Striking the Balance

III

Panagiotis Mavrogordato pointed to the coastline off theNaxos’ port rail. “There it is,” he said in Greek-accented German. “The Holy Land. We dock in Haifa in a couple of hours.”

Moishe Russie nodded. “Meaning no offense,” he added in German of his own, with a guttural Yiddish flavor to it, “but I won’t be sorry to get off your fine freighter here.”

Mavrogordato laughed and tugged his flat-crowned black wool sailor’s cap down lower on his forehead. Moishe wore a similar cap, a gift from one of the sailors aboard theNaxos. He’d thought the Mediterranean would be warm and sunny all the time, even in winter. It was sunny, but the breeze that blew around him-blew through him-was anything but warm.

“There’s no safe place in a war,” Mavrogordato said. “If we got through this, I expect we can get through damn near anything,Theou thelontos.” He took out a string of amber worry beads and worked on them to make sure God would be willing.

“I can’t argue with you about that,” Russie said. The rusty old ship had been sailing into Rome when what had been miscalled the eternal city-and was the Lizards’ chief center in Italy-exploded in atomic fire. The Germans were still bragging about that over the shortwave, even though the Lizards had vaporized Hamburg shortly afterwards in retaliation.

“Make sure you and your family are ready to disembark the minute we tie up at the docks,” Mavrogordato warned. “The lot of you are the only cargo we’re delivering here this trip, and as soon as the Englishmen pay us off for getting you here in one piece, we’re heading back to Tarsus as fast as theNaxos will take us.” He stamped on the planking of the deck. TheNaxos had seen better decades. “Not that that’s what you’d call fast.”

“We didn’t bring enough to have to worry about having it out of order,” Moishe answered. “As long as I make sure Reuven isn’t down in the engine room, we’ll be ready as soon as you like.”

“That’s a good boy you have there,” the Greek captain answered. Mavrogordato’s definition of a good boy seemed to be one who got into every bit of mischief imaginable. Moishe’s standards were rather more sedate. But, considering everything Reuven had been through-everything the whole family had been through-he couldn’t complain nearly so much as he would have back in Warsaw.

He went back to the cabin he shared with Reuven and his wife Rivka, to make sure he’d not been telling fables to Mavrogordato. Sure enough, their meager belongings were neatly bundled, and Rivka was making sure Reuven stayed in one place by reading to him from a book of Polish fairy tales that had somehow made the trip first from Warsaw to London and then from London almost to the Holy Land. If you read to Reuven, or if he latched onto a book for himself, he’d hold still; otherwise, he seemed a perpetual motion machine incarnated in the shape of a small boy-and Moishe could think of no more fitting shape for a perpetual-motion machine to have.

Rivka put up the book and looked a question at him. “We land in a couple of hours,” he said. She nodded. She was the glue that held their family together, and he-well, he was smart enough to know it.

“I don’t want to get off theNaxos,” Reuven said. “I like it here. I want to be a sailor when I grow up.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Rivka told him. “This is Palestine we’re going to, the Holy Land. Do you understand that? There haven’t been many Jews here for hundreds and hundreds of years, and now we’re going back. We may even go to Jerusalem. ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ people say during the High Holy Days. That will really come true for us now, do you see?”

Reuven nodded, his eyes big and round. Despite their travels and travails, they were bringing him up to understand what being a Jew meant, and Jerusalem was a name to conjure with. It was a name to conjure with for Moishe, too. He’d never imagined ending up in Palestine, even if he was being brought here to help the British rather than for any religious reason.

Rivka went back to reading. Moishe walked up to the bow of theNaxos and watched Haifa draw near. The town rose up from the sea along the slopes of Mount Carmel. Even in winter, even in cold, the Mediterranean sun shed a clearer, brighter light than he was used to seeing in Warsaw or London. Many of the houses and other buildings he saw were whitewashed; in that penetrating sunlight, they sparkled as if washed with silver.

Mixed among the buildings were groves of low, spreading trees with gray-green leaves. He’d never seen their like. When Captain Mavrogordato came up for a moment, he asked him what they were. The Greek stared in amazement. “You don’t know olives?” he exclaimed.

“No olive trees in Poland,” Moishe said apologetically. “Not in England, either.”

The harbor drew near. A lot of the men on the piers wore long robes-some white, others bright with stripes-and headcloths.Arabs, Moishe realized after a moment. The reality of being far, far away from everything he’d grown up with hit him like a club.

Other men wore work clothes of the kind with which he was more familiar: baggy pants, long-sleeved shirts, a few in overalls, cloth caps or battered fedoras taking the place of the Arabs’ kerchiefs. And off by themselves stood a knot of men in the khaki with which Moishe had grown so familiar in England: British military men.

Mavrogordato must have seen them, too, for he steered theNaxos toward the pier where they stood. The black plume of coal smoke that poured from the old freighter’s stacks shrank, then stopped as the ship nestled smoothly against the dockside. Sailors and dockworkers made theNaxos fast with lines. Others dropped the gangplank into place. With that thump, Moishe knew he could walk down to the land of Israel, the land from which his forefathers had been expelled almost two thousand years before. The hair at the back of his neck prickled up in awe.

Rivka and Reuven came out on deck. Moishe’s wife was carrying one duffel bag; a sailor had another slung over his shoulder. Moishe took it from the man, saying,“Evkharisto poly — thanks very much.” It was almost the only Greek he’d picked up on the long, nervous voyage across the Mediterranean, but a useful phrase to have.

“Parakalo,”the sailor answered with a smile: “You’re welcome.”

The uniformed Englishmen walked toward theNaxos. “May I-may we-go to them?” Moishe asked Mavrogordato.

“Go ahead,” the captain said. “I’m coming, too, to make sure I get paid.”

Moishe’s feet thudded on the gangplank. Rivka and Reuven followed closely, with Mavrogordato right behind them. Moishe took one last step. Then he was off the ship and onto the soil-well, the docks-of the Holy Land. He wanted to kneel down and kiss the dirty, creosote-stained wood.

Before he could, one of the Englishmen said, “You would be Mr. Russie? I’m Colonel Easter, your liaison here. We’ll get you in contact with your coreligionists as soon as may be. Things have been rather dicey lately, so your assistance will be most welcome. Having everyone pulling in the same direction will help the war effort, don’t you know?”

“I will do what I can,” Moishe answered in his slow, accented English. He studied Easter without much liking: the man plainly saw him as a tool, nothing more. That was how the Lizards had seen him, too. He liked the British cause better than he had that of the aliens, but he was sick of being anyone’s tool.

Off to one side, a British officer handed Panagiotis Mavrogordato several neat rolls of gold sovereigns. The Greek beamed from ear to ear. He didn’t think of Moishe as a tool: he thought of him as a meal ticket, and made no bones about it. That struck Moishe as a more honest approach than the one Easter showed.

The Englishman said, “If you’ll come with me, Mr. Russie, you and your family, we have a buggy waiting down past the end of the dock. Sorry we can’t lay on a motorcar for you, but petrol is in rather short supply these days.”

Petrol was in short supply all over the world. Colonel Easter hardly needed to be polite in mentioning its absence. He ignored politeness at a much more basic level: neither he nor any of his men made any move to take the duffel bags from Moishe and Rivka. You worried about whether guests were comfortable. Tools-who cared about tools?

The buggy was a black-painted English brougham, and might have been preserved in cotton wool and tinfoil for the past two generations. “We’ll take you to the barracks,” Easter said, getting aboard with the Russies and an enlisted man who picked up the reins. The rest of the officers climbed into another, almost identical carriage. Easter went on, “We’ll get you something to eat and drink there, and then see what sort of quarters we can arrange for the lot of you.”

If they’d cared about anything more than using him, they would have had quarters ready and waiting. At least they did remember that he and his family needed food and water. He wondered if they’d remember not to offer him ham, too. The driver flicked the reins and clucked to the horses. The wagon rattled away from the harbor district. Whatever the British had in mind for him, he’d soon find out about it.

He stared wide-eyed at the palm trees like huge feather dusters, at the whitewashed buildings of mud brick, at the mosque the buggy rolled past. Arab men in the long robes he’d already seen and Arab women covered so that only their eyes, hands, and feet showed watched the wagons as they clattered through the narrow, winding streets. Moishe felt very much an interloper, though his own folk had sprung from this place. If Colonel Easter had the slightest clue that God had not anointed him to rule this land, he gave no sign of it.

Suddenly, the buildings opened out onto a marketplace. All at once, Moishe stopped feeling like an alien and decided he was at home after all. None of the details was like what he’d known back in Warsaw: not the dress of the merchants and the customers, not the language they used, not the fruits and vegetables and trinkets they bought and sold. But the tone, the way they haggled-he might have been back in Poland.

Rivka was smiling, too; the resemblance must also have struck her. And not all the men and women in the marketplace were Arabs, Moishe saw when he got a closer look. Some were Jews, dressed for the most part in work clothes or in dresses that, while long, displayed a great deal of flesh when compared to the clothes in which the Arab women shrouded themselves.

A couple of Jewish men carrying brass candlesticks walked by close to the wagon. They were talking loudly and animatedly. Rivka’s smile disappeared. “I don’t understand them,” she said.

“That’s Hebrew they’re speaking, not Yiddish,” Moishe answered, and shivered a little. He’d caught only a few words himself. Learning Hebrew so you could use it in prayer and actually speaking it were two different things. He’d have a lot to pick up here. He wondered how fast he could do it.

They passed the market by. Houses and shops closed in around them again. At bigger streetcorners, British soldiers directed traffic, or tried to: the Arabs and Jews of Haifa weren’t as inclined to obey their commands as the orderly folk of London might have been.

A couple of blocks past one thoroughfare, the road all but doubled back on itself. A short young fellow in a short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers stepped out in front of the wagon that held the Russies. He pointed a pistol at the driver’s face. “You will stop now,” he said in accented English.

Colonel Easter started to reach for his sidearm. The young man glanced up to the rooftops on either side of the road. Close to a dozen men armed with rifles and submachine guns, most of them wearing kerchiefs to hide their faces, covered both wagons heading back to the British barracks. Very slowly and carefully, Easter moved his right hand away from his weapon.

The cocky young fellow in the street smiled, as if this were a social occasion rather than-whatever it was. “Ah, that’s good, that’s very good,” he said. “You are a sensible man, Colonel.”

“What is the point of this-this damned impudence?” Easter demanded in tones that said he would have fought had he seen the remotest chance for success.

“We are relieving you of your guests,” the hijacker answered. He looked away from the Englishman and toward Moishe, dropping into Yiddish to say, “You and your family, you will get out of the buggy and come with me.”

“Why?” Moishe said in the same language. “If you are who I think you are, I would have been talking with you anyhow.”

“Yes, and telling us what the British want us to hear,” the fellow with the pistol said. “Now get out-I haven’t got all day to argue with you.”

Moishe climbed down from the buggy. He helped his wife and son down, too. Gesturing with the pistol, the hijacker on the street led him through a nearby gate and into a courtyard where a couple of other men with guns waited. One of them set down his rifle and efficiently blindfolded the Russies.

As he tied a cloth over Moishe’s eyes, he spoke in Hebrew-a short sentence that, after a moment, made sense to Moishe. It was, in fact, much the same sort of thing he might have said had he been blindfolder rather than blindfoldee: “Nice job, Menachem.”

“Thanks, but no chatter,” the man who’d been on the street said in Yiddish. He was Menachem, then. He shoved Russie lightly in the back; someone else grabbed his elbow. “Get moving.” Having no choice, Russie got.

Big Uglies pushed munitions carts toward Teerts’ killercraft. Most of them were of the dark brown variety of Tosevite, not the pinkish-tan type. The dark brown ones on this part of the lesser continental mass were more inclined to cooperate with the Race than the lighter ones; from what the flight leader had gathered, the lighter ones had treated them so badly, rule by the Race looked good in comparison.

His mouth fell open in amusement. As far as he was concerned, a Big Ugly was a Big Ugly, and no more needed to be said. The Tosevites themselves, though, evidently saw things differently.

These Tosevites had stripped off the tunics that covered the upper parts of their bodies. The metabolic water they used for bodily cooling glistened on their hides. As far as they were concerned, it was hot.

To Teerts, the temperature was comfortable, though he found the air far too moist to suit him. Still, the humidity in this Florida place was the only thing about its weather he didn’t care for. He’d spent winters in Manchuria and Nippon. Next to them, Florida seemed wonderful.

A couple of armorers began loading the munitions onto Teerts’ klllercraft. He looked at the load. “Only two air-to-air missiles?” he said unhappily.

The senior armorer said, “Be thankful you’ve got two, superior sir.” He was a solid fellow named Ummfac. Though he was nominally subordinate to the killercraft pilots, wise ones treated him and his ilk as equals-and often got better loads because of it. Now he went on, “Pretty soon it’ll be nothing but cannon fire, we and the Big Uglies hammering away at each other from short range.”

“There’s a nasty thought,” Teerts said. He sighed. “You’re probably right, though. That’s the way the war seems to be going these days.” He patted the skin of the killercraft’s fuselage. “The Emperor be praised that we still fly superior aircraft.”

“Truth,” Ummfac said. “There’s the question of spares even with them… “

Teerts climbed up into the cockpit and snuggled down in the armored, padded seat as if he were a hatchling curling up inside the eggshell from which he’d just emerged. He didn’t want to think about problems with spares. Already, the Big Uglies were flying aircraft far more dangerous to his machine than they had been when the Race first came to Tosev 3.

He laughed again, bitterly. The Big Uglies weren’t supposed to have been flying any aircraft. They were supposed to have been pretechnological barbarians. As far as he was concerned, barbarians they were: no one who’d ever been in Nipponese captivity could possibly argue with that. Pretechnological, however, had turned out to be another matter.

He went through his preflight checklist. Everything was as it should have been. He stuck a finger into the space between a loose piece of padding and the inner wall of the cockpit. No one had found his vial of ginger. That was good. The Nipponese had addicted him to the herb while he lay in their hands. After he’d escaped from captivity, he’d discovered how many of his fellow males tasted it of their own accord.

He called the local flight controller, got permission to take off. The twin turbofans in the killercraft roared to life. The vibration and noise went all through him, a good and familiar feeling.

He taxied down the runway, then climbed steeply, acceleration shoving him back hard into his seat. His horizon expanded marvelously, as it did whenever he went airborne. He enjoyed that expansion less than he had from other bases, though, for it soon brought into view the ruins of Miami.

Teerts had been flying down to Florida when that area went up in an appalling cloud. Had he been a little ahead of himself, the fireball might have caught him, or the blast might have wrecked his killercraft or flipped it into a spin from which it never would have recovered.

Even thinking about that squeezed an alarmed hiss from him. Of itself, his hand started to reach for the little plastic vial of powdered ginger. When he was reassigned to the lesser continental mass, he’d wondered if he would still be able to get the powdered herb he craved. But a good many males on the Florida base used it, and the dark-skinned Big Uglies who labored for the Race seemed to have an unending supply. They hadn’t yet asked him for anything more than trinkets, little electronic gadgets he could easily afford to give up in exchange for the delights ginger brought him.

But-“I will not taste now,” he said, and made his hand retreat. However good ginger made him feel, he knew it clouded his judgment. Engaging the Big Uglies wasn’t so easy or so safe as it had once been. If you went at them confident you’d have things all your own way no matter what, you were liable to end up with your name on the memorial tablet that celebrated the males who had perished to bring Tosev 3 into the Empire.

Rabotev 3 and Halless 1 had such tablets at their capitals; he’d seen holograms of them before setting out from Home. The one on Halless 1 had only a few names, the one on Rabotev 2 only a few hundred. Teerts was sure the Race would set up memorial tablets for Tosev 3; if they’d done it on the other worlds they’d conquered, they’d do it here. If you didn’t maintain your traditions, what point to having a civilization?

But the memorial tablets here would be different from those of the other two habitable worlds the Race had conquered. “We can set up the tablets, then build the capital inside them,” Teerts said. In spite of himself, his mouth fell open. The image was macabre, but it was also funny. The memorial tablets to commemorate the heroes who fell in the conquest of Tosev 3 would have alot of names on them.

Teerts flew his prescribed sweep, north and west over the lesser continental mass. A lot of the territory over which he passed was still in the hands of the local Big Uglies. Every so often, antiaircraft fire would splotch the air below and behind him with black puffs of smoke. He didn’t worry about that; he was flying too high for the Tosevites’ cannon to reach him.

He did keep a wary eye turret turned toward the radar presentation in his head-up display. Intelligence said the Americans lagged behind the British and the Deutsche when it came to jet aircraft, and they mostly used their piston-and-airfoil machines for ground attack and harassment duties, but you never could tell… and Intelligence wasn’t always as omniscient as its practitioners thought. That was another painful lesson the Race had learned on Tosev 3.

Here and there, snow dappled the higher ground. As far as Teerts was concerned, that was as good a reason as any to let the Big Uglies keep this part of their world. But if you let them keep all the parts where snow fell, you’d end up with a depressingly small part of the world to call your own.

He drew nearer the large river that ran from north to south through the heart of the northern half of the lesser continental mass. The Race controlled most of the territory along the river. If his aircraft got into trouble, he had places where he could take refuge.

The large river marked the westernmost limit of his planned patrol. He was about to swing back toward Florida, which, no matter how humid it was, did at least enjoy a temperate climate, when his forward-looking radar picked up something new and hideous.

Whatever it was, it took off from the ground and rapidly developed more velocity than his killercraft had. For a moment, he wondered if something inside his radar had gone wrong. If it had, would the base have the components it needed to fix the problem?

Then his paradigm shifted. That wasn’t an aircraft, like the rocket-powered killercraft the Deutsche had started using. It was an out-and-out rocket, a missile. The Deutsche had those, too, but he hadn’t known the Americans did. From his briefings, he didn’t think Intelligence knew it, either.

He flicked on his radio transmitter. “Flight Leader Teerts calling Florida base Intelligence,” he said.

Satellite relay connected him almost as quickly as if he’d been in the next room. “Intelligence, Florida base, Aaatos speaking. Your report, Flight Leader Teerts?”

Teerts gave the particulars of what his radar had picked up, then said, “If you like, I have fuel enough to reach the launch site, attack any launcher or Tosevite installation visible, and still return to base.”

“You are a male of initiative,” Aaatos said. Among the Race, the phrase was not necessarily a compliment, though Teerts chose to take it as one. Aaatos resumed: “Please wait while I consult my superiors.” Teerts waited, though every moment increased the likelihood that he would have to refuel in the air. But Aaatos was not gone long. “Flight Leader Teerts, your attack against the Tosevite installation is authorized. Punish the Big Uglies for their arrogance.”

“It shall be done,” Teerts said. The computers aboard the killercraft held the memory of where radar had first picked up the missile. They linked to the Satellite mappers the Race had orbiting Tosev 3 and guided Teerts toward the launch site.

He knew the Race was desperately low on antimissile missiles. They’d expended a lot of them against the rockets the Deutsche hurled at Poland and France. Teerts had no idea how many-if any-were left, but he didn’t need to wear the fleetlord’s body paint to figure out that. If the Race had to start using them here in the United States, whatever remaining reserves there were would vanish all the sooner.

He skimmed low over the woods west of the great river, and over a clearing where. If his instruments didn’t lie, the American missile had begun its flight. And, sure enough, he spotted a burned place in the dead grass of the clearing. But that was all he saw.

Whatever launcher or guide rails the Big Uglies had used, they’d already got them under cover of the trees.

Had he had an unlimited supply of munitions, Teerts would have shot up the area around the clearing on the off chance of hitting worthwhile. As things were… He radioed the situation back to the Florida air base. Aaatos said, “Return here for full debriefing, Flight Leader Teerts. We shall have other opportunities to make the Big Uglies look back in sorrow upon the course they have chosen.”

“Returning to base,” Teerts acknowledged. If the American Tosevites were starting to use missiles, the Race would have plenty of chances to attack their launchers in the future, anyhow. Whether that was just what Aaatos had meant, Teerts didn’t know.

Holding his white flag of truce high, George Bagnall moved out into the clearing in the pine woods south of Pskov. Hisvalenki made little scrunching noises as he walked through the packed snow. The big, floppy boots put him in mind of Wellingtons made of felt; however ugly they were, though, they did a marvelous job of keeping his feet warm. For the rest of him, he wore his RAF fur-and-leather flying suit. Anything that kept him from freezing above Angels Twenty was just about up to the rigors of a Russian winter.

On the far side of the clearing, a Lizard came into sight. The alien creature also carried a swatch of white cloth tied to a stick. It too wore a pair ofvalenki, no doubt plundered from a dead Russian soldier; in spite of them, in spite of layers of clothes topped by aWehrmacht greatcoat that fit it like a tent, it looked miserably cold.

“Gavoritye li-vui po russki?”it said with a hissing accent. “Oder sprechen Sie deutsch?”

“Ich spreche deutsch besser,”Bagnall answered, and then, to see if he was lucky, added, “Do you speak English?”

“Ich verstehe nicht,”the Lizard said, and went on in German, “My name is Nikeaa. I am authorized to speak for the Race in these matters.”

Bagnall gave his name. “I am a flight engineer of the British Royal Air Force. I am authorized to speak for the German and Soviet soldiers defending Pskov and its neighborhood.”

“I thought the Britainish were far from here,” Nikeaa said. “But it could be I do not know as much of Tosevite geography as I thought.”

WhatTosevite meant came through from context “Britain is not close to Pskov,” Bagnall agreed. “But most human countries have allied against your kind, and so I am here.”And I bloody well wish I weren’t. His Lancaster bomber had flown in a radar set and a radarman to explain its workings to the Russians, and then been destroyed on the ground before he could get back to England. He and his comrades had been here a year now; even if they had established a place for themselves as mediators between the Reds and the Nazis-who still hated each other as much as either group hated the Lizards-it was a place he would just as soon not have had.

Nikeaa said, “Very well. You are authorized. You may speak. Your commanders asked this truce of us. We have agreed to it for now, to learn what the reason is for the asking. You will tell me thissofort — immediately.” He madesofort come out as a long, menacing hiss.

“We have prisoners captured over a long time fighting here,” Bagnall answered. “Some of them are wounded. We have done what we can for them, but your doctors will know better what to do with them and how to treat them.”

“Truth,” Nikeaa said. He moved his head up and down in a nod. For a moment, Bagnall took that for granted. Then he realized the Lizard had probably had to learn the gesture along with the German and Russian languages. His respect for Nikeaa’s accomplishments went up a peg.

What he’d told the Lizard was indeed true. From everything he’d heard, the troops around Pskov treated Lizard prisoners far better than the Germans had treated their Russian captives, or vice versa. Being hard to come by, Lizard prisoners were valuable. The Nazis and Reds had had plenty of chances to take each other’s measure.

“In return for giving these wounded males back to the Race, you want what?” Nikeaa asked, and made a queer coughing noise that sounded like something left over from his own language. “We also have captives, Germans and Russians. We have no Britainish here, this I tell you. We do not harm these captured ones after we have them. We give them for yours. We give ten for one. If you like.”

“Not enough,” Bagnall said.

“Then we give twenty for one,” Nikeaa said. Bagnall had heard from others who’d dealt with the Lizards that they were not good bargainers. Now he saw what they’d meant. Human negotiators would not have backpedaled so readily.

“Still not enough,” he said. “Along with the soldiers, we want a hundred of your books or films, and two of your machines that play the films, along with working batteries for them.”

Nikeaa drew back in alarm. “You want us to give you our secrets?” He made that coughing noise again. “It cannot be.”

“No, no. You misunderstand,” Bagnall said hastily. “We know you will not give us any military manuals or things of that sort. We want your novels, your stories, whatever science you have that will not let us build weapons with what we learn from it. Give us these things and we will be content.”

“If you cannot use them immediately, why do you want them?” Reading tone into a Lizard’s voice probably told you more about yourself than about the Lizard, but Bagnall thought Nikeaa sounded suspicious. The alien went on, “This is not how Tosevites usually behave.” Yes, he was suspicious.

“We want to learn more about your kind,” Bagnall answered. “Eventually, this war will end, and your people and mine will live side by side.”

“Yes. You will be our subjects,” Nikeaa said flatly.

But Bagnall shook his head. “Not necessarily. If your conquest were as easy as you’d thought it was going to be, it would have been finished by now. You’ll need to be dealing with us more nearly as equals at least until the end of the war, and maybe afterwards as well. And we with you-the same does apply. I gather you’ve been studying us for a long time. We’re just beginning to learn about you.”And most of what we have learned I don’t fancy.

“I have not the authority to decide this on my own,” Nikeaa said. “It is not a demand we were prepared for, and so I must consult with my superiors before replying.”

“If you must, then you must,” Bagnall said; he’d already noted-and he was sure he was far from the only one who had-that the Lizards were not good at deciding things on the spur of the moment.

He’d tried to put disappointment in his own voice when he replied, though he doubted whether Nikeaa recognized it. Even inserting it wasn’t easy. If the Lizards did come up with the books and films and readers, they wouldn’t stay in Pskov. Half of them would go to Moscow, the other half to… no, not to Berlin, which was ruined, but to some town in Germany. The NKVD, no doubt, would pore over one set, and theGestapo over the other. No matter how much he wanted mankind to defeat the Lizards, Bagnall had a devil of a time finding much enthusiasm for the notion of the Bolsheviks and Nazis getting a leg up on England and the United States in understanding the alien invaders. He’d seen Hitler and Stalin’s men in action, and had more often been horrflied than impressed.

Nikeaa said, “I will report this condition of yours and will make my reply when my superiors determine what the correct response should be. Shall we meet again in fifteen days? I hope to have their decision by that time.”

“I had not expected so long a delay,” Bagnall said.

“Decisions should not be made hastily, especially those of such importance,” Nikeaa said. Was that reproach he was trying to convey? Bagnall had trouble being sure. The Lizard added, “We are not Tosevites, after all, to rush into everything.” Yes, reproach, or perhaps just scorn.

“Fifteen days, then,” Bagnall said, and made for the woods where his escort-a mixed party, or rather two separate parties, one German, the other Russian-awaited his return. He glanced back over his shoulder. Nikeaa was hurrying away toward his own folk. Bagnall’s sigh sent a plume of fog out ahead of him. But for Ken Embry the pilot and Jerome Jones the radarman, his folk were far from Pskov.

Captain Martin Borcke was holding Bagnall’s horse. TheWehrmacht man spoke fluent English; Bagnall thought he was in Intelligence, but wasn’t certain. In English, he asked, “Have we got the exchange agreement?”

Bagnall wished Borcke hadn’t used English, as if expecting a reply in the same tongue-one the Russians did not know. Keeping the two alleged allies from each other’s throats was anything but easy. The RAF man answered in German, which many of the Red Army men could follow: “No, we have no agreement yet. The Lizards need to talk to their superiors before they decide whether they can give us the books we want.”

The Russians accepted that as a matter of course. To their way of thinking, moving an inch past the orders you had was dangerous. If anything went wrong, the blame landed squarely on you. Borcke snorted in contempt; theWehrmacht let people do more thinking for themselves. “Well, it can’t be helped,” he said, and then turned that into Russian:“Nichevo.”

“Nichevo, da,”Bagnall said, and swung up onto the horse. Riding it wasn’t as pleasant as being in a heated motorcar, but it did keep his legs and thighs warm. That was something. He hadn’t been on horseback above half a dozen times before he came to Pskov. Now he sometimes felt ready to ride in the Derby. Intellectually, he knew that wasn’t so, but the strides he had made in equitation encouraged him in the fancy.

After a cold night encampment, he got back into Pskov the next afternoon. He went over to theKrom, the medieval stone castle, to report the delay to Lieutenant General Kurt Chill and to Brigadiers Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, the German and Russian officers commanding in the city. With them, as he’d expected, he found Ken Embry. The RAF men, being relatively disinterested, served as lubricant betweenWehrmacht and Red Army personnel.

After Bagnall made his report, he and Embry headed back to the wooden house they shared with Jerome Jones. When they drew near, they heard a dish shatter with a crash, and then angry voices, two men’s and a woman’s, shouting loudly.

“Oh, bugger, that’s Tatiana!” Ken Embry exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Bagnall said. They both started to run. Panting, Bagnall added, “Why the devil couldn’t she leave Jones alone after she took up with that Jerry?”

“Because that would have been convenient,” Embry answered. Ever since he’d been pilot and Bagnall flight engineer aboard their Lancaster, they’d had a contest to see who could come up with the most casually cynical understatements. For the moment, Embry had taken the lead.

Bagnall, though, was a better runner, and got to the door a couple of strides ahead of his comrade. He would willingly have forgone the honor. All the same, he threw the door open and rushed inside, Embry right behind him.

Georg Schultz and Jerome Jones stood almost nose-to-nose, screaming at each other. Off to one side, Tatiana Pirogova had a plate in her hand, ready to fling. By the shards, she’d thrown the last one at Jones. That didn’t mean this one wouldn’t fly at Schultz’s head. At that, Bagnall was glad Tatiana was still flinging crockery instead of reaching for the scope-sighted Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle she wore slung on her back.

She was a striking woman: blond, blue-eyed, shapely-altogether lovely. If face and body were all you cared about. She’d made advances to Bagnall, not so long ago. That she’d been Jones’ lover at the time hadn’t been the only reason he’d declined. It would have been like bedding a she-leopard-probably fun while it lasted, but you could never afford to turn your back afterward.

“Shut up, all of you!” he shouted now, first in English, then in German, and finally in Russian. The three squabblers didn’t shut up, of course; they started yelling at him instead. He thought the fair Tatiana was going to let fly with that plate, but she didn’t, not quite.Good sign, he thought. Having them scream at him was another good sign. Since he wasn’t(thank God!) sleeping with any of them, they might be slower to get lethally angry at him.

Behind him, Ken Embry said, “What the devil is going on here?” He used the same mixture of Russian and German he did with Lieutenant General Chill and the Russian partisan brigadiers. Their squabbles sometimes came near to blows, too.

“This bastard’s still fucking my woman!” Georg Schultz shouted, pointing at Jerome Jones.

“I am not your woman. I give my body to whom I please,” Tatiana answered, just as hotly.

“I don’t want your body,” Jerome Jones yelled in pretty fluent Russian; he’d studied the language in his undergraduate days at Cambridge. He was a thin, clever-looking fellow in his early twenties, about as tall as Schultz but not nearly so solidly made. He went on, “Christ and the saints, how many times do I have to tell you that?”

His picturesque oath meant nothing to Tatiana, or even less. She spat on the floorboards. “That for Christ and the saints! I am a Soviet woman, free of such superstitious twaddle. And if I want you again, little man, I will have you.”

“What about me?” Schultz said, like the others conducting the argument at the top of his lungs.

“This will be even more delightful to mediate than the generals’ brawls,” Bagnall murmured in an aside to Ken Embry.

Embry nodded, then grinned impudently. “It’s rather more entertaining to listen to, though, isn’t it?”

“-have been sleeping with you,” Tatiana was saying, “so you have no cause for complaint. I do this even though, last time you got on top of me, you called me Ludmila instead of my own name.”

“I what?” Schultz said. “I never-”

“You did,” Tatiana said with a certainty that could not be denied-and an obvious malicious pleasure in that certainty. “You can still think about that soft little Red Air Force pilot you pined for like a puppy with its tongue hanging out, but if I think of anyone else, it’s like you think your poor mistreated cock will fall off. If you think I mistreat your cock when it’s in there, it can stay out.” She turned to Jones, swinging her hips a little and running her tongue over her lips to make them fuller and redder. Bagnall could see exactly what she was doing, but that didn’t mean he was immune to it.

Neither was the British radarman. He took half a step toward Tatiana, then stopped with a very visible effort. “No, dammit!” he yelled. “This is how I got into trouble in the first place.” He paused and looked thoughtful, so well that Bagnall wondered if the expression was altogether spontaneous. And when Jones spoke again, he made a deliberate effort to turn the subject: “Haven’t seen Ludmila about for the past few days. She’s overdue from her last flight, isn’t she?”

“Ja,”Schultz said. His head bobbed up and down. “She flew last to Riga, and should have been back soon.”

“No, not necessarily,” Bagnall said. “General Chill got a message answering whatever query he’d sent with her, and saying also that the soldier commanding in Riga was taking advantage of her light airplane for some mission of his own.” Now he had trouble keeping his face straight. He’d been interested in Ludmila Gorbunova, too, but she hadn’t been interested back.

“Ah, that is good; that is very good,” Schultz said. “I had not heard it.”

Tatiana started to smash the plate over his head. He was fast; he knocked it out of her hand so that it flew across the room, hit the timbers of the wall, and broke there. Tatiana cursed him in Russian and in the bad German she’d picked up. When she’d run through all her invective once-and the choicer bits twice-she shouted, “Since no one cares about me, to the devil’s uncle with the lot of you.” She stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind her loud enough, probably, to make the neighbors think an artillery round had hit it there.

Georg Schultz surprised Bagnall by starting to laugh. Then Schultz, a farmerly type, surprised him again by quoting Goethe:“Die ewige Weibliche- the eternal feminine.” The German shook his head. “I don’t know why I get myself into such a state over her, but I do.”

“Must be love,” Ken Embry said innocently.

“God forbid!” Schultz looked around at the shattered crockery. “Ah, the hell with it.” His gaze fixed on Jerome Jones. “And the hell with you, too,Englander.”

“From you, that’s a compliment,” Jones said. Bagnall took a step over to the radarman’s side. If Schultz wanted to try anything, he wouldn’t be going against Jones alone.

But the German shook his head again, rather like a bear be deviled by bees, and left the house. He didn’t slam the door as hard as Tatiana had, but broken pieces of dishes jumped all the same. Bagnall took a deep breath. The scene hadn’t been as bad as combat, but it hadn’t been any fun, either. He clapped Jerome Jones on the back. “How the devil did you ever get tangled up with that avalanche who walks like a man?”

“The fair Tatiana?” Now Jones shook his head-ruefully. “She doesn’t walk like a man. She walks like a woman-that was the problem.”

“And she doesn’t want to give you up, even though she has her dashing Nazi, too?” Bagnall said.Dashing wasn’t the right word to describe Georg Schultz, and he knew it.Capable fit pretty well.Dangerous was in there, too, perhaps not as overtly as with Tatiana Pirogova, but part of the mix nonetheless.

“That’s about it,” Jones muttered.

“Tell her to go away often enough and she’ll eventually get the message, old man,” Bagnall said. “You dowant her to go away, don’t you?”

“Most of the time, of course I do,” Jones answered. “But sometimes, when I’m-you know-” He glanced down at the crockery-strewn floor and didn’t go on.

Bagnall did it for him: “When you’re randy, you mean.” Jones nodded miserably. Bagnall looked at Ken Embry. Embry was looking at him. They both groaned.

The coming of the Lizards had brought ruin to hundreds of towns for every one it helped. Lamar, Colorado, though, was one of the latter. The prairie town, a no-account county seat before the aliens invaded, had become a center for the defense against them. People and supplies had flowed into it rather than streaming away, as was the usual case.

Captain Rance Auerbach thought about that as he watched mutton chops sizzle on the grill of a local cafe. The fire that made them sizzle was fueled by dried horse dung: not much in the way of timber around Lamar, and coal was in short supply and natural gas unavailable. There were, however, plenty of horses around-Auerbach himself wore a cavalry captain’s bars.

A waitress with a prizefighter’s beefy arms set down three mugs of home brew and a big bowl of boiled beets-beets being one of the leading local crops. She too glanced at the chops. “Uh-huh,”she said, as much to herself as to Auerbach. “Timed that about right-those’ll be ready in just a couple minutes.”

Auerbach slid one of the mugs of beer down the counter to Rachel Hines, who sat on his left, and the other to Penny Summers, who sat on his right He raised his own mug. “Confusion to the Lizards!” he said.

“Hell with ’em,” Penny agreed, and gulped down half of what her mug held. With her flat Midwestern accent, she could have been a native of Lamar; Auerbach’s Texas drawl proclaimed him an outsider every time he opened his mouth. Neither Penny nor Rachel was from Lamar, though. Auerbach and his men had rescued both of them from Lakin, Kansas, when his company raided the base the Lizards had set up there.

After a moment’s hesitation, Penny Summers softly echoed, “Confusion to the Lizards,” and also sipped at her beer. She did everything softly and slowly these days. In the escape from Lakin, her father had been blown to sloppily butchered raw meat before her eyes. She’d never been quite the same since.

The waitress went around the counter, stabbed the mutton chops with a long-handled fork, and slapped them onto plates. “There y’go, folks,” she said. “Eat hearty-y’never know when you’ll get another chance.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Rachel Hines said. She attacked the mutton with knife and fork. Her blue eyes glowed as she gulped down a big bite. She hadn’t been the same since she got out of Lakin, either, but she hadn’t withdrawn into herself the way Penny had. These days, she wore the same khaki uniform Auerbach did, though with a PFC’s single chew on rather than his captain’s badges. She made a pretty fair trooper; she could ride, she could shoot, she didn’t mouth off (too much), and the rest of the company paid her what had to be the ultimate compliment: for the most part, they treated her like one of the boys.

She cut off another bite, frowning a little as she transferred the fork to her left hand so she could use the knife. “How’s your finger doing?” Auerbach asked.

Rachel looked down at her hand. “Still missing,” she reported, and spread the hand so he could see the wide gap between middle finger and pinkie. “Now if I’d been shot by a Lizard, it would have been one thing,” she said. “Having that crazy son of a bitch nail me, though, that just makes me mad. But it could have been worse, I expect, so I’ve got no real kick coming.”

Few men Auerbach knew could have talked about a wound so dispassionately. If Rachel was one of the guys, she was a better one than most. Auerbach said, “That Larssen fellow was supposed to be going over to the Lizards with stuff they weren’t supposed to know. He’d shot two men dead, too. He had what he got when we caught up with him coming, you ask me. I’m just sorry we took casualties bringing him down.”

“Wonder what it was he knew,” Rachel Hines said.

Auerbach shrugged. His troopers had been asking that question since the order to hunt down Larssen came out of Denver. He didn’t know the answer, but he could make some pretty fair guesses, ones he didn’t share. Back a while before, he’d led the cavalry escort that got Leslie Groves into Denver, and Groves had been carrying something-he wouldn’t say what-he treated as just a little more important than the Holy Grail. If it didn’t have something to do with the atomic bombs that had knocked the Lizards for a couple of loops, Auerbach would have been mightily surprised.

Penny Summers said, “I spent a lot of time praying everyone would come through the mission safe. I do that every time people ride out of here.”

“It’s not the worst thing to do,” Auerbach said, “but coming out and cooking or nursing or whatever you want wouldn’t hurt, either.” Since she’d come to Lamar, Penny had spent a lot of time in a little furnished room in an overcrowded apartment house, brooding and reading the Bible. Getting her out for mutton chops was something of a triumph.

Or so he thought, till she shoved her plate away and said, “I don’t like mutton. It tastes funny and it’s all greasy. We never had it much back in Lakin.”

“You should eat,” Auerbach told her, knowing he sounded like a mother hen. “You need it” That was true; Penny was rail-thin. She hadn’t been that way when she came to Lamar, but she hadn’t been the same in a lot of ways since Wendell Summers got himself messily killed.

“Hey, it’s food,” Rachel Hines said. “I don’t even mind the beets, not any more. I just shovel it all down; I quit worrying about it as soon as I put on the uniform.”

She filled out that uniform in a way the Army bureaucrats who’d designed it hadn’t had in mind. Despite her talk of gluttony, she wasn’t the least bit fat. If she hadn’t been so all-around good-natured, she would have had half the men in the company squabbling over her. There were times when Auerbach had been tempted to pull rank himself. Even if she’d been interested, though, that would have created as many problems as it solved, maybe more.

He glanced over to Penny again. He felt responsible for her, too. He also had the feeling more was there than met the eye. With Rachel, what you saw was what you got-he couldn’t imagine her holding anything back. With Penny, he got the feeling her present unhappiness masked something altogether different. He shrugged. The other possibility was that his imagination had gone and run away with him.Wouldn’t be the first time, he thought.

To his surprise, she did take back the plate and start eating again, not with any great enthusiasm but doggedly, as if she were fueling a car. With what she’d been giving herself lately, a car would long since have run out of gas. He didn’t say anything. That might have broken the spell.

Rachel Hines shook her head. She’d cropped her hair into a short bob, the better to have it fit under a helmet. She said, “Going off and giving secrets to the Lizards. I purely can’t fathom that, and there’s a fact. But plenty of people in Lakin got on with ’em just fine and dandy, like they were the new county commissioners or something.”

“You’re right.” Penny Summers’ face twisted into an expression both fierce and savage, one altogether unlike any Auerbach had seen on her since she’d come to Lamar. “Joe Bentley over at the general store, he sucked up to them for all he was worth, and when Edna Wheeler went in there and called them a bunch of goggle-eyed things from out of a freak show, you tell me he didn’t go trotting off to them fast as his legs could take him. And the very next day she and her husband and both their kids got thrown out of their house.”

“That’s so,” Rachel said, nodding. “It sure is. And Mel Six-killer, I guess he got sick of folks calling him half-breed all the time, on account of he’d even make up tales to take to the Lizards, and they’d believe ’em, too. He got a lot of people in trouble like that. Yeah, some people were mean to him, but you don’t go getting even by hurting ’em that kind of way.”

“And Miss Proctor, the home economics teacher at the high school,” Penny said. “What was it she always called the Lizards? ‘The wave of the future,’ that was it, like we couldn’t do anything about ’em no matter what. And then she’d go out and make sure we couldn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, she sure did,” Rachel said. “And… ”

They went on for another five or ten minutes, talking about the collaborators back in their little hometown. Auerbach sat quietly, drinking his beer, finishing his supper (he didn’t mind mutton, but he could have lived for a long time without looking another beet in the eye) and listening. He’d never seen Penny Summers so lively, and he’d never seen her finally clean her plate, either-she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. Complaining about the old neighbors got her juices flowing as nothing else had.

The brawny waitress came by. “Get you folks some more beer, or are you gonna sit there takin’ up space?”

“I’ll have another one, thanks,” Auerbach said. To his surprise, Penny nodded before Rachel did. The waitress went away, came back with fresh mugs. “Thanks, Irma,” Auerbach told her. She glowered at him, as if doing her job well enough to deserve thanks showed she’d somehow failed at it.

“You’ve raided Lakin since you got us out, haven’t you, Captain?” Rachel asked.

“Sure we have,” Auerbach answered. “You weren’t along for that, were you? No, you weren’t-I remember. We hurt ’em, too; drove ’em clean out of town. I thought we’d be able to keep it, but when they threw too much armor at us-” He spread his hands. “What can you do?”

“That’s not what she meant,” Penny said. “I know what she meant.”

Auerbach stared at her. She surely hadn’t been this animated before. “What did she mean?” he asked, hoping to keep her talking-and, more than that, hoping to keep her involved with the world beyond the four walls within which she’d chosen to shut herself away.

It worked, too; Penny’s eyes blazed. “She meant, did you settle up scores with the quislings?” she said. Rachel Hines nodded to show her friend was right.

“No, I don’t think we did,” Auerbach said. “We didn’t know just who needed settling back then, and we were too busy with the Lizards to risk putting anybody’s nose out of joint by getting the locals mad at us for giving the wrong people a hard time.”

“We’re not going back to Lakin any time soon, are we?” Rachel asked.

“Not that I know of, anyhow,” Auerbach said. “Colonel Nordenskold might have a different idea, but he hasn’t told me about it if he does. And if he gets orders from somewhere up the line-” He spread his hands again. Above the regimental level, the chain of command kept getting broken links. Local commanders had a lot more autonomy than anybody had figured they would before the Lizards started plastering communications.

“The colonel needs to get word to the partisans,” Rachel said. “Sooner or later, those bastards ought to get what’s coming to ’em.” She brought out the word as casually as any cavalry trooper might have; Auerbach didn’t think of it as a woman swearing till he listened to the sentence over again inside his head. Even if she had curves, Rachel was a cavalryman, all right.

“That’s what needs doing,” Penny Summers said with a vigorous nod. “Oh yes indeed.”

“Seems funny, talking about American partisans,” Rachel said. “I mean, we saw the Russians hiding in the woods in the newsreels before the Lizards came, but to have to do that kind of stuff ourselves-”

“Funny to you, maybe, but you’re from Kansas,” Auerbach answered. “You come from Texas the way I do, or from Virginia like Lieutenant Magruder, and you’ll know about bushwhacking, ’cause odds are you’re related to somebody who did some of it during the States War.” He touched his sleeve. “Good thing this uniform isn’t blue the way it used to be. You come out of the South, your part of the country’s been invaded before.”

Rachel shrugged. “For me, the Civil War’s something out of a history book, that’s all.”

“Not to Southerners,” Auerbach said. “Mosby and Forrest are real live people to us, even nowadays.”

“I don’t know who they are, but I’ll take your word for it,” Penny said. “Thing of it is. If we can do that, we ought to. Can Colonel Nordenskold get in touch with the partisans?”

“Oh, yeah,” Auerbach said, “and do you know how?” He waited for her to shake her head, then set a finger by the side of his nose and grinned. “Carrier pigeons, that’s how. Not even any radio for the Lizards to intercept, and they haven’t figured it out yet.” He knew he was talking too much, but the chance to see Penny Summers act like a real live human being led him to say a little more than he should.

She bounced up off her stool now. “That’s terrflic. Let’s go talk with the colonel right this minute.” It was as if she’d flicked a switch inside herself, and everything she’d turned off over the past months came back to life all at once. It was quite a thing to see.Hell of a woman there, Auerbach thought, and then, a moment later,and she’s a civilian, too.

Colonel Morton Nordenskold made his headquarters in what still said it was Lamar’s First National Bank. Back in the twenties, some sort of spectacular robbery had happened there; Lamar natives talked about it even now. There weren’t a lot of Lamar natives left any more, though. Soldiers and refugees dominated the town now.

No sentries stood outside the bank. Half the town away, a couple of dummies from Feldman’s tailor shop, dressed in Army uniform from helmet to boots, guarded a fancy house. If the Lizards came by with bombers, the hope was that they’d hit there instead of the real HQ. So far, they hadn’t bothered either one.

Inside, where reconnaissance couldn’t spot them, two real live soldiers came to attention when Auerbach walked through the door with Rachel and Penny. “Yes, sir, you can see the colonel now,” one of them said.

“Thanks,” Auerbach said, and headed for Nordenskold’s office.

Behind him, one of the sentries turned to the other and said, not quite quietly enough, “Look at that lucky son of a bitch, will you, walkin’ out with two o’ the best-lookin’ broads in town.”

Auerbach thought about going back and calling him on it, then decided he liked it and kept on toward the colonel’s office.

The Tosevite hatchling made a squealing noise that grated in Ttomalss’ hearing diaphragms. It reached up for the handle of a low cabinet, grabbed hold on about the third try, and did its best to pull itself upright. Its best wasn’t good enough. It fell back down, splat.

Ttomalss watched curiously to see what it would do next. Sometimes, after a setback like that, it would wail, which he found even more irritating than its squeals. Sometimes it thought a fall was funny, and let out one of its annoyingly noisy laughs.

Today, rather to Ttomalss’ surprise, it did neither of those. It just reached up and tried again, as deliberate and purposeful an action as he’d ever seen from it. It promptly fell down again, and banged its chin on the floor. This time, it did start to wail, the cry it made to let the world know it was in pain.

When it did that, it annoyed everyone up and down the corridor of the starship orbiting above Tosev 3. When the other males researching the Big Uglies got annoyed, they grew more likely to side against Ttomalss in his struggle to keep the hatchling and keep studying it rather than returning it to the female from whose body it had emerged.

“Be silent, foolish thing,” he hissed at it. The hatchling, of course, took no notice of him, but continued to make the air hideous with its howls. He knew what he had to do: he stooped and, being careful not to prick its thin, scaleless skin with his claws, held it against his torso.

After a little while, the alarming noise eased. The hatchling liked physical contact. Young of the Race, when newly out of the eggshell, fled from anything larger than they were, instinctively convinced it would catch and eat them. For the first part of their lives, Big Uglies were as immobile as some of the limestone-shelled creatures of Home’s small seas. If they got into trouble, the females who’d ejected them (and a hideous processthat was, too) had to save them and comfort them. With no such female available here, the job fell to Ttomalss.

The hatchling’s cheek rubbed against his chest. That touched off its sucking reflex. It turned its head and pressed its soft, wet mouth against his hide. Unlike a Tosevite female, he did not secrete nutritive fluid. Little by little, the hatchling was realizing that faster than it had.

“A good thing, too,” Ttomalss muttered, and tacked on an emphatic cough. The little Tosevite’s saliva did unpleasant things to his body paint. He swung down an eye turret so he could look at himself. Sure enough, he’d have to touch up a spot before he was properly presentable. He hadn’t intended to demonstrate experimentally that body paint was not toxic to Big Uglies, but he’d done it.

He turned the other eye turret down, studied the hatchling with both eyes. It looked up at him. Its own eyes were small and flat and dark. He wondered what went on behind them. The hatching had never seen itself, nor its own kind. Did it think it looked like him? No way to know, not until its verbal skills developed further. But its perceptions would have changed by then, too.

He watched the corners of its absurdly mobile mouth curl upwards. Among the Tosevites, that was an expression of amiability, so he had succeeded in making it forget about its hurt. Then he noticed the cloth he kept around its middle was wet. The Tosevite had no control over its bodily function. Interrogations suggested Big Uglies did not learn such control for two or three of their years-four to six of those by which Ttomalss reckoned. As he carried the hatchling over to a table to clean it off and set a new protective cloth in place, he found that a very depressing prospect.

“Youare a nuisance,” he said, adding another emphatic cough.

The hatchling squealed, then made a noise of its own that sounded like an emphatic cough. It had been imitating the sounds Ttomalss made more and more lately, not just emphatic and interrogative coughs but sometimes real words. Sometimes he thought it was making those noises with deliberate intent. Tosevites could and did talk, often to excess-no doubt about that.

When the hatchling was clean and dry and content, he set it back down on the floor. He tossed the soaked cloth into an airtight plastic bin to prevent its ammoniacal reek from spreading, then squirted cleansing foam on his hands. He found the Tosevites’ liquid wastes particularly disgusting; the Race excreted neat, tidy solids.

The hatchling got up on all fours and crawled toward the cabinets again. Its quadrupedal gait was much more confident than it had been at the beginning; for a couple of days, the only way it had been able to get anywhere was backwards. It tried pulling itself erect-and promptly fell down once more.

The communicator chimed for attention. Ttomalss hurried over to it. The screen lit, showing him the image of Ppevel, assistant administrator for the eastern region of the main continental mass. “I greet you, superior sir,” Ttomalss said, doing his best to hide nervousness.

“I greet you, Research Analyst,” Ppevel replied. “I trust the Tosevite hatchling whose fate is now under discussion with the Chinese faction known as the People’s Liberation Army remains healthy?”

“Yes, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. He turned one eye turret away from the screen for a moment, trying to spot the hatchling. He couldn’t. That worried him. The little creature was much more mobile than it had been, which meant it was much more able to get into mischief, too… He’d missed some of what Ppevel was saying. “I’m sorry, superior sir?”

Ppevel waggled his eye turrets ever so slightly, a sign of irritation. “I said, are you prepared to give up the hatchling on short notice?”

“Superior sir, of course I am, but I do protest that this abandonment is not only unnecessary but also destructive to a research program vital for the successful administration of this world after it is conquered and pacflied.” Ttomalss looked around for the hatchling again, and still didn’t see it. In a way, that was almost a relief. How could he turn it over to the Chinese if he didn’t know where it was?

“No definitive decision on this matter has yet been made. If that is your concern,” the administrator said. “If one is reached, however, rapid implementation will be mandatory.”

“At need, it shall be done, and promptly,” Ttomalss said, hoping he could keep relief from his voice. “I understand the maniacal stress the Big Uglies sometimes place on speedy performance.”

“If you do understand it, you have the advantage over most males of the Race,” Ppevel said. “The Tosevites have sped through millennia of technical development in a relative handful of years. I have heard endless speculation as to the root causes of this: the peculiar geography, the perverse and revolting sexual habits the Big Uglies practice-”

“This latter thesis has been central to my own research, superior sir,” Ttomalss answered. “The Tosevites certainly differ in their habits from ourselves, the Rabotevs, and the Hallessi. My hypothesis is that their constant sexual tensions, to use an imprecise simile, are like a fire continually simmering under them and stimulating them to ingenuity in other areas.”

“I have seen and heard more hypotheses than I care to remember,” Ppevel said. “When I find one with supporting evidence, I shall be pleased. Our analysts these days too often emulate the Tosevites not only in speed but also in imprecision.”

“Superior sir, I wish to retain the Tosevite hatching precisely so I can gather such evidence,” Ttomalss said. “Without studying the Big Uglies at all stages of their development, how can we hope to understand them?”

“A point to be considered,” Ppevel admitted, which made Ttomalss all but glow with hope; no administrator had given him so much reason for optimism in a long time. Ppevel continued, “We-”

Ttomalss wanted to hear more, but was distracted by a yowl-an alarmed yowl-from the Big Ugly hatchling. It also sounded oddly far away. “Excuse me, superior sir, but I believe I have encountered a difficulty,” the researcher said, and broke the connection.

He hurried along the corridors of his laboratory area, looking to see what the hatchling had managed to get itself into this time. He didn’t see it anywhere, which worried him-had it managed to crawl inside a cabinet? Was that why its squawks sounded distant?

Then it wailed again. Ttomalss went dashing out into the corridor-the hatchling had taken it into its head to go exploring.

Ttomalss almost collided with Tessrek, another researcher into the habits and thought patterns of the Big Uglies. In his arms, none too gently, Tessrek carried the wayward Tosevite hatchling. He thrust it at Ttomalss. “Here. This is yours. Kindly keep better track of it in future. It came wandering into my laboratory chamber, and, I assure you, it is not welcome there.”

As soon as Ttomalss took hold of it, the hatchling stopped wailing. It knew him, and knew he cared for it. He might as well have been its mother, a Tosevite term with implications far more powerful than its equivalent in the language of the Race.

Tessrek went on, “The sooner you give that thing back to the Big Uglies, the happier everyone else along this corridor will be. No more hideous noises, no more dreadful stenches-a return to peace and quiet and order.”

“The hatchling’s ultimate disposition has not yet been determined,” Ttomalss said. Tessrek had always wanted the little Tosevite gone. Its jaunt today would only give him fresh ammunition.

“Getting rid of it will improve my disposition,” he said, and let his mouth fall open in appreciation of his own joke. Then he grew serious once more: “If you must have it, keep it in your own area. I cannot answer for its safety if it invades my laboratory once more.”

“Like any hatchling, it is as yet ignorant of proper behavior,” Ttomalss said coldly. “If you ignore that obvious fact and deliberately mistreat it, I cannot answer foryour safety.” To make sure he’d made his point, he turned and carried the hatchling back into his own chamber. With one eye turret, he watched Tessrek staring after him.