Striking the Balance

XIII

Liu Han turned and saw Liu Mei pickup a bayonet Nieh Ho-T’ing had been careless enough to leave on the floor. “No!” Liu Han shouted. “Put it down!” She hurried across the room to take the edged weapon away from her little daughter.

Before she got there, Liu Mei had dropped the bayonet. The baby stared up at her with wide eyes. She started to scold Liu Mei, then stopped. Her daughter had obeyed her when she yelled in Chinese. She hadn’t had to speak the little scaly devils’ language or use an emphatic cough to make the baby understand her.

She scooped up Liu Mei and squeezed her tight. Liu Mei didn’t scream and squawk and try to get away, as she had when Liu Han first got her back from Ttomalss. Little by little, her daughter was becoming used to being a human being among other human beings, not a counterfeit little devil.

Liu Mei pointed to the bayonet. “This?” she asked in the little devils’ tongue, complete with interrogative cough.

“This is a bayonet,” Liu Han answered in Chinese. She repeated the key word: “Bayonet.”

Liu Mei made a noise that might have been intended forbayonet, though it also sounded like a noise a scaly devil might have made. The baby pointed in the general direction of the bayonet again, let out another interrogative cough, and said, “This?” once more.

Liu Han needed a moment to realize that, in spite of the cough, the question itself had been in Chinese. “This is a bayonet,” she said again. Then she hugged Liu Mei and gave her a big kiss on the forehead. Liu Mei hadn’t known what to make of kisses when Liu Han got her back, which struck Liu Han as desperately sad. Her daughter was getting the idea now: a kiss meant you’d done something pleasing.

The baby laughed in reply. Liu Mei laughed, but seldom smiled. No one had smiled at her when she was tiny; the scaly devils’ faces didn’t work that way. That saddened Liu Han, too. She wondered if she would ever be able to make it up to Liu Mei.

She paused and sniffed, then, despite the baby’s protests-Liu Mei, whatever else you could say about her, wasn’t shy about squawking-put a fresh cloth around her loins after cleaning the night soil from them.

“Something goes through you,” she told her daughter. “Is it enough? Are you getting enough to eat?”

The baby made squealing noises that might have meant anything or nothing. Liu Mei was old for a wet nurse now, and Liu Han’s breasts, of course, were empty of milk because her child had been stolen from her so young. But Liu Mei did not approve of the rice powder and overcooked noodles and soups and bits of pork and chicken Liu Han tried to feed her.

“Ttomalss must have been feeding you from tins,” Liu Han said darkly. Her mood only got angrier when Liu Mei looked alert and happy at hearing the familiar name of the little scaly devil.

Liu Han had eaten food from tins, too, when the little devils kept her prisoner aboard the airplane that never came down. Most of those tins had been stolen from Bobby Fiore’s America or other countries that ate similar kinds of foods. She had loathed them, almost without exception. They were preferable to starving to death, but not, as far as she was concerned, greatly preferable.

But they were what Liu Mei had known, just as the scaly devils were the company she had known. The baby thought the food of China, which seemed only right and proper to Liu Han, tasted and smelled peculiar, and ate it with the same reluctance Liu Han had felt in eating canned hash and other horrors.

Foreign-devil food could still be found in Peking, though most of it was under the control of rich followers of the Kuomintang’s counterrevolutionary clique or those who served as the scaly devils’ running dogs-not that those two groups were inseparable.

Nieh Ho-T’ing had offered to get some by hook or by crook so Liu Mei could have what she was used to.

Liu Han had declined when he first made the offer and every time since. She suspected-actually, she more than suspected; she was sure-one reason he’d made his proposal was to help keep the baby quiet through the night. She had a certain amount of sympathy with that, and certainly had nothing against a full night’s sleep, but she was dedicated to the idea of turning Liu Mei back into a proper Chinese child as fast as she could.

She’d had that thought many times since she got her baby back. Now, though, she stared down at Liu Mei in a new way, almost as if she’d never seen the child before. Her program was the opposite of the one Ttomalss had had in mind: he’d been as intent on making Liu Mei into a scaly devil as Liu Han was on turning her daughter back into an ordinary, proper person. But both the little devil and Liu Han herself were treating Liu Mei as if she were nothing more than a blank banner on which they could draw characters of their own choosing. Wasn’t a baby supposed to be something besides that?

Nieh wouldn’t have thought so. As far as Nieh was concerned, babies were small vessels to be filled with revolutionary spirit. Liu Han snorted. Nieh was probably annoyed that Liu Mei wasn’t yet planning bombings of her own and didn’t wear a little red star on the front of her overalls. Well, that was Nieh’s problem, not Liu Han’s or the baby’s.

Over a brazier in a corner of the room, Liu Han had a pot ofkao kan mien-erh, dry cake powder. Liu Mei liked that better than the other common variety of powdered rice,lao mi mien-erh or old rice flour. She didn’t like either one of them very much, though.

Liu Han went over and took the lid off the pot. She stuck in her forefinger and took it out smeared with a warm, sticky glob of the dry cake powder. When she brought the stuff over to Liu Mei, the baby opened her mouth and sucked the powdered rice off the finger.

Maybe Liu Mei was getting used to proper sorts of food after all. Maybe she was just so hungry that anything even vaguely edible tasted good to her right now. Liu Han understood how that might be from her own desperate times aboard the airplane that never came down. She’d eaten grayish-green tinned peas that reminded her of nothing so much as boiled dust. Perhaps in the same spirit of resignation, Liu Mei now took several blobs ofkao kan mien-erh from Liu Han’s finger and didn’t fuss once.

“Isn’t that good?” Liu Han crooned. She thought the dry cake powder had very little flavor of any sort, but babies didn’t like strongly flavored food. So grandmothers said, anyhow, and if they didn’t know, who did?

Liu Mei looked up at Liu Han and let out an emphatic cough. Liu Han stared at her daughter. Was she really saying she liked the dry cake powder today? Liu Han couldn’t think of anything else that cough might mean. Although her daughter had still expressed herself in the fashion of a little scaly devil, she’d done it to approve of something not only earthly but Chinese.

“Mama,” Liu Mei said, and then used another emphatic cough. Liu Han thought she would melt into a little puddle of dry-cake-flour mush, right there on the floor of her room. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been right: little by little, she was winning her daughter back from the scaly devils.

Mordechai Anielewicz looked at his companions in the room above the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “Well, now we have it,” he said. “What do we do with it?”

“We ought to give it back to the Nazis,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “They tried to kill us with it; only fair we should return the favor.”

“David Nussboym would have said we should give it to the Lizards,” Bertha Fleishman said, “and not the way Solomon meant, but as a true gift.”

“Yes, and because he kept saying things like that, we said goodbye to him,” Gruver answered. “We don’t need any more of such foolishness.”

“Just a miracle we managed to get that hideous stuff out of the casing and into our own sealed bottles without killing anybody doing it,” Anielewicz said: “a miracle, and a couple of those antidote kits theWehrmacht men sold us, for when their own people started feeling the gas in spite of the masks and the protective clothes they were wearing.” He shook his head. “The Nazis are much too good at making things like that.”

“They’re much too good at giving them to us, too,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Before, their rockets would send over a few kilos of nerve gas at a time, with a big bursting charge to spread it around. But this… we salvaged more than a tonne from that bomb. And they were going to have us place it so it hurt us worst. The rockets could come down almost anywhere.”

Solomon Gruver’s laugh was anything but pleasant. “I bet that Skorzeny pitched a fit when he found out he couldn’t play us for suckers the way he thought he could.”

“He probably did,” Mordechai agreed. “But don’t think he’s done for good because we fooled him once. I never thought themamzer would live up to the nonsense Gobbels puts out on the wireless, but he does. That is a man to be taken seriously no matter what. If we don’t keep an eye on him all the time, he’ll do something dreadful to us. Even if we do, he may yet.”

“Thank God for your friend, the other German,” Bertha said.

Now Anielewicz laughed-uncomfortably. “I don’t think he’s my friend, exactly. I don’t think I’m his friend, either. But I let him live and I let him carry that explosive metal back to Germany, and so… I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a stiff-necked sense of honor, and he’s paying back a debt.”

“There can be decent Germans,” Solomon Gruver said reluctantly. That almost set Mordechai laughing again. If he had started, the laugh would have carried an edge of hysteria. He could imagine some plump, monocled Nazi functionary using that precise tone of voice to admit,There can be decent Jews.

“I still wonder if I should have killed him,” Mordechai said. “The Nazis would have had a much harder time building their bombs without that metal, and God knows the world would be a better place without them. But the world wouldn’t be a better place with the Lizards overrunning it.”

“And here we are, still stuck in the middle between them,” Bertha Fleishman said. “If the Lizards win, everyone loses. If the Nazis win, we lose.”

“We’ll hurt them before we go,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve helped us do it, too. If they should come back, we won’t let them treat us the way they did before. Not now. Never again. What was the last desire of my life before the Lizards came has been fulfilled. Jewish self-defense is a fact.”

How tenuous a fact it was came to be shown a moment later, when a Jewish fighter named Leon Zelkowitz walked into the room where they were talking and said, “There’s an Order Service district leader down at the entrance who wants to talk with you, Mordechai.”

Anielewicz made a sour face. “Such an honor.” The Order Service in the Jewish district of Lodz still reported to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had been Eldest of the Jews under the Nazis and was still Eldest of the Jews under the Lizards. Most of the time, the Order Service prudently pretended the Jewish fighters did not exist. That the Lizards’ puppet police came looking for him now-he needed to find out what it meant. He got up and slung a Mauscr over his shoulder.

The Order Service officer still wore his Nazi-issue trench coat and kepi. He wore his Nazi-issue armband, too: red and white, with a blackMagen David on it; the white triangle inside the Star of David showed his rank. He carried a billy club on his belt. Against a rifle, that was nothing much.

“You wanted me?” Anielewicz was ten or twelve centimeters taller than the district leader, and used his height to stare coldly down at the other man.

“I-” The Order Service man coughed. He was chunky and pale-faced, with a black mustache that looked as if a moth had landed on his upper lip. He tried again: “I’m Oskar Birkenfeld, Anielewicz. I have orders to take you to Bunim.”

“Do you?” Anielewicz had expected a meeting with Rumkowski or some of his henchmen. To be summoned instead to meet with the chief Lizard in Lodz… something out of the ordinary was going on. He wondered if he should have this Birkenfeld seized and drop out of sight himself. He’d made plans to do that at need. Was the need here? Temporizing, he said, “Does he give me a safe-conduct pledge to and from the meeting?”

“Yes, yes,” the Order Service man said impatiently.

Anielewicz nodded, his face thoughtful. The Lizards were perhaps better than human beings about keeping those pledges. “All right. I’ll come.”

Birkenfeld turned in what looked like glad relief. Maybe he’d expected Mordechai to refuse, and also expected to catch it from his own superiors. He started away with his shoulders back and a spring in his step, for all the world as if he were on a mission of his own rather than a puppet of puppets. Sad and amused at the same time, Anielewicz followed him.

The Lizards had moved into the former German administrative offices in the Bialut Market Square.Only too fitting, Anielewicz thought. Rumkowski’ s offices were in the next building over; his buggy, with its German-made placard proclaiming him Eldest of the Jews, sat in front of it. But Mordechai got only a glimpse of the buggy, for Lizard guards came forward to take charge of him. District Leader Birkenfeld hastily disappeared.

“Your rifle,” a Lizard said to Anielewicz in hissing Polish. He handed over the weapon. The Lizard took it. “Come.”

Bunim’s office reminded Mordechai of Zolraag’s back in Warsaw: it was full of fascinating but often incomprehensible gadgets.

Even the ones whose purpose the Jewish fighting leader could grasp worked on incomprehensible principles. When the guard brought him into the office, for instance, a sheet of paper was silently issuing from a squarish box made of bakelite or something very much like it. The paper was covered with the squiggles of the Lizards’ written language. It had to have been printed inside the box. As he watched, a blank sheet went inside; it came out with printing on it. How, without any sound save the hum of a small electric motor?

He was curious enough to ask the guard. “It is askelkwank machine,” the Lizard answered. “Is no word forskelkwank in this speech.” Anielewicz shrugged. Incomprehensible the machine would remain.

Bunim turned one eye turret toward him. The regional sub-administrator-the Lizards used titles as impressively vague as any the Nazis had invented-spoke fairly fluent German. In that language, he said, “You are the Jew Anielewicz, the Jew leading Jewish fighters?”

“I am that Jew,” Mordechai said. He wondered how angry the Lizards still were at him for helping Moishe Russie escape their clutches. If that was why Bunim had summoned him, maybe he shouldn’t have admitted his name. But the way he’d been summoned argued against it. The Lizards didn’t seem to want to seize him, but to talk with him.

Bunim’s other eye turret twisted in its socket till the Lizard looked at him with both eyes, a sign of full attention. “I have a warning to deliver to you and to your fighters.”

“A warning, superior sir?” Anielewicz asked.

“We know more than you think,” Bunim said. “We know you Tosevites play ambiguous-is that the word I want? — games with us and with the Deutsche. We know you have interfered with our war efforts here in Lodz. We know these things, I tell you. Do not trouble yourself to deny them. It is of no use.”

Mordechai did not deny them. He stood silent, waiting to see what the Lizard would say next. Bunim let out a hissing sigh, then went on, “You know also that we are stronger than you.”

“This I cannot deny,” Anielewicz said with wry amusement.

“Yes. Truth. We could crush you at any time. But to do this, we would have to divert resources, and resources are scarce. So. We have tolerated you as nuisances-is this the word I want? But no more. Soon we move males and machines again through Lodz. If you are interfering. If you are nuisances, you will pay. This is the warning. Do you understand it?”

“Oh, yes, I understand it,” Anielewicz said. “Do you understand how much trouble you will have all through Poland, from Jews and Poles both. If you try to suppress us? Do you want nuisances, as you call them, all over the country?”

“We shall take this risk. You are dismissed,” Bunim said. One eye turret swiveled to look out the window, the other toward the sheets of paper that had emerged from the silent printing machine.

“You come,” the Lizard guard said in his bad Polish. Anielewicz came. When they got outside the building from which the Lizards administered Lodz, the guard returned his rifle.

Anielewicz went, thoughtfully. By the time he got back to the fire station on Lutomierska Street, he was smiling. The Lizards were not good at reading humans’ expressions. Had they been, they would not have liked his.

Max Kagan spoke in rapid-fire English. Vyacheslav Molotov had no idea what he was saying, but it sounded hot. Then Igor Kurchatov translated: “The American physicist is upset with the ways we have chosen to extract plutonium from the improved atomic pile he helped us design.”

Kurchatov’s tone was dry. Molotov got the idea he enjoyed delivering the American’s complaints. Translating for Kagan let him be insubordinate while avoiding responsibility for that insubordination. At the moment, Kagan and Kurchatov were both necessary-indeed, indispensable-to the war effort. Molotov had a long memory, though. One day-

Not today. He said, “If there is a quicker way to get the plutonium out of the rods than to use prisoners in that extraction process, let him acquaint me with it, and we shall use it. If not, not.”

Kurchatov spoke in English. So did Kagan, again volubly. Kurchatov turned to Molotov. “He says he never would have designed it that way had he known we would be using prisoners to remove the rods so we could reprocess them for plutonium. He accuses you of several bloodthirsty practices I shall not bother to translate.”

You enjoy hearing of them, though.Kurchatov was not as good as he should have been at concealing what he thought. “Have him answer my question,” Molotov said. “Is there a quicker way?”

After more back-and-forth between the two physicists, Kurchatov said, “He says the United States uses machines and remote-control arms for these processes.”

“Remind him we have no machines or remote-control arms.”

Kurchatov spoke. Kagan replied. Kurchatov translated: “He says to remind you the prisoners are dying from the radiation in which they work.”

“Nichevo,”Molotov answered indifferently. “We have plenty to replace them as needed. The project will not run short, of that I assure him.”

By the way Kagan’s swarthy face grew darker yet, that was not the assurance he’d wanted. “He demands to know why the prisoners are not at least provided with clothing to help protect them from the radiation,” Kurchatov said.

“We have little of such clothing, as you know perfectly well, Igor Ivanovich,” Molotov said. “We have no time to produce it in the quantities we need. We have no time for anything save manufacturing this bomb. For that, the Great Stalin would throw half the state into the fire-though you need not tell Kagan as much. How long now till we have enough of this plutonium for the bomb?”

“Three weeks, Comrade Foreign Commissar, perhaps four,” Kurchatov said. “Thanks to the American’s expertise, results have improved dramatically.”

A good thing, too,Molotov thought. Aloud, he said, “Make it three; less time if you can. And results are what counts here, not method. If Kagan cannot grasp this, he is a fool.”

When Kurchatov had translated that for Kagan, the American sprang to attention, clicked his heels, and stuck out his right arm in a salute Hitler would have been proud to get. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I do not think he is convinced,” Kurchatov said dryly.

“Whether he is convinced or not I do not care,” Molotov answered. Inside, though, where it didn’t show, he added an entry to the list he was compiling against Kagan. Maybe, when the war was over, the sardonic physicist would not find it so easy to go home again. But that was for later contemplation. For now, Molotov said, “What matters is that he continue to cooperate. Do you see any risk his squeamishness will imperil his usefulness?”

“No, Comrade Foreign Commissar. He is outspoken”-Kurchatov coughed behind his hand; Kagan was a lot more, a lot worse, than outspoken-“but he is also dedicated. He will continue to work with us.”

“Very well. I rely on you to see that he does.”Your head will go on the block if he doesn’t, Molotov meant, and Kurchatov, unlike Kagan, was not so naive as to be able to misunderstand. The foreign commissar continued, “This center holds the future of the USSR in its hands. If we can detonate one of these bombs soon and then produce more in short order, we shall demonstrate to the alien imperialist aggressors that we can match their weapons and deal them such blows as would in the long run prove deadly to them.”

“Certainly they can deliver such blows to us,” Kurchatov replied. “Our only hope for preservation is to be able to match them, as you say.”

“This is the Great Stalin’s policy,” Molotov agreed, which also meant it was how things were going to be. “He is certain that, once we have shown the Lizards our capacity; they will become more amenable to negotiations designed to facilitate their withdrawal from therodina.”

The foreign commissar and the Soviet physicist looked at each other, while Max Kagan stared at the two of them in frustrated incomprehension. Molotov saw one thought behind Kurchatov’s eyes, and suspected the physicist saw the same one behind his, despite his reputation for wearing a mask of stone. It was not the sort of thing even Molotov could say.The Great Stalin had better be right.

Ttomalss’ hiss carried a curious mixture of annoyance and enjoyment. The air in this Canton place was decently warm, at least during Tosev 3’s long summers, but so moist that the researcher felt as if he were swimming in it. “How do you keep fungus from forming in the cracks between your scales?” he asked his guide, a junior psychological researcher named Saltta.

“Superior sir, sometimes you can’t,” Saltta answered. “If it’s one of our fungi, the usual creams and aerosols do well enough in knocking it down. But, just as we can consume Tosevite foods, some Tosevite fungi can consume us. The Big Uglies are too ignorant to have any fungicides worthy of the name, and our medications have not proved completely effective. Some of the afflicted males had to be transported-in quarantine conditions, of course-to hospital ships for further treatment.”

Ttomalss’ tongue flicked out and wiggled in a gesture of disgust. A great deal of Tosev 3 disgusted him. He almost wished he could have been an infantrymale so he could have slaughtered Big Uglies instead of studying them. He didn’t like traveling through Tosevite cities on foot. He felt lost and tiny in the crowd of Tosevites who surged through the streets all around him. No matter how much the Race learned about these noisy, obnoxious creatures, would they ever be able to civilize them and integrate them into the structure of the Empire, as they’d succeeded in doing with the Rabotevs and Hallessi? He had his doubts.

If the Race was going to succeed, though, they’d have to start with new-hatched Tosevites, ones that weren’t set in their ways, to learn the means by which Big Uglies might be controlled. That was what he’d been doing with the hatching that had come out of the female Liu Han’s body… until Ppevel shortsightedly made him return it to her.

He hoped Ppevel would come down with an incurable Tosevite fungus infection. So much time wasted! So much data that would not be gathered. Now he was going to have to start all over with a new hatching. It would be years before he learned anything worth having, and for much of the first part of this experiment, he would merely be repeating work he’d already done.

He would also be repeating a pattern of sleep deprivation he would just as soon have avoided. Big Ugly hatchlings emerged from the bodies of females in such a wretchedly undeveloped state that they hadn’t the slightest idea about the difference between day and night, and made a horrendous racket whenever they felt like it. Why that trait hadn’t caused the species to become extinct in short order was beyond him.

“Here,” Saltta said as they turned a corner. “We are coming to one of the main market squares of Canton.”

If the streets of the city were noisy, the market was cacophony compounded. Chinese Tosevites screamed out the virtues of their wares at hideous volume. Others, potential customers, screamed just as loud or maybe louder, ridiculing the quality of the merchants’ stock in trade. When they weren’t screaming, and sometimes when they were, they entertained themselves by belching, spitting, picking their teeth, picking their snouts, and digging fingers into the flesh-flapped holes that served them for hearing diaphragms.

“You want?” one of them yelled in the language of the Race, almost poking Ttomalss in an eye turret with a length of leafy green vegetable.

“No!” Ttomalss said with an angry emphatic cough. “Go away!” Not in the least abashed, the vegetable seller let out a series of the yipping barks the Big Uglies used for laughter.

Along with vegetables, the merchants in the market sold all sorts of Tosevite life forms for food. Because refrigeration hereabouts ranged from rudimentary to nonexistent, some of the creatures were still alive in jugs or glass jars full of seawater. Ttomalss stared at gelatinous things with a great many sucker-covered legs. The creatures stared back out of oddly wise-looking eyes. Other Tosevite life forms had jointed shells and clawed legs; Ttomalss had eaten those, and found them tasty. And still others looked a lot like the swimming creatures in Home’s small seas.

One fellow had a box containing a great many legless, scaly creatures that reminded Ttomalss of the animals of his native world far more than did the hairy, thin-skinned life forms that dominated Tosev 3. After the usual loud haggling, a Big Ugly bought one of those creatures. The seller seized it with a pair of tongs and lifted it out, then used a cleaver to chop off its head. While the body was still writhing, the merchant slit open the animal’s belly and scooped out the offal inside. Then he cut the body into finger-long lengths, dripped fat into a conical iron pan that sat above a charcoal-burning brazier, and began frying the meat for the customer.

All the while, instead of watching what he was doing, he kept his eyes on the two males of the Race. Nervously, Ttomalss said to Saltta, “He would sooner be doing that to us than to the animal that shares some of our attributes.”

“Truth,” Saltta said. “Troth, no doubt. But these Big Uglies are still wild and ignorant. Only with the passage of generations will they come to see us as their proper overlords and the Emperor”-he lowered his eyes, as did Ttomalss-“as their sovereign and the solace of their spirits.”

Ttomalss wondered if the conquest of Tosev 3 could be accomplished. Even if it was accomplished, he wondered if the Tosevites could be civilized, as the Rabotevs and Hallessi had been before them. It was refreshing to hear a male still convinced of the Race’s power and the rightness of the cause.

North of the market, the streets were narrow and jumbled. Ttomalss wondered how Saltta found his way through them. The comfortable warmth was a little less here; the Big Uglies, for whom it was less comfortable, built the upper stories of their homes and shops so close together that they kept most of Tosev’ s light from reaching the street itself.

One building had armed males of the Race standing guard around it. Ttomalss was glad to see them; walking through these streets never failed to worry him. The Big Uglies were so-unpredictable was the kindest word that crossed his mind.

Inside the building, a Tosevite female held a newly emerged hatching to one of the glands on her upper torso so it could ingest the nutrient fluid she secreted for it. The arrangement revolted Ttomalss; it smacked of parasitism. He needed all his scientific detachment to regard it with equanimity.

Saltta said, “The female is being well compensated to yield up the hatching to us, superior sir. This should prevent any difficulties springing from the pair bonding that appears to develop between generations of Tosevites.”

“Good,” Ttomalss said. Now he could get on with his experimental program in peace-and if snivelers like Tessrek did not care for it, too bad. He switched to Chinese to speak to the Big Ugly female: “Nothing bad will happen to your hatching. It will be well fed, well cared for. All its needs will be met. Do you understand? Do you agree?” He was getting ever more fluent; he even remembered not to use interrogative coughs.

“I understand,” the female said softly. “I agree.” But as she held out the hatching to Ttomalss, water dripped from the corners of her small, immobile eyes. Ttomalss recognized that as a sign of insincerity. He dismissed it as unimportant. Compensation was the medicine to heal that wound.

The hatchling wiggled almost bonelessly in Ttomalss’ grasp and let out an annoying squawk. The female turned her head away. “Well done,” Ttomalss said to Saltta. “Let us take the hatching back to our own establishment here. Then I shall remove it to my laboratory, and then the research shall begin. I may have been thwarted once, but I shall not be thwarted twice.”

To make sure he was not thwarted twice, four guards accompanied him and Saltta back toward the Race’s base in the little island in the Pearl River. From there, a helicopter would take him and the hatching to the shuttlecraft launch site not far away-and from there, he would return to his starship.

Saltta retraced in every particular the route by which he had come to the female Big Ugly’s residence. Just before he, Ttomalss, and the guards reached the marketplace with the strange creatures in it, they found their way forward blocked by an animal-drawn wagon as wide as the lane down which they were coming.

“Go back!” Saltta shouted in Chinese to the Big Ugly driving the wagon.

“Can’t,” the Big Ugly shouted back. “Too narrow to turn around. You go back to the corner, turn off, and let me go by.”

What the Tosevite said was obviously true: he couldn’t turn around. One of Ttomalss’ eye turrets swiveled back to see how far he and his companions would have to retrace their steps. It wasn’t far. “We shall go back,” he said resignedly.

As they turned around, gunfire opened up from two of the buildings that faced the street. Big Uglies started screaming. Caught by surprise, the guards crumpled in pools of blood. One of them squeezed off an answering burst, but then more bullets found him and he lay still.

Several Tosevites in ragged cloth wrappings burst out of the buildings. They still carried the light automatic weapons with which they’d felled the guards. Some pointed those weapons at Ttomalss, others at Saltta. “You come with us right now or you die!” one of them screamed.

“We come,” Ttomalss said, not giving Saltta any chance to disagree with him. As soon as he got close enough to the Big Uglies, one of them tore the Tosevite hatching from his arms. Another shoved him into one of the buildings from which the raiders had emerged. In the back, it opened onto another of Canton’s narrow streets. He was hustled along through so many of them so fast, he soon lost any notion of where he was.

Before long, the Big Uglies split into two groups, one with him, the other with Saltta. They separated. Ttomalss was alone among the Tosevites. “What will you do with me?” he asked, fear making the words have to fight to come forth.

One of his captors twisted his mouth in the way Tosevites did when they were amused. Because he was a student of the Big Uglies, Ttomalss recognized the smile as an unpleasant one-not that his current situation made pleasant smiles likely. “We’ve liberated the baby you kidnapped, and now we’re going to give you to Liu Han,” the fellow answered.

Ttomalss had only thought he was afraid before.

Ignacy pointed to the barrel of the FieselerStorch’s machine gun. “This is of no use to you,” he said.

“Of course it’s not,” Ludmila Gorbunova snapped, irritated at the indirect way the Polish partisan leader had of approaching things. “If I’m flying the aircraft by myself, I can’t fire it, not unless my arms start stretching like an octopus’. It’s for the observer, not the pilot.”

“Not what I meant,” the piano-teacher-turned-guerrilla-chief replied. “Even if you carried an observer, you could, not fire it. We removed the ammunition from it some time ago. We’re very low on 7.92mm rounds, which is a pity, because we have a great many German weapons.”

“Even if you had ammunition for it, it wouldn’t do you much good,” Ludmila told him. “Machine-gun bullets won’t bring down a Lizard helicopter unless you’re very lucky, and the gun is wrongly placed for ground attack.”

“Again, not what I meant,” Ignacy said. “We need more of this ammunition. We have a little through the stores the Lizards dole out to their puppets, but only a little is redistributed. So-we have made contact with theWehrmacht to the west. If, tomorrow night, you can fly this plane to their lines, they will put some hundreds of kilograms of cartridges into it. When you return here, you will be a great help in our continued resistance to the Lizards.”

What Ludmila wanted to do with theStorch was hop into it and fly east till she came to Soviet-held territory. If she somehow got it back to Pskov, Georg Schultz could surely keep it running. Nazi though he was, he knew machinery the way a jockey knew horses.

Schultz’s technical talents aside, Ludmila wanted little to do with theWehrmacht, or with heading west. Comrades in aims though the Germans were against the Lizards, her mind still shoutedenemies! barbarians! whenever she had to deal with them. All of which, unfortunately, had nothing to do with military necessity.

“I take it this means you have petrol for the engine?” she asked, grasping at straws. When Ignacy nodded, she sighed and said, “Very well, I will pick up your ammunition for you. The Germans will have some sort of landing strip prepared?” The Fieseler-156 wouldn’t need much, but putting down in the middle of nowhere at night wasn’t something to anticipate cheerfully.

The dim light of the lantern Ignacy held showed his nod. “You are to fly along a course of 292 for about fifty kilometers. A landing field will be shown by four red lamps. You know what it means, this flying a course of 292?”

“I know what it means, yes,” Ludmila assured him. “Remember. If you want your ammunition back, you’ll also have to mark off a landing strip for my return.”And you’ll have to hope the Lizards don’t knock me down while I’m in the air over their territory, but that’s not something you can do anything about-it’s my worry.

Ignacy nodded again. “We will mark the field with four white lamps. I presume you will be flying back the same night?”

“Unless something goes wrong, yes,” Ludmila answered. That was a hair-raising business, but easier on the life expectancy than going airborne in broad daylight and letting any Lizard who spotted you take his potshots.

“Good enough,” Igancy said. “TheWehrmacht will expect you to arrive about 2330 tomorrow night, then.”

She glared at him. He’d made all the arrangements with the Nazis, then come to her. Better he should have had her permission before he went off and talked with the Germans. Well, too late to worry about that now. She also realized she was getting very used to operating on her own, as opposed to being merely a part of a larger military machine. She never would have had such resentments about obeying a superior in the Red Air Force: she would have done as she was told, and never thought twice about it.

Maybe it was that the Polish partisans didn’t strike her as being military enough to deserve her unquestioned obedience. Maybe it was that she felt she didn’t really belong here-if her U-2 hadn’t cracked up; if the idiot guerrillas near Lublin hadn’t forgotten an extremely basic rule about landing strips-

“Make sure there aren’t any trees in the middle of what’s going to be my runway,” she warned Ignacy. He blinked, then nodded for a third time.

She spent most of the next day making as sure as she could that theStorch was mechanically sound. She was uneasily aware she’d never be a mechanic of Schultz’ class, and also uneasily aware of how unfamiliar the aircraft was. She tried to make up for ignorance and unfamiliarity with thoroughness and repetition. Before long, she’d learn how well she’d done.

After dark, the partisans took the netting away from one side of the enclosure concealing the light German plane. They pushed theStorch out into the open. Ludmila knew she didn’t have much room in which to take off. The Fieseler wasn’t supposed to need much. She hoped all the things she’d heard about it were true.

She climbed up into the cockpit. When her finger stabbed the starter button, the Argus engine came to life at once. The prop spun, blurred, and seemed to disappear. The guerrillas scattered. Ludmila released the brake, gave theStorch full throttle, and bounced toward two men holding candles who showed her where the trees started. They grew closer alarmingly fast, but when she pulled back on the stick, theStorch hopped into the air as readily as one of its feathered namesakes.

Her first reaction was relief at flying again at last. Then she realized that, compared to what she was used to, she had a hot plane on her hands now. That Argus engine generated more than twice the horsepower of a U-2’s Shvetsov radial, and theStorch didn’t weigh anywhere near twice as much as aKukuruznik. She felt like a fighter pilot.

“Don’t be stupid,” she muttered to herself, good advice for a pilot under any circumstances. In the Fieseler’s enclosed cabin, she could hear herself talk, which had been all but impossible while she was flyingKukuruzniks. She wasn’t used to being airborne without having the slipstream blast her in the face, either.

She stayed as low to the ground as she dared; human-built aircraft that got up much above a hundred meters had a way of reaching zero altitude much more rapidly than their pilots had intended. Flying behind the lines, that worked well. Flying over them, as she discovered now, was another matter. Several Lizards opened up on theStorch with automatic weapons. The noise bullets made hitting aluminum was different from that which came when they penetrated fabric. But when theStorch didn’t tumble out of the sky, she took fresh hope that its designers had known what they were doing.

Then she passed the Lizards’ line and over into German-held Poland. A couple of Nazis took potshots at her, too. She felt like hauling out her pistol and shooting back.

Instead, she peered through the night for a square of four red lanterns. Sweat that had nothing to do with a warm spring night sprang out on her face. She was so low she might easily miss them. If she couldn’t spot them, she’d have to set down anywhere and then no guessing how long the Germans would take to move the ammunition from their storage point to her aircraft, or whether the Lizards would notice theStorch and smash it on the ground before the ammo got to it.

Now that she was flying over human-held terrain, she let herself gain a few more meters’ worth of altitude. There! Off to the left, not far. Her navigation hadn’t been so bad after all. She swung theStorch through a gentle bank and buzzed toward the marked strip.

As she got close to it, she realized it seemed about the size of a postage stamp. Would she really be able to set theStorch down in such a tiny space? She’d have to try, that was certain.

She eased off on the throttle and lowered the aircraft’s huge flaps. The extra resistance they gave her cut into her airspeed astonishingly fast. Maybe she could get theStorch down in one piece after all. She leaned over and looked down through the cockpit glasshouse, almost feeling for the ground.

The touchdown was amazingly gentle. TheStorch’s landing gear had heavy springs to take up the shock of a hard descent. When the descent wasn’t hard, you hardly knew you were on the ground. Ludmila killed the engine and tromped hard on the brake. Almost before she knew it, she was stopped-and she still had fifteen or twenty meters of landing room to spare.

“Good. That was good,” one of the men holding a lantern called to her as he approached the Fieseler. The light he carried showed his toothy grin. “Where did a pack of ragtag partisans come up with such a sharp pilot?”

At the same time as he was speaking, another man-an officer by his tone-called to more men hidden in the darkness: “Come on, you lugs, get those crates over here. You think they’re going to move by themselves?” He sounded urgent and amused at the same time, a good combination for getting the best from the soldiers under his command.

“You Germans always think you’re the only ones who know anything about anything,” Ludmila told theWehrmacht man with the lantern.

His mouth fell open. She’d heard that meant something among the Lizards, but for the life of her couldn’t remember what. She thought it was pretty funny, though. The German soldier turned around and exclaimed, “Hey, Colonel, would you believe it? They’ve got a girl flying this plane.”

“I’ve run into a woman pilot before,” the officer answered. “She was a very fine one, as a matter of fact.”

Ludmila sat in the unfamiliar seat of theStorch. Her whole body seemed to have been dipped in crushed ice-or was it fire? She couldn’t tell. She stared at the instrument panel-all the gauges hard against the zero pegs now-without seeing it. She didn’t realize she’d dropped back into Russian till the words were out of her mouth: “Heinrich… is that you?”

“Mein Gott,”the officer said quietly, out there in the cricket-chirping darkness where she could not see him. She thought that was his voice, but she hadn’t seen him for a year and a half, and never for long at any one stretch. After a moment, he tried again: “Ludmila?”

“What the hell is going on?” asked the soldier with the lantern.

Ludmila got out of the FieselerStorch. She needed to do that anyhow, to make it easier for the Germans to get the chests of ammunition into the aircraft. But even as her feet thumped down onto the ground, she felt she was flying far higher than any plane could safely go.

Jager came up to her. “You’re still alive,” he said, almost severely.

The landing lamp didn’t give enough light. She couldn’t see how he looked, not really. But now that she was looking at him, memory filled in the details the light couldn’t: the way his eyes would have little lines crinkling at the corners, the way one end of his mouth would quirk up when he was amused or just thinking hard, the gray hair at his temples.

She took a step toward him, at the same time as he was taking a step toward her. That left them close enough to step into each other’s arms. “What thehell is going on?” the soldier with the lantern repeated. Ludmila ignored him. Jager, his mouth insistent on hers, gave no sign he even heard.

From out of the night, a big, deep German voice boomed, “Well, this is sweet, isn’t it?”

Ludmila ignored that interruption, too. Jager didn’t. He ended the kiss sooner than he should have and turned toward the man who was coming up-in the night, no more than a large, looming shadow. In tones of military formality, he said,“Herr Standartenfuhrer, I introduce to you Lieutenant-”

“Senior Lieutenant,” Ludmila broke in.

“-Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova of the Red Air Force. Ludmila”-the formality broke down there-“this isStandartenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny of theWaffen SS, my-”

“Accomplice.” Now Skorzeny interrupted. “You two are old friends, I see.” He laughed uproariously at his own understatement. “Jager, you sneaky devil, you keep all sorts of interesting things under your hat, don’t you?”

“It’s an irregular sort of war,” Jager answered, a little stiffly. Being “old friends” with a Soviet flier was likely to be as destructive to aWehrmacht man’s career-and maybe to more than that-as having that sort of relationship with a German had been dangerous for Ludmila. But he didn’t try to deny anything, saying, “You’ve worked with the Russians, too, Skorzeny.”

“Not so-intimately.” The SS man laughed again. “But screw that, too.” He chucked Jager under the chin, as if he were an indulgent uncle. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.” Whistling a tune that sounded as if it was probably salacious, he strolled back into the night.

“You-work with him?” Ludmila asked.

“It’s been known to happen,” Jager admitted, his voice dry.

“How?” she said.

The question, Ludmila realized, was far too broad, but Jager understood what she meant by it. “Carefully,” he answered, which made better sense than any reply she’d expected.

Mordechai Anielewicz had long since resigned himself to wearing bits and pieces of German uniforms. There were endless stocks of them in Poland, and they were tough and reasonably practical, even if not so well suited to winter cold as the ones the Russians made.

Dressing head to foot inWehrmacht gear was something else again, he discovered. Taking on the complete aspect of the Nazi soldiers who had so brutalized Poland gave him a thrill of superstitious dread, no matter how secular he reckoned himself. But it had to be done. Bunim had threatened reprisals against the Jews if they tried to block Lizard movements through Lodz. Therefore, the attack would have to come outside of town, and would have to seem to come from German hands.

Solomon Gruver, also decked out in German uniform, nudged him. He had greenery stuck onto his helmet with elastic bands, and was almost invisible in the woods off to the side of the road. “They should hit the first mines soon,” he said in a low voice distorted by his gas mask.

Mordechai nodded. The mines were German, too, with casings of wood and glass to make them harder to detect. A crew charged with repairing the highway had done just that… among other things. Over this stretch of a couple of kilometers, the Lizards would have a very bumpy ride indeed.

As usual, Gruver looked gloomy. “This is going to cost us a lot of men no matter what,” he said, and Anielewicz nodded again. Doing favors for the Germans was nothing he loved, especially after what the Germans had tried to do to the Jews of Lodz. But this favor, while it might help Germans like Heinrich Jager, wouldn’t do Skorzeny or the SS any good. So Anielewicz hoped.

He peered through the eye lenses of his own gas mask toward the roadway. The air he breathed tasted flat and dead. The mask made him look like some pig-snouted creature as alien as any Lizard. It was German, too-the Germans knew all about gas warfare, and had been teaching it to the Jews even before the Lizards came.

Whump!The harsh explosion announced a mine going off. Sure enough, a Lizard lorry lay on its side in the roadway, burning. From the undergrowth to either side of the road, machine guns opened up on it and on the vehicles behind it Farther off, a German mortar started lobbing bombs at the Lizard convoy.

A couple of mechanized infantry combat vehicles charged off the road to deal with the raiders. To Anielewicz’s intense glee, they both hit mines almost at once. One of them began to burn; he fired at the Lizards who emerged from it. The other slewed sideways and stopped, a track blown off.

The weapon with which Anielewicz hoped to do the most damage, though, involved no high explosives whatever: only catapults made with lengths of inner tube and wax-sealed bottles full of an oily liquid. As he and Gruver had learned, you could fling a bottle three hundred meters with old rubber like that, and three hundred meters was plenty far enough. From all sides, bottles of captured Nazi nerve gas rained down on the stalled head of the Lizard column. Still more landed farther down its length once the head had stalled. They didn’t all break, but a lot of them did.

Lizards started dropping. They weren’t wearing masks. The stuff could nail you if it got on your skin, too. Since they wore only body paint, the Lizards were also at a disadvantage there-not that ordinary clothing was any sure protection. Mordechai had heard that the Germans made special rubber-impregnated uniforms for their troops who dealt with gas all the time. He didn’t know for certain whether it was true. It sounded typically German in its thoroughness, but wouldn’t you stew like a chicken in a pot if you had to fight cooped up in a rubber uniform for more than an hour or two at a stretch?

“What do we do now?” Gruver asked, pausing to shove another clip into hisGewehr 98.

“As soon as we’ve thrown all the gas we brought, we get out,” Anielewicz answered. “The longer we hang around, the better the chance the Lizards will capture some of us, and we don’t want that.”

Gruver nodded. “If we can, we have to bring our dead away, too,” he said. “I don’t know how smart the Lizards are about these things, but if they’re smart enough, they can figure out we’re not really Nazis.”

“There is that,” Mordechai agreed. The last time he’d been reminded of the obvious difference, Zofia Klopotowski had thought it was funny. Consequences springing from it would be a lot more serious here.

The catapult-propelled bottles of nerve gas had a couple of advantages over more conventional artillery: neither muzzle flash nor noise gave away the positions of the launchers. Their crews kept flinging bottles till they were all gone.

After that, the Jewish fighters pulled away from the road, their machine guns covering the retreat. They had several rendezvous points in the area: farms owned by Poles they could trust(Poles we hope we can trust, Mordechai thought as he neared one of them). There they got back into more ordinary clothes and stashed weapons of greater firepower than rifles. These days in Poland, you might as well have been naked as go out in public without a Mauser on your shoulder.

Mordechai slipped back into Lodz from the west, well away from the direction of the fighting. It wasn’t long past noon when he strolled into the fire station on Lutomierska Street. Bertha Fleishman greeted him outside the building: “They say there was a Nazi raid this morning, just a couple of kilometers outside of town.”

“Do they?” he answered gravely. “I hadn’t heard, though there was a lot of gunfire earlier in the day. But then, that’s so about one day in three.”

“It must have been that what’s-his-name-Skorzeny, that’s it,” Bertha said. “Who else would be crazy enough to stick his nose in the wasps’ nest?”

While they were standing there talking, the Order Police district leader who’d taken Anielewicz to Bunim approached the fire station. Oskar Birkenfeld still carried only a truncheon, and so waited respectfully for the rifle-toting Anielewicz to notice him. When Mordechai did, the man from the Order Police said, “Bunim requires your presence again, immediately.”

“Does he?” Anielewicz said. “Whatever for?”

“He’ll tell you that,” Birkenfeld answered, sounding tough-or as tough as he could when so badly outgunned. Anielewicz looked down his nose at him without saying anything. The Order Service man wilted, asking weakly, “Will you come?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll come, though Bunim and his puppets could stand to learn better manners,” Mordechai said. Birkenfeld flushed angrily. Mordechai patted Bertha Fleishman on the shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

At his Bialut Market Square offices, Burnm stared balefully at Anielewicz. “What do you know of the Deutsche who severely damaged our advancing column this morning?”

“Not much,” he answered. “I’d just heard it was a Nazi attack when your pet policeman came to fetch me. You can ask him about it after I go; he heard me get the news, I think.”

“I shall ascertain this,” Bunim said. “So you deny any role in the attack on the column?”

“Am I a Nazi?” Anielewicz said. “Bertha Fleishman, the woman I was talking with when Birkenfeld found me, thinks that Skorzeny fellow might have had something to do with it. I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve heard talk he’s here in Poland somewhere, maybe to the north of Lodz.” If he could do the SS man a bad turn, he would.

“Skorzeny?” Bunim flipped out his tongue but did not waggle it back and forth, a sign of interest among the Lizards. “Exterminating that one would be a whole clutch of eggs’ worth of ordinary Tosevites like you.”

“Truth, superior sir,” Mordechai said. If Bunim wanted to think he was bumbling and harmless, that was fine with him.

The Lizard said, “I shall investigate whether these rumors you report have any basis in fact. If they do, I shall bend every effort to destroying the troublesome male. Considerable status would accrue to me on success.”

Mordechai wondered whether that last was intended for him or if Bunim was talking to himself. “I wish you good luck,” he said, and, despite having led the raid on that column moving north against the Germans, he meant what he told the Lizard.

“Now we’re cooking with gas!” Omar Bradley said enthusiastically as he sat down in Leslie Groves’ office in the Science Building at the University of Denver. “You said the next bomb wouldn’t be long in coming, and you meant it.”

“If I told lies about things like that, you-or somebody-would throw my fanny out of here and bring in a man who delivered on his promises,” Groves answered. He cocked his head to one side. Off in the distance, artillery still rumbled. Denver did not look like falling, though, not now. “And you, sir, you’ve done a hell of a job defending this place.”

“I’ve had good help,” Bradley said. They both nodded, pleased with each other. Bradley went on, “Doesn’t look like we’ll have to use that second bomb anywhere near here. We can try moving it someplace else where they need it worse.”

“Yes, sir. One way or another, we’ll manage that,” Groves said. The rail lines going in and out of Denver had taken a hell of a licking, but there were ways. Break the thing down into pieces and it could go out on horseback-provided all the riders got through to the place where you needed all the pieces.

“I figure we will,” Bradley agreed. He started to reach into his breast pocket, but arrested the motion halfway through. “All this time and I still can’t get used to going without a smoke.” He let out a long, weary exhalation. “That should be the least of my worries-odds are I’ll live longer because of it.”

“Certainly seem longer, anyhow,” Groves said. Bradley chuckled, but sobered in a hurry. Groves didn’t blame him. He too had bigger worries than tobacco. He voiced the biggest one: “Sir, how long can we and the Lizards keep going tit for tat? After a while, there won’t be a lot of places left. If we keep on trading them the way we have been.”

“I know,” Bradley said, his long face somber. “Dammit, General, I’m just a soldier, same as you. I don’t make policy, I just carry it out, best way I know how. Making it is President Hull’s job. I’ll tell you what I told him, though. If you want to hear it.”

“Hell, yes, I want to hear it,” Groves answered. “If I understand what I’m supposed to be doing, figuring out how to do it gets easier.”

“Not everybody thinks that way,” Bradley said. “A lot of people want to concentrate on their tree and forget about the forest. But for whatever you think it’s worth, my view is that the only fit use for the bombs we have is to make the Lizards sit down at the table and talk seriously about ending this war. Any peace that lets us preserve our bare independence is worth making, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Our bare independence?” Groves tasted the words. “Not even all our territory? That’s a hard peace to ask for, sir.”

“Right now, I think it’s the best we can hope to get. Considering the Lizards’ original war aims, even getting that much won’t be easy,” Bradley said. “That’s why I’m so pleased with your efforts here. Without your bombs, we’d get licked.”

“Even with them, we’re getting licked,” Groves said. “But we aren’t getting licked fast, and we are making the Lizards pay like the dickens for everything they get.”

“That’s the idea,” Bradley agreed. “They came here with resources they couldn’t readily renew. How many of them have they expended? How many do they have left? How many more can they afford to lose?”

“Those are the questions, sir,” Groves said.“The questions.”

“Oh, no. There’s one other that’s even more important,” Bradley said. Groves raised an interrogative eyebrow. Bradley explained: “Whetherwe have anything left by the timethey start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Groves grunted. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Nuclear fire blossomed above a Tosevite city. Seen from a reconnaissance satellite, the view was beautiful. From up at the topmost edges of the atmosphere, you didn’t get the details of what a bomb did to a city. Riding in a specially protected vehicle, Atvar had been through the ruins of El Iskandariya. He’d seen firsthand what the Big Uglies’ bomb had done there. It wasn’t beautiful, not even slightly.

Kirel had not made that tour, though of course he had viewed videos from that strike and others, by both the Race and the Tosevites. He said, “And so we retaliate with this Copenhagen place. Where does it end, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Shiplord, I do not know where it ends or even if it ends,” Atvar answered. “The psychologists recently brought me a translated volume of Tosevite legends in the hope they would help me-would help the Race as a whole-better understand the foe. The one that sticks in my mind tells of a Tosevite male fighting an imaginary monster with many heads. Every time he cut one off, two more grew to take its place. That is the predicament in which we presently find ourselves.”

“I see what you are saying, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Hitler, the Deutsch not-emperor, has been screaming over every radio frequency he can command about the vengeance he will wreak on us for what he calls the wanton destruction of a Nordic city. Our semanticists are still analyzing the precise meaning of the termNordic.”

“I don’t care what it means,” Atvar snapped petulantly. “All I care about is carrying the conquest to a successful conclusion, and I am no longer certain we shall be able to accomplish that.”

Kirel stared at him with both eyes. He understood why. Even when things seemed grimmest, he had refused to waver from faith in the ultimate success of the Race’s mission. He had, he admitted to himself, repeatedly been more optimistic than the situation warranted.

“Do you aim to abandon the effort, then, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, his voice soft and cautious. Atvar understood that caution, too. If Kirel didn’t like the answer he got, he was liable to foment an uprising against Atvar, as Straha had done after the first Tosevite nuclear explosion. If Kirel led such an uprising, it was liable to succeed.

And so Atvar also answered cautiously: “Abandon it? By no means. But I begin to believe we may not be able to annex the entire land surface of this world without suffering unacceptable losses, both to our own forces and to that surface. We must think in terms of what the colonization fleet will find when it arrives here and conduct ourselves accordingly.”

“This may involve substantive discussions with the Tosevite empires and not-empires now resisting us,” Kirel said.

Atvar could not read the shiplord’s opinion of that. He was not sure of his own opinion about it, either. Even contemplating it was entering uncharted territory. The plans with which the Race had left Home anticipated the complete conquest of Tosev 3 in a matter of days, not four years-two of this planet’s slow turns around its star-of grueling warfare with the result still very much in the balance. Maybe now the Race would have to strike a new balance, even if it wasn’t one in the orders the Emperor had conferred upon Atvar before he went into cold sleep.

“Shiplord, in the end it may come to that,” he said. “I still hope it does not-our successes in Florida, among other places, give me reason to continue to hope-but in the end it may. And what have you to say to that?”

Kirel let out a soft, wondering hiss. “Only that Tosev 3 has changed us in ways we could never have predicted, and that I do not care for change of any sort, let alone change inflicted upon us under such stressful circumstances.”

“I do not care for change, either,” Atvar answered. “What sensible male would? Our civilization has endured for as long as it has precisely because we minimize the corrosive effect of wanton change. But in your words I hear the very essence of the difference between us and the Big Uglies. When we meet change, we feel it is inflicted on us. The Tosevites reach out and seize it with both hands, as if it were a sexual partner for which they have developed the monomaniacal passion they termlove.” As well as he could, he reproduced the word from the Tosevite language called English: because it was widely spoken and even more widely broadcast, the Race had become more familiar with it than with most of the other tongues the Big Uglies used.

“Would Pssafalu the Conqueror have negotiated with the Rabotevs?” Kirel asked. “Would Hisstan the Conqueror have negotiated with the Hallessi? What would their Emperors have said if word reached them that our earlier conquests had not achieved the goals set for them?”

What he was really asking was what the Emperor would say when he learned the conquest of Tosev 3 might not be a complete conquest. Atvar said, “Here speed-of-light works with us. Whatever he says, we shall not know about it until near the time when the colonization fleet arrives, or perhaps even a few years after that.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. “Until then, we are autonomous.”

Autonomous,in the language of the Race, carried overtones ofalone orisolated orcut off from civilization. “Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “Well, Shiplord, we shall have to make the best of it, for ourselves and for the Race as a whole, of which we are, and remain, a part.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “With so much going on in such strange surroundings at so frenetic a pace, keeping that basic fact in mind is sometimes difficult.”

“Is frequently difficult, you mean,” Atvar said. “Even without the battles, there are so many irritations here. That psychological researcher the Big Uglies in China have kidnapped… They state it is in reprisal for his studies of a newly hatched Tosevite. How can we do research on the Big Uglies if our males go in fear of having vengeance taken on them for every test they make?”

“It is a problem, Exalted Fleetlord, and I fear it will only grow worse,” Kirel said. “Since we received word of this kidnapping, two males have already abandoned ongoing research projects on the surface of Tosev 3. One has taken his subjects up to an orbiting starship, which is likely to skew his results. The other has also gone aboard a starship, but has terminated his project. He states he is seeking a new challenge.” Kirel waggled his eye turrets, a gesture of irony.

“I had not heard that,” Atvar said angrily. “He should be strongly encouraged to return to his work: if necessary, by kicking him out the air lock of that ship.”

Kirel’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“Exalted Fleetlord!” The image of Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, suddenly filled one of the communicator screens in the fleetlord’s chamber. It was the screen reserved for emergency reports. Atvar and Kirel looked at each other. As they’d just said, the conquest of Tosev 3 was nothing but a series of emergencies.

Atvar activated his own communications gear. “Go ahead, Adjutant. What has happened now?” He was amazed at how calmly he brought out the question. When life was a series of emergencies, each individual crisis seemed less enormous than it would have otherwise.

Pshing said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I regret the necessity of reporting a Tosevite nuclear explosion by a riverside city bearing the native name Saratov.” After a moment in which he swiveled one eye turret, perhaps to check a map, he added, “This Strata is located within the not-empire of the SSSR. Damage is said to be considerable.”

Atvar and Kirel looked at each other again, this time in consternation. They and their analysts had been confident the SSSR had achieved its one nuclear detonation with radioactives stolen from the Race, and that its technology was too backwards to let it develop its own bombs, as had Deutschland and the United States. Once again, the analysts had not known everything there was to know.

Heavily, Atvar said, “I acknowledge receipt of the news, Adjutant. I shall begin the selection process for a Soviet site to be destroyed in retaliation. And, past that”-he looked toward Kirel for a third time, mindful of the discussion they’d been having-“well, past that, right now I don’t know what we shall do.”