Upsetting the Balance

10

Ludmila Gorbunova was used to flying over the endless plains of the Ukraine and central Russia. She’d seen little of the great forests of pine and fir and beech and birch that blanketed the more northerly reaches of her country.

Around Pskov, trees dominated, not steppe. The great dark green expanse to the east had been called the forest republic when Soviet partisans used it as their base and stronghold against the Nazis who held the city. Now Russians and Germans both used the woods in their struggle against the Lizards.

The Lizards used them, too. Ludmila was still discovering one major difference between forest and steppe: out on the steppe, despite vigorous Sovietmaskirovka, concealing soldiers and weapons and machines was hard work. Here in the woods, it was second nature.

An aircraft that flew low and slow like her little U-2 biplane was the only sort of machine with much of a chance to look down and see what the enemy was doing. As she buzzed along, she wished theKukuruznik could also fly low and fast. A Lizard helicopter could run her down and shoot her out of the air with no trouble at all, if it chanced to notice her.

She skimmed over a path in the forest. On the path she spied a pair of lorries, pushing north. They were of human manufacture-one a German model, the other an American one probably captured from the Soviets-but where they were and the direction in which they were going declared them to be under Lizard control. And where she’d seen two, there were likely to be two dozen more she hadn’t seen, plus armored personnel carriers and tanks.

Ludmila had heard stories of Red Air Force pilots who’d flown below treetop height right down paths like that, shooting up everything in their sights. People who did things like that got the Hero of the Soviet Union award pinned on their tunics, sometimes by the Great Stalin himself. It was tempting, but…

“I’d only get myself killed,” Ludmila said, as if someone were in theKukuruznik arguing with her. It wasn’t that she was afraid the Lizards would shoot her down; she’d signed up with the risk of getting shot down when she joined the Red Air Force. But she didn’t think the lane was wide enough to let her get the U-2 down it. Tearing the wings off your aircraft by running into a tree was not what they taught you in flight school.

That left her with one choice. She spun the little-but not little enough-biplane through a tight turn and headed back toward Pskov. The Germans had artillery that could pound this position and the area north of it. It wouldn’t be a guaranteed kill, not by any means, but it would make the Lizards unhappy.

Again she wished she could wring a better turn of speed from the Wheatcutter. The sooner she got back to Pskov, the shorter the distance the supply convoy would have traveled and the better the chance for a hit.

The tall stone pile of theKrom and the onion domes of the churches marked the town. The old citadel wasn’t badly damaged, but some of the domes had bites taken out of them and others leaned drunkenly away from the perpendicular. Some churches, along with a great many secular buildings, were in ruins.

Ludmila was a loyal child of the October Revolution, and had no great use for churches. Had the Soviet government knocked them down, she wouldn’t have missed them a bit. But to have them destroyed by invading aliens was something else again. Even the Nazis, albeit for reasons of their own, had usually refrained from wrecking churches.

Instead of using the airstrip to the east of Pskov, as she usually did, Ludmila brought theKukuruznik down in the park in the middle of town, the way she had when she first came to the city. Again, she managed to keep from running over people or livestock. Men came running to get the U-2 under the shelter of friendly trees.

She scrambled out of the aircraft and hurried toward theKrom, whereGeneralleutnant Kurt Chill had his headquarters. Having a Nazi in overall command of the defenses of a Soviet city galled her, but she couldn’t do anything about it, not now. And if Chill didn’t fight hard against the Lizards, it was assuredly his backside, too.

People shouted to her, asking what she’d seen that made her want to land in the middle of Pskov. “I can’t tell you that,” she answered. Some of the Pskovites seemed never to have heard of security. Well, if they hadn’t, she certainly had.

She hurried over to theKrom. No sentries, Soviet or German, stood outside. Nobody wanted to give the Lizards a clue that anything important went on in there. Inside the entrance, a couple of tall Nazi soldiers leered at her. The Germans often found the idea of women in the fighting forces funny.“Was willst du, Liebchen?” one of them asked. His companion, a very rough-looking customer indeed, broke out in giggles.

“Ich will Generalleutnant Chill sofort zu sehen,”Ludmila answered in the iciest German she could muster: “I want to see Lieutenant General Chill immediately.”

“Give me a kiss first,” the guard said, which made his comrade all but wet himself with mirth.

Ludmila drew her Tokarev automatic, pointing it not at the fellow’s head or chest but at his crotch. “Stop wasting my time,dummkopf,” she said sweetly. “If the Lizards get away on account of you, it won’t be my neck that goes into the noose.”

“Bitch,” muttered one of the Germans. “Dyke,” the other said under his breath. But both of them moved aside. Ludmila didn’t put the pistol back in its holster till she got round the corner.

Another German, a captain, sat at a desk in the antechamber outside Lieutenant General Chill’s office. He treated Ludmila like a soldier, but was no more helpful on account of that. “I am sorry, Senior Lieutenant, but he is away at the front,” the German said. “I do not expect him back for several days.”

“I need to have an artillery barrage laid on,” Ludmila said, and explained what she’d seen moving up the forest track from the south. The German captain frowned. “I have no authority to commit artillery to action except in immediate defense of the front,” he said doubtfully. “Using it is dangerous, because Lizard counterbattery fire so often costs us guns and men, neither of which we can afford to lose.”

“I risked my life to get this information and bring it back here,” Ludmila said. “Are you going to sit there and ignore it?” The captain looked too clean and much too well-fed to have seen the front lines lately, no matter where Lieutenant General Chill was.

Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “If the matter is as important as all that, Senior Lieutenant, I suggest you take it to the Englishmen down the hall.” He pointed out the direction. “In the absence of the commander, they have the power to bind and to loose.” He sounded like a man quoting something. If he was, Ludmila didn’t recognize it. He also sounded like a man unhappy about command arrangements. He didn’t need to be happy, though-he just had to obey. Germans were supposed to be good at that.

“Yes, I’ll try them, thank you,” Ludmila said, and hurried out.

All three of the Englishmen were in their map-bedecked office, along with a blond woman in Red Army uniform, a rifle with telescopic sight slung on her back. She was so decorative, Ludmila doubted at first that she had any right to the uniform and sniper’s weapon. A second glance at the woman’s eyes changed her mind. She’d seen enough action herself to recognize others who had done likewise.

One of the Englishmen-Jones-had his hand on her shoulder. She stood close to him, but she was watching the one called Bagnall, the one Ludmila had met in the park when she first came to Pskov. She felt as if she’d walked into something out ofAnna Karenina, not a place where battles got planned.

But Ken Embry, the third Englishman, saw her and said,“Chto- What?” His Russian remained on the rudimentary side. Even so, he attracted the others’ attention to Ludmila. Jones jerked his hand away from the woman’s shoulder as if she’d suddenly become red-hot.

Best, probably, for Ludmila to pretend she hadn’t seen anything. What the Englishmen did in their private lives was their private business, although she wished they hadn’t brought their private lives with them to theKrom. In German interspersed with Russian, Ludmila explained what she’d seen and what she’d wanted. George Bagnall translated her words into English.

“Come to the map,” he said in German when he was done. He pointed to the forests south of Pskov. “Where exactly did you see these lorries, and how long ago?”

She studied the map. It made her slightly nervous; in the Soviet Union, maps were secret things, not to be shown to the generality. She pointed. “It was here, west of this pond. I am sure of it. And it was”-she glanced at the watch strapped to her left wrist-“twenty-three minutes ago. I came in to report as soon as I saw them.”

George Bagnall smiled at her. By Russian standards, his face was long, thin, and bony. He was not, to Ludmila’s way of thinking, a particularly handsome man, but that smile lit up his face. He said, “You did well to note the exact time, and to get back to Pskov so fast.”

After that, he dropped back into English to talk with his comrades. Ludmila, who had no English, at first thought that rude. Then she realized the RAF men had business to do and needed their own language for it. Her irritation faded.

Bagnall returned to the same mixture of German and Russian that Ludmila used: “By the time we can get the guns to open up, the lorries will be almost to the Lizards’ front line-do you see?” He drew their probable track up to the line south of Pskov marked in red ink. Seeing Ludmila’s disappointed expression, he went on, “But the Lizards may not be done unloading them. A few shells might do us some good. Wait here.”

He left the map chamber, returning a few minutes later with a different sort of smile on his face. “Captain Dolger does not approve of us, but he is a good soldier. If he is ordered to do something, it will get done.”

Sure enough, within a couple of minutes field guns off to the north and east of Pskov began hammering away in the short, intense bombardment that seemed best calculated to hit the Lizards. They shifted position before counterbattery fire could wreak full havoc.

And sure enough, Ludmila heard incoming rounds hard on the heels of the last outgoing ones. “I hope they managed to move their cannon,” she said, and then shook her head. “Hoping anything good for the Germans still feels wrong to me.” Saying that in German felt wrong to her, too. She repeated it in Russian.

The woman with the sniping rifle nodded emphatically. In fair Russian of his own, Jones, the youngest Englishman, said, “For us also. Remember, we were at war with the Hitlerites for almost two years before the Soviet Union joined that fight.”

Ludmila did remember. For those almost two years, in the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany could do no wrong. It was dealing blow after blow to the imperialist powers… until it dealt a blow to the Soviet Union that almost wrecked it forever. Ludmila said, “They are our allies against the Lizards. I try to forget everything but that. I try-but it is not easy.”

“No, it is not easy,” George Bagnall said. “Things I’ve seen here, things I saw in France, make me glad we were dropping bombs on Jerry’s head. And yet the Nazis give the Lizards a thin time of it. Very strange.”

Most of that had been in German, but the blond Russian woman understood enough of it to say, “Nobody says the Nazis cannot fight. Or if anyone does say it, it is a lie; we have all seen enough to know better. But they do not think why they fight. Someone tells them what to do, and they do it well. And for what? For Hitlerism!” Her cornflower-blue eyes blazed contempt.

No one argued with her. A couple of minutes later, Captain Dolger came running into the room. His fleshy, handsome face glowed. “Field telephones from the front say our artillery touched off secondary explosions-some of those lorries were carrying shells.” Bagnall had told him what to do, and he’d done it well.

The blonde with the rifle threw her arms around Bagnall and kissed him on the mouth. Captain Dolger coughed; he left the Englishmen’s office as fast as he’d come in. Jerome Jones flushed till he looked like a boiled crayfish. Ludmila turned away, embarrassed. Such behavior by a Soviet woman was uncultured in the extreme.

She expected Bagnall to take all he could get from the shameless sniper. For one thing, men were like that. For another, he was an Englishman, therefore a capitalist, therefore an exploiter. But he broke the kiss as soon as he decently could, and looked as embarrassed about it as Ludmila felt.

She scratched her head. Bagnall wasn’t behaving the way school had taught her Englishmen were supposed to behave. What did that say about her lessons? She didn’t really know, but the more you looked at things, the more complicated they got.

Jens Larssen pedaled wearily into Hanford, Washington. He stopped in the middle of the main street. “God, what a dump,” he muttered. He could see why the physicists back at the Met Lab had been hot for the place. He could hear the murmur and splash of the Columbia as it flowed by next to the town. It was all the river anybody could ask for, and he knew what the Mississippi was like.

Not only that, the place already had a railroad line coming into it from the north: the train station was much the biggest building in town. No tracks came out of Hanford going south; it was the end of the line.In more ways than one, Jens thought. But the railroad line was a point in favor of the place. With it, you could conveniently move stuff in and out. Without it, that wouldn’t have been so easy.

River and railroad: two big pluses. Everything else, as far as Jens could see, was a minus. Hanford couldn’t have held more than a few hundred people. Any major industrial activity here would stand out like a sore thumb. Hanford didn’t have any major industries. Just to make up for it, Hanford didn’t have any minor industries, either. If it suddenly developed some, the Lizards couldn’t help but notice.

Jens looked around. Both the pile and the plant to get the plutonium out of its fuel elements would have to go underground; there were no buildings big enough to conceal them. Could you do that much digging and keep it a secret? He had his doubts.

“It’s too damn little,” he said, as if someone were arguing with him. The only reason Hanford existed was to act as a market town for the nearby farmers. Some of the fields to the north, south, and west were still green; more, thanks to the job the Lizards had done on pumping stations, lay brown and dry under the sun.

Besides the railhead, Hanford’s amenities were of the basic sort: a couple of general stores (one of them now closed), a gas station (also closed), a school (it being summer vacation, Jens couldn’t tell if that was closed or not), and a doctor’s office. The doctor’s office was open; Jens saw a pregnant woman walk into it.

He scratched absently at a flake of peeling skin on his wrist. Back in Ogden, Utah, that doctor-Sharp, that was his name-had said some small-town doc might have some sulfa to give him to get rid of the clap. He’d tried once or twice on his way here, but no sawbones had had any, or been willing to use it on somebody just passing through. As long as he was here, he figured he might as well ask this one, too. If he heard no, he heard no. He’d heard it before.

He walked his bike over in front of the doctor’s office, put down the kickstand with his foot. On second thought, he shook his head and carried the bike upstairs. If a local absconded with it, everyone else would pretend he hadn’t seen a thing. Jens had grown up in a small town. He knew what they were like.

The waiting room was clean and pleasant. All the magazines were more than a year old, but that might have been true even if the Lizards hadn’t come. Behind the desk sat a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman in a gingham dress. If the arrival of an unkempt, rifle-toting, bike-hauling stranger fazed her, she didn’t show it. “Good morning, sir,” she said. “Dr. Henry will be able to see you soon.”

“Okay, thanks.” Jens sat down. He hadn’t paid any attention to the name on the sign outside. As long as it had M.D. after it, that would do. He leafed through aLife with pictures of Germans retreating through the snow of the fierce Russian winter. Worse things than Nazis were loose in the world these days, even if that hadn’t seemed possible in the early days of 1942.

“Uh, sir,” the receptionist asked, “what’s your name?” Larssen gave it, then spelled it for good measure. People always fouled up either his first name or his last one, sometimes both of them.

The door by the receptionist opened. The pregnant woman came out. Except for being big as a blimp, she looked fine. She was smiling, too, so the doc had probably told her she was fine.

A woman a few years younger than the receptionist poked her head out the door. “Come in, Mr. uh, Larssen,” she said. She wore a frayed but clean white coat and had a stethoscope slung round her neck.

Jens went into the room to which she waved him. She weighed him, stuck a blood-pressure cuff on his arm, and asked him what his trouble was. He felt his ears get hot. “I’d sooner talk about that with the doctor,” he mumbled.

She raised an eyebrow. She had a long, rather horsey face, and wore her dark hair pulled back from it and caught behind in a short ponytail. “Iam the doctor,” she said. “I’m Marjorie Henry. Did you think I was the nurse?” By the way she asked the question, a lot of people over a lot of years had thought she was the nurse.

“Oh,” Jens said, embarrassed now for a different reason. “I beg your pardon.” That new embarrassment was piled on top of the old one, which hadn’t gone away. How was he supposed to tell a woman, even a woman doctor, he had the clap? He wished to Jesus he’d read the sign out front. Gonorrhea wouldn’t kill you, and he could have looked for a different doctor to do something about it.

“What seems to be the trouble?” Dr. Henry repeated. When Larssen didn’t answer, that eyebrow went up again. “I assure you, Mr. Larssen, whatever it is, I’ve probably seen it and dealt with it before. And if I haven’t seen it before, I’ll just send you on your way, because with things as they are I won’t be able to do anything about it anyhow.”

She had a no-nonsense attitude Jens liked. That made things easier, but not enough. “I, uh, that is, well, I-” He gave up. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t make himself say it.

Dr. Henry got up and shut the door to her office. “There. Now Beulah can’t hear,” she said. “Mr. Larssen, am I to infer from this hemming and hawing that you are suffering from a venereal disease?” He gulped and nodded. She nodded, too, briskly. “Very good. Do you know which disease you are suffering from?”

“Gonorrhea,” he whispered, looking down at his Army boots. Of all the words he’d never imagined saying to a woman, that one was high on the list. Gathering courage, he went on, “I’ve, uh, heard that sulfa can cure it, but no doc I’ve talked to has had any to spare.”

“No one has anything to spare any more,” she said. “But you’re lucky here. Just before the Lizards came, I received a large shipment of sulfanilamide. I expect I can spare you a few grams. Believe me, actually being able to attack germs rather than just defending against them is quite an enjoyable sensation.”

“You really will give me some sulfa?” he said, happy and disbelieving at the same time. “That’s great!” His opinion of Hanford underwent a quick 180-degree shift.Great town, friendly people, he thought.

Dr. Henry unlocked a drawer full of medications. As she’d said, she had several large jars of sulfanilamide tablets in there. The tablets were small and yellowish-white. She said, “Take three of these five times a day your first day with them, four times a day the second day, three times a day the third day, and twice a day after that until you’ve taken them all. Do you have something to carry them in? I have plenty of pills, but I’m desperately short on jars and bottles and vials.”

“Here, I’ve got a spare sock,” he said, digging it out of his pack. Dr. Henry started to laugh, but she filled the sock full of pills. There were an awful lot of them. Larssen didn’t care. He would have swallowed a bowling ball if he could have got rid of the clap that way. When the doctor was done counting pills, he asked her, “What do I owe you?”

She pursed her lips. “Mr. Larssen, these days you can’t really buy medicine for money. You can still buy other things, though, so money has some use… A fair price, I’d say, would be about two hundred dollars. If you don’t have that, and you probably don’t-”

Jens reached into a hip pocket and pulled out a roll of bills fat enough to choke a horse. Dr. Henry’s eyes widened as he started peeling off twenties. “Here you go,” he said. “You may just be surprised about medicine, too.”

“Really?” she said. “Who are you, anyway?”

Who was that masked man?ran through his head. It was a fair question, though. People who looked like unshaven bums didn’t often go around with enough loot to make them seem like apprentice John Dillingers. And people who did go around with that kind of loot probably weren’t in the habit of dropping in on small-town doctors to get their social diseases treated.

Instead of answering in words, he took out the fancy letter with which General Groves had equipped him and handed it to her. She carefully read it through, gave it back to him. “Where are you going, Mr. no, Dr. Larssen, on this important government mission of yours?” she asked. She didn’t add,And where did you pick up the clap along the way? — just as well, too, since he’d picked it up twice.

He grinned at her. “As a matter of fact, I was coming here. Now I have to get my bicycle out of your waiting room and head on back to make my report.”

“You were coming here? To Hanford?” Marjorie Henry burst out laughing. “Excuse me, Dr. Larssen, but what on earth does Hanford have that you couldn’t get ten times as much of somewhere-anywhere-else?”

“Water. Space. Privacy,” he answered. Those were absolutely the only things Hanford had going for it, with the possible exception of Dr. Henry, but Larssen had already changed his mind about the dreadful review he’d first thought he would give to the place.

“Yes, we have those things,” Dr. Henry admitted. “Why are they important enough for the government to send someone out looking for them?”

“I’m sorry; I really can’t tell you that.” Jens started to regret pulling out the letter. He said, “Please don’t spread it around, either. In fact, I’d be grateful if you just told Beulah-did I get her name right? — I won the money in a poker game or something like that.”

“All right,” she said. “I can do that. You can’t afford to gossip as a small-town doctor, anyway. If you do, you lose all your patients after about the first week. I will ask one question, though: are you going to put a hospital in here? You may be Dr. Larssen, but I don’t think you’re an M.D.”

“I’m not, and no, that’s not what’s planned,” Jens said, and let it go at that. Telling her what kind of doctorate he had might have told her other things, too, things she didn’t need to know. Now that he was here, security seemed to matter again. He hadn’t worried much about it while he was on the road.

Dr. Henry was visibly disappointed, but didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe she’d really meant what she said about not gossiping. She stuck out her hand and shook his, man-fashion. “Good luck to you,” she said. “I hope the sulfanilamide tablets do as well for you as they commonly do. I also hope you won’t need such medications again.” Before he could decide if that was patronizing, or get mad about it if it was, she went on, “Will we see you again in Hanford, then?”

“You may very well,” he answered. That didn’t seem to make her angry. In spite of her jab, she was a doctor, and didn’t think of gonorrhea as the end of the world. He nodded to her, opened the door, and walked down the hall to the waiting room.

Dr. Henry called after him, “Mr. Larssen has paid me for the visit, Beulah.” Jens nodded again, this time to himself. If she remembered to call him Mr. Larssen in public, she would probably remember not to talk about his letter. He could hope so, anyhow.

In the waiting room sat another pregnant woman, this one less rotund than the one who’d preceded Larssen, and a farmer with a hand wrapped in a blood-soaked rag. They both gave Jens a curious look as he recovered his bicycle. Beulah said, “Go on in, George. The doctor will clean that out and sew it up for you.”

“She got any o’ that tetanus stuff left?” George asked as he rose from his chair.

Jens didn’t find out whether or not Dr. Henry had antitetanus serum. He walked out of her office, lugging the bicycle. Sure enough, the sign outside gave her name in good-sized letters; he just hadn’t noticed. If he had, he wouldn’t have gone in, and he wouldn’t have got the sulfa tablets. Sometimes ignorance worked out pretty well.

He swung onto the bike and began to pedal, southbound now. Dr. Henry was also the first woman he’d met in a long time who hadn’t screwed him, one way or another. She knew what her job was and she went out and did it without any fuss or feathers.

“If she’d been waiting for me, she’d havewaited, by Jesus,” Jens said as he rolled out of Hanford. “She wouldn’t have fallen into bed with some lousy ballplayer.” When he got back to Denver, he’d have some choice things to say to Barbara, and if Sam Yeager didn’t like it, well, there were ways to deal with Sam Yeager, and with Barbara, too.

He reached around behind his back and patted the wooden stock of his Springfield. Then he bent low over the bicycle handlebars and started pumping hard. Colorado was still a long way away, but he could hardly wait to get back.

Lugging a heavy picnic basket uphill on a hiking trail in Arkansas summer wasn’t Sam Yeager’s idea of fun. But getting away from the Army and Navy General Hospital for a while-to say nothing of getting away from the Lizards-was worth some discomfort. And he wasn’t about to let Barbara carry the picnic basket, not when her belly was starting to bulge.

She glanced over at him. “You’re red as a beet, Sam,” she said. “Really, nothing will happen if I take that for a few minutes. Just because I’m expecting doesn’t mean I’m made out of cut glass. I won’t break.”

“No,” Yeager answered stubbornly. “I’m all right.” The path rounded a corner. The pines to either side opened out onto a grassy meadow. “Besides,” he went on with a grin not altogether free of relief, “this looks like a perfect spot.”

“Why, so it does,” Barbara said. At first he thought that was hearty agreement. Then, when he listened to it again in his mind, he suspected she would have agreed had the meadow been a dismal swamp. She was ready to stop walking, and she was ready to have him stop toting that basket.

The meadow wasn’t so closely trimmed as it might have been had the federal government not had more urgent things to worry about. Long grass didn’t bother Yeager; he’d played in outfields where it wasn’t a whole lot shorter. He set down the basket, flipped open the lid, pulled out a blanket, and spread it on the ground. As soon as Barbara sat down on it, he did, too.

Now that the hauling was done, the picnic basket became her responsibility. She reached in and got out ham sandwiches wrapped in cloth napkins from the hospital-waxed paper was a thing of the past. The bread was homemade and sliced by hand; the ham came from a Hot Springs razorback; the mustard had never seen the inside of a factory. It might have been the best sandwich Sam had ever eaten. After it came hard-boiled eggs and a peach pie that gave the ham sandwich a run for its money.

The only rough spot in the road was the beer. Several people in Hot Springs were brewing, but what they turned out didn’t stack up too well against store-bought brands. It wasn’t cold, either. But Sam could drink it, and he did.

When he was through, he lay back on the blanket with a sigh of contentment. “I wish I had me a cigarette,” he said. “Otherwise, the world looks like a pretty fine place right now.” Barbara didn’t answer. He glanced over to her. She hadn’t done justice to either that magnificent sandwich or the peach pie. “Come on,” he told her. “You’re eating for two.”

“I know,” she said. “Sometimes I still have trouble keeping down food for one, though.” She looked a trifle green. Defensively, she added, “It’s better than it was a couple of months ago. Then I thought having a baby meant starving to death-or rather, eating something and then tossing it up right away. Thank heaven I’m not doing that any more.”

“You said it,” he answered. “Well, I’m not going to agitate you about it, not now. It’s too nice a day-now that that picnic basket’s sitting here on the blanket.” He consoled himself: “It’s downhill on the way back-and the basket’ll be lighter, too.”

A lazy breeze drifted through the pines, filling the meadow with their spicy scent. High overhead, a hawk circled. Blue larkspur and violets, great blue sage and purple cone splashed the rainbow here and there across the green grass. Bees buzzed from one flower to another. Flies snacked on the remains of the feast, and on the picnickers.

Barbara let out a squeak. Sam jumped; he’d been lulled by the peaceful surroundings-the most peace he’d known in quite a while. “What’s the matter?” he asked. He reached into the pocket of his chinos. If peace dissolved, as it had a way of doing, he was armed with nothing better than a pocketknife.

But Barbara pointed to the blanket and said, “A little green lizard just ran across there. I didn’t see it till it jumped out of the grass. Now it’s gone again.”

“I know the ones you mean,” Sam said, relaxing. “They can change colors-sometimes they’re brown instead of green. People around here call ’em chameleons on account of that, but I don’t think they are, not really. They don’t have the funny eyes real chameleons do, the ones that go every which way like Lizards’ eye turrets.”

Barbara sniffed. “I was looking for sympathy, not herpetology,” she said, but she was laughing while she said it. Then everything but concentration drained from her face. Her face was turned toward Sam, but she was looking inward. “The baby’s moving,” she murmured. Her eyes got wide. “Moving, heck-he’s kicking like nobody’s business. Come here, Sam. You should be able to feel this.”

He slid across the blanket toward her. She pulled the shirttail of her thin white cotton blouse out from the waistband of her pleated skirt. He set his hand on her belly, just below her navel. When she had clothes on, you couldn’t see she was pregnant, or not, and be sure, but you could feel the mound that had begun to rise there. Her flesh was warm and beaded with sweat from the sticky day.

“He’s stopped,” Barbara said, disappointed. “No, wait-did you feel that?”

“I sure did,” Yeager said. Something had-fluttered-under his palm. He’d felt it a few times before, but it never failed to awe him. He closed his hand into a fist, tapped gently on her belly. “Hello? Anybody home?”

Barbara made her voice high and squeaky: “I’m sorry, I’m not ready to come out yet.”

They both laughed. Somewhere back in the forest, a wood thrush trilled. But for the droning of the bees, that was the only sound. The two of them might have had the national park to themselves. Lazily, Sam slid his hand up under the blouse to cup her left breast through the fabric of her brassiere-gently, because she was still often sensitive.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Barbara said. She looked around to see who might be watching. No one was. No one, probably, was within a mile of them.

“I think-I hope-I’m getting ready to make love to my wife,” he answered. “How about that?” He pulled the blouse all the way out of her skirt, then bent down to kiss the spot where his hand had rested to feel the baby move.

“How about that?” she said softly. She reached around to the back of her neck. Through endless practice, women learn to work buttons behind them as smoothly as men do those they can see. She pulled the blouse up and over her head.

Sam unhooked her bra and tossed it on the blanket. Her breasts were fuller than they had been, her nipples larger and darker. He lowered his head to one of them. Barbara sighed. Her head lolled back; her breasts were sensitive to more than pain these days.

Presently he got out of his own clothes. In weather like this, bare skin felt best anyhow. Barbara was still wearing her skirt. He slid his hand under it, peeled down her panties, and tossed them on top of the bra Then his hand returned. When he kissed her at the same time, she set one hand on the back of his head and pulled him to her. Her other hand toyed with him.

After a couple of minutes of that, he couldn’t stand to wait any more. He started to hike up her skirt, but she said, “No. Take it off me,” in such urgent tones that he quickly did as she asked. Sometimes being smart didn’t amount to anything more than knowing when not to ask questions.

They both glistened with sweat when they were through; their skins slid greasily across each other. Barbara dressed in what seemed like no time flat. “Hurry up!” she hissed to Sam when she saw he wasn’t in quite such a rush.

He looked down at his still-bare self and shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and sped up. As he buttoned his shirt and tucked it into his trousers, he went on, “I guess I’ve spent so much time in the buff in locker rooms and things, I don’t much worry about getting caught that way.”

“All well and good,” Barbara answered, “but getting caught naked with me is different from getting caught naked with a bunch of baseball players-or at least I hope it is.”

“You better believe it,” he said, and got a chuckle out of her. He folded up the blanket and stowed it inside the picnic basket. The napkins that had wrapped the sandwiches went in there, too. So did the empty bottles of beer, and even their cork-sealed lids. You couldn’t afford to waste anything, not with the war going the way it was. Even so, the picnic basket had been a good deal heavier on the way up the trail.

They were almost out of Hot Springs National Park when Barbara said in a small voice, “I’m sorry I barked at you back there.” Sam raised a questioning eyebrow. Looking down at the ground, Barbara went on, “I mean about hiking up my skirt. I remembered a time when-” She didn’t go on.

Yeager kicked at the dirt. What she probably meant was that she remembered a time when Jens Larssen had hiked up her skirt. If she hadn’t thought Jens was dead, she never would have ended up with him. He knew that damn well. After a few seconds-maybe a couple of seconds too long-he said, “Don’t worry about it. Nobody here but the two of us now. That’s what counts.” With a laugh, he set his hand on her belly again. “Nobody here but the three of us, I mean.”

Barbara nodded. They walked on.That’s what reallycounts, Sam thought. If she hadn’t been pregnant, dollars to doughnuts she would have gone back to Larssen when she found out he was alive. Yeager still marveled that she hadn’t. You play half your life in the minor league-and most of that in the low minors, to boot-you get used to winding up on the short end of the stick. Winning a big one like having the woman you’ve fallen in love with pick you instead of the other guy-that was pretty special.

When they rounded the last corner and came into sight of the Army and Navy General Hospital, Barbara slipped her hand into his. He squeezed it gratefully. Every once in a while, he wondered whether she regretted the choice she’d made. That was another question he was smart enough never, ever to ask.

A horse-drawn wagon pulled up in front of the two towers of the hospital building just as he and Barbara got to the entrance. A GI-even if the fellow was in civvies, Yeager knew one when he saw one-took a gadget, a Lizardy-looking gadget, from the bed of the wagon and started to carry it in.

“What the devil you got there?” Yeager asked him. The thing, whatever it was, was cylindrical, maybe a foot long and three or four inches wide, with a glittering lens at one end and some wires trailing off the other.

“Bomb guider,” the man answered, which left Sam unenlightened. The fellow went on, “We took it from a Lizard dude up in Chicago, figured we’d bring it down here to get the straight skinny on what it does and how it does it. We’ve got several up there, and we can’t make ’em work worth a damn.” He pointed at Yeager. “You talk Lizard talk?”

“Matter of fact, I do, not too bad,” Yeager answered.

“Okay. I figured a lot of guys down here would,” the GI said. “You know whatskelkwank means? That’s what the Lizard POWs say when they talk about this stupid thing, and nobody up north can make it make sense.”

“Skelkwank?”Yeager echoed. “Yeah, that’s a word I’ve run into.” He was damn glad it was, too. Saying you were an expert and then showing you weren’t got old fast. “It’s something to do with light-I’m not sure exactly what, and I’m not sure anybody else human is, either. I’ve heard Lizards sayskelkwank when they’re talking about rangefinders, things like that.”

“That helps some,” the fellow said, nodding. “How’sskelkwank light different than any other kind, though?”

“There you’ve got me,” Sam admitted. “Tell you what-bring that thing inside and we’ll round up a Lizard or two and ask ’em some questions. They’re pretty good about giving straight answers. As soon as they get captured, they figure we’re their superiors now, and they have to obey us. They’re not as ornery as people, you know what I mean?”

“Once they’re caught, they’re not, maybe,” the man with theskelkwank device said. “Long as they’re still carrying guns, they’re no fun at all.”

Sam gave an emphatic cough to show he agreed with that. The other fellow understood and nodded. Barbara said, “Here, Sam, you’re working again. Give me the picnic basket. I’ll take care of it.”

“Okay, honey.” Sam held the door open for her and for the soldier with the Lizard gadget, then followed them into the lobby of the hospital building. He spotted Ristin there, talking with one of the human doctors. Ristin waved to him, a human gesture he’d picked up. Sam waved back, and then waved him over.

Ristin came up, gaudy in his American-flag style “official” POW body paint. “Hello, superior sir,” he said in his hissing English. “You need me?”

“Sure do, pal” Yeager pointed to the device the other man held. “Tell me about that thing, will you?”

Ristin turned one eye turret toward it. “That? That is askelkwank sight, I think maybe from a bomb. Artillery shells use a smaller model.Skelkwank in your language is… is-” He paused and fluttered his lingers, a Lizardy way of showing frustration. “I think your language has not this word. Yep, that is what! think.”

The fellow with theskelkwank sight snorted in amusement. “First time I ever heard a Lizard go, ‘Yep.’ ”

Yeager kicked at the carpet. “He got that from me,” he said, mildly embarrassed. “I’m the guy he learned English from, and I say it. Made me laugh, too, first time I heard it from him” He turned back to Ristin. “Okay, we don’t have a word for it.Skelkwank has to do with light, right? What makesskelkwank light special?”

“Why, it comes from aftaskelkwank, of course,” Ristin said. Tackingfta- onto the front of a word in Lizard talk was about like tacking-er onto the back of one in English. Aftaskelkwank was something that turned lightskelkwank askelkwanker, in other words. The only trouble was, that didn’t help much withskelkwank still undefined.

“Of course,” Yeager said with a sigh. “What does theftaskelkwank do with the light to change it from regular toskelkwank?”

“It makes the light-” Ristin used another Lizard word.

Sam turned to the fellow with the gadget. “I’ve heard that term before, too. It means something like ‘coherent.’ I don’t know what that means here, though.”

“Coherent, yep.” Ristin liked learning new English words. “Most light, ordinary light, is of waves of all different lengths, photons-is right word? — of all different energies. Coherent light has only one length of wave, only one energy. Is all exact same color, you could say.”

“So if I put red cellophane on top of my flashlight lens, I’d have coherent light?” Sam asked, trying to figure out what the Lizard meant.

“Nep. I mean, nope.” Ristin’s mouth fell open: he was laughing at himself. “Not all photons of exact same energy, only close. Not all going in exact same direction. This is what coherent means.”

The GI with the Lizardskelkwank device said, “Okay, howdo you get this, uh, coherent light?”

“Take rod made of right kind of crystal,” Ristin answered. “Grind ends very, very flat, put on coating like mirror. Pump energy into the crystal. Coherent light will come out. Is one way. Are others.”

For all the sense he made, he might as well have suddenly started speaking Tibetan. Yeager had seen that happen before when the Lizards talked about goodies they had and people didn’t. He said, “Never mind how. What can you do witha ftaskelkwank once you’ve got it?”

“Aim it at, say, one of your landcruisers-no, tanks, you say.Skelkwank sight here sees that coherent light reflected, guides rocket or bomb straight to it. This is why we do not miss much when we use these sights.”

The soldier stuck the sight under Ristin’s snout. “How does it see the coherent light and not any other kind?”

“How?” Ristin turned one eye on the sight, the other on the soldier. He started to answer, spluttered, stopped, started over, stopped again. “I do not know how it does this. I only know that it does this.”

“He’s just a dogface like me,” Yeager said, “or a dogface like I used to be-I’ve got three stripes when I’m not in civvies. You want more than that, friend, we’ve got a couple of Lizard technicians down here who’ll talk as long as you’ll listen.”

The fellow with the sight stared at Sam. “You got this much out of an ordinary Lizard soldier? Holy Jesus, Sergeant, up north they’ve been beating around the bush with technicians who haven’t said as much in weeks as I just got in ten minutes here. You’re doing a hell of a job.”

“Thanks very much,” Sam said. “Here, let me take you over to Major Houlihan. He’ll be able to fix you up with the Lizards who can tell you the most.” He patted Ristin on his scaly shoulder. “Thanks for helping us out.”

“It is for me a pleasure, superior sir,” Ristin said.

Yeager was still grinning when he got upstairs. He told the story to Barbara, who listened while he burbled on. When he was done, she said, “Why should you be so surprised when somebody tells you you’re good at what you do?”

“Because it’s not anything like something I imagined I could be good at, and because I don’t have any education to speak of-you know that, honey-and because it’s important to the country,” he answered. “Suppose you got into riveting some kind of way, and after a little while on the job you riveted more wings onto B-17s than anybody else at the plant, even people who’ve been riveting for twenty years. Wouldn’t you be surprised about that?”

“But Sam, nobody’s been talking with the Lizards for twenty years,” Barbara reminded him. “You have more experience at that than just about anyone else here. And you may not have thought you’d be good at it, but by now you should have seen that you are.” She gave him the kind of appraising look that always made him nervous, lest she see less than she wanted. “Isn’t that what you’d call bush-league thinking, thinking you’re not good enough for the big time?”

He stared at her. “What are you doing using baseball talk on me?”

“I’m married to you, remember?” she answered, sticking her tongue out at him. “Don’t you think I’d look for some way to get ideas through your thick head?”

Sam walked over and gave her a big kiss. “I’m a heck of a lucky guy, you know that? When I got you, I wasn’t thinking bush league at all, not even a little bit.”

“That’s good,” she said. “We keep on like this for another thirty or forty years and we’ll have something pretty fine.” He nodded. She pulled back a little as his beard rasped her cheek. That, unfortunately, reminded him how unlikely they were to live another thirty or forty years, or to be free if they did live so long.

The pitching deck of a ship in the Baltic did not strike Vyacheslav Molotov as the ideal locale on which to hold diplomatic negotiations. Stalin, however, had not asked his opinion, merely sent him forth.

Being aboard ship had one advantage: it meant he could avoid flying, an experience he heartily loathed. Molotov watched the fishing vessel approach. It flew a Danish flag, white cross on red. His own ship sported the red, gold, and green ensign of Lithuania, even though that unhappy land had first been incorporated into the USSR and then overrun by the Nazis. But the Lizards were more likely to shoot at vessels displaying German and Soviet flags than those of small, weak nations.

A signal light blinked across the water from the fishing boat. “Comrade Foreign Minister, it is indeed the vessel of the German foreign minister,” the captain said. “They ask permission to come alongside.”

“I am ready to meet with von Ribbentrop,” Molotov said-not eager, but ready. “As for matters of shiphandling, that is why you are here, is it not?”

“Yes, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” The captain met icy sarcasm with wooden obedience. “I shall have them convey the foreign minister to this vessel.”

“You had better,” Molotov answered. “Anyone who thinks I am going to board that-scow-is sadly mistaken.” The Soviet ship in Lithuanian colors was a rust-bucket freighter. Next to the fishing boat now sidling up to it, it seemed a decadent capitalist luxury liner by comparison. A strong odor of stale herring made Molotov wrinkle his nose-or perhaps, he thought, it was only Ribbentrop and his Nazi policies he was smelling.

A couple of sailors let down a rope ladder to the deck of the fishing boat. The German foreign minister scrambled up to the Soviet ship like a monkey, closely followed by his interpreter, who rather resembled one. Molotov’s own interpreter appeared at his elbow. Each side guarded itself against twisted meaning from the other.

Ribbentrop turned his complacent pop-eyed face, marbled with fat like expensive beef, toward the Lithuanian flag. Half sketching a salute to that banner of a country which no longer existed, he said, “I honor the brave Lithuanian people.”

Molotov was more than a little surprised his opposite number remembered that flag represented Lithuania rather than Estonia or Latvia. He was also coldly furious, though he kept his face and voice expressionless as he replied, “If you honor them so much, why did Germany include Lithuania in the territory designated as a Soviet sphere of influence in the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, which you helped negotiate? You do recall that clause, I trust?”

Ribbentrop coughed and spluttered and turned a mottled shade of red. Thanks to Hitler’s favor, he could bluster his way through the Nazi hierarchy, but that meant nothing to Molotov. “Well, let us speak of the present and not of the past,” Ribbentrop said with the air of a man making a great concession.

“You would have been well-advised to do that from the beginning,” Molotov said.

“Do not take that tone with me,” Ribbentrop snapped, the bluster returning to his voice. What was the old saying? — The German was either at your throat or at your feet.Much truth there-no middle ground. The foreign minister went on, “Just because you have managed to set off one explosive-metal bomb, you should not count yourselves little tin gods. We Germans are nearly to the point of being able to do that as well, and we are also deploying other new weapons in the fight against the Lizards.”

“Your nerve gases, you mean,” Molotov said. Reluctantly, Ribbentrop nodded. Molotov remarked, “You Germans seem as reluctant to speak of your successes gassing Lizards as you were of your earlier successes gassing Jews.”

The eyes of Molotov’s interpreter slid to him for a moment. Maybe he shaded the translation, for Ribbentrop’s man murmured into his principal’s ear afterwards. Ribbentrop said, “I am given to understand that the chemical weapon bureau of the Red Army has made inquiries as to the formula for these gases-both kinds.”

Molotov changed the subject, the closest he would come to acknowledging the hit: “Let us detail the ways in which our two governments can cooperate in our common struggle against the imperialist aggressors.” Stalin was nervous about the Germans’ poison gas. Nuclear bombs, as yet, were too bulky to fit into any rocket mere humans could build. The same did not hold true for gas. Only the stretch of Lizard territory in what had been Poland kept the soil of the Soviet Union from being vulnerable to German rockets loaded with invisible death.

Ribbentrop said, “This is why we were to meet here in this way. The rudeness that has gone on is distracting.” He seemed blithely unaware he had begun the rudeness himself. That probably was no affectation, either. The Nazis had a remarkable knack for ignoring their own flaws.

“Let us try to be polite to each other for the rest of this meeting, then.” Molotov was not sure that was possible, but he would make the effort. “Since theFuhrer requested this meeting of General Secretary Stalin, I presume you will enlighten me as to what he intended to accomplish by it.”

Ribbentrop gave a fishy stare, as if suspecting sarcasm. Molotov doubted he would recognize it till-or perhaps even after-it chewed out the seat of his pants. The German foreign minister said, “Indeed yes. TheFuhrer wishes to discuss with you the possibilities of coordinating our future use of explosive-metal bombs against the Lizards.”

“Does he?” Molotov had a good reason to stall for time: having nearly exhausted its store of explosive metal with its first blast, the Soviet Union, despite frantic work, was nowhere near ready to loose another one. Hearing that the Nazis were close enough to having a weapon of their own to want to talk with the USSR about how best to use it was disquieting, to say the least.

But Ribbentrop nodded, his pop eyes bulging like a netted bream’s. “That is his purpose, yes. Between these explosive-metal bombs and our poison gas, we are in a position to make this world a very unpleasant place for the invaders.”

“And for ourselves,” Molotov said. “The last time I discussed with Hitler the use of explosive-metal bombs, his principal aim was to level Poland with them, and to use the poisons that spread from them to wreck the Soviet Union as well. To this we could not possibly agree. I hope also that your engineers and scientists are more careful than they were earlier at producing explosive metal without wrecking themselves in the process.”

He wondered if Ribbentrop would resent any of that. It sounded sardonic, but every word of it was true. The German foreign minister said, “Production problems seem well on their way to solution.”

“That is good news,” Molotov lied.

“Is it not?” Ribbentrop agreed, not noticing the lie at all.Like a fat puppy, Molotov thought scornfully.And then he wonders why he gets kicked. Ribbentrop went on, “We were fortunate when the Lizards diverted forces from their offensive against us to assail England. That let us stop them at the Rhine. They had come uncomfortably close to our research facilities.”

“How fortunate for you that they were halted,” Molotov agreed tonelessly, if he’d been Himmler, he would have had Ribbentrop’s interpreter reporting back to him. And, if he’d been Himmler, he’d have had some sharp things to say to Ribbentrop about talking too much. Molotov knew better than to reveal, even in the most general terms, where the Soviet nuclear weapons project was based.

“Yes, wasn’t it?” Ribbentrop said without a shred of guile. “TheFuhrer still is of the opinion that punishing the Lizards and the Jews in Poland is the best strategic course to take. It would open up that blocked passage between Germany and the Soviet Union and permit direct communications between our two great countries once more. This could be vital in carrying on the war.”

“The war against whom?” Molotov asked. “General Secretary Stalin views the Lizard presence in Poland, at least for the time being, as a useful buffer between us. If we do not touch, we cannot fight.”And you cannot resupply your troops inside the Soviet Union. As they exhaust their stores, they become mare and more dependent on us-and vulnerable to us.

Ribbentrop looked so innocent, Molotov expected a halo to spring into being above his head at any moment. “TheReich has no intention of continuing its former campaign against the Soviet Union. Circumstances have changed.”

“Circumstances changed, as you put it, in 1939, and then changed again in 1941. They could change yet again at a moment’s notice,” Molotov said. “Thus the value of the buffer.”

“If we do not cooperate against the Lizards, we shall never have the chance to pursue our private grievances,” Ribbentrop answered.

That was the first sensible thing he’d said since he boarded the Russian freighter. Molotov eyed him warily. “True enough, but cooperation must run both ways. If you enjoy all the advantages, you must not expect us to be your dupes.”

“If we did not honestly cooperate with you, you would not have got the explosive metal from which to make your bomb,” Ribbentrop said. “Do remember that half the team which took the metal was made up of German soldiers, who supplied all the heavy weapons for the raid.”

“True enough,” Molotov said, and then paused to think. Ribbentrop had now made sense twice running, which, as far as the foreign commissar knew, equaled his all-time record. Was the jumped-up champagne salesman actually developing competence in his old age? An alarming notion, if true. More cautiously than he’d spoken before, Molotov asked, “When will your country have its own explosive-metal bombs? We cannot very well coordinate our strategy if we do not know when that strategy becomes effective.”

“Ja,”Ribbentrop said, not very happily. He paced up and down along the deck, his interpreter an obsequious half pace behind and to his left. At last he said,“Gott mit uns, we shall have our first bomb next spring, with others following quickly on its heels. What of Soviet Russia? When will you be ready to give the Lizards another dose of their own medicine?”

“Our timetable is tightly similar to yours,” Molotov answered. For years, he had trained himself to reveal nothing with his face, with his voice, with his stance. That training served him in good stead now. The Soviet program would not produce a bomb of its own next spring, and probably not for a couple of years thereafter.

Molotov wished he could pace. What to do, what to do? If Ribbentrop was telling the truth, the Nazis had not only recovered from the disaster their nuclear program had suffered but were also ready to produce their own explosive metal in large amounts.

What to do? Ribbentrop had let slip that the heart of the German effort lay somewhere not far from the Rhine. Word ever so discreetly leaked to the Lizards would mean they-and the Soviet Union-might be freed of the threat of explosive-metal bombs in the hands of a madman like Hitler.

But the Nazis were also putting up a stubborn resistance against the Lizards. If they collapsed under a cloud of nuclear fire, the imperialist aggressors from the stars would be able to turn more force on the peaceloving people of the Soviet Union. They were already giving signs of realizing the USSR was not in a position to deploy more nuclear weapons against them. Keeping Germany in the fight might keep the Soviet Union alive, too.

It was a delicate calculation. Molotov knew the final decision would not be his. Only Stalin would make it. Stalin’s cult of personality maintained that the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was never wrong. Molotov knew better, but this time Stalin had to be right.

Nieh Ho-T’ing maneuvered his pedicab through the streets of Peking. He swerved to avoid a horse-drawn wagon, then again to keep from being run down by a lorry full of Lizards with guns. He wished he could fling a grenade into the back of the truck, but no, not now. If you couldn’t be patient, you didn’t deserve to win.

Men on foot got out of the way for Nieh. When they didn’t move fast enough to suit him, he screamed at them: “Move, you stupid wooden-headed sons of a turtle mother!” The men he abused shouted insults back at him. They also grinned and waved, as did he. It was all good fun, and helped pass the time.

Nieh did not swear at men afoot who were dressed in Western-style clothes. Instead, he called out to them in beseeching tones: “Ride, noble sir?” Sometimes he varied that by using the little scaly devils’ phrasing: “Ride, superior sir?” Other pedicab drivers also loudly solicited the little devils’ running dogs. So did rickshaw men, who toiled between the shafts of their carts like bullocks. Anyone rich enough to dress like a foreign devil was also rich enough to pay for a ride.

Little scaly devils patrolled the streets on foot. No one asked them if they wanted a ride: people knew better. The scaly devils skittered along in squad-sized packs. They didn’t go out in Peking by ones and twos: they knew better.

“Ride, superior sirs?” Nieh Ho-T’ing called to a couple of men in white shirts and ties who walked along with jackets slung over their shoulders. They looked tired, the poor running dogs.

They climbed into the back of the pedicab. “Take us to theCh’i Nien Tien,” one of them said. “Go fast, too; we need to be there quickly.”

“Yes, sir.” Nieh Ho-T’ing started to pedal. “The Hall of Annual Prayers it is. You pay me five dollars Mex, all right?”

“Stop the cab. We will get out,” the man answered. “We do not need to ride with a thief. If you asked for two dollars Mex, that would still be too much.”

Nieh slowed down but did not stop. “If I let you out, gentlemen, you will be late on your important journey. Suppose you give me four Mex fifty; I suppose, if I am stingy, my wife and children will not starve on that fare.”

“Do you hear the gall of this man?” one of the scaly devils’ henchmen said to the other. “He talks of his wife and children, but thinks nothing of ours, who will suffer if we meet his extortionate demands. Anyone who expects to get more than three dollars Mex for such a short journey would surely steal coppers from a blind beggar.”

“Rich men who refuse to share their bounty-something dreadful will surely happen to them in the next life if not in this one,” Nieh said. “Even four Mex twenty-five would not be altogether without virtue.”

They finally settled on three Mex dollars seventy-five cents, by which time they’d nearly reached the Hall of Annual Prayers. Nieh scorned the running dogs as inept hagglers; anything over three dollars Mex was too much to pay for that ride. When he worked as a pedicab driver, hebecame a pedicab driver. Anything else, anything less, was dangerous.

The two lackeys of the scaly devils paid him, alighted, and headed off toward the tall circular building with its domed triple roof of blue tiles. Nieh slowly pedaled away, every now and then jingling a brass bell to try to lure in another fare. He soon did, a worn-looking woman with a straw basket filled to overflowing with chicken feet, rooster combs, giblets, and other bits of meat no one who could afford better would want. She told him to go to a little cookshop in one of Peking’s innumerablehutungs, not to a fancy public building.

“Your load there will make many tasty soups,” Nieh said. The woman nodded. He hardly haggled with her at all; solidarity between proletarians came ahead of desire for profit. She noticed his generosity and smiled at him. He took note of where her eatery was. The Party needed all the friends it could find, and all the hiding places, too.

He pedaled back out onto the bigger streets, jangling his bell. He felt dispirited; those two men in Western clothes should have sent him where he wanted to go. If worse came to worst, he might have to head for theP’an T’ao Kung without anyone in his pedicab. Going to the Spiral Peach Palace with an empty pedicab was risky, though. He would be remarked upon. But how long could he wait for just the right fare?

“Patience,” he said out loud, reminding himself. The revolution was built one small step at a time. If anyone tried to rush it, it would fail. He picked up another meaningless fare, won the haggle without effort, and took the man where he wanted to go.

Back and forth across the city Nieh pedaled. Sweat soaked through his black cotton tunic and ran down his face from under the straw hat that shielded him from the merciless sun. That sun slid steadily across the sky. Soon it would be evening, and time for Nieh Ho-T’ing to go back to his lodging till morning came again. For a whole cadre of reasons, Nieh did not want to do that.

“You! Driver!” a fat man shouted imperiously. Anyone fat in Peking these days surely trafficked with the little scaly devils. Nieh zoomed toward him, cutting off another fellow with a pedicab whom he might also have been calling.

“Where to, superior sir?” he asked as the man climbed in.

“TheP’an T’ao Kung,” the fat man answered. Springs creaked under him as his large, heavy fundament pressed down on the seat “Do you know where that is?”

“Yes-just south of the Eastern Wicket Gate,” Nieh answered. “I can take you there for five dollars Mex.”

“Go.” The fat man waved, disdaining even to dicker. His pudgy face puffed out farther with pride. “I am to meet with the little scaly devils in the Spiral Peach Palace, to show how my factory can work for them.”

“Eee,you must be a very powerful man,” Nieh said, pedaling harder. “I will get you there safe, never fear.” He raised his voice: “Move, you sluggards! I have here a man who cannot waste the day.”

Behind him, his passenger shifted smugly on the padded seat, enjoying the face he gained by having his importance publicly proclaimed. Traffic did not vanish for Nieh’s pedicab as he rolled east downHua Erh Shih — Flower Market Street. He hadn’t expected it would. Most of the people on the street would have sworn at Nieh’s passenger had they dared, and desisted only for fear he might have been important enough to get them in trouble if he wanted. Some went out of their way to obstruct Nieh’s progress. In their sandals, he would have done the same.

Along with the artificial flowers that gave it its name, Flower Market Street also boasted a number of shops that sold cheap costume jewelry. Hsia Shou-Tao probably would have loved the area, for a great many pretty women frequented it. Nieh Ho-T’ing frowned. Hsia was politically progressive, but he remained socially exploitive. The two should not have coexisted in the same man.

Nieh Ho-T’ing turned north offHua Erh Shih toward the Spiral Peach Palace. It was not a prepossessing building, having only two small rooms, but it was the headquarters of the little scaly devils in charge of turning the output of human factories to their own advantage.

Nieh steered the pedicab right up to the entranceway of the Spiral Peach Palace. A scaly devil stood guard outside it. Nieh’s passenger dropped five silver Mex dollars into his hand, got down from the pedicab, and strutted over to the guard. He showed him a card and gained entrance to the palace.

After reaching down to the frame of the pedicab, as if to adjust the chain, Nieh also went over to the guard. “You watch my cab, hey?” he said in slow Chinese. He pointed across the street to a couple of men selling noodles and pork and fish from two big pots. “I go over, get some food, come back, all right?”

“All right, you go,” the guard said. “You come back fast.”

“Oh yes, of course I will, superior sir,” Nieh answered, speaking faster now that he saw the guard understood him.

Several people crowded round the noodle-sellers for late lunch, early supper, or afternoon snack. As soon as he got into the crowd, Nieh let his hat fall onto the back of his neck; the string under his chin held it in place there. Even that small change in his appearance should have been plenty to confuse the guard about exactly who he was. He asked the noodle-sellers their prices, exclaimed in horror at the answer he got, and departed.

He did not go back to reclaim the pedicab. Instead, he ducked into the first narrow littlehutung he came upon. He took the first chance he got to doff the straw hat and throw it away. All the while, he rapidly walked south and east, turning corners every chance he got. The more distance he put between himself and the Spiral Peach Palace-

Blam!Even though he’d gone better than a half ali, the blast was plenty to stagger him. Men shouted. Women shrieked in alarm. Nieh looked back over his shoulder. A very satisfactorily thick cloud of smoke and dust was rising from the direction of the Spiral Peach Palace. He and his comrades had loaded more than fifty kilos of high explosive and a timer under the seat of the pedicab and in the steel tubing of the frame. The blast had surely killed the sentry. With luck, it had knocked down the palace and disposed of the little scaly devils who exploited mankind for their own advantage. The little devils needed to remember not every man could be made into a running dog or a traitor.

He came out on a street big enough to have pedicabs on it, and hailed one for the journey back to his lodging house in the western part of the city. He haggled with the driver for form’s sake, but yielded sooner than he might have had his heart been in the dicker. He knew just how hard the gaunt fellow was working for his coins.