Aftershocks

7

Having got to Greifswald, Johannes Drucker rather wished he hadn’t. The town where he and his family had lived hadn’t taken an explosive-metal bomb, but it had been heavily fought over. And nearby Peenemunde and Stralsund and Rostock had taken any number of hits from explosive-metal weapons, so the radioactivity level remained high.

Few people still dwelt among the ruins. The ones who did might have slipped back in time several hundred years. Instead of coal or gas, they burned wood from the wrecked buildings all around them. They had no running water. They stank, and so did the city.

The neighborhood where the Druckers had lived was even more ruinous than the rest of the town. No one seemed to live there these days; gangs of scavengers prowled through the wreckage, after whatever they could find. Nobody admitted to hearing of Drucker or his family.

“Try the Red Cross shelters, pal,” one heavily armed forager told him. “Maybe you’ll have some luck there.”

“Try the graveyards,” the forager’s sidekick added. “Plenty of new people staying there these days.” He laughed. So did his comrade.

Drucker wanted to kill them both. He had a pistol, too, a comforting weight on his right hip. But the ruffians looked very alert. He gave a curt nod and walked off through the rubble-strewn streets.

Checking the Red Cross shelters was actually a good idea. Drucker had done that every time he passed one on the long road up from Nuremberg. But, even having done so, he knew too well that he might have missed his family. He couldn’t go through the endless tents and huts one by one looking for Kathe and Heinrich and Claudia and Adolf. He had to rely on the records in each camp headquarters, and the records were in a most shocking state of disarray-anyone who expected the usual German efficiency, as he had, was out of luck.

It’s the war, he thought. At last-and for the first time since Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I unified Germany-the Reich had run into a catastrophe too large for it to cope with. Surviving from day to day took precedence over keeping the files that would have made administering the state over the long haul so much easier. Drucker understood that without liking it. It made his life too difficult for him to like it, even a little.

Checking the graveyards also wasn’t the worst idea in the world, he realized glumly. Or it wouldn’t have been, if so many bodies hadn’t been bulldozed or just flung into mass graves without headstones of any sort-and if so many others didn’t still lie under rubble, and if so many hadn’t simply been vaporized.

Someone rode past on a bicycle-the way things were now, a sign of prosperity. The man knew how valuable that bicycle was, too; he had an assault rifle slung on his back, and looked extremely ready to use it. Drucker called out to him: “Excuse me, but where is the Red Cross shelter closest to town?”

“North,” the man answered. “On the road to Stralsund, not quite halfway there, not far from the damned Lizards’ camp.” He started to pedal on, but then grudged a few more words: “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”

“Thanks,” Drucker said. “So do I.”

He trudged up the road. To his right, the gray, ugly Baltic rolled up the flat, muddy beach and then sullenly retreated again. He smelled salt water and stale seaweed and dead fish: the odors of home. And, when he got to the shelter in the late afternoon, he smelled ordure and unwashed humanity, the same stinks he’d known in every camp and in every town on his way up from Bavaria.

More Lizard troopers prowled around this Red Cross shelter than he’d seen at most of the others. They looked jumpier and more alert than the males he’d seen elsewhere, too. He came up to one of them and said, “I greet you,” in the language of the Race.

“And I greet you,” the Lizard answered. It wasn’t much of a greeting; the male looked ready to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. “What do you want?” His hissing voice was hard with suspicion.

“I am looking for my mate and hatchlings, from whom I am long separated,” Drucker said. The answer, and the fluency with which he used the Race’s language, made the Lizard relax a little. He went on, “And I am also curious why you watch the refugees in this particular camp so closely.”

“Why? I will tell you why,” the male said. “Because there are many Deutsch soldiers here, males against whom we fought in Poland. We do not trust them. We have no great reason to trust them.”

“I see,” Drucker said slowly. He nodded. He’d been running into occupation troops up till now: Lizards who’d come into the Reich after the surrender, and who hadn’t done any fighting beforehand. But the males here had been combat soldiers. No wonder they didn’t trust anything or anybody. Drucker risked one more question: “Where is the administrative center for this camp?”

“That way, where the flag flies,” the Lizard answered, pointing with the muzzle of his weapon. “You may proceed.”

“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker said. The Lizard didn’t wish him any sort of luck finding his family. Some of that, no doubt, was because Lizards didn’t think in terms of families. And the rest? He was an enemy. Why should a male of the Race waste any sympathy on him?

He was just coming up to the large tent above which the Red Cross flag flew when a man not far from his own age rode up on a bicycle. The fellow carried an impressive collection of lethal hardware. He swung down from the bicycle, grunted and stretched, and started to walk it into the tent.

A woman standing in the entranceway exclaimed, “You can’t do that! It is forbidden!”

“Too bad,” the man answered in German flavored by Polish and something else. “I’m not going to have it stolen. If you don’t like it, that’s rough.”

“He’s right,” Drucker said. “There’s no place to chain it up out here, and it’ll disappear without a trace if he just leaves it.”

“Most irregular,” the woman sniffed. She didn’t seem to see that things were different in the Reich nowadays. But, after another glance at the weaponry festooning the other fellow, she stopped arguing.

“Thanks, pal,” the stranger said to Drucker. “Appreciate it. Some people have trouble getting the idea that times have changed through their thick heads.”

After a moment, Drucker placed the man’s secondary accent. He’d heard it before, thicker, in Poland and the Soviet Union before the Lizards landed. Yiddish, that was it. “You’re a Jew,” he blurted.

With an ironic bow, the other man nodded. “And you’re a German. I love you, too,” he said. “Mordechai Anielewicz, at your service. I’m trying to find my family after some of you Nazi bastards hauled them out of Poland.”

All Drucker said was, “I’m trying to find my family, too. They were in Greifswald, but they aren’t any more, and not much of the town is left.” He paused, staring at the other man. “Mordechai Anielewicz? Jesus: I know you. A million years ago”-actually, back in the first round of fighting against the Race-“I was Colonel Heinrich Jager’s panzer driver.” He gave his own name.

“Were you?” Anielewicz’s eyes narrowed. “Gottenyu, maybe you were. And if you were, maybe you’re not quite a Nazi bastard after all. Maybe. My younger son is named for Heinrich Jager.”

“My older son is,” Drucker said. “What happened to him after that Russian pilot took him off to Poland?” He didn’t mention how he and his fellow tank crewmen had killed several SS men to make Jager’s escape possible.

“He married her,” the Jew answered. “He’s dead now. You know the explosive-metal bomb Skorzeny tried to set off inside Lodz? We stopped that, he and Ludmila and I. We all breathed in some nerve gas doing it, too. It hit him hardest; he was never quite right afterwards, and he died twelve, thirteen years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Drucker said, “but thanks for telling me. He was a good man-one of the best officers I ever served under-and I always wondered what happened to him once he got away.”

“He was one of the best.” Mordechai Anielewicz eyed Drucker. “You drove a panzer then. What have you been doing since?”

“I stayed in the Wehrmacht, ” Drucker replied. “I ended up in the upper stage of an A-45. The Lizards captured me after I shot two missiles at one of their starships. If they hadn’t knocked both of them down, I don’t suppose they would have bothered taking me alive, but they did. Eventually, they set me down in Nuremberg. I had a devil of a time getting here, but I managed. Now if I could manage to find my wife and kids…”

Anielewicz looked at him as if he’d failed a test. “You served under Heinrich Jager, and you stayed in the Wehrmacht? He had the sense to get away.”

“Don’t get high and mighty with me,” Drucker snapped. “I know something about what the Reich was doing to Jews. I didn’t do any of that. I had it done to me, in fact.”

“You had it done to you?” Anielewicz snarled. “You son of a bitch, you”-he cursed in Yiddish and Polish-“what do you know about it?” He looked ready to grab one of his weapons and start shooting. Drucker had thought him a dangerous man a generation before, and saw no reason to change his mind now. He slid his legs into a position from which he could better open fire, too.

But, instead of grabbing for his pistol, he answered Anielewicz in a low, urgent voice: “I’ll tell you what I know about it. The SS grabbed my wife because they got wind she had a Jewish grandmother, that’s what.” He’d never thought he would tell that to anyone, but who in the Reich ever imagined talking with a Jew?

And it worked. Mordechai Anielewicz relaxed, suddenly and completely. “All right, then,” he said. “You do know something.” He cocked his head to one side. “From what you’ve said, you got her back. How’d you manage that? I know a thing or two about the SS.”

“How?” Drucker chuckled mirthlessly. “I told you-I was an A-45 pilot. I had connections. My CO was General Dornberger-he’s Fuhrer now, wherever the devil he is. I had enough pull to bring it off. Officially, Kathe got a clean pedigree.”

“If you have pull, you should use it,” Anielewicz agreed. His face clouded again. “Back in the 1940s, there were an awful lot of Jews who didn’t have any.”

Drucker didn’t know how to reply to that. All he could do was nod. He hadn’t thought much about Jews, or had much use for them, before Kathe got in trouble with the blackshirts. At last, he said, “The only thing I want to do now is find out if my family is alive, and get them back if they are.”

“Fair enough. We’re in the same boat there, no matter how we got dropped into it.” Anielewicz pointed at Drucker. “If you know the Fuhrer, why aren’t you using your pull now to have him help you look for your kin?”

“Two main reasons, I suppose,” Drucker answered after a little thought. “I wanted to do it myself, and… I’m not sure there’s anyone to find.”

“Yes, knowing they’re dead would be pretty final, wouldn’t it?” Anielewicz’s voice was grim. “Still and all, if you’ve got a card left to play, don’t you think it’s time to play it?”

Drucker considered, then slowly nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “And if I try to find out for myself, maybe I should try to find out for you, too?”

“That thought did cross my mind,” Mordechai Anielewicz allowed. “I’ve got pull with the Lizards, myself. Shall we trade?” Drucker considered again, but not for long. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it.

Sam Yeager had never imagined that a jail could be so comfortable. His place of confinement didn’t look like a jail. It looked like, and was, a farmhouse somewhere in… nobody had told him exactly where he was, but it had to be Colorado or New Mexico. He could watch television, though no station came in real well. He could read Denver and Albuquerque papers. He could do almost anything he wanted-except go outside or write a letter or use a computer. His guards were very polite but very firm.

“Why are you keeping me here?” he demanded of them one morning, for about the five hundredth time.

“Orders,” replied the one who answered to Fred.

Yeager had heard that about five hundred times, too. “You can’t keep me forever,” he said, though he had no evidence that that was true. “What will you do with me?”

“Whatever we get told to do,” answered the one called John. “So far, nobody’s told us to do anything except keep you on ice.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to count your blessings about that, Lieutenant Colonel.”

By which he no doubt meant they could have buried Yeager in the yard behind the house without anyone’s being the wiser. That was probably-no, that was certainly-true. “But I haven’t done anything,” Sam said, knowing full well he was lying. “And you haven’t even tried to find out whether I’ve done anything,” which was the God’s truth.

Fred looked at John. John looked at the one named Charlie, who hardly ever said anything. He didn’t say anything now, either-he only shrugged. John, who seemed to be the boss, answered, “We haven’t had any orders to interrogate you, either. Maybe they don’t want us knowing whatever you know. I don’t ask questions. I just do what I’m told.”

“But I don’t know anything,” Sam protested, another great, thumping lie.

Fred chuckled. “Maybe they don’t want us catching ignorance, then.” Of the three there that day, and of the other three who spelled them in weekly shifts, he was the only one with even a vestigial sense of humor. He pointed at Sam’s empty cup. “You want some more coffee there?”

“Sure,” Yeager answered, and the-agent? — poured the cup full again. After a couple of sips, Sam tried a question he hadn’t asked before: “By whose orders are you keeping me here? I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, after all.”

He didn’t really expect to get an answer. Charlie just sat there looking sour. Fred shrugged, as if to say he was pretending he hadn’t heard the question. But John said, “Whose orders? I’ll tell you. Why the hell not? You’re here on the orders of the president of the United States, Mister Officer in the U.S. Army.”

“The president?” Sam yelped. “What the dickens does President Warren care about me? I haven’t done anything.”

“He must think you did,” John said. “And if the president thinks you did something, buddy, you did it.”

That, unfortunately, was likely to be correct. And Sam knew only too well what Earl Warren was liable to think he’d done. He’d done it, too, even if these goons didn’t know, or want to know, that. He had to keep up a bold front, though. If he didn’t, he was ruined. And so he said, “Tell the president that I want to talk to him about it, man to man. Tell him it’s important that I do. Not just for me. For the country.” He remembered the papers he’d given Straha and the things he’d told Barbara and Jonathan. It was important, all right.

“Crap,” Charlie said-from him, an oration.

John said the same thing in a different way: “President Warren’s a busy man. Why should he want to talk to one not particularly important lieutenant colonel?”

“Why should he want to make one not particularly important lieutenant colonel disappear?” Sam returned.

“That’s not for us to worry about,” John answered. “We got told to put you on ice and keep you on ice, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Yeager didn’t say anything. He just sat there and smiled his most unpleasant smile.

Charlie didn’t get it. Yeager hadn’t expected anything else. John didn’t get it, either. That disappointed Yeager. After a few seconds’ silence, Fred said, “Uh, John, I think he’s saying the big boss might want to see him for the same reason he had him put on ice, whatever the hell that is.”

“Bingo,” Sam said happily.

John didn’t sound or look happy. “Like I care what he’s saying.” He sent Sam an unpleasant look of his own. “Other thing he’s been saying all along is that he doesn’t know why he got nabbed. If he’s lying about that, who knows what else he’s been lying about?”

What that translated to was, Who knows what we’re liable to have to try to squeeze out of him? Back in his baseball days, Sam had known a fair number of small-time, small-town hoodlums, men who thought of themselves as tough guys. It had been a good many years, but the breed didn’t seem to have changed much, even if these fellows got their money from a much more important boss.

At this point, Sam had two choices of his own. He could say something like, Anything happens to me, you’ll be sorry. Or he could just sit tight. He decided to sit tight. These guys struck him as the sort who would take a warning as a sign of weakness, not as a sign of strength.

He wondered if Straha had yet decided he was really missing, and whether the ex-shiplord had looked at the papers he’d given him. Sam had his doubts. If Straha had seen those papers, wouldn’t he have got them to the Lizards in Cairo just as fast as he could? Yeager’s bet was that he would have. And if he had, the fur would have started flying by now. Sam was sure of that.

Maybe his captors had been expecting him to speak up and warn them. When he sat tight, they didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Were they unused to people who could bargain from a position of strength? Or were they just too dumb-and too far down on the totem pole-to realize he had some strength in this bargaining match?

Fred was the one who looked to have a clue. He gathered up the other two by eye and said, “I think we need to talk about this.”

They couldn’t go off into another room and leave Sam unattended. If they did, he was liable to be out the door like a shot. He didn’t know where the next closest house was-he’d come here at night, and had no idea how big a farm this was-but he might well make life difficult for these guys. Of course, they might shoot him if they caught up with him. It would be too bad if they did, too bad for him and, very possibly, too bad for the USA and the whole world.

He wondered if he could slide out of here while they talked among themselves. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than John said, “Don’t even think about it, buddy.” Yeager wondered how he’d given himself away. Had his eyes slid longingly toward the door? Whatever the answer, he sat where he was.

After a couple of minutes, his guards broke apart. “Tell you what we’re going to do,” Fred said, his voice so full of sweet reason, Sam instantly grew suspicious. “We’re going to do just like you say, Lieutenant Colonel. We’ll pass your request along, and we’ll see what comes of it. If it gets turned down, it’s not our fault. Is that fair?” He beamed at Yeager.

“I don’t think kidnapping me in the first place was exactly fair,” Sam answered. “Besides, how do I know I can believe you? You can say you’ll pass it along and then just forget about it. How would I know you’re telling the truth?”

“What do you want us to do?” John asked. “Put it in writing?”

“That’d be nice,” Yeager said dryly.

Everybody laughed, as if they were good buddies sitting around shooting the breeze somewhere. Nobody was going to put anything in writing. If some people hadn’t put this, that, and the other thing in writing, Sam wouldn’t have been where he was now. In a lot of different ways, he wished he weren’t.

He decided to press just a little: “When you do pass the word along, you might want to let people know it’s already liable to be later than they think.”

“Crap,” Charlie said again.

“If you say so,” Sam answered. “But I think it’s important for the president to know everything that’s going on.”

“Now you listen up, Lieutenant Colonel,” John said. “You aren’t in a real good place to start telling people what to do. Nothing’s happened to your family-yet. You want to make real sure nothing does, you know what I mean?”

“Why, you son of a-” Sam surged to his feet.

He took half a step forward, but only half a step. All three of his watchdogs packed Army.45s. All three of them had the pistols out and pointed at his brisket in less time than he would have imagined possible. The difference between these guys and the small-town muscle he’d known in his younger days suddenly became obvious. The small-town punks had been minor leaguers, same as he’d been in those days. These fellows could have played in Yankee Stadium, and made the all-star team every year, too. Yeah, they were bastards, but they were awfully damn good at what they did.

Very slowly, Yeager sat down again. John nodded. “Smart boy,” he said. His.45 disappeared again. So did Fred’s. Charlie held on to his. He looked disappointed that Sam hadn’t given him the chance to use it. John went on, “You really don’t want to get your ass in an uproar, Lieutenant Colonel, honest to God you don’t. We said we’d pass things along, and we will.”

Sam studied him. “Saying things is easy. Really doing them-that’s something different. I’m telling you, President Warren needs to talk to me. He doesn’t know how much trouble he may end up in if he doesn’t.”

“Talk is cheap,” John said.

“That’s what I just told you,” Yeager answered. “But how many laws are you guys breaking by holding me here like this, not letting me see my lawyer, not letting me know what the charges against me are, or even if there are any charges against me?”

“National security,” Charlie intoned, as if reciting Holy Writ.

Yeager might have guessed he would say that. Yeager had, in fact, guessed he would say that. And he had a comeback ready: “If it turns out you’re right and everything works out okay, you guys are heroes. But if things go wrong, who’s going to end up with egg on his face? You guys will, because whoever’s over you sure as hell isn’t going to sit still and take the blame.”

“That’s not for you to worry about, Lieutenant Colonel,” Fred said. “That’s for us to worry about-and do we look worried?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “But the point is, maybe you ought to.”

“Crap,” Charlie said: a man of strong opinions and limited vocabulary. John and Fred didn’t contradict him-and, dammit, they didn’t look worried. Sam had to hope he’d planted some seeds of doubt… and that planting seeds of doubt mattered.

Because of the time he’d spent in space, Jonathan Yeager was going to graduate from UCLA a couple of quarters later than he would have otherwise. That had been the biggest thing on his mind when he got back to Gardena-till his father disappeared. He and his mother both knew, or thought they knew, why his father had disappeared. If they went to the papers, they might raise enough of a stink to get his dad released. They hadn’t done it, not yet. The stink they would raise might turn out to be a lot bigger and messier than that.

And so, now that classes had started again, Jonathan drove up to Westwood every day feeling as if he were in limbo. He didn’t know where his dad was, or when-or if-he might return. The police were supposed to be looking for Sam Yeager. So was the Army. So was the FBI. Nobody’d had any luck. Jonathan feared nobody was likely to have any luck, either.

He felt in limbo at UCLA, too. Because he’d dropped a couple of quarters behind, he wasn’t in so many classes with his friends-they’d gone on, and he hadn’t. What he’d learned from Kassquit and from the Race was and would be immensely valuable to him, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that fit into the university curriculum.

That was on his mind as he left his modern political science class-modern, of course, meaning since the coming of the Lizards- and headed out to the grass between Royce Hall and Powell Library to eat the ham sandwich and orange and cookies he’d brought from home. Brown-bagging it was cheaper than buying lunch from any of the campus greasy spoons, and his mom had started watching every penny since his dad hadn’t come home from Desert Center. “After all,” she’d said once, “you never know, I might disappear next.”

He was just sitting down when Karen walked by. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he waved. “Hi!” he said. “You got a few minutes?”

She paused, obviously thinking it over. They’d been an item-they’d been more than an item; they’d been drifting toward getting married-till he went up to the starship to instruct Kassquit about Tosevite sexual customs. Since then… since then, things had been tense, no two ways about it. He’d known they would be when he rode the shuttlecraft into space. He hadn’t known the war between the Reich and the Race would strand him up there for so long-which only made things between Karen and him that much tenser.

At last, though frowning, she nodded. “How are you?” she asked, leaving the walkway to sit down beside him. “Any word about your father?” She sounded genuinely worried there. They’d known each other since high school, and she’d always got on well with his folks.

“Nothing,” Jonathan answered with a grimace. “Zero. Zip. Zilch. I wish to God there were.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and brushed a lock of red hair back from her face. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks and shoulders; she sunburned if you looked at her sideways. Despite that, she wore a flesh-colored halter top to show off the body paint that alleged she was a military communications specialist: like a lot of people of their generation, she was as passionately interested in the Lizards as was Jonathan. After a moment, she found another safe question to ask: “How are Mickey and Donald?”

She’d been there when they hatched from their eggs. Jonathan supposed that was a breach of security, but he hadn’t cared at the time, and his father had let him get away with it. “They’re fine,” he answered. “Growing like weeds, and learning new words all the time.” He hesitated, then plunged: “You know they always think it’s hot when you come over to see them.”

“Do they?” Karen’s voice wasn’t hot; it was colder than winter in Los Angeles ever got. “I like seeing them. I like seeing your mom, too. You… that hasn’t worked out so well since you got back, and you know it hasn’t.”

Jonathan’s sack lunch lay by him, forgotten. “Go easy,” he said. “I’ve told you and told you-what happened up there wasn’t what I thought it was going to be when I left.”

“I know,” she said. “It lasted longer, so you had more fun than you figured you would when you left. But you went up there intending to have fun. That’s the long and short of things, isn’t it, Jonathan?”

He admitted what he could scarcely deny: “That’s some of it, yeah. But it’s not all. It was almost like what fooling around with a real Lizard would be. We both learned a lot from it.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Karen said.

“I didn’t mean it like that, darn it,” Jonathan said. “Now she’s thinking about coming down here to see what life among the Big Uglies is like, and all she ever wanted to do before was stay on the starship and pretend she was a Lizard.”

“And what would she do if she did come down here?” Karen demanded. “Whatever it was, would she do it with you?”

Jonathan’s ears heated. That had nothing to do with the weather, even though the day, like a lot of allegedly early-autumn days in Los Angeles, was well up into the eighties. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s research, is what it is.”

“Is that what you call it?” Karen said. “How would you like it if I were doing research like that?” She laced the word with scorn.

And Jonathan knew he wouldn’t like it for hell. He took a deep breath. “There’s one way that wouldn’t happen, even if Kassquit did come down to Earth,” he said.

“Sure there is-if she landed in Moscow,” Karen said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jonathan said. “Not even close. She knows about marriage-I don’t think she really understands it, but she knows what it means. That’s why”-he blushed again-“that’s why my dad wasn’t up there being experimental, if you know what I mean.”

“And so?” Karen said.

“And so…” Jonathan plunged: “And so, if I were engaged to you, it wouldn’t be the same as married, but it would be on the way to the same thing, and she’d see that it meant she and I couldn’t do, uh, anything any more.” He brought the words out in a quick, almost desperate rush.

Karen’s eyes widened-widened more, in fact, than Jonathan had ever seen them do. Ever so slowly, she said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”

“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded, feeling very much as if he’d just gone off the high board without bothering to see if there was any water in the pool. “I guess that kind of is what I’m doing. Will you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” Karen shook her head, not in rejection but in bemusement. “If you’d asked me before you went up to the starship the last time, I’d’ve said yes in a minute. Now…? Now it sounds more like you’re asking me to marry you to give you an excuse not to fool around with Kassquit than for any other reason, and I don’t think I like that very much.”

“That isn’t why,” Jonathan protested, though it had sounded like why to him, too. He did his best to make it sound like something else: “It was the only way I could think of to tell you I’m sorry about what happened up there and that there isn’t anybody but you I want to spend my life with.” His mother wouldn’t have approved of his ending a sentence with a preposition. Right this minute, he didn’t care whether his mother would have approved or not.

And this time he’d said the right thing, or something close to it. Karen’s expression softened. “That’s… very sweet, Jonathan,” she said. “I’ve thought for a long time that we might one day. Like I say, I used to like the idea-but things changed when you went up there. I’m going to have to sort that out.”

“We weren’t engaged or anything.” Jonathan thought about adding that he’d used some of the things Karen had taught him with Kassquit. But, not being of a suicidal bent, he didn’t.

“No, not really,” Karen said, “but we were as close as makes no difference-I thought so, anyway.”

That had teeth, sharp ones. Jonathan considered explaining again how he’d done everything he’d done with Kassquit purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Again, he thought better of it. What he did say was just as inflammatory, though he didn’t realize it at the time: “Come to think of it, maybe you’d better not marry me. It might not be safe for you.”

“What do you mean, not safe?” Karen asked. “I know you’re crazy, but I never thought you were especially dangerous.”

“Thanks-I think.” He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t told her about this when he found out about it after he got back from the starship. He hadn’t told anybody. The son of an officer, he knew secrets could leak if you started running your mouth. But he was afraid his father had disappeared because of what he knew. Didn’t that mean he, Jonathan, had an obligation to make sure the secret couldn’t be wiped out? And Karen could be counted on. After all, she knew about the hatchlings, didn’t she?

The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. His father had insisted on that for as long as he could remember. Here as other places, his old man looked to have a point.

“You still haven’t told me what you meant,” Karen reminded him.

“Well…” Jonathan did his best to temporize. “I’ve got some idea of why my dad disappeared, and it has to do with something he knew and something he told me.”

“Something he knew?” Karen echoed, while people worrying about nothing but classes and lunch walked back and forth only a few feet away. “Something he knew that he wasn’t supposed to, you mean? Sounds like something out of a spy story.”

“I know it does. I’m sorry,” Jonathan answered. “You’re liable to be in trouble just because you know me. I’m sorry.” He realized he was repeating himself. He also wondered how the devil the conversation had got so far away from his proposal so fast.

Karen said, “You know something?” That was just an ordinary question; she waited for him to shake his head before going on, “You’re going to have to tell me now. If you want me to marry you, I mean. You can’t have that kind of great big secret from somebody you’re married to.”

“Hey! That’s not fair. You don’t even know what you’re asking for,” Jonathan protested. “You don’t know how much trouble you might get into, either. Remember the guy who tried to firebomb our house? As far as we could find out, nothing ever happened to him.”

Karen only folded her arms across her chest-across that ridiculously unconcealing halter top-and waited. She said one word: “Talk.”

And Jonathan saw that, having come this far, he couldn’t do anything but talk. He leaned close to her so none of the happy, unconcerned students going by would hear anything out of the ordinary. Telling what he knew didn’t take long. When he was done, he said, “There. Are you satisfied?”

“My God,” Karen said quietly. “Oh, my God.” She looked around the bright, sun-splashed UCLA campus as if she’d never seen it before. “What do we do now?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out,” Jonathan replied. “I still don’t have any answers I like. And speaking of answers, you still owe me one for the question I asked you a little while ago.”

“What? Oh, that.” Karen’s voice remained far away. “I’ll worry about that later, Jonathan. This is more important.”

Jonathan wondered if he ought to be insulted. He wondered if he ought to get angry. He discovered he couldn’t do either. The trouble was, he agreed with her.

Mordechai Anielewicz had imagined any number of things in his search for his family. Having a German along, though, a German who was interested in helping him, had never once crossed his mind. But Johannes Drucker had a missing family, too. Anielewicz had always had trouble imagining Germans as human beings. How could they be human and have done what they’d done? But if a man desperately searching for his wife and sons and daughter wasn’t a human being, what was he?

What was funny, in a horrid, macabre sort of way, was that what Drucker had thought about Jews pretty much mirrored what he himself had thought about Nazis. “I never worried my head about the enemies of the Reich,” he told Mordechai one evening. “If my leaders said they were enemies, I went out and dealt with them. That was my job. I never cared about rights or wrongs till Kathe got in trouble.”

“Nothing like the personal touch.” Anielewicz’s voice was dry.

“You think you’re joking,” the German spaceman said.

“No, dammit, I’m not joking.” Now Mordechai couldn’t help letting some of his anger show. “If every other German had a Jewish grandmother or grandfather, none of that murderous nonsense would have happened.”

Drucker sighed and looked around the little tavern in which they were drinking beer and eating a rather nasty stew. There wasn’t much to see; only the fireplace gave light and heat. “Hard to say you’re wrong,” he admitted, and then laughed without much humor. “Hard to imagine I’m sitting here talking with a Jew. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”

“Oh? What about your wife?” Anielewicz asked acidly. He watched the German flush. But maybe that wasn’t altogether fair; again, he had the feeling that one of them was looking out of a mirror at the other.

Drucker said, “I didn’t mean it like that, dammit. I meant with somebody who really believes.”

“What difference does that make?” Mordechai said. “The taint is in the blood, not in the belief, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have cared about your wife. They wouldn’t have cared about converts. They wouldn’t have-ahhh!” He made a disgusted noise. “Why do I waste my time?”

He took another pull at the pilsner in his stein. It was thin and sour, a telling measure of the Reich’s troubles. Across the table from him, Johannes Drucker bit his lip. “You don’t make this easy, do you?”

“Should I?” Mordechai returned. “How easy was it for us when you held Poland? How easy was it for us when you invaded Poland again this spring? Explosive-metal bombs, poison gas, panzers-what did we do to deserve that?”

“You sided with the Lizards instead of mankind,” Drucker answered.

There was just enough truth in that to sting. But it wasn’t the whole truth, nor anything close to it. “Oh, of course we did,” Anielewicz said. “That’s why I came looking for your Colonel Jager, because I sided with the Lizards all the time.”

Drucker sighed again. “All right. Things weren’t simple. Things are never simple. Just getting here, or trying to, taught me that.”

Jews, Anielewicz thought, were born knowing that. He didn’t say as much to the German-what point to it? What he did say was, “We’ve both been through the mill. If we start fighting with each other now, it won’t do us any good, and it won’t make it any easier for us to find our families.”

“If they’re there,” Drucker said. “What are the odds?” He poured down his remaining beer in a couple of long, dispirited gulps.

“I’ve pulled the wires I know how to pull looking for my family,” Mordechai said. “I didn’t have any luck, but I’ll pull them again for yours. And I’ll help you get in touch with your Fuhrer”-am I really saying this? he wondered-“so you can pull your wires for your family.”

“And for yours,” Drucker said.

“Yes. And for mine.” Anielewicz wondered whether the Reich would have bothered keeping records of Jews kidnapped in the fighting in Poland. With anyone but the Germans, he would have had his doubts. As a matter of fact, he still did have his doubts, big ones. But the possibility remained. He’d seen German efficiency and German bureaucracy in action in the Warsaw ghetto. If any battered, beaten, retreating army would have kept track of the prisoners with whom it was falling back, the Wehrmacht was that force.

The next morning, after a breakfast about as unpleasant as supper had been, Anielewicz led Drucker to the little garrison the Race used to watch the refugee camp. There he ran into Lizard bureaucracy, which turned out to be every bit as inflexible as the German variety. “No,” said the male to whom he addressed his request. “I have not the authority to take any such action. I am sorry.” In the best tradition of bureaucrats regardless of species, he sounded not in the least sorry.

Trying to conceal his exasperation, Mordechai demanded, “Well, who does have the authority, and where do I find him?”

“No one here,” the Lizard replied. Again, like any good bureaucrat, he seemed to take pleasure in thwarting those who came before him.

Johannes Drucker proved fluent in the language of the Race: “You did not fully answer the Jewish fighting leader’s question. Where can we find someone with that authority?” He didn’t use Anielewicz’s religion as a slur but as a goad, reminding the Lizard he wasn’t helping an ally.

It got through, too. With a resentful hiss, the male said, “The closest officers with the authority to treat with the upper echelons of the Reich are based near the place called Greifswald.” He made a hash of the pronunciation, but it wasn’t a name easy to mistake for any other.

Anielewicz turned to Drucker. “Back where we started from. I’ve got a seat on the rear of my bicycle.”

“Must be close to twenty kilometers,” Drucker answered. “We can split the pedaling.”

“I won’t argue,” Mordechai said. Drucker wasn’t far from his own age, and very likely had stronger legs. Odds were he’d never breathed in nerve gas, anyhow.

They returned to Greifswald in the early afternoon, after going back through some of the flattest, dullest terrain Mordechai had ever seen. Bomb craters gave it most of the relief it had. None of them was from an explosive-metal bomb, but he still wondered how much radioactivity he was picking up. He’d wondered that ever since he came into Germany. For that matter, he’d wondered back in Poland. He tried to make himself stop wondering. He couldn’t do anything about it.

Drucker was pedaling as they rode into the Lizard encampment. Over his shoulder, he said, “Do you suppose these males will give us the runaround, too?”

“I hope not,” was all Anielewicz could say. If the Lizards chose to be difficult, he couldn’t do much about that, either.

But they didn’t. One of the males in their communications section turned out to have fought alongside some of the Jewish fighters Mordechai had commanded. “Your males helped save my unit several times,” he said, folding into the posture of respect. “Anything you require, you have but to ask.”

“I thank you,” Mordechai answered, a little taken aback at such wholehearted cooperation. He introduced Drucker and explained why the German spaceman needed to be connected to the leader of what was left of the Reich.

“It shall be done,” the Lizard said. “I do not fully understand this business of intimate kinship, but I know of its importance to you Tosevites. Come with me. I shall arrange this call.”

Drucker stared at Anielewicz in something close to amazement. “This is too easy,” he said in German. “Something will go wrong.”

“You’d better be careful,” Mordechai answered in the same language. “You keep saying things like that and people will start thinking you’re a Jew yourself.” Drucker laughed, though Anielewicz again hadn’t been joking.

But nothing went wrong. Inside of a couple of minutes, the Lizard was talking with a male of the Race in Flensburg, a not too radioactive town near the Danish border from which General Dornberger was administering the broken Reich. A couple of minutes after that, Dornberger’s image appeared on the screen. He was older than Anielewicz had expected he would be: old and bald and, by all appearances, tired unto death.

“Ah, Drucker,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re alive. Not many who went up into orbit came down again.”

“Sir, I was lucky, if you want to call it that,” the spaceman answered. “If I’d killed my starship instead of failing, I’m sure the Lizards would have killed me, too.”

“We need every man we have to rebuild,” Walter Dornberger said, a sentiment that struck Anielewicz as almost too sensible to come from the mouth of a German Fuhrer. Dornberger went on, “Who’s that with you, Hans?”

Anielewicz spoke for himself: “I’m Mordechai Anielewicz, of Lodz.” He waited to see what reaction that brought.

All Dornberger said was, “I’ve heard of you.” Hitler would have pitched a fit at the idea of talking to a Jew. Himmler, no doubt, would have been quietly furious. Dornberger just asked, “And what can I do for the two of you?”

“We’re looking for our families,” Anielewicz answered. “Drucker’s is missing from Greifswald, and mine was kidnapped from Widawa by retreating German troops.” He’d said it so many times, it hurt less than it had before. “If anyone can order German records examined to help us find them, you’re the man.” He startled himself; he’d almost added sir.

Dornberger’s hand disappeared from the screen for a moment. It came back with a cigar, which he puffed. “How is it that the two of you have become friends?”

“Friends?” Mordechai shrugged. “That may go too far,” he said, to which Drucker nodded. The Jewish fighting leader went on, “But we both knew, and we both liked, a panzer officer named Heinrich Jager.”

“You knew and liked…” Walter Dornberger’s expressions sharpened. “Jager. The deserter. The traitor.”

“Sir”-now Anielewicz did say it-“he saved Germany from getting in 1944 what you got in 1965. He also saved my life, but you’d probably think that was a detail.”

“That may be true,” Dornberger replied. “It doesn’t make him any less a deserter or a traitor.”

“Sir, he was a deserter,” Drucker said, “but a traitor, never.”

“Et tu, Brute?” the German Fuhrer murmured. His eyes swung back to Mordechai. “And if I don’t help you, I suppose you’ll tell your friends the Lizards on me.”

“Sir, it’s my family,” Anielewicz said tightly. “I’ll do whatever I can, whatever I have to, to get them back. Wouldn’t you?”

Dornberger sighed. “Without a doubt. Very well, gentlemen, I will do what I can. I do not know how much that will be. Things being as they are, our records are in no small degree of chaos. Good-bye.” His image vanished.

“Hope,” Mordechai said as he and Drucker left the tent from which they’d spoken with the new Fuhrer.

“I know,” Drucker said. “Is it a blessing or a curse?” He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that funny noise?”

Had he not asked, Anielewicz might not even have noticed the small, whistling beep. But when it came again, the hair prickled upright on his arms and at the nape of his neck. “My God,” he whispered. “That’s a beffel.”

“What’s a beffel?” Drucker asked. But Mordechai didn’t answer. He’d already started running.

Straha watched his driver take the motorcar off on an errand that would keep him gone for at least an hour. The ex-shiplord let out a hiss of satisfaction. He hurried into the bathroom and scrubbed off his body paint with rubbing alcohol, as he would have if he were going to redo it.

But instead of repainting himself as the male of third-highest rank in the conquest fleet, he chose the much simpler pattern of a shuttlecraft pilot. The job he did wasn’t of the best, but it would serve. Neither the Big Uglies nor his own kind would be likely to recognize him at once.

As he carried an attache case of Tosevite manufacture out the front door of his house, he turned one eye turret back toward the building, wondering if he would ever see it again, and if it would still be standing in a few days’ time. A considerable portion of him wished Sam Yeager had never entrusted him with this burden.

But Yeager had, and the Big Ugly must have known the likely consequences of that. Sighing, Straha walked down to the end of the block, turned right, and walked two more blocks. In front of a small grocery store stood a public telephone in a booth of glass and aluminum.

Straha had never used a Tosevite public phone before. He read the instructions and followed them, letting out a relieved hiss when he was rewarded with a dial tone after inserting a small coin. He dialed the number he had memorized back at the house. The phone rang three times before someone answered it. “Yellow Cab Company.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Straha spoke the best English he could: “I am at the corner of Rayen and Zelzah. I wish to go to downtown, to the consulate of the Race.”

He waited, wondering if he’d have to repeat himself. But the female on the other end of the line just echoed him: “Rayen and Zelzah. Yes, sir. About five minutes.”

“I thank you,” Straha said, and hung up.

The cab took about twice as long as the predicted time to arrive, but not so long as to make Straha much more nervous than he was already. The driver hopped out and opened a rear door for him. “Hello!” the Big Ugly said. “Don’t pick up a male of the Race every day.” When he spoke again, it was in Straha’s language: “I greet you, superior sir.”

“And I greet you,” Straha replied in the same tongue. “How much of my language do you speak?”

“Not much. Not well,” the Tosevite answered. “I like to try. Where you want to go?” His accent was indeed thick, but comprehensible.

“To the consulate.” Straha repeated it in English, to make sure he was not misunderstood, and gave the address in English, too.

“It shall be done,” the driver said, and proceeded to do it. Straha had judged his regular driver a Tosevite who cared less for safety on the road than he might have. Next to this fellow, the other male Big Ugly was a paragon of virtue. How the cab driver arrived at the consulate with his motorcar uncrumpled baffled Straha, but it was a fact. “Here we are,” he remarked cheerfully as he pulled up in front of the building.

“I thank you,” Straha answered, though he was feeling anything but thankful. He gave the Big Ugly a twenty-dollar bill, which more than covered journey and gratuity. American money had never felt quite real to him, and odds were good-one way or another-he would never have to worry about it again.

A couple of Tosevites who reminded Straha of his regular driver stood outside the consulate. They glanced at him as he walked inside, but did nothing more. He wondered if his driver had yet discovered him missing. If so, the Big Uglies would be looking for a shiplord, not a shuttlecraft pilot. Straha hurried up to the reception desk.

“Yes?” asked the male at that desk, swinging an eye turret his way. “How may I help you, Shuttlecraft Pilot?” He too saw only what he expected to see, what Straha wanted him to see.

Now, with more than a little pleasure, Straha threw off the disguise. “I am not a shuttlecraft pilot,” he replied. “I am a shiplord: Shiplord Straha, commanding-well, formerly commanding-the 206th Emperor Yower of the conquest fleet.”

His mouth flew open in a laugh at the receptionist’s startled jerk. The other male recovered fairly quickly, saying, “If you are who you claim to be, you must know there is and has been an order for your arrest.”

“I am who I say I am,” Straha answered. “I am certain you have a database with the scale patterns of my snout and palm included in it. You are welcome to take those patterns from me and compare them.”

“To verify such an incendiary claim, we would of course have to do that,” the receptionist said. “But if you are who you say you are, why would you subject yourself to arrest and certain punishment after so many years of treason?”

Straha hefted the attache case. “What I have in here will protect me from punishment. Once he sees it, once he understands what it means, even Atvar will recognize as much.” He had better, Straha thought. Not even his malice against me could withstand this… could it? Half of him wanted to flee the consulate. But he’d already come too far for that. Now he was in trouble with the Americans as well as the Race.

“I do not know anything about that.” The receptionist would not give him his proper title, but was talking into a telephone attachment to the computer. After a moment, he swung his eye turrets toward Straha. “Please go to the Security office on the second floor. Your identity will be ascertained there.”

“It shall be done,” Straha said.

When he got to the Security office, he found the males and females there almost jumping out of their hides. Their tailstumps quivered with excitement. Most of them hadn’t been anywhere near Tosev 3 when he staged his spectacular defection, but they all knew of it. “This will not take long,” the senior Security officer said, advancing on him with a couple of trays full of waxy greenish plastic. “I have to take the impressions and then scan the patterns into the computer.”

“I am familiar with the procedure, I assure you,” Straha replied. He let the officer press the plastic to his snout and left palm, then waited for him to finish the scanning and comparison. By the way the officer stiffened when the data came up on the monitor, Straha knew he’d proved he was himself. He said, “You will now please be so kind as to take me to the consul here. I believe his name is Tsaitsanx-is that not correct?”

Absently, the Security officer made the affirmative gesture. “It shall be done.” He sounded dazed. “Although perhaps I should formally place you under arrest first.”

“No. Not while I have this.” Straha waved the attache case. “If Tsaitsanx is not fluent in written English, it would be wise to have a male or female-I suppose a male from the conquest fleet-who is fluent with us.”

“The consul does read the local language, yes,” the Security male said. He ordered a couple of his subordinates to escort Straha to Tsaitsanx’s office, as if afraid the former shiplord would do something nefarious if allowed to walk the corridors unattended.

Tsaitsanx proved to have come with the conquest fleet, though Straha had not known him. The consul said, “I always knew you lived in my area: indeed, I have spoken with males and females who met you at functions given by, ah, more legitimate expatriates. But I never expected to make your acquaintance here, and I do not know whether to greet you or not.”

“You had better greet me.” Straha opened the attache case and pulled out the papers Sam Yeager had given him. “Examine these, if you would be so kind. I assure you, they are genuine. I would not be here if they were not. They were given to me by one of those rare creatures, a Tosevite with a conscience.”

“Examine them I shall,” Tsaitsanx replied. “What have we here…” He read with great attention for a little while. Then, as if of their own accord, his eye turrets lifted from the papers in front of him and focused intently on Straha. “By the Emperor, Shiplord, do you know what these papers mean?”

“I know exactly what they mean, Consul. Exactly,” Straha said. “I would not be here if I did not.”

“I believe that.” Tsaitsanx returned to his reading, but not for long. “Have I your permission to scan these documents and transmit them to Cairo?”

“You have.” Straha was sure the consul would have done so without his permission had he withheld it, but he did appreciate being asked.

After sending the papers on their electronic way, Tsaitsanx said, “That brings me to the next question: what to do about you, Shiplord. I cannot scan you and transmit you to Cairo.”

“It would be convenient if you could,” Straha said. “Before long, the Big Uglies will realize I have gone missing. They may not know why. On the other fork of the tongue, they may. And this is bound to be one of the first places they search.”