Upsetting the Balance

4

Sam Yeager had been staring out the window of the bright yellow DC-3 ever since it took off from Lowry Field outside Denver. He’d never been in an airplane before, and found looking down at the ground from two miles in the air endlessly fascinating.

Ullhass and Ristin kept looking out the window, too, but anxiously. Every time turbulence shook the aircraft, they hissed in alarm. “You are certain this machine is safe to fly?” Ullhass demanded for the dozenth time.

“Hasn’t crashed yet,” Yeager answered, which for some reason did not fully reassure the Lizard POWs. He added, “The pilot wouldn’t take it up if he didn’t think he could bring it down again. Biggest thing we have to worry about is having one of your friends shoot us out of the sky, and everything’s supposed to be taken care of to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Ullhass jerked a clawed thumb at Barbara Yeager, who had the single seat in front of Sam’s on the right side of the aisle. She’d closed the curtain over her window and was snoring gently. “How can she sleep in this trap of death?” the Lizard said indignantly.

“Well, for one thing, being in a family way tires you out so you want to sleep all the time,” Yeager said, “and for another, she doesn’t think this is one-a death trap, I mean. Relax, boys. We’ll be down on the ground pretty soon now.”

He looked out the window again. The endless flat expanse of the Great Plains had given way to rather rougher ground, much of it covered with pine woods. The airliner’s two engines changed their note as it descended, and it bounced a little when the flaps came down.

“What’s that?” Ristin and Ullhass exclaimed together.

Sam didn’t answer; the flaps had caught him by surprise, too. Off to the north, the Arkansas River was a silvery ribbon of water. Here and there, buildings poked out of the forest. More rumblings and thumpings came from under the DC-3. The Lizards started having conniptions again.

The noise and the bumping were enough to wake Barbara. “Oh, the landing gear is down,” she said, stretching, which told Ullhass and Ristin and, incidentally, her husband what was going on.

After one bounce, landing was as smooth as takeoff had been. As soon as the plane rolled to a stop in front of a building made of corrugated sheet metal, a fellow in khaki brought a wheeled ladder up to the door behind the left wing. “Everybody out!” he shouted. He had a rifle on his back, just in case Ullhass and Ristin proved friskier than they looked. The only friskiness they showed was grumbling over how far apart the rungs were on a human-built ladder.

The hot, muggy air hit Sam like a blow when he got down onto the tarmac. He hadn’t played in the Southeast for a good many years; he’d forgotten how sticky and unpleasant it could be.

He stood at the base of the ladder to help Barbara down in case she needed it. She didn’t, but her eyes widened just the same. “Thank goodness the baby’s not due till winter. If I were going to have it in August in this weather, I think I’d sooner die.”

“Come on, let’s get you folks under cover, too,” the guard said, pointing to the door in the airport building through which the Lizards had already gone. As they moved away from the ladder, a couple of colored men in overalls climbed up into the DC-3 to get out their luggage.

It was even hotter inside the building than it had been on the runway. Yeager felt as if he were stuck inside an upside-down frying pan. Ullhass and Ristin strutted around, obviously enjoying the heat. “If it didn’t seem like too much work, I’d strangle them,” Sam said. Barbara nodded. Even the tiny motion made sweat leap out on her forehead.

A two-horse team pulling a covered wagon a lot like the one in which they’d traveled from Chicago to Denver left from the other side of the building. A moment later, so did another one, and a moment after that another one still. “What are those all about?” Barbara asked, pointing.

“Come on-you people and the POWs go in the next one,” the guard answered. “We send ’em out in all different directions to keep the Lizards from swooping down and tryin’ a rescue while we move the prisoners to their camp.”

“Where is this camp, anyway?” Yeager asked.

“Hot Springs, maybe sixty miles west and a little south of here,” the fellow answered.

“Haven’t ever been there,” Yeager said.

A gleam of mischief in her eye, Barbara said. “What with your baseball and all, I thought you’d been everywhere, Sam.”

Yeager shook his head. “I played in El Dorado in the Cotton States League back maybe ten years ago, the year after I broke my ankle. The league went under partway through the season. Hot Springs wasn’t in it then, though I hear it joined up after the league started up again a few years later.”

The Negroes had already stowed their suitcases in the back of the wagon and had made themselves invisible again. Yeager had forgotten what things were like in the South, how many colored people there were and how they mostly got the short end of the stick. He wondered if they wouldn’t have been just as well pleased to see the Lizards win the war. The Lizards would treat everybody, white and black, like niggers.

After flying more than nine hundred miles from Denver to Little Rock in a little over five hours, Sam and Barbara and the Lizards took two days to go the sixty miles from Little Rock to Hot Springs. All the same, Yeager didn’t complain. Till they got there, he was essentially on leave. It was pretty country, too: pine woods more than halfway to Hot Springs, after which black gum and sweet gum began to predominate in the bottomlands by the creeks. Everything smelled green and alive and growing.

Arkansas didn’t seem to have seen a lot of war. When he asked the wagon driver about that, the fellow said, “The Lizards bombed the aluminum plants over there by Bauxite pretty good when they first got here, but those are going again now. Otherwise it ain’t been too bad.”

“Just looking at the highway tells me that,” Barbara said, and Sam nodded. They’d passed only a few wrecked, rusted cars dragged off to the side of US 70. Most of them had their hoods gaping open, as if visiting an automotive dentist-whatever was useful in their engine compartments had been salvaged.

By the time the wagon got into Hot Springs, Sam envied Ristin and Ullhass their scaly hides. Mosquitoes had made him and Barbara miserable, but didn’t seem to bother the Lizards. “Maybe we do not taste good to them,” Ristin said.

“I wish I didn’t,” Yeager answered darkly.

Hot Springs was a medium-sized town, tucked in among the deep green slopes of the Ouachita Mountains. US 70 entered it from the northeast, and swung south past what the driver called Bathhouse Row, where in happier times people had come from all over the world to bathe in the springs that gave the town its name and its fame. The wagon rolled past the greensward of Arlington Park, the limestone-and-brick Fordyce Bathhouse, the plastered Quapaw Bathhouse with its red tile roof and mosaic dome, and the Hot Springs National Park administrative building before turning left on Reserve and stopping at the magnificent five-story towers of the Army and Navy General Hospital.

The wagon pulled past the one-story white stone front and up under an awning that led into one of the towers. “We’re here, folks,” he announced. He looked back over his shoulder at the Lizard POWs. “You’ll want to stay under the awning when you go inside.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ristin answered, though whether he actually wanted to obey remained an open question. But Lizard aerial intelligence was uncannily good, so if you were smart you revealed as little as you could to the sky. Yeager wondered where the decoy wagons were unloading their feigned prisoners.

He left his bags in the wagon, helped Barbara down, and hurried after his charges into the hospital building. Barbara followed him. Inside there, Ullhass and Ristin were talking in a mixture of English and their own language with a bright-looking man some years younger than Sam who wore captain’s bars. Sam waited for the officer to notice him, then saluted and said, “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting from Denver as ordered, sir, with my wife Barbara and the Lizard prisoners Ristin and Ullhass.”

The captain returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you, Sergeant, Mrs. Yeager.” He had a New York accent. “I’m Benjamin Berkowitz.” He glanced down at some papers stuck in a clipboard. “General Groves speaks highly of your abilities with the Lizards, Yeager. From what I’ve heard, any praise from him is high praise. How did you get so good with them? Were you a translator or something like that before the war?”

“No, sir, I was a baseball player.” Sam’s face heated as he admitted, “All I knew about creatures from outer space before the war, sir, I got from reading science fiction.”

Berkowitz grinned. It made him look like a kid. “You know what, Sergeant? I’m just the same way. You know what else? That starts us out two jumps ahead of everybody else, because our minds are flexible.” He looked down at the papers in the clipboard again. “We’ve got you and your wife and the POWs assigned to rooms 427 and 429 upstairs. Why don’t you get settled in tonight-supper’s at 1800, about half an hour from now-and report with the Lizards at 0800 tomorrow.”

“That sounds fine, sir,” Sam said. “Uh-our bags are still in the wagon, sir.”

“Somebody will carry them up for you,” Berkowitz said. “Your job is to ride herd on your friends here.”

A room in a hospital wasn’t going to be as nice as an apartment across the street from the University of Denver, but Yeager was in no position to argue. He hoped Barbara wouldn’t mind the change too much. She wasn’t in the Army, but it still jerked her around.

When he and his companions trudged up to the fourth floor, the rooms proved bigger than he’d expected. The window to 429 had iron bars fitted-on the inside, so they wouldn’t show from the air-which meant that one was intended for the Lizards.

A Negro in khaki brought up the luggage. Sam pulled a half-dollar out of his pocket. The black man shook his head. “Sergeant, I’m in the Army, jus’ like you. This here’s my job.”

“I don’t care if you’re a congressman, buddy. You do that kind of work in this kind of weather, you ought to get something special for it.” Yeager tossed the man the half-dollar. He picked it out of the air with an infielder’s smoothness, sketched a salute, and went down the hall whistling something Dixieland.

Drawn by the noise in the hallway, a Lizard came out of room 431 to see what was going on. He had the fanciest body paint Sam had ever seen. Ristin and Ullhass hadn’t kept themselves painted for months, which made the contrast all the more striking: this male’s body gleamed with spirals and swirls of silver and gold and red.

Ullhass and Ristin turned and stared, their eye turrets swiveling toward the fancily painted Lizard as if drawn to him by magnets. Then they started spluttering honorifics Yeager had never heard before: “Supreme sir!” “Splendid Shiplord!” “How did you come here, splendid sir?”

Barbara didn’t follow the Lizards’ language as well as Sam, but tone and gesture spoke volumes by themselves. “That’s animportant Lizard,” she said quietly.

“No kidding,” Yeager murmured back. His two scaly buddies were reacting to the fellow with the bright paint job the way a couple of bobby-soxers would have reacted to Frank Sinatra. He walked over to the Lizard, gave forth with his best interrogative cough, and said, “May I ask your name and rank?” He didn’t use any of the formal titles of respect Ullhass and Ristin had employed; the Lizard was, after all, a prisoner.

The male turned from his two fellow aliens to Yeager. “You speak our language as well as any Tosevite I have heard,” he said, and added the emphatic cough. Sam grinned a wide, foolish grin, as if he’d just knocked in the game-winning run in the bottom of the ninth. The Lizard went on, “I am Straha, shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower. Former shiplord, I should say-no more, thanks to the exalted incompetence of Atvar the fleetlord.”

Yeager stared. How the devil had the Americans bagged a shiplord? From what he knew, a lot of them stayed up in outer space where nothing human could touch them, let alone capture them. Ristin said, “This is our third-highest male, superior sir, in all the fleet. Above him are only the shiplord of the bannership and the exalted fleetlord himself.”

Most of that was in English, so Barbara caught it, too. It was her turn to gape. “What’s he doing here?” she asked, a split second ahead of her husband.

“Whatare you doing here, Shiplord?” Sam asked in the Lizard’s language. He granted Straha his title, but not the flowery language that went with it.

The Lizard didn’t take offense. He said, “When the Russkis set off their plutonium bomb-you know about this?” He waited for Yeager to say he did, then went on, “And when other parts of our campaign were botched and mishandled, I alone had the courage to stand up and propose that we replace the inept exalted fleetlord. My motion had large majority, but not the three parts in four our law requires. It was defeated.”

“Oh, lord,” Yeager said softly. The scene sounded like something out of South America or the Balkans. Somehow he hadn’t imagined the Lizards with political squabbles of their own. It made them seem much more-human. He switched back to their language: “What happened then?”

“I knew the exalted incompetent would have his revenge,” Straha said. “Nowhere in the conquest fleet would I be safe from his injustice. And so, with my pilot, I brought my shuttle down and gave myself into the hands of you Tosevites here.”

“God, it’s almost like Rudolf Hess flying to England,” Barbara said when Sam translated that.

“Yeah, it sure is,” he said, and, sticking to English, went on, “I wonder if we have the spaceship he flew down in. If we do, I wonder if we can make one like it. If we can do that-”

“If you can, you will be a greater danger to the Race,” Ristin said in the same language. Sam wondered why he didn’t translate that for Straha. Maybe he wasn’t happy with him for giving the U.S.A. that kind of chance.

Letting that go, Yeager gave his attention back to Straha. “Shiplord, now that you are here with us, what will you do?”

“I have already begun,” the alien answered. “I have made one radio broadcast telling the males of the Race that this war will be lost because of the stupidity of the males who lead them-either that, or this planet will be wrecked in the fighting. I tell them the best thing for them to do would be to give up to the males of the empires in whose lands they are situated.”

“Do you?” Yeager said with something like delight. Lizard POWs had broadcast to their comrades before, but they were the alien equivalent of dogfaces: nobody to take seriously on account of who they were. But Straha was a big wheel. If he was turning collaborator-the world might become a very interesting place.

The recording of the broadcast was scratchy, full of hisses and pops and bursts of static. Tosevite radio equipment left a great deal to be desired, and the Big Uglies’ broadcasts were vulnerable to interference from their star and from atmospheric electrical phenomena. Nonetheless, the message being sent was perfectly comprehensible, and made Atvar perfectly furious.

Straha was saying, “-because our campaign has been misadmimstered at the highest level, we have no hope of the victory for which the Emperor sent us forth. We have been betrayed by the arrogance and overconfidence of the exalted fleetlord, who consistently refuses to listen to advice from those who know better than he. And if we cannot win this war, what must we do?”

“Getting rid of traitors would be a good first step,” Kirel said savagely.

“Who could have imagined this?” Atvar agreed. “To be captured in battle is one thing, and no disgrace. To flee to the enemy, especially when the enemy is not of the Race… such has never been done in all our history, not since the Empire first covered all of Home.” In his mind, breaking a precedent a hundred thousand years old was a crime as appalling as betraying the Race.

Straha’s ranting had gone on while Atvar and Kirel vented their fury. The fleetlord ran the recording back and let it play once more: “We must make the best terms with the Tosevites we can. I am treated well here by the Americans, though I was a shiplord in the force that vainly tried to overcome them. Males of lower rank enjoy treatment equally good here, as is true in many of the other empires on this world. Take yourselves out of danger you should never have been in.”

Atvar stabbed out a clawed forefinger and turned off the recording. “How many of our males will hear this poisonous nonsense?” he demanded.

Kirel looked unhappy. “Some of these broadcasts are on our entertainment frequencies: no doubt the Big Uglies learned those from prisoners. Others-translations-use the frequencies the Tosevites more commonly employ, and are no doubt intended to boost their morale. Exalted Fleetlord, my opinion is that both uses are extremely damaging to us.”

“I should say so!” Atvar snarled. “The Race is hierarchical by nature and training. Foolish males who hear the third-highest officer in the conquest fleet tell them all is lost are all too likely to believe him. What can we do to suppress his treacherous twaddle?”

Kirel looked unhappier still. “Exalted Fleetlord, of course we attack transmitters, but that does only so much good. The Americans quickly rebuild and relocate them. And Straha, I am certain, is not present at the transmission sites. Our engineers say these broadcasts are made from recordings.”

“Where is he, then?” Atvar demanded. “His shuttle landed not far from one of the sites to which the Big Uglies fly prisoners. Surely they must have a facility somewhere in this area.”

“No doubt they do, but they have gone to great pains to keep us confused as to where it might be,” Kirel said. “So far, they have succeeded, too. Besides, they may well have shifted Straha away from that region to prevent us from reacquiring him through a raid on the prisoner holding facility. In short, we do not know where he is and have no immediate hope of learning.”

“Most unsatisfactory,” Atvar said. “We can jam the frequencies where Straha’s babbling is directed at other Big Uglies, but if we jam those on which he seeks to speak to our males, we jam our own entertainment channels, which is also unsatisfactory. Straha-” He let out a long hiss. “I was angry at him for trying to overthrow me, but even then I never expectedthis. ”

“Nor I, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “He must have greatly feared the might of your vengeance.”

Atvar wondered if that was polite, oblique criticism. Should he have tried to come to terms with Straha after the shiplord failed to oust him? How could he, without relinquishing some of the power the Emperor had granted him? In any case, no point worrying about that now: far too late.

“Did we at least succeed in destroying the shuttle Straha used to escape?’ he asked.

“I-believe so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered cautiously. “The Big Uglies show an amazing capacity for deception, though, so I cannot be quite certain.”

“We’d better have destroyed it,” Atvar said. “The Deutsche are already throwing their own missiles at us, but those are just short-range weapons with bad guidance, small payloads, and no chance of achieving orbital velocity, much less velocity to escape this planet. If the Big Uglies get proper rocket motors, though, and a couple of them with atomic weapons-”

He and Kirel stared at each other in horror. Kirel said, “If that happens, Exalted Fleetlord, the entire conquest fleet is at risk. We may have to think about wrecking this world for the sake of our own survival.”

“This fleet’s survival, yes, but the colonization fleet will be thrown away if it arrives to discover a world unsuitable for colonization.”

“It will also be thrown away if it arrives to discover a world that is the base for space-traveling Big Uglies with atomic weapons,” Kirel replied.

Atvar would have given him a hot answer, if only he could have come up with one. At last, he said, “Let us hope we did destroy the shuttle. That will buy us the time we need to complete the conquest before the Tosevites become spacefarers.” But when you bought time against the Big Uglies, somehow you always ended up buying less than you thought you were paying for.

Marching. Nieh Ho-T’ing sometimes thought he’d been born marching. He would have bet a goodly sum that he would die marching. If his death advanced the cause of the proletarian revolution, he would have accepted it without a qualm, although he had no more interest in immediately dying than any other healthy man of thirty-five.

He’d been on the Long March with Mao, commanding a ragged division of the Communist Army as it fled Chiang Kai-Shek’s counter-revolutionary forces. That had been a march worthy of the name. Now he personally commanded only a squadron of men on the road northwest from Shanghai to Peking. It looked like a demotion. It wasn’t. Responsibility for guerrilla resistance to the scaly devils-and, when necessary, to other foes of the revolution as well-through that whole stretch of territory rested in his hands.

He turned to his second-in-command, Hsia Shou-Tao, and said, “This is surely the most complicated piece of warfare the world has ever known.”

Hsia grunted. He was a big, burly man with a wide, tough-looking face, the archetype of a stupid, brutal peasant. He had a deep, rasping voice, too, and had used it and his appearance to escape trouble any number of times. He was, however, anything but stupid. Laughing a little, he said, “Why on earth would you say that? Just because we, the little scaly devil imperialists, the Kuomintang and Chiang’s counter-revoluntionary clique, and the remnants of the eastern devil imperialists from Japan areall struggling over the same territory?”

“No, not just because of that.” Nieh paused a moment to fan himself with his straw hat. Peasant dress-the hat, loose-fitting black cotton shirt and trousers, sandals-was as good as anything at withstanding the muggy heat of Chinese summer. “If we faced merely a four-cornered struggle, everything would be simple.”

“For you, maybe,” Hsia Shou-Tao said. Sometimes he played the role of foolish boor so well that he even seemed to convince himself with it

“I mean what I say,” Nieh Ho-T’ing insisted. “This is not a war with corners, this is a war in a spider’s web, with threads running from each force to all the others, and sometimes sticking when they cross. Consider sometimes the men of the Kuomintang cooperate with us against the scaly devils, sometimes they betray us to them. Knowing when they will do the one and when the other is a matter of life and death, of success or failure for the progressive forces.”

“We’ve sold them out a few times, too,” Hsia said with a reminiscent chuckle.

“Exactly so, and they are as wary of us as we are of them. But sometimes we do work with them, as we do sometimes with the Japanese, and sometimes with even stranger allies,” Nieh said.

“That foreign devil, the American, you mean?” Hsia asked. “Yes, he was useful. I’ve never seen a man who could throw like-what was his name?”

“Bobby Fiore,” Nieh answered, pronouncing the foreign sounds with care. “Yes, without him we probably would not have escaped after we assassinated that scaly devil back in Shanghai. Pity he was killed; he could have taught our men his skill.”

“He was a reactionary, of course,” Hsia said.

“Of course,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “Also a lecher.” Bobby Fiore had made full use of the services of the Shanghai brothel in which Nieh bad based himself while preparing the assault on the scaly devil official. Like a lot of his Communist comrades, Nieh looked on such looseness with disdain. But he was a pragmatic man. “As you say, though, he was useful, not only for his throwing but also because he understood the little devils’ language.”

“We would have had to liquidate him sooner or later,” Hsia said. “He was ideologically most unsound.”

“Of course,” Nieh said again. “I think he may even have known that. But he had a true hatred for the little scaly devils, even if it was just personal and not ideological.”

“Personal hatred for the little devils is too easy to come by to be much of a virtue,” Hsia Shou-Tao said. There Nieh could not disagree with him.

Pick up a foot, put it down, pick it up, put it down… If you let your feet work and didn’t think about it, you covered more ground than you dreamt you could. The Long March had drilled that into Nieh. He looked back over his shoulder. The men he led were strung out along ali — a third of a mile-of the dirt road. That was all right. The less they looked like part of an armed force, the less likely the little devils were to give them trouble.

Peasants labored in the fields and paddies to either side of the road. They looked up warily from their labor as Nieh and his followers went by. They were wiser than the scaly devils; they knew soldiers when they saw them. A couple of men waved to Nieh: they knew what kind of soldiers he led, too. That pleased him. If at need his men could become but a single minnow in the vast school of the peasantry, they would be impossible for any enemy to root out.

One of the peasants called, “Are you people going by the camp the little devils built up ahead? You want to be careful if you are; they don’t like anyone snooping around there.”

“Thank you for the warning, friend. We’ll steer clear,” Nieh Ho T’ing said. He waved to the peasant, who nodded and went back to work. Nieh and Hsia nodded, too, to each other. As long as the people supported your efforts, you could not be beaten.

As a matter of fact, Nieh wanted as close a look at the prison camp as he could get without making himself appear an obvious spy to the scaly devils. The camps they’d set up to oppress the people had become fertile sources of intelligence against them. From this one, for instance, had come word that the scaly devils had cameras that could somehow see heat. The news had tactical implications: no campfires at night when in close contact with the enemy-except as diversions-travel through cool water whenever possible, and more.

The camp, set in the middle of the fields that might otherwise have raised a good crop of beans, was as big as a fair-sized city. The stink of its night soil came sharp on the breeze. “A lot of shit there that’s not going into the fields for fertilizer as it should,” Hsia Shou-Tao said. He thought like a peasant, too.

“True,” Nieh said, his voice abstracted. As casually as he could, he peered across the fields toward the perimeter of the camp: razor wire, with sentry posts and little forts all around. Liberating it would be suicidally expensive, however grand to contemplate.

Down the road, swiftly drawing nearer, came a rising cloud of dust. Its speed meant motor vehicles were kicking it up, and motor vehicles, in these days, meant little scaly devils. Nieh did not break his stride. His submachine gun was hidden in the blanket roll he carried slung over one shoulder. He could get at it in a hurry if he had to, but hoped the occasion would not arise. Motor vehicles were usually armored against weapons like his.

Hsia walked along as nonchalantly as he did. They stepped off the road into the field beside it when the vehicle-a troop carrier-sped past. Had they not moved, Nieh thought, the driver would have run them down: what were peasants to an imperialist aggressor, especially one of alien race?

“What we ought to have,” Hsia said thoughtfully, “is more land mines. The little devils would lose some of their arrogance if they had to worry about blowing up as they barreled down the road.”

“We have people manufacturing some of them,” Nieh answered. “If we want to get them fast and in quantity, though, we’d do best to dicker with the Japanese. They don’t have many vehicles of their own left in this part of China, so they shouldn’t mind trading us some mines. I wonder what we’d have to give in exchange. Food, probably. They’re always hungry.”

“As if we aren’t.” But Hsia nodded. After a few seconds, he nodded again, for a different reason: “You’re right, Comrade-thisis a complicated war.”

Heinrich Jager felt like a soccer ball, with the continent of Europe his pitch. Since the war started in 1939, he’d been to just about every corner of it: Poland, France, the Soviet Union, France again, back to Germany, Croatia, France one more time… and now Germany again.

He turned to Kurt Diebner, who stood beside him on the walls of Schloss Hohentubingen. “Professor, I tell you again that I am not needed for this recovery operation. I would be of far more use to theVaterland leading panzer troops against the Lizards.”

Diebner shook his head. “It has to be you, Colonel,” the physicist said, running a hand through his greasy, dark brown hair. “We need someone with a military background to supervise those engaged in recovering the material from the failed pile down in Hechingen, and you also have the required security clearances. We prefer you to anyone from theSchutzstaffel, and the SS itself has no objection to your employment. So you see-” He beamed at Jager through thick, black-rimmed spectacles and spread his hands, as if he’d just proved some abstruse piece of math relating to quantum mechanics.

The explanation made sense to Jager, which did not mean he liked it. He wondered how he’d got a good character from the SS: Otto Skorzeny’s doing, most likely. Skorzeny no doubt thought he was doing him a favor. Jager supposed itwas a favor, but having Himmler’s approval, however useful it might be, was also slightly chilling.

Jager also noted the bloodless language Diebner used: the “failed pile” twenty kilometers south in Hechingen had poisoned a good stretch of the local landscape, and would have poisoned Tubingen, too, had the wind been blowing out of the south rather than from the north and west after the accident. Soldiers talked the same way; they spoke of “maintaining fire discipline” when they meant not shooting until the enemy was right on top of you.

A Geiger counter sat on the wall between Jager and Diebner. It rattled away, a good deal more quickly than it would have had everything gone right in Hechingen. Diebner insisted the level of radiation they were getting wasn’t dangerous. Jager hoped he knew what he was talking about. Of course, nobody had thought the pile would go berserk before it did, either.

Diebner glanced down at the Geiger counter. “It’s good enough,” he said. Maybe he needed to reassure himself every so often, too.

“Good enough for us, yes,” Jager said. “What about the poor devils who’re getting that stuff out of there?” Getting pulled away from the front line was one reason he hated the assignment here. Having to deal with the men who went into Hechingen to recover uranium from the pile was another.

Kurt Diebner shrugged. “They are condemned by the state,” he said, as if he were Pilate washing his hands. “If this did not happen to them, something else would.”

Nothing like this,Jager started to say, but the words did not cross his lips. Some of the men who went into the underground chamber with shovels and lead boxes wore pink triangles on their striped uniforms; others wore six-pointed yellow stars. In theReich, anything was liable to happen to Jews and homosexuals.

“You have of course told them the sickness from which they are suffering is only temporary, and that they will make a full recovery,” Diebner said.

“Yes, I’ve told them?the first group, and then the ones who replaced them when they got too sick to work.” No one had argued with Jager when he spoke what he knew to be a lie. The thin, weary men just stared back at him. They didn’t believe a word he said. He didn’t blame them.

Diebner shifted uncomfortably. Like Jager, he was a fairly decent man in a nation whose regime did horrible things as a matter of course. If you weren’t directly involved in them, you could pretend they weren’t there. Even if you were directly involved, pretending not to see was one way of preserving in your own mind your sense of personal decency. Very fewWehrmacht officers admitted to knowing what the SS had done to Jews in Poland and Russia; Jager hadn’t admitted it to himself until a Russian Jew rubbed his nose in it.

Diebner said, “If we do not recover the nuclear material, Colonel Jager, we are all the more likely to lose the war against the Lizards, at which point all ethical arguments become irrelevant. Whatever we must do to get it back, we have to have it.”

Jager turned his back and walked several paces along the parapet. Arguments from military necessity were hard to refute, and losing the war against the Lizards would be disastrous not just for Germany but for mankind as a whole. And yet-Jager took the physicist by the arm. “When you say these things, Professor, you should know firsthand whereof you speak. Come along with me.”

Diebner was not a small man, nor a weak one. He hung back, protesting, “This is not my concern; it is why we had you brought here. My business is with the nuclear pile itself.”

Though a couple of centimeters shorter than the nuclear physicist, Jager was wider through the shoulders and better trained at wrestling. Not only that, his will burned hotter. He frog-marched the reluctant Diebner off the wall and down into the bowels of Schloss Hohentubingen.

The castle’s cellar was a different world from the light and fresh air of the wall. It was dank and gloomy; somewhere out of sight, water dripped continuously. A startled bat dropped from the roof and flew chittering between Jager and Diebner. The physicist jumped back with a startled oath. Jager wasn’t dragging him along any more, but he followed nonetheless; officers learned ways to get themselves obeyed.

In happier times, the cellar had contained a monster wine cask that held 300,000 liters of Burgundy. The cask was gone now, probably chopped into firewood. In its place were the miserable cots of the prisoners who got the uranium out of the pile at Hechingen.

“Faugh!” Diebner said, a noise of disgust.

Jager wrinkled his nose, too; the cellar stank, not least because the only sanitary arrangements were some buckets off in a corner. Not everything went into the buckets, either. Jager said, “One of the symptoms many of these people seem to have is diarrhea.”

“Yes, I knew of this in principle,” Diebner said in a small voice that suggested he was much more used to dealing with abstract principles than this reeking reality.

“Ah.” Jager clicked his heels in exquisite irony. “Are you also aware-in principle, of course-of the other symptoms this work brings with it?’

“Which ones do you mean?” the physicist asked. “The burns from actually handling the metal, the loss of hair, the bleeding gums and nausea? I am familiar with these, yes, and also with the cancer that is likely to result some years from now as a result of this exposure. I know these things, Colonel.”

“You know of them,” Jager said coldly. “Here-see what they do to real people who are not just abstracted principles.”

A man with a pink triangle on the front of his striped shirt was spooning cabbage soup into the mouth of a Jew who lay on a straw pallet, too sick to get up. When the Jew retched and coughed up the soup, the homosexual held his head so he would not foul himself too badly, then got a rag and put it on the patch of vomit. Then he started trying to feed the Jew again.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Jager insisted. “Maybe we do have to use condemned people, as you call them, for this work, but we don’t have to make their lot worse by treating them like beasts of burden.”

Diebner nodded to the several wooden platforms that had been built around the edges of the cellar-incongruously, they reminded Jager of the lifeguards’ stands by a lakeshore or along a popular stretch of riverbank. Each held, not a lifeguard in white tank top and colorful trunks, but a uniformed, helmeted guard who cradled a submachine gun. Quietly, the physicist said, “Without coercion, this work would not be done?and itmust be done. For that matter, neither the guards nor we are entirely safe.”

Jager looked at him sharply. “How do you mean?”

“How do you think, Colonel?” Diebner answered. “We, too-and the guards-are exposed to these radioactive materials, at lower levels than the prisoners, yes, but certainly exposed. What the long-term consequences of this may be, I cannot say with certainty, but I doubt they will be good. We have lined the roof of this cellar with lead to keep the Lizards from detecting the radioactivity gathered here; that we are close to Hechingen will help account for a higher level than might otherwise be expected, and gives us some added security.”

“I-see,” Jager said. He rubbed his chin, remembering the raid in which he, along with Russians and other Germans, had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards, and remembering riding across Poland with the German share of the explosive metal stowed in lead-lined saddle bags. He wondered what he’d done to himself in the service of theReich.

The classically trained part of him thought of Prometheus, who’d stolen fire from the gods and brought it down to mankind. Zeus had chained Prometheus to a rock, with a vulture gnawing at his liver. The gods weren’t much in the habit of manifesting themselves these days, but Jager wondered what might be gnawing at his own entrails.

Despairingly, Teerts turned his eye turrets toward the heavens. Those heavens remained empty, silent if they remained so much longer, he would either starve or be recaptured-or use the one shot he was sure he could fire from his Nipponese rifle.

He counted himself lucky not to have been recaptured already. So much of the train on which he’d been riding had gone up in flames. However savage and backwards they were, though, the Big Uglies were not stupid enough to take his demise for granted. A search would be mounted. Teerts was gloomily certain of that.

A little stream tinkled by the stand of brush where he was holed up; at night he could come out to drink. He’d caught a couple of crawling and scurrying things and eaten them raw, but hunger gained on him regardless. He did his best to remember how used to hunger he’d got while the Nipponese were mistreating him, but it wasn’t easy.

He hungered for ginger, too, all the way down to the depths of his spirit.

Every once in a while, when he saw no Tosevites around, he emerged from the shrubbery during daylight, to show himself for aircraft or satellites that might be passing overhead. If they’d spotted him, they’d certainly given no sign of it.

Now he lay curled up in a nest he’d made of branches and twigs and dry leaves. It was the sort of thing in which an animal might live, not a male of the Race. The Nipponese had done their best to make him into an animal, and failed. Now he was doing it to himself.

A noise in the sky-Teerts’ head came up, but only for a moment. Some of the flying creatures of Tosev 3 were noisy as they made their way through the air. His hearing diaphragms stretched tight with hope, he’d mistaken their wingbeats for the thutter of a rescue helicopter again and again. He couldn’t fool himself any more.

But this sound swelled and swelled. Teerts jumped to his feet, crying the Emperor’s name. From above, in a voice like thunder, came a call in his own language: “Male of the Race, show yourself! This is hostile airspace; we cannot stay long!” The accent was pure and clean-that of Home. Teerts had been listening to the mushy, barking way the Nipponese mangled his speech for so long, he needed a moment to recognize this was how it should be spoken.

He sprang from cover, waved his arms frantically, and did everything but turn backflips in the wild effort to make himself as visible as he could. His swiveling eyes caught sight of the helicopter-and one of the crewmales saw him, too, and the big, ungainly, ever so beautiful machine swung in his direction. Its rotor kicked up gravel and dust; nictitating membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from flying grit.

The helicopter hovered, its landing wheels not quite touching the ground. Its side door came open; a male inside let down a chain-link ladder. Teerts was already running toward the copter. He scrambled aboard. “We’ve got him!” the male shouted to the pilot and weapons officer in their cockpit forward.

The fellow hauled in the ladder, slammed and dogged the door. The helicopter was already gaining altitude and scurrying out toward the sea. “Thank you!” Teerts gasped. “The Emperor grant you bounty. You don’t know-”

“Don’t thank me yet,” the crewmale answered. He hurried to a machine gun that stuck out one of the windows. “We’re a long way from safe. We’ve got a killercraft overhead, but if the Big Uglies send enough aircraft after us, they’re liable to catch up with us and shoot us down. They’re a lot faster than we are.” He turned one eye back toward Teerts. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Teerts, killercraft pilot and flight leader,” Teerts answered. Stating his specialization and rank made him consciously aware for the first time in a very long while that he was without his body paint. That didn’t seem to bother his rescuer, who said, “Good. You know how to handle one of these things, then.” He patted the machine gun. “In case I get hit, keep shooting till we go into the water.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said. Actually, he outranked the male at the gun, but he was not part of the helicopter crew-and, after so long in Nipponese captivity, he was used to attaching honorifics to anyone with whom he spoke. As the land of Nippon receded behind them, his wits began to work again. “You couldn’t have flown straight here from any land the Race controls: you must have used in-flight refueling.”

“That’s right,” the crewmale said. “We’re on our way out for more hydrogen now, too. That should be enough to take us back to base.” He paused, listening to the microphone fastened to one hearing diaphragm. “Pilot says our killercraft cover just shot down three of the Big Uglies’ aircraft and the rest have broken off pursuit. Now I really start to think we’re going to be all right.”

“Emperor be praised,” Teerts said, dropping his eye turrets to the grimy mats on the floor of the helicopter. When he raised them again, he asked, “How is the conquest faring? I’ve been away from our kind for what has to be more than a year.”

“Between you, me, and this gun here, not so well,” the crewmale answered. “We were driving the Russkis hard, and then they somehow exploded an atomic bomb and made us stop there. These Big Uglies are a thousand times worse than we expected when we got to this stinking planet.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Teerts said feelingly. “The Nipponese told me about-gloated about-the Russkis’ atomic bomb. I was afraid they were telling the truth, but I wasn’t sure.” He suddenly sat bolt upright on the hard, uncomfortable seat. “They’re working on their own nuclear project, too. They spent endless time interrogating me about atomic energy. They got everything out of me, too. That’s how I managed to escape: they were taking me somewhere else so they could ask me about different things.”

“We’ll sendthat news upstairs, by the Emperor,” the crewmale exclaimed, lowering his eyes as Teerts had. “And after that, unless I miss my guess, we’ll have a present for these Big Uglies. You can show us where this work was being done?”

“The city was Tokyo,” Teerts answered. “Where in the city-”

“-Likely won’t matter,” the crewmale finished for him.

Teerts shivered. The male was probably right: the Nipponese would discover firsthand what nuclear weapons were like. They were only Big Uglies, and vicious ones to boot, but did they deserve that? Whether they did or not, he would have bet they were going to get it.

No point in arguing about that; the decision would come from levels far higher in the hierarchy than himself or the crewmale. He said, “Do you have any food here? The Nipponese didn’t give me a lot to eat.”

The crewmale unsnapped a pouch on the side of the helicopter wall, pulled out a couple of ration packs, and tossed them to Teerts. They were unheated and inherently unexciting: just fuel for the body to keep a male going until he had a chance to stop and rest and eat something better. Teerts thought he’d never eaten anything so wonderful in his life.

“After so long without the tastes of home, this may be the best meal I ever had,” he said ecstatically. His tongue cleansed the hard outer surfaces of his mouth. Every crumb it encountered brought him fresh delight.

“I’ve heard others we rescued say the same thing,” the crewmale answered. “That may be true for them, but I just can’t see it.” He let his mouth fall open to show he didn’t expect to be taken altogether seriously.

Teerts laughed, too; he remembered the rude jokes he and the rest of his flight had made about ration packs in the days before he’d been captured. He also remembered something else, remembered it with a physical longing more intense than anything he’d ever known outside of mating season. Hesitantly, he said, “The Nipponese fed me a Tosevite herb. They made me depend on it; my body craves it still. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”

To his surprise, the crewmale laughed again. He rummaged in a pouch he wore on one of his belts, pulled out a tiny plastic vial, and offered it to Teerts. “Who says you have to do without it, friend? Here, have a taste on me.”

Liu Han grunted as the labor pain washed over her. “Oh, that is a good one!” Ho Ma, the midwife, said enthusiastically. She’d been saying that for a long time now. She went on, “Soon the baby will come, and then you will be happy.” She’d been saying that for a long time, too, which only proved she didn’t know Liu Han very well.

Several midwives had set up shop in the prison camp. Liu Han recognized the red-tasseled signs they set up outside their huts, and knew what the characters on those signs said even if she could not read them: “light cart and speedy horse” on one side and “auspicious grandmother-in-law” on the other. The midwife who’d worked in her now-wrecked village had had just the same sign.

Ttomalss said, “Move aside, please, female Ho Ma, so the camera can see as it should.”

The midwife grumbled under her breath but moved aside. The little scaly devils were paying her extravagantly in silver and food and even, she’d boasted to Liu Han, in tobacco they’d got from who could say where. They had to pay her extravagantly to ignore the bright lights they’d put into Liu Han’s hut, to ignore their presence and that of their cameras, and to ignore the way that, contrary to all custom and decency, they’d insisted on Liu Han’s being naked through the entire delivery so those cameras could do their work as the little scaly devils thought proper.

To the scaly devils’ payment, Liu Han had added several dollars Mex from her own pocket to persuade Ho Ma not to gossip about the humiliations she would witness. The midwife had agreed at once-for money, a midwife would agree to almost anything. Whether she would keep her promise afterward was a different question.

Another contraction shook Liu Han. Ho Ma peered between her legs. “I can see the top of the baby’s head,” she said. “Lots of nice black hair… but then, the father had proper black hair even if he was a foreign devil, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Liu Han said wearily. Bobby Fiore’s being the baby’s father would just add to the scandal of this already extremely irregular delivery. Liu Han feared she could never bribe Ho Ma enough to be sure of keeping her quiet.

Then her body made its own demands, and she stopped worrying about what Ho Ma would say. The urge to push the baby out of her became overwhelming. She held her breath and bore down with all her might. A squealing grunt told of her effort.

“Again!” Ho Ma exclaimed when Liu Han had to stop because, like a punctured pig’s bladder, she had no more air left in her. Liu Han needed no urging. She panted for a moment, gathering her strength, took a deep breath and held it, and pushed once more. The urgency seemed unbearable, as if she were passing night soil at last after months of complete constipation.

“Once more!” Ho Ma said, reaching down to help guide the baby out. A couple of the little scaly devils with their accursed cameras shifted so they could still see what they wanted to see. Caught up in her body’s travail, Liu Han barely noticed them.

“Here, I have the head,” the midwife said. “A pretty baby, considering who its father was-not big-nosed at all. One more push, now, and I’ll bring the baby out of you.” Liu Han pushed. Now that the head had emerged, the rest was easy. A moment later, Ho Ma said, “A girl baby.” Liu Han knew she should have been disappointed, but she was too worn to care.

A couple of more pushes brought out the afterbirth, looking like a great bloody chunk of raw liver. One of the little scaly devils set down his camera and ran out of the hut, slamming the door behind him.

Ho Ma tied off the umbilical cord with two pieces of silk thread. Then she cut the cord with a pair of shears. She pinched the baby’s feet. After a moment, it began to squall like an angry kitten. The midwife thrust an iron poker into the flames of the fireplace, then touched the hot tip of it to the end of the umbilical stump.

“Do you do that to kill the little invisible demons-not the word I want, but as close as your language has-that cause sickness?” Ttomalss asked.

“I do that because it is custom to do that,” Ho Ma answered, rolling her eyes at the foolish questions the scaly devils asked. She wrapped the afterbirth in a cloth to take it away and bury it in some out-of-the-way place.

Liu Han had long since resigned herself to the little devils’ ignorant and presumptuous questions. “Give me the baby, please,” she said. Just talking was an enormous effort. She remembered that crushing weariness from the son she’d borne to her husband not long before a Japanese attack killed him and the boy.

Ho Ma handed her the child: as she’d said, a girl, her private parts swollen as newborns’ often were. Liu Han set the baby to her breast. The tiny mouth rooted, found the nipple, and began to suck. Liu Han turned to Ttomalss and said, “Have you seen everything you need? May I put my clothes on again?” She wanted to put some rags between her legs; she knew she would pass blood and other discharge there for weeks to come.

The little scaly devil did not answer, not directly. Instead, he asked another question: “Why do you not clean off the hatchling, which is still covered with these disgusting substances from inside your body?”

Liu Han and Ho Ma exchanged glances. How stupid scaly devils were! The midwife answered, “The baby is still too new to the world to bathe. On the third day after it is born, it will be more solid. We will wash it then.”

Ttomalss spoke to one of his machines in his own language. The machine answered back. Liu Han had seen that too often to be amazed by it any more. The scaly devil switched to Chinese and said, “My information is that other groups of Big Uglies do not do this.”

“Who cares what foreign devils do?” Ho Ma said scornfully. Liu Han nodded. Surely Chinese ways were best. Cradling the baby in one arm, she sat up, ever so slowly and carefully-she felt as if she’d aged about fifty years this past half-day-and reached for her tunic and trousers. When Ttomalss did not object, she set the baby down for a moment and got dressed, then picked up the child again, set it to her shoulder, and patted it on the back till it belched out the air it had sucked in with her milk.

Ho Ma gave her some tea, a single hard-boiled egg (had she had a son, she would have got five), round sugar cakes of fermented dough, and little sponge cakes shaped like fans, pomegranates, and ingots of silver. She devoured the traditional food, for she’d eaten nothing and drunk only a glass of hot sugar water with a dried shrimp in it-she hadn’t eaten the shrimp-since her labor began. She was stuffed when she was through, but felt she could have eaten twice as much.

One of the little scaly devils holding a camera spoke to Ttomalss in their language: “Superior sir, that was one of the most revolting processes I have ever had the misfortune to observe.”

“I thank you for maintaining your position,” Ttomalss answered. “We may have lost valuable information when Dvench fled this hut; he failed in his duty to the Race.”

“You are generous in your praise, superior sir,” the other scaly devil said. “Shall we now proceed with the experiment?”

Liu Han had listened to their hisses and squeaks with half an ear; not only was she exhausted from childbirth and distracted by her newborn daughter, but she also had only a halting command of the scaly devils’ tongue. But the word “experiment” made her start paying close attention, though she tried not to show it; she’d been part of the little devils’ experiments ever since they first appeared. They had their purposes, which emphatically werenot hers.

Ttomalss said, “No, the matter is not yet urgent. Let the Chinese carry on with their ceremonies. These may conceivably produce an increased survival rate for infants: more Tosevites appear to be of this Chinese variety than any other.”

“It shall be as you say, superior sir,” the other little devil said. “My opinion is that it’s surprising the Big Uglies retain their numbers, let alone increase them, with this system of reproduction. Passing an egg is far simpler and less dangerous and harrowing to the female involved than this gore-filled procedure.”

“There we agree, Msseff,” Ttomalss said. “That is why we must learn to understand how and why the Tosevites do in fact increase. Perhaps the risks inherent in their reproductive processes help explain their year-round sexual activity. This is another connection we are still exploring.”

Liu Han stopped listening. Whatever their latest experiment was, they weren’t going to tell her any more about it now. Ho Ma took up the cloth with the afterbirth and carried it away. Even Ttomalss and the other scaly devils got out of the hut, leaving Liu Han alone with the baby.

She set the sleeping little girl in the scrapwood cradle she’d readied. As Ho Ma had said, it did look like a proper Chinese baby, for which she was glad. If she ever escaped the camp, she could raise it properly, too, with no awkward questions to answer.

If she ever escaped the camp-Her laugh rang bitter. What chance of that, with or without the baby? Then all thought, no matter how bitter, dissolved in an enormous yawn. Liu Han lay down on top of thek’ang- the raised, heated platform in the middle of the hut-and fell deeply asleep. The baby woke her a few minutes later. She had groggy memories of her first child doing that, too.

The next two days passed in a blur of fatigue. Ho Ma came back with food, and the little scaly devils with their cameras. Then on the third day the midwife brought incense, paper images of the gods and paper goods to sacrifice to them, and a basin to be filled with water and a spicy mixture of ground locust branch and catnip leaves.

Ho Ma prayed to the family kitchen god, the goddess of smallpox, the goddess of playmates, the goddess of breast milk, the six minor household gods, the god of heaven and the god of earth, and the god and goddess of the bed, and burned offerings to each. She set out round cakes in a row before their images.

Msseff said to Ttomalss, “Superior sir, if all this is necessary for survival, then I am an addled egg.” Ttomalss’ mouth fell open.

The midwife bathed the baby, dried her, and sprinkled alum on her here and there. Then she laid the child on her back and set slices of ginger by the blackened stump of the umbilical cord. She put a little smoldering ball of catnip leaves on the ginger, and another at the baby’s head. A couple of the scaly devils let out hisses of longing for the ginger. Ttomalss took no notice of those, perhaps not recognizing what they signified.

Other ritual objects made their appearance: the small weight that portended a big future, the padlock to ward off impropriety, the tap of the onion punningly used to impart wisdom (both were pronouncedts’ung), and the comb for the child’s hair. The onion would be tossed on the roof of the hut, to predict the sex of Liu Han’s next child by the way it landed.

Ho Ma extinguished the burning balls of catnip and lit the paper images of the gods, who, having done their duty, were thus urged to depart the scene. The hut filled with smoke. Coughing a little, the midwife took her leave. The onion thumped up onto the roof. “The root points to the eaves,” Ho Ma called. “Your next baby will be a boy.”

Liu Han couldn’t remember what the onion had foretold after the birth of her first child. She wondered how many fortune-tellers made a good living by counting on their bad predictions’ being forgotten. A lot of them, she suspected, but how could you tell which ones till after the fact?

As if Ho Ma’s leaving the hut had been a signal, several little scaly devils came in. They were not carrying cameras; they were carrying guns. Alarm flared in Liu Han. She snatched up the baby and held it tight.

Ttomalss said, “That will do you no good. We now go to the next step of the experiment-we of the Race will raise this hatchling apart from you Tosevites, to learn how well it can acquire duty and obedience.” He turned to the males and spoke in his own language: “Take the hatchling.”

Liu Han screamed and fought with all she had in her. It did no good. Individually, the scaly devils were little, but several of them together were much stronger than she. The threat of their guns drove back the people who came out to see why she was screaming. Even the sight of a wailing infant in their arms was not enough to make men brave those terrible guns.

Liu Han lay on the ground in the hut and moaned. Then, slowly, she rose and made her painful way through the staring, chattering people and into the marketplace. Eventually, she came to the stall of the poultry seller. The little scaly devils might think they were through with her, but she was not through with them.

Half past two in the morning. Vyacheslav Molotov wished he were home and asleep in bed. Stalin, however, had not asked his opinion, merely summoned him. Stalin was not in the habit of asking anyone’s opinion. He expected to be obeyed. If he kept late hours, everyone else would, too.

The doorman nodded politely to Molotov, who nodded back. Normally he would have ignored such a flunky, but the doorman, along-time crony of Stalin’s, knew as many secrets as half the members of the Politburo-and he had his master’s ear. Slighting him was dangerous.

Stalin was writing at his desk when Molotov came in. Molotov wondered if he’d become dominant simply because he needed less sleep than most men. No doubt that wasn’t the whole answer, but it must have played its part.

“Take some tea, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Stalin said, pointing to a samovar in a corner of the cramped room.

“Thank you, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. When Stalin told you to take tea, you took tea, even if it was the vile mix that passed for the genuine article these days-much worse than the coarsemakhorka everyone, even Stalin, had to smoke. Molotov poured a glassful, sugared it-as long as the Soviet Union had beets, it would have sugar-and drank. He had to work to keep from betraying surprise. “This is-excellent.”

“The real leaf,” Stalin said smugly. “Brought in from India, thanks to the lull in the fighting with the Lizards after we showed we could match them bomb for bomb.”So there, his eyes added. He’d gone against Molotov’s advice and not only got away with it but prospered. Not only was that bad in itself, it meant he would pay less attention to Molotov the next time.

The Foreign Commissar sipped his tea, savoring its warmth and its rich flavor. When he was through, he set the glass down with real regret. “What do you need, Iosef Vissarionovich?” he asked.

“The lull is slowly dying away,” Stalin answered. “The Lizards begin to suspect we have no more bombs than that first one.” He sounded as if that were Molotov’s fault.

“As I have noted, Comrade General Secretary, they are aware we used their metal to produce that bomb,” Molotov said cautiously; telling StalinI told you so was as dangerous as defusing any other pyrotechnic device. Molotov tried to put the best face on it he could: “They cannot know, however, whether we have enough of that metal to use it for more bombs.”

“We should,” Stalin said. “Sharing with the Germans was a mistake.” His mouth twisted in annoyance at the irrevocability of the past.“Nichevo.” Try as he might, Stalin could not utterit can’t be helped with the fatalism a native Russian put in the word. His throaty Georgian accent gave it a flavor of,but someone ought to be able to do something about it.

Molotov said, “Creating the impression that wedo have more bombs available will be a cornerstone of our policy against the Lizards for some time to come. They suspect our weakness now. If they become certain of it, the strategic situation reverts to what it was before we used the bomb, and that was not altogether to our advantage.”

He stood up and got himself another glass of tea, both because he hadn’t had any real tea in a long time and because he was all too aware of how large an understatement he’d just loosed. If the Soviet Union hadn’t set off that bomb, the Lizards surely would have been in Moscow by now. If Stalin and he had escaped the fall of the city, they’d be trying to run the country from Kuibyshev, in the heart of the Urals. Would the workers and peasants-more to the point, would the soldiers-of the Soviet Union have continued to obey orders from a defeated government that had had to abandon the national capital?

Maybe. Neither Molotov nor Stalin had been anxious to attempt the experiment.

Stalin said, “Kurchatov and his team must accelerate their efforts.”

“Yes, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said dutifully. Igor Kurchatov, Georgi Flerov, and the rest of the Soviet nuclear physicists were doing everything they could to isolate uranium 235 and to produce the equally explosive element 94. Unfortunately, before the war nuclear physics in the Soviet Union had lagged several years behind its course in the capitalist and fascist nations. The mere search for abstract knowledge had not seemed vitally urgent then. Now it did, but, with their limited expertise and limited cadre, the physicists were still years away from producing homegrown nuclear material.

“The fascists in Germany are not idle,” Stalin said. “In spite of their setback, espionage confirms that their explosive-metal project goes forward. I believe the same is true in the United States and Britain, though communications with them both are not everything we might wish.” He slammed a fist down on the top of the desk. “And the Japanese?who knows what the Japanese are doing? I don’t trust them. I never trust them.”

The only man Stalin had ever trusted was Hitler, and that trust almost destroyed the Soviet Union. But here Molotov agreed with him. He said, “If Zhukov hadn’t treated them roughly in Mongolia in 39, they would have joined with the Nazis two years later, and that might have been very difficult for us.”

It would have been altogether disastrous, but Molotov didn’t have the nerve to tell that to Stalin. No one had the nerve to tell Stalin such things. The Moskva Hotel had two wings that spectacularly didn’t match. The architects had chosen to show Stalin their plans, expecting him to pick one design or the other. He’d just nodded and said, “Yes, do it that way,” and no one dared do anything else.

The doorman tapped on the door. Stalin and Molotov looked at each other in surprise; they weren’t supposed to be interrupted. Then the doorman did something even more surprising: he stuck his head in and said, “Iosef Vissarionovich, the officer here bears an urgent message. May he deliver it?”

After a moment, Stalin said,“Da,” with clear overtones ofit had better be.

The officer wore the three red squares of a senior lieutenant and the green backing on his collar tabs that meant he was from the NKVD. Saluting, he said, “Comrade General Secretary, Lizard propaganda broadcasts report-and Japanese radio confirms-that the Lizards have detonated an explosive-metal bomb over Tokyo. They say this was because the Japanese were engaged in nuclear research there. Casualties are said to be very heavy.”

Molotov waited to see how Stalin would react, intending to match his own response to his leader’s. Stalin said, “The Germans were inept, and blew themselves up. The Japanese were careless, and let the Lizards get wind of what they were about. We can afford neither mistake. We already knew that, but now we are, mm, strongly reminded once more.”

“Truth, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said. Stalin did have an eye for the essential. Not for nothing had he dominated the Soviet Union these past twenty years. Molotov wondered where-or if-the USSR would be in another twenty.