Tilting the Balance

V

The air-raid siren at Bruntingthorpe began to howl. David Goldfarb sprinted for the nearest slit trench. Above the siren came the roar of the Lizards’ jets. It seemed to grow impossibly fast.

Bombs started falling about the time Goldfarb dove headlong into the trench. The ground shook as if it were writhing in pain. Antiaircraft guns hammered. The Lizard planes screamed past at just above treetop height. Their cannon were pounding, too. Through everything, the siren wailed on.

The jets streaked away. The AA around Bruntingthorpe sent a last few futile rounds after them. Shell fragments pattered down from the sky like jagged metal hail. Stunned, half deafened, filthy, his heart pounding madly, Goldfarb climbed to his feet.

He glanced down at his watch. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, and then, because that didn’t have enough kick, “Gevalt.” Hardly more than a minute had gone by since the air raid warning began.

In that minute, Bruntingthorpe had been turned upside down. Craters pocked the runway. One of the bombs had struck an airplane in spite of the camouflaged revetment in which it huddled. A column of greasy black smoke rose into the cloudy sky.

Goldfarb looked around. “Oh, bloody fucking hell,” he said. The Nissen hut where he’d been studying how to fit a radar into the Meteor jet fighter was just a piece of rubble. Part of the curved roof of corrugated galvanized iron had been blown fifty feet away.

The radarman scrambled out of the trench and dashed toward the Nissen hut, which was beginning to burn. “Group Captain Hipple!” he shouted, and then called in turn the names of the other men with whom he’d been working. A dreadful fear that he would hear no reply rose in him.

Then, one by one, the heads of the RAF officers popped up out of the trench close by the hut. Only the top of Hipple’s cap was visible; be really was very short. “That you, Goldfarb?” he called. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. “Are you?”

“Quite, thanks,” Hipple answered, scrambling out spryly. He looked around at the hut, shook his head. “There’s a good deal of work up in smoke. I’m glad we salvaged what we did.” As the other officers got out, he waved Goldfarb over to see what he meant.

The bottom of the slit trench was covered with manila folders and the papers that had spilled out of them. Goldfarb stared from them to Hipple and back again. “You-all of you-stopped to grab papers when the air raid alarm went off?”

“Well, the work upon which we are engaged here is of considerable importance, don’t you think?” Hipple murmured, as if he hadn’t imagined doing anything but what he’d done. He probably hadn’t. Had Goldfarb been in the Nissen hut with the others, the only thing he would have thought about was getting to cover as fast as he could.

Groundcrew men had already emerged from their shelters. They swept and pushed chunks of tarmac off onto the winter-brown grass to either side of the newly hit runways, or else tossed them into the craters the bombs had made. Others started dragging up lengths of pierced steel planking material to put over the holes until they could make more permanent repairs.

Flight Lieutenant Kennan pointed toward the burning aircraft. “I do hope that’s not one of our Pioneers.”

“Not in that revetment, sir.” Flight Officer Roundbush shook his head. “It’s only a Hurricane.”

“Only a Hurricane?” Kennan looked scandalized; he’d flown one during the Battle of Britain. “Basil, if it weren’t for Hurricanes, you’d have had to trim that mustache of yours down to a toothbrush and start learning German. The Spitfires grabbed the glory-they look like such thoroughbreds, after all-but Hurricanes did more of the work.”

Roundbush’s hand went protectively to the bushy blond growth on his upper lip. “I beg your pardon, sir. Had I realized the Hurricane stood between my mustache and war’s desolation, I should have spoken of it with more respect-even if it is as obsolete as a Sopwith Camel these days.”

If possible, Kennan looked even more affronted, not least because Roundbush was in essence right. Indeed, against the Lizards a Sopwith Camel might have been of more use than a Hurricane, simply because it contained very little metal and so was hard for radar to pick up.

Before Kennan could return to the verbal charge, Group Captain Hipple said, “Maurice, Basil, that’s quite enough.” They shuffled their feet like a couple of abashed schoolboys.

Wing Commander Peary jumped back down into the trench, started rummaging through file folders. “Oh, capital,” he said a minute later. “We didn’t lose the drawings for the installation of the multifrequency radar in the Meteor fuselage.”

At the same time as Goldfarb breathed a silent sigh of relief, Basil Roundbush said, “I had to save those. David would have smote me hip and thigh if I’d left them behind.”

“Heh,” Goldfarb said. He wondered if Roundbush was using that pseudo-Biblical language to mock his Jewishness. Probably not, he decided. Roundbush made fun of everything on general principles.

“Shall we gather up our goods and see who will give us a temporary home?” Hipple said. “We shan’t have a hut of our own for a while now.”

Planes were taking off and landing on the damaged runways by that afternoon. By then, Goldfarb and the RAF officers were back at work in a borrowed corner of the meteorological crew’s Nissen hut. The inside of one of the temporary buildings was so much like that of another that for a few minutes at a time Goldfarb was able to forget he wasn’t where he had been.

The telephone rang. One of the weathermen picked it up, then held it out to Hipple. “Call for you, Group Captain.”

“Thank you.” The jet engine specialist took the phone, said, “Hipple here.” He listened for a couple of minutes, then said, “Oh, that’s first-rate. Yes, we’ll be looking forward to receiving it. Tomorrow morning some time, you say? Yes, that will do splendidly. Thanks so much, for calling. Goodbye.”

“What was that in aid of?” Wing Commander Peary asked.

“There may be some justice in the world after all, Julian,” Hipple answered. “One of the Lizard jets which strafed this base was later brought down by antiaircraft fire north of Leicester. The aircraft did not burn upon impact, and damage was less extensive than in most other cases where we have been fortunate enough to strike a blow against the Lizards. An engine and the radar will be sent here for our examination.”

“That’s wonderful,” Goldfarb exclaimed; his words were partly drowned by similar ones from the other members of his team and from the meteorologists as well.

“What happened to the pilot?” Basil Roundbush’ asked, adding, “Nothing good, I hope.”

“I was told he used one of the Lizards’ exploding seats to get free of the aircraft, but he has been captured by Home Guards,” Hipple answered. “Perhaps it might be wise for me to seek to have him placed here so we can draw on his knowledge of the parts of his aircraft once he gains some command of English.”

“I’ve heard the Lizards sing like birds once they get to the point where they can talk,” Roundbush said. “They’re supposed to be even worse than the Italians for that. It’s odd, if you ask me.”

Maurice Kennan walked into the trap: “Why’s that?”

“Because they all come with stiff upper lips, of course.” Roundbush grinned.

“You’re one of the brightest Britain has to offer?” Kennan said, groaning. “God save us all.”

Goldfarb groaned, too-Basil Roundbush would have been disappointed if he hadn’t-but he was also smiling. He’d seen this kind of chaffing at the radar station in Dover at the height of the Battle of Britain, and then again with the Lancaster crew testing airborne radar. It made men work better together, lessened their friction against one another. Some, like Group Captain Hipple, didn’t need such social lubrication, but most mere mortals did.

They labored on until well past eight, trying to make up for time lost to the Lizard raid. They didn’t catch up; Goldfarb spent most of his time looking for the papers he needed, and didn’t always find them. The other four men, being more concerned with engines than radar, had grabbed those file folders first and his as an afterthought.

When Fred Hipple yawned and stood up from his stool, that was a signal for everyone else to knock off, too: if he’d had enough, they didn’t need to be ashamed to show they were worn. Goldfarb felt it in the shoulders and in the small of the back.

Hipple, a man of uncommon rectitude, headed for the refectory and then, presumably, for his cot-such, at least, was his usual habit. Goldfarb, though, had had a bellyful-in both the literal and figurative senses of the word-of the food the RAF kitchens turned out. After a while, stewed meat (when there was meat), soya links, stewed potatoes and cabbage, dumplings the size, shape, and consistency of billiard balls, and stewed prunes got to be too much.

He climbed onto his bicycle and headed for nearby Bruntingthorpe. Nor was he surprised to hear the rattling squeak of another bicycle’s imperfectly oiled chain right behind him. Looking back over his shoulder in the darkness would have been an invitation to go straight over the handlebars. Instead, he called, “A Friend In Need-”

Basil Roundbush’s chuckle came ahead to him. The flight officer finished the catch phrase: “-is a friend indeed.”

A few minutes later, they both pulled up in front of A Friend In Need, the only pub Bruntingthorpe boasted. Without the RAF aerodrome just outside the hamlet, the place would not have had enough customers to stay open. As things were, it flourished. So did the fish-and-chips shop next door, though Goldfarb fought shy of that one because of the big tins of lard that showed up in its refuse bins. He was not nearly so rigid in his Orthodox faith as his parents, but eating chips fried in pig’s fat was more than he could stomach.

“Two pints of bitter,” Roundbush called. The publican poured them from his pitcher, passed them across the bar in exchange for silver. Roundbush raised his pint pot in salute to Goldfarb. “Confusion to the Lizards!”

They both drained their pints. The beer was not what it had been before the war. After the first or second pint, though, you stopped noticing. Following immemorial custom, Goldfarb bought the second round. “No confusion to us tomorrow, when they fetch the damaged goods,” he declared. He said no more, not off the base.

“I’ll drink to that, by God!” Roundbush said, and proved it “The more we can learn about how they do what they do, the better our chance of keeping them from doing it”

The innkeeper leaned across the waxed oak surface of the bar. “I’ve still got half a roasted capon in the back room, lads,” he said in a confidential voice. “Four and six, if you’re interested-”

The slap of coins on the bar gave his sentence its end punctuation. “Light meat or dark?” Goldfarb asked when the bird appeared: as an officer, Roundbush had the right to choose.

“I fancy breasts more than legs,” Roundbush answered, and added, after the perfect tiny pause, “and I like light meat better, too.”

So did Goldfarb, but he ate the dark without complaint; it was vastly better than anything they made back at the aerodrome. The two RAF men each bought another round. Then, regretfully, they rode back to the base. Keeping bicycles on a steady course seemed complicated after four pints of even bad bitter.

The headache Goldfarb had the next morning told him he probably shouldn’t have drunk the last one. Basil Roundbush looked disgustingly fresh. Goldfarb did his best to keep Group Captain Hipple from noticing he was hung over. He thought he succeeded, and got help because no one was working at his best, not only because of yesterday’s raid, but also because everyone was looking forward to examining the wreckage from the Lizard plane.

Said wreckage did not arrive until nearly eleven, which put everyone, even the patient, mild-mannered Hipple, on edge. When it finally happened, though, the arrival was a portent: the fragments came to Bruntingthorpe aboard a pair of 6x6 GMC trucks.

The big rumbling American machines seemed to Goldfarb almost as great a prodigy as the cargo they bore. Next to them, the British lorries he was used to were awkward makeshifts, timid and underpowered. If the Lizards hadn’t come, thousands of these broad-shouldered bruisers would have been hauling men and equipment all around England. As it was, only the earliest handful of arrivals were working here. The Yanks had more urgent use for the rest on their own side of the Atlantic.

That a couple of the precious American lorries had been entrusted with their present cargo spoke volumes about how important the RAF reckoned it. The lorries also boasted winches, which helped get the pieces out of the cargo compartments: radar and engine, especially the latter, were too heavy for convenient manhandling.

“We have to get these under cover as quickly as we can,” Hipple said. “We don’t want Lizard reconnaissance aircraft noting that we’re trying to learn their secrets.”

Even as he spoke, men from the groundcrew were draping camouflage netting over the wreckage. Before long, it looked pretty much like meadow from above. Goldfarb said, “They’ll expect us to rebuild the Nissen hut they wrecked yesterday. When we do, it might be worthwhile to move this gear into it. That way, the Lizards won’t be able to tell we have it.”

“Very good suggestion, David,” Hipple said, beaming. “I expect we’ll do that as soon as we have the opportunity. Yet no matter how quickly they can run up a Nissen hut, we shan’t wait for them. I want to attack these beasts as rapidly as possible, as I’m certain you do also.”

There Hipple was right. Even though it was gloomy under the netting, Goldfarb got to work right away. The Lizard plane must have come down on its belly rather than nose first, a happy accident that had indeed kept it from being too badly smashed up. Part of the streamlined nose assembly remained in place in front of the parabolic radar antenna.

The antenna itself had escaped crumpling. It was smaller than Goldfarb had expected; for that matter, the whole unit was smaller than he’d expected. The Lizards had mounted it in front of their pilot-that was obvious. It was good design; Goldfarb wished the set that would go into the Meteor was small enough to imitate it.

Some of the sheet metal around the radar had torn. Peering through a gap, Goldfarb saw bundles of wires with bright-colored insulation. Coded somehow, he thought, wishing he knew which color meant what.

Even wrecked, the finish of the Lizard aircraft was very fine. Welds were smooth and flat, rivets countersunk so their heads lay flush with the metal skin. Even tugging with pliers at a tear in the metal to widen it so he could reach inside felt like tampering to Goldfarb.

Behind the radar antenna lay the magnetron; he recognized the curved shape of its housing. It was the last piece of apparatus he did recognize. Things that looked like screws held it to the rest of the unit. They did not, however, have conventional heads. Instead of openings for a flat-blade or Phillips-head screwdriver, they had square cavities sunk into the centers of the heads.

Goldfarb rummaged through the tools on his belt till he found a flat-blade screwdriver whose blade fit across the diagonal of one of the Lizard screws. He turned it. Nothing happened. He gave the screw a hard look that quickly turned speculative and tried to turn it the other way. It began to come out.

Bad language was coming from the RAF men working on the engine. Suspecting he knew why, Goldfarb called, “The screws are backwards to ours: anticlockwise tightens, clockwise loosens.”

He heard a couple of seconds’ silence, then a grunt of satisfaction. Fred Hipple said, “Thank you, David. Lord only knows how long that would have taken to occur to us. One can sometimes become too wedded to the obvious.”

Goldfarb fairly burst with pride. This from the man who had designed and patented the jet engine almost ten years before the war began! Praise indeed, he thought.

The bad language from the engine crew faded away as the officers got the casing off and started looking at the guts. “They use fir-tree roots to secure the turbine blades, sir,” Julian Peary said indignantly. “Pity you had so much trouble convincing the powers that be it was a good notion.”

“The Lizards have had this technology in place rather longer than we have, Wing Commander,” Hipple answered. Despite long thwarting by RAF indifference and even hostility, he showed no bitterness.

“And look,” Basil Roundbush said. “The blades have a slight twist to them. How long ago did you suggest that, sir? Two years? Three?”

Whatever Hipple’s answer was, Goldfarb didn’t hear it. He’d loosened enough screws himself to get off a panel of the radar’s case. He had a good notion of what he’d find inside: since physical laws had to be the same all through the universe, he figured the Lizard set would closely resemble the ones he was used to. Oh, it would be smaller and lighter and better engineered than RAF models, but still essentially similar. Valves, after all, remained valves-unless you went to the United States, where they turned into tubes.

But the second he got a good look at the radar, the flush of pride he’d felt a little while before evaporated. Hipple and his team could make some sense of what they saw inside the jet engine. The parts of the radar set remained a complete mystery to Goldfarb. The only thing of which he could be certain was that it had no valves… or even tubes.

What took their place was sheets of grayish-brown material with silvery lines etched onto them. Some had little lumpy things of various shapes and colors affixed. Form said nothing about function, at least not to Goldfarb.

Basil Roundbush chose that moment to inquire, “How goes it with you, David?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t go at all.” Goldfarb knew he sounded like a bad translation from the French. He didn’t care: he’d found the simplest way to tell the truth.

“Pity,” Roundbush said. “Well, I don’t suppose we need every single answer this morning. One or two of them may possibly wait until tonight.”

Goldfarb’s answering laugh had a distinctly hollow ring.

Mutt Daniels drew the cloth patch through the barrel of his tommy gun. “You got to keep your weapon clean,” he told the men in his squad. Telling-even ordering-accomplished only so much. Leading by example worked better.

Kevin Donlan obediently started in on his rifle. He obeyed Daniels like a father (or maybe, Mutt thought uneasily, like a grandfather-he was old enough to be the kid’s grandfather, if he and his hypothetical child had started early). Other than that, though, he had a soldier’s ingrained suspicion of anyone of higher rank than his own-which in his case meant just about the whole Army. He asked, “Sarge, what are we doing in Mount Pulaski anyways?”

Daniels paused in his cleaning to consider that. He wished he had a chaw; working the wad of tobacco in his mouth always helped him think. He hadn’t come across one in a long time, though. He said, “Near as I can see, somebody looked at a map, saw ‘Mount,’ and figured this here was high ground. Hell of a mountain, ain’t it?”

The men laughed. Mount Pulaski was on higher ground than the surrounding hamlets-by twenty, thirty, sometimes even fifty or sixty feet. It hardly seemed worth having spent lives to take the place, even if it did also sit at the junction of State Roads 121 and 54.

Bela Szabo said, “They finally figured out we weren’t about to take Decatur, so they figured they’d move us someplace new and see how many casualties we can take here.” Szabo wasn’t much older than Kevin Donlan, but had a couple of extra lifetimes’ worth of cynicism under his belt.

But Mutt shook his head. “Nash, that ain’t it, Dracula. What they’re really after is seein’ how many fancy old-time buildings they can blow to hell. They’re gettin’ right good at it, too.”

The Mount Pulaski Courthouse was his case in point, here. Almost a hundred years old, it was a two-story Greek Revival building of red-brown brick with a plain classical pediment. Or rather, it had been: after a couple of artillery hits, more of it was rubble than building. But enough still stood to show it would have been worth saving.

“You boys hungry?” a woman called. “I’ve got some ducks and some fried trout here if you are.” She held up a big wicker picnic basket.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mutt said enthusiastically. “Beats the sh-pants off what the Army feeds us-when they feed us.” Quartermaster arrangements had gone to hell, what with the Lizards hitting supply lines whenever they could. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of locals, Daniels and his men would have gone hungry a lot more than they did.

The woman came up to the front porch of the wrecked house where the squad was sitting. None of the young soldiers paid her any particular mind-she was a year or two past forty, with a tired face and mousebrown hair streaked with gray. Their attention was on the basket she carried.

Springfields and M-1s still came with bayonets, even If nobody was likely to use them in combat any more. They turned out to make first-rate duck carvers, though. The roast ducks were greasy and gamy. Mutt still ate duck in preference to trout; the only fish he cared for was catfish.

“Mighty fine, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said, licking his fingers. “Where’d you come by all this good stuff, anyhow?”

“Up in Lincoln Lakes, six, seven miles north of here,” she answered. “They aren’t real lakes, just gravel pits filled with water but they re stocked with fish and I can use a shotgun.”

“Found that out,” Mutt said His teeth had stumbled on birdshot a couple of times. You could break one that way If you weren’t lucky. He tossed aside a leg bone gnawed bare, then went on, “Mighty kind, of you to go to so much trouble for us, uh”-his eyes flicked to her left hand to see if she wore a ring-“Miss…”

“I’m Lucille Potter,” she answered. “What’s your name?”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Lucille,” he said. “I’m M-uh, Pete Daniels.” He thought of himself as Mutt these days; he had for years. But that didn’t seem the right way to introduce yourself to a woman you’d just met. The kids might ignore her-they were younger than most of the players he’d managed-but she didn’t look half bad to him.

Only trouble was, the kids wouldn’t let him get away with being Pete. Some of them started rolling in the dirt; even Kevin Donlan snorted. Lucille looked from one of them to the next. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

Resignedly, Daniels said, “My name’s Pete, but they usually call me Mutt.”

“Is that what you’d rather be called?” she asked. When he nodded, she went on, “Why didn’t you say so, then? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Her brisk tones made a couple of the soldiers look abashed, but more of them didn’t care what she said, even If she had brought them food. The matter-of-fact common sense in her words made him eye her speculatively. “You a schoolteacher, ma’am?”

She smiled. That made some of her tiredness fall away and let him see what she’d looked like when she was twenty-five or so. No, she wasn’t bad at all. She said, “Pretty good guess, but you didn’t notice my shoes.”

They were white-an awfully dirty white now-with thick, rubbery soles. “You’re a nurse,” Mutt said.

Lucille Potter nodded. “I sure am. I’ve been doing a doctor’s work since the Lizards came, though. Mount Pulaski only had Doc Hanrahan, and somebody’s bomb-God knows whose-landed in his front yard just when he was coming out the door. He never knew what hit him, anyhow.”

“Lord, I wish we could take you with us, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said. “The medics we got, they ain’t everything they oughta be. ‘Course, what is these days?”

“That purely is a fact,” Daniels agreed. The Army tried hard, the same as it did with supplies. As with supplies, war’s disruption was too great to permit hurt men proper care. He suspected his grandfathers in the War Between the States hadn’t risked much worse medical treatment. Doctors knew a lot more nowadays, but so what? All the knowledge in the world didn’t matter if you couldn’t get your hands on the medicines and instruments you needed to use it.

Lucille Potter said, “Why the hell not?”

Mutt gaped at her, startled twice-first at the casual way she swore and then by how she fell in with Donlan’s suggestion, which had been more wistful than serious. Mutt said, “But, ma’am, you’re a woman.” He thought that explained everything.

“So?” Lucille said-evidently she didn’t. “Would you care if I was digging a bullet out of your leg? Or do you think your boys here are going to gang-rape me the second your back is turned?”

“But-But-” Mutt spluttered like a man who can’t swim floundering out of a creek. He felt his face turn red. His men were staring at Lucille Potter with their mouths open. Rape wasn’t a word you said around a woman, let alone a word you expected to hear from one.

She went on, “Maybe I should bring my shotgun along. You think that might make ’em behave?”

“Y all mean it,” he said, surprised again this time into a Southernism he seldom used.

“Of course I. mean it,” she said. “Get to know me for a while and you’ll find out I hardly ever say things I don’t mean. People in town were stupid, too, till they started coming down sick and breaking bones and having babies. Then they found out what I could do-because they had to. You can’t afford to wait around like that, can you? If you give me five minutes, I’ll go home and get my black bag. Or”-she shrugged-“you can do without.”

Mutt thought hard. Whatever the trouble she brought with her, could it be worse than the hurts they’d take that would go bad without a doctor? He didn’t think so. But he also wanted to find out why she was volunteering, so he asked, “How come you want to leave this town, If you’re the only thing even halfway close to a doctor here?”

“When the Lizards held this part of the state, I had to stay here-I was the only one around who could do anything,” Lucille answered. “But now that proper human beings are back in charge, it’ll be easier to bring a real doctor around. And an awful lot of what I’ve been doing lately is patching up hurt soldiers. I hate to put it so plain, Mutt, but I think you people are liable to need me worse than Mount Pulaski does.”

“That makes sense,” Mutt said. Glancing at Lucille Potter, he got the feeling she would make sense a lot of the time. He rubbed his chin. “Tell you what, Miss Lucille. Let’s take you over to Captain Maczek, see what he thinks about the idea. If it’s all right with him, I like it.” He looked over to the men in his squad. They were all nodding. Mutt suddenly grinned. “Here-bring some of this duck along with you. That’ll help put him in the right kind of mood.”

Maczek was around the corner, eating with another squad from the company. He was maybe half Mutt’s age, but not altogether lacking in sense. Mutt grinned again to see him digging a spoon in what looked like a can of baked beans. He held up the duck leg. “Got something better’n that for you, sir-an’ here’s the lady who shot the bird.”

The captain stared in delight at the duck, then turned to Lucille. “Ma’am, my hat’s off to you.” He took himself literally, doffing his net-covered helmet. The sweaty blond hair underneath it stuck up in all directions.

“Pleased to meet you, Captain.” Lucille Potter gave her name, shook Maczek’s hand with a decisive pump. Then the captain took the drumstick and thigh from Daniels and bit into it. Grease ran down his chin. His expression turned ecstatic.

“You know what else, sir?” Mutt said. He told Maczek what else.

“Is that a fact?” Maczek said.

“Yes, sir, it is,” Lucille said. “I’m not a proper doctor, and I don’t claim to be one. But I’ve learned a hell of a lot these past few months, and I’m a lot better than nothing.”

Maczek absently took another bite of duck. As Mutt had, he eyed the men around him. They’d all been listening with eager curiosity. You couldn’t run an army by asking what everybody thought all the time, but you didn’t ignore what people thought, either, not if you were smart. Maczek wasn’t stupid, anyhow. He said, “I’ll clear it with the colonel later, but I don’t think he’ll say no. It’s irregular as all get out, but this whole stinking war is irregular.”

“I’ll go get my tools,” Lucille said, and strode off to do just that.

Captain Maczek watched her no-nonsense walk for a few seconds before he turned back to Daniels. “You know, Sergeant, if you’d come along to me with some little chippy you’d found, I’d have been very angry at you. But this one-I think she may do. If I’ve ever seen a female who can take care of herself, she’s it.”

“Reckon you’re right, sir.” Mutt pointed to the bones Maczek was still holding. “And we already know she can handle a shotgun.”

“That’s true, by God.” Maczek laughed. “Besides, she’s old enough to be a mother for most of the men. You have anybody in your squad with an Oedipus complex, you think?”

“With a what, sir?” Mutt frowned-just because Maczek had been to college, he didn’t need to show off. And besides-“She’s not bad-lookin’, I don’t think.”

Captain Maczek opened his mouth to say something. By the glint in his eye, it would have been lewd or rude or both. But he didn’t say it-he was too smart an officer to make fun of his noncoms, especially in front of a bunch of listening soldiers. What he did finally say was, “However you like, Mutt. But remember, she’s going to be medic for the whole company, maybe the battalion, not just your squad.”

“Yeah, sure, Captain, I know that,” Daniels said. To himself, he added, I saw her first, though.

The U-2 droned through the night just above the treetops. The cold slipstream buffeted Ludmila Gorbunova’s face. It was not the only reason her teeth chattered. She was deep inside Lizardheld territory, If anything went wrong, she wouldn’t make it back to her dirt airstrip and the cramped little space she shared with the other female pilots.

She forced such thoughts from her mind, concentrated on the mission at hand. That was the only way to get through them, she’d learned: keep your mind firmly fixed on what you had to do now, then what you had to do next, and so on. Look ahead or off to one side and you were in trouble. That had been true against the Nazis; it was doubly so against the Lizards.

“What I have to do now,” she said, aloud, letting the slip-stream fling her words away behind her, “is find the partisan battalion.”

Easier said than done, in what looked like endless stretches of forest and plain. She thought her navigation was good, but when you were flying by compass and wristwatch, little errors always crept in. She thought about gaining altitude so she could see farther, but rejected the idea. It would also have made it easier for the Lizards to spot her.

She worked the pedals and the stick, swung the U-2 into a wide, slow spiral to search the terrain below. The little wood-and-fabric biplane responded beautifully to the controls, probably better than it had when it was new. Georg Schultz, her German mechanic, might be-was-a Nazi, but he was also a genius at keeping the aircraft not only flying but flying well in spite of an almost complete lack of spare parts.

There down below-was that a light? It was, and a moment later she spotted the other two with it. She’d been told to look for an equilateral triangle of lights. Here they were. She buzzed slowly overhead, hoping the partisans had all their instructions straight.

They did. As goon as they heard the sewing-machine whine of the U-2’s little Shvetsov engine, they set out two more lights, little ones, that were supposed to mark out the beginning of a stretch of ground where she could land safely. Her mouth went dry, as it did every time she had to land at night on a strip or a field she’d never seen before. The Kukuruznik was a rugged machine, but a mistake could still kill her.

She lined up on the landing lights, lost altitude, killed her airspeed-not that the U-2 had much to lose. At the last moment, the lights disappeared: they must have had collars, to keep them from being seen at ground level. Losing them made her heart thump fearfully, but then she was down.

The biplane bounced along over the field. Ludmila hit the brakes hard; every meter she traveled was one more meter in which a wheel might go into a hole and flip the U-2 over. Fortunately, it did not need many meters in which to stop.

Men-dark shapes in darker night-came running up and got to the Kukuruznik while the prop was still spinning. “You have presents for us, Comrade?” one of them called.

“I have presents,” Ludmila agreed. She heard the mutters when they heard her voice-variations on the theme of a woman! She was used to that; she’d been dealing with it ever since she joined the Red Air Force. But there were fewer such murmurs among the partisans than there had been at some air force bases to which she’d flown. A fair number of partisans were women, and most male partisans understood that women could fight.

She climbed down from the front cockpit, set a foot in the metal stirrup on the left side of the fuselage that gave access to the rear one. She didn’t go up into it, but started handing out boxes. “Here we are, Comrades: presents,” she said. “Rifles-with ammunition… submachine guns-with ammunition.”

“The weapons are good, but we already have most of the weapons we need,” a man said. “But next time you come, Comrade Pilot, bring us lots more bullets. It’s the ammunition we’re short of-we use a lot of it.” Wolflike chuckles rose from the partisans’ throats.

From back in the crowd of fighters, someone called, “Comrade, did you fetch us any 7.92mm ammunition? We have a lot of German rifles and machine guns we could use more if we had bullets for them.”

Ludmila hauled out a canvas bag that clinked metallically. The partisans’ murmurs turned appreciative; a couple of them clapped gloved hands together in delight. Ludmila said, “I am told to tell you: you cannot expect this bounty on every resupply run. We have to scavenge German cartridges-we don’t manufacture them. The way things are, we have a hard enough time manufacturing our own calibers.”

“Too bad,” said the man who had asked about German ammunition. “The Mauser is not a great rifle-accurate, da, but a slow, clumsy bolt-but the Nazis make a very fine machine gun.”

“Maybe we can work a trade,” the fellow who’d first greeted Ludmila said. “There’s a mostly German band of fighters back around Konotop, and they use our weapons just as we use theirs. They might swap some of their caliber for some of ours.”

Those couple of sentences spoke volumes about the anguish of the Soviet Union. Konotop, a hundred fifty kilometers east of Ludmila’s native Kiev, had been in German hands. Now it belonged to the Lizards. When would the Soviet workers and people be able to reclaim the rodina, the motherland?

Ludmila started handing out cardboard tubes and pots of paste. “Here you are, Comrades. Because wars are not won only by bullets, I bring also the latest posters by Efrimov and the Kukryniksi group.”

That drew pleased exclamations from the partisans. Newspapers hereabouts had been forced to echo the Nazi line; now they slavishly reproduced Lizard propaganda. Radios, especially those able to pick up signals from land still under human control, were few and far between. Posters gave one way of striking back. They could go up on a wall in seconds and show hundreds the truth for days.

“What do the men of Kukryniksi do this time?” a woman asked.

“It’s one of their better ones, I think,” Ludmila said, which was no small praise, for the team of Kupryanov, Krylov, and Sokolov probably turned out the best Soviet poster art. She went on, “This one shows a Lizard in Pharaoh’s headdress lashing Soviet peasants; the caption reads, ‘A Return to Slavery.’ ”

“That is a good one,” the partisan leader agreed. “It will make the people think, and make them less likely to collaborate with the Lizards. We will post it widely, in towns and villages and at collective farms.”

“How much collaboration goes on with the Lizards?” Ludmila asked. “This is something of which our authorities need to be aware.”

“It’s not as bad as what went on with the Germans at first,” the man answered. Ludmila nodded; little could be as bad as that. Large segments of the Soviet populace had welcomed the Nazis as liberators in the early days of their invasion. If they’d played on that instead of working to prove they could be even more savage and brutal than the NKVD, they might have toppled the Soviet regime. The partisan went on, “We do have collaboration, though. Many people passively accept whatever power they find above them, while others welcome the rather indifferent rule of the Lizards as superior to the hostility they had known before.”

“Hostility from the fascists, you mean,” Ludmila said.

“Of course, Comrade Pilot.” The partisan leader’s voice was innocence personified. No one could safely speak of hostility to the people from the Soviet government, though that shadow lay across the whole of the rodina.

“You called the Lizards’ rule indifferent,” Ludmila said. “Explain that more fully, please. Intelligence is worth more than many rifles.”

“They take crops and livestock for themselves; in the towns, they try to set up manufacturers that might be useful to them: forges and chemical works and such. But they care nothing for what we do as people,” the partisan said. “They do not forbid worship, but they do not promote it, either. They do not even forbid the Party, which would be only elementary prudence on their part. It is as If we are beneath their notice unless we take up arms against them. Then they hit hard.”

That much Ludmila already knew. The other perplexed her. By the sound of his voice, it perplexed the partisan, too. They were used to a regime that minutely regulated every aspect of its citizens’ lives-and disposed of them without mercy when they didn’t meet its expectations… or sometimes even If they did. Simple indifference seemed very alien by contrast. She hoped her superiors would have a better idea of what to make of it.

“Does anyone have letters for me?” she asked. “I’ll be glad to take them along, though with the post as disrupted as it is, they may be months on the way.”

The partisans queued up to hand her their notes to the outside world. None of them had envelopes; those had been in short supply before the Lizards came. The papers were folded into triangles to show they came from soldiers: the Soviet mail system carried such letters, albeit slowly, without a postage fee.

When she had the last letter, Ludmila climbed back into the front cockpit and said, “Would you please swing my aircraft around nose for tail? If I landed safely on this strip, I’d like to take off down the same ground.”

The little U-2 was easy to haul around by hand; it weighed less than a thousand kilos. Ludmila had to explain to someone how to turn the prop. As always on these missions, she had an anxious moment wondering whether the engine would start-no mechanical starter here If it didn’t. But it was still warm from the flight in, and kicked over almost at once.

She released the brake, pushed the stick forward. The Kukuruznik jounced over the rough field. A few partisans ran alongside, waving. They soon fell behind. The takeoff run was longer than the one she’d needed to land. That meant she was going over some new terrain (to say nothing of the holes she might have missed while she was landing). But after a last couple of jolts, the biplane made an ungainly leap into the air.

She swung the U-2 north and west, back toward the base from which she’d set out. Finding it again would take the same kind of search she’d needed to locate the partisans’ makeshift airstrip. A base that advertised its presence soon drew the attention of the Lizards. Once that happened, the base was unlikely to remain present for long.

Not that she had any guarantees of getting back safely, anyhow. U-2s were detected and destroyed less often than any other Soviet aircraft; Ludmila’s best guess was that they were too small and light and flimsy to be noticed most of the time. But Kukuruzniks did not always come home, either.

Off in the distance, she saw flashes, like heat lightning on a summer evening: someone’s artillery, probably the Lizards’. She glanced at her watch and compass, made the best position estimate she could. When she landed, she’d report it to Colonel Karpov. Maybe one day before too long, the partisans would fire a rack of Katyusha rockets that way.

Stars twinkled through gaps in the clouds. A couple of times, she spotted brief twinkles of light on the ground, too: muzzle flashes. They made the stars seem less safe and friendly.

Watching the compass and her watch, she flew on toward the base. When she thought she was overhead, she looked down and saw-nothing. That failed to surprise her; finding it on the first try by dead reckoning was no likelier than plunging your hand into a haystack and bringing out a needle between thumb and forefinger.

She began another search spiral. Now she watched her fuel gauge, too. If she was lost and had to set down in a field, she wanted to do it while she still had power, not dead stick.

Just when she was beginning to worry she might have to do exactly that, she spied the lights she’d been looking for. She gratefully made for them; knowing where you were made you feel ever so much more in control of things.

The airstrip had supposedly been leveled. As a matter of fact, it was no smoother than the one the partisans had marked off for her. Ludmila’s teeth clicked together at every jolt until the U-2 stopped. She told herself the roughness made the runway harder to spot. Was that consolation enough for the bruises she’d have wherever her safety harness touched her? Maybe.

She unbuckled the harness, got out of the plane while the prop was still spinning. The groundcrew ran up, hauled the Kukuruznik away to its between-missions home in a camouflaged revetment. “Where’s Colonel Karpov?” she asked.

“He went to bed an hour ago,” somebody answered. “It is close to three in the morning. You have anything so important it won’t keep till dawn?”

“I suppose not,” she said. The Lizard artillery wasn’t something he had to know about right now. She followed the Kukuruznik toward its shelter.

Ludmila would have bet as much money as she had that she’d find Georg Schultz waiting at the revetment. Sure enough, there he was. “Alles khorosho?” he asked in his usual mixture of German and Russian.

“Gut, da,” she answered, mixing the languages the same way.

He scrambled up into the cockpit No lantern was lighted, not even beneath the camouflage netting; the Lizards had gadgets that could pick up the tiniest gleam. That didn’t stop Schultz from starting to work on Ludmila’s biplane. He tested the pedals and other controls, leaned out to say, “Left aileron cable not good-feels a little loose. Come light, I fix.”

“Thank you, Georgi Mikhailovich,” Ludmila answered. She hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the cable, but If Schultz said it needed tightening, she was willing to believe him. His understanding for machinery was, to her way of thinking, all but uncanny. She flew the aircraft; Georg Schultz projected himself into it as if he were part plane himself.

“Nothing else bad,” he said, “but here-you leave on floor.”

He handed her a folded triangle of paper.

“Thank you,” she said again. “Our post is unreliable enough without me losing a letter before it ever gets into the mail.” She wasn’t sure how much of that he understood, but found herself yawning enormously. She was too tired to try to dredge up German to make things clear for him. If Colonel Karpov was asleep, she saw no reason she shouldn’t grab a couple of hours for herself, too.

She shrugged out of her parachute harness-not that she’d have much chance to use a chute if she got hit while she was hedgehopping the way she usually did-and stowed it in the cockpit, then started out of the revetment toward her sleeping quarters. As she passed Georg Schultz, he patted her on the backside.

Ludmila took a skittering half step, half jump. She whirled around in fury. This wasn’t the first time such things had happened to her since she’d joined the Red Air Force, but somehow she’d thought Schultz too kulturny to try them.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” she blazed in Russian, then switched to German to drive it home: “Nie wieder, verstehst du?” It was the du of insult, not intimacy. She added, “What would your Colonel Jager think if he found out what you just did?”

Schultz had been the gunner in the tank Jager commanded; he thought highly of his former leader. Ludmila hoped reminding him of that would bring him to his senses. But he just laughed quietly and said, “He would think I wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t done himself.”

A short, deadly silence followed. Ludmila broke it in tones of ice: “That is none of your business. If it will not make you keep your hands where they belong, maybe this will: remember, you are the only Nazi on a base full of Red Air Force men. They leave you alone because you work well. But they do not love you. Verstehst du dos?”

He drew himself to stiff attention, did his best to click his heels in soft felt valenki, shot out his arm in a defiant Hitlerite salute. “I remember very well, and I do understand.” He stomped away.

Ludmila wanted to kick him. Why couldn’t he have just said he was sorry and gone on about his business instead of getting angry, as If she had somehow wronged him instead of the other way round? Now what was she supposed to do? If he was that angry with her, did she still want him working on her aircraft? But if he didn’t, who would?

The answer to that formed in her mind with the question: some quarter-trained Russian peasant who hardly knew the difference between a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. She could do some work herself, but not all, and she knew she didn’t have Schultz’s artist’s touch with an engine. Her show of temper was liable to end up getting her killed.

But what should she have done? Let him treat her like a whore? She shook her head violently. Maybe she should have responded with a joke instead of a blast, though.

Too late to worry about it now. Slowly, tiredly, she walked over to the building that sheltered the women pilots. It wasn’t much of a shelter: the walls were dirt-filled sandbags and bales of hay like the revetments that protected the aircraft, the roof camouflage netting over straw over unchinked boards. It leaked and let in the cold. But no one here, Colonel Karpov included, had quarters any better.

The door to the improvised barracks had no hinges, and had to be pushed aside. Inside was a blackout curtain. Ludmila pulled the door closed before she went through the curtain. Let no light leak out was a rule she took as much for granted as take off into the wind.

The barracks held little light to leak, anyhow: a couple of candles and an oil lamp were enough to keep you from stumbling over blanket-wrapped women snoring on straw pallets, but that was about all. Yawning, Ludmila stumbled toward her own place.

A white rectangle lay on top of her folded blankets. It hadn’t been there when she ‘went out on her mission a few hours earlier. “A letter!” she said happily-and from a civilian, too, or it would have been folded differently. Hope flared in her, painfully intense: she hadn’t heard from anyone in her family since the Lizards came. Maybe they were safe after all, when she’d almost given up on them.

In the dim light, she had to pick up the letter to realize it was in an envelope. She turned it over, bent her head close to it to look at the address. She needed a moment to notice part of it was written in the Roman alphabet, and the Cyrillic characters were printed with a slow precision that said the person who used them wasn’t used to them.

Then her eyes fixed on the stamp. Had anyone told her a year before that she’d have been glad to see a picture of Adolf Hitler, she’d either have thought him mad or been mortally insulted-probably both. “Heinrich,” she breathed, doing her best to pronounce the H at the beginning of the name, which was not a sound the Russian language had.

She tore the envelope open, eased out the letter. To her relief, she saw Jager had considerately printed: she found German handwriting next to indecipherable. She read, My dear Ludmila, I hope this finds you safe and well. In fact, I have to hope it finds you at all.

In her mind’s eye she could see one corner of his mouth quirking upwards as he set his small joke down on paper. The perfection and intensity of the image told her how much she missed him.

I was on duty in a town I cannot name lest the censor reach for his razor, he went on. I will be leaving in the next day or two, though, and going back to a panzer outfit I also cannot name. I wish I were returning to you instead, or you to me. So much easier to travel long distance by plane than by horse or even by panzer.

She remembered some of his stories of crossing Lizard occupied Poland on horseback. That made anything she’d done in her U-2 seem tame by comparison. In the letter, he went on, I wish we could be together more. Even at best, we have so little time on this world, and with the war we do not have the best. Yet without it, we would not have met, you and I, so I suppose I cannot say it is altogether a bad thing.

“No, it isn’t,” she whispered. Having an affair with an enemy might be stupid (a feeling Jager no doubt shared with her), but she couldn’t make herself believe it was a bad thing.

The letter continued, I thank you for looking out for my comrade Georg Schultz; your country is so vast that only great luck could have brought him to your base, as you said when we were last together. Greet him for me; I hope he is well.

Ludmila didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she read that. Schultz was well, all right, and she had looked out for him, and all he wanted was to get her pants down. She wondered whether he had enough sense of shame to be embarrassed if she showed him Jager’s letter.

She didn’t have to decide now. She wanted to finish the letter and get a little sleep. Everything else could wait. She read, If fate is kind, we will meet again soon in a world at peace. If it is less kind, we will meet again though the war goes on. It would have to be very cruel to keep us from meeting again at all. With love and the hope you stay safe-Heinrich.

Ludmila folded the letter small and stuck it in a pocket of her flying suit. Then she took off her leather helmet and goggles, but none of the rest of the outfit, not even her valenki. The inside of the barracks was cold. She lay down on the straw, pulled the blanket up over her head, and fell asleep almost at once.

When she woke the next morning, she found one hand in the pocket where she’d put the letter. That made her smile, and resolved her to answer it right away. Then she had to figure out whether to show it to Schultz. She decided she would, but not this minute. Time enough when they were calmer, not actively angry at each other. Meanwhile, she still had to make her report to Colonel Karpov.

The Nipponese guard handed Teerts his bowl of food. He bowed polite thanks, turned one eye toward it to see what he’d got. He almost hissed with pleasure: along with the rice, the bowl was full of chunks of some kind of flesh. The Big Uglies had been feeding him better lately; by the time he finished the meal, he was almost content.

He wondered what they were up to. Captivity had taught him they were not in the habit of doing gratuitous favors for anybody. Up till now, captivity had taught him they weren’t in the habit of doing any favors whatever. The change made him suspicious.

Sure enough, Major Okamoto and the usual stone-faced, rifle-toting guard marched up to the cell door not long after the bowl was taken away. As the door swung open, Okamoto spoke in the language of the Race: “You will come with me.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts agreed. He left the cell with no small relief. His step seemed lighter than it had in a long time; going upstairs to the interrogation chamber of the Nagasaki prison felt like good exercise, not a wearing burden. Amazing what something close to proper food can do, he thought.

Again, the Nipponese inside the chamber wore the white robes of scientists. The Big Ugly in the center chair spoke. Major Okamoto translated: “Dr. Nishina wishes to discuss today the nature of the bombs with which the Race destroyed the cities of Berlin and Washington.”

“Why not?” Teerts answered agreeably. “These bombs were made from uranium. In case you do not know what uranium is, it is the ninety-second element in the periodic table.” He let his mouth fall slightly open in amusement. The Big Uglies were so barbarous, they would surely have not the slightest notion of what he was talking about.

After Okamoto relayed his answer to the Nipponese scientists, he and they talked back and forth for some time. Then he returned his attention to Teerts, saying, “I do not have the technical terms I need to ask these questions in proper detail. Give them to me as we speak, please, and do your best to understand even without them.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said, agreeable still.

“Good.” Okamoto paused to think; his rubbery Big Ugly features made the process easy to watch. At length, he said, “Dr. Nishina wishes to know which process the Race uses to separate the lighter, explosive kind of uranium from the more common heavy kind.”

Teerts bit down on that as if it were an unsuspected bone in his meat. Not in his wildest nightmares-and he’d had some dreadful ones since his capture-had he imagined that the Big Uglies had the slightest clue about atomic energy, or even that they’d heard of uranium. If they did-He abruptly realized they might be dangerous to the Race, not just the horrid nuisances they’d already proved themselves.

To Major Okamoto, he said, “Tell the learned Dr. Nishina that I do not know which processes he means.” He had to work not to turn an eye turret toward the instruments of torture in the interrogation chamber.

Okamoto fixed him with a stare he’d come to identify as hostile, but passed his words on to Nishina without comment. Nishina spoke volubly in reply, ticking off points on his fingers as If he were a male of the Race.

When he was through, Okamoto translated: “He says theory shows several ways which might accomplish this. Among them are successive barriers to a uranium-containing gas, heating the gas so that part of it which has the lighter kind of uranium rises more than the other, using a strong electromagnet”-a word that took a good deal of backing and filling to get across-“and using rapid spinning to concentrate the lighter kind of uranium. Which of these does the Race find most efficient?”

Teerts stared at him. He was even more appalled than he had been when his killercraft got shot down. That had affected only his own fate. Now he had to worry about whether the Race had any idea what the Tosevites were up to. They might be barbarians-by everything Teerts had seen, they were barbarians-but they were also alarmingly knowledgeable… which meant it behooved Teerts to be more than cautious in his answers. He’d have to do his best to avoid giving away any information at all.

He took so long figuring that out that Okamoto snapped, “Don’t waste time dreaming up lies. Answer Dr. Nishina.”

“I beg your pardon, superior sir,” Teerts said, and added, “Gomen nasai-so sorry,” from his limited stock of Nipponese. “Part of the problem is my not having enough words to give a proper answer, and another part is my own ignorance, for which I again beg pardon. You must remember that I am-I was-a pilot. I had nothing at all to do with uranium.”

“You certainly were glib enough talking about it a little while ago,” Okamoto said. “You do not want to make me disbelieve you. Some of the tools back there are very sharp, others can be made hot, and still others can be hot and sharp at the same time. Do you want to learn which is which?”

“No, superior sir,” Teerts gasped with utmost sincerity. “But I truly am ignorant of the knowledge you seek. I am only a pilot, not a nuclear physicist. What I know of flying, I have freely told you. I am not an expert in the matter of atomic weapons. What little I know of nuclear energy I learned in school as I was growing from hatchlinghood. It is no more and no less than any other ordinary male of the Race would know.”

“This is difficult to believe,” Okamoto said “You spoke quite a lot about uranium just a little while ago.”

That was before I realized how much you knew about it, Teerts thought. He wondered how he was going to escape with his integument intact. He knew he couldn’t lie to the Nipponese; he didn’t know how much they knew, and the only way to find out-getting caught-would involve the painful penetration of that integument.

He said, “I do know that atomic weapons do not necessarily use uranium alone. Some involve, I am not sure how, hydrogen as well-the very first element.” Let the Japanese chew on that paradox for a while, he thought: how could a weapon involve the lightest and heaviest elements at the same time?

After Okamoto interpreted, the team of Big Ugly scientists chattered for a while among themselves. Then Nisbina, who seemed to be their spokesman, put a question to Okamoto. The major translated for Teerts: “The uranium explosion, then, is hot enough to make hydrogen act as it does in the sun and convert large amounts of matter to energy?”

Horror filled Teerts. Every time he tried to escape from this hideous mess in which he found himself, he sank deeper instead. The Big Uglies knew about fusion. To Teerts, the product of a civilization that grew and changed at a glacial pace, knowing about something was essentially the same as being able to do it. And If the Tosevites could make fusion bombs…

Major Okamoto knocked him out of his appalled reverie by snapping, “Answer the learned Dr. Nishina!”

“I beg your pardon, superior sir,” Teerts said. “Yes, everything the learned, doctor says is true.”

There. He’d done it Any day now, he feared, the Nipponese would start using nuclear weapons against the Race on the mainland-which still struck Teerts as nothing more than a big island; he was used to water surrounded by land, not the other way around.

He heard Okamoto say “Honto,” confirming his answer to the Nipponese scientist’s question. The cold of the interrogation room sank deeply into his spirit. The Nipponese hardly seemed to need him. By their questions, they had all the answers already, just waiting to be put into practice.

Then Nishina spoke again: “We return to the question of getting the lighter uranium, the kind which is explosive, out of the other, more common, type. This as yet we have not succeeded in doing; indeed, we have only just begun the attempt. That is why we will learn from you how the Race solves this problem.”

Teerts needed a moment to understand that The Race had been shocked when they reached Tosev 3 to discover how advanced the Big Uglies were. Before Teerts was captured, pilots had talked endlessly about that; they’d expected no opposition, and here the Tosevites were, shooting back-not very well, and from inadequate aircraft, but shooting back. How could they have learned to build combat aircraft in the eight hundred local years since the Race’s probe examined them?

Now, for the first time, Teerts got a glimmering of the answer. The Race made change deliberately slow. When something new was discovered, extrapolationists performed elaborate calculations to learn in advance how it would affect a long-stable society, and how best to minimize those effects while gradually acquiring the benefits of the new device or principle.

With the Big Uglies, the tongue was on the other side of the mouth. When they found something new, they seized it with both hands and squeezed until they got all the juice out. They didn’t care what the consequences five generations-or even five years-hence would be. They wanted advantages now, and worried about later trouble later, if at all.

Eventually, they’d probably end up destroying themselves with that attitude. At the moment, it made them far more deadly opponents than they would have been otherwise.

“Do not waste time thinking up lies. I warned you before,” Major Okamoto said. “Tell Dr. Nishina the truth at once.”

“By what I know, superior sir, the truth is that we do not use any of these methods,” Teerts said. Okamoto drew back his hand for a slap. Afraid that would be the start of a torture session worse than any he’d yet known, Teerts went on rapidly, “Instead, we use the heavier form of uranium: isotope is the term we use.”

“How do you do this?” Okamoto demanded after a brief colloquy with the Nipponese scientists. “Dr. Nishina says the heavier isotope cannot explode.”

“There is another element, number ninety-four, which does not occur in nature but which we make from the heavier, nonexplosive-Dr. Nishina is right-isotope of uranium. This other element is explosive. We use it in our bombs.”

“I think you are lying. You will pay the penalty for it, I promise you that,” Okamoto said. Nevertheless, he translated Teerts’ words for the Big Uglies in the white coats.

They started talking excitedly among themselves. Nishina, who looked to be the senior male, sorted things out and relayed an answer to Okamoto. He said to Teerts, “I may have been wrong. Dr. Nishina tells me the Americans have found this new element as well. They have given it the name plutonium. You will help us produce it.”

“Past what I have already said, I know little,” Teerts warned: Despair threatened to consume him. Every time he’d revealed something new to the Nipponese, it had been with the hope that the technical difficulties of the new revelation would force them off the road that led toward nuclear weapons. Instead, everything he told them seemed to push them further down that road.

He wished a plutonium bomb would fall on Nagasaki. But what were the odds of that?