Upsetting the Balance

2

Captain Rance Auerbach led his cavalry company out of Syracuse, Kansas, heading east along the north bank of the Arkansas River toward Garden City. Somewhere before he got there, he expected to run into the Lizards.

People in Syracuse waved to him and his command. Like him, they were up with the sun. Most of them were heading out to their farms. “God bless you, boys,” a man in overalls called. “Give ’em hell,” somebody else said. Two people said, “Be careful.”

“We’ll do our best,” Auerbach said, brushing the brim of his hat with the forefinger of his right hand. He was a big, rawboned man; years out in the open in all weather had tanned and lined his long face till he looked a good deal older than his actual thirty-two. That was true of most of the farmers, too, but amid their flat Kansas accents his Texas drawl stood out like a bobcat in a pack of coyotes.

His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, came out of Virginia and had a softer version of a Southern accent. “So’t of hate to leave a nice little town like this,” he remarked.

“It is pretty, isn’t it?” Auerbach said. Syracuse boasted a cool, green profusion of poplars, willows, and other trees. On this stretch of the Great Plains, there wasn’t much like it. Folks drove from miles around to relax under those trees. Or rather, folks had driven, in the days before the Lizards came.

“Your grandfather ride this way during the States War?” Magruder asked.

“Two of my great-grandfathers were Texas cavalrymen, sure enough,” Auerbach answered. “One of ’em did some fighting in the Indian Territory-what’s Oklahoma now-and up in Missouri, so I reckon he went through Kansas a time or two, but probably not this far west. Wasn’t anything here to speak of back then.”

“Mm, you’re likely right,” Magruder said.

They rode on a while in silence punctuated only by the occasional jingle of harness and the steady clopping of their horses’ hooves. A little to the north, US 50 paralleled the Arkansas, but bare ground was easier on the horses’ feet and legs than the asphalt would have been.

Every few hundred yards, a dead car or a clump of them sat on or alongside the highway. Some had just run out of gas with no hope for getting more. The Lizards had strafed others in the early days of their invasion, back when their fighter planes roamed everywhere and shot up everything. Farther east along the road, there would be dead tanks, too. The Great Plains were wonderful country for armor, too bad the Lizards had the wonderful armor to take advantage of the terrain.

“Or maybe it’s not too bad,” Auerbach murmured, leaning forward to pat the side of his gelding’s neck. “Otherwise you’d be out of a job and I’d be just another grease monkey.”

The horse snorted softly. Auerbach patted it again, if you sent cavalry charging tanks, the way the Poles had against the Nazis in 1939, you’d get yourself killed, but you wouldn’t accomplish anything else. But if you used your horses to take you to places farther and faster than infantry could go, and if you made sure the garrisons you raided weren’t big ones, you could still do some useful things.

“You know, we aren’t really cavalry, not the way Jeb Stuart would have used the word,” Auerbach said.

“I know. We’re dragoons,” Magruder answered calmly. If anything ever rattled him, he didn’t let it show on the outside. “We use the horses to get from here to there, then get down and fight on foot. Jeb Stuart might not have done things that way, but Bedford Forrest sure as hell did.”

“He’d have done better if he’d had our firepower, too,” Auerbach said. “Every trooper with an M-1 except for the boys with BARs, a couple of nice, light Browning 1919A2 machine guns and a mortar on our packhorses… give ’em to Forrest and we’d all be singin’ ‘Dixie’ instead of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

“If Forrest had ’em, the damnyankees would’ve had ’em, too,” Magruder said. “It’d just ratchet the slaughter up a notch without doin’ anything else much, seems to me. Right now, I’m not much worried about what we sing for the national anthem, as long as it’s not the song the Lizards use.”

To that, Auerbach could only nod. The company rode past the ruins of Fort Aubrey, about four miles east of Syracuse. After the Civil War, the Army had used it as a base from which to fight Indians. There hadn’t been any fighting in these parts since. There was now.

High overhead, a westbound Lizard airplane scribed a white contrail, straight as if drawn by a draftsman, across the blue sky-a blueprint for somebody catching hell,Auerbach thought. The deadly roar of the plane’s jet engines came down to the ground as a thin, attenuated whisper.

Bill Magruder shook his fist at the flying silver speck. Auerbach understood that only too well. He said, “I’m just glad it’s not after us.”

“Yes, sir,” Magruder said. They’d both been through assaults by ground-attack aircraft. Those chewed up horse cavalry as bad as tanks did. Helicopters were even worse. They didn’t just make strafing runs and leave; they stayed around and hunted you no matter which way you ran. If cavalry flew instead of riding, it would be mounted on helicopters.

Auerbach turned his head to follow the Lizard plane as it disappeared into the west. “These days, I can’t help wondering what those sons of bitches carry,” he said. “I keep worrying it’s another one of those bombs like the one they used on Washington or the Russians used on them south of Moscow. Once the gloves for that kind of fight come off, how do you put ’em back on again?”

“Damned if I know,” Magruder answered. “I just wish to Jesus we had some of those bombs ourselves. You think we can make ’em?”

“I sure hope so,” Auerbach answered. He thought back to the knapsack that colonel-what was his name? Groves, that was it-had toted from Boston all the way to Denver, complete with a detour into Canada. He’d commanded the company that had escorted Groves on the cross-country jaunt. He didn’t know for sure what was in that knapsack; Groves had been mighty tight-lipped about the whole business, like any good officer. But if it wasn’t something to do with one of those fancy bombs, Auerbach figured his guesser needed repairing.

He didn’t say anything about that to Magruder, who hadn’t been with the company then. If Groves couldn’t talk to him about it, he didn’t figure he could talk to anybody else.

The company rode into Kendall, twelve miles east of Syracuse, a couple of hours before noon. If Syracuse had been a small town, Kendall was a dusty hamlet dozing by the Arkansas River. Auerbach let the horses rest, crop some grass, and drink from the river. He walked into the general store to see if it had anything worth getting, but the 150 Kendallians had pretty much picked it clean over the past year. They were living on whatever they got from their farms, the way their grandparents and great-grandparents had just after the War Between the States.

When the company left Kendall, Auerbach ordered a couple of scouts with radios well forward. He knew the Lizards were in Garden City, forty miles east. He didn’t think they were in Lakin, fifteen miles east. He didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

He also ordered the men to spread out wide. Even if the worst happened-the worst being attack from the air-some of them should escape.

One minute, one hour, melted into another. Sweat dripped from the end of Auerbach’s pointed nose, soaked the armpits of his khaki jacket. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it. It didn’t help much.

Just as if the world remained at peace, windmills spun, pumping water up from underground to nourish wheat and corn and sugar beets. Almost every farm had a big brooder house; every so often, Auerbach would hear chickens clucking. Cows and sheep cropped grass, while pigs wandered around eating anything that wasn’t nailed down. Even though shipping had gone to the devil here no less than anywhere else, people still ate pretty well.

The company approached Lakin in the late afternoon. Auerbach didn’t mind that at all: if the town did hold Lizards, they’d have the sun in their eyes when fighting started. “Sir!” The radioman brought his horse up next to Auerbach’s. “Henry and Red, they say they’ve spotted razor wire like the Lizards use. They’re dismounting and they’ll wait for us.”

“Right.” Auerbach reined in and got out a pair of binoculars. He didn’t see any razor wire, but the scouts were a lot closer than he was. Far and away the biggest set of buildings ahead looked at first distant glance like military barracks. Auerbach turned the binoculars on them, whereupon he laughed at himself-they let him read the words painted in big letters on the side of one building, which saidKEARNY COUNTY CONSOLIDATED HIGH SCHOOL. He turned back to the radioman. “Tell ’em we’re on our way.”

“Yes, sir.” The radioman spoke into the microphone.

“Horse holders!” Auerbach called, hoping the sunwould keep the Lizards in Lakin from noticing him and his men. If it didn’t, that could prove embarrassing-maybe fatally embarrassing.

In the States War, one man in four had held horses while the others went up to fight on foot. Auerbach’s company was already about ten men understrength; he couldn’t afford to lose any more effectives than he could help. Letting one man hold five horses also let the company bring four or five extra weapons to the front.

Some of the horse holders resented the duty; he had to rotate it through all the troopers to make it seem fair. Some, though, looked just as well pleased not to be going up against the firepower the Lizards could throw at them. He pretended not to notice that. Nobody had to be a hero all the time.

He wondered how big a garrison the Lizards had thrown into Lakin. They hadn’t been there long; how well could they have fortified the place? He was bringing about seventy men with him; if they were going up against a battalion, they’d get slaughtered. But why in God’s name would the Lizards stick a battalion into a godforsaken place like Lakin, Kansas? He hoped he wouldn’t find out.

The company advanced at the best pace the crews for the machine guns and mortar could manage: they were the ones weighed down by their guns and ammunition. Auerbach would have liked to approach Lakin closer on horseback, but that was asking to get chewed up. Here on the plains, they could see you coming from a long way off.

About a mile outside of town, the mortar crew set up shop. A little bit closer, Red and Henry had tied their horses to fence posts. Red-his last name was O’Neill-pointed ahead. “See that, sir? They’ve got a perimeter out around the school.”

“Mmhmm.” Auerbach studied it. “Wire, yeah, and firing pits, too. I don’t see anybody in ’em, though.”

“No, sir,” O’Neill agreed. “They’re there, all right, but they don’t look like they’re expecting company.”

“Which may mean they aren’t, and which may mean they’re laying for us.” Auerbach rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers. He was getting scruffy enough to make a good States War trooper, that was for sure. He sighed. “I think we better find out.”

Nobody argued, but then nobody would; he was the captain, the fellow who got paid to make the choices. He wished someone would have tried to talk him out of this one. Instead, the men fanned out and started moving in on the consolidated high school. At his murmured orders, one of the machine-gun crews went straight toward it while the other circled around to the left, away from the Arkansas River.

Auerbach went straight in, too. With every step he took, he wished Kansas wasn’t so blinking flat. He felt like a bug on a plate, walking toward a man with a fly swatter the size of Dallas. Before long, he wasn’t walking any more; he was crawling on his belly through the grass.

Something moved inside the perimeter ahead. Auerbach froze. Somebody fired. As if that were a signal, the whole company opened up. Some of the high school’s windows had been broken before. Abruptly, just about all of them were.

The Lizards wasted no time shooting back. They had machine guns on the roofs of several high school buildings. Auerbach blew air out through his lips, making a snuffling noise amazingly like one a horse might produce. This wasn’t going to be anything like a walkover.

A mortar bomb whistled through the air, landing about fifty yards short of the school buildings. Another round flew over the high school.Bracketed, Auerbach thought. Then bombs started falling on the buildings. One of the rooftop machine guns suddenly fell silent. Auerbach yelled himself hoarse.

After about fifteen rounds, the mortar stopped shooting. That was painfully developed doctrine. If you kept banging away from the same place too long, the Lizards would get you. Besides, they were going to be calling in air support any minute now. You didn’t want to lose artillery, even a little old mortar. If they couldn’t find you, they couldn’t shoot you.

One of the high school buildings had caught fire. Lizards skittered out of it. Auerbach drew a bead on one, fired. The Lizard sprawled on the ragged grass and lay there kicking. Auerbach shot at another one, to no visible effect. He swore.

Some of his men had got into Lakin itself, so fire came at the consolidated high school from three sides of a ring. Auerbach pricked up his ears-some of the weapons firing from, that direction weren’t regulation Army issue. That meant the locals had joined in the fight. Auerbach wanted to pound his head against the dirt of the shallow foxhole he’d scraped out for himself. The cavalry was going to have to get the hell out in a couple of minutes. Did the Lakinites or whatever they called themselves think the Lizards would give them a big kiss on the cheek for trying to make like soldiers?

He turned to the radioman. “Call our boys in town and tell ’em to get out. Tell ’em to bring out as many of the townies with guns as they can.” He laughed. “Those folks don’t know it yet, but they just joined the Army.” Several of his troopers had joined in the same highly informal way. If you were willing to put your neck on the line to fight the Lizards, Uncle Sam was more than willing to give you a chance to do it by the numbers.

When firing in Lakin began to die down, Auerbach also ordered his troops on the left to pull back. Now he used his machine guns to cover the retreat and keep the Lizards from getting too enthusiastic about pursuit. The troopers had made a lot of raids on Lizard-held small towns. They knew the drill. You wanted to get back to your horses and scatter before the Lizards brought in their planes and helicopters and splattered you all over the landscape.

You could tell at a glance the new fish the troopers were bringing out of Lakin, and uniforms or their absence had next to nothing to do with it. The civilians who’d taken up arms against the Lizards didn’t know how to take cover, they didn’t know how to move, they hesitated before doing what somebody told them. About what you’d expect from three or four farmers in bib overalls and… two girls?

Auerbach did a double take. Sure as hell, a couple of young women toting.22s were trotting back with his soldiers. One of them wore overalls, too; the other was in a dress. He played back in his head the orders he’d given the radioman. He’d saidtownies; he hadn’t saidmen, if the troopers claimed they were just following orders, they’d have a point.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered. That sort of thing had happened before, but, like anybody, he hadn’t expected it to happen to him. He hoped the girls could ride. He’d have horses for them; he’d seen a couple of his men go down. Companions were helping others along.

There were the horses, in a little hollow that shielded them from being spotted from the high school. The mortar was already broken down and packed away. Here came the machine gun crews. The 1919A2 had been developed especially for cavalry; with the weapons came light metal fittings that attached to the standard pack saddle and carried gun, tripod, a spare parts chest, a spare barrel, and three small ammunition chests. Getting everything ready for travel took bare moments.

Auerbach turned to the civilians who’d taken up arms against the Lizards. “Can you ride, people?” Even in farm country like this, it wasn’t a given, the way it would have been a generation before.

But nobody said no, for which he was duly grateful. The newcomers gave their names as they mounted-or, in a couple of cases, clambered onto-the horses of cavalrymen who wouldn’t need them any more. What anybody called Lorenzo Farquhar was doing in Lakin, Kansas, was beyond Auerbach, but it wasn’t his business, either.

The woman in overalls was named Penny Summers; her father Wendell was there, too. The other one was Rachel Hines. She said, “I’ve wanted to shoot those things ever since they came here. Thanks for giving me the chance.” Though she showed a lot of leg mounting, she swung into the saddle as smoothly as any of the men.

When everyone was horsed, Auerbach said, “Now we scatter. You new people, pick a trooper and stick close to him. Rendezvous point is Lamar, Colorado. See you there in a couple of days. Let’s ride.”

Scattering was the best way to make sure attack from the air didn’t wipe out your whole command. Some of the troops galloped off to the north, some to the south toward the Arkansas, some straight off to the west. Auerbach headed northwest himself, to be in the middle of things when the air attacks came. Not that he could do anything about them, but his job was to try…

Penny Summers and her dad rode with him. They weren’t horse-folk like his troopers, but they kept up-and everyone was going flat out, too. Hearing a swelling roar in the air behind him, he roweled his gelding with his spurs, wringing out of it every ounce of speed it had. A hammering noise rang through the roar, as if God’s jalopy had developed a knock.

The damage was done in the few seconds before the fighter plane screamed overhead, close enough for Auerbach to see the seams and rivets on the underside of its fuselage. Cannon shells chewed up the ground around the fleeing cavalrymen. A fragment tore his trouser leg and drew a bleeding line on the side of his calf.

He looked around as the plane streaked off after other targets. One of his troopers was down, dead. So was Wendell Summers. It looked as if one shell had got him and another his horse. Auerbach gulped. Even for war, it was ugly.

Penny Summers had reined in, staring in numb astonishment at the red smears and badly butchered meat that had been her father. “Get moving!” Auerbach shouted at her. “You want to end up just like him? We’ve got to get out of here.”

“But-he’s dead,” she said disbelievingly, as if such things couldn’t happen, as if this were peaceful 1938 rather than 1943.

“It’s a chance you take, shooting back at the Lizards,” Auerbach answered. He wanted to be gentle, but he didn’t have time. “Look, miss, we can’t hang around. That plane may be back for another pass, you know.”

Her eyes were green, but white showed all around their irises. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her middle twenties, but shock left her face so blank, she looked years younger. But if she didn’t pull herself together at least well enough to ride that horse in the next ten seconds, he was damn well going to leave her here.

She did. She was still stunned, but she booted the horse in the ribs and got rolling. Auerbach rode alongside her. When he had the time, he’d grieve for his lost men, too. Not now. Now getting away was all that mattered. If that stinking jet hadn’t chewed up the rest of the company too badly, he might even have won himself a minor victory.

Ussmak said, “If they keep pulling us out of the line, how do they expect us to maintain the advance against the Deutsche?”

Nejas let out a hissing sigh. “I am but a landcruiser commander, Ussmak, just as you are but a driver and Skoob here but a gunner. I do not make these decisions, but I am a male of the Race. I obey.”

“Yes, superior sir.” Ussmak sighed, too, but quietly. High-ranking males made decisions, lower-ranking ones obeyed them… and paid the price. Two landcruiser commanders and one gunner with whom he’d fought were dead now, and another commander and gunner arrested for being ginger addicts-all that in what everyone had assumed would be a walkover campaign, back when males went into the cold-sleep tanks while the conquest fleet still orbited Home.

Nejas and Skoob were good crewmales, the best he’d had since his first commander and gunner. They didn’t know he had his own little stash of ginger stowed away under one of the flameproof mats in the driver’s compartment of the landcruiser. He wished he’d never got the habit, but when good males died around you, when half your orders made no sense, when you were hurt and bored and didn’t look forward to more combat but knew you had no choice, what were you going to do?

He was no fleetlord or shiplord or grand strategist of any sort, but pulling the landcruisers back from the thrust they’d made struck him as stupid. They’d reached an important river (the locals called it the Rhine) and were poised to strike deep into Deutschland if they could force a crossing-and now this.

“You have to give the Deutsche credit,” he said reluctantly. “No matter how hard we hit them, they hit back. And the Swiss-is that what the other tribe’s name is? — are like that, too. They don’t have weapons as good as the Deutsche, but-”

“I know what I want to give the Deutsche,” Skoob the gunner said. He pointed to the main armament of the landcruiser, a thin black line against the dark blue of the night sky. “Better that than credit, if you ask me.”

Ussmak didn’t argue. The landcruiser was pulled off the road north of Mulhouse (and hadn’t going back through the wrecked Tosevite town been a delight?), parked in a meadow. Tosev 3’s big moon spilled pale light on the mountains to the west, but only made the closer woods seem blacker and more forbidding.

Even by day, Tosev 3 was an alien world to Ussmak. It was too cold to suit him, while the light from the star Tosev paradoxically seemed whiter and brighter than he was used to. At night, though, the planet turned into the sort of haunted place a female might have used to frighten hatchlings.

Everything felt unfamiliar. The odors the chilly breeze brought to the scent receptors on Ussmak’s tongue, some spicy, some bland, others redolent of decay, were all strange to him. The air itself felt heavy and wet to breathe. And the sounds-the chirps and tweets and occasional snarls-were none of them like those night creatures made back on Home. That was one reason Ussmak found them frightening. Another was that he could never be certain which of those night noises came from a Big Ugly sneaking up with the intent of doing him permanent bodily harm.

He said, “I’m going to get my rest while I can. We’ll probably be fighting tomorrow.” Somewhere altogether too close for comfort, the Deutsche were camped with their landcruisers, too, waiting for Tosev to rise. The landcruisers themselves weren’t much, though the new models could sting. But by the way the Deutsche handled them, they could have served as instructors at any training center in the Empire.

New models.The thought ran through his head as he slid down into the landcruiser through the driver’s hatch. The weapons with which the Race fought on Tosev 3 were not much different from the ones they’d used to conquer the Rabotevs and Hallessi, thousands of years before. They’d been on Tosev 3 a bit more than two years (only a little more than one of this planet’s slow turns around its sun), and already the landcruisers and aircraft with which the Big Uglies fought them were vastly more dangerous than those they’d first met.

That was frightening in and of itself. Worse than frightening was the atomic bomb the Russkis had used. If the Big Uglies got nuclear weapons, the Race was liable to lose the war. Ussmak hadn’t imagined that, not when he rampaged across the plains of the SSSR just after the Race landed.

He closed the hatch after him, dogged it tight. Nejas and Skoob would sleep by the landcruiser, they didn’t have enough room for comfort in the turret. But his seat reclined to make a fair bed. He lay there for a while, but sleep eluded him.

Ever so cautiously, he reached under the mat and took out a little plastic vial. It was full of brownish powder. He pulled off the top, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand, and brought the hand up to his mouth. His scent receptors caught the ginger’s spicy tang even before his tongue flicked out to lap up the powder.

As it made its way to his brain, well-being flowed through him: he felt wise and quick and powerful all at the same time, as if he were the fleetlord and part of the fleetlord’s computer scrambled together. But he also feltgood, almost as good as he would during mating season. With no females within light-years, mating hardly ever crossed his mind; to the Race, the habits of the Big Uglies seemed a planetwide dirty joke.

When ginger coursed through him, the Big Uglies were laughable, contemptible. Better yet, in his mind they weresmall. With ginger, the war looked not only winnable but easy, the way everyone had thought it would be before the conquest fleet left Home.

But Ussmak had learned better than to taste just before he went into combat. Ginger made you think you were smart and strong, but it didn’t really make you smart and strong. If you roared into action convinced the Tosevites couldn’t possibly hurt you, you were all too likely to end up dead before you realized you’d made a mistake.

Tasting ginger had two other problems attached to it. One was that the first thing a taste made you want was another taste. Ussmak knew he was an addict; he fought against it as best he could, but an addict he remained.

The other problem was what happened when you didn’t take that second taste. Ginger didn’t just lift you. When it was through with you, it dropped you-hard. And the drop seemed all the worse because of how high you’d been before.

Ussmak made himself not reach for the vial again when exhilaration faded. “I’ve done this a lot of times by now,” he said aloud, willing himself to stillness. Depression and fear crashed down on him just the same. He knew they weren’t real, but they felt as real as the pleasure that had gone before them.

Infantrymales screened the landcruisers. In Ussmak’s worried imagination, they fell asleep at their posts or simply failed to spy Deutsch males creeping through what were to the Race alien woods. The first the crewmales would know of their blunders was satchel charges chucked at their landcruisers. Ussmak dozed off shivering in terror.

He woke with a fresh spasm of alarm when the turret hatches clanged shut, but it was only Nejas and Skoob getting into the landcruiser. “I thought you were a couple of Tosevites,” he said resentfully.

“If we were, you’d be dead meat,” Skoob retorted. A short pause showed he was letting his mouth fall open in laughter.

“Let’s get moving,” Nejas said. “Driver, start the engine.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” The return to routine heartened Ussmak; however battered by fate he’d been, he was still a male of the Race. The hydrogen-burning turbine caught on the first try. He would have been astonished at anything else. The Race’s engineering was solid.

“We’ll clean up the Deutsche here and then resume our advance,” Nejas said as the landcruiser began to move. “A little delay won’t matter.” Ussmak wondered if he’d had his tongue in the ginger jar, too. But no. Nejas and Skoob had never developed the habit. They were everything a male of the Race should be, and so unselfconscious about it that he couldn’t even resent them.

Landcruisers and troop carriers rumbled up the road together. The farmland to either side had probably been fertile once, but armies going back and forth across it hadn’t done much to help that. Ruins, craters, and the tumbled corpses of Tosevite animals were appalling. Ussmak didn’t see any Big Uglies. They weren’t too stupid to get out of the way of the war.

Not far ahead, a male in the gray sacks the Deutsche wore to protect themselves from their world’s beastly climate popped up out of a concealed hole in the ground and pointed something at a troop carrier. Flame shot from the rear of the device; a projectile rocketed toward the carrier. Without looking to see whether he’d scored a hit, the Big Ugly ducked back into his hole.

Troop carriers were armored against small-arms fire but, unlike landcruisers, not against heavy weapons. The projectile struck just below the turret. The carrier burst into flames at once. Escape hatches popped open as its crew and the fighting males it bore tried to escape. Some did; fire from Deutsch gunners cut down others.

“Smash that Tosevite!” Nejas screamed from the intercom speaker taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. Normally a calm, collected commander, he sounded as furiously excitable as any ginger-licker after three tastes.

By contrast, Ussmak was coldly furious. “It shall be done, superior sir,” he said grimly, and steered straight for the foxhole from which the Big Ugly had emerged. He made sure he put a tread right on it, then locked that tread and turned the landcruiser in its own length, crushing the Deutsch male as if he were grinding an insect underfoot. Then he drove on.

“It’s not revenge enough,” Skoob complained.

“It certainly isn’t, by the Emperor,” Nejas agreed. “The Deutsche came out ahead in that exchange.”

As he’d been trained since hatchlinghood to do, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. Before he could raise them-WHAM! The impact against the front of the landcruiser was like a kick in the muzzle. He’d been in a landcruiser that had taken shell hits back in the SSSR, but never one like this. But the armor held-if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been sitting there thinking about how hard he’d just been hit.

Commander and gunner normally went through a series of orders identifying a target and designating it for destruction. This time, Skoob just said, “With your permission, superior sir,” and fired after a tiny pause. That hesitation was enough to let the Deutsche fire again, too. WHAM! Again an impact that jolted Ussmak, again the shell failed to penetrate.

The landcruiser rocked with the round Skoob fired. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted as flame and smoke spurted from behind bushes. Not even the best Big Ugly landcruiser gun could pierce the frontal armor of one of the Race’s landcruisers, but the reverse did not hold true.

“Forward,” Nejas ordered. Ussmak gave the engine more throttle. The landcruiser leaped ahead.

More Deutsche, Ussmak discovered, were armed with those alarming rocket projectors. They killed two troop carriers that he saw, and managed to set one landcruiser afire. Few of the males who used the projectors escaped. The blast from the launchers showed just where they were, and gunners sent heavy fire their way-nor was Ussmak the only male to take more direct measures of extermination.

He’d almost reached a town marked on the map as Rouffach when Nejas ordered, “Driver halt.”

“Halting, superior sir,” Ussmak said obediently, though the command puzzled him: despite the antivehicle rockets, they’d been driving the Big Uglies before them.

“Orders from the unit commander,” Nejas said. “We’re to pull back from this position and resume our previous offensive.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, as he had to say. Then, not only because he’d been through a lot of combat with a lot of crews but also because the deaths of his previous crewmales made him much more an outsider than males of the Race usually became, he went on, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, superior sir. Even if we were beating them, we haven’t smashed the Big Uglies here, and by going off we’ve just given the Deutsche by the big river a couple of days’ rest to strengthen their defenses. They were tough enough before, and they’d stay that way, even if we had forced our way through some of them.”

For a considerable time, Nejas did not answer him. At last, the landcruiser commander said, “Driver, I fear you demonstrate imperfect subordination.” Ussmak knew he was imperfect in any number of ways. That was a long way from saying he was wrong.

“Take off your clothes,” Ttomalss said. The little scaly devil’s Chinese held a thick, hissing accent, but Liu Han was used to it and followed it without trouble.

She used the little devil’s speech in return: “It shall be done, superior sir.” She wondered if Ttomalss could detect the weary resignation in her voice. She didn’t think so. The little scaly devils were interested in learning everything they could about people, but only as people might be interested in learning everything they could about some new kind of pig. That people might have feelings didn’t seem to have occurred to them.

Sighing, Liu Han pulled off her black cotton tunic, let her baggy trousers and linen drawers fall to the dirt floor of the hut in the refugee camp west of Shanghai. Outside, people chattered and argued and scolded children and chased chickens and ducks. The marketplace lay not far away; the racket that came from there was never-ending, like the plashing of a stream. She had to make a deliberate effort to hear it.

Ttomalss’ weird eyes swiveled independently as they examined her. She stood still and let him look all he cared to; one thing more than a year’s association with the little scaly devils had taught her was that they had no prurient interest in mankind… not that she would have aroused prurient interest in many men, not with a belly that looked as if she’d swallowed a great melon whole. Her best guess was that the baby would come in less than a month.

Ttomalss walked up to her and set the palm of his hand on her belly. His skin was dry and scaly, like a snake’s, but warm, almost feverish, against hers. The little devils were hotter than people. The few Christians in the camp said that proved they came from the Christian hell. Wherever they came from, Liu Han wished they’d go back there and leave her-leave everyone-alone.

The baby kicked inside her. Ttomalss jerked his hand away, skittering back a couple of paces with a startled hiss. “That is disgusting,” he exclaimed in Chinese, and added the emphatic cough.

Liu Han bowed her head. “Yes, superior sir,” she said. What point to arguing with the scaly devil? His kind came from eggs, like poultry or songbirds.

Cautiously, Ttomalss returned He reached out again and touched her in a very private place. “We have seen, in your kind, that the hatchlings come forth from this small opening. We must examine and study the process most carefully when the event occurs. It seems all but impossible.”

“It is true, superior sir.” Liu Han still stood quiet, enduring his hand, hating him. Hate filled her, but she had no way to let it out. After the Japanese overran her village and killed her husband and little son, the little scaly devils had overrun the Japanese-and kidnapped her.

The little devils had mating seasons like farm animals. Finding out that people didn’t had repelled and fascinated them at the same time. She was one of the unlucky people they’d picked to learn more about such-again, as people might explore the mating habits of pigs. In essence, though they didn’t seem to think of it in those terms, they’d turned her into a whore.

In a way, she’d been lucky. One of the men they’d forced on her, an American named Bobby Fiore, had been decent enough, and she’d partnered with him and not had to endure any more strangers. The baby kicked again. He’d put it in her belly.

But Bobby Fiore was dead now, too. He’d escaped from the camp with Chinese Communist guerrillas. Somehow, he’d got to Shanghai. The scaly devils had killed him there-and brought back color photos of his corpse for her to identify.

Ttomalss opened a folder and took out one of the astonishing photographs the little scaly devils made. Liu Han had seen photographs in magazines before the little devils came from wherever they came from. She’d seen moving pictures at the cinema a few times. But never had she seen photographs with such perfect colors, and never had she seen photographs that showed depth.

This one was in color, too, but not in colors that seemed connected to anything in the world Liu Han knew: bright blues, reds, and yellows were splashed, seemingly at random, over an image of a curled-up infant. “This is a picture developed by the machine-that-thinks from scans of the hatchling growing inside you,” Ttomalss said.

“The machine-that-thinks is stupid, superior sir,” Liu Han said scornfully. “The baby will be born with skin the color of mine, except pinker, and it will have a purplish patch above its buttocks that will fade in time. It will not look like it rolled through a painter’s shop.”

Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open. Liu Han couldn’t tell if he was laughing at her or he thought the joke was funny. He said, “These are not real colors. The machine-that-thinks uses them to show which parts of the hatchling are warmer and which cooler.”

“The machine-that-thinks is stupid,” Liu Han repeated. She didn’t understand everything Ttomalss meant by the phrase; she knew that. The scaly devils were pretty stupid themselves, even if they were strong-maybe they needed machines to do their thinking for them. “Thank you for showing me I will have a son before it is born,” she said, and bowed to Ttomalss. “How could the machine-that-thinks see inside me?”

“With a kind of light you cannot see and a kind of sound you cannot hear,” the little devil said, which left Liu Han no wiser than before. He held out other pictures to her. “Here are earlier pictures of the hatchling. You see it looks more like you now.”

He was right about that. Foolish colors aside, some of the pictures hardly looked like anything human. But Liu Han had talked with women who’d miscarried, and remembered them speaking of the oddly shaped lumps of flesh they’d expelled. She was willing to believe Ttomalss wasn’t lying to her.

“Will you take more pictures now, superior sir, or may I dress?” she asked.

“Not of the hatchling, but of you, that we may study how your body changes as the hatchling grows inside.” Ttomalss took out what had to be a camera, although Liu Han had never seen one so small in a human’s hands. He walked all around her, photographing from front, back, and sides. Then he said, “Now you dress. I see you again soon.” He skittered out the door. He did remember to close it after himself, for which Liu Han was duly grateful.

Sighing, she got back into her clothes. Other cameras hidden in the hut probably recorded that. She’d given up worrying about it. The little scaly devils had had her under close surveillance ever since she fell into their clutches, and that had grown closer yet after Bobby Fiore somehow managed to get out of the camp.

Yet no matter how tight it was, there were ways around it. Ttomalss had told her something worth knowing. She took a couple of silver Mex dollars from a hiding place among her pots and pans, then left the hut herself.

A lot of people gave her a wide berth as she walked slowly down the dirt road that ran in front of the house-anyone who was so obviously involved with the little devils was not to be trusted. But children didn’t skip alongside her chanting “Running dog!” as they once had.

The market square brawled with life, merchants selling pork and chicken and ducks and puppies and vegetables of every sort, jade and silk and cotton, baskets and pots and braziers-anything they could raise or find or trade for (or steal) in the refugee camp. Women in clinging dresses with slits pasted alluring smiles on their faces and offered to show men their bodies, a euphemism for prostituting themselves. They didn’t lack for customers. Liu Han pitied them; she knew what they had to endure.

She dodged a mountebank juggling knives and bowls as he strolled through the market. Her sidestep almost made her upset the ivory tiles of a mahjong player who made his living by matching wits against all comers (and maybe by unduly clever fingers as well). “Watch where you’re going, stupid woman!” he shouted at her.

Bobby Fiore had used a one-fingered gesture to answer shouts like that; he knew what it meant and the Chinese didn’t, so he could vent his feelings without getting them angry. Liu Han just kept walking. She paused in front of a cart full of straw hats. As she tried one on, she said to the man behind the cart, “Did you know the little scaly devils have a camera that can see how hot things are? Isn’t that amazing?”

“If I cared, it would be,” the hat seller answered in a dialect she could hardly follow; the camp held people from all over China. “Do you want to buy that hat or not?”

After haggling for a while, she walked on. She talked about the camera at several other stalls and carts, and bought somebok choi and a small brass pot. She’d wandered through half the market before she came to a poultry seller whose stand was next to that of a pig butcher. She told him about the camera, too, while she bought some chicken feet and some necks. “Isn’t that amazing?” she finished.

“A camera that can see how hot things are? Thatis amazing,” he said. “You think I give you that much for thirty cents Mex? Woman, you are crazy!”

She ended up paying forty-five cents Mex for the chicken parts, which was too much, but she kept her temper about it. With the poultry seller, “Isn’t it amazing?” was a code phrase that meant she had information to pass, and his “Thatis amazing” said he’d understood. Somehow-she had no idea how, and didn’t want to know-he’d get word to the Chinese Communists outside the camp.

She knew the little scaly devils watched her closely, not only because they were interested in her pregnancy but also because of what Bobby Fiore had done. But if she spread gossip all through the marketplace, how could they figure out which person who heard it was the one who mattered? She just seemed like a foolish woman chattering at random.

What she seemed and what she was were not one and the same. As best she could, she was getting her revenge.

Having a rifle in his hands again made Mordechai Anielewicz feel he was doing something worth doing once more. The months he’d spent in the little Polish town of Leczna had been the most pleasant he’d passed since the Germans invaded in 1939-especially the romance he’d had with Zofia Klopotowski, who lived next door to the people who had taken him in-but that memory made him feel guilty, not glad. With a war raging all around, what right did he have to take pleasure in anything?

Back in the Warsaw ghetto, he’d been readying an uprising against the Germans when the Lizards came. The Jews of the ghetto had risen, all right, against the Nazis and for the Lizards-and he’d become head of all the Jewish fighters in Lizard-held Poland, one of the most powerful humans in all the land.

But the Lizards, while they weren’t interested in exterminating the Jews the way the Nazis had been, were intent on enslaving them-and the Poles and the Germans and the Russians and everybody else. Joining them for the short term had helped save his people. Joining them for the long term would have been ruinous for all peoples.

So, quietly, he’d begun working against them. He’d let the Germans smuggle explosive metal west, though he had diverted some for the British and Americans. He’d smuggled his friend Moishe Russie out of the country after Moishe couldn’t stomach telling any more lies for the Lizards on the wireless. But the Lizards had grown suspicious of Mordechai, and so…

Here he was in the forest in dead of night with a rifle in his hands. Some of the partisans with him were Jews, some were Poles, a few were Germans. The Germans still alive and fighting in Poland a year after the Lizards came were some very tough customers indeed.

Somewhere up ahead, an owl hooted. He didn’t mind that. A few nights before, he’d heard wolves howling. That had sent the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck prickling up in atavistic terror.

Also up ahead, but closer, the point man for the partisan band let out a hiss. Everybody froze. A whisper came back down the line: “Jerzy’s found the highway.”

The road from Lublin up to Biala Podlaska was paved, which by the standards of Polish country roads made it worthy of that handle. One of the Germans in the band, a hulking blonde named Friedrich, thumped Anielewicz on the shoulder and said, “All right, Shmuel, let’s see how this works.”

“It worked once, or something like it,” Mordechai answered in German cleaner than theWehrmacht man’s. First names were plenty in the partisan band. His was false-anybody who figured out who he really was might be tempted to betray him to the Lizards-but had to be Jewish in spite of his unaccented German and Polish. Languages were all very well, but some things they couldn’t disguise.

“All right,” Friedrich said. “We see if it works again.” His voice carried an implied threat, but Anielewicz didn’t think that had anything to do with his own Judaism. Friedrich just didn’t want things to go wrong. That much he still kept from his army days. Otherwise he didn’t look much like the spit-and-polish soldiers who’d made life hell for the Jews in Warsaw and Lodz and everywhere in Poland. A floppy hat had replaced his coalscuttle helmet, he wore a fuzzy yellow beard, and the bandoliers crossed over the chest of his peasant blouse gave him a fine piratical air.

With a grunt of relief, Anielewicz unstrapped the crate he’d been carrying along with his knapsack. Some enterprising soul had stolen it from the Lizards’ base at Lublin. It wasn’t anything special, just an ordinary Lizard supply container. As he carried it toward the road, other partisans put in cans and jars of food, some from purloined Lizard stock, others of human make.

Up by the highway, Jerzy had thepiece de resistance: a jar full of ground ginger. “Stick it in my pocket,” Mordechai whispered to him. “I’m not going to put it in there yet.”

“This is your play,” the point man whispered back as he obeyed. He grinned, his teeth for a moment startlingly visible. “You sneaky Jew bastard.”

“Fuck you, Jerzy,” Anielewicz said, but he grinned, too. He stepped out onto the asphalt and tipped the supply crate over sideways. Cans and jars rolled out of it along the surface of the road. He decided that wasn’t good enough. He stomped on a couple of cans, smashed two or three jars.

He stepped back, considered the artistic effect, and found it good. The crate looked as if it had fallen off a supply lorry. He took the jar of ginger from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and spilled half the contents over the cans and jars still inside. Then he set the jar and the lid by the crate and retreated back into the woods.

“Now we set up the ambush and we wait,” he told Jerzy.

The point man nodded. “They’re fools for not cutting the brush farther back from the sides of the road,” he remarked.

“Fools?” Anielewicz said. “Well, maybe. You ask me, though, they just don’t have the manpower to do everything they need. Good thing, too. If they did, they’d beat us. But trying to take on the whole world spreads them thin.”

He found a good hidey-hole behind a shrub-as a city boy, he couldn’t identify it any more closely than that. He detached the bayonet from his Mauser and used it to dig himself a little deeper into the soft, rich-smelling dirt. He was too aware of how much better he could have done with a proper entrenching tool.

Then it was lie and wait. A mosquito bit him in the hand. He swatted at it. It or one just like it bit him on the ear. Somebody warned he was making too much noise. Another mosquito bit him. He lay still.

Lizard vehicles weren’t as noisy as the grunting, flatulent machines the Nazis used. Sometimes the racket from the German tanks and troop carriers was intimidating, but it always told you right where they were. The Lizards could sneak up on you if you weren’t careful.

Mordechai was careful. So were the rest of the partisans; the ones who hadn’t been careful-and some of the ones who had-were dead now. When the faint rumble of northbound vehicles came to his ears, he flattened himself against the earth, to be as nearly invisible as he could. The Lizards had gadgets that could see in the dark like cats.

A personnel carrier whizzed by the artistically arranged crate without stopping. So did three lorries in quick succession. Anielewicz’s heart sank. If his ambush went for nothing, he’d lose prestige in the band. He might have been the leader of Poland’s Jewish fighters, but the partisans here didn’t know that. As far as they were concerned, he was just a new fish showing what he could do.

The last lorry in the convoy pulled to a stop. So did the troop carrier riding shotgun for it. Mordechai didn’t raise his head. He strained to catch the noises from the highway. A door on the lorry slammed. His heart thumped. One of the Lizards was going over to investigate the crate.

His biggest worry was that the Lizards wouldn’t touch it because they were afraid it was rigged to a land mine or a grenade. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, but Mordechai was ambitious. He wanted to bag more Lizards than he could with such a ploy.

He knew the exact instant when the Lizard realized the ginger was there: the excited, disbelieving hiss needed no translation. He wanted to hiss himself, with relief. Not all Lizards were ginger tasters, by any means, but a lot of them were. He’d counted on there being at least one taster among those who investigated the spilled crate.

That hiss brought another male out of the lorry. Maybe the Lizard who’d made it had a radio with him, for a moment later hatches on the troop carrier came down, too. Anielewicz’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. Just what he’d hoped for!

Easy, easy… patient.He willed his comrades to hold their fire until they could do the most damage. With a whole lot of luck, the fighting vehicle’s crew would get down along with the infantry they transported.If they were smart, they wouldn’t, but ginger tasters were more apt to be greedy than smart. Would they be foolish enough to forget about the heavy weapons the troop carrier bore?

One of the partisans couldn’t stand to wait any more. As soon as one man opened up, everybody started shooting, intent on doing the most damage to the Lizards in the shortest time possible.

Anielewicz threw his rifle to his shoulder and, still prone, started squeezing off shots in the direction of the crate. You couldn’t use aimed fire at night, not unless you had gadgets like those of the Lizards, but if you had put enough bullets in the air, that didn’t matter too much.

Hisses turned to screeches on the roadway. A couple of Lizards started firing back at the partisans. Their muzzle flashes gave the humans hidden in the woods better targets at which to aim. But then the turret-mounted machine gun and light cannon in the troop carrier opened up. Anielewicz swore, first in Polish, then in Yiddish. The Lizards hadn’t been altogether asleep at the switch after all.

With that kind of fire raking the trees and bushes, there was only one thing to do. “Let’s get out of here,” Mordechai yelled, and he rolled away from the road. The Lizards weren’t the only ones screeching now; screams from the darkness and Polish cries for the Virgin said some of those sprayed bullets and shells had found targets.

The advantage of opening fire from close to the highway was that you were right on top of the enemy. The disadvantage was that you took a long time to get away from his guns. Not until Anielewicz scrambled behind an oak tree whose trunk was thicker than his own did he begin to feel safe.

Firing from the road died away. Anielewicz didn’t think the partisans had hurt the Lizards so badly they’d call in air strikes. This sort of warfare walked a fine line, if you did too little, you didn’t harm the enemy. If you did too much, you were liable to provoke him into squashing you like a bug. The Lizards could do that almost anywhere in the world, if they wanted to badly enough. Keeping them too busy in a lot of places to concentrate on any one worked fairly well.

Mordechai was walking a line himself, but not a fine one. It involved fetching up against a tree with his nose, stepping into a hole and twisting his ankle (by luck alone, not too badly), and splashing through a tiny rill he discovered by the simple expedient of getting his feet wet. Some people moved through the woods at night silent as a lynx. He sounded more like a drunken wisent. He thanked God the Lizards were even less woodswise.

“That you, Shmuel?” somebody hissed-Jerzy.

“Yes, it’s me,” Anielewicz answered in Polish. He had no idea the other partisan was within a kilometer till he spoke. Well, that was why Jerzy walked point while he shlepped along well back in the line.

But the Pole didn’t sound angry at him. “That was a good scheme you had there. The Lizards really like sticking their snouts into that stuff, don’t they?”

“That they do,” Mordechai said. “The ones who get hooked good, they’ll do just about anything for a taste of ginger, and a lot of them are hooked-quite a lot of them, if what happened back there is any clue.”

“Might as well be pussy, eh?” Friedrich stepped out from behind a tree. He was twice Jerzy’s size, but just about as light on his feet-and it didn’t do to think him stupid, either. He’d understood Polish and answered in the same language.

None of which made Mordechai feel easy around him. “I don’t think they keep their brains in their pricks, unlike some people I could name,” he said. He tried to keep his tone light, but wasn’t sure how well he succeeded; having to deal withWehrmacht men made his hackles rise.

“If men keep brains in their pricks, why do you Jews make yourselves stupider by cutting some off?” Friedrich retorted. Was that just raillery, or did the German mean something more by it? Who could tell what a German had been up to in Poland before the Lizards came? Anielewicz gave it up. They were-supposed to be-on the same side now.

Jerzy said, “Come on-we go this way now.” Mordechai was damned if he knew how Jerzy could tell which way to go, or, for that matter, which waythis way was. But the Pole was rarely wrong-and Mordechai had no idea which way he was supposed to be going. He followed. So did Friedrich.

The point man’s skill or instinct or whatever it was led them back to the partisans’ camp deep in the forest. No one risked a fire even with thick tree cover overhead; the Lizards had too many eyes in the air. They just found blankets, rolled themselves in them, and tried to go to sleep.

For Anielewicz, that proved impossible. For one thing, adrenaline still sang through him from the fight. For another, he wasn’t used to sleeping in a blanket on the hard ground. And for a third, men-and a few women-not lucky enough to have been guided by Jerzy kept stumbling into camp all night long. Some of them moaned with wounds.

Some of them couldn’t sleep, either. He joined one of the little knots of fighters sitting in the darkness and trying to figure out how well they’d done. One fellow claimed four Lizards downed, another twice that many. It was hard to figure out the partisans’ losses, but at least two men were known dead, and four or five wounded. What morning would prove remained to be seen.

Mordechai said, “If we hit them this hard every time, we’ll make them know we’re there. We can afford to trade one for one longer than they can.” That produced thoughtful silence, then grunts he took as agreement.

Sirens screaming, airplanes roaring overhead, bombs crashing down, antiaircraft guns pounding maniacally-Moishe Russie had been through that in Warsaw in 1939, when theLuftwaffe methodically pounded the Polish capital to pieces. But this was London almost four years later, with the Lizards trying to finish the job the Germans had started here, too.

“Make it stop!” his son Reuven cried, one more wail lost in the many that filled the Soho shelter.

“We can’t make it stop, darling,” Rivka Russie answered. “It will be all right.” She turned to Moishe. She didn’t speak again, but her face held two words: I hope.

He nodded back, sure he bore an identical expression. Having to admit your powerlessness to your child was awful, and being afraid you were lying when you reassured him even worse. But what else could you do when you had no power and were dreadfully afraid things wouldn’t be all right?

More bombs hit, somewhere close by. The mattresses strewn across the floor of the shelter jumped with the impact. The outcry inside the shelter rose to a new pitch of polylingual panic. Along with English and the Russies’ Yiddish, Moishe heard Catalan, Hindustani, Greek, and several languages he couldn’t identify. Soho held immigrants and refugees from all over the world.

Reuven squealed. At first, Moishe was afraid he’d hurt himself. Then he realized the flickering candlelight had been enough to let his son spot the Stephanopoulos twins, who lived in the flat across the hall from his own. Reuven had no more than a handful of words in common with Demetrios and Constantine, but that didn’t keep them from being friends. They started wrestling with one another. When the next flight of Lizard planes dropped another load of death, they paid hardly any attention.

Moishe glanced over at Rivka. “I wish I could be so easily distracted.”

“So do I,” she said wearily. “You at least don’t look like you’re worried.”

“No?” he said, surprised. “The beard must hide it, because I am.” His hand went to his whiskery chin. A lot of men were sporting whiskers in London these days, what with shaving soap, razor blades, and hot water all in short supply. He’d worn a beard in Warsaw, though, and felt naked when he shaved it off to escape to Lodz one step ahead of the Lizards after he refused to be their radio mouthpiece any more.

They’d captured him anyhow, a few months later. Growing the beard again had been the one good thing about the prison into which they’d clapped him. He shook his head. No, there had been one other good thing about that prison-the commando raid that got him out of it. The trip to England by submarine had followed immediately.

He peered around the shelter. Amazingly, some people managed to sleep despite the chaos. The stink of fear and stale piss was the same as he’d known back in Warsaw.

Rivka said, “Maybe that was the last wave of them.”

“Alevai omayn,”Moishe answered fervently: “May it be so-amen!” The vigor of his reply made Rivka smile. Wishing didn’t make things so, worse luck, but he didn’t hear any more explosions, either nearby or off in the distance. Maybe Rivka was right.

The all-clear sounded half an hour later. Friends and neighbors woke the men and women who’d slept in spite of everything. People slowly went back above ground to head back to their homes-and to discover whether they had homes to head back to. It was about as dark on the street as it had been inside the shelter. The sky was overcast; the only light came from fires flickering here and there. Moishe had seen that in Warsaw, too.

Fire engines screamed through the streets toward the worst of the blazes. “I hope the Lizards didn’t wreck too many mains,” Moishe said. “They’ll need all the water pressure they can get.”

“I just hope our block of flats is still standing,” Rivka said. They turned the corner. “Oh, thank God, it is.” Her voice changed timbre: “Get away from there, Reuven! That’s broken glass-you could cut yourself.”

A woman lay groaning in front of the apartment building. Moishe hurried over to her. He’d been a medical student when the war started, and used what he’d learned in the Warsaw ghetto-not that all the medical training in the world did any good when people were starving to death.

“My leg, my leg,” the woman moaned. Russie was just starting to learn English, so that didn’t mean much to him. But the way she clutched at the injured part, and the way the shin bent where it had no business bending, told him everything he needed to know.

“Doctor,” he said; he’d made sure he learned that word. He pointed to himself. It wasn’t quite true, but he was the closest thing to a doctor the poor woman would see for a while, and thinking he was the genuine article might give her more confidence in him. He wanted that; he knew how to set a broken leg, but he also knew how much the process hurt.

The woman sighed, he hoped with relief. A small crowd had gathered around her and Moishe. He looked up to the people and said, “Fetch me a couple of flat boards and some rags to tie them to her leg.”

Nobody moved. Russie wondered what was wrong until Rivka said gently, “Dear, they don’t understand Yiddish.”

He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling seventeen different kinds of idiot. He tried again, this time in the clear German he’d learned in school. Every time he had to use it, irony rose up to choke him. Here, in the heart of Germany’s most important enemy, the irony was doubled.

But no one in the crowd followed German any better than Yiddish. In desperation, Moishe tried Polish. “Here, I’ll get what you need,” somebody said in the same language. Better yet, he translated Russie’s request into English. Several people hurried away. In the rubble from years of bombings, boards and rags were easy to come by.

Moishe said to the fellow who spoke Polish, “Tell her I’m going to set her leg and splint it. Tell her it will hurt.” The man spoke in English. The injured woman nodded. “Maybe you and a couple of other men should hold her while I work,” Moishe went on. “If she thrashes around, she’s liable to make things worse.”

The woman tried to thrash. Moishe didn’t blame her; he admired the way she did her best to keep gasps from turning into shrieks. He got the broken bones aligned and tied the splint tight to keep them from shifting again. When he was through, the woman whispered, “Thank you, Doctor.”

He understood that. It warmed him. When he stood up, his own knees clicked. The sky was growing light. He sighed. No point in going to bed. He had an early broadcast scheduled at the BBC Overseas Services. Yawning, he said to Rivka, “I may as well just get my script and go on in.”

“Oh, dear,” she said sympathetically, but nodded. He and his family went upstairs together. He found the manila folder with the papers inside, then realized he was wearing only a greatcoat over pyjamas. He threw on a white shirt and a pair of trousers and headed out to face the world. A stretcher party had taken away the woman with the broken leg. Moishe hoped she’d do well. He wouldn’t sleep, but he thought his wife and son might.

The building that housed the BBC Overseas Services was at 200 Oxford Street, not far west of his Soho flat and a few blocks east of Hyde Park. As he walked to work, London came to life around him. Pigeons cooed and sparrows chirped-lucky creatures, they knew nothing of war, save that it made the air sharp with smoke. Bicycles, men and women afoot, and horse-drawn wagons and even buggies taken out of sheds where they’d moldered for a generation clogged the streets. Petrol was in as desperately short supply here as in Warsaw or Lodz; only fire engines had all they needed.

Nathan Jacobi approached the building that housed the studios from the other direction at the same time as Moishe reached it. The two men waved to each other. Moishe broadcast in Yiddish and German; Jacobi translated his words into English. His Yiddish was polished and elegant. If his English came close to it-Russie wasn’t qualified to judge, but doubted the BBC would have hired him if it didn’t-he made a very effective newsreader indeed.

Now he surveyed Moishe with a sympathetic eye. “Bad for you last night? You look done in.”

“Iam done in,” Russie said. “I hope the tea in there has a jolt to it this morning. If it doesn’t, I’m apt to fall asleep in front of the microphone.”

“It’ll be hot, anyhow,” Jacobi said, which was true. “As for the jolt, you never can tell from day to day, not with these messes of leaves and roots and rose hips we get instead of the proper stuff.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of vintage Darjeeling-Bloody war.”

The last two words were in English. Moishe knew what they meant, but took the adjective literally. “Bloody war is right. And the worst of it is, we can’t make the Lizards out to be as black as we would otherwise, because they haven’t done much worse to us than we were already doing to ourselves.”

“You would know best about that. Anyone who was in Poland-” Jacobi shook his head. “But still, if we hadn’t been geared up to a fever pitch to fight each other, could we have put up such a battle against the Lizards?”

“I suppose not, but it’s no credit to us that we were,” Russie answered. “It’s not as if we knew they were coming. We’d have gone right on slaughtering ourselves if they hadn’t come, too. Still, I admit that’s neither here nor there at the moment. They are here, and we have to make life miserable for them.” He waved the pages of his script, then fished out his pass and showed it to the guard at the door. The guard nodded. Russie and Jacobi went in to get ready to broadcast.