Tilting the Balance

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Teerts was coming to look forward to mealtimes. For one thing, the Nipponese had been feeding him better lately, with many more bits of meat and fish mixed in with the rice that made up the greater part of his diet. For another, they’d also taken to spicing his food instead of leaving it bland and boring; his tongue tingled pleasantly when he ate now. The spices weren’t the same as the ones cooks back on Home would have used, but they livened up meals in a similar way.

And for a third, food these days gave him a lift that carried him altogether out of the depression that had gripped him since his killercraft went down near Harbin. For a while after he ate, he felt bright and strong and ever so wise. The feeling never lasted as long as he wished it would, but having it even for a little while was welcome.

The Nipponese seemed to notice his changed attitude, too. They’d developed the habit of interrogating him right after he ate. He didn’t mind. Food made him seem so omniscient that he dealt with their questions with effortless ease.

He heard a squeak and a rattle down the hall: the food cart. He sprang to his feet, waited eagerly by the bars of his cell for the cart to arrive. One guard unlocked the cell. Another stood watch with a knife-tipped rifle. The fellow who actually served the food handed Teerts his bowl.

“Thank you, superior sir,” he said in Nipponese, bowing as he did so. The guard locked the cell door again. The cart clattered away.

Out of necessity, Teerts had become adept with the little paired sticks the Nipponese used to manipulate food. He brought a chunk of fish to his mouth, twisted his tongue around it. It didn’t taste the way it had for a good many meals. It wasn’t bad, though. They’ve changed the herbs they’re using, he thought, and gulped it down.

He got to the bottom of the bowl in a hurry; although the Nipponese were feeding him better than they had, he wasn’t any great threat to get fat. As he ran his tongue over his hard outer mouthparts to clean them, he waited for the wonderful feeling of well-being that had come to accompany each meal.

He didn’t get it, not this time. He’d been more than unusually gloomy when the feeling passed away after a meal. Now, failing to find it at all, he felt desperate, betrayed; the iron bars of his cell seemed to be closing in around him. He paced restlessly back and forth, his tailstump jerking like a metronome.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d depended on that mealtime burst of euphoria till it was denied him. He opened his mouth, displaying his full set of small, sharp teeth. If Major Okamoto came by, he’d gnaw a chunk off him. That would give him a good feeling, by the Emperor!

Not much later, Major Okamoto did come down the hallway. He stopped in front of Teerts’ cell. The captured killercraft pilot’s dreams of vengeance turned to fear at the sight of the Big Ugly, as they always did.

“Good day,” Okamoto said in the language of the Race. He’d become quite fluent, much more so than Teerts was in Nipponese. “How are you feeling today?”

“Superior sir, I am not so well as I would like,” Teerts answered; among the Race, that question was taken literally.

Okamoto’s rubbery face twisted into what Teerts had come to recognize as an expression of amusement. That worried the male; Okamoto’s amusement often came at his expense. But the Big Ugly’s words were mild enough: “I may know what is troubling you, and may even have a medicine to cure your trouble.”

“Honto? — Really?” Teerts asked suspiciously: From all he’d seen of what the Big Uglies called medicine, he’d sooner have taken his chances on being sick.

“Hai, honto,” Okamoto answered, also falling back into Nipponese. From a pocket of his uniform, he pulled out a small waxed-paper bag. He poured a little of the brown powder it held into the palm of his hand, then held the hand out to Teerts through the bars. “Here, put your tongue on this.”

Teerts sniffed first. The powder had a pungent, spicy odor that seemed familiar, though he could not place it at once. He reflected that the Tosevites could kill him any time they chose; they did not need to put on an elaborate charade if they wanted him dead. Therefore he flicked out his tongue and licked up the powder.

As soon as he tasted it, he knew what it was: the flavor that had been missing from his latest bowl of food. A moment later, he realized the Nipponese must have been feeding it to him in tiny doses till now. He didn’t just feel good; he felt as if the sacred Emperor were some sort of lowly cousin of his. Ruling the Race would have been too small a job for him; keeping track of all the planets in all the galaxies seemed about right.

Through the omnipotence that blazed in him, he saw Okamoto’s face contort again. “You like that, neh?” the Big Ugly asked, all but the last word in Teerts’ tongue.

“Yes,” Teerts said, as if from very far away. He wished Okamoto were very far away, so he would not pester him at this transcendent moment.

But the interrogator and interpreter did not pester him. The Big Ugly just leaned back against the bars of the empty cell across from Teerts’ and waited. For a while, Teerts ignored him as being beneath notice, let alone contempt. The glorious feeling from the powder he’d licked up, though, didn’t last as long as he’d hoped it would. And when it was gone…

When it was gone, Teerts crashed into depths deeper than the heights he had scaled. The weight of all the worlds he’d so blithely imagined he could oversee came down on his narrow shoulders and crushed him. Now he ignored Okamoto because the Big Ugly was outside his sphere of intensely personal misery. Nothing the Nipponese did to him could be worse than what his own body and brain were doing. He huddled in a corner of the cell and wished he could die.

Okamoto’s voice pursued him. “Not so good? Want another taste?” The Big Ugly held out his broad, fleshy hand, a small mound of powder in the middle of the palm.

Even before his conscious mind willed him to action, Teerts was on his feet and bounding toward the bars between which that hand so temptingly protruded. But before his tongue could touch that precious powder, Okamoto jerked the hand back. Teerts almost slammed his muzzle against the cold, unyielding iron that caged him. Careless of his own safety, he cursed Okamoto as vilely as he knew how.

The Tosevite threw back his head and let out several of the loud barking noises his kind used for laughter. “So you want more ginger, do you? I thought you might. We have learned males of the Race are-how do you say it? — very fond of this herb.”

Ginger. Now Teerts had a name for what be craved. For some reason, that only made him crave it more. His fury collapsed into depression once again. Instead of hissing at Okamoto, he pleaded with him: “Give it to me, I beg. How can you hold it away from me if you know how badly I need it?”

Okamoto laughed again. “One who lets himself be captured does not deserve to have anything given to him.” When it came to prisoners of war, the Nipponese knew only scorn. Okamoto went on, “Maybe, though, just maybe, you can earn more ginger for yourself. Do you understand?”

Teerts understood too miserably well. The trap’s teeth were sharp, sharp. His captors had given him a taste for ginger in his food, withheld it, shown him exactly what he craved, and now were withholding it again. They expected that would make him submit. They were, he admitted to himself, dead right. Hating the cringing whine he heard in his own voice, he said, “What do you want me to do, superior sir?”

“More exact answers to the questions we have been putting to you on explosive metals might make us more pleased with you,” Okamoto said.

Teerts knew that was a lie. Because he’d let himself be taken prisoner, the Nipponese would never be happy with him, no matter what he did. But they might find him more useful; he’d already seen how his treatment varied with their perception of his value. If he satisfied them, they would give him ginger. The thought tolled in his head like the reverberations from a big bass drum.

Despite it, he had to say, “I have already given you the best and truest answers I can.”

“So you claim now,” Okamoto answered. “We shall see how you’reply when you want ginger more than you can imagine now. Maybe then you will remember better than you do today.”

The teeth of the trap were not only sharp, they were jagged as well. The Nipponese didn’t just want Teerts to be their prisoner, they wanted him to be their slave, Slavery had vanished from the culture of the Race long before Home was unified, but the Rabotevs (or was it the Hallessi? — Teerts had always dozed through history lessons) practiced it whenever their world, whichever it was, came into the Empire. They returned the concept, if not the institution, to the notice of the Race. Teerts feared it wasn’t just a concept on Tosev 3.

He also feared that if he went without ginger, he would go mad. The craving ate at him like acid dripping on his scaly skin. “Please, let me taste it now,” he begged.

Some of his Nipponese captors had been wantonly cruel, and exulted in their cruelty in the exact proportion that they enjoyed power over his helplessness. They would have refused, merely to experience the pleasure they took from watching him suffer. Okamoto, to give him his limited due, did not daub on that pattern of body paint. Having shown Teerts he was indeed trapped, the Big Ugly let him sample the bait once more.

The feeling of power and wisdom flooded through Teerts again. While he reached that ecstatic, exalted peak, he did his best to come up with a way to escape the prison where the Nipponese held him. For an all but omnipotent genius, it should have been easy.

But no brilliant ideas came. Maybe the ginger did sharpen his analytical faculty a little: he swiftly concluded the feeling of brilliance it gave him was just that, a feeling, and nothing more. Had the powder not been coursing through his veins, he would have been bitterly disappointed. As things were, he noted the problem, then dismissed it.

Tosevites were impetuous, hot-blooded, always doing things. The Race’s virtues were study, patience, careful planning. So Teerts had been indoctrinated, and little he had seen inclined him to doubt what his killercraft squadron’s briefing officers had said. But now, out in the hallway, Okamoto stood quietly and waited as patiently as any male of the Race.

And Teerts? As the joy from the ginger ebbed in him, leaving only a memory of sensation, Teerts became a veritable parody of a Big Ugly, grabbing at the bars of his cell, shouting curses, reaching uselessly for Okamoto in a foredoomed effort to get more ginger onto his tongue: in short, he acted blindly, without the slightest concern for consequences. He should have been ashamed of himself. He was ashamed of himself-but not enough to stop.

Okamoto waited until his blustering had died away, swallowed in the crushing depression that followed ginger euphoria. Then, at just the right instant, the Nipponese said, “Tell me everything you know about the process that transforms element 92 to element 94.”

“The special word for this in our language is ‘transmutes,’ ” Teerts said. “It takes place in several steps. First-” He wondered how much Okamoto would make him talk before he got another taste.

Bobby Fiore threw an easy peg to the young Chinese man who stood waiting to catch the ball. The fellow actually did catch it, too; it slapped into the leather glove (a duplicate of Fiore’s) he wore, and he covered it with his bare hand.

“Good job!” Fiore said, using tone and expression and dumb show to get across what he still had trouble saying in Chinese. “Now throw it back.” Again, gesture showed what he wanted.

The Chinese, whose name was Lo, threw high. Fiore sprang and caught the ball. He landed lightly, ready to throw again himself: after so many years on so many infields, he could probably do that in his sleep. Drop a ball anywhere near him and he’d be on it like a cat.

“Don’t throw like a girl,” he told Lo; this once, it was just as well that his pupil didn’t understand exactly what he had to say. He demonstrated, exaggerating the from-the-elbow style the Chinese had used and shaking his head violently to show it wasn’t the best way to do the job. Then he showed the full-arm motion American kids picked up on farmyards, parks, and vacant lots.

Lo didn’t seem to think one better than the other. Instead of using his handmade, expensive baseball to prove the point, Bobby Fiore bent down to get an egg-sized rock. He and Lo were not far from the razor-wire fence around the Lizards’ camp. He turned and threw the rock as far as he could into the green fields beyond the perimeter.

He found another rock, tossed it underhand to Lo. “Let’s see you top that, throwing like you do,” he said. Again, gestures eked out meaning. Lo nodded and let fly, grunting with effort. His rock flew barely half as far as Fiore’s had. He looked at the American, nodded thoughtfully, and tried the full-arm motion. Fiore clapped his hands. “That’s the idea!”

The truth was, he couldn’t antagonize a cash customer. He and Liu flan still put on their baseball show, but it didn’t pull in as much as it had when it was new. A few Chinese had been interested enough to pay to learn more, so he was teaching them to hit and catch and throw. Had the camp had enough open space, they could have put on a real game.

He didn’t care to kowtow to Chinamen, but he’d grown used to the little luxuries spare cash allowed him to buy. And it wasn’t as if he was selling something they had to have. If he got ’em mad at him, they’d just leave. So he did his best to stay on good behavior.

“Come on, try it with the ball,” he said, and tossed it to Lo. The Chinese threw it back, still not too straight but with a better motion. “That’s the way to do it!” Fiore said, clapping his hands in encouragement.

After several more throws that showed he was starting to get the idea, Lo picked up another rock and flung it out over the razor wire into the field. Throwing with his whole arm, he made it go a good deal farther than he’d managed before, but still not as far as Fiore had flung it. The ballplayer puffed out his chest, thinking no Chink was going to get the better of him.

Maybe Lo thought the same thing, for he bowed to Fiore and spoke several sharp sentences. Almost in spite of himself, Fiore was starting to understand Chinese. He didn’t follow all of this, but, got the idea that Lo was praising his arm and wanted to bring by some friends who would also be interested in the way he threw.

“Yeah, sure, that’d be fine,” Fiore answered in English, and then did his best to turn it into Chinese. Evidently Lo got the idea, because he bowed again and nodded, then gave the glove back to Fiore and went on his way.

Well enough pleased with how the afternoon had gone, Fiore headed back toward the house he shared with Liu Han. He started whistling “Begin the Beguine” to himself as he walked along, but had to cut it out when the Chinese he walked past stared at him. As far as he was concerned, Chinese music sounded as if it were made by stepping on cats’ tails-out-of-tune cats, at that. The locals returned the sentiment when he made melodies he liked. Since there were lots of them and one of him, he shut up.

When he opened the door to the hut the Lizards had given him and Liu Han, his nostrils twitched appreciatively. Something tasty was cooking, even if the vegetables that went with it would be strange and underdone for his taste. “Smells good,” he said, and added the Lizards’ emphatic cough.

Liu Han looked up from the pan in which she was cooking. It was, to Fiore’s way of thinking, a funny kind of pan, being shaped like the wide, conical hats a lot of Chinese wore. It had a funny name, too: she called it a walk. Whenever he heard that, he pictured the pan tossing away its bat and trotting down to first base.

Liu Han tilted the walk on its stand so he could see the bite-sized pieces of chicken in it. “Cooked with five spices,” she said. He nodded, smiling. He didn’t know what all five spices were, but they made for mighty tasty cooking.

After supper, he gave her the trade dollars Lo had paid him for learning the art of throwing straight. “He has other people he may want me to teach, too,” he said. “If they all pay as well as he did, that should keep us in groceries a good long while.”

He said it first in English, then added Chinese and Lizard words till he was sure she’d got the idea. When she talked to him, she used a Chinese frame padded with English and Lizard. As time passed, they gained more and more words in common.

She said, “If they pay silver like this Lo, I be fat even without baby.” She was starting to show now, her belly pressing against the cotton tunic that had been loose.

“Babe, you still look good to me,” he said, which made her smile. He got the idea she was surprised he kept wanting her even though she was pregnant. He hadn’t been sure he would, either, but the growing mound of her belly didn’t bother him. It meant he couldn’t just climb on top all the time, but doing it other ways was broadening his horizons.

Thinking about it made him want to do it. One nice thing about the way Liu Han cooked was that it didn’t leave him feeling as if he’d swallowed an anvil, the way pasta did sometimes. If you got too full, you had trouble staying interested in other things. As it was…

Before he could get up and head for the blankets on the kang, somebody knocked on the door. He made a sour face. Liu Han giggled; she must have known what was on his mind. “Whoever it is, I’ll get rid of him in a hurry,” he said, climbing to his feet.

But when he opened the door, there stood Lo with several other men behind him. Business, Fiore thought. He waved them in. Business counted, too, and Liu Han would still be there after they’d gone. Now she’d be hostess and interpreter. She offered the newcomers tea. Fiore still missed his coffee, thick with cream and sugar, but tea, he’d decided, would do in a pinch.

The last of the newcomers shut the door behind him. Lo and his Friends-six men in all-crowded the hut. They sat quietly and seemed polite, but the longer Fiore looked at them, the more he wished he hadn’t let them all in at once. They were all young and on the hard side and, with their silence, more disciplined than the usually voluble Chinese of the camp. He carefully didn’t glance over to the corner where he’d leaned his bat against the wall, but he didn’t let them get between him and it.

He knew about shakedowns. His uncle Giuseppe, a baker, had paid protection money for a while for the privilege of going to work every day without getting his arms broken. He wasn’t going to let that happen to him, not from a bunch of Chinamen. They could do their stuff on him tonight, but he’d have the Lizards on them tomorrow.

Then he realized the only one whose name he knew was Lo, and even Lo was only half a name. The rest-would he recognize them again? Maybe. Maybe not.

He grabbed the bull by the horns, asking, “What can I do for you guys? You’re interested in learning to throw the right way, yeah?” He made a proper, full-arm throwing motion without any ball.

“We are interested in throwing, yes,” Lo answered through Liu Han. Then he asked a question of his own: “Are you and your woman lackeys and running dogs of the little scaly devils or just their prisoners?”

Bobby Fiore and Liu Han looked at each other. Though he had been thinking of siccing the Lizards on these guys if they turned out to be hoodlums, that question had only one possible answer. “Prisoners,” he said, and mimed holding his hands up to the bars of a cell.

Lo smiled. So did two or three of his buddies. The others just sat, still and watchful. Lo said, “If you are prisoners, you must want to help the oppressed peasants and workers strike a blow for freedom.”

Liu Han’s translation wasn’t anywhere near as smooth as that. Fiore cocked his head to one side anyway. Traveling through small and medium-sized towns in an America staggered by the Depression, he’d heard plenty of guys standing on crates at street corners who talked like that. He pointed a finger at Lo. “You’re a Red, that’s what you are-a Communist, a Bolshevik.”

Liu Han didn’t recognize any of the English (or Russian). She stared and spread her hands, at a loss to interpret. But one of the terms made sense to Lo. He nodded soberly to Bobby Fiore, as if to say he was smarter than the Chinese had figured. Then he spoke to Liu Han, letting her know what was going on.

She didn’t gasp as if she’d just seen a rat scurry across the floor, the way a lot of American women would have. She just nodded and tried to explain to Fiore, then fell silent when she realized he already understood. “They not bad,” she told him. “They fight Japanese, more than Kuomintang does.”

“Okay,” he said. “The Reds were on our side before the Lizards came, sure. And everybody wants to give them a good swift kick. But what do these guys want with me?”

Lo didn’t answer, not with words. Instead, he nudged one of his comrades. The young man reached under his tunic and pulled out a grenade. He didn’t say anything, either. He just let it sit in the palm of his hand.

Bobby didn’t need more than a heartbeat before the light went on in his head. He started to laugh. “So you want me to do your pitching for you, huh?” he said, not caring that neither Lo nor Liu Han understood what he was talking about. “I wish Sam Yeager was here. You think my arm’s hot stuff, you oughta see his.”

Lo politely waited till he was done before speaking. Liu Han hesitantly translated: “They want you-” She forgot the English for throw, but made a gesture to show what she meant. Fiore nodded. Then she pointed at the grenade.

“Yeah, I already worked that out,” Fiore said. He’d worked out some other things, too: if he said no, for instance, he and Liu Han were liable to end up wearing whatever Chinamen used for concrete overshoes. This wasn’t just a shakedown. If he said no, he was a big danger to these people. From everything he’d ever heard, Bolsheviks didn’t let people who were dangerous to them keep walking and breathing.

And besides, he didn’t want to say no. He wished he could have chucked some grenades at the Lizards back in Cairo, Illinois, after they caught him the first time. That would have kept him out of this whole mess. Even though he did care for Liu Han, he would have given a lot to be back in the good old U.S. of A.

Since he couldn’t have that, giving the little scaly bastards a hard time here on the other side of the world would have to do. “So what do you want me to blow up?” he asked Lo.

Maybe the Red hadn’t expected such enthusiastic cooperation. He talked in low tones with his friends before he turned back to Liu Han. She sounded worried as she told Fiore, “They want you to go with them. No say where.”

He wondered if he ought to insist that Lo tell Liu Han where he’d be. After a second’s doubt, he decided that would be stupid. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell anybody, especially the Lizards… and, if she didn’t know, the Reds would have less reason to come after her to shut her up in case things went wrong.

He got to his feet. “Let’s go take care of it,” he said to Lo.

He felt edgy, almost bouncy, as he walked, as if Mutt Daniels (and he wondered what had happened to old Mutt) had flashed him the sign to steal home on the next pitch. Well, why not? He wasn’t just trying to steal home. He was going into combat.

Sooner or later, he was sure, he would have volunteered for the Army. But even then, he would have trained for months before he got the chance to see action. Now-it was as if he’d got his rifle and headed up to the front line one right after the other. No wonder he felt all loosey-goosey.

He blew Liu Han a kiss. Lo and his fellow Bolsheviks snickered and said things that were probably rude to one another: Chinese men weren’t in the habit of showing they gave a damn about their women. Well, to hell with them, too, he thought. Liu Han managed a return smile, but he could see she was frightened about this whole business.

Night in the prison camp was darker than anything Fiore had known back in the States, even in the panicky blackouts that had followed Pearl Harbor. Few of the huts had any windows, and few of what windows there were had lights showing through them. If the moon was up in the sky, a thick layer of clouds made sure nobody could see it. Though that made Fiore stumble along, he didn’t bellyache, not even to himself: darkness would give the Lizards a harder time spotting him. That he liked.

The Chinese picked their way through the black as if they had headlights. A couple of times, Bobby Fiore heard people getting out of their way in a hurry. A large group of disciplined men traveling confidently was something few wanted to mess with. He liked that, too.

Before long, he had no idea where in the camp Lo was taking him. It all looks alike to me, he thought, and stifled a nervous giggle. He didn’t know if the Bolsheviks were walking him around in circles to get him lost or if it just worked out that way, but lost he undoubtedly was.

Lo opened the door of a shabby little hut, gestured for his companions and Fiore to go in. The inside of the hut was darker than the alley had been. That didn’t stop Lo. He shoved aside a heavy wooden chest-by all appearances, the only furniture in the place-and pulled up a square piece of board underneath it. He and two of his friends dropped down into the tunnel the board concealed.

One of the remaining Reds nudged Fiore and pointed to the round mouth of the tunnel. He went into it with all the eagerness of a man walking to the electric chair. As he had when he left the hut he shared with Liu Han, he learned new lessons about how dark darkness could be. As far as his eyes were concerned, he’d just gone blind. But with Chinese ahead and Chinese pushing him on from behind, he could have no doubt about which direction to go.

The tunnel wasn’t tall enough for him to stand upright, or even to crouch. He had to crawl along on hands and knees, and even then the top of his head kept bumping on the roof and showering clods of dirt down onto his neck. The air in the tunnel smelled like moist earth, dank and musty, and felt dead, as if nobody had any business breathing down here.

He had no idea how long he crawled, either in time or distance. It seemed forever, either way. He imagined the tunnel was sloping up several times, but each one proved to be just that: imaginary. Without eyes to help it, his sense of balance played tricks on him.

At last, though, he smelled fresh air. He hurried forward, and now found himself going unmistakably upward as well. He scrambled out and lay gasping in relief in a hollow in a field. After the tunnel, that seemed a wonderful luxury. It also seemed almost bright as day. The other three Chinese Reds came out of the hole just as eagerly as he had. That made him feel better.

Lo cautiously raised his head. He turned to Bobby Fiore, pointed. Fiore raised his head, too. Off in the distance sat a Lizard guard station on the camp perimeter. Fiore mimed lobbing a grenade in that direction. Lo smiled, his teeth startlingly white in the darkness. Then he reached out and thumped Fiore on the shoulder, as if to say, You’re okay, Mac.

He whispered something to one of the other young men, who handed Bobby Fiore a grenade. He felt for the pin, found it. Lo held up fingers close to his face-one, two, three. Then he, too, mimed throwing. “Yeah, I know I gotta get rid of it,” Fiore said laconically.

The fellow who’d given him the grenade proved to have three more, which he also passed on. Fiore took them, but less enthusiastically each time. He figured he could throw one, maybe two, and get away in the confusion, but anything after that and he’d be asking to get blown to pieces.

But the Reds weren’t asking him to do anything they weren’t game for themselves. Some of them pulled out pistols from the waistbands of their trousers; Lo and one other fellow had submachine guns instead-not tommy guns like gangsters, but stubbier, lighter weapons of a make Fiore didn’t recognize. He wondered if they were Russian. Any which way, he was glad he hadn’t tried using that baseball bat back in his hut.

Lo started crawling through the field-beans were growing in it, Fiore discovered-toward the Lizard outpost. The other raiders and Fiore trailed after him. The reek of night soil (as poetic a way of saying shit as he’d ever heard) filled his nostrils; the Chinese used it for fertilizer.

The Lizards obviously weren’t expecting trouble from the outside. The humans easily got within fifty yards of their perimeter. Lo looked a question to Bobby Fiore: was this close enough? He nodded. Lo nodded back and thumped him on the shoulder again. For a Chinaman and a Communist, Lo was all right.

The raiders slithered out into a rough skirmish line. Lo stayed close by Fiore. He gave his comrades maybe a minute and a half to find firing position, then pointed to Fiore and then to the guard station.

I get to open the show, huh? It was an honor Fiore could have done without, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He yanked the pin out of one of the grenades, hurled it as if he’d just taken a relay in short right and was trying to nail a runner at the plate. Then he flung himself flat on the stinking ground.

Bang! The blast was oddly disappointing; he’d expected more. But it did what it was supposed to do: it got the Lizards’ attention. Fiore heard hissing shouts, saw motion in and around the guard post.

That was what the Chinese had been waiting for. Their guns opened up with a roar quite satisfyingly loud. Lo went through a whole magazine in what seemed no more than a heartbeat; his submachine gun spat a flame bright and searingly yellow as the sun. He rammed in another clip and started shooting again.

Did the hisses turn to screams? Did Lizards fall, pierced by bullets? Fiore didn’t know for sure. He jumped up and threw another grenade. Its boom added to the cacophony all around.

For somebody who’d never seen action till that moment, he’d gauged it pretty well. No sooner had he hit the dirt again than the Lizards woke up. Searchlights came on. If the muzzle flash from Lo’s submachine gun had been sun-bright, they were like looking at the naked face of God. And the machine guns they opened up with reminded Fiore of God, too, or at least of His wrath. Bobby even wished he were back in the tunnel.

Off to his left, one of the Chinese raiders started screaming and wouldn’t stop. Off to his right, fire from the second submachine gun cut off in the middle of a burst and didn’t start up again. Just over his head, bullets clipped off the tops of growing bean plants like a harvester from hell.

Lo kept right on shooting, which made him either brave or out of his ever-loving mind. Two searchlights swung toward him, which meant that for a moment none was pointing at Bobby Fiore. He threw his third grenade, got down, and started rolling away from where he had been. The location didn’t seem healthy any more.

Lo’s weapon fell silent. Fiore didn’t know whether he was dead or also moving. He kept rolling himself until he fetched up against a long obstruction: a dead Chinese, pistol still in hand. Fiore took it and scuttled away from the Lizard guns. He’d done all the fighting he intended to do today.

He put all the distance he could between himself and that terrible fire. Bullets lashed the plants all around him, kicking up dirt that spattered his hands, his feet, his neck. Somehow, none of the bullets hit him. If Lizard infantry came out after him, he knew he was dead. But the aliens relied on firepower instead, and however awesome it was, it wasn’t perfect-not quite. The last Chinaman stopped shooting and started shrieking.

Alternating Hail Marys with under-his-breath mutters of “Where the fuck’s that tunnel?” Fiore slithered back toward where he thought it was. After a while, he realized he must have gone too far. At the same instant, he also realized he couldn’t possibly go back, not if he wanted to keep on breathing.

“If I can’t get back into camp, that means I better get my ass outta here,” he mumbled. He crawled and scuttled as fast as he could. No searchlights picked hip up as he dodged between rows of beans. Then he tumbled into a muddy ditch or tiny creekbed in the poorly tended field that providentially ran diagonally away from the Lizard guard post. He hoped the Chinese Reds had done some damage there, but was whatever they’d done worth six lives?

He didn’t know. He was damned sure it wasn’t worth seven, though.

After an eternity that might have lasted fifteen minutes, the beans on either side of the ditch gave way to bushes and sapling. About then, a helicopter came rattling over the field and raked it with fire. Dust and pulverized bean plants flew into the sky. The noise was like the end of the world. Bobby Fiore’s teeth chattered in terror. The same sort of flying gun-ships had strafed his train and the fields around it back in Illinois.

After a while, the gunship flew away. It hadn’t lashed the place where Fiore lay trembling. That still didn’t mean he was safe. The farther out of there he got, the better off he’d be. He made himself move even though he shook. He didn’t feel as if he were in a tight baseball game any more. Combat against the Lizards was more like the fly taking on the swatter.

He was altogether alone and on his own. He counted up his assets: he had one grenade, a pistol with an uncertain number of cartridges, and a tiny smattering of Chinese. It didn’t seem like enough.

“Mild bloody climate,” George Bagnall muttered, stamping snow from his boots and brushing it from his shoulders. “Sod Jerome bloody Jones.”

“Not so bad in here,” Ken Embry answered. “Shut the door. You’re letting in the bloody spring.”

“Right.” Bagnall slammed the door with a satisfying crash. He promptly started to sweat, and divested himself of fur cap and leather-and-fur flying suit. As far as he could tell, the Soviet Union in general and Pskov in particular had only two temperatures, too cold and too hot. The wood-burning stove in the corner of the house he and Embry had been assigned was more than capable of keeping it warm: too much more than capable. But none of the windows opened (the notion seemed alien to the Russian mind), and if you let the fire go out, you were facing chilblains again within the hour.

“Want some tea?” Embry asked, pointing to a dented samovar that added its quotient of warmth to the close, tropical air.

“Real tea, by God?” Bagnall demanded eagerly.

“Not likely,” the pilot answered with a sneer. “Same sort of leaves and roots and muck the Bolshies are drinking these days. No milk, either, and no cups, same as always.” The Russians drank tea-and their ersatz, too-from glasses, and used sugar but no milk. Considering that at the moment there was no milk in Pskov, save from nursing mothers and a few officers’ closely guarded cows and goats, the Englishmen had had to get used to it that way, too. Bagnall consoled himself by thinking he was less likely to catch tuberculosis without milk in his tea; the Reds didn’t fret over attestation.

He poured himself a glass of the murky brown brew, stirred in sugar (plenty of beets around Pskov), and tasted. “I’ve had worse,” he admitted. “Where’d you come by it?”

“Bought it from a babushka,” Embry answered. “God knows where she got it-probably grew the herbs herself, then fixed them up to sell. Not what you’d call perfect communism, but then not much here seems to be.”

“No, hardly,” Bagnall agreed. “I wonder if it has to do with the Germans’ having been here most of a year before the Lizards arrived.”

“I have my doubts,” Embry said. “From all I’ve seen, my guess is that the Russians did what they had to do for the collective farm and the factory and then turned around and did all they could for themselves.”

“Mm-you’re likely right.” Even after some weeks in Pskov, Bagnall did not know what to make of the Russians. He admired their courage and resilience. About everything else he had doubts. Had Englishmen so tamely submitted to those above them, no one would ever have questioned the divine right of kings. Only their resilience had let the Russians survive the string of incompetents and tyrants who ruled them.

“And what is the news of the day?” Embry asked.

“I was just thinking I find Russians difficult to fathom,” Bagnall said, “but in one regard they are perfectly comprehensible: they still hate the Germans. And, I assure you, the sentiment is most generously returned.”

Ken Embry rolled his eyes. “Oh, God, what now?”

“Here, wait, let me get some more of this. It isn’t tea, but it isn’t too bad, either.” Bagnall poured his glass full, sipped, and went on, “One of the things we shall have to do, on the unlikely assumption the ground ever unthaws, is build miles upon miles of antitank ditches. Let me merely state that where to site these ditches, the personnel to excavate them, and the troops to defend them once dug are matters which remain in dispute.”

“Do you care to give me the particulars?” Embry asked, with an expression that said he wasn’t particularly eager to hear them but felt he should. Bagnall understood that expression; he suspected his own matched it.

He said, “General Chill is willing to have his Wehrmacht lads do some of the digging, but feels the rest should fall on the shoulders of what he terms the ‘otherwise useless population.’ Typical German tact there, what?”

“I am certain his Soviet colleagues received that in the spirit in which it was intended,” Embry said.

“No doubt,” Bagnall said dryly. “They were also particularly pleased with his proposal that Russian soldiers and partisans be those particularly concerned with stopping the Lizards’ tanks once they traverse said ditches.”

“I can see that they would be. How generous of the distinguished German officer to offer his Soviet allies the opportunity to commit suicide under such distinguished circumstances.”

“If you stick that tongue any farther into your cheek, you’re liable to bite it off,” Bagnall said. As long as he’d known Embry, he and the pilot had dueled to see which of them could wield the twin scalpels of irony and understatement more effectively. He feared Embry had just taken the lead on points.

The pilot asked, “And why has General Chill been so extraordinarily gracious?”

“His justification is that the Nazis, with their heavier weapons, would be better used as a reserve to meet any possible Lizard breakthroughs.”

“Oh,” Embry said in a slightly different tone.

“Just what I thought,” Bagnall answered. The rationale made just enough military sense to force one to wonder whether Chill’s plan shouldn’t be carried out as proposed. The flight engineer added, “Germans are bloody good at coming up with plausible reasons for things that are to their advantage.”

“To their short-term advantage,” Embry amended. “Setting the Russians up to be massacred will not endear Chill to them.”

Bagnall snorted. “Somehow I doubt that will cause him to lose any great quantity of sleep. He wants to keep his own forces intact first.”

“He also wants to hold Pskov,” Embry said. “He won’t do that without the Russians’ help-nor will they, without his. A lovely muddle, wouldn’t you say?”

“If you want my opinion, it would be even lovelier if viewed from a distance-say from a London pub-than when we’re caught in the middle of it.”

“Something to that,” Embry sighed. “Real springtime leaves… flowers… birds… a pint pot of best bitter… perhaps even Scotch.”

The pain of longing pierced Bagnall like a stiletto. He feared he’d never see England or its loveliness again. As for Scotch… well, the spirit the Russians brewed from potatoes would warm a man, or send him to sleep if he drank enough of it, but it didn’t taste like anything. He’d also heard that drinking neutral spirits kept you from feeling the effects the next morning. He shook his head. He’d shot that theory right behind the ear more often than he cared to remember.

Embry said, “Speaking of getting stuck in the middle, is there more talk of turning us into infantrymen again?”

Bagnall didn’t blame him for sounding anxious; their one foray against the Lizard outpost south of Pskov had been plenty to put the flight engineer off the life of a foot soldier forever. The choice, unfortunately, did not rest with him. He said, “They didn’t say anything about that when I was in the Krom. But then, they might not have wanted to, either.”

“For fear we’d bugger off, you mean?” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The pilot went on, “Nothing I’d like better. Only-where would we go?”

It was a good question. The short answer, unfortunately for both of them, was nowhere, not with the woods full of partisan bands, German patrols, and just plain bandits. Next to some of them, the prospect of facing the Lizards seemed less disastrous. The Lizards wouldn’t do anything worse than killing you. Bagnall said, “You don’t really believe those stories about the cannibals in the forest, do you?”

“Let’s just say it’s something I’d sooner not find out by experiment.”

“Too right there.”

Before Bagnall could go on, someone knocked at the door. The plaintive voice that came through the thick boards was London-accented: “Can you let me in? I’m fair frozen.”

“Radarman Jones!” Bagnall threw the door wide. Jerome Jones came in. Bagnall quickly shut the door after him, and waved him over to the samovar. “Drink some of that. It’s fairly good.”

“Where’s the beautiful Tatiana?” Ken Embry asked Jones as he poured himself a glass of herb tea. Embry sounded jealous. Bagnall didn’t blame him. Somehow Jones had managed to connect with a Russian sniper who was even more decorative than she was deadly.

“She’s off trying to kill things, I suppose,” the radarman answered. He sipped the tea, made a face. “Maybe not bad, but it could be better.”

“Being all alone, then, you deigned to honor us with a visit, eh?” Bagnall said.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Jones muttered, then hastily added, “sir.” His position in Pskov was, to put it mildly, irregular. While Bagnall and Embry were both officers and he very much from the other ranks, he had the specialization in which the Russians-and the Nazis-were interested.

Ken Embry said, “It’s all right, Jones. We know they treat you like a field marshal everywhere else in town. Decent of you to remember your military manners around low cannon-fodder types like ourselves.”

The radarman winced. Even Bagnall, used to such sarcastic sallies, had trouble being sure how much was intended as wit and how much fired with intent to wound. A spell as an infantryman in an attack that got crushed was enough to jaundice anyone’s outlook.

Giving the pilot the benefit of the doubt, Bagnall said, “Don’t let him faze you, Jones. Our mission was to get you here, and that we’ve done. What came afterwards, the Lanc getting bombed-well, nichevo.”

“There’s a useful word, eh, sir?” Jones said, anxious to change the subject. “Can’t be helped, nothing to be done about it-that the Russians pack it all into one word says a lot about them, I think.”

“Yes, and not all of it good, either,” Embry said, evidently willing to drop his bitterness. “These people have spent their entire history being stepped on. Tsars, commissars, what have you-it’d be a miracle indeed if that didn’t show in the language.”

“Shall we put Mr. Jones’ knowledge of Russian to more practical use?” Bagnall said. Without waiting for a reply from Embry, he asked the radarman, “What do you hear, going up and down in the city?”

“The name is Jones, sir, as you noted, not Job,” Jones replied with a grin which rapidly slipped. “People are hungry, people are battered. They don’t love the Germans or the Bolsheviks. If they thought the Lizards would feed them and leave them alone otherwise, a lot would just as soon see them as top dogs.”

“If I’d stayed safe at home in England, I’d have trouble imagining that,” Bagnall said. Of course, flying bomber missions first against the Germans and then against the Lizards had been anything but safe, but Jones and Embry both nodded, understanding what he meant. He went on, “After the Jews rose for the Lizards and against the Nazis, I thought they were the blackest traitors in the history of the world-until their story started coming out. If a tenth part of what they say is true, Germany has more blood on her hands than a thousand years of Hitler’s Reich can wash away.”

“And they and we are allies,” Embry said heavily.

“And they and we are allies, yes,” Bagnall agreed. “And so are they and the Russians, and so are we and the Russians, and Stalin, by all that’s said, matches Hitler for butchery any day of the week, even if he’s not so showy about it.”

“It’s a rum old world,” Embry said.

Not far away, somebody fired a rifle in the street. Somebody else fired another one, with a report that sounded different: one weapon was German, the other Soviet. Another handful of shots followed, then silence. Bagnall waited tensely wondering if the shooting would start up again. That would be all anyone needed-war inside Pskov between alleged allies to accompany war outside against foes. But silence held for a couple of minutes.

Then the shooting started again, worse than ever-one of those new German machine guns, the ones with the terrifyingly high cyclic rate that made them sound even more dreadful than they really were, added to the chaos. Several Russian submachine guns gave answer. Through the raucous racket of gunfire came hoarse screams. Bagnall couldn’t tell if they were Russian or German.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Jerome Jones said.

Embry took hold of one end of a chest of drawers and started pushing it toward the front door, saying, “Best we put up something of a barricade, wouldn’t you say?”

Bagnall didn’t say anything, but did put his back into helping the pilot manhandle the heavy wooden chest into place. Then he picked up a chair and, grunting, set it on top of the low chest. Together, he and Embry leaned a table against the window by the doorway.

“Jones, you have your pistol with you?” Bagnall asked, then answered himself: “Yes, I see you do. Good.” He went into the bedroom and returned with his Mauser, Ken Embry’s, and as much ammunition as they had left from the raid on the Lizard base. “I hope we shan’t have to use these, but-”

“Quite,” Embry said. He glanced over at Jones. “No offense, old man, but I’d sooner Tatiana were here than you. She’d be likelier to keep us safe.”

“No offense taken, sir,” the radarman answered. “I’d sooner Tatiana were here, too. Given any choice at all, I’d sooner be back in Dover, or better yet, London.”

Since Bagnall had had almost the same thought not long before, he could only nod, Embry went into the bedroom. He came back with their pair of coal-scuttle helmets. “I don’t know whether we ought to put these on. They’ll keep out splinters or glancing bullets, but they’ll also make the Russians take us for Jerries, which might prove less than ideal under the circumstances.”

A random bullet smashed through the wooden front wall, just missed Jones and Bagnall, and buried itself in plaster next to the samovar. “I’ll wear a helmet,” Bagnall said. “The Russians may ask questions about who we are and whose side we’re on, but their ammunition doesn’t.”

He heard the pop of a mortar and, a moment later, the much louder bang as its bomb went off. He found cover behind another chair and aimed his rifle at the doorway. “The Lizards may not need to take Pskov,” he said. “Seems to me more as if the Russians and Germans want to give it to them.”

A tracked Lizard troop carrier rattled down the wet dirt road, splattering mud in all directions. Some of it splashed Mordechai Anielewicz as he trudged along on the soft shoulder. The Lizards in the tracked carrier took no special notice of him: to them, he was just another gun-toting Big Ugly on the move.

His lips skinned back from his teeth in a humorless smile. The motion set his whole face itching. Moishe Russie, when he fled the Lizards, had been able to get rid of his beard in one fell swoop. Growing one took longer and, as far as Anielewicz was concerned, was a lot less comfortable.

Also uncomfortable was the Gewehr 98 slung across his back. He valued the rifle all the same: he’d promised himself Zolraag and his minions would not take him alive, and it was the means by which he could keep that promise. He’d also had the sense to take German marching boots a size too large when the time came to disappear from Warsaw. His feet had swollen in them, yes, but he could still take them off and put them on without trouble.

He’d sent Russie west to Lodz. Now that it was his turn to escape the Lizards, he was walking south and east, into the part of Poland the Russians had occupied in 1939 before the Germans ran them out less than two years later. His chuckle sounded anything but mirthful. “Sooner or later, the people who used to work with the Lizards are going to be scattered all over the countryside,” he said, and waved his arms to show what he meant. The motion startled a magpie, which flew away, chattering angrily.

He sympathized with the bird. Till he’d moved suddenly, it had taken him as harmless. He’d thought the same about the Lizards, or at least that they were a better bargain than the Nazis. For the Jews of Poland, he still thought them a better bargain than the Nazis; had they not come, Poland would have been Judenfrei-without Jews-by now.

But he was coming to see that the world was a wider place than Poland. The Lizards might not be out to exterminate mankind, as the Nazis aimed to exterminate Polish Jewry, but they intended to do to humanity as the Germans had done to the Poles themselves: turn them into hewers of wood and drawers of water forever. Anielewicz couldn’t stomach that.

A Pole came up the road, heading toward Warsaw with a wheelbarrow full of turnips. The wheel of the wheelbarrow got stuck in a patch the Lizards’ troop carrier had chewed to slime. Anielewicz helped the Pole free it from the clinging ooze. It was quite a fight; the wheelbarrow seemed to think it ought to be a submarine.

Finally, though, the two men wrestled it up onto firmer ground. “God and the Black Virgin of Czestochowa, that was tough,” the Pole said, shedding his tweed cap so he could wipe his forehead with a frayed sleeve. “Thank you, friend.”

“Any time,” Anielewicz answered. Back before the war, he’d been much more fluent in Polish than Yiddish. He’d thought himself secular then, not so much denying his Judaism as ignoring it, until the Nazis showed him it couldn’t be ignored. “Those are good fat turnips you’ve got there.”

“Take a couple for yourself. You hadn’t been here, I might have lost the whole load,” the fellow said. His grin showed a couple of missing front teeth. “Besides, you’ve got a rifle. How am I supposed to stop you?”

“I don’t steal,” Anielewicz answered. Not now I don’t, anyway. I’m not starving at the moment. When the Nazis ran the Warsaw ghetto, though…

The Pole’s grin got wider. “Armija Krajowa fighter, are you?” It was a reasonable guess; Anielewicz’s looks were more Polish than Jewish, too. Without waiting for an answer, the man went on, “Better I should give you the turnips than sell ’em to the damned Yids in Warsaw, anyhow, eh?”

He had no way of knowing how close he came to dying in the middle of the muddy road without ever learning why. Mordechai Anielewicz took a tight grip on his temper; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known plenty of Poles were anti-Semites-and a murder here was liable to make it easier for pursuers to trace him. So he just said, “They’re still hungry in there. I expect you’ll get a good price.”

“Hungry? Why should the Jews be hungry? They’ve got their mouths pressed to the Lizards’ backsides, and they eat their-” The Pole spat into the roadway in lieu of finishing, but left no doubt about what he’d meant.

Again Anielewicz forced himself to coolness. If the Pole thought he was a countryman rather than a Jew on the dodge, his presence here would attract no notice. So he told himself. But oh, the temptation-

“Here, wait,” The turnip seller undid a Polish Army canteen from his belt, yanked out the cork which had replaced the proper stopper. “Have a belt of this to help you on your way.”

This was vodka, obviously homemade and strong enough to scar the lining of Anielewicz’s throat as it went down. After a small nip, he handed the canteen back to the Pole. “Thank you,” he said, wheezing a little.

“Any time, pal.” The Pole tilted his head back for a couple of long swallows. “Ahh! Jesus, that’s good. Us Catholics got to hang together. Ain’t nobody gonna do it for us, am I right? Not the damned Jews, not the godless Russians, not the stinking Germans, and sure as hell not the Lizards. Am I right?”

Anielewicz made himself nod. The worst thing was that the Pole was right, at least from his parochial perspective. No one would give his people any special help, so they’d have to help themselves. But if every people helped itself at the expense of its neighbors, how would any people-or all the peoples together-withstand the Lizards?

With a wave, Anielewicz headed down the road, leaving the Pole to trundle his turnips on toward Warsaw. The Jewish fighting leader (Jewish refugee, he corrected himself-someone new would head the fighters now) wondered what the peddler would have done, knowing he was a Jew. Probably nothing much, since he had a gun and the Pole didn’t, but he didn’t think he would have got the turnips, let alone the belt of vodka.

A Lizard jet flew by, high overhead. Its vapor trail caught Anielewicz’s eye before he heard the thin, attenuated bellow of its engines. It probably carried a load of destruction. He hoped someone, would shoot it down… after it had dropped the load of destruction on a Nazi’s head.

The road ran through fields of barley, potatoes, and beets. Peasants and their animals plowed those fields as they had every spring for the past thousand years. No tractors snorted or chuffed alongside the horses and mules-gasoline was next to impossible to come by. That had been true under the Germans and was even truer under the Lizards.

Overall, though, the aliens’ rule lay lightly on the land. Alter that armored troop carrier splattered past him, Anielewicz didn’t see another Lizard vehicle for the rest of the day. The Lizards garrisoned Warsaw and other towns like Lublin (to which Anielewicz intended to give a wide berth, for just that reason), but used the threat of their power rather than the power itself to hold down the countryside.

“I wonder how many Lizards there are altogether, not just in Poland, but all over the world,” he mused aloud. Few enough so that they were stretched thin trying to hold it down and run it, that seemed clear.

He wondered how humanity could best exploit such a weakness. That musing quickly turned to one more practical: he wondered what he was going to do about supper and a place to sleep. Sure, he had hard bread and cheese in his pack to go with the turnips, but none of that was inspiring fare. Similarly, he could roll himself in a blanket on the ground, but he didn’t want to unless he had to.

The problem soon solved itself: a farmer coming in from the fields waved to him and called, “Are you hungry, friend? Always happy to feed an Armija Krajowa man. Besides, I killed a pig yesterday, and I’ve got more meat than my family can eat. Join us, if you care to.”

Anielewicz hadn’t touched pork since the ghetto walls came down, but to decline such a feast would only have made the farmer suspicious. “Thank you very much,” he said. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“Not a bit. Come in, wash up, sit and rest your feet.”

The farmhouse stood between two thatch-roofed outbuildings. The farmer shooed some chickens away from the woodpile and into a henhouse in one of those outbuildings, then slammed the door on them. At the fellow’s urging, Anielewicz clumped up the wooden stairs and into the foyer.

A big brass basin there served for a sink. He washed his hands and face, dried them on a linen towel hung on a nail above the basin. The farmer courteously waited for him to use the water first, then cleaned himself off. After that, introductions were in order: the farmer gave his own name as Wladyslaw Sawatski; his wife was Emilia (a pleasant-looking woman who wore a kerchief over her hair), his teenage son Jozef, and his daughters Maria and Ewa (one older than Jozef, one younger).

Anielewicz said he was Janusz Borwicz, giving himself a good Polish name to go with his Polish looks. Everyone made much of him. He got the seat at the head of the table in the parlor, he got a mug of apple brandy big enough to make three people shikker, and he got the family’s undivided attention. He gave them all the Warsaw gossip he had, especially the part pertaining to the Polish majority.

“Did you fight the Germans when the Lizards came?” Jozef Sawatski asked. He and his father-and both his sisters, too-leaned forward at that.

They wanted war stories, Mordechai realized. Well, he could give them some. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” he said truthfully. Again, he edited the tales to disguise his Jewishness.

Wladyslaw Sawatski, who had a brandy mug the size of Anielewicz’s, slammed it down on the table with a roar of approval. “Well done, by God!” he exclaimed. “If we’d fought like that in ‘39, we wouldn’t have needed these-creatures-to get the Nazis off our backs.”

Anielewicz doubted that. Sandwiched between Germany and Russia, Poland was going to get walloped every so often. Before he could come up with a polite way to disagree with his host, Emilia Sawatski turned to her daughters and said, “Why don’t you go and bring in the food now?” Alone in the family, she hadn’t cared about tales of conflict.

In came supper, mountains of it: boiled potatoes, boiled kielbasa sausage, big pork steaks, headcheese, fresh-baked bread. Warsaw might be hungry, but the countryside seemed to be doing pretty well for itself.

As Maria, the older girl, plopped a length of sausage onto Anielewicz’s plate, she gave him a sidelong glance, then spoke in silky tones to her father. “You’re not going to send a hero like Janusz out onto the road after supper, are you, Papa? He’ll sleep here tonight, won’t he?”

She wants to go to bed with me, Anielewicz realized with some alarm. That alarm had nothing to do with Maria’s person: she was eighteen or nineteen, and quite pretty in a wide-faced, blue-eyed way. Anielewicz didn’t particularly worry about angering her father either. But if he took off his trousers for her, he wouldn’t be able to hide being a Jew.

Wladyslaw Sawatski looked from Maria to Mordechai and back again. The glance was full of understanding: whatever else he might be, Sawatski was no fool. He said, “I was going to let him rest in the barn, Maria, but as you say, he is a hero, and too good for straw. He can sleep on the sofa in the front room there.”

He pointed to show Anielewicz where that was. Mordechai was not surprised to discover it lay right outside the doorway to a bedroom that would surely be Wladyslaw’s. You’d have to be crazy to try to screw there.

He said, “Thank you, sir. That will be excellent.” Sawatski might figure he was lying, but he meant every word of it. Maria had to nod-after all, her father had given her just what she’d said she wanted. Anielewicz hadn’t expected to find rabbinic wisdom in a Polish farmer, but there it was.

The meat on his plate smelled delicious. Then Ewa Sawatski asked, “Don’t you want any butter on your potatoes?”

He stared at her. Mixing meat and dairy products in the same meal-? Then he remembered the meat was pork. If he was eating pork, how could another violation of dietary law matter? “Thank you,” he said, and took some butter.

Wladyslaw filled his mug when it got empty. The farmer gave himself a refill, too. His cheeks were red as if he’d rouged them, but that was all the brandy did to him. Mordechai’s head was starting to swim, but he didn’t think he could decline the drink. Poles poured it down till they couldn’t see, didn’t they?

The women went into the kitchen to clean up. Wladyslaw sent Jozef off to bed, saying, “We have plenty of work tomorrow.” But he still lingered at the table, politely ready to talk as long as Anielewicz felt like it.

That wasn’t long. When Mordechai yawned and couldn’t stop, Sawatski got him a pillow and a blanket and settled him on the sofa. It was hard and lumpy, but he’d slept on worse in the ghetto and during the fighting afterwards. No sooner had he taken off his boots and stretched himself out at full length than he was asleep. If Maria sneaked out bent on seduction in the night, he didn’t wake up for her.

Breakfast the next morning was an enormous bowl of oatmeal flavored with butter and coarse salt. Emilia Sawatski waved away Mordechai’s thanks and wouldn’t even take the turnips he tried to give her. “We have enough here, and you may need them in your travel,” she said. “God keep you as you go.”

Wladyslaw walked out to the road with Anielewicz. He too said, “God keep you,” then added quietly, “Friend Janusz, you do a good job of pretending to be a Pole rather than a Jew, but not always good enough. You’re awkward when you cross yourself, for instance”-in a single swift motion, the farmer showed how it should be done-“and you don’t always do it at quite the right time. At another man’s house, you might put yourself in danger.”

Mordechai stared at him. Finally, he managed, “You knew, yet you took me in anyway?”

“You looked like a man who needed taking in.” Sawatski slapped Anielewicz on the back. “Now go on. I hope you stay safe to wherever you’re headed.”

He asked no questions about that; Anielewicz noticed so much. Still dazed (no man, and especially no young man, cares to be shown he is not as clever as he thought he was), he started down the road away from Warsaw. He’d had so much bitter experience with anti-Semitic Poles that he’d come to think the whole nation hated its Jews. Being reminded that wasn’t so made him feel good all the rest of the day.