Striking the Balance

XIX

Ttomalss must have slept through the opening of the outer door to the building that confined him. The sharp click of the lock to the inner door, though, brought him up to his feet from the hard floor, his eye turrets swiveling wildly as he tried to see what was going on. Next to no light came through the narrow window that illuminated and ventilated his cell.

Fear coursed through him. The Big Uglies had never come here at night before. Like any male of the Race, he found a break in routine threatening in and of itself. This particular change, he suspected, would have felt ominous even to a Tosevite.

The door opened. Not one but three Big Uglies came in. Each carried in one hand a lantern burning some smelly fat or oil and in the other a submachine gun. The lanterns were primitive: much the sort of tools the Race had expected the natives of Tosev 3 to possess. The submachine guns, unfortunately, were not.

In the dim, flickering light, Ttomalss needed a moment to recognize Liu Han. “Superior female!” he gasped when he did. She did not answer right away, but stood looking at him. He commended his spirit to Emperors past, confident they would care for it better than the Race’s authorities had protected his body while he lived.

“Be still!” Liu Han snapped. Ttomalss waited for the weapon in her hand to stitch him full of holes. Instead of shooting him, though, she set it on the floor. She pulled out something she had tucked into the waist of her cloth leg-covering: a sack made of coarse, heavy fabric.

While the two males with her kept their submachine guns pointed at Ttomalss, Liu Han came up to him and pulled the sack down over his head. He stood frozen, not daring to resist.If they shoot me now, I will not see the guns go off before the bullets strike, he thought. Liu Han tied the bag closed around his neck, not quite tight enough to choke off his breath.

“Can he see?” one of the males asked. Then the fellow spoke directly to Ttomalss: “Can you see, miserable scaly devil?”

Miserable Ttomalss was. “No, superior sir,” he answered truthfully.

Liu Han shoved him. He almost fell over. When he recovered, she put a hand in the middle of his back. “You walk in the directions I choose for you,” she said, first in Chinese and then in the language of the Race. “Only in those directions.” She used an emphatic cough.

“It shall be done,” Ttomalss gasped. Maybe they were just taking him out to shoot him somewhere else. But if they were, wouldn’t they have told him as much, so they could enjoy his terrified anticipation? Big Uglies were dreadfully sophisticated when it came to inflicting pain.

Liu Han shoved him again, lightly this time. He walked forward till she said, “Go left,” and emphasized that by moving the hand on his back in the appropriate way. He turned to the left. Why not? In the sphere of blackness in which he moved, one direction was as good as another. A little later, Liu Han said, “Go right.” Ttomalss went right.

He had not known where he was when he set out. Had he known, he soon would have become hopelessly lost. He turned right and left and right and left tens of times, with what seemed to him random intervals and choices. The streets of Peking were very quiet. He guessed it was somewhere between the middle of the night and dawn, but could not be certain.

At last, Liu Han said, “Stop.” Ttomalss did, in apprehension. Was this the moment? Was this the place? Liu Han untied the cord fastening the cloth sack over his head. She said, “Count to one hundred, out loud, slowly, in your language. Then lift off the hood. If you lift it before you reach one hundred, youwill die at once. Do you understand?”

“Y-Yes, superior female,” Ttomalss quavered. “It shall be done. One… two… three…” He went on, as steadily as he could: “Ninety-eight… ninety-nine… one hundred.” As he reached for the sack, he waited for bullets to tear into him. He yanked the cloth from his head in a quick, convulsive gesture.

No one shot him. His eye turrets scanned all around. He was alone, at the mouth of one of Peking’s innumerable littlehutungs. He threw down the sack. The softthwap! it made hitting the ground was the only sound that reached his hearing diaphragms. Ever so cautiously, he stepped out into the street onto which thehutung opened.

To his amazement, he recognized it. It was the Lower Slanting Street, in Chinese theHsia Hsieh Chieh. And there stood the ruins of theCh’ang Ch’un Ssu, the Temple of Everlasting Spring. He knew how to get back to the Race’s headquarters in the center of Peking. He did not know if he would be allowed to do so, but he knew he had to try. The Lower Slanting Street even led in the right direction.

Before long, he ran into a patrol of males of the Race. Where the Tosevites had let him go, the patrol almost shot him before recognizing him as one of their own.That would have been an irony on which to end his career! But when he told them who he was, they hurried him off to the thoroughly fortified citadel the Race retained in what had been the Forbidden City.

He was pleased to find his arrival important enough to justify rousing Ppevel. Soon the assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, came into the chamber where Ttomalss was enjoying proper food for the first time in ever so long and said, “I am glad to see you at liberty once more, Researcher. The Tosevites informed us yesterday they would release you, but they are not always reliable in their assertions, as you know.”

“Truth, superior sir-as I know too well,” Ttomalss said with an emphatic cough. “Did they saywhy they were releasing me? To me, they never gave a reason.” Without waiting for an answer, he dug into the plate of fried worms the cooks had given him. Even though they’d been desiccated for the trip to Tosev 3 and then reconstituted, they were still a taste of Home.

Ppevel said, “By their messages, partly as a goodwill gesture and partly as a warning: typical of the Big Uglies to try to do both at once.” As if to give his words a different sort of emphatic cough, a rattle of gunfire broke out, off in the distance. He went on, “They say this shows us they can move at will through this city and other cities in this not-empire, releasing whom they will, taking whom they will, killing whom they will. They warn us the struggle to integrate China into the Empire will fail.”

Before coming down to the surface of Tosev 3, perhaps even before his kidnapping, Ttomalss would have found that laughable, ludicrous. Now-“They are determined, superior sir, and they are both ingenious and surprisingly well armed. I fear they may trouble us for years, maybe generations, to come.”

“It could be so,” Ppevel admitted, which surprised Ttomalss.

He said, “While I was a captive, the female Liu Han claimed the Race had granted certain Tosevite not-empires a cease-fire. Can this be so?”

“It can. It is,” Ppevel said. “These are the not-empires capable of producing their own nuclear weapons and desperate enough to use them against us. China-all of its factions-has no such weapons, and is excluded from the cease-fire. This offends the Chinese, or so it would seem, and so they redouble their annoyances in an effort to be included.”

“The Race-treating with barbarous Tosevites as if they were equals?” Ttomalss looked up toward the ceiling in wonder and dismay. “Even from your mouth, superior sir, I have trouble believing it.”

“It’s truth nonetheless,” Ppevel answered. “Even with these Chinese, we have negotiated, as you know, though we have not granted them the concessions the other not-empires have gained. We shall share dominion of this planet with the Tosevites until the colonization fleet arrives. Perhaps we shall share it after the colonization fleet arrives. I would not care to guess as to that. It is the fleetlord’s decision, not mine.”

Ttomalss’ head reeled, almost as if he had ingested too much of the Tosevite herb so many males found alluring. So much had changed while he lay in captivity! He would have to work hard to adapt himself, always unsettling to the Race. He said, “We shall need more than ever, then, to seek to understand the essential nature of the Big Uglies.”

“Truth,” Ppevel agreed. “When you are physically recovered from your ordeal, Researcher, we shall obtain for you, with the greatest discretion possible, a new Tosevite hatchling, with which you can resume your interrupted work.”

“Thank you, superior sir,” Ttomalss said, his voice far more hollow than he would have expected. After what had happened to him with the last hatching-with Liu Mei, he made himself remember-the work that had once consumed him now seemed liable to be more dangerous than it was worth. “With your generous permission, superior sir, I shall carry on this research back aboard a starship laboratory rather than here on the surface of Tosev 3.”

“That may well be arranged,” Ppevel said.

“Thank you, superior sir,” Ttomalss repeated. He hoped the distance between the surface and the cleanness of open space would protect him from Big Uglies wild for revenge because of their familial and sexual structure. He hoped so-but he was not so confident of it as he had been in the days when Tosev 3 was new and conquest had seemed certain to be quick and easy. He cherished that certainty, and knew he would never have its like again.

Patients and refugees crowded around the Lizard with the fancy body paint and the hand-held electrified megaphone. Rance Auerbach moved up slowly and carefully-the only way of moving he had-to get as good a vantage point as he could. Since so many other people had as much trouble moving as he did, he got up pretty close, almost to the gun-toting guards around the speaker.

He looked around for Penny Summers and spotted her on the opposite side of the crowd. He waved to her, but she didn’t see him.

The electrified megaphone made flatulent noises. Somewhere close by, a child laughed. Then, in pretty fair English, the Lizard began to speak: “We leave this place now. The Race and the government of this not-empire here, the United States, we make agreement now. No more fight. The Race to leave the land of the United States. That include this place, this Karval, Colorado, too.”

He couldn’t go on, not right away. A buzz ran through the crowd, and then a cheer. A woman started singing “God Bless America.” Inside the second line of the song, everybody there was singing with her. Tears stung Auerbach’s eyes. The Lizards were leaving! They had won. Even getting shot up suddenly seemed worth it.

When the singing stopped, the Lizard resumed: “You free now, yes.” More cheers rang out. “We go now.” Auerbach cut loose with a Rebel yell: more of a coughing yip than the wild shriek he’d wanted, but good enough. The Lizard went on, “Now you free, now we go-now we not have to take care for you no more. We go, we leave not-empire of United States to take care for you now. They do it or nobody do it. We go now. That is all.”

The Lizard guards had to gesture threateningly with their weapons before the people would clear aside and let them and the speaker out. For a few dreadful seconds, Auerbach was afraid they would start shooting. With people packed so tight around them, that would have been a slaughter.

He made his halting way toward Penny Summers. This time, she did spot him, and moved, far more nimbly than he could, to meet him. “What did that scaly bastard mean, exactly?” she asked. “Way he was talking, it sounded like the Lizards are just gonna up and leave us on our own.”

“They couldn’t do that,” Auerbach said. “There’s what? — thousands of people here, and a lot of ’em-me, for instance-aren’t what you’d call good at getting around. What are we supposed to do, walk to the American lines up near Denver?” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

But the Lizards didn’t think it was absurd. They piled into trucks and armored personnel carriers and rolled out of Karval that afternoon, heading east, back toward wherever their spaceships were parked. By the time the sun went down, Karval was an altogether human town again.

It was a good-sized human town, too, and one utterly without government of any sort. The Lizards had taken as many of the supplies as they could load into their vehicles. Fights broke out over what was left. Penny managed to get hold of some hard biscuits, and shared them with Rance. They made his belly rumble a little less than it would have without them.

Off to the left, not quite far enough away from his convalescent tent to be out of earshot, somebody said, “We ought to string up all the stinking bastards who kissed the Lizards’ butts while they was here. String ’em up by the balls, matter of fact.”

Auerbach shivered, not so much because of what the fellow said as at the calm, matter-of-fact way he said it. In Europe, they’d called people who’d gone along with the Nazis, people like Quisling, collaborators. Auerbach had never figured anybody would need to worry about collaborators in the U.S.A., but he didn’t know everything there was to know, either.

Penny said, “There’s gonna be trouble. Anybody who’s got a score to settle against somebody else will say they went along with the Lizards. Who’s gonna be able to sort out what’s true and what ain’t? Families will be feuding a hundred years from now on account o’ this.”

“You’re probably right,” Rance said. “But there’s going to be trouble sooner than that.” He was thinking like a soldier. “The Lizards may have pulled out of here, but the Army hasn’t pulled in. We’ll eat Karval empty by tomorrow at the latest, and then what do we do?”

“Walk toward Denver, I reckon,” Penny answered. “What else can we do?”

“Not much,” he said. “But walk-what? A hundred miles, maybe?” He gestured toward the crutches that lay by his cot. “You might as well go on without me. I’ll meet you there in a month, maybe six weeks.”

“Don’t be silly,” Penny told him. “You’re doin’ a lot better than you were.”

“I know, but I’m not doing well enough.”

“You will be,” she said confidently. “Besides, I don’t want to leave you, darling.” She blew out the one flickering candle that lit the inside of the tent. In the darkness, he heard cloth rustle. When he reached out toward her, his hand brushed warm, bare flesh. A little later, she rode astride him, groaning both in ecstasy and, he thought, in desperation, too-or maybe he was just guessing she felt the same thing he did. Afterwards, not bothering to dress, she slept beside him in the tent.

He woke before sunrise, and woke her, too. “If we’re going to do this,” he said, “we’d better get started early as we can. That way we can go a long way before it gets too hot, and lie up during the hottest part of the day.”

“Sounds good to me,” Penny said.

The eastern sky was just going pink when they set out. They were far from the first to leave Karval. Singly and in small groups, some people were making their way north along one of the roads that led out of town, others along the westbound road, and a few hearty souls, splitting the difference, heading northwest cross-country. Had Auerbach been in better shape, he would have done that. As things were, he and Penny went west: the Horse River was likelier to have water in it still than any of the streams they would cross heading north.

He was stronger and better on his crutches than he had been, but that still left him weak and slow. Men and women passed Penny and him in a steady stream. Refugees from Karval stretched out along the road as far as he could see.

“Some of us are going to die before we get to Denver,” he said. The prospect upset him much less than it would have before he got wounded. He’d had a dress rehearsal for meeting the Grim Reaper; really doing it couldn’t be a whole lot worse.

Penny pointed up to the sky. The wheeling black specks up there weren’t Lizard airplanes, or even Piper Cubs. They were buzzards, waiting with the patient optimism of their kind. Penny didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Rance wondered if one of those buzzards would gnaw his bones.

He needed two days to get to the Horse. Had its bed been dry, he knew he wouldn’t have got much farther. But people crowded the bank, down where the river passed under Highway 71. The water was warm and muddy, and there, not twenty feet away, some idiot was pissing into the stream. Auerbach didn’t care about any of it. He drank till he was full, he splashed his face, he soaked his head, and then he took off his shirt and soaked that, too. As it dried, it would help keep him cool.

Penny splashed water on her blouse. The wet cotton molded itself to her shape. Auerbach would have appreciated that more had he not been so deadly weary. As things were, he nodded and said, “Good idea. Let’s get going.”

They headed north up Highway 71, and reached Punkin Center early the next morning. They got more water there. A sad-eyed local said, “Wish we could give you some eats, folks-you look like you could use ’em. But the ones ahead o’ you done et us out of what we had. Good luck to you.”

“I told you to go on without me,” Auerbach said. Penny ignored him. One foot and two crutches at a time, he wearily plodded north.

By the end of that afternoon, he figured the buzzards were out tying napkins around their necks, getting ready for a delicious supper of sunbaked cavalry captain. If he fell over and died, he figured Penny could speed up and might make it to Limon before the heat and the dry and the hunger got her.

“I love you,” he croaked, not wanting to die with things left unspoken.

“I love you, too,” she answered. “That’s why I’m gonna get you through.”

He laughed, but, before he could tell her how big a joke that was, he heard cheering up ahead. He pointed, balancing for a moment on one foot and one crutch. “That’s an Army wagon,” he said in glad disbelief. The horses were the most beautiful animals he’d ever seen.

The wagon was already full, but the soldiers gave him and Penny canteens and crackers and scooted people around to make room in back. “We’ll get you up to the resettlement center,” one of them promised, “and they’ll take care of you there.”

That took another couple of days, but there were supply depots all the way. Auerbach spent his time wondering what the resettlement center would be like; the soldiers didn’t talk much about it. When they finally got there, he found out why: it was just another name for a refugee camp, one dwarfing the squalid, miserable place outside Karval.

“How long will we have to stay here?” he asked a harried clerk who was handing Penny bedding for two and directing her to an enormous olive-drab communal tent, one of many all in a row.

“God knows, buddy,” the corporal answered. “The war may be stopped, but this ain’t no Easy Street. Ain’t gonna be for a long time, neither. Welcome to the United States, new and not so improved model. With luck, you won’t starve.”

“We’ll take that,” Penny said, and Auerbach had to nod. Together, they set off to acquaint themselves with the new United States.

In his green undershirt and black panzer man’s trousers, Heinrich Jager didn’t look badly out of place on the streets of Lodz. Lots of men wore odds and ends of German uniform, and, if his was in better shape than most, that meant little. His colonel’s blouse, on the other hand, he’d ditched as soon as he jumped out of theStorch. AWehrmacht officer was not a popular thing to be, not here.

Ludmila strode along beside him. Her clothes-a peasant tunic and a pair of trousers that had probably once belonged to a Polish soldier-were mannish, but no one save a particularly nearsighted Lizard could have mistaken her for the male of the species, even with an automatic pistol on her hip. Neither pants nor sidearm drew any special notice. A lot of women wore trousers instead of skirts or dresses, and a surprising number-most but not all of them Jewish-looking-carried or wore firearms.

“Do you know Lodz at all?” Ludmila asked. “Do you know how to find-the person we’re looking for?” She was too sensible to name Mordechai Anielewicz where anyone might overbear his name.

Jager shook his head. “No and no, respectively.” He kept his voice low; nobody who spoke German,Wehrmacht officer or not, was likely to be popular in Lodz these days, not with Jews, not with Poles, and not with Lizards, either. “I expect we’ll find him, though. In his own way, he’s a big man here.”

He thought about asking a policeman. He had a couple of different brands from which to choose: Poles in dark blue uniforms and Jews with armbands left over from German administration and with kepis that made them look absurdly like Frenchflics. That didn’t strike him as a healthy idea, though. Instead, he and Ludmila kept walking north up Stodolniana Street till they came to what had to have been the Jewish quarter. Even now, it was brutally crowded. What it had been like under theReich was something Jager would sooner not have contemplated.

Many more of those comic-opera Jewish policemen were on the street in that part of town. Jager kept right on ignoring them and hoping they would extend him the same courtesy. He nodded to a fellow with a wild mop of hair and a big, curly reddish beard who carried a Mauser, had another slung over his shoulder, and wore crisscross bandoliers full of brass cartridges: a Jewish bandit if ever there was one, and as such a man likely to know where Anielewicz could be found. “I’m looking for Mordechai,” he said. The Jew’s eyes widened slightly at his clear German.“Nu? Are you?” he said, using Yiddish, perhaps to see if Jager could follow.

Jager nodded again to show he could. The Jewish fighter went on, “So you’re looking for Mordechai. So what? Is he looking for you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Jager answered. “Does the name Skorzeny mean anything to you?”

It did. The fighter stiffened. “You’re him?” he demanded, and made as if to point the rifle he carried at Jager. Then he checked himself. “No. You can’t be. He’s supposed to be taller than I am, and you’re not.”

“You’re right” Jager pointed to Ludmila.“She’s really Skorzeny.”

“Ha,” the Jew said. “A funny man. All right, funny man, you can come with me. We’ll see if Mordechai wants to see you. See both of you,” he amended, seeing how close Ludmila stuck to Jager.

As it happened, they didn’t have to go far. Jager recognized the brick building they approached as a fire station. His escort spoke in Polish to a gray-bearded man tinkering with the fire engine. The fellow answered in the same language; Jager caught Anielewicz’s name but no more. Ludmila said, “I think they said he’s upstairs, but I’m not sure.”

She proved right. The Jew made his companions precede him, a sensible precaution Jager would also have taken. They went down the hall to a small room. Mordechai Anielewicz sat at a table there with a plain woman. He was scribbling something, but stopped when the newcomers arrived. “Jager!” he exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“You know him?” The ginger-bearded Jew sounded disappointed. “He knows something about Skorzeny, he says.”

“I’ll listen to him.” Anielewicz glanced at Ludmila. “Who’s your friend?”

She answered for herself, with manifest pride: “Ludmila Vadimovna Gorbunova, Senior Lieutenant, Red Air Force.”

“Red Air Force?” Anielewicz’s lips silently shaped the words. “You have the oddest friends, Jager-her and me, for instance. What would Hitler say if he knew?”

“He’d say I was dead meat,” Jager answered. “Of course, since I was already under arrest for treason, he’s already said that, or his bully boys have. Right now, I want to keep him from blowing up Lodz, and maybe keep the Lizards from blowing up Germany to pay him back. For better or worse, it still is my fatherland. Skorzeny doesn’t care what happens next. He’ll touch that thing off for no better reason than because someone told him to.”

“You were right,” the woman beside Anielewicz said. “You did see him, then. I thought you were worrying over every little thing.”

“I wish I had been, Bertha,” he replied, worry and affection warring in his voice. He turned his attention back to Jager. “I didn’t think… anybody”-he’d probably been about to say something likeeven you damned Nazis, but forbore-“would explode the bomb in the middle of truce talks. Shows what I know, doesn’t it?” His gaze sharpened. “You were arrested for treason, you say?Gevalt! They found you were passing things to us?”

“They found out I was, yes,” Jager answered with a weary nod. Since his rescue, things had happened too fast for him to take them all in at once. For now, he was trying to roll with each one as it hit. Later, if there was a later and it wasn’t frantic, he’d do his best to figure out what everything meant. “Karol is dead.” One more memory he wished he didn’t have. “They didn’t really have any idea how much I was passing on to you. If they’d known a tenth part of it, I’d have been in pieces on the floor when my boys came to break me out-and if my boys knew a tenth part of it, they never would have come.”

Anielewicz studied him. Quietly, the younger man said, “If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known about the bomb, it would have gone off, and God only knows what would have happened next.” He offered the words as in consolation for Jager’s having been rescued by his men when they didn’t know what he’d truly done; he understood, with a good officer’s instinctive grasp, how hard that was to accept.

“You say you saw Skorzeny?” Jager asked, and Anielewicz nodded. Jager grimaced. “You must have found the bomb, too. He said it was in a graveyard. Did you move it after you found it?”

“Yes, and that wasn’t easy, either,” Anielewicz said, wiping his forehead with a sleeve to show how hard it was. “We pulled the detonator, too-not just the wireless switch, but the manual device-so Skorzeny can’t set it off even if he finds it and even if he gets to it.”

Jager held up a warning hand. “Don’t bet your life on that. He may come up with the detonator you yanked, or he may have one of his own. You never want to underestimate what he can do. Don’t forget: I’ve helped him do it”

“If he has only a detonator for use by the hand,” Ludmila said in her slow German, “would he not be blowing himself up along with everything else? If he had to, would he do that?”

“Good question.” Anielewicz looked from her to Jager. “You know him best.” He made that an accusation.“Nu? Would he?”

“I know two things,” Jager answered. “First one is, he’s liable to have some sort of scheme for setting it off by hand and escaping anyhow-no, I have no idea what, but he may. Second one is, you didn’t just make him angry, you made him furious when his nerve-gas bomb didn’t go off. He owes you one for that. And he has his orders. And, whatever else you can say about him, he’s a brave man. If the only way he can set it off is to blow himself up with it, he’s liable to be willing to do that.”

Mordechai Anielewicz nodded, looking unhappy. “I was afraid you were going to say that. People who will martyr themselves for their cause are much harder to deal with than the ones who just want to live for it.” His chuckle held little humor. “The Lizards complain too many people are willing to become martyrs. Now I know how they feel.”

“What will you do with us now that we are here?” Ludmila asked.

“That is another good question,” said the woman-Bertha-sitting by Anielewicz. She turned to him, fondly; Jager wondered if they were married. She wore no ring, whatever that meant. “What shall we do with them?”

“Jager is a soldier, and a good one, and he knows Skorzeny and the way his mind works,” the Jewish fighting leader said. “If he had not been reliable before, he would not be here now. Him we will give a weapon and let him help us guard the bomb.”

“And what of me?” Ludmila demanded indignantly; Jager could have guessed she was going to do that. Her hand came to rest on the butt of her automatic pistol. “I am a soldier. Ask Heinrich. Ask the Nazis. Ask the Lizards.”

Anielewicz held up a placatory hand. “I believe all this,” he answered, “but first things first.” Yes, he was a good officer, not that Jager found that news. He knew how to set priorities. He also knew how to laugh, which he did now. “And you will probably shoot me if I try to separate you from Colonel Jager here. So. All rightWehrmacht, Red Air Force, a bunch of crazy Jews-we are all in this together, right?”

“Together,” Jager agreed. “Together we save Lodz, or together we go up in smoke. That’s about how it is.”

A male shook Ussmak. “Get up, headmale! You must get up,” Oyyag said urgently, adding an emphatic cough. “That is the signal for rousing. If you do not present yourself, you will be punished. The whole barracks will be punished because of your failing.”

Ever so slowly, Ussmak began to move. Among the Race, superiors were supposed to be responsible for inferiors and to look out for their interests. So it had been for millennia uncounted. So, on Home, it no doubt continued to be. Here on Tosev 3, Ussmak was an outlaw. That weakened his bonds of cohesion to the group, though some of them were mutineers, too. Even more to the point, he was a starved, exhausted outlaw. When you were less than convinced your own life would long continue-when you were less than convinced you wanted it to continue-group solidarity came hard.

He managed to drag himself to his feet and lurch outside for the morning inspection. The Tosevite guards, who probably could not have stated their correct number of thumbs twice running without luck on their side, had to count the males of the Race four times before they were satisfied no one had grown wings and flown away during the night. Then they let them go in to breakfast.

It was meager, even by the miserable standards of the prison camp. Ussmak did not finish even his own small portion. “Eat,” Oyyag urged him. “How can you get through another day’s work if you do not eat?”

Ussmak had his own counterquestion. “How can I get through another day’s work even if I do eat? Anyhow, I am not hungry.”

That set the other male hissing in alarm. “Headmale, you must report to the Big Ugly physicians. Perhaps they can give you something to improve your appetite, to improve your condition.”

Ussmak’s mouth fell open. “A new body, perhaps? A new spirit?”

“You cannot eat?” Oyyag said. Ussmak’s weary gesture showed he could not. His companion in misery, who was every bit as thin as he was, hesitated, but not for long. “May I consume your portion, then?” When Ussmak did not at once say no, the other male gulped down the food.

As if in a dream, Ussmak shambled out to the forest with his work gang. He drew an axe and went slowly to work hacking down a tree with pale bark. He chopped at it with all his strength, but made little progress. “Work harder, you,” the Tosevite guard watching him snapped in the Russki language.

“It shall be done,” Ussmak answered. He did some more chopping, with results equally unsatisfactory to the guard. When he first came to the camp, that would have left him quivering with fear. Now it rolled off his skinny flanks. They had put him here. Try as they would, how could they do worse?

He shambled back to camp for lunch. Worn as he was, he could eat little. Again, someone quickly disposed of his leftovers. When, too soon, it was time to return to the forest, he stumbled and fell and had trouble getting up again. Another male aided him, half guiding, half pushing him out toward the Tosevite trees.

He took up his axe and went back to work on the pale-barked tree. Try as he would, he could not make the blade take more than timid nips at the trunk. He was too weak and too apathetic for anything more. If he did not chop it down, if the work gang did not saw it into the right lengths of wood, they would fall short of their norm and would get only penalty rations.So what? Ussmak thought. He hadn’t been able to eat a regular ration, so why should he care if he got less?

All the other males would get less, too, of course. He could not care about that, either. A proper male of the Race would have; he knew as much. But he’d begun to get detached from the rest of the Race when a Tosevite sniper killed Votal, his first landcruiser commander. Ginger had made things worse. Then he’d lost another good landcruiser crew, and then he’d led the mutiny for which he’d had such hope. And the results of that had been… this. No, he was no proper male, no longer.

He was so tired. He set down the axe.I’ll rest for a moment, he thought.

“Work!” a guard shouted.

“Gavno?”Ussmak said, adding an interrogative cough. Grudgingly, the Big Ugly swung aside the muzzle of his weapon and bobbed his head up and down to grant permission. The guards let you evacuate your bowels-most of the time. It was one of the few things they did let you do.

Stumbling slowly away from the tree, Ussmak went behind a screen of bushes. He squatted to relieve himself. Nothing happened-not surprising, not when he was so empty inside. He tried to rise, but instead toppled over onto his side. He took a breath. A little later, he took another. Quite a bit later, he took one more.

Of themselves, the nictitating membranes slid across his eyes. His eyelids drooped, closed. In those last moments, he wondered if Emperors past would accept his spirit in spite of all he had done. Soon, he found out what he would find out.

When the Lizard didn’t come out of the bushes after taking a shit, Yuri Andreyevich Palchinsky went in after it. He had to scuffle around to find it, and it would not come out when he called. “Stinking thing will pay,” he muttered.

Then he did find it, by tripping over it and almost falling on his face. He cursed and drew back his foot to give it a good kick, but didn’t. Why bother? The damn thing was already dead.

He picked it up, slung it over his shoulder-it didn’t weigh anything to speak of-and carried it back toward the camp. Off to one side was a trench in which to toss the ones who starved or worked themselves to death this week. In went the latest body, on top of a lot of others.

“We’re liable to fill this one up before it’s time to dig next week’s,” Palchinsky muttered. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. The work gang was. He turned his back on the mass grave and headed out to the woods.

“We have shown we can be merciful,” Liu Han declared. “We have let one little scaly devil go back to his kind in spite of his crimes against the workers and peasants.”I have let him go in spite of his crimes against me, she added to herself.Let no one say now that I cannot put the interests of the Party, the interests of the People’s Liberation Army, above my own. “In a few days, the truce to which we agreed with the scaly devils expires. They still refuse to make us party to the larger cease-fire. We shall show them we can be strong as dragons, too. They will become sorry enough to make concessions.”

She sat down. The men of the Peking central committee put their heads together, discussing what she had said and how she said it. Nieh Ho-T’ing murmured something to a newcomer, a handsome, plump-cheeked man whose name she hadn’t caught. The man nodded. He sent Liu Han an admiring glance. She wondered if he was admiring her words or her body. She stared back steadily, measuring him with her eyes.Country bumpkin, she decided, forgetting for a moment how recently she had been a peasant with no politics whatever.

Sitting on Nieh’s other side was Hsia Shou-Tao. He got to his feet. Liu Han had been sure he would. If she said the Yangtze flowed from west to east, he would disagree because she had said it.

Nieh Ho-T’ing raised a warning finger, but Hsia plunged ahead anyhow: “Zeal is important to the revolutionary cause, but so is caution. Through too much aggressiveness, we are liable to force the little devils into strong responses against us. A campaign of low-level harassment strikes me as a better plan, one more likely to yield the results we desire, than going at once from truce to all-out war.”

Hsia looked around the room to see what sort of reaction he’d received. Several men were nodding, but others, among them four or five upon whom he’d counted, sat silent and stony. Liu Han smiled inside while keeping her own features impassive. As was her way, she’d prepared this ground before she began to fight on it. Had Hsia Shou-Tao an ounce of sense, he would have realized that beforehand. Learning of it now, the hard way, made his face take on almost the rictus of agony it had worn when Liu Han kneed him in the private parts.

To her surprise, the bumpkinish fellow by Nieh Ho-T’ing spoke up: “While war and politics cannot be divorced for a single instant, still it is sometimes necessary to remind the foe that power springs ultimately from the barrel of a gun. The little scaly devils, in my view, must be forcibly shown that their occupation is temporary and shall in the end surely fail. Thus, as Comrade Liu has so ably stated, we shall strike them a series of hard blows the instant the truce expires, gauging our subsequent actions on their response.”

He didn’t talk like a bumpkin; be talked like an educated man, perhaps even a poet. And now, up and down the table, heads bobbed in approval of his words. Liu Han saw more was involved there than how well he’d spoken: he had authority here, authority everyone acknowledged without question. She wished she’d learned what his name was.

“As usual, Mao Tse-Tung analyzes clearly,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “His viewpoint is most reasonable, and we shall carry out our program against the little scaly devils as he directs.”

Again, the members of the Peking central committee nodded as if a single puppeteer controlled all their heads. Liu Han nodded along with everyone else. Her eyes were wide with amazement, though, as she stared at the man who headed the revolutionary cause throughout China. Mao Tse-Tung had thought well of somethingshe said?

He looked back at her, beaming like Ho Tei, the fat little god of luck in whom proper Communists did not believe but whom Liu Han had trouble dismissing from her mind. Yes, he’d approved of her words. His face said that clearly. And yes, he was looking at her as a man looks at a woman: not crudely, as Hsia Shou-Tao did when he all but spread her legs with his eyes, but unmistakably all the same.

She wondered what she ought to do about that. She’d already had doubts about her attachment to Nieh Ho-T’ing, doubts both ideological and personal. She was a little surprised to note Mao’s interest; a lot of the central committee members, probably most of them, lusted after revolution more than after women. Hsia was a horrible example of why that rule worked well. But Mao was surely a special case.

She’d heard he was married. Even if he did want her, even if he did bed her, she was certain he wouldn’t leave his wife for her: some sort of actress, if she remembered rightly. How much influence could she gain as a mistress, and was that enough to make the offer of her body worthwhile? Had she felt no spark, she wouldn’t have considered the notion for an instant; thanks to the scaly devils, she’d had far too much of coupling with men she did not want. But she’d thought Mao attractive before she had any idea who he was.

She smiled at him, just a little. He smiled, too, politely. Nieh Ho-T’ing noticed nothing. He tended to be blind that way; she sometimes thought she was more a convenience for him than a proper lover. The foreign devil Bobby Fiore had shown far more consideration for her as a person.

What to do, then? Part of that, of course, depended on Mao. But Liu Han, with a woman’s ancient wisdom, knew that. If she showed herself to be interested, he would probably lie down beside her.

Did she want to do that? Hard to be sure. Would the benefits outweigh the risks and annoyances? She didn’t have to decide right away. The Communists thought in terms of years, five-year plans, decades of struggle. The little scaly devils, she’d learned, thought in decades, centuries, millennia. She hated the little devils, but they were too powerful to be dismissed as stupid. Viewed from their perspective, or even that of the Party, leaping ahead with a seduction before you worked out the consequences was foolish, nothing else but.

She smiled at Mao again. It might well not matter, anyhow, not today. Who could guess how long he’d be here? She’d never seen him in Peking before, and might not see him again any time soon. But he likely would come back: that only stood to reason. When he did, she wanted him to remember her. By then, wheneverthen was, she would have made up her mind. She had plenty of time. And, whichever way she decided, the choice would behers.

Mordechai Anielewicz had played a lot of cat-and-mouse games since the Nazis invaded Poland to open the Second World War. In every one of them, though, against the Germans, against the Lizards, against what Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski thought of as the legitimate Jewish administration of Lodz, playing the Germans and Lizards off against each other, he’d been the mouse, operating against larger, more powerful foes.

Now he was the cat, and finding he didn’t much care for the role. Somewhere out there, Otto Skorzeny was lurking. He didn’t know where. He didn’t know how much Skorzeny knew. He didn’t know what the SS man was planning. He didn’t like the feeling one bit.

“If you were Skorzeny, what would you do?” he asked Heinrich Jager. Jager was, after all, not only a German but a man who’d worked closely with the commando extraordinaire. Asking a German felt odd, anyhow. Intellectually, he knew Jager was no Jew-butcher. Emotionally…

The panzer colonel scratched his head, “If I were in charge instead of Skorzeny, I’d lie low till I knew enough to strike, then hit quick and hard.” He chuckled wryly. “But whether that’s what he’ll do, I couldn’t begin to tell you. He has his own way of getting things done. Sometimes I think he’s daft-till he brings it off.”

“Nobody’s set eyes on him since I did,” Anielewicz said, frowning. “He might have fallen off the face of the earth-though that’d be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it? Maybe be is lying low.”

“He can’t do that for too long, though,” Jager pointed out. “If he finds out where the bomb is, he’ll try to set it off. It’s late already, of course, and a major attack hinges on it. He won’t wait.”

“We’ve taken out the detonator,” Mordechai said. “It’s not in the bomb any more, though we can get it to the bomb in a hurry if we have to.”

Jager shrugged. “That shouldn’t matter. If Skorzeny didn’t bring another one, he’s a fool-and a fool he’s not. Besides which, he’s an engineer; he’d know how to install it.” An engineering student himself, Anielewicz grimaced. He wanted nothing in common with the SS man.

Ludmila Gorbunova asked, “Will he have men he can recruit here in Lodz, or is he all alone in this city?”

Anielewicz looked to Jager. Jager shrugged again. “This town was under the rule of theReich for some time before the Lizards came. Are there still Germans here?”

“From the days when it was Litzmannstadt, you mean?” Mordechai asked, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “No, after the Lizards came, we made most of the Aryan colonists pack up and go. The Poles did the same thing with them. And do you know what? We don’t miss the Germans a bit, either.”

Jager looked at him steadily. Anielewicz felt himself flushing. If any man alive was entitled to score points off a German soldier, he was.A German soldier, yes, but notthis German soldier. If it hadn’t been forthis German soldier, he wouldn’t be hereto score points. He had to remember that, no matter how hard it was.

“Not many Germans, eh?” Jager said matter-of-factly. “If any are left, Skorzeny will find them. And he’ll probably have connections among the Poles. They don’t like you Jews, either.”

Was he trying to score points, too? Mordechai couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, that didn’t make him wrong. Ludmila said, “But the Poles. If they help Skorzeny, they’ll be blowing themselves up, too.”

“You know that,” Jager said. “I know that. But the Poles don’t necessarily know it. If Skorzeny says, ‘Here, I have a big bomb hidden that will blow up all the Jews but not you,’ they’re liable to believe him.”

“He’s a good liar?” Anielewicz asked, trying to get more of a feel for his opponent than he could from the unending propaganda theReich pumped out about Skorzeny.

But Jager might have been part of Gobbels’ propaganda mill. “He’s good at everything that has to do with being a raider,” he answered with no trace of irony, then proceeded to give an example: “He went into Besancon, for instance, with a sack of ginger to bribe the Lizards, and he came out driving one of their panzers.”

“I do not believe this,” Ludmila said, before Anielewicz could. “I heard it reported on German shortwave wireless, but I do not believe it.”

“It’s true whether you believe it or not,” Jager said. “I was there. I saw his head sticking up out of the driver’s hatch. I didn’t believe he could do it, either, I thought he was going in there to commit suicide, nothing more. I was wrong. I have never underestimated him since.”

Anielewicz took that evaluation, which he found almost too depressing to contemplate, to Solomon Gruver and Bertha Fleishman. Gruver’s mouth turned down at the corners, making him look even gloomier than he usually did. “He can’t be that good,” the former sergeant said. “If he were that good, he’d be God, and he isn’t. He’s just a man.”

“We have to put our ears to the ground among the Poles,” Bertha said. “If anything is going on with them, we need to hear about it fast as we can.”

Mordechai sent her a grateful look. She took this whole business as seriously as he did. Given the levelheadedness she usually displayed, that was a sign it needed to be taken seriously.

“So we listen. So what?” Gruver said. “If he’s that good, we won’t hear anything. We won’t spot him unless he wants to be spotted, and we won’t know what he’s up to till he decides to hit us.”

“All of which is true, and none of which means we can stop trying,” Anielewicz said. He slammed his open hand into the side of the fire engine. That hurt his hand more than the engine. “If only I’d been certain I recognized him! If only I’d come out of-where I came out of-a few seconds earlier, so I could have seen his face. If, If, if-” It ate at him.

“Even thinking he was in Lodz put us on alert,” Bertha said. “Who knows what he might have done if he’d got here without our knowing it?”

“He turned a corner,” Anielewicz said, running it through his mind again like a piece of film from the cinema. “He turned a corner, and then another one, very quickly. The second time, I had to guess which way he’d gone, and I guessed wrong.”

“Don’t keep beating yourself over the head with it, Mordechai,” Bertha said. “It can’t be helped now, and you did everything you could.”

“That’s so,” Gruver rumbled. “No doubt about it”

Anielewicz hardly heard him. He was looking at Bertha Fleishman. She’d never called him by his first name before, not that he remembered. He would have remembered, too; he was certain of that.

She was looking at him, too. She flushed a little when their eyes met, but she didn’t look away. He’d known she liked him well enough. He liked her well enough, too. Except when she smiled, she was plain and mousy. He’d been to bed with women far prettier. He suddenly seemed to hear Solomon Gruver’s deep voice again, going,So what? Gruver-that-wasn’t had a point. He’d bedded those women and enjoyed himself doing it, but he hadn’t for an instant thought of spending his life with any of them. Bertha, though…

“If we live through this-” he said. The five words made a complete sentence. If you knew how to listen to them.

Bertha Fleishman did. “Yes. If we do,” she replied: a complete answer.

The real Solomon Gruver seemed less attentive to what was going on around him than the imaginary one inside Anielewicz’s head. “If we live through this,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something better with that thing we have than leaving it where it is. But if we move it now, we just draw attention to it, and that lets this Skorzenymamzer have his chance.”

“That’s all true, Solomon-every word of it,” Mordechai agreed solemnly. Then he started to laugh. A moment later, so did Bertha.

“And what is so funny?” Gruver demanded with ponderous dignity. “Did I make a joke and, God forbid, not know it?”

“God forbid,” Anielewicz said, and laughed harder.

As George Bagnall and Ken Embry walked to Dover College, jet engines roared overhead. Bagnall’s automatic reaction was to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump into it. With an effort, he checked himself and looked upward. For once, the thinking, rational part of his brain had got it right: those were Meteors up there, not Lizard fighter-bombers.

“Bloody hell!” Embry burst out; conditioned reflex must nearly have got the better of him, too. “We’ve only been gone a year and a half, but it feels as though we’ve stepped back into 1994, not 1944.”

“Doesn’t it just,” Bagnall agreed. “They were flying those things when we left, but not many of them. You don’t see Hurricanes at all any more, and they’re phasing out Spitfires fast as they can. It’s a brave new world, and no mistake.”

“Still a place for bomber crew-for the next twenty minutes, anyhow,” Embry said. “They haven’t put jets on Lancs, not yet they haven’t. But everything else they have done-” He shook his head. “No wonder they sent us back to school. We’re almost as obsolete as if we’d been flying Sopwith Camels. Trouble is, of course, we haven’t been flyinganything.”

“It’s even worse for Jones,” Bagnall said. “We’re still flying the same buses, even if they have changed the rest of the rules. His radars are starting to come from a different world: literally.”

“Same with our bomb-aiming techniques,” Embry said as they climbed the poured-concrete steps and strode down the corridor toward their classroom.

The lecturer there, a flight lieutenant named Constantine Jordan, was already scribbling on the blackboard, though it still lacked a couple of minutes of the hour. Bagnall looked around as he took his seat. Most of his classmates had a pale, pasty look to them; some were in obvious if stifled pain. That made sense-besides the rarities like Bagnall and Embry, the people who’d been out of service long enough to require refresher courses were the ones who’d been badly wounded. A couple had dreadful scars on their faces; what lay under their uniforms was anyone’s guess, though not one Bagnall cared to make.

An instant before the clock in the bell tower chimed eleven, Flight Lieutenant Jordan turned and began: “As I noted at the end of yesterday’s session, what the Lizards callskelkwank bids fair to revolutionize bomb aiming.Skelkwank light, unlike the ordinary sort”-he pointed up to the electric lamps-“is completely organized, you might say. It’s all of the same frequency, the same amplitude, the same phase. The Lizards have several ways of creating such light. We’re busy working on them to see which ones we can most readily make for ourselves. But that’s largely beside the point. We’ve captured enough generators ofskelkwank light to have equipped a good many bombers with them, and that’s why you’re here.”

Bagnall’s pencil scurried across the notebook. Every so often, he’d pause to shake his hand back and forth to wring out writer’s cramp. All this was new to him, and all vital-now he was able to understand the term he’d first met in Pskov. Amazing, all the things you could do withskelkwank light.

Jordan went on, “What we do is, we illuminate the target with askelkwank lamp. A sensor head properly attuned to it manipulates the fins on the bomb and guides it to the target. So long as the light stays on the target, the guidance will work. We’ve all seen it used against us more often than we’d fancy. Again, we’re operating with captured sensor heads, which are in limited supply, but we’re also exploring ways and means to manufacture them. Yes, Mr. McBride? You have a question?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the flying officer who’d raised his hand. “These new munitions are all very well, sir, but if we’re flying against the Lizards, how do we approach the target closely enough to have some hope of destroying it? Their weapons can strike us at much greater range than that at which we can respond. Believe me, sir, I know that.” He was one of the men who had scar tissue slagging half his face.

“It is a difficulty,” Jordan admitted. “We are also seeking to copy the guided rockets with which the Lizards have shot down so many of our aircraft, but that’s proving slower work, even with the assistance of Lizard prisoners.”

“We’d best not fight another war with them any time soon, is all I can say,” McBride answered, “or we’ll come out of it with no pilots left at all. Without rockets to match theirs, we’re hors d’oeuvres, nothing better.”

Bagnall had never thought of himself as a canape, but the description fit all too well. He wished he could have gone up against theLuftwaffe with a Lancaster armed withskelkwank bombs and rockets to swat down theMesserschmitts before they bored in for the kill. After a moment, he realized he might fly with those weapons against the Germans one day. But if he did, the Germans were liable to have them, too.

Flight Lieutenant Jordan kept lecturing for several minutes after the noon bells rang. Again, that was habit. At last, he dismissed his pupils with the warning, “Tomorrow you’ll be quizzed on what we’ve covered this past week. Those with poor marks will be turned into toads and sent hopping after blackbeetles. Amazing what technology can do these days, is it not? See you after lunch.”

When Bagnall and Embry went out into the corridor to head to the cafeteria for an uninspiring but free meal, Jerome Jones called to them, “Care to dine with my chum here?”

His chum was a Lizard who introduced himself in hissing English as Mzepps. When Bagnall found out he’d been a radar technician before his capture, he willingly let him join the group. Talking civilly with a Lizard felt odd, even odder than his first tense meeting with that German lieutenant-colonel in Paris, barely days after the RAF had stopped going after the Nazis.

Despite Mzepps’ appearance, though, the Lizard soon struck him as a typical noncommissioned officer: worried about his job, but not much about how it fit into the bigger picture. “You Big Uglies, you all the time go why, why, why,” he complained. “Who cares why? Just do. Why not important. Is word? Yes, important.”

“It never has occurred to him,” Jones remarked, “that if we didn’t go why, why, why all the time, we should have been in no position to fight back when he and his scaly cohorts got here.”

Bagnall chewed on that as he and Ken Embry headed back toward Flight Lieutenant Jordan’s class. He thought about the theory Jordan was teaching along with the practical applications of what the RAF was learning from the Lizards. By everything Mzepps had said, the Lizards seldom operated that way themselves.What mattered more to them thanwhy.

“I wonder why that is,” he murmured.

“Why what is?” Embry asked, which made Bagnall realize he’d spoken aloud.

“Nothing, really,” he answered. “Just being-human.”

“Is that a fact?” Embry said. “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

The RAF men in the lecture hall stared at them as they walked through the doors. As far as Bagnall knew, no one had ever done that laughing before.

A sunbeam sneaking through the slats of a Venetian blind found Ludmila Gorbunova’s face and woke her. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up in bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping in a bed, not any more. After blankets on the ground, a real mattress felt decadently soft.

She looked around the flat Mordechai Anielewicz had given her and Jager. The plumbing wasn’t all it might have been, the wallpaper was peeling after years of neglect-Anielewicz had apologized for that. People in Lodz, it seemed, were always apologizing to outsiders for how bad things were. They didn’t seem that bad to Ludmila. She was slowly starting to think the problem was different standards of comparison. They were used to the way things here had been before the war. She was used to Kiev. What that said-

She stopped worrying about what that said, because her motion woke Jager up. He came awake quickly and completely. She’d seen that, the last couple of nights. She had the same trick. She hadn’t had it before the war started. She wondered if Jager had.

He reached up and set a hand on her bare shoulder. Then he surprised her by chuckling. “What is funny?” she asked, a little indignantly.

“This,” he answered, waving at the flat “Everything. Here we are, two people who for love of each other have run away from all the things we used to think important. We can’t go back to them, ever again. We are-what do the diplomats say? — stateless persons, that’s what we are. It’s like something out of a cheap novel.” As he had a way of doing, he quickly sobered. “Or it would be, if it weren’t for the small detail of the explosive-metal bomb cluttering up our lives.”

“Yes, if it weren’t.” Ludmila didn’t want to get out of bed and get dressed. Here, naked between the sheets with Jager, she too could pretend love had been the only thing that brought them to Lodz, and that treason and fear not only for the city but for the whole world had had nothing to do with it.

With a sigh, she did get up and start to dress. With a matching sigh an octave deeper, Jager joined her. They’d only just finished putting on their clothes when somebody knocked on the door. Jager chuckled again; maybe he’d had amorous thoughts, too, and also set them aside. They would have had to answer the door anyhow. Now, at least, they weren’t interrupted.

Jager opened it, as warily as if he expected to find Otto Skorzeny waiting in the hallway. Ludmila didn’t see how that was possible, but she hadn’t seen how a lot of Skorzeny’s exploits Jager talked about were possible, either.

Skorzeny wasn’t out there. Mordechai Anielewicz was, a Mauser slung over his shoulder. He let it slide down his arm and leaned it against the wall. “Do you know what I wish we could do?” he said. “I wish we could get word to the Lizards-just as a rumor, mind you-that Skorzeny was in town. If they and their puppets were looking for him, too, it would hold his feet to the fire and make him do something instead of lying back and letting us do all the running around.”

“You haven’t done that, have you?” Jager said sharply.

“I said I wished I could,” Anielewicz answered. “No. If the Lizards find out Skorzeny’s here, they’re going to start wondering what he’s doing here-and they’ll start looking all over for him. We can’t afford that, which leaves first move up to him: he has the white pieces, sure enough.”

“You play chess?” Ludmila asked. Outside the Soviet Union, she’d found, not so many people did. She had to use the Russian word; she didn’t know how to say it in German.

Anielewicz understood. “Yes, I play,” he answered. “Not as well as I’d like, but everyone says that.”

Jager kept his mind on the business at hand: “Whatare you doing-as opposed to the things you’re reluctantly not doing, I mean?”

“I understood you,” Anielewicz answered with a wry grin. “I’ve got as many men with guns on the street as I can afford to put there, and I’m checking with every landlord who won’t run straight to the Lizards to find out if he’s putting up Skorzeny. So far-” He snapped his fingers to show what he had so far.

“Have you checked the whorehouses?” Jager asked. That was another German word Ludmila didn’t know. When she asked about it and he explained, she thought at first he’d made a joke. Then she realized he was deadly serious.

Mordechai Anielewicz snapped his fingers again, this time in annoyance. “No, and I should have,” he said, sounding angry at himself. “One of those would make a good hideout for him, wouldn’t it?” He nodded to Jager. “Thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that myself.”

Ludmila wouldn’t have thought of it, either. The world outside the Soviet Union had corruptions new to her, along with its luxuries.Decadent, she thought again. She shook her head. She’d have to get used to it. No going back to therodina, not now, not ever, not unless she wanted endless years in thegulag or, perhaps more likely, a quick end with a bullet in the back of the head. She’d thrown away her old life as irrevocably as Jager had his. The question remained: could they build a new one together here, this being the sole remaining choice?

If they didn’t stop Skorzeny, that answer was depressingly obvious, too.

Anielewicz said, “I’m going back to the fire station: I have to ask some questions. I haven’t worried much about thenafkehs- the whores,” he amplified when he saw Ludmila and Jager didn’t catch the Yiddish word, “but somebody will know all about ’em. Men are men-even Jews.” He looked a challenge at Jager.

The German, to Ludmila’s relief, didn’t rise to it. “Men are men,” he agreed mildly. “Would I be here if I didn’t think so?”

“No,” Anielewicz said. “Men are men-even Germans, maybe.” He touched a finger to the brim of the cloth cap he wore, reslung his rifle, and hurried away.

Jager sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, however much we wish it would. Even if we stop Skorzeny, we’re exiles here.” He laughed. “We’d be a lot worse off than exiles, though, if the SS got its hooks in me again.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Ludmila said. “Not about the SS, but about the NKVD, I mean.” She smiled happily. If two people thought the same thing at the same time, that had to mean they were well matched. But for herself, Jager was all she had left in the world; not believing the two of them were well matched would have left her desolately lonesome. Her eyes slipped to the bed. Her smile changed, ever so slightly. They were well matched there, that was certain.

Then Jager said, “Well, not surprising. We haven’t got much else to think about here, have we? There’s us-and Skorzeny.”

“Da,”Ludmila said, disappointed out of the German she’d mostly been speaking and back into Russian. What she’d taken as a good sign was to Jager merely a commonplace. How sad that made her showed how giddy she was feeling.

On the table lay a chunk of black bread. Jager went into the kitchen, came back with a bone-handled knife, and cut the chunk in two. He handed Ludmila half of it. Without the slightest trace of irony, he said, “German service at its finest.”

Was he joking? Did he expect her to take him literally? She wondered as she ate her breakfast. That she didn’t know and couldn’t guess with any real confidence of being right bothered her. It reminded her how little she truly knew of the man she’d helped rescue and whose fate she’d linked with her own. She didn’t want to be reminded of that-very much the contrary.

When she’d flown away with him, he’d come straight out of the hands of the SS. He hadn’t had a weapon then, of course. Anielewicz had given him a Schmeisser after he got to Lodz, a sign the Jewish fighting leader trusted him perhaps further than he was willing to admit to himself. Jager had spent a lot of time since with oil and brushes and cloth, getting the submachine gun into what he reckoned proper fighting condition.

Now he started to check it yet again. Watching how intent his face grew as he worked made Ludmila snort, half in annoyance, half in fascination. When he didn’t look up, she snorted again, louder. That distracted him enough to make him remember she was there. She said, “Sometimes I think you Germans ought to marry machines, not people. Schultz, your sergeant-you act the same way he did.”

“If you take care of your tools, as you should, they take proper care of you when you need them.” Jager spoke as automatically as if he were reciting the multiplication table. “If what you need them for is keeping yourself alive, you’d better take care of them, or you’ll be too dead to kick yourself for not doing it.”

“It’s not that you do it. It’show you do it, like there is nothing in the world but you and the machine, whatever it is, and you are listening to it. I have never seen Russians do this,” Ludmila said. “Schultz was the same way. He thought well of you. Perhaps he was trying to be like you.”

That seemed to amuse Jager, who checked the action of the cocking handle, nodded to himself, and slung the Schmeisser over his shoulder. “Didn’t you tell me he’d found a Russian lady, too?”

“Yes. I don’t think they got on as well as we do, but yes.” Ludmila hadn’t told him how much time Schultz had spent trying to get her trousers down as well as Tatiana’s. She didn’t intend to tell him that. Schultz hadn’t done it, and she hadn’t-quite-had to smash him across the face with the barrel of her pistol to get him to take his hands off her.

Jager said, “Let’s go to the fire station ourselves. I want to tell Anielewicz something. It’s not just whorehouses-Skorzeny might be taking shelter in a church, too. He’s an Austrian, so he’s a Catholic-or he was probably raised as one, anyhow; he’s about the least godly man I know. But that’s one more place, or set of places, to look for him.”

“You have all sorts of ideas.” Ludmila would not have thought of anything that had to do with religion. Here, though, that outmoded notion proved strategically relevant. “It is worth checking, I think, yes. The part of Lodz that is not Jewish is Catholic.”

“Yes.” Jager headed for the door. Ludmila followed. They walked downstairs hand in hand. The fire station was only a few blocks away-go down the street, turn onto Lutomierska, and you were there.

They went down the street. They were about to turn onto Lutomierska when a great thunderclap, a noise like the end of the world, smote the air. For a dreadful moment, Ludmila thought Skorzeny had touched off his bomb in spite of everything they’d done to stop him.

But then, as glass blew out of windows that had held it, she realized she was wrong. This explosion had been close by. She’d seen an explosive-metal bomb go off. Had she been so near one of those blasts, she would have been dead before she realized anything had happened.

People were screaming. Some ran away from the place where the bomb had gone off, others toward it to help the wounded. She and Jager were among the latter, pushing past men and women trying to flee.

Through stunned ears, she caught snatches of horrified comments in Yiddish and Polish: “-horsecart in front-” “-just stopped there-” “-man went away-” “-blew up in front of-”

By then, she’d come close enough to see the building in front of which the bomb had blown up. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was a pile of rubble, through which flames were beginning to creep.“Bozhemoi,” she said softly.

Jager was looking at the dazed and bleeding victims, grim purpose on his face. “Where’s Anielewicz?” he demanded, as if willing the Jewish fighting leader to emerge from the wreckage. Then he spoke another word: “Skorzeny.”