Little by little, Jerusalem began to settle down after the latest round of Arab rioting. Reuven Russie shook his head as he walked toward the medical college that bore his father’s name. It wasn’t so much that Jerusalem was settling down as that the riots had a few days between them now rather than coming one on the heels of another. When the Arabs erupted, they were as fierce as ever.
For the moment, they were quiet. An Arab woman in a long black dress with a black scarf on her head walked past Reuven. He nodded politely. So did she, though his clothes and his fair skin clearly said he was a Jew. Did something nasty gleam in her eyes despite the polite nod? Maybe, maybe not. The Arabs’ riots were aimed first and foremost at the Lizards, with the Jews being secondary targets because they got on with the Race better than their Arab neighbors did.
Reuven wondered if that woman had been screeching “Allahu akbar!” and breaking windows or throwing rocks or setting fires during the latest round of turmoil. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. The sour smell of old burning still clung to Jerusalem, even after a late-winter rainstorm. The rain hadn’t been able to wash away all the soot streaking the golden sandstone that was the most common local building material, either.
A razor-wire security perimeter surrounded the Moishe Russie Medical College. As Reuven approached, a Lizard in a sandbagged strongpoint waved an automatic rifle at him. “Show me your authorization for entry,” the Lizard snapped in his own language. No one who didn’t understand that language was likely to have authorization to pass through the perimeter.
“It shall be done,” Reuven said, also in the language of the Race. He handed the Lizard a plastic card with his photograph. The Lizard didn’t compare the photograph to his appearance. Even after more than twenty years on Earth, many males of the Race had trouble telling one human being from another. Instead, the soldier fed the card into an electronic gadget and waited to see what colored lights came on.
The result must have satisfied him, for he handed the card back to Russie when the machine spat it out. “Pass on,” he said, gesturing with the rifle.
“I thank you,” Reuven answered. The medical college had come under heavy attack during the fighting. He was glad the Race thought the school important enough not to be endangered so again.
He certainly thought it was that important, though he would have admitted he was biased. Nowhere else on earth did the Lizards teach people what they knew of medicine, and their knowledge was generations ahead of what humanity had understood about the art before the Race came.
Learning some of what the Lizards knew had been Moishe Russie’s goal ever since the fighting stopped. Reuven was proud he’d been accepted to follow in his father’s footsteps. If he hadn’t passed the qualifying examinations, the name above the entrance to the block Lizard building wouldn’t have meant a thing.
He went inside. The Race had built doors and ceilings high enough to suit humans, and the seats in the halls fit Tosevite fundaments. Other than that, the Race had made few concessions. Reuven carried artificial fingerclaws in a little plastic case in his back pocket. Without them, he would have had a devil of a time using the computer terminals here.
More people than Lizards bustled through the halls on the way to one class or another. The people-most of them in their mid- to late twenties, like Reuven-were students, the Lizards instructors: physicians from the conquest fleet, now joined by a few from the colonization fleet as well.
Reuven and another student got to the door of their lecture hall at the same time. “I greet you, Ibrahim,” Reuven said in the language of the Race-the language of instruction at the college and the only one all the human students had in common.
“I greet you,” Ibrahim Nuqrashi replied. He was lean and dark, with a perpetually worried expression. Since he came from Baghdad, which was even more convulsed than Jerusalem, Reuven had a hard time blaming him.
They went in together, talking about biochemistry and gene-splicing. When they got inside, their eyes went in the same direction: to see if any seats were empty near Jane Archibald. Jane was blond and shapely, easily the prettiest girl at the college. No wonder, then, that she was already surrounded by male students this morning.
She smiled at Reuven and called “Good day!” in English-she was from Australia, though heaven only knew if she’d go back there once her studies were done. The Lizards were colonizing the island continent more thoroughly than anywhere else, except perhaps the deserts of Arabia and North Africa.
Nuqrashi sighed as he and Reuven sat down. “Maybe I should learn English,” he said, still in the language of the Race. English was the human language most widely shared among the students, but Reuven didn’t think that was why the Arab wanted to acquire it.
He didn’t get much of a chance to worry about it. Into the lecture hall came Shpaaka, the instructor. Along with the other students, Reuven sprang to his feet and folded himself into the best imitation of the Race’s posture of respect his human frame could manage. “I greet you, superior sir,” he chorused with his comrades.
“I greet you, students,” Shpaaka replied. “You may be seated.” Anyone who sat without permission landed in hot water; even more than most Lizards, Shpaaka was a stickler for protocol. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that as he surveyed the class. “I must say that, until I read through this latest set of examination papers, I had no idea there were so many ways to write my language incorrectly.”
Jane Archibald raised her hand. When Shpaaka recognized her, she asked, “Superior sir, is that not because we are all used to our own languages rather than to yours, so that our native grammar persists even when we use your vocabulary?”
“I think you may well be correct,” Shpaaka replied. “The Race has done some research on grammatical substrates, work occasioned by our conquests of the Rabotevs and Hallessi. Our ongoing experience with the multiplicity of languages here on Tosev 3 clearly shows more investigation will be needed.” His eye turrets surveyed the class once more. “Any further questions or comments? No? Very well: I begin.”
He lectured as if his human students were males and females of the Race, diluting nothing, slowing down not at all. Those who couldn’t stand the pace had to leave the medical college and pursue their training, if they pursued it, at a merely human university. Reuven scribbled frantically. He was lucky in that he’d already known Hebrew, English, Yiddish, and childhood pieces of Polish before tackling the Race’s language; after four tongues, adding a fifth wasn’t so bad. Students who’d spoken only their native language before tackling that of the Race were likelier to have a hard time.
After lecture, laboratory. After laboratory, more lecture. After that, more lab work, now concentrating on enzyme synthesis and suppression rather than genetic analysis. By the end of the day, Reuven felt as if his brain were a sponge soaked to the saturation point. By tomorrow morning, he would have to be ready to soak up just as much again.
Wringing his hand as he stuck his pen back in its case, he asked Jane, “Would you like to come to my house for supper tonight?”
She cocked her head to one side as she considered. “It’s bound to be better than the food in the dormitories-though your mother’s cooking deserves something nicer than that said about it,” she answered. “Your father is always interesting, and your sisters are cute…”
Reuven thought of the twins as unmitigated-well, occasionally mitigated-nuisances. “What about me?” he asked plaintively-she’d mentioned everyone else in the Russie household.
“Oh. You.” Her blue eyes twinkled. “I suppose I’ll come anyway.” She laughed at the look on his face, then went on, “If the riots start up again, I can always sleep on your sofa.”
“You could always sleep in my bed,” he suggested.
She shook her head. “You didn’t sleep in mine when you spent that night in the dormitory while the fighting in the city was so bad.” She wasn’t offended; she reached out and took his hand. “Come on. Let’s go. I’m getting hungry standing here talking.”
Several students gave Reuven jealous looks as he and Jane left the campus hand in hand. They made him feel three meters tall. In fact, he was a thoroughly ordinary one meter seventy-three centimeters-in absent moments, he thought of it as five feet eight-so when he and Jane looked into each other’s eyes, they did so on a level. Three or four Arab men whooped when they saw Jane. They approved of big blondes. She took no notice of them, which worked better than telling them where to go and how to get there. That only encouraged them.
“I’ve brought Jane home for supper,” Reuven called in Yiddish as he came inside.
“That’s fine, his mother answered from the kitchen in the same language. “There will be plenty.” Rivka Russie, Reuven was convinced, could feed an invading army as long as it gave her fifteen minutes’ notice.
His sisters came out and greeted Jane in halting English and in the language of the Race, which they were studying at school. Judith and Esther had just entered their teens; next to Jane’s ripe curves, they definitely seemed works in progress. She answered them in the bits and pieces of Hebrew she’d picked up since coming to Jerusalem. Reuven smiled to himself. Like most native English speakers, she couldn’t come out with a proper guttural to save her life.
Judith-he was pretty sure it was Judith, though the twins were identical and wore their hair the same way, not least for the sake of the confusion it caused-turned to him and said, “Cousin David’s having more troubles. Father’s doing what he can to fix things, but…” She shrugged.
“What now?” Reuven asked. “It’s not the Nazis again, is it?”
“No, but the English don’t want to let him leave,” his sister answered, “and things are getting scary for Jews over there.”
“Gevalt,” he said, and then translated for Jane.
She nodded understanding. “It’s like being a human in Australia. The Lizards wish none of us were left. After what they did to our cities, it’s a wonder any of us are.” For her, dealing with oppression from outside had begun when she was a little girl. For Reuven, it had begun two thousand years before he was born. He didn’t make the comparison, not out loud.
His father came home a few minutes later. Moishe Russie looked like an older version of Reuven: he’d gone bald on top, and the hair he had left was iron gray. Reuven asked, “What’s this I hear about Cousin David?”
Moishe grimaced. “That could be a problem. The fleetlord doesn’t seem very interested in helping him out. It’s not as if he’s in jail or about to be executed. He’s just having a hard time. Atvar thinks plenty of Tosevites are having worse times, so he won’t do anything about it.”
He and Reuven had both spoken Hebrew, which Jane could follow after a fashion. In English, she said, “That’s terrible! What will he do if he can’t get out of England?”
English was Moishe Russie’s fourth language, after Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. He stuck to the latter: “He’ll have to do the best he can. Right now, I don’t know how I can give him a hand.”
From the kitchen, Rivka Russie called, “Supper’s ready. Everyone come to the table.” Reuven headed for the dining room, but discovered he’d lost some of his appetite.
The flat-they didn’t call them apartments down here-in which the Lizards had set up Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers was barely half the size of the one Rance had lived in by himself in Fort Worth, and that one had been none too large.
He limped to the refrigerator, which was also about half the size of the one he’d had up in the States. Even though the flat was tiny, he was panting by the time he got there. He’d never win a footrace, not after the Lizards had shot him in the leg and in the chest during the fighting in Colorado. He supposed he was lucky nobody’d amputated that leg. He would have been a lot more certain had keeping it not meant living in pain every day of his life since.
One way or another, he did what he could to ease that pain. He took a Lion Lager out of the icebox and popped off the lid with a churchkey. At the hiss, Penny called, “Bring me one of those, too, will you?”
“Okay,” he answered. His Texas drawl contrasted with her harsh, flat Kansas tone. Here in South Africa, they both sounded funny. He opened another beer and carried it out to Penny, who was sitting on a sofa that had seen better days.
She took it with a murmur of thanks, then lifted it in salute. “Mud in your eye,” she said, and drank. She was a brassy blonde of about forty, a few years younger than Rance. Sometimes, she still looked like the farm girl he’d first met during the fighting. More often, though, a lot more often, she seemed hard as nails.
With a sardonic glint in her blue eyes, she raised the beer bottle again. “And here’s to South Africa, goddammit.”
“Oh, shut up,” Auerbach said wearily. It was hot in the flat; late February was summer down here. Not too humid, though-the climate was more like Los Angeles’ than Fort Worth’s.
Auerbach sank down on the sofa beside her. He grunted; his leg didn’t like going from standing to sitting. It liked going from sitting to standing even less. He took a pull at his Lion, then smacked his lips. “They do make pretty good beer here. I’ll give ’em that.”
“Hot damn,” Penny said, even more sarcastically than before. She waved her bottle around. “Aren’t you glad we came?”
“Well, that depends.” Thanks to the bullet he’d taken in the shoulder and lung, Rance’s voice was a rasping croak. He lit a cigarette. Every doctor he’d ever seen told him he was crazy for smoking, but nobody told him how to quit. After another sip, he went on, “It beats spending the rest of my life in a Lizard hoosegow-or a German one, for that matter. It beats going back to the USA, too, on account of your ginger-smuggling buddies want you dead for stiffing ’em and me for plugging the first two bastards they sent after you.”
He had to pause and pant a little. He couldn’t give speeches, not these days-he didn’t have the wind for it. While he was reinflating, Penny said, “You still think it beats Australia?”
If she hadn’t burst back into his life, on the run from the dealers she’d cheated, he would still be back in Fort Worth… doing what? He knew what: getting drunk, collecting pension checks, and playing nickel-ante poker with the other ruined men down at the American Legion hall. He coughed a couple of times, which also hurt. “Yeah, it still beats Australia,” he answered at last. “The Lizards wouldn’t have been happy shipping us there-as far as they’re concerned, it’s theirs. And even if they did do it, they’d have their eye turrets on us every second of the day and night.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know, I know.” Penny plucked the pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit one herself. She smoked it in short, savage puffs, and then, when it was hardly more than a butt, aimed the glowing coal at him like the business end of a pistol. “But when you asked ’em to send us here, Mr. Smart Guy, you didn’t know it was gonna be nigger heaven, did you?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Auerbach answered querulously. “How the hell was I supposed to know that? White men ran things here before the fighting. I knew that much. Tell me you heard a whole hell of a lot about South Africa in the news since the Lizards took it over. Go on. I dare you.”
Penny didn’t say anything. She stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one.
Rance used that pause to take a swig from the Lion Lager and to draw a couple of breaths. He went on, “I guess it makes sense, the way they did what they did. They don’t give a damn about white men and black men. And there are more blacks than whites here, and the whites are the ones who fought ’em hardest, and so-”
“So it’s nigger heaven.” Penny rolled her eyes. “You know what? Till the Lizards came, I never even saw a nigger-not for real, I mean, only in the movies. Weren’t any where I grew up. I didn’t figure it’d be like this when we came here.”
“Neither did I,” Auerbach admitted. “How could I have? You wanted to go to a place where people speak English as much as I did. That didn’t leave us a whole lot of choice, not to anywhere the Lizards were willing to send us.”
“Some people speak English-a lot fewer than I thought.” Penny aimed that second cigarette at Rance, too. “And a lot fewer than you thought, too, and you can’t tell me any different about that, either. At least in the United States, the colored people can talk with you. And they mostly know their place, too.” She got up from the sofa and walked quickly to the window of the third-floor flat. The stairs were hell on Rance’s bad leg, but he couldn’t do anything about that. Staring out onto Hanover Street, the main drag of Cape Town’s disreputable District Six, Penny gestured to him. “Come over here.”
Though his leg felt as if he’d jabbed a hot iron into it, Rance rose and limped to the window. He looked down and saw a trim figure in a khaki uniform and a cap like the ones British officers wore. The man had a bayoneted rifle slung on his back. “What did you get me up for?” he asked. “I’ve seen Potlako on his beat plenty of times before.”
“He’s a cop,” Penny said. “He’s black as the ace of spades, and he’s a cop. Almost all the cops in Cape Town are black as the ace of spades.”
“He’s a pretty good cop, too, by what I’ve seen,” Rance said, which made Penny give him a furious look. Ignoring it, he went on, “The Lizards aren’t stupid. They tried playing blacks against whites in the USA, too, but it didn’t work out so well there. A lot more smokes than white men here, and I guess the South Africans treated ’em worse than we did our colored fellows. So they’re happy as you please, working for the Lizards.”
“Sure they are. You just bet they are,” Penny snarled. “And now they treat us like we was niggers, and I tell you something, Rance Auerbach: I don’t like it for hell.”
Auerbach limped into the kitchen, opened another beer, and went back to the couch. “I don’t like it, either, but I don’t know what I can do about it. If you can’t stand it any more, I bet the Lizards would fly you back to the States after all. By now, they’ve probably figured out you’d last about twenty minutes after you got off the plane. That’d suit ’em fine, I bet.”
She put her hands on her hips, looking, for a moment, like a furious schoolgirl. She sounded like one, too, when she wailed, “Look what you got me into!”
He was sipping from the Lion Lager. He started to laugh, and choked, and sprayed beer out his nose, and generally came closer to drowning than he ever had in his life. When he could talk again-which took a little while-he said, “Who called me out of the blue after more than fifteen years? Whose fault was it that I shot those two nasty bastards? Whose fault was it that I ended up in a Lizard jail for running ginger down into Mexico, or in a Nazi jail for trying to get Pierre the damn Turd to quit running it out of Marseille? You know anybody who fills that bill?”
By the time he got through, he was speaking in a rasping whisper, that being as much air as he could force out of his ravaged lungs. He waited to see how Penny would take a little plain home truth thrown in her face. Sometimes she went off like a rocket. Sometimes…
He thought she was going to ignite here. She started to: he saw that. Then, all at once, she laughed instead. She laughed as hard as she would have raged if she’d stayed furious. “Oh, you got me, God damn you,” she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her checked cotton blouse. “You got me good there. Okay, I had a little something to do with getting you into things, too.”
“Just a little something, yeah,” Rance agreed.
Penny got herself a fresh beer, too, then came over and sat down beside him, so close they rubbed together. She swigged, set down the bottle, and leaned over to look into his face from a distance of about four inches. “Haven’t I done my best to make it up to you?” she asked, and ran her tongue over her lips.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Rance said evenly.
For a second, he thought he’d blown it and made her angry. But, to his relief, she decided to laugh again. “Well, then, I’ll just have to show you, won’t I?” she said, and brought her mouth down onto his. She tasted of beer and cigarette smoke, but he did, too, so that was all right.
The kiss went on and on. Auerbach brought up his hand and tangled his fingers in her yellow hair so she couldn’t pull back. Finally, he was the one who had to break away. It was either that or quit breathing altogether. She let his hand slide down to the back of her neck, where he started undoing the buttons on the blouse.
“Aren’t you a sneak?” she said, as if she’d never expected he would do any such thing. She took matters into her own hands, yanking the blouse off over her head. He undid her bra and grabbed for her breasts; she still had a hell of a nice pair. When she laughed this time, it was down deep in her throat.
She unzipped his fly, pulled him out, and bent down over him. His gasp had very little to do with bad lungs. She had a hell of a mouth, too.
If she’d felt like going on that way till he exploded, he wouldn’t have minded a bit-which was putting it mildly. But, after a little while, she pulled down his chinos, took off her skirt and her girdle, and swung astride him as if she intended to ride him to victory in the Kentucky Derby.
His mouth closed on her nipple. Now she grabbed his head and pressed him to her. He slipped a hand between her legs and rubbed gently. Her breath came almost as short as his, and she’d never taken a bullet in the lungs. When she gasped and shuddered and arched her back, she squeezed him inside her almost as if she had a hand of her own down there. He groaned and came and had to work very hard to remember not to bite.
“God damn,” he said sincerely. “It’s worth fighting with you, just on account of the way we make up.”
“Who says we’ve made up?” Penny demanded. But, whether she wanted it to or not, her voice held a purr that hadn’t been there before.
She slid off him-and dribbled on his thigh. “God damn,” he said again, this time in mock anger. “I put that stuff where it was supposed to go. I’m not supposed to be wearing it.”
“I don’t want it staying where you put it, either,” she retorted. “That’d be the last thing I need-getting knocked up at my age.” She shook her head in what was either real horror or a pretty good imitation. Then, gathering up her clothes, she hurried off to the bathroom.
Auerbach sat there in just his shirt, waiting for her to come out. He wanted another cigarette. All of him except his lungs wanted one, anyhow. What with all the trouble he’d had breathing while Penny straddled him, he let them win the argument for once. Instead of the smoke, he finished the rest of the Lion Lager sitting on the table. It felt like what it was, a consolation prize, but life didn’t hand out so many prizes of any sort that he could turn one down.
When Penny did come out, she smiled to see him still mostly naked. He picked up his pants and used the arm of the sofa to help lever himself to his feet. That took some of the strain off his bad leg, but made his ruined shoulder groan. “Can’t win,” he muttered as he limped past her toward the john. “Christ, you can’t break even, either.” If being in Cape Town didn’t prove that, he was damned if he knew what would.
Gorppet rattled along in a mechanized combat vehicle, heading northwest toward the Tosevite city of Baghdad. Basra, where he’d been stationed, was calm these days-or so his leaders kept saying. Gorppet had seen a lot of nasty fighting after the Race landed on Tosev 3. Basra didn’t feel calm to him, nor anything close. But no one had asked his opinion. He was there to do what his officers told him to do. If that turned out to be stupid, as it sometimes did, he had to make the best of it.
“Too bad about Fotsev,” said Betvoss, one of the males in his squad.
“Truth-too bad,” agreed Gorppet, who didn’t much care for Betvoss. “He was a good male, and a good squad leader. Now you are stuck with me instead.” He swung an eye turret toward Betvoss to see what the other male would make of that.
“I curse the Big Uglies,” Betvoss said. “The spirits of Emperors past will surely turn their backs on them.” His voice went shrill with complaint, as it did too often to suit Gorppet: “I curse them all the more for forcing ginger on the females of ours they had kidnapped, and for using the females’ pheromones to lure us into that ambush.”
“They are sneaky,” Gorppet said. “If you forget how sneaky they are, you will regret it-if you live to regret it.” He put his own worries into words: “I hope they are not quieting down in Basra to persuade us to lessen the garrison there so they can rise up again after we have weakened ourselves.”
“They are not clever enough to think of something like that. I am sure of it,” Betvoss said. Another reason Gorppet was less than fond of him was that he thought he knew more than he did. He went on, “Besides, if we can stamp out the rebellion in this Baghdad place, it will also fade in Basra.”
That might even have been true. Baghdad was a bigger, more important Tosevite center than Basra. Even so, Gorppet didn’t care to admit Betvoss could be right about anything. The squad leader said, “Until we hunt down that maniac of an agitator called Khomeini, this whole subregion will go on bubbling and boiling like a pot over too high a fire.”
He wondered if Betvoss would argue about that. Since Betvoss was ready to argue about almost everything, it wouldn’t have surprised him. But the other male only made the affirmative hand gesture and said, “Truth. One of the things we will have to do to carry this world fully into the Empire is to bring the Big Uglies’ superstitions under our control.”
“We ought to do that anyhow, for the sake of truth,” Betvoss said. “Imagine believing some sort of oversized Big Ugly up above the sky manufactured the whole universe. Can you think of anything more preposterous?”
“No. But then, I am not a Tosevite,” Gorppet said, speaking the last phrase with considerable relief. In an effort to be charitable, he added, “Of course, up till now, they have not known of the Emperors, and so have been forming their beliefs in ignorance rather than in truth.”
“But they cling to their false notions with such persistence-we would not be going from one city to another like this if they did not,” Betvoss said. “And if I never hear ‘Allahu akbar!’ again, I shall not be sorry for it.”
“Truth!” Every male in the rear compartment of the mechanized combat vehicle said that. Several of them added emphatic coughs, to show how strongly they felt about it.
“Truth indeed,” Gorppet said. “Any male who has served where they say such things knows what a truth it is. Because it is a truth, we must stay especially alert. Remember, too many of the local Tosevites will give up their own lives if they can take us with them. They believe this will assure them of a happy afterlife.”
“As you said, they know not the Emperors.” Betvoss’ voice dripped scorn.
Gorppet scorned the Big Uglies for their foolish beliefs, too. That didn’t mean he failed to respect them as fighters, and especially as guerrilla fighters. He pressed an eye turret to the viewing prism above a firing port and looked out of the combat vehicle.
He sat on the left side of the vehicle, the one that faced away from the river, so he could see not only the farmland-worked by Big Uglies in long, flowing robes-but also the drier country where irrigation stopped. The landscape, in fact, put him in mind of Home. It was no wonder the colonists were running up so many new towns in the interior of this region, towns watered with pipes from desalination plants by the edge of the nearest sea.
Even the weather in this part of Tosev 3 was decent. The mechanized combat vehicle didn’t have its heater going full blast, as it would have on most of the planet. Gorppet had fought through one winter in the SSSR. He’d told some stories about that when he went into one of the new towns. None of the newly revived colonists believed him. He’d stopped telling those stories. For that matter, he’d stopped going into the new towns. He disliked the colonists almost as much as he disliked the Big Uglies. He disliked everyone except his comrades from the conquest fleet, and, with Betvoss beside him, he was forcibly reminded he didn’t much care for some of them, either.
Before it should have, the vehicle came to a halt, tracks rattling. “Oh, by the Emperor, what now?” Gorppet demanded. None of his fellow infantrymales knew, of course-they were as cooped up as he. He picked up the intercom and put the question to the driver. If he didn’t know, everybody was in trouble.
He had an answer, all right, but not one Gorppet cared to hear: “The accursed Tosevites managed to sabotage the bridge we are supposed to pass over.”
“What do you mean, sabotage?” Gorppet asked irritably. “I am in this metal box back here, remember? I cannot see straight ahead. If I do not look out a viewing prism, I cannot see out at all.”
“They bombed the span. It fell into the river. Is that plain enough for you, Exalted Squadlord?” The driver also sounded irritable.
“How did they manage to bomb it?” Gorppet exclaimed, which made the males in his squad exclaim, too. He went on, “Whoever let that happen ought to have green bands painted on him”-the mark of someone undergoing punishment-“and spend about the next ten years-the next ten Tosevite years, mind you-cleaning out the Big Uglies’ stinking latrines with his tongue.”
His squadmates laughed. He was too furious to find it funny. The driver said, “I agree with you, but I cannot do anything about it.”
“How is this column of vehicles to proceed on to Baghdad, then, if we cannot use the bridge?” Gorppet asked.
“We shall have to go on to As Samawan and cross the river there,” the driver replied. “While it is not the route originally planned, it should not delay us too much.”
“That is good,” Gorppet said. Then he paused in sudden sharp suspicion. “Why would the Big Uglies blow up a bridge if doing so causes us no great harm?”
“Who knows why Tosevites act as they do?” the driver said.
“I know this: they act as they do to cause us the greatest possible harm,” Gorppet said with great conviction. “Either they have an ambush waiting for us on the road to this As Samawan place or they are going to-”
The founder of the superstition in which the local Big Uglies believed so passionately, a certain Muhammad, was said to be a prophet, a male who could see the future. The notion, like so many on Tosev 3, was alien to the way the Race thought. But Gorppet, though not pausing even for a moment, proved a prophet in his own right. He hadn’t finished his sentence before bullets started slamming into the mechanized combat vehicle.
A lot of bullets were slamming into the vehicle. “They must have a machine gun out there, may the purple itch get under their scales!” he exclaimed, grabbing for his own automatic weapon.
As he spoke, the light cannon mounted atop the combat vehicle barked into life. He peered out through the vision prism. He couldn’t see much. Because they were close by the river-the Tosevite name for it was the Tigris-plant life grew exuberantly, providing excellent cover for the Big Ugly raiders. Someone should have thought to trim the vegetation farther back from the roadway, but no one had. He didn’t like that. How many Big Uglies were sneaking through the rank, noxiously green foliage toward the column?
There was the muzzle flash of the Tosevites’ machine gun. That being the only sure target he had, Gorppet started shooting at it. If the machine gun fell silent, he would know he was doing some good. The rest of the males in his squad were also blazing away. He didn’t know what the males on the far side of the combat vehicle were shooting at, but they seemed to have found something.
Before he could ask, a Big Ugly burst from the greenery and rushed toward the vehicle. He was, inevitably, shouting “Allahu akbar!” He carried in his right hand a bottle with a flaming wick. Gorppet had seen those in the SSSR. They were full of petroleum distillates, and could easily set even a landcruiser afire.
Gorppet sprayed the Tosevite with bullets. One of them struck the bottle. It burst and exploded into flame, which caught on the Big Ugly’s robes and his flesh. He would have been in greater torment still had Gorppet’s bullets-and probably those of other males as well-not toppled him and sent him quickly on the road to death.
Then a grenade flew out of the plants and exploded not far from Gorppet’s vehicle. He fired in the direction from which it had come, but couldn’t tell whether he’d hit the thrower. Another grenade burst on the far side of the vehicle. “We are surrounded!” Betvoss shouted in alarm.
If Betvoss could see it, it should have been obvious to anyone. Gorppet yelled into the intercom: “We had better get out of here while we still can!”
“I have no orders,” the driver answered, which struck Gorppet as not being nearly reason enough to stay. Before he could say as much, the other male added, “And I will not abandon my comrades without orders.”
That, unfortunately, did make sense to Gorppet. He spotted a shape moving in among the greenery and fired at it. Even through the mechanized combat vehicle’s armor, he heard the shriek the Big Ugly let out. He snarled in savage satisfaction.
The vehicle did begin to back away then, which presumably meant the ones behind it in the column had already started retreating. The machine didn’t have to go around any burning hulks, for which Gorppet let out a sigh of relief. Smoke dischargers helped shield the column from the Tosevites’ eyes. Before long, all the combat vehicles were speeding northwest along the road to As Samawan. Gorppet wasn’t the least bit unhappy to leave that marauding band of Big Uglies behind.
“Praise the spirits of Emperors past, that was not too expensive, anyhow,” Betvoss said. “All they made us do was change our route.”
“Now we have to hope they have not mined the highway to As Samawan,” Gorppet said. Betvoss laughed, but the squad leader went on, “I was not joking. They have forced us to do something we did not plan to do. That means we are moving to their plan, not to our own. They will have something waiting for us.”
Again, he proved right. The column had not gone much farther before a mine exploded under the lead combat vehicle. Fortunately, it did no more than blow off a track. The vehicle’s crew scrambled out, made hasty repairs, with soldiers and the guns of the rest of the column protecting them, and got moving again. All things considered, it was, as Betvoss had said, an inexpensive journey.
As a shuttlecraft pilot, Nesseref was one of the first females revived from the colonization fleet. That meant she had more experience with Big Uglies than most of the other colonists in the new town outside Jezow, Poland. Despite that experience, she admitted-indeed, she proclaimed, whenever she got the chance-she did not understand the way the minds of the natives of Tosev 3 worked.
“Superior sir, when I began coming into this city, I could not imagine why you treated the Tosevites with such restraint,” she told Bunim, the regional subadministrator based in Lodz. “Now, having spent a while on the surface of the planet, I begin to see: they are all of them addled, and many of them heavily armed. I can conceive no more appalling combination.”
The male from the conquest fleet answered, “You may think you are joking, Shuttlecraft Pilot, but that is the problem facing the Race all over Tosev 3. Poland is merely a microcosm of the planet as a whole.”
“In no way was I joking, superior sir,” Nesseref replied. “The Poles are heavily armed. They hate the Jews, the Deutsche, us, and the Russkis, in that order. The Jews are also heavily armed. They hate the Deutsche, the Poles, the Russkis, and us, in that order. The Deutsche, off to the west, hate the Jews, us, the Russkis, and the Poles, in that order. The Russkis, off to the east, hate the Deutsche, us, the Jews, and the Poles, in that order. The Deutsche and the Russkis, of course, are even more heavily armed than the Jews and Poles. Do I have it all straight?”
“More or less,” Bunim said. “You will notice, however, that in your list each group of Big Uglies hates some other group of Big Uglies more than it hates us. That is what makes our continued administration of this region possible.”
“Yes, I understand as much,” Nesseref said. “But I also notice that each group of Big Uglies does hate us. This strikes me as ungrateful on their part, but seems to be so.”
“Truth,” Bunim agreed. “That is what makes our continued administration of this region difficult. That is what makes our continued administration of this whole planet difficult. Each Tosevite faction-and there are tens upon tens of them-reckons itself superior to all the others. Each resents being administered by anyone but one of its own members. Each also resents being administered by anyone not of the Tosevite species. And, with so many explosive-metal bombs on this planet and orbiting it, we must be cautious in our actions lest we touch off a catastrophe.”
“Madness,” Nesseref said. “Utter madness.”
“Oh, indeed.” Bunim used an emphatic cough to show just how much madness he thought it was. “But it is not madness we can afford to disregard. Understanding that fact has often come hard to males and females of the colonization fleet. You show a better grasp of it than most.”
“I thank you, Regional Subadministrator,” Nesseref said. “Difficulties in finding land for the shuttlecraft port and in dealing with Big Ugly laborers in the construction process have proved most educational.”
“I can see how they would. Everything on Tosev 3 is educational, although some of the lessons are those we would rather not learn.” Bunim paused. “And you are also acquainted with the Jew Anielewicz, are you not?”
“Yes, superior sir,” Nesseref answered. She also paused before continuing, “For a Big Ugly, he is quite likable.” She wondered how Bunim would take that; he certainly seemed none too fond of any of the Tosevites whose territory he helped govern.
To her surprise, the regional subadministrator said, “Truth.” But Bunim went on, “He is very clever, he is very capable, he is very dangerous. He plays us off against the Deutsche, the Poles, and the Russkis, and plays those groups off against one another. His own group should be the weakest among them, but I am not nearly sure it is-and if it is not, that is largely thanks to his abilities.”
“Many Tosevites, I gather, are able,” Nesseref said. “Your experience is greater than mine, but I would say as many Tosevites are as able as are members of the Race.”
“Yes, I would say that is probably a truth,” Bunim agreed. “We would have an easier time on this planet were it a falsehood.” He let out a long, heartfelt sigh.
“No doubt,” Nesseref said. “Many Big Uglies are able, as I say. But few are, or can make themselves be, congenial to us. Anielewicz is one of those who can. I count him a friend of sorts, even if he is not of our species-certainly more of a friend than an accursed male who sought to give me ginger to induce me to mate with him.”
“I sometimes think ginger is the revenge Tosev 3 is taking on the Race for our efforts to bring this world into the Empire,” Bunim said wearily. “In some ways, the herb causes us more trouble than the Big Uglies do.”
“Truth,” Nesseref said, with an emphatic cough. She’d tried ginger once herself, before the Race fully understood what it did to females. She’d gone straight into her season, of course, and mated with a couple of Bunim’s sentries. Only luck that she hadn’t laid a clutch of eggs afterwards. And only luck-luck and a strong, strong will-that the one taste hadn’t led to addiction, as it had for so many males and females.
Bunim went on, “I also note that, however congenial you may find Anielewicz, by no means do all of his fellow Tosevites share your opinion. He was recently the target of an assassination attempt by one of the Big Ugly groupings with no great use for Jews. I am not certain which, but there is no shortage of such groups. You have shown you understand as much.”
“Yes.” Nesseref did her best to hold in surprise and dismay. Murder, especially political murder, was rare among the Race. She supposed she shouldn’t have been shocked to learn it was otherwise here on Tosev 3, but she was. “An attempt, you say, superior sir? Was he injured?”
“No. Apparently fearing someone might be seeking to attack him, he dropped to the floor an instant before the assailant fired through the door of his flat. Whoever that assailant was, he escaped.”
“I am relieved to hear Anielewicz was not harmed,” Nesseref said.
“So was I,” the regional subadministrator answered. “You cannot imagine the chaos into which a successful assassination would have thrown this area. I very likely cannot imagine it, either, and I am glad I do not have to.”
He cared only about the politics involved, not about Anielewicz as an individual. Nesseref supposed she understood that. Bunim would have to go on dealing with whoever Anielewicz’s successor proved to be had the Jew been killed. Still, the attitude saddened her. She returned to her own immediate business: “I do thank you for expediting inspections of the liquid-hydrogen storage system at the shuttlecraft port. An accident would be unfortunate.”
“Truth.” Bunim looked at her sidelong. “You have a gift for understatement, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”
“I thank you,” Nesseref answered. “I would be less concerned had the Race done all the construction. But, even with the Tosevites working to our specifications, I want every possible assurance that they did the job properly.”
“I understand. I shall see to it.” Bunim turned one eye turret toward a chronometer. “And now, if you will excuse me, I also have other things to see to…”
“Of course, superior sir.” Nesseref left Bunim’s office, and also left the building housing it. Having been in the hands of the Race since shortly after the arrival of the conquest fleet, it suited her kind about as well as a building originally put up by Big Uglies could. When she went outside, into the cold of the Bialut Market Square, she found herself back in a different world.
Even Tosevites had to wear layer upon layer of wrappings to protect themselves from their own planet’s weather. That didn’t deter them from gathering in large numbers to buy and sell. Foods of all sorts were on display (no, almost all sorts, for this was a market full of Jews, and so held no pork, which was to Nesseref’s way of thinking most regrettable). So were more of the Big Uglies’ wrappings. So were pots and pans and plates and the curious implements the Tosevites used to feed themselves.
And so were a good many items obviously manufactured by the Race. Nesseref wondered how they’d got there. She wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to learn it was through no legitimate means. The window in Bunim’s office overlooked the market square. She wondered if the regional subadministrator or his subordinates paid any attention to the commerce the Big Uglies were conducting right under their snouts. Then she wondered if the Tosevites quietly paid some of those subordinates-with ginger, say-to turn their eye turrets in a different direction. She wouldn’t have been surprised about that, either.
Big Uglies were more voluble than males and females of the Race. They shouted and whined and gesticulated and generally acted as if the world would come to an end if bargains didn’t come out exactly the way they wanted them. Their frantic eagerness would have impressed and probably influenced Nesseref. The Tosevites against whom they were dickering, though, were used to such ploys, and took no notice of them-or else they too were shouting and whining and gesticulating.
Someone-a Big Ugly, by the timbre and mushy accent-called her name. She swung an eye turret in the direction from which the sound had struck her hearing diaphragm, and saw a Tosevite approaching, waving as he-she? no, he, by the wrappings and the voice-drew near. A little more slowly than she should have, she recognized him. “I greet you, Mordechai Anielewicz,” she said, annoyed he’d seen and known her first.
“I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the Big Ugly said, extending his right hand in the greeting gesture common among his kind. Nesseref took it. His fingers, though large, felt soft and fleshy against hers. They also felt cool; her body temperature was a couple of hundredths higher than his. Speaking the language of the Race pretty well for one of his kind, he went on, “I hope you are well?”
“Well enough, I thank you, though I do not much care for the cold and damp. I am glad spring is coming,” Nesseref replied. She wagged the eye turret with which she was looking at him, as she might have done to commiserate with one of her own kind. “I have heard from the regional subadministrator that you are having a difficult time of it.”
“Why, no, the pains are no worse than-” Anielewicz caught himself. “Oh. You must mean the male with the gun. He missed me. He has not returned since. I do not worry about him… too much.” His hand dropped to the butt of the pistol he wore on his hip.
“Who would wish to kill you?” Nesseref asked.
The Big Ugly’s mouth twisted in the gesture Nesseref had come to associate with amusement, though she didn’t understand why the circumstances should amuse him. “Who?” he said. “The Deutsche, the Poles, the Russkis, perhaps, and perhaps also the regional subadministrator.”
“Bunim?” Nesseref made the negative hand gesture. “Impossible! The Race does not do such things. Besides, he would have mentioned it to me. He spoke of its happening through some agency other than his own.”
“He would not admit to it,” Anielewicz said. “Even if he arranged to have it done, he would not admit it, not to anyone who did not have to know of it.”
“Why not?” Again, Nesseref was puzzled.
Again, the Tosevite smiled. Again, the shuttlecraft pilot could not see any reason to show amusement. As if speaking to a hatchling barely old enough to understand words, Mordechai Anielewicz replied, “Because if he arranged to have it done, and if I found out he had arranged it, I would probably try to kill him in retaliation, and he knows it.”
He spoke, as far as Nesseref could judge, quite calmly. She reckoned him her friend, as far as she could across the lines of species. But he’d just shown her how alien he was. Her shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather.
Mordechai Anielewicz could tell he’d horrified Nesseref. He didn’t really think Bunim had tried to assassinate him. Had Bunim done so, he wasn’t sure he would try to take revenge by killing the regional subadministrator. Murdering a prominent Lizard was the best way he could think of to land the Jews of Poland in serious trouble. Of course, if what he said got back to Bunim, it might keep the regional subadministrator from coming up with any bright ideas. He hoped it would.
“And how is your explosive-metal bomb?” Nesseref asked him casually.
Not for the first time, he wished he’d never mentioned the bomb to her. And now, instead of displaying his amusement, he had to hide it. The shuttlecraft pilot was trying to get information out of him the same way he was trying to give it to her. He answered, “It is very well, thank you. And how is yours?”
“I have none, as you know perfectly well,” Nesseref said. “All I have to worry about is a great deal of liquid hydrogen.”
Back before the invasions of first the Nazis and then the Lizards forced him into war and politics, Anielewicz had studied engineering. He whistled respectfully; he knew a little something about the kinds of problems he might be facing. And, of course, when he thought of hydrogen, he thought of the Hindenburg; the newsreel footage was still vivid in his mind after more than a quarter of a century. The Lizards were a lot more careful than the Germans ever dreamt of being-the Lizards were, in a word, inhumanly careful-but still…
“How do you make that noise?” Nesseref asked. “I have heard other Tosevites do it, but I cannot see how.”
“What, whistling?” Mordechai asked. The key word came out in Yiddish; if it existed in the Lizards’ language, he didn’t know it. He whistled a few bars. Nesseref made the affirmative hand gesture. He said, “You shape your lips this way…” He started to pucker, then stopped. “Oh.”
Once examined, the problem was simple. Nesseref couldn’t pucker. Her face didn’t work that way. She didn’t even really have lips, only hard edges to her mouth. She could no more whistle than Anielewicz could perfectly produce all the hisses and pops and sneezing noises that went into her language. She realized that at about the same time he did, and let her mouth fall open in a laugh. “I see now,” she said. “It is impossible for one of my kind.”
“I fear that is truth,” Anielewicz agreed. “I also fear I must shop now, or my wife”-another Yiddish word, another concept missing from the language of the Race-“will be very unhappy with me.” He used an emphatic cough to show just how unhappy Bertha would be.
“Farewell, then,” Nesseref told him. “I return to my new town. Perhaps you will visit me there one day.”
“I thank you. I would like that.” Mordechai meant it. Regardless of what they thought of the weather, lots of Lizards were colonizing Poland. He was very curious about how they lived.
But, as Nesseref went about her business, Anielewicz realized he had to go about his. Bertha would indeed be unhappy if he came home without the things she’d sent him to buy. Cabbage was easy. Several vendors were selling it; he had only to choose the one with the best price. Potatoes didn’t prove any great problem, either. And he got a deal on onions that would make his wife smile.
Eggs, now… He’d expected eggs to be the hard part of the shopping, and they were. You could always count on plenty of people having vegetables for sale. Ever since the Nazis had been driven out of Poland, there had been enough vegetables to go around. And vegetables, or a lot of them, stayed good for weeks or months at a time.
None of that held true for eggs. You never could tell how many would be on sale when you went to the market square, or what sort of prices the vendors would demand. Today, only a couple of peasant grandmothers, scarves around their heads against the winter cold, displayed baskets of eggs.
Radiating charm, Anielewicz went up to one of them. “Hello, there,” he said cheerfully. He spoke Polish as readily as Yiddish, as did most Jews hereabouts. Unlike a lot of them, he also looked more Polish than Jewish, having a broad face, fair skin, and light brown, almost blond, hair. Sometimes his looks helped him when he was dealing with Poles.
Not today. The old lady with the eggs looked him up and down as if he’d just crawled out of the gutter. “Hello, Jew,” she said flatly.
Well, few goyim came to buy at the Bialut Market Square. During the Nazi occupation, it had been the chief market of the Lodz ghetto. The ghetto was gone, but this remained the Jewish part of town. Mordechai gathered himself. If she was going to play tough, he could do the same. Pointing to the eggs, he said, “How much for half a dozen of those sad little things?”
“Two zlotys apiece,” the Polish woman said, sounding as calm and self-assured as if that weren’t highway robbery.
“What?” Anielewicz yelped. “That’s not selling. That’s stealing, is what it is.”
“You don’t want them, you don’t have to pay,” the woman answered. “Ewa over there, she’s charging two and a half, but she says hers are bigger eggs. You go on over and see if you can find any difference.”
“It’s still stealing,” Mordechai said, and it was-even two zlotys was close to twice the going rate.
“Feed’s gone up,” the Polish woman said with a shrug. “If you think I’m going to sell at a loss, you’re meshuggeh.” Where he stuck to Polish, she threw in a Yiddish word with malice aforethought. A moment later, she slyly added, “And I know you Jews aren’t crazy that way.”
“What are you feeding your miserable chickens, anyhow? Caviar and champagne?” Anielewicz shot back. “Bread’s up a couple of groschen, but not that much. I think you’re out for some quick profit.”
Her eyes might have been cut from gray ice. “I think if you don’t want my eggs, you can go away and let someone who does want them have a look.”
Dammit, he did want the eggs. He just didn’t want to pay so much for them. Bertha would pitch a fit; then she’d make disparaging noises about the uselessness of sending a mere man to the market square. Mordechai was, or thought he was, a competent shopper in his own right. “I’ll give you nine zlotys for half a dozen,” he said.
For a bad moment, he thought the egg seller wouldn’t even deign to haggle with him. But she did. He ended up buying the eggs for ten zlotys forty groschen, and won the privilege of picking them himself. It wasn’t a victory-he couldn’t pretend it was, no matter how hard he tried-but it was something less than a crushing defeat.
Weighed down by groceries, he started south on Zgierska Street, then turned right onto Lutomierska; his flat wasn’t far from the fire station on that street. The backs of his legs pained him as he walked. His arms felt as if he were carrying sacks of lead, not vegetables and eggs.
Scowling, he kept on. He’d never been quite right after inhaling German nerve gas half a lifetime before. At that, he’d got off lucky. Ludmila Jager-Ludmila Gorbunova, she’d been then-was far more crippled than he, while the gas had helped bring Heinrich Jager to an early grave. Anielewicz found that dreadfully unfair; were it not for the German panzer colonel, an explosive-metal bomb would have blown Lodz off the face of the earth, and probably would have blown up the then-fragile truce between humans and Lizards.
Anielewicz’s younger son was named Heinrich. There was a stretch of several years when he would either have laughed or reached for a rifle had anyone suggested he might name a child after a Wehrmacht officer.
Panting, he fought his way up the stairs to his flat. He paused in the hail to catch his breath, gathering himself so Bertha wouldn’t worry, before he went inside. He also paused to examine the new door, after the would-be assassin put a submachine-gun magazine through the old one, it had become too thoroughly ventilated to be worth much. The flat also had new windows.
When he did go inside, the look on his wife’s face said he hadn’t paused long enough. “It must be bothering you today,” Bertha Anielewicz said.
“Not too bad,” Mordechai insisted. If she believed it, maybe he would, too. “And I did pretty well at the market.” That won a smile from his wife. She wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense of the word, but she turned beautiful when a smile lit up her face. Then, of course, she wanted details.
When he gave them to her, the smile disappeared. He’d known it would. “That’s robbery!” she exclaimed.
“I know,” he said. “It would have been worse robbery if I hadn’t haggled hard. We did need the eggs.”
“We needed the money, too,” Bertha said mournfully. Then she shrugged. “Well, it’s done, and the eggs do look good.” Her smile returned. He smiled back, knowing full well she was letting him down easy.
Vyacheslav Molotov was not happy with the budget projections for the upcoming Five Year Plan. Unfortunately, the parts about which he was least happy had to do with the money allocated for the Red Army.
Since Marshal Zhukov had rescued him from NKVD headquarters after Lavrenti Beria’s coup failed, he couldn’t wield a red pencil so vigorously as he would have liked. He couldn’t wield one at all, in fact. If he made Zhukov unhappy with him, a Red Army-led coup would surely succeed.
Behind the expressionless mask of his face, he was scowling. After Zhukov got all the funds he wanted, the Red Army would in essence be running the Soviet State with or without a coup. Were Zhukov a little less deferential to Party authority, that would be obvious already.
The intercom buzzed. Molotov answered it with a sense of relief, though he showed no more of that than of his inner scowl. “Yes?” he asked.
“Comrade General Secretary, David Nussboym is here for his appointment,” his secretary answered.
Molotov glanced at the clock on the wall of his Kremlin office. It was precisely ten o’clock. Few Russians would have been so punctual, but the NKVD man had been born and raised in Poland. “Send him in, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov said. Dealing with Nussboym would mean he didn’t have to deal with-or not deal with-the budget for a while. Putting things off didn’t make them better. Molotov knew that. But nothing he dared do to the Five Year Plan budget would make it better, either.
In came David Nussboym: a skinny, nondescript, middle-aged Jew. “Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” he said in Polish-flavored Russian, every word accented on the next-to-last syllable whether the stress belonged there or not.
“Good day, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered. “Take a seat; help yourself to tea from the samovar if you care to.”
“No, thank you.” Along with Western punctuality, Nussboym had a good deal of Western briskness. “I regret to report, Comrade General Secretary, that our attempt against Mordechai Anielewicz did not succeed.”
“Your attempt, you mean,” Molotov said. David Nussboym had got him out of his cell in the NKVD prison. Otherwise, Beria’s henchmen might have shot him before Marshal Zhukov’s troops overpowered them. Molotov recognized the debt, and had acquiesced in Nussboym’s pursuit of revenge against the Polish Jews who’d sent him to the USSR. But there were limits. Molotov made them plain: “You were warned not to place the Soviet government in an embarrassing position, even if you are permitted to use its resources.”
“I did not, and I do not intend to,” Nussboym said. “But, with your generous permission, I do intend to continue my efforts.”
“Yes, go ahead,” Molotov said. “I would not mind seeing Poland destabilized in a way that forces the Lizards to pay attention to it. It is a very useful buffer between us and the fascists farther west.” He wagged a finger at the Jew, a show of considerable emotion for him. “Under no circumstances, however, is Poland to be destabilized in a way that lets the Nazis intervene there.”
“I understand that,” David Nussboym assured him. “Believe me, it is not a fate I’d wish on my worst enemies-and some of those people are.”
“See that you don’t inflict it on them,” Molotov said, wagging that finger again: Poland genuinely concerned him. “If things go wrong, that is one of the places that can flash into nuclear war in the blink of an eye. It can-but it had better not. No debt of gratitude will excuse you there, David Aronovich.”
Nussboym’s features were almost as impassive as Molotov’s. The Jew had probably learned in the gulag not to show what was on his mind. He’d spent several years there before being recruited to the NKVD. After a single tight, controlled nod, he said, “I won’t fail you.”
Having got the warning across, Molotov changed the subject: “And how do you find the NKVD these days?”
“Morale is still very low, Comrade General Secretary,” Nussboym answered. “No one can guess whether he will be next. Everyone is fearful lest colleagues prepare denunciations against him. Everyone, frankly, shivers to think that his neighbor might report him to the GRU.”
“This is what an agency earns for attempting treason against the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union,” Molotov said harshly. Even so, he was disquieted. He did not want the GRU, the Red Army’s intelligence arm, riding roughshod over the NKVD. He wanted the two spying services competing against each other so the Party could use their rivalry to its own advantage. That, however, was not what Georgi Zhukov wanted, and Zhukov, at the moment, held the whip hand.
“Thank you for letting me continue, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”
Nussboym got to his feet.
“I won’t take up any more of your time.”
He used another sharp nod, then left Molotov’s office. Molotov almost wished he’d stayed longer. Anything seemed preferable to returning to the Five Year Plan.
But then the intercom buzzed again, and Molotov’s secretary said, “Comrade General Secretary, your next appointment is here: the ambassador from the Race, along with his interpreter.”
Next to confronting an irritable Lizard-and Queek was often irritable-the Five Year Plan budget suddenly looked alluring. Bozhemoi! Molotov thought. No rest for the weary. Still, his secretary never heard the tiny sigh that fought its way past his lips. “Very well, Pyotr Maksimovich,” he answered. “I will meet them in the other office, as usual.”
The other office was identical to the one in which he did most of his work, but reserved for meetings with the Race. After he left it, he would change his clothes, down to his underwear. The Lizards were very good at planting tiny electronic eavesdropping devices. He did not want to spread those devices and let them listen to everything that went on inside the Kremlin: thus the meeting chamber that could be quarantined.
He went in and waited for his secretary to escort the Lizard and his human stooge into the room. Queek skittered in and sat down without asking leave. So did the interpreter, a stolid, broad-faced man. After the ambassador spoke-a series of hisses and pops-the interpreter said, “His Excellency conveys the usual polite greetings.” The fellow had a rhythmic Polish accent much like David Nussboym’s.
“Tell him I greet him and hope he is well,” Molotov replied, and the Pole popped and hissed to the male of the Race. In fact, Molotov hoped Queek and all his kind (except possibly the Lizards in Poland, who shielded the Soviet Union from the Greater German Reich) would fall over dead. But hypocrisy had always been an essential part of diplomacy, even among humans. “Ask him the reason for which he has sought this meeting.”
He thought he knew, but the question was part of the game. Queek made another series, a longer one, of unpleasant noises. The interpreter said, “He comes to issue a strong protest concerning Russian assistance to the bandits and rebels in the part of the main continental mass known as China.”
“I deny giving any such assistance,” Molotov said blandly. He’d been denying it for as long as the Lizards occupied China, first as Stalin’s foreign commissar and then on his own behalf. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true-only that the Race had never quite managed to prove it.
Now Queek pointed a clawed forefinger at him. “No more evasions,” he said through the interpreter, who looked to enjoy twitting the head of the USSR. “No more lies. Too many weapons of your manufacture are being captured from those in rebellion against the rule of the Race. China is ours. You have no business meddling there.”
Had Molotov been given to display rather than concealment, he would have laughed. He would, in fact, have chortled. What he said was, “Do you take us for fools? Would we send Soviet arms to China, betraying ourselves? If we aided the Chinese people in their struggle against the imperialism of the Race, we would aid them with German or American weapons, to keep from being blamed. Whoever gives them Soviet weapons seeks to get us in trouble for things we haven’t done.”
“Is that so?” Queek said, and Molotov nodded, his face as much a mask as ever. But then, to his surprise and dismay, Queek continued, “We are also capturing a good many American weapons. Do you admit, then, that you have provided these to the rebels, in violation of agreements stating that the subregion known as China rightfully belongs to the Race?”
Damnation, Molotov thought. So the Americans did succeed in getting a shipload of arms through to the People’s Liberation Army. Mao hadn’t told him that before launching the uprising. But then, Mao had given even Stalin headaches. The interpreter grinned offensively. Yes, he enjoyed making Molotov sweat, imperialist lackey and running dog that he was.
But Molotov was made of stern stuff. “I admit nothing,” he said stonily. “I have no reason to admit anything. The Soviet Union has firmly adhered to the terms of all agreements into which it has entered.” And you cannot prove otherwise… I hope.
For a bad moment, he wondered if Queek would pull out photographs showing caravans of weapons crossing the long, porous border between the USSR and China. The Lizards’ satellite reconnaissance was far ahead of anything the independent human powers could do. But the ambassador only made noises like a samovar with the flame under it turned up too high. “Do not imagine that your effrontery will go unpunished,” Queek said. “After we have put down the Chinese rebels once and for all, we will take a long, hard look at your role in this affair.”
That threat left Molotov unmoved. The Japanese hadn’t been able to put down Chinese rebels, either Communists or Nationalists, and the Lizards were having no easy time of it, either. They could hold the cities-except when rebellion burned hot, as it did now-and the roads between them, but lacked the soldiers to subdue the countryside, which was vast and heavily populated. Guerrillas were able to move about at will, almost under their snouts.
“Do not imagine that your colonialism will go unpunished,” Molotov answered. “The logic of the historical dialectic proves your empire, like all others based on the oppression of workers and peasants, will end up lying on the ash heap of history.”
Marxist terminology did not translate well into the language of the Race. Molotov had seen that before, and enjoyed watching the interpreter have trouble. He waited for Queek to explode, as Lizards commonly did when he brought up the dialectic and its lessons. But Queek said only, “You think so, do you?”
“Yes,” Molotov answered, on the whole sincerely. “The triumph of progressive mankind is inevitable.”
Then Queek startled him by saying, “Comrade General Secretary, it is possible that what you tell me is truth.”
The Lizard startled his interpreter, too; the Pole turned toward him with surprise on his face, plainly wondering whether he’d really heard what he thought he had. With a gesture that looked impatient, the Lizard ambassador continued, “It is possible-in fact, it is likely-that, if it is truth, you will regret its being truth.”
Careful, Molotov thought. He is telling me something new and important here. Aloud, he said, “Please explain what you mean.”
“It shall be done,” Queek said, a phrase Molotov understood before the interpreter translated It. “At present, you Tosevites are a nuisance and a menace to the Race only here on Tosev 3. Yet your technology is advancing rapidly-witness the Americans’ Lewis and Clark. If it should appear to us that you may become a risk to the Race throughout the Empire, what is our logical course under those circumstances?”
Vyacheslav Molotov started to lick his lips. He stopped, of course, but his beginning the gesture told how shaken he was. Now he hoped he hadn’t heard what he thought he had. Countering one question with another, he asked, “What do you believe your logical course would be?”
Queek spelled it out: “One option under serious consideration is the complete destruction of all independent Tosevite not-empires.”
“You know this would result in the immediate destruction of your own colonies here on Earth,” Molotov said. “If you attack us, we shall assuredly take vengeance-not only the peace-loving peasants and workers of the Soviet Union, but also the United States and the Reich. You need have no doubts about the Reich.” For once, he was able to use the Germans’ ferocity to his advantage.
Or so he thought, till Queek replied, “I understand this, yes, but sometimes a mangled limb must be amputated to preserve the body of which it is only one part.”
“This bluff will not intimidate us,” Molotov said. But the Lizards, as he knew only too well, were not nearly so likely to bluff as were their human opposite numbers.
Again, their ambassador echoed his unhappy thoughts, saying, “If you think of this as a bluff, you will be making a serious mistake. It is a warning. You and your Tosevite counterparts-who are also receiving it-had better take it as such.”
“I shall be the one who decides how to take it,” Molotov replied. He concealed his fear. For him, that was easy. Making it go away was something else again.