Tilting the Balance

IX

Mutt Daniels crouched in a foxhole on the edge of Randolph, Illinois, hoping and praying the Lizard bombardment would ease up before it smeared him across the small-town landscape.

He felt naked with just a hole in the ground for cover. Back in France during the Great War, he’d been able to dive into a deep dugout when German shells came calling. If you were unlucky, of course, a shell would come right in after you, but most of the time a dugout was pretty safe.

No dugouts here. No proper trench lines, either, not really. This war, unlike the last one, moved too fast to let people build elaborate field fortifications.

“Plenty of foxholes, though,” Matt muttered. The local landscape looked like pictures of craters on the moon. The Lizards had taken Randolph last summer in their drive on Chicago. Patton’s men had taken it back in the pincers movement that brought them into Bloomington, six or eight miles north. Now the Lizards were moving again. If Randolph fell, they’d be well positioned to drive back into Bloomington.

Yet another shell crashed into the ground, close enough to lift Daniels into the air and fling him back to earth as if body-slammed by a wrestler. Dirt pattered down on him. His lungs ached from the blast when he drew in a shaky breath.

“Might as well be between Washington and Richmond, the way we’re goin’ back and forth here,” Daniels said. Both his grandfathers had fought for the South in the War Between the States; as a small boy, he’d listened avidly to the tales they told, tales that grew taller with each passing year. No matter how tall the tales got, though, France and now this convinced him his grandfathers hadn’t had it as tough as they’d thought.

More shells whistled overhead, these southbound from Bloomington. Mutt hoped they were registered on the Lizard guns, but they probably weren’t; the Lizards outranged American artillery. Giving Lizard infantry a taste of what he was going through wasn’t the worst thing in the world, either. A flight of prop-driven fighters screamed by at treetop height. Mutt touched his helmet in salute to courage; pilots who flew against the Lizards didn’t last long.

Once the planes zipped out of sight, he didn’t spot them again. He hoped that meant they were returning to base by a different route instead of getting knocked down. “No way to find out for sure,” he said.

He abruptly stopped being interested, too, because Lizard shelling picked up again. He embraced the ground like a lover, pressed his face against her cool, damp neck.

Some of the blasts that shook him where he lay were explosions of the same sort he’d known in France. Others had a sound he’d first met retreating toward Chicago: a smaller bang, followed by a pattering as of hail.

“Y’all want to look, sharp,” he called to the scattered members of his squad. “They’re throwin’ out them goddamn little mines again.” He hated those little baseball-sized blue explosives. Once a regular shell went off, at least it was gone. But the Lizards’ fancy ammo scattered potential mutilation over what seemed like half an acre and left it sitting there waiting to happen. “Instant goddamn mine field,” Mutt said resentfully.

After a while, the barrage let up. Daniels grabbed his tommy gun and took a cautious peek out of the foxhole. If the Boches had been doing that shelling, they’d follow up with an infantry attack just as sure as you were supposed to hit the cutoff man. But the Lizards didn’t always play by the book Mutt knew. Sometimes they fooled him on account of that. More often, he thought, they hurt themselves.

So here: if they wanted to drive the Americans out of Randolph, they’d never have a better chance than now, while the shelling had stunned and disorganized their human foes. But they stayed back in their own lines south of town. The only sign of action from them was a single plane high overhead, its path through the sky marked by a silvery streak of condensation.

Mutt gave the aircraft a one-finger salute. “Gonna see how bad you beat on us before you send in the ground-pounders, are you?” he growled. “Mis’able cheap bastards.” What was infantry for, after all, if not to pay the butcher’s bill?

His battered eardrums made the quiet that followed the barrage seem even more intense than it was. The short, sharp bang! that punctuated it wouldn’t have seemed worth noticing, save for the shriek right after.

“Oh, shit,” Mutt exclaimed. “Somebody went and did somethin’ dumb. Goddamn it to hell, why don’t nobody never listen to me?” He’d thought minor-league ballplayers were bad at paying attention to what a manager told them. Well, they were, but they looked like Einsteins when you set ’em next to a bunch of soldiers.

He scrambled out of the foxhole. His body was skinnier and sprier than it had been while he was wearing his Decatur Commodores uniform, but he’d have cheerfully gone back to fat and flab if anybody offered him the choice.

No one did, of course. He crawled over battered ground and through ruined buildings toward where that shriek had come from. Memory wasn’t his only guide; a low moaning kept him on course.

Kevin Donlan lay just outside a shell hole, clutching his left ankle. Below it, everything was red ruin. Mutt’s stomach did a slow lurch. “Jesus Christ, kid, what did you do?” he said, though the answer to that was all too obvious.

“Sarge?” Donlan’s voice was light and clear, as if his body hadn’t really told him yet how bad he was hurt. “Sarge, I just got out to take a leak. I didn’t want to piss in my hole, you know, and-”

Next to what he had, swimming a river of piss was nothing. No point telling him that, though, not now. “Miss Lucille!” Mutt bawled. While he waited for her, he got a wound bandage and a packet of sulfa powder out of a pouch on Donlan’s belt. He dusted the powder onto the wound. He wondered if he ought to get the remains of Donlan’s shoe off his foot before he started bandaging it, but when he tried, the kid started screaming again, so he said the hell with it and wrapped the bandage over foot, shoe, and all.

Lucille Potter scrambled up a minute later, maybe less. In dirty fatigues and a helmet, she looked like a man except that she didn’t need a shave. The helmet bore a Red Cross on a white circle; the Lizards had learned what that mark meant, and weren’t any worse than people about respecting it.

She looked at the way blood was soaking through the bandage, clicked her tongue between her teeth. “We’ve got to get a tourniquet on that wound, Sergeant.”

Mutt looked down at Donlan. The kid’s eyes had rolled up in his head. Mutt said, “You do that, Miss Lucille, he’s gonna lose the foot.”

“I know,” she said. “But if we don’t do it, he’s going to bleed to death. And he’d lose the foot anyhow; no way to save it with a wound like that.” Her sharp stare dared him to argue. He couldn’t; he’d seen enough wounds in France and Illinois to know she was right.

She cut Donlan’s torn trousers, took out a length of bandage and a stick, and set the tourniquet. “Hell of a thing,” Daniels said, to himself and her both: another young soldier on crutches for the rest of his life.

“It’s hard, I know,” Lucille Potter answered. “But would you rather have him dead? Ten years from now, if this war ever ends, would he rather we’d let him die?”

“I reckon not,” Daniels said. In his younger days in Mississippi, a lot of the older white men he’d known were shy an arm or a leg or a foot from the States War. They weren’t glad of it, naturally, but they got on better than you’d expect. When you got right down to it, people were pretty tough critters.

He sent a runner over to Captain Maczek. Where the captain was, the company field telephone would be, too. After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Donlan seemed pretty shocky. When Mutt remarked on it, Lucille Potter said, “It’s probably a blessing in disguise-he won’t feel that foot as much.”

The forward aid station wasn’t much more than a quarter of a mile back of the line. A four-man litter team got to Donlan in less than fifteen minutes. The boss of the team, a corporal, looked at the youngster’s ruined foot and shook his head. “Nothing much we’ll be able to do about that,” he said. “They’ll have to take him back into Bloomington, and I expect they’ll chop it off there.”

“You’re almost certainly right,” Lucille said. All the litter bearers stared when she spoke. She stared right back, daring them to make something out of it. None of them did. She went on, “The sooner he goes back, the sooner they can treat him.”

The team got Donlan onto the stretcher and carried him away. “Too stinkin’ bad,” Mutt said. “He’s a good kid. Ain’t this war a-” He stopped, inhibited in his language by a woman’s presence. After a sigh, he resumed, “Lord, I wish I had me a cigarette, or even a chaw.”

“Filthy habits, both of them,” Lucille Potter said, her voice so sharp he turned to give her an irritated look. Then, with a wry chuckle, she added, “I wish I had a smoke, too. I ran out of tobacco months ago, and I miss it like anything.”

“Might be some back in Bloomington,” Mutt said. “We ever get a real lull, could be I’d send Szabo back there to see how the foraging is. You want to liberate somethin’ from where it rightly belongs, ol’ Dracula’s the man for the job.”

“He’s certainly good at coming up with home brew and moonshine,” Lucille said, “but people make those around here. Illinois isn’t tobacco country, so we can’t get hold of bootleg cigars.”

“Can’t get hold of much of anything these days,” Mutt said. “I’m skinnier’n I’ve been for close to thirty years.”

“It’s good for you,” she answered, which made him give her another resentful glance. She was on the lean side, and looked to have always been that way: not an ounce of excess flesh anywhere. What did she know about what felt comfortable and what didn’t?

He wasn’t in a mood to argue, though, so he said, “I just hope Donlan’s gonna make out okay. He’s a good kid. Hell of a thing to be crippled so young.”

“Better than dying. I thought we already settled that,” Lucille Potter answered. “I’m just glad the field telephone was working and the litter crew was on the ball. If they hadn’t gotten here inside of about another ten minutes, I was going to take his foot off myself.” She tapped her little black bag. “I’ve got some ether in here. He wouldn’t have felt anything.”

“You know how?” Daniels asked. Battlefield wounds were one thing, but cutting into a man on purpose… He shook his head. He was sure he couldn’t do it.

Lucille said, “I haven’t had to do an amputation yet, but I’ve read up on the technique. I-”

“I know that,” Mutt broke in. “Every time I see you, you got a doctor’s book in your hand.”

“I have to. Nurses don’t operate, and I wasn’t even a scrub nurse to watch doctors work. But a combat medic had better be able to do as much as she can, because we’re not always going to have a lull like this one to get our casualties back to the aid station. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yeah,” Daniels said. “You usually do-” Off to the left, small arms began to chatter on both sides of the line. Mutt interrupted himself to scramble into the shell hole from which unlucky Kevin Donlan had emerged to relieve himself. Lucille Potter jumped in beside him. Her only combat experience was what she’d had in the past few weeks, but take cover was a lesson you learned in a hurry, at least if you wanted to keep on living.

Then the artillery started up again, the Lizards firing steadily, the Americans in bursts of a few rounds here, a few rounds there, a few somewhere else. They’d learned the hard way that if their pieces stayed in one place for more than a short salvo, the Lizards would zero in on them and knock them out.

The ground began tossing like the stormy sea, though Mutt had never been in a natural storm that made such a god-awful racket. He pushed Lucille down flat on her belly, then lay on top of her to protect her from splinters as best he could. He didn’t know whether he did it because she was a woman or because she was the medic. Either way, he figured, she needed to stay as safe as possible.

As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. Mutt stuck his head up right away. Sure as hell, Lizard ground troops were scurrying forward. He squeezed off a long burst with his tommy gun. The Lizards flattened out on the ground. He didn’t know whether he’d hit any of them; the tommy gun wasn’t accurate out past a couple of hundred yards.

He wished he had one of the automatic weapons the Lizards carried. Their effective range was something like double that of his submachine gun, and their cartridges packed a bigger kick, too. He’d heard of dogfaces who toted captured specimens, but keeping them in the right ammo was a bitch and a half. Most of the weapons the Lizards lost went straight back to the high-forehead boys in G-2. With luck, the Americans would get toys just as good one of these days.

That train of thought abruptly got derailed. He moaned, down deep in his throat. The Lizards had a tank with them. Now he understood what the poor damned Germans had felt like in France in 1918 when those monsters came clanking their way and they couldn’t stop them or even do much to slow them down.

The tank and the Lizard infantry screening it slowly advanced together. The aliens had learned something since the winter before; they’d lost a lot of tanks then for lack of infantry support. Not any more.

Lucille Potter peered over the forward lip of the foxhole beside Mutt. “That’s trouble,” she said. He nodded. It was big trouble. If he ran, the tank’s machine gun or the Lizard foot soldiers would pick him off. If he stayed, the tank would penetrate the position and then the Lizard infantry would get him.

Off to the right, somebody fired one of those new bazooka rockets at the Lizard tank. The rocket hit the tank right in the turret, but it didn’t penetrate. “Damn fool,” Mutt ground out. Doctrine said you were supposed to shoot a bazooka only at the rear or sides of a Lizard tank; the frontal armor on the aliens’ machines was just too thick for you to kill one with a straight-on shot.

Being too eager cost the fellow who’d fired at the tank. It turned toward him and his buddies and opened up first with its machine gun and then its main armament. For good measure, the Lizard infantry moved in on the bazooka man, too-their job was to make sure nobody got a good shot at the armored fighting vehicle. By the time they were done, there probably wasn’t enough of the American and his buddies left to bury.

Which meant they forgot about Mutt. For a second, he didn’t think that would do him any good: if the line was overrun, he would be, too, in short order. Ever so cautiously, he raised his head again. There sat the tank, maybe a hundred feet away, ass end on to him, still pouring fire at a target more necessary to destroy than he was.

He ducked back down, turned to Lucille Potter. “Gimme that ether,” he snapped.

“What? Why?” She took a protective grip on the black bag. “The-stuff’ll burn, won’t it?” His pa’s hard hand on his backside and across his face had taught him never to swear where a woman could hear, but he almost slipped that time. “Now gimme it!”

Lucille’s eyes widened. She opened the bag, handed him the glass jar. It was about half full of a clear, oily-looking liquid. He hefted it thoughtfully. Yeah, it would throw just fine. His bat had kept him from having a decent big-league career; nobody’d ever complained about his arm. He’d been a good man with a grenade in France, too.

It wasn’t even as if he had to throw all of a sudden, as he would have with a runner breaking for second. He could take a few moments, think through what he was going to do, see every step of it in his mind before it actually happened.

Doing that took longer than the throw itself. He popped up as if exploding out of his crouch behind a batter, fired the jar for all he was worth, and ducked back down again. Nobody who wasn’t looking right at him would have known he’d appeared.

“Did you hit it?” Lucille demanded.

“Miss Lucille, I tell you for a fact, I didn’t stay up long enough to find out. I tried to smash it off the back of the turret so it’d drip down into that nice, hot engine compartment.” Mutt’s shoulder twinged; he hadn’t put that much into a snap throw in years. It had felt straight, but you never could tell. A little long, a little short, and he might as well not have bothered.

Then he heard hoarse yells from the Americans in other scattered foxholes. That encouraged him to take another cautious peek. When he did, he yelled himself, in sheer delight. Flames danced all over the engine compartment and were licking up the back of the turret. As he watched, an escape hatch popped open and a Lizard jumped onto the ground.

Mutt ducked down for his tommy gun. “Miss Lucille, that there is one Lizard tank that’s out stealing.”

She pounded him on the back as any other soldier would have. He wouldn’t have tried to kiss another soldier, though. She let him do it, but she didn’t do much in the way of kissing back. He didn’t worry about that; he popped up out of the foxhole and started blazing away at the fleeing Lizard tank crew and the foot soldiers, who were much less terrifying without armor to back them up.

The Lizards fell back. The tank kept burning. A Sherman would have brewed up a hell of a lot faster than it did, but eventually its ammunition and its fuel tank went up in a spectacular blast.

Mutt felt as if he’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer. “Lord!” he exclaimed. “You couldn’t make a fancier explosion in the movies.”

“No, probably not,” Lucille Potter agreed, “nor one that did more for us. We’ll hold Randolph a while longer now, I expect. That was a wonderful throw; I’ve never seen a better one. You must have been a very fine baseball player.”

“You don’t make the majors unless you’re pretty fair,” he said, shrugging. “You don’t stick there unless you’re better’n that, and I wasn’t.” He brushed a hand across the front of his shirt, as if he’d been a pitcher shaking off a sign rather than a catcher; baseball wasn’t what he wanted to talk about at the moment. After a couple of tentative coughs, he said, “Miss Lucille, I hope you don’t think I was too forward there.”

“When you kissed me, you mean? I didn’t mind,” she said, but not in a way that encouraged him to try it again; by her tone, once had been okay but twice wouldn’t be. He kicked at the churned-up dirt inside the foxhole. Lucille added, “I’m not interested, Mutt, not that way. It’s not you-you’re a good man. But I’m just not.”

“Okay,” he said; he was too old to let his pecker do his thinking for him. But that didn’t mean he’d forgotten he had one. He pushed up his helmet so he could scratch his head above one ear. “If you like me, why-” He broke off there. If she didn’t want to talk about it, that was her business.

For the first time since he’d met her, he found her at a loss for words. She frowned, obviously not caring for that herself. Slowly, she said, “Mutt, it’s not something I can easily explain, or care to. I-”

Easily or not, she didn’t get the chance to explain. Following a cry of “Miss Lucille!” a soldier from another squad in the platoon came scrambling over to the foxhole and gasped out, “Miss Lucille, we’ve got two men down, one hit in the shoulder, the other in the chest. Peters-the guy with the chest wound-he’s in bad shape.”

“I’m coming,” she said briskly, and climbed out of the hole she’d shared with Mutt. As she hurried away, he scratched his head again.

Even in these times, David Goldfarb had expected things to be handled with more ceremony. The Prime Minister, after all, did not visit the Bruntingthorpe Research and Development Test Flying Aerodrome every day.

But there was no line of RAF men in blue serge standing to attention for Winston Churchill to inspect, no flyby of a squadron of Pioneers or Meteors to impress him with what Fred Hipple and his team had accomplished in jet propulsion. In fact, up until an hour before Churchill got to Bruntingthorpe, no one knew he was coming.

Group Captain Hipple brought the news back from the administrative section’s Nissen hut. It produced a brief, startled silence from his subordinates, who were laboring mightily to pull secrets from the wreckage of the Lizard fighter-bomber that had been brought down not far from the aerodrome.

Typically, Flight Officer Basil Roundbush was first to break that silence: “Generous of him to give us notice enough to make sure our flies are closed.”

“I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be confident yours is, dear boy,” Hipple returned. Roundbush covered his face with his hands, acknowledging the hit. The group captain might have been shorter than his subordinates, but gave away nothing in wit. He continued, “I gather no one knew until moments ago: quite a lot of security laid on, for reasons which should be plain enough.”

“Wouldn’t do for the Lizards to pay us a visit just now, would it, sir?” Goldfarb said.

“Yes, that would prove-embarrassing,” Hipple said, an understatement Roundbush might have coveted.

And so, just as Goldfarb had, the Prime Minister came down from Leicester by bicycle, pedaling along on an elderly model like a grandfather out for a constitutional. He dismounted outside the meteorology hut, where Hipple and his team still labored after the latest Lizard bombing raid. When Goldfarb saw the round pink face and the familiar cigar through the window, he gulped. He’d never expected to meet the leader of the British Empire.

Wing Commander Julian Peary’s reaction was more prosaic. In the big deep voice that went so oddly with his slight physique, he said, “I do hope he’s not damaged any of the beets.”

It was only half a joke. Like everyone else at Bruntingthorpe-like everyone else in Britain, or so it seemed-Hipple’s team cultivated a garden. The British Isles held more people than they could easily feed, and shipments from America were down, not so much because the Lizards bombed them (they still took much less notice of ships than of air or rail or road transport) as because the Yanks, beset at home, had little to spare.

So, gardens. Beets, potatoes, peas, beans, turnips, parsnips, cabbages, maize… whatever the climate would permit, people grew-and sometimes guarded with cricket bats, savage dogs, or shotguns against two-legged thieves too big to be frightened by scarecrows.

Everyone did come to attention when the Prime Minister, accompanied by a bodyguard who looked as if he never smiled, walked into the Nissen hut. “As you were, gentlemen, please,” Churchill said. “After all, officially I am not here, but speaking over the BBC in London. Because I am in the habit of speaking live, I can occasionally use the subterfuge of sound recordings to let myself be in two places at once.” He let out a conspiratorial chuckle. “I hope you won’t give me away.”

Automatically, Goldfarb shook his head. Hearing Churchill’s voice without the static and distortion of a wireless set was to him even more intimate than seeing the Prime Minister in the tubby flesh rather than through photographs: pictures captured his image more accurately than the airwaves did his voice.

Churchill strode over to Fred Hipple, who was standing beside a wooden table on which lay pieces of the turbine from the crashed Lizard fighter’s jet engine. Pointing to them, the Prime Minister asked, “How long before we shall be able to duplicate that engine, Group Captain?”

“Duplicate it, sir?” Hipple said, “It won’t be soon; the Lizards are far ahead of us in control mechanisms for the engine, in machining techniques, and in the materials they employ: they do things with titanium and ceramics we’ve never dreamt of, much less attempted. But in determining how and why they make things as they do, we learn how to do better ourselves.”

“I see,” Churchill’ said thoughtfully. “So even though you have the book in front of you”-he pointed to the Disassembled chunks of turbine again-“you cannot simply read off what is on its pages, but must decode it as if it were written in a cipher.”

“That’s a good analogy, sir,” Hipple said. “The facts of the engine are relatively straightforward, even if we can’t yet produce one identical to it ourselves. When it comes to the radar from the same downed aircraft, I fear we are still missing a great many code groups, so to speak.”

“So I have been given to understand,” Churchill said, “although I do not fully grasp where the difficulty lies.”

“Let me take you over to Radarman Goldfarb, then, sir,” Hipple said. “He joined the team to help emplace a radar set in production Meteors, and has labored valiantly to unlock the secrets of the Lizard unit that fell into our hands.”

As the group captain brought the Prime Minister over to his workbench, Goldfarb thought, not for the first time, that Fred Hipple was a good man to work for. A lot of superior officers would have done all the explaining to the brass themselves, and pretended their subordinates didn’t exist. But Hipple introduced Goldfarb to Churchill, then stood back and let him speak for himself.

He didn’t find it easy at first. When he stammered, the Prime Minister shifted the subject away from radar: “Goldfarb,” he said musingly. “Was I not told you are the lad with a family connection to Mr. Russie, the former Lizard spokesman from Poland?”

“Yes, that’s true, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “We’re cousins. When my father came to England before the Great War, he urged his sister and her husband to come with him, and he kept urging them to get out until the second war started in ‘39. They wouldn’t listen to him, though. Moishe Russie is their son.”

“So your family kept up the connection, then?”

“Till the war cut us off, yes, sir. After that, I didn’t know what had happened to any of my relatives until Moishe began speaking on the wireless.” He didn’t tell Churchill most of his kinsfolk had died in the ghetto; the Prime Minister presumably knew that already. Besides, Goldfarb couldn’t think about their fate without filling up with a terrible anger that made him wish England were still at war with the Nazis rather than the Lizards.

Churchill said, “I shan’t forget this link. It may yet prove useful for us.” Before Goldfarb could work up the nerve to ask him how, he swung back to radar: “Suppose you explain to me how and why this set is so different from ours, and so baffling.”

“I’ll try, sir,” Goldfarb said. “One of our radars, like a wireless set, depends on valves-vacuum tubes, the Americans would say-for its operation. The Lizards don’t use valves. Instead, they have these things.” He’ pointed to the boards with little lumps and silvery spiderwebs of metal set across them.

“And so?” Churchill said. “Why should a mere substitution pose a problem?”

“Because we don’t know how the bloody things work,” Goldfarb blurted. Wishing the ground would open up and swallow him, he tried to make amends: “That is, we have no theory to explain how these little lumps of silicon-which is what they are, sir-can perform the function of valves. And, because they’re nothing like what we’re used to, we’re having to find out what each one does by cut and try, so to speak: we run power into it and see what happens. We don’t know how much power to use, either.”

Churchill fortunately took his strong language in stride. “And what have you learnt from your experiments?”

“That the Lizards know more about radar than we do, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “That’s the long and short of it, I’m afraid. We can’t begin to make parts to match these: a chemical engineer with whom I’ve spoken says our best silicon isn’t pure enough. And some of the little lumps, when you look at them under a microscope, are so finely etched that we can’t imagine how, let alone why, it’s been done.”

“How and why are for those with the luxury of time, which we have not got,” Churchill said. “We need to know what the device does, whether we can match it, and how to make it less useful to the foe.”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said admiringly. Churchill was no boffin, but he had a firm grip on priorities. No one yet fully understood the theory of the magnetron, or how and why the narrow channels connecting its eight outer holes to the larger central one exponentially boosted the strength of the signal. That the device operated so, however, was undeniable fact, and had given the RAF a great lead over German radar-although not, worse luck, over what the Lizards used.

Group Captain Hipple said, “What have we learnt which is exploitable, Goldfarb?”

“Sorry, sir; I should have realized at once that was what the Prime Minister needed to know. We can copy the design of the Lizards’ magnetron; that, at least, we recognize. It gives a signal of shorter wavelength and hence more precise direction than any we’ve made ourselves. And the nose dish that receives returning pulses is a very fine bit of engineering which shouldn’t be impossible to incorporate into later marks of the Meteor.”

“Very good, Radarman Goldfarb,” Churchill said. “I shan’t keep you from your work any longer. With the aid of men like you and your comrades in this hut, we shall triumph over this adversity as we have over all others. And you, Radarman, you may yet have a role to play even more important than your work here.”

The Prime Minister looked uncommonly cherubic. Three years in the RAF had taught Goldfarb that rankers who wore that expression had more up their sleeves than their arms. They’d also taught him he couldn’t do anything about it, so he said what he had to say: “I’ll be happy to serve in any way I can, sir.”

Churchill nodded genially, then went back to Hipple and his colleagues for more talk about jet engines. After another few minutes, he put his hat back on, tipped it to Hipple, and left the Nissen hut.

Basil Roundbush grinned at Goldfarb. “I say, old man, after Winnie makes you an MP, do remember the little people who knew you before you grew rich and famous.”

“An MP?” Goldfarb shook his head in mock dismay. “Lord, I hope that’s not what he had in mind. He said he had something important instead of this.”

That sally met with general approval. One of the meteorologists said, “Good job you didn’t tell him you’re a Labour supporter, Goldfarb.”

“It doesn’t matter, not now.” Goldfarb had backed Labour, yes, as offering more to the working man than the Tories could (and, as was true of a lot of Jewish immigrants and their progeny, his own politics had a slant to the left). But he also knew no one but Churchill could have rallied Britain against Hitler, and no one else could have kept her in the fight against the Lizards.

Thinking of the Nazis and the Lizards together made Goldfarb think of the invasion so many had feared in 1940. The Germans hadn’t been able to bring it off, not least because radar kept them from driving the RAF from the skies. If the Lizards came, no one could offer any such guarantee of success. Ironically, the Germans holding northern France served as England’s shield against invasion by the aliens.

But the shield was not perfect. The Lizards had control of the air when they chose to use it. They could leapfrog over northern France and the Channel both. Just because, they hadn’t done it didn’t mean they wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Goldfarb snorted. The only thing he could do about that was try to make British radar more effective, which would in turn make the Lizards pay more if they decided to invade. It wasn’t as much as he’d have wanted to do in an ideal world, but it was more than most people could say, so be supposed it would do.

And he’d not only met Winston Churchill, but talked business with him! That wasn’t something everyone could say. He couldn’t write home to his family that the Prime Minister had been here-the censors would never pass it-but he could tell them if he ever got down to London. He’d almost given up on the notion of leave.

Fred Hipple said, “Churchill’s full of good ideas. The only difficulty is, he’s also full of bad ones, and sometimes telling the one from the other’s not easy till after the fact.”

“What he said about tackling the Lizards’ radar circuitry was first-rate,” Goldfarb said. “What is more important for us now than how or why; we can use what we learn without knowing why it works, just as some stupid clot can drive a motorcar without cluttering his head with the theory of internal combustion.”

“Ah, but someone must understand the theory, or your stupid clot would have no motorcar to drive,” Basil Roundbush said.

“That’s true only to a limited degree,” Hipple said. “Even now, theory takes you only so far in aircraft design; eventually, you just have to go out and see how the beast flies. That was much more the case during the Great War, when practically everything, from what the older engineers have told me, was cut and try. Yet the aircraft they manufactured did fly.”

“Most of the time,” Roundbush said darkly. “I’m bloody glad I never had to go up in them.”

Goldfarb ignored that. Roundbush made wisecracks the same way other men fiddled with rosaries or cracked their knuckles or tugged at one particular lock of hair: it was a nervous tic, nothing more.

Clucking softly to himself, Goldfarb fixed a power source to one side of a Lizard circuit element and an ohmmeter to the other. He’d measure voltage and amperage next: with these strange components, you couldn’t tell what they were supposed to do to a current that ran through them except by experiment.

He turned on the power. The ohmmeter swung; the component did resist the current’s flow. Goldfarb grunted in satisfaction: He’d thought it would: it looked like others that had. He noted down the reading, as well as where the circuit element sat on its board and what it looked like. Then he turned off the power and hooked up the voltage meter. One tiny piece at a time, he added to the jigsaw puzzle.

As Vyacheslav Molotov turned the knob that led him into the antechamber in front of Stalin’s night office, he felt and suppressed a familiar nervousness. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, his word went unchallenged. In negotiating with the capitalist states that hated the Soviet revolution, even in discussions with the Lizards, he was the unyielding representative of his nation. He knew he had a reputation for being inflexible, and did everything he could to play it up.

Not here, though. Anyone who was unyielding and inflexible with Stalin would soon know the stiffness of death. Then Molotov had no more time for such reflections, for Stalin’s orderly-oh, the fellow had a fancy title, but that was what he was-nodded to him and said, “Go on in. He expects you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”

Molotov nodded and entered Stalin’s sanctum. This was not where the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was photographed with diplomats or soldiers. He had a fancy office upstairs for that. He worked here, at hours that suited him. It was one-thirty in the morning. Stalin would be at it for at least another couple of hours. Those who dealt with him had to adjust themselves accordingly.

Stalin looked up from the desk with the gooseneck lamp. “Good morning, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said with his throaty Georgian accent. His voice held no irony; morning it was, as far as he was concerned.

“Good morning, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov replied. Whatever his feelings about the matter were, he had schooled himself not to reveal them. He found that important at any time, doubly so around the ruler of the Soviet Union.

Stalin waved Molotov to a chair, then stood up himself. Though well-proportioned, he was short, and did not like other men looming over him. What he did not like did not occur. He filled his pipe from a leather tobacco pouch, lit a match, and got the pipe going.

The harsh smell of makhorka, cheap Russian tobacco, made Molotov’s nose twitch in spite of himself. Under the iron-gray mustache, Stalin’s lip curled. “I know it’s vile, but it’s all I can find these days. What shipping we get has no room aboard for luxuries.”

That said as much as anything about the plight in which mankind found itself. When the leader of one of the three greatest nations on the planet could not get decent tobacco even for himself, the Lizards were the ones with the upper hand. Well, if he understood what was in Stalin’s mind, this meeting was to be about how to tilt the balance back the other way.

Stalin sucked in more smoke, paced back and forth. At length he said, “So the Americans and Germans are pressing ahead with their programs to make bombs of this explosive metal?”

“So I have been given to understand, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. “I am also told by our intelligence services that they had these programs in place before the Lizards began their invasion of the Earth.”

“We also had such a program in place,” Stalin answered placidly.

That relieved Molotov, who had heard of no such program. He wondered how far along Soviet scientists had been compared to those in the decadent capitalist and fascist countries. Faith in the strength of Marxist-Leninist precepts made him hope they might have been ahead; concern over how far the Soviet Union had had to come since the revolution made him fear they might have been behind. With hope and fear so commingled, he dared not ask Stalin which was the true state of affairs.

Stalin went on, “We now have an advantage over both the United States and the Hitlerites: in that raid against the Lizards last fall, we obtained a considerable supply of the explosive metal, as you know. I had hoped the German taking the metal back to the Hitlerites would be waylaid in Poland, and his share lost.” Stalin looked unhappy.

So did Molotov, who said, “This much I did know, and how he had to give up half his share, though not all, to the Polish Jews, who then passed it on to the Americans.”

“Yes,” Stalin said. “Hitler is a fool, do you know that?”

“You have said it many times, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. That was true, but it had not kept Stalin from making his nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, or from living up to it for almost the next two years, or from being so confident Hitler would also live up to it that he’d ignored warnings of an impending Nazi attack, ignored them so completely that the Soviet state had almost crashed in ruins because of it. Since Molotov had supported Stalin in those choices, he could hardly bring them up now (if he hadn’t supported him then, he would be in no position to bring them up now).

Stalin drew on his pipe again. His cheeks, pitted from a boyhood bout of smallpox, twitched with distaste. “Not even from so close as Turkey can I get decent tobacco. But do you know why I say Hitler is a fool?”

“For wantonly attacking the peace-loving people of the Soviet Union, who had done nothing to deserve it.” Molotov gave the obvious answer, and a true one, but it left him unhappy. Stalin was looking for something else.

Sure enough, he shook his head. But, to Molotov’s relief, he was only amused, not angry. “That is not what was in my mind, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. I say he was a fool because, when his scientists discovered the uranium atom could be split, they published their findings for all the world to see.” Stalin chuckled rheumily. “Had we made that finding here… Can you imagine such an article appearing in the Proceedings of the Akademia Nauk, the Soviet Academy of Sciences?”

“Hardly,” Molotov said, and he chuckled, too. He was normally the most mirthless of men, but when Stalin laughed, you laughed with him. Besides, this was the sort of thing he did find funny. Stalin was dead right here-Soviet secrecy would have kept such an important secret from leaking out where prying eyes could fasten on it.

“I will tell you something else that will amuse you,” Stalin said. “It takes a certain amount of explosive metal to explode, our scientists tell me. Below this amount, it will not go off no matter what you do. Do you understand? Oh, it is a lovely joke.” Stalin laughed again.

Molotov also laughed, but uncertainly. This time, he did not see the joke.

Stalin must have sensed that; his uncanny skill at scenting weakness in his subordinates was not least among the talents that had kept him in power for twenty years. Still in that jovial mood, he said, “Never fear, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich; I shall explain. I would far sooner the Germans and Americans had no explosive metal, but because the Polish Jews divided it between them, neither has enough for a bomb. Now do you see?”

“No,” Molotov confessed, but he reversed course a moment later: “Wait. Yes, perhaps I do. Do you mean that we, with an undivided share, have enough to make one of these bombs for ourselves?”

“That is exactly what I mean,” Stalin said. “See, you are a clever fellow after all. The Germans and the Americans will still have to do all the research they would have required anyhow, but we-we shall soon be ready to fight the Lizards fire against fire, so to speak.”

Just contemplating that felt good to Molotov. Like Stalin, like everyone, he had lived in dread of the day when Moscow, like Berlin and Washington, might suddenly cease to exist. To be able to retaliate in kind against the Lizards brought a glow of anticipation to his sallow features.

But his joy was not undiluted. He said, “Iosef Vissarionovich, we shall have the one bomb, with no immediate prospect for producing more, is that right? Once we have used the weapon in our hands, what is to keep the Lizards from dropping a great many such weapons on us?”

Stalin scowled. He did not care for anyone going against anything he said, even in the slightest way. Nevertheless, he thought seriously before he answered; Molotov’s question was to the point. At last he said, “First of all, our scientists will go on working to produce explosive metal for us. They will be strongly encouraged to succeed.”

Stalin’s smile reminded Molotov of that of a lion resting against a zebra carcass from which it had just finished feeding. Molotov had no trouble visualizing the sort of encouragement the Soviet nuclear physicists would get: dachas, cars, women if they wanted them, for success… and the gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck if they failed. Probably a couple of them would be purged just to focus the minds of the others on what they were doing. Stalin’s methods were ugly, but they got results.

“How long before the physicists can do this for us?” Molotov said.

“They babble about three or four years, as if this were not an emergency,” Stalin said dismissively. “I have given them eighteen months. They shall do as the Party requires of them, or else suffer the consequences.”

Molotov chose his words with care: “It might be better if they did not undergo the supreme penalty, Iosef Vissarionovich. Men of their technical training would be difficult to replace adequately.”

“Yes, yes.” Stalin sounded impatient, always a danger sign. “But they are the servants of the peasants and workers of the Soviet Union, not their masters; we must not let them get ideas above their station, or the virus of the bourgeoisie will infect us once again.”

“No, that cannot be permitted,” Molotov agreed. “Let us say that they do all they have promised. How do we protect the Soviet Union in the time between our using the bomb we have made from the Lizards’ explosive metal and that in which we begin to manufacture it for ourselves?”

“For one thing, we do not use that one bomb immediately,” Stalin answered. “We cannot use it immediately, for it is not yet made. But even if it were, I would wait to pick the proper moment. And besides, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich”-Stalin looked smug-“how will the Lizards be certain we have only the one bomb? Once we use it, they shall have to assume we can do it again, not so?”

“Unless they assume we used their explosive metal for the first one,” Molotov said.

He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Stalin didn’t shout or bluster at him; that he would have withstood with ease. Instead, the General Secretary fixed him with a glare as cold and dark and silent as midwinter at Murmansk. That was Stalin’s sign of ultimate displeasure; he ordered generals and commissars shot with just such an expression.

Here, though, Molotov’s point was too manifestly true for Stalin to ignore. The glare softened, as winter’s grip did at last even in Murmansk. Stalin said, “This is another good argument for carefully choosing the time and place we use the bomb. But you also must remember, if we face defeat without it, we shall surely use it against the invaders no matter what they do to us in return. They are more dangerous than the Germans, and must be fought with whatever means come to hand.”

“True enough,” Molotov said. The Soviet Union had 190,000,000 people; throw twenty or thirty million on the fire, or even more, and it remained a going concern. Just getting rid of the kulaks and bringing in collectivized agriculture had killed millions through deliberate famine. If more deaths were what building socialism in the USSR required, more deaths there would be.

“I am glad you agreed, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Stalin said silkily. Under the silk lay jagged steel; had Molotov persisted in disagreeing, something most disagreeable would have happened to him.

The Foreign Commissar of the Soviet Union was fearless before the leaders of the decadent capitalist states; he had even confronted Atvar, who led the Lizards. Before Stalin, Molotov quailed. Stalin genuinely terrified him, as he did every other Soviet citizen. Back in revolutionary days, the little mustachioed Georgian had not been so much, but since, oh, but since…

Nevertheless, Molotov owed allegiance not just to Stalin, but to the Soviet Union as a whole. If he was to serve the USSR properly, he needed information. Getting it without angering his master was the trick. Carefully, he said, “The Lizards have taken a heavy toll on our bombing planes. Will we be able to deliver the bomb once we have it?”

“I am told the device will be too heavy and bulky to fit in any of our bombers,” Stalin said. Molotov admired the courage of the man who had told-had had to tell-that to Stalin. But the Soviet leader did not seem nearly so angry as Molotov would have guessed. Instead, his face assumed an expression of genial deviousness that made Molotov want to make sure he still had his wallet and watch. He went on, “If we can dispose of Trotsky in Mexico City, I expect we can find a way to put a bomb where we want it.”

“No doubt you are right, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said. Trotsky had thought he was safe enough to keep plotting against the Soviet Union, but several inches of tempered steel in his, brain proved that a delusion.

“No doubt I am,” Stalin agreed complacently. As undisputed master of the Soviet Union, he had developed ways not altogether different from those of other undisputed masters. Molotov had once or twice thought of saying as much, but it remained just that-a thought.

He did ask, “How soon can the Germans and Americans begin producing their own explosive metal?” The Americans didn’t much worry him; they were far away and had worries closer to home. The Germans… Hitler had talked about using the new bombs against the Lizards in Poland. The Soviet Union was an older enemy, and almost as close.

“We are working to learn this. I expect we shall be informed well in advance, whatever the answer proves to be,” Stalin answered, complacent still. Soviet espionage in capitalist countries continued to function well; many there devoted themselves to furthering the cause of the socialist revolution.

Molotov cast about for other questions he might safely ask. Before he could come up with any, Stalin bent over the papers on his desk, a sure sign of dismissal. “Thank you for your time, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said as he stood to go.

Stalin grunted. His politeness was minimal, but then, so was Molotov’s with anyone but him. When Molotov closed the door behind him, he permitted himself the luxury of a small sigh. He’d survived another audience.

For getting his consignment of uranium or whatever it was safely from Boston to Denver, Leslie Groves had been promoted to brigadier general. He hadn’t yet bothered replacing his eagles with stars; he had more important things to worry about. His pay was accumulating at the new rate, not that that meant much, what with prices going straight through the roof.

At the moment what galled him worse than inflation was the lack of gratitude he was getting from the Metallurgical Laboratory scientists. Enrico Fermi looked at him with sorrowful Mediterranean eyes and said, “Valuable as this sample may be, it does not constitute a critical mass.”

“I’m sorry, that’s not a term I know,” Groves said. He knew nuclear energy could be released, but nobody had done much publishing on matters nuclear since Hahn and Strassmann split the uranium atom, and, to complicate things further, the Met Lab crew had developed a jargon all their own.

“It means you have not brought us enough with which to make a bomb,” Leo Szilard said bluntly. He and the other physicists round the table glared at Groves as if he were deliberately holding back another fifty kilos of priceless metal.

Since he wasn’t, he glared, too. “My escort and I risked our lives across a couple of thousand miles to get that package to you,” he growled. “If you’re telling me we wasted our time, smiling when you say it isn’t going to help.” Even relatively lean as the journey had left him, he was the biggest man at the conference table, and used to using his physical presence to get what he wanted.

“No, no, this is not what we mean,” Fermi said quickly. “You could not have known exactly what you had, and we could not, either, until you delivered it.”

“We did not even know that you had it until you delivered it,” Szilard said. “Security-pah!” He muttered something under his breath in what might have been Magyar. Whatever it was, it sounded pungent. Groves had seen his dossier. His politics had some radical leanings, but he was too brilliant for that to count against him.

Fermi added, “The material you brought will be invaluable in research, and in combining with what we eventually produce ourselves. But by itself, it is not sufficient.”

“All right, you’ll have to do here what you were going to do at Chicago,” Groves said. “How’s that coming?” He turned to the one man from the Met Lab crew he’d met before. “Dr. Larssen, what is the status of getting the project up and running again here in Denver?”

“We were building the graphite pile under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago,” Jens Larssen answered. “Now we’re reassembling it under the football stadium here. The work goes-well enough.” He shrugged.

Groves gave Larssen a searching’ once-over. He didn’t seem to have the driving energy he’d shown in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the summer before. Then, he’d passionately urged the federal government-in-hiding to do all it could to hold Chicago against the Lizards. But the Met Lab had had to move even though Chicago was held, and now-well, it just didn’t seem as if Larssen gave a damn. That kind of attitude wouldn’t do, not when the work at hand was so urgent.

The meeting with the physicists went on for another half hour, over lesser but still vital issues like keeping electricity coming into Denver and into the University of Denver in particular so the men could do their jobs. People in the United States had taken electricity for granted until the Lizards came. Now, over too much of the country, it was a vanished luxury. But if it vanished in Denver, the Met Lab would have to find somewhere else to go, and Groves didn’t think the country-or the world-could afford the delay.

Unlike nuclear physics, electricity was something with which, by God, he was intimately familiar. “We’ll keep it going for you,” he promised, and hoped he could make good on the vow. If the Lizards got the idea humans were experimenting with nuclear energy here, they’d have something to say about the matter. Keeping them from finding out, then, was going to be a sizable part of keeping the lights on.

When the meeting broke up, Groves fell into step with Larssen and ignored the physicist’s efforts to break away. “We need to talk, Dr. Larssen,” he said.

“No we don’t, Colonel-sorry, General-Groves,” Larssen said, loading the title with all the scorn he could. “The Army’s already done enough to screw up my life, thanks very much. I don’t need any more help from you.” He turned his back and started to stamp off.

Groves shot out a big, meaty hand and caught him by the arm. From the way Larssen whirled around, Groves thought he was going to swing on him. Decking a physicist wasn’t part of his own job description, but if that was what it took, that was what he’d do.

Maybe Larssen saw that in his eyes, for he didn’t throw the punch. Groves said, “Look, your life is your business. But when it makes you have trouble with your job, well, your particular job is too important to let that happen. So what’s eating you, and how come you think it’s the, Army’s fault?”

“You want to know? you’really want to know?” Larssen didn’t wait for an answer from Groves, but plowed ahead: “Well, why the hell shouldn’t I tell you? Somebody else will if I don’t. After I saw you last year, I managed to get all the way to western Indiana on my own. That’s when I ran into General Patton, who wouldn’t let me send my wife a message so she’d know I was alive and okay.”

“Security-” Groves began.

“Yeah, security. So I couldn’t get her a message then, and by the time I got to Chicago, it was too late-the Met Lab team had already taken off. And I couldn’t get a message to Barbara after that-security again. So she figured I was dead. What was she supposed to think?”

“Oh,” Groves said. “I’m sorry. That must have been a shock when she came into Denver. But I’ll bet you had quite a reunion.”

“It was great,” Larssen said, his voice deadly cold. “She thought I was dead, so she fell for this corporal who rides herd on Lizard POWs. She married him up in Wyoming. I was already in Denver, but Colonel Hexham, God bless him, still wouldn’t let me write. Security one more time. Now she’s gonna have the guy’s baby. So as far as I’m concerned, General Groves; sir, the U.S. Army can go fuck itself. And if you don’t like it, throw me in the brig.”

Groves opened his mouth, closed it again. He’d been through Chugwater just after that wedding in Wyoming. He’d known something was eating Larssen, but not what. No wonder the poor bastard was in a blue funk. Mahatma Gandhi wouldn’t have stayed cool, calm, and collected with this landing on him.

“Maybe she’ll come back to you,” he said at last. It sounded lame, even in his own ears.

Larssen laughed scornfully. “Doesn’t look that way. She’s still going to bed with Sam stinking Yeager, that’s for sure. Women!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “You can’t live without ’em and they won’t live with you.”

Groves hadn’t seen his own wife in months, either, or sent her a note or anything else. He didn’t worry about her running around, though; he just worried about her being all right. Maybe that just meant he was older and more settled than Larssen and his wife. Maybe it meant his marriage was in better shape. Or maybe (unsettling thought) it meant he didn’t know what to worry about.

He fell back on his own training: “Dr. Larssen, you cannot let it get you down to the point where it affects your work. You cannot. More than just you and your wife depends on what you do here, more even than your country. I am not exaggerating when I say the fate of humanity rests on your shoulders.”

“I know that,” Larssen said. “But it’s hard to give a damn about the fate of humanity when the one human being who really matters to you goes and does something like this.”

There Groves could not argue with him, nor did he try. He said, “You’re not the only one in that boat. It happens all the time-maybe more in war than in peace, because things are more broken up nowadays-but all the time. You have to pick up the pieces and keep going.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Larssen said. “I tell myself the same thing twenty times a day. But it’s damned hard when I keep seeing her there with that other guy. It hurts too much to stand.”

Groves thought about shipping out the other guy-Yeager, Larssen had said his name was. With the war on, keeping a physicist happy counted for more than the feelings of a Lizard liaison man. But even if he did that, he had no guarantee it would bring Barbara back into Jens’ arms, not if she was carrying Yeager’s baby.

And she and Yeager wouldn’t have got married if they hadn’t thought Larssen was dead. They’d tried to make things right, the best way they knew how. It hadn’t worked, but they hadn’t had all the data they needed, and humans couldn’t be engineered like electrons, anyhow.

Just the same, Groves wished he could order Barbara to go to bed with Jens for the good of the country. It would have made things a lot simpler. But, while a medieval baron might have gotten away with an order like that, a twentieth-century woman would spit in his eye if he tried it. That was what freedom was about. He believed in freedom… no matter how inconvenient it was at the moment.

“Professor Larssen, you’ve got yourself a mess,” he said heavily.

“Yeah. Now tell me one I haven’t heard.”

When Larssen broke away this time, Groves didn’t try to stop him. He just stood and watched till the physicist turned a corner and disappeared. Then he shook his head. “That’s trouble, waiting to happen,” he muttered, and started slowly down the hall himself.

Atvar turned one eye turret to the left side of the audience chamber, the other to the right. The assembled shiplords stared back at him. He tried to gauge their temper. They’d been struggling for close to two years, almost one of Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its star, to bring the miserable world into the Empire. By all they’d known when they left from Home, the conquest should have been over in a matter of days-which only proved they hadn’t known much.

“My fellow males, let us consider the status of our enterprise,” he said.

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the shiplords chorused in a show of the perfect obedience the Race so esteemed. No virtue was more fundamental than obedience. So Atvar had been taught since he came from his egg; so he’d believed till he came to Tosev 3.

He still believed it, but not as he had back on Home. Tosev 3 corroded every assumption the Race made about how life should be lived. The only thing the Big Uglies knew about obedience was that they weren’t very good at it. They’d even overthrown and murdered emperors: to Atvar, whose ruling dynasty had held the throne for tens of thousands of years, a crime almost incomprehensibly heinous.

He said, “We do continue to make progress in our campaigns. Our counterattacks south of the Tosevite city known as Chicago on the smaller continental mass have pushed back the enemy, and-”

Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower, raised a hand. Atvar wished he could ignore the male. Unfortunately, Straha was next most senior shiplord after Kirel, who commanded the bannership itself. Even more unfortunately, from Atvar’s point of view, Straha headed a loud and vocal faction of males whose principal amusement seemed to be carping about the way the war against the Tosevites was going.

Having been (reluctantly) recognized, Straha said, “May it please the exalted fleetlord, I would respectfully note that the campaign continues to have obvious shortcomings. I hope I shall not try his patience if I elucidate?”

“Proceed,” Atvar said. Maybe, he thought hopefully, Straha will say something really unforgivable and give me the excuse I’ve been looking for to sack him. It hadn’t happened yet, worse luck.

Straha stood a little straighter, the better to display his elaborate, punctiliously applied body paint. He had his own agenda, Atvar knew: if he could persuade enough males that the fleetlord was botching his leadership of the war, he might become fleetlord himself. It would be irregular, but everything about the conquest-the attempted conquest-of Tosev 3 was irregular. If Straha succeeded where Atvar had failed, the Emperor would turn his eye turrets away from the irregularity.

The fractious shiplord said, “First and most important is the increased punishment our armor is taking at the hands of the Big Uglies. Loss rates are up significantly from last year’s fighting to this. Such a toll cannot continue indefinitely.”

There Atvar, try as he would, could not disagree with Straha. He made his voice sharp, though, as he answered, “I cannot produce landcruisers out of thin air, nor can the Big Uglies under our control manufacture any that meet our needs. Meanwhile, those out of our control continue to improve their models, and to introduce new weapons such as antilandcruiser rockets. Thus our losses are higher of late.”

“The Tosevites out of our control always seem capable of more than those we have conquered,” Straha said acidly.

With an effort, the fleetlord ignored the sarcasm and replied to the literal sense of Straha’s words: “This is not surprising, Shiplord. The most technologically advanced regions of this inhomogeneous planet are precisely the ones most capable of extended resistance and, I suppose, of innovation.”

He spoke the last word with a certain amount of distaste. In the Empire, innovation came seldom, and its effects were tightly controlled. On Tosev 3, it ran wild, fueled by the endless squabbling among the Big Uglies’ tiny empires. Atvar thought such quick change surely malignant for the long-term health of a civilization, but the Tosevites cared nothing for the long term. And in the short term, quick change made them more dangerous, not less.

“Let that be as you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Straha answered. Atvar gave him a suspicious look; he’d yielded too easily. Sure enough, he went on, “Some of our losses, however, may be better explained by causes other than Tosevite technical progress. I speak in reference to the continued and growing use among our fighting males of the herb termed ginger.”

“I concede the problem, Shiplord,” Atvar said. He could hardly do otherwise, what with some of the after-action reports he’d seen from the landcruiser combats in France. Had things gone as planned, the Race would have been pushing into Deutschland. Instead, they’d taken a pounding almost as costly as the one that had held them out of Chicago, and without the excuse of winter.

Atvar continued, “Surely, though, you cannot hold me responsible for the effects of an unanticipated alien herb. We are making every effort to diminish its consequences on our operations. If you have any concrete suggestions in that regard, I would gratefully receive them.”

He’d hoped that would shut Straha up. It didn’t; nothing seemed to. But it did make the shiplord change the subject: “Exalted Fleetlord, what have we learned of the Big Uglies’ efforts to produce their own nuclear weapons?”

Where Straha had been playing to his own faction before, now he seized the attention of all the assembled males. If the Tosevites got their clawless hands on nuclear weapons, the campaign stopped being a war of conquest and turned into a war of survival. And what would the onrushing colonization fleet do if, between them, the Big Uglies and the Race rendered Tosev 3 uninhabitable?

Hating Straha, Atvar answered, “Though they did steal nuclear material from us, we have found no sign that they can yet produce a weapon with it.” The fleetlord had expected that question to arise, if not from Straha, then from someone else. He touched a recessed button on the podium. A holograph of one of the Race’s power plants appeared. Seeing the familiar egg-shaped protective dome over the reactor made him long bitterly for Home. Forcing down the emotion, he went on, “We have also detected no indications of any structures like this one, which would be required for them to utilize their own radioactive materials.”

Most of the shiplords relaxed when they heard that. Even Straha said, “So they won’t be able to use nuclear weapons against us for the next few years, eh? Well, there’s something, anyhow.” If that wasn’t praise, it wasn’t carping criticism, either. Atvar gratefully accepted it.

Loyal, steadfast Kirel raised a hand. Atvar was delighted to recognize him. Then Kirel said, “Excuse me, Exalted Fleetlord, but the Big Uglies are good at camouflage. And besides, some of their primitive structures look very little like those of ours which perform equivalent functions.” Are we truly as certain as we would like to be that their nuclear weapons programs are not progressing under our very snouts, to emerge as unexpectedly as some of their other weapons?”

Aside from the difficulty of proving a negative, Atvar had no answer prepared for that. The meeting did not dissolve on the note for which he’d hoped.