lizards. He checked the radar screen for targets at which he could launch his missiles and aim his guns. He didn’t expect to last long, but he would-what was the phrase the Americans used? Go down swinging, that was it.

And then, to his astonishment, the reply came: “Take no action.”

“Repeat, please?” Drucker said, not sure he could believe his ears.

“Take no action,” came up again from the relay ship. “We are told this punishment will be only symbolic, and will also be inflicted on Russia and America. If we were misinformed, you will proceed to avenge the Vaterland on the liars.”

“Jawohl,” Drucker said. Not sure the Lizards had monitored his conversation with the ship, he switched to the frequency they had used and back to their language: “Spacecraft of the Reich calling the Race.”

“Go ahead.” The reply came back at once. “Do you hear? Do you understand? Do you obey?”

“I hear. I understand,” Drucker said, as he had before. “I will obey, unless the punishment you give is so severe, my superiors order me to fight. In that case, I will obey them, not you.”

“This does you credit as a warrior,” said the Lizard on the other end of the circuit. “It will not keep you from dying if you are foolish enough to fight.”

“I serve the Reich,” Drucker answered. “I serve the Fuhrer.” The Fuhrer, or at least Himmler’s fair-haired boys in the SS, had treated him shabbily of late, and Kathe even worse. That didn’t mean he was ready to give up on the Greater German Reich. Without the Reich, he thought, the Lizards would surely have overrun the whole world, not just around half of it.

“You would do better to serve the Emperor,” the Lizard said, adding another emphatic cough. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh out loud. The earnest alien sounded like nothing so much as a missionary trying to save a heathen savage’s soul. Lizards got offended when humans pointed such things out to them.

Drucker’s radar showed several Lizard spacecraft dropping out of orbit. He estimated their courses, not bothering to feed the numbers into his computing machine. He didn’t need precision, not when he’d been ordered to sit tight. But they were heading for the Reich.

He itched to change course and pursue them. He could knock down a couple, maybe more, before they wrecked him. The Lizards were technically proficient pilots, but they weren’t inspired. He was, or could be.

“These are the punishment ships,” the Lizard told him. “If you could see with your eyes and not with your sensors, you would see they have been painted to include the broad green bands that symbolize punishment.”

Drucker didn’t answer. He kept nervously watching the radar screen. The Lizards were using a lot of force for a purely symbolic punishment. Had they been lying? Were they seizing this excuse to throw a sucker punch at each of the three main human powers still standing? If they were… How they would pay if they were! He would be one of the men who made them pay.

Then he got a signal from another German relay ship, one of the many that kept spacecraft in touch with the territorially limited Reich: “They have destroyed an air base near the town of Flensburg. Many aircraft have been wrecked; there are casualities. They state they intend to take no further action.”

That sounded like more than a symbolic attack to Drucker. “What are my orders?” he asked. “Am I to retaliate?”

A long silence followed. Had the Lizards truly intended a strike on the Reich, he realized, one logical thing for them to do would have been to sink as many of the relay ships as they could. During the fighting, they hadn’t paid so much attention to ships as they might have; later, men had discovered that seas on their home planet were small and unimportant compared to the oceans of Earth. But thinking the Lizards could not learn from experience was a deadly dangerous mistake.

He was just starting to worry in earnest when the relay ship did respond: “No, no retaliation at this time, not unless the Lizards take some further action. The Fuhrer has warned them in the strongest terms against thinking our forbearance will extend past this one occasion.”

“Good,” Drucker said. “Even once is too often, if anyone cares what a pilot thinks.” He knew perfectly well that no one did. “Have they also struck at the Russians and the Americans, as they said they would?” Misery loves company, he thought.

“Reports are coming in from the United States,” was the reply. “They also hit an air base there. Radar indicates an attack was made on the USSR, but no comment from Radio Moscow.”

“Radio Moscow wouldn’t tell anyone the sun had risen if they couldn’t already see it for themselves,” Drucker said with a snort.

He sighed. He wasn’t the least bit sorry the Lizards had had a good many ships from the colonization fleet blown to hell and gone. He wished they’d lost more. They kept landing more and more ships all over the territory they controlled. More and more Lizards, male and female, would be thawing out every day. The more of them there were, the harder getting rid of them would be. They’d got no better than a draw in the fighting, but they were liable to win the peace.

When he got over the United States, the American radioman with whom he spoke was full of righteous indignation. “They had no business hitting us like that-none,” the fellow said. “We didn’t do anything to them. They didn’t even claim we did. They hit us anyhow.”

“They did the same to the Reich,” Drucker said. “They did the same to the Russians-I think. They got to do it because they are strong. The stronger always get to do what they like against the weaker.”

“That’s not fair,” the American said.

“I am sure your Indians would be the first to agree with you,” Drucker said.

“So would your Jews-if you had any left,” the American retorted. Most Germans would have laughed at that. They were just as well pleased to be Judenfrei — free of Jews. Drucker would have laughed at it himself, only a handful of weeks before. He wasn’t laughing now. Had he not figured out which strings to pull, and had he not been able to pull them, Kathe would have disappeared from his life forever. That changed the way he looked at things.

Drucker didn’t say anything. The American radio operator kept jeering at him till he passed out of range. He had seldom been so glad to listen to a signal break up and dissolve in static.

The Lizards who controlled Africa did not give him so hard a time as the Americans had done. Part of that was because they were more polite than Americans had ever imagined being. The other part was that they didn’t know how to get under his skin as well as a fellow human did.

American and German radio stations were full of reports of what the Lizards had done. All the German commentators said the same thing. Dr. Goebbels would never have permitted anything less. Some of the American broadcasters presented a generally similar line, but not all. Some even said the Lizards had the right to do what they’d done. In the Reich, anyone who dared utter such a disloyal sentiment in public-let alone on the radio-would have vanished into night and fog, very likely never to be seen again. Johannes Drucker approved. Americans, in his view, were disorderly to the point of anarchy, even to the point of insanity.

Radio Moscow played Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky. The Russian news report, when it finally came on the air, bragged of the overfulfillment of the steel quota set forth in the latest Five-Year Plan and of the anticipated bountiful harvest. As far as the broadcaster was concerned, the Lizards might as well not have existed. Drucker snorted. The Russians put him in mind of so many ostriches, burying their heads in the sand.

He squeezed meat paste out of a tinfoil tube onto a slice of dark bread. After he ate, a few crumbs floated in the air. Eventually, the blower pushed them into one filter or another. Drucker drank fruit juice from a bladder of synthetic rubber that left a harsh, chemical taste. He wished the powers that be would let pilots take beer into space, though he understood why they didn’t.

He sighed. “The beer would taste lousy, too, if I had to drink it out of one of those miserable squeeze toys,” he muttered. But even bad beer looked good to him now.

He sighed again. Times were changing. He knew the Lizards didn’t like that. Trouble was, he didn’t like it, either. He’d lived most of his adult life at wary peace with the Lizards. Now that the colonization fleet was finally here, how could the peace survive?

Rance Auerbach peered west from his bedroom window toward the great pillar of smoke rising from Carswell Air and Space Force Base, over past the outskirts of Fort Worth. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch! The Lizards really went and did it, God damn them to hell and gone.”

Penny Summers put a hand on his arm. “They said they were going to. Did you think they were bluffing? You ought to know better than that, Rance. When they say they’re going to do something, they mean it.”

“Oh, I know that.” Auerbach shook his head, which sent pain shooting through his ruined shoulder. “What really riles me is that we didn’t fire a shot when they came down and shot up the field-just lay there with our legs in the air like a yellow dog and let ’em do it.” Talking hurt, too, but he didn’t much care. He was too full of rage to care. If he didn’t let it out, it would fester like an abscess at the base of a tooth. He sucked in another breath of air.

Before he could let it out again, the telephone rang. He limped over to the nightstand and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Cut the broad loose, Auerbach,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Cut her loose, or else your place will end up looking just like that airstrip out there.” The man who’d called hung up. Auerbach listened to the click, and then to the dial tone that followed it. Slowly, he hung up, too.

“Who was that?” Penny asked.

“Friend of yours, I reckon,” he answered.

For a moment, she simply accepted that. Then alarm washed over her face, leaving her looking older and harder than she had. “I haven’t got any friends, except maybe you,” she said bleakly. “If anybody knows I’m here, I better get the hell out. What did they say they’d do if I didn’t?” She sounded very sure they’d said something along those lines.

And, of course, she was right. Auerbach said, “Burn the building down. You’ve gotten to know some really nice folks since you walked out on me the first time, haven’t you, Penny?”

“You might say so,” she answered. “Yeah, you just might say so. Okay, Rance. I don’t want to put you on the spot, not if they know I’m here. This isn’t turning out to be as easy to fix as I figured it would. I’ll be out of here in an hour’s time.” Her laugh came brittle. “It’s not like I’ve got a lot to pack.”

“You aren’t going anywhere.” Auerbach opened the nightstand drawer, took out a.45, and stuck it in the waistband of his trousers. Then he pulled out another one and offered it to Penny. “You know how to handle it?”

“I know how,” she said. “I don’t need it. I’ve got a.357 magnum in my handbag. But I still ought to leave. What can you do if they pour gasoline all over the downstairs and toss in a match?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “You really made some people like you a hell of a lot, didn’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “If you leave, where will you go?”

“Somewhere,” Penny said. “Anywhere. Someplace where those bastards can’t find me. I’ve got plenty of money-not enough to make ’em happy, but plenty. You’ve seen that.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Rance agreed. “It doesn’t do a dead person much good, though. How long can you last on the run? You’ve got no place to run to, and you know it. You may as well stay here. You’ll have somebody to cover your back.”

Penny stared at him, then looked away. “God damn you, Rance Auerbach, you just made me want to cry, and I haven’t come close to doing that in more years than you can shake a stick at. The crowd I’ve been running with isn’t what you’d call chock full of gentlemen.”

“Gentleman, hell.” Auerbach felt himself flushing; he hadn’t been so embarrassed since the day he’d found out where babies came from. “All I am is a broken-down, busted-up cavalry captain who knows better than to let his troops get out of line.”

Penny Summers came to attention and saluted, which jerked startled laughter out of Rance. “Call it whatever you want to call it, then. I don’t care. But I don’t want to get you into trouble on account of me.”

“You won’t,” he answered. “Worst thing your pals can do is kill me, and two weeks out of every month I’d reckon they were doing me a favor if they did the job. I haven’t been afraid of anything since the night the Lizards shot me. Oh, I know how that sounds, but it’s the Lord’s truth.”

“I believe you,” Penny said. “I nursed you back then, remember? I changed your bandages. I looked underneath. I know what they did to you. It’s a miracle you aren’t pushing up a lily somewhere in Colorado.”

Cautiously, he touched his shattered leg. “If this here’s a miracle, God’s got a nasty sense of humor,” he said. He glanced toward her. “You gave me the bedpan, too.”

“When you needed it.”

He laughed his ruined laugh. “Every once in a while, you made like you were giving me the bedpan and then you did something else instead.”

“When you needed it,” Penny repeated in exactly the same tone of voice. Mischief sparked in her eyes. “You think you need it now?” This time, she was the one who didn’t wait for an answer. She set a hand on his chest and pushed. He didn’t have much in the way of balance, not with one wrecked leg he didn’t. In spite of flailing his arms, he went over on his back onto the bed.

Penny crouched above him. She undid his belt, she unzipped his fly, and she pulled down his chinos and his briefs. Then she took him in hand and bent her head low. “Jesus!” he said hoarsely as her mouth came down on him, hot and wet. “First time you did that, they set off an explosive-metal bomb outside of Denver just when I was shooting my load.”

“Sweetheart”-she looked up again for a moment-“when I’m through with you, you’re going to feel like they set off an explosive-metal bomb inside of you.” After that, she stopped talking for the next few minutes. And she turned out to be exactly right.

She went into the bathroom to wipe off her chin. Auerbach went in himself after she came out. When he emerged, he had a cigarette going. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “Damn things are hell on your wind,” he said, “but I don’t have much wind anyhow. And I like ’em.”

“You had enough wind there,” Penny said. “Let me have one of those, will you?” He tossed her the pack and a book of matches. After she lit her cigarette, she smoked it in quick, nervous puffs.

Auerbach sat down on the bed. His breath caught as his leg twinged when he shifted position, but he didn’t feel too bad once he’d stopped moving. He laughed a little. Maybe afterglow was good for aches and pains. He wished he were able to experiment more often. Had he been younger, he could have.

But afterglow lasted only so long and meant only so much. After he stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray made from the casing of a five-inch shell, he said, “I didn’t want to pry too much before, but now that they know you’re here, I reckon I’ve earned the right to know: just who are they, anyway?”

By the way she nodded, Penny had been expecting the question. “Yeah, you’ve got the right to know,” she agreed. “Like I pretty much said, I was a go-between for some ginger smugglers. Ginger’s not illegal here-I don’t think it’s illegal anywhere people still run their own affairs.”

“It’s sure as hell illegal everywhere the Lizards run things, though,” Rance said.

“Oh, I know that,” Penny said. “I didn’t have any trouble. Lizards don’t know everything there is to know about searching people, especially women. So I delivered the goods, and the Lizards paid me off, and…” She laughed out loud. “And I decided to go into business for myself.”

“Did you?” Auerbach asked. “That’s not quite what you said when you showed up on my doorstep, you know. No wonder they aren’t very happy with you.”

“No wonder at all,” Penny agreed. “But I decided to take a chance. I didn’t know if I’d ever get another one, you know what I mean? So I kept the money. Those people can do without it a hell of a lot better than I can. The only thing I wish is that they never got wise to me.”

“I believe that.” Auerbach’s comment was completely matter-of-fact. Only after he’d spoken did he wonder how he’d come to take thieving and everything that went with it so much for granted. This wasn’t the life he’d had in mind when he went off to West Point. He’d always known he might die for his country. The idea had never fazed him. But getting shot up and discarded as useless, left to live out the rest of his days as best he could-that had never crossed his mind, not then. “God damn the Lizards,” he repeated, this time for a different reason.

“Amen,” Penny said, “I wish there had been some way for me to give ’em poison to taste instead of ginger.”

“Yeah.” But thinking of the Lizards one way made Rance think of them another way. “Christ! Those damn chameleon-faces aren’t going to come after you along with the real people you stiffed, are they?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t think so, though. They’ve got enough trouble telling one person from another one, and they hadn’t seen me all that often.” She lit another cigarette. Rance watched her cheeks hollow as she sucked in smoke. They’d hollowed the same way while she’d been… She forced his mind back onto the Lizards, saying, “If they’d been after me, they’d have blown up this apartment house instead of the airfield outside of town.”

“Different batch of Lizards,” he said, before realizing she already knew that. He chuckled. “Okay. A.45’ll stop those bastards, too, believe you me it will-knock ’em ass over teakettle. Your gun’ll do the job on a Lizard, probably better than it would on a person.”

“I can take care of myself,” Penny said. He just looked at her and didn’t say anything. Under the rouge on her cheeks, she got redder still. If she’d been so sure she could take care of herself, she wouldn’t have come to him for help. She stubbed out the cigarette, a sharp, savage gesture. “Well, most of the time I can take care of myself, goddammit.”

“Sure, babe. Sure.” Auerbach didn’t want to argue with her. He hadn’t particularly wanted her here-she’d walked out on him, after all, and never looked back: never till she needed him again, anyhow. Now she’d walked back in without a backwards glance, too, and he’d discovered he was glad she had. In crassest terms, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d got so much.

“We’re all right, the two of us,” she said, as if she’d picked the thought out of his back pocket. “We’re both a couple of wrecks, and we deserve each other.”

“Yeah,” he said, one more time. But there was a difference, and he knew it even if she didn’t. He’d been wrecked. If the Lizards hadn’t done their best to kill him, he’d probably be a colonel by now, maybe even a brigadier general if he caught some breaks along the way. Penny, now, Penny had wrecked herself. Even after she’d left him, she could have settled down. He’d always figured she had. But no-and so she was here with him.

She said, “The Lizards didn’t do that much harm, not when you look at the whole country. Things’ll be all right. And when you look at you and me, things’ll be all right there, too, for as long as we want ’em to be.”

“If I had a drink, I’d drink to that,” Auerbach said. Penny ran out to the kitchen to fix him one. And if that didn’t prove she had a point, he was damned if he knew what did.

“Comrade General Secretary,” Vyacheslav Molotov’s secretary said, “the Lizards’ ambassador has arrived, along with his interpreter.”

“I quiver with delight,” Molotov said, his features expressionless as usual. His secretary gave him an odd look. Good, he thought. I am not entirely predictable. “Send him-send them-in, Pyotr Maksimovich.”

In came Queek. In with him came the Pole who did his translating. After the usual exchange of politely insincere greetings, the Lizard said, “We have struck at you, as we promised we would do. Remember, only our mercy and our uncertainty as to the degree of your guilt made the blow light. If we prove you were responsible for this outrage, we shall strike again, and heavily.”

“Since we were not responsible, you cannot possibly prove we were,” Molotov replied. He was, for once, telling the truth (unless Beria had lied to him). He delivered it exactly as he delivered lies he knew to be lies. Consistency was the key. He could have shouted and blustered and got the same results, so long as he shouted and blustered the same way every time.

“Your assertions have not always proved reliable,” Queek said: half a step short of calling Molotov a liar. The translator smiled as he turned the Lizard’s words into Russian. Sure as sure, he had some axe to grind against the Soviet Union.

“Here is an assertion that is altogether reliable,” Molotov said: “If you presume to violate our territory again, we shall move in our own interest. This may include combat with the Race. It may include rethinking our position on your imperialist aspirations in China. And it may include rethinking our relationship with the Greater German Reich.”

After the interpreter translated that, Queek spoke one word. Again, the interpreter smiled as he turned it into Russian: “Bluff.”

“You know better,” Molotov said, addressing the fellow directly. “Remind your principal that the USSR and the Reich enjoyed a nonaggression pact for almost two years before coming to blows. We cooperated to some degree against the Race during the fighting. If we both see ourselves threatened, we can cooperate again.”

Not smiling any more, the Pole spoke in the Lizards’ language. Queek listened intently, then said, “It is precisely the instability of your species that makes you so dangerous.”

“We are not unstable,” Molotov said. “We are progressive.”

“I cannot translate that,” the interpreter told him. “The language of the Race has no such word, no such concept.”

“I believe it,” Molotov said, and then regretted wasting his time on a cut the interpreter would feel but the Lizard, even were it translated for him, would not. Reactionary that he was, he would take it for praise. Sighing, Molotov went on, “I reiterate: we have tolerated one blow because we are a peace-loving nation and are, in the words of the old superstition, willing to turn our cheek. Once. We are willing once. If you also strike at the cheek we have turned, only the devil’s grandfather knows where things will end.”

Whenever Russians brought the devil’s kin into a conversation, they meant something had gone or would go dreadfully wrong somewhere. Molotov wondered how Queek’s interpreter was getting that across in the language of the Lizards. The ambassador said, “I have delivered my message. You have delivered yours, which I shall transmit to my superiors for their evaluation. Have we any further business?”

“I think not,” Molotov answered. “We have threatened each other enough for a summer afternoon.” The interpreter gave him an odd look. He stared back, imperturbable as always. With a shrug that said the Pole couldn’t believe what he’d heard, the fellow translated for Queek.

“Truth,” the ambassador said, one of the few words in his language Molotov understood. He and the interpreter left together.

Molotov went into the chamber behind the office and changed clothes, then went into the other office onto which that chamber opened, the one no Lizard was allowed to enter. He spoke to the secretary there: “Summon Lavrenti Pavlovich, Andrei Andreyevich, and Georgi Konstantinovich to meet me here in an hour’s time.”

“Yes, Comrade General Secretary,” the man said.

What will they be thinking? Molotov wondered. What will be going through Beria’s mind? Through Gromyko’s? Through Zhukov’s? Molotov had always trembled inside when Stalin summoned him to a meeting-often in the wee hours of the morning. Did his summons make his chief lieutenants shiver? He doubted it. He was as ruthless as Stalin had ever been, but less showy about it. And Stalin had enjoyed, and let people know he enjoyed, issuing death sentences. Molotov did it as routinely as Stalin ever had, but got no great pleasure from it. Maybe that made him less frightening than his great predecessor. So long as he held plots at bay, he didn’t care.

Marshal Zhukov arrived first, fifty-eight minutes after Molotov told the secretary to call him. Gromyko was a minute behind him. This time, Beria was late: he strolled into the office ten minutes after Gromyko. He did not excuse himself, but simply sat down. Molotov did not think he was making a display of his power-just an uncultured lout from the Caucasus with no sense of time.

He did not make an issue of it. It would keep. Heading the NKVD did make Beria immensely powerful. But no chief of the secret police was ever loved. If Molotov decided to get rid of him, he would have the Party and the Red Army behind him, and a faction within the NKVD as well. So he did not worry about Beria… too much.

Of course, no one in the Reich had worried about Himmler too much, either. Molotov wished he hadn’t had that thought.

Shoving it aside, he said, “Now that we are all here”-as much of a dig at Beria as he would take-“let us discuss latest developments with the Lizards.” He summarized his conversation with Queek.

“Comrade General Secretary, I want you to know we could have inflicted severe losses on the Lizards when they attacked our air base,” Zhukov said. “Only at your orders did we refrain from punishing the bandits.”

“It is as well you did,” Molotov said. He did not glance over to Zhukov. He did not need to see the man who looked like a peasant and fought the way Wehrmacht field marshals wished they could to worry about him. Like Beria, Zhukov was able. Unlike Beria, the marshal was also popular. But he had had many chances to stage a coup, and had taken none of them. Molotov trusted him as far as he trusted any man, which was not far. He went on, “I do not know how harshly the Lizards would have retaliated had we struck at them, and I did not wish to discover this by expensive experiment.”

“They are sons of bitches, nothing but sons of bitches,” said Zhukov, who could affect a peasant’s crudity to cloak his keen wits.

“They are powerful sons of bitches,” Gromyko said, another self-evident truth. “Powerful sons of bitches have to be handled carefully.” He did glance over at Beria.

Beria either did not notice or affected not to. He said, “The foreign commissar is right. And I can also tell you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, that the Lizards think we are powerful sons of bitches. Signals intercepts and reconnaissance satellite photos”-both provinces of the NKVD-“show their colonists are not settling close to the southern borders of the USSR. You told them they did not have our leave to do so, and they are taking your word seriously.”

“That is good news,” Molotov said, and Zhukov and Gromyko both nodded. Molotov continued, “That the colonists are continuing to land anywhere on the surface of the world is not good news, however.”

“From all I have learned, they will have a hard time making the colonists into soldiers,” Zhukov said, “a much harder time than we have in turning conscripts into fighting men. This works in our favor.”

“So it does, Georgi Konstantinovich, but only so far,” Molotov replied. “They are landing many workers and many machines. Their industrial output will increase with more factories and more workers who do not seek to sabotage production. What soldiers they have will be better equipped.”

“They will also be able to exploit the resources of the territory they control more effectively than has been true up till now,” Gromyko added. In many ways, he thought very much like Molotov. Unlike Molotov, though, he seemed content with a subordinate role in affairs.

Zhukov said, “If they train no more soldiers, they will run out sooner or later. How many weapons they make will not matter if they have no one who can fire them.”

“Interesting,” Molotov murmured. “Perhaps very interesting.” Now he glanced over at Beria. “Inquire among our prisoners as to how rapidly Lizards reproduce and how long they need to be trained to become proper parts of their society.”

“I will do that, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the NKVD chief said. “This is not information we needed before, and so we never tried to pull it out. Now that we see it might be useful, I expect we can get it.”

“Good,” Molotov said. “Without the captives we took in the fighting, we would never have been able to move ahead in so many fields so fast. We have learned a great deal from them. And now that a new kind of knowledge becomes more valuable, as you say, we shall learn more.”

Beria nodded. “I shall have the precise details for you very soon, even if it means testing a couple of Lizards to destruction, as the engineers say.” The electric lights overhead glinted from his spectacles, and perhaps from his eyes as well. He was no simple sadist, as were some of the men who worked for him, but he was not immune to the pleasures inherent in his job, either. Molotov had heard stories about a couple of young girls who’d vanished without a trace. He’d never tried to find out if they were true. It didn’t matter. If he ever decided to topple Beria, he’d trot out the stories whether they were true or not.

“Comrade General Secretary, were you serious when you told Queek we might consider realigning ourselves with the Greater German Reich if pressure from the Lizards forced us in that direction?” Gromyko asked.

“I was not jocular,” Molotov replied. Gromyko gave him a reproachful look. Ignoring it, he elaborated: “I shall act as circumstances force me to. If I judge the Lizards are a more dangerous threat than the Nazis, how in good conscience can I avoid seeking a rapprochement with Nuremberg?” The Germans had not rebuilt Berlin after the Lizards struck it with an atomic bomb, but left the city in ruins as a monument to the enemy’s depravity-showing, in Molotov’s view, a curious delicacy given their own habits.

Nodding at his words, Gromyko said, “We have come through the first crisis since the arrival of the colonization fleet well enough-not perfectly, but well enough. May we likewise weather the storms ahead.”

“We shall not merely weather them. We shall prevail,” Molotov said. “The dialectic demands it.” His colleagues solemnly nodded.