Striking the Balance

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Mordechai Anielewicz had company as he approached the meeting with the Nazis: a squad of Jews with submachine guns and rifles. He wasn’t supposed to bring along that kind of company, but he’d long since stopped worrying about what he was supposed to do. He did what needed doing.

He waved. His support squad vanished among the trees. If anything went wrong at the meeting, the Germans would pay. A couple of years before, Jewish fighters wouldn’t have been so smooth about moving in the woods. They’d had practice since.

Anielewicz walked up the trail toward the clearing where he was supposed to confer with the Nazis and see what Heinrich Jager had up his sleeve-or what he said he had up his sleeve. Since that talk with the Pole who called himself Tadeusz, Anielewicz was leery about believing anything the German might tell him. On the other hand, he would have been leery about believing Jager without talking to Tadeusz, too.

As he’d been instructed, he paused before entering the clearing and whistled the first few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. He found that a curious choice for the Germans, since those bars made a Morse V-for-victory, the symbol of the anti-Nazi underground before the Lizards came. But, when somebody whistled back, he advanced up the forest track and out into the open space.

There stood Jager, and beside him a tail, broad-shouldered man with a scar on his face and a glint in his eye. The scar made the big man’s expression hard to read: Mordechai couldn’t tell if that was a friendly grin or a nasty one. The German had on a private’s tunic, but if he was a private, Anielewicz was a priest.

Jager said, “Good day,” and offered his hand. Mordechai took it: Jager had always dealt fairly with him. The German panzer colonel said, “Anielewicz, here is Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who’s given the Lizards more trouble than any ten men you could name.”

Mordechai kicked himself for not recognizing Skorzeny. The German propaganda machine had pumped out plenty of material about him. If he’d done a quarter of what Gobbels claimed, he was indeed a hero on the hoof. Now he stuck out his hand and boomed, “Good to meet you, Anielewicz. From what Jager says, you two are old friends.”

“We know each other, yes,Standartenfuhrer.” Mordechai shook hands, but deliberately used Skorzeny’s SS rank rather than theWehrmacht equivalent Jager had given.I know what you are.

So what?Skorzeny’s eyes answered insolently. He said, “Isn’t that sweet? How do you feel about giving the Lizards a boot in the balls they haven’t got?”

“Them or you, it doesn’t much matter to me.” Anielewicz kept his voice light, casual. Skorzeny impressed him more than he’d expected. The man didn’t seem to give a damn whether he lived or died. Mordechai had seen that before, but never coupled with so much relentless energy. If Skorzeny died, he’d make sure he had a lot of choice company.

He studied Anielewicz, too, doing his best to intimidate him with his presence. Mordechai stared back. If the SS man, wanted to try something, he’d be sorry. He didn’t try. He laughed instead. “All right, Jew, let’s do business. I’ve got a little toy for the Lizards, and I could use some help getting it right into the middle of Lodz where it’ll do the most good.”

“Sounds interesting,” Mordechai said. “So what is this toy? Tell me about it.”

Skorzeny set a finger by the side of his nose and winked. “It’s the biggest goddamn ginger bomb you ever did see, that’s what. Not just the powdered stuff, mind you, but an aerosol that’ll get all over everything in a huge area and keep the Lizards too drugged up to get into it for a long time.” He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “We’ve tested it on Lizard prisoners, and it’s the straight goods. It’ll drive ’em out of their skulls.”

“I bet it will,” Anielewicz answered.Sure it will. If he’s telling the truth. Is he? If you were a mouse, would you let a cat carry cheese down into your hole? But if Skorzeny was lying, he didn’t show it at all. And if, by some odd chance, he was telling the truth, the ginger bomb would wreak all the havoc he said it would. Mordechai could easily imagine the Lizards battling one another in the streets because they were too full of ginger to think straight, or even to do much thinking at all.

He wanted to believe Skorzeny. Without Jager’s obscure warning, he thought he would have believed Skorzeny. Something about the SS man made you want to go in the direction he was pushing. Anielewicz had enough of that gift himself to recognize it in others-and Skorzeny had a big dose.

Anielewicz decided to prod a little, to see what lay behind the bluff, hearty facade. “Why the devil should I trust you?” he demanded. “When has the SS ever meant anything but trouble for Jews?”

“The SS means trouble for all enemies of theReich.” Pride rang in Skorzeny’ s voice. In his own way, he was-or seemed-honest. Anielewicz didn’t know whether he preferred that or the hypocrisy he’d been expecting. Skorzeny went on, “Who now is the most dangerous enemy of theReich? You kikes?” He shook his head. “Of course not. The Lizards are the most dangerous. We worry about them first and the rest of the shit later.”

Before the Lizards came, the Soviet Union had been the most dangerous enemy of theReich. That hadn’t stopped the Nazis from building extermination camps in Poland, diverting resources they could have used to fight the Bolsheviks. Anielewicz said, “All right, suppose you drive the Lizards away from Lodz and Warsaw. What happens to us Jews then?”

Skorzeny spread his big hands and shrugged. “I don’t make policy. I just kill people.” Amazing that his grin could be disarming after he said something like that, but it was. “You don’t want to be around us, though, and we don’t want you around, so maybe we could ship you somewhere. Who knows? To Madagascar, maybe; they were talking about that before the Lizards came, but we didn’t exactly own the seas.” Now that twisted grin was wry. “Or maybe even to Palestine. Like I say, who the hell knows?”

He was glib. He was convincing. He was all the more frightening on account of that. “Why use this thing in Lodz?” Mordechai asked. “Why not at the front?”

“Two reasons,” Skorzeny answered. “First, you get a lot more enemies in one place at concentration areas in the rear. And second, a lot of Lizards at the front have some protection against gas warfare, and that keeps the ginger out, too.” He chuckled. “Ginger is gas warfare-happy gas, but gas.”

Anielewicz turned to Heinrich Jager. “What do you think of this? Will it work? If it was up to you, would you do it?”

Jager’s face didn’t show much, but Jager’s face, from what Mordechai had seen, seldom showed much. He half regretted his words; he was putting on the spot the nearest thing he had to a friend and ally in theWehrmacht. Jager coughed, then said, “I’ve been on more missions with Colonel Skorzeny than I care to remember.” Skorzeny laughed out loud at that. Ignoring him, Jager went on, “I’ve never seen him fail when he sets himself a goal. If he says this will do the job, you’d better listen to him.”

“Oh, I’m listening,” Anielewicz said. He gave his attention back to Otto Skorzeny. “Well,Herr Standartenfuhrer, what will you do if I tell you we don’t want anything to do with this? Will you try to get it into Lodz anyhow?”

“Aber naturlich.”Skorzeny’s Austrian accent made him sound like an aristocrat fromfin de siecle Vienna rather than a Nazi thug. “We don’t give up easily. We’ll do this with you or without you. It would be easier with you, maybe, and you Jews can put yourselves in our good graces by going along. Since we’re going to win the war and rule Poland, doesn’t that strike you as a good idea?”

Come on. Collaborate with us.Skorzeny wasn’t subtle. Mordechai wondered if he had it in him to be subtle. He sighed. “Since you put it that way-”

Skorzeny slapped him on the back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Ha! I knew you were a smart Jew. I-”

Noise from the woods made him break off. Anielewicz quickly figured out what it was. “So you brought some friends along to the meeting, too? They must have bumped up against mine.”

“I said you were a smart Jew, didn’t I?” Skorzeny answered. “How soon can we get this moving? I don’t like waiting around with my thumb up my arse.”

“Let me get back to Lodz and make the arrangements to bring in your little package,” Mordechai said. “I know how to get in touch with Colonel Jager here, and he probably knows how to get in touch with you.”

“Yes, probably.” Jager’s voice was dry.

“Good enough,” Skorzeny said. “Just don’t take too damn long, that’s all I have to tell you. Remember, with you or without you, this is going to happen. Those Lizards will be sorry about the day they crawled out of their eggs.”

“You’ll hear from me soon,” Mordechai promised. He didn’t want Skorzeny doing whatever he had in mind all by himself. The SS man was altogether too likely to succeed at it, whatever it was. It might make the Lizards sorry, but Anielewicz wouldn’t have bet the Jews would care for it, either.

He whistled loudly, a cue for his men to head toward Lodz, then nodded to Jager and Skorzeny and left the clearing. He was very thoughtful all the way back down there.

“How far do we trust the Germans?” he asked back at the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “How farcan we trust the Germans, especially when one of them has told us not to?”

“Timeo Danaos et donas ferentes,”Bertha Fleishman said. Mordechai nodded; he’d had a secular education, with Latin a good part of it. For those who didn’t know their Virgil, Bertha translated: “I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.”

“That’s it exactly,” Solomon Gruver said. The fireman was a battered, blunt-faced fellow who looked like a prizefighter and had been a sergeant in the Polish Army in 1939. He’d managed to conceal that from the Nazis, who probably would have liquidated him for it. It made him enormously useful to the Jewish underground: unlike most of its members, he hadn’t had to learn matters military from scratch. He tugged at his bushy, gray-streaked beard. “Sometimes I think Nussboym had the right idea after all: better to live under the Lizards than with these Nazimamzrim cracking the whip.”

“Either way, we get the short end of the stick,” Mordechai said. Heads bobbed up and down along the length of the table. “With the Nazis, it’s just us who get the short end, but it’s bloody short. With the Lizards, everybody gets it, but maybe not so bad as the Germans give it to us.” He chuckled ruefully. “Some bargain, isn’t it?”

“So what do we do?” Gruver demanded. This wasn’t a military matter, or not strictly so. He let others lead-sometimes made others lead-in policy decisions, then weighed in with his own opinion, but was oddly shy about taking the lead himself.

Everybody looked at Anielewicz. Partly that was because he’d met the Germans, partly because people were used to looking at him. He said, “I don’t think we have any choice but to take the thing from Skorzeny. That way, we have some control over it, no matter what it ends up being.”

“The Trojan Horse,” Bertha Fleishman suggested.

Mordechai nodded. “That’s right. That’s just what it’s liable to be. But Skorzeny said he’d do it with us or without us. I believe him. We’d be making a big mistake if we ever took that man less than seriously. We’ll take it now, we’ll do our best to find out what it is, and go from there. Otherwise, he’d find some other way to sneak it into Lodz without our knowing-”

“You really think he could do that?” Gruver asked.

“I have talked with this man. I would not put anything past him,” Mordechai answered. “The only way we have a chance of getting away with this is pretending we’re a pack ofschlemiels who believe everything he says. Maybe then he’ll trust us to do his dirty work for him and not look inside the Trojan Horse.”

“And if it is the world’s biggest ginger bomb, as he says?” somebody asked.

“Then we have a lot of Lizards getting into a king-sized brawl, right in the middle of Lodz,” Mordechai said.“Alevai omayn, that’s all we have.”

“T-T-T-oma,” the Tosevite hatchling said triumphantly, and looked right at Ttomalss. Its mobile face twisted into an expression that indicated pleasure.

“Yes, I am Ttomalss,” the psychologist agreed. The hatchling had no control over its excretions, but it was learning to talk. The Big Uglies were a peculiar species indeed, as far as Ttomalss was concerned.

“T-T-T-oma,” the hatchling repeated, and added an emphatic cough for good measure. Ttomalss wondered whether it really was putting stress on his name or just reproducing another word-like sound it knew.

“Yes, I am Ttomalss,” he said again. If Big Uglies acquired language in a way at all similar to that which hatchlings of the Race used, hearing things over and over would help it learn. It was already showing itself to be a good deal more precocious than hatchlings of the Race as far as talking went: however it learned words, it learned them rapidly. But its coordination, or rather lack of same, set it apart from hatchlings still wet with the juices of their eggs.

He started to repeat his name once more, but the communicator squawked for attention. He went over to it and saw Ppevel staring out of the screen. “Superior sir,” he said as he turned on the video so Ppevel could see him in turn. “How may I serve you, superior sir?”

The assistant administrator for the eastern section of the main continental mass wasted no time with polite small talk. He said, “Prepare the hatchling that came from the body of the Tosevite called Liu Han for immediate return to the surface of Tosev 3.”

Ttomalss had known for some time that that blow might come. He still could not prevent a hiss of pain. “Superior sir, I must appeal,” he said. “The hatchling is at the point of beginning to acquire language. To abandon the project involving it would be to cast aside knowledge that can be obtained in no other way, violating principles of scientflic investigation the Race has traditionally employed regardless of circumstances.” He knew no stronger argument than that.

“Tradition and Tosev 3 increasingly prove immiscible,” Ppevel replied. “I repeat: prepare the hatchling for immediate return to Tosev 3.”

“Superior sir, it shall be done,” Ttomalss said miserably. Obedience was a principle the Race had traditionally followed, too. Even so, he went on, “I do protest your decision, and request”-he couldn’t demand, not when Ppevel outranked him-“that you tell me why you made it.”

“I will give you my reasons-or rather, my reason,” the assistant administrator answered. “It is very simple: the People’s Liberation Army is making life in China unbearable for the Race. Their most recent outrage, which took place just the other day, involved the detonation of several large-caliber artillery shells, and produced losses larger than we can afford to absorb. The males of the People’s Liberation Army-and the one angry female whose hatchling you now have-have pledged to diminish such activities in exchange for the return of this hatchling. The bargain strikes me as being worth making.”

“The female Liu Han is still high in the councils of this bandit grouping?” Ttomalss said glumly. He had been so certain his plan to disgrace the female would succeed. It had fit perfectly with what he thought he knew of Big Ugly psychology.

But Ppevel said, “Yes, she is, and still insistent on the return of the hatchling. It has become a political liability to us. Returning it to the Tosevite female Liu Han may transform that liability into a propaganda victory, and will have the effect of reducing military pressure on our forces in Peking. Therefore, for the third time, ready the hatchling for immediate return to Tosev 3.”

“It shall be done,” Ttomalss said sadly. Ppevel didn’t hear that: he’d already broken the connection, no doubt so he wouldn’t have to listen to any further objections from Ttomalss. That was rude. Ttomalss, unfortunately for him, was in no position to do anything about it except resent it.

He had to assume that when Ppevel saidimmediate, he meant it. He made sure the Tosevite hatchling had dry wrappings for its excretory orflices, and made sure those wrappings were snug around the hatchling’s legs and midsection. The trip down would be in free fall; the last thing he wanted was bodily waste floating around in the shuttlecraft. The pilot wouldn’t be delighted if that happened, either.

He wished he could do something about the hatchling’s mouth. Big Uglies in free fall had been known to suffer reverse peristalsis, as if they were expelling poisonous material they had swallowed. The Race did not suffer similar symptoms. Ttomalss packed several clean waste cloths, just in case he’d need them.

While he worked, the hatchling cheerfully babbled on. The sounds it made these days were as close to the ones the Race used as it could come with its somewhat different vocal apparatus. Ttomalss let out another hissing sigh. He would have to start over with a new hatchling, and it would be years before he could learn all he wanted about Tosevite language acquisition.

Tessrek stopped in the doorway. He didn’t undo the gate Ttomalss had rigged to keep the hatchling from wandering the corridor, but jeered over it. “You’ll finally be getting rid of that horrible thing, I hear. I won’t be sorry to see-and scent-the last of it, let me tell you.”

Ppevel wouldn’t have called Tessrek directly. He might well have called the male who supervised both Tessrek and Ttomalss, though, to make sure his orders were obeyed. That would have been all he needed to get rumors flying. Ttomalss said, “Go tend to your own research, and may it be treated as cavalierly as mine has.”

Tessrek let his mouth fall open in a derisive laugh. “My research, unlike yours, is productive, so I have no fear of its being curtailed.” He did leave then, and just as well, or Ttomalss might have thrown something at him.

Only a little later, a male in the red and silver body paint of a shuttlecraft pilot gave the gateway a dubious look with one eye turret. He speared Ttomalss with the other, saying, “Is the Big Ugly ready to travel, Researcher?” His tone warned,It had better be.

“It is,” Ttomalss said grudgingly. He examined the other male’s body paint again and added, even more grudgingly, “Superior sir.”

“Good,” the shuttlecraft pilot said. “I am Heddosh, by the way.” He gave Ttomalss his name as if convinced the researcher should already have known it.

Ttomalss scooped up the Tosevite hatchling. That wasn’t as easy as it had been when the creature was newly emerged from the body of the female Liu Han: it was much bigger now, and weighed much more. Ttomalss had to put down the bag of supplies he had with him so he could open the gate, at which point the hatchling nearly wriggled out of his arms. Heddosh emitted a derisive snort. Ttomalss glared at him. He had no idea of the difficulties involved in keeping this hatchling of another species alive and healthy.

Being taken to the shuttlecraft fascinated the hatchling. Several times on the journey, it saw something new and said, “This?”-sometimes with the interrogative cough, sometimes without.

“It speaks!” Heddosh said in surprise.

“Yes, it does,” Ttomalss answered coldly. “It would learn to speak more if I were allowed to continue my experiment, too.” Now the hatchling would have to acquire the horrible sounds of Chinese rather than the Race’s elegant, precise, and (to Ttomalss) beautiful language.

The clanging noises the shuttlecraft airlock doors made frightened the hatchling, which clung tightly to Ttomalss. He soothed it as best he could, all the while trying to look on the bright side of things. The only bright side he found was that, until he could obtain another newly emerged Big Ugly hatchling, he would get enough sleep for a while.

More clangings signaled the shuttlecraft’s freeing itself from the starship to which it had been attached. With centrifugal force no longer giving a simulacrum of gravity, the shuttlecraft went into free fall. To Ttomalss’ relief, the hatchling showed no perceptible distress. It seemed to find the sensation interesting, perhaps even pleasant. Data showed that the female Liu Han had had the same reaction. Ttomalss wondered if it was hereditary.

There was a long-term research project, he thought. Maybe someone could start it after the conquest was safe and secure. He wondered if the day would ever come when the conquest was safe and secure. He’d never imagined the Race making concessions to the Tosevites in negotiations, as Ppevel was in yielding the hatchling to them. Once you started making concessions, where would you stop? That was a chilling thought, when you got down to it.

The shuttlecraft’s rocket engine began to roar. Acceleration shoved Ttomalss back into his couch, and the hatchling against him. It squalled in fright. He comforted it again, even though its weight pressing on him made him far from comfortable. The hatchling had calmed before acceleration ended, and squealed with delight when free fall returned.

Ttomalss wondered if the Big Ugly female Liu Han could have done as well with the hatchling, even if she’d kept it since it emerged from her body. He had his doubts.

When Otto Skorzeny came back to the panzer encampment, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Brush the canary feathers off your chin,” Heinrich Jager told him.

The SS man actually did make brushing motions at his face. In spite of everything, Jager laughed. Whatever else you could say about him, Skorzeny had style. The trouble was, there was so much else to say. “Off it went,” Skorzeny boomed. “The Jews ate the story up like gumdrops, poor damned fools. They brought up their own wagon to carry the present, and they promised they’d sneak it past the Lizards. I figure they can do that, probably better than I could. And once they do-”

Jager tipped back his head and slid his index finger across his throat. Chuckling, Skorzeny nodded. “When is the timer set for?” Jager asked.

“Day after tomorrow,” Skorzeny answered. “That’ll give ’em plenty of time to get the bomb back to Lodz. Poor stupid bastards.” He shook his head, perhaps even in genuine sympathy. “I wonder if anybody’s ever done such a good job of committing suicide before.”

“Masada,” Jager said, dredging the name up from the long-vanished days before the First World War, when he’d wanted to be a Biblical archaeologist. He saw it meant nothing to Skorzeny, and explained: “The whole garrison killed one another off instead of surrendering to the Romans.”

“There’ll be more of ’em done in now,” the SS man said. “A lot more.”

“Ja,”Jager answered absently. He still couldn’t tell whether Skorzeny hated Jews on his own hook or because he’d got orders to hate them. In the end, what did it matter? He’d go after them with the same genial ferocity either way.

Had the message got through to Anielewicz? Jager had been wondering about that ever since the meeting he, Skorzeny, and the Jewish fighting leader had had in the forest. Anielewicz hadn’t tipped his hand then. Had he got the message and then not believed it? Had he got it, believed it, and then been unable to convince his fellow Jews it was true?

No way to be sure, not from here. Jager shook his head. He’d have a way to tell, soon enough. If the Jews in Lodz were snuffed out like so many candles day after tomorrow, he could figure somebody down there had decided he was lying.

Skorzeny had an animal alertness to him. “What’s up?” he asked, seeing Jager’s head go back and forth.

“Nothing, really.” The panzer colonel hoped his voice sounded casual. “Thinking about the surprise they’ll have in Lodz-for a little while, anyhow.”

“For a little while is right,” Skorzeny said. “Stupid sheep. You’d think they’d know better than to trust a German, but no, they walked right into it.” He bleated sardonically. “And the lambs’ blood will go up on the doorposts of all the houses.” Jager stared; he hadn’t imagined Skorzeny as a man who knew his Scripture. The SSStandartenfuhrer chuckled again. “TheFuhrer will have his revenge on the Jews, and who knows? We may even kill a few Lizards, too.”

“We’d better,” Jager answered. “You go and rip the heart out of the human sector of Lodz and there’s nothing to keep the scaly sons of bitches from staging out of it any more. They could hit the bases of our penetrations north and south of the city and cut us right off. That’s too steep a price for theFuhrer’s revenge, you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you, and theFuhrer doesn’t think so,” Skorzeny said. “He told me as much himself-he wants those Jews dead.”

“How am I supposed to argue with that?” Jager said. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. So he’d set himself up to circumvent a personal order from theFuhrer, had he? Well. If anyone ever found out what he’d done, he was a dead man anyhow. They couldn’t kill him any deader.No, but they can take longer getting you dead, he thought uneasily.

He threw himself flat on the ground almost before he consciously heard the shells whistling in from out of the east. Skorzeny sprawled there beside him, hands up to cover the back of his neck. Somewhere not far away, a wounded man was screaming. The bombardment went on for about fifteen minutes, then let up.

Jager scrambled to his feet “We’ve got to move camp now,” he shouted. “They know where we are. We were lucky that time-far as I could tell, that was all ordinary ammunition coming, none of their special delights that spit mines all over the place so people and panzers don’t dare go anywhere. They’re short of those little beauties, by all the signs, but they will use ’em if they think they can make a profit. We won’t let ’em.”

He’d hardly finished speaking before the first panzer engines rumbled into life. He was proud of his men. Most of them were veterans who’d been through everything the Russians and the British and the Lizards could throw at them. They understood what needed doing and took care of it with a minimum of fuss and bother. Skorzeny was a genius raider, but he couldn’t run a regiment like this. Jager had his own talents, and they were not to be sneezed at.

While the regiment was shifting its base, he didn’t have to think about the horror waiting to happen in Lodz, growing closer with every tick of a timer. Skorzeny was right: the Jews were fools to trust any German. Now the question was, which German had they been fools enough to trust?

The next day, he was too busy to worry about it. A Lizard counterattack drove the German forces west six or eight kilometers. Panzers in the regiment went from machinery to burnt and twisted scrap metal, a couple from the fire of Lizard panzer cannon, the rest because of the antipanzer rockets the Lizard infantry carried. The only Lizard panzer killed was taken out by aWehrmacht private in a tree who dropped a Molotov cocktail down into the turret through the open cupola when the panzer clattered by below him. That happened toward sunset, and seemed to halt the Lizards’ push all by itself. They didn’t like losing panzers these days.

“We have to do better,” he told his men as they ate black bread and sausage that night. “We got flank targets, but we weren’t hitting them. Can’t make many mistakes like that, not unless we want to get buried here.”

“But,Herr Oberst,” somebody said, “when they move, they can move so damned fast, they’re by us before we have a chance to react.”

“Good thing we had defense in depth, or they would have cracked us wide open,” somebody else said. Jager nodded, pleased at the way the troops were hashing things out for themselves. That was how German soldiers were supposed to operate. They weren’t just ignorant peasants who followed orders without thinking about them, as Red Army men did. They had brains and imaginations, and used them.

He was about to curl up in his bedroll under his Panther when Skorzeny showed up in camp. The SS man was toting a jug of vodka he’d found God only knew where, and passed it around so everybody got a nip. It wasn’t good vodka-the taste put Jager in mind of stale kerosene-but it was better than no vodka.

“Think they’re going to hit us again in the morning?” Skorzeny asked.

“Won’t know for certain till then,” Jager answered, “but if I had to guess, I’d say no. They’d have kept pressing harder after it got dark if that was what they had in mind. These days, they push when they think they’ve found a weakness, but they ease up when we show strength.”

“They can’t afford the kind of losses they get when they go up against a strongpoint,” Skorzeny said shrewdly.

“I think you’re right.” Jager glanced over at the SS man in the darkness. “We could have used that nerve gas here at the front.”

“Ahh, you’d say that even if things were quiet,” Skorzeny retorted. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, right where it is.” He grunted. “I want your wireless people to be alert for any intercepts they pick up about that, too. If the Lizards don’t burn up the airwaves, I’ll eat my hat.”

“That’s fine.” Jager yawned enormously. “Right now, I’m alert for sleep. You want to crawl in under here? Safest place you can be if they start shelling again. I know damn well you snore, but I suppose I can live with it.”

Skorzeny laughed. Gunther Grillparzer said, “He’s not the only one who snores-sir.” Betrayed by his own gunner, Jager settled in for the night.

Spatters of small-arms fire woke him a couple of times. They picked up at dawn, but, as he’d predicted, the Lizards were more interested in consolidating what they’d gained the day before than in pushing on against stiffening resistance.

Otto Skorzeny hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted the wireless men to stay alert. He made sure they did, hanging around them and regaling them with what seemed like an endless stream of dirty stories. Most of them were good dirty stories, too, and some were even new to Jager, who’d thought he’d heard every story of that sort ever invented.

As morning gave way to afternoon, Skorzeny’s temper began to wear thin. He paced through the camp, kicking up dirt and sending spring flowers flying. “Damn it, we should have intercepted something from the Jews or the Lizards in Lodz by now!” he stormed.

“Maybe they’re all dead,” Jager suggested. The notion horrflied him, but might ease Skorzeny’s mind.

But the big SS man shook his head. “Too much to hope for. Somebody always lives through these things by one kind of fool luck or another.” Jager thought of Max, the foulmouthed Jew who’d lived through Babi Yar. Skorzeny was right. He went on with a muttered, “No, something’s gone south somewhere.”

“You think the timer didn’t work the way it should have?” Jager asked.

“I suppose it is possible,” Skorzeny allowed, “but fry me for aschnitzel if I ever heard of one of them failing before. They aren’t just foolproof, they’re idiotproof, and the gadget had a backup. We send out a goody like that, we want to make sure it works as advertised.” He chuckled. “That’s what people who don’t like us so well call German efficiency, eh? No, the only way that bomb could have failed would have been-”

“What?” Jager said, though he had an idea as to what. “As you say. If it had a backup timer, it was going to go off.”

“The only way that bomb could have failed-” Skorzeny repeated musingly. His gray eyes went very wide. “The only way that bomb could have failed would have been for that stinking little kike to pull the wool over my eyes, and dip me in shit if he didn’t do it!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “The bastard! The fucker! The nerve of him! Next time I see him, I’ll cut off his balls one at a time.” Then, to Jager’s amazement, he started to laugh. “He played me for a sucker. I didn’t think any man alive could do that. I’d like to shake his hand-afterhe’s castrated, not before. You thinkstupid kike and you take it for granted, and this is what it gets you. Jesus Christ!”

Also a Jew,Jager thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked, “What now? If the Jews in Lodz know what it is”-and if they do, or guess, it’s thanks to me, and how do I feel about that? — “they’ve got their hands on something they can use against us.”

“Don’t I know it.” Skorzeny sounded disgusted, maybe with the Jews, maybe with himself. He wasn’t used to failing. Then he brightened. For a moment, he looked like his old, devilish self. “Maybe we can plaster the place with rockets and long-range artillery, hope to blow up the damned thing that way, at least deny the Jews the use of it.” He made an unhappy clucking noise. “It’s bloody long odds, though.”

“Too true,” Jager said, as if sympathetically. “Those rockets pack a decent punch, but you can’t tell for sure whether they’ll hit the right town, let alone the right street.”

“I wish we had some of the toys the Lizards know how to make,” Skorzeny said, still discontented with the world. “They don’t just hit the right street. They’ll pick a room for you. Hell, they’ll fly into a closet if that’s what you want.” He scratched at his chin. “Well, one way or another, those Jews are going to pay. And when they do, I’ll be the one who collects.” He sounded very sure of himself.

Off in the next room at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, there were so many car batteries that they’d had to reinforce the floor to take the weight. Among the Lizard gadgets they powered was the radio set taken from the shuttlecraft that had brought Straha down to Earth when he defected to the United States.

Now he and Sam Yeager sat in front of that radio, flipping from one frequency to another in an effort to monitor the Lizards’ signals and find out what the Race was up to. Right now, they weren’t picking up much anywhere. Straha had the leisure to turn to Yeager and ask, “How many of our males do you have engaged in the practice of espionage and signal gathering?”

“Numbers? Who knows?” Sam answered. If he had known, he wouldn’t have told Straha. One of the things he’d had drilled into him was that you didn’t tell anybody, human or Lizard, anything he didn’t have to know. “But a lot of them, a lot of the time. Not many of us Big Uglies”-he used the Lizards’ nickname for mankind unselfconsciously-“speak your language well enough to follow without help from one of you.”

“You, Sam Yeager, I think you could succeed at this,” Straha said, which made Sam feel damn good. He thought he could have gained even more fluency in the Lizards’ language if he hadn’t also had to spend time with Robert Goddard. On the other hand, he would have learned more about rockets if he hadn’t had to spend time with Straha and the other Lizard POWs.

And he would have learned more about his baby son if he hadn’t been in the Army. That would have kept Barbara happier, too; he worried about not seeing her enough. There weren’t enough hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, to do all the things he wanted to do. That was true all the time, but trying to keep up during a war rubbed your nose in it.

Straha touched the frequency-advance toggle. The Lizard numbers in the display showed that the radio was now monitoring a frequency a tenth of a megacycle higher (or rather, something that worked out to be about an eighth of a megacycle-the Lizards naturally used their own units rather than those of mankind). A male’s voice came out of the speaker.

Yeager leaned forward and listened intently. The Lizard was apparently in a rear area, and complaining about rockets falling nearby and disrupting resupply efforts for the troops pushing toward Denver. “That’s good news,” Sam said, scribbling notes.

“Truth,” Straha agreed. “Your ventures into uncharted technology are paying a handsome profit for your species. If the Race were so innovative, Tosev 3 would long since have been conquered-provided the Race had not blown itself to radioactive dust in innovative frenzy.”

“You think that’s what we would have done if you hadn’t invaded?” Sam asked.

“It is certainly one of the higher probabilities,” Straha said, and Yeager was hard-pressed to disagree with him. The ex-shiplord flipped to a new frequency. The Lizard talking now sounded angry as all get-out. “He is ordering the dismissal, demotion, and transfer of a local commander in a region called Illinois,” Straha said. Yeager nodded. The Lizard went on, “Where is this Illinois place?”

Sam showed him on a map. He was listening, too. “Something about letting a pack of prisoners escape or get rescued or something. The fellow who’s cursing him is really doing quite a job, isn’t he?”

“If said snout-to-snout, telling a male that someone shit in his egg before it hatched is guaranteed to start a fight,” Straha said.

“I believe it.” Sam listened to the radio some more. “They’re moving that incompetent officer to-upstate New York.” He wrote it down. “That’s worth knowing. With luck, we’ll be able to take advantage of his weaknesses over there, too.”

“Truth,” Straha said again, this time in bemused tones. “You Big Uglies aggressively exploit the intelligence you gather, and you gather great quantities of it. Do you do this in your own conflicts as well?”

“Don’t know,” Yeager answered. “I’ve never been in a war before, and I’m only a little fellow in this one.” He thought back to his ballplaying days, and to all the signs he and his teammates had stolen. Mutt Daniels was a genius at that kind of thing. He wondered how-and if-Mutt was doing these days.

Straha shifted to yet another frequency. An excited-sounding Lizard was relaying a long, involved message. “Ah, that is most interesting,” Straha said when he was done.

“I didn’t follow all of it,” Sam confessed, embarrassed at having to say that after Straha had praised his grasp of the Lizards’ tongue. “Something about ginger and calculator fraud, whatever that is.”

“Not calculator fraud-computer fraud,” Straha said. “I do not blame you for not understanding completely. You Big Uglies, while technically far more advanced than you have any business being, as yet have no real grasp of the potential of computing machines.”

“Maybe not,” Yeager said. “Sounds like we don’t have any grasp of how to commit crimes with them, either.”

Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement. “Committing the crime is easy. Males in the payroll section diverted payments to ginger purveyors into accounts of which only they and the purveyors-and, of course, the computers-were aware. Since no one else knew these accounts existed, no one not party to the secret could access them. The computers would not announce their presence; it was, in essence, a perfect scheme.”

“We have a saying that there’s no such thing as a perfect crime,” Yeager remarked. “What went wrong with this one?”

Straha laughed again. “Nothing is accident-proof. A male in the accounting section who was not part of the miscreants’ scheme was investigating a legitimate account. But he made a mistake in entering the number of that account and found himself looking at one of the concealed ones. He recognized it at once for what it was and notflied his superiors, who began a larger investigation. Many males will find themselves in difficulties because of it.”

“Hope you won’t be angry if I tell you that doesn’t make me too unhappy,” Sam said. “Who would have thought the Race would turn out to have drug fiends? Makes you seem almost human-no offense.”

“I shall endeavor to take none,” Straha replied with dignity.

Yeager kept his face straight; Straha was getting pretty good at interpreting human expressions, and he didn’t want the Lizard to see how funny he thought that was. He said, “I wonder if we have any way to use the news, maybe make some of your people think males who aren’t ginger tasters really are. Something like that, anyhow.”

“You have an evilly twisted mind, Sam Yeager,” Straha said.

“Thank you,” Sam answered, which made Straha first jerk both eye turrets toward him and then start to laugh as he understood it was a joke. Yeager went on, “You might talk with some of our propaganda people, maybe ask if they want you to broadcast about it. Who knows what kind of trouble you might stir up?”

“Who indeed?” Straha said. “I shall do that.” It wasn’t quiteIt shall be done, the Lizards’ equivalent forYes, sir, but it was more deference than Sam had ever got from Straha before. Little by little, he was earning respect.

When his shift was done, he started to go upstairs to see Barbara and Jonathan, but ran into Ristin and Ullhass in the hospital lobby. Those two Lizard POWs were old buddies; he’d captured them back in the summer of 1942, when the Lizard invasion was new and looked irresistible. By now, they seemed well on the way to becoming Americans, and wore their official U.S. prisoner-of-war red-white-and-blue body paint with considerable pride. They’d also picked up pretty good English over the last couple of years.

“Hey, Sam,” Ristin said in that language. “Baseball this afternoon?”

“Yes,” Ullhass echoed. “Baseball!” He added an emphatic cough.

“Maybe later-not now,” Sam said, to which both Lizards responded with steam-whistle noises of disappointment. With their fast, skittery movements, they made surprisingly good middle infielders, and had taken to the game well. Their small size and forward-sloping posture gave them a strike zone about the size of a postage stamp, too, so they were good leadoff men-well, leadoff males-even if they seldom hit the ball hard.

“Good weather for a game,” Ristin said, doing his best to tempt Sam. A lot of soldiers played ball when they were off duty, but Ristin and Ullhass were the only Lizards who joined in. With Yeager’s endless years of bush-league experience, everybody was glad to see him out there, and people had put up with his Lizard pals for his sake. Now Ullhass and Ristin were starting to get noticed for the way they played, not for their scaly hides.

“Maybe later,” Sam repeated. “Now I want to see my wife and son. If you don’t mind too much.” The Lizards sighed in resignation. They knew families mattered to Tosevites, but it didn’t feel real to them, any more than Yeager understood in his gut how much their precious Emperor meant to them. He headed for the stairs. Ristin and Ullhass started practicing phantom double plays. Ristin, who mostly played second, had a hell of a fast pivot.

Up on the fourth floor, Jonathan was telling the world in no uncertain terms that he didn’t care for something or other it had done to him. Listening to him yowl, Sam was glad the Lizards who lived up there weren’t around to hear the racket. It sometimes drove him a little squirrely, and he was a human being.

The crying stopped, very suddenly. Sam knew what that meant: Barbara had given the baby her breast. Sam smiled as he opened the door to their room. He was fond of his wife’s breasts, too, and figured the kid took after his old man.

Barbara looked up from the chair in which she was nursing Jonathan. She didn’t seem as badly beat up as she had just after he was born, but she wasn’t what you’d call perky, either. “Hello, honey,” she said. “Shut the door quietly, would you? He may fall asleep. He’s certainly been fussing as if he was tired.”

Sam noted the precise grammar there, as he often did when his wife talked. He sometimes envied her fancy education; he’d left high school to play ball, though an insatiable curiosity had kept him reading this and finding out little fragmented pieces of that ever since. Barbara never complained about his lack of formal schooling, but it bothered him anyhow.

Sure enough, Jonathan did go to sleep. The kid was growing; he took up more room in the cradle now than he had when he was first born. As soon as Sam saw he would stay down after Barbara put him in there, he touched her on the arm and said, “I got a present for you, hon. Well, really it’s a present for both of us, but you can go first with it. I’ve been saving it all morning long, so I figure I can last a little longer.”

The buildup intrigued her. “Whatdo you have?” she breathed.

“It’s not anything fancy,” he warned. “Not a diamond, not a convertible.” They both laughed, not quite comfortably. It would be a long time. If ever, before you could start thinking about driving a convertible. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a new corncob pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, then handed them to her with a flourish. “Here you go.”

She stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Where did you get them?”

“This colored guy came around early this morning, selling ’em,” Sam answered. “He’s from up in the northern part of the state, where they grow some tobacco. Cost me fifty bucks, but what the heck? I don’t have a whole lot of things to spend money on, so why not?”

“It’s all right with me. It’s better than all right with me, as a matter of fact.” Barbara stuck the empty pipe in her mouth. “I never smoked one of these before. I probably look like a Southern granny.”

“Babe, you always look good to me,” Yeager said. Barbara’s expression softened. Keeping your wife happy was definitely worth doing-especially when you meant every word you said. He tapped at the tobacco pouch with his index finger. “You want me to load the pipe for you?”

“Would you, please?” she said, so he did. He had a Zippo, fueled now not by lighter fluid but by moonshine. He had no idea how he’d keep it going when he ran out of flints, but that hadn’t happened yet. He flicked the wheel with his thumb. A pale, almost invisible alcohol flame sprang into being. He held it over the bowl of the pipe.

Barbara’s cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Careful,” Sam warned. “Pipe tobacco’s a lot stronger than what you get in cigarettes, and-” Her eyes crossed. She coughed like somebody in the last throes of consumption. “-you haven’t smoked much of anything lately,” he finished unnecessarily.

“No kidding.” Her voice was a raspy wheeze. “Remember that bit inTom Sawyer? ‘First Pipes-“I’ve Lost My Knife,” ’ something like that. I know just how Tom felt. That stuff isstrong.”

“Let me try,” Sam said, and took the pipe from her. He drew on it cautiously. He knew about pipe tobacco, and knew what any tobacco could do to you when you hadn’t smoked for a while. Even taking all that into account, Barbara was right; what smoldered in that pipe was strong as the devil. It might have been cured and mellowed for fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes-smoking it felt like scraping coarse sandpaper over his tongue and the inside of his mouth. Spit flooded from every salivary gland he owned, including a few he hadn’t known were there. He felt dizzy, almost woozy for a second-and he knew enough not to draw much smoke down into his lungs. He coughed a couple of times himself. “Wowie!”

“Here, give it back to me,” Barbara said. She made another, much more circumspect, try, then exhaled. “God! That is to tobacco what bathtub gin was to the real stuff.”

“You’re too young to know about bathtub gin,” he said severely. Memories of some pounding headaches came back to haunt him. He puffed on the pipe again himself. It wasn’t a bad comparison.

Barbara giggled. “One of my favorite uncles was a part-time bootlegger. I had quite a high-school graduation party-from what I remember of it, anyway.” She took the pipe back from Sam. “I’m going to need a while to get used to this again.”

“Yeah, we’ll probably be there just about when that pouch goes empty,” he agreed. “God knows when that colored fellow will come through town again. If he ever does.”

They smoked the bowl empty, then filled it again. The room grew thick with smoke. Sam’s eyes watered. He felt loose and easy, the way he had after a cigarette in the good old days. That he also felt slightly nauseated and his mouth like raw meat was only a detail, as far as he was concerned.

“That’s good,” Barbara said meditatively, and punctuated her words with another set of coughs. She waved those aside. “Worth it.”

“I think so, too.” Sam started to laugh. “Know what we remind me of?” When Barbara shook her head, he answered his own question: “We’re like a couple of Lizards with their tongues in the ginger jar.”

“That’s terrible!” Barbara exclaimed. Then she thought it over. “Itis terrible, but you may be right. It is kind of like a drug-tobacco, I mean.”

“You bet it is. I tried quitting a couple of times when I was playing ball-didn’t like what it was doing to my wind. I couldn’t do it. I’d get all nervous and twitchy and I don’t know what. When you can’t get any, it’s not so bad: you don’t have a choice. But stick tobacco in front of us every day and we’ll go back to it, sure enough.”

Barbara sucked on the pipe again. She made a wry face. “Ginger tastes better, that’s for certain.”

“Yeah, I think so, too-now,” Sam said. “But if I’m smoking all the time, I won’t think so for long. You know, when you get down to it, coffee tastes pretty bad, too, or we wouldn’t have to fix it up with cream and sugar. But I like what coffee used to do for me when we had it.”

“So did I,” Barbara said wistfully. She pointed toward the cradle. “With him waking up whenever he feels like it, I could really use some coffee these days.”

“We’re a bunch of drug fiends, all right, no doubt about it.” Yeager took the pipe from her and sucked in smoke. Now that he’d had some, it wasn’t so bad. He wondered whether he ought to hope that Negro would come around with more-or for him to stay away.

The partisan leader, a fat Pole who gave his name as Ignacy, stared at Ludmila Gorbunova.“You are a pilot?” he said in fluent but skeptical German.

Ludmila stared back. Almost at sight, she had doubts about Ignacy. For one thing, almost the only way you could stay fat these days was by exploiting the vast majority who were thin, sometimes to the point of emaciation. For another, his name sounded so much likeNazi that just hearing it made her nervous.

Also in German, she answered, “Yes, I am a pilotYou are a guerrilla commander?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There hasn’t been much call for piano teachers the past few years.”

Ludmila stared again, this time for a different reason.This had been a member of the petty bourgeoisie? He’d certainly managed to shed his class trappings; from poorly shaved jowls to twin bandoliers worn crisscross on his chest to battered boots, he looked like a man who’d been a bandit all his life and sprang from a long line of bandits. She had trouble imagining him going through Chopinetudes with bored young students.

Beside her, Avram looked down at his scarred hands. Wladeslaw looked up to the top of the linden tree under which they stood. Neither of the partisans who’d accompanied her from near Lublin said anything. They’d done their job by getting her here. Now it was up to her.

“You have here an airplane?” she asked, deciding not to hold Ignacy’s looks, name, or class against him. Business was business.

If the Great Stalin could make a pact with the fascist Hitler, she could do her best to deal with a Schmeisser-toting piano teacher.

“We have an airplane,” he agreed. Maybe he was trying to overcome distrust of her as a socialist and a Russian, for he went on with a detailed explanation: “It landed here in this area when the Lizards were booting out the Germans. We don’t think anything was wrong with it except that it was out of fuel. We have fuel now, and we have a new battery which holds a charge. We have also drained the oil and the hydraulic fluid, and have replaced both.”

“This all sounds good,” Ludmila said. “What sort of airplane is it?” Her guess would have been an Me-109. She’d never before flown a hot fighter-or what had been a hot fighter till the Lizards came. She suspected it would be a merry life but a short one. The Lizards had hacked Messerschmitts and their opposite numbers from the Red Air Force out of the sky with hideous ease in the early days of their invasion.

But Ignacy answered, “It’s a Fieseler 156.” He saw that didn’t mean anything to Ludmila, so he added, “They call it aStorch- a Stork.”

The nickname didn’t help. Ludmila said, “I think it would be better if you let me see the aircraft than if you talk about it.”

“Yes,” he said, and put his hands out in front of him, as if on an imaginary keyboard. He had been a piano teacher, sure enough. “Come with me.”

The aircraft was about three kilometers from Ignacy’s encampment. Those three kilometers of rough trail, like most of the landscape hereabouts, showed how heavy the local fighting had been. The ground was cratered; chunks of metal and burned-out hulks lay everywhere; and she passed a good many hastily dug graves, most marked with crosses, some with Stars of David, and some just left alone. She pointed at one of those. “Who lies under there? A Lizard?”

“Yes,” Ignacy said again. “The priests, so far as I know, have not yet decided whether Lizards have souls.”

Ludmila didn’t know how to answer that, so she kept quiet. She didn’t think she had a soul, not in the sense Ignacy meant. The things people too ignorant to grasp the truths of dialectical materialism could find over which to worry themselves!

She wondered where the alleged Fieseler 156 was hiding. They’d passed only a couple of buildings, and those had been too battered to conceal a motorcar, let alone an airplane. Ignacy led her up a small rise. He said, “We’re right on top of it now.” His voice showed considerable pride.

“Right on top of what?” Ludmila asked as he led her down the other side of the rise. He took her around to a third side-and then realization sank in.“Bozhemoi! You built a platform with the aircraft under it.” That wasmaskirovka even the Soviets would have viewed with respect.

Ignacy heard the admiration in her voice. “So we did,” he said. “It seemed the best way of concealing it we had available.” To that she could only nod. They’d done as much work as the Red Air Force had outside Pskov, and they couldn’t even fly the airplane they were hiding. The partisan leader pulled a candle out of one of the pockets of theWehrmacht tunic he was wearing. “It will be dark in there with the earth and the timer and the nets blocking away the light.”

She sent Ignacy a suspicious look. She’d had trouble from men when they got her alone in a dark place. She touched the butt of her Tokarev. “Don’t try anything foolish,” she advised him.

“If I tried nothing foolish, would I be a partisan?” he asked. Ludmila frowned but held her peace. Stooping, Ignacy held up an edge of the camouflage netting. Ludmila crawled under it. She in turn held it up so the Polish guerrilla could follow her.

The space under the camouflaged platform was too large for a single candle to do much to illuminate it. Ignacy walked over to the aircraft hidden there. Ludmila followed him. When the faint glow showed her what the aircraft was, her eyes got wide. “Oh, one of these,” she breathed.

“You know it?” Ignacy asked. “You can fly it?”

“I know of it,” she answered. “I don’t know yet whether I can fly it. I hope I can, I will tell you so much.”

The FieselerStorch was a high-wing monoplane, not much bigger than one of her belovedKukuruzniks, and not much faster, either. But if aKukuruznik was a cart horse, aStorch was a trained Lipizzan. It could take off and land in next to no room at all; flying into a light breeze, it could hover in one place, almost like a Lizard helicopter. Ludmila took the candle from Ignacy and walked around the plane, fascinatedly studying the huge flaps, elevators, and ailerons that let it do its tricks.

From what she’d heard, not everyStorch was armed, but this one carried two machine guns, one under the body, one in back of the pilot for an observer to fire. She set her foot in the mounting stirrup, opened the pilot-side door, and climbed up into the cockpit.

So much of it was glass that, although it was enclosed, she had a much better all-around view than she did in the open cabin of aKukuruznik. She wondered how she’d like flying without the slipstream blasting her in the face. Then she brought the candle up to the instrument panel and studied it in amazement. So many dials, so many gauges… how were you supposed to do any flying if you tried to keep track of all of them at once?

Everything was finished to a much higher standard than she was used to. She’d seen that before with German equipment; the Nazis made their machines as if they were fine watches. The Soviet approach, contrariwise, was to turn out as many tanks and planes and guns as possible. If they were crude, so what? They were going to get destroyed anyhow.

“You can fly it?” Ignacy repeated as Ludmila, rather reluctantly, descended from the cabin.

“Yes, I really think I can,” Ludmila answered. The candle was burning low. She and Ignacy started back out toward the netting under which they would leave. She glanced back at theStorch, hoping to be a rider worthy of her steed.

Soviet artillery boomed south of Moscow, flinging shells toward Lizard positions. Distantly, the reports reverberated even in the Kremlin. Listening to them, Iosef Stalin made a sour face. “The Lizards grow bolder, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said.

Vyacheslav Molotov did not care for the implication behind the words.It’s your fault, Stalin seemed to be saying. “As soon as we can produce another explosive-metal bomb, Iosef Vissarionovich, we shall remind them we deserve respect,” he answered.

“Yes, but when will that be?” Stalin demanded. “These so called scientists have been telling me lies all along. And if they don’t move faster, they will regret it-and so will you.”

“So will the entire Soviet Union, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said. Stalin always thought everyone lied to him. A lot of the time, people did, simply because they were too afraid to tell him the truth. Molotov had tried to tell him that, after using the bomb made from the Lizards’ explosive metal, the USSR would not be able to make anymore for a long time to come. He hadn’t wanted to listen. He seldom wanted to listen. Molotov went on, “It seems, however, that we shall soon have more of these weapons.”

“I have heard this promise before,” Stalin said. “I grow weary of it.When exactly will the new bombs appear in our arsenal?”

“The first by summer,” Molotov answered. That made Stalin sit up and take notice, as he’d thought it would. He continued, “Work at thekolkhoz has made remarkable progress lately, I’m happy to report.”

“Yes, Lavrenti Pavlovich tells me the same. I am glad to hear it,” Stalin said, his expression hooded. “I will be gladder to hear it if it turns out to be true.”

“It will,” Molotov said.It had better. But now he began to believe that it would-and so, evidently, did Beria. Getting that American toKolkhoz 118 had proved a master stroke. His presence and his ideas proved, sometimes painfully, just how far behind that of the capitalist West the Soviet nuclear research program had been. He took for granted both theory and engineering practice toward which Kurchatov, Flerov, and their colleagues were only beginning to grope. But, with his knowledge, the Soviet program was finally advancing at a decent pace.

“I am glad to hear we shall have these weapons,” Stalin repeated, “glad for your sake, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Molotov said. He picked up the glass of vodka in front of him, knocked it back, and filled it again from the bottle that stood beside it. He knew what Stalin meant. If the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union did not soon have an explosive-metal bomb, they would soon have a new foreign commissar. He would get the blame for the failure, not Stalin’s Georgian crony, Beria. Stalin was not allergic to scribbling the initials VMN on the case files of those marked for liquidation, any more than Molotov had been.

“When we have our second bomb, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said, resolutely not thinking about what would happen-to the USSR and to him-if they didn’t have it, “I recommend that we use it at once.”

Stalin puffed on his pipe, sending up unreadable smoke signals. “With the first bomb, you advised against using it. Why now the change of mind?”

“Because when we used the first, we had no second with which to back it, and I feared that would become obvious,” Molotov answered. “Now, though, by using the new bomb, we not only prove we do have it, but also give the promise of producing many more after it.”

More nasty smoke rose. “There is method in this,” Stalin said with a slow nod. “Not only does it serve warning on the Lizards, it also warns the Hitlerites we are not to be trifled with. And it sends the same signal to the Americans. Not bad, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”

“First priority, as you say, is the Lizards.” Molotov stuck strictly to the business at hand. He had not let Stalin see his fear at the threat he’d received, though the General Secretary surely knew it was there. He did not show his relief, either. Again, sham or not, Stalin could hardly be ignorant of it. He played his subordinates’ emotions as if they were violin strings, and set one man against another like an orchestra conductor developing and exploiting opposing themes.

Now Stalin said, “In remembering the first priority, we must also remember it is not the only one. After the Lizards make peace with therodina-” He stopped and puffed meditatively on the pipe.

Molotov was used to listening for subtle nuances in the General Secretary’s speech. “After the Lizards make peace, Iosef Vissarionovich? Not, after the Lizards are defeated or exterminated or driven from this world?”

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, for your ears only, I do not think this within our power,” Stalin said. “We shall use the bomb-if the scientists deign to give it to us. We shall destroy whatever concentration of Lizards we can with it. They, in turn, will destroy one of our cities: this is the exchange they make. We cannot win at this rate. Our goal now must be to convince the aliens they cannot win, either, but face only ruin if the war goes on.”

“Under these circumstances, what terms do you intend to seek?” Molotov asked.How long do you intend to honor them? also came to mind, but he did not have the nerve to put that question to Stalin. The General Secretary was ruthlessly pragmatic; he’d wrung every bit of advantage he could from his pact with Hitler. The one thing he hadn’t expected there was Hitler’s outdoing him in ruthlessness and striking first. Any peace with the Lizards was liable to be similarly temporary.

“I want them out of the USSR,” Stalin said, “beyond the frontiers of 22 June 1941. Past that, everything is negotiable. Let the fascists and capitalists dicker for their own countries. If they fail, I shall not lift a finger to help them. They would not help me, as you know.”

Molotov nodded, first in agreement to that and then in slow consideration of the General Secretary’s reasoning. It fit with what Stalin had done in the past. Rather than trying to foment world revolution, as the Trotskyites urged, Stalin had concentrated on building socialism in one country. Now he would take the same approach toward building independent human power.

“The Lizards are imperialists,” Molotov said. “Can they be made to accept something less than their full, planned scope of conquest? This is my principal concern, Iosef Vissarionovich.”

“We can make the Soviet Union not worth their having.” By Stalin’s tone, he was prepared to do exactly what he said. Molotov did not think the General Secretary was bluffing. He had the will to do such a thing if he was given the ability. The physicists were giving him that ability. Could the Lizard fleetlord match the General Secretary’s driving will? The only humans Molotov had met who came up to that standard were Lenin, Churchill, and Hitler. Could Atvar come up to it? Stalin was betting the fate of his country that the alien could not.

Molotov would have been more confident had Stalin not so disastrously misjudged Hitler. He-and the USSR-had come close to perishing from that mistake. If he made a similar one against a foe with explosive-metal bombs, neither he, the Soviet Union, nor Marxism-Leninism would survive.

How to tell Stalin of his misgivings? Molotov drained the second glass of vodka. He could find no way.