Striking the Balance

XII

As prisons went, the one Moishe Russie and his wife and son now inhabited wasn’t bad. It even outdid the villa where the Jewish underground in Palestine had incarcerated them. Here, in what had been a fine hotel, he and his family got plenty of food and enjoyed both electricity and hot and cold running water. If not for bars on the windows and armed Lizard guards outside the door, the suite would have been luxurious.

Despite bars, the windows drew Moishe. He stared in endless fascination out across Cairo at the Nile and, beyond it, the Pyramids. “I never thought we would be like Joseph and come to Egypt out of Palestine,” he said.

“Who will be our Moses and lead us out again?” Reuven asked.

Moishe felt a burst of pride: the boy was still so young, but already not just learning the great stories of the Torah but applying them to his own life. He wished he had a better answer to give his son than “I don’t know,” but he didn’t want to lie to Reuven, either.

Rivka had a question much more to the point: “What will they do to us now?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Moishe said. He wished Rivka and Reuven hadn’t come with him after Zolraag recognized him in the Jerusalem prison camp. Far too late now to do anything but wish, though. But he was vulnerable through them. Even back in Warsaw, the Lizards had threatened them to try to make him do what they wanted. His family’s convenient disappearance had scotched that there. It wouldn’t here. He’d been ready to let himself be killed rather than obey the Lizards. But letting his wife and son suffer-that was something else again.

A key turned in the lock, out in the hall. Moishe’s heart beat faster. It was halfway between breakfast and lunchtime, not a usual hour for the Lizards to bother him. The door opened. Zolraag came in. The former provincelord of Poland was wearing more ornate body paint now than either of the times when Moishe had seen him in Palestine. He hadn’t returned to the almost rococo splendor of his ornamentation back in his Warsaw days, but he was gaining on it.

He stuck out his tongue in Moishe’s direction, then reeled it back in. “You will come with me immediately,” he said in fair German, turningsofort into a long, menacing hiss.

“It shall be done,” Moishe answered in the language of the Race. He hugged Rivka and kissed Reuven on the forehead, not knowing whether he would see them again. Zolraag allowed that, but made small, impatient noises, like a thick pot of stew coming to a boil.

When Moishe came over to him, the Lizard rapped on the inner surface of the door: the knob there had been removed. Zolraag used a sequence of knocks different from any the Lizards had employed before, presumably to keep the Russies from learning a code, breaking out, and causing trouble. Not for the first time, Moishe wished he and his family were as dangerous as the Lizards believed they were.

Out in the hallway, four males pointed automatic weapons at his midsection. Zolraag gestured for him to walk toward the stairwell. Two of the Lizard guards followed, both of them too far back to let him whirl and try to seize their rifles-as if he would have beenmeshuggeh enough to try.

Zolraag ordered him into a mechanical combat vehicle. The guards got into it, too. One of them slammed the rear doors shut behind him. The clang of metal striking metal had a dreadfully final sound.

Zolraag spoke a single word into what looked like a microphone at the front of the troop compartment: “Go.”

The combat vehicle clattered through the streets. Moishe got only a limited view through the machine’s firing ports. It was one of the least pleasurable journeys of his life in any number of ways. The seat on which he awkwardly tried to perch was made for a male of the Race, not someone his size; his backside didn’t fit it, while his knees came up under his chin. It was hot in there, too, hotter even than outside. The Lizards basked in the heat. Russie wondered if he’d pass out before they got where they were going.

He glimpsed a marketplace that dwarfed any he’d seen in Palestine. Through the fighting vehicle’s armor plate, he heard people jeering and cursing at the Lizards-that, at least, is what he thought they were doing, though he knew not a word of Arabic. But if anything so gutturally incandescent wasn’t cursing, it should have been. Whatever it was, Zolraag ignored it.

A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped. One of Moishe’s guards opened the doors at the rear.“Jude heraus,” Zolraag said, which made the hair stand up on the back of Russie’s neck.

They’d brought him to another hotel. The Lizards had fortified this one like the Maginot Line; when Moishe looked around, he saw enough razor wire, aliens with automatic weapons, and panzers and combat vehicles to hold off Rommel’sAfrika Korps and the British who’d fought him… not that the Nazis or the British were going concerns in North Africa these days.

He didn’t get much time for sightseeing. Zolraag said, “Come,” the guards pointed their weapons at him, and he perforce came. The hotel lobby had ceiling fans. They weren’t turning. The electric lights were on, so Moishe decided the fans were off because the Lizards wanted them off.

The lift worked, too. In fact, it purred upward more silently and smoothly than any on which Moishe had ever ridden. He didn’t know whether it had always been like that or the Lizards had improved it after they conquered Cairo. It was, at the moment, the least of his worries.

When the lift doors opened, he found himself on the sixth floor, the topmost one. “Out,” Zolraag said, and Moishe obeyed again. Zolraag led him along the hallway to a suite of rooms that made the one where the Russies were confined seem prisonlike indeed. A Lizard who wore strange body paint-the right side fairly plain, the left fancier than any Moishe had seen till now-spoke with Zolraag at the doorway, then ducked back into the suite.

He returned a moment later. “Bring in the Big Ugly,” he said.

“It shall be done, adjutant to the fleetlord,” Zolraag answered.

They spoke their own language, but Moishe managed to follow it. “The fleetlord?” he said, and was proud that, despite his surprise, he’d remembered to add an interrogative cough. The Lizards ignored him even so. He hadn’t even thought the fleetlord was on the face of the Earth.

Atvar’s body paint was like that of Pshing’s left side, only all over. Other than that, he looked like a Lizard to Russie. He was able to tell one of the aliens from another, but only after he’d known him for a while.

Zolraag said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the Tosevite Moishe Russie, who is at last returned to our custody.”

“I greet you, superior sir,” Moishe said, as politely as he could: no point in insulting the chief Lizard over anything inconsequential.

He turned out to be wrong even so. “ ‘I greet you,Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said sharply. Moishe repeated the phrase, this time with the right honorific. “That is better,” Zolraag told him.

Atvar, meanwhile, was studying him from head to toe, eye turrets swinging up and down independently of each other in the unnerving way Lizards had. The fleetlord spoke in his own language, too fast for Moishe to stay with him. Seeing that, Zolraag translated his words into German: “The exalted fleetlord wants to know if you are now satisfied as to the overwhelming power of the Race.”

The word he used to translateRace into German wasVolk. That raised Moishe’s hackles all over again: the Nazis had usedVolk for their own ends. He had to bring himself back under conscious control before answering, “Tell the fleetlord I am not. If the Race had overwhelming power, this war would have been over a long time ago.”

He wondered if that would anger Atvar. He hoped not. He had to be careful about what he said, much less for his own sake than for Rivka’s and Reuven’s. To his relief, Atvar’s mouth fell open. The Lizard’s sharp little teeth and long, forked tongue were not delightful sights in and of themselves, but they meant the fleetlord was amused rather than annoyed.

“Truth,” Atvar said, a word Russie knew. He nodded to show he understood. Atvar went on in the Lizards’ speech, again too quickly for Moishe to keep up. Zolraag translated once more: “The exalted fleetlord has learned, from me among others, that you opposed having the Jews rise on our behalf when we entered Palestine. Why did you do this, when you supported us against the Germans in Poland?”

“Two reasons,” Moishe said. “First, I know better now than I did then that you plan to rule all of mankind forever, and I cannot support that. Second, the Germans in Poland were slaughtering Jews, as you know. The British in Palestine were doing no such thing. Some of the Jews who back you there had escaped from Germany or from Poland. You seem more dangerous to me than the British do.”

Zolraag translated that into the Lizards’ hisses and pops and squeaks. Atvar spoke again, this time slowly, aiming his words directly at Moishe: “These other males who escaped do not think as you do. Why is this?”

Moishe did his best to answer in the language of the Race: “Other males see short. I look for long. In long, Race worse, British better.” To show how strongly he believed that, he ended with an emphatic cough.

“It is good that you think of the long term. Few Big Uglies do,” Atvar said. “It may even be that, from the point of view of a Big Ugly who does not wish to come under the rule of the Race, you are right.” He paused and turned both eye turrets toward Moishe’s face. “This will not help you, though.”

The Lizards had replaced the human-made furniture in the suite with their own gear. It made the room in which Russie stood appear even larger than it really was. One of the many devices with blank glass screens lit up, suddenly showing a Lizard’s face. The Lizard’s voice came out of the machine, too.A telephone with a cinema attachment, Moishe thought.

By the way Atvar’s adjutant jerked at whatever the message was, he might have stuck his tongue into a live electrical socket. He turned one eye turret back toward Atvar and said, “Exalted Fleetlord!”

“Not now, Pshing,” Atvar replied with very human impatience.

But the adjutant-Pshing-kept talking. Atvar hissed something Russie didn’t understand and whirled away from him toward the screen. As he did so, the Lizard’s face disappeared from it, to be replaced by a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into the sky. Moishe gasped in horror. He’d seen one of those clouds on his way to Palestine, rising over what had been Rome.

The sound he made seemed to remind Atvar he was there. The fleetlord turned one eye turret toward Zolraag for a moment and snapped, “Get him out of here.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said. He turned to Russie. “Go now. The exalted fleetlord has more important things with which to concern himself at the moment than one insignificant Big Ugly.”

Moishe went. He said nothing until the infantry combat vehicle that had brought him to Atvar’s headquarters started back toward the hotel in which he was imprisoned. Then he asked, “Where did that atomic bomb explode?”

Zolraag let out a hiss that made him sound like an unhappy samovar. “So you recognized it, did you? The place is part of this province of Egypt. I gather it has two names, in your sloppy Tosevite fashion. It is called both El Iskandariya and Alexandria. Do you know either of these names?”

“Someone bombed Alexandria?” Moishe exclaimed.“Vay iz mir! Who? How? You of the Race control all this country, don’t you?”

“I thought we did,” Zolraag answered. “Evidently not, yes? Who? We do not know. The British, taking revenge for what we did to Australia? We did not-do not-believe them to have weapons of this sort. Could they have borrowed one from the Americans?”

He sounded as if he meant the question seriously. Moishe made haste to reply: “I have no idea, superior sir.”

“No?” Zolraag said. “Yet you broadcast for the British. We must investigate further.” Ice ran up Russie’s back. The Lizard went on, “The Deutsche, fighting us as best they could? We do not know-but when we learn which Big Uglies did this, they will pay a great price.”

Something Zolraag had said got through to Moishe slower than it should have. “Australia, superior sir? What happened in Australia?”

“We destroyed two cities to secure our conquests there,” the former Polish provincelord answered with chilling indifference before returning to a previous question: “How? We do not know that, either. We detected no airplanes, no missiles, no boats moving over the water. We do not believe the bomb could have been smuggled in by land, either; we would have found it in our searches of cargo.”

“Not over water, not by air, not on land?” Moishe said. “That doesn’t leave much. Did someone dig a tunnel and set the bombunder Alexandria?”

Zolraag made more horrified-teakettle noises, then burst out, “You Tosevites have not the technology to accomplish this!” That was when he figured out Russie had been offering a jest, however feeble. “Not funny,Reb Moishe,” he said, and used an emphatic cough to show how unfunny it was.

Nobody had called MoisheReb since he’d left Warsaw. Then he’d thought the Lizards had come in answer to his prayer to make the Nazis leave off persecuting the Jews in the ghetto they’d established. People had gained hope from that. Now he saw that the Lizards, while they didn’t hate Jews in particular, were more dangerous for the rest of the world than the Nazis had dreamt of being. Two Australian cities, destroyed without provocation? No matter how sweltering the air inside the armored fighting vehicle, he shivered.

Heinrich Jager peered down into the Panther’s engine compartment. “Fuel-pump gasket again?” he growled. “God in heaven, how long does it take for them to get the fabrication right?”

Gunther Grillparzer pointed to the lot number stenciled in white paint on the black rubber gasket. “This is an old one, sir,” he said. “Probably dates back to the first couple of months’ production run.”

That did little to console Jager. “We’re damned lucky the engine didn’t catch fire when it failed. Whoever shipped it out to us ought to be horsewhipped.”

“Ahh, give the dumb bastard a noodle and put somebody else in his job,” Grillparzer said, using SS slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He’d probably picked that up from Otto Skorzeny. He probably wasn’t joking, either. Jager knew how things worked in German factories these days. With so many German men at the front, a lot of people doing production work were Jews, Russians, Frenchmen, and other slave laborers subject to just that kind of punishment if they made the slightest mistake.

“Is the replacement a new one?” Jager demanded.

Grillparzer checked the lot number. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “We slap that in there, it shouldn’t give us any trouble till-the next time, anyhow.” On that optimistic note, he grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the fuel pump.

Off in the distance, a flight of rockets screamed away toward the Lizard lines. Jager winced at the horrible noise. He’d been on the receiving end of Stalin-organ concertos when the Red Army lobbedKatyushas at theWehrmacht before the Lizards came. If you wanted to tear up a whole lot of ground in a hurry, rockets were the way to do it.

They didn’t bother Skorzeny at all. “Someone will be catching hell,” he said cheerfully. Then, lowering his voice so only Jager could hear, he went on, “Almost as good as the pasting we gave Alexandria.”

“Ah, that was us, was it?” Jager said, just as softly. Skorzeny-heard things. “The radio hasn’t claimed it for theReich.”

“The radio bloody well isn’t going to claim it for theReich, either,” the SS man answered. “If we take credit for it, one of our towns goes right off the map. Cologne, maybe, or Frankfurt, or Vienna. May happen anyway, but we’re not going to brag and help it along, not when we can keep quiet and smile mysteriously. If you know what I mean.” Maybe his smile was intended to be mysterious, but it ended up looking raffish.

Jager asked, “Do you know how we did it? That’s a mystery to me.”

“As a matter of fact, I do, but I’m not supposed to tell,” Skorzeny said. Jager picked a branch up off the ground and made as if to hit him with it. Skorzeny chuckled. “Shit, I never have been any good at doing what I’m supposed to. You know you can’t fit one of those bombs on a plane or a rocket, right?”

“Oh, yes,” Jager said. “Remember, I got involved in that project deeper than I wanted to. You mad bastard, that was your fault, too. If I hadn’t been on that raid with you that snatched the explosive mend from the Lizards-”

“-You’d have stayed a Soviet puppet and you’d probably be dead by now,” Skorzeny broke in. “If the Lizards didn’t get you, the Bolsheviks would have. But that’s neither here nor there. We didn’t put it on a freighter, either, the way we did when we blasted Rome. Hard to fool the Lizards the same way twice.”

Jager walked along, thinking hard. He scratched the side of his jaw. He needed a shave. He had a straight razor, but scraping his face without shaving soap hurt more than it was worth. At length, he said, “We couldn’t have sent it in overland. Insane even to think about it. That leaves-nothing I can see.”

“Nothing the Lizards can see, either.” Skorzeny grinned an evil grin. “They’d be tearing their hair if they had any. But I know something they don’t know.” He almost chanted the words, as if he were a little boy taunting the other children on the schoolyard. He thumped his finger off Jager’s chest. “I know something you don’t know, too.”

“That’s all right,” Jager said. “I know I’m going to boot you in the arse if you don’t spill it. How did we burn the library at Alexandria?”

Like most classical allusions, that one sailed past Skorzeny. He answered the main question, though: “I know we have a new kind of U-boat, that’s what I know. Damned if I know how, but it can do 450 kilometers submerged every centimeter of the way.”

“God in heaven,” Jager said in genuine awe. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d have swept the Atlantic clean with boats like that.” He scratched his jaw again, visualizing a map of the eastern Mediterranean. “It must have sailed from-Crete?”

Skorzeny’s blunt features registered a curious blend of respect and disappointment. “Aren’t you the clever chap?” he said. “Yes, from Crete to Alexandria you can sail underwater-as long as you understand you won’t sail back.”

“Mm, yes, there is that.” Jager did some more muffing. “You couldn’t tell the whole crew-there’d be a mutiny. But you could find a man you could rely on to press the button or flip the switch or whatever he had to do.” He took off his black service cap in respect for the courage of that man.

“Has to be how they did it, all right,” Skorzeny agreed. “One thing-he’d never know what hit him.”

Jager thought of the fireball he’d seen going up east of Breslau, the one that had stalled the Lizards’ attack on the town. He tried to imagine being at the center of that fireball. “You’re right,” he said. “You might as well drop a man into the sun.”

“That’s what it would be like, sure enough,” the SS man said. He walked along beside Jager, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. After half a dozen paces or so, he asked, ever so casually, “Your Jewish chums down in Lodz send any messages back to you? They gloating that they got the better of me?”

“I haven’t heard a word from them,” Jager answered truthfully. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d stopped trusting Germans altogether after that bill of goods you tried selling them.” And there, he thought, was a fine euphemism for a nerve-gas bomb. If you couldn’t speak straight out about the things you did, maybe you shouldn’t have done them. In pointed tones, he went on, “They are still keeping the Lizards from using Lodz as a staging point against us, in spite of everything.”

“Goody for them,” Skorzeny said with a fine sardonic sneer. He thumped Jager on the back, hard enough that he almost went headlong into the trunk of a birch tree. “Not so long from now, that won’t matter, either.”

“No?” Apprehension trickled down Jager’s spine. Skorzenydid hear things. “Are they going to order us to try to reduce the town? I’m not sure we can do it-and even if we manage, street fighting’ll play hob with our armor.”

Skorzeny laughed, loud and long. From up in that birch tree, a squirrel chattered indignantly. “No, they’re not going to stick your dick in the sausage machine, Jager,” he said. “How do I put it? If we can give the Lizards a present in Alexandria, we can give them and the Jews one in Lodz.”

Jager was a Lutheran. He wished he’d grown up Catholic. Crossing himself would have been a comfort. There could be no mistaking what Skorzeny meant. “How will you get it into Lodz?” he asked, genuinely curious. “The Jews will never trust you-trust us-again. They’re liable to have warned the Poles, too. God. If they know what’s in that bomb of yours, they’re liable to have warned the Lizards.”

“Fuck the Lizards. Fuck the Poles. And fuck the Jews, too,” Skorzeny said. “I won’t take anybody’s help with this one. When the package gets here, I’ll deliver it personally.”

“You have to work,” David Nussboym said in the language of the Lizards. He used an emphatic cough. “If you don’t work, they’ll starve you or they’ll just kill you.” As if to underscore his words, men with submachine guns surrounded Alien Prisoner Barracks Number 3.

The Lizards in the barracks hissed and squeaked and muttered among themselves. Their spokesman, the male called Ussmak, answered, “So what? For what they feed us, the work is impossibly hard. We starve anyhow. If they kill us quickly, it will all be over. Our spirits will join those of Emperors departed, and we will be at peace.” He cast down his eyes. So did the rest of the Lizards who listened to the talk.

Nussboym had seen Lizards in Lodz do likewise when they spoke of their sovereign. They believed in the spirits of Emperors past as passionately as ultraorthodox Jews in God or good Communists in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were also right about the rations they got. None of that mattered much to Nussboym. If he didn’t get these Lizards working again, out he’d go to the timber-cutting detail he’d escaped when they arrived. The rations human woodchoppers got were made for slow starvation, too.

“What can the camp administrators do that would put you back to work?” he asked Ussmak. He was ready to make extravagant promises. Whether the NKVD men who ran the camp would keep them was another matter. But once the Lizards again got into the habit of working, they’d keep at it.

At lot of Lizards were naive and trusting by human standards. Ussmak proved he wasn’t one of those. “They can leave. They can die,” he answered, his mouth dropping open in a laugh surely sardonic.

“Truth,” several males echoed from their crowded bunks.

“Fsseffel’s gang is working as ordered,” Nussboym said, trying another tack. “They are meeting norms in all areas.” He didn’t know whether that last bit was true or not, but Ussmak had no way to contest it: contact between his barracks hall and the one where Fsseffel was headman had been cut off as soon as the males here began their strike.

“Because Fsseffel is a fool, do not think I am a fool, too,” Ussmak replied. “We will not be worked to death. We will not be starved to death. Until we believe we will not be overworked or underfed, we will not do anything.”

Nussboym glanced out toward the NKVD guards. “They could come in here, drag a few of you outside, and shoot you,” he warned.

“Yes, they could,” Ussmak agreed. “They would not get much work from the males they shot, though.” He laughed again.

“I shall take your words to the commandant,” Nussboym said. He meant that for a warning, too, but did not think Ussmak was impressed. The Lizard seemed to him to have more depths of bitterness than any male of the Race Nussboym had known in Poland. He might almost have been a human being. In Poland, of course, the Race had kept prisoners. Males had not been prisoners there.

When Ussmak declined to answer, Nussboym left the barracks. “Any luck?” one of the guards called to him in Russian. He shook his head. He did not like the scowl on the guard’s face. He also did not like going back to the hodgepodge of Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he used to communicate with his fellow humans here in the camp. Making himself understood was sometimes easier in the Lizards’ language.

The leader of the guards who surrounded the barracks was a gloomy captain named Marchenko. “Comrade Captain, I need to speak with Colonel Skriabin,” Nussboym said.

“Maybe you do.” Marchenko had some kind of accent-Ukrainian, Nussboym thought-that made him even harder to understand than most Russians. “But does he need to speak to you?” From him, that passed for wit. After a moment, scowling still, he nodded. “All right. Pass back into the old camp.”

The camp administrative offices were better built, better heated, and far less crowded than thezeks’ barracks. Half the people working there werezeks, though: clerks and orderlies and what have you. It was far softer work than knocking down pines and birches in the woods, that was certain. His fellow prisoners eyed Nussboym with glances half conspiratorial, half suspicious: in a way, he was one of them, but his precise status wasn’t yet clear and might prove too high to suit a lot of them. The speed with which he won access to Skriabin prompted mutters among the file cabinets.

“What news, Nussboym?” the NKVD colonel asked. Nussboym was not important enough to rate first name and patronymic from the short, dapper little man. On the other hand, Skriabin understood Polish, which meant Nussboym didn’t have to mumble along in his ugly makeshift jargon.

“Comrade Colonel, the Lizards remain stubborn,” he said in Polish. As long as Skriabin called him by his surname, he couldn’t address the colonel as Gleb Nikolaievich. “May I state an opinion as to why this is so?”

“Go ahead,” Skriabin said. Nussboym wasn’t sure just how smart he was. Shrewd, yes; of that there could be no doubt. But how much real Intelligence underlay that mental agility was a different question. Now he leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and gave Nussboym either his complete attention or a good facsimile of it.

“Their reasons, I think, are essentially religious and irrational,” Nussboym said, “and for that reason all the more likely to be deeply and sincerely held.” He explained about the Emperor-worship that suffused the Race, finishing, “They may be willing to martyr themselves to join with Emperors gone by.”

Skriabin closed his eyes for a little while. Nussboym wondered if the NKVD man had listened at all, or if he would start to snore at any moment. Then, all at once, Skriabin laughed, startling him. “You are wrong,” he said. “We can get them back to work-and with ease.”

“I am sorry, Comrade Colonel, but I do not see how.” Nussboym didn’t like having to admit incapacity of any sort. The NKVD was only too likely to assume that. If he didn’t know one thing, he didn’t know anything, and so to dispense with his services. He knew things like that happened.

But Colonel Skriabin seemed amused, not angry. “Perhaps you are naive and innocent. Perhaps you are merely ignorant. Either one would account for your blindness. Here is what you will tell this Ussmak who thinks we cannot persuade him to do what the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union require of him-” He spoke for some little while, then asked, “Now do you see?”

“I do,” Nussboym said with respect grudging but nonetheless real. Either Skriabin was very shrewd or genuinely clever.

He got no chance to think about which, for the NKVD man said, “Now march back there this instant and show that Lizard he cannot set his naked will against the historical dialectic impelling the Soviet Union ahead to victory.”

“I shall go, Comrade Colonel,” Nussboym said. He had his own opinions about the historical dialectic, but Skriabin hadn’t asked him about them. With luck, Skriabin wouldn’t.

Captain Marchenko glowered at Nussboym when he returned. It didn’t faze him; Marchenko glowered at everyone all the time. Nussboym went into the barracks full of striking Lizards. “If you do not go back to work, some of you will be killed,” he warned. “Colonel Skriabin is fierce and determined.”

“We are not afraid,” Ussmak said. “If you kill us, the spirits of Emperors past will watch over us.”

“Will they?” David Nussboym asked. “Colonel Skriabin tells me many of you males here are mutineers who murdered your own officers. Even those who did not, have surely given secrets of the Race to the Soviet Union. Why would the Emperors want anything to do with your spirits?”

Appalled silence crashed down inside the rebellious barracks. Then the Lizards started talking among themselves in low voices, mostly too fast for Nussboym to follow. He got the drift, though: that was something the Lizards might have thought privately but bad never dared speak aloud. He gave Skriabin credit for understanding the way the aliens’ minds worked.

At last, Ussmak said, “You Big Uglies go straight for the killing shot, don’t you? I have not abandoned the Empire, not in my spirit, but the Emperors may have abandoned me. This is truth. Dare I take the chance of finding out? Darewe take the chance of finding out?” He turned to the prisoners and put the question to them.

In Poland, the Lizards had derisively called democracysnoutcounting. Here they were using something uncommonly like it to hash the matter out for themselves. Nussboym didn’t say anything about that. He stood waiting till they were done arguing, and tried to follow the debate as best he could.

“We will work,” Ussmak said. He sounded dull and defeated. “We do need more food, though. And-” He hesitated, then decided to go on: “If you can get us the herb ginger, it would help us through these long, boring days.”

“I will put your requests to Colonel Skriabin,” Nussboym promised. He didn’t think the Lizards were likely to get more food. Nobody except the NKVD men, their trusties, and the cooks got enough to eat. Ginger was another story. If it drugged them effectively, they might get it.

He walked out of the barracks. “Well?” Captain Marchenko barked at him.

“The strike is over,” he answered in Polish, then added a German word to make sure the NKVD man got it:“Kaputt.” Marchenko nodded. He still looked unhappy with the world, but he didn’t look like a man about to hose down the neighborhood with his submachine gun, as he often did. He waved Nussboym back toward the original camp.

As he returned, he saw Ivan Fyodorov limping back into camp, accompanied by a guard. The right leg of Fyodorov’s trousers was red with blood; his axe must have slipped, out there in the woods.

“Ivan, are you all right?” Nussboym called.

Fyodorov looked at him, shrugged, then looked away. Nussboym’s cheeks flamed. This wasn’t the first time since he’d become interpreter for the Lizards that he’d got the cold shoulder from the men of his former work gang. They made it all too clear he wasn’t one of them any more. He hadn’t been asked to rat on them or anything of the sort, but they treated him with the same mistrustful respect they gave any of the otherzeks who went out of their way to work with the camp administration.

I’m just being realistic,he told himself. In Poland, the Lizards had been the power to propitiate, and he’d propitiated them. Only a fool would have thought the Germans a better choice. Well, God had never been shy about turning out fools in carload lots. That was how he’d ended up here, after all. No matter where a man was, he had to land on his feet. He was even serving mankind by helping the NKVD get the most from the Lizards. He reported what they wanted to Colonel Skriabin. Skriabin only grunted.

Nussboym wondered why he felt so lonely.

For the first time since George Bagnall had had the displeasure of making his acquaintance, Georg Schultz had kitted himself out in full German uniform rather than the motley mix of Nazi and Bolshevik gear he usually wore. Standing in the doorway of the house Bagnall, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones shared, he looked large and mean and menacing.

He sounded menacing, too. “You damned Englishmen, you had better clear out of Pleskau while you have the chance.” He gave the German version of the name of the Russian town. “You don’t clear out now, don’t bet anyone will let you next week. You understand what I’m saying?”

Embry and Jones came up behind Bagnall. As if by chance, the pilot casually held a Mauser, while the radarman bore a Soviet PPSh 41 submachine gun. “We understand you,” Bagnall said. “Do you understand us?”

Schultz spat in the mud by the doorway. “Try and do some people a favor and this is the thanks I get.”

Bagnall looked at Embry. Embry looked at Jones. Jones looked at Bagnall. They all started to laugh. “Why the devil would you want to do us a favor?” Bagnall demanded. “Far as I can tell, you want to see us dead.”

“Me especially,” Jones added. “I am not responsible for the fair Tatiana’s affections, or for the shifts thereof.” He spoke as he might have of blizzards or earthquakes or other ineluctable forces of nature.

“If you’re dead, she can’t yank your trousers down-that’s so,” Schultz said. “But if you’re gone, she can’t yank your trousers down, either. One way or another, you aren’t going to be around long. I already told you that. You can clear out or you can end up dead-and you’d better figure out quick which one you aim to do.”

“Who’s going to kill us?” Bagnall said. “You?” He let his eyes flick back to his companions. “Good luck.”

“Don’t be aDummkopf,” Schultz advised him. “In real fighting, you three would just be-what do they say? — collateral damage, that’s it. Nobody would know you were dead till you started to stink. And there’s going to be real fighting, sure as hell. We’re going to set this town to rights, is what we’re going to do.”

“Colonel Schindler says-” Bagnall began, and then stopped. Lieutenant General Chill’s second-in-command made most of the right noises about maintaining Soviet-German cooperation, but Bagnall had got the impression he was just making noise. Chill had thought working with the Russians the best way to defend Pskov against the Lizards. If Schindler didn’t-

“Ah, see, you’re not so stupid after all,” Schultz said, nodding in sardonic approval. “If somebody draws you a picture, you can tell what’s on it. Very good.” He clicked his heels, as if to an officer of his own forces.

“Why shouldn’t we go off to Brigadier German with news like this?” Ken Embry demanded. “You couldn’t stop us.” He made as if to point his rifle at Schultz.

“What, you think the Russians are blind and deaf and dumb like you?” Schultz threw back his head and laughed. “We fooled ’em good in ‘41. They won’t ever let us do that again. Doesn’t matter.” He rocked back on his heels, the picture of arrogant confidence. “We would have whipped ’em if the Lizards hadn’t come, and we’ll whip ’em here in Pleskau, too.”

The first part of that claim was inherently unprovable. However much he didn’t care for it, Bagnall thought the second part likely to be true. The Soviet forces in and around Pskov were ex-partisans. They had rifles, machine guns, grenades, a few mortars. The Nazis had all that plus real artillery and some armor, though Bagnall wasn’t sure how much petrol they had for it. If it came to open war, theWehrmacht would win.

Bagnall didn’t say anything about that. Instead, he asked, “Do you think you’re going to be able to keep the fair Tatiana”-die schone Tatiana;it was almost a Homeric epithet for the sniper-“as a pet? I wouldn’t want to fall asleep beside her afterwards, let me tell you.”

A frown settled on Schultz’s face like a rain cloud. Plainly, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. In action, he probably let his officers do his thinking for him. After a moment, though, the cloud blew away. “She knows strength, Tatiana. When the forces of theReich have shown themselves stronger than the Bolsheviks, when I have shown myself stronger than she is-” He puffed out his chest and looked manly and imposing.

The three RAF men looked at one another again. By their expressions, Embry and Jones were having as much trouble holding in laughter as Bagnall was. Tatiana Pirogova had been fighting the Germans since the war started, and only reluctantly went over to fighting the Lizards after they landed. If Schultz thought a Nazi win in Pskov would awe her into thinking him a GermanUbermensch, he was in for disappointment-probably painful, possibly lethal, disappointment.

But how could you tell him that? The answer was simple: you couldn’t. Before Bagnall even started to figure out what to say, Schultz spoke first: “You have your warning. Do with it what you will.Guten Tag.” He did a smart about-turn and clumped away. Now that spring was truly here, he wore German infantry boots in place of the Russian felt ones everyone, regardless of politics, used during the winter.

Bagnall shut the door, then turned to his fellow Englishmen. “Well, what the devil are we supposed to do aboutthat?”

“I think the first thing we do, no matter what Schultz said, is to go pay a visit to Aleksandr German,” Jerome Jones said. “Knowing the Germans don’t love you is rather different from knowing they aim to kick you in the ballocks one day soon.”

“Yes, but after that?” Embry said. “I don’t much care to scuttle out of here, but I’m damned if I’ll fight for the Nazis and I’m not dead keen on laying my life on the line for the Bolshies, either.”

That summed up Bagnall’s feelings so well, he nodded instead of adding a comment of his own along those lines. What he did say was, “Jones is right. We’d best learn what German”-he put the hardG in there-“knows about what the Germans”-softG- “are up to.”

He got a rifle of his own before going out on the streets of Pskov. Embry and Jones carried their weapons. So did most of the men and a lot of the women in town: Nazis and Red Russians put him in mind of cowboys and Red Indians. This game, though, was liable to be bloodier.

They went through the marketplace to the east of the ruins of theKrom. Bagnall didn’t like what he saw there. Only a handful ofbabushkas sat behind the tables, not the joking, gossiping throngs that had filled the square even through the winter. The goods the old women set out for sale were shabby, too, as if they didn’t want to show anything too fine for fear of having it stolen.

Aleksandr German made his headquarters across the street from the church of Sts. Peter and Paul at the Buoy, on Ulitsa Vorovskogo north of theKrom. The Red Army soldiers who guarded the building gave the Englishmen suspicious looks, but let them through to see the commander.

The fierce red mustache German wore had given him the appearance of a pirate. Now, with his face thin and pale and drawn, the mustache seemed pasted on, like misplaced theatrical makeup. An enormous bandage still padded his crushed hand. Bagnall was amazed the surgeons hadn’t simply amputated it; he couldn’t imagine the ruined member ever giving the partisan brigadier as much use as he could have got from a hook.

He and Jerome Jones took turns telling German of Georg Schultz’s warning. When they were through, the Soviet partisan officer held up his good hand. “Yes, I do know about this,” he said in the Yiddish that came more naturally to him than did Russian. “The Nazi is probably right-the fascists and we will be fighting again before long.”

“Which does no one but the Lizards any good,” Bagnall observed.

Aleksandr German shrugged. “It doesn’t even do them much good,” he said. “They aren’t going to come north and take Pskov, not now they’re not. They’ve pulled most of their forces off this front to fight the Germans in Poland. We were fighting the fascists before the Lizards came, and we’ll be fighting them after the Lizards go. No reason we shouldn’t fight them while the Lizards are here, too.”

“I don’t think you’ll win,” Bagnall said.

German shrugged again. “Then we fade back into the woods and become the Forest Republic once more. We may not hold the town, but the Nazis will not hold the countryside.” He sounded very sure of himself.

“Doesn’t seem to leave much place for us,” Jerome Jones said in Russian. Thanks to his university studies, he preferred that language to German; with Bagnall, it was the other way around.

“It does not leave much place for you,” Aleksandr German agreed. He sighed. “I had thought to try to get you out of here. Now I shall not have the chance. But I urge you to leave before we and the Nazis start fighting among ourselves again. You did all you could to keep that from happening up until now, but Colonel Schindler is a less reasonable man than his late predecessor-and, as I say, the threat from the Lizards is less now, so we have not got that to distract us from each other. Make for the Baltic while you still can.”

“Will you write us a safe-conduct?” Ken Embry asked him.

“Yes, certainly,” the partisan brigadier said at once. “You should get one from Schindler, too.” His face twisted. “You are Englishmen, after all, and so deserve fair treatment under the laws of war. If you were Russians-” He shook his head. “The other thing you need to remember is how little good a safe-conduct, ours or Schindler’s, may do for you. If someone shoots at you from five hundred meters, you will not be able to present it to him.”

Though that was true, it was not a topic on which Bagnall cared to dwell. Aleksandr German found a scrap of paper, dipped a pen into a bottle that smelled more of berry juice than of ink, and scribbled rapidly. He handed the document to Bagnall, who still read Cyrillic script only haltingly. Bagnall passed it to Jerome Jones. Jones skimmed through it and nodded.

“Good luck,” Aleksandr German said. “I wish I had something more than that to offer you, but even it is in short supply here these days.”

The three Englishmen were somber when they left the partisan brigadier. “Do you think we ought to get alaissez-passer from Schindler?” Embry asked.

“My guess is that we needn’t bother,” Bagnall answered. “The Germans around here are all soldiers, and all know who we are. That isn’t true of the Russians, not by a long chalk. Our piece of paper may keep some peasants from slitting our throats one night while we’re asleep in their haystack”

“Or, of course, it may not,” Embry said, not wanting his reputation for cynicism to suffer. “Still, I suppose we’re better off with it.”

“Pity we didn’t bring all our food and ammunition along,” Bagnall said. “We could have started off straightaway instead of having to go back to the house.”

“It’s not that far back,” Jones said. “And after we recover the gear, I suggest we stay not upon the honor of our going. When both sides tell you you’d better hop it, you’re a fool if you don’t listen. And, except where the fair Tatiana is concerned”-he grinned ruefully-“Mrs. Jones raised no fools.”

“You’ll be free of her at last,” Bagnall reminded him.

“So will I,” he said, and then, “dammit.”

A captain with a set of decorations as impressive as Basil Roundbush’s rapped on the door frame of David Goldfarb’s laboratory at Dover College. “Hullo,” he said. “I have a present for you chaps.” He turned and let out some grunts and hisses that sounded rather as if he were doing his best to choke to death. More funny noises came back at him. Then a Lizard walked into the room, its turreted eyes going every which way.

Goldfarb’s first reaction was to grab for a pistol. Unfortunately, he wasn’t wearing one. Roundbush was, and had it out with commendable speed. “No need for that,” the much-decorated captain said. “Mzepps is quite tame, and so am I: Donald Mather, at your service.”

After his first instant of surprise, Basil Roundbush had taken a good look at Mather’s uniform. The pistol went back into its holster. “He’s SAS, David,” he said. “I expect he can protect us from a Lizard or two… dozen.” He sounded more serious than he normally would have while making such a crack.

Goldfarb took a second look at Mather and concluded Roundbushwas serious. The captain was a handsome chap in a blond, chisel-featured way, and seemed affable enough, but something about his eyes warned that getting on his wrong side would be a mistake-quite likely a fatal mistake. And he hadn’t won those medals for keeping the barracks clean and tidy, either.

“Sir, what will we do with-Mzepps, did you say?” he asked.

“Mzepps, yes,” Mather answered, pronouncing eachp separately. “I expect he might be useful to you: he’s a radar technician, you see. I’ll stay around to interpret till the two of you understand each other well enough, then I’ll be on my merry way. He does speak a little English now, but he’s far from fluent.”

“A radar technician?” Basil Roundbush said softly. “Oh, David, you are a lucky sod. You know that, don’t you? That peach of a girl, now a Lizard of your very own to play with.” He rounded on Mather. “You don’t happen to have a jet-engine specialist concealed anywhere about your person, do you? We have this lovely video platter here on how to service their bloody engines, and knowing what the words mean would help us understand the pictures.”

Captain Mather actually did look up his sleeve. “Nothing here, I’m afraid.” The dispassionate tone of the reply only made it more absurd. Mzepps spoke up in the Lizards’ hissing language. Mather listened to him, then said, “He tells me he was kept with a couple of jet-engine men, er, Lizards, back in-well, you don’t need to know that. Where he was before. They like it where they are, he says. Why was that, Mzepps?” He repeated the question in the Lizards’ speech, listened to the answer, laughed, and reported back: “They like it because the bloke they’re working with is hardly bigger than they are… Hullo! What’s got into you two?”

Goldfarb and Roundbush had both let out yelps of delight. Goldfarb explained: “That has to be Group Captain Hipple. We both thought he’d bought his plot when the Lizards jumped on Bruntingthorpe with both feet. First word we’ve had he’s alive.”

“Ah. That is a good show,” Mather said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Goldfarb. “Something I was supposed to tell you, and I nearly forgot.” He looked angry at himself: he wasn’t supposed to forget things. “You’re cousin to that Russie chap, aren’t you?” Without waiting for Goldfarb’s startled nod, he went on, “Yes, of course you are. I ought to let you know that, not so very long ago, I put him and his family on a boat bound for Palestine, on orders of my superiors.”

“Did you?” Goldfarb said tonelessly. “Thank you for telling me, sir. Other than that-” He shook his head. “I got them out of Poland so the Lizards wouldn’t do their worst to him, and now he’s back in another country they’ve overrun. Have you heard any word of him since he got there?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mather answered. “I’ve not even heardthat he got there. You know how security is.” He seemed faintly embarrassed. “I daresay I shouldn’t have told you what I just did, but blood’s thicker than water, what?”

“Yes.” Goldfarb gnawed on his lower lip. “Better to know, I suppose.” He wasn’t sure he meant what he said. He felt helpless. But then, Mather might as easily have brought news that Moishe and Rivka and Reuven had been killed in a Lizard air raid on London. There was still hope. Clinging to it, he said, “Well, we haven’t much choice but to get on with it, have we?”

“Right you are,” Mather said, and Goldfarb gathered he’d made a favorable impression. The SAS man went on, “Only way to keep from going mad is to carry on.”

How very British,Goldfarb thought, half ruefully, half in admiration. “Let’s find out what Mzepps knows about radars, and what he can tell us about the sets we’ve captured from his chums.”

Before that first day’s work with the Lizard prisoner was done, he learned as much in some areas as he had in months of patient-and sometimes not so patient-trial and error. Mzepps gave him the key to the color-coding system the Lizards used for their wires and electrical components: far more elaborate and more informative than the one with which Goldfarb had grown up. The Lizard also proved a deft technician, showing the RAF radarman a dozen quick tricks, maybe more, that made assembling, disassembling, and troubleshooting radars easier.

But when it came to actually repairing the sets, he was less help. Through Mather, Goldfarb asked him, “What do you do when this unit goes bad?” He pointed to the gadgetry that controlled the radar wavelength. He didn’t know how it did that, but more cut and try had convinced him it did.

Mzepps said, “You remove the module and replace it with one in good working order.” He reached into the radar. “See, it snaps in and out like this. Very easy.”

It was very easy. From an accessibility standpoint, the Lizards’ sets beat what the RAF made all hollow. The Lizards designed them so they not only worked but were also convenient to service. A lot of good engineering had gone into that. British engineers had just got to the point of being able to design radars that worked. Every time he looked at the cat’s cradle of wires and resistors and capacitors and the rest of the electronics that made up the guts of an RAF set, Goldfarb was reminded that they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with convenience.

But Mzepps hadn’t quite grasped what he’d meant. “I see how you replace it, yes. But suppose you haven’t got a replacement for the whole unit. Suppose you want to repair the part in it that’s gone bad? How do you diagnose which part that is, and how do you fix it?”

Captain Mather put the revised question to the Lizard. “No can do,” Mzepps said in English. He went on in his own language. Mather had to stop and ask more questions a couple of times. At last he gave Goldfarb the gist: “He says it really can’t be done, old man. That’s a unitary assembly. If one part of it goes, the whole unit’s buggered for fair.” Mzepps added something else. Mather translated again: “The idea is that it shouldn’t break down to start with.”

“If he can’t fix it when it breaks, what the devil good is he?” Goldfarb said. As far as he was concerned, you had no business mucking about with electronics without some notion of the theory behind the way the machines worked-and if you understood the theory, you were halfway to being able to jury-rig a fix when something went wrong. And something would go wrong.

After a moment, he realized he wasn’t quite fair. Plenty of people ran motorcars without knowing more about how they worked than where to put in the petrol and how to patch a punctured inner tube. Still, he wouldn’t have wanted one of those people on his team if he were driving a race car.

Mzepps might have been thinking along with him. Through Captain Mather, the Lizard said, “The task of a technician is to know which unit is ailing. We cannot manufacture components for our sets on this planet, anyhow. Your technology is too primitive. We have to use what we brought with us.”

Goldfarb imagined a Victorian expeditionary force stranded in darkest Africa. The British soldiers could cut a great swath through the natives-as long as their ammunition held out, their Maxim guns didn’t break some highly machined part, their horses didn’t start dying of sleeping sickness, and they didn’t come down with malaria or yaws or whatever you came down with in darkest Africa (sure as hell, you’d come down with something). If that Victorian army was stuck there, without hope of rescue…

He turned to Donald Mather. “Do you know, sir, this is the first bit of sympathy I’ve ever felt for the Lizards.”

“Don’t waste it,” Mather advised him. “They’d waste precious little on you, and that’s the God’s truth. They’re a nasty set of foes, which only means we shall have to be nasty in return. Gas, these bombs… If we’re not to go under, we must seize what spares we can.”

That was inarguably true. Even so, Goldfarb didn’t think Mather took his point. He glanced over at the SAS man. No, Mather didn’t look to be the sort who’d appreciate argument by historical analogy or any suchpilpul- not that he’d know that word, either.

“Ask Mzepps what he’ll do when he and his scaly chums run out of spares,” Goldfarb said.

“By then, we’ll be beaten,” Mather said after the Lizard was done with his noises. “That’s still their propaganda line, in spite of the thrashing they took when they came over here.”

“Can’t expect them to go about saying they’re doomed, I suppose,” Goldfarb allowed. “But if our charming prisoner there still thinks we’re going to be trounced, why is he being so cooperative here? He’s helping grease the skids for his own people. Why not just name, rank, and pay number?”

“There’s an interesting question.” Mather made steam-engine noises at Mzepps. Goldfarb doubted he came up with many interesting questions on his own, not ones unrelated to the immediate task at hand. The Lizard prisoner replied at some length, and with some heat. Mather gave Goldfarb the essence of it: “He says we are his captors, so we have become his superiors. The Lizards obey their superiors the way Papists obey the Pope, only rather more so.”

Goldfarb didn’t know how well, or even if, Catholics obeyed the Pope. He didn’t point out his ignorance to Mather. The SAS man was liable to have other aversions, including one to Jews. If he did, he didn’t let it interfere with the way he did his job. Goldfarb was willing to settle for that. The world being as it was these days, it was more than you could count on getting.

“What sort of treatment does he get?” he asked Mather, pointing to Mzepps. “After he’s done here, where does he go? How does he spend his time?”

“We’ve brought several Lizards into Dover to work with you boffins,” Mather replied. That in itself surprised Goldfarb, who was used to thinking of people like Fred Hipple as boffins, not to having the label applied to himself. He supposed that, to a combat soldier like Mather, anyone who fought the war with slide rule and soldering iron rather than Sten gun and hand grenade counted as an intellectual sort. His bemusement made him miss part of the SAS man’s next sentence: “-billeted them at a cinema house that was worthless otherwise with so little electricity in town. They get the same rations our troops do, but-”

“Poor devils,” Goldfarb said with deep feeling. “Isn’t that against the Geneva Convention? Being purposely cruel to prisoners, I mean.”

Mather chuckled. “I shouldn’t wonder. I was going to say, they get more meat and fish than we do, which isn’t hard, I know. Signs are, they need it in their diet.”

“So do I,” Basil Roundbush said plaintively from across the room. “Oh, so do I. Can’t you see me pining away for want of sirloin?” He let out a theatrical groan.

Captain Mather rolled his eyes and tried to carry on: “The ones who want it, we give ginger. Mzepps hasn’t got that habit. They talk among themselves. Some of them have taken up cards and dice and even chess.”

“Those can’t be games anything like what they’re used to,” Goldfarb said.

“They have dice, Mzepps tell me. The others, I suppose, help fill up the time. We don’t let them have any of their own amusements. Can’t. Most of those are electric-no, you’d say electronic, what? — devices of one sort or another, and who knows but what they might build some sort of wireless from them.”

“Mm, that’s so.” Goldfarb glanced over at Mzepps. “Is he happy?”

“I’ll ask him.” Mather did, then laughed “ ‘Are you crazy?’ he says.” Mzepps spoke some more. Mather went on, “He says he’s alive and fed and not being tortured, and all that’s more than he expected when he was captured. He may not be dancing in the daisies, but he’s got no kick coming.”

“Fair enough,” Goldfarb said, and went back to work.

Sergeant Herman Muldoon peered out through a glassless second-story window of the Wood House across Quincy, Illinois, down toward the Mississippi at the base of the bluffs. “That there,” he declared, “is one hell of a river.”

“This is a hell of a place, too,” Mutt Daniels said. “Yeah, the windows are blown to smithereens, but the house itself don’t hardly look no different than the way it did last time I was in this town, back about nineteen and seven.”

“They made the joint to last, all right,” Muldoon agreed. “You set stone blocks in lead, they ain’t goin’ anyplace. Bein’ shaped like a stop sign don’t hurt, neither, I guess: more chance to deflect a shell, less chance to stop one square.” He paused. “What were you doin’ here in 1907, Lieutenant, you don’t mind my askin’?”

“Playin’ ball-what else?” Mutt answered. “I started out number two catcher for the Quincy Gems in the Iowa State League-my first time ever in Yankee country, and Lord! was I lonesome. Number one catcher-his name was Ruddock, Charlie Ruddock-he broke his thumb second week in May. I hit 360 for a month after that, and the Gray’s Harbor Grays, out in Washington State, bought my contract. The Northwestern League was Class B, two notches up from Quincy, but I was kinda sorry to leave just the same.”

“How come?” Muldoon asked. “You ain’t the kind of guy to turn down a promotion, Lieutenant, and I bet you never was.”

Daniels laughed softly. He looked out toward the Mississippi, too. Itwas a big river here, but not a patch on what it would be when it got down to his home state, which shared its name. It hadn’t had the Missouri or the Ohio or the Tennessee or the Red or a zillion other rivers join it, not yet.

Only a quarter of him was thinking about the Mississippi, though. The rest looked not so much across Quincy as across almost two thirds of a lifetime. More to himself than to Herman Muldoon, he said, “There was this pretty little girl with curly hair just the color o’ ripe corn. Her name was Addie Strasheim, an’ I can see the little dimple in her cheek plain as if it was yesterday. She was a sweetie, Addie was. I’d’a stayed here all season, likely tell I woulda married her if I coulda talked her pa into it.”

“You get the chance, you oughta go lookin’ for her,” Muldoon said. “Town ain’t been fought over too bad, and this don’t look like the kind of place where a whole bunch of people pull up stakes and head for the big city.”

“You know, Muldoon, for a pretty smart guy, you can be a natural-born damn fool,” Mutt said. His sergeant grinned back at him, not in the least put out. Slowly, again half to himself, Daniels went on, “I was twenty-one then, she was maybe eighteen. Don’t think I was the first boy who ever kissed her, but I reckon there couldn’t have been more than a couple ahead of me. She’s alive now, she’s got old, same as me, same as you, same as everybody. I’d sooner think of her like she was, sweet as a peach pie.” He sighed. “Hell, I’d sooner think of me like I was, a kid who thought a kiss was somethin’ special, not a guy standin’ in line for a fast fuck.”

“World’s a nasty place,” Muldoon said. “You live in it, it wears you down after a while. War makes it worse, but it’s pretty bad any old way.”

“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Mutt said.

“Here.” Muldoon took his canteen off his belt and held it out to Mutt. “Good for what ails you.”

“Yeah?” Nobody had ever offered Mutt water with a promise like that. He unscrewed the lid, raised the canteen to his lips, and took a swig. What came out was clear as water, but kicked like a mule. He’d had raw corn likker a time or three, but this stuff made some of the other moonshine he’d poured down feel like Jack Daniel’s by comparison. He swallowed, coughed a couple of times, and handed the canteen back to Muldoon. “Good thing I ain’t got me no cigarettes. I light a match and breathe in, I figure I’d explode.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit,” the sergeant said with a chuckle. He looked at his watch. “We better grab some sack time while we can. We start earnin’ our pay again at midnight.”

Daniels sighed. “Yeah, I know. An’ if this goes just right, we push the Lizards back a quarter of a mile down the Mississippi. At that rate, we can have the whole damn river open about three weeks before Judgment Day.” Once he got the complaints out of his system, he rolled himself up in a blanket and fell asleep in a minute and a half, tops.

As he was dozing off, he figured Captain Szymanski would have to kick him awake, because he was down for the count. But he woke up in good time without the help of the company commander’s boot. Mosquitoes made sure of that. They came through the glassless windows of the Wood House buzzing like a flight of fighter planes, and they didn’t chew him up a whole lot less than getting strafed would have.

He slapped at his hands and his face. He wasn’t showing any other bare skin, but that was plenty for the mosquitoes. Come morning, he’d look like raw meat. Then he remembered the mission. Come morning, he was liable tobe raw meat.

Muldoon was awake, too. They went downstairs together, a couple of old-timers still hanging on in a young man’s world, a young man’s game. Back when he was a kid fighting to hook onto a big-league job even for a little while, he’d resented-he’d almost hated-old geezers who hung on and hung on and wouldn’t quit and give the new guys a chance. Now he was a geezer himself. When quitting meant going out feet first, you were less inclined to do it than when all you lost was your job.

Captain Szymanski was already down there in the big hall, telling the dogfaces what they were going to do and how they’d do it. They were supposed to know, but you didn’t get anywhere taking brains for granted. Szymanski finished, “Listen to your lieutenant and your sergeant. They’ll get you through.” That made Mutt feel pretty good.

More mosquitoes buzzed outside. Crickets chirped. A few spring peepers peeped, though most of them had already had their season. The night was warm and muggy. The platoon tramped south toward the Lizards’ forward positions. Boots clunked on pavement, then struck dirt and grass more quietly.

A couple of scouts halted the advancing Americans just north of Marblehead, the hamlet next down the river from Quincy. “Dig in,” Mutt whispered through the sticky darkness. Entrenching tools were already biting into dirt. Daniels missed the elaborate trench networks of the First World War, but fighting nowadays moved too fast to make those practical in most places. Even a foxhole quickly scraped out of the dirt was mighty nice to have sometimes, though.

He tugged back the cuff of his sleeve to look at his watch. A quarter to twelve, the glowing hands said. He held it up to his ear. Yes, it was ticking. He would have guessed it a couple of hours later than that, and something gone wrong with the attack “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun,” he muttered.

No sooner had he lowered his arm than artillery opened up, off to the east of Quincy. Shells started slamming into Marblehead, some landing no more than a couple of hundred yards south of where he crouched. Nothing had gone wrong after all; he’d just been too keyed up to keep track of time.

“Let’s go!” he shouted when his watch told him it was time. The barrage shifted at the same moment, plastering the southern half of Marblehead instead of the northern part. Lizard artillery was busy, too, but mostly with counterbattery fire. Mutt was glad the Lizards were shelling the American guns, not him.

“Over here!” a scout yelled. “We’ve got paths cut through their wire.” The Lizards used stuff that was like nothing so much as a long, skinny double-edged razor blade. As far as he was concerned, it was even nastier than barbed wire. The plan had said there would be paths, but what the plan said didn’t always have a lot to do with reality.

Lizards in Marblehead opened up on the Americans as they were coming through the wire. No matter how many traps you set, you wouldn’t get all the rats. No matter how you shelled a place, you wouldn’t clear out all the fighters. Mutt had been on the receiving end of barrages a lot worse than this one. He’d expected opposition, and here it was.

He blazed away with his tommy gun, then threw himself flat behind the overturned hulk of an old Model A. Mike Wheeler, the platoon BAR man, hosed down the town with his Browning Automatic Rifle. Daniels wished for Dracula Szabo, the BAR man in his old platoon. Dracula would have got right up there nose-to-snout with the Lizards before he let ’em have it

His platoon’s attack developed the Lizard position. The company’s other platoon moved on the town from the east a couple of minutes later. They knew where the enemy was holed up, and winkled the aliens out house by house. Some Lizards surrendered, some fled, some died. One of their medics and a couple of human corpsmen worked side by side on casualties.

A little fight,Mutt thought wearily. A few men killed-even fewer Lizards, by the look of things. Marblehead hadn’t been heavily garrisoned. A few of the locals started sticking their heads out of whatever shelters they’d made to protect themselves from pieces of metal flying around with hostile intent.

“Not too bad,” Herman Muldoon said. He pointed west, toward the Mississippi. “Another stretch of river liberated. We’ll clear all the Lizards out a lot sooner than three weeks before Judgment Day like you said.”

“Yeah,” Daniels agreed. “Mebbe six weeks.” Muldoon laughed, just as if Mutt had been kidding.