Tilting the Balance

XV

Ristin let his mouth hang open, showing off his pointy little teeth and Lizardy tongue: he was laughing at Sam Yeager. “You have what?” he said in pretty fluent if accented English. “Seven days in a week? Twelve inches in a foot? Three feet in a mile?”

“A yard,” Sam corrected.

“I thought something with grass growing in it was a yard,” Ristin said. “But never mind. How do you’remember all these things? How do you keep from going mad trying to remember?”

“All what you’re used to,” Yeager said, a little uncomfortably: he remembered trying to turn pecks into bushels into tons in school. That was one of the reasons he’d signed a minor-league contract first chance he got-except for banking and his batting average, he’d never worried about math since. He went on, “Most places except the United States use the metric system, where everything is ten of this and ten of that.” If he hadn’t read science fiction, he wouldn’t have known about the metric system, either.

“Even time?” Ristin asked. “No sixty seconds make a minute or an hour or whatever it is, and twenty-four minutes or hours make a day?” He sputtered like a derisive steam engine, then tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

“Well, no,” Sam admitted. “All that stuff stays the same all over the world. It’s-tradition, that’s what it is.” He smiled happily-the Lizards lived and died by tradition.

But Ristin wasn’t buying it, not this time. He said, “In our ancient days, before we were what is the word? civilized? — yes, civilized, we had traditions like that, traditions that did harm, not good. We made them work for us or we got rid of them. This was a hundred thousand years ago. We do not miss these bad traditions.”

“A hundred thousand years ago,” Yeager echoed. He’d gotten the idea that Lizard years weren’t as long as the ones people used, but even so… “A hundred thousand years ago-fifty thousand years ago, too, come to that-people were just cavemen. Savages, I mean. Nobody knew how to read and write, nobody knew how to grow their own food. Hell, nobody knew anything to speak of.”

Ristin’s eye turrets moved just a little. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed, but Sam had spent more time around Lizards than just about anybody. He knew the alien was thinking something he didn’t want to say. He could even make a pretty fair guess about what it was: “As far as you’re concerned, we still don’t know anything to speak of.”

Ristin jerked as if Sam had stuck him with a pin. “How did you know that?”

“A little bird told me,” Yeager said, grinning.

“Tell it to the Marines,” Ristin retorted. He didn’t quite understand what a Marine was, but he had the phrase down pat and used it at the right times. Sam wanted to bust out laughing every time he heard it.

“Shall we go outside?” he asked. “It’s a nice day.”

“No, it’s not. It’s cold. It’s always cold on this miserable iceball of a world.” Ristin relented. “It’s not as cold as it was, though. You are right about that.” He gave an exaggerated shiver to show how cold it had been. “If you say we must go out, it shall be done.”

“I didn’t say we had to,” Yeager answered. “I just asked if you wanted to.”

“Not very much,” Ristin said. “Before I was a soldier, I was a male of the city. The-what do you call them? — wide open spaces are not for me. I saw enough of them on the long, long way from Chicago to this place to last me forever.”

Sam was amused to hear his own turns of phrase coming out of the mouth of a creature born under the light of another star. It made him feel as if, in some small way, he’d affected the course of history. He said, “Have it your own way, then, even though I don’t call some grass on the University of Denver the wide open spaces. Maybe it’s just as well; Ullhass ought to be back in a few minutes, and then I can take both you guys back to your rooms.”

“They do not need you to be there any more to translate?” Ristin asked.

“That’s what they say.” Yeager shrugged. “Professor Fermi hasn’t called me this session, so I guess maybe he doesn’t. Both of you speak English pretty well now.”

“If you are not needed for this, will they take you away from us?” Ristin showed his teeth. “You want me and Ullhass to forget how we speak English? Then they still need you. We do not want you to go. You have been good to us since you catch us all this time ago. We think then that you people hurt us, kill us. You showed us different. We want you to stay.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay,” Yeager said. A year before, he’d have found absurd the notion that anything a turret-eyed creature with a hissing accent said could touch him. Touched he was, though, and sometimes he had to remind himself how alien Ristin really was. He went on, “I’ve been a bench warmer before. It’s not the end of the world.”

“It may be.” From sympathetic, Ristin turned serious. “If you humans do build an atomic bomb, it may be. You will use it, and we will use it, and little will be left when all is done.”

“We weren’t the first ones to use them,” Yeager said. “What about Washington and Berlin?”

“Warning shots,” Ristin said. “We could choose to use them in a way that did little harm”-he ignored the choked noise that escaped from Sam’s throat-“because we had them and you did not. If they turn into just another weapon of war, the planet will be badly hurt.”

“But if we don’t use them, the Race is probably going to conquer us,” Yeager said.

Now Ristin made a noise that reminded Sam of a water heater in desperate need of replacement. “This is-how do you say two things that cannot be true at the same time but are anyhow?”

“A paradox?” Sam suggested after some thought; it wasn’t a word he hauled out every day.

“If that is what you say. Paradox,” Ristin repeated. “You may lose the war without these bombs, but you may lose it, too, because of them. Is this a paradox?”

“I guess so.” Yeager gave the Lizard a hard look. “But if you think things are like that, how come you and Ullhass have been so much help to the Met Lab?”

“At first, we did not think you Big Uglies could know enough to make a bomb anyhow, so no harm done,” Ristin said. Sam knew he was worried, because he didn’t often slip and use the Lizard slang name for human beings. He went on, “Soon we found how wrong we were. You know enough and more, and were mostly using us to check the answers you had already. Again, because of this not much harm could come, so we went along.”

“Oh,” Yeager said. “Nice to know we surprised you.”

Ristin’s mouth opened and he wagged his head slightly: he was laughing at himself, “This whole planet has been a surprise, and not a good one. From the first time people started shooting at us with rifles and cannon, we knew everything we had believed about Tosev 3 was wrong.”

Somebody rapped on the door of the office where Yeager and Ristin were talking. “That’ll be Ullhass,” Yeager said.

But when the, door opened, Barbara came through it “You are not Ullhass,” Ristin said in accusing tones. He let his mouth hang open again to show he’d made a joke.

“You know what?” Sam said. “I’m darn glad she isn’t. Hi, hon.” He gave her a hug and a peck of a kiss. “I didn’t think they were going to let you off work till later.”

“One thing about English majors: we do learn how to type,” Barbara said. “As long as we don’t run out of ribbons, I’ll have plenty to do. Or until the baby comes-whichever happens first. They ought to give me a couple of days off for that.”

“They’d better,” Yeager said, and added the emphatic cough.

He laughed at himself. To Ristin, he said, “That’s what I get for hanging around with the likes of you.”

“What, a civilized language?” Ristin said, laughing his kind of laugh once more. He turned civilized into a long hiss.

Despite his accent, he gave as good as he got. Yeager didn’t fire back at him. Instead, he asked Barbara, “Why did they let you go early?”

“I turned green, I guess,” she answered. “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It gets me any old time of day it feels like.”

“You look okay now,” he said.

“I got rid of what ailed me,” Barbara said bleakly. “I’m just glad the plumbing works. If it didn’t, somebody-probably me-would have a mess to clean up.”

“You’re supposed to be eating for two, not throwing up what one has,” Sam said.

“If you know a secret way to make lunch stay down, I wish you’d tell me what it is,” Barbara answered, now with a snap in her voice. “Everybody says this is supposed to go away after I get further along. I hope to heaven that’s true.”

Another knock, this one on the frame of the open door. “Here you go, Corporal,” said a kid in dungarees with a pistol holster on his belt. “I’ve brought your pet Lizard back for you.” Ullhass walked in and exchanged sibilant greetings with Ristin. The kid, who except for the pistol looked like a college freshman, nodded to Yeager, gave Barbara a quick once-over and obviously decided she was too old for him, nodded again, and trotted off down the hall.

“I am not a pet I am a male of the Race,” Ullhass said with considerable dignity.

Yeager soothed him: “I know, pal. But haven’t you noticed that people don’t always say exactly what they mean?”

“Yes, I have seen this,” Ullhass said. “Because I am a prisoner, I will not tell you what I think of it.”

“If you ask me, you just did,” Yeager answered. “You were very polite about it, though. Now come on, boys; I’ll take you home.”

Home for the Lizards was an office converted into an apartment. Maybe cell block was a better word for it, Yeager thought: at least, he’d never seen any apartments with stout iron bars across the windows and an armed guard waiting outside the door. But Ristin and Ullhass liked it. Nobody bothered them in there, and the steam radiator let them heat the room to the bake-oven level they enjoyed.

Once they were safely ensconced, Yeager walked Barbara out onto the lawn. Unlike Ristin, she didn’t complain it was too cold. All she said was, “I wish I had some cigarettes. Maybe they’d keep me from wanting to toss my cookies.”

“Now that you haven’t smoked in a while, they’d probably just make you sicker.” Sam slipped an arm around Barbara’s waist, which was still deliciously slim. “As long as you are off early, you want to go back to the place and…?” He let his voice trail away, but squeezed her a little.

Her answering smile was wan. “I’d love to go back to the place, but if you don’t mind, all I want to do is lie down, maybe take a nap. I’m tired all the time, and my stomach isn’t what you call happy right now, either. Is it okay?” She sounded anxious.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Yeager answered. “Fifteen years ago, I probably would have fussed and sulked, but I’m a grown-up now. I can wait till tomorrow.” My dick doesn’t think for me the way it used to, he thought, but that wasn’t something he could say to a new-wed wife.

Barbara let her hand rest on his. “Thanks, hon.”

“First time I ever got thanked for getting old,” he said.

She made a face at him. “You can’t have it both ways. Are you a grown-up and saying it’s okay because it really is, or are you just getting old and saying it’s okay because you’re all feeble and tired?”

“Ooh.” He mimed a wound. When she wanted to, she could get him chasing his tail like nobody’s business. He didn’t think of himself as dumb (but then, who does?), but he hadn’t had formal training in logic and in fencing with words. Trading barbs with ballplayers in his dugout and the ones on the other side of the field wasn’t the same thing.

Barbara let out a loud, theatrical groan as she got to the top of the stairs. “That’s going to be even less fun when I’m further along,” she said. “Maybe we should have looked for a place on the ground floor. Too late to worry about it now, I suppose.”

She groaned again, this time with pleasure, when she flopped onto the sofa in the front room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the bed?” Yeager asked.

“Actually, no. I can put my feet up this way.” The overstuffed sofa had equally overstuffed arms, so maybe that really was comfortable. Sam shrugged. If Barbara was happy, he was happy, too.

Somebody knocked on the door. “Who’s that?” Sam and Barbara said in the same breath. Why doesn’t he go away? lay beneath the words.

Whoever it was didn’t go away, but kept on knocking. Yeager strode over and threw open the door, intending to give a pushy Fuller Brush man a piece of his mind. But it wasn’t a Fuller Brush man, it was Jens Larssen. He looked at Sam like a man finding a cockroach in his salad. “I want to talk to my wife,” he said.

“She’s not your wife any more. We’ve been through this;” Yeager said tiredly, but his hands bunched into fists at his sides. “What do you want to say to her?”

“It’s none of your damn business,” Jens said, which almost started the fight then and there. But before Yeager quite decided to knock his block off, he added, “But I came to tell her good-bye.”

“Where are you going, Jens?” In her stocking feet, Barbara came up behind Sam so quietly that he hadn’t heard her.

“Washington State,” Larssen answered. “I shouldn’t even tell you that much, but I figured you ought to know, in case I don’t come back.”

“That sounds as if I shouldn’t ask when you’re going,” Barbara said, and Larssen nodded to show she was right. Coolly, she told him, “Good luck, Jens.”

He turned red. Because he was so fair, the process was easy to watch. He said, “For all you care, I could be going off to desert to the Lizards.”

“I don’t think you’d do that,” she said, but Larssen was right: she didn’t sound as if she much cared. Yeager had all he could do to keep from breaking into a happy grin. Barbara went on, “I told you good luck and I meant it. I don’t know what more you want that I can give you.”

“You know good and well what I want,” Jens said, and Yeager gathered himself again. If Larssen wanted that fight bad enough, he’d get it.

“That I can’t give you, I said,” Barbara answered.

Jens Larssen glared at her, at Sam, at her again, as if he couldn’t decide which of them he wanted to belt more. With a snarl of curses, some in English, others in throaty Norwegian, he stomped off. His furious footfalls thundered on the stairs. He slammed the front door of the apartment building hard enough to rattle windows.

“I wish that hadn’t happened,” Barbara said. “I wish-oh, what difference does it make what I wish now? If he’s going away for a while, that may be the best thing that could happen. We’ll get some peace and quiet, and maybe by the time he gets back he’ll have figured out he can’t do anything about this.”

“God, I hope so,” Yeager said. “What he’s put you through ever since we got here isn’t right.” He’d been riding the roller coaster himself, but he kept quiet about that. Barbara was the one who’d had the tough time, because she’d been in love with Jens-right up to the minute she found out he was still alive, Sam thought. Since then, since she’d chosen to stay Barbara Yeager instead of going back to being Barbara Larssen, Jens had done his best to act about as unlovable as a human being could.

Barbara’s sigh showed a weariness that had nothing to do with her being pregnant. “Very strange to think that a year ago he and I were happy together. I don’t think he’s the same person any more. He never used to be bitter-but then, he never used to have much to be bitter about, either. I guess you can’t really tell about someone till you see him when the chips are down.”

“You’re probably right.” Sam had seen that playing ball-some guys wanted to be out there with the game on the line, while others hoped they wouldn’t come up or be on the mound or have the ball hit to them in that kind of spot.

Musingly, Barbara went on, “I suppose that’s one of the reasons people write so much about love and war: they’re the situations that put the most strain on a person’s character, so you can see it at its best and at its worst.”

“Makes sense.” Yeager hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but it did make sense to him. He’d seen enough war close up to know it was more terrifying than exciting but it remained endlessly interesting to read about. He’d never thought about why until now. “You put things in a whole new light for me,” he said admiringly.

She looked at him, then reached out and took his hands in hers. “You’ve put some things in a new light for me, too, Sam,” she murmured.

He felt ten feet tall the rest of the day, and didn’t give Jens Larssen another thought.

“Superior sir, I greet you and welcome you to our fine base here,” Ussmak said to the new landcruiser commander. My latest, he thought, and wondered how many more he’d go through before Tosev 3 was conquered-if it ever was.

That gloomy reflection was a far cry from the spirit of unity with which he-and all landcruiser males-had gone into this campaign. Then, they’d thought crews would stay together through the whole war. They’d trained on that assumption, so that a male without his crew was an object of pity, both to his comrades and to himself.

Things hadn’t quite worked that way. Ussmak had had two commanders and a gunner killed on him, and another commander and gunner swept away in the wild hunt for ginger lickers. He studied this new male and wondered how long he’d last.

The fellow seemed promising enough. He was good-looking and alert, and his neatly applied body paint argued that he didn’t have his tongue in a ginger jar (though you never could tell; Ussmak was fastidious about his own paint just to keep his superiors from getting-justifiably-suspicious).

“Landcruiser Driver Ussmak, I am Landcruiser Commander Nejas; you are assigned to my crew,” the male said. “Skoob, our gunner, will be along shortly; he must be completing reporting formalities. Both of us will draw heavily on your knowledge, as you have more combat experience than we do.”

“I shall help you in any way I can, superior sir,” Ussmak said, as he had to. He did his best to sound fulsome, but was not rejoicing inside. He’d hoped he’d get crewed with veterans, but no such luck. As delicately as he could, he added, “The Deutsche are not opponents to take lightly.”

“So I am given to understand,” Nejas said. “I am also given to understand that this garrison has problems beyond the Deutsche, however. Is it true that the Big Uglies actually spirited a landcruiser out of the vehicle park here?”

“I fear it is, superior sir.” Ussmak was embarrassed about that himself, though he’d had nothing to do with it. It showed Drefsab hadn’t managed to sweep out all the ginger tasters, and it showed some of them didn’t care for anything on Tosev 3 past where their next taste was coming from.

“Disgraceful,” Nejas said. “We must have order aboard our own ship before we can hope to put down the Tosevites.”

Another male came into the barracks and swiveled his eye turrets every which way, taking the measure of the place. By the time he was through, he looked dismayed. Ussmak understood that; he’d felt the same way the first time he’d inspected his new housing. From everything he’d heard, even the Big Uglies lived better than this these days.

The newcomer might have been Nejas’ broodbrother. They both had the same perfect body paint, the same alert stance, and, somehow, the same air of trusting innocence about them, as if they’d just come out of cold sleep and didn’t know anything about the way the war against the Big Uglies was (or rather wasn’t) going, about what ginger had done to the Landcruiser crews at Besancon, or about any of the many other unpleasant surprises Tosev 3 had given the Race. Ussmak didn’t know whether to envy or pity them.

Nejas said, “Driver Ussmak, here is Skoob, the gunner of our landcruiser crew.”

Ussmak closely studied Skoob’s body paint. It said the other male’s rank was about the same as his. Nejas’ neutral introduction said the same thing. Ussmak had the feeling he was vastly superior in combat experience: what Nejas had said told him as much, at any rate. On the other hand, Skoob looked to have been together with Nejas for a long time. Ussmak said, “I greet you, superior sir.”

Skoob took the deference as nothing less than his due, which irked Ussmak. “I greet you, driver,” he said. “May we brew up many Tosevite landcruisers together.”

“May it be so.” Ussmak wished he had a taste of ginger; better that than the taste of condescension he got from Skoob. But, because his life would depend in no small measure on how well the gunner did his job, he went on politely, “The other half of the bargain involves keeping the Big Uglies from brewing us up.”

“Shouldn’t be that difficult,” Nejas said. “I’ve studied the technical specifications for all the Tosevites’ landcruisers, even the latest ones from the Deutsche. They’ve improved, yes, but we still handily outclass them.”

“Superior sir, in theory there’s no doubt you’re right,” Ussmak said. “The only trouble is-may I speak frankly?”

“Please do,” Nejas said, Skoob echoing him a moment later. From that, they were an established crewpair. I was wise to defer to Skoob after all, even if he is arrogant, Ussmak thought.

Still, he hoped their willingness to listen meant something. “The trouble with the Big Uglies is, they don’t fight the way we’d expect, or the way our simulations prepared us to meet. They’re masters at setting ambushes, at using terrain to mask what they’re up to, at using feints and minefields to channel our moves into the direction they want, and their intelligence is superb.”

“Ours should be better,” Skoob said. “We have reconnaissance satellites in place, after all, to see how they move.”

“How they move, yes, but not always what the moves mean,” Ussmak said. “They’re very good at concealing that-until they hurt us. And we may have satellites, but they have every Big Ugly between here and their positions to let them know where we’re going. This isn’t like the SSSR, where a lot of the Tosevites preferred us to either the Deutsche or the Russkis. These Big Uglies don’t want us, and they wish we’d all disappear.”

Nejas’ tongue flicked out and then in again, as if at a bad taste. “Helicopter gunships should take the edge off their tactics.”

“Superior sir, they’re of less use here than they were in the SSSR,” Ussmak said. “For one thing, the countryside gives the Deutsche good cover-I said that before. And for another, they’ve learned to bring antiaircraft artillery well forward. They’ve hurt our gunships badly enough that the males in charge of them have grown reluctant to commit them to battle except in emergency, and sometimes then, too.”

“What good are they to us if they cannot be used?” Skoob asked angrily.

“A good question,” Ussmak admitted. “But what good are they to us if they get blown out of the air before they damage the Big Uglies’ landcruisers?”

“You are saying we face defeat?” Nejas’ voice was silky with danger. Ussmak guessed part of his mission was keeping an eye turret turned for defeatists as well as ginger tasters.

“Superior sir, no, I am not saying that,” the driver replied. “I am saying we need to be more wary than we thought we would against the Tosevites.”

“More wary, possibly,” Nejas said with the air of a male making a concession to another who was inferior mentally as well as in rank. “But, when faced in accord with sound tactical doctrine, I have no doubt the Big Uglies will fall.”

Ussmak had had no doubts, either, not until he had a couple of landcruisers wrecked while he was in them. “Superior sir, I say only that the Tosevites are more devious than our tactical doctrine allows for.” He held up a hand to keep Nejas from interrupting, then told the story of the mortar attack on the Race’s local base and the land mine waiting for the armor as it hurried toward the bridge that would let it get at the raiders.

Nejas did break in: “I have heard of this incident. My impression is that males with their heads in the ginger vial were in large measure responsible for our losing an armored fighting vehicle. They charged straight ahead without considering possible risks.”

“Superior sir, that’s true,” Ussmak said, recalling just how true it was. “But it’s not the point I was trying to make. Had they gone more cautiously, they would have taken an alternate route… under which the Big Uglies also had a bomb waiting. We are devious by doctrine and training; they seem to be devious straight from hatchlinghood. They play a deeper game than we do.”

That got through, to Skoob if not to Nejas. The gunner said, “How do we protect ourselves against this Tosevite deviousness, then?”

“If I had the whole answer to that, I’d be fleetlord, not a landcruiser driver,” Ussmak said, which made both his new crewmales laugh. He went on, “The one thing I will say is that, if a move against the Big Uglies looks easy and obvious, you’ll probably find it has claws attached. And the first thing you think of after the obvious move may well be wrong, too. And so may the second one.”

“I have it,” Skoob said. “The thing to do is post our landcruisers in a circle in the middle of a large, open field-and then make sure the Big Uglies aren’t digging under them.”

Ussmak let his mouth drop open at that: good to see one of the new males could crack wise, anyhow. Nejas remained serious. Letting his eyes roam around the barracks once more, he said, “This is such a gloomy place, I’d hardly mind getting out of it to fight in a landcruiser. I expect I’d be more comfortable in one than I will here. Does it have anything in its favor?”

“The plumbing is excellent,” Ussmak said. Through the newcomers’ hisses of surprise, he explained, “The Big Uglies have messier body wastes than we do, so they need more in the way of plumbing. And this whole planet is so wet, they use water more for washing and such than we would dare back on Home. Standing under a decently warm spray is invigorating, even if it does play hob with your body paint.”

“Let me at it;” Skoob said. “We were on duty down south of here, somewhere in the landmass unit the Tosevites call Africa. It was warm enough there, but the water was in the streams or falling from the sky in sheets; the local Big Uglies didn’t know anything about putting it in pipes.”

Nejas also made enthusiastic noises. Ussmak said, “Here, throw your gear on these beds”-they had been Hessef’s and Tvenkel’s-“and I’ll show you what we have.”

All three males were luxuriating in the showers when the unit commander, a male named Kassnass, stuck his head into the chamber and said, “All out. We have an operations meeting coming up.”

Feeling unjustly deprived, to say nothing of damp, Ussmak and his crewmales listened to Kassnass set forth the newest plan for a push toward Belfort. To the driver, it seemed more of the same. Nejas and Skoob, however, listened as if entranced. From what Ussmak had heard, they wouldn’t have faced serious opposition in this Africa place, which was almost as backward technologically as the Race had thought all of Tosev 3 to be. Things were different here.

The unit commander turned one eye turret from the holograms on which the positions of the Deutsche and the Race were marked to the males assembled before him. “A lot of you are new here,” he said. “We’ve had troubles with this garrison, but by the Emperor”-he and the landcruiser crews cast down their eye turrets-“we’ve cleaned up most of that now. Our veterans know how devious the Deutsche can be. You newcomers, follow where they lead and stay cautious. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

“That’s so,” Ussmak whispered to Nejas and Skoob. Neither of them responded; he hoped they’d pay more attention to Kassnass than they did to him.

Kassnass went on, “Don’t let them lure you into rugged country or the woods; you’re vulnerable if you get separated from the other landcruisers in the unit, because then the Big Uglies will concentrate fire on you from several directions at once. Remember, they can afford to lose five or six or ten landcruisers for every one of ours they take out, and they know it, too. We have speed and firepower and armor on our side; they have numbers, trickery, and fanatical courage. We have to use our advantages and minimize theirs.”

They’re the enemy and they’re only Big Uglies, so of course we call their courage fanatical, Ussmak thought. Saying they’re just doing their best to stay alive like anybody else would give them too much credit for sense.

The males trooped out to the revetments that protected the landcruisers, Ussmak guiding his new commander and gunner. The earth was scored with hits from Tosevite mortars; bomb fragment scars pocked the sides of buildings. Nejas and Skoob rapidly swiveled their eye turrets. Ussmak guessed they hadn’t seen resistance like this from the Big Uglies.

Once in place in the driver’s position, he stopped worrying about what they’d seen and what they hadn’t. He had a vial of ginger stashed in the landcruiser’s fuse box, but he didn’t open it up and taste, not now. He wanted to be clear and rational, not berserk, if he saw action unexpectedly soon.

Helicopter gunships took off with whickering roars audible even through the landcruiser’s thick armor. They’d reach the target area well before the ground vehicles did. With luck, they’d soften up the Deutsche and not take too much damage themselves. Ussmak knew somebody reckoned the mission important; as he’d told his crewmales, helicopters had grown too scarce and precious to hazard lightly.

Through the streets of Besancon, past the busy-looking buildings with their filigrees of iron railings and balconies. Engineers preceded the landcruisers, to make sure no more explosive surprises awaited. All the same, Ussmak drove buttoned up and regarded every Big Ugly he saw through his vision slits as a potential-no, even a likely-spy. The Deutsche would know they were coming even before the helicopters arrived.

Ussmak breathed easier when his landcruiser rumbled over the bridge across the Doubs and headed for open country. He was also taking the measure of Nejas as a landcruiser commander. The new male might not have seen much action, but he seemed crisp and decisive. Ussmak approved. He hadn’t felt part of a proper landcruiser crew since a sniper killed Votal, his first commander. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the feeling till he saw some chance of getting it back.

Somewhere off in the trees, a machine gun opened up with harassing fire. A couple of bullets pinged off the landcruiser. Nejas said, “Take no notice of him. He can’t hurt us, anyway.” Ussmak hissed in delight He’d seen males with heads abuzz with ginger badly delay a mission by trying to hunt out Tosevite nuisances.

The column rolled north and east. Reports came back that the helicopters had struck hard at the Tosevite landcruisers. Ussmak hoped the reports were right. Knowing the Big Uglies could hurt him put combat in a new light.

A flash, a streak of fire barely seen, a crash that made the landcruiser ring like a bell. “Turret rotate from zero to twenty-five,” Nejas called-urgently, but without the panic or rage or excessive excitement a ginger taster would have used. “Machine-gun fire into those bushes.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Skoob replied. The turret swung through a quarter of a circle, from northeast to northwest. The machine gun yammered. “No way to tell whether I got him, superior sir, but he won’t shoot another rocket at one of our landcruisers for a while, I hope.”

“Let us hope not,” Nejas said. “We’re lucky that one hit us on the turret and not in the side of the hull, where the armor is thinner. Briefings say the results can be most unpleasant.”

“Briefings don’t know the half of it, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Vivid inside his head were flames and explosions and unremitting fear, fear that had come flooding back at that impact against the turret and now receded only slowly.

The landcruiser column rolled on. Every now and again, bullets from the bushes struck sparks off armor plate, but the column did not slow. Ussmak kept driving buttoned up. He felt half blind, but didn’t care to have one of those rounds clip off the top of his head.

“Why don’t they keep those pests from harassing us?” Nejas asked after yet another band of Tosevites sprayed the column with gunfire. “This is our territory; if we can’t keep raiders from slipping in, we might as well not have conquered it.”

“Superior sir, the trouble is that almost all the Tosevites hereabouts favor the raiders and shelter them, and we have an impossible time trying to figure out who really lives in the farms and villages and who doesn’t. Identity cards help, but they aren’t enough. This is their planet, after all; they know it better than we can hope to.”

“It was simpler down in Africa,” the landcruiser commander said mournfully. “The Big Uglies there had no weapons that could hurt a landcruiser, and did what they were told once we made a few examples of those who disobeyed.”

“We tried that here, too, I’ve heard,” Ussmak said. “This was before I arrived. The trouble was, the Big Uglies had been making examples of one another yet fighting just the same. They ignored the examples we made, the same way they’d ignored their own.”

“Mad,” Skoob said. Ussmak didn’t contradict him.

The landcruisers began passing old battlefields, some still showing the scars of fires set by shot-up landcruisers. The hulks of destroyed Deutsch armored fighting vehicles still sprawled in death. Some of them were the angular little machines Ussmak had encountered on the plains of the SSSR, but others were the big new ones that could endanger a landcruiser of the Race if well handled-and the Deutsche handled them well.

Nejas said, “Those are impressive looking hulks, aren’t they? Even holograms don’t do them justice. When I first saw one, I wondered why our males hadn’t salvaged it; I needed a moment to realize the Big Uglies had made it. I apologize for wondering about some of the things you said, Ussmak. Now I believe you.”

Ussmak didn’t answer, but felt a burst of pleasure more subtle than the jolt he got from ginger, and perhaps more satisfying as well. It had been too long since a superior acknowledged that the Race’s obligations ran down as well as up. His last pair of landcruiser commanders had taken him for granted, as if he were just a component of the machine he drove. Not even being a ginger buddy with Hessef had changed that. No wonder he’d felt isolated, alone, hardly part of the Race at all. Now… it was almost as if he’d come out of the eggshell anew.

Smoke rose from the woods up ahead. An artillery shell burst off to one side of the road: the helicopters hadn’t routed the Deutsche, then. Ussmak had hoped he’d be going in to mop up. He hadn’t really believed it, but he’d hoped.

A cannon belched fire and smoke from behind some bushes. Wham! Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the muzzle. But the landcruiser’s heavy glacis plate kept the Tosevite shell from penetrating. Without being ordered, Ussmak swung the vehicle in the direction from which the round had come. “I almost fouled my seat,” he said. “If the Big Uglies had waited till we passed and shot at the side of our hull-”

Nejas took the time to give him one word: “Yes.” Then the landcruiser commander snapped an order to Skoob: “Gunner!” A moment later another single-word command followed: “Sabot!”

Skoob put the automatic loader through its paces. A round of armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition clattered into the breech of the gun, which closed with a solid thunk. “Up!” the gunner reported.

“Landcruiser, front!” Nejas said, noting the target for Skoob.

“Identified,” Skoob answered: he had it in his thermal sight.

“Fire!”

“On the way,” Skoob said. The report of the landcruiser cannon was less than thunderous inside the hull, but the massive vehicle rocked back from the recoil and a sheet of flame billowed across Ussmak’s vision slits. Again the driver knew pleasure almost as intense as ginger gave: this was how a crew was supposed to work together. He hadn’t known anything like it since Votal got killed. He’d forgotten how satisfying it could be.

And, just as ginger brought a burst of ecstasy as it shot from the tongue to the brain, so teamwork also had its reward: fire and black smoke boiled up behind the bushes as the Deutsch landcruiser that had tried to impede the progress of the Race paid the price for its temerity. The turret machine gun chattered, mowing down the Big Uglies who’d bailed out of their wrecked vehicle.

“Ahead, driver,” Nejas said.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Along with part of the column of landcruisers, he pushed the machine forward down the road past the ambush the Big Uglies had hoped to set. The rest of the Race’s armor went after the Deutsche who’d tried to waylay them. The fight was savage, but didn’t last long. When they weren’t caught by surprise in disadvantageous positions, the Race’s landcruisers remained far superior to those of the foe. They methodically pounded the Deutsche till no more Deutsche were left to pound, then rejoined the rear of the advancing column.

“These Big Uglies are better than any Tosevites I’ve seen before,” Nejas said, “but they don’t seem to be anything we can’t handle.”

Ussmak wondered about that. Had his previous crew, their wits cooked on ginger and their tactics and even their commands full of drug-induced sloppiness, really been so inept? He had trouble believing it, but here was an ambush that would have thrown them into fits, brushed away like any minor annoyance.

On the highway, black smoke rose from burning trucks that formed a barricade across the paved surface. The landcruisers in front of Ussmak’s peeled off to the grassy verge to the left to bypass the obstacle. Ussmak was about to swing his handlebar controller to follow them when dirt fountained up under one and it slewed sideways to a stop.

He. hit the brakes, hard. “Mines!” he shouted.

Concealed Deutsch landcruisers and guns opened up on the crippled vehicle. No armor could take that pounding for long. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment as a hydrogen line began to burn. Then the landcruiser went up in a ball of fire.

Big Ugly males with satchel charges burst from cover to attack the vehicles that had stopped. Machine guns cut down most of them, but a couple managed to fling the explosives either under the rear of a turret or through an open cupola hatch. The roars from those explosions shook Ussmak even inside his armored eggshell.

“Driver, I apologize,” Nejas said. But then, a moment later, he was all business again: “Gunner… Sabot!” The cannon spoke, and killed a Big Ugly landcruiser. Nejas gave his attention back to Ussmak. “Driver, there’s a narrow space of ground on the right between the road and the trees. Take it-if we can get by, we’ll put ourselves in the Tosevites’ rear.”

“Superior sir, that space is probably mined, too,” Ussmak said.

“I know,” Nejas answered calmly. “The gain we win by passing is worth the risk. Steer as close to the burning vehicles as you can without making our own paint catch fire.”

“It shall be done.” Ussmak tramped down hard on the accelerator. The sooner the passage was over, the sooner his scales would stop itching with anticipation of the blast that would put his landcruiser out of commission. With a hiss of relief loud as an air brake, he was through and back on the road again. Big Uglies turned a machine gun on his landcruiser. He let his mouth fall open in scornful laughter that wouldn’t do them any good. Nor did it; from the turret, the coaxial machine gun scythed down the Tosevites.

“Keep advancing,” Nejas said urgently. “We have more landcruisers behind us, and mechanized infantry combat vehicles as well, If we can deploy in the Big Uglies’ rear, we ruin their whole position.”

Ussmak stepped on it again. The landcruiser bounded ahead. Speed, sometimes, was as important a weapon as a cannon. He spied a Deutsch landcruiser barreling through the undergrowth, trying to find a place from which to block the onslaught of the Race’s armor.

“Gunner!.. Sabot!” Nejas shouted-he’d seen it, too. But before Skoob could acknowledge the order and crank the round into the cannon, a streak of fire off to one side took the Big Ugly vehicle, in the engine compartment. Red and yellow flames shot up from it, setting the bushes afire.

“Superior, sir, I think the infantry’s dismounted from their carriers,” Ussmak said. “That was an antilandcruiser rocket.”

“You’re right,” Nejas said, and then, “Steer right, away from the road.” Ussmak obeyed, and caught sight of another Tosevite landcruiser. Nejas gave orders to Skoob, the cannon barked, the landcruiser jerked with the recoil… and the Deutsch machine brewed up.

Before long, Ussmak saw something he hadn’t seen much of since the early days on the endless plains of the SSSR: Big Uglies coming out of their overrun hiding places with arms raised in token of surrender. He hissed in wonder. Just for a moment, the sense of inevitable triumph he’d felt then-before the Race really understood how the Big Uglies could fight-came flooding back. He doubted anything was inevitable any more, but the way to Belfort and, with luck, beyond lay open.

When the landcruiser finally stopped for the evening, he thought, he’d have a taste of ginger to celebrate. Just a small one, of course.

Mutt Daniels tasted the rich black earth just outside Danforth, Illinois. He knew soil; he’d grown up as a dirt farmer, after all. If he hadn’t had a talent for baseball, he’d have spent his life eastbound behind the west end of a mule. This was soil as good as he’d ever come across; no wonder the corn grew here in great green waves.

All the same, he wished he weren’t making its acquaintance under these circumstances. He tasted it because he lay flat on his belly between the rows, his face jammed into the dirt so he wouldn’t get a shell splinter in the eye. With the coming of spring, the Lizards were driving hard. He didn’t know how the Army would hold them out of Chicago this time. “Gotta try, though,” he muttered, and tasted dirt again.

More shells came in. They lifted Mutt up, slammed him back to the ground like a wrestler putting on a show in a tank town. Unlike a wrestler, they didn’t pull any punches-he’d be black and blue all over.

“Medic!” somebody shouted, not far away. The tone wasn’t anguish; surprise was more like it. That meant one of two things: either the wound wasn’t bad or the fellow who’d got it didn’t realize how bad it was. Mutt had seen that before, men perfectly calm and rational with their guts hanging out and blood soaking into the dark dirt and making it blacker than it already was.

“Medic!” The cry came again, rawer this time. Mutt crawled toward it, tommy gun at the ready; no telling what the tall corn might hide.

But only Lucille Potter crouched by Freddie Laplace when Daniels reached him. She was gently getting him to take his bloodstained hands off his calf. “Oh… goodness, Freddie,” Mutt said, inhibited in his choice of language by Lucille’s presence. He hurt not only for Laplace but for the squad; the little guy was-had been-far and away their best point man.

“Give me a hand, Mutt, if you please,” Lucille Potter said. The place where the shell fragment had gone in was a small, neat hole. The exit wound-Mutt gulped. He’d seen worse, but this one’ wasn’t pretty. It looked as if somebody had dug into the back of Laplace’s leg with a sharp edged serving spoon and taken out enough meat to feed a man a pretty good dinner. Lucille was already cutting away the trouser leg so she could work on the wound.

“Careful with that scissors,” Laplace said. “You don’t want to slice me any worse than I am already.” Mutt nodded to himself; if that was what Freddie was worrying about, he didn’t know how bad he’d been hit.

“I’ll be careful,” Lucille answered gently. “We’re going to have to get you back to an aid station after Mutt and I bandage you up.”

“Sorry, Sarge,” Laplace said, still eerily composed. “I don’t think I can walk that far.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid.” Mutt was wondering whether Laplace would keep that leg, not about his walking on it. “We’ll get you there. You just want to hold still now while Miss Lucille patches you up.”

“I’ll try, Sarge. It-hurts.” Freddie was doing his best to be a good Scout, but it didn’t sound easy any more. After a while, the numbness that often came with a wound wore off, and then you started to realize what had happened to you. That wasn’t any fun at all.

Lucille dusted the wound with sulfa powder, then folded the skin over it as best she could. “Too big and ragged to sew up,” she murmured to Mutt. “Just lucky it didn’t smash the bones up, too. He may walk on it again one of these days.” She packed gauze into the hole and put more gauze and tape over it. Then she pointed back toward one of the windmills outside of Danforth. It had a big new Red Cross banner hanging from it “Let’s get him over there.”

“Right you are.” Mutt stooped with Lucille Potter and got Laplace upright, with one of his arms draped over each of their shoulders. They hauled him along toward the windmill. “Musta been Dutch settled around these parts,” Mutt mused. “Not many other folks use those things.”

“That’s true, but I couldn’t tell you for certain,” Lucille said. “We’re too far upstate for me to know much about the people hereabouts.”

“You know more’n I do,” Daniels said. Freddie Laplace didn’t stick his two cents’ worth in. He hung limply in the grasp of the pair who carried him, his head down on his chest. If he was out, it probably counted as a mercy.

“Oh, God, another one,” an unshaven medic with a grimy Red Cross armband said when they hauled Freddie into the makeshift aid station in the room at the bottom of the windmill. “We just got Captain Maczek in here-he took one in the chest.”

“Shit,” Lucille Potter said crisply, which was exactly what Mutt was thinking. The word made his jaw drop just the same.

The medic stared at her, too. She stared back until he lowered his eyes and took charge of Laplace, saying, “We’ll patch him up the best way we know how. Looks like you did good emergency work on him.” He knuckled his eyes, yawned enormously. “Jesus, I’m tired. Other thing we’ve got to worry about is getting out of here in case we’re overrun. We’ve been falling back a lot lately.”

Mutt almost gave him a hot answer-anybody who bitched about the job the Army was doing could go to hell as far as he was concerned. But the medic had a real worry there, because they probably would have to retreat farther. And medic wasn’t exactly a cushy job, either, the Lizards honored the Red Cross most of the time, but not always-and even it they meant to honor it, their weapons weren’t perfect, either.

So, sighing, he tramped away from the windmill and back toward his squad. Lucille Potter followed him. She said, “With the captain down, Mutt, they’re liable to give you a platoon and turn you into a lieutenant.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “If they don’t reckon I’m too old.” He thought he could do the job; if he’d run a ballclub, he could handle a platoon. But how many guys in their fifties sudenly sprouted bars on their shoulders?

“If this were peacetime, you’re right-they would,” Lucille said. “But the way things are now, I don’t think they’ll worry about it-they can’t afford to.”

“Maybe,” Mutt said. “I’ll believe it when I see it, though. And the way things are now, like you said, I ain’t gonna worry about it one way or the other. The Lizards can shoot me just as well for bein’ a lieutenant as for bein’ a sergeant.”

“You have the proper attitude,” Lucille said approvingly.

A compliment from her made Mutt scuff his worn-out Army boot over the ground like a damn schoolkid. “One thing bein’ a manager’ll teach you, Miss Lucille,” he said, “and that’s that some things, you can’t do nothin’ about, if you know what I mean. You don’t learn that pretty darn quick, you go crazy.”

“Control what you can, know what you can’t, and don’t worry about it.” Lucille nodded. “It’s a good way to live.”

Before Mutt could answer, a burst of firing came from the front line. “That’s Lizard small arms,” be said, breaking into a trot and then into a run. “I better get back there.” He was afraid they’d need Lucille’s talents, too, but he didn’t say that, any more than he would have told a pitcher he had a no-hitter going. You didn’t want to put the jinx on.

Running through the corn made his heart pound in his throat, partly from exertion and partly for fear he’d blunder in among the Lizards and get himself shot before he even knew they were there. But the sound of the gunfire and a pretty good sense of direction brought him back to the right place. He flopped down in the sweet-smelling dirt, scraped out a bare minimum of a foxhole with his entrenching tool, and started firing short bursts from his tommy gun toward the racket from the Lizards’ automatics. Not for the first time, he wished he had a weapon like theirs. As he’d said to Lucille Potter, though, some things you couldn’t do anything about.

The Lizards were pushing hard; firing started to come from both flanks as well as straight ahead; “We gotta fall back,” Mutt yelled, hating the words. “Dracula, you ‘n’ me’ll stay here to cover the rest. When they’re clear, we back up, too.”

“Right, Sarge.” To show he had the idea, Dracula Szabo squeezed off a burst from his BAR.

When you advanced, if you were smart, you split into groups, one group firing while the other one moved. You had to be even smarter to carry out that fire-and-move routine while you gave ground. What you wanted to do at a time like that was run like hell. It was the worst thing you could do, but you always had a devil of a time making your body believe it.

The guys in Daniels’ squad were veterans; they knew what they had to do. As soon as they found decent positions, they hunkered down and started firing again. “Back!” Mutt shouted to Szabo. Shooting as they went, they retreated through the rest of the squad. The Lizards kept pressing. Another couple of rounds of fire and fall back brought the Americans into the town of Danforth.

It had held three or four hundred people before the fighting started; if the locals had any brains, they’d abandoned their trim white and green houses a while ago. A lot of the houses weren’t so trim any more, not after artillery and air strikes. The sour odor of old smoke hung in the air.

Mutt pounded on a front door. When nobody answered, he kicked it open and ran inside. One of the windows gave him a good field of fire to the south, the direction from which the Lizards were coming. He crouched down behind it and got ready to give them a warm welcome.

“Mind if I join you?” Lucille Potter’s question made him jump and start to point his gun toward the doorway, but he stopped in a hurry and waved her in.

Freight-train noises overhead and a series of loud bursts a few hundred yards south of town made Mutt whoop with delight “About time our artillery got off the dime,” he said. “Feed the Lizards a taste of what they give us.”

Before long, northbound roars and whistles balanced those coming from out of the north. “They’re awfully quick with counterbattery fire,” Lucille said. “Awfully accurate, too.”

“Yeah, I know,” Daniels said. “But-heck, come to that, all their equipment is better’n ours-artillery and planes and tanks and even the rifles their dogfaces carry. Whenever they want to bad enough, they can move us out of the way. But it’s like they don’t want to all the time.”

“Unless I miss my guess, they’re stretched thin,” Lucille Potter answered. “They aren’t just fighting in Illinois or fighting against the United States; they’re trying to take over the whole world. And the world is a big place. Trying to hold it all down can’t be easy for them.”

“Lord, I hope it’s not.” Grateful for talk to help get him through the lull without worrying about what would happen when it stopped, Mutt gave her an admiring glance. “Miss Lucille, you got a good way of lookin’ at things.” He hesitated, then added, “Matter of fact, you look right good yourself.”

“Mutt…” Lucille hesitated, too. Finally, with exasperation in her voice, she said, “Is this really the right time or place to be talking about things like that?”

“Far as I can see, you don’t think there’s ever any right time or place,” Mutt said, also with some annoyance. “I ain’t no caveman, Miss Lucille, I just-”

The lull ended at that moment: some of the Lizard artillery, instead of going after its American opposite number, started coming in on Danforth. The rising whistle of shells warned Mutt they were going to hit just about on top of him. He threw himself flat even before Lucille yelled “Get down!” and also jammed her face into the floorboards.

The barrage put Daniels in mind of France in 1918. The windows of the house, those that weren’t broken already, blew in, scattering broken glass all over the room. A glittering shard dug into the floor and stuck like a spear, maybe six inches from Mutt s nose. He stared at it, cross-eyed.

The shells kept falling till the blast of each was lost in the collective din. Bricks fell from the chimney and crashed on the roof. Shell fragments punched through the walls of the house as if they were made of cardboard. In spite of his helmet, Mutt felt naked. You could take only so many heavy shellings before something in you started to crack. You didn’t want it to happen, but it did. Once you got your quota, you weren’t worth a whole lot.

As the pounding went on, Mutt began to think he wasn’t far from his own limit. Trying not to go to pieces in front of Lucille Potter helped him ride it out. He glanced away from the broken chunk of glass toward her. She was flattened out just like him, and didn’t look to be having any easier time of it than he was.

Later, he was never sure which one of them rolled toward the other. Whichever it was, they clung to each other tight as they could. In spite of what they’d been talking about when the barrage hit, there was nothing in the least sexual about the embrace-it was more on the order of drowning men grabbing at spars. Mutt had hung on to doughboys the same way when the Boches gave American trenches a going-over in the last war.

Because he was a veteran of 1918, he got to his feet in a hurry when the curtain of Lizard shells moved from the southern edge of Danforth, where he was, to the middle and northern parts of town. He knew about walking barrages, and knew soldiers often walked right behind them.

Danforth looked as if it had gone through the meat grinder and then been overcooked since the last time he’d looked out the window. Now most of the houses were in ruins, the ground cratered, and smoke and dust rising everywhere. And through the smoke, sure enough, came the skittering shapes of Lizard infantry.

He aimed and sprayed a long burst through them, fighting to hold the tommy gun’s muzzle down. The Lizards went over like tenpins. He wasn’t sure how many-if any-he’d hit and how many were just ducking for cover.

Off to one side, the BAR opened up. “Might have known Dracula was too sneaky to kill,” Mutt said to nobody in particular. If the Lizards had any brains, they’d try a rush and support advance to flush him and Szabo out in the open. He aimed to throw a monkey wrench into that scheme. From a different window, he fired at the bunch he thought would be moving. He caught a couple of them on their feet. They went down, scrambling for cover.

“In the two-reelers, this is about the time the U.S. Cavalry gallops over the horizon,” Lucille Potter said as the Lizards started shooting back.

“Right about now, Miss Lucille, I’d be glad to see ’em, and that’s a fact,” Mutt said. Dracula’s BAR was stuttering away, and he had his tommy gun (though he didn’t have as many clips as he would have liked), but only a couple of rifles had opened up with them. Rifles didn’t add a whole lot as far as firepower went, but they covered places the automatic weapons couldn’t reach and denied the Lizards the cover they’d need to flank out Mutt and Szabo.

And then, just as if it had been a two-reeler, the cavalry did come riding to the rescue. A platoon of Shermans rumbled through the streets of Danforth, a couple of them so fresh off the assembly line that only dust, not paint, covered the bright metal of their armor. Machine guns blazing and cannon firing high explosive, they bore down on the Lizard infantry.

The Lizards didn’t have armor with them, they’d been more cautious about committing tanks to action since the Americans started using bazookas. They did have antitank rockets of their own, though, and quickly turned two Shermans into blazing wrecks. Then the tanks shelled the rocketeers, and after that they had the fight pretty much their own way. Most of the Lizards died in place. A few tried to flee and were cut down. A couple came out with their hands up; they’d learned the Americans didn’t do anything dreadful to prisoners.

Mutt let out the catamount screech his grandfathers had called the Rebel yell. The house in which he and Lucille Potter sheltered was pretty well ventilated, but the yell echoed in it just the same. He turned around and hugged her. This time he meant business; he kissed her hard and his hands cupped her backside.

As she had when he’d taken out the Lizard tank with her bottle of ether, she let him kiss her but she didn’t do anything in the way of kissing back “What’s the matter with you?” he growled. “Don’t you like me?”

“I like you fine Mutt,” she answered calmly. “I think you know it, too. You’re a good man. But that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with you-or with anybody else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Over the years, Mutt had done a fair number of things he’d enjoyed at the time but wasn’t proud of afterwards. Forcing a woman who said-and obviously meant-she wasn’t interested wasn’t any of them, though. Frustrated almost past words, he said, “Well, why the… dickens not? You’re a fine-lookin’ lady, it ain’t like you don’t have any juice in you-”

“That’s so,” she said, and then looked as if she regretted agreeing.

“By Jesus,” Mutt murmured. In a lifetime knocking around the United States, he’d seen and heard about a lot of things nobody who stayed on a Mississippi farm ever dreamt of. “Don’t tell me you’re one o’ them-what do they call ’em? — lizzies, is that right?”

“It’s close enough, anyhow.” Lucille’s face shut up as tight as a poker player’s-especially one who was raising on a busted flush. Poker-faced still, she said, “Okay, Mutt, what if I am?”

She hadn’t said she was, not quite, but she didn’t deny it, either, only waited to see what he’d say next He didn’t know what the hell to say. He’d run across a few queers in his time, but to find out somebody he liked not just because he wanted to lay her but on account of who she was-and he couldn’t be fooled on something like that, not when they’d been living in each other’s pockets through months of grinding combat-was one of these creatures almost as alien as a Lizard… that was a jolt, no doubt about it.

“I dunno,” he said at last. “Reckon I’ll keep my mouth shut. Last thing I want to do is cost us a medic as good as you are.”

She startled him immensely by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. An instant later, she looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Mutt. I don’t want to play games with you. But that’s one of the kindest things anybody ever said about me. If I’m good at what I do, why should the rest matter?”

Words like unnatural and perverted flashed across his mind. But he’d had plenty of chances to see that Lucille was good people-somebody you could trust your life to, in the most literal sense of the words.

“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon. Mutt had never imagined he could be relieved to take cover from a bombardment, but right at that moment he was.

Liu Han hated going out to the market. People looked hard at her and muttered behind her back. Nobody had ever done anything to her-the little scaly devils were powerful protectors-but the fear was always there.

Little devils paced through the prison camp marketplace, too. They were smaller than people, but nobody got too close to them; wherever they went, they took open space with them. It was, more often than not, the only open space in the crowded market.

The baby in her belly gave her a kick. Even the loose cotton tunic she wore couldn’t disguise her pregnancy any longer. She didn’t know what to feel about Bobby Fiore: sadness that he was gone and worry about whether he was all right mingled with shame over the way the scaly devils had forced them together and a different sort of shame at conceiving by a foreign devil.

She let the market din wash over her and take her away from herself. “Cucumbers!”-a fellow pulled a couple of them from a wicker basket tied round his middle. They were long and twisty like snakes. A few feet away another man cried the virtues of his snake meat. “Cabbages!” “Fine purple horseradish!”

“Pork!” The man selling disjointed pieces of pig carcass wore shorts and an open jacket. His shiny brown belly showed through, and looked remarkably like one of the bigger cuts of meat he had on display.

Liu Han hesitated between his stall and the one next to it, which displayed not only chickens but fans made from chicken feathers glued to brightly painted horn frames. “Make up your mind, foolish woman!” somebody screeched at her. She hardly minded; that, at least, was an impersonal insult.

She went up to the man who sold chickens. Before she could say anything, he quietly told her, “Take your business somewhere else. I don’t want any money from the running dogs of the imperialist scaly devils.”

A Communist, she thought dully. Then anger flared in her. “What if I tell the scaly devils who and what you are?” she snapped.

“You’re not the dowager empress, to put me in fear with a word,” he retorted. “If you do that, I will find out about it and disappear before they can take me-or if I don’t, my family will be looked after. But you-you’ve been a quiet running dog so far. But if you begin to sing as if you were in the Peking opera, I promise you’ll be sorry for it. Now go.”

Liu Han went, a stone in her heart. Even buying pork at a good price from the fellow in the stupid jacket didn’t ease her spirit. Nor did the cries of the merchants who hawked amber or slippers with upturned toes or tortoiseshell or lace or beaded embroidery or fancy shawls or any of a hundred other different things. The little scaly devils were generous to her: why not, when they wanted to learn from her how a healthy woman gave birth? For the first time in her life, she could have most of the things she wanted. Contrary to what she’d always believed, that didn’t make her happy.

A little boy in rags flashed by. “Running dog!” he squealed at Liu Han, and vanished into the crowd before she got a good look at his face. His mocking laughter was all she could report to the scaly devils, assuming she was foolish enough to bother.

The baby kicked her again. How was he supposed to grow up when everyone down to street urchins scorned his mother so? The easy tears of pregnancy filled her eyes, spilled down her cheeks.

She started back toward the house she’d shared with Bobby Fiore. Though it was a house finer than the one she’d had back in her own village, it seemed as empty as the gleaming metal chamber in which the little scaly devils had imprisoned her on their plane that never came down. The resemblance didn’t end there, either. Like that metal chamber, it wasn’t a home in any proper sense of the word, but a cage where the little devils kept her while they studied her.

Suddenly she had had all the study she could stand. Maybe no scaly devils waited back at the house right now to take photographs of her and touch her in intimate places and ask her questions that were none of their business and talk among themselves with their hisses and pops and squeaks as if she had no more mind of her own than the kang that kept her warm at night. But so what? If they weren’t there now, they would be later today or tomorrow or the day after that.

Back in her village, the Kuomintang was strong; even thinking about being a Communist was dangerous, though Communist armies had done more than most in fighting the Japanese. Bobby Fiore hadn’t had any use for the Reds, either, but he’d willingly gone with them to take a poke at the scaly devils. She hoped he still lived, even if he was a foreign devil, he was a good man-better to get along with than her Chinese husband had been.

If the Communists had fought the Japanese, if Bobby Fiore had gone with them to raid the little devils… they were likely to be doing more against the devils than anyone else. “I owe them too much to let them do whatever they want with me forever,” Liu Han muttered.

Instead of going on to her house, she turned around and went back to the stall of the fellow who sold chickens and chicken feather fans. He was haggling with a skinny man over the price of a couple of chicken feet When the skinny man sullenly paid his price and went away, he gave Liu Han an unfriendly look. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go away.”

“You did,” she said, “and I will, if that’s what you’really want. But if you and your friends”-she did not name them out loud-“are interested in knowing more about the little scaly devils who come to my hut, you’ll ask me to stay.”

The poultry seller’s expression did not change. “You’ll have to earn our trust, show you’re telling the truth,” he said, his voice still hostile. But he did not yell for Liu Han to leave.

“I can do that,” she said. “I will.”

“Maybe we’ll talk, then,” he said, and smiled for the first time.