Second Contact

2

Peking brawled around Liu Han. She wore the long, dark blue tunic and trousers and the conical straw hat of a peasant woman. She had no trouble playing the role; she’d lived it till the little scaly devils came down from the sky and turned China-turned the whole world-upside down.

Her daughter, Liu Mei, who walked along the hutung — the alleyway-beside her, was proof of that. Turning to Liu Han, she said, “I hope we won’t be late.”

“Don’t worry,” Liu Han answered. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

Liu Mei nodded, her face serious. Her face was almost always serious, even when she laughed. The scaly devils had taken her from Liu Han right after she was born, and had kept her in one of their airplanes that never landed for her first year of life outside the womb-her second year of age, as the Chinese reckoned such things. When a baby, she should have learned to smile by watching people around her. But she’d had only little scaly devils around her, and they never smiled-they could not smile. Liu Mei hadn’t learned how.

“I should have liquidated that Ttomalss when I had the chance,” Liu Han said, her hands folding into fists. “Mercy has no place in the struggle against imperialism. I understand that now much better than I did when you were tiny.”

“Truly, Mother, too late to fret over it now,” Liu Mei replied- seriously. Liu Han walked on in grim silence. Her daughter was right, but that left her no happier.

She and Liu Mei both flattened themselves against the splintery front wall of a shop as a burly, sweating man with a load of bricks on a carrying pole edged past them going the other way. He leered at Liu Mei, showing a couple of broken teeth. “If you show me your body, I will show you silver,” he said.

“No,” Liu Mei answered.

Liu Han did not think that was rejection enough, or anywhere close to it. “Go on, get out of here, you stinking turtle,” she screeched at the laborer. “Just because your mother was a whore, you think all women are whores.”

“You would starve as a whore,” the man snarled. But he walked on.

The hutung opened out onto P’ing Tse Men Ta Chieh, the main street leading east into Peking from the P’ing Tse Gate. “Be careful,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “Scaly devils seldom come into hutungs, and they are often sorry when they do. But they do patrol the main streets.”

Sure enough, here came a squad of them, swaggering down the middle of the broad street and expecting everyone to get out of their way. When people didn’t move fast enough to suit them, they shouted either in their own language-which they expected humans to understand-or in bad Chinese.

Liu Han kept walking. Even after twenty years of practice, the scaly devils had trouble telling one person from another. Liu Mei bent her head so the brim of her hat helped hide her features. She did not look quite like a typical Chinese, and a bright little devil might notice as much.

“They are past us,” Liu Han said quietly, and her daughter straightened up once more. Liu Mei’s eyes were of the proper almond shape. Her nose, though, was almost as prominent as a foreign devil’s, and her face was narrower and more forward-thrusting than Liu Han’s. The black hair the hat concealed refused to lie straight, but had a springy wave to it.

She was a pretty girl-prettier than I was at that age, Liu Han thought-which worried her mother as much as or more than it pleased her. Liu Mei’s father, an American named Bobby Fiore, was dead; the scaly devils had shot him before she was born. Before that, he, like Liu Han, had been a captive on one of those airplanes that never landed. They’d been forced to couple-the little scaly devils had enormous trouble understanding matters of the pillow (hardly surprising, when they came into heat like barnyard animals)-and he’d got her with child.

Off to the east, toward or maybe past the Forbidden City, gunfire crackled. The sound was absurdly cheerful, like the fireworks used to celebrate the new year. Liu Mei said, “I didn’t know we were doing anything today.”

“We’re not,” Liu Han said shortly. The Communists were not the only ones carrying on a long guerrilla campaign against the scaly devils. The reactionaries of the Kuomintang had not abandoned the field. They and Mao’s followers fought each other as well as the little devils.

And the eastern dwarfs kept sending men across the Sea of Japan to raise trouble for the little scaly devils and the Chinese alike. Japan had had imperialist pretensions in China years before the little devils arrived, and resented being excluded from what had been her bowl of rice.

More scaly devils whizzed past, these in a vehicle mounting a machine gun. They headed in the direction of the firing. None of them turned so much as an eye turret in Liu Han’s direction. Liu Han decided to make a lesson of it. “This is why we are strong in the cities,” she said to Liu Mei. “In the cities, we swim unnoticed. In the countryside, where every family has known its neighbors forever and a day, staying hidden is harder.”

“I understand, Mother,” Liu Mei said. “But this also works for the Kuomintang, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” Liu Han agreed. “A knife will cut for whoever takes it in hand.” She nodded to her daughter. “You are quick. You need to be quick, the way the world is today.”

When she was Liu Mei’s age and even older, all she’d wanted to do was go on living as she and her ancestors always had. But the Japanese had come to her village, killing her husband and her little son. And then the little scaly devils had come, driving out the eastern dwarfs and capturing her. She, who had not even thought of going to the city, was uprooted from everything she’d ever known.

And she’d thrived. Oh, it hadn’t been easy, but she’d done it. She had abilities she hadn’t even suspected. Once in a while, when she was in an uncommonly kindly mood, she thought she owed the little scaly devils some gratitude for liberating her from her former, ever so limited, life.

She glanced over to Liu Mei. She owed the scaly devils something else for what they’d done to her daughter. And she’d been giving them what she owed them ever since. That debt might never be paid in full, but she intended to keep on trying.

Liu Mei’s face did not change much even when she laughed. She laughed now, laughed and pointed. “Look, Mother! More devil-boys!”

“I see them,” Liu Han said grimly. She did not find the young people-boys and shameless girls, too-in any way amusing. When foreign devils from Europe spread their imperialistic web through China, some Chinese had imitated them in dress and food and way of life because they were powerful. The same thing was happening now with respect to the scaly devils.

This particular pack of devil-boys took things further than most. Like most such bands, they wore tight shirts and trousers printed in patterns that mimicked body paint, but several had shaved not only their heads but also their eyebrows in an effort to make themselves look as much like scaly devils as they could. They larded their speech with affirmative and interrogative coughs and words from the little scaly devils’ language.

Many older people gave way before them, almost as they might have for real scaly devils. Liu Han did not. Stolid as if she were alone on the sidewalk, she strode straight through them, Liu Mei beside her. “Be careful, foolish female!” one of the devil-boys hissed in the scaly devils’ tongue. His friends giggled to hear him insult someone who would not understand.

But Liu Han did understand. That she was part of the revolutionary struggle against the little scaly devils did not mean she had not studied them-just the opposite, in fact. She whirled and hissed back: “Be silent, hatchling from an addled egg!”

How the devil-boys stared! Not all of them understood what she’d said. But they could hardly fail to understand that a plain, middle-aged woman spoke the little devils’ language at least as well as they did-and that she was not afraid of them. The ones who did understand giggled again, this time at their friend’s discomfiture.

The boy who had first mocked Liu Han spoke in Chinese now: “How did you learn that language?” He did not even add an interrogative cough.

“None of your business,” Liu Han snapped. She was already regretting her sharp answer. She and Liu Mei were not perfectly safe in Peking. Sometimes the little devils treated Chinese Communist Party officials like officials from the foreign devils’ governments they recognized. Sometimes they treated them like bandits, even if the Communists made them sorry when they did.

“What about you, good-looking one?” The devil-boy shifted back to the scaly devils’ speech to aim a question at Liu Mei. He showed ingenuity as well as brashness, for the little devils’ language was short on endearments. They did not need them among themselves, not when they had a mating season and no females to put them into it.

“I am none of your business, either,” Liu Mei answered in the little devils’ tongue. She’d begun to pick it up as her birth speech before Ttomalss had to return her to Liu Han. Maybe that had helped her reacquire it later, after she’d become fluent in Chinese. She threw in an emphatic cough to show how much she wasn’t the devil-boy’s business.

Instead of deflating, he laughed and folded himself into the scaly devils’ posture of respect. “It shall not be done, superior female!” he said, with an emphatic cough of his own.

That was when he began to interest Liu Han. “You speak the little scaly devils’ language well,” she said in Chinese. “What is your name?”

“I ought to say, ‘None of your business,’ ” the devil-boy replied. That was apt to be true in more ways than one; people who asked such questions could put those who answered them in danger. But the devil-boy went on, “It does not much matter, though, for everyone knows I am Tao Sheng-Ming.” He returned to the scaly devils’ tongue: “Is that not a foolish name for a male of the Race?”

Those of his friends who understood whooped with glee and slapped their thighs with the palms of their hands. In spite of herself, Liu Han smiled. Tao Sheng-Ming seemed to take nothing seriously, not his own Chinese blood and not the little devils he aped, either. But he was plainly bright; if he discovered the proper ideology, he might become very valuable.

Thoughtfully, Liu Han said, “Well, Tao Sheng-Ming, if you are ever on Nan Yang Shih K’uo — South Sheep Market Mouth-in the eastern part of the city, you might look for Ma’s brocade shop there.”

“And what would I find in it?” Tao asked.

“Why, brocade, of course,” Liu Han answered innocently. “Ask for Old Lin. He will show you everything you need.”

If Tao Sheng-Ming did ask for Old Lin, he would be recruited. Maybe he would pay attention. Maybe, being a devil-boy with an itch for trouble, he wouldn’t. Still, Liu Han judged the effort worth making.

Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker was one of the lucky ones who went out into space: he enjoyed being weightless. Some of the men in the Reich Rocket Force had to nurse their stomachs through every tour in orbit. Not Drucker. His problem was working hard enough on the exercise bicycle to keep from coming home a couple of kilos heavier than when he’d gone up.

And the view from up here was beyond compare. Right now, his orbit was carrying him southeast across the United States, toward the Gulf of Mexico. Through swirling clouds, he could see plains and forests and, coming up swiftly, the deep blue of the sea. And, when he lifted his eyes to the stars blazing in the black sky of space, that was just as fine in a different way.

But he couldn’t gawp for too long. His eyes flicked to the instruments that monitored oxygen, CO2, the batteries-literally, the things that kept him breathing. Everything there was fine. And he’d used very little fuel from the maneuvering rockets so far this tour. He could change his orbit considerably if he had to.

Then he was looking out the window again, this time to the sides and rear. Like its smaller predecessors, the A-45 was an Army project, but the Focke-Wulf design bureau had given the manned upper stage a cockpit view a fighter pilot might have envied. He needed it; he depended far more on his own senses than did Lizard pilots, who had fancier electronics to help them.

Below and to either side were the bulges of his missile tubes, a thermonuclear sting in each of them. If he got the order, he could blow a couple of Lizards or Russians or Americans out of the sky-or, for that matter, aim the missiles at land targets.

Sun sparkled off the titanium wings on which he’d ride back to Earth. The swastikas on the wings were due for repainting; this upper stage had made several landings since the last time they’d been slapped on. He shrugged. That sort of stuff was for people down on the ground to worry about. Up here, as in any combat assignment, what you did counted. What you looked like didn’t.

Drucker lightly touched the control stick. “Just a damn driver,” he muttered. “That’s all I’ve ever been, just a damn driver.” He’d driven panzers against the French, against the Russians, and then against the Lizards before setting his sights higher both figuratively and literally. This upper stage-he’d named it Kathe, after his wife- responded far more smoothly and easily than the big grunting machines he’d formerly guided.

Of course, if a shell slammed into a panzer, he had some chance of bailing out. If anyone ever decided to expend a missile on him here, odds were a million to one he’d never know what hit him.

His wireless set crackled to life. “German pilot, this is the U.S. tracking facility in Hot Springs. Do you read me? Over.” A moment later, the American radioman switched from English to badly accented German.

Like most who flew into space, Drucker spoke some English and Russian-and some of the Lizards’ language-along with his German. “Hot Springs tracking, this is the German rocket,” he said. “How do I look? Over.”

It wasn’t an academic question. By his own navigation, he was in the orbit calculated for him. If American radar showed otherwise, though, things might get sticky. Unexpected changes in course from a spacecraft carrying nuclear weapons had a way of making people nervous.

But the American answered, “In the groove,” which let him relax. Then the fellow said, “How’s the weather up there, Hans? Over.”

“Very bad,” Drucker answered seriously. “Rain last night, and a snowstorm ahead. Is that you, Joe? Over.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Joe said with a laugh at Drucker’s attempt at humor: weather was one thing-maybe the only thing-he didn’t have to worry about in space. “You’ll be coming down from your tour in another few orbits, won’t you? Over.”

“I do not answer this sort of question,” Drucker said. “You know I do not answer this sort of question. Your pilots do not answer this sort of question when we ask. Over.”

“You stay nosy, though, and so do we,” Joe answered, not in the least put out. “Have yourself a safe landing. I’ll talk to you some more when you come up for another turn. Over and out.”

“Thank you-over and out,” Drucker said. The American’s signal had started to break up before strengthening. Like the Reich and the Soviet Union, the USA had strings of ships that relayed transmissions to pilots wherever above the Earth they might be. The Lizards were the only ones who didn’t need to bother with that. For one thing, they had more communications satellites and other spacecraft in orbit than all the human powers put together. For another, they had ground stations around the world, which no human power did.

Drucker scowled. And now their colonization fleet was beginning to join the conquest fleet. The colonists had set out from Tau Ceti II about the time the conquest fleet reached Earth. They’d expected a world subdued and waiting for them. Hitler didn’t let that happen, Drucker thought proudly. Could he have done so without harming the Greater German Reich, he would have blasted every Lizard spacecraft out of the sky. He couldn’t. No human could. What would happen when the colonists started coming down to Earth was something he didn’t like to think about.

What would happen when he came back to Earth was less important to human history, but much more immediately urgent to him. Joe’s Have yourself a safe landing hadn’t been idle chatter. The upper stage Drucker rode, like all manmade spacecraft, was an uneasy blend of human and Lizard technology. The Wall of Heroes at Peenemunde had all too many names inscribed on it. Despite the handsome pension that would accrue to his widow, Drucker did not want his added to it.

He slid over the Atlantic in a matter of minutes, and then across Africa. The whole continent belonged to the Lizards. Some small rebellion still simmered in what had been the Union of South Africa, enough to keep the Lizards from exploiting the minerals there as fully as they might have. Other than that, the whole great land mass was theirs to do with as they would.

When his orbit swung north of the equator once more, he got a call from a Soviet radar station. The Russians also confirmed that he was where they expected him to be. His conversation with them, unlike the one with the American radioman, was coldly formal. He would have got rid of them, too, could he only have done it safely, and he knew they felt the same way about him. He scowled again. If only the Lizards hadn’t come along when they did, the Reich would have put paid to Bolshevism once for all.

He couldn’t do anything about that, either. The world, when you got down to it, could be a pretty unsatisfactory place.

An orbit and a half before he was supposed to land, he radioed a German relay ship and confirmed that he was coming back to Earth. He spoke in clear-code made listeners nervous, and the Lizards certainly were monitoring his transmissions, the Americans and Russians probably were, and the British and Japanese might be.

A touch of a button fired the retarding rockets in the nose of his spacecraft. As soon as they had burned long enough to slow the craft and take him out of orbit, he shut them down. The touch of another button slid covers over the openings to their motors. He breathed easier when sensors confirmed all three covers were in place. A motor opening left unsealed would have wrecked his aerodynamics, his spacecraft, and him.

As he slid back into the atmosphere, the nose of the craft and the leading edges of the wings glowed red. The ablative coating on them was a Lizard invention that all three human nations that put men into space had stolen. Little by little, the stick came alive in Drucker’s hands. Before long, he was flying the upper stage like a large, heavy glider.

Germany’s Baltic coastline was anything but interesting, especially after so many of the Earthly marvels he’d seen from space: nothing but low, flat land sloping ever so gradually downward toward the gray, shallow sea.

Another reassuring sound was that of the landing gear coming down. Drucker landed the upper stage on a long concrete runway. After two weeks of weightlessness, he felt as if he had someone-or maybe two or three someones-sitting on his chest. Moving like an old, old man, he climbed out of the hatch set into the side of the spacecraft and down a little ladder to the runway.

Having fire trucks standing by was normal. Having groundcrew men jogging up to take charge of the upper stage was also normal. So was having the base commandant, a major general with the silver-gray Waffenfarb of the Rocket Force coming up to greet him. Having a couple of SS men in long black coats accompanying the general, though, was anything but normal.

Drucker’s eyes narrowed. His dislike for the SS went back almost half a lifetime, to a day when he and other enlisted men of his panzer crew had cheated them of their chosen prey. No one he knew liked the SS. Everyone he knew feared the SS. He feared the SS himself, and feared the men in black the more because his past, if it ever came out, left him vulnerable to them even after all these years.

As they came up to him, their right arms shot out and up in perfect unison. “Heil Himmler!” they chorused.

“Heil!” Drucker returned the salute. He turned to Major General Dornberger, a decent enough fellow. “What’s up, sir?”

Before Dornberger could speak, one of the SS men said, “You are Drucker, Johannes, lieutenant colonel, pay number-” He rattled it off.

“I am.” Drucker would much sooner not have been standing there. His feet hurt, his back hurt, even his hair seemed to hurt. He wanted to go somewhere, sit down-or, better yet, lie down-and make his report. After riding a rocket into space, wasn’t he entitled to a little comfort? A bottle of schnapps would have been nice, too. “Who are you?” he asked, as cuttingly as he dared.

The SS man ignored him. “You are to consider yourself removed from the roster of approved Reich Rocket Force pilots, effective this date and pending investigation and interrogation,” he droned.

“What?” Drucker stared. “Why? What did I do? What in blazes could I have done? I’ve been out in space, in case you hadn’t noticed.” Inside, he shivered. Had his past risen up to bite him after all?

“You will come with us immediately for interrogation and evaluation,” the SS man said. “We have discovered reliable evidence that your wife’s paternal grandmother was a Jew.” Drucker’s jaw fell open. Kathe had never said a word about that, not in all the years he’d known her. He wondered if she’d known herself. “Come,” the SS man snapped. Numbly, Drucker came.

Mordechai Anielewicz whistled as he rode a bicycle along a road not far from the border between Lizard-occupied Poland and the Greater German Reich. A farmer was weeding not far from the side of the road. Anielewicz waved to him. “Have you stopped beating your wife, Boleslaw?” he called.

The Pole waved to him. “Devils will roast you in hell, you damned Jew.”

They both laughed. Anielewicz kept pedaling up the road toward Lodz. If Poland wasn’t the most peculiar country in the world, he couldn’t imagine what was. Just for starters, it was the only place he could think of where most of the inhabitants were happier to have the Lizards in charge than they would have been with human beings. Of course, given that the choices in human overlords were limited to the Reich and the Soviet Union, that made better sense in Poland than it did most other places.

Oh, some Poles went on and on about regaining their independence. They fondly imagined they could keep that independence more than about twenty minutes if the Lizards ever decided to leave. They’d managed to keep it for twenty years after World War I, but both their big neighbors had been weak then. The USSR and, to Mordechai’s regret, Germany weren’t weak now.

And the Jews who survived in Poland weren’t weak these days, either. Anielewicz had a submachine gun slung across his back. A lot of men and even women, both Poles and Jews, still went armed these days. Mordechai had seen a lot of Westerns from Hollywood, some dubbed into Polish, others into Yiddish. He understood them much better now than he had when he’d been a Warsaw engineering student before the Germans invaded in 1939. A gun was an equalizer.

Hidden away somewhere not too far from Lodz, the Jews had the ultimate equalizer: an explosive-metal bomb, captured from the Nazis who’d intended to turn the city and its large ghetto into a mushroom cloud. Anielewicz didn’t know whether the bomb would still work after all these years. His technicians had done their best to maintain it, but how good was that? The Poles couldn’t be sure. Neither could the Lizards. And neither could the Germans or the Russians.

He started whistling again, a loud, cheery tune. “Not being too certain is good for people,” he said to no one in particular. “It keeps them from going ahead and doing things they’re sorry for later.”

As he got closer to Lodz, his legs started aching. He was up into his forties now, not a young man as he had been during the war. He’d been riding a good long way, too, up from Belchatow. But whenever he got aches and pains he didn’t think he ought to have, he wondered if the nerve gas he’d breathed while keeping the Germans from blowing up Lodz was still having its way with him. He’d had the antidote; without it, he would have just quietly stopped breathing and died. Even so, his health had never been the same since.

That sort of doubt made him pedal harder than ever, to prove to himself that he did have something left. Sweat streamed down his face. The modern suburbs around Lodz whizzed past in a blur. So did a Lizard radar station, one dish scanning toward the west, toward Germany, the other toward the south, in the direction of German-dominated Hungary. If trouble came this way, it could get here in a hurry.

If trouble came this way and didn’t get knocked down, he would probably die before he knew it arrived. That was a consolation of sorts, but he declined to be consoled. Most of the people in the neighborhood around the radar station were Jews. They waved to Mordechai as he rode past. He waved back, and called out the same sort of insults he’d traded with Boleslaw the Pole. Along with most of the Jews in Poland, he switched back and forth between Yiddish and Polish, sometimes hardly noticing he was doing it.

Traffic got heavier as he rode up Franciszkanska Street into the city: horse-drawn wagons, lorries, motorcars-some old gasoline-burners, others hydrogen-powered-and swarms of bicycles. Anielewicz was glad to have an excuse to slow down.

New and old commingled inside Lodz. It had suffered in the German invasion, and again in the Lizards’ conquest of the area, and yet again when the Nazis started lobbing rockets at it. In the intervening years, fresh construction had replaced most of the buildings wrecked in one round or another of fighting. Some new structures were of brick or pale tan sandstone that harmonized with their older neighbors. Others, especially those the Lizards had run up for themselves, were so boxy and utilitarian, they might as well have been alien invaders-and so, in fact, they were.

Anielewicz still lived in what had been the Lodz ghetto, not far from the fire station that had housed the ghetto’s only motorized vehicle, a fire engine. He could have lived anywhere in the city- indeed, anywhere in Poland-he chose. His flat suited him well enough, and his wife, Bertha, had lived her whole life in Lodz. He sometimes thought about moving, but without great urgency.

An old friend waved as he rolled to a stop in front of the block of flats and put his feet down on the ground. Mordechai waved back. “How are you today, Ludmila?” he asked with real concern.

Ludmila Jager slowly walked up to him. “I am… not so bad,” she replied in Russian-accented Polish. “How are you?”

“I’m pretty well,” Anielewicz answered in Yiddish. Ludmila nodded; she spoke German, and could follow the Jews’ variation on it. He went on, “How are your legs? How are your arms?”

She shrugged. The motion made pain flow across her round, ruddy face. With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, she wiped it away. “I will never move fast again,” she said. “Nichevo.” That was a Russian word, and a useful one: it meant something like, It can’t be helped. Ludmila went on, “It could have been worse.” Pain filled her face again. This time, she let it stay. “For Heinrich, it was worse.”

“I know,” Anielewicz said quietly, and kicked at the cobblestones. A Jewish partisan leader, a German panzer officer who couldn’t stomach the incineration of Lodz, and a Red Air Force pilot, as Ludmila had been then-a strange trio to thwart the Reich after the atomic bomb got smuggled into the city. They’d done it, but they’d paid the price.

Mordechai Anielewicz knew how lucky he’d been. All he had to show for his brush with Otto Skorzeny’s nerve gas were pains if he exercised too hard for too long. Ludmila, though, was nearly a cripple. And Heinrich Jager… Mordechai shook his head. Jager, a German who proved his kind could be decent, had died young, and with few healthy days before he did.

After all these years, Anielewicz still wondered why. Was it because Jager had been twenty years older than his two comrades? Or had he breathed in more of the gas? Or had the antidote not been so effective on him? No way to tell, no way at all. Whatever the reason, it was too damn bad.

Ludmila might have been reading his thoughts. She said, “He did what he thought was right. If he hadn’t done it, the fascist jackals might have caused the destruction of the entire world. We had a cease-fire with the Lizards. If it had come apart then… Heinrich said to the end of his days that keeping that from happening was the best thing he ever did.”

“I wish he were still here to say it, your fascist jackal,” Anielewicz replied.

Ludmila smiled; she still sometimes used Communist jargon without even noticing she’d done it. She said, “So do I, but… nichevo.” Yes, that was a very useful word indeed. With another nod, she made her slow, painful way down the street, never once complaining.

Anielewicz carried the bicycle upstairs to his flat. Had he been so rash as to leave it on the sidewalk, even with a stout chain, it would have walked with Jesus. Even Jews used that saying about mysterious disappearances these days.

When he opened the door, familiar chaos surrounded him. His wife, Bertha, wearing a dress that would have been stylish in London a couple of years before and was still the height of fashion in Lodz, came up to give him a kiss. As always, a smile brought beauty to her plain face without the intermediate step of prettiness.

She said something. It was probably “How are you?” or “How are things?” but Anielewicz had trouble being sure. His daughter, Miriam, was practicing the violin. His son David, a couple of years younger, was practicing Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, which was only a little more than a month away. And his other son, Heinrich, who was eight, was working his way through a school lesson in the Lizards’ language. These days, Anielewicz hardly noticed the contrast between Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe and It shall be done, superior sir. He did notice the racket. He would have had to be deaf, or more likely dead, not to notice.

The racket changed only languages when his children spotted him. They all tried to tell him everything about their days at the same time. What he heard were bits and pieces that surely didn’t-couldn’t-have gone together. If a boy had in fact invited Miriam to go to a film about Lizard irregular verbs, the world was even stranger than Anielewicz suspected.

When his wife could get a word in edgewise, she said, “Bunim telephoned a couple of hours ago.”

“Did he?” That brought Mordechai to full alertness; Bunim was the most powerful Lizard stationed in Lodz. “What did he want?”

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Bertha answered. “He said leaving a message would not be proper protocol.”

“Sounds like a Lizard,” Anielewicz said, and Bertha nodded. He went on, “I’d better ring him up. Can you keep the menagerie down to low roars while I’m on the telephone?”

“I can try,” his wife said, and proceeded to lay down the law in a fashion Moses might have envied. In the brief respite thus afforded-and he knew it would be brief-Mordechai went into his bedroom to use the telephone.

He had no trouble getting through to Bunim; the regional subadministrator always accepted calls from his phone code. “I have for you a warning, Anielewicz,” he said without preamble. His German was fairly fluent. Hearing the Nazis’ language in his mouth never failed to set Anielewicz’s teeth on edge.

“Go ahead,” Anielewicz answered, not showing what he felt.

“A warning, yes,” the Lizard repeated. “If you Tosevites plan any interference against the anticipated arrival of colonists in this region, it will be suppressed without mercy.”

“Regional Subadministrator, I know of no such plans inside Poland,” Anielewicz answered, on the whole truthfully. As he’d thought before, most of the human inhabitants of Poland, Jews and Poles alike, preferred their alien overlords to any of the humans who aspired to the job.

“Perhaps you should know more,” Bunim said, and added an emphatic cough. “We have received a communication threatening that if a million males and females of the Race colonize Poland, that entire million shall die.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” Anielewicz said, which was completely true. “Probably a lunatic. In what language was this… communication? That may give you a clue.”

“It gives no clue,” Bunim said flatly. “It was in the language of the Race.”

Nesseref used her maneuvering thrusters to ease the shuttlecraft away from the outer skin of the 13th Emperor Makkakap. She checked the shuttlecraft’s instrument panel with special care. Like the ship with which it had come, it had just crossed a gulf of space even light would have needed more than twenty of the Race’s years to travel. Of course the revived engineers had already been over the shuttlecraft again and again: that was how the Race did things. But Nesseref was no more inclined than any other female or male to leave anything to chance.

Everything seemed normal till she got to the radar display. With a hiss of surprise, she swung both eye turrets toward it, turning what had been a routine glance to a shocked state.

A fingerclaw activated the radio link with the ship. “Shuttlecraft to Control,” Nesseref said. “Shuttlecraft to Control. I wish to report that the radar set is showing impossible clutter.”

“Control to Shuttlecraft,” a technician aboard the 13th Emperor Makkakap replied. “Control to Shuttlecraft. That clutter is not, repeat, is not, impossible. We have a crowded neighborhood around Tosev 3 right now: the ships of the colonization fleet, the ships and satellites of the conquest fleet, and the ships and satellites of the Tosevites-the Big Uglies, the males of the conquest fleet call them. Remember your briefing, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”

“I remember,” Nesseref answered. Things hadn’t been as anticipated for the Race, disorienting in and of itself. The conquest fleet had not conquered, or not completely. The Tosevites had proved improbably far advanced. Nesseref had believed what the briefing male said-he wouldn’t have lied to her. But she hadn’t begun to think about what it meant. Now she was seeing that with her own eyes.

As she scanned more instruments, she discovered that radar frequencies the Race did not use were striking the shuttlecraft. Any one of them might guide a missile on its way to her. “Shuttlecraft to Control,” she said. “You can confirm that we are at peace with these Tosevites?”

“That is correct, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the controller said. “We are at peace with them-or, at least, no great fighting is going on right now. On advice from males of the conquest fleet, we have relayed the time of your burn and your anticipated trajectory to the Tosevites and assured them we have no hostile intentions. The ones with whom I spoke used our language oddly but understandably.”

“I thank you, Control.” Nesseref did not want to speak to touchy, possibly hostile aliens, no matter how well they used the language of the Race. As far as she was concerned, they had no business using radio and radar at all. That they had such things disrupted plans the Race had made centuries before. Nesseref took it almost as a personal affront.

Moments slid past. Nesseref spent them aligning the shuttlecraft with fussy precision. When the job was done, she waited till it was time to leave orbit. Her fingerclaw hovered above the manual-override control, in case the computer didn’t begin the burn at the right time. That was most unlikely, but training held. Never take anything for granted.

Deceleration slammed her back into her padded couch. It seemed to hit harder than she remembered, though all the instruments showed the burn to be completely normal. As the computer had begun it in the proper instant, so the machine shut it down when it should.

“Control to Shuttlecraft,” came the voice from the 13th Emperor Makkakap. “Your trajectory is as it should be. I am instructed to recommend that you acknowledge any radio signals the Tosevites may direct toward you while you are descending from orbit.”

“Acknowledged,” Nesseref said. “It shall be done.” She wondered what things were coming to, when the Race had to treat with these Tosevites as if they held true power. But, if they were out in space, they did hold some true power. And obedience had been drilled into her as thoroughly as into any other male or female of the Race.

Before long, that obedience paid off. The computer reported a signal on one of the Race’s standard communications frequencies. By its direction, it came from an island off the northwestern coast of the main continental mass. The computer indicated the Race did not control that part of Tosev 3. Nesseref tuned the receiver to the indicated frequency and listened.

“Shuttlecraft of the Race, this is Belfast Tracking,” a voice said. The accent was strange and mushy, unlike any she’d heard before. “Shuttlecraft of the Race, this is Belfast Tracking. Please acknowledge.”

“Acknowledging, Beffast Tracking.” Nesseref knew she’d made a hash of the Tosevite name, whatever it meant, but she couldn’t do anything about that. “Receiving you loud and clear.”

“Thank you, Shuttlecraft,” the Tosevite down on the ground said. “Be advised your trajectory matches the flight plan your shiplord sent us. The Nazis will have nothing to complain about when you pass over their territory.”

Nesseref neither knew nor cared what Nazis were. Whatever they were, they had a cursed lot of nerve presuming to complain about anything the Race did. The Big Ugly from this Beffast Tracking had his-she supposed it was a male-nerve, too, for talking with her as if they were equals. “Acknowledging,” she repeated, not wanting to give him anything more than that.

Another Tosevite hailed her. He identified himself not as a Nazi but as a tracker from the Greater German Reich. Nesseref wondered if the Tosevite back at Beffast had been trying to mislead her. As that first Big Ugly had predicted, though, this one did find her course acceptable.

“Do not deviate,” he warned, his accent still mushy but somehow different from that of the first Big Ugly with whom she’d spoken. “If you deviate, you will be destroyed without warning. Do you understand?”

“Acknowledged,” Nesseref said tightly. She was low in the atmosphere now, dropping down toward the speed of sound. If the Tosevites could build spacecraft, they could assuredly blow her out of the sky. But they would have no need. “I shall not deviate from my course.”

“You had better not.” This Big Ugly sounded even more arrogant than the one with whom she’d spoken before. He went on, “And you had better not pay any attention to the lies the English will try to feed you. In no way are they to be trusted.”

“Acknowledged,” Nesseref said yet again. Why were the Tosevites warning her about one another? The too-brief briefing had spoken of their intraspecies rivalries, but she’d paid little attention to those. She hadn’t imagined they could matter to her. Maybe she’d been wrong.

Then, to her vast relief, a familiar-sounding voice said, “Shuttlecraft of the 13th Emperor Makkakap, this is Warsaw Control. Your trajectory is as it should be. You will be on the ground here shortly.”

“Acknowledging, Warsaw Control,” Nesseref said. The male’s assessment agreed with that of her own computer. She brought the shuttlecraft toward the fully upright position, so she could land it with its jet. As she did so, she studied the monitor’s view of the world below: she’d descended enough to get a detailed view of it for the first time. “Warsaw Control, is it always so green here?”

“It is, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” the male on the ground answered, “except during winter, and then it is white with frozen water falling out of the sky in flakes like shed skin. You would not believe how cold it can get here.”

Nesseref wouldn’t have believed the male at all had the briefing officer not also spoken of how beastly Tosev 3’s climate could be. She still found the landscape strange and unnatural; she was used to rocks and dirt with occasional vegetation, not the other way round. Now she would see buildings, too, some the utilitarian cubes and blocks the Race favored, others absurdly ornate. Why would anyone want to build like that? she wondered. She also spied small buildings roofed not with metal or concrete or even stone, but with what looked like dry grass. How could a species that used such primitive building materials fare off the surface of its planet?

Being without a good answer, she eyed the instruments, once more ready to use manual override if the shuttlecraft’s landing legs did not extend or if the rocket failed to ignite at the proper moment. No such emergency developed. Again, she had not expected one. But preparedness was never wasted.

Flame splashed off the concrete of the landing area, then winked out as the computer cut off the rocket motor. The monitor showed people wheeling a landing ramp out toward the shuttlecraft so she could descend. No, they weren’t people; they were Tosevites. They looked like the videos she’d studied: too erect, too large, draped in cloths to conserve body heat even at what was evidently the warmer season of the year. Some of them had hair-it put her in mind of fungus-all over their blunt, round faces, others just on the top of the head. Next to the male of the Race trotting along beside them, they put her in mind of poorly articulated toys for hatchlings.

With a small clank, the top end of the ramp brushed the side of the shuttlecraft. Nesseref opened the outer door, then hissed as chilly air poured in. She hissed again when the air struck the scent receptors on her tongue; it stank of smoke and carried all sorts of other odors she’d never smelled before.

She skittered down the ramp. “I greet you, superior female,” the male waiting at the bottom said. With an emphatic cough, he added, “Strange to see a new face in these parts instead of the same gang of males.”

“Yes, I suppose it must be,” Nesseref said. Her eye turrets swiveled this way and that as she tried to take in as much of this part of this new world as she could. “But then, all of Tosev 3 is strange, isn’t it?”

“That it is.” The male used another emphatic cough. “A Big Ugly, now, a Big Ugly would have said, ‘Good to see a new face.’ By the Emperor”-he cast down his eyes-“they really think that way.”

Nesseref’s shiver had only a little to do with the unpleasant weather. “Aliens,” she said. “How can you bear to live among them?”

“It is not easy,” the male replied. “Some of us have even started thinking more the way they do than anybody straight from Home would be able to imagine, I expect. We have had to. A lot of the ones who could not are dead. But Tosev 3 does have its compensations. There is ginger, for instance.”

“What is ginger?” Nesseref asked. It hadn’t been in the briefing.

“Good stuff,” the male said. “I will give you a vial. You can take it back up with you when you fetch this intelligence data up into orbit. We do not want to transmit it, even encrypted, for fear the Big Uglies will break the encryption. They have done it before, and hurt us doing it.”

“Are they really that bad?” Nesseref asked.

“No,” the male told her. “Really, they are worse.”

David Goldfarb minded being stationed in Belfast less than a lot of people might have. From what he’d seen, even men brought over from England soon tended to divide along religious lines, Protestants going up against Catholics in long-running arguments that sometimes turned into brawls. Being a Jew, he was immune to that sort of pressure.

All things considered, Jews got on pretty well in Belfast. Each faction here despised the other so thoroughly, it had little energy to waste on any other hatreds. Neither Catholics nor Protestants gave Naomi and the kids a hard time when they left the married officers’ quarters to shop.

Goldfarb’s swivel chair creaked when he leaned back in it. “First shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet we’ve tracked,” he remarked.

“That’s right, Flight Lieutenant,” Sergeant Jack McDowell answered. If the Scot disliked serving under a Jew who singularly lacked a cultured accent, he was veteran enough to conceal the fact. “Won’t be the last, though.”

“No.” Goldfarb was a veteran himself, having spent his entire adult life in the RAF. “Not the world we thought it would be, is it?”

“Not half it’s not,” McDowell agreed sorrowfully. He pulled a packet of Chesterfields from his breast pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and lit it. Holding the packet out to Goldfarb, he asked, “Care for a fag, sir?”

“Thanks.” Goldfarb leaned forward to light the smoke from the one McDowell already had going. He took a drag, then blew a ragged smoke ring. After another drag, he sighed. “Doesn’t taste like much, does it?”

“Too right it don’t,” McDowell said, even more sorrowfully than before. He too sighed. “Not a Yank brand going that tastes like much. When you lit up a Players, by God, you knew you had a cigarette in your face.”

“That’s the truth.” Goldfarb coughed in fond reminiscence. “It’s the end of Empire, that’s what it is.” The phrase had taken on a mournful currency in Britain after the Lizards occupied most of what once was the largest empire on the face of the Earth. Cut off from much of the tobacco they’d used, British cigarette manufacturers had gone under one after another.

McDowell’s long, lean, ruddy face got even more sour than usual. “The end of Empire it is. And do you know what’s the worst of it?” He waited for Goldfarb to shake his head, then went on, “The worst of it, sir, is that the youngsters who’ve grown up since the bloody Lizards came, they don’t care. Doesn’t matter to them that we’re shoved back onto a couple of little islands. All they want to do is lay about and drink beer, you ask me.”

“They don’t know any better,” Goldfarb answered. “This is what they’re used to. They don’t remember how things were. They don’t remember how we kept the Nazis from invading us and how we beat the Lizards when they did.”

Savagely, McDowell stubbed out his bland American cigarette and said, “And now we’re on the dole from the Yanks and the Nazis both. Damned if I don’t half wish the Lizards had beaten us after all. Better to go down swinging than to slip into the muck an inch at a bloody time.”

“Something to that,” said Goldfarb, who despised the dependence on the Greater German Reich into which a Britain shorn of her colonies had been forced. “I warned that shuttlecraft pilot about the Nazis. Haven’t heard any squawks since, so I suppose he got down safe in Poland.”

McDowell leered. “That was a shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet. How do you know a lady Lizard wasn’t flying it?”

“I don’t,” Goldfarb admitted, blinking. “It never even occurred to me.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much, not to me and not to the Lizards, either. If their females aren’t in season, the males don’t care about chasing skirt, poor buggers.”

“I’d pay five quid to see a lady Lizard in a skirt,” McDowell said.

“Come to think of it, so would I,” Goldfarb answered with a chuckle. He got to his feet and stretched. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“Any time, Flight Lieutenant,” McDowell said. “I’ve cadged more from you than you ever have from me.”

Goldfarb shrugged again. A Jew who got a reputation for stinginess found himself in even more hot water these days than he would have a generation before. Britain didn’t go in for the madnesses of the Reich over on the Continent, but some of the Nazis’ attitudes had rubbed off, especially down in England. That was another reason Goldfarb hadn’t minded being posted to Northern Ireland.

He walked out into watery sunshine. Belfast seldom got any other sort. Parabolic radar dishes scanned every direction. They were ever so much smaller and ever so much more powerful than the sets he’d served during the Battle of Britain and during the Lizards’ arrival-till the aliens knocked out those sets. Some of the improvement would surely have come over the course of time regardless of whether the Lizards landed on Earth. But captured equipment and training disks playable by what they called skelkwank light had kicked human technology far ahead of where it would have been otherwise.

A couple of RAF officers strode past Goldfarb. He stiffened to attention and saluted; they both outranked him. One of them was saying, “-ce they’re all down, we’ll pay back a lot of-”

After returning Goldfarb’s salute, the other spoke in an elegant Oxonian accent: “Now, now, old man, don’t you know?” His gaze flicked across Goldfarb as if the flight lieutenant were a speck of lint on his lapel.

Both officers fell silent till Goldfarb was out of earshot. He went on his way, quietly steaming. Far too many officers these days gave him the glove because he was Jewish. He couldn’t do anything about it, either-or rather, he could, but anything he did was likely to make matters worse. Anti-Semitism kept wafting across the Channel like a bad smell. That Heinrich Himmler seemed so calm and rational about it, rather than ranting as Hitler had done, only made it more appealing to the aristocratic Englishman of the stiff-upper-lip school.

“What do they think?” Goldfarb muttered. “I should get down on my knees and thank them for the privilege of saving their bacon”-an American phrase, to the point if not kosher-“from the Lizards? Not bloody likely!”

Trouble was, too many of them did think exactly that. He knew his chances of making squadron leader were about as good as Britain’s chances of retaking India from the Lizards. If he hadn’t had a record far better than those of his competitors-and if he hadn’t had some blokes on his side back in the days when being on a Jew’s side didn’t take extraordinary moral courage-he never would have become an officer at all.

He had become one, though. If those snooty brass hats didn’t like it, too bad for them. He wondered what sort of conversation they’d judged unsuitable for his tender ears. He’d never know. He also wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Had he lost sleep over every slight, he’d have lain awake every night.

People on the streets of Belfast kept an eye on him as he headed for his home. He didn’t look like an Englishman or an Irishman or even a Scot; his hair was too curly, and the wrong shade of brown to boot, while his face bore a distinctly Judaic nose. Said nose itched. He scratched it. An itchy nose was supposed to be a sign he’d kiss a fool.

When he got home, he planted a big smack on Naomi. Maybe she’d been a fool for marrying him, all those years ago. Her family had got out of Germany while some Jews still could; his had fled Polish pogroms before World War I. But she hadn’t looked down her own charming nose at him, and they remained as happy as two people could reasonably expect in this uncertain world.

“What’s new?” she asked, her English still faintly accented though she’d been in Britain since her teens.

He told her about the shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet, and about the warning he’d been able to pass on. Then he sighed. “It won’t do any good. The Lizards in the colonization fleet don’t know Nazis from necklaces.”

“You did what you could,” Naomi said, and added an emphatic cough.

Goldfarb laughed. “You caught that from our children,” he said severely, “and they caught it from the wireless and the telly.”

“And the wireless and the telly caught it from the Lizards-maybe we are becoming a part of their Empire, one bit at a time,” his wife answered. “And speaking of such things, you have a letter from your cousin in Palestine.”

“From Moishe?” Goldfarb said in glad surprise. “Haven’t heard from him in a couple of months. What has he got to say?”

“I don’t know-I haven’t opened it,” Naomi said. That was standard practice in the Goldfarb household: no one ever opened mail addressed to someone else. “Here, I’ll get it for you.” He watched her go over to the sideboard-watched appreciatively, as skirts were short this year-and pluck the letter from a cut-glass dish there. She carried it back to him.

It bore no stamp, but an adhesive label covered with Lizard squiggles. Moishe Russie had written Goldfarb’s name and address in the Roman alphabet, but the letter inside the envelope was in Yiddish. Dear Cousin David, he wrote, I hope this finds you well, as all are here in Jerusalem. Reuven has just finished exams for this term of medical school. How much more he knows of how the body works than I did at his age! He would have known more if the Lizards had not come, of course, but he knows even more than he would have otherwise because they did. They understand life at a molecular level we were generations away from reaching.

So Naomi would understand, Goldfarb read the letter aloud. She had no trouble following spoken Yiddish, but could not fight her way through the Hebraic script in which it was written. “Good that your cousin’s son will be a doctor,” she said.

“Yes,” Goldfarb answered, thinking that the Lizards had given medicine the same sort of lift they had electronics. He read on: “ ‘The fleetlord, you know, sometimes uses me as a channel between the Race and people. This is one of those times. Something strange is going on in connection with the arrival of the colonization fleet. I do not know what it is. I do not know if he knows what it is. Whatever it is, it worries him.’ ”

Goldfarb and his wife stared at each other. Anything that worried the fleetlord was liable to mean trouble for the whole human race-and, incidentally, for the Lizards. Why hadn’t Moishe been more explicit? Because he didn’t know much more himself, evidently. “Finish,” Naomi said.

“ ‘Atvar likes back-channel contacts more than he did some years ago,’ ” Goldfarb read. “ ‘If you can put a flea in the ear of some of your officer friends, it might do some good. Your cousin, Moishe.’ ”

“What will you do?” Naomi asked.

“God knows,” Goldfarb answered. “I haven’t got that many officer friends any more, not with things like they are here. And I’m hardly the bloke to play at world politics.” Naomi looked at him. He let out a long sigh. He had no real choice, and knew it. “I’ll do what I can, of course.”

Straha spent a lot of time touching up his body paint. He kept the complex patterns as neat as they had been back in the days when he commanded the 206th Emperor Yower. He’d been the third-ranking male in the conquest fleet, behind only Atvar and Kirel. He’d come within the breadth of a fingerclaw of toppling Atvar from fleetlord’s rank. If he’d done it, if he’d taken charge of things in place of that boring plodder…

He hissed softly. “Had the fleet been mine, Tosev 3 would belong to the Race in its entirety,” he said. He believed that; from snout to tailstump he believed it. It didn’t matter. What might have been never mattered, save in the Big Uglies’ overactive imaginations. A good male of the Race, Straha kept his eye turrets aimed firmly at what had been and what was.

Exile, he thought. When he failed to overthrow Atvar, the fleetlord’s revenge had been as inevitable, as inexorable, as gravity. It had also been slow-typical of Atvar, Straha thought with a sneer. Instead of waiting for it, Straha had taken the 206th Emperor Yower ’s shuttlecraft and fled to the Big Uglies.

Exile. The word tolled mournfully in his head, just as if it were reverberating from his hearing diaphragms. In exchange for his intimate knowledge of the Race, the American Tosevites had treated him and continued to treat him as well as they knew how. Anything he asked for, they gave him. That was why he dwelt in Los Angeles these days: a climate not impossibly cold, not impossibly humid. Whenever he chose, he ate ham, which came close to a delicacy he’d known back on Home. He had video gear purchased from the Race, and electronic entertainments either purchased after the fighting or captured during it.

Exile. When he wanted it, he even had the company of other males. But they were captives, not defectors; no one could blame them for collaborating with the Big Uglies. People could blame him, could and did. However useful traitors were, no one loved them. That had proved as true among the Tosevites as it was among the Race.

Still, time had slipped past without too much unpleasantness till the colonization fleet came into Tosev’s solar system. Very soon now, in the lands that the Race ruled, it would set up a good facsimile of life on Home. And Straha would be-the Big Uglies had a phrase for it-on the outside looking in.

“I do not care,” he said. But that was a lie, and he knew it. If he hadn’t fled, he would have become a part of that life. Atvar would have degraded him, even arrested him, but would not have harmed him. Big Uglies sometimes enjoyed inflicting pain. The Race didn’t, and had had ever so much trouble understanding the difference.

Feeling pain, now, when it came to feeling pain, the Tosevites and the Race were very much alike. Straha opened the drawer of a wooden cabinet of a size to suit Big Uglies better than males of the Race, one with fixtures made for a Tosevite’s hands.

In the drawer, among other things, lay a well-sealed glass jar full of powdered ginger cured with lime, the Race’s favorite form of the herb. The American Big Uglies gave Straha all the ginger he wanted, too, though they were much less generous about letting their own leaders enjoy unlimited drugs.

He poured some ginger onto the fine scales covering the palm of his hand, then raised it toward his mouth. Of itself, his tongue shot out. In a couple of quick licks, the ginger disappeared.

“Ahhh!” he hissed: a long sigh of pleasure. When ginger first lifted him, he forgot he was all alone among barbarous aliens. No, that wasn’t quite true. He remembered, but he no longer cared. With ginger coursing through him, he felt taller and stronger than any Big Ugly, and more clever than all the Big Uglies and all the other males of the Race on Tosev 3. Ideas filled his long, narrow head, each of them so brilliant it dazzled him before he could fully grasp it.

He knew ginger only seemed to turn him tall and strong and brilliant. It didn’t actually make him any of those things. Males who acted as if what the ginger told them were true had a way of dying before their time. That was one reason he tried to keep his tasting within the bounds of moderation.

Descending from ecstasy was the other reason. He had not felt so low going down from the 206th Emperor Yower to the surface of Tosev 3 as he did when the drug’s exaltation began to leach out of him. The harder he tried to grasp it, the more readily it slipped through his fingers. At last it was all gone, leaving him lower than he had been before he tasted, and painfully aware of how low that was.

Sometimes, to hold the crushing depression at bay, he would taste again when the first one wore off, or even for a third time on the heels of the second. But the herb-fueled exhilaration ebbed from one taste to another right after it, while the post-tasting gloom only got worse. Unlimited ginger, however much a taster might crave such a thing, did not mean unlimited happiness.

And so, instead of taking a second taste, Straha put the ginger jar back in the drawer and slammed it shut. He picked up the telephone. Like the cabinet, it was of Tosevite manufacture, the handset made with the distance between a Big Ugly’s mouth and absurd external ear in mind, the holes in the dial designed for blunt, clawless Tosevite fingers.

Those holes served his fingerclaws well enough. The clicks and squawks of the electronics as the call went through were partly familiar, partly strange. The bell at the other end of the line was a purely Tosevite conceit; the Race would have used some sort of hiss instead.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end was Tosevite, too, the greeting the one the local Big Uglies used among themselves on the telephone. Straha had picked up some English during his long years of exile, but Big Uglies who wished to speak with him commonly used the language of the Race.

Straha used his own language now: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”

“I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager replied, dropping English without the least hesitation. Of all the Tosevites Straha had met, he came closest to being able to think like a male of the Race. His question was very much to the point: “Feeling lonely tonight?”

“Yes.” Straha choked back an emphatic cough. His hands folded into fists, so that fingerclaws dug into his palms. Most Big Uglies would not have noticed what he hadn’t quite said. Yeager was different. Yeager heard what wasn’t said as well as what was.

“We have known each other a long time now, Shiplord,” the Tosevite said. “I remember thinking even in the early days, when your folk and mine were still fighting, how hard a road you had chosen for yourself.”

“You thought further ahead than I was thinking when I left the conquest fleet,” Straha said. “I get an itch under the scales admitting such a thing to a Tosevite, but it is truth.” The Race had got where it was by planning ahead, by always thinking of the long term. Straha hadn’t done that. He’d been paying ever since for not doing it. Exile.

As if to rub that in, Yeager said, “You always did think more like a Big Ugly than most other males of the Race I have known.” He used the Race’s slang name for his kind without taking it as an insult, the way some Tosevites did.

“I do not think like a Big Ugly,” Straha said with dignity. “I do not wish to think like a Big Ugly. I am a male of the Race. It is merely that I am not a reactionary male of the Race, as so many officers of the conquest fleet proved to be.” Venting his anger at Atvar and Kirel to a Big Ugly was demeaning-a telling measure of just how lonely he’d become-but he couldn’t help it.

Yeager let out a few barks of noisy Tosevite laughter. “I did not say you thought like a Tosevite, Shiplord. If you were one of us, you would be a hopeless reactionary. Even so, that makes you a radical among the Race.”

“Truth,” Straha said. “You understand us well. How did this happen? I know of your attachment to the wild literature your kind produced before the conquest fleet arrived, but others were attached to this literature, too, and they have not your skill in dealing with the Race.”

“In fact, Shiplord, some of our best males and females for dealing with your folk were science-fiction readers before the conquest fleet came,” Yeager replied, the key term necessarily being in English. “But I count myself lucky. I could not have stayed a paid athlete much longer, and I do not know what I would have done after that. When the conquest fleet came, it let me discover I was good at something I had not known I could do at all. Is that not strange?”

“For the Race, it would be surpassingly strange,” Straha answered. “For you Tosevites? I doubt it. So much of everything you do seems built around lucky accidents. But not all accidents are lucky. If we had come two hundred years later-a hundred of your years, I mean-we might have found this planet dead because of nuclear war.”

“It could be so, Shiplord,” Yeager said. “We can never know, but it could be so. But if you had waited a little longer than that, we might have come to Home before you ever got to Tosev 3.”

Straha hissed in horror. Big Uglies played the game of what-might-have-been far more naturally, far more fluidly, than did the Race. Straha tried to imagine a conquest fleet full of bloodthirsty Tosevites descending on calm, peaceful Home. Save for conquests of other species, the Race had not fought a war in more than a hundred thousand years. Except when a conquest fleet was abuilding, no military hardware above the level the police needed even existed. The Big Uglies would have had an easy time of it.

He did not say that, for fear of giving Yeager ideas-not that any Big Ugly needed help coming up with ideas. What the exiled shiplord did say was, “One day, Big Uglies will visit Home. One day, Big Uglies will bow before the Emperor.” In spite of having abandoned the Race, Straha cast down his eyes at speaking of his sovereign.

“I wish I could visit your planet,” Yeager said. “We Tosevites aren’t very good at bowing to anyone, though. You may have noticed that.”

“Snoutcounting,” Straha said disparagingly. “How you think to rule yourselves through snoutcounting…” Nictitating membranes slid across his eyes, a sure sign he was growing sleepy. “I thank you for your time, Major Yeager. I shall rest now.”

“Rest well, Shiplord,” the Tosevite said.

“I shall.” Straha hung up. But even if he did rest well, tomorrow would be another day alone.