Upsetting the Balance

3

“Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I have an emergency call for you from the206th Emperor Yower,” Atvar’s adjutant said. In the vision screen, the younger male looked as worried as he sounded.

“Very well, Pshing, patch it through,” Atvar said, setting aside for a moment the war against the Big Uglies for his private conflict with the shiplord Straha. After Straha failed to topple him from command of the conquest fleet, the shiplord should have known revenge was on its way. Atvar wondered what sort of lying nonsense Straha would come up with to justify himself.

Pshing’s face disappeared from the vision screen. It was not, however, replaced by that of Straha. Instead, Atvar’s chief security officer, a male named Diffal, turned his eye turrets toward the fleetlord. Diffal was earnest and capable. All the same, Atvar yearned for the cunning deviousness Drefsab had brought to the job. Even as a ginger taster, he’d been the best in the fleet. But now he was dead, and Atvar had to make do. “Do you have the shiplord Straha in your custody?” he demanded.

“Exalted Fleetlord, I do not.” Diffal also sounded worried. “I am informed that, shortly before the arrival of my team aboard the206th Emperor Yower, the shiplord Straha left this vessel and traveled down from orbit to confer with Horrep, shiplord of the29th Emperor Jevon, whose ship has landed in the central region of the northern portion of the lesser continental mass, near the city called St. Louis.”

Atvar hissed. Horrep was a member of Straha’s faction. Pshing, who must have been monitoring the conversation from his outer office, came onto the screen for a moment. “Exalted Fleetlord, the206th Emperor Yower did not report this departure to us.”

Diffal said, “I have been in communication with the29th Emperor Jevon. Straha is not aboard that ship, nor has his shuttlecraft landed nearby. I examined the radar records of the trajectory of the shuttlecraft. Computer analysis of the course they indicate gives a landing point relatively close to the29th Emperor Jevon, but not so close as would be expected if Straha truly intended to confer with Horrep. The shiplord Horrep, I should inform you, vehemently denies that Straha sent messages announcing a visit, as custom and courtesy would have required.”

“Ever since we came to Tosev 3, custom and courtesy have been corroding,” Atvar said. Diffal stared back at him, not replying. One couldn’t expect a male in security to be concerned with philosophy as well. Atvar dragged himself back to the matter at hand: “Well, where is the shiplord Straha, then?”

“Exalted Fleetlord,” Diffal said, “I don’t know.”

Jens Larssen was sick and tired of bicycles. He was sick and tired of pedaling all over creation on missions he shouldn’t have had to take on and knew he wouldn’t get thanked for, and, of all the things he never would have expected before he set out from Denver, he was sick to death of pine trees.

“First the Arapaho goddamn National Forest, now the Payette goddamn National Forest-or is it the Nez Perce goddamn National Forest yet?” he asked as he worked his way up US 95 toward Lewiston, Idaho. He was used to talking to himself on the road; days often went by when he didn’t talk to anybody else. The longer he spent on his bike, the better he liked being alone.

He wiped sweat off his forehead with a sleeve. The day was hot, but he wore long sleeves and a long-brimmed cap anyway-he was so fair that he worried more about burning in the sun than baking in his clothes. His ears, which the cap didn’t protect, were a permanently raw red peeling mess.

“Not that anybody gives a damn what I look like these days,” he said. Self-pity notwithstanding, he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow: a skinny blond Viking, just past thirty, with bright blue eyes. A sour twist to his mouth marred his features, but since he couldn’t see it, he didn’t know it was there.

A Lizard jet screamed by, high overhead, flying west. The Lizards held the Snake River valley from Idaho Falls to Twin Falls, and used it as an air base against the Pacific Northwest. Outside of their airfields, though, they didn’t seem to give a damn about the area-a sentiment with which Jens heartily concurred. He’d gone through several towns-even what passed for cities hereabouts-without seeing a one of the little scaly bastards.

“Maybe I should have stopped and gone looking for them,” he said to the trees. He knew enough to make the Lizards have kittens. What better way to pay back Barbara for dumping him, to pay back Colonel Hexham for helping him lose his wife, to pay back Oscar the guard for slugging him when he grabbed her to try to get her back, to pay back the Metallurgical Laboratory and the whole stinking human race on general principles? Denver might not earn an atomic bomb all on its own, but it would sure as hell get leveled.

A mountain stream chuckled by, close to the road. Jens ran his sleeve over his forehead again, then decided he’d earned a break. He pulled the bike over to the shoulder, let down the kickstand, and climbed off. He pulled a tin cup out of the pack tied behind the bike saddle and headed for the stream. He had to think about walking the first few steps; his legs kept wanting to go round and round.

The water, undoubtedly snowmelt, was very sweet, but so cold it gave him a savage headache for a few seconds after his first long swig. He swore as he waited for the pain to subside. A gray and blue jay scolded him from the branches of one of those pines.

“Oh, shut up,” he told it. “You’d say the same thing if it happened to you.”

He unslung the Springfield he carried on his back and looked around. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but if a deer came down for a drink, he wouldn’t say no to trying for some venison. The jay screeched again. He swung the rifle its way, then laughed at himself. He’d probably miss, and even if he didn’t, nailing a jay with a.30-caliber slug was about like smashing a roach by dropping an anvil on it. You might have a few feathers left, floating on the breeze, but that was it.

Since he was sitting by the stream, he drank another cup of water. If Bambi didn’t show up, he’d be gnawing on beef jerky for lunch. He’d traded a few rounds of rifle ammo for it just outside of a tiny town incongruously called Cambridge; the more he thought about the deal he’d made, the more he figured he’d been snookered.

The water had its usual effect. He got up and walked over to a tree-not the one in which the jay still perched. He undid his fly and, setting his teeth, took a leak against the tree trunk. It didn’t hurt as much as it had just after he came down with the clap; for a while there, he’d been wishing his joint would drop off every time he used it. But it still wasn’t what anybody in his right mind would call fun.

“Goddamn bitch,” he ground out between his teeth as he fastened himself up again. The first time he’d got laid after Barbara left, and that was the present the stinking waitress had given him. Better he should have stayed a monk.

No sign of any deer. No sign of any bears, either, but Larssen, at the moment, was not inclined to look on the bright side of things. Cursing that slut of a waitress all over again (and conveniently forgetting how much he’d enjoyed having her while she lay in his arms), he got up, went back over to the bicycle, and used his belt knife to carve off a lunch-sized slab of jerky.

Chewing on the stuff was about like gnawing well-salted shoe leather. “Good thing I’ve got a decent set of choppers,” Jens said, and the jay, as if carrying on a bad-tempered conversation with him, peevishly screeched back. “I told you once to shut up,” Larssen reminded it. It took no more notice of him than anybody else had lately.

He gulped down a mouthful of the jerky. Even after he’d been chewing on it, little sharp edges scraped his throat. His laugh wasn’t a friendly sound. “I’d like to see Mr. Sam fucking Yeager eat this stuff with his store-bought teeth,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he figured that if Barbara could go for a guy like that, she wasn’t such a bargain after all.

But even figuring he was well rid of her didn’t make the burn of being thrown over go away. She shouldn’t have decided he was dead, not anywhere near so soon. Even if she had, even if she’d ended up in bed with that Yeager son of a bitch a time or two, she shouldn’t have married him, and she sure as hell shouldn’t have let him knock her up. That had put the kibosh on any hope she’d come to her senses, all right.

“Security,” Larssen snarled, making it into a curse word fouler than any of the others he’d been throwing around. If that stinking Colonel Hexham had just let him write to her as the Met Lab wagon train made its slow way across the northern Great Plains, everything would have been fine. But he’d literally had to go on strike in Denver to get Hexham to let him send a letter. By the time it got to her, it was too late. She was already married and already pregnant.

In peacetime, some lawyer probably would have been able to buy himself a new Packard from the fees he’d have made trying to sort out the whole mess. With the Lizards giving the whole world hell, nobody bothered with much in the way of legal niceties any more. Barbara decided she wanted to stay with Mr. Dentures, so she damn well did.

“And I’m the one who gets screwed-or rather, who doesn’t get screwed any more,” Larssen said. “Isn’t that a hell of a note?”

It was, in more ways than one. Not only did his wife up and leave him but, just because he was too burned up about it to let her go quietly, he’d been all but booted off the Met Lab team. And so, instead of the nuclear physics he loved and for which he’d spent a lifetime training, he got to play Natty Bumppo in the wilderness instead.

If he hadn’t refused to admit he was beaten, he never would have managed to make it back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Chicago. He never would have found out where the Met Lab crew had gone, nor managed to beat them there on his own (of course, if he hadn’t been quite so efficient there, he might have had a better chance of hanging on to Barbara).

Well, he owed the Lizards a good deal, for fouling up his life beyond all recognition. So he’d go on to Hanford and see if it made a good place for building an atomic pile to blow them to hell and gone. So much seemed only fair.

“But after I do that, I’ll get even with all the people who fouled me up, too,” he said softly. “You just bet I will.” He got up from the streamside rock he’d been sitting on, walked over to the bicycle, climbed aboard, and started rolling north again.

Ludmila Gorbunova had seen more bomb craters, from closer range, than she’d ever imagined before the war began. But she’d never seen, never dreamt of, a crater like the one over which her little U-2 biplane skimmed now.

The burned area was most of a kilometer across, maybe more than a kilometer. The ground near the center had been baked into something that looked like glass, and gave back dazzling reflections of the sun. Well beyond that, trees, houses-essentially everything-had been knocked flat. It was as if God had decided to step on the land a few kilometers northeast of Kaluga.

Ludmila did not believe in God, not in the top part of her mind. She was a child of the Revolution, born in Kiev in the midst of civil war. But sometimes, in moments of stress, reactionary patterns of speech and thought emerged.

“We’ve not yet built true socialism,” she reminded herself. “Even with the German invasion, the generation born after the war might have lived to see it. Now-”

The air blowing in over the windscreen flung her words away. Having confessed her imperfection, if only to herself, she was willing to admit that stopping the Lizards’ drive on Moscow had taken something that looked very much like divine intervention.

She’d been flying back from a harassment mission against the Lizards when the bomb went off. Then she’d thought at first that the Lizards were visiting on the Soviet Union the same kind of destruction they’d meted out to Berlin and Washington. Only gradually had she realized her own country had matched the invaders at their murderous game.

TheKukuruznik — Wheatcutter-buzzed over the hulks of three Lizard tanks. Their guns slumped limply, as if they’d been made not of steel but of wax and left too close to the fire. Measuring the revenge the Soviet Union had finally taken on its tormentors filled her with fierce joy.

She fired a burst from her machine guns at the dead tanks, just to mark her own hatred. The recoil made her aircraft shudder for a moment. The U-2 had been a trainer before the war, but proved an excellent raider against the Germans and then against the Lizards. It was quiet-the Germans had dubbed it the Flying Sewing Machine-and flew at treetop height and below. Speed wasn’t everything.

“I’m still alive,” she remarked. Again, the slipstream blew her words away, but not the truth in them. The Lizards hacked higher-performance Red Air Force planes out of the sky as if they knew they were coming-no, notas if, for Intelligence was sure theydid know, with help from electronics of the kind that the Soviet Union was just beginning to acquire. The U-2, though, was small enough-maybe slow enough, too-to escape their notice.

Ludmila patted the fabric skin of the plane’s fuselage. She’d been in theOsoaviakhim, the Soviet pilot training organization, before the war. When she joined the Red Air Force after getting out of Kiev just before the Germans took it, she’d wanted to fly bombers or real fighters. Getting assigned toa Kukuruznik squadron had seemed a letdown: she’d flown in U-2s to learn to handle other, more deadly, aircraft.

Time changed her perspective, as time has a way of doing. She patted the U-2’s fabric skin again. It kept flying, kept fighting, no matter what. “Good old mule,” she said.

As she neared Kaluga, she grew alert once more. The Lizards still held the town, though they hadn’t tried to push north from it since the bomb went off. She knew only too well that she hadn’t been invulnerable till now, just lucky-and careful. If you stopped being careful, you wouldn’t stay lucky.

Far off in the distance, she spotted a couple of Lizard trucks stopped right out in the open by a haystack. Maybe one of them had broken down, and the other paused to help. Any which way, they made a tempting target. Her thumb slid to the firing button for the U-2’s machine guns.

A moment later, she used stick and pedals to twist the little biplane away from the trucks in as tight a turn as she could manage. That haystack didn’t have quite the right shape to be sitting in a Russian field-but it was just the right shape to serve asmaskirovka for one of the Lizards’ antiaircraft tanks.

She headed back toward the airstrip from which she’d taken off. If anything, dignifying the place with that description was flattery: it was just a stretch of field with underground shelters for the pilots and groundcrew, and with barley-draped camouflage nets to cover up the planes. A few hundred meters away, a false strip with dummy aircraft, tents, and occasional radio signals was much more prominent. The Lizards had bombed it several times. Sovietmaskirovka really worked.

As Ludmila approached the airstrip, a fellow who looked like any other peasant took off his hat and waved at her with it in his left hand. She accepted the course correction and shifted slightly more to the north.

TheKukuruznik bounced to a stop. It was light enough to have no trouble on plowed-up dirt, and to stop very quickly once the wheels touched down. Like moles emerging from their burrows, groundcrew men dashed toward the biplane, and reached it before the prop had stopped spinning.

“Out, out, out!” they yelled, not that Ludmila wasn’t already descending from the U-2. No sooner had her boots touched ground than they manhandled the biplane toward what looked like just another piece of field. But two of them had run ahead to pull aside the camouflage netting that covered a broad trench. In went the aircraft. Back went the netting. Within two minutes of landing, not a trace of theKukuruznik remained visible.

Ludmila ducked under the netting, too, to help ready the biplane for its next mission. She’d made herself into a good mechanic. Red Air Force pilots needed to be good mechanics, because very often the groundcrew weren’t. That wasn’t the case here; one of the fellows at the base was as good a technician and repairman as she’d ever known. Even so, she helped him as much as she could. It was, after all, her own neck.

“Zdrast’ye,Comrade Pilot,” the mechanic said in accented Russian. He was a tall, lean, ginger-bearded fellow with a grin that said he refused to take her or anything else too seriously.

“Zdrast’ye,”she answered shortly. Georg Schultz was a genius with a spanner in his hands, but he was also a dedicated Nazi, a panzer gunner who’d attached himself to the airbase staff when they were still operating out of the Ukraine. She’d helped him get his place there; she’d known him and his commander, Heinrich Jager, before. Every so often, she wondered how wise she’d been.

“How did it go?” he asked, this time in German, of which she had a smattering: more than that now, thanks to practice with Jager and with Schultz.

“Well enough,” she answered in the same language. She turned away from him toward theKukuruznik so she wouldn’t have to notice the way his eyes roamed up and down her body as if she were naked rather than covered by a heavy leather flight suit. His hands had tried roaming up and down her body a couple of times, too. She’d said no as emphatically as she knew how, butnyet wasn’t a Russian word he seemed to have grasped. For that matter, he wasn’t what you’d call solid onnein, either.

Maybe her indifference was finally getting through to him, though; the next question he asked seemed strictly business: “Did you fly over the crater from the big bomb you people set off a little while ago?”

“Aber naturlich,”she answered. “It’s a good direction from which to approach: I can be sure no Lizard guns will be waiting for me from that position, and it lets me penetrate deep into their lines.”

Schultz puffed out his chest. “Me and Major Jager-Colonel Jager now-we were part of the raiding crew that got you Russkis the metal I expect you used to build that bomb.”

“Were you?” She wanted the words to come out cold as ice, but they didn’t, quite. One thing she reluctantly granted Schultz was his habit of telling the truth as he saw it. She found that sort of bluntness alarming in a way: how had he managed to keep it without getting raked over the coals by theGestapo? Any Russian so outspoken would have ended up in agulag, if he wasn’t simply executed as an enemy of the state. But Ludmila was willing to believe Schultz wasn’t lying just to impress her.

He preened some more. “Yes, we certainly were. Hadn’t been for us Germans, you Reds never would have been able to build your bomb at all.”

Ludmila felt like slapping his smug face. “I don’t suppose you Germans”-she deliberately used the Russian word,nemtsi, with its overtones of barbarism and unintelligible babbling-“would do anything like that if you didn’t get your own share of the metal, too. As you say, we built a bomb with ours. Where is the German bomb?”

Georg Schultz went a dull red. Ludmila chuckled under her breath. The Nazis thought of themselves as the lords of creation and of their Slavic neighbors as subhuman, certainly incapable of a scientific feat like the explosive-metal bomb. Reminding them that wasn’t so always gave a Russian pleasure.

“Let’s look over the aircraft,” Schultz mumbled. Ludmila didn’t argue with him-that was what they were supposed to be doing. With tools in his hands, Schultz became useful enough for her to overlook, if not to forgive, his appalling politics. His piggish approaches to her she already discounted. Plenty of Russian men were just as uncultured-Nikifor Sholudenko, for instance. The NKVD man would be debriefing her as soon as she was done inspecting the U-2.

Schultz grunted as he pried through the five-cylinder Shvetsov radial engine. Ludmila had come to know that grunt. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“One of the springs in your oil pump is starting to go,” he said. “Here, come see for yourself.”

She inspected the part. Sure enough, it wasn’t as strong as it should have been. She nodded with professional respect. The German got into everything, with monomaniacal thoroughness. She couldn’t imagine a Russian technician stripping down a part that wasn’t giving trouble. “Do we have spares for it?” she asked.

“I think so, yes, or if not I can steal one from a plane that’s down for some other reason,” Schultz said. Ludmila nodded; cannibalizing machines for parts happened all the time.

“Good. Do that at once,” she said.

He gave her an odd look. “But I have not yet seen what else may need fixing,” he said. “What do you think I am, some slapdash Russian? Finding one thing wrong does not mean there will be no more.” After a moment, he grunted again, and pointed up into the greasy bowels of the engine. “Here. Look.”

Ludmila, who was close to twenty centimeters shorter, had to stand on tiptoe to see what he was talking about. As she did so, he turned his head and planted a quick kiss on her cheek. Then he stepped back, grinning. As his advances went, that one was downright gentlemanly. She shook her head, exhaling through her nose in exasperation. “You ought to know better than that by now.”

“Why? Maybe I’ll get lucky one of these days,” he said, altogether unabashed. He grinned at her. “After all, Major Jager did.”

She hoped the light under the camouflage netting was too dim and gray for him to notice her flush, but if she’d seen him go red, he could probably see her. And she was sure she was red as fire now. She’d had a brief liaison with Jager when she’d flown Foreign Commissar Molotov to Berchtesgaden while Jager happened to be there to get a medal from Hitler for bringing explosive metal back to Germany.

“The major is a gentleman,” she said. “You-” She stopped in confusion. In the classless society the Soviet Union was building, you weren’t supposed to think or talk about gentlemen, let alone prefer them.

“Maybe,” Schultz said. “But I’m here and he’s not.”

Ludmila made a wordless sound of fury. She made it again when Schultz laughed at her, which only made him laugh harder. What she wanted to do was stalk indignantly out of the underground shelter. Wriggling out from under the camouflage net was a poor substitute, but it had to do.

A groundcrew man came hurrying over to smooth the netting and preserve themaskirovka. He said, “Comrade Pilot, they are ready to debrief you on your mission now.”

“Thank you,” she said, and hurried over to the underground bunkers that housed the air base’s personnel. More camouflage netting concealed the entrance. She pushed it aside to go in.

There had always been the hope that Colonel Karpov, the base commandant, would take her report, but no such luck. Behind a folding table in a chamber lit by four stinking candles sat Nikifor Sholudenko. She sighed internally; she and the NKVD man had come to the base together out of the Ukraine, so his presence here, like Schultz’s, was her own fault. That didn’t make him any easier to take.

“Sit, Comrade Pilot,” he urged, waving her to a battered armchair. Like hers, his Russian had a bit of a Ukrainian flavor in it. He handed her a glass. “Here, drink this. It will make you feel better after your dangerous flight.”

The glass held a reddish liquid. Weak tea? She sipped cautiously. No-pepper vodka, smoother than anything she’d had in quite a while. All the same, she sipped cautiously.

“Drink, drink,” Sholudenko urged her. His eyes glittered avidly in the candlelight. “It will relax you.”

He wanted her relaxed, all right. She sighed again. Sometimes facing the Lizards was easier than coming back and trying to deal with her own side.

A few kilometers south of Pskov, Lizard artillery hammered at the line the Russians and Germans had built together to try to hold the aliens away from the northwestern Russian city. George Bagnall watched the explosions from Pskov’sKrom, the old stone fortress that sat on the high ground where the Velikaya and Pskova rivers came together. TheKrom wasn’t quite in range of the Lizards’ guns-he hoped.

Beside him, Ken Embry sighed. “They’re catching it pretty hard out there.”

“I know,” Bagnall answered. “There but for mistrust go we.”

Embry snorted, though it wasn’t really funny. He’d piloted the Lancaster bomber on which Bagnall had served as flight engineer when they brought an airborne radar to Pskov to help the Soviets in their struggle against the Lizards. The mission had been hurried, and imperfectly conceived. Nobody’d bothered to tell the RAF men, for instance, that Pskov wasn’t altogether in Soviet hands. The Russians shared it uneasily with the Germans, each side hating the Lizards just a little-sometimes a very little-more than it did the other.

Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German came into the makeshift office, the one black-bearded and stocky, the other red-whiskered and foxy-faced. Before the Lizards came, they’d commanded the First and Second Partisan Brigades in what they called the Forest Republic, harassing the Nazis who’d held Pskov. Now they made up an uneasy triumvirate withGeneralleutnant Kurt Chill, who had led a German infantry division and commanded all German forces in the Pskov area.

“Gentlemen,” Bagnall said in German, and then amended that in Russian: “Tovarishchi-comrades.”

“These are not the same thing,” Aleksandr German said reprovingly. “Russia had gentlemen. The Soviet Union has comrades-we got rid of the gentlemen.” His smile showed yellow, pointed teeth, as if he’d had some of those gentlemen for supper. He was a Jew; he spoke Yiddish, not German, and Bagnall had to struggle to understand him. But Bagnall’s Russian, picked up word by word since he’d come to Pskov, was much worse.

The partisan leader translated what he’d said for his companion.“Da!” Nikolai Vasiliev boomed. He drew his thumbnail across his throat, under his beard, as if to show what had happened to the gentlemen of old Russia. Then he came out with one of the handful of German words he knew:“Kaputt!”

Bagnall and Embry, both comfortably middle class by upbringing, shared a look. Even in the middle of a war, such wholehearted enthusiasm about the virtues of liquidation was hard to stomach. Cautiously Bagnall said, “I hope this command arrangement is working to your satisfaction.”

This time, Aleksandr German spoke to Vasiliev before he replied. Vasiliev’s answer was voluble but unintelligible, at least to Bagnall. Aleksandr German said, “It works better than we had expected, maybe because you Englishmen seem more honest than we had expected.”

When Bagnall translated that for Embry, the pilot said, “General Chill told us the same thing.”

“That’s the idea, old man,” Bagnall told him, and then turned the remark into German for the benefit of the partisan brigadiers. The Reds didn’t want Chill giving orders to their men, and he would sooner have swallowed his monocle than let them command his?but if Pskov didn’t have some sort of unified command, it would damn well fall. Both sides, then, appealed orders they reckoned unsatisfactory to the RAF men, and both sides had agreed to abide by their decisions. So far, both sides had.

“If you can keep the Nazis and us equally dissatisfied, you are doing well,” Aleksandr German said.

“Bloody wonderful,” Ken Embry muttered. Without a moment’s hesitation, Bagnall translated that as“Ochen khorosho — very good.” Here he was willing to sacrifice the spirit to preserve the letter-and good feeling all around.

Vasiliev and Aleksandr German walked over to study the situation map tacked up on the wall. The Lizards were still about twenty miles south of town. They hadn’t tried a big push in a while-busy elsewhere,Bagnall supposed-but the work of building new defensive lines against them went on day and night, not that Pskov had much night during high summer.

Bagnall waited for the Russians to ask something, complain about something, demand something. They didn’t. Vasiliev pointed to one of the defensive positions under construction and grunted a mouthful of consonants at Aleksandr German. The other partisan brigadier grunted back. Then they both left the room, maybe to go have a look at that position.

“That was too easy,” Embry said when they were gone.

“Can’t have disasters every day,” Bagnall said, though he wondered why not as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Given his own experience, disasters seemed almost as common as sparrows. He went on, “Can you tend the shop by yourself for half a moment? I’d like to get outside for a bit and stretch my legs.”

“Go ahead,” Embry answered. “I owe you one or two there, I think, and this is a bloody gloomy room.”

“Too right, and not just because it’s poorly lit, either,” Bagnall said. Embry laughed, but they both knew Bagnall hadn’t been joking.

When he escaped the massive medieval stone pile of the PskovKrom, he let out a long sigh of relief. Now that summer truly was here, Pskov seemed a very pleasant place, or could have seemed such if you ignored war damage. Everything smelled fresh and green and growing, the weather was warm and pleasant, the sun smiled down from a bright blue sky ornamented with puffy little white clouds, linnets chirped, ducks quacked. The only trouble was, you had to go through eight months of frozen hell to get to the four nice ones.

The Lizards had bombed the Sovietsky Bridge (older Russians in Pskov, Bagnall had noted, sometimes still called it the Trinity Bridge) over the Pskova. Their accuracy was fantastically good, as the flight engineer noted with professional jealousy; they’d put one right in the middle of the span. Men could cross over the timbers laid across the gap, but machines couldn’t.

A German on a bicycle rode by and nodded to Bagnall.“Heil Hitler!” the fellow said, probably taking the Englishman for one of his own. Bagnall contented himself with a nod. Having Stalin for an ally had felt strange back in 1941. Having Stalin and Hitler both for allies felt surreal, as if the world had turned upside down.

“Well, it bloody well has,” Bagnall muttered.

Boards clumped under his feet as he crossed the bridge into the Zapsokvye district on the west side of the river. Behind a stone fence, which looked old enough to have been there before the city itself, stood the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian on Primostye, its tall onion dome surmounted by an Orthodox cross with a diagonal below the horizontal arm.

Unlike a lot of the bigger buildings in the area, the church hadn’t been bombed. It looked run-down anyway, with paint peeling and pigeon droppings resembling snow on the green copper sheathing of the dome. Bagnall wondered if the Communists had let anybody worship in there since the Revolution.

A soldier in Red Army khaki was sitting on the fence that surrounded the church. He-no, she-waved to Bagnall. “Zdrast’ye,Tatiana Fyodorovna,” he said, waving back.

Tatiana Fyodorovna Pirogova swung down from the fence and strode toward him. Her blond curls gleamed in the bright sunshine. She was pretty-hell, she was more than pretty-in the broad-faced, flat-featured Russian way, and not even baggy Red Army tunic and trousers could altogether disguise her shape. As she came up to Bagnall, she ran her tongue over her full lower lip, as if she were contemplating what sort ofhors d’oeuvre he’d make.

She probably was. She’d been after him ever since he’d coordinated the defense that beat back the last Lizard push against Pskov. Up till then, she’d been with Jerome Jones, the radarman Bagnall and Embry and Alf Whyte (poor Alf-he’d caught a bullet south of the city) had flown into Russia with an airborne set.

Not poaching on his countryman’s turf wasn’t what made Bagnall shy about taking advantage of Tatiana’s abundant charms. The Moisin-Nagant rifle with telescopic sight she wore slung over her right shoulder had a lot more to do with it. She was a sniper by trade, and a damn good one. Bagnall wasn’t in the least ashamed to admit she scared the whey out of him.

He pointed to the church and said,“Schon.” Tatiana understood a little German, though she didn’t speak it.

That luscious lip curled. She let loose with a spate of Russian he had no hope of following in detail. She repeated herself often enough, though, that after a while he got the gist: the church and everything it stood for were primitive, uncultured (an insult to conjure with, in Russian), superstitious rubbish, and too bad neither the Nazis nor theYashcheritsi — Lizards-had managed to blow it to kingdom come.

Then she pointed to the church herself, mimed opening the door, and asked him a question so bluntly coarse that the bad language he’d picked up from Red Army officers and men let him understand it perfectly: did he want to go in there for a quick poke?

He coughed and choked and felt himself turn red. Not even English tarts were so bold, and Tatiana, maneater though she might have been, was no tart. He wished to God she’d been content with Jones instead of setting her sights on him. Stuttering a little, he said,“Nyet. Spasebo, aber nyet. No-thanks, but no.” He knew he was mixing his languages, but he was too rattled to care.

“Bourgeois,” Tatiana said scornfully. She turned on her heel and strode off, rolling her hips to show him what he was missing.

He was perfectly willing to believe there’d be never a dull moment in the kip with her. All the same, he’d sooner have bedded down with a lioness; a lioness couldn’t put one between your eyes at fifteen hundred yards. He hurried back over the Sovietsky Bridge toward theKrom. After an encounter with Tatiana, trying to figure out what the Lizards would do next struck him as a walk in the park.

Mutt Daniels hunkered down in the Swift and Company meat-processing plant behind an overturned machine whose gleaming blades suggested a purpose he’d sooner not have thought about. Was that something moving toward him in the gloom? In case it was, he fired a burst at it from his tommy gun. If it had been moving before, it didn’t afterwards, which was what he’d had in mind.

“Meat-processing plant, my ass,” he muttered. “This here’s a slaughterhouse, nothin’ else but.”

His thick Mississippi drawl didn’t sound too out of place, not when summer heat and humidity turned Chicago’s South Side Southern indeed. He wished he had a gas mask like the one he’d worn in France in 1918; the heat and humidity were also bringing out the stink of the slaughterhouse and the adjacent Union Stockyards, even though no animals had gone through the yards or the plant in the past few months. That smell would hang around near enough forever as to make no difference.

The huge bulks of the Swift meat factory, the Armour plant beside it on Racine Avenue, and the Wilson packing plant not far away formed the keystone to the American position in the south side of Chicago. The Lizards had bombed them from the air and shelled them to a fare-thee-well, but GIs still clung to the ruins. The ruins were too ruinous for tanks, too; if the Lizards wanted the Americans out, they’d have to get them out the hard way.

“Lieutenant Daniels!” That was Hank York, the radioman, who habitually talked in an excited squeak.

“What’s up, Hank?” Mutt asked without taking his eyes off the place where he thought he’d seen movement. He wasn’t used to being called “Lieutenant”; he’d joined up as soon as the Lizards invaded, and went in with two stripes because he was a First World War vet. He’d added the third one pretty damn quick, but he’d only gotten a platoon when the company commander, Captain Maczek, went down with a bad wound.

He didn’t much blame the Army for being slow to promote him. When the Lizards came, he’d been managing the Decatur Commodores, but in normal times who’d want a platoon leader nearer sixty than fifty? Hell, he’d been a backup catcher for the Cardinals before most of the guys he led were born.

But times weren’t normal, no way. He’d stayed alive in spite of everything the Lizards had thrown at him, and so he was a lieutenant.

Hank York said, “Sir, word from HQ is that the Lizards have asked to send somebody forward under a white flag to set up a truce to get the wounded out. He’ll be coming from that direction”-York pointed past a ruined conveyor belt-“in about ten minutes. They say you can agree to up to three hours.”

“Hold fire!” Mutt yelled, loud as he would have shouted for a runner to slide going into third. “Spread the word-hold fire. We may get ourselves a truce.”

Gunfire slowly died away. In the relative quiet, Bela Szabo, one of the fellows in the platoon who toted a Browning Automatic Rifle, let out a yip of glee and said, “Hot damn, a chance to smoke a butt without worryin’ about whether those scaly bastards can spot the coal.”

“You got that one right, Dracula,” Daniels answered the BAR man. Szabo’s nickname was used as universally as his own; nobody ever called him Pete, the handle he’d been born with. The cigarettes were also courtesy of Dracula, the most inspired scrounger Mutt had ever known.

The limit of vision in the ruined packing plant was about fifty feet; past that, girders, walls, and rubble obscured sight as effectively as leaves, branches, and vines in a jungle. Daniels jumped when a white rag on a stick poked out of a bullet-pocked doorway. He swore at himself, realizing he should have made a flag of truce, too. He jammed a hand in a pants pocket, pulled out a handkerchief he hadn’t been sure he still owned, and waved it over his head. It wasn’t very white, but it would have to do.

When nobody shot at him, he cautiously stood up. Just as cautiously, a Lizard came out of the doorway. They walked toward each other, both of them picking their way around and over chunks of concrete, pieces of pipe, and, in Mutt’s case, an overturned, half-burned file cabinet. The Lizard’s eyes swiveled this way and that, watching not only the floor but also for any sign of danger. That looked weird, but Mutt wished he could pull the same stunt.

He saluted and said, “Lieutenant Daniels, U.S. Army. I hear tell you want a truce.” He hoped the Lizards were smart enough to send out somebody who spoke English, because he sure as hell didn’t know their lingo.Sam Yeager might understand it by now, if he’s still alive, Mutt thought. He hadn’t seen Yeager since his ex-outfielder took some Lizard prisoners into Chicago a year before.

However strange the Lizards were, they weren’t stupid. The one in front of Mutt drew himself up to his full diminutive height and said, “I am Wuppah”-he pronounced eachp separately-“smallgroup commander of the Race.” His English was strange to the ear, but Mutt had no trouble following it. “It is as you say. We would like to arrange to be able to gather up our wounded in this building without your males shooting at us. We will let you do the same and not shoot at your males.”

“No spying out the other side’s positions, now,” Daniels said, “and no moving up your troops to new ones under cover of the truce.” He’d never arranged a truce before, but he’d gathered up wounded in France under terms like those.

“It is agreed,” Wuppah said at once. “Your males also will not take new positions while we are not shooting at each other.”

Mutt started to answer that that went without saying, but shut his mouth with a snap. Nothing went without saying when the fellow on the other side had claws and scales and eyes like a chameleon’s (just for a moment, Mutt wondered how funny he looked to Wuppah). If the Lizards wanted everything spelled out, that was probably a good idea. “We agree,” Daniels said.

“I am to propose that this time of not shooting will last for one tenth of a day of Tosev 3,” Wuppah said.

“I’m authorized to agree to anything up to three hours,” Daniels answered.

They looked at each other in some confusion. “How many of these ‘hours’ have you in your day?” Wuppah asked. “Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-four,” Mutt answered. Everybody knew that-everybody human, anyhow, which left Wuppah out.

The Lizard made hissing and popping noises. “This three hours is an eighth part of the day,” he said. “It is acceptable to us that this be so: my superiors have given me so much discretion. For an eighth part of a day we and you will do no shooting in this big and ruined building, but will recover our hurt males and take them back inside our lines. By the Emperor I swear the Race will keep these terms.” He looked down at the ground with both eyes when he said that.

Truces with theBoches hadn’t required anybody to do any swearing, but the Germans and Americans had had a lot more in common than the Lizards and Americans did. “We’ll keep ’em, too, so help me God,” he said formally.

“It is agreed, then,” Wuppah said. He drew himself up straight again, though the rounded crown of his head didn’t even come up to Mutt’s Adam’s apple. “I have dealt with you as I would with a male of the Race.”

That sounded as if it was meant to be a compliment. Mutt decided to take it as one. “I’ve treated you like a human being, too, Wuppah,” he said, and impulsively stuck out his right hand.

Wuppah took it. His grip was warm, almost hot, and, though his hand was small and bony, surprisingly strong. As they broke the clasp, the Lizard asked, “You have been injured in your hand?”

Mutt looked down at the member in question. He’d forgotten how battered and gnarled it was: a catcher’s meat hand took a lot of abuse from foul tips and other mischances of the game. How many split fingers, dislocated fingers, broken fingers had he had? More than he could remember. Wuppah was still waiting for an answer. Daniels said, “A long time ago, before you folks got here.”

“Ah,” the Lizard said, “I go to tell my superiors the truce is made.”

“Okay.” Mutt turned and shouted, “Three-hour ceasefire! No shootin’ till”-he glanced at his watch-“quarter of five.”

Warily, men and Lizards emerged from cover and went through the ruins, sometimes guided by the cries of their wounded, sometimes just searching through wreckage to see if soldiers lay unconscious behind or beneath it. Searchers from both sides still carried their weapons; one gunshot would have turned the Swift plant back into a slaughterhouse. But the shot did not come.

The terms of the truce forbade either side from moving troops forward. Mutt had every intention of abiding by that: if you broke the terms of an agreement, you’d have-and you’d deserve to have-a devil of a time getting another one. All the same, he carefully noted the hiding places from which the Lizards came. If Wuppah wasn’t doing the same with the Americans, he was dumber than Mutt figured.

Here and there, Lizards and Americans who came across one another in their searches cautiously fraternized. Some officers would have stopped it Mutt had grown up listening to his grandfathers’ stories of swapping tobacco for coffee during the War Between the States. He kept an eye on things, but didn’t speak up.

He was anything but surprised to see Dracula Szabo head-to-head with a couple of Lizards. Dracula was grinning as he came back to the American lines. “What you got?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t quite know, Lieutenant,” Szabo answered, “but the brass is always after us to bring in Lizard gadgets, and the scaly boys, they traded me some.”

He showed them to Mutt, who didn’t know what they were good for, either. But maybe some of the boys with the thick glasses would, or could find out. “What did you give for ’em?”

Dracula’s smile was somewhere between mysterious and predatory. “Ginger snaps.”

A blast of chatter greeted David Goldfarb when he walked into A Friend In Need. The air in the pub was thick with smoke. The only trouble was, it all came from the fireplace, not from cigarettes and pipes. Goldfarb couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a smoke.

He worked his way toward the bar. A Friend In Need was full of dark blue RAF uniforms, most of them with officers’ braid on the cuffs of their jacket sleeves. Just a radarman himself, Goldfarb had to be circumspect in his quest for bitter.

If it hadn’t been for the RAF uniforms, A Friend In Need couldn’t have stayed in business. Bruntingthorpe was a tiny village a few miles south of Leicester a greengrocer’s shop, a chemist’s, a few houses, the pub, and damn little else. But the RAF experimental station just outside the place brought hundreds of thirsty men almost to the door of A Friend In Need. The place not only survived, it flourished.

“Goldfarb!” somebody bawled in a loud, beery voice.

The radarman’s head whipped around. There at a table, waving enthusiastically, sat Flight Officer Basil Roundbush, who, along with Goldfarb, was part of Group Captain Fred Hipple’s team that labored to incorporate Lizard knowledge into British jet engines and radars. Goldfarb often thought that was the equivalent of trying to incorporate the technology of smokeless powder into the Duke of Wellington’s infantry squares, but carried on regardless.

Roundbush, by some miracle, had an empty chair next to him. Goldfarb made for it with mixed feelings. On the one hand, sitting down would be nice. On the other, if he sat next to the flight lieutenant, not a barmaid in the world, let alone the ones in Bruntingthorpe, would look at him. Besides being an officer, Roundbush was tall and blond and ruddy and handsome, with a soup-strainer mustache, a winning attitude, and a chestful of medals.

Goldfarb had a Military Medal himself, but it didn’t match up. Nor did he: other rank, medium-sized, lean, with the features and dark, curly hair of an Eastern European Jew. Sitting down next to Roundbush reminded him of how un-English he looked. His parents had got out of Poland a little before the First World War. A lot of people hadn’t been so lucky. He knew that very well.

“Stella, darling!” Roundbush called, waving. Because it was he, the barmaid came right away, with a broad smile on her face. “Pint of best bitter for my friend here, and another for me as well.”

“Right y’are, dearie,” Stella said, and swayed away.

Roundbush stared after her. “By God, I’d like to take a bite out of that arse,” he declared. His upper-class accent made the sentiment sound a trifle odd, but no less sincere for that.

“As a matter of fact, so would I,” Goldfarb said. He sighed. He didn’t have very much chance of that, not just with Roundbush next to him but with the pub-with the whole experimental station-full of officers.

Stella came back with the tall glasses of beer. Roundbush banged his teeth together. If Goldfarb had done that, he’d have got his face slapped. For the mustachioed fighter pilot, Stella giggled.Where is justice? Goldfarb wondered, a thought that would have been more Talmudic had it been directed to something other than trying to end up in bed with a barmaid.

Basil Roundbush raised his glass on high. Goldfarb dutifully followed suit. Instead of proposing a toast to Stella’s hindquarters, as the radarman had expected, Roundbush said, “To the Meteor!” and drank.

“To the Meteor!” Goldfarb drank, too. When you got right down to it, a jet fighter was more toastworthy than a barmaid’s backside, and less likely to cause fights, too.

“On account of the Meteor, we’re going to be good chaps and pedal on back to barracks at closing time,” Roundbush said. “We’re going up tomorrow afternoon, and the powers that be take a dim view of improving one’s outlook, even with such camel piss as this allegedly best bitter, within twelve hours of a flight.”

The thin, sour beer did leave a good deal to be desired, even by wartime standards. Goldfarb was about to agree to that, with the usual profane embellishments, when he really heard what the flight officer had said. “We’regoing up?” he said. “They’ve installed a radar in a Meteor at last, then?”

“That they have,” Roundbush said. “It will give us rather better odds against the Lizards, wouldn’t you say?”

He spoke lightly. He’d flown a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain when a fighter pilot’s life expectancy was commonly measured in days. But a Spitfire had had an even chance against a Messerschmitt Bf-109. Against Lizard aircraft, you had to be lucky just to come back from a combat mission. Actually shooting the enemy down was about as likely as winning the Irish Sweepstakes.

“D’you think we’ll actually be able to accomplish something against them now?” Goldfarb asked.

“We add the radar, which is your wicket, and we add a good deal of speed, which is always an asset,” Roundbush said. “Put them together and I’d say they improve our chances all the way up to bloody poor.”

As a joke, that wouldn’t have been bad. The trouble was, Roundbush wasn’t joking. Goldfarb had tracked Lizard aircraft on ground-based radar down at Dover before the aliens openly revealed their presence. They’d gone so high and fast, he and everybody else had wondered if they were real or defects in the mechanism. He and everybody else knew the answer to that now.

Roundbush said, “You’ve flown airborne radar before, haven’t you? Yes, of course you have; that’s why Group Captain Hipple wanted you as part of the group. Don’t mind me. I’m a silly ass tonight.”

“That’s right.” Goldfarb hoped the pilot would realize he was agreeing about his experience, not the later parenthetical comment. He’d been in charge of a set flown in a Lancaster to see if the thing could be done. “Rather more room to fit the set in a bomber fuselage than in the Meteor.”

“Rather,” Roundbush said, and drained his glass.

Goldfarb finished his bitter, too, then held up a hand to buy a round in turn. That was inviolable pub custom: two men together, two rounds; four men together, four rounds; eight men together and they’d all go home half blind.

Stella took her time about noticing a mere radarman, but Goldfarb’s half-a-crown spent as well as anyone else’s. When she went off to get change, though, she didn’t put as much into her walk for him as she had for Roundbush.

The pilot said, “We’d be better off still if we had guided rockets like the Lizards’. Then we’d knock their planes out of the sky at twenty miles, as they can with us. Once we’re inside gun range, we have an almost decent chance, but getting there, as the saying goes, is half the fun.”

“Yes, I know about that,” Goldfarb said. The Lizards had fired radar-homing rockets at his Lanc. Turning off the radar made them miss, but a turned-off radar was of even less use than no radar at all, because it added weight and made the aircraft that carried it slower and less maneuverable.

“Good. One less thing to have to brief you about.” Roundbush poured down his pint, apparently in one long swallow, then waved to get Stella’s attention. “We’ll just have ourselves another one before we toddle on back to base.”

Another one turned into another two: Goldfarb insisted on buying a matching round. Part of that was pub custom. Another part was a conscious effort on his part to give the lie to Jews’ reputation for stinginess. His parents, products of a harsher world than England, had drilled into him that he should never let himself become a spectacle for the gentiles.

Pedaling back to the airbase with four pints of best bitter in him gave a whole new meaning to Roundbush’s mock-aristocratic “toddling.” He was glad he wasn’t trying to drive a car. He expected to have a thick head come morning, but nothing that would keep him from doing his work, and certainly nothing that would keep him from flying the next afternoon.

The headache with which he did wake up wasn’t what left him abstracted when he headed for the Nissen hut Hipple’s team shared with the meteorological staff. He had his mind too focused on the flight ahead to be as efficient as he might have been in trying to decipher the secrets of a captured Lizard radar, though.

Basil Roundbush had had more than four pints the night before-how many more, Goldfarb didn’t know-but seemed fresh as a daisy. He was whistling a tune the radarman hadn’t heard. Flight Lieutenant Maurice Kennan looked up from a sheaf of three-view drawings and said, “That’s as off-key as it is off-color, which is saying something.”

“Thank you, sir,” Roundbush said cheerfully, which made Kennan return to his drawings in a hurry. If Roundbush hadn’t been a flier, he would have made a masterful psychological warfare officer.

Goldfarb’s pretense of its being a normal day broke down about ten o’clock, when Leo Horton, a fellow radarman, nudged him in the ribs and whispered, “You lucky sod.” After that, he was only pretending to work.

An hour or so later, Roundbush walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. “What say we go don our shining armor and make sure our steed is ready to ride?” From another man, the Arthurian language would have sounded asinine. He was not only a spirit blithe enough to carry it off without self-consciousness, he’d fought a great many aerial jousts already. Goldfarb nodded and got up from his desk.

The flight suit of leather and fur was swelteringly hot in the bright sunshine of an English summer’s day, but Goldfarb zipped zippers and fastened catches without complaint. Three or four miles straight up and it wouldn’t be summery any more. For that matter, the Meteor surely had a higher ceiling than the trudging Lanc in which he’d flown before.

In the Lancaster, he’d tended the radar in the cavernous space of the bomb bay. In the new two-seater version of the Meteor, he sat behind the pilot in a stretched cockpit. The radar set itself was mounted behind and below him in the fuselage; only the controls and the screens were where he could get at them. If something went wrong with the unit, he’d have to wait till he was back on the ground to fiddle with it.

Groundcrew men pulled the plane out of its sandbagged, camouflaged revetment and onto the runway. Goldfarb had heard jet engines a great number of times, but being in an aircraft whose engines were being started was a new experience, and one he could have done without: it reminded him of nothing so much as taking up residence inside a dentist’s drill. “Bit noisy, what?” Roundbush bawled through the interphone.

The moment the Meteor began to taxi, Goldfarb realized he’d traded a brewery horse for a thoroughbred. The engine noise grew even more appalling, but the fighter sprang into the air and climbed as if it were shot from a boy’s catapult.

So Goldfarb thought, at any rate, till Basil Roundbush said, “This Mark is on the underpowered side, but they’re working on new engines that should really pep up the performance.”

“Overwhelming enough for me already, thanks,” the radarman said. ‘What’s our ceiling in this aircraft?”

“Just over forty thousand feet,” Roundbush replied. “We’ll be there in less than half an hour, and we’ll be able to see quite a long ways, I expect.”

“I expect you’re right,” Goldfarb said, breathing rubbery air through his oxygen mask. The Lancaster in which he’d flown before had taken almost twice as long to climb a little more than half as high, and Roundbush was complaining about this machine’s anemia! In a way, that struck Goldfarb as absurd. In another way, given what the pilot would have to face, it seemed only reasonable.

The Meteor banked gently. Through puffs of fluffy white cloud, Goldfarb peered out through the Perspex of the cockpit at the green patchwork quilt of the English countryside. “Good show this isn’t a few months ago,” Roundbush remarked casually. “Time was when the ack-ack crews would start shooting at the mere sound of a jet engine, thinking it had to belong to the Lizards. Some of our Pioneers and Meteors took shrapnel damage on that account, though none of them was shot down.”

“Urk,” Goldfarb said; perhaps luckily, that hadn’t occurred to him. Down in Dover, the antiaircraft crew had opened up at the roar of jets without a second thought.

“How’s the radar performing?” Roundbush asked, reminding him of why they were flying the mission.

He checked the cathode-ray tubes. Strange to think he could see farther and in greater detail with them than with his eyes, especially when, from this airy eyrie, he seemed to be the king of infinite space, with the whole world set out below for his inspection. “Everything seems to be performing as it should,” he said cautiously. “I have a couple of blips that, by their height and speed, are our own aircraft. Could you fly a southerly course, to let me search for Lizard machines?”

“Changing course to one-eight-zero,” Roundbush said, obliging as a Victorian carriage driver acknowledging his toff of a master’s request to convey him to Boodle’s. Like a proper fighter pilot, he peered ahead and in all directions as the Meteor swung through its turn. “I don’t see anything.”

Goldfarb didn’t see anything, either; his screens remained serenely blank. In a way, that was disappointing. In another way, it was a relief: if he could see the Lizards, they assuredly could also see him-and Roundbush had made no bones about their planes’ remaining far superior to the Meteor.

Then, off in the electronic distance, he thought he detected something-and then, an instant later, the radar screens went crazy with noise, as if the aurora borealis had decided to dance on them. “I’m getting interference,” Goldfarb said urgently. “I spied what seemed to be a Lizard plane, right at the edge of where the set could reach, and then everything turned to hash-which means he likely detected me, too.”

“Which also means we’re apt to have a rocket or two pay us a visit in the not too distant future,” Roundbush said. “I don’t propose to wait around for them, all things considered.”

He threw the Meteor into a dive that left Goldfarb’s stomach some miles behind and thousands of feet above the aircraft. He gulped and did his best to keep his breakfast down; vomiting while you were wearing oxygen gear was not a good idea. Roundbush didn’t make it easy, twisting the plane from side to side in evasive maneuvers violent enough to make the wings groan in protest. Goldfarb suspected he was stretching the Meteor’s performance envelope, and hoped it had enough stretch in it.

The radarman had shut down his set to keep any rockets from homing on its signal. Now he was just a passenger, useless weight, as Roundbush shed altitude. The ground rushed up as if thrown at him. Not knowing whether the Lizards had fired and missed or contented themselves with simply scrambling his signal made the descent all the more harrowing.

The first thing he said when the nose wheel touched down at Bruntingthorpe was, “Thank you.” The next thing was, “We have a bit more work ahead of us, haven’t we?”

Teerts was getting quite handy with the eating sticks the Nipponese used. He shoveled rice with bits of raw fish into his mouth, hardly spilling a grain or a morsel. The Big Uglies were feeding him better than they had when they first took him prisoner. He shuddered. They could hardly feed him worse.

Hishashi discovered a thin, reddish piece of pickled ginger. He picked it up, turned both eye turrets toward it. Not so long ago, he’d been a killercraft pilot, a proud male of the conquest fleet of the Race. Now, thanks to bad luck, he was a prisoner in an empire of Big Uglies convinced that no worthy warrior ever let himself be taken prisoner. To help squeeze all they could out of him, they’d addicted him to this perfidious Tosevite herb.

With a convulsive jerk of his hand, he popped the piece of ginger into his mouth. He went rooting through the bowl with the eating sticks, looking for others. He found them and gobbled them up. The Nipponese cook had been unusually generous. He wondered what that meant; the Nipponese were not given to generosity unless they expected to realize something from it.

Then, as the ginger took effect, he stopped worrying about why the Nipponese had given it to him. That they had was enough. He felt smart enough to outwit every Big Ugly interrogator and nuclear physicist, strong enough to bend the bars of his Tokyo prison cell and escape the life of torment that he led.

Those were only feelings. He knew it all too well. The interrogators and physicists had drained him dry; everything he’d known about splitting atoms, they now knew. They’d known much of it already. The Russkis had already built a bomb. How the Nipponese gloated over that! How they strained every fiber to get one of their own!

Could Teerts have torn out the bars of his cell, he would have. Thinking he could wasn’t enough to make it real. He’d tried, the first few times ginger had made him feel like a machine. In somber fact, he was just a male of the Race, and steel bars defeated him.

Usually when they fed him so much ginger, an interrogation was in the offing. The Nipponese liked to question him when the herb made his tongue loose and lively. He waited for Major Okamoto, his interpreter, interrogator, and occasional tormentor, to come down the hall. But Okamoto did not come.

From the top of the lift ginger gave him, Teerts slid into the trough of despair that followed. Just as he started to curl up in the farthest corner of his cell with the blanket drawn up over him both for warmth and to cut himself off from the unpleasant outside world, heavy Tosevite footsteps came echoing down the corridor.

The jailer unlocked his cell. “Come along,” Major Okamoto said in Teerts’ language. By now, Teerts paid little attention to his accent.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said, but Okamoto had to shout at him before he would get up. The silent guard who always accompanied the major gestured with his bayoneted rifle for Teerts to precede him.

Before they left the prison, Okamoto decked Teerts in a conical straw hat like the ones some Nipponese wore, and also gave him trousers and tunic. He looked ridiculous, but that was not the point: the point was to keep him from being spotted from the air or by the Race’s reconnaissance satellites.

The beast-drawn wagon that waited outside did not head off toward the nuclear physics laboratory, as it usually did. Instead, it took an unfamiliar path through the narrow, crowded streets of Tokyo. Teerts asked, “Where are we going, superior sir?”

“To the train station, and then on to Kobe,” Okamoto answered. “Dr. Nishina does not think you can tell him any more of use in his plutonium bomb project, so the naval aviators will resume their questioning of you.”

“I see,” Teerts said dully. Now something more than the absence of ginger weighed down his spirits. The scientists, on the whole, had been restrained when he didn’t know something. The military males-He shuddered.

The train station was packed with Nipponese, some in gowns, some in shirts and trousers, many in the uniforms of army and navy. Using a separate service for the water struck Teerts as absurd, but Tosev 3 had oceans where Home had small seas, so perhaps there was some justification for the idea.

Most of the train was even more crowded than the station as a whole, but Teerts, Major Okamoto, and the stolid guard had a car all to themselves, with tea and food already laid on. Okamoto did not object to Teerts’ feeding himself. His rice had ginger in it, which buoyed his spirits.

A jerk said the train was in motion. Puffs of smoky steam flew from the engine. Teerts reckoned the coal-burner an unbelievably filthy machine, but on such matters the Big Uglies did not solicit his opinion.

Above the racket of the engine, above the clicking of the cars it pulled over the rails, came another sound, one Teerts knew intimately: the high, screaming wail of a turbofan engine. Major Okamoto looked up in alarm. “Air raid!” he shouted, just as bombs and cannon fire began chewing up the train.

Shells punched through the roof of the car as if it were made of tissue. A bomb exploded right next to it. Teerts felt as if he were caught in the egg from which all earthquakes hatched. Glass sprayed around him. The car derailed and overturned.

When the crashing and the spinning stopped, he found himself sitting on what had been the roof. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed, and then, even more surprised, “I’m not hurt.” Major Okamoto and the silent, stolid guard lay on the roof, too, both of them bleeding and unconscious.

Teerts snatched up the guard’s rifle and scrambled out through a shattered window. Ahead, the engine was a shattered wreck. Behind, some of the other passenger cars were in flames. The Big Uglies who had managed to escape from them were more interested in rescuing their trapped and endangered comrades than in a male of the Race, especially since he still wore Tosevite-style clothes and from a distance might have looked like one of them.

He knew the rifle would fire once if he squeezed the trigger. He wasn’t sure how to work the bolt. But one shot was more than he’d had since he fell into Nipponese captivity. If all else failed, he could use it on himself. He put more distance between himself and the train wreck as fast as he could. He didn’t know what he’d do for food or ginger, but he didn’t much care. As soon as he found a place that was out of sight of the railway cars, he took off the hideous clothes the Big Uglies had given him and stretched his arms up to the planes and satellites he devoutly hoped were watching.

“Come and get me!” he cried. “Oh, please, come and get me!”