Upsetting the Balance

9

The mustard-gas burn on David Goldfarb’s leg throbbed painfully. His trousers had pulled up over his socks just for a moment, while he was scrambling through grass near a shell hole that must have come from a gas round. That was all it took.

He pulled up his trousers now. In spite of the slimy stuff the medic had smeared on it, the burn remained red and inflamed. It looked infected. Mustard gas was nasty stuff. It could linger for days. He was just glad he’d been wearing his gas mask while he was near that hole. The idea of trying to breathe with a burn on his lungs made him shiver all over.

“ ‘Ow’s it doin’, flyboy?” Fred Stanegate asked in Yorkshire dialect so broad Goldfarb had trouble following it. Stanegate was a big blond chap with cheekbones that made him look more like a Viking than an Englishman. The Sten gun he carried seemed hardly more than a pistol in his massive, thick-fingered hands. It also seemed anachronistic; he should have been toting a battle-axe and wearing a hauberk, not filthy army battledress.

“I expect I’ll live,” Goldfarb answered. Stanegate chuckled as if he’d said something funny. From the Yorkshireman’s point of view, maybe he had; by all appearances, he bemused Fred at least as much as the other way round.

“Right peculiar they didna want you back,” Stanegate said. “Peculiar.” He repeated the word with relish, making four distinct syllables of it: pee-kyou-lee-yuhr.

“Wasn’t much of a ‘they’ left at Bruntingthorpe by the time the Lizards got through with it,” Goldfarb said, shrugging. After the first Lizard attack on the air base, Basil Roundbush had been recalled to piloting at once, but no orders had come for Goldfarb to return to a proper radar station. Then the Lizards started pounding Bruntingthorpe with pilotless aircraft, and after one of them hit the officers’ barracks in the middle of the night, nobody much was left in RAF blue who could give him orders.

The local army commander had been happy enough to take him on. He’d said, “You know how to handle a weapon and obey orders, and that gives you a leg up-two legs up-on a lot of the lads we’re giving the king’s shilling to these days.” Goldfarb pictured himself with two legs up, and crashing to earth immediately thereafter. He didn’t argue with the major, though. He’d wanted to get into the scrap firsthand.

Now he waved about him and said, “And so we find ourselves approaching the lovely metropolis of Market Harborough and all its amenities, which-”

“All its what?” Fred Stanegate broke in.

“All the good stuff it has in it,” Goldfarb said. Next to Bruntingthorpe, Market Harborough, a town of ten or fifteen thousand people, was indeed a metropolis, not that that in itself said much for Market Harborough. Goldfarb had pedaled into it a few times; it was no farther from Bruntingthorpe than Leicester was. “The Three Swans served some very fine bitter, even in wartime.”

“Aye, that’s so. Ah recall now.” Stanegate’s face grew beatific at the memory. “And in the market-you ken, the one by t’old school-you could get a bit o’ butter for your bread, if you knew the right bloke t’ask.”

“Could you?” Goldfarb hadn’t known the right bloke, or even that there was a right bloke. Too late to worry about it now, even if the margarine he’d been spreading on his bread had tasted like something that dripped from the crankcase of a decrepit lorry.

“Aye, y’could.” Fred Stanegate sighed. “Wonder how much of the place is left.” He shook his head gloomily. “Not much, I wager. Not much o’ anything left these days.”

“Pretty country,” Goldfarb said, waving again. Occasional shell holes marred the green meadows and fields or shattered fence gates, but the Lizards hadn’t quite moved up into Market Harborough itself, so it hadn’t been fought over house by house. “Can’t you just see the hounds and riders chasing a fox into those woods there?”

“Ah, weel, Ah always used t’pull for the fox, if tha kens what I mean, whenever the hunt went by my farm.”

“You’re one up on me, then,” Goldfarb said. “The only hunts I’ve ever seen were in the cinema.”

“Looked to me like it’d be a fair bit of a lark, if you had the brass to keep up the hounds and the horses and the kit and all,” Stanegate said. “Me, Ah was getting by on a couple o’ quid a week, so Ah wasn’t about t’go out ridin’ t’the hounds.” He spoke quite without malice or resentment, just reporting on how things had been. After a moment, he grinned. “So here Ah am in the army now, at a deal less than a couple o’ quid a week. Life’s a rum ‘un, ain’t it?”

“Won’t quarrel with you there.” Goldfarb reached up to straighten the tin hat on his head. His right index finger slid toward the trigger of his Sten gun. Houses were growing thicker on the ground as they got into Market Harborough. Even though the Lizards had never been in the town, they’d bombed it and shelled it, and a lot of their bombs and shells sprayed submunitions that stayed around waiting for some unlucky or careless sod to tread on them. Goldfarb did not intend to be careless.

A lot of people who had lived in Market Harborough had fled. A good many others, no doubt, were casualties. That did not mean the place was empty. Far from it: it bulged with refugees from the fighting farther south in the Midlands. Their tents and blankets filled the grassy square around the old grammar school-the place where, before the Lizards invaded England, Fred Stanegate had bought his butter.

Goldfarb had seen his share of refugees the past few weeks. These seemed at first glance no different from the men and women who’d streamed north before them: tired, pale, thin, filthy, many with blank faces and haunted eyes. But some of them were different. Nurses in white (and some ununiformed but for a Red Cross armband on a sleeve) tended to patients with burns like Goldfarb’s but worse, spreading over great stretches of their bodies. Others did what they could for people who wheezed and coughed and tried desperately to get air down into lungs too blistered and burned to receive it.

“Filthy stuff, gas,” Goldfarb said.

“Aye, that it is.” Stanegate nodded vigorously. “My father, he was in France the last war, and he said it were the worst of anything there.”

“Looking at this, I’d say he was right.” That England had resorted to poison gas in the fight against the Lizards bothered Goldfarb, and not just because he’d had the bad luck to get hurt by it. His cousin Moishe Russie had talked about the camps the Nazis had built in Poland for gassing Jews. How anyone could reckon gas a legitimate weapon of war after that was beyond Goldfarb.

But Fred Stanegate said, “If it shifts the bloody Lizards, Ah don’t care how filthy it is. Manure’s filthy, too, but you need it for your garden.”

“That’s so,” Goldfarb admitted. And itwas so. If you were invaded, you did whatever you could to beat back the invaders, and worried about consequences later. If you lost to the Lizards now, you lost forever and you never had the chance to worry about being moral again. Wouldn’t that make gas legitimate? Churchill had thought so. Goldfarb sighed. “Like you said, it’s a rum world.”

Fred Stanegate pointed. “Isna that the Three Swans there?”

“That used to be the Three Swans, looks more like to me,” Goldfarb answered. The inn had boasted a splendid eighteenth-century wrought-iron sign. Now a couple of finger-length chunks of twisted iron lay in the gutter. A shell hit had enlarged the doorway and blown glass out of the windows. “Bloody shame.”

“They’re not dead yet, seems to me,” Stanegate said. Maybe he was right, too. The building hadn’t been abandoned; somebody’d hung blankets over the doorway. And, as Goldfarb watched, a man in a publican’s leather apron slipped out between two of those blankets and looked around in wonder at what Market Harborough had become.

Spying Goldfarb’s and Stanegate’s draggled uniforms, he waved to the two military men. “Come in and have a pint on me, lads.”

They looked at each other. They were on duty, but a pint was a pint. “Let me buy you one, then, for your kindness,” Goldfarb answered. The innkeeper did not say no, but beckoned them into the Three Swans.

The fire crackling in the hearth was welcome. The innkeeper drew three pints with professional artistry. “Half a crown for mine,” he said. Given what England was enduring, it was a mild price. Goldfarb dug in his pockets, found two shillings. He was still rummaging for a sixpence when Fred slapped one on the bar.

Goldfarb leered at him. “Pitching in on the cheap, are you?”

“That Ah am.” Stanegate sipped his beer. One blond eyebrow rose. So did his mug, in salute to the publican. “Better nor I looked for. Your own brewing?”

“Has to be,” the fellow said with a nod. “Couldn’t get delivery even before the bloody Lizards crashed in on us, and now-Well, you’ll know more about now than I do.”

A good number of tavern keepers were brewing their own beer these days, for just the reasons this one had named. Goldfarb had sampled several of their efforts. Some were ambrosial; some were horse piss. This one… He thoughtfully smacked his lips. Fred Stanegate’s “Better nor I looked for” seemed fair.

Someone pushed his way between the blankets that curtained off the Three Swans. Goldfarb’s gulp had nothing to do with beer: it was Major Smithers, the officer who’d let him embark on his infantry career.

Smithers was a short, chunky man who probably would have run to fat had he been better fed. He ran a hand through thinning sandy hair. His forward-thrusting, beaky face was usually red. Goldfarb looked for it to get redder on his discovering two of his troopers in a public house.

But Smithers had adaptability. Without it, he would have taken Goldfarb’s RAF uniform more seriously. Now he just said, “One for me as well, my good man,” to the innkeeper. To Goldfarb and Stanegate, he added, “Drink up quick, lads. We’re moving forward.”

David Goldfarb downed his pint in three long swallows and set it on the cigarette-scarred wood of the bar, relieved not to be placed on report. Stanegate finished his at a more leisurely pace, but emptied it ahead of Major Smithers even so. He said, “Moving forward. By gaw, Ah like the sound o’ that.”

“On to Northampton,” Smithers said in tones of satisfaction. He sucked foam from his mustache. “That won’t be an easy push; the Lizards are there in force, protecting their perimeter, and they have outposts north of town-their line runs through Spratton and Brixworth and Scaldwell.” He swallowed the last of his pint, did that foam-sucking trick again, and shook his head. “Just a pack of bloody little villages nobody’d ever heard of except the people who lived in ’em. Well, they’re on the map now, by God.”

He meant that literally; he drew from a pocket of his battledress an Ordnance Survey map of the area and spread it on the bar so Goldfarb and Stanegate could see. Goldfarb peered at the map with interest; Ordnance Survey cartography, so clear and detailed, always put him in mind of a radar portrait of the ground it pictured. The map seemed to show everything this side of cow tracks in the fields. Brixworth lay along the main road from Market Harborough down to Northampton; Spratton and Scaldwell flanked that road to either side.

Major Smithers said, “We’ll feint at Spratton. The main attack will go in between Brixworth and Scaldwell. If we can roll them out of Northampton, their whole position north of London unravels.” He glanced at the gas masks hanging from the soldiers’ belts. “Canisters in there fresh?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb and Stanegate said together. Goldfarb clicked his tongue between his teeth. The question probably meant another mustard gas bombardment was laid on as part of the attack. After a moment, he asked, “Sir, how do things stand south of London?”

“Not as well, by what I’ve heard.” Smithers made a sour face, as if the admission tasted bad to him. “They put more men-er, more Lizards-into that one, and seized a broader stretch of territory. In spite of the gas, it’s still very much touch and go in the southeast and the south. I’ve heard reports that they’re trying to push round west of London, by way of Maidenhead and such, to link their two forces. Don’t know whether it’s so, but it would be bad for us if it is.”

“Just on account of you’re goin’ good one place, you think it’s the same all around,” Fred Stanegate said. He sighed. “Wish it were so, Ah do.”

Major Smithers folded the map and returned it to the pocket whence it had emerged. “Let’s be off,” he said. Reluctantly, Goldfarb followed him out of the Three Swans.

Not far outside Market Harborough, they passed a battery of 17-pounders bombarding the Lizards farther south. The men serving the three-inch field guns were bare-chested in the summer sun, but wore gas masks. “Gas shells,” Goldfarb said, and took a couple of steps away from the guns. If one of those shells went off by accident, that wouldn’t do much good, but he couldn’t help it.

The 17-pounders barked and bucked, one after another. As soon as they’d fired three shells each, their crews hitched them to the backs of the lorries from which the shells had come and rattled off across the crater-pocked meadow to a new firing position.

They hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred yards when incoming shells tore fresh holes in the greensward where they’d been. Goldfarb dove for a hole. Fred Stanegate, half a step slower, chose the same hole and landed on top of him. “Ow!” he said; Stanegate’s knee dug into his left kidney.

“Sony,” Stanegate grunted. “Blighters are quick to shoot back, aren’t they?”

“Too bloody accurate, too,” Goldfarb answered, wriggling toward greater comfort, or at least less discomfort. “They always have been. I shouldn’t wonder if they don’t slave their guns to radar somehow.” He had no idea how to do such a thing, but it would account for both speed and accuracy in the Lizards’ response.

Fred Stanegate shifted, too, and not in the right direction. “What’s radar?” he asked.

“Never mind. I talk too bloody much, that’s all.” The shells stopped falling. Goldfarb scrambled out of the hole. So did Stanegate. He looked to the radarman curiously. Goldfarb felt himself flushing. He muttered, “Trust me, Fred, you don’t Need to Know.”

Stanegate heard the capital letters. “It’s like that, is it? All right, Ah’ll say nowt further.”

Three clanking, smoking, rumbling monsters clattered south on iron tracks: two Cromwell tanks and a heavy Churchill. The Cromwells were a vast improvement over the Crusaders they supplanted, but not as good as the tanks the Nazis were turning out these days. The Churchill had thick armor, but a weak engine and a popgun 2-pounder for a cannon. Against Lizard armor, either model was woefully inadequate. They were, however, what Britain had, and into the fight they went.

Fred Stanegate waved to the commander of a Cromwell, who was standing up and peering out his hatch to get a better view. The tankman waved back. In his gas mask, he looked as alien as any Lizard. Stanegate said, “An didn’t know we had so many cards left in t’hand.”

“If we don’t play them now, we’ll never get to use them,” Goldfarb said. “They’ll do some good against Lizard infantry, I hope. From all I’ve heard, gas is the only thing that really does much against their tanks, unless somebody climbs on top and tosses a Molotov cocktail down a hatch.”

The farther south they went, the more chewed up the ground became. They passed the hulks of several burned-out British tanks, as well as tin hats hung on rifles stuck bayonet-first into the ground to mark hastily dug graves. Then, not much later, they came on a Lizard tank in the middle of a field.

Had it not been for the men in masks climbing in and out of the monster machine, Goldfarb would have expected to die in the next moments. The Lizard tank was not much bigger than its English foes, but looked more formidable. Its armor was smooth and beautifully sloped, so that it brought to mind the “cars of the future” magazines sometimes hired artists to draw. As for its cannon-“If that’s not a four-inch gun, or maybe a five-, I’m a Lizard,” Goldfarb said. “I wonder if the shell would even notice one of our tanks on the way through.”

“We knocked it out some kind of way,” Stanegate said. “Don’t look like it’s burned-could be they got a mite too much mustard in their sandwiches.” He laughed at his own wit.

“I don’t care why it’s dead. I’m just glad it is.” Goldfarb set his gas mask on his head, made sure the seal was tight. “Time to start using ’em, I’m afraid.” His voice sounded muffled and alien, even to himself.

Fred Stanegate understood him. “Right y’are,” he said, and put on his own mask. “Hate this bloody thing,” he remarked halfway through the process, although without much rancor. When the mask was in place, he added, “Better nor breathing that stinkin’ mustard, now, mind tha.” Goldfarb’s burned leg twinged, perhaps in sympathy.

Off to the north, British field guns opened up again, pounding the Lizard defenses between Brixworth and Scaldwell. “Not going to be much of a surprise, with them hammering away so,” Goldfarb said, after first glancing around to make sure Major Smithers was out of earshot.

“Aye, well, if they don’t give ’em a nice dose o’ gas first off, the buggers’ll be waiting for us with all their nasty guns,” Stanegate said. Goldfarb smiled inside the mask where his companion couldn’t see him: the Yorkshire accent made the last sound likenahsty goons. But however rustic he sounded, that didn’t mean he was wrong.

Smithers’ Ordnance Survey map had shown a country road going northeast to southwest from Scaldwell down to Brixworth. The Lizards’ line ran just behind it. Or rather, the line had run there. Some Lizards still held their posts and fired on the advancing Englishmen, but others had fled the rain of mustard gas and still others lay in the trenches, blistered and choking. Goldfarb hadn’t been worse than moderately terrified by the time they forced their way through the foxholes and razor wire and pushed on.

“By gaw, if it’s this easy the rest o’ the way, we’ll roll right into Northampton, we will,” Fred Stanegate said.

Before Goldfarb could answer, a flight of Lizard warplanes roared low over the battlefield. Mustard gas didn’t bother them; they had their own independent oxygen supplies. They flailed the English with cannons and rockets. Everywhere men were down, dead or screaming. Several tanks sent greasy black pillars of smoke up into the sky. The Lizards on the ground raffled and peppered survivors with small-arms fire.

Digging himself in with his entrenching tool, Goldfarb panted, “I don’t think it’ll be this easy any more.” Digging just as hard beside him, Fred nodded mournfully.

Mutt Daniels huddled inside the Chicago Coliseum, waiting for the place to fall to pieces around him. The Coliseum had been built with the battlemented facade of Richmond’s Libby Prison, which had housed Union prisoners during the War Between the States. Mutt didn’t know how the hell the facade had got to Chicago, but here it was. He did know that, even if he thought of himself as a very mildly reconstructed Johnny Reb, he sure felt as if he were a prisoner in here, too.

Only bits and pieces of that battlemented facade were left; Lizard artillery and bombs had chewed holes in it and in the roof. The destruction didn’t bother Mutt. The wreckage scattered in the interior of the building made it a better place in which to fight. With any luck at all, the Americans could give the Lizards as much grief here as they had in the meat-packing plants off to the southwest. Rumor said some holdouts were still holed up in the ruins of the Swift plant, sniping at any Lizard dumb enough to show his snout inside rifle range.

“How you doing, Lieutenant?” asked Captain Stan Szymanski, Daniels’ new C.O. He couldn’t have been more than half Mutt’s age (these days, nobody seemed more than half Mutt’s age): blond as a Swede, but shorter, stockier, wider-faced, with gray eyes slanted almost like a Jap’s.

“I’m okay, sir,” Mutt answered, which was more or less true. He still didn’t get up and yell “whoopee” at the prospect of sitting on his ass, but he didn’t get much chance to sit on his ass these days, anyhow. Or maybe Szymanski was trying to find out if his new platoon leader was going to be able to stand the strain generally. Mutt said, “Captain, I been in this slat since the git-go. If I ain’t fallen to pieces by now, don’t reckon I’m gonna.”

“Okay, Mutt,” Szymanski said with a nod-yes, that was what he’d been worrying about. “Why do they call you Mutt, anyway?”

Daniels laughed. “Back when I first started playin’ bush-league ball-this woulda been 1904, 1905, somethin’ like that-I had me this ugly little puppy I’d take on the train with me. You take one look at it, only thing you want to say is, ‘What a mutt.’ That’s what everybody said. Pretty soon they were sayin’ it about me instead of the dog, so I been Mutt now goin’ on forty years. If it wasn’t that, I figure they’d’ve called me somethin’ worse. Ballplayers, they’re like that.”

“Oh.” Szymanski shrugged. “Okay. I just wondered.” He’d probably figured there was a fancier story behind it.

“Sir, are we ever gonna be able to hold the Lizards around these parts?” Mutt asked. “Now that they done broke through to the lake-”

“Yeah, things are tough,” the captain said, as profound a statement of the obvious as Daniels had ever heard. “But they don’t have all of Chicago, not by a long shot. This is still the South Side. And if they want all of it, they’re going to have to pay the price. By the time they’re done here, they’ll have paid more than it’s worth.”

“Lord, I hope so,” Daniels said. “We’ve sure paid a hell of a price fightin’ ’em.”

“I know.” Szymanski’s face clouded. “My brother never came out of one of those meat-packing plants, not so far as I know, anyhow. But the idea is that the more they pour down the rathole here, the less they have to play with someplace else.”

“I understand that, sir. But whenyou’re at the bottom of the rathole and they keep pourin’ all that stuff down on top of you, it wears thin after a while, it really does.”

“You can sing that in church,” Szymanski said. “Eventually, though, they’re supposed to run out of stuff, and we’re still making more. The more we make ’em use, the faster that’ll happen.”

Mutt didn’t answer. He’d heard that song a lot of times before. Sometimes he even believed it: the Lizards did have a way of playing it close to the vest now and again, as if they were short of soldiers and ammunition. But you’d end up dead if you counted on them doing that all the time, or even any one time.

Szymanski went on, “Besides, if they’re still stuck in downtown Shytown when winter comes around again, we’ll give ’em a good kick in the ass, same way we did last year.”

“That’d be pretty fine,” Mutt said agreeably. “They don’t like cold weather, and that’s a fact. Course, now that you get right down to it, I don’t much like cold weather, neither. But what worries me is, the Lizards, they’re peculiar, but they ain’t stupid. You can fool ’em once, but you try foolin’ the same bunch again the same way and they’ll hand you your head.”

Captain Szymanski clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You may have something there. I’ll pass it on to Colonel Karl next time I talk with him, see if he wants to bump it up the line. Meanwhile, though-”

“We gotta stay alive. Yeah, I know.”

The Lizards weren’t going to make that easy, not if they could help it. Their artillery opened up; shells landed just west of the Chicago Coliseum. Chunks of masonry crashed down. Mutt huddled in his rubble shelter. So did his comrades. When the shelling slowed, they came out and dragged newly fallen boards and pieces of sheet metal back to their positions, strengthening them.

Mutt liked that. It meant he had a good bunch of veterans in his new platoon. He wondered how his old gang of thugs was getting on without him. He’d miss Dracula Szabo; he’d never known anybody else with such a nose for plunder. Somebody here would have a talent for scrounging, though. Somebody always did.

A Lizard jet shrieked past, not far above the Coliseum’s battered roof. A bomb hit just outside the building. The noise was like the end of the world. For anybody out there, it was the end of the world. More of the nineteenth-century facade crumbled and fell into the street.

Another bomb crashed through the roof and thudded down onto the bricks and boards and broken chairs strewn below. It landed maybe twenty feet from Mutt. He saw it fall. He buried his head against the rough wall of his shelter, knowing it would do no good.

But the explosion that would have thrown and torn and smashed him did not come. The Lizard plane dropped a couple of more bombs a little north of the Chicago Coliseum, close enough to make it shake, but the one inside lay inert where it had fallen.

“Dud!” Mutt shouted in glad relief, and sucked in as wonderful a breath of air as he’d ever enjoyed, even if it did smell like a cross between an outhouse and a forest fire. Then he realized that wasn’t the only possible explanation. “Or else a time bomb,” he added, his voice more subdued.

Captain Szymanski spoke to the company communications man: “Gus, call back to division headquarters. Tell ’em we need a bomb disposal unit fast as they can shag ass up here.”

“Yes, sir.” With a happy grunt, Gus slipped from his shoulders the heavy pack that contained a field telephone and batteries. He cranked the telephone and spoke into it. After a couple of minutes, he told Szymanski, “They’re on their way.” He closed up the phone pack and, sighing, redonned it.

Mutt scrambled to his feet and walked over toward the bomb. It wasn’t bravado: if the stupid thing went off, it would kill him just as dead in his shelter as out in the open. “Don’t touch it!” Captain Szymanski called sharply.

“Touch it? Captain, I may be a damn fool sometimes, but I ain’t crazy. I just want to look at it-I thought it had my name on it.”

“You and me both,” Szymanski said. “Okay, Mutt, go ahead.”

The bomb looked like a bomb: sheet metal casing painted olive drab, a boxy tail section for aerodynamics. If it hadn’t been for the complicated gadget that replaced a normal twirl fuse, and for the wires that ran back from the gadget to flaps attached to the tail section, he would have taken it for an American weapon, not one the Lizards had made at all.

“Goddamn,” Mutt said quietly after he’d walked all the way around the bomb. “That don’t just look like one of ours, itis one of ours, wearin’ a Lizard vest and spats.” He raised his voice: “Captain, I think maybe you want to take a good close look at this thing your own self.”

Szymanski came; nothing was wrong with the size of his balls. As Mutt had, he walked around the bomb. By the time he’d got back to where he’d started from, he looked as bemused as Daniels did. “That’s a U.S. Army Air Force 500-pounder, either that or I’m Queen of the May. What the hell have the Lizards gone and done to it?”

“Damfino,” Mutt answered. “But you’re right, sir, that’s what it is, all right. Seems to me somebody ought to know about this.” He reached under his helmet to scratch above one ear. “Reckon those bomb disposal people’ll be able to say more about it than we can-if they make it here alive, that is.”

They did. There were four of them, all quiet and unhurried men who didn’t look as if anything got on their nerves, If you were nervous when you started out disposing of bombs, odds were you wouldn’t last long enough to get good at it.

Their leader, a first lieutenant in his middle thirties, nodded when he saw the bomb. “Yeah, we’ve run into a fair number of these,” he said. He’d stuck a toothpick in one corner of his mouth, maybe in lieu of a cigarette. “It’s one of ours, but the fixtures there make it nastier than it used to be.” He pointed to the Lizards’ additions at the nose and tail of the bomb. “Some way or other-don’t quite know how-they can guide these things right into a target. You fellas are lucky to be here.”

“We figured that out, thanks,” Szymanski said dryly. “Can you pull its teeth for us?”

The toothpick waggled. “Sir, if we can’t, you won’t be around to complain about it.” The first lieutenant turned around and studied the bomb. With his back to Mutt and Szymanski, he said, “Now that I think about it, we’ve run into too damn many of these. I used to think the Lizards had raided an arsenal or something, but now my guess is that they’re making bombs for themselves-or having us make ’em for them, I mean.”

“I don’t even like to think about it,” Mutt said. “How can you go to a weapons plant, work all day, know the Lizards are going to use whatever you make to blow up other Americans, and then go home at night and look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Beats me,” the bomb disposal man said. He and his companions stooped beside the bomb and got to work. Their talk reminded Mutt of what you heard in movie operating rooms, except they asked one another for wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers instead of scalpels and forceps and sutures. The real doctors and medics in the aid station he’d just escaped had been a gamier crew; they’d sounded more like ballplayers than anybody’s conventional notion of medical men. On the other hand, if they made a mistake on one of their patients, they wouldn’t blow themselves sky high. That might have a way of concentrating the mind on the job at hand.

One of the men grunted soffly. “Here we go, sir,” he said to the first lieutenant. “The fuse assembly in the nose is fouled up eight ways till Sunday. We could use this one for a football and it still wouldn’t go off.”

The first lieutenant’s sigh was long and heartfelt. “Okay, Donnelly. We’ve seen a fair number of those, too.” He turned back to Mutt and Szymanski. Sweat was pouring down his face. He didn’t seem to notice. “I think maybe the guys who work the bomb factory do a little bit of sabotage when they can get away with it. When the Lizards were using all their own ordnance, they hardly ever had duds.”

“So are they all out of theirs?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t know,” the bomb disposal man answered, with a shrug to dramatize it “If it blows up, who can say who made it?”

“Plenty of them blew up outside.” Captain Szymanski’s voice was harsh. “This probably wouldn’t have been the only Made in the U.S.A. bomb in whatever load that airplane carried. They may be sabotaging some, but they sure as hell aren’t sabotaging all of ’em.”

“Sir, that’s the God’s truth,” the first lieutenant said. He and his men set up what looked like a heavy-duty stretcher next to the bomb. With much careful shifting, they loaded it onto the stretcher and carried it away. Their chief said, “Thanks for calling us on this one, sir. Every time we get one of these guiding mechanisms in one piece, it bumps up the odds we’ll figure out how they do what they do, sooner or later.”

Staggering under the weight of weapon and stretcher, the bomb disposal crew hauled their burden out of the Chicago Coliseum. Mutt watched anxiously till they were gone. Yeah, Donnelly had said the bomb was harmless, but high explosive was touchy stuff. If one of them fell and the bomb went thud on the ground, the bad guys might still win.

Szymanski said, “Sabotage one in ten, say, and you hurt the enemy with that one, yeah, but the other nine are still gonna hurt your friends.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt agreed, “but even if you’re just sabotaging one in a hundred, you’re making it so you can live with yourself afterwards. That counts, too.”

“I suppose so,” Szymanski said unwillingly.

Mutt didn’t blame him for sounding dubious. Being able to live with yourself counted, sure. But giving the Lizards a good swift kick in the balls counted for more in his book. Having them bomb American positions with American bombs… it stuck in his craw.

But if they were running out of their own, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Crash!The shell smote Ussmak’s landcruiser in the glacis plate. The driver’s teeth clicked together. The shell did not penetrate. The landcruiser kept rolling forward, toward the village that topped the wooded hill.Crash! Another shell struck, with the same result, or rather lack of result.

“Front!” Nejas said, back in the turret.

“Identified,” Skoob answered. The turret hummed as it traversed, bringing the landcruiser’s main armament to bear on the little gun that was hammering away at them. Through his vision slits, Ussmak saw Tosevites dash about in the deepening twilight as they served the gun. The landcruiser cannon spoke; the heavy machine rocked back on its tracks for an instant from the recoil. At the same time, Skoob called, “On the way!”

He hadn’t finished the sentence when the high-explosive round burst alongside the Tosevite gun. The cannon overturned; the Big Uglies of its crew were flung aside like crumpled papers. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted. “Well placed, Skoob!” Even now, he could still sometimes recapture the feeling of easy, inevitable triumph he’d known when the war on Tosev 3 was newly hatched. Most of the time, he needed ginger to do it, but not always.

Skoob said, “The British here, they don’t have such good antilandcruiser guns. When we were down there fighting the Deutsche, now, and they hit you, you knew you’d been hit.”

“Truth,” Ussmak said. Deutsch antilandcruiser guns could wreck you if they caught you from the side or rear. The British didn’t seem to have anything to match them. Even the British hand-launched antilandcruiser weapons weren’t a match for the rockets the Deutsch infantry used. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the campaign on this Emperor-forsaken island any easier. Ussmak shivered, though the inside of the landcruiser was heated to a temperature he found comfortable. “The British may not have good antilandcruiser guns, but they have other things.”

“Truth,” Nejas and Skoob said in identical unhappy tones. Nejas went on, “That accursed gas-”

He didn’t say any more, or need to. The landcruiser crew was relatively lucky. Their machine shielded them from the risk of actually being splashed with the stuff, which, if it didn’t kill you, would make you wish it had. They’d stuck makeshift filters over all the land-cruiser’s air inlets, too, to minimize the danger of getting it into their lungs. But the landcruiser wasn’t sealed, and minimizing the danger didn’t make it go away.

In a pensive voice, Skoob said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to make me want to be an infantrymale in Britain.”

Now Ussmak and Nejas chorused, “Truth.” Gas casualties among the infantry had been appalling. They moved from place to place in their combat vehicles-a couple of those were advancing up the hill toward the village with Ussmak’s landcruiser-but when they got to where they were going, they had to get out and fight. Getting out was dangerous at any time. Getting out with the gas in the air and clinging to the ground was worse than dangerous.

Machine-gun fire pattered off the landcruiser. At Nejas’ orders, Skoob pumped high-explosive shells into the buildings that sheltered the gunners. The buildings, made largely of timber, began to burn.

“We’ll seize that village,” Nejas declared. “The native name is”-he paused to check his map-“Wargrave, or something like that. The height will give us a position from which we can look down on and shell the river beyond. Tomorrow we advance on the… the”-he checked again-“the Thames.”

“Superior sir, should we consider a night advance?” Skoob asked. “Our vision equipment gives us a great advantage in night fighting.”

“Orders are to stop at Wargrave,” Nejas answered. “Too many casualties have been suffered and machines lost charging through territory still heavily infested with Big Uglies. The gas only makes that worse.”

The shelling had not taken out all the British gunners. Skoob poured more rounds into Wargrave. The mechanized combat vehicles also opened up on the village with their smaller guns. Smoke rose high into the evening sky. Down on the ground, though, muzzle flashes said the British were still resisting. Ussmak sighed. “Looks as if we’ll have to do it the hard way,” he said, wishing for a taste of ginger. The resigned comment might have applied to the Race’s whole campaign on Tosev 3.

“Landcruiser halt,” Nejas said.

“Halting, superior sir.” Ussmak stamped down on the brake pedal. Nejas, he thought approvingly, knew what he was doing. He’d stopped the landcruiser outside the built-up area of Wargrave, but close enough so it could still effectively use not only its cannon but also its machine gun. Firepower counted. Being literally in the middle of action didn’t.

Ussmak had had a couple of commanders who would have charged right into the middle of Wargrave, guns blazing. One of them had got his bravado from a vial of ginger; the other was just an idiot. Both males would have wondered where the satchel charge or bottle full of blazing hydrocarbons or spring-fired hollow-charge bomb had come from… for as long as it left them alive to wonder. Nejas hung back and didn’t have the worry.

The mechanized combat vehicles, unfortunately, did not enjoy such luxury. If they disembarked their infantrymales too far from the fighting, they might as well have stayed back at the base-enemy fire would chew those poor males to pieces. They pulled up right at the edge of the village. The infantrymales skittered out, automatic rifles at the ready. Ussmak wouldn’t have wanted their job for all the ginger on Tosev 3.

One of those males went down. He wasn’t dead; he kept firing. But he didn’t advance with his fellows any more. Then a British male in the wreckage of Wargrave launched one of their antilandcruiser bombs at a combat vehicle. The thing was all but ludicrous against the landcruisers. It couldn’t defeat their frontal armor, and usually wouldn’t penetrate from side or rear, either.

But a mechanized combat vehicle was not a landcruiser, nor was it armored like one. Flames and smoke shot from the turret, and from the door by which the infantrymales had exited. Escape hatches popped open. The three-male crew bailed out. One of them managed to reach the second combat vehicle. The Big Uglies shot the other two on the ground. A moment later, the stricken combat vehicle brewed up.

“Advance, driver,” Nejas said. “We’re going to have to mix it up with them whether we want to or not, I fear. Move forward to the outermost buildings. As we clear the village of enemies, we may be able to go farther.”

“It shall be done.” The landcruiser rumbled forward. Shell casings clattered down from the machine gun to the floor of the fighting compartment.

“What’s that?” Nejas said in alarm. With his limited vision, Ussmak had no idea what it was. Of itself, one eye turret swung up to the hatch above his head. If whatever it was hit the landcruiser, he hoped he could dive out in time. Then Nejas said, “Rest easy, males. It’s only a couple of combat vehicles bringing up fresh troops. These egg-impacted British are too stubborn to know they’re beaten.”

Skoob said, “If we have to send in more males here than we’d planned, so be it. We have to get across the river and link up with our males in the northern pocket.”

And why did they have to do that? Ussmak wondered. The short answer was, because the males in the northern pocket not only weren’t beating the British, they were having a dreadful time staying alive. Neither Nejas nor Skoob seemed to notice the contradictions in what the two of them had just said. They were both solid males, gifted militarily, but they didn’t examine ideas outside their specialties as closely as they did those within them.

Ussmak’s lower jaw fell slightly open in an ironic laugh. Since when had he become a philosopher fit to judge such things? Only alienation from the rest of the Race had let part of his mind drift far enough from his duties to notice such discrepancies. Those who still reckoned themselves altogether part of the great and elaborate social and hierarchical web were undoubtedly better off than he was.

Night had fallen by the time the males either killed or drove out the last British defenders of Wargrave. Even then, small-arms fire kept rattling from the woods below the crest of the hill atop which the village sat.

An aggressive officer would have sent males into those woods to clear out the nuisance. The local commander did nothing of the sort. Ussmak didn’t blame him. Even with infrared gear, Tosevite forests were frightening places at night for males of the Race. The Big Uglies belonged in amongst those trees and bushes, and could move quietly through them. The Race didn’t and couldn’t. A lot of males had ended up dead trying.

“Shall we get out and stretch our legs and wiggle our tailstumps?” Nejas asked. “The Emperor only knows when we’ll see another chance.”

As he’d been trained, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. Skoob said, “It’ll be cold out there, but I’ll come. Even a Big Ugly town is better than looking at my gunsight and autoloader all day.”

“What about you, driver?” Nejas asked.

“No thank you, superior sir,” Ussmak said. “With your permission, I’ll sit tight. I’ve already seen more Big Ugly towns than I ever wanted.”

“You don’t want to hatch out of your nice steel eggshell,” Nejas said, but jokingly, not in a way that would cause offense. “As you will, of course. I can’t say I disagree with you for not caring about Tosevite towns. They’re generally ugly before we smash them up, and uglier afterwards.”

He scrambled out through the cupola. Skoob opened his escape hatch and joined him. Ussmak waited till they both jumped down from the landcruiser. Then he reached under the mat below the control pedals and pulled out his little jar of ginger. He’d been twitchy with need for it all through the fighting, but made himself refrain. Males who went snarling into combat with a head full of the herb were braver than they would have been otherwise-and also stupider. It was a bad combination.

Now, though-He pulled off the stopper to the vial and hissed in dismay. The little bit of brownish powder that poured into the palm of his hand was all he had left. His forked tongue flicked out and lapped it up.

“Ah!” he said. Well-being flowed through him. Fear, loneliness, even cold fell away. He felt proud to be a male of the Race, bringing the benighted Tosevites into the domain of civilization. He thought he could singlehandedly force a crossing of the Thames ahead and effect a junction with the rest of the Race’s males north of London.

With a distinct effort of will, he made himself keep his hands away from the wheel and his foot away from the accelerator. He’d been using ginger a long time now, and knew he wasn’t as omnipotent as he thought he was.

He hadn’t been all that smart before he tasted, though. Had he remembered how low on the herb he was, he could have got out of the landcruiser and found an infantrymale who had more than he could taste at the moment. Now, though, he’d look foolish if he emerged. Worse, he’d look suspicious. Nejas and Skoob both had untainted tongues. They thought he did, too. If they ever found out otherwise, he’d be sent off for punishment, with green stripes painted on his arms.

But if he didn’t find some ginger somewhere, before long his condition would be apparent to them anyhow. He’d be a red-nostriled nervous wreck. Once you started tasting ginger, it got its claw in you and you had to keep doing it.

The exaltation from the herb faded. He sank as low as he had been high. Now the only thing he wanted to do was sit quietly and pretend the world outside the landcruiser didn’t exist. Nejas had had the right of it: he was using the vehicle as an eggshell to separate himself from everything around him. The world couldn’t come in here.

But it did, in the persons of Nejas and Skoob. The landcruiser commander said, “You were wiser than we, driver. Nothing here worth seeing, nothing worth taking. Better we should have stayed inside.”

“We’ll sleep in here, no matter how cramped it is,” Skoob added. “I don’t want to be out in the open if the British start throwing gas at us.”

“No arguments there,” Nejas said, whereupon they did start arguing about who would try to sleep in the turret and who would have the dubious privilege of stretching halfway out next to Ussmak’s reclining driver’s seat. Being the landcruiser commander, Nejas won the argument. The victory proved of dubious value because, among other things, he tried lying down on the spent machine-gun cartridges that littered the floor.

He sat up suddenly, cracking his head on the low ceiling of the driver’s compartment, and hissed in pain. “Help me clean up these miserable things,” he snapped. “You think my hide’s armored in steel and ceramic?” There wasn’t room for anyone to give him a lot of help, but Ussmak opened the hatch above his head. He and Nejas threw the spent cartridges out of the landcruiser. They jingled on the flagstones outside. As soon as most of them were gone, Ussmak dogged the hatch again. As his commander had said, poison gas made sleeping in the open even less attractive than it had been before.

Even for Ussmak, who had the best resting place in the landcruiser, sleeping in it was no bargain, either. He twisted and turned and once almost fell off his seat onto Nejas. Except for feeling elderly, he was glad to see light build up when he peered through his vision slit. Day came early at these latitudes.

Nejas started to sit up again, but thought better of it just in time. He called back to the turret: “Are you awake, Skoob?”

“Superior sir, the question is, ‘Skoob, have you been asleep?’ ” the gunner replied in aggrieved tones. “And the answer is, ‘Yes, but not nearly enough.’ ”

“That holds for all of us,” Nejas said. “Toss down a couple of ration bars, would you?”

“It shall be done.”

The ration bars almost landed on Nejas’ toes. He twisted around so he could pick them up, then handed one to Ussmak. When they were done eating, the commander scrambled back up into the cupola with Skoob and said, “Driver, advance us to the point where we have a good view of the river and that town by it… Henley-on-Thames.” After a moment, he added, “ ‘On’ must mean something like ‘alongside of’ in the local Big Uglies’ language.”

Ussmak cared for the local Big Uglies’ language about as much as he’d cared for his egg tooth after it fell off his snout in earliest hatchlinghood. He started the landcruiser engine. “Superior sir, we’re a little low on hydrogen,” he said as he studied the gauges. “We can operate today, I think, but a supply tanker should have come up last night.”

“I’ll radio Logistics,” Nejas answered. “Maybe they did try to send one, and Tosevite bandits ambushed it behind the line. The Big Uglies are pestilentially good at that kind of thing.”

The landcruiser rumbled forward. Ussmak listened with a certain malicious satisfaction to paving stones breaking under the pressure of the tracks. When Nejas ordered him to halt, he hit the brake.

He leaned forward and peered through the vision slit. It didn’t give him anywhere near the view Nejas had from the turret, but what he saw, he didn’t like. The Big Uglies had spent the night-and who could say how much time before that? — fortifying the slope that led down to the river. Belts of the spiky stuff they used in place of razor wire were everywhere. So were trenches, brown scars on green, plant-covered earth. Ussmak was willing to bet that greenery also concealed cleverly hidden mines.

“We shall begin shelling Henley-on-Thames,” Nejas said.

“Gunner, high explosive.”

“It shall be done,” Skoob said, “but we are also low on high-explosive shells. We used a good many yesterday, and, as with the hydrogen, we got no resupply afterwards.”

Before Skoob began firing, the English down below opened up with their own artillery. Whitish puffs, different from the usual clouds of smoke and dust, rose from the Tosevite shells as they burst. Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “That’s gas!” he exclaimed, with less than the equanimity a landcruiser commander should have displayed.

Nor was Ussmak delighted at having to drive the landcruiser through a thickening curtain of the horrid stuff. The filters that shielded the landcruiser’s air intakes were makeshifts, and he distrusted them for no other reason than that. The Race did not think well of makeshifts. They went wrong too easily. Properly engineered solutions worked right every time. Trusting your life to anything less seemed a dreadful risk to take.

But at least Ussmak and his crewmales enjoyed, if that was the word, some protection against the poison the British spread with such enthusiasm. The poor males in the infantry had next to none. Some males wore masks, patterned either after those the Race used to fight radiation or based on Big Ugly models. But there weren’t nearly enough masks to go around, and the gas also left hideous burns and blisters on bare skin. Ussmak wondered if that was one of the reasons the Tosevites wrapped themselves in cloth.

The landcruiser’s main armament started hammering away, searching for the British guns. Not all the flying rubble came from that cannon’s shells. Radar-guided counterbattery fire also rained down on the sites from which the gas shells had been launched. Low-flying killercraft poured rockets and their own cannon shells into Henley-on-Thames.

“Forward!” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak took his foot off the brake. A moment later, to his surprise, the commander said, “Landcruiser halt.” Halt Ussmak did, as Nejas went on, “We can’t move forward, not against positions like those, without infantry support to keep the Tosevites from wrecking us as we slow down for their egg-addled obstacles.”

“Where are the infantrymales, superior sir?” Ussmak couldn’t see them, but that didn’t prove anything, not with the narrow field of view his vision slits gave. He wasn’t about to unbutton and look around, either, not with gas shells still coming in. “Have they got back into their mechanized combat vehicles?”

“Some of them have,” Nejas said. “They don’t do us much good in there, though, or themselves, either; the combat vehicles will have to slow down for the wire and trenches. But some of the males”-his voice sputtered in indignation-“are running away.”

Ussmak heard that without fully taking it in at first. A few times, especially during the hideous northern-hemisphere winter, Tosevite assaults had forced the Race to fall back. But he slowly realized this was different. These infantrymales weren’t falling back. They were refusing to go forward. He wondered if the like had ever happened in the history of the Race.

Skoob said, “Shall I turn the machine gun on them, superior sir, to remind them of their duty?” His voice showed the same disbelief Ussmak felt.

Nejas hesitated before he answered. That in itself alarmed Ussmak; a commander was supposed to know what to do in any given situation. At last he said, “No, hold fire. The disciplinarians will deal with them. This is their proper function. Hold in place and await orders.”

“It shall be done.” Skoob still sounded doubtful. Again, Ussmak was taken aback. Nejas and Skoob were a long-established unit; for the gunner to doubt the commander was a bad sign.

Orders were a long time coming. When they came, they were to hold in place until the field guns in Henley-on-Thames and the bigger British cannon farther north could be silenced. Aircraft and artillery rained destruction on the town. Ussmak watched that with great satisfaction. All the same, gas shells and conventional artillery kept falling on Wargrave.

Fresh hydrogen eventually reached the landcruiser, but the ammunition resupply vehicle never came. The males of the Race did not move forward, save for a probe by the infantry that the entrenched Big Uglies easily repulsed.

Ussmak wasn’t very happy about where he was. He would have been even less happy, though, he decided, had he been in the northern pocket. That one wasn’t just stalled. It was shrinking.

Atvar paced back and forth. That helped him to think, to some degree. It didn’t mean he wasn’t always staring at the situation map of Britain; one eye always swiveled toward it, no matter how his body was aligned. That kept the pain constant, as if it were festering in several tooth sockets at once.

He hissed in rage and frustration. “Perhaps you were right, Shiplord,” he said to Kirel. “Perhaps even Straha was right, though his egg should have addled before it hatched. We might have done better to deal with the British by means of a nuclear weapon.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, if that be your pleasure, we can still accomplish it,” Kirel said.

“Using nuclear weapons is never my pieasure,” Atvar answered. “And what point to it?”

“Securing the conquest of Britain?” Kirel said.

“The accursed island is so small, it’s scarcely worth having after a couple of these devices detonate on it,” Atvar answered gloomily. “Besides, our losses there have been so dreadful that I fear even keeping pacification forces on it will be more expensive than it’s worth. And besides-” He stopped, unwilling to go on.

Kirel, a reliable subordinate, did it for him: “And besides, now that the British have introduced the use of these vile poisonous gases, every Tosevite empire still in the field against us has begun employing them in large quantities.”

“Yes.” Atvar made the word a hiss of hate. “They were not using them against one another when we came to this miserable iceball of a world. Our analysis leaves no possible doubt as to that point. And yet all their leading empires and not-empires had enormous quantities of these munitions stored and ready for deployment. Now they know we are vulnerable to them, and so bring them out. It seems most unjust.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. “Our historical analysis unit has perhaps uncovered the reason for the anomaly.”

“Seeking rational reasons for anything the Big Uglies do strikes me as an exercise in futility,” Atvar said. “What did the analysis unit deduce?”

“The Big Uglies recently fought another major war, in which poisonous gases played an important part. Apparently, they were so appalled at what the gases did that, when this new war broke out among them, no empire dared to use them first, for fear of retaliation from its foes.”

“One of the few signs of rationality yet detected among the Tosevites,” Atvar said with heavy sarcasm. “I gather this unwillingness to use the poisonous gases did not keep them from producing such gases in limitless quantities.”

“Indeed not,” Kirel said. “No empire trusted its neighbors not to do so, and no empire cared to be without means of retaliation should its neighbors turn the gases against it. And so production and research continued.”

“Research.” Atvar made that into a curse. “The blistering agent the British threw at us is quite bad enough, but this stuff the Deutsche use-Have you seen those reports?”

“I have, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. His tailstump curled downward in gloom. “First a male finds the day going dim around him, then he has difficulty breathing, and then he quietly dies. I am given to understand, though, that there is an injectable antidote to that gas.”

“Yes, and if you inject it thinking you have breathed the gas but are mistaken, it makes you nearly as ill as the gas would without treatment.” Atvar hissed mournfully. “A perfect metaphor for Tosev 3, would you not agree? When we do nothing, the Big Uglies wreck us, and when we take steps against them, that presents problems just as difficult in a different way.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. He pointed to the map. “In aid of which, what are we to do about the northern pocket in Britain? We have not been able to suppress British artillery, and it can reach every spot within the pocket. The closer our males get to London, the more built-up areas they have to traverse, and fighting in built-up areas means heavy losses in males and materiel both.”

“That’s not the worst of it, either,” Atvar said. “Flying transports over Britain gets riskier by the day. Not only do the British seem to keep pulling aircraft out from under flat stones, but the Deutsche in northern France strike at our machines as they fly back and forth to Britain. We have lost several transports, and cannot afford to lose many more.”

“Truth,” Kirel repeated glumly.

“If we have to start using starships instead, and if we start losing starships in significant numbers-” Atvar didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on. If the Race started losing starships in significant numbers, the war against the Big Uglies would be within shouting distance of being lost along with them.

“What then is our course in regard to the northern pocket in Britain, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked.

Atvar hissed again. He heartily wished the northern pocket did not exist. If the British kept pounding on it, it wouldn’t exist much longer. That, however, was not what he’d had in mind as a means for disposing of it. Bitterly, he said, “If only the sweep around London to the west from the southern force hadn’t been halted at the river line, we could have withdrawn the males north of London without undue trouble.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said dutifully. Although he had every right to, he didn’t remind Atvar that ifs like this had no place in military planning.

“Bringing the males out from the north would be feasible,” Atvar said, “but with the heavy transports having such difficulty there-with all manner of fixed-wing aircraft having such difficulty there-we would be compelled to leave behind a great deal of equipment.”

Not until the words had left his mouth did he realize he’d abandoned all hope of salvaging the northern pocket. The battle there was one the Race would lose, and he couldn’t do anything about it except make the defeat less costly.

He hoped Kirel would contradict him. He’d phrased his comment hypothetically; the shiplord might well find reason for optimism where he saw none. But Kirel said, “Exalted Fleetlord, if we stay in the pocket we shall lose not only the equipment but the males as well. We should do our best to deny the materiel to the British, lest it be turned against us.”

Now Atvar said, “Truth.” In a way, acknowledging defeat was liberating. In another way, it was terrifying. The fleetlord said, “If we withdraw from the northern pocket, the political consequences will be unpredictable but surely unfortunate.”

“They shouldn’t be as bad as that, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, his voice soothing. “We will have kept the British from meddling on the main continental mass for some time to come, and other Tosevite empires opposing us can hardly be stimulated to more effort than they are already making.”

“Those were not the consequences to which I was referring,” Atvar answered. “I was thinking of possible developments within the ranks of the shiplords themselves.”

“Ahh,” Kirel said. “Now I see.” He paused thoughtfully. “My view is that, with Straha gone, it will likely be too divisive an issue for any male to raise. His defecting to the Big Uglies has worked to your advantage, because it discredits in advance those who would rebel against your leadership.”

“Yes, I have made a similar calculation,” Atvar said. He carefully did not send Kirel a suspicious look. Straha had also been Kirel’s chief rival for leadership among the shiplords. Now Kirel had no chief rival among them. After only himself, Kirel was supreme. If he took it into his head to claw aside the fleetlord… Kirel hadn’t played that role when he’d had the chance, but then Straha had been the one calling for his head.

Kirel said, “As I mentioned before, we have met some of our goals for the invasion of Britain, if not all of them. We need not be ashamed of our efforts on the island.”

“No,” Atvar agreed. He let his mouth fall open and nodded slightly: a rueful laugh. “Anywhere in the Empire but Tosev 3, partial fulfillment of goals is a matter for shame and reproach. Here, against the Big Uglies, we feel like celebrating whenever we can accomplish that much.”

“More is relative than the behavior of objects at speeds approaching that of light,” Kirel said. “Among ourselves and when dealing with the Rabotevs and Hallessi, planning can take into account all known variables, and almost all variables are known. When we deal with the Big Uglies, almost all variables have indeterminate values.”

“Truth,” Atvar answered sadly. “Sometimes we don’t even know a variable exists until it rises up and bites off the tip of our tailstump. These poisonous gases, for instance: the Tosevites had them in unlimited quantity, but weren’t using them against each other or against us. For all we know, we may have overrun considerable stores of them without noticing-and the Big Uglies would hardly have gone out of their way to point them out to us.”

“There’s a notion, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “We should explore the weapons stocks in empires under our control. That may enable us to retaliate in kind against the Tosevites.”

“See to that,” Atvar said. “We will still be at a disadvantage against them, as their protection technology is ahead of ours”-he opened and closed his hands in embarrassment at the admission-“but having the tool in our kit will prove useful, as you say. Start the investigation today.”

“It shall be done,” Kirel said.

Atvar went on, “Whether or not we come upon stores of these gases, though, the point is that we were unaware the Tosevites even had them until we made the British desperate enough to use them against us.”

“With all too much success,” Kirel said.

“With all too much success,” Atvar agreed. “The Big Uglies care nothing for the long term. If something will help them for a moment, they seize on it. In the long run; their species may well have wrecked itself had we not come along at this particular time.” He hissed a sigh. “But come we did, and now we must make the best of it.”

“The Soviets’ use of the nuclear device was a similar phenomenon, I believe,” Kirel said. “When we press the Tosevites-or some of them, at any rate-they are liable to do astonishing things.”

“Astonishing, yes,” Atvar replied dryly. “To say nothing of appalling. And several of their other empires and not-empires are sure to be working on nuclear weapons for themselves. And if we press hard enough to make them desperate-” He paused.

“But if we don’t, Exalted Fleetlord, how are we to win the war?” Kirel said.

“Planners back on Home never have to worry about dilemmas like that,” Atvar said. “By the Emperor, bow I envy them!”