Upsetting the Balance

18

Heinrich Jager felt like a table-tennis ball. Whenever he returned from a mission, he never knew where he would bounce up next: to Schloss Hohentubingen to help the men with the thick glasses and the high foreheads drive the explosive-metal bomb project forward, off on another run with Otto Skorzeny to tweak the Lizards’ snouts, or to lead panzers into battle, something he actually knew how to do.

After he got back from Albi, they’d stuck him in a panzer again. That was where the powers that be stuck him when the war was going badly. If the Lizards overran theVaterland, everything else became irrelevant.

He stood up in the cupola of his Panther. The wind tore at him, even through his reversible parka. He wore it white side out now, to go with the panzer’s whitewashed turret and hull. The machine, large and white and deadly, reminded him of a polar bear as it rumbed east from Breslau. As for the parka, it kept him from freezing. Next to the makeshifts theWehrmacht had used two winters before in Russia, it was a miracle. With it on, he was just cold. That seemed pretty good; he knew all about freezing.

His gunner, a moon-faced corporal named Gunther Grillparzer, said, “Any sign of the Lizards yet, sir?”

“No,” Jager answered, ducking back down inside the turret to talk. “I tell you the truth: I’m just as glad not seeing them.”

“Ach, ja;”Grillparzer said. “I just hope that call from the damned Jews wasn’t a pack of damned moonshine. For all we know, the bastards want to make us motor around and burn up petrol for no reason.”

“They wouldn’t do that.”I hope they wouldn’t do that, Jager added to himself. After what theReich had done to the Jews in Poland, how could he blame them if they wanted revenge? Aloud, he went on, “The commandant seems convinced the call was legitimate.”

“Ja, Herr Oberst,”Grillparzer said, “but those aren’t angels that come out the commandant’s arse when he squats on the WC, are they?”

Jager stood up again without answering. Russians and Lizards-and SSEinsatzgruppe men-followed orders without thinking about them. TheWehrmacht trained its soldiers to show initiative in everything they did-and if that made them less respectful of their superiors than they would have been otherwise, well, you had to take the bad with the good.

They reached the crest of a low rise. “Halt,” Jager told the driver, and then relayed the command to the rest of the panzers in the battle group: anad hoc formation that essentially meant,all the armored vehicles we can scrape together for the moment. “We’ll deploy along this line. Hull down, everyone.”

When a polar bear prowled through ice and snow, it was the most deadly predator in its domain. Foxes and badgers and wolverines stepped aside; seals and reindeer fled for their lives. Jager wished-oh, how he wished! — the same held true for his Panther, and for the Panthers and Panzer IVs and Tigers with it.

Unfortunately, however, in straight-up combat it took anywhere from five to a couple of dozen German panzers to knock out one Lizard machine. That was why he had no intention of meeting the Lizards in straight-up combat if he could possibly help it. Strike from ambush, fall back, hit the Lizards again when they stormed forward to overwhelm the position you’d just evacuated, fall back again-that was how you hurt them.

He wished for a cigarette, or a cigar, or a pipe, or a dip of snuff. He’d never tasted snuff in his life. He just wanted tobacco. There were stories that people had killed themselves when they couldn’t get anything to smoke. He didn’t know if he believed those or not, but he felt the lack.

He had a little flask of schnapps. He took a nip now. It snarled its way down his gullet. It might have been aged half an hour before somebody poured it into a bottle. Then again, it might not have. After he drank, he felt warmer. The doctors said that was nonsense.To hell with the doctors, he thought.

What was that off in the distance? He squinted through swirling snow. No, it wasn’t a horse-drawn wagon: too big and too quick. And there came another behind it, and another. His stomach knotted around the schnapps. Lizard panzers, heading this way. Down into the turret again. He spoke two brief sentences, one to the gunner-“The Jews weren’t lying”-and one to the loader-“Armor-piercing.” He added one more sentence over the wireless for the benefit of the battle group: “Hold fire to within five hundred meters.”

He stuck head and shoulders out into the cold again, raising binoculars to his eyes for a better look. Not just Lizard panzers coming this way, but their personnel carriers, too. That was good news and bad news. The panzers could smash them, but if they disgorged their infantry before they were hit, they were very bad news. Lizard foot soldiers carried antipanzer rockets that madePanzerschrecks look like cheap toys by comparison.

The panzer troops he commanded had plenty of fire discipline,danken Gott dafur. They’d wait as he had ordered, let the Lizards get close and then hit them hard before dropping back to the next ridge line. They’d-

Maybe the crew of the Tiger a few hundred meters away hadn’t been paying attention to the wireless. Maybe their set was broken. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn about fire discipline. The long-barreled 88 roared with the leaders of the Lizard force still a kilometer and a half away.

“Dumbheaded pigdog!” Jager screamed. The Tiger scored a clean hit. One of the personnel carriers stopped dead, smoke spurting from it. Through the dying reverberations of the cannon shot, Jager heard the crew of the Tiger yelling like drunken idiots. The resemblance didn’t end there, either, he thought bitterly.

He ducked into the turret once more. Before he could speak, Gunther Grillparzer said it for him: “The Lizards know we’re here.”

“Ja.”Jager slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Good luck. We’ll need it” He spoke to the driver over the intercom. “Listen for my orders, Johannes. We may have to get out of here in a hurry.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”

They were agood crew, probably not quite so fine as the one he’d had in France-Klaus Meinecke had been a genius with a cannon-but damn good. He wondered how much that was going to help them. Exactly what he’d feared was happening. Instead of motoring blithely down the highway toward Breslau and presenting their flanks for close-range killing shots, the Lizard panzers were turning to face his position straight on. Neither a Tiger’s main armament nor a Panther’s could penetrate their glacis plates and turrets at point-blank range, let alone at fifteen hundred meters.

And the personnel carriers were pulling back even farther. He got on the all-panzers circuit: “They know we’re here now. Panzer IVs, concentrate on the carriers.Gott mit uns, we’ll come out of this all right.”Or some of us will, anyhow, he glossed mentally. Some of them wouldn’t.

The Panzer IVs along the line of the ridge opened up, not only with armor-piercing shells to wreck the personnel carriers but also with high-explosive rounds to deal with the Lizards who’d left before being hit. The order was cold-blooded calculation on Jager’s part. The IVs had the weakest cannons and the weakest armor of the machines in the battle group. Not only were they best suited for handling the carriers, they were also the panzers Jager could best afford to lose when the Lizards started shooting back.

He’d hoped the Lizard panzers would come charging up the slope toward his position, cannon blazing. The Russians had made that mistake time and again, and the Lizards more than once. That kind of rush would give his Panther and Tiger crews close-range shots and shots at the Lizards’ side armor, which their cannon could penetrate.

The Lizards were learning, though. Their panzer crews had been through combat, too, and had a notion of what worked. They didn’t need to charge; they could engage at long range. Even at fifteen hundred meters, a hit from one of their monster shells would blow-did blow-the turret right off a Panzer IV and send it blazing into the snow. Jager clenched his fists. With luck, the commander, gunner, and loader there never knew what hit them.

Nor were the armored personnel carriers helpless against panzers. Their light cannon wouldn’t penetrate turret armor, but some of them carried rockets on launch rails on the sides of their turrets. Like the ones the Lizard infantry used, those had no trouble cracking a panzer.

“Retreat!” Jager bawled on the all-hands frequency. “Make them come to us.” The Maybach in the Panther he personally commanded bellowed louder as it stopped idling and went into reverse.

“This’ll be interesting,” Grillparzer shouted up at Jager. “Will we be in our new position before they get up here where we are now and start blasting away at us?”

Interestingwasn’t the word Jager would have used, but it would do. The trouble was, the Lizard panzers were not only better armed and armored than the ones theWehrmacht had, they were faster, too. General Guderian hadn’t been joking when he said a panzer’s engine was as important a weapon as its gun.

A Tiger maybe half a kilometer off to the north of Jager took a hit just as it was about to reach the cover of pine woods. It brewed up spectacularly, with a smoke ring going out through the cupola as if the devil were enjoying a cigar, and then with the ammunition cooking off in a display of orange and red fireworks. Some of the smoke that boiled out of it came from the burning flesh of its five crewmen.

Grillparzer got a decent shot at one of the Lizard panzers, but its armor held the round out of the fighting compartment. A trail of fire appeared from out of a snowdrift, with no Lizard panzers nearby: the Lizard infantry had come up. The rocket hit a Panzer IV in the engine compartment, which burst into flames. Hatches popped open. Men ran for the trees. A couple of them made it. Machine-gun fire cut down the rest.

Voices were screaming in Jager’s earphones: “They’re flanking us,Herr Oberst!” “Two enemy panzers have broken through. If they get in our rear, we’re done for.” “Can you call for reinforcements, sir?”

If you were commanding a battle group, you didn’t have much hope of calling for reinforcements: battle groups got formed from the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. Jager’s men were right-if the Lizards got behind them, they were in big trouble. That made the requisite order easy, no matter how distasteful it was.

“Retreat,” Jager said on the all-panzers circuit “We’ll fall back to the first line of defenses around Breslau.”

Three belts of fortifications ringed the city on the Oder. If they were penetrated, Breslau itself could hold for a long time, perhaps even in the way Chicago was holding in the United States. Though Jager had distant relatives on the other side of the Atlantic, nothing he’d seen in the First World War or heard in this one till the Lizards came left him thinking much of Americans as soldiers. Chicago made him wonder if he’d been wrong.

But Chicago was far away. Breslau was close, and getting closer all the time as the driver retreated westward. The town had lots of bridges. If you managed to blow them all, Jager thought, the Lizards would have a rough time crossing the Oder. When that occurred to him, he realized he didn’t really believe theWehrmacht could make a stand at Breslau. But if they couldn’t hold the Lizards there, where could they?

“So you see, General Groves-” Jens Larssen began.

Before he could go on, Groves was glaring at him again, like a fat old bulldog getting ready to growl at a stranger across the street. “What I see, Professor, is somebody who won’t listen when I tell him no,” he said. “We aren’t packing up and moving to Hanford, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sick of your whining. Soldier, shut up and soldier. Do you understand me?”

“Oh, I understand you, all right, you-” Larssen clamped his jaw down hard on the scarlet rage that welled up in his mind.You goddamn pigheaded son of a bitch. He got more creative from there. He’d never seen an atomic bomb go off, but the explosion inside his head felt like one.

“They aren’t paying you to love me,” Groves said. “They’re paying you to do what I tell you. Get on back to work.” The boss of the Metallurgical Laboratory crew held up a hand. “No, take the rest of the day off. Go back to your quarters and think it over. Come tomorrow morning, I expect you to throw everything you have into this project You got it?”

“I’ve got it,” Jens said through clenched teeth.

He left the office and went downstairs. He’d leaned the Springfield he always carried against the wall down there. Now he slung it back over his shoulder. Oscar the guard said, “You don’t really need to tote that thing, sir. Not like you’re in the Army.” His companion, a jug-eared yahoo named Pete, laughed. His big, pointy Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

Jens didn’t answer. He went out to the row of parked bicycles, lifted the kickstand to his with the side of his shoe, and started to head off north on the road back to Lowry Field, as Groves had ordered.

Oscar’s voice pursued him: “Where are you going, sir? The piles are that way.” He pointed down toward the athletic field.

The piles are on your miserable, snooping ass.With no tone at all in his voice, Larssen said, “General Groves wants me to take the day off and think about things in my quarters, so I’m not going back to the piles.”

“Oh. Okay.” But instead of letting it go at that, Oscar spoke quietly to Pete for a moment, then said, “I guess I’ll come with you then, sir, make sure you get there all right.”

Make sure you do what you’re told.Oscar didn’t trust him. Nobody here trusted him. Between the Met Lab and Colonel Hexham, they’d all got together to screw up his life eight ways from Sunday, and now they didn’t trust him. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing? “Do whatever you damn well please,” Larssen said, and started pedaling.

Sure as shit, Oscar climbed aboard his own bicycle and rolled after him. Up University Boulevard to Alameda, then east on Alameda to the air base and the delightful confines of BOQ. Jens didn’t think much of the place as somewhere to do any serious contemplating, but he’d take the day off and see what sprang from it. Maybe he’d be able to look at things differently afterwards.

The day was cold but clear. Jens’ long winter shadow raced along beside him, undulating over snowdrifts by the side of the road. Oscar’s lumpier shadow stayed right with it, just as Oscar clung to Jens like a leech.

For a long while, they had the road to themselves. Oscar knew better than to try any casual conversation. Larssen despised him quite enough when he was keeping his mouth shut.

About halfway between the turn onto Alameda and the entrance to Lowry Field, they met another bicycle rider coming west. The fellow wasn’t making any great speed, just tooling along as if out for a constitutional. Jens’ jaw tightened when he recognized Colonel Hexham.

Hexham, unfortunately, recognized him, too. “You-Larssen-halt!” he called, stopping himself. “What are you doing away from your assigned post?”

Jens thought about ignoring the officious bastard, but figured Oscar wouldn’t let him get away with it. He stopped maybe ten feet in front of Hexham. Oscar positioned himself between the two of them. Oscar was a bastard, but not a dumb bastard. He knew how Jens felt about Colonel Hexham.

“What are you doing away from your post?” Hexham repeated. His voice had a yapping quality, as if he were part lapdog. His face, as always, was set in disapproving lines. He had pouchy, suspicious eyes and a shriveled prune of a mouth with a thin smudge of black mustache above it. His hair was shiny and slick with Wildroot or some other kind of grease; he must have had his own private hoard of the stuff.

Jens said, “General Groves ordered me to take a day off, go back to my quarters and just relax for a bit, then get back to it with a new attitude.”Fat chance, if I have to deal with a slug like you.

“Is that so?” By the mockery Hexham packed into the question, he didn’t believe a word of it. He wasn’t any fonder of Jens than Jens was of him. Turning to Oscar, he said, “Sergeant, is what this man tells me true?”

“Sir, it’s exactly the same thing he told me,” Oscar replied.

Hexham clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead, a gesture he must have stolen from a bad movie. “My God! And you didn’t check it with General Groves yourself?”

“Uh, no, sir.” Oscar’s voice suddenly went toneless. He might have been trying to deny he was there while standing in plain sight, a trick Larssen had seen enlisted men use before.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Colonel Hexham snapped.

‘We’ll all go back to the University of Denver and find out just precisely what-if anything-General Groves told Professor Larssen to do. Come on!” He made as if to start riding again.

“Uh, sir-” Oscar began, and then shut up. A sergeant had no way to tell a colonel he was being a damn fool.

“Come on!” Hexham growled again, this time staring straight at Jens. “We’ll get to the bottom of this malingering, damn me to hell if we don’t. Get moving!”

Jens got moving. At first he seemed to be watching himself from outside. He unslung the Springfield, flipping off the safety as he did so. He always carried a round in the chamber. But as the rifle came up to his shoulder, he was back inside his own head, calculating as abstractly as if he were working on a problem of atomic decay.

Tactics… Oscar was the more dangerous foe-not only was he closer to Jens, he was a real fighting man, not a pouter pigeon in a uniform. Jens shot him in the face. Oscar never knew what hit him. He flew off the bike saddle, the back of his head exploding in red ruin.

Jens worked the bolt. The expended cartridge jingled cheerily when it hit the asphalt Colonel Hexham’s eyes and mouth were open as wide as they could be. “Good-bye, Colonel,” Jens said sweetly, and shot him in the head, too.

The clank of the second cartridge on the roadway brought Jens back to himself. He felt exalted, as if he’d just got laid. He even had a hard-on. But two bodies sprawled in spreading pools of blood would take some explaining he couldn’t give, no matter how much both the stinking bastards had it coming.

“Can’t go back to BOQ, not now, nosiree,” Jens said. He often talked to himself when he was alone on the road, and he sure as hell was alone now. He’d made certain-dead certain-of that.

Couldn’t go to BOQ. Couldn’t go back to the pile, either. Okay, what did that leave? For a second, he didn’t think it left anything. But that was just a last bit of reluctance to face what had been in the back of his mind for a long time. Humanity didn’t have any use for him any more. People had been rubbing his nose in that ever since Barbara let him know she’d been spreading her legs for the lousy ballplayer she’d found. They didn’t need him in Denver. They wouldn’t listen to his plans, they’d gone ahead and built a bomb-built a couple of bombs-without him.

Well, to hell with humanity, then. The Lizards would care to hear what he had to tell them. Yes, sir, they sure would (dim memories of Thornton Burgess stories floated up in his mind from childhood). They’d know how to reward him properly for telling them, too. But he wouldn’t be doing it for the reward. Oh, no. Getting his own back was a lot more important.

He carefully put the safety back on, slung the Springfield over his shoulder, and headed east. The sentries at the entrance of Lowry Field just nodded to him as he rolled past. They hadn’t heard the rifle shots. He’d worried a little about that.

A map unrolled in his mind. They’d find the bodies. They’d chase him. If they understood he was heading east toward the Lizards, they’d probably figure he’d go east on US 36. That was the straight route, the route a crazy man who wasn’t hitting on all cylinders would take.

But he wasn’t crazy, not even slightly. Not him. He had US 6 and US 34 north of US 36, and US 24 and US 40 south of it, plus all the little back roads between the highways. Before long, he’d pick one. Somewhere not far from the Colorado-Kansas border, he’d find the Lizards. He bent his back and pedaled harder. It was all downhill from here.

“Yes, sir,” Mutt Daniels said. The way he said it told what he thought of the order. Cautiously, he added, “We been doin’ a lot of retreating lately, ain’t we, sir?”

“So we have.” Captain Szymanski also looked sour about it.

Seeing that, Mutt pushed a little harder: “Seems like we ain’t needed to do most of it, neither, not from the way the fightin’ went beforehand. And this latest, this here, is just a skedaddle, nothin’ else but. Sir.”

His company commander shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t do anything about it no matter what he thought “Major Renfree and I have been screaming to the colonel, and he’s been screaming to the high command. There’s nothing he can do to get the orders changed. From what he says, they came right from the top, from General Marshall himself. You want to call up FDR, Lieutenant?”

“It would take somethin’ like that, wouldn’t it?” Daniels sighed. “Okay, sir, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I’ll just shut my damnfool mouth and do like I’m told. Anybody’d think I was in the Army or some damn thing like that”

Szymanski laughed. “I’m glad you are in the Army, Mutt You keep everybody around you all nice and loosey-goosey.”

“I’mnot glad I’m in the Army, meanin’ no offense to you, sir,” Mutt said. “I done my bit in the last war. Only reason they need old farts like me is on account of the Lizards. Wasn’t for them bastards, I’d be lookin’ ahead to spring training, not tryin’ to figure out how to pull my men back without lookin’ too much like I’m doin’ it.”

“We’ve got to do it,” Captain Szymanski answered. “I don’t know why, but we do. And if that’s not the Army for you, what the devil is?”

“Yes, sir.” If Mutt laid down the bunt sign, the fellow at the plate had to try and bunt, whether he liked Mutt’s strategy or not. Now it was his turn to do something he really hated because the higher-ups thought it was a smart move.They better be right, he thought as he climbed to his feet.

Sergeant Muldoon looked anything but happy when he brought the news from on high. “Jeez, Lieutenant, they’re sandbaggin’ so hard, they could build a wall around these damn Lizards with all the sand,” he said. “We should be kickin’ their ass instead o’ letting them push us around.”

“You know it, I know it, the captain knows it, the colonel knows it, but General Marshall, he don’t know it, and he counts for more’n the rest of us put together,” Daniels answered. “I just wish I was sure he had some kind of notion of what he was up to, that’s all. What’s that they say about ‘Ours is not to wonder why’?”

“The other part of it goes something like, ‘Ours is to let the bastards kill us even when they don’t have a clue,’ ” Herman Muldoon said. He was cynical enough to make a sergeant, all right. And, like any decent sergeant, he knew fighting city hall didn’t pay. “Okay, Lieutenant, how we gonna make this work?”

Mutt let stories from his grandfathers give him the clues he needed to do the job right. He thinned his main line down to what either granddad would have called a line of skirmishers, then to nothing but pickets. To disguise that as best he could, he made sure the pickets had automatic weapons and both the bazooka launchers in the platoon.

To try to hold back Lizard armor, the brass also had a lot of tanks and antitank guns well forward. Mutt didn’t quite follow that: it was as if they wanted the Lizards to go forward, all right, but not too far or too fast. He hoped the big picture made sense, because the little one sure as hell didn’t.

His men had the same feeling. Retreat was hard on an army; you felt as if you were beaten, regardless of whether you really were. The troops didn’t look ready to bug out, but they didn’t act like men with their peckers up, either. If they had to fight and hold ground, he wasn’t sure they could do it.

Not that much of Chicago looked like ground worth holding, anyhow. As far as that went, one stretch of rubble was pretty much like another. Even tanks had a rough time making their way through piles of brick and stone and craters big enough to swallow them whole.

He was taken by surprise when he came upon one stretch of halfway decent road as his unit trudged north. “You can go that way if you want to,” an MP doing traffic control said, “but it makes you easier for the Lizards to spot from the air.”

“Then what the hell did anybody build it for?” Mutt asked. The MP didn’t answer. Odds were, the MP couldn’t answer because he didn’t know. Maybe nobody knew. Maybe the Army had cleared the road just so people walking along it could get killed in carload lots. Mutt was past the stage where anything had to make sense.

Not far from the southern end of the road, he watched a team of soldiers busily repairing a house. They weren’t repairing it to look like new, they were repairing it to look like the wreckage all around it. It looked as if they’d knocked down the whole side nearest the road. Inside was a wooden crate big enough to make a pretty good Hooverville shack. In a little while, though, you wouldn’t be able to see it because the soldiers would have restored the wall they’d knocked down. By the time they were done, the place would look as ugly as it had before they started.

“Ain’t that a hell of a thing?” Muldoon jerked his thumb at the soldiers. “Are we fighting the Lizards or are we building houses for ’em?”

“Don’t ask me,” Daniels answered. “I gave up a long time ago, tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ on.”

“They ain’t gonna stay there and try and hold on to that box, are they?” Muldoon asked. The question wasn’t aimed particularly at Mutt, who didn’t have any answers, but at whoever in the world might know. Muldoon spat in the mud. “Sometimes I think everybody’s gone crazy but me, you know?” He gave Daniels a sidelong look. “Me and maybe you, too, Lieutenant. It ain’t like it’s your fault.” From Muldoon, that was a compliment, and Mutt knew it.

He thought about what the sergeant had said. He also thought about the way the brass was running the fight here in Chicago. If they’d just kept at what they were doing, they could have pushed the Lizards back to the South Side, maybe even out of Chicago altogether. Oh, yeah, it would have cost, but Mutt had been through the trenches in the First World War. He knew you had to pay the price if you wanted to gain ground.

But instead, they were pulling back Mutt turned to Muldoon. “You’re right. They must be crazy. It’s the only thing that makes any sense a-tall.” Solemnly, Muldoon nodded.

Heinrich Jager slammed his fist down on the cupola as his Panther rumbled out of Oels, heading west toward Breslau. He was wearing gloves. Otherwise his skin would have peeled off when it hit the frozen metal of the panzer. He wasn’t crazy-no, not he. About his superiors, he had considerable doubts.

So did Gunther Grillparzer. The gunner said, “Sir, what the devil’s the point of pulling out of Oels now, after we’ve spent the last three days fighting over it as if it were Breslau itself?”

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Jager answered. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.” Not only had theWehrmacht done a good job of fortifying Oels as part of the outer ring of Breslau’s defensive system, the fourteenth-century castle up on the hill made a first-class artillery observation post. And now they were abandoning the town, the castle (or what was left of it), and the works the engineers had made, just letting the Lizards take them while the panzers pulled back closer to Breslau.

Artillery shells whistled overhead, plowing up the frozen ground between the retreating panzers and Oels, as if to tell the Lizards,thus far and no farther. Jager wondered if the Lizards would listen. They were hitting hard in this latest onslaught, probably fighting better than they had since the days when they first came to Earth and swept everything before them.

His Panther had two narrow rings and one wide one painted on the cannon, just behind the muzzle brake: two armored personnel carriers and one panzer. The Lizards were still tactically sloppy; they didn’t watch their flanks as well as they should, and they walked into ambushes even Russians would have seen. Half the time, though, they fought their way out of the ambushes, too, not because they were great soldiers but because their panzers and rockets broke the trap from the inside out. As always, they’d inflicted far more damage than they suffered.

Even now, Lizard artillery shells fell around the panzers as they withdrew. Jager feared them almost as much as he feared the Lizards’ panzers. They spat little mines all over the bloody place; if your panzer ran over one of those, it would blow a track right off, and maybe send you up in flames. Sure enough, his Panther passed two disabled Panzer IVs, their crews glumly trudging west on foot.

He gnawed on his lower lip. Oels was only about fifteen kilometers east of Breslau. The Lizards were already shelling the city that sprawled across the Oder. If they established artillery in Oels, they could pound Breslau to pieces, scattering about so many of their little mines that no one would dare walk the streets, let alone drive armored vehicles through them.

And yet, he’d been ordered to give up a position he could have held for a long time-ordered in terms so peremptory that he knew protest would have been useless. Stand-fast orders were what he’d come to expect, even when standing fast cost more lives than retreating would have. Now, when standing fast made sense, he had to give ground. If that wasn’t insanity, what was it?

His discontent deepened when his panzer finally reached its new assigned position. The village just outside of Breslau that was the linchpin of the new German line might have held fifty people before the war. It was on flat ground and, as far as he could see, had no special reason for existing. Some rolls of barbed wire strung across the landscape and a few trenches for infantrymen didn’t constitute a line of defense as far as he was concerned, no matter how imposing the wire and trenches might seem on a map in a warm room out of the range of the guns.

His driver thought the same thing. “Sir, they made us pull back tothis?” he said in incredulous dismay.

“Johannes, believe you me, I wouldn’t have given you the order on my own,” Jager answered.

Somebody had at least some small sense of how to defend a position. A soldier in a white parka over black panzer coveralls directed the Panther to a barn with a doorway that pointed east: a good firing position if the Lizards broke out of Oels and stormed toward Breslau. A couple of hundred meters farther west lay a stone farmhouse behind which he could retreat after firing, and which would do for a second position. But if the Lizards broke out of Oels, nothing here, at least, was going to stop them from breaking into Breslau.

To give the artillery its due, it was trying to make sure the Lizards didn’t break out of Oels. Just west of the town, the ground jerked and quivered and shook like a live thing. Every gun the Germans had around Breslau must have been pounding that stretch of terrain. Jager hadn’t seen such a bombardment since his days in the trenches in World War I.

He didn’t see any shells fallingin Oels, though. TheWehrmacht had conceded the town to the Lizards, and for the life of him he didn’t understand why. They could consolidate there at their leisure for the next big push. They were taking advantage of everything the Germans gave them, too. Through field glasses, he watched panzers and lorries coming into Oels and gathering east of the town.

“What the hell’s going on?” Gunther Grillparzer demanded, out and out anger in his voice. “Why aren’t we throwing gas into Oels? The wind’s blowing in the right direction-straight out of the west. We’ve got a wonderful target there, and we’re ignoring it I’ve seen the high mucky-mucks do some really stupid things, but this takes the cake.”

Jager should have pounced on that open profession of heresy, but he didn’t. He couldn’t He felt the same way himself. He peered through the field glasses for another thirty seconds or so, then lowered them with a grunt of disgust. He’d risked his neck to throw nerve gas at the gas-mask factory in Albi. Why the devil wasn’t the artillery heaving it toward the Lizards now?

“Tear me off a chunk of that bread, will you, Gunther?” he said. When the gunner handed him a piece of the brown loaf, he dug out a tinfoil tube of meat paste and squeezed a blob onto the bread. Just because your commanders belonged in an institution for the feebleminded was no reason to starve. Die, yes; starve, no.

He was looking down at the bread and meat when the gloomy interior of the barn suddenly filled with a light as bright as-brighter than-day.

Johannes, the driver, let out a cry in his earphones: “My eyes!”

Jager looked up, just for an instant, then lowered his gaze once more. Like the sun, the fireball in what had been Oels was too brilliant to look at. The light that filled the barn went from white to yellow to orange to red, slowly fading as it did so. When Jager looked up again, he saw a great fiery pillar ascending toward the heavens, coloring the clouds red as blood.

The ground shook under the treads of the Panther. A wind tore briefly at the barn doors, then subsided. Stuck inside the turret, Grillparzer demanded, “What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know,” Jager said, and then, a moment later, “My God!” He knew what an explosive-metal bomb had done to Berlin; he’d heard about what had happened to Washington and Tokyo and south of Moscow. But knowing what such a bomb could do and seeing the bomb do it-the difference between those two was like the difference between reading a love poem and losing your virginity.

“They really did it,” he breathed in amazement.

“Who really did what, sir?” the panzer gunner asked indignantly.

“The physicists at-oh, never mind where, Gunther,” Jager answered; even in the midst of such awe as he’d not felt in church for years, he did not forget his worship of the great god Security. “The point is, we’ve just given the Lizards what they gave Berlin.”

The panzer crew shouted like men possessed. Jager joined the exultation, but more quietly. That sense of awe still filled him. Some of the explosive metal was what he’d snatched, Prometheus-like, from the Lizards. It was seldom given to a colonel of panzers to feel he’d personally turned the course of history. Jager had that feeling now. In an odd way, it seemed larger than he was.

He shook himself, bringing the real world back into focus. “Johannes, how are your eyes?” he asked over the intercom.

“I’ll be all right, sir, I think,” the driver answered. “It was like the world’s biggest flashbulb went off a centimeter in front of my nose. I still see a big ring of smeary color; but it’s getting smaller and dimmer.”

“That’s good,” Jager said. “Think of it like this: for the Lizards over there in Oels, it’s as if the sun went off a centimeter in front of their snouts-and they’ll never see anything again.”

More cheers rang out Gunther Grillparzer said, “You know what, sir? I have to apologize to the mucky-mucks. Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“I tell you what, Corporal,” Jager said: “I won’t tell them. That way they won’t die of shock.” The gunner laughed loud and long. Jager added, “I thought they’d gone round the bend myself, and I’m not ashamed to say so. But it makes sense now: they let the Lizards concentrate in Oels, didn’t shell the town itself, both to hold the Lizards there and to make sure the bomb didn’t get hit by accident, and then-”

“Yes, sir,” Grillparzer agreed enthusiastically. “And then!”

In color and shape, the cloud rising from the explosive-metal bomb put Jager in mind of Caesar’s amanita. It was more nearly the hue of apricot flesh than the rich, bright orange of the mushroom prized for its flavor since Roman days, but that was a detail. He wondered how many kilometers into the sky the cap of the mushroom rose.

“Well,” he said, half to himself, “I think Breslau has held.”

Gunther Grillparzer heard him.“Jawohl!” the gunner said.

An alarm hissed insistently. Atvar thrashed and twisted in free fall, fighting to stay asleep. Before long, he knew the fight was lost. As consciousness returned, fear came with it. You didn’t wake the fleetlord to report good news.

One of his eye turrets swiveled toward the communications screen. Sure enough, Pshing’s face stared out of it. The adjutant’s mouth worked, but no sound emerged. He looked extraordinarily ugly that way, or perhaps Atvar was grumpy at being roused so suddenly.

“Activate two-way voice,” he told the computer in his rest chamber, and then addressed Pshing: “Here I am. What’s the commotion?”

“Exalted Fleetlord!” Pshing cried. “The Big Uglies-the Deutsch Big Uglies-set off a fission bomb as we were about to overrun their fortified position at the town called Breslau. We had been concentrating males and equipment in the forward area for the assault on their works immediately outside the city, and suffered large losses in the blast.”

Atvar bared his teeth in a grimace of anguish a Tosevite who knew a little about the Race might have taken for laughter. His plan for the attack on Deutschland had allowed for the Deutsch Big Uglies’ having better weapons than the Race knew them to possess, but had not anticipated their having atomic bombs.

Tensely, he asked, “Is this a case like that of the SSSR, where they’ve shaped a device from plutonium they stole from us?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, results of analysis are at present both preliminary and ambiguous,” Pshing answered. “First approximation is that some of the fissile material was indeed taken from us, but that some may well have been independently produced.”

Atvar grimaced again, if that report was accurate, it was what he’d dreaded most. The SSSR had used the one bomb, apparently of plutonium stolen from the Race, but had shown no signs of being able to produce its own. That was bad, but could be lived with. If the Deutsche knew not only how to exploit radioactives that fell into their hands but also how to produce those radioactives, the war against the Big Uglies had just taken a new and altogether revolting turn.

“What are your orders, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked. “Shall we bomb the Deutsch positions in Breslau, and avenge ourselves in that fashion?”

“Do you mean with our own nuclear weapons?” Atvar said. When his adjutant made the affirmative gesture, he went on, “No. What would be the point of that? It would only create more nuclear zones for our males to cross, and the fallout, given Tosev 3 weather patterns, would adversely affect forces farther east. Unfortunately, we have not succeeded in tracking down the area where the Deutsche are conducting their nuclear experiments.”

“That is not surprising,” Pshing answered. “They so contaminated a stretch of their own territory when a pile went out of control that the radioactivity in the area could mask a successful experiment on their part”

“Truth,” Atvar said bitterly. “Even their incompetence may work in their favor. And, after the lesson we taught the Nipponese, they must know we respond severely to nuclear development efforts on the part of Big Uglies. They will be shielding their program as well as they can.”

“Surely you will not leave them unpunished merely because we cannot locate their nuclear reactors,” Pshing exclaimed.

“Oh, by no means,” Atvar said. If he did nothing, the revolt Straha had led against him would be merely a small annoyance, when compared to what the shiplords and officers would do to him now. Unless he wanted Kirel holding his position, he had to respond. “Have the targeting specialist select a Deutsch city within the zone of radioactive contamination. We shall remind the Big Uglies we are not to be trifled with. Report the targeting choice to me as soon as it is made-and it had best be made soon.”

“It shall be done.” Pshing’s face vanished from the screen.

Atvar tried to go back to sleep. That would have been the perfect way to show this latest setback did not unduly concern him. The setbackdid concern him, though, and sleep proved as elusive as victory over the Big Uglies.So much for enhancing my reputation among the males, he thought. He laughed in self-mockery. By the time this war was done, if it ever was, he’d be lucky to have any reputation left.

The communicator screen lit up again. “The largest Deutsch city within the contaminated zone is the one called Munchen, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing reported. A map showed Atvar where in Deutschland Munchen lay. “It is also a major manufacturing center and transport hub.”

Atvar studied the railroad and highway networks surrounding the city. “Very well,” he said, “let Munchen be destroyed, and let it be a lesson to the Deutsche and to all the Big Uglies of Tosev 3.”

“It shall be done,” Pshing said.

Thegoyim had a legend of the Wandering Jew. With a knapsack on his back and a German rifle slung over his shoulder, Mordechai Anielewicz felt he’d done enough wandering to live up to the legend.

There weren’t as many woods and forests around Lodz as there were farther east: fewer places for partisan bands to take refuge against the wrath of the Lizards. He hadn’t been able to find a band to join, not yet. Lizards had rolled past him a few times in their armored vehicles. They’d paid him no special heed. Armed men were common on Polish roads, and some of them fought for, not against, the aliens. Besides, the Lizards were heading west, toward the battle with the Nazis.

Even from many kilometers away, Anielewicz had listened to the sullen mutter of artillery. The sound hung in the air, like distant thunder on a summer’s day. He tried to gauge the progress of the battle by whether the rumble grew louder or softer, but knew he was just guessing. Atmospherics had as much to do with how the artillery duel sounded as did advances and retreats.

He was walking toward a farmhouse in the hope of working for his supper when the western horizon lit up. Had the sun poked through the clouds that blanketed the sky? No-the glow seemed to be coming fromin front of the clouds.

He stared in awe at the great, glowing mushroom cloud that rose into the sky. Like Heinrich Jager, he quickly realized what it had to be. Unlike Jager, he did not know which side had touched it off. If it was Germans, he, too, knew he played a role, and no small one, in their getting at least some of the explosive metal they’d needed.

“If itis the Nazis, do I get credit for that, or blame?” he asked aloud. Again unlike Jager, he found no sure answer.

Teerts checked the radar in his head-up display. No sign of Deutsch aircraft anywhere nearby. The thought had hardly crossed his mind before Sserep, one of his wingmales, said, “It’s going to be easy today, superior sir.”

“That’s what Nivvek thought, and look what happened to him,” Teerts answered. The Race hadn’t been able to rescue the other male before the Deutsche captured him. From some reports, the Deutsche treated prisoners better than the Nipponese did. For Nivvek’s sake, Teerts hoped those reports were true. He still had nightmares about his own captivity.

He suspected more nightmares were heading his way. He wished-how he wished! — Elifrim had chosen a different male to lead the protection for the punishment killercraft now flying toward Munchen. Had the Deutsche known the load that killercraft carried, they would have sent up everything that would fly in an effort to knock it down. They’d used an atomic bomb against the Race, and they were going to be reminded they could not do that without paying the price.

Tokyo had already paid that price, thanks to Teerts, and the Nipponese hadn’t even had nuclear weapons-they were just trying to acquire them. They were only Big Uglies, but Teerts felt guilty anyhow. And now he was going to have to watch a Tosevite city go up in atomic flame.

The pilot of the punishment killercraft, a male named Jisrin, had no such qualms. Mechanical as if he were a computer himself, he said, “Target is visually obscured. I shall carry out the bombing run by radar.”

“Acknowledged,” Teerts said. He spoke to Sserep and his other wingmale, a relatively inexperienced flier named Hossad: “We’ll want to swing wide of the punishment killercraft after it releases its bomb. From everything I’ve heard and reviewed in the training scenarios, blast effects and winds can do dreadful things to aircraft handling if we’re too close to the site of the explosion. You’ll follow my lead.”

“It shall be done,” Sserep and Hossad said together.

In his flight-leader’s circuit, Teerts listened to his opposite number on the other side of the punishment killercraft giving his wingmales almost identical instructions. Then Jisrin said, “I am releasing the weapon on the mark… Mark. Ignition will delay until proper altimeter reading. Meanwhile, I suggest we depart.” He hit his afterburner and streaked away from the doomed city.

Teerts swung his killercraft through a wide turn that would bring him back on course for the air base in southern France. His wing-males followed. Up till now, everything had run as smoothly as if it were a training mission. That relieved him-such things didn’t happen very often on Tosev 3-and alarmed him, too: what would go wrong now?

Nothing. Not this time. A great ball of fire burned through the clouds below and behind him, flinging them aside, scattering them, vaporizing them. The glare was terrifying, overwhelming; Teerts’ nictitating membranes flicked across his eyes to protect them, as if the piercing light were a grain of sand or grit that could be physically pushed aside.

Moments later, the blast wave caught up with the fleeing killercraft and flicked it through the air. It was stronger and sharper than Teerts had expected. The airframe groaned under the sudden strain, but held. Together, Teerts and the killercraft’s computer rewon control.

“By the Emperor,” Hossad said softly as he, too, mastered his killercraft. “We take for granted what the atom can do. It gives us electric power, it electrolyzes hydrogen and oxygen for our vehicles, it powers our ships between the stars. But when you let it loose-” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on. Teerts wished he had a taste of ginger.

Jisrin, still matter-of-fact, put the capper on the mission: “The target is destroyed. Returning to base.”

Atvar listened to the bestial howls of rage that came over the crackling shortwave frequencies from Deutschland. One thing the atomic bomb that had smote Munchen had not done: it had not got rid of Hitler, the not-emperor of the Deutsche. Even without understanding a single word of the Deutsch language, Atvar also gathered that it had not persuaded Hitler to yield.

He turned away from the incomprehensible rantings of the Deutsch not-emperor to a translation: “We shall have vengeance!” Hitler was saying; the translator added an emphatic cough to show the stress the Big Ugly put on the words. “Our strength lies not in defense but in attack. Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles. We shall once more make the heroic decision to resist Our idea-our people-is right, and so is invincible; every persecution will lead to our inner strengthening. This war is one of the elemental conflicts which will usher in a new world era. At its end, Deutschland will either be a world power or will not be at all! If the Deutsch people despair now, they will deserve no better than they get. If they despair, I will not be sorry for them if God lets them down.”

The translator added, “Speaking in my own voice for a moment, I should note that all of these not particularly rational utterances are accompanied by vehement and prolonged applause from the Big Uglies in the audience. Rational or not, Hitler has a strong hold on the Tosevites of his not-empire.”

When he resumed, the febrile tone he assumed showed he was once more passing on Hitler’s words: “We shall have vengeance, I say again! For every bomb the Lizards use against us, we shall use six, eight, ten, a hundred bombs against them. We shall destroy them so completely, it shall be as if they never were. They have dared test themselves against the master race, and they shall fail!” The translator added another emphatic cough, then said, “This preposterous and vain pronouncement was greeted with more applause.”

Atvar turned off the Tosevite’s speech. “Well, what do you think of that?” he asked Kirel.

“Destroying Munchen has failed to intimidate the Deutsche,” Kirel answered. “I find this most unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate, yes,” Atvar said, with an emphatic cough of his own. Kirel’s restrained pattern of speech could sometimes be most effective. Atvar went on, “What do you make of this Hitler’s threat, to respond bomb against bomb?”

“My opinion, Exalted Fleetlord, is that he will do so if he has the ability,” Kirel said. “And, since analysis confirms that this latest bomb was made partly from nuclear material not stolen from us…” His voice trailed away.

“-He either does have the ability or will have it soon,” Atvar finished unhappily. “That is my conclusion also. My other conclusion is that this war has just grown a great deal worse. Spirits of departed Emperors willing, I shall not have to say that so often in future.”

Mutt Daniels opened his canteen and poured from it into his cup. The liquid that went from one to the other was a deep amber color. He lifted the cup in salute before he drank. “Mud in your eye, Miss Willard,” he said, and gulped the whiskey down.

“Ain’t this a hell of a thing, Lieutenant?” said Sergeant Muldoon, who had his own canteen full of whiskey. “Havin’ a drink in the Frances E. Willard Home, I mean.” He drank, too. “All the little old ladies from the WCTU must be spinning in their graves, I figure.”

“I seen plenty o’ the Women’s Christian Temperance Union down home in Mississippi when I was growing up,” Mutt answered. “I figured anything those sour old prunes were against had to be good enough for me to want to be for it. And you know what? Put it all together, I reckon I was right”

“Damn straight you were,” Muldoon said, taking another drink.

“But that ain’t why I chose this here house for us,” Daniels said.

Herman Muldoon laughed. “I know why you chose it: it’s standing up.”

“You ain’t just joking.” Even here in Evanston, north of the Chicago city line, devastation was heavy. The Northwestern University campus had been pounded hard. The water filtration plant close by was just a ruin. Maybe it was the whiskey-though he’d had only the one swig-and maybe just frustration boiling up in him, but he burst out, “God damn it to hell, we don’t need to be in Evanston. We should be takin’ the fight to the Lizards down in Chicago.”

“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “But as long as we’re here, we got ourselves a nice fire goin’, an’ we can get snug as a couple of bugs in a rug.”

The fireplace in the sitting room of the Willard House still worked fine, and there was anything but a shortage of wood to feed it. A plaque on the wall of the room said it was dedicated to Miss Anna Gordon, Frances Willard’s lifelong companion and a world president of the WCTU in her own right. Mutt wondered exactly whatlifelong companion meant. Lucille Potter, who was dead now, had shown him that even if it meant what he suspected it did, it wasn’t necessarily as shocking and sinful as he’d been brought up to believe.

“You know what?” he said, almost plaintively, to Muldoon. “You get stuck in a war, you don’t just set your body on the line. Everything you knew or thought you knew goes up into the front lines with you, and some of it ends up dead even if you don’t.”

“That’s over my head, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “I’m a dumb noncom, nothin’ else but I leave the thinking to officers like you.” He laughed to show Mutt wasn’t supposed to take him all that seriously. “What I think is, sounds like you could use another drink.”

“I’d like to, don’t you doubt it for a minute,” Daniels answered. “But if I’m gonna keep track of this platoon full of wild men, I can’t afford to get me lit up.”

Later, he wondered if God had been listening to him. A brilliant yellow-white light blazed through the south-facing window of the sitting roam, printing his shadow against the far wall, the one with the plaque on it. It reminded him of the way a flashbulb could do the same thing. But a flashbulb was there and then it was gone, while this light was not only brighter than any flashbulb but went on for several seconds, though it got fainter and redder as time went on.

The ground jerked under Daniels’ feet. As he exclaimed in surprise and alarm, he heard a report that reminded him of a big artillery piece being fired maybe a hundred yards away. The few shards of glass that remained in the sitting-room window blew out. By luck, none of them pierced him or Muldoon.

“What thehell was that?” the sergeant burst out. “Biggest darn boom I’ve ever been through, and I’ve been through some doozies. Somebody’s ammunition dump going up, maybe. Hope to Jesus it was theirs and not ours.”

“Yeah.” Mutt went to the window to see what he could see. Muldoon joined him a moment later. For perhaps half a minute, they stared south together. Then, very softly and not in the least irreverently, Mutt whispered, “Goddamn.” Muldoon’s head bobbed up and down. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.

Mutt had seen plenty of explosions and their aftermaths. He’d seen an ammunition dump go up, too, maybe from a lucky hit, maybe because somebody got careless-not enough was left afterwards for anyone to be sure. But he’d never seen anything like this.

He had no idea how high into the night the glowing cloud mounted. Miles, that was all he could be sure of. Other thing was, the base of that cloud looked a lot farther away than he’d figured it would-which meant the explosion was even bigger than he’d guessed.

“Goodgodalmightydamnwillyoulookitthat!” Muldoon said, as if words had just been invented and nobody quite knew yet where they stopped and started. Mutt had the feeling that words to describe what he was seeing hadn’t been invented yet, and maybe never would be.

Whatwas he seeing, anyhow? Pursuing his earlier thought, he said, “That ain’t no ammo dump. You could blow up all the ammo in the world, and it wouldn’t make a cloud like that there one.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon agreed, almost with a sigh. “Whatever it is, it came down on the Lizards’ heads, not ours. Look where it’s at, Lieutenant-that’s the part of Shytown we retreated out of.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Mutt said. “Maybe we was lucky to get out of there when we did. Or maybe-” He stopped, his eyes going wide. “Or maybe, an’ I hate like hell to say it, the brass ain’t so dumb after all.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about, uh, sir?” Muldoon said. Then he got a faraway look on his face, too. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lieutenant, you think we pulled back on purpose so those scaly bastards could walk right into that big boom like they was moths divin’ into a fire?”

“Don’t know if it’s so, but it stands to reason,” Daniels answered. “The Russians, they figured out last year how to make one of them big bombs the Lizards use, and the Nazis, they fired one off last week, I hear, ‘less’n the radio’s tellin’ more lies’n usual.”

“Fat lot of good it did ’em, too,” Muldoon retorted. “The Lizards went and blew one of their cities to hell and gone right afterwards.”

Mutt refused to let that distract him. “If the Reds can do it and the goddamn Nazis can do it, though, why the hell can’t we? You think we don’t got a bunch o’ guys with thick glasses and what d’you call ’ems-slide rules, that’s it-tryin’ to figure out how to make our own bombs? You’re crazy if you do. And you ain’t never seen an explosion like that, and neither have I, so what do you think it’s liable to be?”

“That makes sense, sounds like,” Muldoon said reluctantly. Then he brightened. “Jeez, if that’s what it was, Lieutenant, a whole bunch o’ Lizards and all their gear just went up in smoke.”

“Reckon that was the idea.” Daniels thought back to the crew who’d been hiding the big crate in what looked like more rubble. Had they been setting the bomb there so it would be waiting for the Lizards when they advanced in pursuit of the withdrawing Americans? He didn’t know for sure; no way he ever would, but he couldn’t think of any better reason for wanting to conceal a crate. He laughed. You’d have a devil of a time proving him wrong, that was for sure.

“Let’s say it was one o’ those bombs, Lieutenant,” Muldoon persisted. “When the Germans used one, next thing you know the Lizards knocked one of their towns flat, like I said. They gonna do the same thing to us?”

Mutt hadn’t thought about that. Now that he did, he found he didn’t fancy any of the answers that popped into his head. “Damfino,” he said at last. “We’ll just have to wait and find out, seems like to me. That’d be a damned ugly way to fight a war, wouldn’t it? You blew up all o’ my guys in this city over here, so I’ll go and blow up all o’ yours in that one over yonder.”

“Shit, that’s what the krauts and the limeys were doin’ to each other when the Lizards got here,” Muldoon said. “But doin’ it with one bomb to a city makes you start runnin’ out o’ cities pretty damn quick.”

“Lordy, don’t it just,” Mutt said. “Like two guys playin’ Russian roulette, ‘cept they’re pointin’ the guns at each other an’ five o’ the chambers are loaded. Maybe all six of ’em, you come to that.”

The cloud to the south of them was fading now, dispersing, the wind sweeping it away toward Lake Michigan. Pretty soon it would be gone. But the horrible dilemmas it raised would not disappear so soon.

Uneasily, Mutt looked north, east, west, and then last of all south once more, toward and past the dissipating cloud. “What you tryin’ to do, Lieutenant?” Muldoon asked. “You tryin’ to figure out where the Lizards are gonna drop the one they use to answer ours?”

Daniels scowled. He didn’t like being that obvious. But he didn’t want to be a liar, either, not when he was talking about something as important as this. He sighed. “Yeah,” he said.

The alarm hissed hideously. When Atvar woke, for a moment he thought he was dreaming about the last time the alarm had gone off. Then, incontestably, his senses came to full alertness, and the alarm was still yammering away. And there was Pshing’s face in the communicator screen, just as it had been that dreadful, all-too-recent night.

“Activate two-way voice,” Atvar said to the computer, as he had then. Whatever disaster his adjutant had to report, it couldn’t be so hideous as news of the Deutsche with nuclear weapons. So the fleetlord told himself, even as he was asking Pshing, “What now?”

“Exalted Fleetlord-” Pshing began, and then had trouble going on. Gathering himself, he finally managed to continue: “Exalted Fleetlord, I regret to have to inform you that the Tosevites of the not-empire of the United States detonated a fission bomb in the northern sector of the city known as Chicago. As our males had only just succeeded in occupying this sector, and as the front lay not far north, our concentrations in the area of the explosion, and thus our losses, appear to have been heavy.”

A predator in the warm, friendly deserts of Home dug a pit in the sand and hid at the bottom. When an animal stumbled into the pit, it would scrabble at the loose sand, but generally slide down deeper and deeper until the trapmaker came out and devoured it with a minimum expenditure of effort. Atvar felt now like a creature trapped in one of those sand pits. No matter what he did on Tosev 3, things kept getting worse.

He gathered himself. “Tell me the rest,” he said, as if knowing the rest could somehow restore what the Race had lost.

Pshing clung to what had been normality with some of the same desperation Atvar felt “Exalted Fleetlord, the bomb appears to have been of the same type as that which the Deutsche employed against us: that is to say, some of the plutonium in it was stolen from us, while the Big Uglies produced the rest for themselves.”

“But the American Big Uglies are on the other side of an immense ocean from the Deutsche and the Russkis,” Atvar said, “and we have made air passage between the continental masses rare, difficult, and dangerous for the Tosevites to attempt. To think they could have smuggled the explosive metal across in one of the few successful flights-” He checked himself. “Wait I am overlooking something.”

“Exalted Fleetlord?” By the tone of his interrogative cough, Pshing didn’t see what Atvar was missing.

“Water. It is the curse of this world whether liquid or frozen,” Atvar said. “The Big Uglies have so much of it to deal with, they transport goods on it much more readily than ever became the norm back on Home. We’ve not properly dealt with their ships and boats because we’ve assumed them to be of relatively small importance-and because we’ve had so many other commitments on this miserable iceball of a world that seemed more urgent We may now be paying the price for our inability to think as the Big Uglies do.”

Pshing made an eloquent gesture of distaste. “If becoming like the Big Uglies is a condition for victory over them, I for one would almost rather lose.”

“A distinct point,” Atvar admitted. “Were it only my own personal choice, I should agree with you. But we have committed ourselves to bringing this world and its noxious inhabitants under the rule of the Emperor.” He cast down his eyes. What would his sacred sovereign think when he learned of the difficulties the Race was having in annexing Tosev 3? First reports of combat were already on the way Home, but at laggard lightspeed would have completed only about a sixth part of their journey.

“For the Emperor, I would brave anything,” Pshing said, seeming to take fresh spirit. Sometimes Atvar thought loyalty and reverence to the Emperor were all that kept his males performing as they should on a world where the weather and the natives both seemed calculated to drive them mad.

Atvar forced himself to think clearly, even if not like a Tosevite. “The composition of the bomb, like the one the Deutsche used, means the Americans will soon have more such weapons, of production entirely native. For that matter,” he added, as if reminding himself, “they may already have more such weapons, and be saving them for future strikes against us.”

“Underestimating the capacity of the Big Uglies has caused us grief and misfortune ever since we arrived here,” Pshing said.

“Truth,” Atvar answered wearily. “Even when we build their advances in technology into our planning, as we did with the campaign against the Deutsche, we still underestimate them-and pay the price for it.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “Rouse the targeting specialists. Also rouse the shiplord Kirel and summon him to the operations chamber. We must plan our response to the American bomb.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

When Kirel reached the operations chamber, Atvar couldn’t decide if he looked sleepy or stunned. A bit of both, perhaps. “Another nuclear weapon, your adjutant tells me,” the shiplord said. “From the Americans this time? Did I hear that correctly?”

“You did,” Atvar said. “As at Breslau, our progress at Chicago has been halted, and the spearhead of our forces destroyed.” He hissed again, this time thoughtfully. “In both instances, we were led to impale ourselves on the bomb by unforced or lightly forced retreats on the part of the Big Uglies. In future, we shall be more wary.”

“A worthy plan, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “but the very recent past has been extremely damaging to us. Have we any notion where the Americans prepared their fission bomb?”

“I wish we did,” Atvar said. “That site would no longer exist. The Americans cannot hide their program in an already radioactive area, as the Deutsche seem to be doing. They are simply careful about allowing leaks to pinpoint their atomic piles and reprocessing plants.”

“That is a problem,” Kirel said-a good-sized understatement. “If they destroy fighting males with their bombs and we only civilians with ours, do they not gain advantage from that?”

“Some, certainly, but we also destroy industrial sites, and, were this planet not industrialized, it would long since have been incorporated into the Empire,” Atvar answered. Kirel could not disagree with that Atvar went on, “We also put pressure on the Tosevites’ not-empires to accommodate themselves to us while they still have a significant civilian population.”

“None of the Tosevite empires and not-empires we have bombed has yet chosen to accommodate itself to us,” Kirel remarked, but he let it go at that. He knew better, these days, than to criticize Atvar. After a moment, he called up the map of the United States and highlighted two cities the targeting specialists had chosen. Pointing to one, he said, “Here is a centrally located target, Exalted Fleetlord, if you want one.”

Atvar read the name of the place. “Denver? No, I don’t want that one. See how relatively close our males to the east of it are. The prevailing wind will sweep radioactive waste in among them.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. “Very well, then. Your adjutant gave me to understand that you are concerned about the Big Uglies’ traffic on the water.” He brightened the light that showed the other town. “This one is a waterside city, and we have no great numbers of males nearby.”

“Seattle?” Atvar considered. “Yes, that is a good choice, for exactly the reasons you name. We shall bomb it. The Tosevites have begun this game-let us see if they have the liver to play it out to the end.”