Upsetting the Balance

17

Sam Yeager paced back and forth in the Army and Navy General Hospital waiting room. He wondered how much experience the doctors had with delivering babies. Soldiers and sailors being of the male persuasion, they weren’t likely to end up in a family way themselves. How often had the medical staff here helped their wives? Lots and lots, he devoutly hoped.

From the delivery room beyond the swinging doors came a muffled shriek. It made him clench his fists till nails bit into flesh, bite his lip till he tasted blood. That was Barbara in there, straining with all her might to bring their child into the world. Part of him wished he could be in there with her, holding her hand and reassuring her everything was all right(Please, God, let everything be all right!) Another part of him was grimly certain he’d either lose his lunch or pass out if he watched what she was going through.

He paced harder, wishing he had a cigarette to calm him and to give him something to do with his hands. He’d actually smoked a couple of pipefuls up in southern Missouri; they grew tobacco around there. But when word came that Barbara was going to pop any day now, he’d hurried back to Hot Springs fast as horseflesh would carry him. Robert Goddard had been good about letting him go; he owed his boss one for that.

Barbara shrieked again, louder. Sam’s guts churned. For a man to have to listen to his wife in agony just wasn’t right. But the only other things that came to mind were charging into the delivery room, which he couldn’t do, and sneaking off somewhere like a yellow dog and holing up with a bottle of booze, which he couldn’t do, either. He just had to stay here and take it. Some ways, going into combat had been easier. Then, at least, the danger had been his personally, and he’d had some small control over it. Now he couldn’t do anything but pace.

Maybe the worst was that he couldn’t hear anything the doctors or nurses were saying in there, only Barbara’s cries. He didn’t know whether she was supposed to be making noises like that. Were things going okay, or was she in trouble? He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

He sat down in a hard chair and made a conscious effort to relax, as if he were stepping into the batter’s box against some kid pitcher who could fire a fasthall through the side of a barn-if he could hit the side of a barn. He blanked everything but the moment from his mind, took a couple of deep breaths. His heart stopped pounding so hard.That’s better, he thought.

Barbara chose that moment to make a new noise, not a scream exactly, but cry and grunt and moan all mixed together. It was a sound of supreme effort, as if she were trying to lift the front axle of a car off somebody pinned underneath it. Sam bounced out of his seat, all efforts at relaxation out of the park like a line drive off the bat of Hank Greenberg.

Barbara made that appalling noise again, and then once more. After that, for maybe a minute, Sam didn’t hear anything. “Please, God, let her be all right,” he mumbled. He wasn’t usually much of a praying man; when he asked God for something, it was something he really wanted.

Then another cry came through the swinging doors: a thin, furious wail that said only one thing: what is this place, and what the devil am I doing here? Sam’s knees sagged. It was a good thing he was standing next to that chair, because he would have sat down whether or no.

The swinging doors opened outward. A doctor came through them, gauze mask fallen down under his chin, a few splashes of blood on his white robe. In one hand he held a crudely rolled cigar, in the crook of his other elbow the littlest person Sam had ever seen.

He handed Yeager the cigar. “Congratulations, Sergeant,” he said. “You’ve got yourself a fine baby boy here. Haven’t put him on the scales yet, but he’ll be around seven and a half pounds. He’s got all his fingers, all his toes, and a hell of a good set of lungs.” As if to prove that, the baby started crying again.

“B-B-B-B-” Sam took one more deep breath and made himself talk straight: “Barbara? Is she all right?”

“She’s doing just fine,” the doctor said, smiling. “Do you want to see her?” When Yeager nodded, the doctor held out the baby to him. “Here. Why don’t you take your son in, too?”

Your son.The words almost made Sam’s legs buckle again. He stuffed the cigar into a trouser pocket and warily reached out for the baby. Seeing his inexperience, the doctor showed him how to hold it so its head wouldn’t flop around like a fish out of water.

Now he could pass through the doors that had held him back before. The delivery room smelled of sweat and of the outhouse; a nurse was taking a bucket away from the table with the stirrups. Sam gulped. Birth was a process with no dignity to it.

His son wiggled in his hands. He almost dropped the baby. “Bring him here,” Barbara said from the table. “They only showed him to me for a couple of seconds. Let me see him.”

She sounded beat up. She looked it, too. Her face was pale and puffy, with big purple circles under her eyes. Her skin glistened with sweat, even though the delivery room wasn’t what you’d call warm. If a guy caught two doubleheaders back to back on the same day in ninety-degree heat and ninety-percent humidity, he’d look a little like that when it was finally over.

Sam showed her the baby. The smile that spread over her face cut through her exhaustion like a sharp knife through tender steak. “Give him to me,” she said, and held out her hands.

“You can nurse him now, if you like,” the doctor said from behind Sam. “In fact, it would be good if you did. There aren’t going to be many bottle babies, not any more.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Barbara said. “Before the war, of the people I knew who had babies, hardly any nursed theirs. Bottles seemed so much more modern and sanitary. But if there aren’t any bottles-” She drew aside the sheet that was draped over the top part of her body. For a moment, Sam was startled that she’d bare her breasts to the doctor. Then he told himself not to be an idiot. After all, the fellow had just helped guide the baby out from between her legs.

Barbara set the baby on her breast. He knew what he was supposed to do. If he hadn’t known, people would long since have been as extinct as dinosaurs. He made little slurping noises, just like the calves and lambs and piglets on the farm where Sam had grown up.

“What are you going to name him?” the doctor asked.

“Jonathan Philip,” Barbara answered. Sam nodded. It wasn’t the most imaginative way to name a kid-after his father and hers-but it would do the job. Had it been a girl, they would have called it Carol Paulette, for her mother and his.

He said, “I wish we had some kind of way to let our folks know we had a baby.” After a moment, he added, “Heck, I wish we had some kind of way to let our families know we’re married, or even that we’re alive. I wish I knew whether my folks were alive or dead, too; from what I hear, the Lizards have been in Nebraska just about since they landed.”

“What I wish,” Barbara said, sitting up and draping the sheet over her like a toga, “is that I could have something to eat I feel as if I’d spent the last two weeks digging ditches.”

“We can take care of that,” the doctor said. “In fact, we should be taking care of that right about now.” As if his words were a cue, a nurse came in carrying a tray that bore a huge steak, a couple of baked potatoes, a pumpkin pie, and two large mugs. Pointing at those, the doctor said, “I know they should be full of champagne, but that is the best homebrew we’ve made yet. Call it a wartime sacrifice.” He pushed a little wheeled table next to the one on which Barbara was lying.

Since she was still nursing Jonathan, Sam did the honors with knife and fork, cutting alternate bites for her and himself. As far as he could remember, he’d never fed anybody like that before. He liked it. By the way Barbara smiled as she ate, so did she. She hadn’t been kidding about being hungry, either; food disappeared off the plate at an astonishing rate. The homebrew was as good, and as potent, as promised.

Barbara said, “If the beer goes to my milk, will it make Jonathan drunk?”

“Maybe,” the doctor answered. “If it does, it’ll probably make him sleep better, and I don’t think you’ll complain about that.”

Sam wondered how they’d do: a man, a woman, and a baby, all in one room. People did manage, so he supposed they would. Then he remembered he’d be going back up to Missouri any day now. That didn’t seem fair, either to him or to Barbara, but he didn’t know what he could do about it No, that wasn’t true. He did know what he could do about it: nothing.

When they were done eating, the nurse took away the tray. Sam waited for her to come back with a wheelchair for Barbara, then realized that wouldn’t do any good, not without the elevators running. “She can’t walk upstairs to our room,” he protested.

“Oh, she probably could,” the doctor said. “One thing you find out pretty fast is that people are tougher than you’d imagine. But we’re not going to let her. You and I, Sergeant, we’ll get her up there.”

They did, too, in a sort of modified fireman’s carry that had them both panting by the time they made it to the fourth floor. The nurse followed with Jonathan. When they finally came out into the hallway Barbara said, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

Walk she did, toward their room. It was more shamble than stride; her feet were as wide apart as if she’d spent the last twenty years in the saddle. While that wasn’t true, she had spent a good long while in the stirrups.

Straha came out of his room to see what was going on in the hall. He kept his body paint unsmeared and in the magnificent shiplord’s pattern he’d worn when defecting: no Official American Prisoner markings for him. He came skittering up to the nurse. She drew back a pace, as if to protect the baby from him. “It’s okay,” Sam said quickly. “We’re friends. Let him see Jonathan.”

The nurse looked dubious, but held out the baby boy. As Straha examined it, he looked dubious, too. “This is a Tosevite hatchling?” he said in his own hissing language. “It is a Little Ugly, not a Big Ugly.” His mouth fell open in appreciation of his own wit.

Barbara answered in the same tongue: “Shiplord, that ismy hatchling, and it is not ugly.” For good measure, she tacked on an emphatic cough. Yeager added one of his own, to show he agreed. Among the Lizards, that was grammatically uncouth, but it got the message across.

“Familial attachments,” Straha said, as if reminding himself. “No insult was intended, I assure you. For a Tosevite hatchling, this is undoubtedly a paragon.”

“What’s he talking about?” the doctor asked.

“He says we’ve got a cute kid,” Sam answered. He was skeptical about Straha’s sincerity, but the Lizard was too big a cheese for him to make a fuss over it. Besides, except for an exaggerated sense of his own brilliance and worth-hardly a trait unique to Lizards-he was a pretty good fellow.

Barbara returned to English: “I may be able to walk, but I can’t stand in one place very long. I’m going inside and lying down.” She waddled the last few steps toward their door and started to go into the room. The nurse followed with the baby.

Before she got there, Ristin and Ullhass came out to look over the new arrival. They were politer than Straha, but still curious. When Jonathan opened his mouth to squawk, Ristin exclaimed, “The hatchling has no teeth! How can it eat if it has no teeth?”

Barbara rolled her eyes. “If the baby did have teeth, it wouldn’t eat from me,” she said feelingly.

“That’s right-you Tosevites nourish your hatchlings yourself.” Ullhass was more thoughtful, less high-spirited than Ristin. “I am sure you will do everything you can to make this little-is it a male or a female? — this little male an upstanding member of your race.”

“Thank you, Ullhass,” Barbara said, “but if I’m on my feet another minute, I’m going to be a downfalling member of my race.” She went into the room she and Sam would now share with their son.

The nurse brought in the baby. “Y’all holier if there’s anything we can do,” she said as she gave it to Barbara. “Good luck to you, honey.” Then she left, and closed the door behind her. All at once, in spite of what the nurse had said, it seemed to Sam that he, his wife, and their child were the only people left in the world. He gulped. Could he handle responsibility like that? After a moment, he realized the question hardly mattered. He wouldn’t get that much chance to handle the responsibility of being a father, not when Jonathan was here and he’d be heading back up to Missouri.

Barbara set Jonathan in the crib he’d bought at a secondhand store in Hot Springs. The crib wasn’t very large-even if it did crowd the already-crowded room-but the baby all but disappeared in it With a long, shuddering sigh, Barbara lay down. “You all right, hon?” Sam asked anxiously.

“I think so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure, though. I’ve never done this before. Am I supposed to feel as if a steamroller just mashed me?”

“I can’t tell you from what I know myself, but by everything my mother used to say, that is how you’re supposed to feel.”

“That’s good. I’m going to sleep for a while, I think, while the baby’s resting, and then, if he’s still asleep, I’ll stagger down the hall and take a shower. Thank heavens the hot springs give us all the hot water we need, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt so… greasy in my whole life. That was hard work.”

“I love you, honey.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek, then turned and shook a severe finger at Jonathan. “And you, buster, keep it quiet for a while.” He laughed. “There, I’m already showing our kid who’s boss.”

“That’s easy-he is.” Barbara closed her eyes.

Sam sat down in the one chair the room boasted. Barbara dropped off almost at once. Her slow, deep breaths mixed oddly with Jonathan’s quick, uncertain ones. The baby was a restless sleeper, wiggling and thrashing and sometimes trying to suck at the sheets or the blanket that covered him. Every so often, Yeager got up to peer at him. He tried to figure out whom the baby looked like. He couldn’t tell. What Jonathan mostly looked was squashed. Even his head almost came to a point at the top. None of the doctors or nurses had got upset about that, so Sam supposed it was normal.

After an hour or so, Barbara woke up, stretched, and said. “Isn’t he a little angel, sleeping like that? I am going to get clean. I won’t be long. Pick him up and hold him if he fusses while I’m gone.”

Sam hadn’t thought about that. He was going off and leaving Barbara on the spot for God only knew how long, but she was a woman-she was supposed to be able to take care of babies. What would he do if Jonathan started crying?

Jonathan started crying. One minute he was quiet except for snorts and grunts, the next he sounded like an air-raid siren in the little room. Gulping, Sam picked him up, careful to support his head as the doctor had shown him. One thing immediately became obvious: the kid was wet.

Next to the crib stood a pile of diapers; safety pins lay on top of the chest of drawers. Sam undid the diaper Jonathan had on, and discovered he was more than wet; he had a mess in there, too. Sam stared at it: was it supposed to be greenish black? He didn’t know, but figured he’d assume everything was normal there, too, till he heard otherwise.

Growing up on a farm had inured him to dealing with messes of most sorts. He wiped his son’s bottom, which made Jonathan fuss more, then folded a diaper into a triangle and got it onto the kid. He stuck himself with a pin only once, which he reckoned a victory of sorts. The doctors hadn’t circumcised the baby. He wasn’t circumcised himself, so that didn’t bother him.One less thing to have to worry about, he thought.

Jonathan kept fussing. “It’s okay, kid, it really is,” Sam said, rocking the baby in his arms. After a while, the cries subsided to whimpers. Jonathan drifted off to sleep. Ever so carefully, Sam put him back in the crib. He didn’t wake up. Sam felt as if he’d caught a fly ball that clinched a pennant.

Barbara came back a couple of minutes later. “Is hestill asleep?” she exclaimed, looking at the baby.

Sam pointed to the galvanized bucket where he’d tossed the dirty diaper. “I managed,” he said, which, with his ballpark thought of a little while before, made him wonder how Mutt Daniels was doing these days. The news coming out of embattled Chicago lately was better than it had been earlier in the year, but still not good.

“I wish you didn’t have to go back tomorrow,” Barbara said that evening as they got ready for bed.

“So do I.” Sam passed her the cigar the doctor had given him: they were sharing it for a treat. “But I can’t do anything about that I’m just lucky Dr. Goddard was a good enough guy to let me get down here at all.”

By the time he crawled out of bed the next morning, Sam wasn’t so sure he was sorry to go. He wondered if it might not be more like an escape. He’d expected Jonathan to wake several times in the night, and the baby did. Whenever he roused, Barbara nursed him. What he hadn’t expected-nor Barbara, either, by her increasingly haggard look-was that the baby could wake them without waking up him self. Every little snort or grunt or slurping noise Jonathan made would bring his parents alert, their eyes wide, wondering what they needed to do next. Often the answer wasnothing, but they couldn’t know that in advance.

As he put on his khakis, shirt, and jacket, Sam felt himself moving as if underwater. Barbara looked to be in worse shape than he was.

“Jesus,” he said, his voice a rusty croak, “I wish there was coffee.”

“Oh, so do I,” Barbara said fervently. She managed a wan smile. “One thing about the shortages, though: I don’t have to worry about your falling asleep at the reins of your horse and driving him into a tree or a ditch.”

“Something to that,” Sam said. “Not much, but something.” He hugged her, then smiled himself. “I don’t have to lean over your belly any more. That’s pretty good.”

“I’m still all-” Barbara gestured. “I hope I’ll have my figure back when I see you again.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t, because that would mean I won’t see you for a while, and I want you back here as soon as you can come. I love you, Sam, and besides, Jonathan needs to know who his daddy is.”

“Yeah.” The baby was asleep for the moment. Yeager kissed the tip of his own finger and brushed it against Jonathan’s cheek. “So long, kiddo.” He hugged Barbara again. “So long, hon. Love you, too.” Sighing, he lurched out the door and headed down the hall to the stairs.

From behind him, Straha called in peremptory tones: “I must tell you that your hatchling’s howls last night disturbed me and, I have no doubt, other males of the Race on this floor. How long can we expect this unseemly cacophony to continue?”

“Oh, about six months, more or less,” Sam answered cheerfully. “That’s one of your years, isn’t it? So long. I’m going back to Missouri, away from the noise.” He ducked down the stairway, leaving the shiplord staring after him.

Georg Schultz spun the U-2’s prop. The five-cylinder Shvetsov radial engine caught at once. Being air-cooled, it was less susceptible to cold weather than a lot of aircraft powerplants. When the weather got cold enough, oil didn’t want to flow, but it wasn’t quite that bad today. It had been, on and off, and Ludmila Gorbunova had no doubt it would be again before long.

Schultz got out of the way in a hurry. Ludmila released the brake and let theKukuruznik bounce down the rutted dirt of the airstrip. When she’d built up enough speed, she pulled back on the stick and clawed her way into the air. Getting the little biplane off the ground always made her feel that, if you wanted to badly enough, you could run along with your arms spread and take off and fly all by yourself.

The slipstream that came over the windscreen threatened to freeze her cheeks and mouth, the only flesh she bared to it She went into a wide turn and flew over the airstrip on her way south. Georg Schultz was already out of sight.Probably on his way to Tatiana ‘s bed, Ludmila thought scornfully. But he was right: she really had no business complaining. She didn’t want him, and was just as glad to have him out of her hair once and for all.

She buzzed over the defense lines south of Pskov, built with such unflagging and dreadful civilian effort the summer before. Soldiers in the trenches waved at her. And, as happened fairly often, a couple of fools shot at her, not believing anything built by human beings could be in the air. She saw muzzle flashes, heard a couple of bullets crack past.

“Who do you think I am, the devil’s grandmother?” she shouted. That helped relieve her own feelings, but the men on the ground couldn’t hear her. Sometimes, when bullets came closer than they had today, she thought longingly about machine-gunning the trenches of her own side.

Then she was over the Lizards’ lines. She gunned the U-2 for all it was worth, but that, as she knew only too well, was a matter of kopecks, not rubles. A couple of Lizards shot at her, too. They didn’t come any closer than the Russians had. That wasn’t what worried her. They’d use their radios to let their side know she was out and flying, and the Lizards had antiaircraft weapons far more deadly than automatic rifles.

Once she was past the Lizards’ main line, she swung theKukuruznik ’s nose west, then south, then west again, then north for a little ways, and then east for an even shorter time. The less predictable she made her path, the less likely they were to blow her out of the sky.

Some kilometers south of the Lizards’ forward positions, she spotted a convoy of tanks and soft-skinned vehicles slogging along a dirt road. Now that snow had replaced the fall rains, roads were passable again: what had been mud was frozen solid.

That wasn’t what drew her notice to the convoy, though. The tanks and lorries weren’t moving up to help the Lizards advance on Pskov. Instead, they were heading south themselves, away from the city. They had artillery with them, too, some self-propelled and some towed weapons captured from the Red Army and the Germans.

She didn’t get too close to the convoy. A lot of those vehicles mounted machine guns for defense against low-flying aircraft, and her best hope for surviving such a barrage was not drawing it in the first place. As soon as she was sure they really were southbound, she flew away as fast as the U-2 would take her.

“Whatare they doing?” she wondered aloud. Had she not been wearing thick gloves and a leather flying helmet, she would have scratched her head. She’d never seen such a large-scale withdrawal by the Lizards before.

She skimmed along a few meters above the treetops, drawing occasional potshots from the woods below, but was gone before the Lizards could do her any damage. She was thinking hard. The evasive maneuvers she’d performed south of the Lizards’ lines had left her a trifle disoriented, but if she was where she thought she was, she ought to strike another road if she flew southeast for a couple of minutes.

And there it was! Like most roads between Soviet cities, it was dirt-surfaced. But it also had Lizard armor on it, and lorries with the tanks and fighting vehicles. This was a bigger column than the one she’d seen before, and also heading south-southwest, actually, given the direction of the highway, which ran toward Daugavpils in what had been Latvia till the Soviet Union reclaimed it a couple of years before.

“Whatare they doing?” she repeated, but that seemed pretty obvious. They were pulling back from Pskov, or at least pulling back the forces with which they could advance farther rather than merely holding in place.

She found another question: “Why are they doing it?” She didn’t think it was because they’d despaired of conquering Pskov. They had to want the armor somewhere else. Where, she had no idea, and it wasn’t her job to worry about such things anyhow. But she needed to get the information to someone whose jobwas worrying about them.

Not for the first time, she wished theKukuruznik had a radio. She sighed; a lot of Soviet aircraft and tanks went without radios. That saved the expense of building and installing them, and the trouble of training personnel who were liable to be illiterate peasants just off the farm. Whether such economies were worth the disadvantage of being without good communications was another question entirely.

When she bounced in for a landing outside Pskov, no Soviet groundcrew men waited for her. The possibility that she might come back early had never entered their minds. She taxied as far from the concealed airplanes as she could, leaving her own at the very edge of the trees. With luck, the Lizards would be so intent on their retreat that they wouldn’t notice theKukuruznik.

Without luck…“Nichevo,” Ludmila said: “It can’t be helped.”

She hurried into Pskov. By the time she got to theKrom, she was sweating; if anything would keep you warm, flight gear would. She almost ran into George Bagnall as he was coming out “What’s going on?” he asked in his bad Russian.

She poured out the story, first in Russian and then, when she realized she was going too fast for him to follow, in German instead.

“And so I must seeGeneralleutnant Chill and the Soviet brigadierssofort — immediately,” she finished. German was a good language in which to sound urgent. If you didn’t get your way, it seemed to warn, something terrible would happen.

But Bagnall only nodded.“Da, they all need to know that,” he said, and, setting a hand on her shoulder to show she was with him, he marched her through layers of sentries and subordinates to the commandments of Pskov.

She told them the story in the same mix of languages she’d used with Bagnall. Aleksandr German translated from the Russian for Kurt Chill and from the German for Nikolai Vasiliev. The leaders were as excited as Ludmila had been. Vasiliev slammed a fist down on the tabletop. “We can drive them far from our city!” he shouted.

“They’re already going,” Chill said. “Whereare they going-and why? We must have more intelligence reports. I shall order up additional flights.” He reached for a field telephone.

Until they got more data, the commanders weren’t about to order anything irrevocable, which struck Ludmila as sensible. She and Bagnall both withdrew. He said, “You did well to come back so soon. You showed a lot of-” He had trouble with the word, both in Russian and in German. Finally, after some fumbling, Ludmila decided he was trying to sayinitiative.

She shrugged. “It needed doing, so I did it.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she realize that was unusual, at least among the Soviets. You did what you were told, and nothing else. That way, you never got in trouble. From what she’d seen, the Germans were looser, more demanding of imagination from their lower ranks. She didn’t know how the English did things.

“Das ist gut,”he said, and then repeated himself, this time in Russian:“Khorosho.” Ludmila supposed that meant he thought initiative was a good thing, too. Like a lot of Soviet citizens, she mistrusted the concept How could social equality survive if some people shoved themselves ahead of the rest?

Coming out of the gloomy confines of theKrom took such ideological concerns from her mind. The sun had escaped the clouds while she was passing her news on to the local commanders. It gilttered off the snow on the ground and made the whole world dazzlingly white. The day wasn’t warm-they wouldn’t see a warm day for months-but it was beautiful.

Bagnall must have felt it, too. He said, “Shall we walk along the river?”

Ludmila looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Yes, he definitely believed in initiative. After a moment, she smiled. “Well, why not?” she said. Maybe she had a weakness for foreign men, something that struck her as vaguely-well, not so vaguely-subversive. Then she shook her head. Georg Schultz was foreign, but she’d never had the slightest yen for him. Maybe she had a weakness forkulturny men. In the Soviet Union, she sometimes thought, they were almost as hard to come by as foreigners.

The Pskova River was frozen over, ice stretching from bank to bank. Here and there, men had cut holes in it and were fishing. A couple had plump pike and bream out on the ice to show their time wasn’t going to waste.

“Fish here keep fresh all winter long,” Bagnall said.

“Well, of course,” Ludmila answered. Then she paused. England was supposed to have warmer winters than the Soviet Union. Maybe it wasn’t anof course for him.

After a while, he stopped and looked across the river. “Which church is that?” he asked, pointing.

“I think that is the one they call the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian on Gremyachaya Hill,” Ludmila answered. “But I ought to be asking you these things, not the other way round. You have been in Pskov much longer than I have.”

“That’s true,” he said, and laughed in some embarrassment “But it’s your country, after all, so I think you should know these things. Easy to forget you could drop England anywhere in the Soviet Union and it would disappear.”

Ludmila nodded. “After the Lizards came, I flew once into Sweden and Denmark and Germany.” She didnot say she’d taken Molotov to Berchtesgaden. “Everything seemed so small and so… so-used. Here we have more land than we know what to do with. I have seen it is not like that all over the world.”

“No, hardly,” Bagnall said. “With us, the trouble is finding the land to do all the things we want to do with it.” He hesitated, then laughed. He had a good laugh; even when he was laughing at himself, he sounded genuinely amused. He went on, “Here I am with a pretty girl, and I’m talking about churches and land. I must be getting old.”

Ludmila looked up at him. He was a few years older than she, but-“I do not think you are ready for the dustbin yet,” she said. She didn’t know how to saydustbin in German, and getting it across in Russian took almost as much work as his trying to makeinitiative comprehensible.

When he finally understood, he laughed again and said, “Then it must be my young, fiery blood that makes me do this.” He slipped an arm around her shoulder.

When Georg Schultz tried putting his hands on her, she’d always got the feeling she had to shake him off right away, that if she didn’t, he would tear off whatever she happened to be wearing and drag her to the ground. Bagnall didn’t give the same impression. If she said no, she thought he’d listen.Yes, I do like kulturnymen.

Because she thought she could say no any time she wanted to, she didn’t say it right away. That emboldened Bagnall to bend down and try to kiss her. She let his lips meet hers but, after a moment’s hesitation, she didn’t kiss back.

Schultz wouldn’t have noticed, or cared if by some chance he had noticed. Bagnall did. He said, “What’s wrong?” When Ludmila didn’t answer right away, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he smote his forehead with the heel of his hand, a gesture she’d seen him use before. “I’m an idiot!” he exclaimed. “You have someone else.”

“Da,”she said, and in an odd sort of way it was true, though all she and Heinrich Jager had together was time best measured in hours and a couple of letters. Then, to her amazement and dismay, she burst into tears.

When Bagnall patted her shoulder this time, it was in pure animal comfort. No, perhaps not quite pure; anyone who finds someone else attractive will always have mixed motives in touching that person. But he was doing the best he could. “What’s wrong?” he asked again. “You don’t know if he’s all right?”

“No, I don’t know that,” she said. “I don’t know very much at all.” She looked up at his long face, set now in lines of concern. She would never have told her story to a countryman. Speaking to a foreigner somehow felt safer. And so, in a torrent where Russian soon swamped her German, she poured out what she’d hidden from everyone for so long. By the time she was done, she felt as if she’d been flattened by a train.

Bagnall rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers; both razors and hot water for shaving were in short supply in Pskov. The RAF man uttered something in English. That meant nothing to Ludmila. Seeing as much, Bagnall dropped back into his mix of German and Russian: “You don’t do anything the easy way, do you?”

“Nyet.”She scanned his face, trying to figure out what he was thinking. It wasn’t easy. What they said about Englishmen was true: whatever went on inside their heads, they kept it to themselves. At least he hadn’t called her a traitor and a whore for ending up in the German’s bed when they found each other in Berchtesgaden. That was something.

Slowly, Bagnall said, “You must know something of what the fair Tatiana”-die schone Tatiana,he called her; which made Ludmila smile in spite of herself-“feels because she is carrying on with Georg Schultz.”

“Yes, perhaps so, though I don’t think she’d give me much sympathy.” Ludmila didn’t think Tatiana gave anyone much sympathy. She looked Bagnall in the eye. “Now you know why I cannot, do not want to-how did you say it? — carry on with you. And so?”What areyou thinking? Your face is as quiet as Molotov’s.

“Yes, I see that,” Bagnall answered. He didn’t sound happy about it, either. Ludmila felt obscurely good about that, even though she’d just told him she didn’t want to have an affair with him. Picking his words with care, he went on, “Your German had best be a good man, if he is to be good enough to deserve you.”

Your German.Ludmila’s guilt came flooding back. Even after a year and a half of uneasy alliance with the Nazis against the Lizards, the memory of the war against Hitler’s invading minions would not go away. But the rest of it-Ludmila stood on tiptoe and kissed Bagnall’s whiskery cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He chuckled, a little uncomfortably. “If you do that sort of thing, you will make me forget my good intentions.”

“With you, I will take the chance.” There was a notion believers had, one Ludmila, a thoroughgoing atheist, had always scorned. Now, though, for the first time in her life, she understood the idea of absolution. No matter that an Englishman rather than a priest had given it to her. Given her own secular beliefs, that only made it better.

The fellow who made his living exhibiting dung beetles was talking so fast and so excitedly, Nieh Ho-T’ing could hardly follow him. “They loved it, loved it, I tell you,” he exclaimed, gulping down one glass after another ofsamshu, the potent, triple-distilled brew made fromkaoliang — millet beer. “They paid me three times as much as I expected, and they want me to come back again as soon as I can.” He stared at Nieh in sodden gratitude. “Thank you so much for arranging my performance before them.”

“Hou Yi, it was my pleasure,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said expansively. “Anything I can do to make the lives of the little scaly devils more pleasant, that I shall do.” He smiled. “Then they pay me, which makesmy life more pleasant.”

Hou Yi laughed a loud, sozzled laugh. He poured the last few drops from the jar ofsamshu into his cup, then lifted a finger to show he wanted another. After a while, a girl brought it to him. He was drunk enough to pat her on the backside by way of showing thanks. She made a face as she hurried away. She might well have been available, but making a show of that demeaned her.

Nieh let Hou freshen his cup ofsamshu, too. The tavern-it was called theTa Chiu Kang: the Big Wine Vat-was only a couple of blocks from his rooming house, but he assumed an altogether different persona here. Instead of being the scaly devils’ staunchest foe, he acted the part of a medium-important tout for them, someone who was always looking for new ways to keep them entertained. Thanks to the connections the People’s Liberation Army had with men and women in the little devils’ employ, he had no trouble living up to the role.

TheTa Chiu Kang was different from his usual haunts in other ways besides the part he played here.MO T’AN KUO SHIH, a sign announced: do not talk politics. Every time he looked at it, Nieh snickered. In a revolutionary situation, all speech was political speech. As if to underline that, a smaller banner below the sign read,PLEASE KEEP YOUR HONORABLE MOUTH SHUT. In less inherently futile fashion, other signs declaredCASH ONLY andNO CREDIT.

Hou Yi said, “The little devils want me back. Oh, I told you that, didn’t I? Well, they do. One of them told me as much, as I was capturing my bugs and getting ready to go. Can you arrange it for me?”

“Arrange it for you? My friend, I can do better than that,” Nieh answered. “Do you know what I’ve learned? The little scaly devils want to make films of some animal-show performances-ofyour beetle show-so they can show them far away from here, in countries where the foreign devils have no such shows. Before you go to them next time, you will visit me, and I will fix a special camera from the scaly devils inside your case. It will take just the pictures they need, by some magic I am too ignorant to understand.”

Hou Yi goggled at him, then bowed his head-and almost banged it on the top of the table. “You are much too generous to me. I am unworthy of such an honor.”

Nieh knew that was politely insincere. “Nonsense,” he said. “The little scaly devils demanded it of me-they insisted, I tell you. Could I say ‘no’ to my masters, especially when I know what enjoyment you give them?”

“This is wonderful, wonderful,” Hou Yi babbled. “I am your slave for life.” He looked close to the maudlin tears of drunkenness.

“Just remember,” Nieh said, no idle warning in view of the show man’s condition, “before your next performance in front of the little scaly devils, you come to me with your case of insects, and I will mount the camera inside. Do not act as if you know it is there; the little devils want you to put on your show exactly as you would otherwise.”

“I shall obey you as a dutiful son obeys his father.” Hou Yi giggled, belched, set his head down on the table where he and Nieh Ho T’ing were drinking, and went to sleep.

Nieh looked down on him, then shrugged and left coins on the table to pay for thesamshu they had been drinking. He walked out of the Big Wine Vat and into the maze of Peking’shutungs. Torches and candles and lanterns and the occasional electric light made the alleys almost as bright as day. Nieh used every trick he knew to make sure no one was following him before he made his way back to the rooming house where the Communist cause flourished.

Sitting in the dining room there was Hsia Shou-Tao. To Nieh’s relief, his aide was alone; he never stopped worrying that one of the tarts Hsia brought back here would prove to be an agent of the scaly devils or the Kuomintang or even the Japanese. Hsia simply was not careful enough about such things.

In front of him stood a jar ofsamshu identical to the one from which Hou Yi had been drinking. He also had plates with crackers and meat dumplings and pickled baby crabs and a salad of jellyfish and gelatin. When he saw Nieh, he called, “Come join my feast There’s enough here for two to celebrate.”

“I’ll gladly do that,” Nieh said, waving to the serving girl for a cup and a pair of chopsticks. “What are we celebrating?”

“You know Yang Chueh-Ai, the mouse man? The little scaly devils liked his act, and they want him back. He says they didn’t do a careful search of the cages he carries his mice in, either. We shouldn’t have any trouble planting our bomb inside there.” Hsia slurped at hissamshu. “Ahh, that’s good.”

Nieh poured himself a cup of the potent millet liquor. Before he drank, he ate a couple of crackers and a pickled crab. “That is good news,” he said as he finally lifted his cup. “Hou Yi, one of the fellows who shows dung beetles, told me the same thing. We can get bombs in amongst the little scaly devils; that much seems clear. The real trick will be to have them invite all the beast-show men at the same time, so we can do them as much damage as possible.”

“You’re not wrong there,” Hsia said with a hoarse, raucous chuckle. “Can’t use the beast-show men more than once, either, poor foolish fellows. Once should do the job, though.” He made a motion of brushing something disgusting from the front of his tunic.

To Hsia, the beast-show men were to be used and expended like any other ammunition. Nieh was just as willing to expend them, but regretted the necessity. The cause was important enough to use innocent dupes to further it, but he would not forget the blood on his hands. Hsia didn’t worry about it.

“The other thing we need to make sure of is that we have good timers on all our explosives,” Nieh said. “We want them to go off as close to the same time as we can arrange.”

“Yes, yes, Grandmother,” Hsia said impatiently. He’d had a good deal to drink already, unless Nieh was much mistaken. “I have a friend who is dickering with the Japanese outside of town. From what he says, they have more timers than they know what to do with.”

“I believe that,” Nieh said. With the coming of the little scaly devils to China, Japanese forces south of their puppet state in Manchukuo were reduced to little more than guerrilla bands, and, unlike the Communist guerrillas, did not enjoy the protection of the populace in which they moved. Too many atrocities had taught the Chinese what sort of soldiers the Japanese were.

But Japan was an industrial power. It had been able to manufacture for its troops all sorts of devices the Chinese, unable to produce the like locally, had to beg, borrow, or steal. They had got materiel from the British, the Americans, and the Russians, but now both capitalist imperialists and fraternal socialist comrades were locked in their own struggle for survival. That left the Japanese remnants as the best source for advanced munitions.

Nieh said, “A pity the little scaly devils did not wait another generation before beginning their imperialist onslaught. The spread of industry over the world and the advance of revolutionary progressive forces would have made their speedy defeat a certainty.”

Hsia Shou-Tao reached for a dumpling with his chopsticks. They crossed in his fingers, leaving him with a confused expression on his face. If he was too drunk to handle them properly, he had indeed had quite a lot ofsamshu. He said, “We’ll beat them anyway, and the damned eastern dwarfs from Japan, and the Kuomintang, and anybody else who gets in our way.” He tried for the dumpling again, and succeeded in capturing it He popped it into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “Jus’ likethat.”

Nieh thought about lecturing him on the difference between something’s being historically inevitable and its being easy to accomplish, but concluded he’d be wasting his breath. Hsia didn’t need a lecture. What he needed was a bucket of cold water poured over his head.

Hsia belched heroically. From confused, his face took on a look of drunken foxiness. “You think Liu Han is going to get her brat back?” he asked, breathingsamshu fumes across the table into Nieh Ho T’ing’s face.

“That I don’t know,” Nieh said. Like any scientific doctrine, the historical dialectic considered the motion through time of mankind as a mass; the vagaries of individuals were beneath its notice.

Leering, Hsia found another question: “You get inside her Jade Gate yet?”

“None of your business,” Nieh snapped. How did Hsia know he wanted her? He was sure he’d been discreet-but evidently not discreet enough.

His aide laughed at him. “That means no.”

Looking at Hsia Shou-Tao’s red, mirth-filled countenance, Nieh decided Hsia didn’t need just a bucket of water poured over him. Clobbering him with the bucket afterwards seemed a good idea, too.

Kirel stood beside Atvar and studied the evolving dispositions of the Race’s infantrymales and armor. For a moment, one of his eye turrets slid away from the map and toward his superior. “Exalted Fleetlord, this had better work,” he said.

“I am aware of that, yes,” Atvar answered. He was painfully aware of it, and having Kirel remind him of it so bluntly didn’t make him feel any easier about what he’d set in motion. “If spirits of Emperors past look down on us in approval, we shall smash Deutschland once for all.”

Kirel did not say anything, but his tailstump twitched a little. So did Atvar’s, in irritation. He could read his subordinate’s thoughts: not so very long ago-though it seemed an age-he’d promised to smash Britain once for all. That hadn’t worked out. In spite of hurting the British, the Race had hurt itself worse, and Britain remained in the war.

“This time, it will be different,” the fleetlord insisted. “This time, our logistics are far better than they were for the invasion of that pestiferous island.” He brought up highlights on the map. “Instead of having to fly males and materiel long distances to bring them into the battle, we shall be operating from our own long-established strongholds on either side of the Deutsche, from France and Poland. We shall move forward with both forces and crush the Big Uglies between us.”

“So the operational planners have maintained,” Kirel said. “So they would maintain, the better to underline their usefulness to our efforts. If reality matches the computer simulations, this operation will succeed. But how often, Exalted Fleetlord, does reality match simulations on Tosev 3?”

“We know what the Deutsche have,” Atvar said. “We have even extrapolated that they will have some new weapons, with performance improved over those with which we are familiar: when dealing with the Big Uglies, as you say, an upward slope on the projection line seems as reasonable as one that is flat for us. Even given that, though, the projections show us beating them.”

“Do the projections take into account the wretched weather on that part of the planet at this time of its year?” Kirel stroked computer keys. A corner of the screen that displayed the simulations map went first to a satellite image of endless storm systems rolling east from Deutschland toward Poland, and then to a video of wind whipping crystallized frozen water across a desolate landscape that resembled nothing so much as the inside of some tremendous refrigeration plant. “Our males and our equipment do not perform at optimum levels in such conditions.”

“Truth. But we have improved over our levels during the previous local winter,” Atvar said stoutly. “And the cold, ironically, also hinders the activities of the Deutsche. Their poisonous gases are far less effective now than when the weather is warmer. We’ve also succeeded in developing filters to keep most gases out of the interior compartments of our fighting vehicles. This will boost both performance and morale.”

“Except, perhaps, among the infantrymales still compelled to leave their fighting vehicles from time to time and perform their duties in the open,” Kirel said.

Atvar sent him a dubious look. Ever since Straha’s attempted coup, Kirel had been scrupulously, almost ostentatiously, loyal. Unlike Straha, he did not believe in adventure for its own sake. Indeed, he hardly believed in adventure at all, as witness his protests against the upcoming campaign. But his very conservatism, a quality that endeared him to most males of the Race, might yet make him the focus for disaffected shiplords and officers. Atvar had enough troubles worrying about the political effects on his campaign on the Big Uglies. When he also had to worry about its political effects on his own males, he sometimes thought be was having to bear too heavy a burden.

“Let us look at the benefits of success,” he said. “With Deutschland defeated, the whole northwest of the main continental mass comes under our control. We gain improved positions for any future assaults, whether by air alone or with ground forces, against Britain. We go from active combat to pacification over that whole area, freeing up troops for operations elsewhere. And the psychological impact on the remaining Tosevite not-empires will be profound.”

“Truth, all of it, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “But, as the saying goes, to get the hatchling, you first must have the egg.”

Atvar’s tailstump lashed harder now. “Let us not mince words, Shiplord,” he said coldly. “Do you advise me to abandon this planned effort, or shall we go forward with it? Proceeding in the face of your obstructionism is difficult.”

“I obstruct nothing, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. Almost involuntarily, he hunched down into the posture of obedience. “I merely question methods and timing to obtain the best possible results for the Race. Have I not labored long and hard to support the implementation of this plan?”

“Truth.” Atvar knew be sounded reluctant to admit as much, but he couldn’t help it. Externally, Kirel had done as he’d said. The fleetlord had been inferring the thoughts behind his actions. Maybe he was wrong. He hoped he was. Sighing, he said, “Blame it on Tosev 3, Shiplord. Anything that has anything to do with this cursed planet goes wrong one way or another.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, there we agree completely,” Kirel said. “As soon as we detected radio signals from it, we should have realized all our previous calculations needed revising.”

“We did realize that,” Atvar said. “What we didn’t have, what we should have had, was a feel forhow much revising they needed.”

“And yet,” Kirel said in tones of wonder, “we may yet succeed, in spite of having to abandon plans already made.”

For a Big Ugly, as Atvar had seen time after time-generally to his consternation-abandoning plans and making new ones on the spur of the moment (or even going ahead and acting without making new plans) was so common as hardly to be worth noting. For the Race, that attitude started at traumatic and got worse from there. Routine, organization, forethought-thanks to them, the Empire had endured for a hundred millennia and made two other species reverence the Emperor in the same way the Race did. Adhering to routine on Tosev 3 as often as not led straight to disaster, for the Big Uglies anticipated and exploited routine behavior.

But deviating from routine had dangers of its own. The routine pattern was often the best one; deviations just made things worse. And the Race wasn’t good at thinking under such stress: the snap decisions males came up with were usually bad decisions. The Big Uglies exploited those, too.

Atvar removed from the screen the map of the planned campaign against Deutschland. In its place he substituted a detailed chart of an urban area on the lesser continental mass. “As you say, we may yet succeed,” he told Kirel. “Here in Chicago, we have reversed the setbacks the American Tosevites inflicted upon us when the weather first turned, and are now moving forward once more. If the trend continues, the entire city may be in our hands by the end of local winter.”

“May it prove so,” Kirel said. “Even if we do achieve victory there, the cost has proved very high. We threw many males, many fighting vehicles, many landcruisers into that grinding machine.”

“Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “But once having begun the campaign to wrest control of the city from the Big Uglies, we had to go forward with it. If we abandoned it, the Tosevites would conclude we dared not press our attacks in the face of stiff opposition. We invested more than our males in the fight for Chicago; we invested our prestige as well. And that prestige will rise with a victory.”

“This is also truth,” Kirel agreed. “Once joined, the battle could not be abandoned. Had we been able to anticipate the full cost, however, we might not have initiated the battle in the first place.” He let out a hissing sigh. “This has proved true in all too many instances on Tosev 3.”

“Not always, though,” Atvar said. “And I have a special reason for hoping the conquest of Chicago will be successfully completed. Somewhere in the not-empire called the United States skulks the oh-so-redoubtable shiplord Straha.” He laced his voice with all the scorn he could muster. “Let the traitor see the might of the Race he abandoned. Let him have some time to contemplate the wisdom first of revolt against me and then of treachery. And, when our triumph is at last complete, let us bring him to justice. On Tosev 3, his name shall live forever among the colonists as a symbol of betrayal.”

The Race’s memory was long. When Atvar said forever, he intended to be taken literally. He thought of Vorgnil, who had tried to murder an Emperor sixty-five thousand years before. His name survived, as an example of infamy. Straha’s would stand alongside it after the conquest of Tosev 3 was complete.

Mordechai Anielewicz strode down the sidewalk, as if enjoying every moment of his morning outing. That the temperature was far below freezing, that he wore a fur cap with earflaps down, two pairs of wool trousers one inside the other, a Red Army greatcoat and felt boots, and heavy mittens, that his breath smoked like a chimney and crystals froze in his beard and mustache-by the way he strolled along, it might have been spring in Paris, not winter in Lodz.

He was far from the only person on the street, either. Work had to get done, whether it was freezing or not. People either ignored the weather or made jokes about it “Colder than my wife after she’s talked with her mother,” one man said to a friend. They both laughed, building a young fogbank around themselves.

The Lizards were busy on the streets of Lodz, too. Alien police, looking far colder and more miserable than most humans Mordechai saw, labored to get traffic off the main east-west streets. They had their work cut out for them, too, for as fast as they shooed people away, more spilled onto the boulevards they were fighting to clear.

Not all of that was absentminded cussedness; quite a few men and women were being deliberately obstructive. Anielewicz hoped the Lizards didn’t figure that out. Things might get ugly if they did.

Finally, the Lizards cleared away enough people and wagons to get their armored column through. The males peering out of the cupolas of tanks and armored personnel carriers looked even more miserable than the ones on the street. They also looked absurd: a Lizard wearing a shaggy wolfskin cap tied on under his jaws resembled nothing so much as a dandelion gone to seed.

Four tanks, three carriers… seven tanks, nine carriers… fifteen tanks, twenty-one carriers. He lost track of the lorries, but they were in proportion to the armored vehicles they accompanied. When the parade was done, he whistled softly between his teeth. West of Lodz, the Lizards had something big laid on. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to figure out what, either. West of Lodz lay… Germany.

Still whistling, he walked down to the Balut Market square and bought a cabbage, some turnips, some parsnips, and a couple of chicken feet. They’d make a soup that tasted meaty, even if it didn’t have much real meat in it. Next to what he’d got by on in Warsaw, the prospect of a soup with any meat in it-the prospect of a soup with plenty of vegetables in it-seemed ambrosial by comparison.

He wrapped his purchases in an old ragged cloth and carried them back to the fire station on Lutomierska Street. His office was upstairs, not far from the sealed room where people took refuge when the Nazis threw gas at Lodz. If they’d known what he knew, their rockets would have been flying an hour earlier.

He fiddled around with the draft of a letter for Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski to present to the Lizard authorities, asking them to release more coal for heating. Having to rely on the Lizards’ dubious mercy grated on him, but every so often Rumkowski did win concessions, so the game was worth playing. Rumkowski had begged Himmler for concessions, too, and won a few. As long as he could be a big fish in the little pool of Jewish Lodz, he’d debase himself for the bigger fish in the bigger pools.

People wandered in and out. Bertha Fleishman’s sister had had a baby girl the night before; along with everyone else, Anielewicz saidmazeltov. Even as people kept blowing one another to bits, they were having babies, too. He’d seen that in the ghetto. In the midst of horror worse than any he’d imagined, people kept falling in love and getting married and having children. He wondered if that was absolutelymeshuggeh or the sanest thing they could possibly do.

Finally, three o’clock rolled around. That hour corresponded to a change of shift at the telephone exchange. Anielewicz picked up the phone and waited for an operator to come on the other end of the line. When one did, he called his landlady, Mrs. Lipshitz, and told her he’d be working late. She bore up under the news with equanimity. He tried again. When he heard the operator’s voice, he asked her to put him through to Rumkowski’s office. He asked a meaningless question about the upcoming request for more coal, then hung up.

Muttering under his breath, he picked up the telephone once more. When the operator answered, he brightened. “Is that you, Yetta?” he said. “How are you this afternoon, darling?”

“Saul?” she asked, as she’d been trained to do. Yetta wasn’t her real name. Mordechai didn’t know what it was, or what she looked like. The less he knew, the less he could give away if he fell into the Lizards’ hands.

“The same. Listen, sweetheart, I need to talk to Meyer the baker. You know the one-his shop is right next to the Balut.”

“I’ll try to put you through,” Yetta said. “We’ve been having some trouble with the wires down there, so it may take a while. Please be patient.”

“For you darling, anything,” Anielewicz said. The Balut was code for Breslau, the nearest major city in German hands; had he wanted Poznan, he’d have asked for an establishment on Przelotna Street. Telephone lines between Lodz and Breslau were supposed to be down. In fact, theywere down, but here and there illicit ground lines ran between Lizard-held territory and that which the Germans still controlled. Getting through on those lines wasn’t easy, but people like Yetta were supposed to know the tricks.

Mordechai hoped she knew the tricks. He didn’t want to call Breslau, not so you’d notice, but he didn’t see that he had any choice, either. The Nazis, curse them, needed to know something large and ugly was heading their way. One reason the Lizards were relatively mild in Poland was that they had the Germans right next door, and needed to keep the locals contented. If Hitler and his crew folded up, the Lizards would lose their incentive to behave better.

Gevalt,what a calculation to have to make, Anielewicz thought.

Sooner than he’d expected, the phone on the other end of the line started ringing. Somebody picked it up.“Bitte?” came the greeting in crisp German. The connection was poor, but good enough.

“Is this the shop of Meyer the baker?” Mordechai asked in Yiddish, and hoped the Nazi on the other end was on the ball.

He was. Without missing a beat, he answered,“Ja. Was wilist du? — What do you want?”

Anielewicz knew that was thedu of insult, not intimacy, but held on to his temper. “I want to give an order I’ll pick up a little while from now. I want you to bake me fifteen currant buns, twenty-one onion bagels, and enough bread to go with them. No, I don’t know how much yet, not exactly; I’ll try to call you back on that. Do you have it? Yes, fifteen currant buns. How much will that come to?… Meyer, you’re agonif and you know it.” He hung up in a good display of high dudgeon.

A voice came from the doorway: “Laying in supplies?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, Nussboym,” Mordechai answered, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt. “I was going to bring it all in so we could celebrate Bertha’s niece. Children deserve celebrating, don’t you think?” Now he’d have to go over to Meyer’s and buy all that stuff.

David Nussboym walked into Mordechai’s room. He was several years older than Anielewicz, and a lot of the time acted as if he thought Mordechai had no business doing anything more than wiping his snotty nose. Now, scowling, he spoke in the manner of a professor to an inept student: “I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re lying to me, and that you were passing on code of some kind. There’s only one kind of code you’re likely to be passing, and only one set of people you’re likely to be passing it to. I think you’ve turned into Hitler’stukhus-lekher.”

Slowly, deliberately, Anielewicz got to his feet He was three or four centimeters taller than Nussboym, and used that height advantage to look down his nose at the older man. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, his voice silky with menace. “You gabble on abouttukhus-lekhers — I think you can lickmy arse.”

Nussboym stared. Nobody had talked to him like that since the Lizards ran the Germans out of Lodz. He’d had a year and a half to get used to beingsomebody. But he also had considerable native spirit, and the awareness that those in authority backed him. After drawing back a pace in surprise, he thrust his chin forward and snapped, “I wouldn’t talk so fine if I were you. I’ve been doing some quiet checking, Mr. Mordechai Anielewicz-oh, yes, I know who you are. Some males of the Race back in Warsaw would be very interested in having a word or two with you. I haven’t said anything to my friends there because I know these things can be misunderstandings, and you’ve done good work since you got here. But if you’re going to bring the Nazis back into Poland-”

“God forbid!” Mordechai broke in, with complete sincerity. “But I don’t want the Lizards in Germany, either, and you can’t understand that side of the coin.”

“I want Hitler dead. I want Himmler dead. I want Hans Frank dead. I want every Nazi bastard with SS on his collar tabs dead,” Nussboym said, his face working. “That wouldn’t begin to be payment enough for what they did to us. I’d sooner kill them all myself, but if I have to let the Race do it for me, I’ll settle for that.”

“And then what happens?” Anielewicz demanded.

“I don’t care what happens then,” David Nussboym answered. “That’s plenty, all by itself.”

“But it’s not, don’t you see?” Mordechai said, something like desperation in his voice. “After that, who stops the Lizards from doing exactly as they please? If you know who I am, you know I’ve worked with them, too. They don’t make any bones about it: they intend to rule mankind forever. When they say forever, they don’t mean a thousand years like that madman Hitler. They mean forever, and they aren’t madmen. If they win now, we won’t get a second chance.”

“Better them than the Germans,” Nussboym said stubbornly.

“But you see, David, the choice isn’t that simple. We have to-” Without changing expression, without breaking off his flow of words, Amelewicz hit Nussboym in the belly, as hard as he could. He’d intended to hit him in the pit of the stomach and win the fight at the first blow,blitzkrieg — fashion, but his fist landed a few centimeters to one side of where he wanted to put it Nussboym grunted in pain but instead of folding up like a concertina, he grappled with Mordechai. They fell together, knocking over with a crash the chair on which Anielewicz had been sitting.

Mordechai had done a lot of fighting with a rifle in his hand. It was a different business altogether when the fellow you were trying to beat wasn’t a tiny spot seen through your sights, but was at the same time doing his best to choke the life out of you. Nussboym was stronger and tougher than he’d figured, too. Again, he realized being on the opposite side didn’t turn you into a sniveling coward.

Nussboym tried to knee him in the groin. He twisted aside and took the knee on the hip. He would have thought it even less sporting had he not tried to do the same thing to Nussboym a moment earlier.

They rolled up against Mordechai’s desk. It was a cheap, light, flimsy thing, made of pine and plywood. Mordechai tried to bang Nussboym’s head against the side of it. Nussboym threw up an arm just in time.

A heavy glass ashtray fell off the desk. Anielewicz was damned if he knew why he’d kept the thing around. He didn’t smoke. Even if he had smoked, nobody in Poland had any tobacco these days, anyhow. But the ashtray had been on his desk when he got the office, and he hadn’t bothered getting rid of it.

It came in handy now. He and David Nussboym both grabbed for it at the same time, but Nussboym couldn’t reach it Mordechai’s arm was longer. He seized it and hit Nussboym in the head. Nussboym groaned but kept fighting, so Mordechai hit him again. After the third blow, Nussboym’s eyes rolled up and he went limp.

Anielewicz struggled to his feet. His clothes were torn, he had a bloody nose, and he felt as if he’d just crawled out of a cement mixer. People crowded in the doorway, staring. “He was going to tell the Lizards who I am,” Mordechai said. His voice came out raw and rasping; Nussboym had come closer to strangling him than he’d thought.

Bertha Fleishman nodded briskly. “I was afraid that would happen. Do you think we have to shut him up for good?”

“I don’t want to,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t want any more Jews dead. He’s not a bad man, he’s just wrong here. Can we get him out of the way for good?”

She nodded again. “He’ll have to go east, but we’ll manage. I have enough Communist friends to be sure he’ll get into Russia without ever having the chance to speak his piece to the Lizards.”

“What’ll happen to him there?” Anielewicz asked. “They’re liable to ship him to Siberia.” He’d meant it for a joke, but Bertha’s sober nod said it was indeed a possibility. Mordechai shrugged. “If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. He’ll have a chance to stay alive there, and we’d have to kill him here.”

“Let’s get him out of here for now,” Bertha said. More quietly, she added, “You ought to think about disappearing, too, Mordechai. Not everyone who favors the Lizards is as open as Nussboym. You could be betrayed any time.”

He bit his lip. She was right He knew she was right. But the idea of going on the road again, finding another alias and joining a partisan band, pierced him with a chill worse than any winter’s gale.

“Good-bye, Lodz. Good-bye, flat,” he muttered as he took hold of David Nussboym’s feet.