Aftershocks

9

“Queek and his interpreter are here, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov’s secretary told him.

“Very well, Pyotr Maksimovich. I am coming.” It wasn’t very well, and Molotov knew it. He’d hated the Reich, but he missed it now that it was reduced to a battered shadow of itself. And the United States was in trouble. If the Race found an excuse for smashing the USA, how long could the USSR last after that? No matter what the dialectic said about inevitable socialist victory, Molotov didn’t want to have to find out for himself.

He hurried into the office reserved for visits from the Race’s ambassador. A couple of minutes later, his secretary led in Queek and the Pole who translated his words into Russian. “Good day,” Molotov told the human. “Please convey my warm greetings to your principal.” His words were as warm as a Murmansk blizzard, but he’d observed the forms.

The Pole spoke to the Lizard. The Lizard hissed and popped back at him. “He conveys similar greetings to you, Comrade General Secretary.”

Queek’s greetings were probably as friendly as Molotov’s, but the Soviet leader couldn’t do anything about that. He said, “I thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”

“That is my duty,” Queek replied. “Now that I am here, I will ask why you have summoned me.” His interpreter made it sound as if Molotov would find himself in trouble if he didn’t have a good reason.

He thought he did. “If at all possible, I want to use my good offices to help the Race and the United States come to a peaceful resolution of the dispute that has arisen between them.” He didn’t know why the dispute had arisen, which frustrated him no end, but that didn’t matter.

Queek gestured. The interpreter said, “That means he rejects your offer.”

Molotov hadn’t expected anything so blunt. “Why?” he asked, fighting to keep astonishment from his voice.

“Because this dispute is between the Race and the United States,” Queek replied. “Do you truly wish to include your not-empire and suffer the consequences of doing so?”

“That depends on the circumstances,” Molotov said. “If the Soviet Union were to include itself on the side of the United States, do you doubt that the Race would also suffer certain consequences?”

When the interpreter translated that, Queek made the boiling and bubbling noises he used to show he was an unhappy Lizard. The interpreter didn’t translate them, which might have been just as well. After half a minute or so, the Race’s ambassador started spluttering less. Now the Pole turned his words into Russian: “You would destroy yourselves if you were mad enough to attempt such a thing.”

“Possibly.” Even for Molotov, sounding dispassionate while speaking of his country’s ruin didn’t come easy, but he managed. “If, however, the Race attacked first the United States and then the peace-loving peasants and workers of the Soviet Union, our destruction would be even more certain. If you think the Germans hurt you, you had better think very hard on what the United States and the Soviet Union could do together.”

“Do you threaten me, Comrade General Secretary?” Queek asked.

“By no means, Ambassador,” Molotov replied. “I warn you. If you leave the Soviet Union out of your calculations, you make a serious mistake. This government cannot be, is not, and will not be blind to the danger the Race poses to the other chief independent human power, and thus to all of mankind.”

“I assure you that, whatever the danger in which the United States finds itself, it is a danger that that not-empire has abundantly earned,” Queek said. “I also assure you that it is none of your business.”

“If you assure me it is none of my business, I have no way to examine your other assurances,” Molotov said. “Therefore, I must assume them to be worthless.”

“Assume whatever you please,” Queek said. “We are not interested in your efforts to mediate. If we ever do seek mediation, we shall inquire of you. And as for your threats, you will find that you cannot intimidate us.”

“I have no intention of intimidating you,” Molotov said, glad he had the knack of lying with a straight face. “You will follow your interests, and we shall follow ours. But I did want to make sure you understood what the Soviet Union considers to be in its interest.”

“The Soviet Union does not understand what is in its interest, not if it courts destruction like-” The interpreter broke off and went back and forth with Queek in the Lizards’ language. Then he returned to Russian: “The expression people would use is ‘like a moth flying into a flame.’ ”

“It is possible that we might be defeated.” Molotov knew it was as near certain as made no difference that the Soviet Union would be defeated. Sometimes, though, a demonstrated willingness to fight made fighting unnecessary. Switzerland had never become a part of the Greater German Reich. “Think carefully, Ambassador, on whether you and the Race care to pay the price.”

“I assure you, Comrade General Secretary, that our discussions shall revolve around that very subject,” Queek replied. “I think we have now said everything that needs saying, one of us to the other. Is that not a truth?”

“It is,” Molotov said.

Queek rose. So did the interpreter-like a well-trained hound, Molotov thought scornfully. “Perhaps I shall see you again,” the ambassador said. “Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this ugly building will cease to exist in the not too distant future. It would be no enormous loss if that came to pass.”

“I care nothing for your views on architecture,” Molotov said. “And if this building should cease to exist, if many buildings throughout the Soviet Union should cease to exist, the Race and the buildings it cherishes would not come through unscathed.”

The Lizard’s tailstump quivered, a sign of anger. But Queek left without making any more cracks, which was probably just as well.

As soon as the door closed behind the Race’s envoy and his interpreter, Molotov rose from his chair and went into a chamber off to the side of the office. There he changed his clothes, including socks, shoes, and underwear. The Race could make extraordinarily tiny mobile surveillance devices; he did not want to take the chance of carrying them through the Kremlin.

Marshal Zhukov waited in Molotov’s own office. “You heard, Georgi Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.

“Oh, yes.” Zhukov patted the intercom speaker that had relayed the conversation to him. “I heard. You did about as well as anyone could have, Comrade General Secretary. Now we wait and see what happens.”

“Is everything in readiness to defend the rodina?” Molotov asked.

Zhukov nodded. “Strategic Rocket Forces are ready to defend the motherland. Admiral Gorshkov tells me our submarines are ready. Our ground forces are dispersed; the Lizards will not find it easy to smash large armies with single weapons. Our forces in space will do everything they can.”

“And our antimissiles?” Molotov suppressed hope from his voice as efficiently as he had suppressed fear.

With a big peasant shrug, Zhukov answered, “They will also do everything they can. How much that is likely to be, I’ve got no idea. We may knock some down. We will not knock down enough to make any serious difference in the fighting.”

“How many of ours will they knock down?” Molotov asked.

“More,” Zhukov said. “You spoke accurately. We can hurt them. Together with the United States, we can hurt them badly. They can do to us what they did to the Reich. I wish you could have learned how this trouble with the USA blew up so fast.”

“So do I.” Molotov’s smile was Moscow winter. “Do you suppose President Warren would tell me?”

“You never can tell with Americans, but I wouldn’t hold my breath,” the leader of the Red Army replied. Molotov nodded; that was also his assessment. Zhukov cursed. “I don’t want to fight the damned Lizards blind. I don’t want to fight them at all, with or without the Americans on my side.”

“Would you rather they came and fought us after beating the Americans? That looks to be our other choice,” Molotov said.

“You were right. That’s worse,” Zhukov said. “But this is not good. I wish the Lizards would have let you mediate.”

“Queek did not want mediation,” Molotov said gloomily. “Queek, unless I am very much mistaken, wanted the Americans’ blood.”

“That is not good, not good at all.” Zhukov slammed his fist down onto Molotov’s desk. “Again, I think you were right.”

The telephone rang. Molotov quickly picked it up, not least to make sure Zhukov wouldn’t. Andrei Gromyko was on the other end of the line. “Well?” the foreign commissar asked, one word that said everything necessary.

Molotov gave back one word: “Bad.”

“What are we going to do, Comrade General Secretary?” Gromyko sounded worried. When Gromyko sounded like anything, matters were serious if not worse. “The threat the Lizards present makes that of the Hitlerites in 1941 seem as nothing beside it.”

“I am painfully aware of that, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov answered. “I judge that the threat from the Race will not decrease if the Lizards are allowed to ride roughshod over the United States and then come after us. Marshal Zhukov, who is here with me, concurs. Do you disagree?”

“No, I do not. I wish I could,” Gromyko said. “All our choices are bad. Some may be worse than others.”

“Our best hope, I believe, is persuading the Race that another wan of aggression would cost them more than they could hope to gain in return,” Molotov said. “Since that is obviously true, I had no trouble making my position, the Soviet Union’s position, very plain to Queek.”

He spoke with more assurance than he felt. The phone lines to his office were supposed to be the most secure in the Soviet Union. But the Lizards were better at electronics than their Soviet counterparts. He had no guarantee they were not listening. If they were, they weren’t going to hear anything secret different from what he’d said to their ambassador’s scaly face.

Gromyko understood that. “Of course, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the foreign commissar said. He was good. No one, human or Lizard, would have said that he was using a public voice, an overly fulsome voice, to put undue stress on his words.

“Have you any further suggestions?” Molotov asked.

“No,” Gromyko replied. “I am content to leave everything in your capable hands.” Had Molotov been unsure Gromyko was content to do that, someone else would have held the foreign commissar’s job. Gromyko added, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

“Does he agree with you?” Zhukov asked.

Molotov nodded. “Da. And you?” He wanted it out in the open. If Zhukov didn’t agree, somebody else would start holding the general secretary’s job.

But the marshal, however reluctantly, nodded. “As you say, our best hope. But it is not a good one.”

“I wish I thought it were,” Molotov said. “Now we can only wait.”

Rance Auerbach spoke French slowly and with a Southern accent nothing like the one the people in the south of France used. But he read the language pretty well. Everything he saw in the Marseille newspapers made him wish he were back on the other side of the Atlantic. “Christ, I wonder if they’d let me back in the Army if I asked ’em nice.”

Penny Summers looked at him from across their room at La Residence Bompard. The hotel lay well to the west of the city center, and so had survived the explosive-metal bomb without much damage. Penny said, “What the hell were you drinking last night, and how much of it did you have? The Army wouldn’t take you back to fight off an invasion of chipmunks, let alone Lizards.”

“Never can tell,” he said. “Back when the Race first hit us, they took anybody who was breathing, and they didn’t check that real hard, either.”

“You aren’t hardly breathing night now,” Penny retorted, which was cruel but not altogether inaccurate. “I can hear you wheezing all the way over here.”

Like her previous comment, that one held an unfortunate amount of truth. Auerbach glared just the same. “You want to be over here if the Lizards try and kick the crap out of the country?”

“I’d sooner be here than there, on account of they can kick our ass from here to Sunday, and you know it as well as I do,” Penny said.

One more home truth he could have done without. Putting the best face on it he could, he said, “We’ll go down swinging.”

“That won’t do us a hell of a lot of good.” Penny walked past him to the window and looked north toward the blue, blue waters of the Mediterranean. The hotel sat on the headland west of the inlet that had prompted Greek colonists to land at Marseille what seemed a very long time ago by Earthly standards. Turning back, Penny went on, “You want to go back, go ahead. It’s no skin off my nose. You won’t see me doing it, though.”

Rance grunted. He was just gassing, and he knew it. If he’d thought the Army would take his ruined carcass, he would have gone back if he had to swim the Atlantic to do it. As things were… As things were, he wanted a drink and he wanted a cigarette. The cigarettes hereabouts were nasty items; they tasted like a blend of tobacco, hemp, and horse manure. He lit one anyway, as much an act of defiance as anything else.

He looked at his watch. “It’s half past ten,” he said. “We’re supposed to see Pierre the Turd at noon. We’d better get moving.”

“One of these days, you’re gonna call him that to his face, and you’ll be sorry,” Penny predicted.

“I still say that’s what his name sounds like.” Rance took another quick drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. He’d sated his craving for nicotine, and he didn’t like the taste for hell.

By writing out what he wanted, Auerbach got the concierge to call him a cab. It showed up a few minutes later: a battered Volkswagen. “Where to?” the cabby asked. He was smoking a cigarette like the one Rance had had, but he’d worked it down to a tiny little butt.

“I would like… to go… to the refugee center… to the north… of the city.” Auerbach spoke slowly, and as carefully as he could. Sometimes the locals would understand him, sometimes not.

This time, the driver nodded. “Oui, monsieur,” he said, and opened the door so Penny and Rance could get into the back seat. Auerbach grunted and grimaced as he squeezed himself into the narrow space. He ended up knee to knee with Penny, which was pleasant, but not so pleasant as to keep him from wishing he had more room.

The road north skirted the Vieux Pont, the inlet at the heart of the city. It also skirted the worst of the wreckage from the bomb. Rance eyed the ruins with fascination. He’d seen plenty of pictures of the kind of damage explosive-metal bombs produced, but never the real thing till now. Everything looked to have been blasted out from a central point, which, he supposed, was exactly what had happened. It happened with ordinary bombs, too, but not on such a scale. He wondered how many had died when the bomb went off. Then he wondered if anybody knew, even to the nearest ten thousand.

But a lot of people remained very much alive, too. The tent city north of town was enormous. Penny wrinkled her nose. “Smells like the septic tank just backed up,” she said.

“It’s a wonder they don’t have disease.” Rance spoke with the authority of a former officer. “They will before too long, if they don’t do something about their sanitation pretty damn quick.”

“Dix-huit francs, monsieur,” the driven said as he brought the Volkswagen to a halt. Eighteen francs was about three bucks-it would have been high for the trip back in the States, but not outrageously so. Auerbach dug in his pocket and found two shiny ten-franc coins. They didn’t weigh anything to speak of; they were stamped from aluminum, which struck him as money for cheapskates. The driver seemed glad enough to get them, though. “Merci beaucoup,” he told Rance.

Then Auerbach had to tell him the same thing, because the fellow and Penny had to work together to extract him from the back seat of the VW. Rance normally hated standing up, which made his ruined leg hold more weight than it really felt like bearing. Compared to being crammed into that miserable back seat, standing up wasn’t half bad. He took as much of his weight as he could on his stick and his good leg.

A dumpy little woman a few years younger than Penny came up to them. “You are the Americans?” she asked. Rance’s eyes snapped toward her the minute she started to speak: if she didn’t have a bedroom voice, he’d never heard one. Not much to look at, but she’d be something between the sheets in the dank.

He had to remind himself he needed to answer. “Yes, we are the Americans,” he said in his slow, Texas-flavored Parisian French. “And you?”

“I’m Lucie,” she told him. “I’m Pierre’s friend. Come with me.”

They came. Even without running water, the tent city had better order than Rance would have guessed from the smell on his arrival. There were latrine trenches off in the distance. Just too many people, and they’ve been here too long, he thought. He knew about that; he and Penny had been stuck in a refugee camp for a while after the first round of fighting ended. Kids in short pants ran by, making a godawful racket. Rance almost tripped over a yappy little dog.

The tent in which Lucie and Pierre lived was a good-sized affair whose canvas had been bleached by sun and rain. Ducking through the tent flap wasn’t easy for Rance, either, but he managed, leaning on the stick. When he straightened up again, he said, “Oh, hello,” rather foolishly, in English, because another woman was in the tent with Pierre and Lucie. She was younger than the ginger dealer, but they had a family look to them-though she was better looking than old Pierre the Turd ever dreamt of being.

She surprised him by answering in English: “Hello. I am Monique Dutourd, Pierre’s soeur- his sister.”

He went back to his own bad French: “How is it that you speak English?”

“I am a professor of Roman history,” she said, and then, with a flash of bitterness, “A professor too long without a position. I read English and German much better than I speak them.” Her mouth narrowed into a thin line. “I hope never to speak German again.”

“Any language can be useful,” Pierre Dutourd said, first in English and then in the language of the Race. He went on in the latter tongue: “Is that not a truth?”

Rance and Penny had spent too much time in the company of Lizards over the past few years. They both made the Race’s affirmative hand gesture at the same time. Lucie laughed, which raised a couple of goosebumps on Rance’s arms. Penny gave him a sour look; she must have known what the Frenchwoman’s voice was doing to him.

Lucie hefted a green glass bottle. “Wine?” she asked.

“Merci,” Auerbach said, and Penny nodded. Rance would have preferred either real booze or beer, but this was France, so what could you do?

Pierre Dutourd raised his glass in salute. “This is a better meeting than our last one,” he said.

“Amen!” Rance exclaimed, and drank. He fumbled for words. “No Nazis with rifles, no trouble, no fear.”

“Less fear, anyhow,” the ginger dealer said. “Less trouble. The Lizards-the Lizards in authority-still do not love us. With France as she is today, this causes certain difficulties.”

“But you’re getting around them,” Penny said after Auerbach translated for her. He started to turn that back into French, but Pierre’s sister did the job faster and better than he could have.

“Yes, we are.” This time, Pierre Dutourd spoke the language of the Race. “Do we all understand this speech?” Everyone did but Monique, and she seemed not particularly unhappy at being excluded. “Good,” Pierre said. “Now-I am given to understand you have some of the herb you are interested in selling me?”

“Truth,” Penny said.

“Congratulations on getting it into this not-empire,” Dutourd said. “That is more difficult these days. Officials are altogether too friendly with the Race. Some of my former suppliers are having troubles, which is a pity: there are many males and females hereabouts who are longing for a taste.”

“I hope Basil Roundbush is one of those suppliers,” Rance said.

“As a matter of fact, he is,” Pierre said. “You know him?” He waited for Rance to nod, then went on, “He is, I believe, fixing his troubles now.”

“I hope he does not,” Auerbach said, and used an emphatic cough.

“Ah?” Dutourd raised an eyebrow, scenting scandal.

“Dealing with Penny and me will mean you have less need to deal with him,” Rance said. “I aim to hunt his business if I can.” He didn’t wait for the French ginger dealer to ask why, but went on to explain his run-in with Roundbush in Edmonton and the way the Englishman was hounding David Goldfarb.

Pierre Dutourd listened, but didn’t seem much impressed. Business is business to him, the son of a bitch, Auerbach thought. But when he mentioned Goldfarb’s name, Monique Dutourd perked up. She and her brother went back and forth in rapid-fire French, most of it too fast for Rance to keep up with. He gathered Pierre was filling her in on what he’d said.

Then she seemed to slow down deliberately, to give Auerbach a chance to understand her next words: “I think that, if it is possible for you to do without the Englishman and his ginger, you should. Anyone who would send a Jew-and a Jew who did not speak even so much as a word of French-in among the Nazis is not a man who deserves to be trusted. If he has the chance to betray you, he will take it.”

“I have been guarding my back for many years, Monique,” Pierre said with amused affection. “I do not need you to tell me how to do it.”

His sister glared at him. Auerbach was sure he’d lost the play. But then Lucie said, “It could be Monique has reason. I have never trusted this Roundbush, either. He is too friendly. He is too handsome. He thinks too much of himself. Such men are not to be relied upon-and now we have another choice.”

Rance had been trying to keep up with a translation for Penny, but he caught that. With a nod to good old Pierre the Turd, he said, “C’est vrai. Now you have another choice.”

“It could be,” Dutourd said. Auerbach carefully didn’t smile. He knew a nibble on the hook when he felt one.

Monique Dutourd looked up from the letter she was writing. She wondered how many applications she’d sent out to universities all over France. She also wondered how many of those universities still existed at the moment, and how many had vanished off the face of the earth in an instant of explosive-metal fine.

And she wondered how many letters she’d sent to universities still extant had got where they were addressed. The situation with the mail in newly independent France remained shockingly bad. The Nazis would never have tolerated such inefficiency. Of course, the Nazis would have read a lot of the letters in the mailstream along with delivering them. Monique dared hope the officials of the Republique Francaise weren’t doing the same.

She also dared hope department chairmen were reading the letters she sent them. She had very little on which to base that hope. Only three or four letters had come back to the tent city outside Marseille. None of them showed the least interest in acquiring the services of a new Romanist.

Because nobody cared about her academic specialty, she remained stuck with her brother and Lucie. She wished she could get away, but they were the ones who had the money-they had plenty of it. They were generous about sharing it with her: more generous, probably, than she would have been were roles reversed. But being dependent on a couple of ginger dealers rankled.

Not for the first time, Monique wished she’d studied something useful instead of Latin and Greek. Then she could have struck out on her own, got work for herself. As things were, she had to stay here unless she wanted to spend the rest of her days as a shopgirl or a maid of all work.

Pierre glanced over to her and said, “Do you really think I ought to tell the Englishman to go peddle his papers? He and I have done business for a long time, and who can be sure if these Americans are reliable?”

“You’re asking me about your business?” Monique said, more than a little astonished. “You’ve never asked me about business before, except when it had to do with that cochon from the Gestapo.”

“I knew plenty about him without asking you, too,” her brother said. “But he did make a nuisance of himself when he connected the two of us.”

“A nuisance of himself!” Now Monique had to fight to keep from exploding. Dieter Kuhn might have hounded Pierre, but he’d not only hounded Monique but also subjected her to a full-scale Nazi-style interrogation and then forced his way into her bed. As far as she was concerned, the one good thing about the explosive-metal bomb that had burst on Marseille was that it turned Kuhn to radioactive dust.

“A nuisance,” Pierre repeated placidly. Monique glared at him. He ignored the glare. His thoughts were fixed firmly on himself, on his own affairs. “You did not answer what I asked about the Americans.”

“Yes, I think you should work with them,” Monique answered. “If you have a choice between someone with a conscience and someone without, would you not rather work with the side that has one?”

“You’re probably right,” Pierre said. “If I have none myself, people with a conscience are easier to take advantage of.”

“Impossible man!” Monique exclaimed. “What would our mother and father say if they knew what you’d turned into?”

“What would they say? I like to think they’d say, ‘Congratulations, Pierre. We never expected that anyone in the family would get rich, and now you’ve gone and done it.’ ” Monique’s brother raised an eyebrow. “Getting rich does not seem to be anything you’re in severe danger of doing. When you were teaching, you weren’t getting much, and now you can’t even find a job.”

“I was doing what I wanted to do,” Monique said. “If I weren’t your sister, I’d still be doing what I wanted to do.”

“If you weren’t my sister, you’d be dead,” Pierre said coldly. “You’d have been living back at your old flat, and it was a lot closer to where the bomb went off than my place in the Porte d’Aix was. Next time you feel like calling me nasty names or asking about our parents, kindly bear that in mind.”

He was, infuriatingly, bound to be right. That didn’t make Monique resent him any less-on the contrary. But it would make her more careful about saying what was on her mind. “All right.” Even she could hear how grudging she sounded. “But I have spent a lot of time learning to be a historian. I’ve never spent any time learning the ginger business.”

“It’s all common sense,” her brother told her. “Common sense and a good ear for what’s true and what’s a lie-and the nerve not to let anyone cheat you. People-and Lizards-have to know you’ll never let anybody cheat you.”

A historian needed the first two traits. The third… Monique wondered how many people Pierre and his henchmen had killed. He’d been willing enough-more than willing enough-to use his Lizard friends to try to arrange Dieter Kuhn’s untimely demise. It hadn’t worked; the Lizard assassin, unable to tell one human from another, had gunned down a fish merchant by mistake. Of course, that effort had been in Pierre’s interest as well as Monique’s. She wondered if he ever did anything not in his own interest.

And she didn’t like the way he was eyeing her now. In musing tones, he said, “If I go with the Americans, little sister, you could be useful to me-you know English, after all. Even if I find the Americans don’t work out, I’ll go back to the Englishman-and you could be useful with him, too.”

“Suppose I don’t want to be… useful?” Monique had never-well, never this side of Dieter Kuhn-heard a word whose sound she liked less.

Her brother, as she’d already seen, was a relentless pragmatist. With a shrug, he answered, “I’ve carried you for a while now, Monique. Don’t you think it’s time you started earning your keep, one way on another?”

“I’m trying to do just that.” She held up the letter she was working on. “I haven’t had any luck, that’s all.”

“One way or another, I said.” Pierre sighed. “I admire you for trying to go on doing what you had done, truly I do. You can even go on trying to do it. I have no objection whatsoever, and I will congratulate you if you get a position. But if you don’t…” His smile was sad and oddly charming. “If you don’t, you can work for me.”

“I was just thinking you hadn’t been cruel enough to say anything like that to me,” Monique replied, her voice bitter. She snapped her fingers. “So much for that.”

“You don’t have to make up your mind right away,” Pierre said. “But do remember, I pulled wires to get you away from the purification police. I hoped you might want to show you were grateful.”

Monique scornfully tossed her head. “If you weren’t my brother, you’d be using that line to get me to go to bed with you.” All of a sudden, the prospect of being a maid of all work didn’t look so bad.

“Thank you, but no. I would not be interested even then-I’ve never had much use for women who argue and talk back all the time,” Pierre replied with wounding dignity. Monique wondered how well he knew himself. Lucie was anything but a shrinking violet.

But that thought flickered in her mind and then was gone. She wanted to hit back, to wound. “I believe you there,” she said. “The only time you’d want them to open their mouths would be to swallow something-just like that damned SS man. I’m surprised you didn’t jump to put on your own black shirt. They’d have paid you well, after all, and what else is there?”

Pierre surprised her with an immediate, emphatic answer: “Not being told what to do, of course. I had a bellyful of orders in the Army. I’ve done my best not to have to take them ever since.”

“You don’t care to take them, that could be,” Monique snarled. “But you don’t mind giving them, do you? No, you don’t mind that a bit.”

Her brother spread his hands in a startlingly philosophical gesture. “If one does not take orders, it is because he can give them, n’est ce-pas? Do you see any other arrangement?”

“I had another arrangement, till being your sister turned my life upside down,” Monique said. “I taught my classes, and outside of that I studied what I wanted, what interested me. No one made me do it. No one would have been interested in making me do anything. People let me alone. Do you understand what that means? Do you have any idea what that means?”

“It means you were very lucky,” Pierre said. “If you get another position, you will be lucky again. But if you are not so lucky, what then? Why, then you have to work for a living, just like everyone else.”

“There is a difference between working for a living and playing the whore,” Monique said. “Maybe you can’t understand that, but the Germans already made me play the whore. I’ll be damned if I let my brother do the same.”

She threw down the letter-why not? it was bound to be useless, anyhow-and stormed out of the tent. She fled not just the tent but the whole tent city as if it were accursed. It might as well have been, as far as she was concerned. If she’d had a little lead tablet and thought inscribing a curse in the name of the gods would have wiped the miserable place from the face of the earth, she would have done it in a heartbeat. As things were, all she could do was storm away.

Marseille was a great racket of bulldozers and jackhammers and saws and ordinary hammers and tools for which she didn’t even have names. Wrecked buildings were coming down. New buildings were going up. Most of those new buildings were supposed to be blocks of flats. Monique didn’t see the tent city shrinking, though. She had a pretty good idea what that meant: somebody’s pockets were getting lined.

She didn’t want to look at the buildings. Looking at them reminded her she wasn’t living in one of them, that she wouldn’t be able to afford to live in one of them. They had things she could buy-unless Pierre cut off all her money. What would I do then? she wondered. Could I stand his business? She doubted it. And yet…

A man smoking a pipe called out a lewd proposition. Monique rounded on him and, in a voice that could be heard all over the square, suggested that he ask his mother for the same service. He turned very red. He turned even redder when people jeered him and cheered her. Puffing furiously at the pipe, he withdrew in disorder.

“Nicely done, Professor Dutourd,” someone behind Monique said. “A boor like that deserves whatever happens to him.”

She whirled. The world whirled around her. There stood Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn. In civilian clothes, he looked like a Frenchman, but his accent declared who and what he was. “In that case, you deserved to be blown to the devil,” she snapped. “I thought you were. I prayed you were.”

He smiled the smile he no doubt thought so charming. “No such luck, I’m afraid. I was sent back to the Vaterland two days before the bomb fell here. They were going to put me in a panzer unit, but the Reich surrendered before they could.” He shrugged. “C’est la vie.”

“What are you doing here again?” Monique asked.

“Why, I am a tourist, of course. I have a passport and visa to prove it,” the SS man replied with another of those not quite charming smiles.

“And what are you here to see?” Monique’s wave took in ruin and reconstruction. “There isn’t much left to see.”

“Oh, but Marseille is still the home of so many wonderful herbs,” Kuhn said blandly. Christ, Monique thought. He’s still in the ginger business. The Reich is still in the ginger business. He’ll be looking for Pierre. And if I start working for Pierre, he’ll be looking for me, too.

Every time David Goldfarb crossed a street, he didn’t just look both ways. He made careful calculations. If a car suddenly sped up, could it get him? Or could he scramble up onto the sidewalk and something close to safety? Nothing like almost getting killed to make one consider such things.

Of course, that fellow who’d tried to run him down wasn’t the first driver in Edmonton who’d almost killed him-just the first one who’d meant to. David had a lifetime of looking left first before stepping off the curb. But Canadians, like their American cousins, drove on the right. That was a recipe for attempted suicide. Goldfarb didn’t try to do himself in quite so often as he had after first crossing the Atlantic, but it still happened in moments of absentmindedness.

This morning, he got to the Saskatchewan River Widget Works unscathed by either would-be murderers or drivers he didn’t notice till too late. “Hello, there,” Hal Walsh said. As usual, the boss was there before any of the people who worked for him. He pointed to a Russian-style samovar he’d recently installed. “Make yourself some tea, get your brains lubricated, and go to town.”

As usual, Goldfarb complained about the samovar: “Why couldn’t you leave the honest kettle? That damn thing is a heathen invention.”

“You’re a fine one to talk about heathens, pal,” Walsh retorted. Every now and again, he would make cracks about David’s Judaism. Things being as they were in Britain, that had made Goldfarb nervous. But Hal Walsh, unlike Sin Oswald Mosley and his ilk, didn’t mean anything nasty by it. He gave Jack Devereaux a hand time about being French-Canadian, and also derided his own Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestors. Goldfarb had decided he could live with that.

He did get himself a cup of tea. “Bloody miracle you set out milk for it,” he said. “With this contraption, I’d think you’d want us to drink it Russian-style, with just sugar. My parents do that. Not me, though.”

“You’re acculturated,” Walsh said. Goldfarb must have looked blank, because his boss explained: “England was your mother country, so you got used to doing things the way Englishmen do.”

“Too right I did,” Goldfarb said, and explained how he was in danger of doing himself an injury every time he tried to cross the street.

Walsh laughed, then stopped abruptly. “My brother went to London a couple of years ago, and I remember him complaining because he kept looking the wrong way. I hadn’t thought about your being in the same boat here.”

“What boat’s that?” asked Jack Devereaux. He made straight for the samovar and got himself a cup of tea. He didn’t worry that the gleaming gadget was un-British; he wasn’t British himself, not by blood, though he spoke English far more fluently than French. “David, did you take the Titanic?”

“Of course, and you’re daft if you think I didn’t have fun rigging a sail on the iceberg afterwards so I could finish getting over here,” Goldfarb retorted.

Devereaux gave him a quizzical look. “What all have you got in that teacup?” he asked, and then, before David could answer, “Can I have some, too?”

“We don’t need spirits to lift our spirits,” Walsh said, “or we’d damn well better not, anyhow.” He didn’t mind people drinking beer with lunch-he’d drink beer with lunch himself-but frowned on anything more than that. He led by example, too. Since he worked himself like a slave driven, the people who worked for him could hardly complain when he expected a lot from them. He tilted back his cup to drain it, then said, “What’s on the plate for today?”

“I’m still trying to work the bugs out of that skelkwank — light reader,” Devereaux answered. “If I can do it, we’ll have a faster, cheaper gadget than the one the Lizards have been using since time out of mind. If I can’t…” He shrugged. “You don’t win every time you bet.”

“That’s true, however much you wish you did,” Walsh said. “What about you, David?”

“I’ve got a couple of notions to improve the phone-number reader,” Goldfarb said, “but they’re just notions, if you know what I mean. If I get a chance, I’ll do some drawings and play with the hardware, but odds are I’ll spend a lot of my time giving Jack a hand. I think he’s pretty close to getting where he wants to go.”

“As opposed to getting where you want me to go,” Devereaux said with a grin.

“The climate’s better there in winter than it is here, but probably not in summer,” Goldfarb said.

“That would be funny, if only it were funny,” Walsh said. “It’s not by accident we call our football team the Eskimos.”

Goldfarb didn’t call what the Canadians played football at all. It was, to him, one of the most peculiar games imaginable. Of course, the Canadians didn’t call the game he was used to football, either. To them, it was soccer, and they looked down their noses at it. He didn’t care. More of the world agreed with him than with them.

Walsh fixed himself a second cup of tea, then said, “Let’s get going.”

There were times when David was reminded he was a jumped-up technician, not a properly trained engineer. This morning gave every sign of being one of those times. He got only so far looking at drawings of the phone-number reader he’d devised. Then, muttering, he went back to the hardware and started fiddling with it. Cut-and-try often took him further fasten than study. He knew that could also be true for real engineers, but it seemed more emphatically so for him.

He wasn’t altogether sorry when Jack Devereaux looked up and said, “David, what about that hand you promised?” Goldfarb applauded him. Devereaux groaned. “I suppose I asked for that. Doesn’t mean I had to get it, though.”

“Of course it does,” Goldfarb said, but he made a point of hurrying over to see what he could do for-rather than to-the other engineer.

The motors that turned the Lizards’ silvery skelkwank — light disks-a technology mankind had copied widely-all operated at the same speed. As far as anyone human knew, they’d been operating at that same speed for as long as the Race had been using them. It worked. It was fast enough. Why change? That was the Lizards’ attitude in a nutshell, or an eggshell.

People, now, people weren’t so patient. If you could make the disks turn faster, you could get the information off them faster, too. Seeing that was obvious. Getting a motor anywhere near as compact and reliable as the ones the Lizards used was a different question, though. Expectations for quality had gone up since the Race came to Earth. People didn’t come so close to insisting on perfection as the Lizards did, but breakdowns they would have taken for granted a generation earlier were unacceptable nowadays.

“It runs fine,” Devereaux said, “but it’s too goddamn noisy.” He glared at the motor, which was indeed buzzing like an angry hive.

“Hmm.” Goldfarb eyed the motor, too. “Maybe you could just leave it the way it is and soundproof the case.” He knew that was a technician’s solution, not an engineer’s, but he threw it out to see what Devereaux would make of it.

And Devereaux beamed. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he said reverently. “Let’s do it. Let’s see if we can do it, anyhow.”

“What measurements will we need for the case?” David asked, and answered his own question by measuring the motor. “Let me cut some sheet metal. We ought to have some sort of insulation around here, too. That’ll give us an idea of whether this’ll be practical.”

He’d got used to flanging up this, that, or the other thing in the RAF. Cutting sheet metal to size was as routine as sharpening a pencil. But when he was carrying the metal back to the motor, his hand slipped. He let out a yelp.

“What did you do?” Devereaux asked.

“Tried to cut my bloody finger off,” Goldfarb said. It was indeed bloody; he added, “I’m bleeding on the carpet,” and grabbed for his handkerchief.

Hal Walsh hurried over. “Let’s have a look at that, David,” he said in commanding tones. Goldfarb didn’t want to take off the handkerchief. The blood soaking through told its own story, though. Walsh clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You’re going to need stitches with that. There’s a new doctor’s office that’s opened up in the building next door, and a good thing right now. Come along with me.”

David didn’t argue. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so clumsy. He didn’t want to look at his hand. Whenever he did, he felt woozy and wobbly. Blood was supposed to stay on the inside, not go leaking out all over the place.

JANE ARCHIBALD M.D., read the sign on the door. “A lady doctor?” Goldfarb said.

“I hear she studied under the Lizards,” Walsh answered. “She ought to be able to patch you up, wouldn’t you say?”

“What happened here?” the receptionist asked when Walsh brought David into the office. Then she said, “Never mind. Come into the examining room with me, sir. The doctor will be with you right away.”

“Thanks,” David said vaguely. Hardly noticing he’d done so, he sat down on the chair there. He was cursing softly to himself in Yiddish when the doctor hurried into the room. He stopped in embarrassment all the worse because he hadn’t expected the female physician to be so decorative. More slowly than he should have, he realized this tall, blond, obviously Anglo-Saxon woman was unlikely to have understood his pungent remarks.

But her laughter said she did, which embarrassed him all the more. A moment later, she was all business. “Let’s have a look at it,” she said, her accent lower-class British or perhaps Australian. David undid the makeshift bandage. Dr. Archibald examined the wound and nodded briskly. “Yes, that’ll take a few stitches. Hold the edges together while I give you a bit of novocaine so you won’t feel the other needle so much.”

“All right,” he said, and did. As she injected him, he asked, “Do you really know Yiddish? How did that happen?”

“Just bits and pieces, Mister-?”Dr. Archibald said, threading catgut on whatever they used for sutures these days onto a needle.

“Goldfarb.” David looked away. He didn’t care to see what would happen next. “David Goldfarb.”

She stared at him, blue eyes going wide. “Not the David Goldfarb who’s related to Moishe and Reuven Russie?” She was so astonished, she almost-but not quite-forgot to start stitching him up.

And he was so astonished, he almost-but not quite-forgot to notice it stung despite the novocaine. “My cousins,” he answered automatically. “How do you know them?”

“I was at the Russie Medical College with Reuven,” she answered. “Hold still there, please. I want to put in a couple of more stitches.” That was spoken in physician’s tones. Then she went back to talking as if to a person: “I might have married Reuven, but he wanted to stay in Palestine and I couldn’t stomach living under the Race any more, not after what they did to Australia.” Her tone changed again: “There. That’s done. Let me bandage you.”

As she wrapped the finger with gauze and adhesive tape, Goldfarb said, “I didn’t meet you when I was in Jerusalem. I would have remembered.” That was probably more than he should have said. He realized it too late. Well, Naomi didn’t need to know about it.

Dr. Archibald didn’t get angry. She’d probably heard such things from the age of fourteen up. “It’s very good to meet you now,” she said. “I heard about your troubles in France, and getting out of England. That you’d wound up here in Edmonton had slipped my mind. You’ll need to come back in about ten days to have the sutures removed. See Myrtle out front for an appointment.” She stuck her head out the door and called to the receptionist:

“No charge for this one, Myrtle. Old family friend.”

As David went back to the Widget Works, Hal Walsh turned to him and said, “I saw the doctor. Old family friend? You lucky dog.” David smiled, doing his best to look like the ladykiller he didn’t come close to being.

Felless hadn’t had a holiday in much too long. She hadn’t done much work after fleeing Marseille for the new town in the Arabian Peninsula, but life as a refugee was vastly different from life as a vacationer. Here in Australia, too, the Race had claimed the land for its own, even more emphatically than it had in Arabia. And, unlike in Arabia, here no fanatical Big Uglies willing, even eager, to die for their superstitions prowled the landscape and had to be warded against.

The landscape in the central part of the continent reminded Felless eerily of Home. The rocks and sand and soil were all but identical. The plants were similar in type though different in detail. Many of the crawling creatures reminded members of the Race of those of Home, though a rather distressing number of them were venomous.

Only the furry animals that dominated land life on Tosev 3 really told Felless she remained on an alien world. Even those were different from the large beasts on the rest of the planet; Australia, by all indications, had long been ecologically isolated. The bipedal hopping animals filling the large-herbivore ecological niche hereabouts were so preposterous, Felless’ mouth fell open in astonished laughter the first time she turned an eye turret toward one. But the creatures were very well adapted to their environment.

She saw less of that environment than she might have otherwise. Business Administrator Keffesh had been even more generous than she’d hoped after she arranged the release of the imprisoned Big Ugly, Monique Dutourd. She’d brought a lot of ginger to Australia, and she was enjoying it.

That required care. Felless would spend one day in an orgy of tasting, the next in her hostel room waiting for her pheromones to subside so she could go out in public without exciting all the males who smelled them into a mating frenzy. Getting meals sent to the room rather than eating in the refectory cost extra. Felless authorized the change without the slightest hesitation.

All the individuals who brought meals to her were females. Once she noticed the pattern, she found that very interesting. Were the males and females who ran the hostels quietly adapting to the unavoidable presence of ginger on Tosev 3? She couldn’t have proved it. She didn’t dare ask about it. But the assumption certainly looked reasonable.

On the days when she was out and about, she noticed that ginger did indeed make its presence known in these new towns. She couldn’t smell the pheromones she emitted in her season; they were for males. But she saw a couple of matings on the sidewalks, and she saw more than a few males hurrying along in unusually erect posture and with the scales of their crests upraised. That meant they smelled female pheromones and were looking for a chance to mate.

How foolish they look, she thought. Back on Home, she wouldn’t have seen males interested in mating unless she was in her season herself. Then she would have found them attractive, not absurd. As things were, she viewed them with a cool detachment unlike anything she’d known on Home.

I wonder if this is the attitude Tosevite females have toward their males. That struck her as an interesting notion. It might repay further research when she got back to France. I might even ask this Monique Dutourd, she thought. She owes me favors, and I know she was involved in at least one sexual relationship.

The idea didn’t occur to her on a day when she’d been tasting ginger, but on one when she hadn’t, and when she was feeling the gloomy aftereffects of overindulgence in the herb. She wondered what that meant. Ginger was supposed to make a female clever. Maybe it only made a female think she was clever.

Such reflections disappeared when she got a telephone call from Ambassador Veffani. Without preamble, he said, “Senior Researcher, I strongly recommend that you return to France at once.”

“Why, superior sir?” Felless asked, doing her best to disguise dismay.

“Why? I shall tell you why.” Veffani sounded thoroughly grim. “Because there is serious danger of war between the Race and the not-empire known as the United States.”

“By the Emperor!” Felless was so upset, she barely remembered to cast down her eyes after naming her sovereign. “Have all these Tosevite not-empires gone addled at the same time?”

“It could be so,” Veffani answered. “There are threats that, if we fight the United States, the not-empire called the Soviet Union will join in on the side of their fellow Big Uglies.”

“That might almost be for the best,” Felless said. “Once we have smashed them both, Tosev 3 will be ours without possibility of dispute.”

“Truth,” the ambassador to France said. “Truth to a point, at any rate. The question remaining is, how much damage can the Big Uglies do us while we are smashing them? Estimates are that each of these not-empires could by itself hurt us at least as badly as the Deutsche did. If they fight us together, they may be able to do a good deal more than that, because we would not be able to concentrate all our military strength against either one of them.”

“Oh.” Felless stretched out the word. However much she wished it didn’t, that made good logical sense. But a new question occurred to her: “Why should I cut short my holiday to return to France? Will I not be in at least as much danger there as I am here?”

Veffani made the negative gesture. “I do not think so, Senior Researcher. Australia is part of the territory the Race rules, and so is a legitimate target for both the USA and the SSSR, as it was for the Reich. But France is an independent Tosevite not-empire. By the rules of war on Tosev 3, it is not a fair target for them unless it declares itself to be at war against them. The government of the Francais shows no willingness to do this.”

“They are ungrateful after we regained for them the independence they had lost to the Deutsche?” Felless asked indignantly.

“They are the most cynical beings I have ever known,” Veffani replied. “They know we did not free them from the Deutsche for their benefit, but for our own. And our efforts to use Big Uglies as soldiers against other Big Uglies have been far less successful than we would have wished. Let them be independent. Let them be neutral. Let their not-empire be a safe haven. It was not during the fight against the Deutsche.”

“Well, that is a truth,” Felless said, and then, “Tell me, superior sir, what is the cause of the latest crisis with the not-empire of the United States? I thought that, except for such peculiarities as snoutcounting, it was relatively civilized.”

“I know the answer to your question, Senior Researcher, but security forbids me from telling you,” Veffani replied. “Negotiations with the USA are still in progress; there is some hope that this war may be prevented. That will be more difficult if reasons for the crisis become too widely known. Even we are not immune from being forced to actions we might otherwise not take.”

“But will the Big Uglies of the USA not bellow these reasons to the sky?” Felless asked. “That not-empire is notorious for telling everything that should stay secret.”

“Not always,” Veffani said. “The American Big Uglies concealed the launch of their spaceship to the belt of minor planets in this solar system very well. And they have more reason to conceal this-believe me, they do.” He used an emphatic cough. “They would not bellow unless they wanted a war with us in the next instant.”

“I am not sure I understand, superior sir,” Felless said-an understatement, because she was annoyed Veffani wouldn’t trust her with whatever secret he knew, “but I shall obey, and shall arrange to return to Marseille as soon as I can.”

“You are wise to do so,” Veffani told her. “Now you colonists are beginning to get some notion of the delights we of the conquest fleet faced when we first came to Tosev 3. For you, though, these delights are less a surprise.”

He broke the connection before Felless could tell him how utterly mistaken he was. Everything about Tosev 3 had been a horrible surprise to the males and females of the colonization fleet. Felless remembered waking from cold sleep weightless, in orbit around what she’d thought would be the new world of the Empire, to be informed that nothing she’d believed on setting out from Home was true.

I will go back to Marseille, she though. I will go back to Marseille-after I enjoy myself one more time here. She still had more ginger in her luggage than she knew what to do with. No, that wasn’t true-she knew exactly what to do with it. She set out to taste as much as she could in one day.

Normally, a ginger-taster rode from exhilaration to depression and back again. Intent on tasting all she could, Felless didn’t wait for one taste to wear off before enjoying another. She stayed strung as tight as the herb would make her.

When a female she telephoned to arrange an early return to France pointed out a couple of difficulties in her revised schedule, Felless screamed insults. The other female said, “There is no reason to snap my snout off.”

“But-” Felless began. She seemed to have the Race’s entire aircraft schedule at the tips of her fingerclaws. But, when she tried to access the information with the thinking part of her mind, she discovered she couldn’t.

Yes, ginger makes you believe you are smart, she reminded herself. It does not really make you smarter, or not very much. It also made her far more vulnerable to frustration than she would have been otherwise.

“Here.” The female proposed another schedule. “Will this do?”

Felless examined it. “Yes,” she said, and the other female, with every sign of relief, vanished from her screen. Felless took another taste. She wasn’t sure the departure time would be late enough to let her stop producing pheromones by then. With so much ginger coursing through her, she didn’t care.

She cared the following day. For one thing, the depression that followed her binge was the worst she’d ever known. For another, she hadn’t stopped pumping out pheromones. She mated in the hotel lobby, in the motorcar that took her to the airfield, and in the terminal waiting to board the aircraft.

“A good holiday,” the last male said, with an emphatic cough.

And Felless answered, “Truth.” The pleasure of mating was different from that of the herb, but it was enough to lift her partway out of the shadows in which she’d walked since taking her tongue out of the ginger vial.

She wondered if she would lay a clutch of eggs. If I do, I do, she thought, and then, But if I do, Veffani had better not find out about it. The ambassador would not be pleased. He might even be angry enough to send her back to the Reich.

Fortunately, she was able to board the aircraft without stirring up a commotion. That could have been dangerous, especially if the flight crew had males in it. But her fellow passengers paid her no special heed. She settled down for the long, dull flight to Cairo, where she would board another aircraft for the return to Marseille.

Not so bad, she thought. She wished the holiday had been longer. That would have let her taste more. But she’d made up for a lot of lost time even so. Maybe she really was ready to get back to work.

Liu Han and Liu Mei sat side by side in an insanely crowded second-class car as the train of which it was a part rattled north. Children squealed. Babies screamed. Chickens squawked. Ducks quacked. Dogs-likelier headed for the stew pot than for the easy life of a pet-yelped. Several young porkers made noises even more appalling than those that came from the human infants. The smells were as bad as the racket.

“Can we get any fresh air?” Liu Mei asked her mother.

“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “I’ll try.” She was sitting by the window. She had to use all her strength to get it to rise even a little. When it did, she wasn’t sure she was glad it had. The engine was an ancient coal-burner, and soot started pouring in as the stinks poured out.

Liu Mei got a cinder in the eye, and rubbed frantically. Once she’d managed to get rid of it, she said, “Maybe you ought to close that again.”

“I’ll try,” Liu Han repeated. She had no luck this time. What had gone up refused to come down. She sighed. “We knew this trip wouldn’t be any fun when we set out on it.”

“We were right, too.” Liu Mei coughed. Several people had lit up cigarettes and pipes so they wouldn’t have to pay quite so much attention to the pungent atmosphere they were breathing. Their smoke made the air that much thicker for everyone else.

One of the babies in the carn-or possibly one of the dogs-had an unfortunate accident. Liu Han sighed. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed walking back to Peking, but I’m not enjoying this, either. You, at least, you’re going home.”

Liu Mei leaned toward Liu Han so she could speak into her ear: “We’re going back to begin the revolutionary struggle again. The struggle is our home.”

“Well, so it is.” Liu Han glanced over at her daughter. Liu Mei could think of the struggle as home. She was young. Liu Han was getting close to fifty. Trapped in this hot, smelly, packed car, she felt every one of her years. There were times when she wished she could settle down somewhere quiet and forget about the revolution. She generally got over that once she’d had a chance to rest for a while, but she found it happening more and more often these days.

The dialectic said the proletarian revolution would succeed. For many years, that had kept Liu Han and her comrades working to overthrow the imperialist little scaly devils despite all the defeats they’d suffered. It had kept them confident of victory, too. But now the dialectic made Liu Han thoughtful in a different way. If the revolution would inevitably succeed, wouldn’t it succeed just as inevitably without her?

She didn’t say anything like that to Liu Mei. She knew it would have horrified her daughter. And she supposed that, once she got to Peking, the fire of revolutionary fervor would begin to burn in her own bosom once more. It always had. Still, there were times when she felt very tired.

I’m getting old, she thought. Her skin was still firm and her hair had only a few threads of silver in it, but Chinese showed their age less readily than round-eyed devils did. She’d seen that on her visit to the United States. But whether she showed her age or not, she felt it. This miserable car made everyone feel her age, and twenty years older besides.

Brakes squealing, the train stopped in a small town. A few people left her car. More tried to crowd on. Nobody wanted to make room for anybody else. Men and women pushed and shouted and cursed. Liu Han had ridden enough trains to know things were always like that.

Hawkers elbowed their ways through the cars, selling rice and vegetables and fruit juice and tea. They didn’t do a whole lot of business; most people had the sense to bring their own supplies with them. Liu Han and Liu Mei certainly had. Only the naive few riding a train for the first time gave the hawkers any trade.

A conductor came through, too, screaming for the hawkers to get off or buy a ticket-they were going to get moving. The hawkers laughed and jeered; they knew to the second when the train would really set out, and they also knew the conductors always tried to get rid of them early. The last one leaped off just as the train started to roll. He stuck out his tongue in derision.

“That’ll cost him extra squeeze the next time this train crew comes through here,” Liu Han predicted.

“You’re probably right,” her daughter replied. “But he assented his freedom even so. In his small way, he is a revolutionary.”

He was more likely to be a bad-tempered fool, but Liu Han didn’t argue with Liu Mei. Instead, she wrestled with the window again. She had no luck; it was stuck, and looked as if it would stay stuck. The smoke that poured in was thick and black, because the train wasn’t going fast enough to dissipate it. Liu Han coughed and cursed. People nearby were coughing, too, and cursing her.

Things got better as the train picked up speed, but they never got very good. As far as Liu Han could tell, not very good was about as good as rail travel ever got in China.

And then, less then half an hour later, the train slowed to a stop again, not at a station but in the middle of the countryside. “Now what?” a woman behind Liu Han demanded indignantly.

“Have we broken down?” Three or four people asked the same question at the same time.

“Of course we’ve broken down,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “The little scaly devils don’t care whether trains work well, or even if they work at all, so they don’t bother keeping them up.”

But, for once, this wasn’t something she could blame on the scaly devils. A conductor poked his head into the car and shouted, “We can’t go on because bandits have blown up the tracks ahead of us. We are going to be here for a while. We may have to go back and find a way around the damage.”

That set people yelling and screaming at him and at one another. He just kept repeating what he’d said the first time. Most of the unhappy passengers cursed the bandits up one side and down the other. People would curse anything that made them late.

Liu Mei asked, “Do you suppose the People’s Liberation Army sabotaged the track?”

“It could be,” Liu Han said. “Not everyone will have known we were on this train. But it could have been the Kuomintang, too. No way to tell.”

The sun beat down on the car. Because it was standing still, it got hotter and hotter. People started opening more windows. Some wouldn’t open at all. People started breaking them. That brought in an angry conductor, but he had to flee in the face of the passengers’ wrath.

“Whoever it was probably wanted to make the train derail,” Liu Han said. “That would really have done damage.”

It would have done damage to us, she thought. Derailing trains was a favorite game of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Kuomintang as well. It taught people that the rule of the little scaly devils remained insecure. It also caused a lot of casualties. She and Liu Mei could have been among them as easily as not.

And, of course, a machine-gun crew might have been waiting to shoot up the train once it derailed, Liu Han thought. That was another game both the People’s Liberation Army and the Kuomintang played. So did independent bandit outfits, who kept themselves in business by robbery. But no one started shooting here.

After what seemed like forever, the train began to inch backwards. Because it was going in reverse, the smoke from the engine’s stack blew away from the passenger cars, not into them. The breeze the slow motion stirred up wasn’t very strong, but it was ever so much better than nothing. Sweat began to dry on Liu Han’s face. She took off her conical straw hat and fanned herself with it. People all over the car were doing the same thing. They started smiling at one another. A couple of babies and a couple of dogs stopped howling. It was as pleasant a time on a train as Liu Han had ever known.

The train rolled back over a switch. Then it stopped, presumably so a couple of men from the engine could get down and use crowbars to shift the switch and let the train go down the other track. After that, the train started going forward again, and swung onto the route it hadn’t used before.

With the exhaust now blowing back once more, the car filled with coal smoke. Since the passengers had broken a good many windows, they couldn’t do anything about it. The conductor laughed at them. “You see, you stupid turtles? It’s your own fault,” he said. Somebody threw a squishy plum at him, and hit him right in the face. Juice dribbled down the brass-buttoned front of his uniform. He let out a horrified squawk and retreated in disorder. Everyone cheered.

But then somebody not far from Liu Han said, “Since we’re going up a track we’re not supposed to, I hope there’s no train coming down it toward us.”

That produced exclamations of horror. “Eee!” Liu Han said. “May ten thousand little demons dance in your drawers for even thinking such a thing.”

No train slammed head-on into theirs. No stretch of tracks on the new line had been blown up. Thoroughgoing guerrillas often did such things, which caused more than double the delay and aggravation of a single strike. On the receiving end for once, Liu Han was glad these raiders hadn’t been thorough.

Her train was scheduled to get into Peking in the early evening. Even at the best of times, even under the little devils, railroad schedules in China were more optimistic guesses than statements of fact. When things went wrong… Trying to sleep sitting up on a hard seat, with the air full of smoke and other stinks and noise, was a daunting prospect. Liu Han thought she dozed a little, but she wasn’t sure.

She was sure she watched the sun rise over the farmlands to the east a couple of hours before the train did at last roll into the railroad yard in the southwestern part of Peking. It took more time crawling up to the station itself. Liu Han minded that less. It let her look around the city.

Liu Mei was doing the same thing. “We fought them hard. We fought them with everything we had,” she said, and pride rang in her voice.

“So we did,” Liu Han agreed. Wrecked buildings outnumbered those still intact. Laborers carrying buckets on shoulder poles were everywhere, hauling away rubble. Liu Han sighed. “Fighting hard is important, but only up to a point. More important, even so much more important, is winning.”

The little scaly devils had won this fight, and taken Peking back for their own. Liu Han found fresh proof of that at the station. Along with the other passengers, she and her daughter had to walk through a machine that could tell if they were carrying weapons. They weren’t, and had no trouble. Someone else in the car was. Chinese police, running dogs to the imperialist scaly devils, hustled him away. Liu Han and Liu Mei walked out of the station and into the city. “Home,” Liu Mei said, and Liu Han had to nod.