Striking the Balance

IV

An ugly little tracked ammunition carrier cameput-putting up to the Panthers halted in the forest north of Lodz. The front hatch of the French-built machine-booty from the triumphant campaign of 1940-opened and a couple of men scrambled out, calling, “Here, lads! We’ve got presents for you.”

“About time,” Heinrich Jager said. “We were down to our last few rounds for each panzer.”

“That’s not where you want to be against the Lizards, either,” Gunther Grillparzer added. The gunner went on, “Their armor is so good, you can waste a lot of hits before you get one penetration.”

The ammunition haulers grinned. They wore one-piece coveralls like the panzer crewmen, but in the field-gray of self-propelled gun units rather than panzer black. One of them said, “New toys for you here-a notion we borrowed from the Lizards and put into production for ourselves.”

That was plenty to get the panzer men crowding around them. Jager took shameless advantage of his rank to push his way to the front. “What do you have?” he demanded.

“We’ll show you, sir,” the fellow who’d spoken before answered. He turned to his companion. “Show them, Fritz.”

Fritz went around to the back of the Lorraine hauler, undid the whitewashed canvas tilt on top of the storage bin at the rear of the machine. He reached in and, grunting a little at the weight, drew out the oddest-looking shell Jager had ever seen. “What the devil is it?” half a dozen men asked at once.

“You tell ’em, Joachim,” Fritz said. “I never can say it right”

“Armor-piercing discarding sabot,” Joachim said importantly. “See, the aluminum sabot fits your gun barrel, but as soon as it gets out, it falls off, and the round proper goes out with a lot more muzzle velocity than you can get any other way. It’s capped with wolfram, too, for extra penetration.”

“Is that so?” Jager pricked up his ears. “My brother is a panzer engineer, and he says wolfram is in short supply even for machine tools. Now they’re releasing it for antipanzer rounds?”

“I don’t know anything about machine tools,Herr Oberst,” Joachim said, and Fritz’s head solemnly bobbed up and down to signify he didn’t know anything, either. “But I do know these shells are supposed to give you half again as much penetration as you get with regular capped armor-piercing ammunition.”

“Are supposed to give you.” That was Karl Mehler, Jager’s loader. Loaders had an inherently pessimistic view of the world. When panzers were moving, they didn’t see much of it. They stayed down in the bottom of the turret, doing what the gunner and the commander ordered. If you were a loader, you never had a clue before a shell slammed into your machine. One second, you’d be fine; the next, butchered and burnt. Mehler went on, “How good are they really?”

Fritz and Joachim looked at each other. Fritz said, “They wouldn’t issue them to front-line units if they didn’t think they’d perform as advertised, would they?”

“You never can tell,” Mehler said darkly. “Some poor slobs have to be the guinea pigs, I suppose. We must have drawn the short straw this time.”

“That’s enough, Karl,” Jager said. The rebuke was mild, but plenty to make the loader shut up. Jager turned to the men with the munitions conveyor. “Do you have any of our conventional armor-piercing rounds to use in case these things aren’t as perfect as the people away from the firing line seem to think?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Joachim answered. “This is what came off the train, so this is what we have.”

The mutters that rose from the panzer crewmen weren’t quite rumbles of mutiny, but they weren’t rapturous sighs, either. Jager sighed, also not rapturously. “Well, we all still have a few rounds of the old issue, anyhow. We know what that will do-and what it won’t. Tell me one thing right now, you two: is this new round supposed to be able to pierce the frontal armor of a Lizard panzer?”

Regretfully, the ammunition resupply men shook their heads.“Herr Oberst, the next round that can do that will be the first,” Joachim said.

“I was afraid you were going to say as much,” Jager answered. “The way things are now, it costs us anywhere between six and ten panzers, on average, for every Lizard machine we manage to kill-that’s just panzer against panzer, mind you. It would be even worse if we didn’t have better crews than they do-but we’ve lost so many veterans that our edge there is going. The thing that would help us most is a gun that would let us meet them face-to-face.”

“The thing that would help us most is another one of those bombs that they set off outside of Breslau and Rome,” Gunther Grillparzer put in. “And I know just where to set it, too.”

“Where’s that?” Jager asked, curious to see what his gunner used for a sense of strategy.

“Lodz,” Grillparzer answered promptly. “Right in the middle of town. Blast all the Lizards and all the kikes there to kingdom come, just like that.” He was wearing gloves, so instead of snapping his fingers he spat in the snow.

“Wouldn’t mind getting rid of the Lizards,” Jager agreed. “The Jews-” He shrugged. “Anielewicz said he’d keep the Lizards from mounting a counterattack out of the city, and he’s done it. He deserves the credit for it, too. If you ask me.”

“Yes, sir.” The gunner’s round, fleshy face went sullen, not that Grillparzer didn’t look a little sullen most of the time. He knew better than to argue with his regimental commander, but he wasn’t about to think warm, kind thoughts about any Jews, either.

Jager glanced around the rest of the panzer crewmen. Nobody disagreed with him, not out loud, but nobody sprang up to say anything nice about the Jews in the Lodz ghetto. That worried Jager. He wasn’t massively enamored of Jews himself, but he’d been horrflied when he learned what German forces had done to them in the areas theReich had conquered. He hadn’t wanted to learn about such things, but he’d had his nose rubbed in them, and he was not the sort of man who could pretend he was blind when be wasn’t. A lot of German officers, he’d found to his dismay, had no trouble at all managing that.

Right this second, though, he didn’t have to think about it “Let’s share out what they’ve brought us,” he told his men. “If all you’ve got is a dead pig, you eat pork chops.”

“This stuff is liable to turn us all into dead pigs,” Karl Mehler muttered under his breath, but that didn’t keep him from taking his fair share of the newfangled rounds. He stowed them in the Panther’s ammunition bins. “It doesn’t look right,” he grumbled when he scrambled back out of the panzer. “It looks funny. We’ve never had anything like it before.”

“Intelligence says one of the reasons we drive the Lizards crazy is that we keep coming up with new things,” Jager said. “They don’t change, or don’t change much. Do you want to be like them?”

“Well, no, sir, but I don’t want to change for the worse, either, and not for the hell of it,” Mehler said. “These things look like a sausage sticking out of a bun, like some engineer is having a joke with us.”

“They don’t pay off on looks,” Jager answered. “If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, then somebody’s head rolls. First, though, we have to find out.”

“If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, our heads roll,” Karl Mehler said. “Maybe somebody else’s head rolls afterwards, but we won’t get to watch that.”

Since Mehler was right, the only thing Jager could do was glare at him. With a shrug, the loader climbed back into the turret. A moment later, Gunther Grillparzer followed him. Jager climbed in, too, and flipped up the lid to the cupola so he could stand up and see what he was doing. The driver, Johannes Drucker, and the hull gunner, Bernhard Steinfeldt, took their positions at the front of the Panther’s fighting compartment.

The big Maybach petrol engine started up. Steam and stinking exhaust roared from the tailpipe. All through the clearing, Panthers, Tigers, and Panzer IVs were coming to life. Jager really thought of it that way: they seemed like so many dinosaurs exhaling on a cold winter’s morning.

Drucker rocked the Panther back and forth, going from low gear to reverse and back, to break up the ice that accumulated overnight between the panzer’s interleaved road wheels. That freeze-up problem was the only drawback to the suspension; it gave a smooth ride over rugged terrain. But sometimes even rocking the panzer wouldn’t free up the road wheels. Then you had to light a fire to melt the ice before you could get going. If the enemy attacked you instead of the other way around, that could prove hazardous to your life expectancy.

But today, the Germans were hunters, not hunted-at least for the moment. The panzers rolled out of the clearing. With them came a few self-propelled guns and a couple of three-quarter-tracked carriers full of infantrymen. Some of the foot soldiers carried hand-held antipanzer rockets-another idea stolen from the Lizards. Jager thought about remarking on that to his crewmen, but decided not to bother. They were doing fine as things stood.

Against the Poles, against the French, against the Russians, theWehrmacht panzers had charged out ahead of the infantry, cutting great gaps in the forces of the enemy. Do that against the Lizards and your head would roll, sure as sure. The only way you had any hope of shifting them was with a combined-arms operation-and even then, you’d better outnumber them.

Jager would have been just as well content to find no trace of the aliens. He knew how many times he’d been lucky. Christ crucflied, he’d killed a Lizard panzer with the 50mm gun of a Panzer III back in the days when the Lizards had just come to Earth, and if that wasn’t luck, he didn’t know what was. And here he was, almost two years later, still alive and still unmaimed. Not many who’d seen as much action could say the same.

Up ahead, the trees thinned out. He got on the all-vehicles wireless circuit. “We’ll halt at the forest’s edge to reconnoiter.” Charge out into open country and you deserved to get slaughtered.

Foot soldiers in winter white got down from their carriers and trotted ghostlike out across the snow-covered fields. A couple of them had rocket launchers (also whitewashed) on their backs; the rest carried MP-40 submachine guns. Jager had heard Hugo Schmeisser wasn’t involved with the design of that weapon, but it got called a Schmeisser just the same.

From behind a barn, a machine gun started chattering, kicking up clumps of snow. TheWehrmacht men out in the open dove for whatever cover they could find. Two panzers fired high-explosive shells at the barn to flush out the Lizards in back of it. Not ten seconds later, one of those panzers brewed up, flame and smoke spurting from every hatch and out the top of the cupola.

Jager’s mouth went dry. “That’s a Lizard panzer there,” he shouted into the microphone to his wireless set. It was stating the obvious-overstating the obvious-but it had to be said.

“Armor-piercing,” Gunther Grillparzer said to Karl Mehler. “Give me one of the new rounds-we’ll see what they can do.”

“If they can do anything,” Mehler said gloomily, but he slammed one of the aluminum-sabot rounds into the breach of the Panther’s long 75mm cannon. With a clang, Grillparzer closed it.

“Range?” Jager asked.

“Long, sir,” the gunner answered. “Better than fifteen hundred meters.”

Jager grunted. He didn’t see any other good hiding places for panzers ahead, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Even against the one, sending his own panzers out to flank it was more likely to get them picked off one at a time than anything else. The Lizard panzer’s turret had a powered traverse, about which Jager was fearfully jealous.

He couldn’t just sit here, either. Even if he’d bumped into the last of the Lizard rear guard, that panzer could call down artillery on his head or maybe even summon a helicopter or two. With their rockets, Lizard helicopters made nasty antipanzer weapons, and they chewed up infantry like teething biscuits.

The barn started to burn, the sole result of the high-explosive shells the Germans had thrown at it That was a break; the smoke would screen his panzers from the Lizards’ eyes, at least until they shifted position. And, set alongside his other options, flanking out the Lizard panzer didn’t look so bad after all.

He was off to the right of the barn. He ordered out a Tiger from off to the left and a Panzer IV from right out in front That done, he spoke to the driver of his own machine: “Come on, Hans-time to earn our pay. Forward!”

“Jawoh!”Johannes Drucker sped out into the open country. The Panzer IV fired at the Lizard panzer. Its gun wasn’t much worse than the Panther’s, but at long range its odds of doing anything useful were slim indeed.

A shell knocked down a tree behind the Panzer IV. When the Lizards missed, it was commonly because they couldn’t see well. Their panzer did move out into the open. The Tiger fired at it. The 88 scored a clean hit, but the Lizard panzer kept moving. It was unfair, how tough they were.

The cannon in that panzer spoke. The Tiger’s turret flew off, shells inside exploding as it crashed to the ground five or six meters away from the stricken panzer. The chassis burned merrily, too. All five crewmen had to be dead. An infantryman fired an antipanzer rocket at the Lizard machine. He hit it right in the glacis plate, but the Lizard panzer’s frontal armor-from what Jager had heard, it wasn’t just steel-defeated the shaped-charge warhead. The machine gun kept searching for Germans on foot.

“Range?” Jager said again.

“Down under five hundred meters, sir,” Gunther Grillparzer answered.

“Driver halt,” Jager said, and then, “Fire!”

Because he was still standing up in the cupola rather than sheltered in the turret, the noise was like the end of the world. A tongue of flame spurted from the cannon’s muzzle.

Flame and smoke spurted from the Lizard panzer, too. “Hit!” everybody in Jager’s panzer screamed together. Jager listened to the breech clang shut on another round. The long 75mm gun bellowed again-another hit. Hatches popped open in the Lizard machine. The Panther’s hull-mounted machine gun started barking in short, precise bursts. In moments, the three Lizards who’d bailed out lay motionless on the ground, their all too humanly red blood staining the snow. Their panzer kept on burning.

Very seriously, Gunther Grillparzer said, “Sir, this is good ammunition. We can get good use from it.”

“Even if it looks funny?” Jager teased.

“Even so.”

The west wind brought the yellow dust of the Gobi with it. The dust left a thin film over everything; you could taste it if you smacked your lips a couple of times. Nieh Ho-T’ing was used to it. It came with life in and around Peking.

Major Mon rubbed at his eyes. The dust bothered him. In fair Chinese, he asked Nieh, “So-what do you want from me now? More timers? I hear you did well with the last batch.”

“No, not this time,” Nieh answered. His first thought was that the Japanese major was a fool if he thought a trick would work against the Lizards twice running. But the eastern devil could not have been a fool, not if he’d kept his force in being this long even with the Lizards, the People’s Liberation Army, the troops loyal to the Kuomintang reactionary clique, and the Chinese peasantry all arrayed against him.

What then? Nieh’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a grin that showed scant amusement. The likeliest explanation was that Major Mori hoped he’d try the same trick twice in a row-and get smashed as a result. In Mori’s boots, Nieh would have hoped for something like that.

“Well, whatare you after now?” Mori demanded. Although the troops he led were hardly more than a guerrilla band, he kept all the arrogance the Japanese had shown when they held the whole of northeastern China and coastal enclaves elsewhere-and could push forward as they wished, even if they couldn’t always hold the gains they’d made.

“Artillery shells would be useful about now,” Nieh said musingly.

“Maybe so, but you won’t get them from us,” Mon said. “We still have some 75mm guns in commission, though I won’t tell you where.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing knew where the Japanese were concealing those cannon. Going after them struck him as being more trouble than it was worth, since they were far more likely to be turned on the Lizards than on his own men. He said, “Soldiers can be coolies and haul 75mm guns from one place to another. As you say, they are also easy to hide. But the Japanese Army used to have heavier artillery, too. The scaly devils destroyed those big guns, or else you’ve had to abandon them. But you still should have some of the ammunition left. Do you?”

Mori studied him for a while before answering. The eastern devil was somewhere not far from forty, perhaps a couple of years older than Nieh. His skin was slightly darker, his features slightly sharper, than a Chinese was likely to have. That didn’t bother Nieh nearly so much as Mori’s automatic assumption of his own superiority.Barbarian, Nieh thought scornfully, secure in his knowledge that China was the one true home of culture and civilization. But even a barbarian could be useful.

“What if we do?” Mori said. “If you want one of those shells, what will you give us for it?”

Capitalist,Nieh thought.Imperialist. If all you care about is profit, you don’t deserve even that. Aloud, though, he answered, “I can give you the names of two men you think reliable who are in fact Kuomintang spies.”

Mori smiled at him. It was not a pleasant smile. “Just the other day, the Kuomintang offered to sell me the names of three Communists.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Nieh said. “We have been known to give the names of Japanese sympathizers to the Kuomintang.”

“Miserable war,” Mori said. Just for a moment, the two men understood each other completely. Then Mori asked. “And when you dicker with the little devils, whom do you sell to them?”

“Why, the Kuomintang, of course,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. “When the war with you and the scaly devils is over, the reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries will still be here. We shall deal with them. They think they will deal with us, but the historical dialectic shows they are mistaken.”

“You are mistaken if you think Japanese cannot enforce on China a government friendly to its wishes-leaving the little scaly devils out of the picture, of course,” Major Mori said.

“Whenever your troops and ours meet in battle, yours always come off second best.”

“And what has that got to do with the price of rice?” Nieh asked in honest bewilderment. “Eventually you will get sick of winning expensive battles and being nibbled to death inside areas you think you control, and then you will go away and leave China alone. The only reason you win now is that you started using the machines of the foreign devils”-by which he meant Europeans-“before we did. We will have our own factories one day, and then-”

Mori threw back his head and laughed, a deliberate effort to be insulting.Go ahead, Nieh thought.Laugh now. One fine day the revolution will cross the sea to your islands, too. Japan had a large urban proletariat, exploited workers with nothing to offer but their labor, as interchangeable to a big capitalist as so many cogs and gears. They would be dry tinder for the flame of class warfare. But not yet-the Lizards remained to be beaten first.

Nieh said, “Are we agreed on the price of one of these shells?”

“Not yet,” the Japanese answered. “Information is useful, yes, but we need food, too. Send us rice, send us noodles, send usshoyu, send us pork or chicken. Do this and we will give you as many 150mm shells as you can use, whatever you plan to do with them.”

They started dickering about how much food would buy Nieh how many shells, and when and how to arrange deliveries. As he had before, Nieh kept the contempt he felt from showing. On the Long March, he’d dickered with warlords’ officers and bandit chieftains over things like this. In China now, though, what survived of the once-mighty Imperial Japanese Army was reduced to bandit status; the Japanese couldn’t do much more than prey on the countryside, and they didn’t even do that well, not if they were trading munitions for food.

Nieh resolved not to tell Liu Han any details about how he was negotiating with the Japanese. Her hatred for them was personal, as it was for the little devils. Nieh hated the Japanese and the scaly devils, too, with an ideological purity his woman could never hope to match. But she had imagination, and came up with ways to hurt the enemies of the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist Party that he would never have dreamt of. Success, especially among those who did not form large-scale policy, could make up for a lack of ideological purity-for a while, anyhow.

Major Mon was not the best bargainer Nieh had ever faced. Two Chinese out of three could have got more supplies from him than Mori did. He gave a mental shrug. Well, that was Mori’s fault, for being a barbarous eastern devil. The Japanese made good soldiers, but not much else.

As far as he was concerned, the same went for the little scaly devils. They could conquer, but seemed to have no idea how to hold down a rebellious land once under their control. They didn’t even use the murder and terror the Japanese had taken for granted. As far as Nieh could tell, all they did was reward collaborators, and that was not enough.

“Excellent!” Major Mori exclaimed when the haggling was over. He slapped his belly. “We will eat well for a time.” The military tunic he wore hung on him like a tent. He might once have been a heavyset man. No more.

“And we will have a present for the little devils one day before too long,” Nieh replied. Even if he could do what he hoped with the 150mm shells, he aimed to try to blame it on the Kuomintang. Liu Han would not approve of that; she’d want the Japanese to receive the scaly devils’ wrath. But, as Nieh had said, the Kuomintang was more dangerous in the long run.

So long as the little scaly devils did not blame the People’s Liberation Army for the attacks, talks with them could go on unimpeded. Those talks had been building in size and importance for some time now; they needed to continue. Something of greater substance might come from them than the stalled negotiations about Liu Han’s baby. Nieh hoped so, at any rate.

He sighed. If he’d had his choice, the People’s Liberation Army would have driven the Japanese and the scaly devils out of China altogether. He didn’t have his choice, though. If he’d ever needed reminding of that, the Long March would have given it to him. You did what you had to do. After that. If you were lucky, you got the chance to do what you wanted to do.

He bowed to Major Mori. The major returned the compliment. “Miserable war,” Nieh said again. Mori nodded.But the workers and peasants will win it, here in China and all over the world, Nieh thought. He glanced at the Japanese officer. Maybe Mori was thinking victorious thoughts, too. Well. If he was, he was wrong. Nieh had the dialectic to prove it.

Mordechai Anielewicz stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of the building on Lutomierska Street. “I can deal with my enemies,” he said. “The Nazis and Lizards are not a problem, not like that. My friends, now-” He rolled his eyes in theatrical despair.“Vay iz mir!”

Bertha Fleishman laughed. She was a year or two older then Mordechai, and normally so colorless that the Jewish resistance of Lodz often used her to pick up information: you had trouble noticing she was there. But her laugh stood out. She had a good laugh, one that invited everybody around to share the joke.

Now she said, “Actually, we’ve done pretty well, all things considered. The Lizards haven’t been able to get much through Lodz to throw at the Nazis.” She paused. “Of course, not everyone would say this is a good thing.”

“I know.” Anielewicz grimaced. “I don’t say it’s a good thing myself. This is even worse than being caught between the Nazis and the Russians. Whoever wins,we lose.”

“The Germans are living up to their promise not to attack Lodz so long as we keep the Lizards from mounting any moves from here,” Bertha said. “They haven’t thrown any of their rocket bombs at us lately, either.”

“For which God be thanked,” Anielewicz said. Before the war, he’d been a secular man. That hadn’t mattered to the Nazis, who’d dumped him into the Warsaw ghetto all the same. What he’d seen there, what he’d seen since, had left him convinced he couldn’t live without God after all. What would have been ironic in 1938 came out sincere today.

“We’re useful to them at the moment.” Bertha Fleishman’s mouth turned down. “Even that’s progress. Before, we were working in their factories, making all kinds of things for them, and they slaughtered us anyhow.”

“I know.” Mordechai kicked at the paving stones. “I wonder if they tried out their poison gas on Jews before they started using it against the Lizards.” He didn’t want to think about that. If he let himself brood on it, he’d wonder why he was helping Hitler, Himmler, and their henchmen against the Lizards. Then he’d take a look at Bunim and the other Lizard officials in Lodz and be sure he couldn’t help them beat the Germans and, in so doing, subject all of mankind.

“It isn’t fair,” Bertha said. “Has anyone since the world began ever been in such a predicament?”

“We’re the Chosen People,” Anielewicz answered with a shrug. “If you think I’d be just as glad if we hadn’t been chosen for this, though, you’re right.”

“Speaking of which, aren’t the Lizards supposed to be moving a convoy of lorries through town in about half an hour?” Bertha asked. Since she was the one who’d come up with that bit of intelligence, the question was rhetorical. She smiled. “Shall we go watch the fun?”

The convoy was supposed to head north up Franciszkanska Street, to bring reinforcements to the Lizards who were trying to cut the base off one of the German prongs advancing to either side of Lodz. The Lizards had not had much luck with their counter-movements. What they would do when they figured out why would be interesting-and likely unpleasant.

Jews and Poles stood on the corner of Inflancka and Franciszkanska and in the streets themselves, chatting, chaffering, and carrying on their business as they would have on any other day. It was a scene that might almost have come from the time before the war, save that so many of the men-and a few of the women-had rifles on their backs or in their hands. Cheating, these days, was liable to meet with swift and summary punishment.

About fifteen minutes before the convoy was due to come through, human policemen, some Jews, some Poles, began trying to clear the street. Anielewicz watched them-especially the Jews-with undisguised loathing. The Jewish police-thugs would have been a better word for them-owed allegiance to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had been Eldest of the Jews when the Lodz ghetto was in Nazi hands and still ran it for the Lizards. They still wore the long coats, shiny-brimmed caps, and red-white-and-black rank armbands the Germans had given them, too. Maybe it made them feel important. It made everyone else despise them.

They didn’t have much luck with their street clearing, either. They were armed with nothing better than truncheons. That had been intimidating back in the days when the Nazis held Lodz. It did not do much, though, to shift men with rifles. Anielewicz knew the Jewish police had been screaming at the Lizards for guns of their own. What had been in place before the Lizards arrived, though, seemed to be like the Torah to them: not to be changed or interfered with by mere mortals. The police remained without firearms.

An old Jewish man driving a horse-drawn wagon that carried tables stacked four and five high tried to cross Franciszkanska on Inflancka just as a Polish lorry-driver rumbled down Franciszkanska with a load of empty tin milk cans. The Pole tried to slow down, but seemed to be having trouble with his brakes. His lorry crashed into the old Jew’s wagon.

The racket that immediately followed the collision was louder than the crash itself. The rear gate of the lorry hadn’t been well secured, so milk cans clattered down onto the pavement and started rolling away. As best Mordechai could see, the load of tables hadn’t been secured at all. They landed in the street, too. Some of them broke, some didn’t.

By what looked like a miracle, the wagon driver hadn’t been hurt. Surprisingly agile for an old man, he jumped down from his beast and ran up to the driver’s side of the lorry, screaming abuse in Yiddish.

“Shut up, you damned kike!” the Pole answered in his own language. “Stinking old Christ-killer, you’ve got your nerve, yelling at me.”

“I’d yell at your father, except even your mother doesn’t know who he is,” the Jew retorted.

The Polish lorry-driver jumped out of the cab and grabbed the Jew. In a moment, they were wrestling on the ground. Jews and Poles both ran toward the altercation. Here and there, some of them bumped into one another and started fresh trouble.

Policemen-Jews and Poles-blew furiously on whistles and waded into the crowd, trying to clear it. Some of them got drawn into fistfights, too. Mordechai Anielewicz and Bertha Fleishman watched the unfolding chaos with eyebrows raised high.

Into the chaos came the Lizards’ motor convoy. Some of their lorries were of their own manufacture, others human products they’d appropriated. A Lizard lorry horn made a noise that reminded Mordechai of what you’d get if you dropped a bucket of water onto a red-hot iron plate. When you added in the klaxons from the Opels and other human-made lorries, the din became truly dreadful.

No one in the street paid the least attention to it. As far as the Jews and Poles were concerned, the impatient Lizards might have been back on the far side of the moon, or wherever it was they came from. “What a pity,” Mordechai said. “It looks like the Lizards are going to be delayed.”

“That’s terrible,” Bertha said in the same solemn tones he’d used. Without warning, both of them started to laugh. In a low voice, Bertha went on, “This worked out even better than we thought it would.”

“So it did,” Anielewicz agreed. “Yitzkhak and Boleslaw both deserve those statues the Americans give their best cinema actors every year.”

Bertha Fleishman’s brown eyes twinkled. “No, they couldn’t have played that much better if they’d rehearsed it for years, could they? The rest of our people-and also theArmija Krajowamen,” she admitted, “are doing nicely, too.”

“Good thing most of the people at this corner really do belong to us or the Polish Home Army,” Mordechai said. “Otherwise we’d have a real riot on our hands, not a scripted one.”

“I am glad no one’s decided to pull a rifle off his back and use it,” Bertha said. “Not everybody here knows we’re playing a game.”

“That’s true,” Anielewicz said. “The police don’t, and the Lizard lorry drivers don’t, either.” He pointed back to the rear of the long, stalled column of motor vehicles. “Oh, look. Some of them look like they’re trying to turn around and use a different route to get out of town.”

Bertha shaded her eyes so she could see better. “So they are. But they seem to be having some trouble, too. I wonder who started an argument way down there. Whoever it was, he certainly managed to pull a lot of people into the street in a hurry.”

“He certainly did.” Mordechai grinned at her. She was grinning back. Maybe she wasn’t beautiful, but he certainly liked the way she looked when she was happy like this. “I don’t think those poor Lizard lorries will be able to go anywhere for quite a while.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.” Bertha sighed theatrically. “Isn’t it a pity?” She and Mordechai laughed again.

Lizards weren’t what you’d call big to begin with. Even as Lizards went, Straha was on the shortish side; a husky nine-year-old would have overtopped him. With Lizards as with people, though, size had little to do with force of personality. Whenever Sam Yeager got to talking with the former shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower, he needed only a couple of minutes to forget that Straha was hardly more than half his size.

“By not falling at once, you Big Uglies presented Atvar the brain-addled fleetlord with a problem he will not be able to solve,” Straha declared. “At the time, I urged him to strike a series of blows against you so strong that you would have no choice but to yield to the Race. Did he heed me? He did not!” Straha’s emphatic cough was a masterpiece of rudeness.

“Why didn’t he?” Yeager asked. “I’ve always wondered about that. The Race never seemed to want to turn up the pressure more than one notch at a time. That let us-how would I say it? — I guessadapt is the word I want.”

“Truth,” Straha said, with another emphatic cough. “One thing we did not realize until far later than we should have was how adaptable you Tosevites are. Fool that he is, Atvar always intended to come as close as he could to the campaign we would have fought had you been the preindustrial savages we expected you to be. Even his eye turrets are not entirely locked in place, and he did conclude a greater effort would be called for, but he always did his best to keep the increases to a minimum, so as to have the least possible distortion in the plan with which we came to Tosev 3.”

“Most of you Lizards are like that, aren’t you?” Sam used mankind’s disparaging name for the Race as casually as Straha used the Race’s handle for humanity. “You don’t much care for change, do you?”

“Of course not,” Straha said-and, for a Lizard, he was a radical. “If you are in a good situation where you are, why. If you have any sense, would you want to alter it? It would be only too likely to get worse. Change must be most carefully controlled, or it can devastate an entire society.”

Sam grinned at him. “How do you account for us, then?”

“Our scholars will spend thousands of years attempting to account for you,” Straha answered. “It could be that, had we not arrived, you would have destroyed yourselves in relatively short order. You were, after all, already working to develop your own atomic weapons, and with those you would have had no trouble rendering this planet uninhabitable. Almost a pity you failed to do so.”

“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said. “We really love you Lizards a whole bunch, too.” He added an emphatic cough to that, even though he wasn’t sure whether the Race used them for sardonic effect. Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement, so maybe they did-or maybe the ex-shiplord was laughing at the way Sam mangled his language.

Straha said, “Like most males of the Race, Atvar is a minimalist.You Big Uglies, now, you are maximalists. In the long term, as I pointed out, this will probably prove disastrous for your species. I cannot imagine you Tosevites building an empire stable for a hundred thousand years. Can you?”

“Nope,” Sam admitted. The years Straha used were only about half as long as their earthly equivalents, but still-Fifty thousand years ago, people had been living in caves and worrying about mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. Yeager couldn’t begin to imagine what things would be like in another fifty years, let alone fifty thousand.

“In the short term, though, your penchant for change without warning presents us with stresses our kind has never before faced,” Straha said. “By the standards of the Race, I am a maximalist-thus I would have been well suited to lead us against your kind.” By human standards, Straha was more mossbound than a Southern Democrat with forty-five years’ seniority, but Yeager didn’t see any good way to tell him so. The Lizard went on, “I believe in taking action, not waiting until it is forced upon me, as Atvar and his clique do. When the Soviets’ nuclear bomb showed us how disastrously we’d misjudged your kind, I tried to have Atvar the fool ousted and someone more suitable, such as myself, raised to overall command. And when that failed, I took the direct action of fleeing to you Tosevites rather than waiting for Atvar to have his revenge upon me.”

“Truth,” Yeager said, and it was truth-maybe Straha really was a fireball by Lizard standards. “There’s more ‘direct action’ from you people these days, isn’t there? What are the mutineers in Siberia doing, anyhow?”

“Your radio intercepts indicate they have surrendered to the Russkis,” Straha answered. “If they are treated well, that will be a signal for other disaffected units-and there must be many-to realize they, too, can make peace with Tosevites.”

“That would be nice,” Sam said. “When will the fleetlord realize he needs to make peace with us, that he can’t conquer the whole planet, the way the Race thought it would when you set out from Home?”

Had Straha been a cat, he would have bristled at that question. Yes, he despised Atvar. Yes, he’d defected to the Americans. Somewhere down in his heart of hearts, though, he was still loyal to the Emperor back on Tau Ceti’s second planet; the idea that a scheme the Emperor had endorsed might fail gave him the galloping collywobbles.

But the shiplord countered gamely, asking in return, “When will you Big Uglies realize that you cannot exterminate us or drive us off your miserable, chilly planet?”

Now Yeager grunted in turn. When the U.S.A. had been fighting the Nazis and the Japs, everybody had figured the war would go on till the bad guys got smashed flat. That was the way wars were supposed to work, wasn’t it? Somebody won, and he took stuff away from the guys who had lost. If the Lizards came down and took part of Earth away from humanity, didn’t that mean they’d won?

When Sam said that out loud, Straha waggled both eye turrets at him, a sign of astonishment. “Truly you Big Uglies are creatures of overweening pride,” the shiplord exclaimed. “No plan of the Race has ever failed to the extent of our design for the conquest of Tosev 3 and its incorporation into the Empire. If we fail to acquire the whole of the planet. If we leave Big Ugly empires and not-empires intact and independent upon it, we suffer a humiliation whose like we have never known before.”

“Is that so?” Yeager said. “Well. If we think letting you have anything is a mistake, and if you think letting us keep anything is an even bigger mistake, how are Lizards and people ever going to get together and settle things one way or the other? Sounds to me like we’re stuck.”

“We might not be, were it not for Atvar’s stubbornness,” Straha said. “As I told you before, the only way he will consent to anything less than complete victory is to become convinced it is impossible.”

“If he hasn’t gotten that idea by now-” But Sam paused and shook his head. You had to remember the Lizards’ point of view. What looked like disastrous defeats from up close might seem only bumps in the road if considered in a thousand-year context. Men prepared for the next battle, the Lizards for the next millennium.

Straha said, “When he does get that idea-if ever he does-he will do one of two things, I think. He may fly to make peace along the lines you and I have been discussing. Or he may try to use whatever nuclear arsenal the Race has left to force you Tosevites into submission. This is what I would have done; that I proposed it may make it less likely now.”

“Good,” Yeager said sincerely. He’d been away from the American nuclear-bomb program for a while now, but he knew the infernal devices didn’t roll off the assembly line like so many De Sotos. “The other thing holding him back is your colonization fleet, isn’t it?”

“Truth,” Straha replied at once. “This consideration has inhibited our actions in the past, and continues to do so. Atvar may decide, however, that making peace with you will leave the Race less of the habitable surface of Tosev 3 than he could hope to obtain by damaging large portions of the planet on our behalf.”

“It wouldn’t keep us from fighting back, you know,” Sam said, and hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark.

Evidently Straha didn’t think he was, because the shiplord said, “We are painfully aware of this. It is one of the factors that has to this point deterred us from that course. More important, though, is our desire not to damage the planet for our colonists, as you have noted.”

“Mm-hmm,” Sam said, tasting the irony of Earth’s safety riding more on the Lizards’ concern for their own kind than on any worries about human beings. “We’ve got what, something like eighteen years, before the rest of your people get here?”

“No, twice that,” Straha answered. Then he made a noise like a bubbling teakettle. “My apologies-if you are using Tosevite years, you are correct.”

“Yeah, I was-I’m a Tosevite, after all,” Yeager said with a wry grin. “What are your colonists going to think if they come to a world that isn’t completely in your hands, the way they thought it would be when they set out from Home?”

“The starship crews will be aware of changed conditions when they intercept our signals beamed back toward Home,” Straha said. “No doubt this will fill them with consternation and confusion. Remember, we of the conquest fleet have had some time now to try to accommodate ourselves to the unanticipated conditions on Tosev 3. These will be new for them, and the Race does not adapt well. In any case, there will be little they can do. The colonization fleet is not armed; the assumption was that we of the conquest fleet would have this world all nicely pacflied before the colonists arrived. And, of course, the colonists themselves are in cold sleep and will remain ignorant of the true situation until they are revived upon the fleet’s arrival.”

“They’ll get quite a surprise, won’t they?” Sam said, chuckling.

“How many of them are there, anyhow?”

“I do not know, not in precise figures,” Straha replied. “My responsibility, after all, was with the conquest fleet. But if our practice in colonizing the worlds of the Rabotevs and Hallessi was followed back on Home-as it almost certainly would have been, given our fondness for precedent-then we are sending here something between eighty and one hundred million males and females… Those coughs mean nothing in my language, Samyeager.” He pronounced Yeager’s name as if it were one word. “Have they some signflication in yours?”

“I’m sorry, Shiplord,” Sam said when he could speak coherently again. “Must have swallowed wrong, or something.”Eighty or a hundred millioncolonists? “The Race doesn’t do things by halves, does it?”

“Of course not,” Straha said.

“One mortflication after another,” Atvar said in deep discontent. From where he stood, the situation down on the surface of Tosev 3 looked gloomy. “Almost better we should have expended a nuclear device on those mutineers than let them go over to the SSSR.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. “The loss of the armaments is bad. Before long, the Big Uglies will copy whatever features they can figure out how to steal. That has happened before, and is happening again: we have recent reports that the Deutsche, for instance, are beginning to deploy armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition against our landcruisers.”

“I have seen these reports,” the fleetlord agreed. “They do not inspire me with delight.”

“Nor me,” Kirel answered. “Moreover, the loss of the territory formerly controlled by the base whose garrison mutinied has given us new problems. Though weather conditions in the area remain appallingly bad, we have evidence that the SSSR is attempting to reestablish its east-west rail link.”

“How can they do that?” Atvar said. “Surely even Big Uglies would freeze if forced to work in such circumstances.”

“From what we have seen in the SSSR, Exalted Fleetlord, it would appear hardly more concerned about the well-being of its laborers than is Deutschland,” Kirel said mournfully. “Getting the task done counts for more than the number of lives expended in the process.”

“Truth,” Atvar said, and then added, “Madness,” and an emphatic cough. “The Deutsche sometimes appear to put expending lives above extracting labor. What was the name of that place where they devoted so much ingenuity to slaughter? Treblinka, that was it.” The Race had never imagined a center wholly devoted to exterminating intelligent beings. Atvar would have been as glad never to have been exposed to some of the things he’d learned on Tosev 3.

He waited for Kirel to mention the most important reason why the fall of the Siberian base was a disaster. Kirel didn’t mention it. All too likely, Kirel hadn’t thought of it. He was a good shiplord, none better, when someone told him what to do. Even for a male of the Race, though, he lacked imagination.

Atvar said, “We now have to deal with the problem of propaganda broadcasts from the mutineers. By all they say, they are cheerful, well fed, well treated, with plenty of that pernicious herb, ginger, for amusement. Transmissions such as these are liable to touch off not only further mutinies but also desertions by individual males who cannot find partners with whom to conspire.”

“What you say is likely to be correct,” Kirel agreed. “It is to be hoped that increased vigilance on the part of officers will help to allay the problem.”

“It is to be hoped, indeed,” Atvar said with heavy sarcasm. “It is also to be hoped that we shall be able to keep from losing too much ground in this northern-hemisphere winter, and that guerrilla raids against our positions will ease. In some places-much of Italia springs to mind-we are unable to administer or control territory allegedly under our jurisdiction.”

“We need more cooperation from the Tosevite authorities who yielded to us,” Kirel said. “This is true all over the planet, and especially so in Italia, where our forces might as well be at war again.”

“Most of the Italian authorities, such as they were, went up with the atomic bomb that destroyed Roma,” Atvar answered. “Too many of the ones who are left still favor their overthrown not-emperor, that Mussolini. How I wish the Deutsch raider, that Skorzeny, hadn’t succeeded in stealing him and spiriting him off into Deutschland. His radio broadcasts, along with those of our former ally Russie and the traitor Straha, have proved most damaging of all counterpropaganda efforts against us.”

“That Skorzeny has been a pin driven under our scales throughout the campaign of conquest,” Kirel said. “He is unpredictable even for a Tosevite, and deadly as well.”

“I wish I could dispute it, but it is truth,” the fleetlord said sadly. “In addition to all the other harm he has inflicted on our cause, he cost me Drefsab, the one Intelligence officer we had who was both devious and energetic enough to match the Big Uglies at their own primary traits.”

“Wherefore now, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked.

“We carry on as best we can,” Atvar answered, a response that did not satisfy him and plainly did not satisfy Kirel. Trying to amplify it, he went on, “One thing we must do is increase security around our starships. If the Big Uglies can smuggle nuclear weapons within range of them, rather than of cities, they potentially have the ability to hurt us even worse than they have already.”

“I shall draft an order seeking to forestall this contingency,” Kirel said. “I agree; it is a serious menace. I shall also draft procedures whose thorough implementation will make the order effective.”

“Good,” Atvar said. “Be most detailed. Allow no conceivable loopholes through which a careless male might produce disaster.” All that was standard advice from one male of the Race to another. After a moment, though, the fleetlord added in thoughtful tones, “Before promulgating the order and procedures, consult with males who have had experience down on the surface of Tosev 3. They may possibly make your proposed procedures more leak-proof against the ingenious machinations of the Big Uglies.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel promised. “May I respectfully suggest that none of us up here in orbit has enough firsthand experience with conditions down on the surface of Tosev 3?”

“There is some truth in what you say,” Atvar admitted. “Perhaps we should spend more time on the planet itself-in a reasonably secure area, preferably one with a reasonably salubrious climate.” He called up a flat map of the surface of Tosev 3 on a computer screen. One set of color overlays gave a security evaluation, with categories ranging from unconquered to pacflied (though depressingly little of the planet showed that placid pink tone). Another gave climatological data. He instructed the computer to show him where both factors were at a maximum.

Kirel pointed. “The northern coastal region of the subcontinental mass the Tosevites term Africa seems as near ideal as any region.”

“So it does,” Atvar said. “I have visited there before. Itis pleasant; parts of it could almost be Home. Very well, Shiplord, make the requisite preparations. We shall temporarily shift headquarters to this region, the better to supervise the conduct of the conquest at close range.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Ludmila Gorbunova wanted to kickGeneralleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt right where it would do the most good. Since the damned Nazi general was in Riga and she was stuck outside Hrubieszow, that wasn’t practical. In lieu of fulfilling her desire, she kicked at the mud instead. It clung to her boots, which did nothing to improve her mood.

She hadn’t thought of Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt as a damned Nazi when she was in Riga herself. Then he’d seemed a charming,kulturny general, nothing like the boorish Soviets and cold-blooded Germans it had mostly been her lot to deal with.

“Fly me one little mission, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova,” she muttered under her breath. “Take a couple of antipanzer mines to Hrubieszow, then come on back here and we’ll send you on to Pskov with a pat on the fanny for your trouble.”

That wasn’t exactly what thekulturny general had said, of course, and he hadn’t tried to pat her on the fanny, which was one of the things that made himkulturny. But if he hadn’t sent her to Hrubieszow, herKukuruznik wouldn’t have tried to taxi through a tree, which would have meant she’d still be able to fly it.

“Which would have meant I wouldn’t be stuck here outside of Hrubieszow,” she snarled, and kicked at the mud again. Some of it splashed up and hit her in the cheek. She snarled and spat.

She’d always thought of U-2s as nearly indestructible, not least because they were too simple to be easy to break. Down in the Ukraine, she’d buried one nose-first in the mud, but that could have been fixed without much trouble if she hadn’t had to get away from the little biplane as fast as she could. Wrapping aKukuruznik around a tree, though-that was truly championship-quality ineptitude.

“And why did the devil’s sister leave a tree in the middle of the landing strip?” she asked the God in whom she did not believe. But it hadn’t been the devil’s sister. It had been these miserable partisans. It wastheir fault.

Of course she’d been flying at night. Of course she’d had one eye on the compass, one eye on her wristwatch, one eye on the ground and sky, one eye on the fuel gauge-she’d almost wished she was a Lizard, so she could look every which way at once. Just finding the partisans’ poorly lit landing strip had been-not a miracle, for she didn’t believe in miracles-a major achievement, that’s what it had been.

She’d circled once. She’d brought the Wheatcutter down. She’d taxied smoothly. She’d never seen the pine sapling-no, it was more than a sapling, worse luck-till she ran into it.

“Broken wing spars,” she said, ticking off the damage on her fingers. “Broken propeller.” Both of those were wood, and reparable. “Broken crankshaft.” That was of metal, and she had no idea what she was going to do about it-what shecould do about it.

Behind her, someone coughed. She whirled around like a startled cat. Her hand flew to the grip of her Tokarev automatic. The partisan standing there jerked back in alarm. He was a weedy, bearded, nervous little Jew who went by the name Sholom. She could follow pieces of his Polish and pieces of his Yiddish, and he knew a little Russian, so they managed to make themselves understood to each other.

“You come,” he said now. “We bring blacksmith out from Hrubieszow. He look at your machine.”

“All right, I’ll come,” she answered dully. Yes, a U-2 was easy to work on, but she didn’t think a blacksmith could repair a machined part well enough to make the aircraft fly again.

He was one of the largest men she’d ever seen, almost two meters tall and seemingly that wide through the shoulders, too. By the look of him, he could have bent the crankshaft back into its proper shape with his bare hands if it had been in one piece. But it wasn’t just bent; it was broken in half, too.

The smith spoke in Polish, too fast for Ludmila to follow. Sholom turned his words into something she could understand: “Witold, he say if it made of metal, he fix it. He fix lots of wagons, he say.”

“Has he ever fixed a motorcar?” Ludmila asked. If the answer there was yes, maybe she did have some hope of getting off the ground again after all.

When he heard her voice, Witold blinked in surprise. Then he struck a manly pose. His already huge chest inflated like a balloon. Muscles bulged in his upper arms. Again, he spoke rapidly. Again, Sholom made what he said intelligible: “He say, of course he do. He say, for you he fix anything.”

Ludmila studied the smith through slitted eyes. She thought he’d said more than that; some of his Polish had sounded close to what would have been a lewd suggestion in Russian. Well. If she didn’t understand it, she didn’t have to react to it. She decided that would be the wisest course for the time being.

To Sholom, she said, “Tell him to come look at the damage, then, and see what he can do.”

Witold strutted along beside her, chest out, back straight, chin up. Ludmila was not a tall woman, and felt even smaller beside him. Whatever he might have hoped, that did not endear him to her.

He studied the biplane for a couple of minutes, then asked, “What is broken that takes a smith to fix?”

“The crankshaft,” Ludmila answered. Witold’s handsome face remained blank, even after Sholom translated that into Polish. Ludmila craned her neck to glare up at him. With poisonous sweetness, she asked, “You do know what a crankshaft is, don’t you? If you’ve worked on motorcars, you’d better.”

More translation from Sholom, another spate of fast Polish from Witold. Ludmila caught pieces of it, and didn’t like what she heard. Sholom’s rendition did nothing to improve her spirits: “He say he work on car springs, on fixing dent in-how you say this? — in mudguards, you understand? He not work on motor of motorcar.”

“Bozhemoi,”Ludmila muttered. Atheist she might be, but swearing needed flavor to release tension, and so she called on God. There stood Witold, strong as a bull, and, for all the use he was to her, he might as well have had a bull’s ring in his nose. She rounded on Sholom, who cringed. “Why didn’t you find me a real mechanic, then, not this blundering idiot?”

Witold got enough of that to let out a very bull-like bellow of rage. Sholom shrugged helplessly. “Before war, only two motor mechanics in Hrubieszow, lady pilot. One of them, he dead now-forget whether Nazis or Russians kill him. The other one, he licks the Lizards’ backsides. We bring him here, he tell Lizards everything. Witold, he may not do much, but he loyal.”

Witold followed that, too. He shouted something incendiary and drew back a massive fist to knock Sholom into the middle of next week.

The Jewish partisan had not looked to be armed. Now, with the air of a man performing a conjurer’s trick, he produced a Luger apparently from thin air and pointed it at Witold’s middle. “Jews have guns now, Witold. You’d better remember it. Talk about my mother and I’ll blow your balls off. We don’t need to takegowno from you Poles any more.” In Polish or in Russian, shit was shit.

Witold’s pale blue eyes were wide and staring. His mouth was wide, too. It opened and closed a couple of times, but no words emerged. Still wordlessly, he turned on his heel and walked away. All the swagger had leaked out of him, like the air from a punctured bicycle tire.

Quietly, Ludmila told Sholom, “You’ve just given him reason to sell us out to the Lizards.”

Sholom shrugged. The Luger disappeared. “He has reason to want to breathe more, too. He keep quiet or he is dead. He knows.”

“There is that,” Ludmila admitted.

Sholom laughed. “Yes, there is that. All Russia is that, yes?”

Ludmila started to make an angry retort, but stopped before the words passed her lips. She remembered neighbors, teachers, and a couple of cousins disappearing in 1937 and 1938. One day they were there, the next gone. You didn’t ask questions about it, you didn’t talk about it. If you did, you would disappear next. That had happened, too. You kept your head down, pretended nothing was going on, and hoped the terror would pass you by.

Sholom watched her, his dark, deep-set eyes full of irony. At last, feeling she had to say something, she answered, “I am a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force. Do you like hearing your government insulted?”

“Mygovernment?” Sholom spat on the ground. “I am Jew. You think the Polish government is mine?” He laughed again; this time, the sound carried the weight of centuries of oppression. “And then the Nazis come, and make Poles look like nice and kindly people. Who thinks anyone can do that?”

“So why are you here and not with the Lizards inside Hrubieszow?” Ludmila asked. A moment later, she realized the question was imperfectly tactful, but she’d already let it out.

“Some things are bad, some things are worse, some things are worst of all,” Sholom answered. He waited to see if Ludmila followed the Polish comparative and superlative. When he decided she did, he added, “For Jews, the Nazis are worst of all. For people, the Lizards are worst of all. Am I a person first, or am I a Jew first?”

“You are a person first,” Ludmila answered at once.

“From you, it sounds so easy,” Sholom said with a sigh. “My brother Mendel, he is in Hrubieszow.” The Jew shrugged yet again. “These things happen.”

Not knowing what to say, Ludmila kept quiet. She gave her U-2 one more anxious glance. It was covered up so it would be hard to spot from the air, but it wasn’t concealed the way a Red Air Force crew would have done the job. She did her best not to worry about it. The guerrillas remained operational, so their camouflage precautions were adequate.

In some way, theirmaskirovka was downright inspired, with tricks like those she’d seen from her own experience. A couple of kilometers away from their encampment, large fires burned and cloth tents simulated the presence of a good-sized force. The Lizards had shelled that area a couple of times, while leaving the real site alone.

Fires here were smaller, all of them either inside tents or else hidden under canvas sheets held up on stakes. Men went back and forth or sat around the fires, some cleaning their weapons, others gossiping, still others playing with packs of dog-eared cards.

With the men were a fair number of women, perhaps one in six of the partisans. Some, it seemed, were there for little more than to cook for the men and to sleep with them, but some were real soldiers. The men treated the women who fought like any other fighters, but towards the others they were as coarse and scornful as peasants were to their wives.

A fellow who wore a German greatcoat but who had to be a Jew got up from his card games to throw some powdered herbs into a pot and stir it with a wooden-handled iron spoon. Catching Ludmila’s eye on him, he laughed self-consciously and said something in Yiddish. She got the gist of it: he’d been a cook in Hrubieszow, and now he was reduced to this.

“Better a real cook should cook than someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she answered in German, and set a hand on her stomach to emphasize what she meant.

“This, yes,” the Jew answered. He stirred the pot again. “But that’s salt pork in there. It’s the only meat we could get. So now we eat it, and I have to make it tasty, too?” He rolled his eyes up to heaven, as if to say a reasonable God would never have made him put up with such humiliation.

As far as Ludmila was concerned, the dietary regulations he agonized over transgressing were primitive superstitions to be ignored by modern, progressive individuals. She kept that to herself, though. Even the Great Stalin had made his peace with the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow and enlisted God on the side of the Red Army. If superstition would serve the cause, then what point to castigating it?

She was young enough that such compromises with medievalism still struck her as betrayals, in spite of the indoctrination she’d received on the subject. Then she realized the Jew undoubtedly thought cooking salt pork and, worse yet, eating it, was a hideous compromise with godlessness. He was wrong, of course, but that did not make him insincere.

When she got a bowl of the pork stew, she blinked in amazement at the flavor. He might have thought it an abomination, but he’d given it his best.

She was scrubbing out her bowl with snow when one of the camp women-not one of the ones who carried a rifle-came up to her. Hesitantly, in slow Russian, the woman (girl, really; she couldn’t have been more than seventeen) asked, “You really flew that airplane against the Lizards?”

“Yes, and against the Nazis before them,” Ludmila answered.

The girl’s eyes-very big, very blue-went wide. She was slim and pretty, and would have been prettier if her face hadn’t had a vacant, cowlike expression. “Heavens,” she breathed. “How many men did you have to screw to get them to let you do that?”

The question was innocent, candid. Somehow, that made it worse. Ludmila wanted to shake her. “I didn’t screw anybody,” she said indignantly. “I-”

“It’s all right,” the girl-Stefania, that’s what her name was-interrupted. “You can tell me. It’s not like it’s something important. If you’re a woman, you have to do such things now and again. Everybody knows it.”

“I-didn’t-screw-anybody,” Ludmila repeated, spacing out the words as if she were talking to a half-wit. “Plenty of men have tried to screw me. I got to be a Red Air Force pilot because I’d been in theOsoaviakhim- the state pilot training program-before the war. I’m good at what I do. If I weren’t, I’d have got killed twenty times by now.”

Stefania studied her. The intent look on the Polish girl’s face made Ludmila think she’d made an impression on her. Then Stefania shook her head; her blond braids flipped back and forth. “We know what we get from Russians-nothing but lies.” As Witold had, she walked away.

Ludmila wished she were pointing a pistol at the stupid little bitch. She finished cleaning her bowl. This was her second trip outside the Soviet Union. Both times, she’d seen how little use foreigners had for her country. Her immediate reaction to that was disdain. Foreigners had to be ignorant reactionaries if they couldn’t appreciate the glorious achievements of the Soviet state and its promise to bring the benefits of scientflic socialism to all mankind.

Then she remembered the purges. Had her cousin, her geometry teacher, and the man who ran the tobacconist’s shop across from her block of flats truly been counterrevolutionaries, wreckers, spies for the Trotskyites or the decadent imperialists? She’d wondered at the time, but hadn’t let herself think about it since. Such thoughts held danger, she knew instinctively.

How glorious were the achievements of the Soviet state if you didn’t dare think about them? Frowning, she piled her bowl with all the rest.