Aftershocks

15

As Reuven and Moishe Russie were walking from their home to the office they now shared, Reuven’s father asked him, “And how is Mrs. Radofsky’s toe these days?”

His tone was a little too elaborately casual to be quite convincing. “It seems to be coming along very well,” Reuven answered. Listening to himself, he found he also sounded a little too elaborately casual to be quite convincing.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Moishe Russie said. “And what is your opinion of those parts of Mrs. Radofsky located north of her fractured toe?”

“My medical opinion is that the rest of Mrs. Radofsky is quite healthy,” Reuven replied.

His father smiled. “I don’t believe I asked for your medical opinion.”

“Well, it’s what you’re going to get,” Reuven said, which made Moishe Russie laugh out loud. After a few more paces, Reuven added, “I think she’s a very nice person. Her daughter is a sweet little girl.”

“Yes, that’s always a good sign,” Moishe Russie agreed.

“A good sign of what?” Reuven asked.

“That someone is a nice person,” his father said. “Nice people commonly have nice children.” He gave his own son a sidelong glance. “There are exceptions every now and then, of course.”

“Yes, I suppose an obnoxious father could have a nice son,” Reuven said blandly. His father laughed again, and thumped him on the back.

They were both still chuckling as they went into the office. Yetta, the receptionist, had got there ahead of both of them. She sent them disapproving looks. “What’s waiting for us today, Yetta?” Moishe Russie asked. He and Reuven already had a pretty good idea of their scheduled appointments, but Yetta got fussy if they didn’t respect what she saw as her prerogative.

Sometimes, as now, she got fussy anyhow. “Neither one of you has enough to keep you busy,” she complained. “I don’t know how you expect to pay the bills if you don’t have more patients.”

“We’re doing all right,” Reuven said, which was true and more than true.

“Well, you won’t keep doing all right unless more people come down sick,” Yetta snapped. Reuven looked at his father. His father was looking at him. That made it harder for both of them to keep from laughing. Somehow, they managed. They went past the disapproving Yetta and into their own offices. Neither of them had an appointment scheduled till ten o’clock, an hour and a half away. Reuven caught up on paperwork-a never-ending struggle-and was working his way through a Lizard medical journal when his father called him.

“What’s up?” Reuven asked.

“I hear Ppurrin and Waxxa really have gone to the United States,” Moishe Russie answered.

“Have they?” Reuven said. “Well, that’s one problem solved for old Atvar, then, and some credit for us because we came up with the idea for him.”

“Credit for us, yes,” his father said. “A problem solved? I don’t know. I wouldn’t bet on it, though for the time being I think Atvar thinks he won’t have to worry about it any more.”

“What do you mean?” Reuven said. “The Americans will let those Lizards stay. They may be perverts to the Race, but not to us.”

“I’m sure the Americans will let them stay, yes.” His father nodded. “That’s not the problem, or not as I see it, anyhow.”

Reuven scratched his head. “What is, then? I’m sorry, Father, but I’m not following you at all.”

No? Moishe Russie grinned. “All right. Let’s put it like this: do you think Ppurrin and Waxxa will be the only pair of what the Lizards call perverts that they’ll have? A lot of Lizards taste ginger.”

“Oh,” Reuven said, and then, in an altogether different tone of voice, “Oh.” He gave his father an admiring look. “You think those two are just the tip of the iceberg, don’t you?”

“Don’t you?” his father returned. “The colonists haven’t been here very long, after all, and this is already starting to happen. What will things be like when you’re my age? What will things be like when your children are my age?”

Most times, Reuven would have pointed out with some heat that he had no children at present. Today, though, he nodded thoughtfully. “They’ll have to change a lot of things to adjust to that, won’t they? I mean, if they really do start forming permanent mated pairs.”

“Start falling in love and getting married,” Moishe Russie said, and Reuven nodded, accepting the correction. His father went on, “It will be as hard for them to get used to the idea of pairs settling down together as it would be for us to get used to the idea of being promiscuous all the time.” He wagged a finger at his son. “And wipe that dirty grin off your face.”

“Who, me?” Reuven said, as innocently as he could. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s pretty funny,” Moishe Russie said. “Now tell me another one.”

“No.” Reuven shook his head. He cautiously looked out the door, then lowered his voice anyhow: “Who do you think I am, Yetta or somebody?”

His father rolled his eyes. “She does her work well. As for the rest…” He shrugged and then, in a near whisper, went on, “We might get somebody who’s a pain in the neck and doesn’t do her job well. I can put up with bad jokes.”

“I suppose so.” Reuven pulled his mind back to the business at hand. “Do you really think we’ll see a day when the Lizards start pairing off by the thousands instead of just one couple at a time? That would make this world different from all the others in the Empire in some very important ways.”

“I know,” Moishe Russie said. “I’m not sure the Race has really figured all of that out yet. And it will be years before the other planets in the Empire find out what ginger is doing here, even if it does what I think it will. It’s always going to be years between stars as far as radio goes, and even more years between them as far as travel. The Race is more patient than we are. I don’t think we could have built an empire that would hang together in spite of all the delays in giving orders and getting things done.”

“You’re bound to be right about that,” Reuven said. “Somebody who was governor on one planet would decide he wanted to be king or president or whatever he called himself, and he’d stop taking orders and set up his own government or else start a civil war.”

“That’s how we are,” his father agreed. “The Lizards here know it, too. I wonder what they think of us back on Home.”

“So do I,” Reuven said. “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be ten years out of date.”

“I know.” Moishe Russie laughed. “And by the time Home answers, it’s twenty years out of date. Atvar is just now finding out what the Emperor thinks of the truce he made with us Big Uglies.”

“And what does the Emperor think?” Reuven asked. “Has Atvar said?” He was going to use his father’s connections with the Race for all they were worth.

“He hasn’t said much,” his father answered. “I gather the Emperor knows Atvar’s the man, uh, the Lizard on the spot, and so he has to do what he thinks best. It’s a good thing the Emperor didn’t order him to go back to war with all of us, and you had best believe that’s a truth.” He’d been speaking Hebrew, but threw in an emphatic cough even so.

“Do you really think he would have done it if the Emperor had told him to?” Reuven asked. That unpleasant possibility hadn’t crossed his mind.

But his father nodded. “If the Emperor told Atvar to stick a skewer through Earth and throw it on the fire, he’d do it. I don’t think we can even imagine how well the Lizards obey the Emperor.”

“I suppose not.” Reuven knew the males of the Race with whom he’d dealt over the years didn’t understand what made him tick. He was willing to believe it worked both ways.

The front door opened. “Hello, Mr. Krause,” Yetta said. She raised her voice: “Dr. Russie, Mr. Krause is here.”

“He’s mine,” Reuven’s father said. In a soft aside, he added, “If he’d lose twenty kilos and stop drinking and smoking, he’d add twenty years to his life.”

Reuven said, “He probably thinks they’d be twenty boring years.” He got up and went back to his own office while his father was still scratching his head over that. If Mr. Krause was here, his own first patient would come through the door pretty soon, too.

Before Yetta announced that first patient’s arrival, Reuven picked up the telephone and made a call. After the phone rang a couple of times, somebody on the other end of the line, a woman, picked it up. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Radofsky?” Reuven said.

“No, she’s at work. This is her sister,” the woman answered. “Who’s calling, please?” In the background, Miriam prattled something-the sister was undoubtedly looking after her.

“This is Dr. Russie,” Reuven answered. “I’m calling to find out how her broken toe is doing.”

He wondered if the sister would simply tell him and hang up. Instead, she said, “Oh, thank you very much, Dr. Russie. Let me give you her number.”

She did. Reuven wrote it down. After he said his good-byes, he called it. “Gold Lion Furniture,” a woman said.

This time, Reuven recognized Mrs. Radofsky’s voice. He named himself, and then asked, “How’s your toe doing these days?”

“It’s still sore,” the widow Radofsky answered, “but it’s getting better. It’s not as swollen as it was, and it doesn’t hurt as much as it did, either.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, for all the world as if he, as opposed to the passage of time, had had something to do with her recovery.

“Thank you very much for calling,” she said. “I’m sure most doctors wouldn’t have done it for their patients.”

Reuven was sure he wouldn’t have done it for most of his patients, too. He also had a pretty good notion the widow Radofsky was sure of that. Even so, he nervously drummed his fingers on his desk before asking, “Would you, ah, like to go out to supper with me one of these evenings to celebrate feeling better?”

Silence on the other end of the line. He braced himself for rejection. If she said no, if she still had her dead husband and nobody else in her heart, how could he blame her? He couldn’t. For that matter, if she just wasn’t interested in him for a multitude of other reasons, how could he blame her? Again, he couldn’t.

But, at last, she said, “Thank you. I think I would like that. Call me at home, why don’t you, and we’ll make the arrangements.”

“All right,” he said. Yetta chose that moment to bawl out his name. His first patient had made an appearance after all. Reuven said his goodbyes and hung up. He was smiling. The patient had waited just long enough.

Marshal Zhukov had, or could have, more power than Vyacheslav Molotov. Molotov knew it, too. But, because of his Party office, he exercised a certain moral authority over the marshal-as long as Zhukov chose to acknowledge it, which he did.

Molotov took advantage of that now. He said, “I assume our support for the People’s Liberation Army will be altogether clandestine, Georgi Konstantinovich. It had better be, at any rate.”

“If it isn’t, Comrade General Secretary, it will be at least as big a surprise to me as it is to you,” Zhukov answered.

That was, no doubt, intended for a joke. As usual, Molotov disapproved of jokes. All they were good for, in his jaundiced opinion, was clouding the issue. He did not want this issue clouded. He wanted no ambiguity whatsoever here. “If we are detected, Comrade Marshal, very unfortunate things will spring from it. Consider the Reich. Consider the United States.”

“I do consider them. I consider them every day,” Zhukov said. “As far as the People’s Liberation Army knows, our aid has not been detected. As far as the GRU knows, it has not been detected. As far as the NKVD knows, it has not been detected. We are as secure as we can possibly be.”

His lip curled when he condescended to name the NKVD at all. The Party’s espionage and security service, as opposed to the Red Army’s (which it frequently was), had fallen on hard times since Beria’s botched coup. That was partly at Molotov’s insistence, partly at Zhukov’s-the NKVD spied on the Red Army as well as the rest of the world. It had needed purging of Beria’s henchmen, and had got it.

Even so, Molotov wished he had the NKVD running at a higher level of efficiency than it possessed right now. The GRU was a good service, but its first loyalty lay with the Army, not with the Party: with Zhukov, not with him. And he wanted more than one perspective on his course of action. Having to rely on the GRU alone left him feeling like a one-eyed man.

He said nothing of that to Zhukov, of course. It would have roused the marshal’s suspicions, and Zhukov had plenty even when they weren’t roused. He would have thought Molotov was trying to rebuild an independent political position. He would have been right, too.

Aloud Molotov was mild, as he had to be: “Let us hope the assessments are correct, then. Given the German arms we have been able to supply to the People’s Liberation Army, do you think they stand any serious chance of throwing off the Race’s yoke in China?”

“Probably not, but they can make enormous nuisances of themselves, and when was Mao ever good for any more than that?” Zhukov answered, proving Molotov did not have the exclusive franchise for cynicism among the Soviet leaders. “Besides, even if the Chinese do seem on the brink of expelling the Lizards, the Race has explosive-metal bombs, and the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t.”

“Not from us, anyhow,” Molotov agreed. “But life gets more difficult and more complicated now that the Japanese do have them.”

Zhukov nodded. “They had imperialist designs on China before the Lizards showed up. They haven’t forgotten, either. They still think of it as their rightful sphere of influence.”

“That is part of it, Georgi Konstantinovich, but only part.” Molotov was glad the marshal did leave him control over foreign policy. Zhukov was a long way from stupid, but he didn’t always see the subtleties. “The rest is, the Race may also hesitate longer before using explosive-metal weapons now that they have to take the Japanese more seriously.”

“Maybe.” Zhukov didn’t sound convinced. “The Lizards didn’t give a fart about what we thought when they pounded the Nazis flat. We’re going to be worrying about fallout in the Baltics and Byelorussia and the western Ukraine for years to come.”

“Not all of that fallout is from the Lizards’ bombs,” Molotov said. “Some of it comes from the ones the Germans used on Poland.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Marshal Zhukov insisted. “The point is the same either way: they’ll do what they think needs doing, and they’ll worry about everything else later. If the rebels in China look like winning, their cities will start going up in smoke.” He waved his hand. “Do svidanya, Mao.”

Molotov considered. Maybe he’d looked for subtleties and missed a piece of the big picture. “It could be,” he admitted.

“There are times I wouldn’t miss him, believe you me there are,” Zhukov said. “He’s as arrogant as Stalin ever was, but Stalin did plenty to earn the right. Mao’s nothing but a jumped-up bandit chief, and a lot of the jumping up is only in his own mind.”

More than the foolish joke earlier, that did tempt Molotov to smile. It also made him look nervously around the office. He noticed Zhukov doing the same thing. “We’re both afraid Iosef Vissarrionovich is listening,” he said.

“He’s been dead twelve years and more,” Zhukov said. “But if anybody could still be listening after all that time, he’s the one.”

“That is the truth,” Molotov agreed. “Very well, then. Do your best to get still more weapons to the Chinese. If they are going to annoy the Lizards, we want them to do it on a grand scale. The more attention the Race pays to China, the less it will be able to pay to anything else-including us.”

“And the less attention the Race pays to us, the better we shall like it.” Zhukov nodded; he saw the desirability of that as plainly as Molotov did. After another nod, he got to his feet. “All right, Comrade General Secretary. We’ll continue on the course we’ve set.” A grin spread over his broad peasant features. “And with any luck at all, the Nazis will get the blame.”

“Yes, that would break my heart,” Molotov said, which made Zhukov laugh out loud. The marshal’s salute was unusually sincere. He did a smart about-turn and left the general secretary’s office.

Molotov scratched his chin. Little by little, he was, or thought he was, regaining some of the authority he’d had to yield to Marshal Zhukov after the Red Army crushed Beria’s abortive coup. He hadn’t really tried to exert it; he could have been wrong. One of these days, though, he might have to try. He wouldn’t live forever. He didn’t want his successor as beholden to the Army as he was. Of course, what he wanted might end up having nothing to do with the way things turned out.

His secretary stuck his head into the office. “Your next appointment is here, Comrade General Secretary,” he said. “It’s-”

“I know who it is, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov snapped. “I do keep track of these things, you know. Send him in.”

“Yes, Comrade General Secretary.” His secretary retreated in a hurry, which was what Molotov had in mind.

David Nussboym came into the office. “Good day, Comrade General Secretary.”

“Good day, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered automatically. Then even his legendary impassivity cracked. “Sit down. Take it easy. Here, I will get you some tea.” As he rose to do that, he added, “How are you feeling?”

“I have been better,” Nussboym allowed. He sounded as battered as he looked. The last time Molotov had seen him-when he’d given Nussboym permission to go into Poland-the Jewish NKVD man had been thin and bald and nondescript. He was thinner now: skeletally lean. And he was balder: he had not a hair on his head, not even an eyebrow or an eyelash. No Lizard could have had less hair than he did. And he was no longer nondescript, either: with his skin a pasty yellowish white, anyone who saw him would remember him for a long time, though possibly wishing he wouldn’t.

“Here.” Molotov gave him the tea, into which he’d dumped a lot of sugar. “Would you care for a sweet roll, too?”

“No, thank you, Vyacheslav Mikhaibovich.” Nussboym shook his head. Even so small a motion seemed to take all his strength. “I’m afraid I still haven’t got much in the way of an appetite.” His rhythmic Polish accent gave his Russian the appearance of a vitality lacking in truth.

“I had heard you were suffering from radiation sickness,” Molotov said, returning to his desk after the unusual show of solicitude, “but I had no idea…”

Nussboym’s shrug looked effortful, too. “By everything the doctors tell me, I ought to be dead from the dose of radiation I took.” He shrugged again. “I’m still here. I intend to be here a while longer. They say I’m a lot likelier now to get cancer later on, but I can’t do anything about that, either. Who knows? Maybe I’ll beat the odds one more time.”

“I hope so,” Molotov said, on the whole sincerely. Nussboym hadn’t had to get him out of the cell where Beria had imprisoned him, but he’d done it. Afterwards, the NKVD man had been reasonable in the rewards he’d requested. And so Molotov did wish him well. He was useful, after all.

“Thank you,” Nussboym said. “In the meantime, I serve the Soviet Union.”

“Good.” Molotov nodded approval. “Spoken like an Old Bolshevik.” Stalin, of course, had purged most of the Old Bolsheviks, the men who’d made the Russian Revolution. At need, Molotov could always purge Nussboym. Knowing that was reassuring. The general secretary went on, “Speak to me of the situation in Poland.”

“You will-or you had better-have more up-to-date information than I can give,” Nussboym replied. “I’ve spent most of the past few months on my back with needles and tubes sticking into me.”

Molotov had always been a scrawny, even a weedy, little man-which might well have helped keep him safe during Stalin’s tenure, for Iosef Vissarionovich hadn’t been any too big, either. Despite looking anything but robust, though, he’d always been healthy. The idea of going into a hospital-of entrusting his physical well-being to a physician he could not fully control-gave him the cold chills. Doing his best not to think about that, he said, “You were on the spot for some time, and you survived the fighting, which a good many of our operatives did not. And, of course, you are a native of Poland. Your impressions of what is going on there, then, will be of particular value to me.”

“You are too kind, Comrade General Secretary,” David Nussboym murmured, seeming genuinely moved. “From what I saw, the Jews are solidly behind the Race, which understands that and exploits it. A good many Poles favor independence, but they too-all except for a few fascist madmen or progressive Communists-prefer the Lizards to either the Reich or the Soviet Union.”

That accorded well with everything Molotov had already heard. He asked, “How much do you think the extensive damage Poland suffered as a result of the fighting will make Poles and Jews resent the Race?”

“There I fear I cannot tell you much.” Nussboym gave the Soviet leader a bony grin. “I suffered my own extensive damage too early in the fighting to have an opinion. If you like, though, I will go back to investigate.”

“I will think about that,” Molotov said. “First, though, you plainly need more recovery time.” Had the NKVD man argued with him, he would have sent Nussboym back to Poland right away-no tool was better than one that actively wanted to be used. But David Nussboym didn’t argue. That left Molotov a trifle disappointed, though he showed it no more than he showed anything else.

Mordechai Anielewicz lifted a glass of plum brandy in salute. “L’chaim,” he said, and then added, “And to life as a whole family.”

“Omayn,” his wife said. His sons and daughter raised their glasses-even Heinrich had a shot glass’ worth of slivovitz tonight. Mordechai drank. So did Bertha and their children.

Heinrich hadn’t drunk plum brandy more than once or twice before. Then, he’d taken tiny sips. Tonight, imitating his father, he knocked back the whole shot at once. He spluttered and choked a little and turned very red. “Am I poisoned?” he wheezed.

“No.” Mordechai did his best not to laugh. “Believe me, you have to drink a lot more slivovitz than that to get properly poisoned.”

“Mordechai!” Bertha Anielewicz said reprovingly.

But Anielewicz only grinned at his wife-and at Heinrich, whose color was returning to normal. “Besides, if you do drink too much, you don’t usually know how poisoned you are till the next morning. You haven’t had nearly enough to need to worry about that.”

His wife sent him another reproachful look. He pretended not to see it. They’d been married long enough that he could get away with such things every now and then. The look his wife sent him for ignoring the first one warned him he couldn’t get away with such things any too often.

His daughter Miriam was old enough to make the more regular acquaintance of slivovitz, but she’d had the good sense not to get greedy with what he’d given her. Now she raised her glass, which still held a good deal of the plum brandy. “And here’s to Przemysl, for taking us in.”

Everybody drank to that-everybody except Heinrich, who had nothing left to drink. The town in southern Poland, not far from the Slovakian border, hadn’t been hit too hard in the fighting. And it kept its good-sized Jewish community. Back in 1942, the SS had been on the point of shipping the Jews to an extermination camp, but local Wehrmacht officials hadn’t let it happen-the Jews were doing important labor for them. And then the Lizards had driven the Nazis out of Poland, and Przemysl’s Jews survived.

Thinking of Wehrmacht men who’d been, if not decent, then at least pragmatic, made Mordechai also think of Johannes Drucker. He said, “I wonder if the German space pilot ever found his kin.”

“I hope so,” his wife said. “After all, his wife and children are part Jewish, too.”

“No matter how little they like it.” That was David, Mordechai’s older son.

“He wasn’t the worst of fellows,” Anielewicz said. “I’ve known plenty of Germans worse, believe me.” He used an emphatic cough.

“His own family helped remind him what being a human being meant.” David was, at fifteen, convinced everything came in one of two colors: black or white. What he said here, though, probably held a lot of truth.

Bertha Anielewicz said, “He’ll go his way, we’ll go ours, and with any luck at all we’ll never have anything to do with each other again. Odds are good, anyhow.” That also probably held a lot of truth.

Before Mordechai could say so, Pancer walked up to him and said, “Beep!” The beffel stretched up toward him, extending its forelegs as far as they would go. That, he’d learned, meant it want to be scratched. He obliged. The beffel might have been hatched on Home, but it got on better with humans than the Lizards did.

“We should have drunk a toast to Pancer,” Heinrich said. “If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t all be here now.”

Mordechai lifted the bottle of slivovitz. “Here, son. Do you want another drink? You can have one.” Heinrich hastily shook his head. Anielewicz’s grin covered his relief. He would have given the boy one more shot of brandy, but he was just as well pleased that Heinrich didn’t want it.

“I’ll tell you what I’d drink a toast to,” Miriam said with a toss of the head, “and that’s a bigger flat.”

“This isn’t so bad,” Mordechai said. “Next to what things were like in Warsaw before the Lizards came, this is paradise.”

“And in Lodz,” his wife agreed. Their children didn’t know how things had been back in the Nazi-created ghettos. That also was all to the good.

Miriam didn’t see the benefits of ignorance. “I’m tired of sleeping on a cot here in the front room,” she said, and tossed her head again.

“We’re all sleeping on cots,” Mordechai pointed out. “Your brothers are in one bedroom, your mother and I in the other, and you have this room here. The only other places for you to sleep are under the shower or on the kitchen table.”

“I know that,” Miriam said impatiently. “It’s why we need a bigger flat.”

“It doesn’t matter so much,” Bertha Anielewicz said. “Everything we used to have went up in smoke. I wish it hadn’t-I’d be lying if I said anything different-but we’ll get by as long as we’ve got each other.”

Miriam started to say something, then visibly thought better of it. Anielewicz wondered what it would have been. Maybe he was better off not knowing.

But his wife didn’t need to wonder. She knew. She wagged a finger at her daughter. “You were going to say we’ve got altogether too much of each other, weren’t you? But that’s not so, either. Just remember what things were like in the barracks at that Nazi’s farm. Next to that, this is paradise, too.”

“We didn’t have any choice there, though,” Miriam said.

“We don’t have any choice here, either, not now,” Bertha Anielewicz said. “But be patient for a little while, and we will. If your father hadn’t tracked us down, we never would have had any choices there.”

“And if Pancer hadn’t beeped when he did, so Father heard him, he might never have tracked us down.” Heinrich scratched his pet. The scaly little animal wiggled sinuously.

Miriam rolled her eyes. “If you were a goy, you’d say that beffel ought to be canonized.”

“Pancer deserves it more than some saints I can think of,” Heinrich retorted.

“Enough of that,” Mordechai Anielewicz said sharply. “The goyim can afford to make jokes about us-they outnumber us ten to one. We can’t afford to make jokes about them. Even with the Lizards to lean on, it’s too dangerous.”

His children looked ready to argue about that, too. They were less aware of how dangerous being a small minority could prove than he was. But before the argument could get going, the telephone rang. Bertha was closest to it. “I’ll get it,” she said, and did. A moment later, she held the handset out to Anielewicz. “For you. A member of the Race.”

“Nesseref?” he asked, and his wife shrugged. He took the telephone. “I greet you,” he said in the Lizards’ language.

“And I greet you,” the Lizard replied. “I am Odottoss, liaison officer between the Race’s military and your Tosevite forces here in Poland. We have spoken before.”

“Truth,” Anielewicz agreed. “Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref was kind enough to give me your name. I thank you for the assistance you were able to give my mate and my hatchlings and me.”

“You are welcome,” Odottoss replied. “You and your fighters have served the Race well. It is only fair that you should have some recompense for that service.”

“Again, I thank you. And now, superior sir, what can I do for you?” He did not for a moment believe the male of the Race had called merely to throw bouquets at him.

And he was right, for Odottoss inquired, “Do you know the whereabouts of the explosive-metal bomb you Jews have claimed to have since the end of the first round of fighting?”

“At the moment, I do not know that, no,” Mordechai admitted. “Since the recent fighting against the Reich, I have been concerned with other things. Till now, no one has mentioned any problems with this explosive-metal bomb.”

“I do not know that there are any,” Odottoss said. “But I do not know that there are none, either. As best the Race has been able to determine, the bomb is not where we formerly thought it was. Have you ordered its transfer?”

“Have I personally? No,” Anielewicz said. “But that does not mean other Jewish fighters may not have given such an order. For that matter, we never wanted the Race to know where we keep it.”

“I understand your reasons for that,” Odottoss said. “You will understand, I hope, our reasons for seeking this knowledge.”

“I suppose so.” Anielewicz tried not to sound grudging, but it wasn’t easy.

“Very well, then,” the Lizard said. “If this bomb has been moved clandestinely, you will also understand our concern about where it is now and to what use it may be put.” Clandestinely moving the explosive-metal bomb wasn’t easy. Mordechai wondered how well Odottoss understood that. The device weighed about ten tonnes. The Germans had just been learning how to make such bombs in 1944. They’d got better since.

But even that old, primitive weapon would be devastating if it went off. Anielewicz wasn’t sure it could detonate. He also wasn’t sure it couldn’t. He realized there were too many things about which he wasn’t sure. “I shall do my best to find out what is going on here, superior sir,” he said.

“And then you will report to me?” Odottoss asked.

“I may not give you much detail,” Mordechai said. “If I find nothing much has gone wrong, but that the bomb was moved for security reasons during the fighting, I would just as soon have its whereabouts stay secret from the Race.”

“I understand,” Odottoss replied. “I do not approve, mind you, but I understand. Arrangements in Poland have been so irregular for so long, one more irregularity probably will not hurt much. But I would appreciate learning that the bomb is safe and is in responsible hands.”

“That is a bargain,” Anielewicz said. “If I learn that, I will tell you. Farewell.”

After he hung up, Bertha asked, “What was that all about? You speak the Lizards’ language a lot better than I do.” Once Mordechai had explained, she said, “You don’t know where the bomb is, either? It’s not a good thing to lose.”

“I know.” Mordechai started to reach for the phone, then checked himself. “I’d better not call from here. If the Lizards know where I am, I have to assume they’re tapping the line. Why make things easy for them?”

He needed several days before he could get hold of Yitzkhak, one of the Jews up in Glowno who’d had charge of the bomb, on a line he reckoned secure. They spent a couple of minutes congratulating each other on being alive. Then Yitzkhak said, “I suppose you’re calling about the package.” Even on a secure line, he didn’t want to come right out and talk about an explosive-metal bomb.

Mordechai didn’t blame him. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am,” he answered. “Somebody’s worried that it might get delivered to the wrong address. The post’s gone to pot lately, and everybody knows it.”

“Well, that’s true. Actually, I’m afraid it could happen.” Yitzkhak was precise to the point of fussiness. If he said he was afraid, he meant it. “The people who took charge of it during the confusion are pretty careless, and they may try to deliver it themselves.”

“Oy!” That was about the worst news Moishe could imagine. Who had got hold of the bomb during the fighting? Had some of David Nussboym’s NKVD henchmen spirited it off toward Russia, or would some Jewish hotheads try to give the Greater German Reich one last kick while it was down? Mordechai phrased the question somewhat differently: “Has it headed east or west?”

“West, I think,” Yitzkhak answered.

“Oy!” Anielewicz repeated. If a bomb went off in Germany now, would the Nazis reckon themselves betrayed and try to retaliate? Did they have anything left with which they could retaliate? He suspected they would and could. With a sigh, he said, “I suppose we have to try to get it back.” He paused. “Dammit.”

Tao Sheng-Ming came up to Liu Han and Liu Mei with his shaved head gleaming and with an impudent grin on his face. “I greet you, superior female,” the devil-boy said in the language of the little scaly devils. “Give me an order. Whatsoever you may request, it shall be done.”

Liu Han stuck to Chinese: “Suppose I order you not to be so absurd?” But she shook her head. “No. That would be foolish. No good officer gives an order knowing it will be disobeyed.”

Tao bowed as if she’d paid him a great compliment. “You give me too much credit,” he said, still in the scaly devils’ tongue. “All I aim to be is the biggest nuisance possible.”

“Do you mean to the little devils or to the People’s Liberation Army?” Liu Han’s voice was dry.

“Why, both, of course,” Tao Sheng-Ming answered. “Life would be boring if we all did exactly what we were supposed to all the time.”

“That is a truth,” Liu Mei said. “A little unpredictability is an asset.” She also used the little devils’ language, as if to show solidarity with Tao Sheng-Ming.

Liu Han thought her daughter’s response entirely predictable. Liu Mei was fond of the devil-boy. Liu Han wondered what, if anything, would come of that. Nothing at all would come of it if Tao didn’t pay more attention to what came out of his mouth before he opened it. “If you do not precisely obey the orders of your superiors, you will find yourself purged as an unreliable,” she warned him. “That would be unfortunate.”

“I would certainly think so,” Tao Sheng-Ming said. He had trouble taking anything seriously, even the Chinese Communist Party.

Liu Mei might have been fond of him, but she was a dedicated revolutionary. “You must obey the dictates of the Party, Tao,” she said seriously. “It is our only hope against the unbridled imperialism of the little scaly devils.”

He drew himself up, as if affronted. “I did not come to your rooming-house to argue politics,” he said. “I came to find out how things were going, and what I could do to help them go.”

“Do you think no one will tell you when the time comes?” Liu Han demanded. “Do you think you will be left on the sidewalk standing around when the revolutionary struggle begins anew?”

“Well, no,” he admitted, using Chinese for the first time-perhaps out of embarrassment. “But I am not a mahjongg tile, to be played by somebody else. I am my own person, and I want to know what I am doing, and why.”

Liu Mei spoke to her mother: “He sounds more like an American than a proper Chinese.”

That held some truth. Liu Han chose not to acknowledge it. She said, “He sounds like a foolish young man who thinks he is more important than he is.” She didn’t want to anger Tao Sheng-Ming too much, so she tempered that by adding, “He is important to a degree, though, and he will-I assure you, he will — learn what he’s supposed to know when he’s supposed to know it.”

Unabashed, Tao said, “But I want to know more, and I want to know sooner.”

“I will tell you what you need to know, not what you want to know,” Liu Han said. “What you need to know is, soon we will rise against the little scaly devils. When we do, you and your fellow devil-boys will help lure them to destruction. They will trust you more than they would trust other human beings. You will make them pay for their mistake.”

“Yes!” Tao Sheng-Ming said, and used an emphatic cough. His eyes glowed with anticipation.

Liu Han anticipated that most of the devil-boys assigned to mislead the little scaly devils would pay the price for their deception. She said nothing about that. If Tao Sheng-Ming didn’t see it for himself, he would perform better as a result of his ignorance.

When she thought about such tactics, she sometimes knew brief shame. But it was only brief, because she remained convinced the struggle against the imperialist little devils was more important than any individual’s fate.

“I need to tell you one other thing,” Tao said. “Some of the scaly devils are beginning to suspect that something may be going on. They are talking about making moves of some kind. My fellow devil-boys and I do not know as much about that as we would like, because they quiet down around us. They know a lot of us speak their language, and they do not want us overhearing.”

“That is not good,” Liu Mei said.

“No, it’s not,” Liu Han agreed. “The knife has two edges. The little devils trust the devil-boys because they know the devil-boys imitate their ways. But they also know the devil-boys understand what they say. We need to send out more ordinary Chinese who know their language and hope the scaly devils will be indiscreet around them.”

“You will know the people who can arrange that. I hope you will know those people, anyway,” Tao Sheng-Ming said. “I’ve tried to tell some people with higher rank than mine, but they don’t take me seriously. After all, I’m only a devil-boy. I’m funny-looking, and I have strange ideas-and if you don’t believe me, just ask anybody from the People’s Liberation Army.” He didn’t try to hide his bitterness. What he did do, a moment later, was swagger around like a pompous general who was round in the belly and empty in the head.

Liu Mei laughed and clapped her hands. Liu Han laughed, too; she couldn’t help herself. She tried to put reproof in her voice as she said, “I am from the People’s Liberation Army, Tao, and so are you.” She tried to put reproof in her voice, yes, but she heard herself failing.

“We’re with the People’s Liberation Army, yes, but we’re not old men who haven’t had a new thought since the last emperor ruled China,” Tao answered with the ready scorn of the young. Liu Mei nodded emphatically. Why not? She was young, too.

Liu Han wasn’t so young any more, as her body and sometimes her spirit kept reminding her. But she knew the kind of people Tao Sheng-Ming meant. She hoped she wasn’t one of those people. “I’m on the Central Committee,” she said. “I can make people listen to me.” She lowered her voice: “Besides, things will start to happen before very long.” Tao’s face lit up. That was the kind of news he wanted to hear.

Liu Han did have the rank to get Tao’s message noted. She hoped that would do the cause some good. One thing it did was get the date for the start of the operation moved forward again. That made Liu Mei clap her hands once more. She wanted action. Liu Han wanted action, too, but not at the cost of striking before the People’s Liberation Army was ready. Success was a longshot even if they struck when the People’s Liberation Army was ready. Everyone on the Central Committee understood that. No one seemed willing to admit it, not out loud.

When the Second World War started in Europe, back in the dim dark days before the little scaly devils came, the Germans had staged a border incident to give themselves an excuse to go to war against Poland. The Germans were fascists, of course, but Mao admired the stratagem: it turned the Wehrmacht loose exactly when its leaders wanted it to move.

Borrowing from the Germans’ book, Mao arranged for an incident in the railroad yards in the southwestern part of Peking. Liu Han wasn’t far away. When she heard the first gunshots ring out after sudden provocation from the devil-boys turned unbearable, she spoke one word into a radio: “Now.” Then she shut it off and took herself elsewhere, lest the little devils trace the transmission. That one word was the signal for riots to break out around the railroad yards, too, in carefully chosen places.

As the planners in the People’s Liberation Army had been sure they would, Chinese policemen-tools of the imperialist scaly devils-came rushing from all over Peking to quell those secondary riots. And they rushed straight into withering machine-gun fire: those emplacements had been sited and manned for a couple of days, and covered the likely routes of approach.

The Chinese police reeled back in dismay. Watching from a third-story window, Liu Han hugged herself with glee. The scaly devils’ running dogs weren’t soldiers, and couldn’t hope to hold their own in a fight against soldiers. Now that they’d discovered they couldn’t hope to put down the rioters, what would they do? Call in the little devils themselves, of course, Liu Han thought, and hugged herself again.

As usual, the little scaly devils wasted no time in responding. They were soldiers, and formidable soldiers at that. Three of their mechanized fighting vehicles, machines identical to the one in which Liu Han, her daughter, and Nieh Ho-T’ing had left the prison camp, rattled past her, guided toward the trouble-and toward ruination-by a couple of devil-boys. But they didn’t rattle very far. Barricades had already started going up. When the machines tried to bull them aside, the obstacles proved to have surprisingly solid cores.

Chinese rushed out from houses and storefronts to heave bottles of burning gasoline at the mechanized fighting vehicles. Liu Han had never learned why those were called Molotov cocktails, but they were. Two of the vehicles quickly caught fire. The third one sprayed death all around with its light cannon and with the scaly devils shooting from the firing ports set into the sides of the machine. Fighters fell one after another. At last, though, the third vehicle started burning, too, and the little devils inside had to bail out or be roasted. They lasted only moments outside their armored shell.

Columns of smoke began rising into the sky all over Peking. Liu Han nodded in sober satisfaction as she watched them sprout. Now the little scaly devils would really know they had an insurrection on their hands. What would they do next, now that their mechanized fighting vehicles were having trouble? Send in the landcruisers, of course, Liu Han thought. Landcruisers were the bludgeon they’d used to retake Peking after the last progressive uprising.

Sure enough, here came a pair of them, with infantrymales skittering along beside them spraying gunfire to keep would-be flingers of Molotov cocktails from getting close enough to harm them. Some of the little devils fighting on foot went down. The rest stayed with the landcruisers. They were brave. Liu Han wished she could have denied them that virtue-and many others.

But the landcruisers got a surprise not long after they rolled past the burnt-out hulks of the mechanized fighting vehicles and shouldered aside the barricades that had stalled the lesser machines. Spewing tails of fire, antilandcruiser missiles manufactured by the Reich slammed into their relatively thin side armor. They brewed up, flame belching from their turrets.

“See how you like that!” Liu Han shouted. The Russians wouldn’t give rockets they made themselves, but they were willing to supply plenty of these.

And, when a helicopter thuttered by overhead, another missile swatted it out of the sky. Liu Han whooped again. If the little scaly devils thought they were going to keep China forever, if they thought they could get away with ruling over a people who yearned to rule themselves, some reeducation for them was in order. The People’s Liberation Army would provide it.

“I give you the option of declining this flight, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the female in the monitor told Nesseref. “Missiles have been fired at shuttlecraft attempting to land in the subregion known as China. Shuttlecraft have been damaged. Two, I am sorry to report, have been destroyed.”

Nesseref wondered how much truth that held. If the dispatcher admitted two shuttlecraft destroyed, how many more had gone down in flaming ruin? Nevertheless, she said, “Superior female, I will accept the mission. I have seen the aftermath of fighting here in Poland. We must maintain control of the areas of Tosev 3 where we presently rule.”

“I thank you for your display of public spirit,” the dispatcher said. “Many from the colonization fleet in particular have seemed reluctant to accept any personal risk in maintaining our position on Tosev 3.”

“I find that unfortunate,” Nesseref said. “It lends truth to the disparaging comments certain males of the conquest fleet have been known to make about us colonists. Tosev 3 is now our world, too.”

“Exactly so.” The other female made the affirmative gesture, then turned one eye turret toward a monitor other than the one in which she was speaking with Nesseref. “Report to your shuttlecraft port at once. The male you are transporting to China will be waiting there for you.”

“It shall be done,” Nesseref said, and broke the connection. She didn’t leave her apartment quite at once. First, she made sure Orbit had enough food and water to last him till her expected return, and for some little while after that, too. “Behave yourself while I am gone,” she told the tsiongi. He yawned in lordly disdain, as if to say she had no business telling him what to do.

She couldn’t wait for the regularly scheduled transport to the shuttlecraft port. That meant she had to hire a Big Ugly to drive her there. In her experience, Tosevites in motorcars were more dangerous than members of the Race in shuttlecraft, but she survived the journey and gave her driver enough of the metal disks the locals used as currency to keep him happy.

One of the males in charge of maintaining shuttlecraft hurried up to her. He pointed to the machine waiting on the concrete. “You are fully fueled, and your oxygen supply is also full. We have thoroughly checked the shuttlecraft. I assure you, everything is as it should be.”

“I thank you for your care.” As always, Nesseref would make her own checks before she let her fingerclaw press the launch control. She asked, “Is my passenger ready? He had better be, seeing how urgently I was sent here.”

“Here he comes now,” the technician answered, pointing with his tongue toward the blockhouse by the broad concrete expanse of the landing area. And, sure enough, another male hurried up to the technician and Nesseref.

“I greet you, superior sir,” Nesseref told him, for his body paint was a good deal more ornate than hers.

“And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” he answered. “I am Relhost. I have considerable experience in fighting Big Uglies, both in full-scale combat against organized forces and in battle against irregulars. I am given to understand the situation in China combines elements of both combat modes.”

“All right, superior sir.” Nesseref didn’t need to know anything about Relhost’s expertise. She assumed he had it; if not, he wouldn’t have been sent to China. She started for the shuttlecraft. Relhost followed. She climbed the mounting ladder and took her place in the pilot’s seat. Relhost strapped himself into the passenger’s seat with a familiarity that showed he’d flown in a shuttlecraft a good many times before.

“Must we give the SSSR notice that we will be flying over its territory?” Relhost asked.

“I am afraid so, superior sir,” Nesseref answered. “Permission is routine, but the Big Uglies are touchy about being informed of our flights. And we are required to treat their independent not-empires as if they were our equals.”

“I understand,” Reihost said with a sigh. “But the SSSR shares an ideology with the Chinese Big Uglies. The rebels will thus learn of our flight as soon as we launch, if they do not already know of it. They may well be waiting for us on our arrival.”

“Nothing to be done about that, superior sir,” Nesseref said. She radioed the blockhouse: “Are we cleared for launch?”

“You are, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” came the reply. Nesseref’s eye turrets swiveled, checking all the gauges one last time. Everything was as it should have been. She would have been astonished were it otherwise, but she did not want astonishment of that sort. Her fingerclaw stabbed at the launch control. The motor roared to life beneath her. Acceleration shoved her back in her seat.

It was, of course, only a suborbital hop, perhaps a quarter of the way around Tosev 3. After the motor cut off-precisely on schedule-they had a brief stretch of weightlessness before Nesseref would have to begin preparations for landing.

Relhost sighed. “Now to see what new horrible tricks the Big Uglies have devised to drive us mad. I commanded the attack on Chicago, over on the lesser continental mass, back during the first winter of the fighting. The conditions were terrible, and the American Big Uglies struck hard at our flanks. They threw us back. It was then that we really knew what a desperate struggle we would have before we could make this world our own.”

“We still have not made it our own.” Nesseref was perhaps less diplomatic than she might have been.

“No, we have not,” Rethost agreed. “But whatever else we do, we cannot allow a rebellious area to break away from our control. That would be an open invitation to Tosevites all over the planet to try to break away from us.”

“That is probably a truth.” Nesseref corrected herself before her high-ranking passenger could correct her: “No, that is certainly a truth.”

A Tosevite voice came from the radio receiver: “Shuttlecraft of the Race, this is Akmolinsk Control. Your trajectory is acceptable. You are warned not to maneuver over the territory of the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, or we shall be forced to respond vigorously to your aggression.”

“Acknowledged, Akmolinsk Control,” Nesseref said, and then turned off the transmitter with quite unnecessary violence. To Relhost, she added, “I grow very tired of the arrogance the Big Uglies display.”

“As do we all, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the officer answered. “And they display less than they feel-in Akmolinsk, our name is cursed, as it is over much of the planet. They truly do believe they are our equals, as you said. Reeducating them will require generations: like their preposterous superstitions, their political ideologies have taken deep root among them. Sooner or later, though, we shall succeed.”

“May it be so,” Nesseref said. “And now, superior sir, if you will excuse me…” She examined the plot of the actual trajectory as measured against the planned one, and authorized the computer to make the small burns necessary to bring the one into conformity with the other. “We should be landing soon.”

As if to confirm that, a member of the Race came on the radio: “Shuttlecraft, we have you on radar. Trajectory for the shuttlecraft port outside Peking is acceptable.”

“How nice,” Nesseref said, acid in her voice. “The Big Uglies in the SSSR told me exactly the same thing.”

“Be glad they did,” answered the controller at the shuttlecraft port. “They can be most difficult, even dangerous, if your trajectory varies in any way from that which is planned. You will no doubt know this for yourself. But, speaking of dangerous, I will tell you something the Big Uglies in the SSSR did not: be extremely alert in your descent. Tosevite rebels are active in the area, and are equipped with missiles homing on radar and on the heat emissions of your engine as you brake for landing.”

“And what do I do if they launch one of these missiles at me?” Nesseref asked.

“You do the best you can, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller answered. “In that case, you discover how good a pilot you truly are, and how well you have studied and practiced the manual overrides. Shuttlecraft computers are not programmed to operate on the assumption that something is trying to shoot them down.”

“Here on Tosev 3, they should be,” Nesseref said indignantly.

“As may be, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller said. “Perhaps they will be, at some time in the future. For the present, good luck. Out.”

Relhost waggled an eye turret in an ironic way. “Good luck, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”

“I thank you so very much, superior sir,” Nesseref said.

Her own eye turrets went to the manual controls. Of course she’d put in endless simulator practice with them. But how seriously had she taken it? How well could she fly the shuttlecraft on her own? And, if something happened to her, who would take care of Orbit? Mordechai Anielewicz, perhaps? No. He had a beffel. The two animals wouldn’t get along. Nesseref hoped she wouldn’t have to find out the answers to any of her questions.

But, even as the computer activated the braking rocket for final descent into the shuttlecraft port, she kept an anxious eye turret on the radar screen. And so the controller’s shout of alarm in the radio was not a warning, only a distraction. “I can see it,” she snarled. “Now shut up.”

Her fingerclaw stabbed the manual override control. She didn’t adjust the burn right away, but eyed the radar and the displays around it for data on the missile’s performance. That was alarmingly good. Whatever she was going to do, she didn’t have long to do it.

Relhost said, “I suggest, Shuttlecraft Pilot, that you do not waste time.”

“You shut up, too,” Nesseref hissed, a moment later absently adding, “superior sir.”

She would have only one chance. She saw as much. If she maneuvered too soon, that cursed missile would follow and knock her down. If she maneuvered too late, she wouldn’t get the chance to maneuver at all. She checked her fuel gauge. She would worry about that later, too. Now…

Now her fingerclaw hit the motor control, giving her maximum thrust and, in effect, relaunching her. The missile had only begun to pull up when it burst a little below the shuttlecraft. Shrapnel fragments pattered off her ship. Some of them didn’t patter off-some pierced it. Alarm lights came on.

Nesseref gave control back to the computer. She hoped she had enough fuel to brake again. If she didn’t, the Big Uglies who’d launched the missile would win even if they hadn’t disabled her. She also hoped with all her liver that they had no more missiles to launch. She’d been lucky once-she thought she’d been lucky. She doubted she could manage it twice.

“Well done,” Relhost said.

“I hope so,” Nesseref answered. Fuel alarms weren’t hissing at top volume, so maybe she would be able to get down in one piece. She went on, “You had better help suppress these rebels, superior sir. Otherwise, I will be very disappointed in you.” She granted herself the luxury of an emphatic cough.

When David Goldfarb came into the office of the Saskatchewan River Widget Works, Ltd., he found Hal Walsh there before him. That was nothing out of the ordinary; he often thought Walsh lived at the office. The music blaring out of a skelkwank- disk player was a different matter. It was a song by a quartet of shaven-headed young Englishmen who called themselves, perhaps from their appearance, the Beetles.

As far as David was concerned, they made noise, not music. His boss, most of a generation younger, loved it. So did a lot of people Walsh’s age; the Beetles were, in Goldfarb’s biased opinion, much more popular than they had any business being. Walsh was singing along at the top of his lungs when Goldfarb walked in.

Since Walsh couldn’t carry a tune in a pail, he didn’t improve the music, if that was what it was. He did have the grace to stop, and even to look a little shamefaced. Better yet, at least from David’s point of view, he turned down the player.

“Good morning,” he said in the relative quiet thus obtained.

“Good morning,” Goldfarb answered. If Walsh wanted to play Beetles music at top volume, Goldfarb knew he couldn’t do much about it except look for another job. He didn’t care to do that, and his boss didn’t usually go out of his way to make the office miserable for him.

“I just wanted you to know, I’m the happiest fellow in the world right now,” Hal Walsh said. “I asked Jane to marry me last night, and she said she would.”

“Congratulations! No wonder you’re singing-if that’s what you want to call it.” David stuck out his hand. Walsh pumped it. Goldfarb went on, “That’s wonderful news-really terrific.”

“I think so,” his boss said, tacking on a Lizard-style emphatic cough. “And just think-if you hadn’t cut your finger, I probably never would have met her.”

“Life’s funny that way,” Goldfarb agreed. “You never can tell how something that seems little will end up changing everything. If you’d missed a phone call you ended up getting, or hadn’t got out of your motorcar five minutes before a drunk smashed it to scrap metal…”

“I know.” Walsh nodded vigorously. “It almost tempts you to wonder if bigger things work the same way. What if the French had won on the Plains of Abraham? Or if the Lizards hadn’t come? Or any of a dozen more things that occur to me in the blink of an eye?”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” David said. The mere idea made him open his eyes very wide. Thinking about changes in your life was one thing. You could see where, if things had happened differently or if you’d chosen differently, what happened next went wouldn’t have stayed the same, either. But trying to imagine the same phenomenon on a larger level, trying to imagine the whole world changing because something had happened differently… He shook his head. “Too big an idea for me to get my brain around so early in the morning.”

“You should read more science fiction,” Hal Walsh said. “Actually, that’s not the worst thing for somebody in our line of work to do anyhow. It goes a long way toward helping people think lefthanded, if you know what I mean. The more adaptable your mind is, the better the chance you have of coming up with something new and strange while you’re working with Lizard electronics.”

“I suppose there’s something to that,” Goldfarb admitted. “I used to read the American magazine called Astounding, back before the Lizards came. But it stopped getting across the Atlantic then, and I lost the habit.”

“They still print it,” Walsh said. “You can find it in the magazine counter at any drugstore here.” That was an Americanism David had taken a while to get used to; because he was so accustomed to chemist’s, the new word struck him as faintly sinister. His boss went on, “The issues from back before the war would be worth a pretty penny, if you’ve still got any of them.”

“Not likely,” Goldfarb answered. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

“Here in Edmonton, they’re liable to still be stacked up in the odd places, waiting to get shoveled away,” Walsh answered. “Still, though, I do take your point.”

The door opened. In strolled Jack Devereaux. He was never late, but he never looked as if he hurried, either. “Hello, all,” he said, and went to get himself a cup of tea. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

“Cut and try,” David Goldfarb said. “A lot of bad language when things don’t go the way we want. Nothing too much out of the ordinary.” He noticed Hal Walsh taking a deep breath and, with malice aforethought, forestalled him: “Oh, and Hal’s getting married. Like I said, nothing important.”

That won him the glare he’d hoped he would get from his boss. It also won him a raised eyebrow from Devereaux. “Really?” the other engineer asked Hal Walsh.

“Yes, really,” Walsh said, still giving David a sour look. “I asked Jane, and she was rash enough to tell me she would.” That sounded as if he was doing some forestalling of his own.

“Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard this morning,” the French-Canadian engineer said. “Of course, up till now I hadn’t heard much in the way of news this morning, so I don’t know exactly what that proves.”

“Thank you so much,” Walsh said. “I’ll remember you in my nightmares.”

Still helpfully slanderous, Goldfarb said, “He’s been blaming me-and you, too, because I cut my finger on that sheet metal when I was giving you a hand. If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have had to take me to the doctor, and she’d still be a happy woman today.”

He supposed he would, one of these days, have to let Moishe Russie know Reuven’s former lady friend would be tying the knot. He wondered how Reuven would take that. His second cousin once removed hadn’t wanted to stay with Dr. Jane Archibald. As far as David was concerned, that meant very poor eyesight on his younger cousin’s part, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He wondered if Reuven had found anyone else after Dr. Archibald left Palestine. Maybe Moishe would tell him.

Meanwhile, he had plenty of work here. He and Devereaux were still refining the design of that speedy new skelkwank- light disk player. He had a side project of his own, too, one that was nothing but a few sketchy notes at the moment but that he hoped would prove important one of these days. Hal Walsh knew he was working on something there, but didn’t yet know what it was. Walsh made a good boss. He didn’t insist on finding out every last detail of what was in his employees’ minds. Goldfarb hoped his notion would reward the younger man’s confidence in him.

Between the disk player and his own idea-with time out for lunch, and for odd bits of banter through the day-his hours at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works went by so fast, he was startled when he realized he could go home. He was also startled to see how dark it had got by the time he went outside, and how chilly the breeze from the northwest was. Autumn was here. Winter wouldn’t wait very long-and winter in Edmonton, he’d already seen, had more in common with Siberia than with anything the British Isles knew by that name.

Naomi greeted him with a kiss when he got home. “You’ve got a letter here from London,” she said.

“Have I?” he said. “From whom?”

“I don’t know,” his wife answered. “Not a handwriting I recognize. Here-see for yourself.” She handed him the envelope.

He didn’t recognize the handwriting, either, though it had a tantalizing familiarity. “Let’s find out,” he said, and tore open the envelope. His voice had gone grim. So had Naomi’s face. She had to be thinking the same thing he was: wondering what Basil Roundbush had to say to him.

“Oh!” they both exclaimed at the same time. Naomi amplified that.

“You haven’t heard from Jerome Jones for a while.”

“So I haven’t,” Goldfarb agreed. “Better him than some other people I’d just as soon not name.”

“Much better,” his wife agreed. “We’d still be in Northern Ireland if it weren’t for his help, and I always thought he was rather a nice chap from what I remember of him during the first round of fighting.”

“Did you?” David asked in a peculiar, toneless way.

“Yes, I did.” Naomi stuck out her tongue at him. “Not like that, though.” She made as if to poke him in the ribs. “What does the letter say? I’ve been waiting since the postman brought it.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Goldfarb said, at which his wife did poke him in the ribs. He threw his hands in the air. “Give over! I surrender. Here, I’ll read it. ‘Dear David,’ he says, ‘I trust this finds you and your lovely wife and family well and flourishing.’ ”

“No wonder I liked him,” Naomi remarked.

“Yes, he always did have a smooth line. A lot of girls fell for it,” David said, which got him a dirty look. He held up the letter and went on, “ ‘I am doing as well as can be expected for one with such a dissolute past. You may perhaps be interested to learn that a certain unfriend of yours has had his own unsavoury past, or something of the sort, catch up with him-so it would appear, at any rate.’ ”

He looked up from the page. His wife made little pushing motions.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “For God’s sake, go on.”

“I love it when you talk to me like that,” David said, which made Naomi give him a good push-exactly what he’d had in mind. “Oh,” he went on. “The letter. I thought you meant something else.” He glanced down at it. “Where was I? Oh, yes… ‘A certain-often a very certain, by all indications-Group Captain Roundbush is in hospital and not expected to pull through, the brakes to his Bentley having failed whilst he was negotiating a curve at a high turn of speed. Signs are that his brakes were encouraged to fail. “A highly professional job,” someone from Scotland Yard writes on a report that just chanced to cross my desk.’ ”

“I wish I could say I was sorry,” Naomi said at last.

“So do I,” Goldfarb agreed. “But I can’t, because I’m not. There’s a bit more here: ‘Not everyone is altogether displeased at this development, because his faction had close ties to the Reich, and the Reich, being more radioactive than not these days, is no longer seen as our stalwart bulwark against the Lizards. What our stalwart bulwark against the Lizards shall be now, I have no idea, but seeing Roundbush hoisted by his own hooked-cross petard doubtless pleases you more. As ever, Jerome.’ ” Goldfarb kissed his wife. “And do you know what, sweetheart? He’s right.” He kissed her again.