In the Balance

14

Bicycling across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Chicago had seemed a good idea when Jens Larssen set about it. In summer, in a country that had never known invasion, it might even have been a good idea. In winter, pedaling through territory largely occupied by the Lizards, it looked stupider with every passing moment.

He’d seen newsreel footage of half-frozen German soldiers captured by the Russians in front of Moscow. The Russians, in their white snow suits, many of them on skis, had looked capable of going anywhere any time. That was how Jens had thought he would do, if he’d really thought about it at all. Instead, he feared he much more closely resembled one of those Nazi ice cubes with legs.

He didn’t have the clothes he needed for staying out in the open when the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed there. He’d done his best to remedy that by piling on several layers at a time, but his best still left him shivering.

The other thing he hadn’t thought about was that nobody was plowing or even salting the roads this winter. In a car, he would have done all right A car was heavy, a car was fast-best of all, his Plymouth had had a heater. But drifted snow brought a bicycle to a halt. As for ice… he’d fallen more times than he could count. Only dumb luck had kept him from breaking an arm or an ankle. Or maybe God really did have a soft spot in his heart for drunks, children, and damn fools.

Jens looked at a map he’d filched from an abandoned gas station. If he was where he thought he was, he’d soon be approaching the grand metropolis of Fiat, by God, Indiana. He managed a smile when he saw that, and declaimed, “And God said, Fiat, Indiana, and there was Indiana.”

His breath puffed out around him in a cloud of half-frozen fog. A couple of times, on really frigid days, he’d had it freeze in the mustache and beard he was growing. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror any time lately, so he didn’t know what he looked like. He didn’t care, either. He’d decided scrounging for razor blades was a waste of time, and shaving without either mirror or hot water hurt too much to be worthwhile. Besides, the new growth. helped keep cheeks and chin warm. He wished he could sprout fur all over.

As he had on most of his journey, he owned the road. Cars and trucks just weren’t moving, especially not in this Lizard-occupied stretch of country. Trains weren’t moving much, either, and the few he’d seen had Lizards aboard. He’d wished for a white snow suit of his own, to keep from drawing their notice. But the aliens hadn’t paid any attention to him as they chugged by.

He supposed that was one advantage to having been invaded by creatures from another planet as opposed to, say, Nazis or Japs. The Lizards didn’t have a feel for what was normal on Earth. A Gestapo man, spotting a lone figure pedaling down a road, might well have wondered what he was up to and radioed an order to pick him up for questions. To the Lizards, he was just part of the landscape.

He rolled past a burned-out farmhouse and the twisted wreckage of a couple of cars. Snow covered but did not erase the scars of bomb craters in the fields. There had been fighting here, not so long ago. Jens wondered how far west into Indiana the Lizards’ control reached, and how hard crossing back into American-held territory would be.

(Down deep, he wondered if Chicago was still free; if Barbara was still alive; if this whole frozen trek wasn’t for nothing. He seldom let those thoughts rise to the surface of his mind. Whenever he did, the urge to keep going faltered.).

He peered ahead, shielding his eyes against snow glare with the palm of his hand. Yes, those were houses up there-either Fiat or, if he’d botched his navigation, some other equally unimpressive little hamlet.

Off to one side of the road, he saw little dark figures moving against the white-splashed background. Hunters, he thought In hard times, anything you could add to your larder was all to the good. A deer might mean the difference between starving and getting through the winter.

He was not a great outdoorsman (though he’d learned a lot lately), but one good glance at how the dark figures moved warned him his first hasty thought was wrong. Hunters, at least of the human variety, did not walk like that. It was some sort of Lizard patrol.

And, worse luck, they’d seen him, too. They broke off whatever they were doing and came toward the road. He thought about diving off his bike and running away from them, but no surer way to get himself shot came to mind. Better to assume the air of an innocent traveler out and about.

One of the Lizards waved to him. He waved back, then stopped his bicycle and waited for them to come up. The closer they got, the more motley and miserable they looked. That struck him as somehow wrong; bug-eyed monsters weren’t supposed to have troubles of their own. At least, they never did in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials.

But a couple of the Lizards were tricked out in their own kind’s shiny cold-weather gear, while the rest had draped themselves with a rummage sale’s worth of stolen human coats, mufflers, hats, snow pants, and boots. They looked like sad little tramps, and they also looked frozen in spite of everything they had on. They were, in fact, so many Winter Fritzes in the scaly flesh.

The one who had waved led the squad out onto the roadway, which was hardly less snow-covered than the surrounding fields. “Who you?” he asked Larssen in English. His exhaled breath steamed around him.

“My name is Pete Smith,” Jens answered. He’d been questioned by Lizard patrols before, and never gave his real name on the off chance that they’d somehow compiled a list of nuclear physicists. He didn’t give the same alias twice, either.

“What you do, Pete Ssmith? Why you out?” The Lizard turned the first sound in Larssen’s assumed surname into a long hiss and pronounced the th at the end as a Cockney’s ff.

“I’m going to visit my cousins. They live a little past Montpelier,” Jens said, naming the small town just west of Fiat on his map.

“You not cold?” the Lizard said. “Not cold on that-that thing?” He’d evidently forgotten the word bicycle.

“Of course I’m cold,” Larssen answered; he had the feeling the Lizard would have shot him if he’d dared deny it. Hoping he sounded properly indignant, he went on, “Have to go by bike if I want to go, though. Don’t have any gas for my car.” That was true for everybody these days. He didn’t mention that his dead car was back in eastern Ohio.

The Lizards sounded like steam engines as they talked among themselves. The one who’d been questioning Larssen said, “You come with us. We ask you more things.” He gestured with his gun to make sure Jens got the point.

“I don’t want to do that!” Larssen exclaimed, which was true for both his Pete Smith persona and his very own self. If the Lizards did any serious questioning, they’d find out he didn’t know much about his alleged cousins west of Montpelier. They might even find out he didn’t have any cousins west of Montpelier. And if they found that out, they’d likely start doing some serious digging about who he really was and why he was biking across eastern Indiana.

“Not care what you want,” the Lizard said. “You come with us. Or you stay.” He brought the rifle up to point straight at the middle of Larssen’s chest The message was clear: if he stayed here, he’d stay forever. The Lizard spoke in his own language, maybe translating for his friends what he’d told Jens. Their mouths fell open. Larssen had seen that before, often enough to figure out what it meant. They were laughing at him.

“I’ll come,” he said, as he had to. The Lizards formed up on either side of his bicycle and escorted him into Fiat.

The town wasn’t even a wide spot on Highway 18, just a few houses, a general store, an Esso station (its pumps now snow-covered mounds), and a church along the side of the road. The store was probably the main reason the town existed. A couple of children ran shoutmg across the empty pavement of the highway, pelting each other with snowballs. They didn’t even look up when the Lizards went past; by now they were used to them. Kids adapt fast, Larssen. thought. He wished he did.

The Lizards had turned the general store into their headquarters. A razor-wire fence ringed the building to keep anyone from getting too close. A portable pillbox sat in front of the store. Larssen wouldn’t have envied a human on duty in there. It had to seem even chillier for one of the invaders.

A blast of heat hit him in the face when the Lizards opened the store’s front door. He went from too cold to too hot in the space of a few seconds. Sweat glands he’d thought dormant till summer suddenly returned to life. In his wool hat, overcoat, and sweater, he felt like a main dish in a covered kettle that had just been moved from the icebox to the oven.

“Ahh!” The Lizards all said it together. As one, they stripped off their layers of insulation and drank in the heat they loved so well. They did not object when Larssen shed his own coat and hat and, a moment later, his sweater. Even in shirt and trousers, he was too warm. But while the Lizards took nudity in stride, the last time he’d been naked in public was at a swimming hole when he was thirteen years old. He left the rest of his clothes on.

The Lizard who spoke English led him to a chair, then sat down across a table from him. The alien reached forward and poked a knob on a small Lizardy gadget that lay on the table. Behind a small, transparent window, something inside the machine began to spin. Jens wondered what it was for.

“Who you?” the Lizard asked, as if seeing him for the first time. He repeated his Pete Smith alias. “What you do?” the alien said, and he gave back his story about the mythical cousins west of Montpelier.

The Lizard picked up another contraption and spoke into it. Larssen jumped when the contraption hissed back. The Lizard spoke again. He and the machine talked back and forth for a couple of minutes, in fact. Larssen thought at first that it was some kind of funny-looking radio or telephone, but the more the Lizard used it, the more he got the feeling the device itself was doing the talking. He wondered what it was saying, especially when it spoke his name.

The Lizard turned one of its turreted eyes toward him. “We have of you no record, Pete Smith.” It might have been pronouncing sentence. “How you explain this?”

“Well, uh, sir, uh-what is your name?”

“I am Gnik,” the Lizard said. “You call me superior sir.”

“Well, superior sir, Gnik, I guess the reason you don’t have any record of me is that till now I’ve just stayed on my own little farm and not bothered anybody. If I’d known I’d run into you, I’d have stayed there longer, too.” That was the best excuse Larssen could come up with on the spur of the moment. He wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

“It could be,” Gnik said neutrally. “These cousins of you-who, what they are?”

“They’re my father’s brother’s son and his wife. His name is Olaf Smith, hers is Barbara. They have two children, Martin and Josephine.” By naming the imaginary cousins (what’s the square root of minus one cousin? flashed across his mind) after his father, wife, brother, and sister, he hoped he’d be able to remember who they were.

Gnik talked to his gadget again, listened while it talked back. “No record of these Big Uglies,” he. said, and Larssen thought he was doomed. Then the Lizard went on, “Not have all records yet,” and he breathed again. “One day soon, put in machine here.” Gnik tapped the talking box with a clawed forefinger.

“What is that thing, anyway?” Larssen asked, hoping to get the Lizard to stop asking him questions about relatives he didn’t have.

But Gnik, though too short for basketball and too little for football, was too smart to go for a fake. “You not ask questions at I. I ask questions at you.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but what Gnik had, Larssen didn’t like. “You ask questions at me to spy out secrets of Race, yes?”

Yes, Jens thought, though he didn’t think coming out and admitting it would be the smartest thing he’d ever done. He didn’t have to fake a stammer as he answered, “I don’t know anything about your secrets and I don’t want to know anything about them. I just never saw a box that talked back to somebody before, that’s all.”

“Yes. You Big Uglies are pri-mi-tive.” Gnik pronounced the three-syllable English word with obvious relish; Larssen guessed he’d learned it so he could score points off uppity humans. He was still suspicious, too. “Maybe you find this things out, pass on to other sneaky Big Uglies, eh?”

“I don’t know anything about sneaky Big Uglies-I mean, people,” Larssen said, noticing that the Lizards had as unflattering a nickname for human beings as humans did for their kind. “I just want to go see my cousins, that’s all.” Now he wanted Gnik to ask questions about Olaf and his nonexistent family.

That suddenly seemed safer than being grilled about spies who might very well be real.

Gnik said, “We see more about this, Pete Smith. You not leave town called Fiat now. We keep your travel thing here”-he still couldn’t remember how to say bicycle-“ask more questions to you later.”

Larssen started to exclaim, “You can’t do that!” He opened his mouth, but shut it again in a hurry. Gnik damn well could do that, and if he didn’t care for the cut of Jens’ jib, he could reslice it-and Jens-into a shape that better pleased his fancy. Losing a bicycle was the least of his worries.

No, that wasn’t so. Along with the bike, he was also losing precious time. How long would. he take to hike across Indiana in the dead of winter? How long before another Lizard patrol picked him up and started asking unanswerable questions? Not long, he feared. He wanted to ask Gnik where the Lizard-human frontier through Indiana ran, but didn’t think it wise. For all he knew, the invaders had conquered the whole state by now. And even if they hadn’t, Gnik almost certainly wouldn’t answer and almost certainly would get even more suspicious.

He couldn’t fail to make some kind of protest, though, not if he wanted to keep his self-respect, so he said, “I don’t think you ought to take my bicycle when I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You say this. I not know this,” Gnik retorted. “You put on now your warm things. We take you to other Big Uglies we keep here.”

Putting on sweater, overcoat, and hat in the sweltering general store and then going outside reminded Jens of the runs from steam room to snow he’d shared with his grandfather when he was a kid. The only thing missing was his father standing out there to whack him with birch twigs. The Lizards didn’t seem invigorated when they left the store. They just seemed cold.

They took him over to the church. Lizard guards stood outside it. When they opened the closed door, he found it was heated to a more humanly tolerable level. He also found Gnik was using it as a holding pen for people who came through or near Fiat.

People sat up on the pews; turned around to look him over; and started talking, both at him and among themselves. “Look, another poor sucker.” “What did they get him for?” “What did they get you for, stranger?”

“Sstay-here,” one of the Lizards said to Jens, his words accented almost past comprehension. Then he left the church. As the door swung shut, Larssen saw him and his companion racing back toward the general store and what they thought of as a decent temperature.

“What did they get you for, stranger?” repeated the woman who’d asked the question before. She was a brassy blonde not far from Jens’ age; she might have been pretty if her hair (which showed dark roots) hadn’t been a snaky mess and if she didn’t look as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for quite a while.

Everybody in the church had that same grubby look. The faces that turned toward Larssen were mostly clean, but a strong, almost barnyard odor in the air said no one had bathed lately. He was sure he contributed to that odor; he hadn’t seen a bar of Lifebuoy for a while himself. Without hot water, baths in winter were more likely to be next to pneumonia than to godliness.

He said, “Hello, folks. I don’t know just what they got me for. I don’t think they know, either. One of their patrols spotted me on my bicycle and pulled me in so they could ask me questions. Now they don’t want to let me go.”

“Sounds like the little bastards,” the woman said. She wore no lipstick (maybe she’d run out) but, as if to make up for it, had rouged her cheeks almost bloodred.

Her words touched off a torrent of abuse from the other involuntary churchgoers. “I’d like to squeeze their skinny necks till those horrible eyes of theirs pop,” said a man with a scraggly reddish beard.

“Put ’em in a cage and feed ’em flies,” suggested a skinny, swarthy gray-haired woman.

“I wouldn’t mind if they bombed us off the face of the Earth here, so long as the Lizards went with us,” added a stout, red-faced fellow. “The scaly sons of bitches won’t even let us go out to scrounge around for cigarettes.” Larssen missed his nicotine fix, too, but Redface sounded as though he’d forgive the Lizards anything, up to and including bombing Washington, if they’d only let him have a smoke. That struck Jens as excessive.

He gave his Pete Smith alias, and was bombarded with the others’ names. He wasn’t especially good at matching faces and monickers, and needed a while to remember that the gray-haired woman was Marie and the bleached blonde Sal, that the fellow with the red beard was Gordon and the man with the red face Rodney. Then there were also Fred and Louella and Mort and Ron and Aloysius and Henrietta to keep straight.

“Hey, we still have pews to spare,” Rodney said. “Make yourself at home, Pete.” Looking around, Larssen saw people had made nests of whatever clothes they weren’t wearing. Sleeping wrapped in an overcoat on a hard pew did not strike him as making himself at home, but what choice had he?

He asked, “Where’s the men’s room?”

Everyone laughed. Sal said, “Ain’t no such thing, or powder room neither. No running water, see? We’ve got-what do you call ’em?”

“Slop buckets,” Aloysius said. He wore a farmer’s denim overalls; by the matter-of-fact way he spoke, he was more than familiar with such appurtenances of rural life.

The buckets were set in a hall behind a door which stayed sensibly closed. Larssen did what he had to do and got out of there as fast as he could. “My father grew up with a two-seater,” he said. “I never thought I’d have to go back to one.”

“Wish it was a two-seater,” Aloysius said. “Dang sight easier on my backside than squattin’ over one o’ them buckets.”

“What do you folks-what do we, I mean-do to pass the time here?” Jens asked.

“Cuss the Lizards,” Sal answered promptly, which brought a chorus of loud, profane agreement. “Tell lies.” She batted her eyes at him. “I can make like I was in Hollywood so good I almost believe it myself.” He found that more pathetic than alluring, and wondered how long she’d been cooped up here.

Gordon said, “I’ve got a deck of cards, but poker’s no damn good without real money. I’ve won a million dollars three or four times and thrown it away again on nothing better than a pair of sevens.”

“Do we have four for bridge?” Larssen was an avid contract player. “You don’t need to have money to enjoy bridge.”

“I know how to play,” Gordon admitted. “I think poker’s a better game, though.” A couple of other people also said they played. At first, Jens was as close to ecstatic as a prisoner could be; study and work had never left him as much time for cards as he would have liked. Now he could play to his heart’s content without feeling guilty. But the men and women who didn’t know bridge looked so glum that his enthusiasm faded. Was it really fair for some people to enjoy themselves when others couldn’t?

The church door opened. A tall, thin woman with her hair pulled back in a tight bun and her face set in disapproving lines put down a box of canned goods. “Here’s your supper,” she said, each word clipped as precisely as if by scissors. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

“What’s eating her?” Larssen said.

“Eating’s the word.” Sal tossed her head in fine contempt. “She says we’re eating the people who live in this miserable little town out of house and home. As if we asked to get stuck here!”

“You notice we’re eating out of tin cans,” Rodney added, his features darkening even more with anger. “Nothing but farms around here, but they save all the good fresh food for themselves. We haven’t seen any of it, anyhow, that’s for sure.”

There weren’t enough spoons to go around; the town woman either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared that the church held a new arrival. Jens ate with somebody else’s, washed in cold water and dried on a trouser leg. Even though he’d given up on hygiene since leaving White Sulphur Springs, that was a new low.

As he chewed on tasteless beef stew, he worried what-if anything-Chicago was eating these days. Rather more to the point, he worried about Barbara. Fiat had at the outside a couple of hundred people for the surrounding countryside to feed. Chicago had three million, and was under Lizard attack, not safely under the Lizards’ thumb.

He wished he’d never left for Washington. He’d thought he was going into the worse danger himself, not leaving his wife behind to face it. Like most Americans under the age of ninety, he’d thought of war as something that happened only to unfortunate people in far-off lands. He hadn’t thought through all the implications of its coming home to roost.

Something strange happened as he was getting to the bottom of the can of stew. A Lizard skittered into the church, peered down into the box of food the grim-faced woman had brought The alien looked up in obvious disappointment, hissed something that could equally well have been English or its own language. Whatever it was, Larssen didn’t understand it.

The people who’d been stuck in church longer did. “Sorry,”

Marie said. “No crabapples in this batch.” The Lizard let out a desolate hiss and slunk away.

“Crabapples?” Larssen asked. “What does a Lizard want with crabapples?”

“To eat ’em,” Sal said. “You know the spiced ones in jars, the ones that go so nice with a big ham at Christmas time? The Lizards are crazy about ’em. They’d give you the shirt off their backs for a crabapple, except they mostly don’t wear shirts. But you know what I mean.”

“I guess so,” Larssen said. “Crabapples. Isn’t that a hell of a thing?”

“Gingersnaps, too,” Gordon put in. “I saw a couple of ’em damn near get into a fight one time over a box of gingersnaps.”

Marie said, “They look a little like gingerbread men, don’t they? They’re not all that far from the right color, and the paint they wear could do for icing, don’t you think?”

It was, without a doubt, the first time a Baptist church had ever resounded to the strains of “Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me-I’m the gingerbread man!” Laughing and cheering one another on, the prisoners made up verses of their own. Some were funny, some were obscene, some-the best ones-were both.

Jens flogged his muse, sang, “I’ve blown up your cities, and I’ve shot up your roads, and I can take your crabapples, too, I can!” He knew it wasn’t very good, but the chorus roared out: “Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me-I’m the gingerbread man!”

When at last they ran out of verses, Sal said, “I hope that sour old prune who brings us our food is listening. ’Course, she probably thinks having a good time is sinful, especially in church.”

“If she had her way, the Lizards would shoot us for having a good time in here,” Mort said.

Sal chuckled. “One thing is, the Lizards don’t pay no more attention to what she wants than we do. Other thing is, she don’t know what all goes on in here, neither.”

“Got to make our own fun,” Aloysius agreed. “Ain’t nobody gonna do it for us. Never thought how much I liked my radio till I didn’t have it no more.”

“That’s true; that’s a fact,” several people said together, as if they were echoing a preacher’s amens.

The short winter day wore on. Darkness poured through the windows and seemed to puddle in the church. Rodney walked over to the box the local woman had brought. “God damn her,” he said loudly. “She was supposed to bring us more candles.”

“Have to do without,” Marie said. “No use complaintng about it. We’ll get by as long as we don’t run out of coal for the furnace.”

“And if we do,” Aloysius said, “we’ll be frozen hard enough that we won’t start to stink till they get around to buryin’ us.”

That cheerful thought pretty well halted conversation. Sitting huddled in his overcoat in the darkness, Larssen thought how important the discovery of fire had been, not just because it heated Neanderthal man’s caves but because it lit them as well. A man with a torch could go out at midnight unafraid, knowing it would show him any lurking danger. And electricity had all but banished night altogether. Now the age-old fears proved not dead but merely sleeping, ready to rouse whenever precious light was lost.

He shook his head. The best way he could think of to fight the night terrors was to sleep through them. Sleep was what day-loving animals did in the dark-stay cozy and quiet so nothing dangerous could find them. He stretched out on the hard pew. It wouldn’t be easy.

After a long spell of tossing and turning and twisting-and once almost rolling onto the floor-he managed at last to fall asleep. When he woke, he almost fell off the pew again before he remembered where he was. He looked at his wrist The luminous dial on his watch said it was half past one.

The inside of the church was absolutely dark. It was not, however, absolutely quiet. He needed a few seconds to identify the noises floating up from a few rows behind him. When he did, he was surprised his ears didn’t glow brighter than his watch. People had no business doing that in church!

He started to sit up and see who was screwing on the pews, but paused before he’d even leaned onto one elbow. For one thing, it was too dark for him to tell anyway. And was it any of his business? His first shock had sprung straight from the heart of his upper Midwestern Lutheran upbringing. But when he thought about it a little, he wondered how long most of these people had been cooped up together and where else they were supposed to go if they wanted to make love. He lay back down.

But sleep would not return. The whispered gasps and moans and endearments, the small creaking of the pew itself, shouldn’t have been enough to keep him awake. They weren’t, not really, not by themselves. Listening to them, though, smote him with the realization of how long it had been since he’d slept with Barbara.

He hadn’t even looked at another woman in his erratic journey back and forth across the eastern half of the United States. Pedaling a bicycle a good many hours a day, he thought wryly, was liable to take the edge off other physical urges. Besides, it was cold. But if just then Sal or one of the other women in here had murmured a suggestion to him, he knew he would have pulled his pants down (if not off) without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he wondered what Barbara was doing about such matters. He’d been gone a long time, a lot longer than he’d thought when he set out in: the late, lamented Plymouth. She might think he was dead. (For that matter, she might be dead herself, but his mind refused to dwell on that).

He’d never imagined he needed to worry about whether she’d stay faithful. But then, he’d never thought he needed to worry about whether he would, either. The middle of the night on a cold, hard pew was hardly the time or place for such thoughts. That didn’t keep him from having them.

It did keep him from going back to sleep for a long, long lime.

“So,” Zolraag said. Moishe Russie knew the Lizard’s accent was the main thing that stretched the word into a hiss, but the knowledge didn’t make it sound any less menacing. The governor went on, “So, Herr Russie, you will no longer for us speak on the radio? This is your measure of-what is the Deutsch word-gratitude, is that it?”

“Gratitude is the word, yes, Excellency,” Russie said, sighing. He’d known this day was coming. Now it had arrived. “Excellency, not a Jew in Warsaw is ungrateful that the Race delivered us from the Germans. Had you not come when you did, there might be no Jews left in Warsaw. So I have said on the radio for your benefit. So much I would say again.”

The Lizards had shown him the extermination camp at Treblinka. They’d shown him the much bigger one at Oswiecim-the Germans called it Auschwitz-which had just been starting up when they came. Both places were worse than anything he’d imagined in his worst nightmares. Pogroms, malignant neglect: those were standard tools in the anti-Semite’s kit. But murder factories… his stomach twisted whenever he thought of them.

Zolraag said, “If you are gratitudeful, we expect you to show this in ways of usefulness to us.”

“I thought I was your friend, not your slave,” Russie answered. “If all you want of me is to repeat the words you say, better you should find a parrot. There must be one or two left in Warsaw.”

His defiance would have been more impressive, even to himself, if he hadn’t had to go back and explain to Zolraag what a parrot was. The Lizard governor took a while to get the whole idea. “One of these animals, then, would speak our message in your words? This could be done?” He sounded astonished; maybe Home didn’t have any animals that could learn to talk. He also sounded excited. “You Tosevites would listen to such an animal?”

Russie was tempted to say yes: let the Lizards make laughing-stocks of themselves. Reluctantly, he decided he had to tell the truth instead; that much he owed to the beings who had saved his people. “Excellency, human beings would listen to a parrot, but only to be amused, never to take it seriously.”

“Ah.” Zolraag’s voice was mournful. So was the Lizard’s whole demeanor. His office was heated past what Russie found comfortable, yet he still draped himself in warm clothing. He said, “You know our studio has been repaired after the damage the Deutsch raiders caused.”

“Yes.” Russie also knew the raiders had been Jews, not Nazi. He was glad the Lizards had never figured that out.

Zolraag went on “You know you are now in good health.”

“Yes,” Moishe repeated. Suddenly the governor reminded him of a rabbi laying out a case for his interpretation of a Talmudic passage: this was so, and that was so, and therefore… He didn’t like the therefore he saw ahead. He said, “I will not go on the radio and thank the Race for destroying Washington.”

The irrevocable words, the ones he’d tried so long to evade, were spoken at last. A large lump of ice seemed to grow in his belly in spite of the overheated room He had always been at the Lizards’ mercy, just as before he and all the Warsaw Jews were at the mercy of the Germans. A quick gesture from the governor and Rivka would be a widow.

Zolraag did not make the gesture-not yet, anyhow. He said, “I do not understand your trouble. Surely you did not object to the identical bombing of Berlin, which helped us take this city from the Deutsche. How does the one differ from the other?”

It was so obvious-but not to the Lizards. Looked at dispassionately, the distinction wasn’t easy to draw. How many Germans incinerated in Berlin had been women children old men people who hated everything for which the regime centered there stood? Thousands upon thousands surely. Their undeserved deaths were as appalling as anything Washington had suffered.

But that regime itself was so monstrous that no one-least of all Moishe Russie-could look at it dispassionately. He said, “You know the kinds of things the Germans did. They wanted to enslave or kill all their neighbors.” Rather like you Lizards he thought. Saying that out loud, however, seemed less than expedient. He went on, “The United States, though, has always been a country where people could be freer than they are anywhere else.”

“What is this freedom?” Zolraag asked. “Why do you esteem it so?”

A quotation from a scripture not his own ran through Russie’s mind: Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? Unlike the Roman, Zolraag seemed to want a serious answer. That only made Russie the sadder for him; he suspected he would be explaining music to a deaf man.

Nonetheless, he had to try. “When we are free, we may think as we like, believe as we like, and do as we like so long as what we do does not harm any of our neighbors.”

“All this you would enjoy under the beneficent rule of the Race.” No, Zolraag heard no music.

“But we did not-do not-choose to come under the rule of the Race, beneficent or not,” Russie said. “Another side of freedom is being able to choose our own leaders, our own rulers, rather than having them forced upon us.”

“If you enjoy the other freedom, how could this one possibly matter?” Zolraag sounded all at sea. Though he and Moishe both used a hodgepodge of Lizard and German words, they did not speak the same language.

“If we cannot choose our own leaders, we keep the other freedoms only on sufferance, not because they are truly ours,” Russie replied. “We Jews, we know all about having freedom taken away from us at a ruler’s whim.”

“You still have not answered my very first question,” the Lizard governor insisted. “How can you condone our bombing of Berlin while you condemn the bombing of Washington?”

“Because, Excellency, of all the countries on this world, Germany had the least freedom of either kind and, when you came, was busy trying to take away whatever freedom its neighbors possessed. That’s why most of the countries-empires, you would say, though most of them aren’t-had banded together to try to defeat it. The United States, now, the United States gives its citizens more freedom than any other country. In hurting Berlin, you were helping freedom; in hurting Washington, you were taking it away.” Russie spread his hands. “Do you understand what I am trying to say, Excellency?”

Zolraag made a noise like a leaky samovar coming to a boil. “Since you Tosevites cannot come close to agreeing among yourselves in matters political, I hardly see how I am to be expected to grasp your incomprehensible feuds. But have I not heard that the Deutsche chose their-what is his name? — their Hitler for themselves in the senseless manner you extol so highly? How do you square this with your talk of freedom?”

“Excellency, I cannot” Russie looked down at the floor. He wished the Lizard had not known about how the Nazis came to power. “I do not claim any system of government will always work well, only that more folk are likely to be made content and fewer harmed with freedom than under any other arrangement.”

“Not so,” Zolraag said. “Under the Empire, the Race and its subject species have prospered for thousands upon thousands of years without ever worrying about choosing their own rulers and the other nonsense of which you babble.”

“To this I say two things,” Moishe answered: “first, that you have not been trying to govern human beings-”

“To which I say, on short experience, that I am heartily glad,” Zolraag broke in.

“Humanity would be glad if you still weren’t,” Russie said. He did not stress that, though; as he’d already admtted, he and his people would have been exterminated had the Lizards not come. He tried another tack: “How would these subject races of yours feel about what you say?”

“They would agree with me, I believe,” Zolraag said, “They can scarcely deny their lives are better under our rule than they were in their barbarous days of what you, I suppose, would call freedom.”

“If they like you so well, why haven’t you brought any of them with you to Earth?” Russie was trying to make the governor out to be a liar. The Germans had had no trouble recruiting security forces from among the peoples they’d conquered. If the Lizards had done the same, why weren’t they using their subjects to help conquer or at least police this world?

But Zolraag answered, “The Empire’s soldiers and administrators come only from the ranks of the Race. This is partly tradition, dating from the epoch when the Race was the only species in the Empire… but then, you Tosevites care nothing for tradition.”

Russie wanted to bristle at that, belonging as he did to a tradition that stretched back more than three thousand years. But he’d gotten the idea that, to Zolraag, three thousand years was about the equivalent of summer before last-hardly worth mentioning if you wanted to talk about a long time ago.

The Lizard governor went on, “That the security of the Race’s rule is another consideration, I will not deny. You should be honored that you are allowed to aid us in our efforts to pacify Tosev 3. Such a privilege would not be afforded to a Hallessi or a Rabotev, I assure you, though the members of subject races may freely pursue careers in areas not affecting the government and safety of the Empire.”

“We do not use the word freely in the same way,” Russie said. “If I weren’t useful to you, I’m sure you wouldn’t grant me this privilege.” He packed all the irony he could into that last word. Zolraag had as much as said that if the Lizards brought Earth into their Empire, humans would be reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water, with no voice in their own fate forevermore.

Zolraag answered, “You are undoubtedly correct, Herr Russie. I suggest you bear that in mind, make the most of the opportunity you are presented, and cease your foolish complaints against our dominion.” Using irony against him was about as futile as German antitank guns firing on Lizard panzers.

Russie said, “I cannot do as you ask of me, not only for the sake of my own self-respect but also because no human who heard me praise you for destroying Washington could ever take my words seriously again.”

“You have been useful to us up until this time, so I have given you many chances to change your mind: more than I should have, very likely. But after this you will have no more chances. Do you understand what I say to you?”

“Yes. Do what you want to me. I cannot speak as you wish.” Russie licked dry lips. As he had when the Nazis ruled the ghetto, he hoped he could endure whatever the Lizards inflicted on him.

Zolraag said, “We will not do anything to you, Herr Russie. Direct intimidation has shown itself to be less valuable on this world than we might have wished.” Russie stared at him, hardly believing his own ears. But the governor was not finished: “Research has suggested another tactic which may prove more effective. As I said, you will not suffer personally for this refusal. But we shall exact reprisals upon the female with whom you are mated and upon your hatchling. I hope this may suggest a possible change in your view.”

Moishe stared at him, not so much in disbelief as in dreadful disappointment “And here I thought I’d helped drive the Nazis out of Warsaw,” he said at last.

“The Deutsche are indeed well and truly driven from this city, and with your help,” Zolraag said, missing the point completely. “We seek your continued assistance in persuading your fellow Tosevites of the justice of our cause.”

The governor spoke without apparent irony. Russie concluded he’d noticed none. But even a Nazi might have hesitated to threaten a woman and child in one breath and proclaim the justice of his cause in the next Alien, Russie thought. Not till now had he had his nose rubbed in the meaning of the word.

He wanted to point out to Zolraag the errors in his reasoning, as if he were a rabbi correcting a young yeshiva-bucher. In the first days after the Lizards came, he could have done just that. Since then, little by little, he’d had to learn discretion-and now his temper could endanger not just himself but also Rivka and Reuven. Softly, then.

“You understand you offer me no easy choice,” he said.

“Your lack of cooperation has forced me to this step,” Zolraag answered.

“You ask me to betray so much of what I believe in,” Russie said. That was nothing but truth. He tried to put a whine in his voice: “Please give me a couple of days in which to think on what I must do.” Getting sick wouldn’t be enough this time. He was already sure of that.

“I ask you only to go on working with us and for our cause as you have in the past.” Just as Russie was getting more cautious in what he said to Zolraag, so Zolraag was getting more suspicious about what he heard from Russie. “Why do you need time in which to contemplate this?” The governor spoke in his own language to the machine on the desk in front of him. It was no telephone, but it answered anyway; sometimes Moishe thought it did Zolraag’s thinking for him. The Lizard resumed: “Our research demonstrates that a threat against a Tosevite’s family is likely to be the most effective way to ensure his obedience.”

Something in the way he phrased that made Russie notice it. “Is the same not true among the Race?” he asked, hoping to distract Zolraag from wondering why he needed extra time to think.

The ploy worked, at least for a little while. The governor emitted a most human-sounding snort; his mouth fell open in amusement. “Hardly, Herr Russie. Among our kind, matings are but for a season, driven by the scent females exude then. Females brood and raise our young-that is their role in life-but we do not have these permanent families you Tosevites know. How could we, when parentage is less certain among us?”

The Lizards were all bastards, then, in the most literal sense of the word. Moishe liked that notion, especially with what Zolraag was putting him through now. He asked, “This is so even with your Emperor?”

Zolraag cast down his eyes at the mention of his ruler’s title. “Of course not, foolish Tosevite,” he said. “The Emperor has females reserved for him alone, so his line may be sure to continue. So it has been for a thousand generations and more; so shall it ever be.”

A harem, Russie thought. That should have made him all the more scornful of the Lizards, but somehow it did not. Zolraag spoke of his Emperor with the reverence a Jew would have given to his God. A thousand generations. With a past of that depth upon which to draw, no wonder Zolraag saw the future as merely a continuation of what had already been.

The governor returned to the question he’d asked before: “With your family as security for your obedience, why do you still hesitate? This appears contrary to the results of our research on your kind.”

What sort of research? Russie wondered. He didn’t really want to know; the bloodless word too likely concealed more suffering than he could think about with equanimity. In doing as they pleased to people without worrying about the consequences of their actions, the Lizards weren’t too different from the Nazis after all. But all of mankind was for them as Jews were for the Germans.

I should have seen that sooner, Russie thought. Yet he could not blame himself for what he’d done before. His own people were dying then, and he’d helped save them. As so often happened, though, the short-term solution was proving part of a long-term problem.

“Please answer me, Herr Russie,” Zolraag said sharply.

“How can I answer now?” Russie pleaded. “You put me between impossible choices. I must have time to think.”

“I will give you one day,” the governor said with the air of one making a great concession. “Past that time, I shall have no more patience with these delaying tactics.”

“Yes, Your Excellency; thank you, Your Excellency.” Russie scurried out of Zolraag’s office before the Lizard got the bright idea of attaching a couple of guards to him. Whatever invidious comparisons he’d drawn, he had to recognize that the invaders were less efficient occupiers than the Nazis had been.

What do I do now? he wondered as he went back out into the cold. If I praise the Lizards for bombing Washington, I deserve an assassin’s bullet. If I don’t…

He thought of killing himself to escape Zolraag’s demands. That would save his wife and son. But he did not want to die; he’d survived too much to throw away his life, if any other way was open, he would seize it.

He was not surprised to find his feet taking him toward Mordechai Anielewicz’s headquarters. If anyone could help him, the Jewish fighting leader was the man. Trouble was, he didn’t know if anyone could help him.

The armed guards outside the headquarters came, if not to attention, then at least to respectful alertness as he approached. He had no trouble getting in to see Anielewicz. The fighter took one look at his face and said, “What’s the Lizard said he’s going to do to you?”

“Not to me, to my family.” Russie told the story in a few words.

Anielewicz swore. “Let’s go for a walk, Reb Moishe. I have the feeling they can listen to whatever we say in here.”

“All right” Russie went out into the street again. Warsaw this winter, even outside the former ghetto, was depressingly drab. Smoke from soft-coal and wood fires hung over the city, tinting both clouds and scattered snow a dingy brown. Trees that would be green and lovely in summer now reached toward the sky bare branches that reminded Russie of skeletons’ arms and fmgers. Piles of rubble were everywhere, swarmed over by antlike Poles and Jews out to take away what they could.

“So,” Anielewicz said abruptly. “What did you have in mind to do?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. We expected this would happen, and now it has. But I thought they would strike only at me, not at Rivka and Reuven.” Russie rocked back and forth on his heels, as if mourning lost chances.

Anielewicz’s eyes were hooded. “They’re learning. They aren’t stupid by any means, just naive. All right, here’s what it comes down to: do you want to disappear, do you want your family to disappear, or should you all vanish at the same time? I’ve set up plans for each case, but I need to know which to run.”

“What I would like,” Russie said, “is for the Lizards to disappear.”

“Ha.” Anielewicz gave that exactly as much laughter as it deserved. “A wolf was devouring us, so we called in a tiger. The tiger isn’t eating us right now, but we are still made of meat, so he’s not a good neighbor to have, either.”

“Neighbor? Landlord, you mean,” Russie said. “And he will eat my family if I don’t throw myself into his mouth.”

“I asked you once already how you want to keep from doing that?”

“I can’t afford to disappear,” Russie said reluctantly; he would have liked nothing better. “Zolraag would just pick someone else from among us to mouth his words. He may decide to do that anyhow. But if I’m here, I serve as a reproach to whoever might want to take such a course-and to Zolraag himself, not that he cares much about reproaches from human beings. But if you can get Rivka and Reuven away…”

“I think I can. I have something in mind, anyhow.” Anielewicz frowned, thinking through whatever his scheme was. In what seemed a non sequitur, he asked, “Your wife reads, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. Write a note to tell her whatever you need to say about escaping: I’d bet the Lizards can hear what goes on at your flat, too. I’d be able to do that, if I were wearing their shoes.”

Russie looked at the Jewish fighting leader in sharp surprise. Sometimes Anielewicz was amazingly matter-of-fact about his own deviousness. Maybe only accident of birth separated him from a Gestapo man. The thought was depressing. Even more depressing that in times like these the Jews desperately needed such men.

Anielewicz had barely paused. Now he went on, “Out loud, you talk to her about the three of you going out shopping to the marketplace on Gesia Street. Then go, but in a couple of hours. Have her wear a hat that stands out.”

“What will happen then?”

The fighting leader let out an exasperated snort. “Reb Moishe, the more you know, the more somebody can squeeze out of you. Even after you see what we do, you won’t know all of it-which is for the best, believe me.”

“All right, Mordechai.” Russie glanced over at his companion. “I hope you’re not putting yourself in too much danger on account of me.”

“Life is a gamble-we’ve learned about that these past few years, haven’t we?” Atiielewicz shrugged. “Sooner or later you lose, but there are times when you have to bet anyhow. Go on, do what I told you. I’m glad you don’t want to go into hiding yourself. We need you; you’re our conscience.”

Moishe felt like a conscience, a guilty one, all the way back to his block of flats. He paused along the way to scribble a note to his wife along the lines Anielewicz had suggested. As be stuck it back into his pocket, he wondered if he’d really have to use it. When he turned the last corner, he saw Lizard guards standing at the entrance to the apartment building. They hadn’t been there the day before. Guilt evaporated. To save his family, he would do what he must.

The Lizards scrutinized him as he approached. “You-Russie?” one of them asked in hesitant German.

“Yes,” he snapped, and pushed past. Two steps later, he wondered if he should have lied. The Lizards seemed to have as much trouble telling people from one another as he did telling them apart. He stamped angrily on the stairs as he climbed up to his own flat. Maybe he’d wasted a chance.

“What’s the matter?” Rivka asked, blinking, when he slammed the door behind him.

“Nothing.” He answered as lightly as he could, mindful Zolraag’s minions might be listening. “Why don’t we go shopping with Reuven this afternoon? We’ll see what they’re selling over on Gesia Street.”

His wife looked at him as if he’d suddenly taken leave of his senses. Not only was he anything but an enthusiastic shopper, his cheery manner did not match the way he’d stormed into the apartment. Before she could say anything, he pulled out the note and handed it to her.

“What is-?” she began, but fell silent at his urgent shushing motions. Her eyes widened as she read what he’d written. She rose to the occasion like a trouper. “All right, we’ll go out,” she said happily, though all the while her glance darted this way and that in search of the microphones he’d warned her about.

If we could spot them so easily, they wouldn’t be a menace, he thought He said, “When we go, why don’t you put on that new gray fur hat you bought? It goes so nicely with your eyes.” At the same time, he nodded vigorously to show her he wanted to be certain she did just that.

“I will. In fact, I’ll fetch it now so I don’t forget,” she said, adding over her shoulder, “You should tell me things like that more often.” She sounded more mischievous than reproachful, but he felt a twinge of guilt just the same.

The hat, a sturdy one with earflaps, had once belonged to a Red Army soldier. It wasn’t feminine, but it was warm, which counted for more in a city full of scarcity and too near empty of fuel. And it did set off her eyes well.

They made small talk to kill the time Anielewicz had asked them to kill. Then Rivka buttoned her coat, put a couple of extra layers of outer clothes on Reuven-who squealed with excitement at the prospect of going out-and left the apartment with Moishe. As soon as they were outside, she said, “Now what exactly is this all about? Why are we-?”

While they walked to the stairs and then down them, he explained more than he’d been able to put in his note. He finished, “So they’ll spirit the two of you away somehow, to keep the Lizards from using you to get a hold on me.”

“What will they do with us?” she demanded. “Where will we go?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Mordechai wouldn’t tell me. He may not know himself, but leave the choice to people the Lizards won’t automatically question. Though any rabbi would have a fit to hear me say it, sometimes ignorance is the best defense.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” she said. “Running from danger while you stay in it isn’t right. I-”

Before she could say won’t, he broke in, “This is the best thing you can do to keep me safe, too.” He wanted to say more, but by then they were at the entrance to the flats, and he couldn’t be sure how much Yiddish or Polish the Lizard guards there knew.

Somehow he wasn’t surprised when those guards, instead of staying at their post, started following him and his family. They didn’t come right alongside as if they were jailers, but they never let the Russies get more than ten or twelve meters ahead. If he or Rivka had tried to break and run, the Lizards would have had no trouble capturing or shooting them. Besides, if they broke and ran, they’d wreck whatever plan Anielewicz had made.

So they kept walking, outwardly as calm as if nothing unusual were happening. By the time they got to the market, four Lizards trailed them and two more walked ahead; with their swiveling eyes, the aliens could keep watch without constantly turning their heads back over their shoulders.

Gesia Street, as usual, boiled with life. Hawkers loudly peddled tea, coffee, and hot water laced with saccharine from samovars, turnips from pushcarts. A man with a pistol stood guard over a crate of coal. Another sat behind a table on which he had set out spare parts for bicycles. A woman displayed bream from the Vistula. The weather was cold enough to keep the fish fresh till spring.

Several stands sold captured German and Russian military clothing. More German gear was available, but the Red Army equipment brought higher prices-the Russians knew how to fight cold. Rivka had bought her hat at one of these stands. Now, Moishe saw, even Lizards crowded around them. That made him abruptly move away.

“Where are we going?” Rivka asked when he swerved.

“I don’t exactly know,” he said. “We’ll just wander about and see what there is to see.” Wander about and let Anielewicz’s men see us, he thought.

As if from a distant dream, he remembered the days before the war, when he could walk into any. tailor’s or grocer’s or butcher’s in Warsaw, find what he wanted, and be sure he had the zlotys to buy it. Compared to those days, the market on Gesia Street was privation personified. Compared to what the ghetto market had been like when the Nazis ruled Warsaw, it seemed cigar-smoking Wall Street capitalist affluence.

People surged this way and that, buying and bartering, trading bread for books, marks for meat, vodka for vegetables. The Lizards who were watching Russie and his family had to get closer to make sure their quarry did not somehow vanish in the crowds. Even then, they had no easy time because they couldn’t even see over or through the taller humans who kept stepping between them and the Russies.

Moishe suddenly found himself in the middle of a large knot of large men. By main force of will, he made himself keep his face straight-a lot of them came from the ranks of Mordechai Anielewicz’s fighters. Whatever happened would happen now.

One of Anielewicz’s men bent down, muttered something in Rivka’s ear. She nodded, squeezed Moishe’s hand hard, then let go. He heard her say, “Come on, Reuven.” A couple of burly fighters shouldered themselves between him and his wife and son. He looked away, biting the inside of his lip and fighting back tears.

A few seconds later, a hand joined his again. He spun round, half afraid something was wrong, half delighted he wouldn’t have to be separated from Rivka and Reuven after all. But the young woman whose fingers interlaced with his, though a fair skinned, gray-eyed brunette who wore Rivka’s hat, was not his wife. Nor was the boy beside her his son.

“We’ll wander around the marketplace a few more minutes, then go back to your flat,” she said quietly.

Russie nodded. This impostor’s coat was much like his wife’s, the hat was hers. He didn’t think the ploy would have fooled, say, SS men, but to the Lizards, one human looked much like another. They might well have recognized Rivka by her hat rather than her features-that obviously was Anielewicz’s gamble, at any rate.

Russie’s first urge was to crane his neck to see where the fighters were taking his family. He fought it down. Then he really realized he was holding the hand of a woman not his wife. He jerked away as if she’d suddenly become red-hot. He would have been even more mortified if she’d laughed at him. To his relief, she just nodded in sympathetic understanding.

But his relief did not last long. “Could we leave now?” he asked. “It’s not only the Lizards, and it’s not that I’m not grateful, but people will see us together and wonder what on earth we’re doing. Or rather, they won’t wonder-they’ll decide they know.”

“Yes, that is one of the things that can go wrong,” the woman agreed, as coolly as if she were one of Anielewicz’s rifle-toting fighters herself. “But this was the best way we could come up with to make the switch on short notice.”

We? Russie thought She is a fighter, then, regardless of whether she carries a gun. So is the boy. He said, “What’s your name? How can I thank you properly if I don’t know who you are?”

She smiled. “I’m Leah. And this is David.”

“Hello, David,” Russie said. David nodded back, as soberly as any adult might have. Moishe felt a stab of guilt at using a child to protect himself.

A short woman with curly gray hair pushed her way between the fighters around him. “Reb Moishe, I need to ask you-” she began. Her words trailed away as she noticed Leah was not Rivka. She backed off, her eyes as wide and staring as if Russie had sprouted a second head.

“That’s torn it,” Leah muttered. “You’re right, Reb Moishe we’d better go. I’m sorry for the damage I’m doing to your reputation.”

“If I have to choose between my reputation and my family, I know which is more important,” Russie said firmly, adding, “Besides, the way we gossip here, before long everyone will know why I’m playing this game.” He spoke for Leah’s benefit, but also eased his own mind because he realized he was probably right.

For the moment, though, what would spread was scandal. Before people started gathering around and pointing fingers, he and Leah and David left the market and strolled, not too fast and not too slow, back toward his home. The Lizard guards moving along in front and behind them were in a way a blessing, because they kept most folk from coming too close and puncturing the masquerade.

Russie’s conscience twinged again when he closed the door to his flat behind him. Bringing a woman-a young, attractive woman-here… shameful was the mildest word he thought of. But Leah remained utterly prosaic. She took off the fur hat, handed it back to him, smiled without saying anything: she must have been warned the Lizards might be listening. She pointed to the hat, then to herself, and shrugged as if to ask how anyone, even a Lizard, could imagine she was Rivka if she didn’t have it on her head. Then she walked out the door and was gone.

The simplicity of the escape took Moishe’s breath away. The Lizards hadn’t posted guards right outside the flat, only at the entrance to the building. Maybe they didn’t want to act as if they were intimidating him, even though they were. Or maybe, as Anielewicz had said, they were just naive about how tricky human beings could be. Whichever was true, Leah, now that she was no longer disguised as Rivka, plainly intended to stroll right past them and off to freedom.

The boy David sat on the floor and played with Reuven’s toys for a little while. Then he got up and stood by the door. Moishe opened it for him. He nodded again with that surprising gravity, then went out into the hall. Russie closed the door.

The flat seemed achingly huge and achingly empty now that he was here alone. He walked into the bedroom, shook his head, came out again in a hurry. Then he went into the kitchen and shook his head for a different reason-he was no cook, and now he’d have to feed himself for a while. He found some black bread and a slab of cheese on the counter. He picked a knife from the dairy service, made himself a sandwich. if he wanted anything fancier than that, he’d need to get someone else to fix it for him.

Of course, the Lizards might fix things so he wouldn’t have to worry about food any more. He tried not to dwell on that. He went back into the main room, pulled out an old medical text on diseases of the large intestine. His eyes went back and forth, he turned pages, but he remembered nothing of what he read.

He slept badly that night. Rivka’s bed next to his, Reuven’s little cot, painfully reminded him his loved ones were not here. He was used to soft breathing and occasional snores in the bedroom with him. The silence their absence imposed on him somehow was more disturbing than a dreadful racket; he felt smothered in thick wool batting.

He ate more bread and cheese the next morning. He was still puttering around afterward, trying to figure out what to do next, when something clicked against the front door. Lizard claws tapping the wood in the quick little drum-rattle the aliens used in place of a knock.

Russie’s mouth went dry. He’d hoped he’d have a full day in which to pretend to be making up his mind. But no. He opened the door. To his surprise, Zolraag himself stood in the hall, along with a large contingent of guards. “Excellency,” Russie stammered. “I am honored. W-won’t you come in?”

“There is no need,” Zolraag answered. “I ask you one question, Herr Russie: will you speak over the radio as we desire and require of you?”

“No, Excellency, I shall not.” Moishe waited for the sky to fall.

The Lizard governor remained businesslike. “Then we shall persuade you.” His eyes swiveled toward one of the guards. “Your males shall now seize the Tosevite female and hatchling.” He spoke, of course, in his own language, but Russie followed him well enough.

“It shall be done.” The guard-officer? — hissed orders to the Lizards with him. One of them pointed his rifle at Russie, who stood very still.

“You will not interfere, Herr Russie,” Zolraag said.

“I will not interfere,” Moishe agreed.

Some guards went into the kitchen, Others into the bedroom. All returned in short order. “The other Big Uglies are not here, superior sir, Provincelord,” one of them reported. Had he been a man, Russie would have said he sounded worried.

“What?” the guard leader and Zolraag said together. The Lizard governor’s eyes drilled into Russie. “Where are they?”

“Excellency, I do not know.” Russie wished he could be as brave as Anielewicz’s fighters, who seemed to go into combat without a trace of worry. If Zolraag had been angry at him before, he’d be furious now-but at least he could no longer vent that fury on the innocent. Russie went on, “As your male said, they are not here.”

“Where did they go?” Zolraag demanded.

“I don’t know that, either.”

“You cannot deceive me as easily as you would hope,” Zolraag said. “The female and hatchling were observed to return to this dwelling with you yesterday. They were not seen to leave. Therefore they must be in the building somewhere.” He turned to the guard officer with whom he’d spoken before. “Summon more males. We shall peel this hovel as if it were a kleggfruit.”

“Provincelord, it shall be done.” The guard spoke into one of the incredibly small, incredibly light radiotelephones the Lizards carried.

Watching him, Russie tried not to show the jubilation he felt. Whatever happened to him, Rivka and Reuven were out of Zolraag’s clawed, scaly hands. The Lizards were welcome to search the block of flats from now until the Messiah came. They wouldn’t find what wasn’t there.

They made a good game try of it, though. Moishe didn’t hear their lorries pull up, as he had too many times when the Nazis rumbled into the ghetto on a sweep. But the noises that came through his open doorway after the Lizards swarmed into the building were all too familiar-rifle butts hammering on doors, frightened Jews wailing as they were herded into hallways, overturned furniture crashing to the ground.

“Excellency, out of all the people in the world, we hailed you as rescuers when you came to Warsaw, and fought on your side against other men,” Russie said. “Now you are doing your best to turn us into foes.”

“You turn yourselves into foes by failing to obey,” Zolraag answered.

“We were happy to be your allies. I told you before that being your slaves, obeying because we have to rather than because we think you are in the right, is something else again.”

Zolraag made his unhappy-samovar noise. “Your effrontery is intolerable.”

Time dragged on. Every so often, a Lizard would come in and report to the governor. Not surprisingly, the searchers had no luck. Zolraag kept right on sounding like a teakettle with something wrong with it. Russie wondered if he could have hidden his wife and son in plain sight. Maybe so. The Lizards had already shown they weren’t any good at telling one human from another. What they were probably doing now was looking for anyone in hiding.

They did bring one little old man with a white beard up in front of Zolraag, but the governor knew enough to dismiss him as a likely spouse for Moishe. By late afternoon, the Lizards confessed failure. Zolraag glared at Russie. “You think you have won a victory, do you, Big Ugly?” He hardly ever hurled the Lizards’ offensive nickname for humanity into Moishe’s face. That he did so now was a measure of his wrath. “Let me tell you, you shall not prove the happier for it”

“Do what you like with me, Excellency,” Russie said. “From your point of view, I suppose you have that right. But I think no one has any business taking hostages and enforcing his will through fear.”

“When I seek your opinions, be assured I shall request them of you,” the governor replied. “Until that time, keep them to yourself.”

Russie tried to figure out what he would do in Zolraag’s position. Probably stick a gun to the recalcitrant human’s head, hand him a script, and tell him to read it or else. And what would he do himself in the face of a threat like that? He hoped for defiance, but was far from sure he could come up with it. Few men had within them the stuff of martyrs.

Zolraag was not quite so peremptory as he’d feared. The Lizard said, “I shall consult with my superiors, Herr Russie, over the proper steps to take in response to this unprecedented act of defiance on your part.” He strode away, his retinue trailing after him.

Limp as a wet blotter, Russie sank down onto the sofa. Unprecedented, he decided, was the word that had saved him. The Lizards were not good at thinking on their feet, at knowing what to do when something failed to go according to plan. That didn’t mean he was out of danger, though, only that it was deferred for the moment. Somewhere higher in the Lizards’ hierarchy was a male who could tell Zolraag what to do. And Zolraag, Russie knew, would do it, whatever it was.

He went into the kitchen, ate more bread and cheese. Then he opened the door-the bathroom was down at the end of the hall. Two armed Lizard guards stood outside; they’d been so quiet, he’d had no clue they were there.

They marched to the toilet with him. Despite his indignant protest, one went inside and kept watch on him while he made water. Then they marched him back to the apartment. He wondered if they’d come in with him, but they didn’t.

Still, they made sure he wasn’t going anywhere they didn’t want him to go. As Mordechai had said, they weren’t stupid. He looked around the flat. He was trapped, awaiting sentence.