In the Balance

16

Off in the distance, antiaircraft guns yarnmered Heinrich Jager listened enviously. If the Wehrmacht had had guns like those, Red Air Force planes would have had a thin time of it indeed. Going up against the Lizards, the Red Air Force still had a thin time of it.

But, as the stutter of AA fire proved, the Russians kept coming. Jager had found out about that, too, in the eleven months before the Lizards’ invasion shoved the war between National Socialism and Communism onto the back burner. Now the Lizards were learnng about Soviet stubbornness. Jager hoped they enjoyed their education as much as he’d liked his.

Maybe the Russians hadn’t lied when they told him his horse had served as a cavalryman’s mount. It only twitched its ears at the distant gunfire. Of course, how it would react if he had to shoot from its back was anyone’s guess. With luck, he wouldn’t have to find out.

“The sons of whores should have put me in a plane,” he said aloud, as much to hear the sound of his own voice in this snowy wilderness as for any other reason. The horse snorted. It didn’t understand German; they’d given him a list of Russian commands for it. But it seemed glad to be reminded it was carrying a human. If ever there was a country for wolves, this was it.

Jager slapped his lead-lined saddlebags with a gloved hand. They held the Reich’s fair share of the metal the partisan raid had stolen from the Lizards outside Kiev. And here he was, alone on horseback, carrying it to Germany.

“They want me to fail,” he said. The horse snorted again. He patted its neck. “They really do.”

When he and foul-mouthed Max made contact with a Red Army unit still in the direct chain of command from Moscow, the Soviets had been effusive in their praise and scrupulously exact in sharing out the precious booty Germans and Russians had combined to seize. Only afterward did things get difficult.

No, he’d been told, unfortunately air transportation wasn’t available. Yes, the Red Army colonel understood his urgent need to return to Germany. But did he understand how likely he was to be shot down before he got there? No, the colonel could not in good conscience let him risk his life by flying.

Now Jager snorted, louder than the horse had. “When a Russian colonel says he won’t risk a life, you know something’s screwy somewhere.” Against the Germans in the last war and this one, the Russian way of putting out a fire was to throw bodies on it till it smothered.

With knees, reins, and voice, Jager urged the horse forward. He hadn’t done much riding since before World War I broke out, but he still remembered the basics. It was a very different business from traveling by panzer. Inside that heavy steel turret, you felt cut off from the world and immune to whatever it might do to you… unless it decided to hit you with a shell, of course.

But on horseback, you met the world face to face. At the moment, the world was snowing in Jager’s face. The Russians had given him a fur hat, a padded jacket, and felt boots, so he wasn’t chilly. Now that he was inside some of it, he discovered for himself how good Russian cold-weather gear really was. No wonder the Ivans had given the Wehrmacht such grief the winter before.

He leaned down, spoke confidentially into the horse’s ear. “If anyone ever asks the Kremlin about this, they’ll be able to say they gave me all the help they thought they could, but I just didn’t make it back to Germany with this stuff.” He slapped a saddlebag again. “But do you know what, Russian horse? I’m going to fool them. I’m going to get there whether they want me to or not. And if they don’t like it, they can go piss themselves for all I care.”

The horse, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Not only was it a dumb animal, it was a Russian dumb animal. Till recently, it had been either pulling a plow for the enemy or carrying a Red Army cavalryman into action. But for the time being, its fate and his were bound together.

The snow muffled the animal’s hoolbeats. Its body heat warmed the insides of his thighs and his rear end. His Panzer III, he remembered fondly, had had a heater that would warm all of him. On the other hand, he liked the horse’s grassy smell better than the oil, petrol, cordite reek of the panzer.

“Yes, that’s how the Kremlin wants it, horse,” he said. “They needed German help to get this metal, but do they want the Reich to have the benefit of it? Not on your life they don’t. They want to be the only ones who can make bombs like this, yes they do. They will use one on the Lizards, and if they beat the Lizards, wouldn’t it be nice for them if they could hold one over Germany’s head, too? But I already told you, horse, I don’t intend to let that happen.”

He peered ahead through the spattering snow. Unfortunately, what he intended to let happen and what would in fact happen were not necessarily one and the same. He didn’t think he was inside what had been Soviet territory before the war any more, but rather in what was formerly Polish-held Ruthernia. Much of that land, after getting overrun first by the Russians and then by the Germans, was now in the Lizards’ hands.

And here, as perhaps nowhere else on earth, the Lizards had their willing puppets-their quislings, the British would have called them, Jager thought with wry amusement. In Moscow, he’d listened to Moishe Russie on the shortwave a couple of times. He’d judged the man a hysteric, a liar, and a traitor to mankind.

Now… now he was not so sure. Every time he tried to laugh off what the Jew said as just another atrocity story, he kept remembering the scar on the side of Max’s neck and the Jewish partisan’s obscenely embellished tale of slaughter and horror at Babi Yar. Much as he wanted to, he didn’t think Max lied. And if Max’s horror was true, then Moishe Russie’s might be, also.

Riding a horse alone through winter gave-you a chance to think, maybe more of a chance than you really wanted. What had the Reich been doing behind the lines of the territory it held? Jager was a field-grade officer, not a policymaker. But German officers were supposed to think for themselves, not blindly follow superiors’ orders like their Soviet or Lizard counterparts. He could not for the life of him see how massacring Jews moved the war effort forward even a centimeter.

Massacring Jews might in fact push the war effort back It had driven the Polish Jews who survived into the Lizards’ arms. A lot of those Jews lay between Jager and the Reich. If they spotted him and let their new masters know a German was loose on their territory… if they did that, the Russians’ scheme would be realized in full.

“Stupid,” he muttered. What did Jews do in battle against the Reich except get in the way like any other civilians?

He rode by a deserted farmhouse, shook his head. So much devastation. How long would people take to recover from it? Even more to the point, on what terms would they recover? Would they be their own masters, or slaves to the Lizards for untold centuries to come? Jager found no sure answer. Humanity had discovered ways to hurt the Lizards, but not to beat them, not yet. Maybe-he hoped-he held a way to beat them in his saddlebags.

The road he was following (actually, it was more of a track) took him into a stand of pale-barked birches a few hundred meters past the farmhouse. He unslung his rifle, set it across his knees. Unpleasant things and even more unpleasant people could lurk among trees. He showed his teeth in a not-quite-humorless grin. A few weeks before, he’d been one of those unpleasant people, or so the Lizards. would have said.

A man stepped out from behind a tree trunk. Like Jager, he wore a mixture of Russian and German winter gear; also like Jager, he carried a rifle. He didn’t aim it at the German, but he looked ready to use it. He said something in Polish. Jager didn’t know any Polish. He weighed his chances as he reined in. If he could get in a quick, sure shot-no guarantee while on horseback-then set spurs to his mount, he had a chance at getting away from this… bandit?

The fellow might have been thinking along with him. “I wouldn’t try that,” he said, now in accented German-or was it Yiddish? “Look behind you.” Jager didn’t look. The man standing in the track laughed, leaned his rifle against the nearest tree. “No trick. Go ahead and look.”

This time, Jager did. He could see two men, both with guns. He wondered how many he couldn’t see. He turned back to the fellow in front of him. “All right, you have me,” he said equably. “What happens now?”

He didn’t know which nonplussed the fellow more, his calm or his clear German. The man grabbed his rifle, a Mauser just like Jager’s. “I thought you were one of those Nazi bastards,” he growled. “You don’t ride like a Pole or a Russian. I ought to shoot you now.” He was speaking Yiddish. Jager’s heart sank.

“Hold on, Yossel,” called one of the men in back of the German. “We’re supposed to take him in to-”

“If you’re going to take me to the Lizards, do me the favor of shooting me instead,” Jager broke in. Here was his worst nightmare coming to life around him. If the Lizards made him talk-and who knew what the Lizards could do along those lines? — he might imperil the Russians’ efforts with the stolen metal, and Germany’s would never be born.

“Why should we do any favors for a German?” Yossel said. Jager heard snarls from behind him. Here indeed was pointless cruelty coming home to roost.

But Jager had an answer. “Because I fought alongside Russian partisans, most of them Jews, to get what I’m carrying away from the Lizards and bring it back toward Germany.” There. It was done. If these were truly the Lizards’ creatures, he’d just done himself in. But he was done in anyhow, the instant the Lizards found what his saddlebags held. And if his captors were men…

Yossel spat. “You’re a fast liar, I give you that much. Where was this, on the road to Treblinka?” Seeing that that meant nothing to Jager, he spoke a word of pure German: “Vernichtungslager.” Extermination camp.

“I don’t know anything of extermination camps,” Jager insisted. The men behind him growled. He wondered if they would shoot him before he could go on. He spoke quickly: “I never heard of this Treblinka. But one of the Jews in the partisan band came back alive from a place called Babi Yar, outside Kiev. He and I worked together for this common good.”

Something changed in Yossel’s face. “So you know of Babi Yar, do you, Nazi? Tell me what you think of it.”

“It sickens me,” Jager answered at once. “I went to war against the Red Army, not-not-” He shook his head. “I am a soldier, not a murderer.”

“As if a Nazi could tell the difference,” Yossel said scornfully. But he did not raise his rifle. He and the other-well, what were they? soldiers? partisans? merely bandits? — talked back and forth, partly in Yiddish, which Jager could follow, and partly in Polish, which he couldn’t. Had the Jew in front of him looked less alert, Jager might have made a break. As it was, he waited for his captors to figure out what to do with him.

After a couple of minutes, one of the men behind him said, “All right, off the horse.” Jager dismounted. His back itched uncontrollably. He was ready to whirl and start shooting at the least untoward sound; they would not find a passive victim, if that was what they wanted. But then the fellow he could not see said, “You can sling that rifle, if you care to.”

Jager hesitated. The invitation could have been a ruse to relax him for easier disposal. But the Jews already had him at their mercy, and no fighting man with even a gram of sense left an enemy armed. Maybe they’d decided he wasn’t altogether an enemy, then. He slid the sling strap over his shoulder, asked, “What do you intend to do with me?”

“We haven’t decided yet,” Yossel said. “For now, you’ll come with us. We’ll take you to someone who can help us figure it out.” Jager’s face must have said something, for Yossel added, “No, not a Lizard, one of us.”

“All right,”, Jager said, “but bring the horse, too; what he has in those saddlebags is more important than I am, and your officer will need to know of it.”

“Gold?” asked the fellow who’d told Jager to get off the horse.

He didn’t want the Jews to think he was just someone to be robbed. “No, not gold. If the NKVD doesn’t miss its guess, I have there some of the same kind of stuff as the Lizards used to bomb Berlin and Washington.”

That got a reaction, all right, “Wait a minute,” Yossel said slowly. “The Russians are letting you take this-this stuff to Germany? How does that happen?”

Why don’t they keep it all themselves? he meant. “If they could have kept it all, they would have, I’m sure,” Jager answered, smiling. “But as I said, it was a joint German-Soviet combat group that won this material, and however much reason the Russians have to dislike us Germans, they know also our scientists are not to be despised. And so…” He slapped a saddlebag.

Further colloquy, now almost entirely in Polish, among the Jews. Fmally Yossel said, “All right, German; if nothing else, you’ve confused us. Come along, you and your horse and whatever he’s carrying.”

“You have to keep me out of the Lizards’ sight,” Jager insisted.

Yossel laughed. “No, no, we just have to keep you from being noticed. It’s not the same thing at all. Get moving, we’ve already wasted too much time here on jabber.”

The Jew proved to know what he was talking about. Over the next few days, Jager saw more Lizards at closer range than he ever had before. Not one even looked at him; they all assumed he was just another militiaman, and so to be tolerated.

Encounters with armed Poles were more alarming. Although he’d grown a gray-streaked beard, Jager was ironically aware he looked not the least bit Jewish. “Don’t worry about it,” Yossel told him when he said as much. “They’ll think you’re just another traitor.”

That stung. Jager said, “You mean the way the rest of the world thinks of you Polish Jews?” He’d been with the band long enough now to speak his mind without fearing someone would shoot him for it.

“Yes, about like that,” Yossel answered calmly; he was hard to rile. “Of course, what the rest of the world still doesn’t believe is that we had good reason to like the Lizards better than you Nazis. If you know about Babi Yar, you know about that.”

Since he did know about that, and didn’t like what he knew, Jager changed the subject. “Some of those Poles looked like they’d just as soon start shooting at us as not.”

“They probably would. They don’t like Jews, either.” Yossel’s voice was matter-of-fact. “But they don’t dare, because the Lizards have given us enough in the way of weapons to hurt them bad if they play their old games with us.”

Jager chewed on that for a while. The Jew frankly admitted his kind depended on the Lizards. Yet he’d had endless chances to betray Jager to them and hadn’t done it. lager admitted to himself that he didn’t understand what was going on. With luck, he’d find out.

That evening, they came to a town bigger than most of the others through which they’d passed. “What’s the name of this place?” Jager asked.

At first he thought Yossel sneezed. Then the Jew repeated himself: “Hrubieszow.” The town boasted cobblestone streets, three-story buildings with cast-iron awnings, and a central boulevard that had a median strip planted with trees, perhaps to achieve a Parisian effect. Having seen the real Paris, Jager found the imitation laughable, but kept that to himself.

Yossel went up to one of the three-story buildings, spoke in Yiddish to the man who answered-his knock. He turned to Jager. “You go in here. Take your saddlebags with you. We’ll get your horse out of town-a strange animal that stays around is plenty to make people start asking questions.”

Jager went in. The gray-haired Jew who stood aside to let him pass said, “Hello, friend. I’m Lejb. What shall I call you while you’re here?”

“Ich heisse Heinrich Jager” Jager answered. He’d grown resigned to the looks of horror he got for speaking German, but it was his only fluent language-and, for better or worse, he was a German. He could hardly deny it. Stiffly, he said, “I hope my presence will not disturb you too much, sir.”

“A Nazi-in my house. They want to put a Nazi-in my house?” Lejb was not talking to Jager. The German didn’t think he was talking to himself, either. Whom did that leave? God, maybe.

As if wound into motion by a key, Lejb bustled over and shut the door. “Even a Nazi should not freeze-especially if I would freeze with him.” With what seemed a large effort of will, he made himself look at Jager. “Will you drink tea? And there’s potato soup in the pot if you want it.”

“Yes, please. Thank you very much.” The tea was hot, the potato soup both hot and filling. Lejb insisted on giving Jager seconds; the Jew apparently could not force himself to be a poor host. But he would not eat with Jager; he waited until the German finished before feeding himself.

That pattern persisted over the next two days. Jager noticed he got the same chipped bowl, the same cup, at every meal; he wondered if Lejb would throw them away once he’d left, along with his bedding and everything else he’d touched. He didn’t ask, for fear the Jew would tell him yes.

Just when he started to wonder if Yossel and the rest of the Jewish fighters had forgotten about him, his first captor returned, again under cover of darkness. Yossel said, “Somebody here wants to see you, Nazi.” From him, unlike from Lejb, the word had somehow lost most of its sting, as if it were a label and nothing more.

An unfamiliar Jew stepped into the living room of Lejb’s house. He was fair and thin and younger than Jager would have expected for someone obviously important enough to be sent for. He did not offer to shake hands. “So you’re the German with the interesting package, are you?” he said, speaking German himself rather than Yiddish.

“Yes,” Jager said. “Who are you?”

The newcomer smiled thinly. “Call me Mordechai.” By the way Yossel started in surprise, that might even have been his real name. Bravado, Jager thought. The more the German studied Mordechai, the more impressed he grew. Young, yes, but an officer all the way: those light eyes were hooded and alert, alive with calculation. If he’d worn German field-gray, he’d have had a colonel’s pips and his own regiment before he hit forty; Jager recognized the type. The Jews had themselves a hotshot here.

The hotshot said, “I gather you’re a panzer soldier and that you’ve stolen something important to the Lizards. What I’ve heard from Yossel here is interesting, but it’s also secondhand. Tell it to me yourself, Jager.”

“Just a minute,” Jager said. Yossel bristled, but Mordechai only grunted, waiting for him to go on. He did: “You Jews cooperate with the Lizards, yet now you seem ready to betray them. Show me I can trust you not to hand me straight over to them.”

“If we wanted to do that, we could have done it already,” Mordechai pointed out. “As for how and why we work with the Lizards-hmm. Think of it like this. Back three winters ago, Russia swamped the Finns. When you Nazis invaded Russia, Finland was happy enough to ride on your coattails and take back its own. But do you think the Finns go around yelling ‘Heil Hitler!’ all day long?”

“Mmm-maybe not,” Jager admitted. “And so?”

“And so we helped the Lizards against you Nazis, but for our own reasons-survival, for instance-not theirs. We don’t have to love them. Now I’ve told my story, and more than you deserve. You tell yours.”

Jager did. Mordechai interrupted every so often with sharp, probing questions. The German’s respect for him grew at every one. He’d figured the Jew would know something of war and especially partisan operations-he had him pegged for a high military official. But he hadn’t figured Mordechai would know so much about the loot he carried in his saddlebags; he soon realized the Jew, though he’d never seen the mud-encrusted chunks of metal; understood them better than he did himself.

When Jager was through (he felt squeezed dry), Mordechai steepled his fingers and stared up at the ceiling. “You know, before this war started, I worried more about what Marx thought than about God,” he remarked. His speech grew more guttural; his vowels shifted so Jager had to think to follow him-he’d fallen out of German into Yiddish. He went on, “Ever since you Nazis shut me up in the ghetto and tried to starve me to death, I’ve had my doubts about the choice I made. Now I’m sure I was wrong.”

“Why now in particular?” lager asked.

“Because I would need to be the wisest rabbi who ever lived to decide whether I ought to help you Germans fight the Lizards with their own filthy weapons.”

Yossel nodded vehemently. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

Mordechai waved him to silence. “I wish this choice fell on someone besides me. All I wanted to be before the war was an engineer.” His gaze and Jager’s clashed, swordlike. “All I am now, thanks to you Germans, is a fighting man.”

“That’s all I’ve ever been,” Jager said. Once, before another war, he’d had hopes of studying biblical archaeology. But he’d learned in the trenches of France what he was good at-and how much the fatherland needed folk with talents like his. Set against that knowledge, biblical archaeology was small beer.

“And so on us the future turns,” Mordechai mused. “I don’t know about you, Jager”-it was the first time he’d used the German’s name-“but I wish my own shoulders were wider.”

“Yes,” Jager said.

Mordechai eyed him again, this time with a soldier’s calculation. “Simplest would be to shoot you and dump your body into the Vistula. So many have gone in that no one would notice one more. Toss your saddlebags in after you and I’d never have to wake up sweating in the night for fear of what you damned Nazis were going to do with this stuff you’ve stolen.”

“No-instead you’d wake up sweating in the night that no one could do anything to fight the Lizards.” Jager tried to keep his voice and manner calm. He’d hazarded his life often enough on the battlefield, but never like this-it felt more like poker than war. He tossed another chip into the pot: “And no matter what you do to me, Stalin already has his share of the loot. Will you also sweat for what the Bolsheviks do with it?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” Mordechai sighed, a sound that seemed to flow out from his whole body, not just his chest. “Better this choice should have fallen to Solomon the Wise than a poor fool like me. Then we would have some hope of a decision rightly taken.”

He started to sigh again, but the noise turned into a sudden, sharp inhalation halfway through. When he looked at Jager now, his eyes blazed. Yes, the German thought, an officer indeed, one men would follow into hell.

“Maybe Solomon shows the way after all,” Mordechai said softly.

“What do you mean?” But even if he hadn’t thought of archaeology in years, Jager knew his Bible well enough. Of themselves, his eyes went to the saddlebags leaning against the wall. “You want to cut the baby in half, do you?”

“That’s just what I want to do, Jager,” Mordechai said. “Just exactly. All right, keep some of what you have. You Nazi bastards are smart, I give you that; maybe you’ll figure out what to do with it. But someone besides you and the Russians ought to have a chance with it, too.”

“Whom did you have in mind? You?” Jager asked. The idea of Polish Jews with such horror weapons alarmed him as much as the prospect of the Germans with them appalled Mordechai. These Jews had too good a reason to want to use it on Germany.

But Mordechai shook his head. “No, not us. We haven’t the men, we haven’t the research facilities we’d need to figure out what we’d have to do, and there’d be too many Lizards underfoot for us to keep the work secret.”

“Who, then?” Jager said.

“I was thinking the Americans,” Mordechai answered. “They’ve lost Washington, so they know in their bellies this thing is real. For all we know, they were working on it already. They have enough scientists there-plenty who fled to America away from you fascists, by all accounts. And it’s big, like Russia; they’d have plenty of places to hide from the Lizards while they figured things out.”

Jager thought about that. He had an instinctive reluctance to hand over strategic material to the enemy-but compared to the Lizards, the Americans were allies. And even in terms of purely human politics, the more counterbalances to Moscow, the better. But one large question remained: “How do you propose to get this stuff across the Atlantic?”

He’d expected Mordechai to blanch, but the Jew was unperturbed “That we can manage easier than you’d think. The Lizards don’t trust us as far as they used to, but we can still move pretty freely through the countryside-and we can get to the sea.”

“Then what?” lager said. “Put your saddlebag on a freighter and sail for New York?”

“You say it as a joke, but I think we could do it,” Mordechal answered. “There’s a surpnsing lot of water traffic going on; the Lizards don’t automatically attack it the way they do trains and lorries. But no, I hadn’t intended to put it on a freighter. We have ways of getting a submarine here without the Lizards’ noticing. We’ve done it a couple of times already, and it ought to be good for one more run.”

“A submarine?” American? Jager thought. No, more likely British. The Baltic had been a German lake; a few months earlier, a British U-boat captain would have been suicidal to poke his periscope into it. Now, though, Germany had more urgent worries than British subs. “A submarine.” This time, Jager made it a statement. “You know, that might be crazy enough to work.”

“Oh, we’re crazy, all right,” Mordechai said. “If we weren’t crazy before the war, you Nazis made us that way.” His laugh was full of self-mockery. “And now I must be crazier than ever, dickering to help Nazis make something that might be the end of the world. Only some ends are worse than others, eh?”

“Yes.” Jager felt just as strange, dickering with Communists and now Jews. Now that he was close to Germany again, he suddenly wondered how his superiors-and the Gestapo-would view his dealings since the Lizards blew his Panzer III out from under him. But unless the world had turned completely insane, what was in the lead-lined saddlebag would redeem almost any amount of ideological contamination. Almost.

“We are agreed?” Mordechai asked.

“We are agreed,” Jager said. Afterward, he was never sure which of them first stuck out a hand. They both squeezed, hard.

Atvar was busy checking the latest reports on how the Race was coping with the insane winter weather of Tosev 3 when a musical note from his computer reminded him of an appointment. He spoke into the intercom mike: “Drefsab, are you there?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I am,” came the reply from an antechamber. Of course no one would presume to make the commander of the Race’s force wait, but formality persisted nonetheless.

“Enter, Drefsab,” Atvar declared, and pressed a button on his desk that made it possible for the operative to enter.

The fleetlord hissed in shocked dismay when Drefsab came into the office. The investigator had been one of his brightest males, infiltrating Straha’s staff to try to learn how the shiplord was spying on him and also dueling with Big Ugly intelligence agents who lacked his tools but made up for that with deceit unmatched even around the Emperor’s court. He’d always been dapper and crisp. Now his body paint was smeared, his scales dull, his pupils dilated.

“By the Emperor, what’s happened to you?” Atvar exclaimed.

“By the Emperor, Exalted Fleetlord, I find I must report myself unfit for duty,” Drefsab answered, casting down his eyes. Even his voice sounded as if he had rust in the works somewhere.

“I can see that,” Atvar said. “But what’s wrong? How have you become unfit?”

“I took it in my mind, Exalted Fleetlord, to investigate how traffic in the Tosevite herb called ginger was affecting our males. I realize I did so without orders, but I judged the problem to be of sufficient importance to justify the breach in conduct.”

“Go on,” Atvar said. Males who did things without orders were vanishingly rare in the Race, though that kind of initiative seemed all too common among the Big Uglies. If this was what happened when the Race tried to match the Tosevites for sheer energy, the fleetlord wished his starships had never left Home.

Drefsab said, “Exalted Fleetlord, to evaluate both the traffic in ginger and the reasons for its spreading use, I deemed it necessary to seek out and sample the herb for myself. I regret to have to inform the fleetlord that I myself have fallen victim to its addictive properties.”

Males of the Race’s primitive ancestors had been hunters, carnivores. Atvar bent his fingers into the position that gave his claws the best opportunity to rend and tear. He did not need more bad news, not now. Tosev 3, and especially winter on Tosev 3’s northern hemisphere, were giving him plenty of bad news by themselves.

He had to say something. He didn’t know what. At last he tried, “How could you do such a stupid thing, knowing your value to the Race?”

Drefsab hung his head in shame. “Exalted Fleetlord, in my arrogance I assumed I could investigate, could even sample the illicit herb, with no ill effects. I was, unfortunately, mistaken. Even now the craving burns in me.”

“What is it like, to be under the influence of this ginger substance?” The fleetlord had read reports, but his confidence in reports was not what it had been back Home. The report on Tosev 3, for instance, had made it sound like an easy conquest.

“I feel-bigger than myself, better than myself, as if I am capable of undertaking anything,” Drefsab said. “When I don’t have that feeling, I long for it with every scale of my skin.”

“Does this drug-induced feeling have any basis in reality?” Atvar asked. “That is, viewed objectively, do you in fact perform better while taking ginger than without it?” He had a moment of hope. If the noxious powder turned out to be a valuable pharmaceutical, some good might yet spring from Drefsab’s initiative.

But the agent only let out a long, whistling sigh. “I fear not, Exalted Fleetlord. I have examined work I produced shortly after tasting ginger. It contains more errors than I would normally find acceptable. I made them, but simply failed to notice them because of the euphoria the drug induces. And when I have not tasted ginger in some time… Exalted Fleetlord, it is very bad then.”

“Very bad,” Atvar echoed in a hollow voice. “How do you respond to this craving, Drefsab? Do you indulge it at every opportunity, or do you resist as best you can?”

“The latter,” Drefsab answered with a certain melancholy pride. “I go as long as I can between tastes, but that period seems to decrease as time passes. And I am also at less than maximum effectiveness in the black interval between tastes.”

“Yes.” Although with regret, Atvar’s thoughts now turned purely pragmatic: how could he get the best use out of this irrevocably damaged male? Decision came quickly. “If you find yourself more valuable to the Race than without taking it, use it at whatever level you find necessary for your continued function. Ignore all else. I so order you, for the good of the Race.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab whispered.

Atvar went on, “I further order you to record in diary form all your reactions to this ginger. Physicians’ views of the problem are necessarily external; your analysis from the ginger user’s perspective will furnish them valuable data.”

“It shall be done,” Drefsab repeated, more heartily now.

“Further, continue your investigation into the trafficking in this drug. Bring down as many of those involved in the foul trade as you can.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab said for the third time. For a moment, he sounded like the keen young male, the hunting solmek, he had always been for Atvar. But then he wilted before the fleetlord’s eyes, asking piteously, “Exalted Fleetlord, if I bring them all down, whence shall my further supply of ginger come?”

Atvar hid his disgust. “Seize all you need to ensure your own stock for as long as you wish to continue your habit,” he said, reasoning that Drefsab on ginger was likely to make a better agent than he would pining for the herb, and was also likely to remain a better agent than any male, no matter how sober, he appointed in his place. To salve his conscience, Atvar added, “Our physicians will continue to seek a cure for this Tosevite herb. Spirits of dead Emperors grant they find it soon.”

“Aye, Exalted Fleetlord. Even now, I crave-” With a shudder, Drefsab broke off in the middle of the sentence. “Have I the Exalted Fleetlord’s gracious leave to depart?”

“Yes, go on, Drefsab, and may Emperors past look kindly on you.”

Drefsab’s salute was ragged, but the male seemed to pull himself together as he left the fleetlord’s office. If nothing else, Atvar bad imbued him with fresh purpose. The fleetlord himself was depressed as he returned to his paperwork. I hate this cursed world, he thought. One way or anothei it is made only for driving the Race mad.

His treatment of Drefsab left him no happier. Subordinate males owed their superiors obedience; superiors, in turn, were bound to grant those males under them support and consideralion. Instead, he’d treated Drefsab exactly as he would have handled a useful but inexpensive tool: he’d seen the cracks, but he’d go on using it till it broke, then worry about acquiring another one.

Back Home, he’d not have used a male so. Back Home, he had luxuries long forgotten on Tosev 3, not least among them time to think. The Race made it a point never to do anything without due reflection. When you planned in terms of millennia, what was a day-or a year-more or less? But the Big Uglies did not work that way, and forced haste and change on him because they were so cursedly mutable themselves.

“They’ve corrupted me along with Drefsab,” he said mournfully, and went back to work.

“What is this thing, anyway?” Sam Yeager asked as he lifted a piece of lab apparatus off a table and stuck it in a cardboard box.

“A centrifuge,” Enrico Fermi answered, which left Yeager little wiser than he had been before. The Nobel laureate crumpled old newspaper-not much in the way of new newspaper around these days-and padded the box with it.

“Don’t they have, uh, centrifuges where we’re going?” Yeager said.

Fermi threw his hands in the air in a gesture that reminded Yeager of Bobby Fiore. “Who knows what they have? The more we are able to bring, the less we shall have to rely on that which is and remains uncertain.”

“That’s true, Professor, but the more we bring, the slower we’re liable to move and the bigger the target we make for the Lizards.”

“What you say is so, but it is also a chance we must take. If, having relocated, we cannot perform the work required of us, we might as well have stayed here in Chicago. We flee not just as individuals, but as an operating laboratory,” Fermi said.

“You’re the boss.” Yeager closed the box, sealed it with masking tape, pulled a grease pencil out of his shirt pocket. “How do you spell ‘centrifuge?’ ” When Fermi told him, he wrote it on the top and two sides of the box in big black letters.

He ran out of tape while sealing another centrifuge, so he went down the hall to see if he could snag another roll. The supply room had plenty; these days, the Metallurgical Laboratory got the best of whatever was left in Chicago. He was heading back to give Fermi more help when Barbara Larssen came out of a nearby room. The frosted glass window in the door from which she emerged was striped with tape to keep splinters from flying if a bomb hit nearby.

“Hi, Sam,” Barbara said. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” he answered, pausing for a moment. “Tired. How about you?”

“About the same.” She looked tired. From somewhere, she’d got hold of some face powder, but it couldn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. The slump in her shoulders had nothing to do with the stack of file folders she carried. It spoke more of not enough sleep, too much work, too much fear.

Yeager hesitated, then asked, “Any good news?”

“About Jens, you mean?” Barbara shook her head. “I’ve just about given up. Oh, I still go through the motions: I just now left a note with Andy Reilly-do you know Andy? — saying where we were going to give to Jens in case he ever does come back.”

“The janitor, you mean? Sure. I know Andy. That’s a good idea; he’s reliable,” Yeager said. “Where are we going? Nobody’s bothered to tell me. Of course, I’m just a cook and bottle-washer around here, so it’s not surprising.”

“Denver,” Barbara said. “if we can get there.”

“Denver,” Sam repeated. “Yeah, I played there. I was with Omaha, I think.” That had been in the days before he broke his ankle, when the Class A Western League was a step up on a road he hoped would lead to the big leagues. Somehow he’d stayed even when he knew the road went nowhere. He shook his head, forcing his thoughts back to the here-and-now. “Why Denver? We’ll have the devil’s own time getting there from here.”

“I think that’s part of the idea,” Barbara said. “The Lizards haven’t bothered it much, especially since winter started. We’ll be safer there, with a better chance to work… if, as I said, we can get there.”

Yeager noticed that as I said. From his lips, it would have come out like I said. But then, he hadn’t done graduate work in English. They probably ran you out of the university on a rail if you used bad grammar; it had to be a sin on the order of trying to go from second to third on a ball hit to short-stop. He snorted.

He still had baseball on the brain. Barbara said, “Listen, I’d better take these downstairs.” She hefted the folders.

“I’ve got to get back to it, too,” Yeager said. “You take care of yourself, you hear? I’ll see you on the convoy.”

“Okay, Sam. Thanks.” She walked down the corridor toward the stairway. Sam’s eyes followed her. Too bad about her husband, he thought. Now even she’d started admitting to herself that he wasn’t coming back. But even worn as she was, she remained too pretty, and too nice, to stay a widow forever. Yeager told himself he’d do something about that, if and when he got the chance.

Not now. Back to work. He taped up the second centrifuge box, then, grunting, piled both of them onto a dolly. He set the sole of his Army boot against the bar in the back, tilted the dolly into the carrying position. He’d learned the trick as a moving man one off-season. He’d learned how to get a loaded dolly downstairs, too: backward was slower, but a lot safer. And from what Fermi said, every gadget here had to be treated as irreplaceable.

He was sweating from effort and concentration both by the time he got down to ground level. Camouflage netting covered a large expanse of lawn in front of Eckhart Hall. Under it, with luck concealed from Lizard fighter-bombers, huddled a motley collection of Army trucks, moving vans, stakebed pickups, buses and private cars. Uniformed guards with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets surrounded them, not so much to keep them from being stolen as from having their gas tanks siphoned dry. They were all full up, and in war-ravaged Chicago gasoline was more precious than rubies.

He didn’t begin to understand all the things people were stowing in them. One olive-drab Studebaker truck was full of nothing but blocks of black, smeary stuff, each with a number neatly stenciled onto the end. It was as if somebody had taken apart a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and planned on putting it back together once he got to Colorado. But what was the thing for?

He turned and asked one of the men who’d got stuck behind him in a stairway traffic jam. The fellow said, “It’s graphite, to moderate the pile, slow down neutrons so uranium atoms have a better chance of capturing them.”

“Oh.” The answer left Yeager less than enlightened. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Not for the first time, he found that reading science fiction, while it put him ahead of where he would have been without it, didn’t magically turn him into a physicist. Too bad.

Barbara came outside with another load of file folders. Yeager went back and gave the graphite blocks another look so he could walk back upstairs with her. If she noticed what he was doing, she didn’t complain, but let him fall into step beside her.

They’d just got to the doorway when antiaircraft guns began to pound off to the west. In moments, the noise spread through the city. Above it, through it, came the scream of Lizard planes’ jet engines, and then the flat, hard cruump! of bombs going off. Barbara bit her lip. “Those are close,” she said.

“Mile, maybe two, north,” Yeager said. Like everyone else in Chicago, he’d become a connoisseur of explosions. He put a hand on Barbara’s shoulder, happy for the excuse to touch her. “You get under a roof. Shrapnel’ll start falling any minute, and you aren’t wearing a tin hat.” He rapped his own helmet with his knuckles.

Right on cue, pieces of antiaircraft shell casing panttered down like hail. Barbara scurried inside Eckhart Hall-you didn’t want to be under one when it landed. She said, “Those were between here and Navy Pier. I hope they don’t fubar the evacuation route.”

“I hope they don’t, too.” Sam stopped and stared. “You,” he said severely, “have been listening to too many soldiers.”

“What? Oh.” Barbara’s eyes widened in a good simulation of innocence. “It means ‘fouled up beyond all recognition,’ doesn’t it?”

“Fouled up. Yeah. Right. Among other things.” The noise Yeager made was half cough, half chuckle. Barbara stuck out her tongue at him. Laughing, they climbed the stairs together.

More Lizard planes hit Chicago that afternoon, and more again after night fell. They hadn’t pounded the city so hard in a while. Yeager wished for bad weather, which sometimes kept the enemy away. Faint in the distahce, he heard the wailing siren of a fire engine that still had fuel. He wondered if the firemen would find any water pressure when they got where they were going.

By the next morning, the loading was done. Yeager was crammed into a bus along with a bunch of boxes that could have held anything, a couple of other soldiers-and with Ullhass and Ristin. The two Lizard POWs were coming along to Denver for whatever help they could give the Met Lab project. Though swaddled in Navy peacoats that hung like tents on their slight frames, they still shivered. The bus had several broken windows; it was as cold inside as out.

All over the lawn, men grumbled about the cut fingers and mashed toes they’d gotten loading the convoy. Then, one after another, engines started up. The roar and yibration sank deep into Yeager’s bones. Soon he’d be on the road again. After God only knew how many trips between towns, getting rolling felt good, felt normal. Maybe he was a nomad by nature.

Diesel and gasoline fumes wafted into the bus. Yeager coughed. He didn’t remember the stink being so bad. But then, lately he hadn’t smelled it much. Not a lot was on the roads these days to make a stink.

Inside of two gear changes, Yeager was convinced he had more business behind the wheel than the clod driving the bus. No, he thought with a touch of pride, any fool can drive. Guarding the Lizards was more important to the war effort.

The convoy rumbled north up University to Fifty-first, then swung left one vehicle at a time. The streets were mostly clear of debris and not too bumpy; rammed earth and rubble filled bomb craters and the subsidence caused by ruptured water mains. The sidewalks were something else again-bulldozers and pick-and-shovel crews had shoved up onto them all the garbage that had clogged the streets. These trucks were going to get through no matter what.

To help make sure it got through, soldiers had machine gun nests in the rubble and stood menacingly at streetcorners. Here and there, colored faces, eyes huge and white within them, stared at the passing traffic from windows of houses and apartment buildings. Bronzeville, Chicago’s black belt, began bare blocks from the university and indeed almost lapped around it. The government feared its Negro citizens only a little less than it feared the Lizards.

Before the aliens came, a quarter of a million people had been jammed into Bronzeville’s six square miles. A lot fewer than that were there now, but the district still showed the signs of crowding and poverty: the storefront churches, the shops advertising mystic potions and charms, the little lunch counters whose windows (those that hadn’t blown out) advertised chitlins and sweet potato pie, hot fish and mustard greens. Poor man’s fare, yes, and poor black man’s fare to boot, but the thought of fresh greens and hot fish was plenty to set Yeager’s stomach rumbling. He’d been living out of cans too long. That was even worse than the greasy spoons he’d haunted as he bounced from one minor-league town to the next. Some of those diners-He hadn’t thought anything could be worse.

“Why we leave this place where we so long stay?” Ristin said. “I like this place, as much as can like any place on this cold, cold world. Where we go now is warmer?” He and Ullhass both swiveled their eyes toward Yeager, waiting hopefully on his reply.

They squeaked in disappointment when he said, “No, I don’t think it will be much warmer.” He didn’t have the heart to tell them it would be colder for a while: once on the Great Lakes, they’d almost certainly sail north and then west, because the Lizards held big stretches of Indiana and Ohio and controlled most of the Mississippi valley. The colder the country, the better, as far as evading them went.

Yeager continued, “As for why we’re leaving, we’re tired of having your people drop bombs on us, that’s why.”

“We tired of that, too,” Ullhass said. He’d learned to nod like a human being to emphasize his words. So had Ristin. Their heads bobbed up and down together.

“I wasn’t real fond of it myself,” Yeager said, adding the Lizards’ emphatic cough; he liked the way it served as a vocal exclamation point. His two charges let their mouths fall open. They thought his accent was funny. It probably was. He laughed a little, too. He and Ullhass and Ristin had rubbed off on one another more than he would have imagined possible back when he became their link to humankind.

The convoy chugged past the domed Byzantine bulk of Temple Isaiah Israel, then past Washington Park, bare-branched and brown and dappled with snow. It swung right onto Michigan Avenue, picking up speed as it went. There were advantages to being the only traffic on the road and not having to worry about stop lights.

Though it was winter, though the Lizards had cut off most rail and truck transport into Chicago, the stink of the stockyards lingered. Wrinkling his nose, Yeager tried to imagine what it had been like on a muggy summer afternoon. No wonder colored folk had taken over Bronzeville-they usually ended up settling in places no one else much wanted.

He also wondered that Jens and Barbara Larssen had chosen to get an apartment somewhere near here. Maybe they hadn’t known Chicago well when they moved, maybe they wanted to live close to the university, for the sake of his work, but Yeager still thought Barbara lucky to have had no trouble getting back and forth each day.

At the corner of Michigan and Forty-seventh, a sign proudly proclaimed, MICHIGAN BOULEVARD GARDEN APARTMENTS. The brick buildings looked as if they held. more people than some of the towns Yeager had played for. One of them had taken a bomb hit and fallen in on itself. More bomb craters scarred the gardens and courts around the apartments. Skinny colored kids ran back and forth, running like banshees.

“What they do?” Ristin asked.

“Probably playing Lizards and Americans,” Sam answered. “It could be cowboys and Indians, though” He spent the next few minutes trying to get the alien to understand what cowboys and Indians were to say nothing of why they were part of a game. He didn’t think he had much luck.

The convoy kept rolling north up Michigan Avenue. Before long though the bus Yeager was riding slowed then stopped. “What the hell s goin’ on?” the driver said “This was supposed to be a straight shot.”

“It’s the Army,” one of the other passengers explained. “The next time something goes just according to plan will be the first.” The fellow wore a major’s gold oak leaves so no one presumed to argue with him. Besides he was obviously right.

After a minute or so, the bus started rolling again, more slowly now. Yeager leaned out into the aisle to peer through the front windows. At the corner of Michigan and Eleventh soldiers waved vehicle after vehicle onto the latter street.

The driver opened the front door with a hiss of compressed air. “What got screwed up now?” he called to one of the men on traffic-cop duty. “Why you movin’ us offa Michigan?”

The soldier jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “You can’t get through no more on Michigan. The goddamn Lizards knocked down the Stevens Hotel this morning, and they’re still clearin’, the bricks and shit away.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

“Go over a block, then up Wabash to Lake. You can get back onto Michigan there.”

“Okay,” the driver said, and swung through the turn. No sooner had he rolled past the Woman’s Club Building than more soldiers waved him right onto Wabash, one block west. St. Mary’s Church there had had its spire blown off; the cross that had topped it lay half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter.

Since Wabash hadn’t been cleared to let the convoy get through, the going was slow and bumpy. Once the bus had to jounce up onto the sidewalk to get around a crater in the road. Two empty gas stations, one Shell, the other Sinclair, stood across the street from each other at Wabash and Balbo. A dusty sign in front of the Sinclair station advertised its regular gasoline, six gallons for ninety-eight cents, tax paid. A fifteen-foot-tall plywood cutout of a waving man in a parking attendant’s uniform plugged the parking lot next to the gas station: twenty-five cents for one hour or less (SAT. NITE 50? AFTER 6 P.M). But for parked cars and rubble, the lot was empty.

Yeager shook his head. Up until the Lizards came, life in the United States had been within shouting distance of normal, war or no war. Now… He’d seen newsreel film of wreckage in Europe and China, seen black-and-white images of stunned people trying to figure out how to go on with their lives after they’d lost everything-and often everybody-that mattered to them. He thought they’d sunk in. But the difference between seeing pictures of war and having war brought home to you was like the difference between seeing a picture of a pretty girl and going to bed with her.

The elevated train curled round the corner of Wabash and Lake. Lizard bombs had torn great gaps in the steel-and-wood superstructure. The trains in Chicago did not run on time, not any more.

Back onto Michigan Avenue. Half a block north of Lake, the forty-story Carbide and Carbon Building had been a Chicago landmark with its black marble base, dark green terra-cotta walls, and gilded trim. Now scorch marks ran up its flanks. Piles of the wall-hell, pieces of the building-were chewed out by bomb hits, as if a dog the size of King Kong had tried it for taste. The glass from hundreds of windows had been swept out of Michigan Avenue, but still glittered on the sidewalk.

The bus driver was evidently a native Chicagoan. Just past the Carbide and Carbon Building, he pointed to the opposite side of the street and said, “This here used to be the 333 North Michigan Building. Now it ain’t.”

Now it ain’t. A mournful pronouncement, but accurate enough. The pile of debris-marble facings, wood floors, endless cubic yards of reinforced concrete, twisted steel girders beginning to be mangy with rust now that they were open to the snow and rain-had been a building once. It wasn’t any more.

Nor was the double-decked Michigan Avenue Bridge a bridge any more. Army engineers had run a temporary pontoon bridge across the Chicago River to get the convoy to the other side. It would come down again as soon as the last truck rattled over it. If it didn’t, the Lizards would blast it in short order.

Armchair strategists said the Lizards didn’t really understand what all human beings used boats for. Yeager hoped they were right. He’d been strafed in a train the night the aliens came crashing down on Earth. Getting strafed on board ship would be ten times worse-no place to run, no place to hide.

But if the Lizards didn’t understand boats, they sure knew what bridges were all about. Looking west as he bounced over the steel plates of the makeshift span the engineers had thrown up, Yeager saw that bridges had leapt over the Chicago River at every block. They didn’t overleap it now. Every one of them, like the Michigan Avenue Bridge, had been bombed into oblivion.

“Ain’t it a bitch?” the driver said, as if reading his mind. “This here bridge was only about twenty, twenty-five years old-my old man was back from France to watch ’em open it up. Fuckin’ waste, if you ask me.”

On the north side of the river, the gleaming white Wrigley Building looked intact but for broken windows. Across the street, though, the Tribune Tower had been gutted. Yeager found a certain amount of poetic justice in that. Even when reduced to a skinny weekly by paper shortages, the Chicago Tribune hadn’t stopped laying into Roosevelt for not Doing Something about the Lizards. Just what he was supposed to be Doing was never quite clear-but he obviously’ wasn’t Doing it, so the paper piled scorn on him.

Yeager felt like thumbing his nose at the ruined building. About all anyone could do about the Lizards was fight them as hard as he could for as long as he could. The United States was doing as well as any other country on Earth, and better than most. But Sam wondered if that would be enough.

Along with the rest of the convoy, the bus turned right on Grand Avenue toward the Navy Pier. The morning sun gleamed off Lake Michigan, which seemed illimitable as the sea.

The pier stretched more than half a mile into the lake. The bus rattled past sheds once full of merchandise, now mostly bombed-out shells. At the east end of the pier were playgrounds, a dance hail, an auditorium, a promenade-all reminders of happier times. Waiting at what had been the excursion landing was a rusty old freighter that looked like the maritime equivalent of the beat-up buses Yeager had been riding all his adult life.

Also waiting were a couple of companies of troops. Antiaircraft guns poked their noses into the sky. If Lizard planes swooped down on the convoy, they’d get a warm reception. Even so, Yeager wished the guns were someplace else-from everything he’d seen, they were better at attracting the Lizards than shooting them down.

But he wasn’t the one who gave the orders-except to his Lizardy charges. “Come on, boys,” he told them, and let them precede him, off the bus and onto the pier. At his urging, Ullhass and Ristin headed toward the freighter, on whose side was painted the name Caledonia.

The gathered soldiers swarmed onto the convoy vehicle like army ants-Yeager smiled as the comparison struck him. One truck after another was emptied and sped back down Navy Pier toward Chicago. Working transport of any sort was precious these days. Watching them head west, Yeager got an excellent view of the proud city skyline-and of the gaps the Lizards had torn in it.

Barbara Larssen came over and stood by him. “They just want us small fry out of the way,” she said unhappily. “They put the physicists on board first, and now the equipment they need. Afterward, if there’s any room and any time, they’ll let people like us get on.”

Given the military needs of the moment, those priorities made sense to Yeager. But Barbara wanted sympathy, not sense. He said, “You know what they say-there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.”

She laughed, maybe a little more than the tired joke deserved. A chilly gust of wind off the lake tried to flip up her pleated skirt. she defeated it with the quick two-hand clutch women seem to learn as a tribal gesture, but shivered just the same. “Brr! I wish I were wearing pants.”

“Why don’t you?” he said. “With all the heaters to hell and gone, I bet you’d be a lot more comfortable. I wouldn’t want to freeze my-well, I wouldn’t want to freeze myself in a skirt just on account of fashion.”

If she’d noticed what he started to say, she didn’t let on. “If I find some that fit me, I think I will,” she said. “Long johns, too.”

Yeager let himself indulge in the fantasy of peeling her out of a pair of long johns until somebody bawled, “Come on, get those goddamn Lizards on board. We ain’t got all day.”

He urged Ullhass and Ristin ahead of him, then had a happy afterthought. Grabbing Barbara’s hand, he said, “Make like you’re a Lizard-keeper, too?” She caught on fast and fell into step behind him. she didn’t shake off his hand, either.

The two Lizard POWs hissed in alarm as the gangplank swayed under their weight. “It’s all right,” Barbara reassured them, playing her part to the hilt. “If humans carrying heavy equipment didn’t break this, you won’t.” Yeager had come to know Ullhass and Ristin well enough to tell how unhappy they were, but they kept walking.

They hissed again when they got up onto the deck of the Caledonia and discovered the ship was still shifting slightly to and fro. “It will fall over and put us all at the bottom of the water,” Ristin said angrily. He didn’t know nautical English, but got his meaning across.

Yeager looked around at the faded paint, the rust that streaked down from rivets, the worn woodwork, the grease-stained dungarees and old wool sweaters the crew wore. “I don’t think so,” he told the Lizards. “This boat’s done a lot more sailing in its day. I expect it’s good for some more yet.”

“I think you’re right, Sam,” Barbara said, perhaps as much to reassure herself as to console Ristin.

“Out of the way, there,” an officer in Navy uniform yelled at Yeager. “And get those damned things into the cabin we’ve set up for them.”

“Yes, sir,” Yeager said, saluting. “Uh, sir, where is this cabin? Nobody told me before I got here.”

The Navy man rolled his eyes. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” He grabbed a passing sailor by the arm. “Virgil, take this guy and his pet Lizards up to cabin nine. That one can be locked from the outside-here’s the key.” He turned to Barbara. “Who are you, ma’am?” When she gave him her name, he checked a list, then said, “You can go along if you like, since you don’t seem to mind being around these things-they give me the creeps. Anyway, you’re in cabin fourteen, just up the corridor. I hope that’s all right.”

“Sure-why not?” Barbara said. The Navy man looked at her, looked back to the Lizards, rolled his eyes again. He obviously didn’t want to have anything more to do with them than duty required.

“Come on,” Virgil said. He had an engaging hillbilly twang, and seemed more curious than repelled by the Lizards. Nodding to Ristin, he said, “You speak English?”

“Yess,” Ristin answered, fixing him with a baleful stare. “You are sure this-thing-will not fall over into the water?”

“Yup.” The sailor laughed. “Hasn’t yet, anyhow.” Just then, other sailors cast off lines at stern and bow. The ship’s engine roared into life, making the deck vibrate. Ristin and Ullhass both glared at Virgil as if they’d just convicted him of perjury in their minds. Black smoke poured from the Caledonia’s twin stacks. She slowly pulled away from the Navy Pier.

Back on the pier, some of the soldiers who’d done stevedore duty waved farewells. More, though, were too worn to do anything but stand or sit at the end of the pier. Yeager wondered how many of them had any idea why the cargo they’d loaded onto the freighter was so important. A handful if any, he guessed.

He was looking back toward Chicago when he saw flames and dust and smoke spurt up from an explosion, and then from another and another. Oddly flat across a widening stretch of water, the blasts reached his ears at about the same time he heard the screaming jets of the Lizard fighter-bombers.

The antiaircraft gunners on the Navy Pier started firing for all they were worth. All that accomplished was to draw the Lizards’ attention to them. One of the planes zoomed along the length of the pier, turned loose a couple of bombs. The AA fire cut off as sharply as a chicken’s squawks when the cleaver comes down.

The Lizard plane shot over the Caledonia, so low Yeager could see the seams where pieces of its skin were joined together. He breathed a sigh of relief when it screamed out over the lake.

Along with his charges, Virgil had stopped to watch the enemy aircraft again. Now he said, “Let’s get you movin’ again.” But he kept his head cocked, as Yeager did, listening to the sound of the jet engine. Worry crossed his face. “I don’t much like that it’s-”

Before he could say comin’ back, a sharp bark rose above the scream. Yeager had been under fire often enough to make his reaction almost reflexive. “Hit the deck!” he yelled, and had the presence of mind to knock Barbara down beside him.

Cannon shells raked the Caledonia from starboard to port. Glass shattered. Metal screamed. A moment later, so did men. The Lizard pilot, happy with the strafing run, darted westward toward his base.

Something hot and wet splashed Yeager. When he touched it, his hand came away smeared with red. He looked up. There on the deck, a little in front of him, lay Virgil’s still-twitching legs. A few feet away were the soldier’s head and shoulders and arms. Nothing but that red smear was left of the parts in between.

Ullhass and Ristin stared at the ruin of what had been a man with as much horror as if they’d been men themselves. As Yeager did, Barbara Larssen looked up into carnage. She was as smeared with blood as he, from her wavy hair to her pleated skirt: and beyond-a neat line between silk-covered pink and crimson on her calf showed just how far down the skirt had gone.

She saw what was left of Virgil, stared down at the slaughterhouse survivor she’d become. “Oh God,” she said, “Oh God,” and was noisily sick on the deck in the middle of the blood. She clung to Yeager and he to her, his hands digging like claws into the firm, marvelously unbroken flesh of her back her breasts pressing against his chest as if they grew there Her head was jammed down into the hollow of his shoulder He didn’t know if she could breathe and he didn’t care. In spite of the stink of the blood and the puke he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted a woman in all his life and from the way his hard-on rubbed her leg and she didn’t pull away but moaned and just shoved herself to him harder than ever he knew she wanted him too and of course it was crazy and of course it was shock but he didn’t care about that either, not one bit.

“Move,” he growled to the Lizards in a voice not his own. They skittered round the pieces of poor dead Virgil. He followed, still clutching Barbara, hoping desperately he could find the cabins before the moment broke.

The numbers on the doors of the first corridor he ducked into showed him he’d been lucky. He opened cabin nine, marched Ullhass and Ristin in, slammed the door behind them, turned the key. Then, almost running, he and Barbara hurried up the echoing metal hallway to fourteen.

The cabin was tiny, the bunk even tinier. Neither of them cared. They fell on it together. She happened to land on top. It could have been the other way round just as easily.

His hand dove under her skirt. He stroked her smooth thigh above the top of her stocking, then yanked at the crotch of her panties. At the same time, she pulled his pants down just far enough. She was so wet, he went deep into her the moment she impaled herself on him.

He’d never known such heat. He exploded almost at once, and in the first instant of returning self-consciousness feared he’d been too quick to satisfy her. But her spine was arched, her head thrown back; she made little mewling noises deep in her throat as she quivered above him. Then her eyes opened. Like him, she seemed to be coming to herself after a hard bout of fever.

She scrambled off him. He hastily put his trousers to rights. They’d both left bloodstains on the blanket that covered the bunk. Barbara stared wildly around the cabin, as if really seeing it for the first time. Maybe she was. “Oh God,” she moaned, “what have I gone and done to myself now?” But of that there could be no possible doubt.

Sam took a step toward her, made as if to take her in his arms. He said what countless men have said to women after lust takes them by surprise: “Darling, it’ll be all right-”

“Don’t you call me that,” she hissed. “Don’t you touch me, don’t you come near me.” She backed as far away from him as she could, which wasn’t very far. “Get out of here this instant. I never want to see you again. Go back to your damned Lizards. I’ll scream. I’ll-”

Yeager didn’t wait to find out what she’d do. He left the cabin in a hurry, closed the door behind him. By sheer dumb luck, the corridor was empty. Through the steel door, he heard Barbara start to cry. He wanted to go back in and comfort her, but she couldn’t have made it any plainer that she wanted no comfort from him. Since they were quartered right down the corridor from each other, she’d have to see him again, and soon. He wondered what would happen then.

“It’ll be all right,” he said without much conviction. Then, shoulders slumped, he walked slowly along the corridor to see how Ristin and Ullhass were. They didn’t have to worry about the whole business of male and female; out of sight was truly out of mind for them. He’d never thought he’d be jealous of that, but right now be was.