Striking the Balance

XVI

Vyacheslav Molotov gulped down yet another glass of iced tea, pausing halfway through to swallow a couple of salt tablets. The heat of Cairo was unbelievable, enervating, even deadly dangerous: one of his aides, an NKVD colonel named Serov, who spoke the Lizards’ language as fluently as any human being in the Soviet Union, had collapsed of heatstroke, and was now recovering in an air-conditioned hospital suite the English had set up to treat similarly afflicted folk of their own nation.

Neither the Semiramis Hotel, in which the Soviet delegation and other human diplomats were staying, nor Shepheard’s, in which the negotiations were being conducted, enjoyed the benefits of air-conditioning. Here, the Soviets kept enough fans going at all times to make paperweights mandatory to prevent a blizzard of documents from blowing around the suite. Even if it did move, the air the fans blew remained hot.

No fans blew during the negotiations. The Lizards, as Molotov had discovered to his dismay when he was first flown up to one of their spaceships to discuss the war with their fleetlord, reveled in heat. Before Colonel Serov was renderedhors de combat, he’d reported that the Lizards here continually talked about how fine the weather was-almost like their home, they said.

As far as Molotov was concerned, they were welcome to it.

He reached in the drawer and pulled out a dark blue necktie. As he fastened the collar button of his shirt, he allowed himself a small, martyred sigh: here in Cairo, he envied the Lizards their body paint. Knotting the tie, he reflected that he still had an advantage over most of his colleagues. His neck was thin, which let air circulate under his shirt. A lot of the Soviets were beefy types, with double chins and rolls of fat at their napes. For them, closed collar and cravat were even worse torment.

Just for a moment, he wondered how the USSR’s Lizard prisoners enjoyed the labor camps northeast of Leningrad and up in the northern reaches of Siberia. He wondered how they would enjoy them come February.

“As much as I enjoy Cairo now,” he murmured, checking in the dresser mirror to make sure the tie was straight. Satisfied, he put on his hat and went downstairs to wait for the Lizard vehicle that would take him to today’s negotiating session.

His interpreter, a birdlike little man named Yakov Donskoi, was pacing about the hotel lobby. He brightened on seeing Molotov arrive. “Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” he said. With Molotov here, he had a set place to be and set things to do.

“Good morning, Yakov Beniaminovich,” Molotov answered, and looked pointedly at his wristwatch. The Lizards were…

Exactly at the appointed hour, an armored personnel carrier pulled up in front of the hotel. He kept expecting the Lizards to be late, and they never were. Donskoi said, “I have been down for some time. Von Ribbentrop left about forty minutes ago, Marshall about twenty. Before that, I do not know.”

The Lizards did not transport human diplomats together. Molotov supposed that was to keep them from conferring with one another. The tactic had its advantages for them. The humans didn’t dare speak too freely among themselves at the hotel, either. The NKVD had swept Molotov’s room for listening devices. He was sure theGestapo, the OSS, and other intelligence agencies had done likewise for their principals’ quarters. He was equally sure they hadn’t found everything there was to find. The Lizards had too long a lead on humanity in that kind of technology.

He turned to Donskoi. “Tell the Lizards it would bekulturny if they provided seats in this machine suitable to the shape of our fundaments.”

Donskoi addressed the Lizard with the fanciest body paint not in his own language but in English, the human tongue in which the talks were being conducted. It was the native tongue of George Marshall and Anthony Eden, while von Ribbentrop and Shigenori Togo were fluent in it. Eden and Togo were not formal conference participants, but the Lizards had let them come and sit in.

The Lizard replied to Donskoi in English that sounded to Molotov not much different from the alien’s native tongue. The interpreter, however, made sense of it: that was his job. He translated for Molotov: “Strukss says no. He says we should be honored they deign to talk with us at all, and that we have no business asking for anything more than they provide.”

“Tell him he isnye kulturny,” Molotov said. “Tell him he is an ignorant barbarian, that even the Nazis whom I hate know more of diplomacy than his people, that his superior will hear of his insolence. Tell him in just those words, Yakov Beniaminovich.”

Donskoi spoke in English. The Lizard made horrible spluttering noises, then spoke English himself. Donskoi said, “He says, with the air of one granting a great concession, he will see what arrangements can be made. I take this to mean he will do as you say.”

“Ochen khorosho,”Molotov said smugly. In some ways, the Lizards were very much like his own people: if you convinced one of them you had superior status, he would grovel, but he would ride roughshod over you if he thought himself of the higher rank.

The armored vehicle-far quieter and less odorous than its human-made equivalent would have been-pulled to a stop in front of Shepheard’s Hotel, where Atvar made his headquarters. Molotov found it amusing and illuminating that the Lizard should choose for his own the hotel that had had the highest status under the British colonialist regime.

He got out of the Lizard personnel carrier with nothing but relief; not only was the seat wrong for his backside, it was even hotter in there than on the street. Strukss led him and Yakov Donskoi to the meeting room, where the other human representatives sat sweltering as they waited for Atvar to condescend to appear. George Marshall drank from a glass of iced tea and fanned himself with a palm-frond fan he’d probably brought from home. Molotov wished he’d thought to bring or acquire such a convenience himself. Marshall’s uniform remained crisp, starchy.

Through Donskoi, Molotov asked the Egyptian servant hovering in the corner of the room for iced tea for himself. The servant, not surprisingly, was fluent in English. With a bow to Molotov-who kept his face still despite despising such self-abnegation-he hurried away, soon to return with a tall, sweating glass. Molotov longed to press it to his cheek before he drank, but refrained. A fan was suitably decorous; that was not.

Atvar came in a few minutes later, accompanied by a Lizard in far less elaborate body paint: his interpreter. The human delegates rose and bowed. The Lizard interpreter spoke to them in English that seemed more fluent than that which Strukss used. Yakov Donskoi translated for Molotov: “The fleetlord recognizes the courtesy and thanks us for it.”

Von Ribbentrop muttered something in German, a language Donskoi also understood. “He says they should show us more courtesy now, and they should have shown us more courtesy from the beginning.”

Like a lot of the things the Nazi foreign minister said, that was both true and useless. Von Ribbentrop was on the heavyset side and, with his tight collar and fair skin, looked rather like a boiled ham with blue eyes. As far as Molotov was concerned, he had the wits of a boiled ham, too, but the interests of the popular front kept him from saying so.

Donskoi translated word for word as Eden asked Atvar, “Am I to construe that my presence means the Race extends the same cease-fire to Great Britain as to my cobelligerents who sit at this table with me?”

The handsome Englishman-Churchill’s alter ego-had asked that question before, without getting a straight answer for it. Now Atvar spoke. The Lizard interpreter, having already translated Eden’s question, turned the fleetlord’s reply into English: “The fleetlord says in his generosity the truce applies to you in your island. It does not apply to any of the other lands of your empire across the seas from you and this island.”

Anthony Eden, though not bad at keeping his face straight, was not in Molotov’s class. The Soviet foreign minister had no trouble seeing his anguish. As Stalin had predicted, the British Empire was dead, having been pronounced so by a child-sized green-brown creature with sharp teeth and swiveling eye turrets.In spite of your heroics, the dialectic consigns you to the ash-heap of history, Molotov thought.Even absent the Lizards, it would have happened soon.

George Marshall said, “For us, Fleetlord, the cease-fire is not enough. We want you off our soil, and we are prepared to hurt your people more if you don’t leave of your own free will and be quick about it.”

“The GermanReich expresses this same demand,” von Ribbentrop declared, sounding pompous even when Molotov did not understand his words till they were translated. Sweating and blustering, he went on, “TheFuhrer insists on the full restoration of all territory under the benevolent dominion of theReich and its allied states, including Italy, at the time of your people’s arrival from the depths of space.”

As far as Molotov was concerned, no territory had been under thebenevolent dominion of theReich. That, however, was not his primary concern. Before Atvar could reply to von Ribbentrop, he spoke up sharply: “Much of the territory claimed by the Germans was illegally seized from the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, to whom, as Comrade Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, rightly requires, it must be restored.”

“If you Tosevites cannot settle where the boundaries of your empires and not-empires lie, why do you expect us to do it for you?” Atvar demanded.

Von Ribbentrop turned to glare at Molotov, who looked back stonily. The two of them might have been allied against the Lizards, but were not and would never be friends.

“Perhaps,” Shigenori Togo said, “this situation being so irregular, both human states might agree to allow the Race to continue to possess some territory between them, serving as a buffer and aiding in the establishment and maintenance of peace all over our world.”

“Subject to negotiation of the precise territory to be retained, this may in principle be acceptable to the Soviet Union,” Molotov said. Given the Germans’ prowess not merely with explosive-metal bombs but also with nerve gas and long-range guided rockets, Stalin wanted a buffer between the Soviet border and fascist Germany. “Since the Race is already in Poland-”

“No!” von Ribbentrop interrupted angrily. “This is not acceptable to theReich. We insist on a complete withdrawal, and we will go back to war before we accept anything less. So theFuhrer has declared.”

“TheFuhrer has declared a great many things,” Anthony Eden said with relish. “ ‘The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe,’ for instance. That a declaration is made does not necessarily test its veracity.”

“When theFuhrer promises war, he delivers,” von Ribbentrop replied, a better comeback than Molotov had looked for from him.

George Marshall coughed, then said, “If we are throwing quotations around, gentlemen, let me give you one from Ben Franklin that fits the present circumstances: ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ ”

To Molotov, Yakov Donskoi murmured the translation, then added, “The pun in English I cannot reproduce in Russian.”

“Never mind the pun,” Molotov answered. “Tell them for me that Franklin is right, and that Marshall is right as well. If we are to be a popular front against the Lizards, a popular front we must be which removes the pleasure of sniping at one another.” He waited till Donskoi had rendered that into English, then went on, for the interpreter’s ears alone, “If I am to be deprived of the pleasure of telling von Ribbentrop what I think of him, I want no one else to enjoy it-but you need not translate that”

“Yes, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the interpreter said dutifully. Then he stared at the foreign commissar. Had Molotov made a joke? His face denied it. But then, Molotov’s face always denied everything.

Ussmak lifted the axe, swung it, and felt the jar as the blade bit into the tree trunk. Hissing with effort, he pulled it free, then swung again. At this rate, felling the tree would take about forever, and he would end up starving for no better reason than that he could not satisfy the quotas the Big Uglies of the SSSR insisted on setting for males of the Race.

Those quotas were the same ones they set for their own kind. Before this ignominious captivity, when Ussmak had thought of the Big Uglies, theugly part was uppermost in his mind. Now he realized how much thebig mattered. All the tools the guards gave him and his fellow males were designed for their kind, not his. They were large and heavy and clumsy in his hands. The males of the SSSR did not care. Unending toil on not enough food was making prisoners die off one after another. The guards did not care about that, either.

A brief moment’s fury made Ussmak take a savage hack at the tree. “We should have kept on refusing to work and made them kill us that way,” he said. “They mean for us to die anyhow.”

“Truth,” said another male nearby. “You were our headmale. Why did you give in to the Russkis? If we had hung together, we might have got them to do what we wanted. More food for less work sounds good to me.” Like Ussmak, he had lost so much flesh, his skin hung loose on his bones.

“I feared for our spirits,” Ussmak said. “I was a fool. Our spirits will be lost here soon enough no matter what we do.”

The other male paused a moment in his own work-and a guard raised a submachine gun and growled a warning at him. The guards didn’t bother learning the language of the Race-they expected you to understand them, and woe betide you if you didn’t The male picked up his axe again. As he swung it, he said, “We could try another work stoppage.”

“We could, yes,” Ussmak said, but his voice sounded hollow even to himself. The males of Barracks Three had tried once and failed. They would never come together as a group enough to try again. Ussmak was morbidly certain of it.

Thiswas what he had bought for mutiny against his superiors. No matter how addled he had thought them, even their worst was a hundred, a thousand, a million times better than the superiors for whom he now toiled. Had he known then what he knew now-His mouth dropped open in a bitter laugh. That was what old males always told young ones just embarking on their lives. Ussmak wasn’t old, not even counting the time he’d spent in cold sleep traveling to Tosev 3. But he had a hard-won store of bitter knowledge acquired too late.

“Work!” the guard snapped in his own language. He didn’t add an emphatic cough; it was as if he’d only made a suggestion. Ignoring that suggestion, though, might cost you your life.

Ussmak hammered away at the tree trunk Chips flew, but the tree refused to fall. If he didn’t chop it down, they were liable to leave him out here all day. The star Tosev stayed in the sky almost all the time here at this season of the Tosevite year, but still could not warm the air much past cool.

He hit two more solid strokes. The tree tottered, then toppled with a crash. Ussmak felt like cheering. If the males quickly sawed the trunk into the sections the guards required, they might yet gain-almost-enough to eat.

Emboldened, he used his halting Russki to ask the guard, “Cease-fire truth is?” The rumor had reached the camp with a fresh batch of Big Ugly prisoners. Maybe the guard would feel well enough inclined to him for having cut down the tree to give him a straight answer.

And so it proved: the Big Ugly said,“Da.” He took some crumbled leaves from a pouch he wore on his belt, rolled them in apiece of paper, lighted one end, and sucked in smoke at the other. The practice struck Ussmak as corrosive to the lung. It couldn’t possibly have been so pleasant, so enjoyable, as, say, tasting ginger.

“We go free?” Ussmak asked. The Tosevite prisoners said that could happen as part of a cease-fire. They knew far more about such things than Ussmak did. All he could do was hope.

“Chto?”the guard said: “What? You gofree?” He paused to suck more smoke and to blow it out in a harsh white cloud. Then he paused again, this time to make the barking noises Big Uglies used for laughter. “Free? You?Gavno!” Ussmak knew that meant some sort of bodily waste, but not how it applied to his question. The guard proceeded to make it perfectly, brutally, clear: “You go free?Nyet! Never!” He laughed louder, the Tosevite equivalent of laughing wider. As if to reject the very idea, he leveled his submachine gun at Ussmak. “Now work!”

Ussmak worked. When at last the guards suffered the males of the Race to return to their barracks, he trudged back with dragging stride: half exhaustion, half despair. He knew that was dangerous. He’d already seen males who’d lost hope give up and die in short order. But knowing something was dangerous was different from being able to keep from doing it.

They had made their work norm for the day. The ration of bread and salted sea creature the Big Uglies doled out was not enough to keep them going through another day of grinding toil, but it was what they got.

Ussmak toppled into his hard, comfortless bunk as soon as he had eaten. Sleep dropped over him like a thick, smothering black curtain. He knew he would not be fully recovered when the males were routed out come morning. Tomorrow would be just the same as today had been, maybe a little worse, not likely to be any better.

So would the day after that, and the day after that, and the day afterthat. Free? Once more, the guard’s barking laughter seemed to reverberate from his heating diaphragms. As sleep overcame him, he thought how sweet never waking up would be.

Ludmila Gorbunova looked to the west, not in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the evening star (in any case, Venus was lost in the skirts of the sun) but longingly nonetheless.

From right beside her elbow, a voice said, “You would fly another mission into theWehrmacht lines in a moment, wouldn’t you?”

She jumped; she hadn’t heard Ignacy come up. She also felt no small anger and embarrassment. Wearing her heart on her sleeve was the last thing she wanted to do, especially when it was given to a Nazi panzer colonel.A Germanpanzer colonel, she thought, correcting herself. That sounded better to her-and besides, could any man who called a medal he’d won “Hitler’s fried egg” be a dedicated fascist? She doubted it, though she knew her objectivity was suspect.

“You do not answer me,” Ignacy said.

She wanted to pretend the guerrilla leader hadn’t spoken, but she couldn’t very well do that. Besides, since his Russian was better than anyone else’s hereabouts, ignoring him would cut her off from the person to whom she could most readily speak. So she replied with something that was true but not responsive: “What I want does not much matter. With the cease-fire in place between the Germans and the Lizards, I will have no occasion to fly over there, will I? If the Germans have any sense, they will not do anything to make the Lizards lose patience with them and start fighting again.”

“If the Germans had any sense, would they be Germans?” Ignacy returned. Ludmila would not have cared to take piano lessons from such a cynical man; perhaps the war had revealed to him his true calling. After pausing a moment to let the jab sink in, he went on, ‘The Germans will, I think, encourage unrest in the parts of Poland they do not control.”

“Do you really?” Ludmila embarrassed herself all over again by how eager she sounded.

Ignacy smiled. It was not altogether pleasant, that curl of lips, not in a plump face in a land full of thin ones, not when it didn’t quite light up his eyes. She hadn’t told him anything of her meeting with Jager; as far as she was concerned, that was her business and nobody else’s. But whether she’d told him or not, he seemed to have drawn his own conclusions, most of them disconcertingly accurate. He said, “As a matter of fact, I am trying to arrange-ever so discreetly, of course-to get my hands on some German antitank rockets. Would you be interested in transporting those if I succeed?”

“I will do whatever is required to bring victory to the workers and peasants of Poland against the alien imperialists,” Ludmila answered. Sometimes taking refuge in the rhetoric she’d learned from childhood was comforting. Using it also gave her more chance to think. She said, “Are you certain flying those rockets in would be the best way to get them? Moving them along back roads and paths might be easier and safer.”

Ignacy shook his head. “The Lizards have been patrolling rear areas much more aggressively than they did when they fought major battles along the front. Also, the Nazis do not want anyone capturing antitank rockets that could be shown to have entered Poland after the cease-fire began. That might give the Lizards the excuse they need to end the truce. But if you flew the rockets back here without having them noticed on the ground, we could use them as we like: who could prove when we acquired them?”

“I see,” Ludmila said slowly, and she did. The Nazis had an interest in playing it close to the vest, while Ignacy, she suspected, didn’t know how to play it any other way. “And what happens if I am shot down trying to deliver the rockets to you?”

“I shall miss both you and the aircraft,” the guerrilla leader answered. She gave him a dirty look. He stared back, his face bland and blank. She got the idea he wouldn’t miss her much, even if she did give him an air force of sorts. She wondered if he wanted to get her airborne to be rid of her, but soon decided that was foolish. He could pick many more direct ways of disposing of her, ones that didn’t involve the precious FieselerStorch.

The nod he gave her was almost a bow: a bourgeois affectation he’d preserved even here in a setting most emphatically proletarian. “Be assured I shall let you know the instant I have word that this plan goes forward, that I have persuaded the German authorities here there is no danger to it. And now I leave you to enjoy the beauties of the sunset.”

Itwas beautiful, even if she bridled at the way he said that. Crimson and orange and brilliant gold filled the sky; drifting clouds seemed to be aflame. And yet, though the colors were those of fire and blood, they didn’t make her think of war. Instead, she wondered what she ought to be doing when, in a few short hours, the sun rose again. Where was her life going, tomorrow and next month and next year?

She felt torn in two. Part of her wanted to go back to the Soviet Union in any way she could. The pull of therodina was strong. But she also wondered what would become of her if she returned. Her dossier already had to be suspect, because she was known to have associated with Heinrich Jager. Could she justify going off to a foreign country-a country under occupation by the Lizards and the Nazis-at the behest of a German general? She’d been in Poland for months, too, without making any effort to come back till now. If the NKVD happened to be in a suspicious mood, as the NKVD so often happened to be (the nasty, skinny face of Colonel Boris Lidov flashed in front of her mind), they’d ship her to agulag without a second thought.

The other half of her wanted to run to Jager, not away from him. She recognized the impracticalities there, too. The Nazis had theGestapo instead of the NKVD. They wouldn’t just be looking at Jager through a magnifying glass, either. They’d rake her over the coals, too, maybe more savagely than the People’s Commissariat for the Interior would. She tried to imagine what happened to Nazis who fell into the NKVD’s hands. That same sort of shuddersome treatment had to await Soviet citizens in the grip of theGestapo.

Realistically, she couldn’t go east. As realistically, she couldn’t go west, either. That left staying where she was, also an unpalatable choice. Ignacy was hardly the sort of leader she’d follow into battle with a song on her ups (though if she did, she thought wryly, she’d better sing in tune).

As she stood and thought and watched, gold faded out of the sky. Now the horizon was orange, with crimson creeping down the dome of heaven toward it. Some of the clouds, off in the east, were just floating dumplings, not fire incarnate. Night was coming.

Ludmila sighed. “What I’d really like,” she said, though nothing and no one was likely to pay her any heed, “is to go off somewhere-maybe by myself, maybe. If he wants, with Heinrich-and forget this whole war and that it ever started.” She laughed. “And while I’m wishing for that, why don’t I wish for the moon from out of the sky, too?”

Ttomalss paced back and forth on the concrete floor of his cell. His toeclaws clicked over the hard, rough surface. He wondered how long he would take to wear a groove in the floor, or maybe even wear through it so he could dig a hole in the dirt below and escape.

That depended on how thick the concrete was, of course. If the Tosevites had put down only a thin layer of the stuff, he shouldn’t need more than, oh, three or four lifetimes.

Not much light came in through the small, narrow windows of the cell. Those windows were set too high for him to see out through them, and too high for any Big Ugly to see in. He had been told that if he raised an outcry, he would be shot without a chance to explain or make amends. He believed the warning. It was very much in character for the Tosevites.

He’d tried to keep track of days by scratching tally marks in the wall. It hadn’t worked. He’d forgotten a day, or thought he had, and then scratched two marks instead of one the next morning, only to decide, afterwards, that maybe he hadn’t forgotten after all, which rendered his makeshift calendar inaccurate and therefore useless. All he knew now was that he’d been here… forever.

“Sensory deprivation,” he said. If no one outside could hear him, he was allowed to talk to himself. “Yes, sensory deprivation: that is the experiment the accursed female Liu Han has in mind for me. How long can I experience nothing and still keep my wits unaddled? I do not know. I hope I do not find out.”

Was a slow descent into madness, watching yourself take each step down the road, preferable to being quickly killed? He didn’t know that, either. He was even beginning to wonder whether he would have preferred to suffer the physical torment against which the Big Uglies, proving their barbarity, had no scruples. If thinking you’d sooner be tortured wasn’t a step on the road to madness, what was?

He wished he’d never gone into cold sleep aboard a starship, wished he’d never seen Tosev 3, wished he’d never turned his eye turrets toward Liu Han, wished he’d never watched the hatchling emerge all slimy and bloody and disgusting from the genital opening between her legs, and wished-oh, how he wished! — he’d never taken that hatchling to see what he could learn from it.

Those wishes weren’t going to come to fruition, either. He cherished them all the same. No one could deny they were utterly rational and sensible, the products of a mind fully in touch with reality.

He heard a sharp, metallic click and felt the building in which he was confined vibrate ever so slightly. He heard footfalls in the chamber outside his door, and heard the outer door to the building close. Someone fumbled at the lock that confined him. It opened, too, with a click different from that of the one on the outer door.

With a squeak of hinges that needed oil, the inner door swung open. Ttomalss all but quivered with joy at the prospect of seeing, speaking with, anyone, even a Big Ugly. “Superior-female,” he said when he recognized Liu Han.

She did not answer right away. She carried a submachine gun in one hand and her hatchling on her other hip. Ttomalss had trouble knowing the hatchling was the creature he had studied. When the little Tosevite had been his, he’d put no cloths on it except the necessary ones around its middle that kept its wastes from splashing indiscriminately all over his laboratory area.

Now-Now Liu Han had decked the hatching in shiny cloth of several bright colors. The hatchling also wore bits of ribbon tied in its black hair. The adornment struck Ttomalss as foolish and unnecessary; all he’d ever done was make sure the hair was clean and untangled. Why bother with anything more?

The hatchling looked at him for some time. Did it remember? He had no way to know; his research had been interrupted before he could learn such things-and, in any case, he couldn’t be sure how long he’d been imprisoned here.

“Mama?” the hatchling said-in Chinese, without an interrogative cough. A small hand went out to point toward Ttomalss. “This?” Again, it spoke in the Tosevite language, without any hint it had begun to learn that of the Race.

“This is a little scaly devil,” Liu Han answered, also in Chinese. She repeated herself: “Little scaly devil.”

“Little scaly devil,” the hatchling echoed. The words were not pronounced perfectly, but even Ttomalss, whose own Chinese was far from perfect, had no trouble understanding them.

“Good,” Liu Han said, and twisted her rubbery face into the expression Big Uglies used to convey amiability. The hatching did not give that expression back. It hadn’t done that so much in the latter part of the time when Ttomalss had had it, perhaps because it had had no models to imitate. Liu Han’s grimace left her features. “Liu Mei hardly smiles,” she said. “For this I blame you.”

Ttomalss realized the female had given the hatchling a name reminiscent of her own.Family relationships are critical among Tosevites, he reminded himself, becoming for a moment a researcher once more, not a captive. Then he saw Liu Han was waiting for his reply. Relying on the patience of a Big Ugly waiting with a submachine gun did not do. He said, “It maybe so, superior female. Perhaps the hatchling needed a pattern for this expression. I cannot smile, so I could not be that pattern. We do not learn these things until we encounter them.”

“You should not have had to learn them,” Liu Han answered. “You should not have taken Liu Mei from me in the first place.”

“Superior female, I wish I had not taken the hatchling,” Ttomalss said, and backed that with an emphatic cough. The hatchling-LiuMei he reminded himself-stirred in Liu Han’s arms, as if reminded of something it had once known. Ttomalss went on, “I cannot undo what I did, though. It is too late for that.”

“It is too late for many things,” Liu Han said, and he thought she meant to kill him on the spot. Then Liu Mei wiggled again. Liu Han looked down at the small Tosevite that had come from her body. “But it is not too late for all things. Do you see how Liu Mei is becoming a proper human person, wearing proper human clothes, speaking proper human language?”

“I see that, yes,” Ttomalss answered. “She is very-” He didn’t know how to sayadaptable in Chinese, and cast around for a way to get across what he meant: “When the way she lives changes, she changes with it, very fast.” Tosevite adaptability had addled the Race ever since the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3. Ttomalss saw no reason to be surprised at one more example.

Even in the gloomy little cell, Liu Han’s eyes glittered. “Do you remember when you gave me back my baby, you gloated because you had raised it as a little scaly devil and it would not become a proper human being? That is what you said?”

“I seem to have been wrong,” Ttomalss said. “I wish I had never said any such thing. We of the Race are always finding out we do not know as much about you Tosevites as we thought we did. That is one of the reasons I took the hatchling: to try to learn more.”

“One of the things you have learned is that you should not have done it,” Liu Han snapped.

“Truth!” Ttomalss exclaimed, and used another emphatic cough.

“I brought Liu Mei here to show you how wrong you were,” Liu Han said. “You little scaly devils, you do not like to be wrong.” Her tone was mocking; Ttomalss had learned enough of the way Tosevites spoke to be sure of that. She went on, mocking still, “You were not patient enough. You did not think enough about what would happen when Liu Mei was among proper human beings for a while.”

“Truth,” Ttomalss said again, this time quietly. What a fool he had been, to scoff at Liu Han without regard for possible consequences. As the Race had so often with the Big Uglies as a whole, he had underestimated her. And, as the Race had, he was paying for it.

“I will tell you something else,” Liu Han said-if it wasn’t going to be sensory deprivation, apparently she would do everything she could to make him feel dreadful. “You scaly devils have had to agree to talks of peace with several nations of human beings, because you were being so badly hurt in the fighting.”

“I do not believe you,” Ttomalss said. She was his only source of information here-why shouldn’t she tell all sorts of outrageous lies to break his morale?

“I do not care what you believe. It is the truth even so,” Liu Han answered. Her indifference made him wonder if perhaps he’d been wrong-but it might have been intended to do that. She continued, “You little devils still go on oppressing China. Before too much time has passed, you will learn this too is a mistake. You have made a great many mistakes, here and all over the world.”

“It may be so,” Ttomalss admitted. “But I make no mistakes here.” He lifted a foot and brought it down on the concrete floor. “When I can do nothing, I can make no mistakes.”

Liu Han let out several barks of Tosevite laughter. “In that case, you will stay a perfect male for a long time.” Liu Mei started to fuss. Liu Han jiggled the hatchling back and forth, calming it more readily than Ttomalss had ever managed. “I wanted to show you how very wrong you were. Think of that as part of your punishment.”

“You are more clever than I ever thought,” Ttomalss said bitterly. Was it worse to contemplate nothing or his own stupidity? He did not know, not yet. Here in this cell, he expected he would have plenty of time to find out.

“Tell this to the other little devils-if I ever let you go,” Liu Han said. She backed out of the chamber, keeping him covered with the submachine gun till she had shut the door. The click of the lock closing over the hasp had a dreadfully final sound. A moment later, he heard her close the outer door, too.

He stared after her. If she ever let him go? He realized she had told him that precisely to have it prey on his mind. Would she? Wouldn’t she? Could he persuade her? If he could, how? Worrying about it would addle his mind, but how could he keep from worrying about it?

She wasmuch more clever than he’d ever thought.

Sam Yeager stood on first base after cracking a single to left. In a seat in back of the first-base dugout, Barbara clapped her hands. “Nice poke,” said the first baseman, a stocky corporal named Grabowski. “But then, you played ball, didn’t you? Pro ball, I mean.”

“Years and years,” Sam answered. “I’d be doing it yet if the Lizards hadn’t come. I’ve got full dentures, top and bottom, so the Army wouldn’t touch me till everything went to hell in a handbasket”

“Yeah, I’ve heard other guys say the same kind of thing,” Grabowski answered, nodding. “But you’re used to playing in a fancy park like this, is what I was getting at.”

Yeager hadn’t thought of Ban Johnson Field as a fancy park. It was just a ballyard, like hundreds of other minor-league parks he’d been through: covered grandstand, bleachers out in back of left and right, advertisements pasted on the boards of the outfield fences-faded, peeling, tattered advertisements now, because nobody in Hot Springs was advertising much of anything these days.

Grabowski went on, “Hell, for me this is like what the Polo Grounds must feel like. City parks’re as hot a ball as I ever played.”

“All depends on how you look at things,” Sam said.

Crack!The guy up behind him hit a bouncer to short. Sam lit out for second full tilt. In a pickup game like this, you couldn’t be sure the shortstop would make the play. But he did. He shoveled the ball to second, smooth as you please.

Ristin, who was playing second base, brushed the bag with one foot, then got it between him and the oncoming Yeager. The Lizard dropped down sidearm for the throw to first, giving Sam the choice between sliding and taking the ball right between the eyes. Sam hit the dirt. The ball thumped into Grabowski’s mitt when the GI who’d hit the grounder was still a stride from the bag. “Yer out!” yelled the dogface making like an ump.

Yeager got up and brushed off his chinos. “Pretty double play,” he told Ristin before he trotted off the field. “Can’t turn ’em any better than that.”

“I thank you, superior sir,” Ristin answered in his own language. “This is a good game you Tosevites play.”

When Sam got back to the bench, he grabbed for a towel and wiped his sweaty face. You played ball in Hot Springs in summertime, you might as well have playedin the hot springs.

“Yeager! Sergeant Sam Yeager!” somebody called from the stands. It didn’t sound like somebody from the crowd-if you called three, four dozen people a crowd. It sounded like somebody looking for him.

He stuck his head out of the dugout. “Yeah? What is it?”

A fellow with a first lieutenant’s silver bar on each shoulder said, “Sergeant, I have orders to fetch you back to the hospital right away.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said, glad the lieutenant wasn’t getting shirty about the casual way he’d answered. “Let me get out of my spikes and into street shoes.” He did that in a hurry, telling his teammates, “You’ll have to find somebody else for left now.” He took off his baseball cap and stuck his service cap on his head. He wished his pants weren’t dirty, but he couldn’t do anything about that now.

“Shall I come, too?” Barbara asked as he climbed up into the stands and headed toward the lieutenant. She shifted Jonathan from her lap to her shoulder and started to get up.

But Yeager shook his head. “You may as well stay, hon,” he answered. “They wouldn’t be looking for me like this if they didn’t have some kind of duty in mind.” He saw the officer had his hands on his hips, a bad sign. “I better get moving,” he said, and did just that.

They went back to the Army and Navy General Hospital at a fast walk that was close to a trot. Ban Johnson Field was in Whittington Park, out at the west end of Whittington Avenue. They went past the old Catholic school on Whittington, down past Bathhouse Row on Central, and over Reserve to the hospital.

“What’s gone wrong, anyhow?” Yeager asked as they went inside.

The lieutenant didn’t answer, but hustled him along to the offices reserved for top brass. Sam didn’t like that. He wondered if he was in trouble and, if he was, how much trouble he was in. The farther down the row of fancy offices they got, the bigger he figured the trouble might be.

A door with a frosted glass windowpane had a cardboard sign taped to it: BASE COMMANDANT’S OFFICE. Yeager gulped. He couldn’t help it. “Hawkins, sir,” the lieutenant said, saluting a captain sitting at a desk full of papers. “Reporting with Sergeant Yeager as ordered.”

“Thank you, Hawkins.” The captain got up from his desk. “I’ll tell Major General Donovan he’s here.” He ducked into the office behind the antechamber. When he emerged a moment later, he held the door open. “Go on in, Sergeant”

“Yes, sir.” Yeager wished to high heaven the lieutenant had given him a chance to clean up a little before he presented himself to a two-star general. Even if they did call Donovan “Wild Bill,” he wasn’t likely to appreciate sweat and grime and an aroma that clearly announced Yeager had been running around in hot, muggy weather.

No help for that now, though. Sam walked through the door, which the adjutant closed behind him. Saluting, he said, “Sergeant Samuel Yeager, sir, reporting as ordered.”

“At ease, Sergeant,” Donovan said as he returned the salute. He was a fit sixty, more or less, with blue eyes and the map of Ireland on his face. He had a couple of cans’ worth of fruit salad on his chest. One of those ribbons was blue, with white stars. Yeager’s eyes widened slightly. You didn’t pick up a Congressional Medal of Honor for playing jacks. Before he got over that surprise, Donovan gave him another one, saying in fluent Lizard talk, “I greet you, Tosevite male who so well understands the males of the Race.”

“I greet you, superior sir,” Yeager answered automatically, using the same language. He dropped back into English to continue, “I didn’t know you knew their lingo, sir.”

“I’m supposed to know everything. That’s my job,” Donovan answered, without the slightest hint he was joking. He made a wry face. “Can’t be done, of course. It’s still my job. Which is why I sent for you.”

“Sir?” Yeager said.I don’t know from nothin’.

Donovan shuffled through papers on his desk. When he found the one he wanted, he peered at it through the bottoms of his bifocals. “You were transferred here from Denver, along with your wife and the two Lizards Ullhass and Ristin. That right?” Without waiting for Yeager’s answer, he went on, “That was before you started making an infielder out of Ristin, hey?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Sam said. Maybe Donovandid know everything. “Okay,” the general said. “You were attached to that Denver project for a good long while, weren’t you? Even when they were back in Chicago. That right?” This time, he did let Sam nod before continuing, “Which means you probably know more about atomic bombs than anybody else in Arkansas. That right?”

“I don’t know aboutthat, sir,” Yeager said. “I’m no physicist or anything like that. Uh, sir, am I allowed to talk about this stuff with you? They worked real hard on keeping it a secret.”

“You’re not only allowed to, you’re ordered to-by me,” Donovan answered. “But I’m glad to see you concerned with security, Sergeant, because I’m going to tell you something you are absolutely forbidden to mention outside this room, except as I may later direct. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said. By the way the base commandant spoke, he’d get a blindfold if he messed that one up; nobody’d bother wasting a cigarette on him.

“Okay,” Donovan repeated. “By now, you’re probably wondering what the hell is going on and why I dragged you in here. That right?” No answer seemed necessary. Donovan charged ahead: “Reason’s real simple-we just got one of these atomic bombs delivered here, and I want to know as much about it as I can find out.”

“Here,sir?” Sam stared.

“That’s what I told you. It set out from Denver before the cease-fire was announced, and after that it just kept going. Makes sense when you think about it, hey? Thing must have come on one devil of a roundabout route to get here at all. They weren’t about to stop it halfway, leave it somewhere in no-man’s-land for the Lizards to find if they got lucky. It’s our baby now.”

“Okay, sir, I see that, I guess,” Yeager answered. “But didn’t some people from Denver come with it, people who know all about it?”

“They did like hell,” Donovan said. “Security again-you don’t want people like that captured. Thing came with typed instructions on how to arm it, a timer, and a radio transmitter. That’s it. Orders boiled down to get it to a target, back away, run like hell, and fire when ready, Gridley.”

Donovan would have been just about starting to shave when that Spanish-American War slang entered the language; Sam hadn’t heard anybody use it for years. He said, “I’ll tell you whatever I can, sir, but like I said before-uh, as I said before” (which was what he got for being married to Barbara) “I don’t know everything there is to know.”

“And as I told you, Sergeant, that’smy job, not yours. So talk.” Donovan leaned forward in his chair, ready to listen intently.

Sam told him everything he knew about the theory and practice of atomic bombs. Some of that was gleaned from science articles in the regrettedAstounding from the days before the Lizards came; more came from what he remembered of interpreting for Enrico Fermi and the other Metallurgical Laboratory physicists and from what he’d picked up while they talked among themselves.

Donovan took no notes. At first, that irked Yeager. Then he realized the general didn’t want to put anything in writing anywhere. That told him how seriously Donovan was taking the whole business.

When he ran down, Donovan nodded thoughtfully and said, “Okay, Sergeant, thanks very much. That clears up one of my major worries: I don’t have to worry about the damn thing going off under my feet, any more than I do with any other piece of ordnance. I didn’tthink so, but with a weapon that new and that powerful, I wasn’t what you’d call eager to risk my neck on what might have been my own misunderstanding.”

“That makes sense to me, sir,” Yeager agreed.

“Okay. Next question: you’re in the rocket business, too, with Goddard. Can we load this thing on a rocket and shoot it where we want it to go? It weighs ten tons, give or take a little.”

“No, sir,” Sam answered at once. “Next rocket we make that’ll throw one ton’ll be the first. Dr. Goddard’s working on ways to scale up what we’ve got, but…” His voice trailed away.

“But he’s sick, and who knows how long he’ll last?” Donovan finished for him. “And who knows how long it’ll take to build a big rocket even if it gets designed, hey? Okay. Any chance of making atomic bombs small enough to go on the rockets we have? That’d be the other way to solve the problem.”

“I plain don’t know, sir. If it can be done, I bet they’re working on it back in Denver. But I have no idea whether they can do it or not.”

“Okay, Sergeant That’s a good answer,” Donovan said. “If I told you how many people try to make like bigshots and pretend they know more than they do-Well, hell, I don’t need to burden you with that. You’re dismissed. If I need to pick your brain some more about this miserable infernal device, I’ll call you again. I hope I don’t”

“I hope you don’t, too,” Sam said. “That’d mean the cease-fire broke down.” He saluted and left Donovan’s office. The major general hadn’t gigged him about his uniform after all.Pretty good fellow, he thought.

The German major at the port of Kristiansand shuffled through an enormous box of file cards. “Bagnall, George,” he said, pulling one out. “Your pay number, please.”

Bagnall rattled it off in English, then repeated it more slowly in German.

“Danke,”said the major-his name was Kapellmeister, though he had a singularly unmusical voice. “Now, Flight Engineer Bagnall, have you violated in any way the parole you furnished to Lieutenant-Colonel Hocker in Paris year before last? Have you, that is, taken up arms against the GermanReich in pursuance of the war existing between Germany and England prior to the coming of the Lizards? Speak only the truth; I have the answer before me.”

“No, I have not,” Bagnall answered. He almost believed Kapellmeister; that a Nazi officer in an out-of-the-way Norwegian town could, at the pull of a card, come up with the name of the man to whom he’d given that parole, or even the fact that he’d given such a parole, struck him as Teutonic efficiency run mad.

Apparently satisfied, the German scribbled something on the card and stuck it back in the file. Then he went through the same rigmarole with Ken Embry. Having done that, he pulled out several more cards and rattled off the names on them-the names of the Lancaster crewmen with whom Embry and Bagnall had formerly served-at Jerome Jones before asking, “Which of the above are you?”

“None of the above, sir,” Jones replied, and gave his own name and pay number.

Major Kapellmeister went through his file. “Every third Englishman is named Jones,” he muttered. After a couple of minutes, he looked up. “I do not find a Jones to match you, however. Very well. Before you may proceed to England, you must sign a parole agreeing not to oppose the GermanReich in arms at any further time. If you are captured while you violate or after you have violated the terms of the parole, it will go hard for you. Do you understand?”

“I understand what you said,” Jones answered. “I don’t understand why you said it. Aren’t we allies against the Lizards?”

“There is at present a cease-fire between theReich and the Lizards,” Kapellmeister answered. His smile was unpleasant. “There may eventually be a peace. At that time, our relations with your country will have to be defined, would you not agree?”

The three Englishmen looked at one another. Bagnall hadn’t thought about what the cease-fire might mean in purely human terms. By their expressions, neither had Embry or Jones. The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. Jones asked, “If I don’t sign the parole, what happens?”

“You will be treated as a prisoner of war, with all courtesies and privileges extended to such prisoners,” the German major said.

Jones looked unhappier yet. Those courtesies and privileges were mighty thin on the ground. “Give me the bloody pen,” he said, and scrawled his name on the card Kapellmeister handed him.

“Danke schon,”Major Kapellmeister said when he returned card and pen. “For now, as you rightly point out, we are allies, and you have been treated as such thus far. Is this not so?” Jones had to nod, as did Bagnall and Embry. The journey across German ally Finland, Sweden (neutral but ever so polite to German wishes), and German-held Norway had been fast, efficient, and as pleasant as such a journey could be in times of hardship.

As Kapellmeister disposed of the card, Bagnall had a vision of copies of it making journeys of their own, to every hamlet where Nazi soldiers and Nazi bureaucrats stood guard. If Jerome Jones ever stepped off the straight and narrow anywhere theReich held sway, he was in trouble.

Once the parole was in his hands and in his precious file box, though, the major went from testy to affable. “You are free now to board the freighterHarald Hardrada. You are fortunate, in fact. Loading of the ship is nearly complete, and soon it will sail for Dover.”

“Been a long time since we’ve seen Dover,” Bagnall said. Then he asked, “Do the Lizards make a habit of shooting up ships bound for England? They haven’t got a formal cease-fire with us, after all.”

Kapellmeister shook his head. “It is not so. The informal truce they have with England appears to prevent them from doing this.”

The three Englishmen left his office and walked down to the dock where theHarald Hardrada lay berthed. The docks smelled of salt and fish and coal smoke. German guards stood at the base of the gangplank. One of them ran back to Kapellmeister to check whether the RAF men were to be allowed aboard. He came back waving his hand, and the rest of the guards stood aside. The inefficiency the Germans showed there made Bagnall feel better about the world.

He had to share with his comrades a cabin so small it lacked only a coat of red paint to double as a telephone box, but that didn’t bother him. After so long away from England, he would cheerfully have hung himself on a hatrack to get home.

That didn’t mean he wanted to spend much time in the cabin, though. He went back out on deck as soon as he’d pitched his meager belongings on a bunk. Uniformed Germans were rolling small, sealed metal drums up the gangplank. When the first one got to theHarald Hardrada, one of the soldiers tipped it onto its flat end. It was neatly stenciled,NORSK HYDRO, VEMORK.

“What’s in there?” Bagnall asked, pointing. By now, his German was fluent enough that, for a few words or a few sentences at a time, he could be mistaken for a native speaker, though not one from his listener’s home region, whatever that happened to be.

The fellow in the coal-scuttle helmet grinned at him. “Water,” he answered.

“If you don’t want to tell me, then just don’t say,” Bagnall grumbled. The German laughed at him and set the next barrel, identically stenciled, on its end beside the first. Irked, Bagnall stomped away, his feet clanging on the steel plates of the deck. The Nazi, damn him, laughed louder.

He and his comrades stowed away the barrels somewhere down in the cargo hold, where Bagnall didn’t have to look at them. He told the story to Embry and Jones, both of whom chaffed him without mercy for letting a German get the better of him.

Thick, black coal smoke poured from the stack of theHarald Hardrada as it pulled out of Kristiansand harbor for the journey across the North Sea to England. Even if Bagnall was going home, it was a voyage he could have done without. He’d never been airsick, not in the worst evasive maneuvers, but the continual pounding of big waves against the freighter’s hull sent him springing for the rail more than once. His comrades didn’t twit him for that. They were right there beside him. So were some of the sailors. That made him feel. If not better, at least more resigned to his fate: misery loves company had a lot of truth to it.

Lizard jets flew over the freighter a couple of times, so high that their vapor trails were easier to see than the aircraft themselves. TheHarald Hardrada had ack-ack guns mounted at bow and stern. Along with everyone else aboard, Bagnall knew they were essentially useless against Lizard planes. But the Lizards did not come down for a closer look or on a strafing run. Cease-fires, formal and otherwise, held.

Bagnall had spied several cloudbanks off to the west, identifying each in turn as England: he was seeing with a landlubber’s eye, and one half blinded by hope. Before long, the clouds would shift and destroy his illusion. Then at last he caught sight of something out there that did not move or dissolve.

“Yes, that is the English coast,” a sailor answered when he asked.

“It’s beautiful,” Bagnall said. The Estonian coast had gained beauty because he was sailing away from it. This one did so because he was approaching. Actually, the two landscapes looked pretty much alike: low, flat land slowly rising up from a sullen sea.

Then, off in the distance, he spotted the towers of Dover Castle, right down by the ocean. That made the homecoming feel real in a way it hadn’t before. He turned to Embry and Jones, who stood beside him. “I wonder if Daphne and Sylvia are still at the White Horse Inn.”

“Can but hope,” Ken Embry said.

“Amen,” Jones echoed. “Would be nice to have a lady friend who wouldn’t just as soon shoot you down as look at you, let alone sleep with you.” His sigh was full of nostalgia. “I remember there are women like that, though it’s been so long I’m beginning to forget”

A tug came out to help nudge theHarald Hardrada up against a pier in a surprisingly crowded harbor. As soon as she’d been made fast in her berth with lines fore and aft, as soon as the gangplank snaked across to the dock, a horde of tweedy Englishmen with the unmistakable look of boffins swarmed aboard at a dead run and besieged every uniformed German they could find with a single question, sometimes in English, sometimes in German:

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Bagnall asked one of the men.

Hearing an undoubtedly British voice, the fellow answered without hesitation: “Why, the water, of course.”

Bagnall scratched his head.

One of the cooks ladled soup into David Nussboym’s bowl. He sank the ladle all the way down to the bottom of the big iron pot. It came out full of cabbage leaves and bits of fish. The ration loaf he handed Nussboym was full weight or even a trifle over. It was still black bread, coarse and hard to chew, but it was warm from the oven and smelled good. His tea was made from local roots and leaves and berries, but the glass the cook gave him had plenty of sugar, so it was palatable enough.

And he had plenty of room in which to eat. Clerks and interpreters and other politicals got fed ahead of the common run ofzek. Nussboym recalled with distaste the mob scenes in which he’d had to defend with his elbows the space in which he was sitting, and recalled a couple of times when he’d been elbowed off a bench and onto the planks of the floor.

He dug in. With every mouthful of soup, well-being flowed through him. It was almost as if he could feel himself being nourished. He sipped at his tea, savoring every morsel of dissolved sugar that flowed over his tongue. When your belly was full, life looked good-for a while.

“Nu,David Aronovich, how do you like talking with the Lizards?” asked Moisei Apfelbaum, Colonel Skriabin’s chief clerk. He spoke in Yiddish to Nussboym but used his name and patronymic anyhow, which would have been an affectation anywhere in the USSR but seemed particularly absurd in thegulag, where patronymics fell by the wayside even in Russian.

Nevertheless, Nussboym imitated his style: “Compared to freedom, Moisei Solomonovich, it is not so much. Compared to chopping logs in the woods-” He did not go on. He did not have to go on.

Apfelbaum nodded. He was a skinny little middle-aged fellow, with eyes that looked enormous behind steel-rimmed spectacles. “Freedom you do not need to worry about, not here. Thegulag has worse things than logging, believe me. A man could be unlucky enough to dig a canal. One can be unlucky, as I say, or one can be clever. Good to be clever, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Nussboym answered. The clerks and cooks and trusties who made thegulag function-for the whole system would have fallen apart in days if not hours had the NKVD had to do all the work-were better company in many ways than thezeks of the labor gang to which he’d formerly been attached. Even if a lot of them were dedicated Communists(plus royaliste que le roi ran through his mind, for they upheld the principles of Marx and Engels and Lenin after other men espousing those same principles had sent them here), they were for the most part educated men, men with whom he had far more in common than the common criminals who were the dominant force in his work gang.

He did easier work now. He got more food for it. He should have been-well, not happy; you’d have to bemeshuggeh to be happy here-as contented as he could be in the context of thegulag. He’d always been a man who believed in getting along with authority, whatever authority happened to be: the Polish government, the Nazis, the Lizards, now the NKVD.

But when thezeks with whom he’d formerly worked were shambling out to the forest for another day of toil, the looks they gave him chilled his blood.Mene, mene, tekel upharsin floated up from his days at thecheder-thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting. He felt guilty for having it easier than his former comrades, although he knew intellectually that interpreting for the Lizards made a far greater contribution to the war effort than knocking down yet another pine or birch.

“You are not a Communist,” Apfelbaum said, studying him through those greatly magnified eyes. Nussboym shook his head, admitting it. The clerk said, “Yet you remain an idealist.”

“Maybe I do,” Nussboym said. He wanted to add,What business is it of yours? He kept his mouth shut, though; he was not such a fool as to insult a man who had such easy, intimate access to the camp commandant. The calluses on his hands were starting to soften, but he knew how easily he could once more grow accustomed to the feel of axehandle and saw grip.

“This will not necessarily work to your advantage,” Apfelbaum said.

Nussboym shrugged. “If everything worked to my advantage, would I be here?”

Apfelbaum paused to sip at his glass of ersatz tea, then smiled. His smile was charming, so much so that Nussboym distrusted it at sight. The clerk said, “Again, I remind you that there are worse things than what you have now. You have not even been required to denounce any of the men of your old gang, have you?”

“No, thank God,” Nussboym said. He hurriedly added, “Not that I ever heard any of them say anything that deserved denunciation.” After that, he devoted himself to his bowl of soup. To his relief, Apfelbaum did not press him further.

But he was not altogether surprised when, two days later, Colonel Skriabin summoned him to his office and said, “Nussboym, we have heard a rumor that concerns us. I wonder if you can tell me whether there is any truth to it.”

“If it concerns the Lizards, Comrade Colonel, I will do everything in my power,” Nussboym said, hoping to deflect the evil moment.

He had no luck. Perhaps he had not really expected to have any Luck. Skriabin said, “Unfortunately, it does not. It is reported to us that the prisoner Ivan Fyodorov has on more than one occasion uttered anti-Soviet and seditious sentiments since coming to this camp. You knew this man Fyodorov, I believe?” He waited for Nussboym to nod before going on, “Can there be any truth to this rumor?”

Nussboym tried to make a joke of it “Comrade Colonel, can you name me even onezek who hasnot said something anti-Soviet at one time or another?”

“That is not the issue,” Skriabin said. “The issue is discipline and examples. Now, I repeat myself: have you ever heard the prisoner Fyodorov utter anti-Soviet and seditious sentiments? Answer yes or no.” He spoke in Polish and kept his tone light and seemingly friendly, but he was as inexorable as a rabbi forcing ayeshiva-bucher through the explication of a difficult portion of the Talmud.

“I don’t really remember,” Nussboym said. Whenno was a lie andyes was trouble, what were you supposed to do?Temporize was all that came to mind.

“But you said everyone said such things,” Skriabin reminded him. “You must know whether the man Fyodorov was a part of everyone or an exception.”

Damn you, Moisei Solomonovich,Nussboym thought. Aloud, he said, “Maybe he was, but maybe he wasn’t, too. As I told you, I have trouble remembering who said what when.”

“I have never noticed this trouble when you speak of the Lizards,” Colonel Skriabin said. “You are always most accurate and precise.” He thrust a typewritten sheet of paper across the desk to Nussboym. “Here. Just sign this, and all will be as it should.”

Nussboym stared at the sheet in dismay. He could make out some spoken Russian, because many of the words were close to their Polish equivalents. Staring at characters from a different alphabet was something else again. “What does it say?” he asked suspiciously.

“That on a couple of occasions you did hear the prisoner Ivan Fyodorov utter anti-Soviet sentiments, nothing more.” Skriabin held out a pen to him. He took it but did not sign on the line helpfully provided. Colonel Skriabin looked sorrowful. “And I had such hope for you, David Aronovich.” His voice tolled out Nussboym’s name and patronymic like a mourning bell.

With a couple of quick jerks that had almost nothing to do with his brain, Nussboym signed the denunciation and shoved it back at Skriabin. He realized he should have shouted at Skriabin the second the NKVD man tried to get him to betray Fyodorov. But if you’d always believed in getting along with authority, you didn’t think of such things till that first fateful second had passed, and then it was too late. Skriabin took the paper and locked it in his desk.

Nussboym got another full bowl of soup at supper that night. He ate every drop of it, and every drop tasted like ashes in his mouth.