Upsetting the Balance

6

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

What the devil was that from?Macbeth? Hamlet? King Lear? Jens Larssen was damned if he could remember, but it was something out of Shakespeare, sure as hell. The lines came floating up into his conscious mind the moment he reached the top of Lewiston Hill.

Looking west from the hilltop, he could certainly count himself a king of infinite space. Even in a land full of spectacular scenic vistas, this one stood out. There was the endless rolling sagebrush prairie of Washington State-desert might have been a more accurate name for it, if less kind.

Nearer, though, were the towns of Clarkston, Washington, and, on this side of the Snake River, Lewiston, Idaho, itself nestled between the Snake and the Clearwater, with mountains pinching it off north and south so that at first glance it seemed to consist of nothing but one long street.

Rafts of logs floated on the Snake, to head downstream to be made into who could say what to help fight the Lizards. As if the clock had turned back a generation, more and more aircraft parts were wood these days.

But did Jens really care these days how the war against the aliens went? Having the Lizards conquer the world was a nightmare of a bad dream. But when the people who had the best chance of stopping them were also the people who’d done him the most dirt, how was he supposed to feel?

“Like hell,” he announced to the air, and kicked his bicycle into motion to roll down into Lewiston.

Roll down intowere the operative words; in the ten miles between Lewiston Hill and Lewiston itself, US 95 dropped two thousand feet, about a four percent average grade. Averages were tricky-it was a lot steeper than that in some places. And going downhill was the easy way; if he came back by this route, he’d have the long slog up to the summit of the hill. Just thinking about it made his thighs ache.

Lewiston bustled in a way he hadn’t seen since he left Denver, or maybe since he left Chicago. Loggers swaggered down the street. So did sawmill workers; not all the timber cut around here headed into Washington, not by a long shot. The bulk of what had to be one of the world’s biggest lumber plants was just a mile down the Clearwater. By the smoke that poured from its chimneys, it was going flat out, too. The world was a big place, too big for the Lizards to knock out every factory in it, no matter how thoroughly destructive they were.

The sawmill was interesting in the abstract, but it didn’t make Jens want to stop for a closer look. When he came up to a YMCA building, though, he stopped so hard he almost pitched himself over the handlebars of his bicycle. Several bikes were parked out front, with a pistol-toting guard to keep an eye on them. Larssen had seen that in Denver, and elsewhere, too. Bicycles now were what horses had been in the old days-come to that, there were also a good many horses on Lewiston’s streets.

Jens nodded to the guard as he let down the kickstand to his bike. When he went inside, he asked the clerk at the front desk, “You have hot water?”

“Yes, sir,” the man answered, unfazed by the sudden appearance of a grimy stranger with a knapsack and a rifle on his back. He’d probably seen a lot of such strangers, for he went on, “A hot shower is two dollars. If you want a shave, you can use a straight razor and-hmm-probably a scissors for you, too, for another fifty cents. If you’ll give me your goods there, you can have them back when you pay.”

Larssen passed him the Springfield and the knapsack. “Thanks, pal. I’ll take a miss on the razor; I’m used to the beard by now.”

“A lot of men say the same thing,” the clerk answered, nodding. “If you want your clothes washed, too, Chung’s laundry down the street does a first-class job.”

“I’m just passing through, so I don’t think I can stay for that, but thanks again,” Jens said. “But a hot shower! Hot dog!” He followed the signs back to the shower room.

As promised, the water was hot, almost hot enough to scald. The soap took off not only the dirt but part of his top layer of hide, too. It was obviously homemade, mushy and full of lye and strong-smelling. But when he turned off the water and toweled himself dry, he was pink again, not assorted grimy shades of brown.

Putting stale clothes over his clean body made him wrinkle his nose. He’d been rank for so long, he’d stopped noticing it. Maybe he’d stop at Chung’s after all. He combed back his hair and walked out to the front desk, whistling.

When he gave the clerk a couple of dollar bills, he got his chattels back. He checked the knapsack to make sure nothing was missing. The clerk looked pained, but said nothing. He’d probably seen that a hundred times, too.

Jens tossed the bike guard a dime, climbed onto his machine, and headed toward the bridge over the Snake that would lead into Washington State. A couple of blocks west of the YMCA, as the clerk had said, was Chung’s laundry, with Chinese characters below the English name of the shop. Jens was about to roll past it, however regretfully, when he saw the place simply called Mama’s next door.

He stopped. If this Chung worked fast, maybe he could get his clothes washed while he had a leisurely lunch. “Why the hell not?” he muttered. An hour this way or that wasn’t enough to worry about.

The laundryman-his first name, you learned inside, was Horace-spoke perfect English. He giggled when Larssen said he was going into Mama’s for lunch, but promised to have his clothes ready in an hour.

When Jens opened the door to Mama’s place, he didn’t smell the friendly odors of home-cooked food he’d expected. Perfume hit him in the nose instead. The joint reeked like a cathouse. After a moment, he realized the jointwas a cathouse. It made sense. All those lumberjacks would want something to do besides chopping down trees all day. But no wonder Horace (lung had broken up when he said he was coming over here to eat.

A big, blowsy woman, maybe Mama herself, came out of a back room. Jens’ rifle didn’t seem to bother her, either. “Ain’t you squeaky clean?” she said, eyeing his just-washed face and damp hair. “Bet you been over to the Y. That’s right thoughtful of you, it sure is. Now come on back with me and pick yourself out a pretty girl.”

Jens opened his mouth to tell her he’d thought the place was a restaurant, but then he shut it again and followed her. He wasn’t going anywhere till the laundryman got done with his clothes, and this would be more fun than lunch.

The girls weren’t particularly pretty, no matter what Mama said, and most of them looked mean. The lingerie they were wearing had seen better years. He wondered again if he really wanted to do this. But then he found himself nodding to a girl with curly, dark blond hair. She looked a little like Barbara had back when they were married, but he didn’t notice that, he just thought she was the best-looking woman there.

She got up and stretched. As she headed for the stairs, she said, “A straight screw is forty. Ten bucks more than that for half-and-half, another ten for French. You want anything else, find yourself a different gal.”

That bald announcement almost made Jens turn on his heel and walk out. If Horace Chung hadn’t had his clothes, he might have done it. As it was, he went after the hooker. The linen on the bed in the little upstairs room was frayed but clean. Larssen wondered if Horace did the laundry for Mama’s place and, if so, how he got paid.

The girl kicked off her shoes, pulled her nightgown up over her head, and stood impassively naked. “What’ll it be, buddy?”

“Tell me your name, at least,” Jens said, unnerved by such straightforward capitalism.

“Edie,” she answered, and didn’t bother asking his. Instead, she repeated, “What’ll it be?”

“Half-and-half, I guess,” he said with dull embarrassment.

“Show me the money first. You don’t pay, you don’t play.” She nodded when he tossed the bills onto the bed, then warned, “You come while I’m sucking you, you gotta pay the extra ten for full French, okay?”

“Okay, okay.” He shook his head, horny and disgusted with himself at the same time. This wasn’t what he’d been used to getting in his happier days. It bore about as much resemblance to love as the painting on an orange crate did to the Mona Lisa. But it was all he could find right now.

He shrugged out of his knapsack, set it and the Springfield in a corner by the bed. Then he undressed. Edie looked him over like somebody inspecting a slab of meat. As Mama had, she said, “You’re clean, anyhow. That’s something. Haven’t seen you round these parts before. You stop at the Y before you came here?”

“Yeah, I did,” he answered, cherishing any human contact between them: it was the first thing she’d said to him that wasn’t strictly business.

It was also the last. “Sit on the edge of the bed, will you?” she asked. When he did, she got down on her knees in front of him and went to work.

She knew what she was doing, no doubt about that. Presently he patted the mattress with one hand. She lay down on the bed, her legs open. She didn’t respond when he caressed her, but gave him a good professional ride after he got on top. Afterwards, the first thing she did was scoop up the money.

He was dressing again when he realized he hadn’t put on a rubber.Too bad for her, he thought coldly. If you were in her line of work, you took your chances with things like the clap.

She said, “You want another round, half price?”

“No, that’s all right,” he answered; what he was thinking about was going back to the YMCA for another shower. He probably had time, but he didn’t feel like explaining himself to the desk clerk-or not explaining himself, but bearing up under the guy’s fishy stare.

“You want a drink downstairs, then?” Edie asked. “We got home-brew beer, moonshine, even a little real whiskey if you feel like payin’ for it.”

She should have been peddling used cars instead of her ass and related amenities. “That’s all right,” Jens said again; all he wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Edie’s look saidcheapskate. He ignored it.

When he went back into Chung’s laundry, the proprietor asked, “You have a nice lunch, sir?” and giggled louder than he had the first time. Then he called something in Chinese into the back room. A woman’s laugh floated out. Jens’ ears felt on fire. He thought seriously about abandoning his clothes and riding west as fast as he could go.

In the end, he decided to stay. But as soon as Horace Chung handed him the hot laundry, he shoved it into his knapsack and fled without changing and getting the clothes he had on cleaned, as he’d intended to do.

The steel suspension bridge over the Snake River was history-the Lizards hadn’t missed it, as they had the sawmill. The only way across the river was by rowboat. The oarsmen all wanted fifteen bucks for the trip, too. Jens flashed his letter that said he was on important government business. One of the boatmen said, “I’m as patriotic as the next guy, Mac, but I gotta feed my face.” Jens paid.

Eastern Washington, as seen from US 410, reminded him of Utah: very fertile when next to a river or irrigated, otherwise pale alkali flats with not much more than sagebrush growing on them. He’d always thought of Washington as full of pines and moss and ferns, with water dripping everywhere all the time. This part of the state didn’t live up to the description.

The roads hereabout hadn’t been badly bombed. Most of the bridges over rivers smaller than the Snake remained intact. Timber makeshifts let light traffic cross some of the spans that had been destroyed from the air. A couple of times, he had to pay his way across.

He got his ashes hauled again in Walla Walla, on the third day after he’d crossed into Washington. Again he picked a dark blond girl; again he didn’t think anything of it. This time, he didn’t have any laundry to reclaim when he left the bordello. He knew nothing but relief that that was so.

About thirty miles west of Walla Walla, US 140 swung north along the eastern bank of the Columbia toward its junction with the Snake. The country had been irrigated farmland once upon a time. Some of it looked to have been abandoned for quite a while; maybe the farmers hadn’t been able to pay their water bills.

Other stretches, though, especially where the two big rivers joined, were just now fading. Irrigation ditches were nothing but muddy, weed-choked grooves in the ground. Here and there, farmers still cultivated small orchards and berry patches, but big stretches of land between them baked brown under the summer sun. Jens wondered what had gone wrong till he pedaled past the ruins of a pumping station, and then of another. If the water couldn’t reach land, the land wouldn’t bear.

The town nearest the Snake River bridge (not that Jens expected to find it standing) was called Burbank. Just before he got into it, he pulled off the highway to contribute his own bit of irrigation to the roadside plants. No sooner had he started to piss than he stopped again with a snarl of pain. Now he knew without having to think about it what that burning meant.

“Anotherdose of clap?” he howled to the sky, though that was not where he’d got it. The next week or two, till things calmed down in there, were going to be anything but fun.

Then, half to his own surprise, he started to laugh. From everything he’d heard, the clap didn’t usually make a woman as sore as it did a man, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have it. And this time, there was every chance he’d given as good-or as bad-as he’d got.

When Nikifor Sholudenko poked his head unannounced into the underground chamber where Ludmila Gorbunova slept and rested between missions, her first thought was that the NKVD man hoped to catch her half dressed. But Sholudenko said, “Comrade Pilot, you are ordered to report to Colonel Karpov’s office at once.”

That was different. That was business. Ludmila jumped to her feet. “Thank you, Comrade. Take me to him at once, please.”

Colonel Feofan Karpov was not a big man, but in his square solidity reminded Ludmila of a bear nonetheless. The stubble on his chin and the decrepit state of his uniform only added to the impression. So did the candles flickering in the underground office; they gave the place the look of a lair.

“Good day, Comrade Pilot,” Karpov said after returning Ludmila’s salute. His voice, which was on the reedy side, did not sound particularly ursine, not even when he growled, “That will be all, Comrade,” at Sholudenko. But the NKVD man disappeared even so.

“Good day, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila said. “I report to you as ordered.”

“At ease, Ludmila Vadimovna-you’re not in trouble, certainly not from me,” Karpov said. Ludmila did not ease; the colonel was a stickler for military formality, and not in the habit of addressing her by name and patronymic. The first reason she came up with for his changing his tune was that he was going to make advances at her. If he did, she decided, she’d scream.

But instead of coming around the desk to lay a “comradely” hand on her shoulder or any such thing, he said, “I have orders for you to report to Moscow immediately. Well, not quite immediately.” He made a wry face. “A wagon is waiting above ground to transport you. It brought a replacement pilot and a replacement mechanic.”

“A replacement mechanic, Comrade Colonel?” Ludmila asked, puzzled.

“Da.”Karpov scowled an angry bear’s scowl. “They are robbing me not only of one of my best pilots in you, but also of that German-Schultz-you roped into this unit. Whatever bungler they’ve sent me, he won’t measure up to the German; engines don’t care if you’re a fascist.”

The prospect of riding in to Moscow with Georg Schultz was less than appealing; the prospect of being paired with him on whatever mission followed the trip to Moscow was downright appalling. Hoping she might find out why the two of them had been ordered to the capital, she asked, “Where and to whom are we to report, Comrade Colonel?”

“To the Kremlin, or whatever may be left of the Kremlin after the Lizards have done their worst.” Karpov looked down at a scrap of paper on his desk. “The order is signed by a certain Colonel Boris Lidov of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior.” He saw Ludmila stiffen. “You know this man?”

“Yes, I know him, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila said in a small voice. She glanced around out through the doorway to see if anyone was loitering in the hall.

Karpov’s gaze followed hers. “An NKVD bastard, eh?” he said roughly-but he didn’t raise his voice, either. “I thought as much, just from the way the order was framed. No help for it that I can see. Go gather your belongings and get into the wagon-you’ll see it when you come out of the tunnels here. Wear something civilian, if you can; it will make you less likely to be shot at from the air. And good luck to you, Ludmila Vadimovna.”

“Thank you, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila saluted again, then walked back down the hall to her chamber. Mechanically, she packed up her flight suit, coveralls, and pistol. She had no civilian blouses, but at the bottom of her duffel bag she did find a flowered skirt. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn it.

When she came out of the tunnels, she blinked like a mole suddenly in daylight as she replaced the grass-covered netting that concealed the entrance. As Colonel Karpov had said, a high-wheeledpanje wagon waited there, the driver in the baggy blouse, trousers, and boots of themuzhik, the horse making the most of the moment by pulling up weeds.

The wagon carried a load of straw. When Georg Schultz sat up in it, he looked like a scarecrow, although Ludmila had never seen a scarecrow with a coppery beard. He was dressed in his oldWehrmacht tunic and Red Army trousers; he didn’t have any civilian clothes this side of wherever in Germany he came from.

He grinned at her. “Come on back here with me,liebchen,” he said in his mixture of Russian and German.

“One minute.” She rummaged in her pack until she found the Tokarev automatic pistol. She belted it on, then climbed into the wagon. “You never listen to me when I tell you to keep your hands where they belong. Maybe you will listen to this.”

“Maybe.” He was still grinning. He’d faced worse things than pistols. “And maybe not.”

The driver twitched the reins. The horse let out a resentful snort, raised its head, and ambled off toward Moscow. The driver whistled something from Mussorgsky-after a moment, Ludmila recognized it as “The Great Gate of Kiev.” She smiled at the reference, no matter how oblique, to her hometown. But the smile quickly faded. Kiev had passed from the Nazis’ hands straight into those of the Lizards.

Although they moved ever farther from the front line, the countryside showed the scars of war. Bombs had cratered the dirt road that ran northeast toward Moscow; every couple of hundred meters, it seemed, thepanje wagon had to rattle off onto the verge.

Georg Schultz sat up again, spilling straw in all directions. “These stinking dirt roads played hell with us, all through Russia. The map would say we were coming up to a highway, and it’d either be dust and dirt like this or mud when it rained. Didn’t seem fair. You damn Russians were so backwards, it ended up helping you.”

The driver didn’t move a muscle; he just kept driving. In spite of that, Ludmila would have bet he knew German. If he was from the NKVD, he’d have more talents than his rough-hewn exterior revealed.

Every so often, they’d pass the dead carcasses of tanks rocketed from the air by the Lizards before they ever reached the front. Some had been there long enough to start rusting. Most had their engine compartments and turret hatches open: the Soviets had salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage.

Even as scrap metal, the T-34s looked formidable. Pointing to one, Ludmila asked with no small pride, “And what did you think of those when you were up against them, Comrade Panzer Gunner?”

“Nasty buggers,” Schultz answered promptly, ignoring the ironic form of address. “Good armor, good gun, good engine, good tracks-all better than anything we had, probably. The gunsight, not so good. Not the two-man turret, either-the commander’s too busy helping the gunner to command the panzer, and that’s his proper job. He should have a cupola, too. And you need more panzers with wireless sets. Not having them hurt your tactics, and they weren’t that great to begin with.”

Now Ludmila hoped the driver was listening. She’d been aiming to twit the German tankman; she hadn’t expected such a serious, thoughtful answer. Being a Nazi didn’t automatically make a man a fool, no matter what propaganda claimed.

The journey in to Moscow took two days. They spent the first night in a stand of trees well off the road. The Lizards still flew by at night, smashing up whatever they could find.

Moscow, when they finally reached it, made Ludmila gasp in dismay. She’d last been there the winter before, after she’d flown Molotov to Germany. The Soviet capital had taken a beating then. Now…

Now it seemed that every building possibly large enough to contain a factory had been pounded flat. A couple of the onion domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s had crumpled. Walls everywhere were streaked with soot; the faint odor of wet, stale smoke hung in the air.

But people hadn’t given up.Babushkas sold apples and cabbages and beets on street corners. Soldiers carrying submachine guns tramped purposefully along. Horse-drawn wagons, some small like the one in which Ludmila rode, others pulled by straining teams, rattled and clattered. No guessing what they held, not with tarpaulins lashed down tight over their beds. If the Lizards couldn’t see what was in them, they wouldn’t know what to bomb. Flies droned around lumps of horse dung.

The driver knew which bridge over the Moscow River was in good enough repair to get them up to the Kremlin, and which parts of the battered heart of Moscow-of the Soviet Union-were still beating. He pulled thepanje wagon up in front of one of those parts, stuck a feed bag on the horse’s head, and said, “I am to escort you to Colonel Lidov.” But for the snatches of whistling he’d let out from time to time, that was almost the first sound he’d made since he set out from the air base.

Some of the walls in the corridor were cracked, but the electric lights worked. Off in the distance, a petrol-fired generator chugged away to keep the lightbulbs shining. “Wishwe had electricity,” Schultz muttered under his breath.

The corridor was not the one down which Ludmila had gone on her earlier meeting with Boris Lidov; she wondered if that part of the Kremlin still stood. The wagon driver opened a door, peered inside, beckoned to her and to Georg Schultz. “He will see you.”

Ludmila’s heart pounded in her chest, as if she were about to fly a combat mission. She knew she had reason to be nervous; the NKVD could kill you as readily, and with as little remorse, as the Germans or the Lizards. And Lidov had made plain what he thought of her after she got back from Germany. She might have gone to agulag then, rather than back to her unit.

The NKVD colonel (Ludmila wondered if his promotion sprang from ability or simply survival) looked up from a paper-strewn desk. She started to report to him in proper military form, but Schultz beat her to the punch, saying breezily, “How goes it with you, Boris, you scrawny old prune-faced bastard?”

Staring, Ludmila waited for the sky to fall. It wasn’t that the description didn’t fit; it did, like a glove. But to say what you thought of an NKVD colonel, right to his prune face… Maybe he didn’t follow German.

He did. Fixing Schultz with a fishy stare, he answered in German much better than Ludmila’s: “Just because Otto Skorzeny could get away with speaking to me so, Sergeant, does not mean you can. He was more valuable than you are, and he was not under Soviet discipline. You, on the other hand-” He let that hang, perhaps to give Schultz the chance to paint horrid pictures in his own mind.

It didn’t work. Schultz said, “Listen, I was one of the men you sent on the raid that gave you people the metal for your bomb. If that doesn’t buy me the right to speak my mind, what does?”

“Nothing,” Lidov said coldly.

Ludmila spoke up before Schultz got himself shot or sent to a camp, and her along with him: “Comrade Colonel, for what mission have you summoned the two of us away from the front line?”

Lidov’s look suggested he’d forgotten she was there, and utterly forgotten he’d ordered the two of them to Moscow for any specific reason. After a moment, he collected himself and even laughed a little. That amazed Ludmila, who hadn’t suspected he could. Then he explained, “Curiously enough, it has to do with Soviet-German friendship and cooperation.” He’d answered Ludmila in Russian; he translated the reply into German for Schultz’s benefit.

The panzer gunner laughed, too. “Till the Lizards came, I was giving you cooperation, all right, fifty millimeters at a time.”

“What are we to do, Comrade Colonel?” Ludmila asked hastily. Lidov had warned Georg Schultz twice. Even once would have been surprising. Thinking he’d forbear three times running was asking for a miracle, and Ludmila, a good product of the Soviet educational system, did not believe in miracles.

Lidov’s chair squeaked as he turned in it to point to a map pinned to the rough plaster on the side of the wall. “Here by the lake-do you see it? — is the city of Pskov. It is still in the hands of mankind, although threatened by the Lizards. Some of the defenders areWehrmacht troops, others partisan members of the Red Army.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Some friction in the defense has resulted from this.”

“You mean they’re shooting at each other, don’t you?” Schultz asked. Ludmila had wondered if he was too naive to see what lay beneath propaganda, but he proved he wasn’t. Gobbels probably used the same techniques as his Soviet counterparts, which would have sensitized Schultz to them.

“Not at present,” Lidov said primly. “Nonetheless, examples of cooperation might prove to have a valuable effect there. The two of you have done an admirable job of working together, by all the reports that have reached me.”

“We haven’t worked together all that close,” Schultz said with a sidelong glance at Ludmila. “Not as close as I’d like.”

She wanted to kick him right where it would do the most good. “By which you mean I don’t care to be your whore,” she snarled. Before she said something worse to him, something irremediable, she turned to Boris Lidov. “Comrade Colonel, how are we to get to Pskov?”

“I could have you sent by train,” Lidov answered. “North of Moscow, rail service works fairly well. But instead, I have a U-2 waiting at a field not far from here. The aircraft itself will prove useful in defending Pskov, as will the addition of a pilot and a skilled mechanic who can also serve a gun. Now go-you spent too much time getting here, but I was unwilling to detach a plane from frontline service.”

Ludmila was unsurprised to find the driver waiting for them when they left Colonel Lidov’s office. The driver said, “I will take you to the airport now.”

Georg Schultz scrambled up into thepanjewagon. He reached out a hand to help Ludmila join him and laughed when she ignored it, as if she’d done something funny. Once more she felt like kicking him. Being sent to Pskov was one thing. Being sent there in the company of this smirking, lecherous lout was something else again.

She brightened for a moment: at least she would be escaping Nikifor Sholudenko. And-exquisite irony! — maybe his reports on her had helped make that possible. But her glee quickly faded. For every Sholudenko she escaped, she was only too likely to find another one. His kind was a hardy breed-like any other cockroaches,she thought.

Atvar nervously pondered the map that showed the progress of the Race’s invasion of Britain. In one respect, all was well: the British could not stop the thrusts of his armored columns. In another respect, though, the picture was not as bright: the Race’s armor controlled only the ground on which it sat at the moment. Territory where it had been but was no longer seethed with rebellion the moment the landcruisers were out of sight.

“The trouble with this cursed island,” he said, jabbing a fingerclaw at the computer display as if it were actually the territory in question, “is that it’s too small and too tightly packed with Tosevites. Fighting there is like trying to hold a longball game in an airlock.”

“Well put, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel let his mouth fall open in an appreciative chuckle. Atvar studied the map with one eye and the shiplord with the other. He still mistrusted Kirel. A properly loyal subordinate would have played no role in the effort to oust him. Yes, next to Straha, Kirel was a paragon of virtue, but that was not saying enough to leave the fleetlord comfortable.

Atvar said, “The cost in equipment and males for territory gained is running far higher than the computer projections. We’ve lost several heavy transports, and we cannot afford that at all. Without the transport fleet, we’ll have to use starships to move landcruisers about-and that would leave them vulnerable to the maniacal Tosevites.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel hesitated, then went on, “At best, computer projections gave us less than a fifty percent chance of succeeding in the conquest of Britain if the campaign in the SSSR was not satisfactorily concluded first.”

Kirel remained unfailingly polite, but Atvar was not in the mood for criticism. “The computer’s reasoning was based on our ability to shift resources from the SSSR after we conquered it,” he snapped. “True, we did not conquer it, but we have shifted resources-after the Soviets exploded that atomic bomb, we’ve scaled back operations in their territory. This produces something of the effect the computer envisioned, even if by a different route.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” If Kirel was convinced, he did a good job of hiding it. He changed the subject, but not to one more reassuring: “We are down to our last hundred antimissiles, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“That is not good,” Atvar said, an understatement that would do until a bigger one came along, which wouldn’t be any time soon. As was his way, he did his best to look on the bright side of things: “At least we can concentrate those missiles against Deutschland, the only Tosevite empire exploring that technology at the moment.”

“You are of course correct,” Kirel said. Then he and the fleetlord stopped and looked at each other in mutual consternation-and understanding. With the Race, saying something was not happening at the moment meant it would not happen, certainly not in a future near enough to require worry. With the Big Uglies, it meant what it said and nothing more: it was no guarantee that the Americans or the Russkis or the Nipponese or even the British wouldn’t start lobbing guided missiles at the Race tomorrow or the day after. Even more unnerving, both males had come to take that possibility for granted. With the Tosevites, you couldn’t tell.

Kirel tried again: “We continue to expend the antimissile missiles at a rate of several per day. We also seek to destroy the launchers from which the Deutsch missiles come, but we have had only limited success there, as they are both mobile and easy to conceal.”

“Any success on Tosev 3 seems limited,” Atvar said with a sigh. “We might do better to blast the factories in which the missiles are manufactured. If the Deutsche cannot produce them, they cannot fire them. And missiles require great precision; if we destroy the tools needed to make them, the Big Uglies will be a long while coming up with more.” He realized he was once more reduced to buying time against the Tosevites, but that was better than losing to them.

“This course is also being attempted,” Kirel said, “but, while it pains me to contradict the exalted fleetlord, the Tosevite missiles are astonishingly crude. Their guidance is so bad as to make them no more than area weapons, extremely long-range artillery, but the prospect of large weights of high explosive landing behind our lines remains unpleasant; some have evaded our countermeasures and done considerable damage, and that situation will grow far worse as we run out of countermissiles. The corresponding point is that they are far easier to build than the missiles that shoot them down. We attack factories we’ve identified as producing missile components, but the Deutsche continue to produce and launch the pestilential things.”

Atvar sighed again. There in an eggshell was the story of the war against the Big Uglies. The Race took all the proper steps to contain them-and got hurt anyhow.

A screen on his desk lit up, showing the features of his adjutant, Pshing. Atvar immediately started to worry. Pshing wouldn’t interrupt his conference with Kirel for anything that wasn’t important, which meant, in practice, for anything that hadn’t gone wrong. “What is it?” Atvar demanded, putting a fierce snarl into the interrogative cough.

“Forgive me for troubling you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said nervously, “but Fzzek, commander of invasion forces in Britain, has received under sign of truce a disturbing message from Churchill, the chief minister to the petty emperor of Britain. He requests your orders on how to proceed.”

“Give me the message,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done.” Pshing swung an eye turret to one side, evidently reading the words from another screen. “This Churchill demands that we begin evacuating our forces from Britain in no more than two days or face an unspecified type of warfare the Tosevites have not yet employed against us, but one which is asserted to be highly effective and dangerous.”

“If this Churchill uses nuclear arms against us, we shall not spare his capital,” Atvar said. “The island of Britain is so small, a few nuclear weapons would utterly ruin it.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, Churchill specifically denies the weapons he describes are nuclear in nature,” Pshing replied. “They are new, they are deadly. Past that, the British spokesmale declined detailed comment.”

“Having begun the conquest of Britain, we are not going to abandon it on the say-so of a Tosevite,” Atvar said. “You may tell Fzzek to relay that to Churchill. For all we know, the Big Ugly is but running an enormous bluff. We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived. Relay that to Fzzek as well.”

“It shall be done,” Pshing said. The screen holding his image went blank.

Atvar turned back to Kirel. “Sometimes the presumption Tosevites show astonishes me. They treat us as if we were fools. If they have a new weapon, which I doubt, advertising it will produce nothing from us, especially since we’ve seen for ourselves what liars they are.”

“Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Mutt Daniels crouched in ruins, hoping the Lizard bombardment would end soon. “If it don’t end soon, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of Chicago,” he muttered under his breath.

“What’s that, Lieutenant?” Dracula Szabo asked from the shelter of a shell hole not far away.

Before Mutt could answer, several Lizard shells came in, close enough to slam him down as if he’d been blocking the plate when a runner bowled him over trying to score. He thanked his lucky stars he’d been breathing out rather than in; a blast could rip your lungs to bits and kill you without leaving a mark on your body.

“Come on,” he said, and charged west across the ruined lawn of Poro College toward the rubble that had been shops and apartments on the other side of South Park Way. Szabo followed at his heels.

Somewhere close by, a Lizard opened up with an automatic rifle. Daniels didn’t know whether the bullets were intended for him, and didn’t wait to find out. He threw himself flat, ignoring the bricks and stones on which he landed. Bricks and stones could hurt his bones, but bullets… he shuddered, not caring for the parody on the old rhyme.

Bela Szabo returned five with his BAR. “Ain’t this a hell of a mess?” he called to Mutt.

“You might say that, yeah-you just might,” Mutt answered. Off to the west, some Americans still fought in the Swift and Armour plants; every so often, little spatters of gunfire rang out from that direction. The plants themselves were worse rubble than the Bronzeville wreckage amidst which he crouched. The Lizards had finally pushed around them and driven halfway toward Lake Michigan. That put them and Chicago’s American defenders smack in the middle of Bronzeville, Chicago’s Black Belt. Nobody had any real solid claim to the land between the packing plants and where Mutt now lay.

Dracula jerked a thumb back at what had been, in happier times, Poro College. “What the hell kind of place was that, anyways?” he asked. “I seen pictures of colored women all gussied up scattered along with all the other junk.”

“That there was what they call a beauty college,” said Mutt, who’d seen a sign on the ground. “I guess that’s where you went to learn how to gussy up colored folk, like you said.”

“Not me, Lieutenant,” Dracula said.

“Not me, neither, but somebody,” Mutt answered. Like most white men from Mississippi, he automatically thought of Negroes as ignorant sharecroppers who were fine as long as they kept to their place. Barnstorming against black ballplayers in the winter and endless travels through the north and west, where things worked a little differently, had softened his attitude without destroying it.

That complicated life at the moment, because Bronzeville held, along with Lizard assault troops and American defenders and counterattackers, a fair number of Negro civilians living in cellars and makeshift shelters cobbled together from the wreckage of what had once been fine houses. They were nonpareil scavengers; that they’d stayed alive in the hell Chicago had become proved as much. They found all sorts of goodies-canned food, medicine, sometimes even smokes and booze-for the Army units fighting hereabouts. But not for Mutt: as soon as they heard his drawl, they dummied up. One, more forthright than the rest, said, “Mistuh, we came no’th to git away from that kind o’ talk.”

As if picking the worry from Mutt’s mind, Dracula Szabo said, “Lieutenant, we gotta get some more help from the spooks around here. I mean, I ain’t the worst scrounger ever born-”

“You’re a sandbaggin’ son of a bitch, is what you are, Dracula,” Daniels answered. Szabo was the best scrounger he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some real pros, Americans and English and especially Frenchmen, in France during the First World War. Hadn’t been for Dracula, the platoon would have been hungrier and grouchier. Mutt still had a couple of precious cigarettes stashed against a day when he’d have to smoke one or die.

Dracula grinned, unabashed. As if Mutt hadn’t spoken, he took up where he’d left off: “-but the thing of it is, the spooks know where most of the stuff is, account of they’re the ones who stashed it in the first place. I’m just goin’ around, maybe finding things by luck, know what I mean? Luck’s a handy thing, no doubt about it, but having an angle’s a damn sight better.” He spoke with the calm assurance of a man who tucked an ace up his sleeve every now and again.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, kid. Tell you what-next time we’re tryin’ to get somethin’ from ’em, you handle it. Tell ’em the lieutenant made you the official U.S. Army special duty supply bloodhound for the platoon. We’ll see how that goes for a while-if we don’t get pushed outta here and don’t walk into a shell.”

“Okay, Lieutenant, if that’s how you want it.” Szabo kept his voice so carefully neutral that Mutt had to put his sleeve up against his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He knew he’d just given the fox the keys to the henhouse. Dracula would be scrounging for himself, not just for the platoon, and he’d turn a handsome profit on some of the things he came up with. But he was smart enough to do that after the things that really needed doing. Or he’d better be smart enough, because if he wasn’t, Mutt would land on him like a ton of bricks.

From somewhere back not far from the shore of Lake Michigan, a mortar started lobbing bombs onto the Lizards over on Calumet Avenue. “Come on!” Mutt shouted, and ran forward toward a house that was more or less intact. The men he led came with him, rifles and submachine guns banging away as they sprinted from one piece of cover to the next.

More bombs fell, these just ahead of the advancing Americans, so close that a couple of fragments flew past Daniels with an ugly whistling noise. The mortars chewed up the landscape even worse than it was already. Mutt peered out from behind a corner of the house, fired a burst at what might have been a Lizard even if it probably wasn’t, and ran forward again to flop down behind a pile of bricks that once upon a time had been somebody’s chimney.

He rested there for a couple of minutes, breathing hard-hell, panting. War was a young man’s business, and he wasn’t a young man any more. As he tried to catch his breath, he wondered whether pushing the Lizards back across a couple of miles of landscape-turned-trash-dump was worth the blood it would cost.

He’d wondered the same thing Over There. Once you were in ’em, the stretches of shell-pocked German trenches you’d taken didn’t seem as if they could possibly make up for the guys who got shot while you were taking them. But you kept doing it, over and over and over, and eventually theBoches couldn’t stand the hammering any more and gave up.

Mutt had figured it was what Mr. Wilson called it: the war to end war. But then up popped Hitler and up popped the Japs, and you had to go off and do it all over again. And then along came the Lizards, and all of a sudden you weren’t fighting in some godforsaken place nobody’d ever heard of, you were fighting in Chicago, for God’s sake. Hell, Comiskey Park, or whatever was left of it, couldn’t have been more than a mile away.

Freight-train noises overhead said the Lizards were going after the mortar crews. Mutt didn’t wish those crews any harm, but he was just as glad to have the aliens’ artillery pounding at something in back of the line.

On his belly, he scrambled toward the hulk of a dead Model-A Ford that sat on four flat tires. Small-arms fire was picking up; the Lizards didn’t feel like leaving the neighborhood. He was almost to the car when he got shot.

He’d gone through months in France and more than a year in Illinois without a scratch. He hadn’t thought he was invulnerable; he knew better than that. But he hadn’t thought his number was up, either.

At first he felt just the impact, as if somebody had kicked him in the rear, hard. “Ahh, shit,” he said, as if an umpire had blown a close call at third base and wouldn’t change it back no matter how obviously wrong he was. He twisted around, trying to see the wound. Given where he’d been hit, it wasn’t easy, but the seat of his pants was filling up with blood.

“Jesus God,” he muttered. “Everybody goes and talks about gettin’ their ass shot off, but I went and did it.”

Then the wound started to hurt, as if he had a red-hot skewer stuck into his hindquarters. “Medic!” he bawled. He knew he sounded like a branded calf, but he couldn’t help it.

Dracula Szabo slithered over to him. When he saw where Mutt was hit, he started laughing. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said after a moment, and even halfway sounded as if he meant it. “I was just thinkin’, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna kiss it and make it better.”

“I ask for a medic an’ I go an’ get W. C. Fields,” Mutt said. “You got a field dressing on you?” At Szabo’s nod, he went on, “Stick it on there, will you?”

“Sure thing. Lift up a little, so I can get your pants down and get at where you’re hit.” When Mutt obeyed, Dracula bandaged him with cool competence that spoke of the practice he’d had at such things. His appraisal also told of that experience: “Doesn’t look too bad, sir. Not quite a crease, but it’s a through-and-through, and it’s just in the ham, not in the bone. You sit tight an’ wait for the medics to take you outta here. You’re gonna be okay, I think.”

“Sit tight?” Mutt rolled his eyes. “I ain’t goin’ anyplace real fast, not with that, but I don’t wanna sit on it, neither.”

“Yeah, well, I can see that,” Dracula answered. He swatted Mutt lightly on the shoulder. “You take care. Good luck to you.” Then he was gone, back to the fight. In the space of a moment, Daniels had gone from platoon leader-essentially, God’s right-hand man-to part of the detritus of war.

He sang out again: “Medic!” That ran the risk of drawing Lizards to him, but he was willing to take the chance. The Lizards were pretty decent about not butchering wounded men, probably better than either the Germans or the Americans had been in the last war.

“Where you hit, soldier?” The man with the Red Cross armband was black; at that moment, Mutt wouldn’t have cared if he’d been green.

“Right in the butt,” he answered.

“Okay.” The black man had a partner who was white. Mutt noticed that, but didn’t say anything about it, even when the Negro kept on being the spokesman: “We’ll get the stretcher over by you, and you slide onto it on your belly, right?”

“Right.” Mutt did as he was told. “Got me what the limeys used to call a Blighty wound: too bad to go on fightin’, but not bad enough to wreck me for good. They’d get shipped back to England and they were done with the war. Me-” He shook his head.

The Negro chuckled sympathetically. “Afraid you’re right about that, Lieutenant. They’ll fix you up and send you out again.” He turned to the white stretcher bearer. “Come on, Jimmy. Let’s get him back to the aid station.”

“Right, Doc.” Jimmy picked up his end of the stretcher.

“Doc?” Mutt said. He’d wondered why the colored guy had done all the talking. “You a doctor?” he asked. He’d learned not to tack “boy” onto that.

“That’s right.” The Negro didn’t look back at Daniels. For the first time, his voice got tight. “Does it bother you, Alabama? If I’m not lily-white enough to take care of you, I can leave you right here.” He sounded deadly serious.

“I’m from Mississippi,” Mutt said automatically. Then he thought about the rest of the question. “I been out of Mississippi a while, too. If you’re American enough to want to patch my ass, I reckon I’m American enough to say thank-you when you’re done.” He waited. He’d run into a few educated black men who were just as good at hating as any Ku-Kluxer.

Doc didn’t say anything for a couple of steps. Then he nodded. “Okay, Mississippi. That sounds fair.”

It damn well better,Daniels thought.You’re not gonna get anything more out of me. But he didn’t say so out loud. The colored doctor was doing his job, and seemed willing to meet him halfway. Given Mutt’s own present circumstances, that was about as much as he had any right to expect.

The aid station had a big Red Cross flag flying in front of it, and several more on the roof. It was a big, foursquare brick building not far from Lake Michigan. Doc said, “Hey, Mississippi, you know what this place was before the war?”

“No, but that don’t matter, on account of I got the feeling you’re just about to tell me,” Mutt answered.

“You’re right,” the Negro said. “You don’t let much bother you, do you? This was-still is, I guess-the Abraham Lincoln Center.”

“Just another damnyankee,” Daniels said, so deadpan that the colored doctor gave him a sharp look over his shoulder before chuckling ruefully. Mutt went on, “Doc, I’ve done two turns of soldiering now, and in between ’em I was a bush-league manager for about a hundred years. So a smartmouth, even a smartmouth doc, that don’t bother me much, no. Gettin’ shot in the ass, now,that bothers me.”

“I can see how that would mess up a man’s day,” Jimmy, the other stretcher bearer, put in.

Some dogfaces trudged past Mutt on their way up to the front. About half of them were grimy veterans like him, the rest fresh-faced kids. Some of the kids looked at the bloodstained bandage on his backside and gulped. That didn’t bother Mutt. He’d done the same thing the first time he saw wounded in France. War wasn’t pretty, and you couldn’t make it pretty.

What did bother him was that about one rifle-toting trooper in four was black. The Army was segregated, like any decent and proper outfit. Seeing white and colored soldiers together in the same outfit bothered Mutt as much as having white and colored ballplayers on the same team would have.

Doc didn’t look back, but he didn’t have to be a mind-reader to figure out what Daniels was thinking, either. He said, “When you’re fightin’ to stay free, sometimes you get freer.” Mutt just grunted.

Doc and Jimmy lugged him into the aid station. His nose wrinkled at the stink of wounds gone bad. “How messed up is this one?” somebody called from farther in.

“Not too,” Doc answered. “Needs a tetanus shot, if we have any antitoxin, and some stitching. Should be okay, though.”

“Yeah, there’s antitoxin,” the somebody-a worn, harassed somebody, by his voice-said. “It’s slow right now, so why don’t you sew him up quick before they bring in half a dozen bad ones all at the same time?”

“Right” Doc and Jimmy set Mutt down where he wouldn’t be in the way of other stretcher parties carrying in the wounded. Doc came back with a syringe, a glass jar partly filled with a clear, oily liquid, and a clean rag. He jabbed Mutt in the backside with the needle.

“Ow!” Mutt said. “Why didn’t you give me the ether first?”

“Mississippi, if you can grouse about a needle after you took a bullet in the cheek, I think you’re probably going to live,” the colored doctor told him. He opened the jar, soaked the rag, and held it to Daniels’ face. The stink of the ether made Mutt cough and choke. He tried to pull away, but the doctor’s hand at the back of his head wouldn’t let him. His vision got frayed and fuzzy and faded out like a movie.

When he woke up, his mouth was dry as a salt mine and tasted like a latrine. He hardly noticed; he had a headache worse than any he’d ever got from moonshine, and that was saying something. His backside felt as if an alligator had taken a good bite out of it, too.

“Doc?” Mutt’s voice was a hoarse croak.

“The doctors are busy,” an orderly said. “Can I get you some water?”

“Oh, Lord, I wish you would,” Mutt answered. The orderly sounded like some kind of pansy, but if he’d bring some water, Mutt didn’t care what he did in his spare time. He shook his head, which made it hurt worse. A nigger doctor and a pansy orderly, colored troops fighting side by side with white men… what the hell was the world coming to?

The orderly brought not only water but a couple of little white pills withBAYER on them. “I found some aspirin,” he said. “It may do your head a little good. You probably don’t feel real well right now.”

“Buddy, you ain’t kidding,” Mutt answered. His hand trembled when he held it out for the aspirin tablets. He grimaced in self-reproach. “You’d think I had the DTs or somethin’.”

“You’re still woozy from the anesthetic,” the orderly said. “That happens to everybody, not-” He shut up and held out the water to Daniels.

Not just to old geezers like you: Mutt could fill in the blanks for himself. He didn’t care; what with his head and his ventilated backside, he felt as elderly as he probably looked. He popped the aspirins into his mouth and washed them down with some water. It probably came straight out of Lake Michigan; Chicago didn’t have running water, or even guaranteed clean water, any more. But you had to go on drinking, even if you did get the runs now and again.

“Thank you, friend,” he said with a sigh. “That was mighty kind of you, even if I do wish it was a bottle of beer instead.”

“Oh, so do I!” the orderly exclaimed, which made Mutt blink; when he thought about queers-which he didn’t spend a lot of time doing?he pictured them sipping wine, not knocking back a beer. The fellow studied Mutt’s bandages, which made him shift nervously from side to side. Just because he had to lie on his stomach didn’t mean… Then the orderly said, “You’re probably one of the few people who’s glad-for a while, anyhow-the toilets don’t work. With that wound, squatting over a bucket will hurt you a lot less than sitting down would.”

“That’s true,” Daniels said. “Hadn’t much thought about it yet, but you’re right.” He was beginning to feel a little more like himself. Maybe the aspirin was starting to work, or maybe the ether cobwebs were going away.

“You have trouble or need help, you just sing out for me,” the orderly said. “My name is Archie. Don’t be shy, I don’t mind-it’s why I’m here.”

I bet you don’t mind.But Mutt kept his mouth shut again. Like the colored doctor, this guy was doing his job. He was entitled to enjoy it-if he did-so long as he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Mutt sighed. The world got crazier day by day, though he wished it hadn’t got crazy enough to shoot him in the ass. “Thanks, Archie. If I have to take you upon that, I will.”

Sweat ran down George Bagnall’s face. When summer finally got to Pskov, it didn’t fool about. The grass on the hills outside of town was turning yellow as the sun. The forests of pine and fir to the east and south, though, remained as dark and gloomy in summer as at any other time of year.

A lot of German troops in Pskov went around bare-chested to get a suntan. The Russians didn’t go in for that. The ones who weren’t in uniform and were lucky enough to have a change of clothes switched to lighter, baggier tunics and trousers. Bagnall’s RAF uniform wasn’t much more than tatters these days. He mostly wore Russian civilian clothes, with a Red Army officer’s cap to give him a semblance of authority.

As happened on account of that, somebody came up to him and asked him something in Russian. He got the gist-which way to the new stables? — and answered in his own halting Russian. “Ah!” the fellow said.“Nemets?”

“Nyet,”Bagnall answered firmly.“Anglichani.” You never could be sure how a Russian would react if he thought you were a Jerry-better to set him right straightaway.

“Ah,Anglichani. Khorosho,” the Russian said: Englishman-good. He rattled off something Bagnall thought was thanks for the directions and hurried off toward the street to which Bagnall had pointed.

Bagnall headed on toward the market square. As a fighting man, he got plenty of black bread, the cabbage soup calledshchi, and borscht, along with the occasional bit of hen or mutton or pork. The Russians ate and thrived, the Germans ate and didn’t complain-the winter before the Lizards came, they’d been eating horses that froze to death in the snow. Bagnall wanted something better, or at least different; he wanted to see if any of thebabushkas would part with some eggs.

The old and middle-aged women sat in rows behind rickety tables or blankets on which they’d laid out what they had for sale. With their solid, blocky figures and the outlines of their heads smoothed and rounded by the scarves they all wore, they reminded Bagnall of nothing so much as figures from those cleverly carved, multilayered sets of Russian wooden dolls. The immobile stolidity with which they sat only enhanced the illusion.

No one was displaying any eggs, but that didn’t necessarily signify. He’d found out good stuff often got held back, either for some special customer or just to keep it from being pilfered. He walked up to one of thebabushkas and said,“Dobry den.” The woman stared at him, expressionless.“Yaichnitsa?”

She didn’t bother returning his good-day. She didn’t even bother scowling at him; she just looked through him as if he didn’t exist. It was one of the most effortlessly annihilating glances he’d ever received. He felt himself wilting as she let him know she didn’t have any eggs, and that even if she had had some eggs, she wouldn’t have had any for a German.

Before the Lizards came, before the partisans emerged from the forest to reclaim a share of Pskov, she never would have dared to act so to a German, either. If she’d had eggs, she would either have turned them over or hidden them so well the Nazis would never had suspected they were there. As it was, he got the notion she was just taunting him.

“Nyet nemets,”he said, as he had before.“Anglichani.”

“Anglichani?”She gave forth with a spate of Russian, much too quick for him to follow in detail. What he did get, though, suggested that that made a difference. She plucked a few sorry-looking potatoes out of a bowl-you’d have to have been starving to want them. Underneath lay more equally unprepossessing spuds-and, nestled among them, several eggs.

“Skolko?”he asked. “How much?”

She wanted 500 rubles apiece, or 750 marks. German money had been falling against its Soviet equivalent ever since Bagnall arrived in Pskov. The Soviet Union and Germany were still going concerns, but the Lizards in Poland and to the south of Pskov screened the city away from much contact with other German forces. The Soviet presence, on the other hand, was growing. That might lead to trouble one day, as if the Reds and the Nazis didn’t already have enough trouble getting along.

“Bozhemoi!”Bagnall shouted, loud enough to draw glances frombabushkas several places away. He’d learned you’d best forget all you’d ever known of British reserve if you wanted to get anywhere dickering with Russians. If you stayed polite, they thought you were weak and they rode roughshod over you.

He knew he mixed his cases and numbers in a way that would have got him a caning in sixth-form Latin, but he didn’t care. This wasn’t school; this was the real world. However inelegant his Russian might have been, it worked, and he didn’t think thebabushka was any budding Pushkin, either. He ended up buying three eggs for seven hundred rubles, which wasn’t half bad.

“Nyet anglichani,”thebabushka said, pointing at him.“Zhid.”

Bagnall remembered an old, beautifully dressed Jewish man he’d seen walking slowly along a Paris street with a six-pointed yellow star with the wordJuif on it sewn to his jacket pocket. The expression of dignified misery that man had worn would go with him to his grave. But the sneer in thebabushka’s voice told him something of how others had thought it a good idea to make the old Jew wear a yellow star.

“Zhid?”Bagnall said quietly.“Spasebo. Thank you.” Thebabushka’s gray eyes went blank and empty as a couple of stones. Bagnall took the eggs and headed for the house he shared with Ken Embry and Jerome Jones. He hoped he wouldn’t run into Tatiana the sniper.

A buzz in the sky made him turn as he walked past a grassy park on whose greensward sheep grazed under the watchful eyes of Red Army andWehrmacht guards. After a moment, he spotted an approaching plane: not a Lizard fighter, lean and graceful as a shark and a millionfold more deadly, but a human-built machine that hardly looked as if it belonged in the same sky as Lizard aircraft or even those of the RAF.

It was, nonetheless, the first human-built airplane-and, not coincidentally, the first plane not loaded with ordnance intended to punch his ticket-he’d seen in a long time. That alone sent his spirits soaring. The Red Army guards raised a cheer when they spied the red stars painted on the wings and fuselage and tailplane.

The Russian aircraft was coming into Pskov at treetop height. At first Bagnall thought that was just because it skimmed the ground to give the Lizards a harder time spotting it. Then, as it lowered its flaps, he realized the pilot intended to bring it down right in the park.

“He’s out of his bloody mind,” Bagnall muttered. But the pilot wasn’t. The biplane wasn’t going very fast and wasn’t very heavy; it rolled to a stop with better than a hundred yards of meadow to spare. It even managed to avoid running over a sheep or butchering one with its prop as it taxied. Bagnall trotted toward it with the vague notion of congratulating whoever had done the flying.

First out of the aircraft was a tall, skinny fellow with a thick red beard. He wore a field-gray tunic, but Bagnall would have guessed him for a German even without it-his face was too long and beaky to belong to most Russians.

Sure enough, he started yelling in German: “Come on, you dumb-heads, let’s get this stinking airplane under cover before the Lizards spot it and blow it to hell and gone.”

The pilot stood up and shouted support for the Nazi. Bagnall didn’t follow all of it, but he knewmaskirovka meant camouflage. That wasn’t what made him stop and stare, though. He’d heard the Reds used female pilots, but he hadn’t more than half believed it till now.

Yet there she was. She took off her leather flying helmet, and hair the color of ripe wheat spilled down almost to her shoulders. Her face was wide and rather flat, her skin fair but tanned except around the eyes, where her goggles shielded it from the sun. The eyes themselves were intensely blue.

She saw him and the officer’s cap he was wearing, climbed down out of the biplane, and walked up to him. Saluting, she said, “Comrade, I am Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, reporting to Pskov as ordered with the German sergeant Georg Schultz, a tank gunner and highly capable mechanic.”

Fumblingly, Bagnall explained he wasn’t really a Red Army officer, and who he really was. Without much hope, he added,“Vuy gavoritye po-angliski?”

“No, I don’t speak English,” she replied in Russian, but then she did switch languages:“Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich kann Deutsch ein wenig sprechen.”

“I speak a little German also. Perhaps more than a little now,” he answered in the same tongue.

Hearing German, Georg Schultz came up and greeted Bagnall with a stiff-arm salute and a loud,“Heil Hitler.”

Bugger Hitler,was the first thought that came to Bagnall’s mind. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, he and Schultz-and, for that matter, Schultz and Ludmila Gorbunova-would have been at each other’s throats. The Germans made even more uncomfortable allies than the Russians.

Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova looked pained. “He is a dedicated fascist, as you hear. But he has also done very good work for the Red Air Force. With tools in his hand, he is a genius.”

Bagnall studied Schultz. “He must be,” he said slowly. If the Nazi hadn’t been bloody good, the Communists would have got rid of him on general principles. That they hadn’t was probably a measure of their own desperate situation.

Men came running up to drag the biplane as far in among the trees over to one side of the park as its wings would permit. Others draped it with camouflage netting. Before long, it had all but disappeared.

“Thatmay do,” Ludmila said, casting a critical eye its way. She turned back to George Bagnall. “I think I am glad to meet you. You English here in Pskov, you are-” She ran out of German, then tried a couple of Russian words Bagnall didn’t understand. Finally he got the idea she meant something likearbitrators.

“Yes, that is right,” Bagnall answered in German. “When theWehrmacht commander and the partisan brigadiers cannot agree, they bring their arguments for us to decide.”

“What if they don’t like what you decide?” Georg Schultz asked. “Why should they listen to a pack of damned Englishmen?” He stared at Bagnall with calculated insolence.

“Because they were killing each other here before they started listening to us,” Bagnall answered. Schultz looked like one very rugged customer, but Bagnall took a step toward him anyhow. If he wanted a scrap, he could have one. The flight engineer went on, “We do need to stick together against the Lizards, you know.”

“That is part of why the two of us were sent here,” Ludmila Gorbunova said. “We are German and Russian, but we have worked well with each other.”

Schultz leered at her. Bagnall wondered if she meant they were sleeping together. He hoped not. She wasn’t as pretty as Tatiana, but on three minutes’ acquaintance she seemed much nicer. Then she noticed Schultz’s slobbering stare, and answered it with one that would have made any longsuffering English barmaid proud.

It also made the world seem a much more cheerful place to George Bagnall “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you to theKrom, where both sides have their headquarters.” Ludmila Gorbunova smiled at him as she nodded. He felt like bursting into song.