Upsetting the Balance

7

“Do you know what one of the troubles with Big Uglies is?” Atvar said to his English-speaking interpreter as they waited for the emissary from the United States to be shown into the conference chamber.

“They have so many, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter answered. “Which in particular are you thinking of today?”

“They areuntidy creatures,” Atvar said with distaste. “Their clothes flap about them like loose skins, the tufts they grow on their heads either flap about, too, or else are held down with enough oil to lubricate a landcruiser engine, and they spew water from their hides instead of panting, as proper people should. They are disgusting.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter said gravely.

Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, came on one of the communications screens. “Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevite from the United States is here. I remind you, his name is Cordell Hull; his title is Secretary of State. Before we came, he was the chief aide in dealing with other Big Ugly empires for his not-empire’s leader.”

“Send him in,” Atvar said.

Cordell Hull looked uncomfortable in weightlessness, but made a good game show of pretending he wasn’t. Even for a Big Ugly, he was long, though not especially wide. The tuft of fuzz on top of his head was almost white. Atvar knew that meant he was aging. So did the wrinkles and sags in his integument. He was not attractive, but then, to Atvar’s eyes, no Big Ugly was.

After the polite greetings customary even between enemies, Atvar plunged straight in: “I demand from you the immediate return of the traitorous shiplord Straha, who fled to you in violation of all law.”

Cordell Hull spoke a single sharp word: “No.” The translator indicated that that was a negative; Atvar had suspected as much. Hull went on at some length afterwards: “The United States does not give back people who come to us seeking shelter. My land is made up of people who came seeking freedom. We welcomed them; we did not turn them away.”

“You welcomed criminals?” Atvar said, and then, in an aside to the interpreter. “It does not surprise me a bit, though you needn’t tell him that.”

“We did,” Hull answered defiantly. “Many things that were called crimes were really nothing more than disagreeing with the leaders of the lands they left.” His eyes, though sunk deep in his head like any Tosevite’s, bored into Atvar’s with disconcerting keenness.

The fleetlord said, “Do you not call stealing a shuttlecraft a crime? Straha is a robber as well as a traitor. Is your not-empire also in the habit of keeping stolen goods? We demand the shuttlecraft’s return, too.”

“Go ahead and demand,” Hull replied. “In war, if one side is generous enough to help the other, it doesn’t get its toys back.”

“In war, the side that is losing is usually wise enough to deal politely with the side that is winning,” Atvar said. “So the ancient records of the Race tell us, at any rate; the Race has never lost a war against another species.”

“If you think we’re losing, look at Chicago,” Hull said. In his own way, he was as exasperating an opponent as the SSSR’s Molotov. The latter Big Ugly was as inflexible as a poorly programmed machine, mechanically rejecting everything Atvar said. Hull instead tried to twist things.

Atvar said, “Look at Chicago yourself. Our forces continue to advance through the city. The large factories you defended for so long are now practically cleared of Tosevites, and soon our victorious males will reach the shore of the lake by which the city lies.”

“Bully for them,” Hull answered, which caused the interpreter considerable confusion. After the misunderstanding was straightened out, the U.S. Secretary of State said, “Some of your victorious males may make it to Lake Michigan, but how many of ’em won’t? How many of ’em are dead and stinking in the streets of Chicago?”

“Far fewer than the males you throw away like wastepaper in a futile effort to halt us,” Atvar snapped. He didn’t like being reminded of the casualties the conquest of Chicago was costing the Race.

Cordell Hull’s face twisted into one of the leers the Big Uglies used to show emotion. (“This is an expression of amusement and irony,” the interpreter told Atvar in a brief aside.) He said, “We have more men to spend than you do, and more of everything else, too. Before long, you’re going to have to start robbing Peter to pay Paul if you want reinforcements.”

The interpreter needed to go back and forth with Hull a few times, but when he finally made sense of that, it made sense to Atvar, too. Worst of it was that the Tosevite was right. Every time fresh males went into Chicago, an offensive somewhere else on Tosev 3 necessarily suffered, either that or a garrison in a “safely conquered” region was reduced, whereupon, more often than not, the region was found not to be so safely conquered after all.

Trying to match Hull’s irony, the fleetlord said, “What would you have us do, then, Exalted Tosevite?”

“Who, me? I’m just a jumped-up Tennessee lawyer,” Hull replied, which occasioned still more translation difficulties. Once they were resolved, Hull went on, “We don’t hold with fancy titles in the United States-never have, never will. We figure part of being free is getting away from all that nonsense.”

Atvar stared at him in honest bewilderment. Every society built by every intelligent race was hierarchical-how could it be otherwise? Why pretend such a manifest and obvious truth did not exist?

He had no time to ponder that; Hull was still talking: “If you really want to know what I want you to do, what the people of the United States want you to do, what the people of the world want you to do, it’s not what anybody would call complicated: quit killing people and go back to your own planet.”

The fleetlord tried to imagine his reception if he returned to Home with a beaten army in cold sleep, bearing word that the species that had defeated him was now seeking to develop space travel on its own and would in a short time (as the Race reckoned such things) be heading out toward the Empire. “It cannot be,” he answered quickly.

“Well, I allow I reckoned you’d say as much,” Cordell Hull told him. “Next best would be for you to stay here-we’d set aside land somewhere for you, maybe-and make peace with us.”

“You Tosevites are not in any position to grant us terms,” Atvar said angrily. “We are in the process of conquering you, of bringing you into the Empire, and we shall continue until victory is won, in Chicago and everywhere else.”

“If you’re going to take that attitude, why did you bring me up here to this spaceship in the first place?” Hull asked. “Flying up here was a big jolt for an old man like me.”

“You were summoned to hear our demand for the return of the traitor Straha, which you have insolently refused, and to bring a warning back to your emperor,” Atvar said.

“We don’t have an emperor, or want one, either,” Hull said.

“Your leader, then-whatever you call him.” Atvar hissed in exasperation. “The warning is simple: if you seek to produce nuclear weapons, you will be utterly destroyed.”

Hull studied him for a while before answering. Every so often, despite their weird features, the Tosevites could look disconcertingly keen. This was one of those times. Being divided up into tens or hundreds of ephemeral little squabbling empires, each always trying to outdo or outcheat its neighbors, had given them a political sophistication-or perhaps just a talent for chicanery-the Race, despite its long history, had trouble matching.

Slowly, Hull said, “You intend to conquer us whether we make these weapons or not. Why should we give up the best chance not just to hurt you but to beat you? What’s the percentage in it for us?”

“We shall conquer you with or without your nuclear weapons,” Atvar answered. “More of your not-empire, more of your people, will survive if you do not force us to extremes.”

Cordell Hull made a strange noise, half gasping, half barking. “This is what the Big Uglies use for laughter,” the interpreter said.

“Yes, I know that,” Atvar answered impatiently. “What did I say that was so amusing?”

When the U.S. Secretary of State spoke again, he made a grim kind of sense: “Why should we care? In your scheme of things, we’re all going to be your slaves forever anyhow. To keep that from happening, we’ll do anything-anything,I tell you. Men are meant to live free. When you came here, we were fighting among ourselves to make that happen. We’ll fight you, too.”

Now Atvar was the one who hesitated. The Big Uglies constantly prated of freedom. The best analysts of the Race kept trying to understand, and kept having trouble. Atvar didn’t find the concept attractive; what the Tosevites meant by it seemed to him nothing more than anarchy.

“Do you not care what happens to the males and females under your rule?” he asked. To any civilized male, the Race came first. Any individual’s fate paled in importance beside the welfare of the group.

If the Tosevites thought like that, they did a good job of hiding it. Cordell Hull said, “If the United States isn’t free, if her people aren’t free, there’s no point to the whole business. Time you figured that out. You get your soldiers and your bases out of our country, maybe we have something to talk about. Until then, forget it.”

Molotov had made the same demand, although he’d couched it in terms of-what had he called it? — the ineluctable historical dialectic, a notion that gave analysts even more trouble than did the mysterious and quite possibly unreal thing called freedom. The Big Uglies had a gift for dreaming up concepts unsupported by evidence.

Atvar said, “If you cannot make us do something, you are in a poor position to tell us we must do it as a price for beginning talks.”

“The same applies to you,” Hull retorted. “You can’t make us quit trying to beat you by any way that comes to hand, so you’d just as well give up on that. Maybe after we’ve battered you some more, you’ll be more willing to talk sense.”

The fleetlord’s breath hissed out in a long sigh. “You will regret your obstinacy.” He turned to one of the males who had brought Hull to the conference chamber. “We are finished here. Take him back to the shuttle; let him convey to his emperor-his not-emperor, I should say-the substance of our discussion.” When the Tosevite was gone, Atvar sighed again. “They refuse to see reason. The more readily they yield and accept the Emperor’s supremacy, the higher their place within the Empire will be. If we cannot trust them, if they are always rising in futile revolt-”

Before he could finish the thought, Pshing’s face appeared on the screen once more. “Exalted Fleetlord, urgent new reports from Britain.”

By his adjutant’s tone, the new reports weren’t good ones. Urgent news from the surface of Tosev 3 was seldom good. “Give them to me,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done. As threatened, the British have turned loose their new weapon or weapons against us. Chemicals?of what sort we are still investigating-are being delivered by artillery and aerosol to poison our males. Casualties have occurred as a result of this. These poisonous gases have also adversely affected morale; when the Big Uglies employ them, they are sometimes able to achieve local successes in their wake. Commanders in Britain urgently request countermeasures.”

Atvar stared at Pshing, who looked back at him as if expecting him to produce countermeasures from a pouch on his belt. “Refer all this to our scientific teams, with a highest priority tag,” the fleetlord answered. Then he asked, “Are the Tosevites indiscriminately poisoning their own fighting males in an effort to harm us?”

One of Pshing’s eye turrets swiveled down toward his desktop to study a report there. “Exalted Fleetlord, this does not appear to be the case. They wear masks which give them at least some protection against their own chemical agents. Some of these have been captured. We are endeavoring to modify them to serve our own needs, and doing the same with our antiradiation masks. Unfortunately, we have very limited quantities of the latter.”

“Good that you thought of it, though,” Atvar said. For a moment there, he’d wondered if he was the only male in the entire Race left with a working brain. Then he realized that now, instead of worrying about whether the Big Uglies were able to match the technical developments of the Race, he was worrying about whether the Race could duplicate something the Big Uglies had invented.

It was a very unpleasant way to come full circle.

When the Lizards first came to Earth, Moishe Russie had been starving in the Warsaw ghetto, praying for a sign from God that He would not abandon His people. Russie had taken the nuclear bomb they’d exploded high above Central Europe as a sign his prayer was being answered, though he’d learned later that the Lizards had hoped to use the blast to scramble communications and disrupt electronics generally. For reasons he didn’t altogether understand, it hadn’t worked out as they’d expected.

That wasn’t the point, though. When the light in the sky answered his prayer, people in the ghetto had started calling himReb Moishe, and some of them had even looked on him as a prophet. He hadn’t believed that himself, not really, but sometimes you wondered.

Now, crouched down in a rubble-strewn St. Albans street between a theater left over from the days of ancient Rome and the even more battered ruins of what had been some wealthy noble’s mansion a couple of hundred years before, he wondered again. As he’d predicted to Nathan Jacobi, here he was in British service, wearing a Red Cross armband.

“I didn’t think about the gas mask, though,” he said. The mask distorted his voice and made him sound like something from another planet, although not, thank God, a Lizard. With its long snout and the tube running down to the chemical canister that purified the air, the mask made him look inhuman, too: rather like a kangaroo with an elephant’s trunk.

Not only did it change the way he looked, it changed the way he saw. Peering out at the world through a pair of portholes that got dirty whenever they felt like it and stayed more or less permanently steamed up made him appreciate what a marvel normal vision was.

Somewhere north of St. Albans, the Lizards were licking their wounds. They’d been in the city itself till a barrage of mustard gas and phosgene, followed by a desperate infantry attack, drove them out again. Now St. Albans was in British hands once more. Moishe wondered when the Lizards would start using poison gas of their own. It probably wouldn’t be long. He also wondered if anyone on either side would be alive when the war was over.

Down in the Roman theater, someone called out “Help!” in a drowned, choking voice. The cry wasn’t Yiddish or Polish; Moishe had to translate it into a language he habitually used. Then he realized it wasn’t English, either. That was a hurt Lizard down there.

He hesitated no more than a heartbeat before he scrambled down into the remains of the theater. He wondered for a moment what sort of plays the ancient inhabitants of St. Albans (which surely hadn’t been the Roman name for the place) had watched there. The theater was shaped like a capital C, with a colonnade-one column still miraculously standing-behind the rectangular stage that occupied what would have been the open space keeping the C from becoming an O. Curved banks of earth formed the letter itself, and showed where the seats had been.

The Lizard lay in the flat, open area in the center of the theater. Would that have been called the orchestra? Moishe knew only slightly more of the classical theater than he did of the fine points of Chinese calligraphy.

That also held true, he realized, for what he knew about how to treat injured Lizards-not that any human being was likely to be expert in that field. “I’ll do what I can,” he muttered inside the mask. He’d dealt with the Lizards long enough in Warsaw to come to see them as people, too. And Lizard prisoners were valuable. He hadn’t had much in the way of a briefing before they sent him out to do his best for King and Country (not his king or his country, but that was irrelevant now), but they’d made that crystal clear.

Then he got a clearer look through his dirty, steamy windows on the world and realized this Lizard wasn’t going to live long enough to be worth anything as a captive. Its body was covered with blisters, some of them bigger than Moishe’s fist. The blisters destroyed the patterns of its body paint. They seemed to cluster under its arms and at the join of its legs, although it also had one that swallowed up an eye turret. From the bubbling way it breathed, Russie was sure the mustard gas was wrecking its lungs as well.

The Lizard could still see out of the eye the gas had not destroyed. “Help me,” it gasped, not caring in the least that he was a despised Tosevite. “Hurts.” It added the emphatic cough, then kept on coughing and couldn’t stop. Bloody bubbles came out of its mouth and nostrils.

“Help how?” Russie asked with an interrogative cough. “Not know.” Seeing what the gas had done left him sick to his stomach, although being sick inside a gas mask was anything but a good idea.

“I don’t know how,” the Lizard answered, more fluent now that Russie had spoken to it in its own language. “You Big Uglies made this horrible stuff. You must have the antidote for it.”

“No antidote,” Moishe answered. There was an ointment that was supposed to do some good on mustard gas burns and blisters, but he had none and, in any case, word was the stuff didn’t really help.

“Then kill me,” the Lizard said. “Kill me, I beg.” Another emphatic cough turned into another paroxysm that tore the Lizard to pieces from the inside out.

Moishe stared at it in dismay. Everything he’d learned in medical school, everything trained into him as a Jew, made him want to cry “No!” and to flee from the abominable act he’d been asked to perform. One of the things they had warned him about in medical school was that you didn’t learn everything you needed to become a doctor there. He’d seen that in Warsaw from 1939 on; now he saw it again, even more starkly.

“I beg,” the Lizard said.

He looked around. The Lizard must not have been gassed here, for he didn’t see its rifle. He had no weapons himself; medical personnel were supposed to be noncombatants. What was he supposed to do, bash in its head with a rock? He didn’t think he could, no matter how much the Lizard wanted him-neededhim-to do just that.

While he stood there in his own mental torment, yet another coughing fit wracked the Lizard. The coughs subsided to gasps; the gasps stopped. “Oh, thank God!” Moishe exclaimed. Sometimes even death could be a blessing-and he hadn’t had to inflict it.

Since Lizards didn’t wear clothes, they carried what they needed in a pack on their back and in belt pouches. Russie peeled off the pack and undid the pouches. Then, because sitting out in the middle of the orchestra made him feel naked and exposed to artillery and whatever live Lizards might still be in the neighborhood, he took the chattels first up onto the stage, where he could shelter behind the one intact column and the stubs of the others, and then down into a shell hole behind it. He didn’t think he could find better cover than that.

He opened the pack first. In it were several full magazines for the automatic rifles the Lizards used. Those would be useful; a few Englishmen carried captured Lizard weapons, and they were always crying for ammunition.

He also found half a dozen little bricks of what the Lizards reckoned field rations, each one wrapped in stuff that reminded him of cellophane but was thicker, more pliable, and less shiny. Lizard prisoners were welcome to the rations, which struck him as distinctly unappetizing. He wondered more about their wrapping: what it was and how they made it. It wasn’t really like anything mankind turned out.

Something else spilled out of the pack, a case about the size of a ration brick. “Better and better,” Moishe said to no one in particular. The case was a wireless set, though how the Lizards managed to build such a tiny wireless was beyond him-and beyond the best human scientists and engineers in the world, too.

In the same way that the ration wrappers reminded him of cellophane, the material from which the case was made put him in mind of Bakelite. But it wasn’t Bakelite; it was another one of the types of stuff the Lizards could manufacture and people couldn’t.

Along with such practical things as food, ammunition, and communications gear, the Lizard also carried in its pack a whole sheaf of papers, more than Russie would have expected to find on any ten human casualties. One of the papers was a map; Moishe recognized the street grid of St. Albans down in one corner.

The map had notations in the squiggly Lizard script. Moishe did his best to puzzle them out. Back in Warsaw, he’d learned the characters the Lizards used for their written language. It hadn’t taken him long: he already dealt with two versions of one alphabet for Yiddish and Hebrew and two versions of another for Polish and German. The trouble was that, while he could read the words, he mostly didn’t know what they meant. He hadn’t had time to build up anything but the most basic vocabulary.

“Too bad,” he said, and tucked the papers into his medical bag. Somebody would understand what they meant. One thing that had impressed him about the English was the amount of scholarly talent they could bring to bear on almost anything.

He fumbled at one of the belt pouches before he finally got it open: the closure would have been much easier to work if he’d had claws on his fingertips rather than nails. A card a little bigger than a standard business card spilled out onto the ground.

When he picked it up and turned it over, he found himself staring into one of the Lizards’ three-dimensional pictures. It showed the male who had just died in the Roman theater. Letter by letter, he sounded out the Lizard’s name: “Ekretkan.”

He wondered what sort of person Ekretkan had been, how he’d lived before he came to Earth, what he’d thought of the Race’s war before he became one of its victims. The card offered no clue to that. Next to Ekretkan’s photo was a complicated network of golds and greens that reminded Russie of the body paint pattern the Lizard had worn. He supposed it showed the dead male’s rank, seniority, and specialization, but had no idea how to read it.

The card went into his bag with the papers. Moishe went through the rest of the pouches, looking for more clues to Ekretkan the individual, as opposed to Ekretkan the soldier. Even Nazis had parents, wives, children, dogs, and often carried pictures of them. Not Ekretkan. He had a couple of pictures Moishe thought were of himself, one with him astride a contraption that looked like a four-wheeled motorcycle, another with him wearing a somewhat simpler version of the body paint in which he’d died.

Ekretkan also had a couple of photos of a flat, empty of other Lizards but filled with gadgets that did things incomprehensible to Russie.Home sweet home, he thought. And the Lizard carried a photo of a street scene that looked like the New York Moishe had seen in the cinema, only more so: tall, thrusting buildings of steel and glass, streets crowded with vehicles, sidewalks full of Lizards who looked as if they were in a hurry.His home town? Russie wondered.

He set the meager handful of photographs on the ground in a row and stared at them, trying to draw meaning from them. If Ekretkan was a typical male, what did that say about how the Race lived? Could a male’s life be as barren as the pictures made it look? Most of the males Moishe had known in Warsaw had seemed happy enough, and no crazier than human beings filling similar social roles.

“And so?” he muttered. The Race had mating seasons, not families; he’d learned that back in Warsaw, too. The Lizards thought human mating customs just as strange and revolting as most humans found theirs. Russie examined the pictures again, searching for clues like a Talmudic scholar contemplating a difficult text.

The most important difference he saw between Lizards and people was that Lizards didn’t have families. That meant-what? That they were alone a lot, especially when they weren’t working. They probably liked it that way, too. Ekretkan’s pictures showed either himself or his empty flat, which argued in favor of Moishe’s line of reasoning.

What about the street scene, then? Moishe picked that one up, set it aside from the others, and thought about families some more. No Lizard families. That didn’t mean lonely Lizards, even if the Lizards were often alone. But it did mean the family wouldn’t get in the way of whatever loyalty the Lizards gave to any entity bigger than the individual.

He nodded, pleased with himself. That fit. He didn’t know whether it was true, but it fit. All the loyalty each Lizard didn’t reserve for himself went straight to the Race. Moishe had seen that; the Race and the Emperor were as important to each male, if in a less vicious way, as theVolk and theFuhrer were to a Nazi.

Moishe gathered up the pictures and put them in his black bag along with the rest of the luckless Ekretkan’s effects. He got out of the shell hole and headed back toward regimental headquarters. Other people needed to evaluate what he’d found.

He wondered how his conclusions would stack up against those of a real Lizard expert.

“You know, Sergeant,” Ben Berkowitz said, clasping his hand behind his head and leaning back in his chair, “the Lizards are plenty to drive a psychiatristmeshuggeh. I ought to know; I am one.” He paused. “You know whatmeshuggeh means? No offense, but you don’t sound like you’re from New York.”

Sam Yeager chuckled. “I better not-I’m from Nebraska. But yeah-uh, yes, sir-I know what it means. Something like crazy, right? I’ve played ball with a few Jewish guys; it’s one of the things they’d say. But why do the Lizards drive you nuts? Except because they’re Lizards, I mean.”

“How much do you know about psychiatry?” Berkowitz asked.

“Not much,” Yeager admitted.Astounding had run some great articles about the physical sciences, and even about weird things like linguistics for time travelers, but zilch about psychiatry.

“Okay,” Berkowitz said equably. “One of the basic principles of Freudian analysis is that a big part of why people do what they do comes from their sex drive and the conflicts that revolve around it.”

“No offense, sir, but it doesn’t seem to me like you have to be a psychiatrist to figure that one out.” Yeager chuckled in fond reminiscence. “I think about some of the crazy things I used to do to get myself laid-”

“Yeah, me, too, except I’m still doing ’em.” Berkowitz’s hand was bare of wedding ring. That didn’t have to signify, not with a man, but evidently it did. “But like you say, if it was that simple, anybody could see it. It’s not. Freud relates sex to all sorts of things that don’t look like they have anything to do with it at first glance: the competitive drive, the urge to create, the way you relate to people the same sex as you.” He hastily held up that ringless hand. “Don’t get me wrong-I don’t mean you in particular and I’m not calling you queer.”

“It’s okay, Captain. I worked that out,” Sam said. Even if he was a shrink, Ben Berkowitz was a regular guy, too. Yeager hadn’t got to the point of realizing it might be important for a psychiatrist to be able to make like a regular guy to help him do the rest of his job better.

“You with me so far?” Berkowitz asked.

“I guess so,” Yeager said cautiously. “I never really thought about sex tying in to all that other stuff, but maybe it does.”

“You’ll go with it for the sake of argument, you mean.”

“I guess so,” Sam repeated.

Berkowitz laughed at him. He was engagingly ugly; when he grinned, he looked about eighteen, like one of the bright-or sometimes smartass-kids who filled the letter column inAstounding. He said, “Careful son of a gun, aren’t you? Remind me not to play poker with you. Well, for the sake of argument, let’s say we can get all sorts of useful insights into the way the human mind works when we use Freudian analysis. It would be nice if we could do the same thing with the Lizards.”

“So why can’t you?” Yeager asked. Then a lightbulb went on in his head. “Oh. They’ve got a waddayacallit-a mating season.”

“Right the first time.” Ben Berkowitz grinned again. “You may look like a farm boy, Yeager, but you’re pretty damn sharp, you know that?”

“Thank you, sir.” Sam didn’t think of himself as pretty damn sharp. Barbara, for instance, could run rings around him. But she didn’t seem bored with him, either, so maybe he wasn’t quite the near-hick he’d often felt hanging around with fast-talking big-city ballplayers.

“ ‘Thank you, sir.’ ” Just like some of those fast-talking city guys, Berkowitz had a flare for mimicry. Unlike a lot of them, he didn’t spike it with malice. He said, “Believe me, Sergeant, if you were a dimbulb, you wouldn’t be in Hot Springs. This and the project you came from are probably the two most important places in the United States-and you’ve had your hand in both of them. Damn few people can say as much.”

“I never thought of it like that,” Yeager said. When he did, he saw he had something to be proud of.

“Well, you should have,” Berkowitz told him. “But back to business, okay? Like you said, the Lizards have a mating season. When their females smell right, they screw themselves silly. When they don’t-” He snapped his fingers. “Everything shuts off, just like that. It’s like they’re sexually neutral beings ninety percent of the time-all the time, if no lady Lizards are around.”

“They think what we do is funny as hell,” Yeager said.

“Don’t they just,” Berkowitz agreed. “Straha tells me they have a whole big research program going, just trying to figure out what makes us tick, and they haven’t come close yet. We’re in the same boat with them, except we’re just starting out, and they’ve been doing it ever since they got here.”

“That’s ’cause they’re winning the war,” Sam said. “When you’re ahead, you can afford to monkey around with stuff that isn’t really connected to the fighting. When you’re losing like we are, you have enough other problems closer to home, so you can’t worry about stuff out on the edge.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Berkowitz said. The colloquialism dropped from his lips without sounding put-on, though Sam was sure he knew his whos and whoms as well as Barbara did. Not sounding put-on was also part of his job. He went on, “So how do we figure out what makes a Lizard tick, way down deep inside? It isn’t sex, and that makes them different from us at a level we have trouble even thinking about.”

“Ristin and Ullhass say the other two kinds of bug-eyed monsters the Lizards have conquered work the same way they do,” Yeager said.

“The Hallessi and the Rabotevs. Yes, I’ve heard that, too.” Berkowitz leaned back in his chair. Sweat darkened the khaki of his uniform shirt under the arms. Sam felt his own shirt sticking to him all down the back, and he wasn’t doing anything but sitting still. If, say, you wanted to go out and play ball… He recalled wringing out his flannels after games down here. You thought you remembered what this kind of weather was like, but when you found yourself stuck in it week in and week out, you learned your memory-maybe mercifully-had blocked the worst of it.

He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. Since one was about as wet as the other, that didn’t help much. “Hot,” he said inadequately.

“Sure is,” Berkowitz said. “I wonder about the Rabotevs and the Hallessi, I really do. I wish we could do something for them; the Lizards have held them down for thousands of years.”

“From what I’ve heard, they’re supposed to be as loyal to the Emperor as the Lizards are themselves,” Yeager answered. “They’re honorary Lizards, pretty much. I guess that’s what the Lizards had in mind for us, too.”

“I think you’re right,” Berkowitz said, nodding. “You want to hear something funny, something I got out of Straha?” He waited for Sam to nod back, then went on, “About eight hundred years ago, the Lizards sent some kind of a probe to Earth. It beamed a whole bunch of pictures and I don’t know what else back to the planet the Lizards call Home… and they figured we’d be a piece of cake, because we couldn’t possibly have changed much in that short a time.”

Sam thought that one over for a few seconds. Then his eye caught Berkowitz’s. They both started to laugh. Yeager said, “You mean they thought they’d be fighting King Arthur and Richard the Lion-Hearted and, and…?” He gave up; those were the only two medieval names he could come up with.

“That’s just what they thought,” Berkowitz agreed. “They expected to run tanks and fighter planes up against knights on horseback. The conquest would have taken maybe twenty minutes, and the only way a Lizard would have gotten hurt was if he fell down and stubbed his toe.”

“We gave ’em a little surprise, didn’t we?” Sam said. “A lot’s happened since”-he paused to subtract in his head-“1142 or so.”

“Uh-huh. Good thing for us it has, too. But you know, here’s the strange part: if they’d sent the probe in 342 and come in 1142, things wouldn’t have changed that much-they’d still have had a walkover. Or if they’d sent it in”-now Berkowitz paused for subtraction-“458 B.C. and come in A.D. 342, it would have been the same story. So they might have been right when they figured things wouldn’t change much, and they could take their own sweet time getting ready to squash us flat.”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Yeager admitted. He didn’t care to think about it like that, either. Something else occurred to him. “They sure came loaded for bear if they expected to be taking on knights in shining armor.”

“Didn’t they just?” Berkowitz ruefully shook his head. “I asked Straha about that. He kind of reared back, the way they do when they think you’re being stupid, you know what I mean? Then he said, ‘You do not go to a war without enough tools to win it. This is what we thought we had.’ ”

“He may still be right,” Sam said.

“So he may.” Berkowitz looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to run and interview a Lizard tank officer about armor-piercing shells. I enjoy chewing the fat with you, Sergeant-you’ve got the right kind of mind to deal with the Lizards. People who start out too sure of themselves end up, you should pardon the expression, nuts.”

Laughing, Yeager went up to the fourth floor. He found Ullhass and Ristin in a state of high excitement. “Look, Exalted Sergeant Sam,” Ristin said, holding up a set of what looked like bottles of nail polish. “The grand and magnificent shiplord Straha brought with him a great store of body paints. He will share them with us. Now we no longer need be naked.”

“That’s nice,” Sam agreed equably. “Does each of you paint himself, or do you paint each other?”

“We paint each other.” Ullhass let out a mournful, hissing sigh. “But we really should not paint our old rank patterns on our bodies. We hold those ranks no longer. We are only prisoners.”

“Then paint yourselves to show that,” Yeager said.

“There are markings to show one is a prisoner,” Ristin said, “but a prisoner who has done something wrong and is being punished. We did nothing wrong; you Big Uglies captured us and made us prisoners. We have no markings for that.”

Probably didn’t think it would ever happen when you set out from Home,Yeager thought. He said, “If you don’t have those markings, why not invent some?”

Ristin and Ullhass looked at each other. Obviously, that idea hadn’t occurred to them, and wouldn’t have, either. “Such markings would not be official,” Ullhass said, as if that doomed the notion in and of itself.

But Sam said, “Sure they would. They’d be official U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks. If you’re our prisoners, you should use our marks, right?”

The two Lizards looked at each other again. They took suggestions from superior authority very seriously indeed. “What are these U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks?” Ristin asked.

Yeager was about to tell him to make up his own when he had a better idea-much more than most people, Lizards liked doing as they were told. He said, “You should paint yourselves with red and white stripes and blue stars. That way you’ll look like you’re wearing American flags.”

Ristin and Ullhass talked back and forth in their own language. Sam was getting fluent enough now to follow them pretty well. He hid a smile as he listened to their enthusiasm grow. Before long, Ristin said, “It shall be done.”

When they were through, Yeager thought they looked gaudy as all get out, but nobody’d hired him for base art critic, so he kept his big mouth shut. Ullhass and Ristin were delighted, which was the point of the exercise. In the next few days, several other formerly paintless Lizards started sporting stars and stripes. Sam’s highly unofficial suggestion looked as if it might turn official after all.

Then one day, as Sam was coming out of the room he shared with Barbara, a peremptory hiss stopped him in his tracks. “You are the Tosevite who devised these-these unpleasant prisoner color combinations?” Straha demanded.

“That’s right, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “Is something wrong with them?”

“Yes, something is wrong.” Straha used an emphatic cough to show how wrong the something was. Past that, he looked angry enough to be twitching; he reminded Yeager of nothing so much as a tent-show revival preacher testifying against the evils of demon rum and loose women. “This you have done with the paint, this is wrong. This is a mark the Race does not use. It must be cleansed at once from the scales of the males. It is an-” Yeager hadn’t heard the next word before, but if it didn’t mean something likeabomination, he’d eat his hat.

“Why is that, Shiplord?” he asked, as innocently as he could.

“Because it destroys all order and discipline,” Straha replied, as if to an idiot child. “Body paint shows rank and assignment and seniority; it is not to be used for frivolous purposes of decoration.”

“Shiplord, it does show assignment: it shows that the males who wear it are prisoners of the United States,” Sam said. “If you want it to show seniority, too, the males who have been prisoners longer can wear more stars than the others. Would that be all right?”

He tried to sound quiet and reasonable. All the same, he expected Straha to blow up like a pressure cooker with its safety valve stuck. But the shiplord surprised him: “The trouble with dealing with Tosevites is that one forgets how perspective shifts. Do you understand this?”

“I don’t think I do, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “I’m sorry.”

Straha made an exasperated noise, rather like a water heater with a slow leak. “I explain further, then. With the Race, all is as it has been. We do not casually invent body paint designs. They all fit into a system we have been refining for more than a hundred thousand years.” Yeager knew enough to divide that by two to convert it into Earthly years, but it was still a hell of a long time. Straha went on, “You Big Uglies, though, you just casually invent. You care nothing for large-scale system; all that matters to you is short-term results.”

“We’re at war, Shiplord. We were at war before the Race got here,” Yeager said. “Whatever it takes to win, we’ll do. We change all the time.”

“This we have noticed, to our sorrow,” Straha said. “The weapons with which you fight us now are better than the ones you used when we first came. Ours are still the same. This is what I meant about looking at you from a different perspective. If something suits you for the moment, you will seize upon it, not caring a bit how it accords with what you formerly did. You invent a body-paint pattern on the spur of the moment.” The shiplord hissed again. “I suppose I should be used to that sort of thing, but every now and again it still shocks me. This was one of those times.”

Yeager thought of all the pulp science-fiction stories he’d read where an inventor had an idea one day, built it the next, and mass-produced it the day after that, generally just in time to save the world from the Martians. He’d always taken those with a grain of salt about the size of the Great Salt Flats outside Salt Lake City. Real life didn’t work that way.

To the Lizards, though, Earth must have seemed the embodiment of pulp science fiction run amok. In not a whole lot more than a year, human beings had rolled out long-range rockets, bazookas, and jet planes, to say nothing of the atomic bomb. That didn’t count improvements to already existing items like tanks, either. And by all accounts, poison gas, which dated back to World War I, was new and nasty to the Lizards.

“So you’ll forgive the other prisoners here for using American-style body paint, then?” Sam asked.

“I am not a prisoner; I am a refugee,” Straha said with dignity. “But yes, I forgive it. I was hasty when I condemned it out of hand, but haste, for the Race, is to be actively discouraged. The captive males may wear any sort of marking Tosevite authorities suggest.”

“Thank you, Shiplord,” Yeager said. As Lizards went, Straha seemed like a pretty adaptable guy. If you actively discouraged haste, though, you didn’t make life any easier for yourself, not on Earth, you didn’t.

Teerts sometimes felt guilty about what happened to Tokyo. Millions of intelligent beings dead, and all because he’d warned of what the Nipponese Tosevites were attempting.

The guilt never lasted long, though. For one thing, the Big Uglies would have blown up a similar number of males of the Race without a qualm. For another, the way the Nipponese had treated him deserved revenge.

He wasn’t flying in the eastern region of the main continental mass any more. His commanders realized his life would end quickly-or perhaps slowly-if the Nipponese captured him again. Now he undertook missions for the Race from an airfield almost halfway round Tosev 3 from Nippon. France, the local Big Uglies called the place.

“These are the toughest Big Uglies you’ll face in the air,” Elifrim, the base commander, told him. “Our friends across the ocean who fight the Americans might argue, but take no notice of them. The Deutsche fly jets more dangerous than any others the Tosevites use, and the British had airborne radar before we invaded their island.”

“I don’t mind facing them in the air, superior sir,” Teerts answered. “I can shoot back at them now.” He remembered too well lying in Tosevite hands, unable to strike his Nipponese captors. He’d never known or imagined such loneliness, such helplessness.

“Shoot first,” Elifrim urged. “That’s what I mean: you could take your time with the Big Uglies before, but not so much now. The other thing is, you’ll want to use your cannon more and your missiles less.”

“Why, superior sir?” Teerts asked. “I can kill with my missiles from much greater range. If the Big Uglies’ weapons systems are better than they were before the Nipponese captured me, I ought to be more cautious about closing with them, not more eager to do it.”

“Under normal circumstances, you would be right,” the base commander answered. “When it comes to Tosev 3, though, precious little is normal, as you’ll have discovered for yourself. The problem, Flight Leader, is that stocks of air-to-air missiles are dwindling planetwide, and we haven’t found a way to manufacture more. We have plenty of shells for the cannons, though, from our own factory ships and from Tosevite plants here in France and in Italia and the U.S.A. That’s why we prefer you to use the guns.”

“I-see,” Teerts said slowly. “How good is this Tosevite ammunition we’re using? I hate trusting my life to something the Big Uglies turn out.”

“We had some quality control problems at first,” Elifrim said; Teerts wondered how many males had ended up dead as a result of such an innocuous-sounding thing. The commandant went on, “Those are for the most part corrected now. Several Tosevite aircraft have been brought down using shells of Tosevite manufacture.”

“That’s something, anyhow,” Teerts said, somewhat reassured.

Elifrim reached into a desk drawer and drew out two shell casings. Teerts had no trouble figuring out which chunk of machined brass had traveled from Home and which was made locally: one was gleaming, mirror-finished, while the other had a matte coating, with several scratches marring its metal.

“It looks primitive, but it works,” Elifrim said, pointing to the duller casing. “Dimensionally, it matches ours, and that’s what really counts.”

“As you say, superior sir.” Teerts was less than enthusiastic about using those shell casings in his killercraft, but if the Race had plenty of them and a dwindling supply of both proper shells and missiles, he didn’t see that he had much choice. “Are the armorers satisfied with them?” Armorers were even fussier about guns than pilots.

“On the whole, yes,” Elifrim answered, though for a moment his eyes looked to the side walls of the office, a sign he wasn’t telling everything he knew. When he spoke again, he attempted briskness: “Any further questions, Flight Leader? No? Very well, dismissed.”

Teerts was glad to leave the office, lit only by a weak electric bulb left over from the days when the Tosevites had controlled the air base, and to go out into the sunlight that bathed the place. He found the weather a trifle cool, but pleasant enough. He walked over to his killercraft to see how the technicians were coming along in readying it for the next mission.

He found a senior armorer loading shells into the aircraft’s magazine. “Good day, Flight Leader,” the male said respectfully-Teerts outranked him. But he was an important male, too, and everything in his demeanor said he knew it.

“Good day, Innoss,” Teerts answered. He saw that some of the shells the armorer was using were shiny ones of the Race’s manufacture, others with the duller finish that marked Big Ugly products. “What do you think of the munitions the Tosevites are making for us?”

“Since you ask, superior sir, the answer is ‘not much,’ ” Innoss said. He lifted a Tosevite shell out of the crate in which it had come. “All the specifications are the same as they are for our own ammunition, but some of these don’t feel quite right.” He hefted the shell. “The weight is fine, but the balance is off somehow.”

“Are all the ones the Tosevites produce like that?” Teerts asked.

“No,” the armorer answered. “Only a few. With their primitive manufacturing techniques, I suppose I should not be surprised. The miracle is that we get any usable shells at all.”

Suspicion flared in Teerts. “If it is not a universal trait, these shells with the odd balance will be somehow flawed,” he predicted. “Believe me when I say this, Innoss. I know the Big Uglies and their tricks better than I ever dreamt I would. Sure as I had an eggtooth to help me break out of my shell, some ingenious Tosevite has found a way to diddle us.”

“I don’t see how,” Innoss said doubtfully. “The weight is proper, after all. More likely some flaw in the process. I have seen video of what they call factories.” Derision filled his hiss.

“Their weapons may be outdated next to ours, but they are well made of their kind,” Teerts said. “I’ll bet you a day’s pay, Innoss, that close enough examination of that misbalanced shell will turn up something wrong with it.”

The armorer sent him a thoughtful look. “Very well, Flight Leader, I accept that wager. Let us see what this shell has to say to us.” He carried it away toward his own shack by the ammunition storage area.

Teerts thought about how he would spend his winnings. Reaching a conclusion didn’t take long: I’ll buy more ginger. Amazing how easy the stuff was to get. Every other Big Ugly who swept up or brought food onto the air base seemed to have his own supply. Every so often, Elifrim caught a user and made an example of him, but he missed tens for every one he found.

Teerts was still busy inspecting his aircraft when Innoss returned. The armorer drew himself up in stiff formality. “Superior sir, I owe you a day’s pay,” he said. “I have already requested a file transfer between our accounts.” He spoke more respectfully than he ever had before; till now, Teerts had been just another officer as far as he was concerned.

“What did the Big Uglies do?” Teerts asked, doing his best not to show the relief he felt. He’d gained prestige by being right; only now did he think about how much he’d have lost had he been wrong.

“I X-rayed three shells: one of ours, one of theirs with proper balance, and one of theirs with improper balance,” Innoss said. “The first two were virtually identical; as you said, superior sir, they can do good enough work when they care to. But the third-” He paused, as if still not believing it.

“What did the Big Uglies do?” Teerts repeated. By Innoss’ tone, he guessed it was something perfidious even for them.

“They left out the bursting charge that goes behind the penetrating head,” the armorer answered indignantly. “If they’d just done that, the shells would have been light, and quality control would have found them easily. But to make up for the empty space within the shells, they thickened the metal of the head just enough to match the missing weight of powder. I wonder how many shells have done far less damage to the enemy than they should because of that.”

“Have you any way to trace down which Tosevite plant turned out the sabotaged shells?” Teerts asked.

“Oh, yes.” Innoss opened his mouth not in a laugh but to show off all his teeth in a threat display that made it clear the distant ancestors of the Race had been fierce carnivores. “Vengeance shall fall on them.”

“Good,” Teerts said. This wasn’t like vengeance on the Nipponese, where thousands who had done nothing to him had died simply because they lived near where the Big Uglies had chosen to undertake nuclear research. The Tosevites who suffered now would have earned what they got, each and every one of them.

“The Race is in your debt,” Innoss said. “I telephoned the base commandant and told him what you had led me to discover. You shall be recognized as you deserve; your body paint will get fancier.”

“That was generous of you,” Teerts said. A promotion, or even a commendation, would mean more pay, which would mean more ginger. After so many horrors, life was good.

Like Shanghai, Peking had seen better days. The former capital’s fall to the Japanese had been relatively gentle-Chiang’s corrupt clique simply cut and ran,Nieh Ho-T’ing thought disparagingly. But the Japanese had fought like madmen before the little scaly devils drove them out of Peking. Whole districts lay in ruins, and many of the palaces formerly enjoyed by the emperors of China and their consorts and courtiers were only rubble through which scavengers picked for bits of wood.

“So what?” Hsia Shou-Tao growled when Nieh spoke of that aloud. “They were nothing but symbols of oppression of the masses. The city-the world-is better off without them.”

“It could be so,” Nieh said. “Were it up to me, though, they would have been preserved as symbols of that oppression.” He laughed. “Here we are, arguing over what should be done with them when, first, they are already destroyed and, second, we have not yet the power to say what any building’s fate will be.”

“A journey of a thousandli begins with but a single step,” Hsia answered. The proverb made him grimace. “More than a thousandli from Shanghai to here, and my poor feet feel every stinking step I took.”

“Ah, but here we are in the hibiscus-flower garden,” Nieh Ho T’ing said with an expansive wave. “Surely you can take your ease.”

“Hibiscus-flower night soil,” Hsia said coarsely; he reveled in a peasant’s crudity. “It’s just another dive.”

The Jung Yuan (which meant hibiscus-flower garden) had been a fine restaurant once. It looked to have been looted a couple of times; soot running up one wall said someone had tried to torch the place. Those efforts were all too likely to succeed; Nieh wondered why this one had failed.

He sipped tea from a severely plain earthenware cup. “The food is still good,” he said.

Hsia grunted, unwilling to admit anything. But, like Nieh, he’d demolished thelu-wei-p’in-p’an — ham, minced pork, pigs’ tripes and tongue, and bamboo shoots-all in a thick gravy-that was one of Jung Yuan’s specialties. Pork and poultry were the only meat you saw these days; pigs and chickens ate anything, and so were eaten themselves.

A serving girl came up and asked, “More rice?” When Nieh nodded, she hurried away and returned with a large bowlful. Hsia used the lacquerware spoon to fill his own eating bowl, then held it up to his mouth and shoveled in rice with his chopsticks. He slurped from a bowl ofkao liang, a potent wine brewed from millet, and belched enormously to show his approval.

“You are a true proletarian,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said, not at all ironically. Hsia Shou-Tao beamed at the compliment.

A couple of tables over, a group of men in Western-style suits was having a dinner party, complete with singsong girls and a raucous orchestra. Despite all Peking had been through, the men looked plump and prosperous. Some had their arms around singsong girls, while others were trying to slide their hands up the slits in the girls’ silk dresses. A couple of the girls pulled away; not all entertainers were courtesans. Most, though, accepted the attentions either as their due or with mercenary calculation in their eyes.

“Collaborators,” Nieh said in a voice that would have meant the firing squad in territory controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. “They could not be so rich without working hand in glove with the little scaly devils.”

“You’re right,” Hsia grunted. He filled his bowl of rice again. With his mouth full, he added, “That one there, in the dark shiny green, she’s a lot of woman.”

“And her beauty is exploited,” Nieh answered. Like a lot of Communist officials, he had a wide puritanical streak in him. Sex for sport, sex for anything but procreation, made him uneasy. His stay in a Shanghai brothel had reinforced that opinion rather than changed it.

“So it is,” Hsia said; Nieh’s doctrine was true. But the other man did not sound happy to concur.

“You are not an animal. You are a man of the revolution,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded him. “If joy girls are what you wanted in life, you should have joined the Kuomintang instead.”

“I am a man of the revolution,” Hsia repeated dutifully. “Coveting women who are forced to show their bodies”-a Chinese euphemism for prostitution-“to get money to live proves I have not yet removed all the old corrupt ways from my heart. Humbly, I shall try to do better.”

Had he made the self-criticism at a meeting of Party members, he would have stood with head bowed in contrition. Here, that would have given him away for what he was-and the scaly devils and their running dogs were as eager as either Chiang’s clique or the Japanese had been to be rid of Communists. Hsia stayed in his seat and slurped millet wine… and, in spite of self-criticism, his eyes kept sliding toward the singsong girl in the green silk dress.

Nieh Ho-T’ing tried to bring his attention back to the matter at hand. Keeping his voice low, he said, “We have to put fear into these collaborators. If a few of them die, the rest will serve the little devils with less attention to their duties, for they will always be looking over their shoulder to see if they will be next to pay for their treacheries. Some may even decide to cooperate with us in the struggle against imperialist aggression.”

Hsia Shou-Tao made a face. “Yes, and then they’d sell us back to the scaly devils, along with their own mothers. That kind of friend does our cause no good; we need people truly committed to revolution and justice.”

“We would be fools to trust them very far,” Nieh agreed, “but intelligence is always valuable.”

“And can always be compromised,” Hsia shot back. He was a stubborn man; once an opinion lodged in his mind, a team of water buffaloes would have had trouble dragging it out.

Nieh didn’t try. All he said was, “The sooner some are slain, the sooner we have the chance to see what the rest are made of.”

That appealed to Hsia, as Nieh had thought it might: his comrade was a man who favored direct action. But Hsia said, “Not that the miserable turtles don’t deserve to die, but it won’t be as easy even as it was in Shanghai. The little scaly devils aren’t stupid, and they learn more about security every day.”

“Security for themselves, yes,” Nieh said, “but for their parasites? There they are not so good. Every set of foreign devils that has tried to rule China-the Mongols, the English, the Japanese-worked with and through native traitors. The little scaly devils are no different. How will they gather in food and collect taxes if no one keeps records for them?”

Hsia noisily blew his nose on his fingers. A couple of the scaly devils’ running dogs looked at him with distaste; they’d learned Western manners to go with their Western clothes. He glared back at them. Nieh Ho-T’ing had seen him do such things before: he needed to hate his enemies on a personal level, not just an ideological one.

Nieh set down five Mex dollars to cover the cost of the meal; war and repeated conquest had left Peking, like Shanghai, an abominably expensive place to live. Both men blinked as they walked out into the bright sun of the western part of the Chinese City of Peking. Monuments of the past glories of imperial China were all around them. Nieh Ho-T’ing looked at the massive brickwork of the Ch’ien Men Gate with as much scorn as he’d given to the scaly devils’ puppets. Come the revolution, all the buildings war had spared deserved to be torn down. The people would erect their own monuments.

He and Hsia shared a room in a grimy little lodging house not far from the gate. The man who ran it was himself progressive, and asked no questions about his lodgers’ political affiliations. In return, no one struck at the oppressors and their minions anywhere close to the lodging house, to keep suspicion from falling on it.

That evening, over tea and soup, Nieh and his comrades planned how best to harass the little devils. After considerable comradely discussion-an outsider would have called it raucous wrangling-they decided to attack the municipal office building, an ugly modern structure close to the western shore of the Chung Hai, the Southern Lake.

Hsia Shou-Tao wanted to do there what Nieh Ho-T’ing and his followers had done in Shanghai: smuggle guerrillas and weapons into the building under the cover of waiters and cooks bringing in food. Nieh vetoed that: “The little scaly devils are not stupid, as you yourself said. They will know we have used this trick once, and will be on their guard against it.”

“We will not be using it against them, only against the men who lick their backsides,” Hsia said sulkily.

“We will not be using it at all,” Nieh Ho-T’ing repeated. “The risk is too large.”

“Whatshall we do, then?” Hsia demanded. That brought on another round of comradely discussion, even more raucous than the one before. But when the discussion was done, they had a plan they could live with-and one which, with luck, not too many of them would die with.

The next morning, Nieh Ho-T’ing went with several of his comrades to the national library, which was just across Hsi An Meen-Western Peace Gate-Street, to the north of the municipal offices. They all wore Western clothes like those the running dogs in the hibiscus-flower garden had had on; Nieh’s shoes pinched his feet without mercy. The librarians bowed to them and were most helpful-who could have guessed they were not carrying papers in their briefcases?

The day was hot and sticky; the windows on the south side of the library were open, to help the air move. Nieh smiled. He had counted on that. All his companions could read. Not all of them had been able to when they first joined the People’s Liberation Army, but ignorance was one means through which warlords and magnates held the people in bondage. The Communists fought it hard. That was useful generally, and a special advantage now: they fit right in until the time came for them to go into action.

Nieh Ho-T’ing knew just when that moment arrived. The noise on Hsi An Meen Street suddenly doubled, and then doubled again. Nieh looked out the window, as any curious person might have done. Clerks and officials were filing out of the municipal office building, gathering in knots on the sidewalk, blocking traffic on the street itself, and generally complaining up a storm.

He caught the word “bomb” several times and smiled again, now more broadly. Hsia Shou-Tao had phoned in his threat, then. He had a deep, raspy voice, and could sound threatening quite without intending to. When he did intend to, the result was chilling indeed.

To make the joke complete, he’d said the Kuomintang had hidden the explosive. When the little scaly devils got around to laying blame for what was going to happen, they’d lay it in the wrong place.

Nieh nodded to his comrades. As one, they opened their briefcases. The grenades inside-some round ones, bought from the Japanese, and some German-style potato mashers, bought from the Kuomintang-had been wrapped in paper, to keep them from rattling about. The men pulled pins, yanked igniters, and hurled them down into the crowd below.

“Fast, fast, fast!” Nieh shouted, flinging grenade after grenade himself. The first blasts and the screams that followed them were music to him. Thus always to those who would oppress not just the peasants and proletarians but all of mankind!

When almost all the grenades were gone, Nieh and his comrades left the chamber. Already there were cries from inside the library. Nieh tossed the last two grenades back into the room he and his men had just abandoned. The grenades went off with twin roars. The diversion worked just as he’d hoped. Feet pounded toward that room. His band of raiders left by a small door on the north side of the library.

He had a pistol ready in case the guard gave trouble, but the fellow didn’t. All he said was, “What’s that racket all about?”

“I don’t know,” Nieh answered importantly. “We were busy with research for the Race.” Running dogs often used the little scaly devils’ names for themselves.

The guard waved him and his comrades by. Instead of fleeing the area, they walked down toward Hsi An Men Street. A shouting policeman ordered them to help move some of the wounded. Nieh obeyed without a word of complaint. Not only did it let him evaluate how much damage he’d done, it was also the best possible cover against investigators.

“Thank you for your help, gentlemen,” the policeman said to Nieh and his group. “Everyone needs to struggle together against these stinking murderers.” To Nieh in particular, he added, “Sorry, you got blood on your clothes, sir. I hope it can be laundered.”

“I hope so, too. Cold water, they say, is good for such things,” Nieh answered. The policeman nodded. In times like these, knowing how to get bloodstains out of clothes was more than merely useful; it was necessary.

Nowhere did the policeman’s uniform display a name or number that would identify him. That was clever; it helped prevent reprisals. Nieh Ho-T’ing carefully studied the man’s face. He would start inquiries tomorrow. A policeman who spoke of “stinking murderers” was too enthusiastic in his support for the little scaly devils. He struck Nieh as ripe for liquidation.