Second Contact

12

Glen Johnson studied Peregrine ’s radar screen. More than anything else up here, including his bare eyes, it told him what he needed to know. Everything was, or seemed to be, as it should have been. He didn’t know exactly what all the targets he saw were, but he hadn’t known that for some time: all three spacegoing human powers and the Lizards kept right on changing the orbits on their weapons installations.

He sighed. Everyone should have cut that crap out after whoever it was struck at the colonizing fleet. Down on Earth, somebody was laughing himself silly because he’d hit the Lizards a good lick and got away with it.

But that stunt could not work twice. The Lizards had made it very plain they wouldn’t let it work twice. Looking at things out of their eye turrets, Johnson couldn’t blame them. If anyone struck at them now, everyone would regret it. That made all the maneuvering out here seem pointless at best, provocative at worst. It went on even so.

“Stupid,” he muttered under his breath, and stupid it undoubtedly was. That didn’t mean it would stop. Who’d said, Nobody ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people? He couldn’t recall, but it was true, and not only of Americans.

His low, fast orbit meant he kept passing things traveling in higher, slower paths around the Earth. Several Falcon — class ships were in orbit at any given time, to make sure they kept a close eye on everything that was going on. When Johnson spotted the large target on his radar, he thought for a moment that it was a ship from the colonization fleet. But the orbit was wrong for that. Moreover, by its transponder signal, it didn’t belong to the Lizards at all. As a matter of fact, it was as American as the Peregrine.

He whistled softly and thumbed on his radio. “Peregrine to Space Station. Peregrine to Space Station. Over.”

The signal came back a moment later: “Go ahead, Peregrine. Over.”

“That thing is really going up there, isn’t it?” Johnson had to remember to add, “Over.”

He got laughter back. “Sure is, Peregrine. Any day now, we’re opening up our own supermarket.”

“Damned if I don’t believe you,” he said. “My last flight up, you weren’t anything special at all on my radar. This time, first thing I thought was that you belonged to the colonization fleet.”

That won him more laughter. “Pretty funny, Peregrine. We’ve got a lot we’re going to be doing up here, that’s all, so the place has to get bigger.”

“Roger that,” Johnson answered. “But what do the Lizards think about you? They don’t like anybody coming up here but them.”

“Oh, they don’t worry about us,” the radio operator on the space station said. “We’re a great, big, fat target, and we’re too damn heavy to do much in the way of maneuvering. If real trouble starts, you can call us the Sitting Duck.”

“Okay,” Johnson said. He didn’t ask what sort of weapons the space station carried. That was none of his business, and even less the business of whoever might be monitoring this frequency. “Over and out.”

Sitting Duck, eh? he thought, and shook his head. More likely the Sitting Porcupine. If that radioman hadn’t been sandbagging, he was a monkey’s uncle. The USA wouldn’t put anything so big and prominent into space without giving it some way to take care of itself. Even the Lizards weren’t that naive. They’d thought they would be facing knights in shining armor (or rusty armor-he remembered some of the pictures from their probe), but they’d come loaded for bear.

What impressed him most about the space station wasn’t its likely armament but, as he’d told the radio operator, how fast it was growing. An awful lot of launches had to be ferrying men and supplies up there. As far as he was concerned, that sort of spaceflight was bus driver’s work, but there was a lot of bus driver’s work going on to make the station expand so quickly.

He scratched his chin, wondering if he’d be able to finagle a ride up there himself, to see with his own eyes what was going on. After a moment, he nodded. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange.

A Lizard radar station called from the ground to inform him his orbit was satisfactory. “I thank you,” he answered in the language of the Race. The Lizard on the radio had sounded sniffy, as Lizards had a way of doing. If his orbit hadn’t been satisfactory, the Lizard would have been screaming his head off.

Johnson suddenly laughed. “That’s what it is!” he exclaimed, speaking aloud to enjoy the joke more. “There’s thousands of tons of powdered ginger up there, and they’re going to drop it on the Lizards’ heads. Wouldn’t that produce some satisfied customers?”

He knew he was anthropomorphizing. When the Lizards didn’t have it, they didn’t miss it the way people would. But when they were interested, they were a lot more interested than anybody above the age of nineteen could hope to understand.

“Hello, American spacecraft. Over.” The call was in crisp, gutturally flavored English. “Who are you?”

“Peregrine here, Johnson speaking,” Johnson answered. “Who are you, German spacecraft?” The German equivalents of his ship had orbits with about the same period as his own, but, because Peenemunde was a lot farther north than Kitty Hawk, they swung farther north and south than he did, and met only intermittently.

“Drucker here, in Kathe,” the flier from the Reich answered. “And I wish I were in Kathe right now, and not up here. Do I say this right auf Englisch?”

“If you mean what I think you mean, yeah, that’s how you say it,” Johnson replied with a chuckle. “Wife or girlfriend, Drucker? I forget.”

“Wife,” Drucker answered. “I am a lucky man, I know, to be still in love with the woman I married. Have you a wife, Johnson?”

“Divorced,” Johnson said shortly. “Spent too much time away from her, I guess. She got fed up with it.” She’d run away with a traveling salesman, was what Stella had done, but Johnson didn’t advertise that. Unless somebody asked him about her, he didn’t think of her twice a month. He wasn’t a man inclined to dwell on his mistakes.

“I am sorry that to hear,” Drucker said. “Here is to peace between us and confusion to the Lizards.”

“Yeah, I’ll drink to that any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Johnson said. “Every day I’m not up here, I mean.”

“They think all I have here is water and ersatz coffee and a horrible powder that turns water into something that is supposed to taste like orange juice,” Drucker said. “They are wrong.” He sounded happy they were wrong.

“Somebody’s listening to you,” Johnson warned.

“They will not shoot me for saying I do not like the tang of their orange drink,” the German answered. “They need a better reason than that.”

For once, Johnson wished the radio speaker in the Peregrine weren’t so tinny. He thought Drucker’s voice had an edge to it, but couldn’t be sure. He was probably imagining things. Spacemen were part of the Nazi elite. The Gestapo wouldn’t go after them. It would pick some poor, beat-up foreigners who couldn’t even complain.

After a pause that stretched, Drucker went on, “You and I and even the Bolsheviks in their flying tin cans-if we were not here, the Lizards would be able to do whatever they chose.”

“That’s so,” Johnson agreed. “Doesn’t mean we get along with each other, though.”

“Well enough not to use the rockets and bombs we have all built,” Drucker said. “That is well enough, when you think of how the world is.”

His signal was starting to break up as his flight path carried him south of the Peregrine. Glen Johnson found himself nodding. “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, pal. Safe landing to you.”

“Safe…” A burst of static drowned out the last of the German’s words.

The rest of Johnson’s tour was uneventful. He approved of that. Events in space meant things going wrong-either in Peregrine, which was liable to kill him, or outside the ship, which was liable to mean the whole world and most of the spacecraft in orbit around it would go up in smoke.

He got down to Kitty Hawk in one piece. After the usual interrogation-almost as if he were a captured prisoner and not an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps-the bright young captain who’d grilled him asked, “And do you have any questions of your own, sir?”

It was, for the most part, a ritualistic question. Past the latest sports scores, what would a returning pilot want to know about what had happened during the mission he’d just completed? He knew better than anybody.

But, this time, Johnson said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” The captain’s eyes widened; Johnson had taken him by surprise. But he recovered quickly, using a gracious gesture to urge the Peregrine ’s pilot to go ahead. And Johnson did: “What are they throwing into that space station to make it grow so fast?”

“Sorry, sir, but I really don’t know a thing about that,” the captain replied. “Not my area of responsibility.”

“Okay,” Johnson said with a smile and a shrug. He got to his feet. So did the young captain, who gave him a precise salute. He did an about-face and left the interrogation room. As soon as he got outside, he scratched his head. Unless everything he’d learned about human nature over a lot of tables with poker chips on them was wrong, that bright young captain had been lying through his shiny white teeth.

Johnson scratched his head again. He could think of only one reason why the captain would lie: whatever was going on aboard the space station was secret. It had to be a pretty juicy secret, too, because the captain didn’t want him to know it was there at all. Had the fellow just said, Sorry, sir-classified, Johnson would have shrugged and gone about his business. Now, though, his bump of curiosity itched. What were they hiding, up there a few hundred miles?

Something the Lizards wouldn’t like. He didn’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out. He couldn’t see the Race breaking out in a sweat about whatever it was, though, not when they had starships from two different fleets practically blanketing the Earth.

“Security,” Johnson muttered, making it into a dirty word. And at that, he had it good. He wouldn’t have traded places with the Nazi in the upper stage of that A-45, not for all the tea in China he wouldn’t. And Russia was no better place to live than Germany, not if half of what people said was true.

Let’s hear it for the last free country in the world, he thought as he headed toward the bar to buy himself a drink to celebrate being alive. Even England was slipping these days. Johnson sadly shook his head. Who would have thought, back in the days when the limeys battled Germany singlehanded, they would have ended up sliding toward the Reich an inch at a time?

He shrugged again. Who would have thought… a whole lot of things over the past twenty years? If the United States had to get secret to stay free, he didn’t see anything in the whole wide world wrong with that.

He was on his second whiskey before the irony there struck him. By the time he’d started his third one, he’d forgotten all about it.

Atvar was glad to return to Australia. It was late summer in this hemisphere now, and the weather was fine by any standards, those of Home included. Even in Cairo, though, the weather had been better than bearable. What pleased him more was how far the colony had come since his last visit.

“Then, all we had were the starships,” he said to Pshing. “Now look! A whole thriving city! Streets, vehicles, shops, a power plant, a pipeline to the desalination center-a proper city for the Race.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant replied. “Before very much longer, it will be like any city back on Home.”

“Indeed it will,” Atvar said with an emphatic cough. “This is going according to plan. When we proceed according to plan, we can move at least as fast as the Big Uglies. And here in the center of Australia, we shall have no Big Uglies interfering with our designs, except for the occasional savage like the one I saw the last time I was here. But this is and shall forevermore be our place on Tosev 3.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “My only concern is that we are, in certain areas, still vulnerable to sabotage from the Tosevites. The desalination plant and pipeline spring to mind.”

“I am assured the security plans are good,” Atvar said. “They had better be good; we have had enough painful lessons from the Big Uglies on how to construct them and where our vulnerabilities lie.”

He did not want to think about security plans and sabotage, not now. He wanted to walk along the sidewalks of the growing city, to watch males and females peacefully going about their business and getting on with their lives. Before too many generations, if all went well, they would rule the whole planet, not just a little more than half. And the Empire could get on with the job of civilizing another world.

If all went well…

Very faintly, he could smell the pheromones that meant a female somewhere upwind was ripe for mating. He tried to ignore the odor. He couldn’t quite. For one thing, it made him a little more irritable than he would have been otherwise. Even here, in the heart of the Race’s haven on Tosev 3, the Tosevite herb had come. He sighed. The troubles this world brought seemed inescapable.

All over the town, alarms began hissing. Amplified voices shouted: “Missile attack! Incoming missile attack! Take cover against missile attack!”

“No!” Atvar screeched. All around him, the colonists stared foolishly. Every moment counted, but they did not seem to realize it. They had not been trained for this. Atvar did not know which way to start himself. The missiles could be coming from any direction. If they’d been launched from one of the accursed submersible ships the Big Uglies had developed, they would be here all too soon.

Antimissile sites ringed the city, as they ringed the whole area of settlement here in Australia. But they were not infallible. They had not been infallible against even the crude missiles the Big Uglies had had during the fighting. And Tosevite technology was better now than it had been then.

Atvar turned his eye turrets toward Pshing. “If we perish here, Kirel will take vengeance the likes of which this world has never seen.”

“Of course, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing sounded so calm, Atvar envied him. The fleetlord did not want to fall here. He wanted to bring the assimilation of this world into the Empire as far forward as he could. How much the universe cared about what he wanted was liable to be another question.

Alarms kept hissing. Atvar looked around for someplace to shelter against the nuclear missile he assumed would momentarily burst overhead. He saw nowhere to hide. Turning to Pshing, he said, “I am sorry you had to come here with me as part of your duties.” If he was about to die, he didn’t want to die with the apology unspoken.

Before Pshing could answer, antimissiles roared off their launch platforms. They would do what they could, but Atvar knew some of their targets were all too likely to elude them.

Explosions to the north, to the northwest, and overhead smote his hearing diaphragms. Debris fell out of the sky, crashing down around and in the city the Race was building. A great chunk dug a hole in the ground not far from Atvar. The leg and tailstump of a male or female stuck out from under it. That leg still twitched feebly, but no one could have lived after so much metal fell on him.

Still, despite the bursts overhead, no new temporary sun blazed into life above the city. “Exalted Fleetlord, we may live!” Pshing cried.

“We may indeed,” Atvar said. “The antimissiles are performing excellently.” They were performing better than he’d imagined they could, let alone hoped. Those continuing explosions above him had to be Tosevite missiles intercepted and blasted out of the sky. Had they been anything else, one of those missiles would have ensured that he never heard anything again.

He opened his mouth to laugh exultantly. As he inhaled, all the strange, alien scents of the Australian desert went past his scent receptors and into his lung. Among them was a spicy scent he did not remember from his previous visit. He had never smelled anything like it before. It was, he thought, the most delicious odor he’d ever known, with the possible exception of a female’s pheromones. It reminded him of those pheromones, as a matter of fact.

“What is that splendid smell?” he asked aloud.

No sooner asked than answered. The response formed in his head even as Pshing spoke the words: “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not know for certain, but I think that must be ginger.”

“Yes. Truth,” Atvar said. He could see the truth, all but hanging there in front of his eyes. It was as obvious as Venteff’s Theorem on the relationship between the squares of the sides of a right triangle and the square of the hypotenuse. Everything suddenly seemed obvious to him. He had never felt so brilliant, never since the day when he’d used the egg tooth at the end of his snout to break through the shell that separated him from the wider world.

“I never tasted ginger before,” Pshing said.

“Neither did I.” Regret filled Atvar. If he’d been using the Tosevite herb during the fighting, the Big Uglies surely would have had to yield to the Race. He felt certain and swift and strong, very strong.

Other males and females must have felt the same way, for they rushed upon the chunk of metal that had crushed one of their comrades and hauled it away. Some of them exclaimed in horror and disgust, for they were colonists, not males from the conquest fleet, and the crushed remains they uncovered were outside their experience. But they had acted swiftly and decisively, without the Race’s usual long pauses for thought.

“They did well,” Pshing said. For the moment, the action was what counted, not what resulted from it.

“Truth,” Atvar said again. He wondered which Tosevite notempire had launched this attack against the Race in its citadel on Tosev 3. Whoever it was certainly had some strange notions of what an attack was. But for the handful of males and females hit by falling pieces of rocket, the rest of the members of the Race on whom the Big Uglies had chosen to shower so much ginger were, if anything, enjoying themselves more than they had before.

He paused and looked about, now here, now there, his eye turrets moving independently of each other. The smell of ginger was not the only marvelous odor coming to his scent receptors now. Along with it, he smelled female pheromones.

Yes, of course, he thought. I remember. Ginger brings them into their season. The Big Uglies had spent all the years since his arrival on Tosev 3 raising his ire; never once had the erectile scales atop his head risen with it. They were for only one sort of display, the sort he made now.

Pshing was also displaying his crest. So were other males, too, as far as the eye turret could reach. And females were lowering their heads and raising their hindquarters into the mating posture. They might have been uninterested mere moments before, but the ginger floating through the air in a fine, delicious cloud did to them what the coming of the season would have done back on Home.

Atvar advanced on the nearest female he saw. With every step he took, his own posture grew more nearly upright. But he was not the only male approaching her. Fury filled him, lest the other male get there before him. “Go back!” he shouted. “I am the fleetlord!” He showed his claws in a threatening gesture.

The other male also displayed his claws. “I do not care who you are!” he shouted back, a shocking lack of decorum at any time but the season. Then, it was every male for himself. “I am going to mate with this female.”

“No!” Atvar hurled himself at the male from the colonization fleet. He was older, but he also knew how to fight, not only as a commander but also as an individual. Before long, the other male fled, hissing and wailing in dismay.

The female over whom they’d fought turned an eye turret back toward Atvar. “Hurry!” she said. “This is uncomfortable.”

He did his best to oblige. It wasn’t uncomfortable while it went on: very much the reverse. As soon as he’d finished, the female skittered away. But he, like the other males in the city, kept right on smelling the pheromones from other females that announced they were still receptive.

It was, in fact, very much the way a day during the season would have gone back on Home. In other words, not a cursed thing got done. Males sought females and brawled among themselves. Females stopped and waited where they stood for males. Sometimes a single mating was enough to satisfy them. Sometimes, perhaps depending on how much ginger they’d inhaled and tasted, they wanted more.

Only slowly did the difference between here and Home sink into Atvar’s mind: what with ginger and pheromones, he was far more distracted than he should have been. Back on Home, everyone expected the season. It was part of the rhythm of the year, not a disruption.

Here in Australia, the reverse was true. This city had just hatched from its egg. Much of it, in fact, still remained inside the shell. Males and females had plenty to do without worrying about the distraction of mating as if they were so many Big Uglies. Some of that work would get done wrong now. Some of it would not get done at all. Out across the city, more males and females were liable to be hurt by the sudden onset of the season than from debris falling out of the sky.

Clever, Atvar thought after a while. The Big Uglies who had done this were liable to be more clever than he was at the moment. His wits working far less clearly than they should have, he wondered whether inciting the Race to mate could be construed as an act of war. Was it not closer to what the Tosevites called, for no obvious reason, a practical joke?

And yet, if they chose to do it again, would they not disrupt life here once more? If, after disrupting life, they followed with an attack that did include nuclear weapons or poisonous gas, what then? We would be in trouble then, Atvar thought.

He’d never imagined he might wish he had not had the joy of mating.

Felless craved ginger. She fought against the craving with a grim intensity the likes of which she’d never imagined. It wasn’t so much that she worried about the immediate effects of the ginger itself. But what it would do to her, what it would do to the males around her…

Whenever she tasted, she went into her season. She’d done that often enough to be convinced it was the ginger. She didn’t want to do it again. It turned her into an animal, one whose desires were even more alien to her than those of the Tosevites she was supposed to be studying. She knew all that. She understood it down to the core.

She still craved ginger.

Every so often, on the streets of Nuremberg or in the corridors of the Race’s embassy to the Reich, she would pass males and females coupling. New regulations had done little to stop it. Every so often, a male filled with lust by some other female’s pheromones would advance upon her with raised head scales and erect posture.

When she had no ginger in her, when she wasn’t chemically stimulated to go along with such nonsense, she enjoyed telling those males what she thought of them. Most of them looked astonished. One had been so drunk on pheromones, she’d had to bite him to get him to leave her alone.

And one, a clever fellow, had offered her ginger. “Have a taste,” he’d said, those upright scales on his head quivering. “You’ll feel like mating then.”

“I do not want to feel like mating!” she’d shouted in a transport of fury that still astonished her. “If my season had come on its own, that would have been one thing. Drugging myself for the sake of your mating urge is something else again.”

“Spoilsport,” he’d hissed, and gone off in a huff. He was Ambassador Veffani’s first secretary, an important male in the embassy. Felless had to hope he wouldn’t hold a grudge against her once female pheromones weren’t addling his scent receptors.

The trouble was, males remained in a state of low-grade lust for days at a time. One female or another in the embassy would taste ginger and set them off. Every so often, Felless proved unable to resist temptation herself. One of the males who coupled with her during a slip was the first secretary. Maybe that made him stop resenting her for her earlier refusal.

Even the Big Uglies noticed the disruption that had come over the Race. One of them, a male with a Deutsch chemical firm, complained to her about it: “Before, we could make arrangements and rely on them. Now, nothing your males and females say can be trusted from one day to the next. This is not good.”

“Were it not for the herb that comes from this planet, were it not for the Tosevites who supply us this herb, we would not have such difficulties,” she answered, not wanting all the blame to rest on her back.

She failed to impress the Big Ugly. “We Tosevites have also drugs,” he answered. “They do not turn all of us unreliable. When we catch Tosevites who use drugs, we treat them as criminals. We punish them. Sometimes we punish them severely.”

What a Deutsch male meant by severe punishment was either death or something that would make the victim long for it. Felless did not care to imagine herself on the receiving end of such punishment. She said, “We also punish those who use ginger.”

“You do not punish them enough, or they would not dare use it,” the Tosevite told her.

He sounded logical. He also sounded sure of himself. The Deutsche had a way of doing both those things at once. Sometimes, that made them very effective. Others, it just meant they went more spectacularly wrong than they would have otherwise. “Your ways are too harsh for us,” Felless said.

“Then you will suffer because of this,” the Big Ugly said, “and those of us who do business with you, unfortunately, will also suffer.” He got up and bowed stiffly from the waist, the Tosevite equivalent of the posture of respect. Then he turned and marched out of Felless’ office.

Troubled, she went to see the ambassador to the Deutsche. “Superior sir,” she said, “we are becoming the laughingstock of the Tosevites. Something must be done to minimize the effect ginger has on us.”

“In principle, Senior Researcher, I agree,” Veffani answered. “After the ginger bombs above our new city in Australia, I could scarcely disagree. Wherever we have both males and females, the Big Uglies have it within their power to incapacitate us. This is a danger we did not face even during the fighting.”

“What are we to do?” Felless asked.

“I do not know,” the ambassador said. “This is still under discussion by leading officials of both the conquest fleet and the colonization fleet. One part of the emerging solution-or emerging effort to find a solution-is the imposition of harsher penalties on those guilty of tasting ginger.”

“That solution would appeal to the Big Uglies,” Felless said, and explained the conversation she’d just had with the Deutsch male. “Shall we imitate their barbarism?”

“We may have no choice,” Veffani replied. “If we do not imitate their barbarism, we seem to be heading in the direction of imitating their reproductive habits, as you must realize.” Felless realized it all too well; he had coupled with her that first time she’d tasted ginger, when she still did not know what it would do to her. The ambassador went on, “Which would you prefer?”

“Neither, superior sir,” Felless answered at once. “I would prefer for things to return to the way they have always been.”

“A sentiment worthy of the Race,” Veffani said. “Tell me, then, how to make this particular situation unhatch and return to its egg.”

“I cannot,” Felless said softly. “I wish I could. And, speaking of eggs…”

She could feel a pair growing inside her, though they would not be ready to lay for some time yet. She had thought a successful mating-whichever one it had been-would shut down her desire and her production of pheromones. That was the sensible way things had worked back on Home.

As the males of the conquest fleet said over and over again, nothing on Tosev 3 worked the way it did back on Home. Ginger short-circuited the end of her cycle. Even though she was gravid, she still released pheromones and wanted to mate every time she tasted. The matings, she knew, were no more than meaningless sensation, like the meaningless sensation suffusing so much of Tosevite sexuality. That did not mean she did not hunger for them.

Ginger also produced nothing but meaningless sensation. That did not mean she did not hunger for it, either.

Veffani said, “If you should have any ginger, Senior Researcher, I strongly suggest you divest yourself of it. Penalties for possession and intoxication are going to increase. They are going to increase more for females than for males, too.”

“That is unjust!” Felless exclaimed.

“Perhaps in one sense, it is. In another sense, however, it most assuredly is not,” Veffani replied. “Consider: a male under the influence of the herb is likely to disrupt only his own life. If he is an experienced user, and not too greedy, he does not even do that to any great extent. But a female disrupts not only her own life but also the lives of all the males who scent her pheromones. Does that not make a greater penalty for females appropriate?”

“Perhaps,” Felless said grudgingly. “But there should also be a penalty, and a severe one, for males who give females ginger in order to induce them to mate when they would not do so otherwise.”

“Such penalties are also being drafted,” the ambassador said. “We have had cases of this sort of behavior reported. Males with pheromones filling their scent receptors are less rational than we would like. Even now, I find a certain difficulty in concentrating. Somewhere in this building, a female is in her season, and the pheromones drift in through my open door. I can understand how thoughts of mating, even by trickery, might come to mind.”

“The Tosevites have a term for this disgusting trickery, which is not unknown among them,” Felless said. “They call it seduction.”

“Tosevite languages have borrowed many words from our tongue,” Veffani said. “How unfortunate that we should have to take such a sordid term from theirs. We never needed it before.”

“Truth,” Felless said. “And I wish we did not need it now.” She let out a worried hiss. “Eventually, smugglers are bound to carry ginger Home. What will it do there, by the Emperor?”

“Nothing good,” the ambassador answered. “I can say no more than that; I have, as yet, no data from which to program the computer to evaluate possible scenarios. But this herb can bring nothing but trouble and disruption to Home. I need no computer to see the truth in that. It brings nothing but trouble and disruption here.”

“With that, superior sir, I cannot possibly disagree,” Felless said. “And now, with your permission, I shall withdraw from your presence.” She did not say she was withdrawing so she could dispose of the ginger in her quarters; after what Veffani had told her, she did not want to admit she had any of the Tosevite herb. If he drew his conclusions from the way she acted, that was one thing. If he had actual evidence of her possessing ginger, that could be something else again.

Her mouth dropped open. He’d mated with her. She’d gone into her season, as ginger made females do. If that didn’t give him some sort of hint that she used the herb, what would?

It was on his mind, for, after using the affirmative hand gesture, he added, “Do bear in mind what I have said, Senior Researcher.”

“It shall be done,” Felless said, and departed. She sneaked back up to the chamber the embassy staff had assigned her, and managed to get inside without having Ttomalss notice her. As males went, he wasn’t a bad fellow. He hadn’t given her ginger in the hope of inciting her to mate, as Veffani’s first secretary had done. So far as she knew, he did not even use the herb. He’d warned her against it before anyone knew the effect it had on females. But even so…

Even so, he’d mated with her. Under most circumstances, that bond was far more casual in the Race than among the Tosevites. Under many circumstances, it was no bond at all. During the season, who could say with certainty with whom one had mated? But ginger changed that, as ginger changed everything Felless knew. She knew only too well, in the cases of Ttomalss and Veffani.

She also knew only too well that she did still have ginger hidden in her office. She opened a drawer, lifted up the folders full of printouts, and took out the vial. Pouring the herb down the sink, letting water wash away the herb, was surely the most expedient course.

Her craving rose up to smite her. She could not throw the ginger away, no matter how hard she tried. She thrust the vial back into the drawer and slammed it shut. Then she stood and quivered for some little while. The temptation was not to take out the vial again and get rid of the ginger. The temptation was to take out the vial again and taste till the ginger was gone.

And then it would do what it did with her mind, bringing exaltation and then crushing depression. And it would do what it did with her body, making her randier than any Big Ugly. And she still craved it. “What am I going to do?” she whispered in desperation and despair. “What can I do?”

A male sidled toward Nesseref as she walked through Lodz. The shuttlecraft pilot watched him with a wariness she’d had to acquire in a hurry. Sure enough, his posture was a little more upright than it might have been. Sure enough, the scales along the midline of his skull kept starting to twitch upright. Sure enough, all that meant the pheromones of an upwind female had addled whatever wits he owned.

“I greet you, superior female,” he said, his voice as ingratiating as he could make it. At least he recognized she was of higher rank; she’d met males too far gone in lust to know or to care.

“I greet you,” she answered resignedly. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he wouldn’t do what she thought he would.

But he did. He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a small glass vial. “How would you like a taste of this?” he asked.

“No!” she said, and used an emphatic cough. That wasn’t empathic enough to make him understand and pay attention to her. He poured some into the palm of his hand, then invitingly held that hand in front of her snout. All she had to do was flick out her tongue and taste the herb.

She pushed him away. He let out a startled squawk, and then a low cry of dismay as the ginger was lost forever. “Curse you, that is not friendly!” he exclaimed.

“It is not friendly to try to make me want to mate when I do not feel like mating, either,” Nesseref said angrily. The male advanced-now, if she was any judge, to hurt her because she’d made him lose some of his precious herb. Used to making quick decisions, she made one here: she lashed out and kicked him as hard as she could. “Go away!” she shouted.

Maybe he hadn’t expected her to fight back. Maybe he hadn’t expected her to start fighting before she did. Whatever he’d expected, she’d given him something else. He hissed in surprise and pain and did scuttle away.

“Well, well,” said someone-a Tosevite-behind her. “That was interesting. Did it mean what I thought it meant?”

Nesseref whirled. The Big Ugly’s voice was familiar, though she still had scant skill at telling Tosevites apart by appearance. “You are Anielewicz, the male I met in Glowno?” she asked. If she was right, splendid. If she was wrong, she would not be embarrassed.

But, as she had been with the male of her own kind, she was right. The Big Ugly’s head bobbed up and down in his kind’s gesture of agreement. “Yes, I am Anielewicz,” he said. “And you are Nesseref. And I have answered your question, and you have not answered mine.”

Was that irony in his voice? With a male of the Race, she would have been certain. Reading Tosevites was harder. Cautiously-but with less caution than she used with the male of her kind-Nesseref said, “How can I answer your question when I do not know what you thought it meant?”

“Did he give you ginger there, or try to, so you would mate with him?” Anielewicz asked.

“Yes, that is what he did.” Spelling it out infuriated Nesseref all over again. “I have tasted ginger, and I have mated while the herb excited me. That male had no business trying to make it excite me.”

“We think alike there,” Anielewicz said. “Sometimes a male Tosevite will give a female alcohol, to make her want to mate or to make her too drunk to stop him from mating with her. We also think this is wrong. Among us, in fact, it is reckoned a crime.”

“It should be,” Nesseref said. “Among us, it is not, though there is talk of making it one. Among us, no one would have or could have done such a thing without this cursed herb, so we did not even consider such possibilities.” She paused thoughtfully. “You Big Uglies have had to do more planning about problems pertaining to reproduction than we have.”

“It has been necessary for us,” Mordechai Anielewicz answered. “Now, with ginger, it may become necessary for you, too.”

“Us, imitating Tosevites?” Nesseref started to laugh, but stopped. “I suppose it could happen. You may have already found solutions for which we would need to spend a long time searching.”

“Truth,” the Big Ugly said. “And now, Shuttlecraft Pilot, may I ask you one question more?”

“You may ask,” Nesseref told him. “I do not promise to answer.”

“You would be a fool if you did promise,” Anielewicz replied. He had good sense for a Big Ugly. No, Nesseref thought. He has good sense. He would have good sense as a male of the Race. He asked his question: “Did you not crave the ginger when the male offered it to you?”

“Some,” Nesseref said. “But, as best I can, I do the things I ought to do, not the things I crave doing.”

To her surprise, Anielewicz burst into the barking laughter of his kind. “You had better be careful, or you will end up a Jew.”

“I do not understand the differences between one group of Tosevites and another,” Nesseref said. “I know there are differences, but I do not see why you put such weight on them.”

“That… is not simple,” the Big Ugly said. “Not all the differences are weighed rationally. I think you of the Race, taken as a whole, are more rational than we Tosevites. We think with our feelings as much as with our brains.”

“I have heard that this is so,” Nesseref replied. “I have seen that it is so, in my small experience of Big Uglies. I find it interesting that a Tosevite should also believe it is so.”

Anielewicz grimaced in such a way that the outer corners of his mouth turned up. Nesseref could not remember whether that meant he was happy or sad. Happy, evidently, for he said, “One friend should not lie to another.”

“Truth,” Nesseref said, and then decided to tease him: “Were you lying to me when you told me you were going to check on that explosive-metal bomb in Glowno? I thought you were, but was I wrong?”

The Big Ugly stood very still. He had a rifle slung on his back, a weapon of Tosevite manufacture. Nesseref had paid it no mind till that moment. She wouldn’t have then, save that he started to reach for it before arresting the motion. “I made a mistake when I ever mentioned that,” he said slowly. “And you, of course, went and told others of the Race.”

She had told Bunim, who hadn’t believed her. She started to say as much, but checked herself. If Anielewicz had been telling the truth then and did not want her or anyone of the Race to know it was truth, she would be in danger if she gave the impression she was the only one who did believe it-with her disposed of, no one would credit it. So all she said was, “Yes, I did that.”

“And now the Race knows where the weapon is,” Anielewicz said with a sigh. He began to reach for the rifle again. Nesseref braced herself to leap for him as she’d attacked the male of her own kind. But he checked himself once more. After shaking his head, he continued, “No blame attaches to you. You could not have known how much this would inconvenience me and my fellow Jews.”

“I do not understand why it does inconvenience you,” Nesseref said. “The Race rules here. No group of Tosevites does. No group of Tosevites can. What need has a small faction like yours for an explosive-metal bomb?”

“You are new to Tosev 3, sure enough,” Mordechai Anielewicz answered patiently. “I must remember: this means you are new to the way groups deal with one another, for the Race has no groups, not as we Tosevites do.”

“And a good thing, too,” Nesseref said, with an emphatic cough. “We do not spend our time squabbling among ourselves. In our unity is our strength.”

Anielewicz’s mouth went up at the corners. “That holds some truth, but only some. With us Tosevites, disunity is our strength. Had we not had so many groups competing against one another, we could never have come far enough fast enough to have resisted when the Race landed on our planet.”

Nesseref wished the Big Uglies had not come far enough fast enough to be able to resist the Race. At the moment, though, that was a side issue. She returned to the main point: “I still do not understand why a small group of Tosevites would need such a thing as an explosive-metal bomb.”

“Because even a large group will think twice about harming a small group that can, if pressed, do a great deal of harm in return,” Mordechai Anielewicz replied. “Even the Race will think twice about harming a small group of Tosevites that can do it a great deal of harm in return. Do you understand now, my friend?”

“Yes, now I understand-at least in theory,” Nesseref said. “But I do not understand why so many Tosevite groups remain small and separate instead of joining together with others.”

“Old hatreds,” Anielewicz said. Nesseref had to laugh at that. Anielewicz laughed, too, in the yipping Tosevite way. He continued, “Nothing here seems old to the Race. I understand that. But it does not matter. Anything that seems old to us may as well be old in truth.”

In one way, that was an absurdity, a logical contradiction. On the other fork of the tongue, though, it made a twisted kind of sense. Many things on Tosev 3, Nesseref was discovering, made that kind of sense if they made any.

Anielewicz had trouble telling females of the Race from males, but he’d gained some skill in reading the reactions males and females had in common. He said, “I think you begin to understand the problem.”

“All I understand is that this world is a much more complicated place than Home,” Nesseref said. “This little place called Poland, for instance. It has Poles in it, which makes sense, and you Jews, which does not.”

“If you think I will argue with that, you are mistaken,” the Tosevite said.

Ignoring the interruption, Nesseref went on, “In one direction are the Deutsche, who hate both Poles and Jews. In the other direction are the Russkis, who also hate both Poles and Jews. Does this make them allies? No! They hate each other, too. Where is the sense in this?”

“Nowhere I can find,” Anielewicz replied; Nesseref got the idea she’d amused him, though she couldn’t understand why. He went on, “Oh, by the way, you missed one thing.”

“And that is?” She was not sure she wanted to know.

Anielewicz told her nonetheless: “Poles and Jews hate each other, too.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Nesseref asked.

“I do not know. Why are you not surprised?” The Tosevite laughed his kind’s laugh once more. Then he asked, “Did you ever find a site you thought would make a good shuttlecraft port?”

“None yet that satisfies me and Bunim both,” Nesseref replied. “And anything near Glowno is also near the explosive-metal bomb you may have.” She chose those words with great care; she did not want him to reach for the rifle again.

“Tell me where you do decide to put the shuttlecraft port, and I will move the bomb close to it,” Anielewicz said, just as if he seriously meant to help.

“Thank you so much,” Nesseref said. “Maybe it is the nature of your reproductive patterns that makes you Big Uglies so full of deceit.”

“Maybe it is,” Anielewicz said. “And maybe the Race will learn such deceit now, too.” And off he went, having got the last word.

Today, of course, Mordechai Anielewicz’s legs decided to act up on him. He had to keep stopping to rest as he bicycled up to Glowno. Had he not breathed in that nerve gas all those years before, he would have been able to make the trip with ease. Of course, had he not breathed in that nerve gas, the Nazis might have touched off the atomic bomb with which he was presently concerned. In that case, he wouldn’t be breathing at all at the moment.

He had radio and telephone codes warning the Jews who kept an eye on the bomb of an emergency. He hadn’t used them. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake by not using them. He’d feared those warnings might be intercepted. If he brought the alert himself, it couldn’t very well be. He didn’t think Lizard commandos would rush the shed where the bomb lay hidden before he could get up to it. He wasn’t sure they would rush it at all. But he’d run his mouth when he shouldn’t have, and now he was paying the price in worry. And he wanted to be on the spot if the alarm came-that was the other reason he hadn’t used his codes.

He dug his fingers into the backs of his calves, trying to loosen up the muscles there. The rest of him could be philosophical about breathing in nerve gas. His legs hurt. As if in sympathy, his shoulders started aching, too. Trying to rub one’s own back was among the most unsatisfactory procedures ever devised.

Pain or no pain, he got rolling again. Ludmila Jager lived with more discomfort every day than he felt when his aches and pains were at their worst. But, again, that was philosophy. It might spur him on, but didn’t make his body feel any better.

Grunting, he leaned forward and put his back into the work. No matter what he did, he couldn’t recapture the ease of motion he’d known the last time he went up to Glowno. By the time he got to the small Polish town, he was about ready to fall off his bicycle.

Before he went to the shed where the bomb hid, he walked into a tavern to wash the dust of the road from his throat. “A mug of beer,” he said to the Pole behind the bar, and set down a coin.

“Here you go, pal.” The fellow slid the mug to him without a second glance. He looked no more Jewish than the half dozen or so men already in the place. As usual, he had his Mauser on his back. Compared to them, he was underdressed. A couple of them wore crisscrossed bandoleers, giving themselves a fine piratical aspect. One had an old Polish helmet on his head, another a German model with the swastika-bearing shield on one side painted over.

“Yeah, we’ll take it,” the tough in the Polish helmet said, knocking back some plum brandy. “We’ll take it, and we’ll get it the hell out of here.”

One of his pals sighed. It might have been the sigh of a lover pining for his beloved. “And when we’ve got it, we’ll be the big shots,” he crooned.

Mordechai sipped his beer, wondering what sort of robbery the roughnecks were plotting. Finding out seemed a bad idea. They had a lot more firepower than he did. He wondered how much cash the local bank held. Then he wondered if Glowno boasted a local bank.

“We’ll be big, all right,” another ruffian said. “And about time, too. The kikes will all burn in hell, but they act like cocks o’ the walk here. Been going on too damn long, anybody wants to know.”

“Won’t last forever,” said the first tough, the one with the helmet. “As soon as they lose it and we get it, everybody’s going to have to listen to us.”

After that, Anielewicz didn’t think they were going to knock over a bank any more. He knew how Nesseref had found out the explosive-metal bomb was here: he’d talked too damn much. He had no idea how these Poles had found out, but how they’d found out didn’t matter. That they’d found out did.

He finished the beer and slipped out of the tavern. The ruffians paid him no attention. They had no idea they’d said anything he might understand-or care about if he did. He looked like a Pole. If he knew what they were talking about, they’d figure he’d be cheering them on.

A lot of Poles would have cheered. The Lizards in Poland did lean toward the Jews. That was partly because the Jews had leaned toward them and against the Nazis in 1942. It was also because there were a lot more Poles than Jews; the Lizards got more benefit from supporting small faction against large than they would have the other way round.

Furthermore, Jews did not dream of an independent Poland strong enough to defy all its neighbors. Poles did. Anielewicz thought the dream a delusion even if the Poles got their hands on an explosive-metal bomb. They didn’t, for which he could hardly blame them-except that they wanted his bomb.

His legs groaned when he got back on the bicycle. He didn’t think the Polish nationalists could touch off the bomb even if they got it, but he didn’t want to find out. He wasn’t sure the Jews could touch it off, either. He didn’t want to find that out any more than the other. Pulling down the Philistines’ temple while he was in it had made Samson famous, but he never got to hear about it.

The shed in which the bomb was stored lay at, or rather just beyond, the northern edge of Glowno. Before the war, it had been attached to a livery stable. Livery stables, these days, were in no greater demand in Glowno than anywhere else. That part of town had taken damage in the fighting between the Nazis and the Poles, too, and then again in the fighting between the Nazis and the Lizards. Rubble and scrubby second growth surrounded the shed. There were only a couple of houses in the area, both owned by Jews. The Poles were just as glad the Jews had chosen an area where they didn’t draw attention to themselves.

Anielewicz swung off his bicycle as soon as the poplars and birches and bushy plants of whose names he wasn’t sure screened him from most of the town. “Good thing you did that,” somebody remarked, “or you’d have been mighty sorry you were ever born.”

That warning might have been in Yiddish, but Anielewicz had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud: it came straight from a U.S. Western film he’d watched the week before dubbed into Polish. He fought down the temptation to respond in kind. Instead, he said, “How many guards can we get in a hurry, Joshua? We’re about to be attacked.”

“Oy!” the unseen Jew said. “There’s Mottel and there’s me, and we can get Pinkhas, I guess. Benjamin and Yitzkhak would be around, but their cousin got hit by a bus in Warsaw, so they’re there.”

“Get everybody here, fast but quiet,” Mordechai ordered. “Who’s on the switch?” If that switch was tripped, the bomb would go up-if it could go up. Somebody always had to be ready to use it.

“You are, now,” Joshua answered. “You know the bomb better than anybody, and-” He broke off. He’d undoubtedly been about to say something like, and you’d have the nerve to do it. Anielewicz didn’t know if he would or not. One more thing he wasn’t anxious to discover by experiment. After a moment, Joshua asked, “How much time have we got?”

“I don’t know, not exactly,” Anielewicz answered. “I saw six Poles drinking in a tavern. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they do what they came to do. I don’t know if they have any friends along, either.”

“It would be nice if you did know a few things,” Joshua remarked.

Ignoring that, Anielewicz picked his way up the twisting path to the shed. The wooden building looked weathered and sad. The two locks on the door seemed to have seen better days. Anielewicz opened them in the right order. Had he unlocked the top one first, something unpleasant would have happened to him.

He went inside. It was dark and dusty in there; a cobweb caught in his hair. But the interior was very different from the exterior. Inside the rainand sun-faded timbers the shed showed the world was reinforced concrete thick enough to challenge medium artillery. It had firing slits for a German-made machine gun; the MG-42 was at least as good a weapon as any the Lizards manufactured.

Also keeping Anielewicz company was the big crate that housed the bomb. He wondered what those half-dozen Poles would do with it if they got it. Did they think they could put it in their back pocket and walk off with it? That would need to be a big, sturdy pocket, considering the size and weight of the thing.

He supposed he should have been glad the Lizards weren’t attacking. They would have known what they were doing, and would have come in overwhelming force. All the Poles knew was that the Jews had something they wanted. Back in the old days, that was all the Poles had needed to know. Things were different now, even if the nationalists hadn’t figured that out.

“A good gun battle will teach them,” Mordechai muttered under his breath. But that wasn’t the answer, either. With or without a gun battle, the bomb would have to leave Glowno now. That was obvious. One small hitch, though: how could it leave? Everyone would be watching the shed from now on.

Joshua came in, not through the door but up out of a tunnel that ran from somewhere in the middle of the rank second growth. “People are posted,” he said. “We’ll give them more than what they want.”

“Good,” Anielewicz said. Sudden decision crystallized in him. “You stay here. You can handle the detonator if you have to. I’m going to try to make sure you don’t have to.”

Before Joshua could protest, Anielewicz opened the door-it was very heavy, but well balanced and mounted on strong hinges, so it swung easily-and stepped outside again. He stooped and picked up a rather rusty large nail or small spike from the dirt by the shed. Smiling a little, he went down the track and waited.

After about half an hour, his patience was rewarded. Here came the Polish nationalists, all of them with weapons at the ready. Mordechai stepped out into the open where they could see him. He held up the nail or spike so the head and a little of the shank protruded from his fist. “Hello, boys,” he said in friendly tones. “If I drop this, the bomb goes off. That means you want to be careful where you point those guns, doesn’t it?”

One of the Poles crossed himself. Another one said, “Christ, it’s that bastard from the tavern. Damn him, he doesn’t look like a Jew!”

“Life is full of surprises,” Anielewicz said, still bland. “The last surprise you’ll ever get, though, is how high you’ll blow. If we Jews don’t keep the bomb, nobody gets it, and that’s a promise.”

If another band was heading for the shed from a different direction, none of this playacting would matter. But, by the way the Poles talked furiously among themselves, Anielewicz didn’t think that was so.

A tough shook a fist in his direction. “You damned Jews won’t keep this thing forever!”

“Maybe not,” Mordechai answered. He thought it all too likely, in fact. They’d have to move the bomb and hide it again, which wouldn’t be easy-it wasn’t the simplest thing either to move or to conceal. But if they didn’t, they’d face more raids, a stronger one from the Polish nationalists or one from the Lizards or the Nazis or even the Russians. He went on, “But we’ve got it now, and you won’t be the ones who get it away from us.”

A Pole raised a submachine gun and started to point it at him. Two of the fellow’s pals slapped the weapon down again. They believed the nail was a dead-man switch. Slowly, sullenly, they withdrew. One of them shook his fist at Mordechai. Anielewicz made as if to wave with the hand holding the nail. That got all the Poles moving faster.

He allowed himself a sigh of relief. This raid had fizzled. He owed Nesseref a big thank-you for getting him worried about Glowno. He wondered if he’d ever be able to explain that to her. He doubted it. Too bad, he thought.

Vyacheslav Molotov looked at his leading advisors. “Comrades, the Lizards have shown us a weakness we did not previously know they possessed. The question before us is, how can we most effectively exploit it?”

“It is not a military weakness, not in the strict sense of the words,” Georgi Zhukov observed. “I wish it were, but it is not.”

“Why do you say that, Georgi Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.

“Because the Lizards’ military personnel are all males,” the Soviet marshal answered. “A ginger bomb at a front would not send them into a mating frenzy, as there would be no females close by to incite.”

Lavrenti Beria smiled. “Against the Lizards, ginger is not a military weapon-I agree with Georgi Konstantinovich. Rather, it is a weapon of terror, a weapon of subversion. I look forward to using it.”

Of course you do, Molotov thought. Is that the smile you wear when you do dreadful things to a young girl? He forced his mind back to the meeting. And of course you agree with Zhukov. If ginger is a weapon of subversion, it is a weapon for the NKVD, not the Red Army. Zhukov was careless, to renounce it so fast.

He turned to the foreign commissar. “Has anyone learned who fired the missiles at the Lizards’ Australian colony, Andrei Andreyevich?”

Gromyko sipped from a glass of sweet tea before shaking his head. “No, Comrade General Secretary, not with certainty-or, if the Lizards know, they are holding the information tight against their chests.”

“Lavrenti Pavlovich?” Molotov asked. Beria had channels Gromyko lacked.

But the chief of the NKVD shook his bald head. “Too many candidates. We did not do it; I know that. But the Nazis might have. The Americans might. And this is a more difficult problem than the massacre of the ships from the colonization fleet in orbit, because the British or the Japanese might also have done it.”

“In a way, I am glad we did not do it,” Molotov said. His colleagues nodded. All of them, even Beria, were at bottom prudes. Beria, Molotov suspected, got some of his vicious pleasure because of the strength of the rules he was breaking.

As Hitler had before him, Himmler made loud noises about the high moral tone of the Greater German Reich. Would that keep him from doing whatever he could to advance his interests? Molotov didn’t believe it for a minute. The Americans and British were decadent capitalists, so they would have few moral scruples. And the Japanese Empire had never shown scruples of any sort. Sure enough, the field was wide open.

Zhukov said, “For myself, I am sorry we did not think of it.” A leer spread over his broad peasant face. “I would have paid money to watch all the Lizards screwing their heads off. Serves them right for laughing at us for so long.”

Gromyko took another sip from his glass of tea. “It does disrupt them, as Lavrenti Pavlovich has said. But I wish whoever had this idea would have saved it till a critical moment instead of using it to make a nuisance of himself and no more.”

“Spoken like a good pragmatist,” Molotov said: high praise from him. He turned to Beria and Zhukov. “Would the wreckage from the missiles have given the Lizards some clues as to who did this?”

“Comrade General Secretary, anyone who would launch his own missiles at the Lizards is such a fool, he would deserve to get caught,” Beria said.

“I agree,” Zhukov said, not sounding happy about agreeing with Beria on anything. “But my colleagues in the Red Navy tell me it would not be so easy to fire a mongrel missile from a submarine. If anything went wrong, the missile might explode in its launch tube, which would destroy the ship.”

“Boat,” Gromyko said. “Submarines are called boats.”

“Submarines are toys for the devil’s grandson,” Zhukov retorted. He muttered something else. Molotov’s hearing wasn’t what it had been; he didn’t catch all of it. He did catch boats and damned civilians and a couple of new references to Satan’s near relations.

Gromyko might have heard all of Zhukov’s bad-tempered tirade, or he might have heard none of it. If he had heard, his face didn’t know about it. He said, “On the basis of geography, the Japanese are likeliest to be guilty.”

“Submarines are sneaky devils,” Zhukov said, apparently determined to disagree with the foreign commissar because Gromyko had presumed to correct him. “The new ones, the ones with atomic motors, hardly need to surface at all. And even a diesel boat ”-he gave Gromyko another sour look-“with a breathing tube could be a long, long way from Australia before it had to fuel.”

However spiteful that was, it was also true. “No evidence, then,” Molotov said. No one disagreed with him. He wished someone would have.

“Ginger bombs are not something over which the Lizards will start a war, as they would over atomic weapons.” Gromyko coughed. “No one goes to war because he is made too happy.”

Beria chuckled at that. Zhukov remained grumpy. Molotov asked, “Were the Lizards made so happy, they could not carry on? If happiness of that sort incapacitates them, they may well fight to prevent it.”

“I believe that to be so, Comrade General Secretary,” Beria said. “Signals intercepts indicate that they feared nuclear missiles following on the heels of the ones loaded with ginger.”

Zhukov nodded. If he was annoyed enough at Gromyko to take Beria’s side, Molotov would have to do something about that. Before he could speak, Zhukov added, “Intercepts also indicate that the Lizards’ fleetlord was in Australia during the ginger attack. That must have made them even jumpier than they would have been anyhow.”

“Are you certain?” Beria leaned forward. “I have received no such reports.”

Zhukov looked smug. “Sometimes military intelligence can do what ordinary spies cannot. This is why we have the GRU as well as the NKVD.”

Beria scribbled something on a notepad, then angrily tore off the sheet, ripped it to shreds, and threw it away. Molotov sat motionless. Inside, though, he was grinning from ear to ear. He hadn’t even needed to turn Zhukov and Beria against each other; they’d taken care of it for themselves. And a good thing, too, he thought. Anything he could do to keep the Red Army and the NKVD at odds with each other, he would. And if he didn’t have to… so much the better.

Gromyko coughed. “In another matter, I have heard that there was an attempt to hijack the nuclear bomb the Jews are said to have in Poland. I am given to understand that it failed.”

“Too bad,” Molotov said insincerely.

“Not necessarily,” Zhukov said. “Some of those Poles might want to use the bomb against us, not the Lizards.”

“That is an unpleasant thought,” Molotov said in the same tone of voice he’d used before. “Even so, the greater the instability within Poland, the greater the advantages for us.” Everyone nodded at that. Molotov added, “This merely proves the nationalists’ incompetence. Knowing them to be ineffective is valuable for us. Were they better at what they do, they would be more dangerous.”

“Were they better at what they do, they would be Nazis,” Gromyko said.

Molotov nodded. “Many of them would like to be Nazis. Many of them, in 1939, were even more reactionary than the Nazis. Spending a couple of years under German rule would have been a useful corrective for that. But they have been under Lizard control for a generation now: time enough to forget such lessons. They will cause the Lizards trouble one day before too long, and that means they will also cause trouble for the Germans and us.”

“Then why,” Beria asked, “did you authorize our operative to tell the nationalists where the Jews were hiding their bomb?”

Before answering, Molotov weighed the startled expression on Zhukov’s face and the stony one on Gromyko’s. Gromyko looked that stony only when concealing what he really thought. Here he was probably concealing horror. Molotov did not look toward Beria. Maybe the NKVD chief would prove smug, maybe he would manage to hold in what he was thinking. But, just as Molotov stirred up dissension among his advisors, so Beria was trying to rouse dissension against the General Secretary. Yes, Lavrenti Pavlovich wanted to follow Himmler to the top.

“Why?” Molotov said, letting none of that show in his face or his voice. “Because I expected the reactionaries to fail and be discredited: a bomb like this early German model weighs a good many tonnes, and is not easy to move. And even if the nationalists did succeed in stealing it, they are likelier to use it against the Lizards or the Jews or the Nazis than against us. A small risk, I thought-and I was right.”

Zhukov relaxed. Gromyko went right on showing the world nothing. And Beria-Beria fumed. Like so many from down in the Caucasus, he had trouble holding on to his temper. Stalin had been the same way. Stalin, though, had been even more frightening. Molotov used Zhukov and Gromyko to check Beria. No one had been able to check Stalin, not in anything that really mattered.

Perhaps realizing he was checked now, Beria changed the subject: “Comrade General Secretary, I am pleased to report that we have successfully delivered a sizable shipment of arms to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”

“That is good news,” Molotov agreed. “I am given to understand, however, that Mao’s emissary to the United States still attracts a good deal of favorable notice in the American press, and that it is likely President Warren will try to get weapons through to the People’s Liberation Army.”

“If you want her assassinated, I will see what I can do,” Beria said. “Blaming it on the Lizards should not be too difficult.”

“Assassinations have dangerous and unpredictable consequences,” Gromyko said. “They are a strategy of last resort, not one of first instance. The risks here outweigh the benefits.”

“How so?” Beria said defiantly.

“America can never have the influence in China we do,” the foreign commissar replied. “Never, with geography as it is and politics as they are now. U.S. access to the mainland of Asia is too limited. The Japanese Empire and the Pacific Ocean prevent it from being anything else-especially when Japan has her own ambitions in China, which she does. We, on the other hand, can penetrate the Chinese frontier at any point of our choosing along thousands of kilometers. Let the Americans do the Lizards in China a little harm. It is all they can do.”

“A reasonable answer, I think, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” Molotov said. “Your comments? Counterarguments?”

“Never mind.” Beria turned his head to glare at Gromyko. The chandeliers overhead made the lenses of his spectacles look like opaque golden ellipses to Molotov. Yes, a barn owl, Molotov thought. That’s what he reminds me of. Gromyko looked back at Beria, imperturbable as always.

Molotov dismissed the meeting a few minutes later. He had a better sense now of what the Soviet Union should and should not try to do. He’d also kept his subordinates divided. As he lit a cigarette, he wondered which was more important.