Striking the Balance

VIII

Leslie Groves couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so far away from the Metallurgical Laboratory and its products. Now that he thought back on it, he hadn’t been away from the project since the day he’d taken that load of plutonium stolen first from the Lizards and then from the Germans off the HMSSeanymph. Ever since then, he’d lived, breathed, eaten, and slept atomic weapons.

And now here he was well east of Denver, miles and miles away from worrying about things like graphite purity and neutron absorption cross sections (when he’d taken college physics, nobody had ever heard of neutrons), and making sure you didn’t vent radioactive steam into the atmosphere. If you did, and if the Lizards noticed, you’d surely never get a second chance-and the United States would almost certainly lose the war.

But there were other ways to lose the war besides having a Lizard atomic bomb come down on his head. That was why he was out here: to help keep one of those other ways from happening. “Some vacation,” he muttered under his breath.

“If you wanted a vacation, General, I hate to tell you, but you signed up with the wrong outfit,” Lieutenant General Omar Bradley said. The grin on his long, horsey face took any sting from his words; he knew Groves did a platoon’s worth of work all by his lonesome.

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. “What you’ve shown me impressed the living daylights out of me, I’ll tell you that. I just hope it looks as tough to the Lizards as it does to us.”

“You and me and the whole United States,” Bradley answered. “If the Lizards punch through these works and take Denver, we’re all in a lot of trouble. If they get close enough to put your facility under artillery fire, we’re in a lot of trouble. Our job is to make sure they don’t, and to spend the fewest possible lives making sure of that. The people of Denver have seen enough.”

“Yes, sir.” Groves said again. “Back in 1941, I saw newsreels of women and kids and old men marching out from Moscow with shovels on their shoulders to dig tank traps and trenches to hold off the Nazis. I never dreamt then that the same thing would happen here in the States one day.”

“Neither did I. Neither did anybody,” Bradley said. He looked tough and worn, an impression strengthened by his Missouri twang and by the M-1 he carried in place of the usual officer’s sidearm. He’d been a crack shot ever since the days when he went hunting with his father, and didn’t let anyone forget it. Scuttlebutt had it that he’d used the M-l to good effect, too, in the first counterattack against the Lizards in late 1942.

“We have more going for us than the Red Army did then,” Bradley said. “We weren’t just shoving dirt around.” He waved to show what he meant, continuing, “The Maginot Line isn’t a patch on these works. This is defense in depth, the way the Hindenburg Line was in the last war.” He paused again, this time to cough. “Not that I saw the Hindenburg Line, dammit, but I did study the reports on it most thoroughly.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said for the third time. He’d heard that Bradley was sensitive about not having gone Over There during World War I, and evidently the rumor machine had that one straight. He took a step up onto the parapet and looked around. “The Lizards’ll stub their snouts if they run up against this, no doubt about it.”

Bradley’s voice went grim. “That’s not anif, worse luck; it’s awhen. We won’t stop ’em short of our works, not by the way they’ve broken out of Kansas and into Colorado. Lamar had to be evacuated the other day, you know.”

“Yes, I’d heard that,” Groves said. It had sent cold chills down his spine, too. “Looking at all this, though, I feel better than I did when the word came down.”

What man could do to turn gently rising prairie into real defensive terrain, man had done. Trenches and deep, broad antitank ditches ringed Denver to the east for miles around. Great belts of barbed wire would impede Lizard infantry. If not armor. Concrete pillboxes had been placed wherever the ground was suitable. Some of them held machine guns; others provided aiming points for bazooka men.

Along with the antitank ditches, tall concrete teeth and stout steel posts were intended to channel Lizard armor toward the men with the rockets that could destroy it. If a tank tried to go over those obstacles instead of around them, it would present its weaker belly armor to the antitank guns waiting for just that eventuality. Stretches of the prairie looked utterly innocent but were in fact sown with mines enough to make the Lizards pay a heavy price for crossing them.

“It all looks grand, that it does,” Bradley said. “I worry about three things, though. Do we have enough men to put into the works to make them as effective as they ought to be? Do we have enough munitions to make the Lizards say uncle if they strike us with everything they’ve got? And do we have enough food to keep our troops in the works day after day, week after week? The best answer I can up with for any of those isI hope so.”

“Considering that any or all of them might beno, that’s a damn sight better than it might be,” Groves said.

“So it is, but it’s not good enough.” Bradley scratched his chin, then turned to Groves. “Your facilities have taken proper precautions?”

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. He was pretty sure Bradley already knew that, but even three-star generals sometimes needed reassuring. “As soon as the bombing in and around Denver picked up, we implemented our deception plan. We lit bonfires by our most important buildings, and under cover of the smoke we put up the painted canvas sheets that make them look like ruins from the air. We haven’t had any strikes close by since, so for now it looks like the plan has paid off.”

“Good,” Bradley said. “It had better pay off. Your facility is why we’ll fight to the last man to hold Denver, and you know it as well as I do. Oh, we’d fight for it anyway-God knows we don’t want the Lizards stretching their hold all the way across the Great Plains-but with the Met Lab here, it’s not a town we want to have, it’s a town we have to have.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Groves said. “The physicists tell me we’ll have another little toy ready inside of a couple of weeks. We’ll want to hold the Lizards away from Denver without using it, I know, but if it comes down to using it or losing the town-”

“I was hoping you would tell me something like that, General,” Bradley answered. “As you say, we’ll do everything we can to hold Denver without resorting to nuclear weapons, because the Lizards do retaliate against our civilian population. But if it comes down to a choice between losing Denver and taking every step we can to keep it, I know what the choice will be.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Groves said. Bradley nodded.

Lizard planes screamed by. Antiaircraft guns hammered at them. Every once in a while, the guns brought down a fighter-bomber, too, but seldom enough that it wasn’t much more than dumb luck. Bombs hit the American works; the blasts boxed Groves’ ears.

“Whatever that was they hit, it’ll take a lot of pick-and-shovel work to set it right again.” Omar Bradley looked unhappy. “Hardly seems fair to the poor devils who have to do all the hard work to see the fruits of their labors go up in smoke that way.”

“Destroying is easier than building, sir,” Groves answered.That’s why it’s easier to turn out a soldier than an engineer, he thought. He didn’t say that out loud. Giving the people who worked for you the rough side of your tongue could sometimes spur them on to greater effort. If you got your superior angry at you, though, he was liable to let you down when you needed him most.

Groves pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully. In its own way, that was engineering, too.

Ludmila Gorbunova let her hand rest on the butt of her Tokarev automatic pistol. “You are not using me in the proper fashion,” she told the leader of the guerrilla band, a tough, skinny Pole who went by the name of Casimir. To make sure he couldn’t misunderstand it, she said it first in Russian, then in German, and then in what she thought was Polish.

He leered at her. “Of course I’m not,” he said. “You still have your clothes on.”

She yanked the pistol out of its holster: “Pig!” she shouted. “Idiot! Take your brain out of your pants and listen to me!” She clapped a hand to her forehead.“Bozhemoi! If the Lizards paraded a naked whore around Hrubieszow, they’d lure you and every one of your skirt-chasing cockhounds out of the forest to be slaughtered.”

Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “You are very beautiful when you are angry,” a line he must have stolen from a badly dubbed American film.

She almost shot him on the spot.This was what she’d got for doing thatkulturny General von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt a favor, a trip to a band of partisans who didn’t have the wits to clear all the trees out of their landing strip and who hadn’t the first clue how to employ the personnel who, for reasons often inscrutable to her, nonetheless adhered to their cause.

“Comrade,” she said, keeping things as simple as she could, “I am a pilot. I have no working aircraft here.” She didn’t bother pointing out-what was the use? — that the partisans hadn’t come up with a mechanic able to fix her poorKukuruznik, which was to her the equivalent of failing kindergarten. “Using me as a soldier gives me less to do than I might otherwise. Do you know of any other aircraft I might fly?”

Casimir reached up under his shirt and scratched his belly. He was hairy as a monkey-and not much smarter than one, either,Ludmila thought. She expected he wouldn’t answer her, and regretted losing her temper-regretted it a little, anyway, as she would have regretted any piece of tactics that could have been better. At last, though, he did reply: “I know of a band that either has or knows about or can get its hands on some sort of a German plane. If we get you to it, can you fly it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If it flies, I can probably fly it. You don’t sound like you know much.” After a moment, she added, “About this airplane, I mean. What kind is it? Where is it? Is it in working order?”

“I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it is. Where? That I know. It is a long way from here, north and west of Warsaw, not far from where the Nazis are operating again these days. If you want to travel to it, this can probably be arranged.”

She wondered if there was any such plane, or if Casimir merely wanted to be rid of her. He was trying to send her farther away from therodina, too. Did he want her gone because she was a Russian? There were a few Russians in his band, but they didn’t strike her as ideal specimens of Soviet manhood. Still. If the plane was where he said it was, she might accomplish something useful with it. She was long since convinced she couldn’t do that here.

“Khorosho,”she said briskly: “Good. What sort of guides and passwords will I need to get to this mysterious aircraft?”

“I will need some time to make arrangements,” Casimir said. “They might go faster if you-” He stopped; Ludmila had swung up the pistol to point at his head. He did have nerve. His voice didn’t waver as he admitted, “On the other hand, they might not.”

“Khorosho,”Ludmila said again, and lowered the gun. She hadn’t taken off the safety, but Casimir didn’t need to know that. She wasn’t even very angry at him. He might not bekulturny, but he did understandno when he stared down a gun barrel. Some men-Georg Schultz immediately sprang to mind-needed much stronger hints than that.

Maybe having a pistol pointed at his face convinced Casimir that he really did want to be rid of Ludmila. Two days later, she and a pair of guides-a Jew named Avram and a Pole called Wladeslaw-headed north and west in a beat-up wagon pulled by a beat-up donkey. Ludmila had wondered if she ought to get rid of her Red Air Force gear, but seeing what the Pole and the Jew wore put an end to that notion. Wladeslaw might have been a Red Army man himself, though he carried a GermanGewehr 98 on his back. And Avram’s hooked nose and stringy, graying beard looked particularly out of place under the brim of a coal-scuttle helmet someWehrmacht man would never need again.

As the wagon rattled on through the modest highlands south of Lublin, she saw how common such mixtures of clothing were, not just among partisans but for ordinary citizens-assuming any such still existed in Poland. And every other man and about every third woman carried a rifle or submachine gun. With only the Tokarev on her hip, Ludmila began to feel underdressed.

She also got a closer look at the Lizards than she’d ever had before: now a convoy of lorries rolling past and kicking up clouds of dust, now tanks tearing up the roads even worse. Had those tanks been in the Soviet Union, their machine guns would have made short work of a wagon and three armed people in it, but they rumbled by, eerily quiet, without even pausing.

In pretty good Russian-he and Wladeslaw both spoke the language-Avram said, “They don’t know whether we’re with them or against them. They’ve learned not to take chances finding out, too. Every time they make a mistake and shoot up people who had been their friends, they turn a lot of people who were for them against them.”

“Why are there so many willing traitors to mankind in Poland?” Ludmila asked. The phrase from Radio Moscow sprang automatically to her lips; only after she’d said it did she wish she’d been more tactful.

Fortunately, it didn’t irk either Wladeslaw or Avram. In fact, they both started to laugh. They both started to answer at the same time, too. With a flowery wave, Avram motioned for Wladeslaw to go on. The Pole said, “After you’ve lived under the Nazis for a while and under the Reds for a while, anything that isn’t the Nazis or the Reds looks good to a lot of folks.”

Now they’d gone and insulted her, or at least her government. She said, “But I remember Comrade Stalin’s statement on the wireless. The only reason the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half of Poland was that the Polish state was internally bankrupt, the government had disintegrated, and the Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland, cousins to their Soviet kindred, were left to the mercy of fate. The Soviet Union extricated the Polish people from war and enabled them to lead a peaceful life until fascist aggression took its toll on us all.”

“That’s what the wireless said, is it?” Avram said. Ludmila stuck out her chin and nodded stubbornly. She was primed and ready for a fine, bruising ideological debate, but Avram and Wladeslaw didn’t feel like arguing. Instead, they howled laughter like a couple of wit-struck wolves baying at the moon. They pounded their fists down on their thighs and finally ended up embracing each other. The donkey flicked its ears in annoyance at their untoward carrying-on.

“What have I said that was so funny?” Ludmila inquired in tones of ice.

Avram didn’t answer directly. Instead, he returned a question of his own: “Could I teach you Talmud in a few minutes?” She didn’t know what Talmud was, but shook her head. He said, “That’s right. To learn Talmud, you’d have to learn a whole new way of looking at the world and think only in that way-a new ideology. If you want to put it that way.” He paused again. This time she nodded. He went on, “You already have an ideology, but you’re so used to it, you don’t even notice it’s there. That’s what’s funny.”

“But my ideology is scientflic and correct,” Ludmila said. For some reason, that started the Jew and the Pole on another spasm of laughter. Ludmila gave up. With some people, you simply could not have an intelligent discussion.

The land dropped down toward the valley of the Vistula. Kaziemierz Doly looked down on the river from high, sandy banks overgrown with willows whose branches trailed in the water and cut by a good many ravines. “Lovers come here in the springtime,” Wladeslaw remarked. Ludmila sent him a suspicious look, but he let it go at that, so it probably hadn’t been a suggestion.

Some of the buildings around the marketplace were large and had probably been impressive when they were whole, but several rounds of fighting had left most of them charred ruins. A synagogue didn’t look much better than any of the other wreckage, but Jews were going in and out. Other Jews-armed guards-stood watch outside.

Ludmila caught Avram glancing over at Wladeslaw to see if he would say anything about that. He didn’t. Ludmila couldn’t tell whether that pleased the Jewish partisan or irked him. What passed for Polish politics was too complex for her to follow easily.

A ferryboat sent up a great cloud of soft-coal fumes as it carried the wagon across the Vistula. The country was so flat, it reminded Ludmila of the endless plain surrounding Kiev. Cottages with thatched roofs and with sunflowers and hollyhocks growing around them could have belonged to her homeland, too.

That evening, they stopped at a farmhouse by a pond. Ludmila didn’t wonder how they’d found that particular house. Not only was it on the water, the Germans must have used it for target practice, for it was ringed by old, overgrown bomb craters, some of them, the deeper ones, on the way to becoming ponds themselves as groundwater seeped up into them.

No one asked or gave names there. Ludmila understood that; what you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell. The middle-aged couple who worked the farm with their swarm of children put her in mind ofkulaks, the prosperous peasants who in the Soviet Union had resisted giving up their property to join the glorious egalitarian collective farm movement, and so had disappeared off the face of the earth when she was still a girl. Poland had not seen the same leveling.

The wife of the couple, a plump, pleasant woman who wore on her head a bright kerchief like a Russianbabushka, cooked up a great pot of what she calledbarszcz: beet soup with sour cream, which, except for the caraway seeds stirred into it for flavor, might have come from a Russian kitchen. Along with it she served boiled cabbage, potatoes, and a spicy homemade sausage Ludmila found delicious but Avram wouldn’t touch. “Jew,” the woman muttered to her husband when Avram was out of earshot. They helped the partisans; that didn’t mean they loved all of them.

After supper, Avram and Wladeslaw went out to sleep in the barn. Ludmila got the sofa in the parlor, an honor she wouldn’t have been sorry to decline, as it was short and narrow and lumpy. She tossed and turned and almost fell off a couple of times in the course of an uncomfortable evening.

Toward sunset the next day, they crossed the Pilica River, a tributary of the Vistula, over a rebuilt wooden bridge and came into Warka. Wladeslaw waxed enthusiastic: “They make the best beer in Poland here.” Sure enough, the air held the nutty tang of malt and hops. The Pole added, “Pulaski was born in Warka.”

“And who is Pulaski?” Ludmila asked.

Wladeslaw let out a long, resigned sigh. “They don’t teach you much in those Bolshevik schools, do they?” As she bristled, he went on, “He was a Polish nobleman who tried to keep the Prussians and the Austrians and you Russians from carving up our country. He failed.” He sighed again. “We have a way of failing at such things. Then he went to America and helped the United States fight England. He got killed there, poor fellow. He was still a young man.”

Ludmila had been on the point of calling-or at least thinking of-Pulaski as a reactionary holdover of the corrupt Polish feudal regime. But helping the revolutionary movement in the United States had surely been a progressive act. The curious combination left her without an intellectual slot in which to pigeonhole Pulaski, an unsettling feeling. This was the second time she’d left the confines of the USSR. On each trip, her view of the world had shown itself to be imperfectly adequate.

No doubt a Talmudic perspective would be even worse,she thought.

She consciously noticed what she’d been hearing for a while: a low, distant rumble off to the north and west. “That can’t be thunder!” she exclaimed. The day was fine and bright and sunny, with only a few puffy white clouds drifting slowly across the sky from west to east.

“Thunder of a sort,” Avram answered, “but only of a sort. That’s Lizard artillery going after the Nazis, or maybe German artillery going after the Lizards. It’s not going to be easy any more, getting where we’re going.”

“One thing I’ve learned,” Ludmila said, “is that it’s never easy, getting where you’re going.”

Avram plucked at his beard. “If you know that much, maybe those Bolshevik schools aren’t so bad after all.”

“Okay, listen up, people, because this is what we’re going to do,” Rance Auerbach said in the cool darkness of Colorado night “Right now we’re somewhere between Karval and Punkin Center.” A couple of the cavalry troopers gathered round him chuckled softly. He did, too. “Yeah, they’ve got some great names for places ’round these parts. Before the sunset, scouts spotted Lizard outposts north and west of Karval. What we want to do is make ’em think there’s a whole hell of a lot more than us between them and Punkin Center. We do that, we slow down this part of their drive on Denver, and that’s the idea.”

“Yeah, but Captain Auerbach, thereain’t nothin’ but us between them and Punkin Center,” Rachel Hines said. She looked around in the darkness at the shapes of their companions. “There ain’t that much left of us, neither.”

“You know that, and I know that,” Auerbach said. “As long as the Lizards don’t know it, everything’s swell.”

His company-or the survivors thereof, plus the ragtag and bobtail of other broken units who’d hooked up with them-laughed some more. So did he, to keep up morale. It wasn’t really funny. When the Lizards wanted to put on a blitzkrieg, they put one on that made the Nazis look like pikers. Since they started by pasting Lamar from the air, they’d ripped damn near halfway across Colorado, knocking out of their path everything that might have given them trouble. Auerbach was damned if he knew how anything could stop them before they hit the works outside of Denver. He’d got orders to try, though, and so he would.

Very likely, he’d die trying. Well, that was part of the job.

Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “Remember, boys and girls, the Lizards have gadgets that let ’em see in the dark like cats wish they could. You want to keep under cover, use the fire from one group so they’ll reveal their position and another group can attack ’em from a different direction. They don’t play fair. They don’t come close to playing fair. If we’re going to beat ’em, we have to play dirty, too.”

The cavalry wasn’t going to beat ’em any which way. Auerbach knew that. Any of his troopers who didn’t know it were fools. As hit-and-run raiders, though, they still might accomplish something useful.

“Let’s mount up,” he said, and headed for his own horse.

The rest of the company was dim shadows, jangling harness, the occasional cough from a man or snort from an animal. He didn’t know this territory well, and worried about blundering into the Lizard pickets before he knew they were there. If that happened, he was liable to get his whole command chewed up without doing the cause a lick of good or the Lizards any harm.

But a couple of the men who rode along were farmers from these parts. They weren’t in uniform. Had they been going up against a human foe, that could have got them shot if they were captured. The Lizards didn’t draw those distinctions, though. And the farmers, in bib overalls, knew the country as intimately as they knew their wives’ bodies.

One of them, a fellow named Andy Osborne, said, “We split here.” Auerbach took it on faith that he knew wherehere was. Some of the company rode off under Magruder’s command. Auerbach-and Osborne-took the rest closer to Karval. After a while, Osborne said, “If we don’t dismount now, they’re liable to spot us.”

“Horseholders,” Auerbach said. He chose them by lot before every raid. Nobody admitted to wanting the job, which held you out of the fighting while your comrades were mixing it up with Lizards. But it kept you safe, too-well, safer, anyhow-so you might crave it without having the nerve to say so out loud. Picking holders at random seemed the only fair way.

“We got a couple o’ little ravines here,” Osborne said, “and if we’re lucky, we can sneak right on past the Lizards without them ever knowin’ we’re around till we open up. We manage that, we can hit Karval pretty damn hard.”

“Yeah,” somebody said, an eager whisper in the night. They had a mortar, a. 50 caliber machine gun, and a couple of bazooka launchers with plenty of the little rockets they shot. Trying to kill Lizard tanks in the darkness was a bad-odds game, but one of the things they’d found out was that bazookas did a hell of a job of smashing up buildings, which weren’t armored and didn’t travel over the landscape on their own. Get close enough to a Lizard bivouac and who could say what you might do?

The mortar crew slipped off on their own, a couple of troopers with tommy guns along to give them fire support. They didn’t have to get as close to Karval as the machine gunners and the bazooka boys did.

Auerbach slapped Osborne on the shoulder to signal him to guide them down the ravine that came closest to the little town. Along with the crews who served their fancy weapons, he and the rest of the men crouched low as they hustled along.

Off to the north somewhere, small-arms fire wentpop-pop-pop. It sounded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and the flares that lit up the night sky could have been fireworks, too. But fireworks commonly brought cheers, not the muffled curses that came from the troopers. “Spotted ’em too soon,” somebody said.

“And they’ll be lookin’ extra hard for us, too,” Rachel Hines added with gloomy certainty.

As if to underscore her words, a flare mounted skyward from the low hilltop where the Lizard pickets were posted. “That’s a good sign, not a bad one,” Auerbach said. “They can’t spy us with their funny gadgets, so they’re trying out the old Mark One eyeball.” He hoped he was right.

The troopers scuttled along down Osborne’s wash. The flare fell, faded, died. In the north, a mortar opened up. That half of the company wasn’t as close to Karval as it should have been, but it was doing what it could.Crump! Crump! If the bombs weren’t landing in the little flyspeck of a town, they weren’t missing by much, either.

Then Auerbach heard motor vehicles moving around inside Karval. His mouth went dry. Expecting to find the Lizards asleep at the switch didn’t always pay off.

“This here’s the end of the wash,” Andy Osborne announced in a tone like doom.

Now Auerbach wished he’d laid Penny Summers when he had the chance. All his scruples had done was to give him fewer happy memories to hold fear at bay. He didn’t even know what had happened to Penny. She’d been helping the wounded last he’d seen her, a day or so before a Lizard armored column smashed Lamar to bits. They’d evacuated the injured as best they could with horse-drawn ambulances-his States War ancestors would have sympathized with that ordeal. Penny was supposed to have gone out with them. He hoped she had, but he didn’t know for sure.

“Okay, boys,” he said out loud. “Mortar crew went off to the left. Machine gun to the right and forward. Bazookas straight ahead. Good luck to everybody.”

He went forward with the two bazooka crews. They’d need all the fire support they could get, and the M-l on his back had more range than a tommy gun.

The Lizard pickets behind them started firing. Troopers who’d stayed back with the mortar crew engaged the Lizards. Then another Lizard machine gun chattered, this one almost in Auerbach’s face. He hadn’t noticed the armored personnel carrier till it was nearly on top of him; Lizard engines were a lot quieter than the ones people built. He stretched himself flat in the dirt as bullets spattered dust and pebbles all around.

But that machine gun gave away the position of the vehicle on which it was mounted. One of the bazooka crew let fly at it. The rocket left the launcher with a roar like a lion. It trailed yellow fire as it shot toward the personnel carrier.

“Get the hell out of there!” Auerbach yelled at the two-man crew. If they missed, the enemy would just have to trace the bazooka’s line of flight to know where they were.

They didn’t miss. A Lizard tank’s frontal armor laughed at the shaped-charge head of a bazooka round, but not an armored personnel carrier. Flame spurted from the stricken vehicle, lighting it up. Troopers with small arms opened up on it, potting the Lizard crew as they popped out of the escape hatches. A moment later, the deep stutter of the. 50 caliber machine gun added itself to the nighttime cacophony.

“Keep moving! Come on, forward!” Auerbach screamed. “We gotta hit ’em inside Karval!” Behind him, his mortar crew started lobbing bombs at the hamlet. He was rooting for one of them to start a fire to illuminate the area. Lots of the Lizards were shooting back now, and they had a much better idea where his men were than the other way around. A nice cheery blaze would help level the playing field.

As if it were Christmas, he got his wish. A clapboard false front in Karval went up in yellow flames. By the way it burned, it had been standing and curing for a long time. Flames leaped to other false fronts along what had probably been the pint-sized main drag. Their lurid, buttery light revealed skittering Lizards like demons in hell.

From more than a mile outside of town, the heavy machine gun started blazing away at the targets the light showed. You couldn’t count on any one bullet hitting any one target at a range like that, but when you threw a lot of bullets at a lot of targets, you had to score some hits. And, when a. 50 caliber armor-piercing bullet hit a target of mere flesh and blood, that target (a nice bloodless word for a creature that thought and hurt like you) went down and stayed down.

Auerbach whooped like a red Indian when another Lizard armored personnel carrier brewed up. Then both bazooka crews started firing rockets almost at random into Karval. More fires sprouted. “Mission accomplished!” he shouted, though nobody could hear him, not even himself. The Lizards had to figure they were getting hit by something like an armored brigade, not a raggedy cavalry company.

The hammering of the guns hid the noise of the approaching helicopters till it was too late. The first warning of them Auerbach had was when they salvoed rockets at the bazooka crews. It seemed the Fourth of July all over again, but this time the fireworks were going the wrong way-from air to ground. That tortured ground seemed to erupt in miniature volcanoes.

Blast grabbed Auerbach, picked him up, and slammed him down again. Something wet ran into his mouth-blood from his nose, he discovered from the taste of iron and salt. He wondered if his ears were bleeding, too. If he’d been a little closer to one of those rockets-or maybe if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling-he might have had his lungs torn to bits inside him.

He staggered to his feet and shook his head like a stunned prizefighter, trying to make his wits work. The bazookas weren’t in operation any more. The. 50 caliber machine gun turned its attention to the helicopters; its like flew in Army Air Force planes. He’d heard of machine guns bagging helicopters. But the helicopters could shoot back, too. He watched their tracers walk forward and over the machine-gun position. It fell silent.

“Retreat!” Auerbach yelled, for anyone who could hear. He looked around for his radioman. There was the fellow, not far away-dead, with the radio on his back blown to smithereens. Well, anybody who didn’t have the sense to retreat when he was getting hit and couldn’t hit back probably didn’t deserve to live, anyhow.

He wondered where Andy Osborne was. The local could probably guide him back to the ravine-although. If helicopters started hitting you from above while you were in there, it would be a death trap, not a road to safety. A couple of the Lizard outposts were still firing, too. There weren’t any roads to safety, not any more.

A shape in the night-He swung his Garand toward it before he realized it was a human being. He waved toward the northwest, showing it was time to head for home. The trooper nodded and said, “Yes, sir-we’ve got to get out of here.” As if from a great distance, he heard Rachel Hines’ voice.

Steering by the stars, they trotted in the right direction, more or less, though he wondered how they were going to find the horses some of the troopers were holding. Then he wondered if it would matter: those helicopters would chew the animals to dog food if they got there first.

They were heading that way, too, when the heavy machine gun started up behind them. With the crew surely dead, a couple of other men must have found it and started serving it. They had to have scored some hits on the helicopters, too, for the Lizard machines abandoned their course and swung back toward the. 50 caliber gun.

The makeshift crew played it smart: as soon as the helicopters got close, they stopped firing at them.No sense running up a SHOOT ME RIGHT HERE sign, Auerbach thought as he stumbled on through the darkness. The Lizard helicopters raked the area where the machine gun hid, then started to leave. As soon as they did, the troopers opened up on them again.

They returned for another pass. Again, when they paused, the gunners on the ground showed they weren’t done yet. One of the helicopters sounded ragged. He dared hope the armor-piercing ammunition had done it some harm. But it stayed in the air. When the helicopters finished chewing up the landscape this time, the machine gun didn’t start up.

“Son of a bitch!” Rachel Hines said disgustedly. She swore like a trooper; half the time, she didn’t notice she was doing it. Then she said, “Son of a bitch,” in an altogether different tone of voice. The two hunting helicopters were swinging toward her and Auerbach.

He wanted to hide, but where could you hide from flying death that saw in the night?Nowhere, he thought, and threw his M-1 to his shoulder. He didn’t have much chance of damaging the machines, but what he could do, he would.If you’re going to go down, go down swinging.

The machine guns in the noses of both helicopters opened up. For a second or so, he thought they were beautiful. Then something hit him a sledgehammer blow. All at once, his legs didn’t want to hold him up. He started to crumple, but he didn’t know whether he hit the ground or not.

A guard threw open the door to Ussmak’s tiny cell. “You-out,” he said in the Russki language, which Ussmak was perforce learning.

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, and came out. He was always glad to get out of the cell, which struck him as poorly designed: had he been a Tosevite, he didn’t think he would have been able to stand up or lie down at full length in it. And, for that matter, since Tosevites produced liquid as well as solid waste, the straw in the cell would soon have become a stinking, sodden mess for a Big Ugly. Ussmak did all his business over in one corner, and wasn’t too badly inconvenienced by the lack of plumbing fixtures.

The guard carried a submachine gun in one hand and a lantern in the other. The lantern gave little light and smelled bad. Its odor reminded Ussmak of cooking; he wondered if it used some animal or plant product for fuel rather than the petroleum on which the Tosevites ran their landcruisers and aircraft.

He’d learned better than to ask such questions. It just got him into deeper trouble, and he was in quite enough already. As the guard led him toward the interrogation chamber, he called down mental curses on Straha’s empty head.May his spirit live an Emperorless afterlife, Ussmak thought. On the radio, he’d sounded so sure the Big Uglies showed civilized behavior toward males they captured. Well, the mighty onetime shiplord Straha didn’t know everything there was to know. That much Ussmak had found out, to his sorrow.

Waiting in the interrogation chamber, as usual, were Colonel Lidov and Gazzim. Ussmak sent the paintless interpreter a stare full of mixed sympathy and loathing. If it hadn’t been for Gazzim, the Big Uglies wouldn’t have got so much from him so fast He’d yielded the base in Siberia intending to tell the males of the SSSR everything he could to help them: having committed treason, he was going to wallow in it.

But Lidov and the other males of the NKVD had assumed from the outset that he was an enemy bent on hiding things rather than an ally eager to reveal them. The more they’d treated him that way, the more they’d done to turn their mistake into truth.

Maybe Lidov was beginning to realize the error in his technique. Speaking without the translation of Gazzim (something he seldom did), he said, “I greet you, Ussmak. Here on the table is something that may perhaps make your day pass more pleasantly.” He gestured toward the bowl full of brownish powder.

“Is that ginger, superior sir?” Ussmak asked. He knew what it was; his chemoreceptors could smell it across the room. The Russkis hadn’t let him taste in-he didn’t know how long. It seemed like forever. What he meant, of course, was,May I have some? The more he associated with the males of the NKVD, the less saying what he meant seemed like a good idea.

But Lidov was in an expansive mood today. “Yes, of course it is ginger,” he answered. “Taste all you like.”

Ussmak wondered if the Big Ugly was trying to drug him with something other than the powdered herb. He decided Lidov couldn’t be. If Lidov wanted to give him another drug, he would go ahead and do it, and that would be that. Ussmak went over to the table, poured some ginger into the palm of his hand, raised the hand to his mouth, and tasted.

Not only was it ginger, it was lime cured, the way the Race liked it best. Ussmak’s tongue flicked out again and again, till every speck of the precious powder on his hands was gone. The spicy taste filled not just his mouth, but his brain. After so long without, the herb hit him hard. His heart pounded; his breath gusted in and out of his lung. He felt bright and alert and strong and triumphant, worth a thousand of the likes of Boris Lidov.

Part of his mind warned him that feeling was a fraud, an illusion. He’d watched males who couldn’t remember that die, confident their landcruisers could do anything and their Big Ugly opponents would not be able to hinder them in the slightest. If you didn’t kill yourself through such stupidity, you learned to enjoy ginger without letting it enslave you.

But remembering that came hard, hard, in the middle of the exhilaration the drug brought. Boris Lidov’s little mouth widened into the gesture the Tosevites used to show amiability. “Go ahead,” he said. “Taste more.”

Ussmak did not have to be invited twice. The worst thing about ginger was the black slough of despond into which you fell when a taste wore off. The first thing you wanted then was another taste. Usually, you didn’t have one. But that bowl held enough ginger to keep a male happy for-a long time. Ussmak cheerfully indulged again.

Gazzim had one eye turret fixed on the bowl of powdered ginger, the other on Boris Lidov. Every line of his scrawny body showed Ussmak his terrible longing for the herb, but he did not make the slightest move toward it. Ussmak knew the depths of a male’s craving. Gazzim had plainly sunk to those depths. That he was too afraid to try to take a taste said frightening things about what the Soviets had done to him.

Ussmak was used to suppressing the effects ginger had on him. But he hadn’t tasted for a long time, and he’d just ingested a double dose of potent stuff. The drug was stronger than his inhibitions. “No, let us now give this poor addled male something to make him happy for a change,” he said, and held the bowl of ginger right under Gazzim’s snout.

“Nyet!”Boris Lidov shouted angrily.

“I dare not,” Gazzim whispered, but his tongue was more powerful than he was. It leaped into the bowl, again and again and again, as if trying to make up for lost time by cramming a dozen tastes into one.

“No, I tell you,” Lidov said again, this time in the language of the Race. He added an emphatic cough for good measure. When neither Ussmak nor Gazzim took the slightest notice of him, he strode forward and knocked the bowl out of Ussmak’s hands. It shattered on the floor; a brownish cloud of ginger fogged the air.

Gazzim hurled himself at the male from the NKVD, rending him with teeth and claws. Lidov let out a bubbling shriek and reeled away, blood spurting from several wounds. He threw up one arm to protect his face. With the other hand, he grabbed for the pistol he wore on his belt.

Ussmak leaped at him, grabbing his right arm with both hands. The Big Ugly was hideously strong, but his soft, scaleless skin left him vulnerable; Ussmak felt his claws sink deep into Tosevite flesh. Gazzim might have been a wild thing. His jaws had a grip on Lidov’s throat, as if he was going to feed on the male from the NKVD. Along with the smell of the spilled ginger, Ussmak’s chemoreceptors filled with the acrid tang of Tosevite blood. The combination brought him close to beasthood, too.

Lidov’s shrieks grew fainter; his hand relaxed on the grip of the pistol. Ussmak was the one who drew it out of its holster. It felt heavy and awkward in his grip.

The door to the interrogation chamber opened. He’d expected that for some time, but the Big Uglies were too primitive to have television cameras monitoring such places. Gazzim screamed and charged at the guard who stood in the doorway. Blood dripped from his claws and his snout. Even armed, Ussmak would not have wanted to stand against him, not drug-crazed and insane as he was at that moment.

“Bozhemoi!”the Tosevite shouted. But he had extraordinary presence of mind. He brought up his submachine gun and fired a quick burst just before Gazzim got to him. The male of the Race crashed to the ground, twitching. He was surely dead, but his body hadn’t quite realized it yet.

Ussmak tried to shoot at the guard. Though his chance of escape from this prison was essentially nil, he was a soldier with a weapon in his hand. The only problem was, he couldn’t make the weapon fire. It had some kind of safety, and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

As he fumbled, the muzzle of the Big Ugly’s submachine gun swung to cover him. The pistol didn’t even bear on the guard. In disgust, Ussmak threw down the Tosevite weapon, which clattered on the floor. He wondered dully if the guard would kill him out of hand.

Rather to his surprise, the fellow didn’t. The sound of gunfire in the prison had drawn other guards on the run. One of them spoke a little of the language of the Race. “Hands high!” he yelled. Ussmak obeyed. “Move back!” the Tosevite said. Obediently, Ussmak stepped away from Boris Lidov, who lay in a pool of his own blood.It looks the same as poor Gazzim’s, Ussmak thought.

A couple of guards hurried over to the fallen Soviet male. They spoke back and forth in their own guttural tongue. One of them looked toward Ussmak. Like any Big Ugly, he had to turn his whole flat face toward him. “Dead,” he said in the language of the Race.

“What good would saying I’m sorry do, especially when I’m not?” Ussmak answered. None of the guards seemed to understand that, which was probably just as well. They talked some more among themselves. Ussmak waited for one of them to raise his firearm and start shooting.

That didn’t happen. He remembered what Intelligence had said of the males of the SSSR: that they stuck to their orders almost as carefully as did the Race. From what he’d seen, that seemed accurate. Without orders, no one here was willing to take the responsibility for eliminating him.

Finally, the male who had led him to the interrogation chamber gestured with the muzzle of his weapon. Ussmak understood that gesture; it meantcome along. He came. The guard led him back to his cell, as if after a normal interrogation. The door slammed behind him. The lock clicked.

His mouth fell open in amusement.If I’d known that was all that would happen if I killed Lidov, I’d have done it a long time ago. But he didn’t think it was going to be all… oh, no. And, as the ginger euphoria leaked out of him and after-tasting depression set in, he wondered what the Russkis would do with him-to him-now. He could think of all sorts of unpleasant possibilities, and he was unpleasantly certain they could come up with even more.

Liu Han walked past theFa Hua Ssu, the Temple of Buddha’s Glory, and, just west of it, the wreckage of the Peking tramway station. She sighed, wishing the tramway station were not in ruins. Peking sprawled over a large area; the temple and the station were in the eastern part of the city, a good manyli from her roominghouse.

Not far from the station was Porcelain Mouth Street,Tz’u Ch’i K’ou, whose clay was famous. She walked north up the street, then turned off onto one of thehutungs, Peking’s innumerable lanes and alleys that branched from it. She was learning her way through the maze; she had to double back and retrace her steps only once before she found theHsiao Shih, the Small Market.

Another name for that market, less often heard but always in the back of everyone’s mind, was the Thieves’ Market. From what Liu Han had been told, not everything in the market was stolen goods; some of the trash so loudly hawked had been legally acquired but was being sold here to create the illusion that the customer was getting a bargain.

“Brass plates!” “Cabbage!” “Chopsticks!” “Mah-jongg tiles!” “Noodles!” “Medicine to cure you of the clap!” “Piglets and fresh pork!” “Peas and bean sprouts!” The noise was deafening. Only by Peking standards could this be reckoned a small market. In most cities, it would have been the central emporium; all by itself, it seemed to Liu Han as big as the camp in which the little scaly devils had placed her after bringing her down from the airplane that never landed.

In the surging crowds, she was just one among many. Anonymity suited her. The kind of attention she got these days was not what she wanted.

A man selling fine porcelain cups that certainly looked as if they might have been stolen saw her, pointed, and rocked his hips back and forth. She walked over to him with a large smile on her face. He looked half eager, half apprehensive.

She made her voice high and sweet, like a singsong girl’s. Still smiling, she said, “I hope it rots off. I hope it shrinks back into your body so you can’t find it even if you’ve tied a string around its tiny little end. If you do find it, I hope you never, ever get it up.”

He stared at her, his mouth falling open. Then he reached under the table that held his wares. By the time he’d pulled out a knife, Liu Han had a Japanese pistol pointed at his midsection. “You don’t want to try that,” she said. “You don’t even want to think about trying that.”

The man gaped foolishly, eyes and mouth wide and round as those of the goldfish in their ornamental ponds not far away. Liu Han turned her back and walked away. As soon as a few people got between her and him, he started screaming abuse at her.

She was tempted to go back and put a bullet in his belly, but shooting every man in Peking who mocked her would have wasted a lot of ammunition, and her peasant upbringing made her hate the idea of waste.

A minute later, another merchant recognized her. He followed her with his eyes but didn’t say anything. By the standards she’d grown used to, that was a restrained response. She paid him the compliment of ignoring him.

Before, I had only Hsia Shou-Tao to worry about,she thought bitterly.Thanks to the little scaly devils and their vile cinemas, I have hundreds. A great many men had watched her yield to the desires of Bobby Fiore and the other men aboard the airplane that never came down. Having seen that, too many of them supposed she would be eager to yield to their desires. The little devils had succeeded in making her notorious in Peking.

Someone patted her backside from behind. She lashed out with a shoe and caught him in the shin. He howled curses. She didn’t care. Notorious or not, she refused to vanish into a hole. The scaly devils had done their best to destroy her as an instrument of the People’s Liberation Army. If they succeeded, she would never see her daughter again.

She had no intention of letting them succeed.

They had made her an object of derision, as they’d planned. But they had also made her an object of sympathy. Women could tell that she’d been coerced in some of the films the little devils had taken of her. And the People’s Liberation Army had mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign to educate the people of Peking, men and women alike, as to the circumstances in which she’d found herself. Even some men were sympathetic to her now.

Once or twice, she’d heard foreign devil Christian missionaries talking in their bad Chinese about martyrs. At the time, she hadn’t understood the concept-what point to suffering when you didn’t have to? These days, she was a martyr herself, and exploiting the role for all it was worth.

She came to the little stall of a woman who was selling carp that looked like ugly goldfish. She picked one up by the tail. “Are these fish fresh?” she asked dubiously.

“Just caught this morning,” the woman answered.

“Why do you expect me to believe that?” Liu Han sniffed at the carp. In grudging tones, she said, “Well, maybe. What do you want for them?”

They haggled, but had trouble coming to an agreement. People watched them for a while, then went back to their own concerns when they didn’t prove very interesting. Lowering her voice, the carp seller said, “I have the word you were looking for, Comrade.”

“I hoped you would,” Liu Han answered eagerly. “Tell me.”

The woman looked around, her face nervous. “How you hear this must never be known,” she warned. “The little scaly devils have no idea my nephew understands their ugly language as well as he does-otherwise they would not talk so freely around him.”

“Yes, yes,” Liu Han said with an impatient gesture. “We have put many like that in among them. We do not betray our sources. Sometimes we have even held off from making a move because the little scaly devils would have been able to figure out where we got the information. So you may tell me and not worry-and if you think I will pay your stinking price for your stinking fish, you are a fool!” She added the last in a loud voice when a man walked by close enough to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Why don’t you go away, then?” the carp seller shrilled. A moment later, she lowered her voice once more: “He says they will soon let the People’s Liberation Army know they are willing to resume talks on all subjects. He is only a clerk, remember; he cannot tell you what ‘all subjects’ means. You will know that for yourself, though, won’t you?”

“Eh? Yes, I think so,” Liu Han answered. If the scaly devils meant what they said, they would return to talking about giving her back her daughter. The girl would be approaching two years old now, by Chinese reckoning: one for the time she’d spent in Liu Han’s womb and the second for the time since her birth. Liu Han wondered what she looked like and how Ttomalss had been treating her. One day before too long, maybe, she’d find out.

“All right, I’ll buy it, even if you are a thief.” As if in anger, Liu Han slapped down coins and stalked away. Behind her angry facade, she was smiling. The carp seller was almost her own personal source of news; she didn’t think the woman knew many others from the People’s Liberation Army. She would get credit for bringing news of impending negotiations to the central committee.

With luck, that would probably be enough to ensure that she got her own seat on the committee. Nieh Ho-T’ing would back her now; she was sure of that. And, once she had her seat, she would support Nieh’s agenda-for a while. One of these days, though, she would have occasion to disagree with him. When she did, she’d have backing of her own.

She wondered how Nieh would take that. Would they be able to go on being lovers after they had political or ideological quarrels? She didn’t know. Of one thing she was sure: she needed a lover less than she had before. She was her own person now, well able to face the world on her own two feet without requiring a man’s support. Before the little scaly devils came, she hadn’t imagined such a thing possible.

She shook her head. Strange that all the suffering the little devils had put her through had led her not only to be independent but to think she ought to be independent. Without them, she would have been one of the uncounted peasant widows in war-torn China, trying to keep herself from starving and probably having to become a prostitute or a rich man’s concubine to manage it.

She passed by a man selling the conical straw hats both men and women wore to keep the sun off their faces. She had one back at the roominghouse. When the little scaly devils first began showing their vile films of her, she’d worn the hat a lot. With its front edge pulled low over her features, she was hardly recognizable.

Now, though, she walked through the streets andhutungs of Peking bareheaded and unashamed. A man leered at her as she left the Small Market. “Beware of revolutionary justice,” she hissed. The fellow fell back in confusion. Liu Han walked on.

The little scaly devils had one of their movie machines playing on a streetcorner. There, bigger than life, Liu Han rode astride Bobby Fiore, her skin and his slick with sweat. The main thing that struck her, looking at her somewhat younger self, was how well fed and well rested she seemed. She shrugged. She hadn’t been committed to the revolutionary cause yet.

A man looked from the three-dimensional image to her. He pointed. Liu Han pointed back at him, as if her finger were the barrel of a gun. He found something else to do-and found it in a hurry.

Liu Han kept walking. The little devils were still doing their best to discredit her, but they were also coming back to the negotiating table, and coming back to talk about all subjects. As far as she was concerned, that represented victory.

The year before, the little scaly devils hadn’t been so willing to talk. The year before that, they hadn’t talked at all, just swept all before them. Life was harder now for them than it had been, and they were starting to see that it might grow harder yet. She smiled. She hoped it would.

New fish came into camp utterly confused, utterly dismayed. That amused David Nussboym, who, having survived his first few weeks, was no longer a new fish but azek amongzeks. He was still reckoned a political rather than a thief, but the guards and the NKVD men had stopped using on him the blandishments they aimed at so many Communists caught in the web of thegulag:

“You’re still eager to help the Party and the Soviet state, aren’t you? Then of course you’ll lie, you’ll spy, you’ll do whatever we say.” The words were subtler, sweeter, but that was what they meant.

To a Polish Jew, the Party and the Soviet state were more attractive than Hitler’sReich, but not much. Nussboym had taken to using broken Russian and Yiddish among his fellow prisoners and answering the guards only in Polish too fast and slangy for them to understand.

“That’s good,” Anton Mikhailov said admiringly after yet another guard went off scratching his head at Nussboym’ s replies. “Keep it up and after a while they’ll quit bothering you because they’ll figure they won’t be able to get any sense out of you anyway.”

“Sense?” Nussboym rolled his eyes. “If you crazy Russians wanted sense, you never would have started these camps in the first place.”

“You think so, do you?” the otherzek answered. “Try building socialism without the coal they get from the camps, and the timber, without the railroadszeks build and without the canals we dig. Why, without camps, the whole damn country would fall apart.” He sounded as if he took a perverse pride in being part of such a vital and socially signflicant enterprise.

“Maybe it should fall apart, then,” Nussboym said. “These NKVD bastards work everybody the way the Nazis work Jews. I’ve seen both now, and there isn’t much to choose between them.” He thought a moment. “No, I take that back. These are just labor camps. You don’t have the kind of assembly-line murder the Nazis had started up just before the Lizards got there.”

“Why murder a man when you can work him to death?” Mikhailov asked. “It’s-what’s the word I want? — it’s inefficient, that’s what it is.”

“This-what we do here-you call this efficient?” Nussboym exclaimed. “You could train chimpanzees to do this.”

The Russian thief shook his head. “Chimpanzees would fall over dead, Nussboym. They couldn’t make ’em stand it. Their hearts would break and they’d die. They call ’em dumb animals, but they’re smart enough to know when things are hopeless-and that’s more than you can say about people.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Nussboym said. “Look what they’ve got us doing now, these barracks we’re making.”

“Don’t you bitch about this work,” Mikhailov said. “Rudzutak was damn lucky to get it for our gang; it’s a hell of a lot easier than going out to the forest and chopping down trees in the snow. This way you go back to your bunk half dead, not all the way.”

“I’m not arguing about that,” Nussboym said impatiently. Sometimes he wondered if he was a one-eyed man in the country of the blind. “Have you paid any attention to what we’re building, though?”

Mikhailov looked around and shrugged. “It’s a barracks. It’s going up according to plan. The guards haven’t said boo. As long as they’re happy, I don’t care. If they wanted me to make herring boats, I wouldn’t complain about that, either. I’d make herring boats.”

Nussboym threw down his hammer in exasperation. “Would you make herring boats that didn’t hold herring?”

“Careful with that,” his partner warned. “You break a tool and the guards will give you a stomping whether they can talk to you or not. They figure everybody understands a boot in the ribs, and they’re mostly right. Would I make herring boats that didn’t hold herring? Sure. If that’s what they told me to do. You think I’m the one to tell ’em they’re wrong? Do I look crazy?”

That sort of keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you’re-told attitude had existed in the Lodz ghetto. It didn’t just exist in thegulags, it dominated. Nussboym felt like yelling, “But the Emperor has no clothes!” Instead, he picked up the hammer and drove a couple of nails into the frame of the bunk bed on which he and Mikhailov were working. He hit the nails as hard as he could, trying to relieve some of his frustration that way.

It didn’t work. As he reached down into the bucket for another nail, he asked, “How would you like to sleep in these bunks we’re making?”

“I don’t like sleeping in the bunks we’ve got now,” Mikhailov answered. “Give me a broad who’ll say yes, though, and I don’t care where you put me. I’ll manage fine, thank you very much.” He drove a nail himself.

“A broad?” Nussboym hesitated. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

His fellowzek stared at him in pity. “Then you’re a fool, aren’t you? They go and run up these new barracks. They put enough barbed wire between them and the ones we sleep in to keep the Nazis from crossing the border, and I hear we’re supposed to get a trainload of ‘special prisoners’ before long. Do I have to draw you a picture, chum?”

“I hadn’t heard about the special prisoners coming in,” Nussboym said. He knew a lot of the gossip on the camp grapevine went right by him because his Russian really wasn’t very good.

“Well, they are,” Mikhailov said. “We’ll be lucky even to catch a glimpse of ’em. The guards, though, they’ll get fucked and sucked till they can’t stand up straight, the stinking sons of bitches. The cooks, too, and the clerks-anybody with pull. You’re just a regularzek, though, forget it.”

Nussboym hadn’t thought about women since he ended up in Soviet hands. No, that wasn’t true: he hadn’t thought about them in any concrete way, simply because he figured he wouldn’t see any for a long, long time. NowNow he said, “Even for women, these bunks are awfully small and awfully close together.”

“So the guards climb in and do it sideways instead of on top,” Mikhailov said. “So what? It doesn’t matter to them, they don’t care what the broads think, and you’re a stubborn kike, you know that?”

“I know that,” Nussboym said; by the other’s tone, it was almost a compliment. “All right, we’ll get it done the way they tell us to. And if there are women here, we don’t have to admit we made this stuff for them.”

“Now you’re talking,” the otherzek said.

The work gang met its norms for the day, which meant it got fed-not extravagantly, but almost enough to keep body and soul together. After his bread and soup, Nussboym stopped worrying about his belly for a little while. It had enough in it that it was no longer sounding an internal air-raid siren. He knew that klaxon would start up again all too soon, but had learned in Lodz to cherish these brief moments of satiety.

A lot of the otherzeks had that same feeling. They sat around on their bunks, waiting for the order to blow out the lamps. When that came, they would fall at once into a deep, exhausted sleep. Meanwhile, they gossiped or read the propaganda sheets the camp muckymucks sometimes passed out (those generated plenty of new gossip, most of it sardonic or ribald) or repaired trousers and jackets, their heads bent close to the work so they could see what they were doing in the dim light.

Somewhere off in the distance, a train whistle howled, low and mournful. Nussboym barely noticed it. A few minutes later, it came again, this time unmistakably closer.

Anton Mikhailov sprang to his feet. Everybody stared at this unwonted display of energy. “The special prisoners!” thezek exclaimed.

Instantly, the barracks were in an uproar. Many of the prisoners hadn’t seen a woman in years, let alone been close to one. The odds that they would be close to one now were slim. The barest possibility, though, was plenty to remind them they were men.

Going outside between supper and lights-out wasn’t forbidden, though the weather was still chilly enough that it had been an uncommon practice. Now dozens ofzeks trooped out of the barracks, Nussboym among them. The other buildings were emptying, too. Guards yelled, trying to keep the prisoners in some kind of order.

They had little luck. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the men made a beeline for the wire that separated their encampment from the new one. The barracks there were only half done, as no one knew better than Nussboym, but that, from everything he’d heard, was a typical piece of Soviet inefficiency.

“Look!” someone said with a reverent sigh. “They’ve put up a canopy to keep the poor darlings from getting the sun on their faces.”

“And then they have them come in at night,” somebody else added. “If that isn’t thegulag, I don’t know what is.”

The train pulled to a stop a few minutes later, iron wheels screaming as they slid along the track. NKVD men with submachine guns and lanterns hurried up to the Stolypin cars that had carried the prisoners. When the doors opened, the first people off the cars were more guards.

“The hell with them,” Mikhailov said. “We don’t want to see their ugly mugs. We know all about what those bastards look like. Where are the broads?”

The way the guards were shouting and screaming at the prisoners to come out and hurry up about it set thezeks laughing fit to burst among themselves. “Better be careful, dears, or they’ll send you to the front, and then you’ll really be sorry,” someone called in shrill falsetto.

A head appeared at the doorway to one of the Stolypin cars. The prisoners’ breath went out in one long, anticipatory sigh. Then what was left of it went out again, this time in dozens of gasps of astonishment. A Lizard jumped out of the car and skittered toward the barracks, then another and another and another.

David Nussboym stared at them as avidly as if they were women. He spoke their language. He wondered if anyone else in the whole camp did.