Upsetting the Balance

11

Teerts sat, worn and depressed, in the debriefing room at the Race’s air base in southern France. He spoke into a recorder: “On this mission, I shelled and bombed targets on the island known by the Big Ugly name of Britain. I returned to base with minimal damage to my aircraft, and inflicted substantial damage on Tosevite males and materiel.”

Elifrim, the base commandant, asked, “Did you encounter any Tosevite aircraft during your support mission over Britain?”

“Superior sir, we did,” Teerts answered. “Our radar identified several Big Ugly killercraft circling at what is for them extreme high altitude. As they were limited to visual search, they spotted neither us nor our missiles, and were shot down without even having the opportunity to take evasive action. Later, at lower altitude, we met more skilled Tosevite raiders. Because we had exhausted our missiles, we had to engage them with cannon fire. Pilot Vemmen in my flight did have his killercraft badly damaged, while I am told two other males in different flights were shot down.”

Elifrim sighed heavily. “These Tosevite aircraft at high altitudes… They were merely circling? They did not seek to dive on you?”

“No, superior sir,” Teerts said. “As I say, we knocked them down before they knew we were in the vicinity. I admit it did strike me as a little odd. Most British pilots are more alert. The ones who attacked us at low altitude certainly were. We had to fly slowly then, to enhance the accuracy of weapons delivery, and were only a little faster than their machines, and, frankly, not as maneuverable. That was a difficult encounter.”

“Your reports of losses in it are correct,” Elifrim said. “It was made more difficult by the fact that you had expended your antiaircraft missiles, was it not?”

“Yes, certainly,” Teerts said. “But-”

The commandant overrode him. “But nothing, Flight Leader Teerts. Over the past several days, our forces on the ground in Britain have recovered wreckage from some of these high-altitude circlers. It is their opinion that these aircraft were never piloted, that some sort of automatic device flew them to altitude and set them circling as diversionary targets, with the deliberate intent of inciting our males to expend missiles without bagging skilled Tosevite pilots in exchange.”

Teerts stared at him. “That’s-one of the most underhanded things I’ve ever heard,” he said slowly. “Superior sir, we cannot afford to ignore aircraft circling above us. If they are not bluffs such as the one you describe, they dive on us and have the potential to hurt us badly.”

“I am painfully aware of this,” Elifrim said, “and I have no good solution to offer. The British have concluded-and it is a conclusion that strikes me as reasonable-that one of their aircraft, if not piloted, is worth exchanging for one of our missiles. They can produce aircraft faster and more cheaply than we can manufacture missiles. And, by making us use missiles early and on the wrong targets, they improve their pilots’ chances of survival in subsequent encounters.”

“Truth.” Teerts also sighed. “After my experiences, no Tosevite perfidy should much surprise me.”

“No Tosevite perfidy should surprise any of us,” the commandant agreed. “I am given to understand that no more missions will be flown in support of the northern pocket in Britain.”

“I see,” Teerts said slowly. He did, too, and didn’t like what he saw. The Race had lost that battle. Before long, he feared, no flights would be going into the southern pocket of Britain, either. That one wasn’t shrinking, but it wasn’t getting any bigger, either. Resupply by air let it hold its own, but the cost there was high, not just in the males on the ground but in the irreplaceable males and aircraft without which the infantry and armor could not long function.

“Dismissed, Flight Leader Teerts,” the commandant said.

Teerts left the debriefing room. Another worn-looking pilot, his body paint smudged, went in to take his place. Teerts headed for the door that led outside. After his interrogations at the hands of the Nipponese, debriefing by an officer of his own kind was so mild as to be hardly worth noticing. Elifrim hadn’t kicked him or slapped him or threatened him with hot things or sharp and pointed things or things that were hot and sharp and pointed or even screamed that he was a liar and would suffer for his lies. What kind of questioning was that supposed to be?

Tosev shone down brightly on this part of its third world. The weather struck Teerts as about halfway between crisp and mild-better than it was most of the time over most of the planet. Tosev 3 might not have been such a bad place… if it weren’t for the Tosevites.

Thanks to them, though, the Race was fighting not just for victory here but for survival. Thanks to them, most of the males who’d flown into Britain with such high hopes of knocking a foe out of the war would fly out wounded or wrapped in plastic for final disposal-or would never fly out at all.

With a deliberate effort of will, Teerts made himself not think about the fiasco Britain had become. But when his eye turrets swiveled in his head to let him look over the air base, he found nothing to cheer him here, either.

When the Race first came to Tosev 3, it had let its aircraft rest openly on their strips, confident the Big Uglies could not reach them. Now Teerts’ killercraft, like those of his comrades-by the Emperor, like those of the Big Uglies! — huddled in earthen revetments. Antiaircraft-missile emplacements still ringed the base, but they were short of missiles.A good thing the Big Uglies don’t know how short we are, Teerts thought. Sooner or later, though, they’d find out. They had a knack for that. They’d spent so much time and effort spying on one another that, low technology or not, they found ways to figure out what the Race was doing.

To try to make up for the missile shortage, technicians had slaved Francais antiaircraft cannon to radars provided by the Race. That made the guns far more accurate than they’d been before, but still left them without either the range or the killing power the missiles had had. And the Big Uglies would eventually notice the cannons, and, worse, figure out why they were emplaced. When they did, the revetments would start paying for themselves.

The debriefing room lay not far from the edge of the air base. Teerts watched a couple of Tosevites shambling along the road that passed by the base. Even by the low standards the Big Uglies set for themselves, these were travel-worn specimens, their clothes (even they needed protection against their home planet’s wretched weather) dirty and stained, their hides grimy. One of them, the bigger one, must have seen war or other misfortune somewhere, for a long scar furrowed one side of his face.

In Teerts’ mind, that just made the Big Ugly uglier. Plastic surgery techniques on Tosev 3 were as backwards as the other arts on the planet, which struck Teerts as a shame, since Tosev 3 offered the unwary so many chances to maim and disfigure themselves. The Race was used to machines and systems that always worked and never hurt anybody. The Big Uglies just wanted results, and didn’t much care how they got them.

Teerts understood that better than he would have before he came to Tosev 3, or, to be specific, before the Nipponese captured him. He felt the same restless craving for ginger as the Big Uglies did for everything in their lives. He wanted a taste, he wanted it now, and, as long as he got it, nothing else mattered to him.

Getting it wasn’t hard, either. Many of the groundcrew males had been here since the Race seized the air base. They’d had plenty of time to make connections with Tosevites who could supply what they needed. Teerts had feared only the Nipponese knew about the herb to which they’d addicted him, but it seemed almost weed-common all over Tosev 3.

And, to the Big Uglies, it was nothing more than a condiment. Teerts’ mouth fell open. What irony! The Tosevites were biologically incapable of appreciating far and away the best thing their miserable planet produced.

He spied a fuel specialist and stepped out into the male’s path. “How may I help you, superior sir?” the specialist asked. His words were all they should have been, but his tone was knowing, cynical.

“My engines could use a cleaning additive, I think,” Teerts answered. The code was clumsy, but worked well enough that, by all accounts, no one here had got in trouble for using ginger. There were horror stories of whole bases closed down and personnel sent to punishment. When ginger-users got caught, those who caught them were disinclined to mercy.

“Think you’ve got some contaminants in your hydrogen line, do you, superior sir?” the specialist asked. “Well, computer analysis should be able to tell whether you’re right or wrong. Come with me; we’ll check it out.”

The terminal to which the fuel specialist led Teerts was networked to all the others at the air base, and to a mainframe in one of the starships that had landed in southern France. The code the specialist punched into it had nothing to do with fuel analysis. It went somewhere into the accounting section of the mainframe.

“How far out of spec are your engines performing?” the male asked.

“At least thirty percent,” Teerts answered. He keyed the figure into the computer. It unobtrusively arranged for him to transfer thirty percent of his last pay period’s income to the fuel specialist’s account. No one had ever asked questions about such transactions, not at this air base. Teerts suspected that meant a real live male in the accounting department was suppressing fund transfer data to make sure no one asked questions. He wondered whether the male got paid off in money or in ginger. He knew which he would rather have had.

“There you are, superior sir. See? Analysis shows your problem’s not too serious,” the fuel specialist said, continuing the charade. “But here’s your additive, just in case.” He shut down the terminal, reached into a pouch on his belt, and passed Teerts several small plastic vials filled with brownish powder.

“Ah. Thank you very much.” Teerts stowed them in one of his own pouches. As soon as he got some privacy, this cold, wet mudball of a planet would have the chance to redeem itself.

Walking with Friedrich through the streets of Lodz made Mordechai Anielewicz feel he was walking alongside a beast of prey that had developed a taste for human flesh and might turn on him at any moment The comparison wasn’t altogether accurate, but it wasn’t altogether wrong, either. He didn’t know what Friedrich had done in the war, or in the time between the German conquest of Poland and the invasion of the Lizards.

Whatever he’d done, Friedrich had sense enough to keep his mouth shut now, even with Jews swarming all about him. The Lodz ghetto wasn’t as large as Warsaw’s, but it was just as crowded and just as hungry. Next to what the ghettos had endured in Nazi times, what they had now was abundance; next to abundance, what they had now wasn’t much.

Anielewicz scowled at the posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski that stared down from every blank wall in the ghetto. Some of the posters were old and faded and peeling; others looked to have been put up yesterday. Rumkowski had run things here under the Nazis, and by all appearances was still running them under the Lizards. Mordechai wondered how exactly he’d managed that.

Friedrich noticed the posters, too. “Give that old bastard hair and a little mustache and he could be Hitler,” he remarked, glancing slyly over at Anielewicz. “How does that make you feel, Shmuel?”

Even now, surrounded by Jews, he didn’t leave off his baiting. Neither did Anielewicz. It wasn’t particularly vicious; it was the sort of teasing two workmen who favored rival football clubs might have exchanged. “Sick,” Mordechai answered. That was true, for before the war he’d never imagined the Jews could produce their own vest-pocket Hitlers. But he wouldn’t give Friedrich the pleasure of knowing he was irked, so he added, “Hitler’s a much uglier man.” As far as he was concerned, that was so both literally and metaphorically.

“Ah, rubbish,” Friedrich said, planting a playful elbow in his ribs. One of these days, the Nazi would do that once too often, and then something dramatic would happen. He hadn’t done it quite often enough for that, not yet.

Something dramatic happened anyhow. A Jew in a cloth cap and a long black coat stopped in the middle of Lutomierska Street and stared at Friedrich. The Jew had a wide, ugly scar across the right side of his face, as if a bullet had creased him there.

He walked up to Anielewicz, waggled a forefinger in front of his nose. “Are you a Jew?” he demanded in Yiddish.

“Yes, I’m a Jew,” Mordechai answered in the same language. He understood why the newcomer sounded a little uncertain. Even with the light brown beard on his cheeks, he looked more like a Pole than the swarthy, hook-nosed stereotype of a Jew.

“Youare a Jew!” The newcomer clapped a hand to his forehead, almost knocking the cap from his head. He pointed at Friedrich. “Do you know whom you’re walking with? Do you knowwhat you’re walking with?” His hand quivered.

“I know that if there’s a fire, the engine is going to come out of there and smash us flat as a couple oflatkes,” Anielewicz answered, nodding over toward the fire station in front of which they stood. The ghetto fire engine still had petrol. As far as he knew, it was the only vehicle in the Jewish quarter of Lodz that did. He gently took the Jew by the elbow. “Come on, let’s go over on the sidewalk.” He gathered in Friedrich with his eyes. “You come, too.”

“Where else would I go?” Friedrich said, his voice easy, amused. It was not an idle question. A lot of the young men on the street had rifles slung over their shoulders. If he ran, a shout of “Nazi!” would surely get him caught, and likely get him shot.

The Jew with the scarred cheek seemed ready to give that shout, too. His features working, he repeated, “Do you know what you’re walking with, you who say you are a Jew?”

“Yes, I know he’s a German,” Mordechai answered. “We were in a partisan band together. He may have been a Nazi soldier, but he’s a good fighting man. He’s given the Lizards many a kick in the arse.”

“With a German, you might be a friend. With a Nazi, even, you might be a friend,” the Jew answered. “The world is a strange place, that I should say such a thing. But with a murderer of his kind-” He spat at Friedrich’s feet.

“I said I was his comrade. I did not say I was his friend,” Anielewicz replied. The distinction sounded picayune even to him. He stared at Friedrich with a sudden, horrid suspicion. A lot of men in the partisan band had been reticent about just what they’d done before they joined it. He’d been reticent himself, when you got down to it. But a German could have some particularly good reasons for wanting to keep his mouth shut.

“His comrade.” Now the Jew spat between Mordechai’s feet. “Listen to me,comrade.” He freighted the word with the hate and scorn a Biblical prophet might have used. “My name is Pinchas Silberman. I am-I was-a greengrocer in Lipno. Unless you are from there, you would never have heard of it: it is a little town north of here. It had a few Jews-fifty, maybe, not a hundred. We got on well enough with our Polish neighbors.”

Silberman paused to glare at Friedrich. “One day, after the Germans conquered Poland, in came a-platoon, is that what you call it? — of a police battalion. They gathered us up, men and women and children-me, my Yetta, Aaron, Yossel, and little Golda-and they marched us into the woods. He, your precious comrade, he was one of them. I shall take his face to the grave with me.”

“Were you ever in Lipno?” Anielewicz asked Friedrich.

“I don’t know,” the German answered indifferently. “I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns.”

Silberman’s voice went shrill: “Hear the angel of death! ‘I’ve been in a lot of little Polish towns,’ he says. No doubt he was, and left not a Jew alive behind him, except by accident. Me, I was an accident. He shot my wife, he shot my daughter in her arms, he shot my boys, and then he shot me. I had a great bloody head wound”-he brought a hand up to his face-“so he and the rest of the murderers must have thought I was dead along with my family, along with all the others. They went away. I got up and I walked to Plock, which is a bigger town not far from Lipno. I was half healed before the Germans emptied out Plock. They didn’t shoot everyone there. Some, the able-bodied, they shipped here to Lodz to work-to slave-for them. I was one of those. Now God is kind, and I can have my revenge.”

“Policebattalion?” Anielewicz stared at Friedrich with undisguised loathing. The German had always acted like a soldier. He’d fought as well as any soldier, and Anielewicz had assumed he’d been aWehrmacht man. That was bad enough, but he’d heard of and even known a few decentWehrmacht men even before the Lizards came. A lot of them were soldiers like any other country’s, just doing their jobs. But the men in the police battalions-

The most you could give them was that they didn’t always kill all the Jews in the towns and villages they visited. As Silberman had said, some they drafted into slave labor instead. And he’d fought beside Friedrich, slept beside him, shared food with him, escaped from the prison camp with him. He felt sick.

“What can you say for yourself?” he demanded. Because he’d done all those things with Friedrich-and because he was, in part, alive thanks to the German-he hesitated to shout for one of those armed Jews right away. He was willing, at least, to hear how the German defended himself.

Friedrich shrugged. “Shall I tell you I’m sorry? Would it do me any good?” He shrugged again; he hadn’t intended that second question to be taken seriously. After a moment, he went on, “I’m not particularly sorry. I did what my officers told me to do. They said you Jews were enemies of theReich and needed eliminating just like our other enemies. And so-” Yet another shrug.

Anielewicz had heard that same argument from Nazis the Jews had captured when they helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw. Before he could say anything, Pinchas Silberman hissed, “My Yetta, my boys, my baby-these were enemies? They were going to hurt you Nazi bastards?” He tried to spit in Friedrich’s face, but missed. The spittle slid slowly down the brick wall of the fire station.

“Answer him!” Anielewicz barked when Friedrich kept silent for a moment.

“Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall!”Friedrich said, clicking his heels with exquisite irony. “You have me. You will do as you like with me, just as I did as I liked before. When England dropped bombs on us and blew up our women and children, they thought those women and children were enemies. And, before you start shouting at me, when we dropped bombs on the English, we did the same thing,ja. How does that make me any different from a bomber, except I did it retail with a rifle instead of wholesale with a bombing plane?”

“But the Jews you murdered had never done anything to you,” Mordechai said. He’d run into that peculiar German blind spot before, too. “Parts of Poland used to be Germany, and some of the Jews here fought for the Kaiser in the last war. What kind of sense does it make to go slaughtering them now?”

“My officers said they were enemies. If I hadn’t treated them as enemies, who knows what would have happened to me?” Friedrich said. “And let me ask you another question, Shmuel-if you could make a giant omelet out of all the Lizards’ eggs, would you do it so they’d never trouble us again?”

“A Nazitzaddik we don’t need,” Silberman said. “Answer me this, Nazischmuck — what would you do if you found the man who’d killed your wife and children? What would you do if you found himand he didn’t even remember doing it?”

“I’d kill the motherfucker,” Friedrich answered. “But I’m just a Nazi bastard, so what the devil do I know?”

Silberman looked at Mordechai. “Out of his own mouth you heard it. He puts the noose around his neck-and if he didn’t, I would.”

Friedrich looked at him, too, as if to say,We fought together, and now you’re going to kill me? You already knew part of what I was a long time ago. How much were you pretending so we didn’t go for each other’s throats?

Anielewicz sighed. “Friedrich, I think we’d better go over to the Balut Market square.” The square didn’t hold the market alone; the administration offices for the Lodz ghetto were there, too. Some of the Jewish fighting men there would know Mordechai was not Shmuel, a simple partisan. With some of those who knew who he really was, that would work to his advantage. Others, though, might be inclined to reveal his true name to Chaim Rumkowski-or to the Lizards.

“So you’re going to tell them to hang me, too, eh?” Friedrich said.

“No,” Anielewicz said slowly. Pinchas Silberman let out an outraged howl. Ignoring it, Mordechai went on, “Silberman here will tell what you did before the Lizards came. I’ll tell what you’ve done since, or what I know of it. It should tilt the balance toward-”

Friedrich laughed in his face. “You Jews took it when you were on the bottom. You think I believe you won’t give it now that you’re on top?”

“We believe in something you Nazis never heard of,” Anielewicz answered. “It’s called justice.”

“It’s calledScheisse, is what it’s called,” Friedrich said. “So in the name of justice, you’re going to-” In the middle of the sentence, without shifting either his eyes or his feet to give warning, he hit Anielewicz in the belly and ran.

“Oof!” Mordechai said, and folded up like a concertina.Shlemiel, he thought as he gasped for air his lungs didn’t want to give him. Friedrich might have started out in a police battalion, but he’d picked up a real soldier’s skills from somewhere-and a partisan’s, as well. Not letting your foe know what you were about to do until you did it ranked high on both lists.

But the German, who knew Anielewicz was dangerous, had not reckoned that Pinchas Silberman might be, too. The Jew from Lipno dashed after him, screaming “Nazi murderer!” at the top of his lungs. Anielewicz made it up to his knees just in time to see Silberman spring on Friedrich’s back. They went down in a thrashing heap. That was a fight in which Silberman was bound to get the worse of it, and quickly, but Friedrich hadn’t beaten and kicked him into unconsciousness before a couple of Mauser-carrying Jewish fighting men put an end to the scrap with peremptory orders.

Silberman gasped out his story. One of the fighting men asked Friedrich a one-word question:“Nu?”

Friedrich gave a one-word answer:“Ja.”

Two rifles barked, almost in the same instant. The gunshots made men who didn’t know what was going on cry out; a couple of women screamed. Pinchas Silberman burst into tears. Joy? Rage? Sadness that yet another death didn’t bring back his slaughtered family? Anielewicz wondered if he knew himself. One of the Jewish fighters said to the other, “Come on, Aaron, let’s get rid of this garbage.” They dragged Friedrich away by the heels. His body left a trail of blood on Lutomierska Street.

Mordechai slowly got to his feet He still bent at the midsection; Friedrich was strong as a mule, and had hit the way a mule kicked, too. He’d been a pretty good companion, but when you set what he’d done before against that-Anielewicz shook his head. The German had probably deserved to die, but if all the people who deserved to die on account of what they’d done in the war dropped dead at once, there’d be hardly more people left alive than after Noah’s flood. The world would belong to the Lizards.

He shook his head again. The Lizards didn’t have clean hands, either. He started slowly and painfully down the street. He was altogether on his own again. One way or another, though, he expected he’d manage to make a nuisance of himself.

“God, I pity the poor infantry,” Heinrich Jager said, putting one foot in front of the other with dogged persistence. “If I haven’t lost ten kilos on this blasted hike, it’s a miracle.”

“Oh, quit moaning,” Otto Skorzeny said. “You’re in the south of France, my friend, one of the prime holiday spots in all the world.”

“Yes, and now you can ask me if I give a damn, too,” Jager said. “When you’re marching across it, it might as well be the Russian steppe. It’s just about as hot as the steppe was in summer, that’s certain.” He wiped the sleeve of his shirt over his face. He wore a workman’s outfit, none too clean. It wouldn’t fool a Frenchman into thinking he was French, but it had done well enough with the Lizards.

“It’s not as cold as the steppe in winter, and that’s a fact” Skorzeny shivered melodramatically. “It’s not as ugly, either. Now shake a leg. We want to get to the next safe house before the sun goes down.” He lengthened his already long stride.

Sighing, Jager kept up. “Were you in such a tearing hurry that you had to march us straight past that Lizard air base the other day?” he grumbled.

“We got by with it, so quit your bellyaching,” Skorzeny said. “The bold line is always the way to go when you mess with those scaly bastards. They’re so cautious and calculating, they never look for anybody to try something risky and outrageous. They wouldn’t be that stupid themselves, so they don’t expect anyone else to be, either. We’ve taken advantage of it more than once, too.”

“All very well, but one of these days you’re going to stick yourSchwantz on the chopping block, and I don’t fancy having mine there beside it,” Jager said.

“Why not? How much use are you getting out of it now?” Skorzeny asked, laughing. He turned back toward the air base. “And did you see the pop-eyed stare that one pilot gave us?” As best he could, he imitated a Lizard’s swiveling eyes.

Jager laughed, too, in spite of himself. Then he sobered. “How could you tell the Lizard was a pilot?”

“Gold and blue bands on his chest and belly, yellow on the arms, and those red and purple squiggles on his head. He’s medium-senior, I’d say-otherwise he’d have fewer of the purple ones. I’ve been studying their paint for a long time, my friend. If I say something along those lines is so, you can take it to the bank.”

“Oh, I will,” Jager said, with some irony but not much.

They trudged on. To their right, the river Tarn chuckled in its banks. Sheep and cattle pulled up grass and shrubs in the fields. Every so often, a dog barked. A hammer rang on an anvil in a blacksmith’s shop in a tiny village, just as it might have done a thousand years before.

“I’ll tell you what I like about this countryside,” Jager said suddenly. “It’s the first I’ve seen in the past four years that hasn’t been fought over to a fare-thee-well.”

“Aber naturlich,”Skorzeny answered. “And when we find a cafe, you can order yourself some vichyssoise, too.”

“Vichyssoise?” Jager said, and then, a moment too late. “Oh.Ja. The French gave up before we got down here, and this part of France wasn’t occupied. Then the Lizards came, and they gave up to them, too. They’re good at it.” He grunted. “And a whole lot of them are alive now who would be dead if they’d fought more. Does that make them cowards, or just smarter than we are?”

“Both,” Skorzeny answered. “Me, though, I’d rather stand up on my hind legs and not lie down till somebody knocks me over-and I’ll try and kick the feet out from under him as I’m falling, too.”

Jager thought that over. He slowly nodded. A bell sounded behind him. He stepped aside to let a French policeman on a bicycle roll past. With his kepi and little dark mustache, the fellow looked like a cinema Frenchman. In the carrying basket under the handlebars, he had a couple of long, skinny loaves of bread and a bottle of red wine. Perhaps his mind was more on them than on anything else, for he rode by the Germans without a second glance.

They strode past the little hamlet of Ambialet. A long time ago, a lord had built a castle on a crag that stuck out into the Tarn. Later, a church and a monastery sprang up close by. They were all ruins now, but the hamlet remained.

Not far beyond it, they came to a farmhouse screened off from the road by a stand of willows. Ducks quacked in a pond close by. From off in a barn, a pig grunted. A stocky, stoop-shouldered Frenchman in a straw hat that almost made him look American put down the bucket he was carrying when the two Germans approached.

“Bonjour, monsieur,”Jager said in his halting, heavily accented French.“Avez-vous une cigarette? Peut-etre deux?”

“I regret,monsieur, that I have not even one, let alone two.” The farmer’s shrug was so perfectly Gallic that Jager forgot about the straw hat. The fellow went on, “You will be from Uncle Henri?”

“Oui,”Jager said, completing the recognition phrase. He didn’t know who Uncle Henri was: perhaps a Frenchified version of Heinrich Himmler.

“Come in, both of you,” the farmer said, waving toward the building. “My wife and daughter, they are staying with my brother-in-law down the road for a few days. They do not know why, but they are glad to visit Rene for a time.” He paused. “You may call me Jacques, by the way.”

That didn’t necessarily mean his name was Jacques, Jager noted. Nonetheless, he said,“Merci, Jacques. I am Jean, and this is Francois.” Skorzeny snickered at the alias he’d been given. Francois was a name for a fussy headwaiter, not a scar-faced fighting man.

Jacques’ eyes had heavy lids, and dark pouches under them. They were keen all the same. “You would be Johann and Fritz, then?” he said in German a little better than Jager’s French.

“If you like,” Skorzeny answered in the same language. Jacques’ smile did not quite reach those eyes. He, too, knew aliases when he heard them.

The interior of the farmhouse was gloomy, even after Jacques switched on the electric lamps. Again, Jager reminded himself no one had fought a war in this part of France for generations; the amenities that had been here before 1940 were still likely to work.

Jacques said, “You will be hungry, yes? Marie left a stew I am to reheat for us.” He got a fire going in the hearth and hung a kettle above it. Before long, a delicious aroma filled the farmhouse. Jacques poured white wine from a large jug into three mismatched glasses. He raised his. “For the Lizards-merde.”

They all drank. The wine was sharp and dry. Jager wondered if it would tan his tongue to leather inside his mouth. Then Jacques ladled out the stew: carrots, onions, potatoes, and bits of meat in a gravy savory with spices. Jager all but inhaled his plateful, yet Skorzeny finished ahead of him. When drunk alongside the stew, the wine was fine.

“Marvelous.” Jager glanced over at Jacques. “If you eat this well all the time, it’s a wonder you don’t weigh two hundred kilos.”

“Farming is never easy,” the Frenchman answered, “and it has grown only harder these past few years, with no petrol at hand. A farmer can eat, yes, but he works off his food.”

“What kind of meat is it?” Skorzeny asked, looking wistfully back toward the kettle.

“Wild rabbit.” Jacques spread his hands. “You must know how it is,messieurs. The livestock, it is too precious to slaughter except to keep from starving orpeut-etre for a great feast like a wedding. But I am a handy man with a snare, and so-” He spread his work-gnarled hands.

He made no move to offer Skorzeny more stew, and even the brash SS man did not get up to refill his plate uninvited. Like Jager, he likely guessed Jacques would need what was left to feed himself after the two of them had moved on.

Jager said, “Thank you for putting us up here for the night.”

“Pas de quoi,”Jacques answered. His hand started to come up to his mouth, as if with a cigarette. Jager had seen a lot of people make gestures like that, this past year. After a moment, the Frenchman resumed: “Life is strange,n’est-ce pas? When I was a young man, I fought youBoches, you Germans, at Verdun, and never did I think we could be allies, your people and mine.”

“Marshal Petain also fought at Verdun,” Skorzeny said, “and he has worked closely with the German authorities.”

Jager wondered how Jacques would take that. Some Frenchmen thought well of Petain, while to others he was a symbol of surrender and collaboration. Jacques only shrugged and said, “It is late. I will get your blankets.” He took for granted that soldiers would have no trouble sleeping on the floor. At the moment, Jager would have had no trouble sleeping on a bed of nails.

The blankets were rough, scratchy wool. The one Jager wrapped around himself smelled of a woman’s sweat and faintly of rose water. He wondered whether it belonged to Jacques’ wife or his daughter, and knew he couldn’t ask.

Skorzeny had already started snoring. Jager lay awake a while, trying to remember how long it had been since he’d lain with a woman. Occasional visits to a brothel didn’t really count, except to relieve pressure like the safety valve of a steam engine. The last one that mattered had been Ludmila Gorbunova. He sighed-most of a year now. Too long.

Breakfast the next morning was slabs of bread cut from a long, thin loaf like those the policeman had carried in his bicycle basket. Jager and Skorzeny washed the bread down with more white wine. “You might prefer coffee, I know,” Jacques said, “but-” His Gallic shrug was eloquent.

“By me, wine is plenty good,” Skorzeny said. Jager wasn’t so sure he agreed. He didn’t make a habit of drinking part of his breakfast, and suspected the wine would leave him logy and slow. Skorzeny picked up the loaf from which Jacques had taken slices. “We’ll finish this off for lunch, if you don’t mind.”

His tone said Jacques had better not mind. The Frenchman shrugged again. Jager would have taken the bread, too, but he would have been more circumspect about how he did it. Circumspection, however, did not seem to be part of Skorzeny’s repertoire.

To smooth things over, Jager asked, “How far to Albi, Jacques?”

“Twenty kilometers, perhaps twenty-five,” the farmer answered indifferently. Jager projected a mental map of the territory inside his head. The answer sounded about right. A good day’s hike, especially for a man who was used to letting panzers haul him around.

The sun beat at the back of his neck and Skorzeny’s when they set out. Sweat started running down his cheeks almost at once.The wine, he thought, annoyed. But it was not just the wine. The air hung thick and breathless; he had to push through it, as if through gauze, to move ahead. When the sun rose higher in the sky, the day would be savagely hot.

A stream of Lizard lorries came up the road toward Jager and Skorzeny. They scrambled off onto the verge; what were a couple of human beings dead by the side of the road to the Lizards? He kicked at the tarmac. If a couple of Russian civilians hadn’t gotten out of the way of a German motor convoy, what would have happened to them? Probably the same thing.

Skorzeny hadn’t been thinking about civilians of any sort. He said, “You know what they’re hauling in those lorries.”

“If it isn’t gas masks, one of us will be the most surprised man in France, and the other will be runner-up,” Jager answered.

“How right you are,” Skorzeny said, chuckling. “Our job is to make sure they don’t keep shipping them out of there in such great lots.”

He sounded as if that posed no more problems than hiking along this all but deserted road. Maybe he even believed it. After his coups-playing Prometheus by stealing explosive metal from the Lizards, absconding with Mussolini from right under their snouts, doing the same with a Lizard panzer, and driving the aliens out of Split and out of all of Croatia-he had a right to be confident. There was, however, a difference between confidence and arrogance. Jager thought so, anyhow. Skorzeny might have had other ideas.

They rested for a while in the heat of midday, going down to the banks of the Tarn to drink some water and to splash some on their faces. Then, under the shade of a spreading oak, they shared the bread Skorzeny had appropriated from Jacques. A kingfisher dove into the river with a splash. Somewhere back in the brush, a bee-eater took off with a cry of“Quilp, quilp!”

“I should have lifted some of that wine, too,” Skorzeny said. “God only knows how many Frenchmen have been pissing in this river, or what we’re liable to catch from drinking out of it.”

“I used to worry about that, too,” Jager answered. “I still do, but not so much. Do it often enough and you stop thinking about it.” He shook his head. “Like you stop thinking about killing people, but on a smaller scale, if you know what I mean.”

Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. “I like that. It’s true, too, no doubt about it.”

Cautiously, Jager said, “Like killing Jews, too, don’t you think, Skorzeny? The more you do, the easier it gets.” There were just the two of them, here in the quiet of southern France. If you couldn’t speak your mind, or at least part of it, here, where could you? And if you couldn’t speak your mind anywhere, was life really worth living? Were you a man or just a mindless machine?

“Don’t start in on me about that,” Skorzeny said. Now he tossed his head like a man shaking flies. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I fought alongside those Jews in Russia, remember, same as you did, when we raided the Lizards for their explosive metal.”

“I remember,” Jager said. “I don’t have anything to do with-” He stopped. How many of the prisoners extracting uranium from the failed nuclear pile outside Hechingen and bringing it to Schloss Hohentubingen had been Jews? A good many, without a doubt. He might not have condemned them himself, but he’d exploited them once they were condemned. He tried again: “When theReich’s hands are dirty, how can anyone’s hands be clean?”

“They can’t,” Skorzeny said placidly. “War is a filthy business, and it dirties everything it touches. The whole business with the Jews is just part of that. Christ on His cross, Jager, are you going to feel clean after we give Albi our little dose of joy and good tidings?”

“That’s different.” Jager stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “The Lizards can shoot back-they shoot better than we do. But marching the Jews up to a pit and shooting them a row at a time-or the camps in Poland… People will remember that sort of thing for a thousand years.”

“Who remembers the Armenians the Turks killed in the last war?” Skorzeny said. “When they’re gone, they’re gone.” He rubbed his dry palms back and forth, as if washing his hands.

Jager couldn’t match that callousness. “Even if you were right-”

“Iam right,” Skorzeny broke in. “Who worries about the Carthaginians these days? Or, for that matter, about the-what’s the right name for them,Herr Doktor Professor of archaeology? — the Albigensians, that’s it, from the town just ahead?”

“Even if you were right,” Jager repeated, “they aren’t all gone and they won’t be all gone, not with the Lizards holding Poland. And those ones who are left will see to it that our name stays black forever.”

“If we win the war, it doesn’t matter. And if we lose the war, it doesn’t matter, either.” Skorzeny climbed to his feet. “Come on. We’ll get into Albi by sundown, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for our toys to arrive.”

That closed out the possibility of more talk. Jager also got up.I shouldn’t have expected anything else, he told himself. Most German officers wouldn’t talk about Jews at all. In a way, Skorzeny’s candor was an improvement. But only in a way. Sighing, Jager tramped on toward Albi.

Liu Han felt invisible. With a wicker basket in hand, she could wander from one of Peking’s markets to the next without being noticed. She was just one more woman among thousands, maybe millions. No one paid the least attention to her, any more than you paid attention to one particular flea among the many on a dog’s back.

“Think of yourself as a flea,” Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her. “You may be tiny, but your bite can draw blood.”

Liu Han was sick to death of being a flea. She was sick to death of being invisible. She’d been invisible all her life. She wanted to do something bold and prominent, something to make the scaly devils regret they’d ever interfered with her. Of course, the one time she’d not been invisible was when she’d been in the little devils’ clutches. She prayed to the Amida Buddha and any other god or spirit who would listen that she never attain such visibility again.

“Bok choi,very fresh!” a merchant bawled in her ear. Others hawked barley, rice, millet, wheat, poultry, pork, spices-any sort of food or condiment you could imagine.

Back in another market, somebody had been selling canned goods: some Chinese, others made by foreign devils with their foods inside. Liu Han’s gorge rose, thinking about those. The little scaly devils had kept her alive with them while they held her prisoner on the plane that never came down. If she tasted them again, she would remember that time, and she wanted to forget. The only good that had come from it was her baby, and it was stolen and Bobby Fiore, its father, dead.

She’d stayed close to the can salesman for some time, though. Canned goods were scarce in Peking these days, especially canned goods produced by the foreign devils. To show such a stock, the fellow who was selling them had to have connections with the little scaly devils. Maybe they would come around to his stall-and if they did, she would eavesdrop. Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her he’d used Bobby Fiore the same way in Shanghai; people who could make sense of the scaly devils’ language were few and far between.

But the can seller, though he might have been what Nieh called a running dog, was no fool. “You, woman!” he shouted at Liu Han. “Do you want to buy something, or are you spying on me?”

“I am just resting here for a moment, sir,” Liu Han answered in a small voice. “I cannot afford your excellent canned goods, I fear.” That was true; he asked exorbitant prices. For good measure, she added, “I wish I could,” which was a crashing lie.

She did not mollify the can seller. “Go rest somewhere else,” he said, shaking his fist. “I think you are telling lies. If I see you again, I will set the police on you.” He was a running dog, then; the Peking police, like police in any Chinese city, were the tools of those in power.

Liu Han retreated across the little market square to the edge of ahutung. She pointed back at the man who sold cans and screeched, “See the fool with his nose up the little devils’ back passage!” as loud as she could, then vanished down the alleyway. With a little luck, she’d have created ill will between the can seller and his neighbors in the market, maybe even cost him some customers.

She couldn’t reckon it a victory, though, because he’d driven her away before any scaly devils showed up at his stall. She bought someliang kao from a man with a basket of them-rice cakes stuffed with mashed beans and peas and served with sweet syrup-ate them, and then left thehutungs for Peking’s more prominent avenues. The scaly devils did not usually venture into the lanes and alleys of the city. If she wanted to find out what they were doing, she would have to go where they were.

Sure enough, when she came out on theTa Cha La, the Street of Large Gateposts, she found scaly devils aplenty. She was not surprised; the street was full of fancy silk shops and led to neighborhoods where fine eateries abounded.

But the scaly devils bought no silks and sought no restaurants. Instead, they gathered several deep around a mountebank whose show might have enlivened a child’s birthday party. “See how fat my mules are, and how warm my carriages!” the fellow cried.

Because the little devils were so short, Liu Han was able to see over them to the folding table the fellow had set up. His carriages were about six inches long, made of cast-off bits of cardboard, and used thin sticks for axles. The little scaly devils hissed with excitement as he pulled out a tin can from the box that held his paraphernalia. Out of the can he took one large, black dung beetle after another. He deftly fastened them to the carriages with reins of thread. They pulled those carriages-some of which resembled old-fashioned mule carts, others Peking water wagons-around and around the tabletop; every so often, he had to use a forefinger to keep his steeds from falling off the edge.

Even in the village where Liu Han had grown up, a beetle-cart show was nothing out of the ordinary. By the way the scaly devils reacted, though, they’d never seen anything like it in their lives. Some of them let their mouths hang open in mirth, while others nudged each other and exclaimed over the spectacle. “They make even pests into beasts of burden,” one of the little devils said.

“See, that one has upset the cart. Look at its little legs wave as it lies on its back,” another replied. He tossed a dollar Mex, and then another, to the mountebank. His comrades also showered the fellow with silver.

The little devils paid Liu Han no attention. The only way they would have noticed her was if she’d got in their way while they were watching the antics of the beetles. But those antics had so fascinated them, they weren’t talking about anything else. After a while, Liu Han decided she wouldn’t hear anything worthwhile here. TheTa Cha La was full of scaly devils. She headed up it toward the next group she saw.

When she got up to them, she discovered they were all staring at a monkey circus going through its paces. Like most of its kind, the circus also included a Pekinese dog and a trained sheep. Both men who ran it clanged brass gongs to draw a bigger crowd.

Growing impatient, one of the little scaly devils said, “You show us these creatures, what they do,now.”

The two men bowed nervously and obeyed. The monkey, dressed in a red satin jacket, capered about. It put on masks, one after another, cued by more taps on the gong.

“See how it looks like a little Tosevite,” one of the scaly devils said in his own language, pointing to the monkey. His mouth opened in mirth.

The little devil beside him said, “It’s even uglier than the Big Uglies, I think. All that fuzz all over it-” He shuddered in fastidious disgust.

“I don’t know,” yet another little scaly devil said. “It has a tail, at least. I think the Big Uglies look funny without them.”

Liu Han pretended she was watching the show without listening to the little devils. She’d known they had no proper respect for mankind-were that not so, they never would have treated her as they had. But hearing their scorn grated. Liu Han rocked slowly back and forth.You will pay, she thought.Oh, how you will pay for all you’ve done to me. But how to make them pay? Vowing revenge was easy, getting it something else again.

The monkey went through the rest of its turns, imitating a wheelbarrow man and a rickshaw puller and then playing on a swing at the top of a bamboo pole. The little devils showered the men who ran the monkey circus with coins. After the monkey itself came the Pekinese. It jumped through hoops of different sizes that the men held at varying heights above the ground. Even in her village, Liu Han had seen dogs that could leap much higher. But the little scaly devils admired the Pekinese as much as they had the monkey.

For the finale, the sheep came out and the monkey sprang onto its back, riding it around in circles like a jockey on a racehorse. The little scaly devils had only to look about them to see men on horseback. They caught the analogy, too, and laughed harder than ever. When at last the show was over, they gave the two men who ran it still more silver-they seemed to have an unlimited supply-and went off in search of further entertainment.

“Eee,”one of the men said, letting Mex dollars jingle through his fingers, “I used to hate the little scaly devils like everyone else, but they are making us rich.”

The other animal trainer did not answer. He picked up the gong and started pounding on it, trying to lure more scaly devils to the next show.

He had competition. A little way up the street, a fellow with a horn was playing old, familiar tunes. He didn’t play very well, but skill on the trumpet was not how he made his living: it was just the traditional signal a fellow who exhibited trained mice used to draw a crowd.

And, sure enough, a crowd gathered. It had children in it, and old people with time on their hands, but also a good many little scaly devils. Because the little devils stood and watched, so did Liu Han.

“Hello, hello, hello!” the mouse show man boomed jovially. He was wearing a square wooden box, held on by a shoulder strap. From the box rose a wooden pole two feet high, on top of which were mounted a pagoda, a wooden fish, a little hanging bucket made of tin, and a hollow wooden peach. “Do you want to see my little friends perform?”

“Yes!” the children shouted, loud and shrill as a flock of starlings. The little scaly devils who understood Chinese added their hissing voices to the cries.

“All right, then,” the man said. “You don’t have any cats, do you?” He looked sly. “If you do, kindly keep them in your pockets till we’re finished.”

He waited till the children’s giggles and the silent laughter of the scaly devils subsided, then rapped three times on the side of the box. It had a latched hole in the front. He lifted the latch. Four white mice came out and climbed a little ladder of string and sticks of bamboo. They went through their paces on the apparatus, scrambling down into the bucket and swinging in it, pulling the fish up by the string that held it, running to the top of the pagoda and jumping inside, and scrambling into the peach and peering out, whiskers quivering, little red eyes aglow.

The mouse show man said, “How’d you like to bite down and findthat inside your peach?” The children giggled once more.

The little scaly devils, though, did not react to that with mirth. One of them said, “The Big Uglies have filthy habits-always parasites in their food.”

“Truth,” another said. “And theyjoke about it.”

“They are disgusting,” a third chimed in, “but they also manage to be entertaining. We don’t have beast-shows back on Home to match these. Who would have thought animals-especially Tosevite animals-could learn to do so many interesting things? I spend as much free time as I can watching them.”

“And I,” said the scaly devil who had spoken second. A couple of others sputtered agreement.

Liu Han watched the performing mice a minute or two more. Then she tossed the man who exhibited them a few coppers and walked down theTa Cha La, thinking hard. More little devils congregated in a vacant lot from which the wreckage of a shop had been cleared away. A trained bear was going through its run of tricks there. The scaly devils exclaimed as it wielded a heavy wooden sword with a long handle. Liu Han walked by, hardly noticing.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was always looking for ways to get close to the little scaly devils, the better to make their lives miserable. If trained animals fascinated them so, a troupe of men with such performers might well gain access even to important males, or groups of important males. Anyone who showed Nieh a new way to do that would gain credit for it.

Liu Han scratched her head. She was sure she had a good idea, but how could she use it to best advantage? She was no longer the naive peasant woman she’d been when the little devils carried her away from her village. Too much had happened to her since. If she could, she would take her fate back into her own hands.

“Not to be a puppet,” she said. A man with a thin wisp of white beard turned and gave her a curious look. She didn’t care. Nieh Ho T’ing hadn’t treated her badly; he’d probably treated her better than anyone except Bobby Fiore. But one of the reasons he did treat her so was that he found her a tool to fit his hand. If she was lucky, if she was careful, maybe she could make him treat her as someone to be reckoned with.

After the lamplit gloom of theKrom, George Bagnall had to blink and wait for his eyes to adjust to daylight. Even after the adjustment, he looked about curiously. Something about the quality of the light, the color of the sky, had changed, ever so slightly. The day was bright and warm, and yet-

When Bagnall remarked on that, Jerome Jones nodded and said, “I noticed it, too, the other day. Somebody Up There”-the capitals were quite audible-“is telling us summer shan’t last forever.” He looked wistful. “Now that it’s beginning to go, it seems hardly to have been here at all.”

“Weren’t you the blighter who swore to us Pskov had a mild climate by Russian standards?” Ken Embry demanded with mock fierceness. “This, as I recall, while we were flying above endless snow and a frozen lake.”

“By Russian standards, Pskovdoes have a mild climate,” Jones protested. “Set alongside Moscow, it’s very pleasant. Set along Arkhangelsk, it’s like Havana or New Delhi.”

“Set alongside Arkhangelsk, by all accounts, the bloody South Pole looks like a holiday resort,” Embry said. “I knew Russian standards in matters of weather were elastic before we got here; I simply hadn’t realized how much stretch the elastic had to it: rather like a fat man’s underclothes, I’d say.”

“That may end up working to our advantage,” Bagnall said. “The Lizards like Russian winter even less than we do. We should be able to push them farther south of the city.”

“A consummation devoutly to be wished.” Ken Embry leered at him. “In aid of which, when will they be posting the banns for you and that little Russian flier?”

“Oh, give over such nonsense.” Bagnall kicked a clod of dirt down the street. “Nothing is going on between us.”

The other two Englishmen snorted, either disbelieving or affecting disbelief. Then Jerome Jones sighed. “I wish I thought you were lying. That might make Tatiana stop throwing her fair white body in your direction. We’ve had rows about it, once or twice.” He kicked moodily at the dirt.

“And?” Embry asked. “Leaving us in suspense that way is bad form.”

“And nothing,” Jones answered. “Tatiana does what she bloody well pleases. If one were mad enough to try stopping her, she’d blow off his head.”

Neither of the other Englishmen thought that was in any way figurative language. Bagnall said, “Whoever came up with ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ must have had your fair Russian sniper in mind.”

“Too true.” Jones sighed again. He glanced sidelong at Bagnall. “That’s why she’s keen on you, you know: she thinks you’re better at killing than I am-I’m just a radarman, after all. The idea makes her motor go.”

Bagnall sent him a sympathetic look “Old chap, I don’t mean to give offense, but have you never wondered if you’d be better off without her company?”

“Oh, many a time,” Jones said feelingly.

“Well, then?” Bagnall asked when the radarman failed to draw the obvious conclusion.

Now Jones looked shamefaced. “For one thing, if I give her the boot, she’s liable to give me something out of the barrel of that sniper’s rifle of hers.” He touched a forefinger to a spot just above the bridge of his nose, as if to say the bullet would go in there.

“Something to that, I expect,” Ken Embry said. “But a ‘for one thing’ generally implies a ‘for another,’ what? Rather like amen implying ade, if you’ve read your Greek like a good fellow.”

“Nai, malista,”Jones said, which made all three Englishmen laugh. Bagnall had trouble imagining anything further removed from the classical world than Pskov during wartime. They walked on for another few steps. Slowly, reluctantly, Jerome Jones continued, “Yes, there’s a ‘for another.’ The other reason I don’t send her packing is that-that-I seem to have fallen in love with her.” He waited for his companions to mock him.

Now it was Bagnall’s turn to sigh. He set a sympathetic hand on Jones’ shoulder. The radarman quivered under his touch like a restive horse. Bagnall said, “Steady, there. If we’re being classical, let’s be downright Socratic and define our terms, shall we? Are you truly in love with her, or is it just that she pleases you in the kip?”

Jerome Jones turned a vermilion not commonly seen this side of a sunset.How young he is, Bagnall thought from his superior altitude of three or four years. “How does one tell the difference?” the radarman asked plaintively.

“Always a good question,” Embry said with a cynical chuckle.

“Let’s try answering it, then,” Bagnall said, for Jones looked not only very young but very lost: he’d meant the question with every fiber of his being. Bagnall went on, “Socratics we are, having another go at theSymposium.”

That pleased Jones. Embry chuckled again and said, “Fair young Alcibiades is right out.”

“Fair young Tatiana is quite enough trouble all on her own,” Jones said. “She and Alcibiades, they’d deserve each other.”

“Here’s one fast clue to your feelings, for starters,” Bagnall said: “If you only want to have anything to do with your possibly beloved when the two of you are naked between the sheets, that should tell you something about your state of mind.”

“So it should.” The radarman looked thoughtful. “Not as simple as that, I’m afraid; I wish to heaven it were. But I like being around her, whether we’re”-he coughed-“or not. It’s rather like setting up a tent next to a tiger’s lair: you never know what will happen next, but it’s apt to be something exciting.”

“And you’re liable to end up as thehors d’oeuvres,” Embry put in.

Bagnall waved the pilot to silence. “How do you think she feels about you, Jones?” he asked.

Jerome Jones’ face furrowed with thought. “I am of the opinion her fidelity leaves something to be desired,” he said, to which Bagnall could but nod. Jones went on, “She set her cap for me, not the other way round. This bloody country-I’d be afraid to chat up a girl, because next thing you know, you’d be talking to the NKVD instead.” He shivered. “Some of my university chums, they weren’t just pink, they were red. If any of them had actually seen Russia, that wouldn’t have lasted long, and there’s the God’s truth.”

“You’re certain to be right about that,” Bagnall said. “The same thing has occurred to me, oh, once or twice during our delightful sojourn here. But it’s not to the point now. That centers on the fair Tatiana.”

“I know.” Jones walked on for several paces without continuing.

Bagnall waited for him to say something, anything, that would clarify what he felt, what Tatiana felt, and might even help all of them get out of their present complications without falling into new ones that were worse. He realized that was asking a lot, but he’d never wanted Tatiana to set her sights on him.

After a bit, the radarman said, “I chased a lot of skirt back in England; I don’t think there was a barmaid in any pub I went into whom I didn’t try to chat up. But we all know there’s a deal of difference between chasing it and catching it, don’t we?” He chuckled wryly. “And so, when we got here and I had this gorgeous creature chasing me, it made me feel about ten feet high. And, of course-” He didn’t go on, but his expression was eloquent.

Ken Embry put that expression into words: “When you’re sleeping with a pretty woman, there is a certain natural disinclination to do anything which will result in your not sleeping with her in future.”

“Well, yes,” Jones said, coloring a little. “In her own bloodthirsty way, I think, Tatiana is fond enough of me, too. Speaking a bit of Russian does me no harm there. But she keeps complaining I’m too soft to quite suit her, that she’d like me better if I stuck a knife between my teeth and crawled about through the bushes slitting Lizards’ throats.”

Bagnall nodded. His own rugged masculine charm (if any) hadn’t been what drew Tatiana to him. He knew that perfectly well. Tatiana wanted him because she thought he was good at hurting the Lizards. She hadn’t made any bones about it, either.

Embry said, “With that cast of mind, it’s a miracle she didn’t throw in her lot with a Jerry.”

“If she hadn’t been trying to pot them before the Lizards came, she would have done just that, my guess is,” Jones said. “But she hates them worse than any other Russian I’ve ever seen, and she thinks her own menfolk are a pack of swine. Which left-me. Except nowadays I’m not good enough, either.”

“Maybe I should make a play for Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova,” Bagnall said meditatively. “It’s the easiest way I can think of to get Tatiana out of my hair for good.”

“Except that if she really is out to have you come hell or high water, losing you to Ludmila is liable to endanger that young lady,” Ken Embry said.

“There I have my doubts,” Bagnall said. “Ludmila is not as outwardly ferocious as Tatiana, that I grant you, but she can take care of herself.”

“I should hope so,” Jerome Jones burst out. “How many combat missions has she flown in that rickety little biplane of hers? More than I like to think about, that’s certain. You wouldn’t get me up in the air in one of those things, especially not where people are trying to shoot me down.”

“Amen to that,” Bagnall said. “She doesn’t go any too high in the air, either-leaves herself a target for any bloke on the ground with a rifle.” He knew she would have been a target for worse things than rifle fire had she strayed high enough for radar to pick her up, but the idea of being vulnerable to simple infantry weapons chilled him to the marrow.

“If she can take care of herself, you really should make a play for her,” Embry said. “That would get you out of harm’s way, and might even reconcile Tatiana to Jones here. See what a Leonora Eyles I’m getting to be?” he added, naming the advice columnist forWomen’s Own magazine.

“This ointment does have one fly in it,” Jerome Jones said, “namely, the Jerry who flew into Pskov with our intrepid pilot: Schultz, that’s what he’s called. Have you never seen him casting sheep’s eyes at her?”

“I’ve seen that, yes,” Bagnall said, “but I’ve never seen Ludmila casting any back his way. He’s a rugged specimen, but I’m not afraid of him.” He rubbed his chin. “I’d not care to put us in a bad odor with the Germans, either, though. If we’re not seen to be honest brokers between the Nazis and the Reds, everything we’ve accomplished goes up in smoke-and so, very likely, does Pskov.”

“Bloody hell of a thing,” Ken Embry remarked, “when you can’t even make a play for a pretty girl for fear of causing an international incident.”

“International incidents be damned,” Bagnall said. “I don’t care about that aspect of it at all. But if making a play for a pretty girl will get me killed and this town blown up around my ears, that does make me thoughtful, I admit.”

“Nice to know something can,” Embry said with a grin.

South of Pskov, antiaircraft guns began to hammer. A moment later, cannon inside the city started throwing shells into the air. With training instilled when theLuftwaffe had been pounding England, the three RAF men leaped into the nearest hole in the ground: a large bomb crater.

The crater was muddy at the bottom, but Bagnall didn’t care about that, not when a couple of Lizard jets were screaming overhead, low enough that their banshee wail all but deafened him. As he buried his face in the cool, wet dirt, he tried to remember what sort of targets were nearby. In a mechanized war, such matters determined who lived and who died.

Bombs raining down made the ground shake. Bagnall had never experienced an earthquake, but was of the opinion that being bombed made a satisfactory substitute.

Still pursued by shells, the Lizard fighter-bombers streaked away to the north. Every so often, the antiaircraft gunners got lucky and brought down a Lizard plane. They expended a great whacking lot of shells between kills, though.

Shrapnel pattered down like hot, jagged hailstones. Bagnall wished for a tin hat. Shrapnel wouldn’t tear you into gory rags the way bomb fragments did; it wasn’t going fast enough. But a big chunk could fracture your skull or do other unpleasant things to the one and only wonderful and precious body you ever got.

When the AA guns fell silent and the rain of machined brass and steel stopped, Ken Embry got to his feet and began brushing dirt and muck from his clothes. The other two Englishmen followed rather more slowly.

“All in a day’s work,” Embry said. “Shall we brew up some of the Russians’ alleged tea when we get back to our digs?”

“Why not?” Bagnall answered. His heart was still pounding in animal response to the bombing, but his mind remained untroubled and collected. As Embry had said, it was all in a day’s work-and that struck Bagnall as the most damning indictment of all.