Upsetting the Balance

5

The engineer in the room next to the broadcast studio gave theyou’re on signal through the large window the two rooms shared. Nodding, Moishe Russie began reading from his Yiddish script: “Good day. This is Moishe Russie, coming to you by way of the BBC’s Overseas Services. Another great world capital has fallen to the malice of the Lizards.”

He sighed. The sigh was part of the script, but also heartfelt. “When the Lizards destroyed Berlin last year, I confess that I was not altogether brokenhearted. The Germans had done dreadful things to the Jews under their control. I thought the Lizards, who helped the Jews of Poland escape the Nazi yoke, were our benefactors.

“I was wrong. The Lizards used us, too. They were willing to let us live, yes, but only as their slaves. And that holds not just for us but also for all mankind. When the Lizards destroyed Washington, they made that plain for anyone with eyes to see. When they destroyed Washington, they showed they were fighting freedom.

“And now Tokyo. The Lizards no longer even try to pretend. They come straight out and tell us they dropped one of their hellish bombs on it because the Japanese were seeking to build weapons there that could meet them on even terms. That some hundreds of thousands of human beings, most of them civilians, died in the bombing is to the Lizards of no consequence.

“Mankind has employed one of these bombs, against a purely military target. The Lizards have now incinerated three historic cities, seeking to terrify humanity into surrender. London, from which I am broadcasting, has already been bombarded by both Hitler and the Lizards, yet still endures. Even if, in their madness, the Lizards treat it as they did Tokyo, the British Isles and the British Empire will continue not only to endure but also to resist. We hope and expect that all of you who are unfortunate enough to live in territory overrun by the aliens, yet can hear my voice, will continue to resist, too. In the end, we shall prevail.”

He came to the end of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat. Beaming at the good timing, Nathan Jacobi took over, in English rather than Yiddish: “I shall translate Moishe Russie’s remarks momentarily. First, though, I should like to note that no one is better qualified to judge the perfidy in the Lizards’ promises than Mr. Russie, for he watched them turn what he’d thought to be liberation into the enslavement and wholesale murder they bring to the entire world. As he said…”

Moishe listened to the introduction with half an ear. He was picking up more English day by day, but remained far from fluent: by the time he figured out what most of one sentence meant, two others would go by.

Jacobi went through an English version of Russie’s speech for Eastern European listeners who had no Yiddish. Since Moishe already knew what he’d said, he did better at following that than he had with the introduction. When the engineer signaled that they were off the air, he leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh.

Switching from English to Yiddish for Moishe’s benefit, the newsreader said, “I do wonder at times whether any of this does the least bit of good.”

“It does,” Moishe assured him. “When the Lizards had me locked up in Lodz, it wasn’t just my English cousin who helped me get out, but plenty of Jewish fighters from Poland. They need encouragement, and to be reminded they’re not the only people left in the whole world who want to stand up to the Lizards.”

“No doubt you’re right,” Jacobi said. “You would know better than I, having been on the spot. I just seem to have spent almost all of the last four years broadcasting messages of hope into occupied Europe-first Nazi-occupied Europe, now Lizard-occupied Europe-with what looks like very little return for the effort. I do want to feel I’m actually contributing to the war effort.”

“The Lizards don’t like truth any better than the Germans did,” Russie answered. “Next to what the Nazis were doing in Poland, they looked good for a moment, but that was all. They may not be out to exterminate anyone, but they are aiming to enslave everyone all over the world, and the more people realize that, the harder they’ll fight back.”

“All over the world,” Jacobi repeated. “That takes thinking about. We called it a world war before the Lizards came, but the Americans, Africa, India, much of the Near East-they were hardly touched. Now the whole world really is in play. Rather hard to imagine.”

Moishe nodded. It was harder for him than for the British Jew. Jacobi had grown up in London, the center of the greatest empire the world had ever known and also closely linked to the United States. Thinking of the world as a whole had to come easy for him. Moishe’s mental horizons hadn’t really reached beyond Poland-indeed, seldom beyond Warsaw-until the day von Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet friendship pact and guaranteed that war would not only come but would be disastrous when it came.

Through the glass, the engineer motioned Russie and Jacobi out of the studio. They got up quickly; another broadcaster or team would soon be taking over the facility.

Sure enough, out in the hall stood a tall, skinny, craggy-faced man with a thick shock of dark hair just beginning to go gray. He was looking at his wristwatch and holding a sheaf of typewritten pages like the ones Jacobi carried. “Good morning, Mr. Blair,” Russie said, trotting out his halting English.

“Good morning, Russie,” Eric Blair answered. He slid off his dark herringbone jacket. “Warm work closed up in the coffin there. I’d sooner be in my shirtsleeves.”

“Yes, warm,” Moishe said, responding to the part he’d understood. Blair broadcast for the Indian Section of the BBC. He’d lived in Burma for a time, and had also fought and been badly wounded fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Somewhere there, or perhaps back in England, he’d picked up a wet cough that was probably tubercular.

He pulled out a handkerchief to stifle it, then said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, I’m going to take some tea to get the scaling out of the pipes.”

“He’s astonishing,” Jacobi murmured in Yiddish as Blair walked away. “I’ve known him to bring up bloody phlegm after a broadcast, but you’d never imagine anything was the matter if you listened to him over the air.”

Blair returned in a moment with a thick, white china cup. He gulped down the not-quite-tea, made a wry face, and hurried into the studio. No sooner had he gone inside than the air-raid sirens began to wail. Russie blinked in surprise; he heard no Lizard jets screaming overhead. “Shall we go down to the shelter in the cellar?” he asked.

To his surprise, Jacobi said, “No. Wait-listen.”

Moishe obediently listened. Along with the howling sirens came another sound-a brazen clangor he needed a moment to identify. “Why are the church bells ringing?” he asked. “They’ve never done that before.”

“In 1940, that was going to be a signal,” Jacobi answered. “Thank God, it was one we never had to use.”

“What do you mean?” Russie asked. “What was it for?”

“After theLuftwaffe began to bomb us, they silenced all the bells,” Jacobi said. “If they ever started ringing again, it meant-invasion.”

The church bells rang and rang and rang, a wild carillon that raised the hair on Moishe’s arms and at the back of his neck. “The Germans aren’t going to invade now,” he said. However much it grated on him, relations between England and German-occupied northern France and the Low Countries had been correct, even sometimes approaching cordial, since the Lizards landed. The Lizards-”Oy!”

“Oy!is right,” Jacobi agreed. He cocked his head to one side, listening to the bells and the sirens. “I don’t hear any Lizard airplanes, and I don’t hear any antiaircraft guns, either. If they are invading, they aren’t coming down on London.”

“Where are they, then?” Moishe asked, as if the newsreader had some way of learning that to which he himself was not allowed access.

“How should I know?” Jacobi answered testily. Then he answered his own question: “We’re in a BBC studio. If we can’t find out here, where can we?”

Russie thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling very foolish. “Next thing I’ll do, I’ll ask a librarian where to find books.” He hesitated again; he still didn’t know the overall layout of the BBC Overseas Section all that well, being primarily concerned with his own broadcasting duties.

Jacobi saw his confusion. “Come on; we’ll go to the news monitoring service. They’ll know as much as anyone does.”

A row of wireless sets sat on several tables placed side by side. The resultant dinning mix of languages and occasional squeals and bursts of static would swiftly have driven any unprepared person mad. The mostly female monitors, though, wore earphones, so each one of them gave heed only to her assigned transmission.

One phrase came through the Babel again and again: “They’re here.” A women took off her earphones and got up from her set for a moment, probably for a trip to the loo. She nodded to Jacobi, whom she obviously knew. “I can guess why you’re hanging about here, dearie,” she said. “The buggers have gone and done it. Parachutists and I don’t know what all else in the south, and up in the Midlands, too. That’s about all anyone knows right now.”

“Thank you, Norma,” the newsreader said. “That’s more than we knew before.” He translated it for Moishe Russie, who had understood some of it but not all.

“The south and the Midlands?” Russie said, visualizing a map. “That’s doesn’t sound good. It sounds as if-”

“-They’re heading for London from north and south both,” Jacobi interrupted. He looked seriously at Moishe. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be broadcasting here. For one thing, God may know how they’ll supply a city of seven million with invaders on both sides of it, but I don’t.”

“I’ve been hungry before,” Moishe said. The Germans would have had no logistic problem in keeping the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto fed; they simply hadn’t bothered.

“I know that,” Jacobi answered. “But there’s something else, too. We would have fought the Germans with every man we had. I don’t expect Churchill will do anything less against the Lizards. Before long, they’ll come for us, put rifles in our hands, give us as many bullets as they happen to have for them, and send us up to the front line.”

That had the ring of truth to it. It was what Russie would have done had he been running the country. All the same, he shook his head. “To you, they’ll give a rifle. To me, they’ll give a medical bag, probably with rags for bandages and not much else.” He surprised himself by laughing.

“What’s funny?” Jacobi asked.

“I don’t know if it’s funny or justmeshuggeh,” Moishe said, “but here I’ll be a Jew going to war with a red cross on my arm.”

“I don’t know which, either,” Jacobi said, “but you haven’t gone to war. The war’s come to you.”

Ussmak was afraid. The lumbering transport in which his landcruiser rode was big and powerful enough to haul two of the heavy machines at a time, but it wasn’t much faster than the killercraft the Big Uglies flew. Killercraft of the Race were supposed to be flying cover missions and making sure no Tosevite aircraft got through, but Ussmak had seen enough war on Tosev 3 to know that the Race’s neat, carefully developed plans often turned to chaos and disaster when they ran up against real, live, perfidious Big Uglies.

He wondered if this plan had turned to chaos and disaster even before it ran up against the Big Uglies. Into the intercom microphone, he said, “I don’t see why we were ordered away from fighting the Deutsche just when we’d finally starting making good progress against them.”

“We are males of the Race,” Nejas replied. “The duty of our superiors is to prepare the plans. Our duty is to carry them out, and that shall be done.”

Ussmak liked Nejas. More to the point, he knew Nejas was a good landcruiser commander. Somehow, though, Nejas had managed to come through all the hard fighting he’d seen with his confidence in the wisdom of his superiors unimpaired. Not even when Ussmak was happy almost to the point of imbecility with three quick tastes of ginger could he sound so certain everything would be all right. And Nejas didn’t even taste.

Neither did Skoob, the gunner. He and Nejas had been together ever since the conquest fleet touched down on Tosev 3, and he was every bit as enamored of the straight and narrow as his commander. Now, though, he said, “Superior sir, I believe the driver has a point. Dividing and shifting effort in combat creates risks, some of which may be serious. While we and our equipment are transferred to attack the British, we grant the Deutsche time to recover, even to counterattack.”

“The Deutsche are staggering, ready to fall on the tailstumps they don’t have,” Nejas insisted. “The British have seen little of the war till now. Their miserable little island has been a base for endless mischief against us. Because it is an island, we can conquer it completely, remove this threat, and then resume our campaign against the Deutsche secure in the knowledge that Britain can no longer threaten our rear.”

He sounded like the dapper officers who had briefed the landcruiser units as they pulled them out of line against the Deutsche. Those officers had exuded wholesome confidence, too, so much confidence that Ussmak was certain they’d never led males in combat against the Big Uglies.

He said, “I don’t think military needs have all that much to do with it, or not in the usual way. I think more of it comes down to politics.”

“How do you mean, driver?” Nejas asked. The interrogative cough with which he punctuated his question was so loud and explosive, Ussmak knew he didn’t follow at all: a good commander, yes, but a natural-hatched innocent.

“Superior sir, when Straha fled to the Big Uglies, the Emperor only knows how many of our plans he took with him. They probably know just what we intend to try for the next two years. To keep them confused, we have to do different things now.”

“Curse Straha. May the Emperor turn his eye turrets away from him forever, now and in the world to come,” Nejas answered fiercely. After a moment, though, he said, “Yes, some truth may hatch from that eggshell. We-”

Before he could finish what he was saying, the transport, without warning, dropped like a stone. The chains that held the landcruiser secure in the fuselage groaned and creaked, but held. Ussmak’s seat belt held, too, to his relief, so he didn’t bounce all over the driver’s compartment as the aircraft dove.

As landcruiser commander, Nejas had a communications link with the pilot of the transport. He said, “We had to take evasive action against a Tosevite killercraft there. The machine guns stitched us up a bit, but no serious damage. We should land without trouble.”

“A good place not to have trouble, superior sir,” Ussmak agreed, and tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

“What happened to the Big Ugly aircraft?” Skoob demanded. He had the proper attitude for a gunner: he wanted to be sure the foe was gone.

Unfortunately, this time the foe wasn’t gone. Nejas said, “I am told that the Tosevite male escaped. The British apparently had more aircraft available than we anticipated, and are throwing them all into the battle against our forces. Here and there, sheer numbers let some of them get through.”

“We’ve seen that before, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Individually, a landcruiser or killercraft of the Race was worth some large number of the machines the Big Uglies manufactured. But the Tosevites, after they’d lost that large number, proceeded to manufacture several more. When the Race lost a machine, it and the male or males who crewed it were gone for good.

Nejas might have picked the thought from his head. “With luck, our conquest of this island of British or whatever its name is will make it harder for the Big Uglies, at least in this part of Tosev 3, to continue building the weapons with which they oppose us.”

“Yes, superior sir, with luck,” Ussmak said. He’d given up on the idea that the Race would get much luck in its struggle with the Big Uglies. Maybe, along with their aircraft and landcruisers, the Tosevites manufactured luck in some hidden underground factory…

Nejas broke into his reverie, saying, “We are on the point of landing. Prepare yourselves.”

Sealed up in the landcruiser, Ussmak hadn’t noticed maneuvers less violent than the ones the transport had used to escape the Big Ugly raider. Now he braced himself for a jolt as the aircraft touched down. It came, hard enough to make his teeth click together. The airstrip, made by combat engineers in country for which “hostile” was a polite understatement, would be short and rough and probably pocked with shell holes, too. He wondered if any transports-and the males they were transporting-had been caught on the ground.

Things started happening very fast once the transport landed. The scream of its engines reversing thrust to help slow it made Ussmak’s head ache even through the aircraft fuselage and the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser. Deceleration shoved him forward against his seat belt.

The instant the transport stopped, Nejas ordered, “Driver, start your engine!”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak replied, and obeyed. The hydrogen-burning turbine purred smoothly. Ussmak stuck his head out through the driver’s hatch to get a better view. At the moment he did so, the nose door of the transport opened, swinging up and back over the cockpit while the aircraft’s integral ramp rolled down to the ground.

Air from outside flowed into the fuselage, bringing with it the smells of powder and dirt and alien growing things. It was also cold, cold enough to make Ussmak shiver. The idea of being on an island, entirely surrounded by water, was less than appealing, too; back on Home, land dominated water, and islands on the lakes were small and few and far between.

A male with a lighted red wand ran up to guide the landcruiser out of the transport. “Forward-dead slow,” Nejas ordered. Ussmak engaged the lowest gear and eased forward. The landcruiser rattled over the metal floor of the fuselage, then nosed down onto the ramp. The male with the wand hadn’t done anything but urge Ussmak straight ahead?he might as well not have been there. The Race, though, tookbetter safe as a general working rule.

By the way they fought, the Big Uglies had never heard of that rule.

A buzzing in the air, like the wingdrone of a flying biter immensely magnified… Ussmak hadn’t heard that sound often, but knew what it meant. He ducked back into the landcruiser and slammed the hatch shut. The Big Uglies’ killercraft shot by at a height not much greater than the top of the transport’s tail. Machine-gun bullets rattled from the glacis plate of Ussmak’s landcruiser. A couple hit the just-closed hatch. Had his head been sticking out through it, they would have hit him.

The male who’d been directing him out of the transport reeled away, blood pouring from two or three wounds. “Forward-top speed!” Nejas screamed into the microphone taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. Ussmak’s foot was already mashing the accelerator. If the Tosevite killercraft had poured bullets into the front end of the transport, what had it done to the rest of the machine?

“Superior sir, is the other landcruiser following us out?” he asked. With the prisms in the cupola, Nejas could see all around, while Ussmak’s vision was limited to ahead and a bit to the sides.

“Not quickly enough,” the commander answered. “And oh, he’d better hurry-there’s flame from one wing of the transport, and now from the fuselage, and-” The blast behind him drowned his words. The rear of the heavy landcruiser lifted off the ground. For a terrifying instant, Ussmak thought it was going to flip end over end. But it thudded back down, harder than any of the jolts it had given the crew while the transport took evasive action in the air.

More explosions followed, one after another, as the ammunition of the landcruiser trapped in the inferno of the fuselage began cooking off. “Emperors past, take the spirits of the crewmales into your hands,” Skoob said.

“May they takeour spirits into their hands, too,” Nejas said. “Until that wreck is cleared, no traffic will be using the runway-and we need all the traffic we can get. More landcruisers, more soldiers, more ammunition, more hydrogen to keep our machines running-”

Ussmak hadn’t thought of that. When he’d rolled across the plains of the SSSR, he’d thought the conquest of Tosev 3 would be as easy as everyone back on Home had expected before the fleet left. Even though the Big Uglies had opposed him with landcruisers of their own rather than the animal-riding, sword-swinging soldiers he’d been led to expect, he and his fellow males disposed of them easily enough.

Even then, though, things had gone wrong: the sniper who’d killed his first commander, the raider who’d wrecked his landcruiser-he’d been lucky to get out of that alive, even if he’d had to jump into radioactive mud to do it. He’d picked up his ginger habit recovering in the hospital ship.

Things had got tougher in France. The terrain was worse, the Deutsche had better landcruisers, and they knew what to do with them. The Francais were hostile, too. He hadn’t thought that would matter, but it did. Sabotage, bombings, endless nuisances, all of which caused damage and forced the males of the Race to divert efforts and guard against them.

And now this-trapped on an island, partially cut off from resupply, with the Big Uglies, even the ones who weren’t soldiers, certain to be more dangerous than the ones in France. “Superior sir,” Ussmak said, “the deeper we get into this war, the more it looks as if we might lose it.”

“Nonsense,” Nejas declared. “The Emperor has ordained that we bring this world into the light of civilization, and it shall be done.” Ussmak thought him optimistic to the point of idealism, but even protesting to a superior was unusual; arguing with his commander would have got him punished.

A male with fancy body paint ran up to the landcruiser, waving his arms. “Driver, halt,” Nejas said, and Ussmak did. The male clambered up onto the landcruiser. Ussmak heard Nejas open the cupola lid. The male shouted, his voice deep with excitement. “Yes, we can do that, superior sir,” Nejas answered him, “provided you have a clearing blade to fit to the front of the vehicle.”

Even really hearing only one side of the conversation, Ussmak had no trouble figuring out what the male wanted: help pushing the wrecked transport off the runway. The officer ran off. Not much later, a truck with a winch came rumbling up to the landcruiser. Combat engineers began attaching the blade.

Not far off, dirt suddenly rose into the air in a graceful fountain. One of the engineers screamed loud enough for Ussmak to hear him through Nejas’ microphone: “Emperor protect us, they’ve snuck a mortar inside the perimeter again!”

Another bomb landed, this one even closer. Fragments of the casing rattled off the sides of the landcruiser. A combat engineer went down, kicking; blood spurted from a wound in his side. A medical technician gave him first aid, then summoned a couple of other males to take him away for further treatment. The rest of the engineers kept on bolting the clearing blade to the landcruiser.

Ussmak admired their courage. He wouldn’t have done their job for all the money-maybe not even for all the ginger-on Tosev 3.

For that matter, his own job didn’t look like such a good risk at the moment.

Mordechai Anielewicz huddled in a deep foxhole in the middle of a thick clump of bushes. He hoped it would give him good enough cover. The forest partisans must have miscalculated how much their raids were annoying the Lizards, for the aliens were doing their best to sweep them into oblivion.

Firing came from ahead of him and from both sides. He knew that meant he ought to get up and move, but getting up and moving struck him as the quickest and easiest way to get himself killed. Sometimes sitting tight was the best thing you could do.

The Lizards were worse in the woods than even an urban Jew like him. He heard them skittering past his hole in the ground. He clutched his Mauser. If the Lizards started poking through the bushes that shielded him, he’d sell his life as dear as he could. If they didn’t, he had no intention of advertising his existence. The essence of partisan warfare was getting away to fight another day.

Time crawled by on leaden feet. He took aWehrmacht- issue canteen from his belt, sipped cautiously-he had less water than he wanted, and didn’t know how long it would have to last. Going out to find more didn’t strike him as a good idea, not right now.

The bushes rustled.Sh’ma yisroayl, adonai elohaynu, adonai ekhod ran through his head: the first prayer a Jew learned, the last one that was supposed to cross his lips before he died. He didn’t say it now; he might have been wrong. But, as silently as he could, he turned toward the direction of the rustling. He was afraid he’d have to pop up and start shooting; otherwise the Lizards could finish him off with grenades.

“Shmuel?” A bare thread of whisper, but an unmistakably human voice.

“Yes. Who’s that?” The voice was too attenuated for him to recognize it, but he could make a good guess. “Jerzy?”

By way of reply, he got a laugh as discreet as the whisper had been. “You damn Jews are too damn smart, you know that?” the partisans’ point man answered. “Come on, though. You can’t hang around here. Sooner or later, they’ll spot you. I did.”

If Jerzy said staying around wasn’t safe, it probably wasn’t. Anielewicz scrambled up and out of his hidey-hole. “How’d you notice me, anyway?” he asked. “I didn’t think anybody could.”

“That’s just how,” the point man answered. “I looked around and I saw an excellent hiding place that didn’t look like it had anyone in it. I asked myself, who would be clever enough to take advantage of that kind of place? Your name popped into my head, and so-”

“I suppose I should be flattered,” Mordechai said. “You damn Poles are too damn smart, you know that?”

Jerzy stared at him, then laughed loud enough to alarm them both. “Let’s get out of here,” he said then, quietly once more. “We’ll head east, in the direction they’re coming from. Now that the main line of them is past, we shouldn’t have any trouble slipping away. They’re probably aiming to drive us against some other force they have waiting. That’s how the Nazis hunted partisans, anyhow.”

“We caught plenty of you Pole bastards, too,” someone behind them said in German. They both whirled. Friedrich sneered at them. “Poles and Jews talk too fucking much.”

“That’s because we have Germans to talk about,” Anielewicz retorted. He hated the arrogant way Friedrich stood there, feet planted on the ground as if he’d sprung from it, every line of his body proclaiming that he thought himself a lord of creation, just as if it had been the winter of 1941, with the Lizards nowhere to be seen and the Nazis bestriding Europe like a colossus and driving hard on Moscow.

The German glared at him. “You’ve got smart answers for everything, don’t you?” he said. Anielewicz tensed. A couple of more words to Friedrich and somebody was liable to die right there; he resolved he wouldn’t be the one. But then the Nazi went on, “Well, that’s just like a Jew. You’re right about one thing-we’d better get out of here. Come on.”

They headed east down a game track Mordechai never would have noticed for himself. Just as if they were raiding rather than running, Jerzy took the point and Friedrich the rear, leaving Anielewicz to move along in the middle, making enough noise to impersonate a large band of men.

Friedrich said, “This partisan business stinks.” Then he laughed softly. “Course, I don’t remember hunting you bastards was a whole lot of fun, either.”

“Hunting us bastards,” Mordechai corrected him. “Remember which side you’re on now.” Having someone along who’d been on both sides could be useful. Anielewicz had theoretical knowledge of how partisan hunters had operated. Friedrich had done it. If only he weren’t Friedrich…

Up ahead a few meters, Jerzy let out a hiss. “Hold up,” he said. “We’re coming to a road.”

Mordechai stopped. He didn’t hear Friedrich behind him, so he assumed Friedrich stopped, too. He wouldn’t have sworn to it, though; he hadn’t heard Friedrich when they were moving, either.

Jerzy said, “Come on up. I don’t see anything. We’ll cross one at a time.”

Anielewicz moved up to him as quietly as he could. Sure enough, Friedrich was right behind him. Jerzy peered cautiously from behind a birch, then sprinted across the rutted, muddy dirt road and dove into the brush there. Mordechai waited a few seconds to make sure nothing untoward happened, then made the same dash and dive himself. Somehow Jerzy had done it silently, but the plants he dove into rustled and crackled in the most alarming way. His pique at himself only got worse when Friedrich, who would have made two of him, also crossed without producing any noise.

Jerzy cast about for the game trail, found it, and headed east once more. He said, “We want to get as far away from the fighting as we can. I don’t know, but-”

“You feel it, too, eh?” Friedrich said. “Like somebody just walked over your grave? I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. What about you, Shmuel?”

“No, not this time,” Anielewicz admitted. He didn’t trust his own instincts, though, not here. In the ghetto, he’d had a fine-tuned sense of when trouble was coming. He didn’t have a feel for the forest, and he knew it.

“Something-” Jerzy muttered, just before the shooting started. The Lizards were ahead of them and off to one flank. At the first gunshot, Mordechai threw himself flat. He heard a grunt and a groan from in front of him. He groaned, too-Jerzy was hit.

In Lizard-accented Polish, a tremendously amplified voice roared, “You have been tracked since you crossed the road. Surrender or be killed. You cannot escape. We shall cease fire to allow you to surrender. If you do not, you will die.”

As promised, the hail of bullets stopped. By the noises in the trees, more Lizards were moving up on the side opposite the one from which the shooting had come. A helicopter thrummed overhead, sometimes visible through the leafy forest canopy, sometimes not.

Anielewicz weighed the odds. The Lizards didn’t know who he was. That counted for a great deal-what they didn’t know he knew, they couldn’t squeeze out of him. Wearily, he set down his Mauser and got to his feet, arms high over his head.

Five or ten meters behind him, Friedrich was doing the same thing. The German managed a wry grin. “Maybe we’ll get away, eh?”

“That would be good,” Anielewicz agreed. He’d managed to arrange it for other people (he wondered how Moishe Russie was getting along these days), and he’d managed to slip out of Warsaw right under the Lizards’ snouts. Whether he could get out of a prison camp once he was inside it was another question, though.

And it was going to be one he’d have to answer. Several Lizards, all of them with automatic rifles at the ready, approached him and Friedrich. He stood very still, not wanting to spook them and get himself shot. One of the Lizards gestured sharply with the barrel of his gun-this way.“Go!” he said in barely understandable Polish. Anielewicz and Friedrich shambled into captivity.

Rance Auerbach and his troopers rode into Lamar, Colorado, after another hit-and-run raid into Lizard-held Kansas. A couple of horses had bodies tied across their backs; nothing came easy when you fought the Lizards. But the company had done what it set out to do.

Auerbach turned to Bill Magruder. “Old Joe Selig won’t play footsie with the Lizards any more.”

“Sir, that’s a fact, and a good thing, too,” Magruder answered. His face was soot-grimy; he’d been one of the band that had torched Selig’s barn. The rest of the company had burned Selig’s farmhouse, and Selig inside it. Magruder leaned down and spat right in the middle of Main Street. “Goddamn collaborator. I never thought we’d see bastards like that, not in the United States.”

“Me, neither,” Auerbach said glumly. “Just goes to show there’s some bastards everywhere, I guess. Hate to say it-hate to see it, by God-but I reckon it’s true.”

Near the railroad station, right where Main Street crossed the Santa Fe tracks, stood the Madonna of the Trail monument, dedicated to all the pioneer mothers. Too bad some of those pioneer mothers had snakes in the grass for grandchildren.

A pigeon flew overhead, making a beeline for the county courthouse. Auerbach spotted the little aluminum tube fastened to its left leg. Spying it took some of the bitter taste out of his mouth. “I’d like to see the Lizards figure out a way to jam that,” he said.

Magruder hadn’t noticed the bird, but he figured out what the captain had to be talking about. “Homing pigeon, was it?” he said. At Auerbach’s nod, he went on, “Yeah, as long as we stick to the nineteenth century, the Lizards don’t have a clue about what we’re doing. Only trouble is, when we get up to the here and now, we get licked.”

“Isn’t it the truth?” Auerbach said ruefully. “And if we have the nineteenth-century stuff and they have the twentieth and the Buck Rogers gadgets, too, we’re going to keep right on getting licked unless we’re a damn sight smarter than we’ve been so far.” The beginning of an idea flickered across his mind, but was gone before he could capture it.

Before the war, Lamar had been a medium-sized town: four thousand people, maybe a few more. Unlike a lot of places, it was bigger now. A lot of the original inhabitants were dead or fled, but soldiers made up for a good many of them because it was an important forward base against the Lizards. And, because it remained firmly in American hands, it was a magnet for refugees from farther east.

Army headquarters was in the First National Bank building, not far from the courthouse (not that Lamar was a big enough town for anything to be real far from anything else). Auerbach dismissed his troopers to see to their horses, then went in to report.

Colonel Morton Nordenskold, the local commander, heard him out and made encouraging noises. “Well done,” he said. “Traitors need to know they’ll pay for treason.” Nordenskold had to be from somewhere in the upper Midwest; his voice held a trace of singsong Scandinavian intonation.

“Yes, sir.” Auerbach felt his own Texas drawl coming out more strongly in reaction to that very northern accent. “What are your orders for the company now, sir?”

“As usual,” Nordenskold answered: “Observe, patrol, raid. Given what we have, what else can we do?”

“Nothing much I can see, sir,” Auerbach said. “Uh, sir, what do we do if the Lizards push west with armor, the way they did last summer to get into Kansas? I’m proud to be a cavalryman-don’t get me wrong-but you go with horses against tanks once and you won’t do it again with the same horses. Probably not with the same men, either.”

“I know.” Nordenskold wore a small, precise gray mustache-too small and precise to fluff out when he sighed. “Captain, we’ll do the best we can under the circumstances: we’ll harass, we’ll counterattack when we can…” He sighed again. “Take away the Army guff, and a lot of us are going to get killed trying to hold them back. Any further questions, Auerbach?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Rance answered. Nordenskold had been more forthright than he’d expected. Things weren’t good, and they weren’t likely to get better any time soon. He’d known that, but having his superior come right out and say it made it feel as real and immediate as a kick in the teeth.

“Dismissed, then,” the colonel said. His desk was piled high with papers, some of them reports and notes handwritten on the backs of old bank forms. He bent to them once more before Auerbach was out of the office.

Without electric lights, the room where First National Bank customers would have stood was dark and gloomy. Rance blinked several times when he went out into the bright sunshine of the street. Then he blinked again, and touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger in what was more a polite gesture than a salute. “Hello, Miss Penny. How are you today?”

“I’m all right, I suppose,” Penny Summers answered indifferently. She’d been like that ever since Auerbach had brought her back to Lamar from Lakin, Kansas. Nothing seemed to matter much to her. He understood that; watching your father smashed to cat meat right before your eyes was plenty to leave you stunned for a while.

“You look mighty nice,” he offered gallantly. She was a nice-looking girl, true, but that wasn’t the same thing. Her face still had a wounded look to it and, like a lot of faces in Lamar, was none too clean. She still wore the overalls she’d had on when she and her father decided to pitch in and help the cavalry against the Lizards in Lakin. Under them she had on a man’s shirt that had seen better years-maybe better decades-and was also several sizes too big for her.

She shrugged, not because she didn’t believe him, he judged, but because she didn’t care one way or the other.

He tried again: “The folks you’re staying with here, are they treating you okay?”

“I guess so,” she said, still so flat that he started to give up hope of bringing her back into full contact with the world. But then her voice picked up a little as she went on, “Mr. Purdy, he tried peekin’ at me when I got undressed one night, but I told him I was your girlfriend and you’d whale the stuffing out of him if he ever did it again.”

“I ought to whale the stuffing out of him for doing it once,” Auerbach growled; he had definite, even vehement, notions about what you should and shouldn’t do. Taking advantage of somebody you were supposed to be helping fell with a thud into the second category.

“I told him I’d tell his wife on him, too,” Penny said. Was that amusement in her voice? Auerbach wasn’t sure, but it was something, and he hadn’t heard anything there since the Lizard plane swooped low over her father.

He decided to risk laughing. “That was a good idea,” he said. Then he asked, “Why did you say you were my girlfriend? Not that I wouldn’t like it if it were so, mind you, but-”

“On account of Mr. Purdy knows you brought me here, and he knows you’re half his age and twice his size,” Penny Summers answered. If she noticed the last sentence he’d politely tacked on, she didn’t show it.

He sighed. He wished he could do something for her, but had no idea what that something might be. When he said good-bye, Penny only nodded and went on down the street. He didn’t think she was going anywhere in particular, just wandering around-maybe she and the Purdys got on one another’s nerves in ways other than the one she’d mentioned, too.

He turned a corner and headed for the stables (funny to think of towns having stables again; they’d been going out of business since about the time he was born) to see to his horse: if you didn’t worry about your animal before you worried about yourself, you didn’t belong in the cavalry.

Somebody sang out, “Hello, Captain Rance, sir!”

Auerbach whirled. Only one person called him Captain Rance. To his men, he was Captain Auerbach. To his friends, he was just Rance-or rather, he’d been just Rance; the people he’d called friends were a lot of duty stations away from Lamar, Colorado. Sure enough, there stood Rachel Hines, grinning at him. He grinned back. “Hello yourself.”

Where Penny, weighed down by her father’s death, had withdrawn into herself since she came to Lamar, Rachel had blossomed. She was still wearing the dress in which she’d come to town, and it wasn’t any too clean, but she wore it with a flair Penny had forgotten-if she’d ever known it. From God knows where, Rachel had managed to come by makeup which highlighted her blond good looks. And, perhaps for no better reason than to keep life interesting, she still had her.22 slung over a shoulder.

Or perhaps she did have a reason: perhaps she was trying to make a point. She walked up to Auerbach and said, “When am I going to get to ride out with your men against the Lizards?”

He didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, as he would have before the Lizards came. The position of the United States was, in a word, desperate. In a situation like that, whether you could take a leak standing up suddenly looked a lot less important than whether you could ride hard, shoot straight, and follow orders.

He studied Rachel Hines. She stared saucily back at him. He wasn’t sure about that last one, not where she was concerned. Some women wouldn’t be any trouble on campaign, but Rachel enjoyed flaunting what she had. That could make trouble. So Auerbach temporized, saying, “I can’t tell you yes or no yet. Colonel Nordenskold is still thinking that one over.” That had the additional virtue of being more or less true.

She took another step toward him; now she was so close, she made him want to take a step back. She ran her tongue over her lips, which made him notice again that she’d painted them red. “I’d do just about anything to get the chance to go along,” she murmured in a breathy little voice he wasn’t used to hearing anywhere outside the bedroom.

The sweat that sprang out on his forehead had nothing to do with the heat of Colorado summer. Women had been few and far between for him this past crazy summer, and, like a lot of guys, he always came back from action horny, probably because he was so relieved to be coming back alive.

But if Rachel would go to bed with him to get what she wanted, she’d do the same thing with somebody else. Politely, in case he’d somehow misunderstood her (though he knew damn well he hadn’t), he said, “I’m sorry, but it isn’t in my hands. Like I said, it’s up to the colonel.”

“Well, I’ll just have to talk withhim, then, won’t I?” She sashayed off toward the First National Bank. Auerbach wondered if Colonel Nordenskold would be able to resist her blandishments, and if he’d even try.

The cavalry captain went on to tend to his horse, also wondering how much he’d regret turning her down. “Damn, if she’d only wanted something easy from me,” he muttered under his breath. “Robbing the bank here, say…”

Leslie Groves did not pretend to be a combat general, even to himself. Engineers fought nature and they fought the efforts of ill-intentioned people in the wrong kinds of uniforms who wanted to knock down the things they ran up. They weren’t supposed to worry about fighting the bad guys, not directly.

On the other hand, engineers had to be able to fight in a pinch. You never could tell what might happen to the officers who made battle their proper business, if enough of them went down, you were liable to be the man on the spot for a while.

So Groves had plenty of experience reading situation maps. Just to keep himself in practice, he often tried to figure out strategy for each side. With pardonable pride, he thought he was pretty good at it.

When he looked at the situation map on the wall of his office, he grimaced. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to realize that, if the Lizards wanted to, they could stroll across Colorado and seize Denver without breathing hard, let alone slowing down.

“What’s going to stop them?” Groves snorted. “Cavalry, for God’s sake?” He hadn’t seen cavalry symbols on a map for a long time; he’d felt mild pride for remembering what they meant.

Cavalry, against the Lizards? Cavalry had had trouble with the Sioux Indians, and he didn’t see that the state of the art had improved enough in the past three generations to give the horse soldiers much of a chance of holding off creatures from another planet. If the Lizards took it into their toothy heads to go after Denver, cavalry wouldn’t be enough to hold them back.

More armored divisions than the U.S. Army owned might not be enough to hold them back, either, but Groves didn’t worry about might-have-beens. Whatwas posed quite enough difficulties.

“They can’t find out we’re working on the atomic bomb here,” he announced, as if he expected someone to materialize in an empty chair across the desk from him and nod at his wisdom.

Of course, if the Lizards did find out the Metallurgical Laboratory had settled down here, they probably wouldn’t bother mounting an armored drive across Colorado. They’d just do unto Denver what they’d done unto Tokyo: they’d blow it off the face of the earth. If they did that, and especially if they did that before the United States had made any bombs, the war would be as good as lost, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

“Japan’s smashed, England’s invaded,” he said. Astonishing how much the destruction of Tokyo worried him. Not much more than a year before, Jimmy Doolittle had won himself a Congressional Medal of Honor for bombing the Japanese capital, and the whole U.S.A. had stood up and cheered. Now-“If we go under now, everything rides on the Reds and the Nazis,” Groves said, scowling. That was a hell of a thought, depending on a couple of the nastiest regimes ever invented to save the day for everybody else. Living under the Lizards might almost be better…

Groves shook his head. Nothing was worse than living under the Lizards. He held one finger in the air, as if to show he’d had a good idea. “The thing to do is not to let them know,” he declared. So far, they hadn’t tumbled. With luck and care, they wouldn’t.

What really worried him, though, was that they wouldn’t have to figure out that the Americans were doing nuclear research to want to conquer Denver. If they decided to head west from where they already were, it was the biggest city in sight. Maybe the Met Lab team would escape, the way they had from Chicago, but where would they go next? He hadn’t the faintest idea. How much precious time would they lose? He didn’t know that, either, but a lot. Could the United States-could the world-afford to have them lose all that time? There, for once, he knew the answer. No.

He got up from his desk, stretched, and headed out the door. Instead of his officer’s cap, he grabbed a civilian-style fedora. He was finally wearing a brigadier general’s stars on his shoulders, but he’d daubed gray paint on them so they wouldn’t sparkle and perhaps draw the notice of Lizard aerial reconnaissance. The last thing he wanted the Lizards wondering was what a general was doing on a university campus. If they were smart enough to figure out that that meant military research, they might also be smart enough to figure out what kind of research it meant… in which case, good-bye, Denver.

The walk to the pile under the football stadium was, aside from eating and sleeping, almost the only break Groves allowed himself in his days of relentless toil. Off to the east, civilians, men and women alike, were out digging tank traps and trenches. Those might not come to anything without the soldiers and guns they’d need to make them effective, but the civilians were giving their all. He could hardly do anything less-and it wasn’t in his nature to do anything less, anyhow.

A chart was thumbtacked to a hallway wall of the stadium by the atomic pile. It kept track of two things: the amount of plutonium produced each day, and how much had been produced overall. That second number was the one Groves watched like a hawk.

Leo Szilard came round the corner. “Good morning, General,” he said in the thick Hungarian accent that always made Groves-and a lot of other people-think of Bela Lugosi. Something else besides the accent lurked in his voice. Groves suspected it was scorn for anybody who put on his country’s uniform. Groves’ reaction to that was returned scorn, but he did his best to hide it. He was, after all, fighting to keep the United States a free country.

And besides, he might have been reading altogether too much into a three-word greeting, although other encounters with the physicist made him doubt that “Good morning, Dr. Szilard,” he answered as cordially as he could-and the chart gave him some reason for cordiality. “We’ve been up over ten grams a day this past week. That’s excellent.”

“It is certainly an improvement. Having the second pile operational has helped a good deal. More than half the production now comes from it. We were able to improve its design with what we learned from this one.”

“That’s always the way things go,” Groves said, nodding. “You build the first one to see if it will work and how it will work, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. Your second one’s a better job, and by the third or fourth you’re about ready to enter regular production.”

“Adequate theory would enable the first attempt to be of proper quality,” Szilard said, now with a touch of frost. Groves smiled. That was just the difference between a scientist, who thought theory could adequately explain the world, and an engineer, who was sure you had to get in there and tinker with things before they’d go the right way.

Groves said, “We’re bringing down the time until we have enough plutonium for a bomb every time I look at the chart, but next year still isn’t good enough.”

“We are now doing everything we can here at Denver, given the materials and facilities available,” Szilard answered. “If the Hanford site is as promising as it appears to be, we can begin producing more there soon, assuming we can set up the plant without the Lizards’ noticing.”

“Yes, assuming,” Groves said heavily. “I wish I’d sent Larssen out as part of a team. If something goes wrong with him… we’ll just have to judge going ahead at Hanford on the basis of theory rather than experience.”

Szilard gave him a surprised look. The physicist owned a sense of humor, a rather dry, puckish one, but seemed surprised to find anything similar lurking in the soul of a military man. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “The atomic piles we have in mind for that facility are truly elegant, and will make these seem like clumsy makeshifts. The Columbia has enough cooling flow to let them be enormously more efficient.”

“Getting equipment and people to Hanford is going to be complicated,” Groves said. “Getting anything anywhere is complicated these days. That’s what having aliens occupying half the country will do to you.”

“If we do not establish additional facilities, our production rate for plutonium here will remain cruelly low,” Szilard said.

“I know,” Groves answered. So many things the United States had to do if it was going to win the war. So many things, also, the United States couldn’t do. And if the United States couldn’t do the things it had to do… Groves was an excellent logician. He wished he weren’t, because he hated the conclusion to which logic led him.

David Goldfarb drew himself to attention as Fred Hipple walked by, which meant he looked down on the crown of the diminutive group captain’s service cap. “Permission to speak to you a moment, sir?”

Hipple stopped, nodded. “What is it, Goldfarb?”

The rumble of artillery was plainly audible in the moment Goldfarb used to gather his thoughts. The Lizards’ northern perimeter was only a few miles away. Up till now, it had been a defensive perimeter; their main effort went into the southward push toward London. That didn’t mean the British were attacking it with any less ferocity, though.

Goldfarb said, “Sir, I’d like your endorsement on a request to transfer from this unit to one where I can get into combat.”

“I thought that might be what you would say.” Hipple rubbed at the thin line of his mustache. “Your spirit does you credit. However, I shall not endorse any such request. On the contrary. As long as this research team exists, I shall bend every effort toward maintaining it at full strength.” He scratched at his mustache again. “You are not the first man to ask this of me.”

“I didn’t think I would be, sir, but this is the first chance I’ve had to speak to you in any sort of privacy,” Goldfarb said. Being one of the other ranks, he didn’t share quarters with Hipple, as did the officers on the jet propulsion and radar research team. Stealing this moment outside the Nissen hut where they all worked wasn’t the same thing-although the roar of cannon and the cloud of dust and smoke that obscured the southern horizon lent his words urgency.

“Yes, yes, I understand all that. Quite.” Hipple looked uncomfortable. “I might add that my own request to return to combat duty was also rejected, and I must admit I found the reasons for its rejection compelling enough to apply them myself.” He shifted from foot to foot, a startling gesture from such a usually dapper little man.

“What are those reasons, sir?” Goldfarb gestured violently. “With the country invaded, seems to me we need every man who can carry a rifle to do just that.”

Hipple’s smile was rueful. “Exactly what I said, though I believe I used the phrase ‘climb into a cockpit’ instead. I was told, quite pointedly, that this was penny wise and pound foolish, that we have a sufficiency of fighting men who are only that and nothing more, but that technical progress had to continue lest in winning this fight we sow the seeds of losing the next one, and that-you will forgive me, I trust, for quoting the words of the Air Vice Marshal-I was to bloody well stay here till we were either evacuated or bloody well overrun.”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. Then, greatly daring, he added, “But sir, if we lose this fight, can we make another?”

“A cogent point,” Hipple admitted. “If by ‘we’ you mean the British Isles, I daresay the answer is no. But if you mean by it mankind as a whole, I believe the answer to be yes. And if we are evacuated, I believe we shan’t go into the Welsh mountains or up into Scotland or across the Irish Sea to Belfast. My guess is that they may send us across to Norway, and from there to join forces with the Germans-no, I don’t care for that, and I see from your face that you don’t, either, but neither of our opinions has anything to do with anything. More likely, though, we’d sail across the Atlantic and set up shop in Canada or the United States. Meanwhile, we soldier on here. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb repeated. Hipple nodded as if everything were settled and went on his way. Sighing, Goldfarb walked into the Nissen hut.

Basil Roundbush was in there, poring over a blueprint with a singular lack of enthusiasm. He looked up, saw Goldfarb’s hangdog expression, and recognized it for what it was. “The Old Man wouldn’t let you go fight either, eh?”

“Too bloody right.” Goldfarb waved to the Sten guns and spare magazines that had gone up on hooks and in bins on the walls of the hut, ready to be grabbed. “I suppose those are there to make us feel like soldiers, even if we’re not.”

Roundbush laughed, but without much humor. “That’s well put. I never should have learned so blinking much. If I were just a pilot, I’d be in there battling, not chained to a draughtsman’s table away from it all.”

One of the meteorologists said, “If you were just a pilot, you’d have been in there battling all along, and odds are you’d’ve long since bought your plot.”

“Oh, bugger off, Ralph,” Basil Roundbush said. For a crack like that, he would have beaten most men to a jelly, but Ralph Wiggs had had an artificial leg since the day when, a generation before, he’d gone over the top at the Somme. Having seen that and been lucky enough to survive it, he knew everything worth knowing about senseless slaughter.

Now he said, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, lad. I tried to get back into it, too-if they’d take Tin-Legs Bader to fly a Spit with both legs gone, why wouldn’t they take me to fight with just one? Blighters said I’d best serve His Majesty by keeping an eye on air pressure and wind direction.”

“It’s a filthy job, Ralph, but someone’s got to do it,” Roundbush said. “I just wish I’d never heard of turbines. Teach me to be an engineer-”

Goldfarb couldn’t make complaints like that. If he hadn’t been mad for wireless sets and the like before the war, he wouldn’t have become a radarman in the first place; he’d have gone straight into the infantry. He might have come back from Dunkirk, but then again he might not have. So many good chaps hadn’t.

He stuck a lead onto one of the subunits he and Leo Horton had salvaged from the radar of a crashed Lizard fighter. Little by little, they were figuring out what the unit did, if not always how it did it.

Just as he was about to take his first reading, the air-raid alarm began to wail. Swearing in English and Yiddish, he dashed for the trench right outside the Nissen hut and jumped down into it.

Basil Roundbush landed almost on top of him. The flight officer clattered as he dove into the trench; on the way out, he’d grabbed several Sten guns and enough ammunition to fight a small war. When the first Lizard plane screamed overhead, he fired off a long burst. “Just on the off chance, don’t you know,” he shouted to Goldfarb through the hellish din.

Bombs slammed down all around, jerking them and the other men in the trench around like so many rag dolls. “Odd pattern,” Goldfarb remarked; he’d become something of a connoisseur of bombing runs. “Usually they go after the runways, but it sounds more as though they were hitting the buildings today.” He stuck up his head. “That’s what they were doing, all right.”

Most of the huts and barracks and other buildings of the Bruntingthorpe Experimental Air Station had just taken a dreadful pounding. The Nissen hut from which he’d fled was still intact, but all its windows had blown in.

Roundbush also peered this way and that. “You’re right-not a scratch on the runways,” he said. “That isn’t like the Lizards, not even a little bit. It’s almost as if they wanted them-” His voice faded before the last word: “-intact.”

No sooner had that passed his lips than Goldfarb’s battered ears caught a thuttering roar from out of the south. It seemed to be coming from the air, but he’d never heard anything like it. Then he caught sight of something that reminded him of a tadpole slung beneath an electric fan. “Helicopter!” he yelled.

“Helicopters,” Roundbush corrected grimly. “And they’re coming this way-probably want to seize the airstrip.”

Goldfarb kept his head up another moment. Then one of the helicopters let loose with a salvo of rockets. He threw himself flat again. Several of them tore into the Nissen hut; a piece of hot corrugated iron landed on him like an overaggressive player in a rugby scrum. “Oof!” he said. A couple of precious Meteors blew up in their revetments.

The radarman started to shake the slab of metal off and get up, but Roundbush sat on him. “Stay low, you bloody fool!” the flight officer shouted. As if to underscore his words, machine-gun bullets kicked up dirt all around. When a fighter plane strafed you, it made its pass and flew on. The helicopters hung in the air and kept shooting and shooting.

Over the racket of the guns, Goldfarb said, “I think Group Captain Hipple’s research team has just broken up.”

“Too bloody right it has,” Roundbush answered.

“Here, give me one of those Sten guns,” Ralph Wiggs said. “If they’re going to shoot us, we may as well shoot back as long as we can.” The middle-aged, one-legged meteorologist sounded a great deal calmer than Goldfarb felt. After the Somme, Wiggs might not have found a mere airborne invasion worth showing excitement over. Roundbush passed him a submachine gun. Wiggs pulled the bolt back, stuck his head up, and started shooting regardless of the bullets still raking the trench. The Somme had been machine-gun hell, hundreds of them firing at the overburdened British troops slogging toward their positions. Next to that, what the Lizards were throwing at Bruntingthorpe had to seem negligible.

If Wiggs could get up and fight, Goldfarb supposed he could also manage it. He peered over the lip of the trench. The helicopters still hovered above the runway, covering the Lizards who skittered along the tarmac, shooting as they ran. Goldfarb blazed away at them. Several of them went down, but whether he’d hit them or they were just taking cover he could not say.

All at once, one of the helicopters turned into a blue-white fireball. Goldfarb whooped like a Red Indian. Antiaircraft guns ringed Bruntingthorpe. Nice to know that, aside from almost shooting down British jet fighters, they could also do some damage to the enemy.

The remaining helicopter whirled in the air and fired more rockets at the ack-ack gun that had brought down its companion. Goldfarb couldn’t imagine anyone living through such a barrage, but the gun kept pounding away. Then the helicopter lurched in the air. Goldfarb screamed louder than he had before. The helicopter did not explode, but did flee, trailing smoke.

Basil Roundbush bounded out of the trench and fired at the Lizards on the ground, who had halted in dismay. “We have to wipe them out now,” he shouted, “before they get their air cover back.”

Goldfarb got up onto the greensward, too, though he felt horribly naked outside the trench. He fired a burst, went down on his belly, wriggled forward, and fired again.

Other men came up and started shooting, too, from their slit trenches, from others, and from the wreckage of the buildings the Lizards had bombed. Ralph Wiggs limped straight toward the Lizards, as if this were 1916 all over again. A bullet caught him. He went down but kept on shooting.

“You hurt badly?” Goldfarb asked.

Wiggs shook his head. “I took one through the knee there, so I can’t walk, but otherwise I’m right as rain.” He fired again.

He didn’t sound like a man who’d just been shot. Goldfarb stared for a moment, then realized the Lizard bullet must have wrecked the knee of Wiggs’ artificial leg. Even out in the open, with precious little cover and bullets whistling all around, he burst out laughing.

“They can’t have more than two squads on the ground,” Roundbush said. “We can take them, I really think we can.”

As if to underline his words, the antiaircraft gun the helicopters hadn’t been able to silence opened up on the Lizard infantry. Using ack-ack as regular artillery was unconventional, although the Germans were supposed to have started doing it as far back as their blitzkrieg through France in 1940. It was also deucedly effective.

Goldfarb scurried forward toward some wreckage strewn over the runway. He got in behind it with a grateful belly flop; any bit of cover was welcome. He poked the barrel of his Sten gun up over the edge of the torn wood and metal and blazed away.

“Hold fire!” somebody yelled from across the runway. “They’re trying to give up.”

One weapon at a time, the insane rattle of small-arms fire died away. Goldfarb ever so cautiously raised his head and peered toward the Lizards. He’d seen them as blips on a radar screen, and briefly in the raid on the prison in Lodz that had freed his cousin, Moishe Russie. Now, as the survivors of the force threw down weapons and raised hands high, he got his first good look at them.

They were only the size of kids. He’d known that intellectually; he’d even seen it for himself. But it hadn’t really registered on an emotional level. The Lizards’ technology was so good that they seemed nine feet tall. Except for size, they didn’t remind him of children. With their forward-slanting posture and scaly skins, they looked something like dinosaurs, but their helmets and armored jackets gave them a martial air-probably a better martial air than he had himself right now, he thought, glancing down at his grimy RAF uniform.

Basil Roundbush tramped up beside him. “By Jove, we did it,” he said.

“So we did.” Goldfarb knew he sounded surprised, but couldn’t help it. He was surprised to be alive, much less victorious. Musingly, he went on, “I wonder if one of those bulletproof waistcoats would fit me.”

“Now there’s a thought!” Roundbush exclaimed. He appraised Goldfarb with his eyes. “You’re smaller and leaner than I am, so you stand a chance. I hope for your sake one does, because the time for research in merry old England, I fear, is past.” He kicked at a broken slide rule lying on the tarmac. “Till we throw those scaly buggers out, there’s nothing but fighting left.”