Striking the Balance

XV

“Armor-piercing!” Jager barked as the Panther’s turret traversed-not so fast as he wished it would move-to bear on the Lizards’ mechanized infantry combat vehicle. He was hull-down behind a rise and well screened by bushes; the Lizards hadn’t a clue his panzer was there.

“Armor-piercing!” Gunther Grillparzer echoed, his face pressed up against the sight for the Panther’s long 75mm cannon.

Karl Mehler slapped the discarding-sabot round into the breech of the gun. “Nail ’em, Gunther,” the loader said.

Grillparzer fired the panzer’s main armament. To Jager, who stood head and shoulders out of the cupola, the roar was like the end of the world. He blinked at the glare of the meter-long tongue of flame that shot from the muzzle of the gun. Down inside the turret, the brass shell casing fell to the floor of the panzer with a clang.

“Hit!” Grillparzer shouted exultantly. “They’re burning.”

They’d better be burning,Jager thought. Those discarding-sabot rounds could punch through the side armor on a Lizard panzer. If they didn’t wreck the more lightly protected combat vehicles, they wouldn’t be worth using.

“Fall back,” he said over the intercom to Johannes Drucker. The driver already had the Panther in reverse. He backed down the rear slope of the rise and continued in reverse to the next pre-selected firing position, this one covering the crestline to attack any Lizard vehicles that pursued too aggressively.

Other panzers of the regiment were also blasting away at any Lizard targets they could find. Infantrymen lurked among trees and in ruined buildings, waiting with their rocket launchers to assail Lizard armor. Lizard foot soldiers had been doing that to German panzers since the invasion began. Having the wherewithal to return the compliment was enjoyable.

Overhead, artillery shells made freight-train noises as they came down on the Lizards. TheWehrmacht had pushed the line several kilometers eastward over the past couple of days. The Lizards didn’t seem to have been looking for an attack north of Lodz, and Jager’s losses, though still dreadful, were lighter than they might have been.

“I hope they’re good and bloody well diverted,” he muttered under his breath. He hadn’t been much better prepared to make the attack than the Lizards were to receive it. How well he succeeded was for all practical purposes irrelevant, anyhow. As long as the Lizards paid full attention to him, he was doing his job.

Very quietly, down to the south, Otto Skorzeny was smuggling an atomic bomb into Lodz. Jager didn’t know just how the SS man and his chums were doing it. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want them to do it, either, but he had no say about that.

He wondered if he’d managed to get word into the city. The fellow he’d contacted didn’t seem nearly so reliable as Karol: he was furtive and frightened, half rabbit, half weasel. He was also alive, however, a good reason to prefer him to the late farmer.

Gunther Grillparzer made a disgusted noise. “They aren’t rushing up to skewer themselves on our guns, the way they used to,” he said. “Took ’em long enough to learn, didn’t it? The British were quicker, down in North Africa. Hell, even the Russians were quicker, and that’s saying something.”

Off to the right, a Lizard antipanzer rocket got a Panzer IV between concealed firing positions. It brewed up, flame spurting from every hatch and a perfect black smoke ring shooting out through the open cupola. None of the five crewmen escaped.

Then Lizard artillery started landing around the German panzers. Jager considered that a signal to halt the attack for the day. The Lizards weren’t so prodigal in their use of the special shells that spat mines as they had been when the war was new, but they did still throw them about from time to time. He didn’t care to lose half a company’s worth of panzers to blown tracks.

The men were just as glad to bivouac. As Gunther Grillparzer got a little cookflre going, he turned to Johannes Drucker and asked, “Ever get the feeling you’ve lived too long already?”

“Don’t talk like a dumbhead,” the driver answered. “You just had a goose walk over your grave, that’s all.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Grillparzer said. “I hope so. Jesus, though, every time we fight the Lizards, I don’t believe I’m going to come through in one piece.”

Otto Skorzeny had a way of materializing out of thin air, like a genie from theArabian Nights. “You’re a young man yet,” he said. “One piece a day shouldn’t be enough to satisfy you.”

“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon,” Jager said as the panzer crewmen snickered.

“Hell, don’t give me that-you didn’t expect to see me at all,” Skorzeny said with a laugh. “But I needed to give you the news and I couldn’t very well put it on the wireless, sohier steh’ ich- here I stand.” He struck a pose perhaps meant to be clerical. Jager was hard-pressed to imagine anyone who seemed less like Martin Luther. The SS man nudged him. They walked away from the cookflre and the big, friendly bulk of the Panther. In a low voice, Skorzeny went on, “It’s in place.”

“I figured it had to be,” Jager answered. “Otherwise you’d still be down in Lodz. But how the devil did you manage it?”

“We have our methods,” Skorzeny said, not sounding much like Sherlock Holmes, either. “Enough ginger for the Lizards, enough gold pieces for the Poles.” He laughed. “Some of them may even live to spend their loot-but not many.” Merely being himself, he was as frightening a man as Jager had ever known.

“When does it go off?” he asked.

“When I get orders to touch it off,” Skorzeny said. “Now that it’s in place, all my chums in the fancy black uniforms will go on home. It’ll be my show. And do you know what?” He waited for Jager to shake his head before continuing, “I’m really looking forward to it, too.”

No, he was never more frightening than when he sounded like Skorzeny.

The rubble behind which Mutt Daniels sprawled had once been the chimney to a prosperous farmhouse about halfway between Marblehead and Fall Creek, Illinois. He glanced over to Herman Muldoon, who was sprawled behind some more of those red bricks. “We don’t go forward any way a-tall,” he said, “we don’t clear the Lizards off the Mississippi till the weekafter Judgment Day.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon agreed mournfully. “They don’t much want to be moved, do they?”

“Not hardly,” Mutt said. Everything had gone fine till the U.S. Army tried to push south from Marblehead. They’d gone a couple of miles and stalled. A double handful of Shermans and a few older Lees had supported the attack, too. A couple of the Shermans were still running, but the powers that be had got leery about putting them any place where the Lizards could shoot at them. In a way, Mutt understood that. In another, he didn’t. What point having tanks if you were afraid to use ’em?

Over to his right, behind the burned-out carcass of one of those Lees, a mortar team started lobbing bombs at the Lizard lines a few hundred yards south of the farmhouse.Whump! Whwnp! Whwnp! Those little finned shells didn’t have much in the way of range, but they could throw a lot of explosive and steel fragments in a hurry.

The Lizards wasted no time replying. Mutt hunkered down and dug himself into the ground with his entrenching tool. Those weren’t only mortar bombs whistling in; the Lizards were shooting real cannon, too, and probably from a range at which American guns couldn’t reply.

Under cover of that bombardment, Lizard infantry skittered forward. When Mutt heard the platoon BAR start chattering, he stuck his head up and blazed away with his tommy gun. He didn’t know whether any of the Lizards got hit or not. The BAR might well nail ’em at those ranges, but he’d just be lucky if he wounded one of the aliens. Still, they dove for cover and stopped advancing, which was the point of shooting early and often.

“Haven’t seem ’em try to move up on us in a while,” Muldoon yelled through the din.

“Me neither,” Daniels said. “They been happy enough on the defensive for a while. An’ you know somethin’ else? I was pretty much happy to have ’em that way my own self.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon said. A big shell landed close by a couple of seconds later, showering both men with dirt and leaving them stunned and half deafened.

Mutt glanced back into a foxhole about twenty yards away to make sure his radioman was still in one piece. The kid was still moving and wasn’t screaming, so Daniels figured nothing irreparable had happened to him. He wondered if he was going to have to call for mustard-gas shells to hold the Lizards back.

He was about to yell to the radioman when the Lizards’ barrage let up. He peered suspiciously over the bricks. What sort of trick were they trying to play? Did they think they could catch the Americans all so deep in their holes that they wouldn’t notice attackers till those attackers were in among them? If they didn’t know better than that after more than two years of hard fighting, they damned well should have.

But the Lizards, having tried one advance, weren’t pushing forward again. Small-arms fire from their side of the line had died away, too. “Made their point, I guess,” Mutt said under his breath.

“Hey, Lieutenant, take a gander at that!” Herman Muldoon pointed out toward the Lizards’ lines. Something white was waving on the end of a long stick. “They want a parley or somethin’.”

“Pick up their wounded, mebbe,” Daniels said. “I dickered that kind o’ deal with ’em once or twice. Wouldn’t mind doin’ it again: they make a truce, they keep it for as long as they say they’re gonna.” He raised his voice: “Hold fire, boys! I’m gonna go out there an’ parley with them scaly sons of bitches.” He turned to Muldoon as the Americans’ guns fell silent. “You got anything white, Herman?”

“Still got a snotrag, believe it or not.” Muldoon pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket with no small pride; not many dogfaces could match it these days. It wasn’t very white, but Mutt supposed it would do. He looked around for something to fix it to. When he didn’t find anything, he cussed for a couple of seconds and then stood up, waving the hanky over his head. The Lizards didn’t shoot at him. He walked out into the debatable ground between the two forces. A Lizard holding his own flag of truce came toward him.

He hadn’t gone very far before the radioman hollered, “Lieutenant! Lieutenant Daniels, sir!”

“Whatever it is, Logan, it’s gonna have to wait,” Mutt called back over his shoulder. “I got business here.”

“But, sir-”

Mutt ignored the call and kept walking. If he turned around and went back now, the Lizards were liable to figure he’d changed his mind about the cease-fire and start shooting at him. The alien with the white flag approached to within maybe ten feet of him, then stopped. So did Mutt. He nodded politely; as a soldier, he had nothing but respect for the Lizards. “Second Lieutenant Daniels, U.S. Army,” he said. “You speak English?”

“Yessss.” The Lizard drew the word out into a long hiss, but Mutt had no trouble understanding him.Good thing, too, he thought: he didn’t know word one of Lizard talk. The alien went on, “I am Chook, small-unit group leader, conquest fleet of the Race.”

“Pleased to meet you, Chook. Our ranks match, pretty much.”

“Yess, I think so also,” the Lizard said. “I come to tell you, there is cease-fire between conquest fleet of the Race and your U.S. Army.”

“We can do that,” Mutt agreed. “How long do you want the truce to last? Till nightfall, say? That’ll give both sides plenty of time to bring in whoever’s hurt and let us have a bit of a blow-a little rest,” he added, thinking the Lizard was liable not to know slang-“afterwards, too.”

“You not understand, Second Lieutenant Daniels,” Chook said. “Is cease-fire between conquest fleet of the Race and your U.S. Army. Whole U.S. Army, whole part of conquest fleet here. Declared by Atvar, fleetlord of conquest fleet. Agree by not-emperor of your U.S. Army, whatever him name be. Cease-fire in place for now: not move forward, not move back. No set time to ending of cease-fire. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?”

“Yeah,” Mutt answered absently. “Jesus.” He didn’t know the last time he’d felt like this. November 1918, maybe, but he’d been expecting that cease-fire. This was a bolt from the blue. He turned and hollered, loud as he could: “Logan!”

“Sir?” The radioman’s voice came back thin and tiny over a hundred fifty yards of ground.

“We got a cease-lire with these Lizards?”

“Yes, sir. I was trying to tell you, sir, I just got the word when-”

Mutt turned back to Chook. The Lizard had already given him the word. He spoke formally to Chook, to make sure the alien knew he had it straight: “I hear you, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. I understand you, too. We got us a cease-fire in place here, just like all over the U.S. of A, no time limit.”

“Truth,” Chook said. “This what we have. This cease-fire not only for you. Is also for SSSR”-Mutt needed a second to figure out he meant Russia-“and for Deutschland.” After going Over There, Daniels got that one fast.

“Lordy,” Mutt said in an awed voice. “You pile that all together, it’s half the world, pretty much.” He noticed something else, too. “You made truces with the countries that bombed you back when you bombed ’em.”

“Truth,” Chook said again. “Are we fools, to waste cease-fire on empires we have beaten?”

“Look at things from your end o’ the stick and I guess maybe you got a point,” Mutt admitted. He wondered what was going to happen to England. Chook hadn’t said a thing about the limeys, and Mutt had admired them ever since he’d seen them in action in France in the war that was supposed to end war. Well, the Lizards had tried invading them once, and got a clout in the snout for their trouble. Maybe they’d learned a lesson.

Chook said, “You are good fighters, you Big Uglies. I tell you that much. It is truth. We come to Tosev 3-this planet, this world-we think we will win and win fast. We not win fast. You fight good.”

“You’re no slouches your own selves.” Mutt half turned. “One of your boys, he shot me right there.” He indicated his left nether cheek.

“I am lucky. I am not shot. Many males who are my friends, they are shot,” Chook said. Mutt nodded. He knew about that. Every front-line soldier knew about that. Chook said, “We are fighters, you and I.” Mutt nodded again. Chook let loose with a hissing sigh, then went on, “I think now one time, now another time, fighters of Race, fighters at the tips of the tongue of the fight, these males more like Big Uglies at tips of tongue of fight than like other males far away. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?” He made a funny coughing noise after each question.

“Small-Unit Group Leader Chook, I hear you real good,” Mutt said. “I understand you real good, too. What do you say when something is just right? You say ‘truth,’ don’t you? That there’s truth, Chook.”

“Truth,” Chook agreed. He spoke into something not much bigger than a paperback book. Back at his line, Lizards started standing up and poking their noses out of cover.He’s got a radio right there with him, Mutt realized,and so do all his troops. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Wish we could do the like.

He turned around and waved to his own men. One by one, they stood up, too. Of them all, Herman Muldoon was the last fellow to show himself. Mutt didn’t blame him a bit. He’d been shot at so many times by now, he probably had trouble believing this wasn’t some sort of trick Mutt would have, too, if he hadn’t already been standing out here all vulnerable in case the Lizards did aim to pull off something sneaky.

Warily, still holding weapons, humans and Lizards approached each other. Some of them tried to talk back and forth, though Chook’s males knew a lot less English than he did, and few Americans had much in the way of Lizard lingo. That was okay. You didn’t need a whole lot of talking to get across the idea that you weren’t trying to kill anybody right now, even if you had been a few minutes before. Mutt had seen that on truces in no-man’s-land in France in 1918. Only a few of his buddies had been able to talk with theBoches, but they’d got on well enough.

Of course, back then the Yanks (Daniels remembered how irate he’d been to find the French considering him a Yankee) andBoches had swapped smokes and rations when they met. He’d traded rations only once; as far as he was concerned, it was a miracle the Germans fought so damn hard on the slop they got to eat.

He didn’t figure he’d see anything like that here now. The Lizards didn’t smoke, and their rations were nastier than anything theBoches had had. But when he looked around, he saw some of his guys trading something with the aliens. What the devil did they nave that the Lizards wanted?

Chook was watching that, too, his eye turrets twisting every which way while his head hardly moved. Mutt wondered if he’d stop this unofficial commerce. Instead, after a minute or so, he said, “You, Second Lieutenant Daniels, have any of the fruit or small cakes with what you Big Uglies callginger in them?”

A lighthulb went on in Mutt’s head. He’d heard the Lizards had a hell of a yen for the stuff. “ ‘Fraid I don’t, Small-Unit Group Leader,” he said, and itwas too bad-no telling what sort of interesting stuff a Lizard might have to trade. “Looks like some of my boys do, though.”

As he spoke, he wondered why some of his boys were carrying around stuff with ginger in it. The only answer that came to mind was that they’d already been doing some trading with the Lizards on the sly. Any other time, that would have made him furious. When you looked at it after a cease-fire, though, how could you get excited about it?

“Yess. Truth,” Chook said. With an eager spring in his skittering stride, he hurried off to find out what the Americans did have for sale. Behind his back, Mutt Daniels smiled.

Fluffy white clouds floated lazily across a blue sky. The sun was high and, if not hot, pleasantly warm. It was a fine day for walking hand in hand with the girl you-loved? David Goldfarb hadn’t used the word with Naomi Kaplan, not out loud, but he thought it more and more often these days.

Naomi’s thoughts, on the other hand, seemed focused on politics and war, not love. “But you are in the RAF,” she said indignantly. “How could you not know whether we have got a cease-fire with the Lizards or have not got any such thing?”

He laughed. “How could I not know? Nothing simpler: they don’t tell rue. I don’t need to know to do my job, which is a good enough reason for not telling. All I know is what I want to know: I’ve not heard any Lizard aircraft-nor heardof any Lizard aircraft-over England since the cease-fire with the Yanks, the Russians, and the Nazis.”

“Then it is a cease-fire,” Naomi insisted. “It must be a cease-fire.”

Goldfarb shrugged. “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not. I admit, I don’t know of any of our planes heading off to bomb the Continent, either, but we’ve not done much of that lately anyhow; the loss rate got too beastly high to bear. Maybe it’s one of those informal arrangements: you don’t hurt me and I shan’t hurt you, but we’ll not put anything in writing for fear of admitting we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing-or not doing.”

Naomi frowned. “This is not right This is not proper. This is not orderly.” At that moment, she sounded very German. Goldfarb would sooner have bitten through his tongue than said so out loud. She went on, “The Lizards’ agreements with the other nations are formal and binding. Why not with us?”

“I told you I don’t know anything for certain,” Goldfarb said. “Will you listen to my guess?” When she nodded, he went on, “The Americans, the Russians, and the Nazis have all used super-bombs of the same type the Lizards have. We’ve not done that. In their eyes, maybe we don’t deserve a truce because we’ve not done it. But when they tried invading us, they found we weren’t a walkover. And so they leave us alone without saying they’re doing it.”

“This is possible, I suppose,” Naomi admitted after some serious thought. “But it is still not orderly.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “No matter what it is, though, I’m glad not to hear the air-raid sirens go off every day, or twice a day, or every hour on the hour.”

He waited to see if Naomi would say such an irregular schedule of raids was disorderly, too. Instead, she pointed to the bright red breast of a robin streaking through the air after a dragonfly.

“That’s the only kind of aircraft I want to see in the sky.”

“Hmm,” Goldfarb said. “I am partial to a nice flight of Meteors, but I’d be stretching things if I didn’t say you had a point.”

They walked on for a while, not talking, glad of each other’s company. It was very quiet. A bee buzzed from flower to flower in a field by the side of the road. Goldfarb noticed both the sound and the field without any vegetables growing in it: it had to be one of the few such so close to Dover.

Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, Naomi remarked, “My father and mother like you, David.”

“I’m glad,” he answered, which was true enough. Had Isaac and Leah Kaplan not liked him, he wouldn’t be out walking with their daughter now. “I like them, too.” That was also true to a large degree: he liked them about as well as a young man could like the parents of the girl he was courting.

“They think you have a serious mind,” Naomi went on.

“Do they?” Goldfarb said, a little more cautiously now. If by serious-minded they meant he wouldn’t try to seduce their daughter, they didn’t know him as well as they thought they did. He’d already tried that. Maybe they knew Naomi, though, because it hadn’t worked. And yet he hadn’t gone off in a huff because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Did that make him serious-minded? Maybe it did. He realized he had to say something more. “I think it’s good they don’t worry about where I’m from-or where my mother and father are from, I should say.”

“They think of you as an English Jew,” Naomi answered. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”

“I suppose so. I was born here,” Goldfarb said. He didn’t think of himself as an English Jew, though, not when his parents had fled here from Warsaw on account of pogroms before the First World War. German Jews had a way of looking down their noses at their Eastern European cousins. If Naomi met his parents, it would be quite plain they weren’t what she thought of as English Jews. If-Thoughtfully, he went on, “My father and mother would like you, too. If I get leave and you can get a day off from the pub, would you like to go up to London and meet them?”

“I would like that very much,” she replied. Then she cocked her head to one side and looked over at him. “How would you introduce me?”

“How would you like me to introduce you?” he asked. But Naomi shook her head; that one wasn’t for her to answer.Fair enough, he thought. He went on for another couple of paces before trying a slightly different question: “How would you like me to introduce you as my fiancee?”

Naomi stopped in her tracks. Her eyes went very wide. “You mean this?” she asked slowly. Goldfarb nodded, though his stomach felt as it sometimes had up in a Lancaster taking violent evasive action. Naomi said, “I would like this very much,” and stepped into his arms.

The kiss she gave him nailed his stomach firmly back in place, though it made his head spin. When one hand of his closed softly on her breast, she didn’t pull away. Instead, she sighed and held him tighter. Emboldened, he slid his other down from the small of her back to her right buttock-and, with a twirl as neat as a jitterbug dancer’s, she twisted away from him.

“Soon,” she said. “Not yet. Soon. We tell my parents. I meet your mother and father-and my mother and father will want to do the same. We find a rabbi to marry us. Then.” Her eyes glittered. “And I tell you this-you will not be the only one who is impatient.”

“All right,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go tell your father and mother now.” He turned and started toward Dover. The faster he cleared obstacles out of the way, the sooner she wouldn’t use that little twirl His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground all the way back to the city.

Mordechai Anielewicz’s voice came out flat as the Polish plain, hard as stone: “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

“Fine. Whatever you say.” The Polish farmer had been milking a cow when Anielewicz found him. He turned away from the Jewish fighting leader and back to the business at hand.Siss! Siss! Siss! Jets of milk landed in the dented tin pail. The cow tried to walk off. “Stay here, you stupid bitch,” the Pole growled.

“But see here, Mieczyslaw,” Mordechai protested. “It’s impossible, I tell you. How could the Nazis have smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into Lodz without us or the Lizards or the Polish Home Army knowing about it?”

“I don’t know anything about how,” Mieczyslaw answered. “I hear tell they’ve done it. I’m supposed to tell you somebody stayed at Lejb’s house in Hrubieszow. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Anielewicz said with as much equanimity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Pole to know how shaken he was. Heinrich Jager had stayed with a Jew named Lejb, all right, back when he was carrying explosive metal from the Soviet Union to Germany. The message had to be authentic, then; who else would know about that? It wasn’t even the sort of thing he’d have been likely to mention in a report. Cautiously, Mordechai asked, “What else have you heard?”

“It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”

“I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt.“Gottenyu! That man has balls the size of an elephant. Thechutzpah it takes to try something like that-and the luck you need to get away with it… ”

“What man is that?” Mieczyslaw asked. Mordechai didn’t answer him. He hardly heard him. How had Skorzeny sneaked an explosive-metal bomb past everybody and into Lodz? How had he got it into the Jewish quarter? How had he got out again afterwards? All good questions, the only trouble being that Mordechai had answers for none of them.

One other question, of course, overrode all of those.Where was the bomb?

He worried at it every step of the way back to Lodz, like a man worrying with his tongue at a piece of gristle stuck between two molars. The gristle was still stuck when he strode into the fire station of Lutomierska Street. Solomon Gruver was fiddling with the fire engine’s motor. “Why the long face?” he asked, looking up — from his work.

He wasn’t the only man in earshot. The last thing Anielewicz wanted to do was spread panic through the ghetto. “Come on upstairs with me,” he said, as casually as he could.

Gruver’s long face turned somber. With his bushy eyebrows, harsh features, and thick, graying beard, he generally looked grim. When he felt grim, he looked as if his best friend had just died. He put down his wrench and followed Mordechai up to the room where the leaders of the Jewish fighters commonly met.

On the stairwell, he said quietly, “Bertha’s up there. She picked up something interesting-what it is, I don’t know-and she’s passing it along. Is whatever you’ve got something she can know about?”

“It’s something she’d better know about,” Anielewicz answered. “If we can’t deal with it ourselves, we may have to let Rumkowski’s gang oftukhus-lekhers know it, too, and maybe even the Lizards, though that’s the last thing I want to do.”

“Oy!”Those eyebrows of Gruver’s twitched. “Whatever it is, it must be bad.”

“No, not bad,” Mordechai said. Gruver gave him a quizzical look. “Worse,” he explained as they got to the top of the stairs. Gruver grunted. Every time Anielewicz lifted his foot off the worn linoleum of the floor, he wondered if he would live to set it down again. That was not in his hands, not any more. If Otto Skorzeny pushed a button or flicked a switch on a wireless transmitter, he would cease to be, probably so fast he wouldn’t realize he was dead.

He laughed. Solomon Gruver stared at him. “You’re carrying news like this and you find something funny?”

“Maybe,” Anielewicz answered. Skorzeny had to be one frustrated SS man right this minute. He’d risked his life getting that bomb into Lodz (Anielewicz who’d despised him on sight, knew how much courage that had taken), but his timing was bad. He couldn’t touch it off now, not without destroying the shiny new cease-fire between the Lizards and theReich.

A couple of serious-looking Jewish men came out of the meeting room. “We’ll take care of it,” one of them promised Bertha Fleishman.

“Thank you, Michael,” she said, and started to follow them out. She almost ran into Anielewicz and Gruver. “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you two here.”

“Mordechai ran into something interesting,” Solomon Gruver said. “What it is, God knows, because he’s not talking.” He glanced over to Mordechai. “Not talking yet, anyhow.”

“Now I am,” Anielewicz said. He walked into the meeting room. When Gruver and Bertha Fleishman had followed him inside, he closed the door and, with a melodramatic touch, locked it. That made Bertha’s eyebrows fly up, as Gruver’s had before.

Mordechai spoke for about ten minutes, relaying as much as Mieczyslaw had told him. As he passed it on, he realized how little it was. When he was finished, Gruver looked at him and said, “I don’t believe a word of it. It’s just the damned Nazis trying to pull our chains and make us run around like chickens in the fannyard.” He shook his head, repeating, “I don’t believe a word.”

“If it hadn’t been this Jager who sent us the message, I wouldn’t believe it, either,” Anielewicz said. “If it hadn’t been for him, you know, the nerve-gas bomb would have done us in.” He turned to Bertha. “What do you think?”

“As far as I can see, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter,” she answered. “We have to act as if it is, don’t we? We can’t really afford to ignore it.”

“Feh!”Gruver said in disgust. “We’ll waste all sorts of time and effort, and what will we come up with? Nothing, I tell you.”

“Alevai omaynyou’re right and there’s nothing to find,” Mordechai said. “But suppose-just suppose-you’re wrong and there is a bomb. Then what? Maybe we find it. That would be good; with a bomb of our own, we could tell the Lizards and Nazis both where to head in. Maybe the Lizards find it, and use it as an excuse to blow up some city somewhere-look what happened to Copenhagen. Or maybe we don’t find it and the Lizards don’t find it. Suppose the truce talks break down? All Skorzeny has to do is get on the wireless and-”

Solomon Gruver grimaced. “All right. You made your point, damn you. Now all we have to do is try to find theverkakte thing-if, like I say, it’s there to be found in the first place.”

“It’s somewhere here, in our part of the city,” Anielewicz said, as he had before. “How could the SS man have got it here? Where would he have hidden it if he did?”

“How big is it?” Bertha asked. “That will make a difference in where he might have put it.”

“It can’t be small; it can’t be light,” Anielewicz answered. “If it were, the Germans would load these bombs into airplanes or onto their rockets. Since they don’t do that, the bombs can’t be something they’d leave behind a kettle in your kitchen.”

“That makes sense,” Gruver admitted. “It’s one of the few things about this miserable business that does. Like you say, it narrows down the places where the bomb is liable to be… if there is a bomb.” He stubbornly refused to acknowledge that was anything more than anif.

“Around the factories,” Bertha Fleishman said. “That’s one place to start.”

“One place, yes,” Gruver said. “A big one place. Dozens of factories here, all through the ghetto. Straw boots, cartridge casings, rucksacks-we were making all sorts of things for the Nazis, and we’re still making most of them for the Lizards. So where around the factories would you have us start?”

“I’d sooner not start with them,” Anielewicz said. “As you say, Solomon, they’re too big to know where to begin. We may not have much time; it probably depends on how soon the Lizards and the Nazis quarrel. So where’s the likeliest place that SSmamzer would have hidden a big bomb?”

“From what you say about him, would he have picked the likeliest place?” Solomon Gruver asked.

“If he didn’t, we’re going to be in even more trouble than I already think we are,” Mordechai answered. “But I think, I hope, I pray this time he didn’t. He couldn’t have spent much time in Lodz. He’d have wanted to hide this thing for a little while, escape, and then set it off. It wouldn’t have needed to stay hidden very long or be hidden very well. But then the cease-fire came along and complicated his life-and maybe saved ours.”

“If this isn’t all a load ofdreck to make us spin our wheels,” Gruver said.

“If,” Anielewicz admitted.

“I know one other place we ought to check,” Bertha Fleishman said: “the cemetery and the ghetto field south of it.”

Gruver and Anielewicz both looked at her. The words hung in the air of the dingy meeting room. “If I were doing the job, that’sjustwhere I’d put it,” Mordechai exclaimed. “Can’t think of a better place-quiet at night, already plenty of holes in the ground-”

“Especially in the ghetto field,” Bertha said, catching fire at a suggestion she had first made casually. “That’s where so many mass graves are, from when the sickness and starvation were so bad. Who would pay any special attention to one more hole in the ground there?”

“Who would notice anybody coming to dig one more hole in the ground in the middle of the night?” Solomon Gruver’s big head bobbed up and down. “Yes. If it’s anywhere, that’s where we need to start looking.”

“I agree,” Mordechai said. “Bertha, that’s wonderful. If you’re not right, you deserve to be.” He frowned after he said that, working it through to make sure he’d really given her the compliment he’d intended. To his relief, he decided he had.

She smiled back at him. When she smiled, she wasn’t plain and anonymous any more. She still wasn’t pretty, not in any ordinary sense of the word, but her smile gave her an odd kind of beauty. She quickly sobered. “We’ll need to have fighters along, not just diggers,” she said. “If we do find this hideous thing, people are going to want to take it away from us. As far as that goes, Lizards are people here.”

“You’re right again,” Anielewicz said. “Draining the nerve gas out of the Nazi bomb made us dangerous nuisances. If we have this bomb, we won’t be nuisances. We’ll have real power.”

“Not while it sits in a hole in the ground,” Gruver said. “As long as it’s there, the most we can do is blow ourselves up with our enemies. That’s better than Masada, but it’s not good. It’s not good enough. If we can get the bomb out and put it where we want it, now-that’s good. For us, anyhow.”

“Yes,” Mordechai breathed. Visions of might floated through his head-hurting the Lizards and getting the Nazis blamed for it, smuggling the bomb into Germany and taking real revenge for what theReich had done to the Jews of Poland. Reality intervened, as reality has a way of doing. “There’s only the one bomb-if there’s any bomb there at all. We have to find it, and we have to get it out of the ground if it’s there-you’re right on both counts, Solomon-before we can even think about what to do with it.”

“If we go with half the fighters in the ghetto, other people will know we’re after something, even if they don’t know what,” Gruver said. “We don’t want that, do we? Find it first, then see if we can get it out without raising a fuss. If we can’t-” He shrugged.

“We’ll walk through the cemetery and the ghetto field,” Anielewicz declared-if he was commander here, hewould command. “If we find something, then we figure out what to do next. And if we don’t find anything”-he too shrugged, wryly-“then we figure out what to do next.”

“And when someone asks us what we’re doing there, what do we tell him?” Gruver asked. He was good at finding problems, not so good at solutions.

It was a good question. Anielewicz scratched his head. They had to say something, and something both innocuous and convincing. Bertha Fleishman said, “We can tell people we’re looking for areas where no one is buried, so we can dig in those places first in case we have to fight inside the city.”

Anielewicz chewed on that, then nodded, as did Solomon Gruver. Mordechai said, “It’s better than anything I could have come up with. It might not even be a bad idea for us to do that one of these days, though there are so many graves there I’d bet there isn’t much open space to be had.”

“Too many graves,” Bertha said quietly. Both men nodded again.

The cemetery and the ghetto field next to it lay in the northeastern corner of the Jewish district of Lodz. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was in the southwest, two, maybe two and a half kilometers away. It started to drizzle as Mordechai, Bertha, and Solomon Gruver tramped across the ghetto. Anielewicz looked gratefully up at the heavens; the rain would give them more privacy than they might have had otherwise.

A white-bearded rabbi chanted the burial service over a body wrapped in a sheet; wood for coffins had long since become a luxury. Behind him, amid a small crowd of mourners, stood a stooped man with both hands pressed up to his face to hide his sobs. Was it his wife going into the increasingly muddy ground? Mordechai would never know.

He and his companions paced among the headstones-some straight, some tilting drunkenly-looking for freshly turned earth. Some of the grass in the cemetery was knee high; it had been poorly tended ever since the Germans first took Lodz, almost five years before.

“Would it fit in an ordinary grave?” Gruver asked, pausing before one that couldn’t have been more than a week old.

“I don’t know,” Anielewicz answered. He paused. “No. Maybe I do. I’ve seen regular bombs the size of a man. Airplanes can carry those. What the Germans have has to be bigger.”

“We’re wasting our time here, then,” the fireman said. “We should go down to the ghetto field, where the mass graves are.”

“No,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Where the bomb is-that doesn’t have to look like a grave, you know. They could have made it seem as if they’d repaired the sewer pipes or something of that sort.”

Gruver scratched at his chin, then finally nodded. “You’re right”

An old man in a long black coat sat by one of the graves, a battered fedora pulled down low over his face against the drizzle. He closed the prayerbook he’d been reading and put it in his pocket. When Mordechai and his friends went by, the fellow nodded but did not speak.

A walk through the cemetery didn’t show any new excavations of any sort bigger than ordinary graves. Gruver had an I-told-you-so look in his eye as he, Mordechai, and Bertha headed south into the ghetto field.

Grave markers got fewer there, and many of them, as Solomon Gruver had said, marked many corpses thrown into one pit: men, women, and children dead of typhus, of tuberculosis, of starvation, perhaps of broken hearts. Grass grew on a lot of those mounds, too. Things were not so desperate now. With the Nazis gone, times had improved all the way up to hard, and burials were by ones, not by companies at a time.

Bertha paused in front of one of the large interments: the board that was all the marker the poor souls down there would ever get had fallen over. When she stooped to straighten it, she frowned. “What’s this?” she said.

Mordechai couldn’t see what “this” was till he came close. When he did, he whistled softly under his breath. A wire whose insulator was the color of old wood ran the length of the board, held to it by a couple of nails pounded in and bent over. The nails were rusted, so they didn’t stand out. The wire stopped at the top of the memorial board, but kept going from the bottom. There, it disappeared into the ground.

“Wireless aerial,” he muttered, and yanked at it. It didn’t want to come out. He pulled with all his strength. The wire snapped, sending him stumbling backwards. He flailed his arms to keep from falling.“Something’s under there that doesn’t belong,” he said.

“Can’t be,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “The ground’s not torn up the way it… ” His voice trailed away. He got down on his hands and knees, heedless of what the wet grass would do to his trousers. “Will you look at this?” he said in tones of wonder.

Mordechai Anielewicz got down beside him. He whistled again. “The grass has been cut out in chunks of sod and then replaced,” he said, running his hand along one of the joins. If it had rained harder and melted the mud, that would have been impossible to notice. In genuine admiration, Anielewicz murmured, “They made a jigsaw puzzle and put it back together here when they were done.”

“Where’s the dirt?” Gruver demanded, as if Anielewicz had stolen it himself. “I don’t care if they didn’t bury the thing deep, they were going to have some left over-and they would have spilled it to either side of the grave as they were digging.”

“Not if they set canvas down first and tossed the spoil onto that,” Mordechai said. Gruver stared at him. He went on, “You have no idea how thorough the Nazis can be when they do something like this. Look at the way they camouflaged their antenna wire. They don’t take chances on having something this important spotted.”

“If the board hadn’t fallen over-” Bertha Fleishman said in a dazed voice.

“I’ll bet it was like that when the SS bastards got here,” Anielewicz told her. “If you hadn’t had the keen eyes to notice the aerial-” He made silent clapping motions and smiled at her. She smiled back. She really was quite extraordinary when she did that, he thought.

“Where’s the dirt?” Solomon Gruver repeated, intent on his own concerns and not noticing the byplay between his comrades. “What did they do with it? They couldn’t have put it all back.”

“You want me to guess?” Mordechai asked. At the fireman’s nod, he went on, “If I were running the operation, I would have loaded it onto the wagon they used to bring in the bomb and hauled it away. Throw canvas over it and nobody would think twice.”

“I think you’re right. I think that’s just what they did.” Bertha Fleishman looked over to the detached wire. “The bomb can’t go off now?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or, anyhow, they can’t set it off by wireless now, which is good enough for us. If they hadn’t needed the aerial, they wouldn’t have put it there.”

“Thank God,” she said.

“So,” Gruver said, sounding as if he still didn’t believe it. “We have a bomb of our own now?”

“If we can figure out how to fire it,” Anielewicz said. “If we can get it out of here without the Lizards’ noticing. If we can move it so that if, God forbid, we have to, we can fire it without blowing ourselves right out of this world. If we can do all that, we have a bomb of our own now.”

Sweat burst from Rance Auerbach’s forehead. “Come on, darling,” Penny Summers breathed. “You can do it. I know you can. You done it before, remember? Come on-big strong man like you can do whatever he wants.”

Auerbach gathered himself, gasped, grunted, and, with an effort that took everything he had in him, heaved himself upright on his crutches. Penny clapped her hands and kissed him on the cheek. “Lord, that’s hard,” he said, catching his breath Maybe he was light-headed, maybe just too used to lying flat on his back, but the ground seemed to quiver like pudding under him.

His arms weren’t strong, either; supporting so much of his weight with his armpits was anything but easy. His wounded leg didn’t touch the ground, and wouldn’t for a long time yet. Getting around with one leg and two crutches felt like using an unsteady photographic tripod instead of his proper equipment.

Penny took a couple of steps back from him, toward the opening of the Lizards’ shelter tent. “Come on over to me,” she said.

“Don’t think I can yet,” Auerbach answered. This was only the third or fourth time he’d tried the crutches. Starting to move on them was as hard as getting an old Nash’s motor to turn over on a snowy morning.

“Oh, I bet you can.” Penny ran her tongue across her lips. She’d gone from almost completely withdrawn to just as brazen with next to nothing in between. When he had time to think, Auerbach wondered if they were two sides of the same coin. He didn’t have time to think right this second. Penny went on, “You come on over to me now, and tonight I’ll…” What she said she’d do would have sent a man hurt a lot worse than Auerbach over to her in nothing flat, maybe less. He let himself fall forward, hopped on his good leg, brought the crutches up to help keep his balance, straightened, did it again, and found himself by her side.

From outside the tent, a dry voice said, “That’s the best incentive for physical therapy I’ve ever heard.” Auerbach almost fell down. Penny squeaked and turned the color of the beets that grew so widely in Colorado.

By the way his own face heated, Auerbach was pretty sure he was the same color. “Uh, sir, it’s not-” he began, but then his tongue stumbled to a halt even more readily than his poor damaged carcass had.

The doctor stepped into the tent. He was a young fellow, a stranger, not one of the Lizards’ POW medicos. He looked from Auerbach to Penny Summers and back again. “Look, folks, I don’t care if it is or it isn’t-none of my business any which way. If it makes you get up and walk, soldier, that’s what matters to me.” He paused judiciously. “In my professional opinion, an offer like that would make Lazarus get up and walk.”

Penny blushed even redder than she had before. Auerbach had had more experience with Army docs. They did their level best to embarrass you, and their level best was usually pretty damn good. He said, “Uh-who are you, sir?” The doctor had gold oak leaves on his shoulder straps.

“My name’s Hayward Smithson-” The doctor paused. Rance gave his own name and rank. After a minute, Penny Summers stammered out her name, too, her right one; Auerbach wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her come up with an alias on the spot. Major Smithson went on, “Now that the cease-fire’s in place, I’m down from Denver inspecting the care the Lizards have been giving to wounded prisoners. I see you’ve got a set of government-issue crutches there. Good.”

“Yes, sir,” Auerbach said. His voice was still weak and thin and raspy as all get out, as if he’d smoked about fifty packs of Camels in the last hour and a half. “I got ’em day before yesterday.”

“They came in a week ago,” Penny said, “but Rance-uh, Captain Auerbach-he wasn’t able to do much in the way of moving around till just the other day.”

Auerbach waited for Smithson to make a crack about Penny’s having done most of the moving before then, but, to his relief, Smithson had mercy. Maybe nailing her again would have been too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, the doctor said, “You took one in the chest and one in the leg, eh, and they’ve pulled you through?”

“Yes, sir,” Auerbach said. “They’ve done their best by me, the Lizards and the people they’ve got helping them. Sometimes I’ve felt kind of like a guinea pig, but I’m here and on my pins-well, on one pin, anyway-instead of taking up space in the graveyard back of town.”

“More power to you, Captain,” Smithson said. He pulled a spiral-bound notebook and a fountain pen out of his pocket and scribbled a note to himself. “I have to say, I’ve been favorably impressed with what I’ve seen of the Lizards’ facilities. They’ve done what they could for the men they’ve captured.”

“They’ve treated me okay,” Auerbach said. “Firsthand, that’s all I can tell you. I got outside this tent yesterday for the very first time.”

“What about you, Miss, uh, Summers?” Major Smithson asked. “Captain Auerbach’s not the only patient you’ve nursed back to health, I expect.”

Auerbach devoutly hoped he was the only patient Penny had nursed back to health that particular way. He didn’t think she noticed the possible double entendre there, and was just as well pleased she didn’t. Seriously, she answered, “Oh, no, sir. I get all over this encampment. They do their best. I really think so.”

“That’s also the impression I’ve had,” Smithson said, nodding. “They do their best-but I think they’re overwhelmed.” He sighed wearily. “I think the whole world is overwhelmed.”

“Are therethat many wounded, sir?” Auerbach asked. “Like I said, I haven’t seen much outside of this tent except through the doorflap since they put me here, and nobody’s told me there’s all that many wounded POWs here in Karval.” He sent Penny a look that might have been accusing. To the other nurses, to the harassed human doctors, to the Lizards, he was just another injured POW; he’d thought he meant something to her.

But Smithson said, “It’s not just wounded soldiers, Captain. It’s-” He shook his head and didn’t try to explain. Instead, he went on, “You’ve been upright a good while now. Why don’t you come outside and have a look for yourself? You’ll have a doctor at your elbow, and who knows what Miss Summers will do for you or to you or with you after that?”

Penny blushed for a third time. Auerbach wished he could give the doctor a shot in the teeth for talking about a lady that way in front of her, but he couldn’t. And he was curious about what was happening in the world beyond the tent, and he had been standing here a while without keeling over. “Okay, sir, lead on,” he said, “but don’t lead too fast, on account of I’m not going to win any races on these things.”

Hayward Smithson and Penny held the tent flaps open so he could come out and look around. He advanced slowly. When he got out into the sunshine, he stood blinking for a moment, dazzled by its brilliance. And some of the tears that came to his eyes had nothing to do with the sun, but with his own delight at being unconfined. If only for a little while.

“Come along,” Smithson said, positioning himself to Auerbach’s left. Penny Summers immediately put Rance between her and the doctor. A slow procession, they made their way along the open track the Lizards had left between the rows of tents sheltering wounded men.

Maybe there weren’tthat many wounded men, but it still made for a pretty fair tent city. Every so often, Auerbach heard a man moaning inside one of those domes of the bright orange slick stuff the Lizards used. Once, a doctor and nurse hurried into one a good ways away on the dead run. That didn’t look good, not even slightly. Smithson clicked his tongue between his teeth.

The way he’d been talking, though, half of Denver might have been here, and that didn’t look to be so. Auerbach was puzzled till he came to the intersection of his lane with one that ran perpendicular to it. He hadn’t come so far before. When you looked down that crossroad in one direction, you saw what was left of the tiny town of Karval: in two words, not much. When you looked the other way, you got a different picture.

He couldn’t guess how many refugees inhabited the shantytown out beyond the Lizards’ neat rows of tents. “It’s like a brand-new Hooverville,” he said, staring in disbelief.

“It’s worse than a Hooverville,” Smithson said grimly. “Most Hoovervilles, they had boxes and boards and sheet metal and what have you to build shacks with. Not much of that kind of stuff here in the middle of nowhere. But people have come anyhow, from miles and miles around.”

“I’ve watched that happen,” Penny said, nodding. “There’s food and water here for prisoners, so people come and try to get some. When the Lizards have anything left over, they give a little. That’s more’n people can get anywheres else, so they keep comin’.”

“Lord,” Auerbach said in his ruined voice. “It’s a wonder they haven’t tried coming into the tents and stealing what the Lizards wouldn’t give ’em.”

“Remember that gunfire the other night?” Penny asked. “A couple of ’em was tryin’ just that. The Lizards shot ’em down like they was dogs. I don’t reckon any more folks’ll try sneakin’ in where the Lizards don’t want ’em to.”

“Sneaking up on the Lizards isn’t easy anyhow,” Dr. Smithson said.

Auerbach looked down at himself, at the much-battered excuse for a carcass he’d be dragging around for the rest of his life.

“Matter of fact, I found out about that. Sneaking away from ’em’s not so easy, either.”

“They have Lizard doctors in Denver, looking out for their people that we caught?” Penny asked.

“Yes-it’s all part of the cease-fire,” Smithson answered. “I almost wish I could have stayed in town to watch them work, too. If we don’t keep fighting them, they’re going to push our medicine forward a hundred years in the next ten or fifteen, we have so much to learn.” He sighed. “But this is important work, too. We may even be able to set up a large-scale prisoner exchange, wounded men for wounded Lizards.”

“That would be good,” Auerbach said. Then he looked over at Penny, whose face bore a stricken expression. She wasn’t a wounded prisoner. He turned his head back toward Smithson. “Would the Lizards let noncombatants out?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor answered. “I can understand why you’d want to find out, though. If this comes off-and there are no guarantees-I’ll see what I can do for you. How’s that?”

“Thank you, sir,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Auerbach’s gaze went toward the canvas tents and old wagons and shelters of brush housing the Americans who’d come to Karval to beg for crumbs of the Lizards’ largesse. Thinking about that brought home like a kick in the teeth what the war had done to the country. He looked down at himself. “You know something? I’m not so bad off after all.”

The buzz of a human-built airplane over Cairo sent Moishe Russie hurrying to the windows of his hotel-room cell for a glimpse. Sure enough, there it was, painted lemon yellow as a mark of truce. “I wonder who’s in that one,” he said to Rivka.

“You’ve said Molotov is already here,” she answered, “so that leaves von Ribbentrop”-she and her husband both donned expressions redolent of distaste-“and the American foreign minister, whatever his name is.”

“Marshall,” Moishe said. “And they call him Secretary of State, for some reason.” He soaked up trivia, valuable or not, like a sponge; the book-learning in medical school had come easy for him because of that. Had his interest lain elsewhere, he would have made a formidableyeshiva-bucher. He turned back to the window. The yellow airplane was lower now, coming in for a landing at the airfield east of town. “That’s not a Dakota. Marshall would fly in one of those, I think. So it’s probably a German plane.”

Rivka sighed. “If you see Ribbentrop, tell him every Jew in the world wished akholeriyeh on him.”

“If he doesn’t know that by now, he’s pretty stupid,” Moishe said.

“Tell him anyway,” his wife said. “You get a chance like that, you shouldn’t waste it.” The drone of the motors faded out of hearing. Rivka laughed, a little uneasily. “That used to be a sound you took for granted. Hearing it here, hearing it now-it’s very strange.”

Moishe nodded. “When the truce talks started, the Lizards tried to insist on flying everyone here in their own planes. I suppose they didn’t want the Nazis-or anyone else-sending a plane full of bombs instead of diplomats. Atvar was very confused when the Germans and the Russians and the U.S.A. all said no. The Lizards haven’t really figured out what all negotiating as equals means. They’ve never had to do it before; they’re used to dictating.”

“It shall be done,” Rivka said in the aliens’ hissing language. Anyone who was around them long learned that phrase. She dropped back into Yiddish: “That’s the way they think. It’s about the only way they think.”

“I know,” Moishe answered. He made as if to pound his head against the wall.“Oy, do I know.”

Through loudspeakers, the muezzins called the faithful to prayer. Cairo slowed down for a little while. Another bright yellow airplane flew low over the city, making for the airport. “That is a Dakota,” Rivka said, coming up to stand by Moishe. “So-Marshall? — is here, too, now.”

“So he is,” Moishe answered. He felt as if he were setting up a game of chess with a friend back in Warsaw, and had just put the last couple of pieces where they belonged. “Now we see what happens next.”

“What will you tell Atvar if he summons you to ask what you think of these people?” Rivka asked.

Moishe used a few clicks and pops himself. “The exalted fleetlord? You mean, besidesgeh in drerd?” Rivka gave him a dangerous look, one that meant,Stop trying to be funny. He sighed and went on, “I don’t know. I’m not even sure why he keeps bringing me in to question me. I wasn’t-”

Rivka made urgent shushing motions. Moishe shut up. He’d started to say something like,I wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of those people. Rivka was right. The Lizards surely monitored everything he said. If they hadn’t figured out for themselves how small a fish he was, no point telling them. Being thought more important than he was might improve both his treatment and his life expectancy.

And sure enough, a couple of hours later Zolraag walked into the hotel room and announced, “You are summoned to the quarters of the exalted fleetlord Atvar. You will come immediately.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Moishe answered. The Lizards certainly hadn’t bothered learning to negotiate with him as an equal. They told him where to go and what to do, and he perforce did it.

The guards didn’t seem quite so eager to shoot him if he so much as stumbled as they had when the Lizards first brought him to Cairo. They still turned out for him full force, though, and transported him from hither to yon and back again in one of their armored personnel carriers, as uncomfortable a mode of travel for a human being as any ever invented.

While they were on their way to Atvar’s headquarters, Zolraag remarked, “Your insights into the political strategies likely to be utilized are of interest to the exalted fleetlord. Having headed a not-empire yourself, you will be prepared to empathize with these other Tosevite males.”

“That’s certainly better than being shot,” Moishe said gravely. He was glad he’d had practice holding his face straight. Yes, he’d headed up the Jews of Poland for a little while after the Lizards came, till he found he could no longer stand to obey them. To imagine that that put him in the same class as Hitler and Hull and Stalin-well, if you could imagine that, you had a vivid and well-stocked imagination. From what he’d gathered, anything smaller than the entire surface of a planet was too small for the Lizards to bother making what they reckoned subtle distinctions in size. The distinctions were anything but subtle to him, but he-thank God! — was not a Lizard.

Atvar rounded on him as soon as he came into the machine-strewn suite the fleetlord occupied. “If we make an agreement with these males, is it your judgment they will abide by it?” he demanded, using Zolraag to translate his words into Polish and German.

This to a man who’d watched Poland carved up between Germany and the USSR after they’d made their secret agreement, and then watched them go to war against each other less than two years later in spite of the agreement still formally in force. Picking his words with care, Moishe answered, “They will-so long as they see keeping the agreement as being in their interest.”

The fleetlord made more mostly unintelligible noises. Again, Zolraag interpreted for him: “You are saying, then, that these Tosevite males are altogether unreliable?”

By any standard with which the Lizard was familiar, the answer to that had to beyes. Moishe didn’t think putting it so baldly would help end the fighting. He said, “You have much to offer that would be in their interest to accept. If you and they can agree upon terms for your males’ leaving their countries, for instance, they would probably keep any agreements that would prevent the Race from coming back.”

As he’d seen with Zolraag’s efforts in Warsaw, the Lizards had only the vaguest notions of diplomacy. Things that seemed obvious even to a human being who had no governmental experience-to Moishe himself, for instance-sometimes struck the aliens with the force of revelation when they got the point. And sometimes, despite genuine effort, they didn’t get it.

As now: Atvar said, “But if we yield to the demands of these importunate Tosevites, we encourage them to believe they are our equals.” After a moment, he added, “And if they believe themselves equal to us, soon they will come to think they are superior.”

That last comment reminded Moishe the Lizards weren’t fools; they might be ignorant of the way one nation treated with another, but they weren’t stupid. Ignoring the difference could be deadly dangerous. Carefully, Moishe said, “What you have already done should make it plain to them that they are not your superiors. And what they have done to you should show you that you are not so much superior to them as you thought you were when you came to this world. When neither side is superior, isn’t talking better than fighting?”

After Zolraag had translated what he’d said, Atvar fixed Russie with what certainly looked like a baleful stare. The fleetlord said, “When we came to Tosev 3, we thought you Big Uglies would still be the spear-flinging barbarians our probes of this planet had shown you to be. We discovered very soon we were not so superior as we had thought we would be when we went into cold sleep. It is the most unpleasant discovery the Race has ever known.” He added an emphatic cough.

“Nothing stays the same here, not for long,” Moishe said. Some of the Polish Jews had tried to pretend time had stopped, to live their lives as they had before the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution blew across Europe. They’d even thought they were succeeding-till the Nazis brought all the worst parts of the modern world to bear against them.

Moishe had spoken with more than a little pride. That wasn’t what he touched off in the fleetlord. Atvar replied in considerable agitation: “This is what is wrong with you Tosevites.You are too changeable. Maybe we can make peace with you as you are now. But will you be as you are now when the colonization fleet reaches this world? It is to be doubted. What will you be? What will you want? What will you know?”

“I have no answers to these questions, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said quietly. He thought of Poland, which had had a large army, well trained to fight the sort of war fought on that frontier a generation before. Against theWehrmacht, the Poles had fought with utmost bravery and utmost futility-and had gone down to ignominious defeat in a couple of weeks. While they weren’t looking, the rules had changed.

“I have no answers to these questions, either,” Atvar said. Unlike the Polish army, he at least sensed the possibility of change. It frightened him even more than it had frightened the pious Jews who tried to turn their backs on Voltaire and Darwin and Marx, Edison and Krupp and the Wright brothers. The fleetlord went on, “I have to be certain this world will be intact and ready for settlement by the males and females of the colonization fleet.”

“The question you must ask yourself, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said, “is whether you would sooner have part of the world ready for settlement than all of it in ruins.”

“Truth,” Atvar said. “But there is also another question: if we let you Tosevites retain part of the land surface of this world on your own terms now, for what will you use that base between now and the arrival of the colonization fleet? Do we end one war now but lay the eggs for another, larger one later? You are a Tosevite yourself; your people have done little but fight one war after another. How do you view this?”

Moishe supposed he should have been grateful the fleetlord was using him for a sounding board rather than simply disposing of him. Hewas grateful, but Atvar had given him another essentially unanswerable question. He said, “Sometimes war does lead to war. The last great war we fought, thirty years ago now it started, sowed the seeds for this one. But a different peace might have kept the new war from happening.”

“Might,” the fleetlord echoed unhappily. “I cannot affordmight. I must have certainty, and there is none on this world. Even you Big Uglies cannot come into concord here. Take this Poland where you lived, where Zolraag was provincelord. The Deutsche claim it because they had it when the Race came to Tosev 3. The SSSR claims half of it because of an agreement they say the Deutsche violated. And the local Tosevites claim it belongs to neither of these not-empires, but to them alone. If we leave this Poland place, to whom shall we in justice restore it?”

“Poland, Exalted Fleetlord, is a place I hope you do not leave,” Moishe said.

“Even though you did everything you could to undermine our presence there?” Atvar said. “You may have the egg, Moishe Russie, or you may have the hatchling. You may not have both.”

“I understand that,” Moishe said, “but Poland is a special case.”

“All cases on Tosev 3 are special-just ask the Big Uglies involved in them,” Atvar answered. “One more reason to hate this world.”