Tilting the Balance

XIII

Vyacheslav Molotov jounced along toward the farm outside Moscow in a panje wagon, as if he were a peasant with a couple of sacks of radishes he hadn’t been able to sell. From the way the NKVD man driving the wagon behaved, Molotov might have been a sack of radishes himself. The Soviet foreign commissar didn’t mind. He was rarely in the mood for idle chitchat, with today no exception to the rule.

All around him, the land burgeoned with Russian spring. The sun rose early now, and set late, and everything that had lain dormant through winter flourished in the long hours of daylight. Fresh green grass pushed up through and hid last year’s growth, now gray brown and dead. The willows and birches by the Moscow River wore new bright leafy coats. Concealed by those new leaves, birds chirped and warbled. Molotov did not know which bird went with which song. He could barely tell a titmouse from a toucan, not that you were likely to find a toucan in a Russian treetop even in springtime.

Ducks stuck their behinds in the air as they tipped up for food in the river. The driver looked at them and murmured, “I wish I had a shotgun.” Molotov saw reply as unnecessary; the driver would likely have said the same thing had he been alone in the wagon.

Molotov wished not for a shotgun but a car. Yes, gasoline was in short supply, with almost all of it earmarked for the front. But as the number two man in the Soviet Union behind Stalin, he could have arranged for a limousine had he wanted one. The Lizards, however, were more likely to shoot up motor vehicles than horse-drawn wagons. Molotov played it safe.

When the driver pulled off the road and onto a meandering path, Molotov thought the fellow had lost his way. The thrill ahead looked like an archetypical kolkhoz, maybe a little smaller than most of its ilk. Chickens ran around clucking and pecking, fat pigs wallowed in mud. In the fields, men walked behind mules. The only buildings were row houses for the kolkhozniks and barns for the animals.

Then one of the men, dressed like any farmer in boots, baggy trousers, collarless tunic, and cloth cap, opened the door to a barn and went inside. Before he closed it after himself, the foreign commissar saw that the inside was brightly lit by electric light. Even before the Germans and the Lizards came, that would have been unusual for a kolkhoz. Now it was inconceivable.

His smile came broader and more fulsome than most who knew him would have imagined his face could form. “A splendid job of maskirovka,” he said enthusiastically. “Whoever designed and implemented the deception plan, he deserves to be promoted.”

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am given to understand the responsible parties have been recognized,” the driver said. He looked like a peasant-he looked like a drunk-but he talked like an educated man. Maskirovka again, Molotov thought. He knew intellectually he would not have a drunken peasant taking him to arguably the most important place in the Soviet Union, but the man played his role well.

Molotov pointed to the barn. “That is where they do their research?”

“Comrade, all l know is that that is where l was told to deliver you,” the driver answered. “What they do in there I could not tell you, and I do not want to know.”

He pulled back on the reins. The horse drawing the high-wheeled panje wagon obediently stopped. Molotov, who was not a large man (even if he was taller than Stalin), scrambled down without grace but also without falling. As he headed for the barn door, the driver took a flask from his hip pocket and swigged from it. Maybe he was an educated drunk.

The barn door looked like a barn door. After that, though, the maskirovka failed: the air that came out of the barn did not smell as it should. Molotov supposed that didn’t matter, if the Lizards got close enough to go sniffing around, the Soviet Union was likely to be finished, anyhow.

He opened the door, closed it behind him as quickly as the fellow who looked like a farmer had done. Inside, the wooden building was uncompromisingly clean and uncompromisingly scientific. Even the “farmer’s” costume, when seen close up, was spotless.

The fellow hurried up to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am delighted to see you here,” he said, extending a hand. He was a broad-shouldered man of about forty, with a chin beard and alert eyes in a tired face. “I am Igor Ivanovich Kurchatov, director of the explosive metal project.” He brushed back a lock of hair that drooped (Hitlerlike, Molotov thought irrelevantly) onto his forehead.

“I have questions on two fronts, Igor Ivanovich,” Molotov said. “First, how soon will you finish the bomb built from the captured Lizard explosive metal? And second, how soon will this facility begin producing more of this metal for us to use?”

Kurchatov’s eyes widened slightly. “You come straight to the point.”

“Time-wasting formalities are for the bourgeoisie,” Molotov replied. “Tell me what I need to know so I can report it to Comrade Stalin.”

Stalin, of course, received regular reports from the project. Beria had been here to see how things went, too. But Molotov, along with being foreign commissar, also served as deputy chairman to Stalin on the State Committee on Defense. Kurchatov licked his lips before he answered; he was well aware of that. He said, “In the first area, we have made great progress. We are almost ready to begin fabricating the components for the bomb.”

“That is good news,” Molotov agreed.

“Yes, Comrade,” Kurchatov said. “Since we have the explosive metal in place, it becomes a straightforward engineering matter of putting two masses of it, neither explosive alone, together so they exceed what is called the critical mass, the amount required for an explosion.”

“I see,” Molotov said, though he really didn’t. If something was explosive, it seemed to him, the only difference between a little and a lot should have been the size of the boom. But all the Soviet physicists and other academicians insisted this strange metal did not work that way. If they achieved the results they claimed, he supposed that would prove them right. He asked, “And how have you decided to join the pieces together?”

“The simplest way we could think of was to shape one into a cylinder with a hole through the center and the other into a smaller cylinder that would fit precisely into the hole. An explosive charge will propel it into the proper position. We shall take great care that it does not go awry.”

“Such care is well-advised, Comrade Director,” Molotov said. But although he kept his voice icy, he intuitively liked the design Kurchatov had described. It had a Russian simplicity to it: slam the one into the other and bang! Molotov knew his own people well enough to know also that they had more trouble keeping complicated plans on track than did, say, the Germans; Russians had a way of substituting brute force for sophistication. They’d held the Nazis outside Moscow and Leningrad that way. Now they were on the edge of striking a mighty blow against the Lizards, more deadly invaders still.

A mighty blow… “After we use up our stock of explosive metal, we have no more-is that correct?” Molotov asked.

“Yes Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Kurchatov licked his lips and went no further.

Molotov frowned. He had been afraid this would happen. The academicians had a habit of promising Stalin the moon, whether they could deliver or not. Maybe the horse will learn to sing, he thought, an echo from some ancient history read in his student days. He shook his head, banishing the memory. The here and now was what counted.

He knew the dilemma the scientists faced. If they told Stalin they could not give him something he wanted, they’d head for the gulag… unless they got a bullet in the back of the neck instead. But if, after promising, they failed to come through, the same applied again.

And the Soviet Union desperately needed a continuous supply of explosive metal. In that Molotov agreed with Stalin. (He tried to remember the last time he had disagreed with Stalin. He couldn’t. It was too long ago.) He said, “What are the difficulties in production, Igor Ivanovich, and how are you working to overcome them?”

As if on cue, another man in farmer’s clothes came up. Kurchatov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar, let me present to you Georgi Aleksandrovich Flerov, who recently discovered the spontaneous fission of the uranium nucleus and who is in charge of the team investigating these difficulties.”

Flerov was younger than Kurchatov; even in the clothes of a peasant, he looked like a scholar. He also looked nervous. Because he was in charge, he was responsible for what his team did-and for what it didn’t do.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, the answer to your first question, or to the first part of it, is simple,” he said, trying to hold his rather light voice steady. “The chief difficulty in production is that we do not yet know how to produce. Our techniques in nuclear research are several years behind those of the capitalists and fascists, and we are having to learn what they already know.”

Molotov gave him a baleful stare. “Comrade Stalin will not be pleased to hear this.”

Kurchatov blanched. So did Flerov, but he said, “If Comrade Stalin chooses to liquidate this team, no one in the Soviet Union will be able to produce these explosives for him. Everyone with that expertise who is still alive is here. We are what the rodina has, for better or worse.”

Molotov was not used to defiance, even frightened, deferential defiance. He harshened his voice as he replied, “We were promised full-scale production of explosive metal within eighteen months. If the team assembled here cannot accomplish this-”

“The Germans are not likely to have that within eighteen months, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Flerov said. “Neither are the Americans, though the breakdown in travel has left us less well-informed about their doings.”

Has played hob with espionage, you mean, Molotov thought: Flerov had a little diplomat in him after all. That, however, was a side issue. Molotov said, “If you cannot produce as promised, we will remove you and bring in those who can.”

“Good luck to you and goodbye to the rodina,” Flerov said. “You may find charlatans who tell you worse lies than we could ever imagine. You will not find capable physicists-and if you dispose of us, you may never see uranium or plutonium produced in the Soviet Union.”

He was not bluffing. Molotov had watched too many men trying to lie for their lives; he knew nonsense and bluff when he heard them. He didn’t hear them from Flerov. Rounding on Kurchatov, he said, “You direct this project. Why have you not kept us informed about your trouble in holding to the schedule?”

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, we are ahead of schedule in preparing the first bomb,” Kurchatov said. “That ought to count in our favor, even if the other half of the project is going more slowly than we thought it would. We can rock the Lizards back on their heels with one explosion.”

“Igor Ivanovich-” Flerov began urgently.

Molotov raised a hand to cut him off. He glared at Kurchatov. “You may be an excellent physicist, Comrade, but you are politically naive. If we rock the Lizards with one explosion, with how many will they rock us?”

Under the harsh electric lights, Kurchatov’s face went an ugly yellowish-gray. Flerov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar, this has been a matter of only theoretical discussion.”

“You need to make it one of the theses of your dialectic,” Molotov said. He was convinced Stalin had the right of that: the Lizards would hit back hard at any nation that used the explosive metal against them.

“We shall do as you say,” Kurchatov said.

“See that you do,” Molotov answered. “Meanwhile, the Soviet Union-to say nothing of all mankind-requires a supply of explosive metal. You cannot make it within eighteen months, you say. How long, then?” Molotov was not large, nor physically imposing. But when he spoke with the authority of the Soviet Union in his voice, he might have been a giant.

Kurchatov and Flerov looked at each other. “If things go well, four years,” Flerov said.

“If things go very well, three and a half,” Kurchatov said. The younger man gave him a dubious look, but finally spread his hands, conceding the point.

Three and a half years? More likely four? Molotov felt as if he’d been kicked in the belly. The Soviet Union would have its one weapon, which it could hardly use for fear of bringing hideous retaliation down on its head? And the Germans and the Americans-and, for all he knew, maybe the English and the Japanese, too-ahead in the race to make bombs of their own?

“How am I to tell this to Comrade Stalin?” he asked. The question hung in the air. Not only would the scientists incur Stalin’s wrath for being too optimistic, but it might fall on Molotov as well, as the bearer of bad news.

If the academicians were as irreplaceable as they thought, the odds were good that Stalin wouldn’t do anything to them.

Over the years, Molotov had done his best to make himself indispensable to Stalin, but indispensable wasn’t the same as irreplaceable, and he knew it.

He asked, “Can I tell the General Secretary you will succeed within two and a half to three years?” If he could arrange to present a small disappointment rather than a big one, he might yet deflect Stalin’s anger.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, you can of course tell the Great Stalin whatever you please, but that will not be the truth,” Kurchatov said. “When the time passes and we do not succeed, you will have to explain why.”

“If the Lizards give us so much time for research and engineering,” Flerov added; he looked to be enjoying Molotov’s discomfiture.

“If the Lizards overrun this place, Comrades, I assure you that you will have no more joy from it than I,” Molotov said stonily. Had the Germans defeated the Soviet Union, Molotov would have gone up against a wall (with a blindfold if he was lucky), but nuclear physicists might have been useful enough to save their skins by turning their coats. The Lizards, however, would not want human beings to know atoms existed, let alone that they could be split. Driving that home, Molotov added, “And if the Lizards overrun this place, it will be in large measure because you and your team have failed to give the workers and people of the Soviet Union the weapons they need to carry on the fight.”

“We are doing everything men can do,” Flerov protested. “There are too many things we simply do not know.”

Now he was the one who sounded uncertain, querulous. That was how Molotov wanted it. He snapped, “You had better learn, then.”

Softly, Igor Kurchatov said, “It is easier to give orders to generals, Comrade Foreign Commissar, than to nature. She reveals her secrets at a pace she chooses.”

“She has revealed altogether too many of them to the Lizards,” Molotov said. “If they can find them, so can you.” He turned his back to show the interview was over. He thought he’d recovered well from the shocking news the academicians had given him. How well he would recover after he gave Stalin that news was, unfortunately, another question.

The peddler smiled in appreciation as David Goldfarb handed him a silver one-mark piece with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustachioed image stamped on it. “That’s good money, friend,” he said. Along with the baked apple on a stick that Goldfarb had bought, he gave back a fistful of copper and potmetal coins by way of change. His expression turned sly. “You have money that good, it doesn’t matter how funny your Yiddish sounds.”

“Geh kak afen yam,” Goldfarb said genially, doing his best to hide the sudden pounding of his heart. “Where I come from, everybody talks like me.”

“What a miserable, ignorant place that must be,” the peddler retorted. “At first, I thought you had a nice Warsaw accent. The more I listen to you, though, the more I figure you’re from Chelm.”

Goldfarb snorted. The legendary town was full of shlemiels. What he really spoke, of course, was Yiddish with a Warsaw accent corrupted by living his whole life in England. He hadn’t thought it was corrupted till the British sub dropped him on the flat, muddy coast of Poland. Now, comparing the way he spoke to the Yiddish of people who used it every day of their lives, he counted himself lucky that they understood him at all.

As an excuse not to say where he really did come from, he bit into the apple Hot, sweet juice flooded into his mouth. “Mmm,” he said, a wordless, happy sound.

“It would be really good if I could get some cinnamon,” the peddler said. “But there’s none to be had, not for love nor money.”

“Good anyhow,” Goldfarb mumbled, his full mouth muffling whatever odd accent the King’s English gave him. With a nod to the peddler, he walked south down the dirt track toward Lodz. He was, he thought, just a couple of hours away. He hoped that wouldn’t be too late. From what he’d heard just before he sailed from England, his cousin Moishe was in jail somewhere in Lodz. He wondered how he was supposed to get Moishe out.

With a noncom’s fatalism, he put, that out of his mind. He’d worry about it when the time came. First he had to get to Lodz. He’d already discovered that a couple of years of fighting the war electronically had left his wind a shadow of what it was supposed to be. His physical-training sergeant would not have approved.

“Something to be said for not laying about puffing on fags all day long-it’d be even shorter if I’d had more to smoke,” he said in low-voiced English. “All the same, I miss ’em.”

He looked around. Just a glimpse of the endless flat farmland of the Polish plain had been plenty to tell him all he needed to know about that country’s unhappy history. Besides the shelter of the English Channel, the United Kingdom had mountains in the west and north in which to take refuge: witness the survival of Welsh and Scots Gaelic over the centuries.

Poland, now-all the Poles had was the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, and nothing whatever to keep either one of them out except their own courage. And when the Germans outweighed them three to one and the Russians two or three times as badly as that, even suicidal courage too often wasn’t enough.

No wonder they give their Jews a hard time, he thought with a sudden burst of insight: they’re sure they can beat the Jews After losing so many wars to their neighbors, having in their midst people they could trounce had to feel sweet. That didn’t make him love the people who had driven his parents from Poland, but it did help him understand them.

Goldfarb looked around again. Almost everywhere in England, he’d been able to see hills on the horizon. Here, it went on forever. The endless flat terrain made him feel insignificant and at the same time conspicuous, as if he were a fly crawling across a big china platter.

The green of Polish fields was different from what he’d known in England, too: duller somehow. Maybe it was the light, maybe the soil; whatever it was, he’d noticed it almost at once.

He’d noticed the workers in those fields, too. Englishmen who labored on the land were farmers. The Poles were inarguably peasants. He had trouble defining the difference but, as with the colors of the fields, it was unmistakable. Maybe part of it lay in the way the Polish farmers went about their work. By the standards Goldfarb was used to, they might as well have been moving in slow motion. Their attitude seemed to say that how hard they worked didn’t matter-they weren’t going to realize much from their labors, anyway.

A noise in the sky, like an angry cockchafer… Goldfarb had heard that noise more times than he cared to remember, and his reaction to it was instinctive: he threw himself flat. Hugging the ground, a flight of German bombers roared by, heading east.

Ju-88s, Goldfarb thought, identifying them by sound and shape as automatically as he would have told his father from an uncle. He was used to praying for fighters and antiaircraft guns to blow German bombers out of the sky. Now he found himself wishing them luck. That felt strange, wrong; the world had taken a lot of strange turns since the Lizards came.

He got to his feet and peered south. Smoke smudged the horizon there, the first mark he’d seen. That ought to be Lodz, he thought. A little farther and he could start doing the job the British high command had, in their wisdom, decided he was right for.

Cloth cap, black jacket and wool trousers-they all shouted I am a Jew! He wondered why Hitler had bothered adding yellow stars to the getup; they struck him as hardly necessary. Even his underwear was different from what he’d worn in England, and chafed him in strange places.

He had to look like a Jew. He spoke Yiddish, but his Polish was fragmentary and mostly foul. In England, even before he went into uniform, he’d dressed and sounded like everyone else. Here in Poland, he felt isolated from a large majority of the people around him. “Get used to it,” he muttered. “Most places, Jews don’t fit in.”

An ornate brass signpost said, LODZ, 5KM. Fastened above it was an angular wooden sign with angular black letters on a white background: LITZMANNSTADT, 5KM. Just seeing that sign pointing like an arrow at the heart of Lodz set Goldfarb’s teeth on edge. Typical German arrogance, to slap a new name on the town once they’d conquered it.

He wondered if the Lizards called it something altogether different.

A little more than an hour brought him into the outskirts of Lodz. He’d been told the town had fallen to the Nazis almost undamaged. It wasn’t undamaged now. The briefings he’d read on the submarine said the Germans had put up a hell of a scrap before the Lizards drove them out of town, and that they’d lobbed occasional rockets or flying bombs (the briefings weren’t very clear about which) at it ever since.

Most of the people in the outer part of the city were Poles. If any German settlers remained from Lodz’s brief spell as Litzmannstadt, they were lying low. Sneers from the Poles were bad enough. He didn’t know what he would have done with Germans gaping at him. All at once, he regretted hoping the German bombers had a good mission. Then he got angry at himself for that regret. The Germans might not be much in the way of human beings, but against the Lizards they and England were on the same side.

He walked on down Lagiewnicka Street toward the ghetto. The wall the Nazis had built was still partly intact, although in the street itself it had been knocked down to allow traffic once more. As soon as he set foot on the Jewish side, he decided that while the Germans and England might be on the same side, the Germans and he would never be.

The smell and the crowding hit him twin sledgehammer blows. He’d lived his whole life with plumbing that worked. He’d never reckoned that a mitzvah, a blessing, but it was. The brown reek of sewage (or rather, slops), garbage, and unwashed humanity made him wish he could turn off his nose.

And the crowd! He’d heard men who’d been in India and China talk of ant heaps of people, but he hadn’t understood what that meant The streets were jammed with men, women, children, carts, wagons-a good-sized city was boiled down into a few square blocks, like bouillon made into a cube. People bought, sold, argued, pushed past one another, got in each other’s way, so that block after block of ghetto street felt like the most crowded pub where Goldfarb had ever had a pint.

The people-the Jews-were dirty, skinny, many of them sickly-looking. After tramping down from the Polish coast, Goldfarb was none too clean himself, but whenever he saw someone eyeing him, he feared the flesh on his bones made him conspicuous.

And this misery, he realized, remained after the Nazis were the better part of a year out of Lodz. The Jews now were fed better and treated like human beings. What the ghetto had been like under German rule was-not unimaginable, for he imagined it all too vividly, but horrifying in a way he’d never imagined till now.

“Thank you, Father, for getting out when you did,” he said. For a couple of blocks he simply let himself be washed along like a fish in a swift-flowing stream. Then he began moving against the current in a direction of his own choosing.

Posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski seemed to follow him wherever he went. Some were tattered and faded, some as new and bright as if they’d been put up yesterday, which they probably had. Rumkowski stared down at Goldfarb from a variety of poses, but always looked stern and commanding.

Goldfarb shook his head; the briefing papers had had considerable to say about Rumkowski and his regime in Lodz, but not much of that was good. In sum, he amounted to a pocket Jewish Hitler. Just what we need, Goldfarb thought.

A couple of times, he passed Order Service men with their armbands and truncheons. He noticed them not only for those, but also because they looked uncommonly well-fed. A pocket Jewish SS, too. Wonderful. Goldfarb kept his head down and did his best to pretend he was invisible.

But he had to look up from time to time to tell where he was going; studying a street map of Lodz didn’t do enough to let him make his way through the town itself. Luckily, being one mote in a swirling crowd kept him from drawing special notice. After three wrong turns-about half as many as he’d expected-he walked into a block of flats on Mostowski Street and started climbing stairs.

He knocked on what he hoped was the right door. A woman a couple of years older than he was-she would have been pretty If she hadn’t been so thin-opened it and stared at his unfamiliar face with fear-widened eyes. “Who are you?” she demanded.

Goldfarb got the idea something unpleasant would happen to him if he gave the wrong answer. He said, “I’m supposed to tell you even Job didn’t suffer forever.”

“And I’m supposed to tell you it must have seemed that way to him.” The woman’s whole body relaxed. “Come in. You must be Moishe’s cousin from England.”

“That’s right,” he said. She closed the door behind him. He went on, “And you’re Rivka? Where’s your son?”

“He’s out playing. In the crowds on the street, the risk is small, and besides, someone has an eye on him.”

“Good.” Goldfarb looked around. The flat was tiny, but so bare that it seemed larger. He shook his head in sympathy.

“You must be sick to death of moving.”

Rivka Russie smiled for the first time, tiredly. “You have no idea. Reuven and I have moved three times since Moishe didn’t come back to the flat we’d just taken.” She shook her head. “He thought someone had known who he was. We must have been just too late getting out of the other place. If it hadn’t been for the underground, I don’t know what we would have done. Got caught, I suppose.”

“They got word to England, too,” Goldfarb said, “and orders eventually got to me.” He wondered if they would have, had Churchill not spent a while talking with him at Bruntingthorpe. “I’m supposed to help get Moishe out of here and take him-and you and the boy back to England with me. If I can.”

“Can you do that?” Rivka asked eagerly.

“Gott vayss-God knows,” he said. That won a startled laugh from her. He went on, “I’m no commando or hero or anything like that. I’ll work with your people and I’ll do the best I can, that’s all.”

“A better answer than I expected.” Her voice was judicious.

“Is he still in Lodz?” Goldfarb asked. “That’s the last information I had, but it’s not necessarily good any more.”

“As far as we know, yes. The Lizards aren’t in a lot of hurry about dealing with him. That doesn’t make sense to me, when he did such a good job of embarrassing them.”

“They’re more sure than quick,” Goldfarb said, remembering pages from the briefing book. “Very methodical, but not swift. What sort of charge do they have him up on?”

“Disobedience,” Rivka said. “From everything he ever said while he was on better terms with them, they couldn’t accuse him of anything much worse.”

That fit in with what Goldfarb had read, too. The Lizards seemed rank-, class-, and duty-conscious to a degree that made the English and even the Japanese look like wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchists. In that kind of society, disobedience had to be as heinous a sin as blasphemy in the Middle Ages.

“Still here in Lodz,” Goldfarb mused. “That’s good, I suppose. The Lizards’ main Polish headquarters is in Warsaw. Getting him out of there would be a lot tougher.” He grinned wryly. “Besides, I don’t fancy walking all that way east, not when I’ve just come here from the coast the same way.”

“Would you like some tea?” Rivka asked. A moment later, she added another, more indignant question: “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, really,” Goldfarb said, though he was still chuckling. “It’s only that any woman in my family would have asked exactly the same question.”

“I am a woman in your family,” Rivka said quietly.

“That’s true. You are.” They eyed each other across the gulf of lifetimes spent in very different lands. Goldfarb’s parents had escaped the ghetto; to him, this place was something medieval returned to malignant life, and Rivka in her long black dress almost as much a part of the past come again. He wondered how he seemed to her: exotic stranger from a land rich and peaceful compared to Poland, in spite of everything Hitler and the Lizards had done to England, or just an apikoros, someone who’d abandoned most of his Judaism to get along in the wider world? He didn’t know how to ask, or even if it was his business.

“Do you want that cup of tea?” Rivka asked again. “It’s not real tea, I’m afraid, only chopped-up herbs and leaves.”

“Same sort of muck we’ve been drinking at home,” Goldfarb said. “Yes, I’d like some, if it’s not too much trouble.”

Rivka Russie made the “tea” on an electric hot plate. She served it to him in a glass with sugar but no milk. That was how his parents drank it, but he’d come to prefer the way most Englishmen took theirs. Asking for milk here, though, didn’t seem likely to produce anything but embarrassment. Cautiously, he sipped.

He raised an eyebrow. “Not bad at all. Better than most of what I’ve had lately, as a matter of fact.” To prove he meant it, he quickly drained the glass. Then he said, “So you’re still in touch with the underground?”

“Yes,” Rivka answered. “If it weren’t for them, the Order Service men would have taken Reuven and me along with Moishe by now.”

“Can you let me know how to get hold of them? If nothing else, I’ll need somewhere to sleep while I’m looking things over.” Can’t very well stay in a flat with my cousin’s wife, not when he’s in gaol.

“It’s not as hard as you might think.” Amusement shone in Rivka’s eyes. “Go across the hall to flat number twenty-four. Knock on the door-twice, then once.”

He’d used a password to identify himself to her. Now he had to trot out a secret knock? He’d always thought that sort of thing more the province of sensational novels than sober fact, but he was learning better in a hurry. If you wanted to keep going when every man’s hand was raised against you, you had to figure out ways to keep from being noticed.

He went across the hall, found the battered door with a tarnished brass 24 on it. Knock, knock… knock. He waited. The door opened. The big man standing in it said, “Nu?”

“Nu, the lady across the way sent me here,” Goldfarb replied. With his shaggy beard and soldier’s cap over civilian clothes, the big man looked like a bandit chief. He also looked like someone it would be wiser not to annoy. Goldfarb was glad he’d had the right code to introduce himself to Rivka Russie; without it, this fellow likely would have descended on him like a falling building. He’d been right to have his wind up.

But now the man grinned (showing bad teeth) and stuck out his hand. “So you’re Russie’s English cousin, are you? You can call me Leon.”

“Right.” The fellow had a blacksmith’s grip, Goldfarb discovered. He also noted that while the local Jew had said he could call him Leon, that didn’t mean it was his name: another precaution out of the books, and probably as necessary as the rest.

“Don’t stand there-come in,” Leon said. “Never can tell who’s liable to be looking down the hall.” He closed the door behind Goldfarb. “Take your pack off if you like-it looks heavy.”

“Thanks” Goldfarb did. The apartment was, if anything, barer than Rivka’s. Only mattresses on the floor said people lived, or at least slept, here. He said, “Moishe’s still in Lodz?” Leon, he figured, would know more surely than Rivka had.

The big man nodded. “He’s in Prison One on Franciszkanska Street-the Nazis called it Franzstrasse, just like they called Lodz Litzmannstadt. We call it Franzstrasse ourselves, sometimes, because there’s a big sign with that name right across from the prison that nobody’s ever bothered taking down.”

“Prison One, eh?” Goldfarb said. “How many are there?”

“Plenty,” Leon answered. “Along with being good at killing people, the Nazis were good at putting them away, too.”

“Do you know where in the prison he’s locked up?” Goldfarb asked. “For that matter, do you have plans for the building?”

“Who do you think turned it into a prison? The Germans should have dirtied their hands doing the work themselves?” Leon said. “Oh yes, we have the plans. And we know where your cousin is, too. The Lizards don’t let Jews anywhere near him-they’re learning-but they haven’t learned yet that some Poles are on our side, too.”

“This whole business must make you meshuggeh sometimes,” Goldfarb said. “The Lizards are better to Jews here than the Nazis ever were, but they’re bad for everybody else, so sometimes you find yourself working with the Germans. And the Poles don’t like Jews, either, but I guess they don’t like the Lizards any better.”

“It’s a mess, all right,” Leon agreed. “I’m just glad I don’t have to do much in the way of figuring out. You wanted plans, I’ll show you plans.” He went over to a cabinet, yanked out a roll of paper, and brought it over to Goldfarb. When Goldfarb opened it, he saw they weren’t just plans but Germanically meticulous engineering drawings. Leon pointed. “They have machine guns on the roof, here and here. We’ll have to do something about those.”

“Yes,” Goldfarb said in a small voice. “A machine gun we don’t do something about would put rather a hole in our scheme, wouldn’t it?”

That might have been Leon’s first taste of British understatement; he grunted laughter. “Put a hole in us, you mean-probably lots of holes. But let’s say we can take out the machine guns-”

“Because if we don’t, we can’t go on anyhow,” Goldfarb broke in.

“Exactly,” Leon said. “So let’s say we do. You’re supposed to be bringing some presents with you. Have you got them?”

By way of answer, Goldfarb opened the battered Polish Army pack that had come from an exile in England. No one had paid any attention to it since he’d landed here. Close to half the people on the road wore one like it, and a lot of those who didn’t had corresponding German or Russian gear instead.

Leon looked inside. His long exhalation puffed out his mustache. “They don’t look like much,” he said dubiously.

“They’re bloody hell to load, but they’ll do the job if I can’t get close enough to use them. I’ve practiced with them. Believe me, they will,” Goldfarb said.

“And what’s all this mess?” Leon pointed into the pack, which held, along with the bombs he’d already disparaged, a motley assortment of metal tubes, levers, and a spring that might have come from the suspension of a lorry.

“The mechanism for shooting them,” Goldfarb answered. “They built one in sections especially for me, lucky chap that I am, so the business end wouldn’t keep sticking out the top of my pack. The whole bloody thing together is called a PIAT-Projector, Infantry, Antitank.” The last four words were necessarily in English.

Leon, luckily, understood “tank.” He shook his head anyhow. “No tanks”-he said panzers-“at the jail.”

“There’d better not be,” Goldfarb said. “But a bomb that will make a hole in the side of a tank will make a big hole in the side of a building.”

He got the impression that that was the first thing he’d said which impressed Leon, even a little. The man from the underground (Goldfarb suppressed a picture of Leon coming up from a London tube station) plucked at his beard. “Maybe you have something there. How far will it shoot?”

“A couple of hundred yards-uh, meters.” Watch that, Goldfarb told himself. You can give yourself away if you don’t think metric.

“Should be far enough.” Leon’s sardonic smile said he’d caught the slip, too. “Do you want to look over the prison before you try cracking it?”

“I’d better. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing before I do it, right?”

“It helps, yes.” Leon studied him. “You’ve seen some action, I think.”

“In the air, yes. Not on the ground, not like you mean. On the ground, I’ve just been strafed like everybody else.”

“Yes, I know about that, too,” Leon said. “But even in the air-that’ll do. You won’t panic when things start going crazy. Why don’t you leave your hardware here? We don’t want to bring it around to the prison till it’s time to use it.”

“Makes sense to me, as long as you’re sure nobody’s going to steal it while we’re gone.”

Leon showed teeth in something that was not a smile. “Anyone who steals from us… he’s very sorry and he never, ever does it again. This happens once or twice and people start to get the idea.”

That probably meant just what Goldfarb thought it did. He didn’t want to know for sure. Goldfarb left the pack on the floor and walked out of the flat after Leon.

Franciszkanska Street was about ten minutes away. Again crowds and sights and smells buffeted Goldfarb. Again he reminded himself that this was how things were long after the Nazis had been driven away.

He stuck to Leon like a pair of socks; even though he’d memorized the local map, he didn’t want to do much navigating on his own. Leon presently remarked, “We’ll just walk by, casual as you please. Nobody will think anything about us looking as long as we don’t stop and stare. The first rule is not to make yourself conspicuous.”

Goldfarb looked, turning his head as if to carry on a conversation with Leon. At first glance, the prison was a tough nut to crack: two machine guns on the roof, barred windows, razor wire around the perimeter. At second glance, he said quietly, “It’s too close to everything else and it doesn’t have enough guards.”

“They didn’t send a blind man over,” Leon said, beaming. “Right both times. That gives us our chance.”

“And what do we do to take it?” Goldfarb asked as they left Prison One behind.

“For now, you don’t do anything,” Leon said. “You sit tight and wait for the right time. Me, I have to go see some people and find out what I need to do to incite myself a riot.”

Bobby Fiore paced along a dirt track somewhere in China. His comrades said they weren’t far from Shanghai. That meant little to him, because he couldn’t have put Shanghai on the map to keep himself out of the electric chair. His guess was that it wasn’t too far from the ocean: the air had the vaguely salty tang he’d known when he played in places like Washington State and Louisiana, anyhow.

The weight of the pistol on his hip was comforting, like an old friend. His baggy tunic hid the little gun. He’d acquired a new straw hat. If you ignored his nose and the five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, he made a pretty fair imitation peasant He still didn’t know what to make of the rest of the band. Some of the men who trudged along in the loose column were Chinese Reds like Lo and the rest of the gang who had gotten him into this mess in the first place. They too looked like peasants, which was fair enough, because he gathered most of them were.

But the others… He glanced over at the fellow nearest him, who carried a rifle and wore a ragged khaki uniform. “Hey, Yosh!” he called, and mimed pivoting at second base to turn a double play.

Yoshi Fukuoka grinned, exposing a couple of gold teeth. He dropped the rifle and went into a first baseman’s stretch, scissoring himself into a split and reaching out with an imaginary mitt to snag the equally imaginary ball. “Out!” he yelled, the word perfectly comprehensible to Fiore, who lifted a clenched fist in the air, thumb pointing up.

The Reds looked from one of them to the other. They didn’t get it. To them, Fukuoka was an eastern devil and Fiore a foreign devil, and the only reason they were tagging along with the Japs was that they all hated the Lizards worse than they hated each other.

Fiore hadn’t even counted on that much. When he stumbled into the Japanese camp-and when he figured out the soldiers there were Japs and not Chinamen, which took him a while-he wished he could find himself a priest for last rites, because roasting over a slow fire was the best he’d expected from them. They’d bombed Pearl Harbor, they’d butchered Liu Han’s husband-what was he supposed to expect?

The Japs had taken a little while to figure out he was an American, too. Their Chinese-the only language they had in common with him-was almost as bad as his, and a good-sized honker and round eyes had counted for less at first than his outfit. When they did realize what he was, they’d seemed more alarmed than hostile.

“Doolittle?” Fukuoka had asked, flying bombers over the ground with his hand.

Even though he thought he’d get killed in the next couple of minutes, that had sent Bobby into laughter which, looking back on it, was probably close to hysterical. He knew a lot of the men from Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo had landed in China, but getting mistaken for one by a jittery Jap was too much.

“I ain’t no bomber pilot,” he’d said in English. “I’m just a second baseman, and a lousy one, to boot.”

He hadn’t expected that to mean a thing to his interrogator, but the Jap’s eyes had widened as much as they could. “Second base?” he’d echoed, pointing at Fiore. “Beisoboru?”

When Fiore still didn’t get it, Fukuoka had gone into an unmistakable hitting stance. The light went on in Fiore’s head. “Baseball!” he yelled. “Son of a bitch, I don’t believe it. You play ball, too?”

It hadn’t been enough for him to win friends and influence people right off, but it had kept him from getting shot or bayoneted or suffering any of the other interesting things that could have happened to him. His questioning stayed questions, not torture. When, haltingly, he explained how he’d been part of the attack on the prison camp guard station that got him promoted from prisoner to fellow fighter.

“You want kill…?”One of the Japs had said a word in his own language. When he saw Fiore didn’t get it, he’d amended it to, “Little scaly devils?”

“Yeah!” Bobby had said savagely. The Japanese might not have known English, but they understood that just fine.

And so he’d started marching with them. That still drove him crazy. They were the enemy, they’d kicked the U.S.A. in the balls at Pearl Harbor, jumped on the Philippines and Singapore and Burma and eight zillion little islands God knows where in the Pacific, and here he was eating rice out of the same bowl with them. It felt like treason. He had uneasy visions of standing trial for treason if he ever got back to the States, But the Japs hated Lizards more than they hated Americans, and, he’d discovered, he hated Lizards worse than he hated Japs. He’d stayed.

The Reds had joined the band a couple of days after he did. They and the Japs hadn’t seemed to have any trouble getting along. That puzzled Bobby-they’d been shooting at each other right up to the day the Lizards came, and probably for a while afterwards, too.

The leader of the Red detachment was a man of about his own age named Nieh Ho-T’ing. Fiore spent more time talking with the Chinese than he did with any of the Japs except Pukuoka the ballplayer, he had more words in common with them. When he asked why they didn’t have any trouble making common cause with their recent foes, Nieh had looked at him as if he were a moron and replied, “The enemy of my enemy is a friend.”

It seemed as simple as that to the Japs, too. They were looking for fighters, they knew The Reds could fight, and that was all she wrote. If they thought about anything else, they sure didn’t show it.

Shanghai was in Lizard hands. The closer the band got to it, the more Bobby began to jitter. “What do we do if we see a Lizard tank?” he demanded of Nieh.

The Chinese officer shrugged, which infuriated Fiore.

“Run,” he answered placidly. “If we cannot run, we fight. If we must, we die. We hope to hurt the enemy as they kill us.”

“Thanks a hell of a lot,” Fiore muttered in English. He had no doubt Nieh Ho-T’ing meant just what he said, too. He had had that do-or-die look Fiore had sometimes seen in the eyes of starting pitchers before a big game. It hadn’t always meant victory, but it generally did mean a hell of an effort.

The Japs had that look, too. In his dreadful Chinese, Fukuoka told stories about pilots who’d flown their bombers right at landed Lizard spaceships, accepting the loss of their own lives as long as they could hurt the foe, too. Fiore shivered. Martyrs were all very well in church, but disconcerting when encountered in real life. He couldn’t decide whether they were insanely brave not just plain insane.

They came to a road sign that said SHANGHAI 50 KM along with its incomprehensible Chinese chicken scratches. At last the band split into little groups of men to make their advance less obvious.

Bobby Fiore didn’t know much about Shanghai, or care. He felt like a man who’d just got out of jail. In essence, he was a man who’d just got out of jail. After a year or so trapped first in Cairo, Illinois, then on the Lizard spaceship, and then in the Chinese prison camp, just being on his own and moving from place to place again felt wonderful.

He’d been a nomad for fifteen years, riding trains and buses across the United States from one rickety minor-league park, one middle-sized town, to the next, every April to September. He’d done his share of winter barnstorming, too. He wasn’t used to being cooped up in one place for weeks and months at a time.

He wondered how Liu Han was doing, and hoped the Lizards weren’t giving her too hard a time because he’d gone grenade-chucking with Lo the Red. He shook his head. She was a sweet gal, no doubt about that-and he wondered what a kid who was half dago, half chink would look like. He rubbed his nose, laughing a little. He would have bet money the schnoz got passed on.

But no going back, not unless he wanted to stick his head in the noose. He wasn’t a man to go back, anyhow. He looked ahead, toward whatever came next: the next series, the next train ride, the next broad. Liu Han had been fun-she’d been more than fun; that much he admitted to himself-but she was history. And history, somebody said, was bunk.

Peasants in their garden plots and rice paddies looked up when the armed band passed, then went back to work. They’d seen armed bands before: Chinese, Japanese, Lizards. As long as nobody shot at them, they worked. In the end, the armed bands couldn’t do without them, not unless the people-and Lizards-wanted to quit eating.

Up ahead on the road, something stirred. Its approach was rapid, purposeful, mechanical-which meant it belonged to the Lizards. Bobby Fiore gulped. Seeing Lizards coming reminded him he wasn’t marching along from place to place here. He’d signed up to fight, and the bill was about to come due.

The Japs ahead started jumping off the road, looking for cover. That suddenly struck Bobby as a real good idea. He remembered the little streambed that had cut across the field outside the prison camp. Better an idea should strike him than whatever the Lizards fired his way. He got behind a big bush by the side of the road. A moment later he wished he’d gone into a ditch instead, but by then it was too late to move.

He willed a thought at the Japs: don’t start shooting. Attack right now would be suicidal-rifles against armor just didn’t work. Through the thick, leafy branches of the bush, he couldn’t see just what kind of.armor it was, but the little band of fighters didn’t have the tools to take on any kind.

Closer and closer the Lizard vehicles came, moving with the near silence that characterized the breed. Bobby pulled out his pistol, which all at once seemed a miserable little weapon indeed. Instead of squeezing the trigger, he squeezed off a couple of Hail Marys.

Somebody fired. “Oh, shit,” Bobby said, in the same reverent tone he’d used a moment before to address the Mother of God. Now he could tell what the fighters were up against not tanks, but what he thought the U.S Army called half-tracks-soldier-haulers with machine guns of their own. Maybe a Lizard had been dumb enough to ride with his head sticking out so a Jap could try to blow it off.

Fiore didn’t think that showed the kind of brains which would have taken the Jap very far on “The $64,000 Question.” Take a potshot at armor and the armor would chew you up-which it proceeded to do. The half-tracks stopped and began hosing down the area with their automatic weapons. The bush behind which Bobby was hiding suffered herbicide as bullets amputated the top two-thirds. Flat on his belly behind it, Fiore didn’t get hit.

He had his pistol out and his surviving grenade alongside him, but he couldn’t make himself use the weapons. That would only have brought more fire down on him-and he wanted to live. He had trouble understanding how anybody in combat ever fired at anybody else. You could get killed like that.

The Japanese soldiers didn’t seem to worry about it. They kept on blazing away at the Lizards’ vehicles-those of them who hadn’t got killed in the curtain of lead the half-tracks laid down, anyway. Bobby had no idea how much damage the Japs were doing, but he was pretty damn sure it wouldn’t be enough.

It wasn’t. Along with keeping up the machine-gun fire, the half-tracks lowered their rear doors. A couple of squads of Lizards skittered out, their personal automatic weapons blazing. They weren’t just going to hurt the people who’d shot at them, they were going to wipe ’em off the face of the earth.

“Oh, shit,” Fiore, said again, even more sincerely than he had before. If the Lizards caught him here with a pistol and a grenade, he was dead, no two ways about it. He didn’t want to be dead, not even a little bit. He shoved the evidence under the chopped-off part of the bush and rolled backwards till he fell with a splash into a rice paddy.

He crouched down there as low as he could, huddling in the mud and doing his best to make like a farmer. Some of the real farmers were still in the knee-deep water. One or two weren’t going to get out again; red stains spread around their bodies. Others, sensible chaps, ran for their lives.

The Japs didn’t run, or Fiore didn’t see any who did. They held their ground and fought till they were all dead. The Lizards’ superior firepower smashed them like a shoe coming down on a cockroach.

Then the shooting tapered off. Fiore fervently hoped that meant the Lizards would get back into their half-tracks and go away. Instead, some of them came prowling his way, making sure they hadn’t missed anybody.

One of them pointed his rifle right at Bobby Fiore. “Who you?” he demanded in lousy Chinese. He was standing no more than a foot and a half from the weapons Bobby had stashed. Bobby was dreadfully aware he hadn’t stashed them all that well, either. The Lizard repeated. “Who you?”

“Name is, uh, Nieh Ho-T’ing,” Fiore said, stealing a handle from the Red officer. “Just farmer. Like rice?” He pointed to the plants peeping out of the water all around him, hoping the Lizard wouldn’t notice how bad his own Chinese was.

He might not have fooled another human being, with his accent, his nose, his eyes, and the stubble on his cheeks, but the Lizard wasn’t trained to pick up the differences between one flavor of Big Uglies and the next. He just hissed something in his own language, then switched back to Chinese: “You know these bad shooters?”

“No,” Fiore said, half bowed so he looked down into the murky water and didn’t show much of his face. “They eastern devils, I think. Me good Chinese man.”

The Lizard hissed again, then went off to ask questions of somebody else. Bobby Fiore didn’t move until all the males got back into the half-tracks and rolled away.

“Jesus,” he said when they were gone. “I lived through it.” He scrambled up out of the rice paddy and reclaimed the weapons he’d stashed. He’d started to feel naked without a pistol, even if it wasn’t any good against armor-and having a grenade around made you warm and comfortable, too.

He wasn’t the only one scuttling for guns, either. The Japs were all communing with their ancestors, but most of the Chinese Reds had played possum the same way he had. Now they came splashing from the paddies and grabbed their rifles and pistols and submachine guns.

They searched the corpses of the Japanese, too, but added little to what they already had. Nieh Ho-T’ing made a sour face as he walked over to Fiore. “Scaly devils are good soldiers,” he said disappointedly. “They don’t leave guns around for just anybody to pick up. Too bad.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Fiore echoed. Water dripped from his pants and formed little puddles and streams by his feet. Whenever he moved, the wet cotton made shlup-shlup noises right out of an animated cartoon.

Nieh nodded to him. “You did well. Unlike these imperialists”-he pointed to a couple of dead Japs not far away-“you understand that in guerrilla war the fighter is but one fish in a vast school of peasants. When danger too great to oppose confronts him, he disappears into the school. He does not call attention to himself.”

Fiore didn’t understand all of that, but he got the gist. “Look like farmer, they not shoot me,” he said.

“That’s what I was talking about,” Nieh answered impatiently. Bobby Fiore gave an absentminded emphatic cough to show he understood. Nieh had started to go off; his soaked pants went shlup-shlup, too. He spun back around, spraying small drops of water as he did so. “You speak the language of the little scaly devils?” he demanded.

“A bit.” Bobby held his hand close together to show how small a bit it was. “Speak more Chinese.” And if that wouldn’t make my mama fall over in a faint, what would? he thought, and then, She’s gonna have a half-Chinese grandkid eveniIf she doesn’t know it. That oughta do the job.

Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t care about grandkids. “You speak some, though?” he persisted. “And you understand more than you speak?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Fiore said in English. Feeling himself flush, he did his best to turn it into Chinese.

Nieh nodded-he got the idea. He patted Bobby on the back. “Oh, yes, we will gladly take you to Shanghai. You will be very useful there. We do not have many who can follow what the little devils say.”

“Good,” Bobby answered, smiling to show how happy he was. And he was happy, too-the Reds could just as easily have shot him and left him here by the side of the road to make sure he didn’t make a nuisance of himself later on. But since he made a good tool, they’d keep him around and use him. Just like Lo, Nieh Ho-T’ing hadn’t asked how he felt about any of that. He had the feeling the Reds weren’t good at asking-they just took.

He started to laugh. Nieh gave him a curious look. He waved the Red away: it wasn’t a joke he knew how to translate into Chinese. But of all the things he’d never expected, getting shanghaied to Shanghai was right up at the top of the list.

“Exalted Fleetlord, here is a report that will please you,” the shiplord Kirel said as he summoned a new document onto the screen.

Atvar read intently for a little while, then stopped and stared at Kirel. “Major release of radioactivity in Deutschland” he said. “This is supposed to please me? It means the Big Uglies there are a short step away from a nuclear bomb.”

“But they do not know how to take that next step,” Kirel replied. “If you please, Exalted Fleetlord, examine the analysis.”

Atvar did as his subordinate asked. As he read, his mouth fell open in a great chortle of glee. “Idiots, fools, maniacs! They achieved a self sustaining pile without proper damping?”

“From the radiation that has been-is being-released, they seem to have done just that,” Kirel answered, also gleefully. “And it’s melted down on them, and contaminated the whole area, and, with any luck at all, killed off a whole great slew of their best scientists.”

“If these are their best-” Atvar’s hiss was full of amazement. “They’ve done almost as much damage to themselves as we did to them when we dropped the nuclear bomb on Berlin.”

“No doubt you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “One of the main characteristics of the Tosevites is their tendency to leap headlong into any new technology which comes within their capabilities. Where we would study consequences first, they simply charge ahead. Because of that, no doubt, they went in the flick of an eye turret from spear-flinging savages to-”

“Industrialized savages,” Atvar put in.

“Exactly so,” Kirel agreed. “This time, though, in leaping they fell and smashed their snouts. Not all ventures into new technology come without risks.”

“Something went right,” Atvar said happily. “Ever since we came to Tosev 3, we’ve been nibbled to pieces here: two killercraft lost in one place, five landcruisers in another, deceitful diplomacy from the Big Uglies, the allies we’ve made among them who betrayed us-”

“That male in Poland who embarrassed us by recanting his friendship is back in our claws,” Kirel said.

“So he is. I’d forgotten that,” Atvar said. “We’ll have to determine the most expedient means of punishing him, too: find some way to remind the Tosevites who have joined us that they would do well to remember who gives them their meat. No hurry there. He is not going anyplace save by our leave.”

“No indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “We also need to consider the effect of stepping up our pressure on Deutschland in light of their failure with the atomic pile. We may find them discouraged and demoralized. Computer models suggest as much, at any rate.”

“Let me see.” Atvar punched up detail maps of the northwestern section of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. He hissed as he checked them. “The guerrillas in Italia give us as much trouble as armies elsewhere… and though the local king and his males loudly swear they are loyal to us, they do cooperate with the rebels. Our drives in eastern France have bogged down again-not surprising, when half the local landcruiser crews cared more about tasting ginger than fighting. We’re still reorganizing there. But from the east-something might be done.”

“I have taken the liberty of analyzing the forces we have available as well as those with which the Deutsche could oppose us,” Kirel said. “I believe we are in a position to make significant gains there, and perhaps, if all goes well, to come close to knocking the Deutsche out of the fight against us.”

“That would be excellent,” Atvar said. “Forcing them into submission would improve our logistics against both Britain and the SSSR-and they are dangerous in their own right. Their missiles, their jet planes, their new landcruisers are all variables I would like to see removed from the equation.”

“They are dangerous in more ways than that, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said quietly. “More even than the emperor-slayers in the SSSR, they have industrialized murder. Eliminating them might also eliminate that idea from the planet.”

Atvar remembered the images and reports from the camp called Treblinka, and from the bigger one, just going into operation when the Race overran it, called Auschwitz. The Race had never invented any places like those. Neither had the Hallessi or the Rabotevs. So many things about Tosev 3 were unique; that was one piece of uniqueness he wished to the tip of his tailstump that the Big Uglies had not come up with.

He said, “When we are through here, the Tosevites will not be able to do that to one another. And we will have no need to do it to them, for they will be our subjects. In obedience to the will of the Emperor, this shall be done.”

Along with Atvar, Kirel cast down his eyes. “So it shall. I hope two things, Exalted Fleetlord: that the other Big Uglies working toward nuclear weapons make the same error as the Deutsche, and that the disaster permanently ended the Deutsch nuclear program. Given their viciousness, I would not want to see them of all Tosevites armed with atomic bombs.”

“Nor I,” Atvar said.