Striking the Balance

XIV

The typewriter spat out machine-gun bursts of letters: clack-clack-clack, clack-clack-clack, clackety-clack The line-end bell dinged. Barbara Yeager flicked the return lever; the carriage moved with an oiled whir to let her type another line.

She stared in dissatisfaction at the one she’d just finished. “That ribbon is getting too light to read any more,” she said. “I wish they’d scavenge some fresh ones.”

“Not easy to come by anything these days,” Sam Yeager answered. “I hear tell one of our foraging parties got shot at the other day.”

“I heard something about that, but not much,” Barbara said. “Was it the Lizards?”

Sam shook his head. “Nothing to do with the Lizards. It was foragers out from Little Rock, after the same kinds of stuff our boys were. There’s less and less stuff left to find, and we aren’t making much these days that doesn’t go straight out the barrel of a gun. I think it’ll get worse before it gets better, too.”

“I know,” Barbara said. “The way we get excited over little things now, like that tobacco you bought-” She shook her head. “And I wonder how many people have starved because crops either didn’t get planted or didn’t get raised or couldn’t get from the farm to a town.”

“Lots,” Sam said. “Remember that little town in Minnesota we went through on the way to Denver? They were already starting to slaughter their livestock because they couldn’t bring in all the feed they had to have-and that was a year and a half ago. And Denver’s going to go hungry now. The Lizards have tromped on the farms that were feeding it, and wrecked the railroads, too. One more thing to put on their bill, if we ever get around to giving it to them.”

“We’re lucky to be where we are,” Barbara agreed. “It gets down to that, we’re lucky to be anywhere.”

“Yeah.” Sam tapped a front tooth with a fingernail. “I’ve been lucky I haven’t broken a plate, too.” He reached out and rapped on the wooden desk behind which Barbara sat. “Way things are now, a dentist would have a heck of a time fixing my dentures if anything did break.” He shrugged. “One more thing to worry about.”

“We’ve got plenty.” Barbara pointed to the sheet of paper in the typewriter. “I’d better get back to this report, honey, not that anybody’ll be able to read it when I’m through.” She hesitated, then went on, “Is Dr. Goddard all right, Sam? When he gave me these notes to type up, his voice was as faint and gray as the letters I’m getting from this ribbon.”

Sam wouldn’t have put it that way, but Sam hadn’t gone in for literature in college, either. Slowly, he answered, “I’ve noticed it for a while now myself, hon. I think it’s getting worse, too. I know he saw some of the docs here, but I don’t know what they told him. I couldn’t hardly ask, and he didn’t say anything.” He corrected himself: “I take that back. He did say one thing: “We’ve gone far enough now that no one man matters much any more.’ “

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Barbara said.

“Now that I think about it, I don’t, either,” Sam said. “Sort of sounds like a man writing his own what-do-you-call-it-obituary-doesn’t it?” Barbara nodded. Sam went on, “Thing is, he’s right. Pretty much everything we’ve done with rockets so far has come out of his head-either that or we’ve stolen it from the Lizards or borrowed it from the Nazis. But we can go on without him now if we have to, even if we won’t go as fast or as straight.”

Barbara nodded again. She patted the handwritten originals she was typing. “Do you know what he’s doing here? He’s trying to scale up-that’s the term he uses-the design for the rockets we have so they’ll be big enough and powerful enough to carry an atomic bomb instead of TNT or whatever goes into them now.”

“Yeah, he’s talked about that with me,” Sam said. “The Nazis have the same kind of project going, too, he thinks, and they’re liable to be ahead of us. I don’t think they have a Lizard who knows as much as Vesstil, but their people were making rockets a lot bigger than Dr. Goddard’s before the Lizards came. We’re doing what we can, that’s all. Can’t do more than that.”

“No.” Barbara typed a few more sentences before she came to the end of a page. She took it out and ran a fresh sheet into the typewriter. Instead of going back to the report, she looked up at Sam from under half-lowered eyelids. “Do you remember? This is what I was doing back in Chicago, the first time we met. You brought Ullhass and Ristin in to talk with Dr. Burkett. A lot of things have changed since then.”

“Just a few,” Sam allowed. She’d been married to Jens Larssen then, though already she’d feared he was dead: otherwise, she and Sam never would have got together, never would have had Jonathan, never would have done a whole lot of things. He didn’t know about literature or fancy talk; he couldn’t put into graceful words what he thought about all that. What he did say was, “It was so long ago that when you asked me for a cigarette, I had one to give you.”

She smiled. “That’s right. Not even two years, but it seems like the Middle Ages, doesn’t it?” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’m the one who feels middle-aged these days, but that’s just on account of Jonathan.”

“Me, I’m glad he’s old enough now that you feel easy about letting the mammies take care of him during the day,” Sam said. “It frees you up to do things like this, makes you feel useful again, too. I know that was on your mind.”

“Yes, it was,” Barbara said with a nod that wasn’t altogether comfortable. She lowered her voice. “I wish you wouldn’t call the colored women that.”

“What? Mammies?” Sam scratched his head. “It’s what they are.”

“I know that, but it sounds so-” Barbara groped for the word she wanted and, being Barbara, found it. “So antebellum, as if we were down on the plantation with the Negroes singing spirituals and doing all the work and the kind masters sitting around drinking mint juleps as if they hadn’t the slightest idea their whole social system was sick and wrong-and so much of what was wrong then is still wrong now. Why else would the Lizards have given guns to colored troops and expected them to fight against the United States?”

“They sure were wrong about that,” Sam said.

“Yes, some of the Negroes mutinied,” Barbara agreed, “but I’d bet not all of them did. And the Lizards wouldn’t have tried it in the first place if they hadn’t thought it would work. The way they treat colored people down here… Do you remember some of the newsreels from before we got into the war, the ones that showed happy Ukrainian peasants greeting the Nazis with flowers because they were liberating them from the Communists?”

“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “They found out what that was worth pretty darn quick, too, didn’t they?”

“That’s not the point,” Barbara insisted. “The point is that the Negroes here could have greeted the Lizards the same way.”

“A good many of them did.” Sam held up a hand before she could rhetorically rend him. “I know what you’re getting at, hon: the point is that so many of ’em didn’t. Things down here would have been mighty tough if they had, no two ways about it.”

“Now you understand,” Barbara said, nodding. She always sounded pleased when she said things like that, pleased and a little surprised: he might not have a fancy education, but it was nice that he wasn’t dumb. He didn’t think she knew she was using that tone of voice, and he wasn’t about to call her on it. He was just glad he could come close to keeping up with her.

He said, “Other side of the coin is, whatever the reasons are, these colored women-I won’t call ’em mammies if you don’t want me to-they can’t do the job you’re doing right now. Since theyare on our side, shouldn’t we give ’em jobs theycan do, so the rest of us can get on with doing the things they can’t?”

“That isn’t just,” Barbara said. But she paused thoughtfully. Her fingernails clicked on the home keys of the typewriter, enough to make the type bars move a little but not enough to make them hit the paper. At last, she said, “It may not be just, but I suppose it’s practical.” Then she did start typing again.

Sam felt as if he’d just laced a game-winning double in the ninth. He didn’t often make Barbara back up a step in any argument. He set a fond hand on her shoulder. She smiled up at him for a moment. The clatter of the typewriter didn’t stop.

Liu Han cradled the submachine gun in her arms as if it were Liu Mei. She knew what she had to do with it if Ttomalss got out of line: point it in his direction and squeeze the trigger. Enough bullets would hit him to keep him from getting out of line again.

From what Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her, the gun was of German manufacture. “The fascists sold it to the Kuomintang, from whom we liberated it,” he’d said. “In the same way, we shall liberate the whole world not only from the fascists and reactionaries, but also from the alien aggressor imperialist scaly devils.”

It sounded easy when you put it like that. Taking revenge on Ttomalss had sounded easy, too, when she’d proposed it to the central committee. And, indeed, kidnapping him down in Canton had proved easy-as she’d predicted, he had returned to China to steal some other poor woman’s baby. Getting him up here to Peking without letting the rest of the scaly devils rescue him hadn’t been so easy, but the People’s Liberation Army had managed it.

And now here he was, confined in a hovel on ahutung not far from the roominghouse where Liu Han-and her daughter-lived. He was, in essence, hers to do with as she would. How she’d dreamed of that while she was in the hands of the little scaly devils. Now the dream was real.

She unlocked the door at the front of the hovel. Several of the people begging or selling in the alleyway were fellow travelers, though even she was not sure which ones. They would help keep Ttomalss from escaping or anyone from rescuing him.

She closed the front door after her. Inside, where no one could see it from the street, was another, stouter, door. She unlocked that one, too, and advanced into the dim room beyond it.

Ttomalss whirled. “Superior female!” he hissed in his own language, then returned to Chinese: “Have you decided what my fate is to be?”

“Maybe I should keep you here along time,” Liu Han said musingly, “and see how much people can learn from you little scaly devils. That would be a good project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?”

“Thatwould be a good project for you. You would learn much,” Ttomalss agreed. For a moment, Liu Han thought he had missed her irony. Then he went on, “But I do not think you will do it. I think instead you will torment me.”

“To learn how much thirst you can stand, how much hunger you can stand, how much pain you can stand-that would be aninteresting project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?” Liu Han purred the words, as if she were a cat eyeing a mouse it would presently devour-when it got a little hungrier than it was now.

She’d hoped Ttomalss would cringe and beg. Instead, he stared at her with what, from longer experience with the scaly devils than she’d ever wanted, she recognized as a mournful expression. “We of the Race never treated you so when you were in our claws,” he said.

“No?” Liu Han exclaimed. Now she stared at the little devil. “You didn’t take my child from me and leave my heart to break?”

“The hatchling was not harmed in any way-on the contrary,” Ttomalss replied. “And, to our regret, we did not fully understand the attachment between the generations among you Tosevites. This is one of the things we have learned-in part, from you yourself.”

He meant what he said, Liu Han realized. He didn’t think he had been wantonly cruel-which didn’t mean he hadn’t been cruel. “You scaly devils took me up in your airplane that never landed, and then you made me into a whore up there.” Liu Han wanted to shoot him for that alone. “Lie with this one, you said, or you do not eat. Then it was lie with that one, and that one, and that one. And all the time you were watching and taking your films. And you say you never did me any harm?”

“You must understand,” Ttomalss said. “With us, a mating is a mating. In the season, male and female find each other, and after time the female lays the eggs. To the Rabotevs-one race we rule-a mating is a mating. To the Hallessi-another race we rule-a mating is a mating. How do we know that, to Tosevites, a mating is not just a mating? We find out, yes. We find out because of what we do with people like you and the Tosevite males we bring up to our ship. Before that, we did not know. We still have trouble believing you are as you are.”

Liu Han studied him across a gap of incomprehension as wide as the separation between China and whatever weird place the little scaly devils called home. For the first time, she really grasped that Ttomalss and the rest of the little devils had acted without malice. They were trying to learn about people and went ahead and did that as best they knew how.

Some of her fury melted. Some-but not all. “You exploited us,” she said, using a word much in vogue in the propaganda of the People’s Liberation Army. Here it fit like a sandal made by a master shoemaker. “Because we were weak, because we could not fight back, you took us and did whatever you wanted to us. That is wrong and wicked, don’t you see?”

“It is what the stronger does with the weaker,” Ttomalss said, hunching himself down in a gesture the little devils used in place of a shrug. He swung both eye turrets toward her. “Now I am weak and you are strong. You have caught me and brought me here, and you say you will use me for experiments. Is this exploiting me, or is it not? Is it wrong and wicked, or is it not?”

The little scaly devil was clever. Whatever Liu Han said, he had an answer. Whatever she said, he had a way of twisting her words against her-she wouldn’t have minded listening to a debate between him and Nieh Ho-T’ing, who was properly trained in the dialectic. But Liu Han had one argument Ttomalss could not overcome: the submachine gun. “It is revenge,” she said.

“Ah.” Ttomalss bowed his head. “May the spirits of Emperors past look kindly upon my spirit.”

He was waiting quietly for her to kill him. She’d seen war and its bloody aftermath, of course. She’d had the idea for bombs that had killed and hurt and maimed any number of little scaly devils-the more, the better. But she had never killed personally and at point-blank range. It was, she discovered, not an easy thing to do.

Angry at Ttomalss for making her see him as a person of sorts rather than an ugly, alien enemy, angry at herself for what Nieh would surely have construed as weakness, she whirled and left the chamber. She slammed the inner door after her, made sure it was locked, then closed and locked the outer door, too.

She stamped back toward the roominghouse. She didn’t want to be away from Liu Mei a moment longer than absolutely necessary. With every word of Chinese the baby learned to understand and to say, she defeated Ttomalss all over again.

From behind her, a man said, “Here, pretty sister, I’ll give you five dollars Mex-real silver-if you’ll show me your body.” He jingled the coins suggestively. His voice had a leer in it.

Liu Han whirled and pointed the submachine gun at his startled face. “I’ll show you this,” she snarled.

The man made a noise like a frightened duck. He turned and fled, sandals flapping as he dashed down thehutung. Wearily, Liu Han kept on her way. Ttomalss was smaller than the human exploiters she’d known (she thought of Yi Min the apothecary, who’d taken advantage of her as ruthlessly as any of the men she’d had the displeasure to meet in the airplane that never landed save only Bobby Fiore), he was scalier, he was uglier, he was-or had been-more powerful.

But was he, at the bottom, any worse?

“I just don’t know,” she said, and sighed, and kept on walking.

“This is bloody awful country,” George Bagnall said, looking around. He, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones no longer had Lake Peipus and Lake Chud on their left hand, as they had through the long slog north from Pskov. They’d paid a chunk of sausage to an old man with a rowboat to ferry them across the Narva River. Now they were heading northwest, toward the Baltic coast.

The forests to the east of Pskov were only a memory now. Everything was flat here, so flat that Bagnall marveled at the lakes’ and rivers’ staying in their beds and not spilling out over the landscape. Embry had the same thought. “Someone might have taken an iron to this place,” he said.

“Someone did,” Jones answered: “Mother Nature, as a matter of fact. In the last Ice Age, the glaciers advanced past here for Lord knows how many thousand years, then finally went back. They pressed down the ground like a man pressing a leaf under a board and a heavy rock.”

“I don’t much care what did it,” Bagnall said. “I don’t fancy it, and that’s that. It’s not just how flat it is, either. It’s the color-it’s off, somehow. All the greens that should be bright are sickly. Can’t blame it on the sun, either, not when it’s in the sky practically twenty-four hours a day.”

“We aren’t very far above lake level,” Embry said. “We can’t be very far above sea level. I wonder how far inland the salt has soaked. That would do something to the plants, I daresay.”

“There’s a thought,” Bagnall said. “Always nice having an explanation for things. I’ve no idea whether it’s the proper explanation, mind you, but any old port in a storm, what?”

“Speaking of which-” Embry took out a map. “As best I can tell, we’re about ten miles from the coast.” He pointed northwest. “That great plume of smoke over there, I think, is from the great industrial metropolis of Kohtla-Jarve.” He spoke with palpable irony; had it not been for the name of the place beside it, he would have taken the dot on the map for a flyspeck.

“Must be something going on in whatever-you-call-it,” Jerome Jones observed, “or the Lizards wouldn’t have pounded it so hard.”

“I don’t think that’s war damage,” Ken Embry said. “The volume of smoke is too steady. We’ve seen it for the past day and a half, and it’s hardly changed. I think the Germans or the Russians or whoever controls the place have lighted off a big smudge to keep the Lizards from looking down and seeing what they’re about.”

“Whatever it is, at the moment I don’t much care,” Bagnall said. “My question is, are we likelier to get a boat if we saunter blithely into Kohtla-Jarve or if we find some fishing village on the Baltic nearby?”

“Would we sooner deal with soldiers or peasants?” Jones asked.

Bagnall said, “If we try to deal with peasants and something goes wrong, we can try to back away and deal with the soldiers. If something goes wrong dealing with the soldiers, though, that’s apt to be rather final.”

His companions considered for the next few steps. Almost in unison, they nodded. Embry said, “A point well taken, George.”

“I feel rather Biblical, navigating by a pillar of smoke,” Jerome Jones said, “even if we’re steering clear of it rather than steering by it.”

“Onward,” Bagnall said, adjusting his course more nearly due north, so as to strike the Baltic coast well east of Kohtla-Jarve and whatever whoever was making there. As he had been many times, Bagnall was struck by the vastness of the Soviet landscape. He supposed the Siberian steppe would seem even more huge and empty, but Estonia had enough land and to spare sitting around not doing much. It struck him as untidy. The Englishmen would walk past a farm with some recognizable fields around it, but soon the fields would peter out and it would be just-land again till the next farm.

That they were approaching the Baltic coast didn’t make the farms come any closer together. Bagnall began to wonder if they’d find a little fishing village when they got to the sea. Hardly anyone seemed to live in this part of the world.

One advantage of traveling at this time of year was that you could keep going as long as you had strength in you. At around the latitude of Leningrad, the sun set for only a couple of hours each night as the summer solstice approached, and never dipped far enough below the horizon for twilight to end. Even at midnight, the northern sky glowed brightly and the whole landscape was suffused with milky light. As Ken Embry said that evening, “It’s not nearly so ugly now-seems a bit like one of the less tony parts of fairyland, don’t you think?”

Distances were hard to judge in that shadowless, almost sourceless light. A farmhouse and barn that had seemed a mile away not two minutes before were now, quite suddenly, all but on top of them. “Shall we beg shelter for the night?” Bagnall said. “I’d sooner sleep in straw than unroll my blanket on ground that’s sure to be damp.”

They approached the farmhouse openly. They’d needed to display Aleksandr German’s safe-conduct only a couple of times; despite their worries, the peasants had on the whole been friendly enough. But they were still a quarter of a mile from the farmhouse, as best Bagnall could judge, when a man inside shouted something at them.

Bagnall frowned. “That’s not German. Did you understand it, Jones?”

The radarman shook his head. “It’s not Russian, either. I’d swear to that, though I don’t quite know what it is.” The shout came again, as unintelligible as before. “I wonder if it’s Estoman,” Jones said in a musing voice. “I hadn’t thought anyone spoke Estonian, the Estonians included.”

“We’re friends!” Bagnall shouted toward the house, first in English, then in German, and last in Russian. Had he known how to say it in Estonian, he would have done that, too. He took a couple of steps forward.

Whoever was in the farmhouse wanted no uninvited guests. A bullet cracked past above Bagnall’s head before he heard the report of the rifle whose flash he’d seen at the window. The range was by no means extreme; maybe the strange light fooled the fellow in there into misjudging it.

Though not an infantryman, Bagnall had done enough fighting on the ground to drop to that ground when someone started shooting at him. So did Ken Embry. They both screamed, “Get down, you fool!” at Jones. He stood gaping till another bullet whined past, this one closer than the first. Then he, too, sprawled on his belly.

That second shot hadn’t come from the farmhouse, but from the barn. Both gunmen kept banging away, too, and a third shooter opened up from another window of the house. “What the devil did we start to walk in on?” Bagnall said, scuttling toward a bush that might conceal him from the hostile locals. “The annual meeting of the Estonian We Hate Everyone Who Isn’t Us League?”

“Shouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Embry answered from behind cover of his own. “If these are Estonians, they must have taken us for Nazis or Bolsheviks or similar lower forms of life. Do we shoot back at them?”

“I’d sooner retreat and go around,” Bagnall said. Just then, though, two men carrying rifles ran out of the barn and toward some little trees not far away to the right. He flicked the safety off his Mauser. “I take it back. If they’re going to hunt us, they have to pay for the privilege.” He brought the German rifle with the awkward bolt up to his shoulder.

Before he could fire, three more men sprinted from the back of the farmhouse toward an outbuilding off to the left. Ken Embry shot at one of them, but the light was as tricky for him as it was for the Estonians. All three of them safely made it to the outbuilding. They started shooting at the RAF men. A couple of bullets kicked up dirt much too close to Bagnall for his liking.

“Bit of a sticky wicket, what?” Jerome Jones drawled. Neither the hackneyed phrase nor the university accent disguised his concern. Bagnall was worried, too.Bugger worried, he told himself-I’m bloody petrified.There were too many Estomans out there, and they too obviously meant business.

The two men in the house and the one still in the barn kept shooting at the Englishmen, making them keep their heads down.

Under cover of their fire and that of the fellow behind the outbuilding, the two Estonians in the trees scooted forward and farther to the right, heading for some tall brush that would give them cover.

Bagnall snapped off a couple of shots at them as they ran, to no visible effect. “They’re going to flank us out,” he said in dismay.

Then another rifle spoke, from behind him and to his right. One of the running men dropped his weapon and crashed to earth as if he’d been sapped. That unexpected rifle cracked again. The second runner went down, too, with a cry of pain that floated over the flat, grassy land.

He tried to crawl to cover, but Bagnall fired twice more at him. One of the bullets must have hit, for the fellow lay quiet and motionless after that.

One of the Estonians behind the outbuilding popped up to shoot. Before he could, the rifleman behind the RAF men squeezed off another round. The Estoman crumpled. He must have dropped his rifle, for it fell where Bagnall could see it. “We have a friend,” he said. “I wonder if he’s Russian or German.” He looked back over his shoulder, but couldn’t see anyone.

The man in the farmhouse who’d fired first-or perhaps someone else using the same window-fired again. At what seemed the same instant, the marksman behind Bagnall also fired. An arm dangled limply from the window till it was dragged back inside.

“Whoever that is back there, he’s a bloody wonder,” Embry said. The Estomans evidently thought the same thing. One of them behind the outbuilding waved a white cloth. “We have a wounded man here,” he called in oddly accented German. “Will you let us take him back to the house?”

“Go ahead,” Bagnall said after a moment’s hesitation. “Will you let us back up and go around you? We didn’t want this fight in the first place.”

“You may do that,” the Estonian answered. “Maybe you are not who we thought you were.”

“Maybe you should have found out about that before you tried blowing our heads off,” Bagnall said. “Go on now, but remember, we have you in our sights-and so does our friend back there.”

Still waving the cloth, the Estonian picked up his fallen comrade’s rifle and slung it on his back. He and his hale companion dragged the wounded man toward the farmhouse. By the limp way he hung in their arms, he was badly hurt.

While they did that, Bagnall and his companions crawled backwards, not fully trusting the truce to which they’d agreed. But the Estonians in the house and barn evidently wanted no more of them. Bagnall realized he was withdrawing in the direction of the rifleman who’d bailed them out of that tight spot. Softly, he called,“Danke sehr,” and then, to cover all bases,“Spasebo.”

“Nye za chto-you’re welcome,” came the answer: he’d guessed right the second time. That wasn’t what made his jaw drop foolishly, though. He’d expected whatever answer he got to be baritone, not creamy contralto.

Jerome Jones yelped like a puppy with its tail caught in a door. “Tatiana!” he exclaimed, and went on in Russian, “What are you doing here?”

“Never mind that now,” the sniper answered. “First we go around that house full of anti-Soviet reactionaries, since you Englishmen were foolish enough to give them quarter.”

“How do you know they aren’t anti-fascist patriots?” Embry asked in a mixture of German and Russian.

Tatiana Pirogova let out an annoyed snort. “They are Estonians, so they must be anti-Soviet.” She spoke as if stating a law of nature. Bagnall didn’t feel inclined to quarrel with her, not after what she’d just done for them.

She didn’t say anything else as she led the RAF men on a long loop around the farmhouse. It went slowly; none of them dared stand while they might still be in rifle range. The house and barn, though, remained as silent as if uninhabited. Bagnall wished they had been.

At last, cat-wary, Tatiana got to her feet. The Englishmen followed her lead, grunting with relief. “How did you come upon us at just the right moment?” Bagnall asked her, taking her rising as giving him leave to speak.

She shrugged. “I left two days after you. You were not traveling very fast. And so-there I was. In half an hour’s time-less, maybe-I would have hailed you if the shooting had not started.”

“What about-Georg Schultz?” Jerome Jones asked-hesitantly, as if half fearing her reply.

She shrugged again, with magnificent indifference. “Wounded-maybe dead. I hope dead, but I am not sure. He is strong.” She spoke with grudging respect. “But he thought he could do with me as he pleased. He was wrong.” She patted the barrel of her telescopically sighted rifle to show how wrong he was.

“What will you do now?” Bagnall asked her.

“Get you safe to the sea,” she answered. “After that? Who knows? Go back and kill more Germans around Pskov, I suppose.”

“Thank you for coming this far to look after us,” Bagnall said. Odd to think of Tatiana Pirogova, sniper extraordinaire (had he been inclined to doubt that, which he wasn’t, the affair at the farmhouse would have proved her talents along those lines), with a mother-hen complex, but she seemed to have one. Now he hesitated before continuing, “If we can lay hold of a boat, you’re welcome-more than welcome-to come to England with us.”

He wondered if she’d get angry; he often wondered that when he dealt with her. Instead, she looked sad and-most unlike the Tatiana he thought he knew-confused. At last she said, “You go back to yourrodina, your motherland. So that is right for you. But this”-she stamped a booted foot down on the sickly green grass-“this is myrodina. I will stay and fight for it.”

The Estonians she’d shot had thought this particular stretch of ground was part of their motherland, not hers. The Germans in Kohtla-Jarve undoubtedly thought of it as an extension of theirVaterland. All the same, he took her point.

He nodded off toward the west, toward the smoke that never stopped rising from Kohtla-Jarve. “What do they make there, that they have to keep it hidden from the Lizards no matter what?” he asked.

“They squeeze oil out of rocks in some way,” Tatiana answered. “We have been doing that for years, we and then the reactionary Estonian separatists. I suppose the fascists found the plants in working order, or they may have repaired them.”

Bagnall nodded. That made sense. Petroleum products were doubly precious these days. Any place the Germans could get their hands on such, they would.

“Come,” Tatiana said, dismissing the Germans as a distraction. She set off with a long, swinging stride that was a distraction in itself and gave some justification to her claim the RAF men traveled slowly.

They reached the Baltic a couple of hours later. It looked unimpressive: gray water rolling up and back over mud. Even so, Jerome Jones, imitating Xenophon’s men, called out,“Thalassa! Thalassa!” Bagnall and Embry both smiled, recognizing the allusion. Tatiana shrugged it off. Maybe she thought it was English. To her, that tongue was as alien as Greek.

Perhaps half a mile to the west, a little village squatted by the sea. Bagnall felt like cheering when he saw a couple of fishing boats pulled up onto the beach. Another, despite the early hour, was already out on the Baltic.

Dogs barked as the RAF men and Tatiana came into the village. Fishermen and their wives stepped out of doors to stare at them. Their expressions ranged from blank to hostile. In German, Bagnall said, “We are three English fliers. We have been trapped in Russia for more than a year. We want to go home. Can any of you sail us to Finland? We do not have much, but we will give you what we can.”

“Englishmen?” one of the fishermen said, with the same strange accent the Estonian fighters had had. Hostility melted. “I will take you.” A moment later, someone else demanded the privilege.

“Didn’t expect to be quarreled over,” Embry murmured as the villagers hashed it out. The fellow who’d spoken first won the argument. He ducked back into his home, reemerging with boots and knitted wool cap, then escorted them to his boat.

Tatiana followed. As the RAP men were about to help drag the boat into the water, she kissed each of them in turn. The villagers muttered among themselves in incomprehensible Estonian. A couple of men guffawed. That was understandable. So were the loud sniffs from a couple of women.

“You’re certain you won’t come with us?” Bagnall said. Tatiana shook her head yet again. She turned around and tramped south without looking back. She knew what she intended to do, and had to know the likely consequences of it.

“Come,” the fisherman said. The RAF men scrambled aboard with him. The rest of the villagers finished pushing the boat into the sea. He opened the fire door to the steam engine and started throwing in wood and peat and what looked like chunks of dried horse manure. Shaking his head, he went on, “Ought to burn coal. Can’t get coal. Burn whatever I get.”

“We know a few verses to that song,” Bagnall said. The fisherman chuckled. The boat had probably been slow burning its proper fuel. It was slower now, and the smoke that poured from its stack even less pleasant than the smudges from Kohtla-Jarve. But the engine ran. The boat sailed. Barring the Lizards’ strafing them from the air, Finland was less than a day away.

“Oh, Jager, dear,” Otto Skorzeny said in scratchy falsetto. Heinrich Jager looked up in surprise; he hadn’t heard Skorzeny come up. The SS man laughed at him. “Stop mooning over that Russian popsy of yours and pay attention. I need something from you.”

“She isn’t a popsy,” Jager said. Skorzeny laughed louder. The panzer colonel went on, “If she were a popsy, I don’t suppose I’d be mooning over her.”

The half admission got through to Skorzeny, who nodded. “All right, something to that. But even if she’s the Madonna, stop mooning over her. You know our friends back home have sent us a present, right?”

“Hard not to know it,” Jager agreed. “More of you damned SS men around than you can shake a stick at, every stinking one of them with a Schmeisser and a look in his eye that says he’d just as soon shoot you as give you the time of day. I’ll bet I even know what kind of present it is, too.” He didn’t say what kind of present he thought it was, not because he believed he might be wrong but from automatic concern for security.

“I’ll bet you do,” Skorzeny said. “Why shouldn’t you? You’ve known about this stuff as long as I have, ever since those days outside Kiev.” He said no more after that, but it was plenty. They’d stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in the Ukraine.

“What are you going to do with-it?” Jager asked cautiously.

“Are you thick in the head?” Skorzeny demanded. “I’m going to blow the kikes in Lodz to hell and gone, is what I’m going to do, and their chums the Lizards, and all the poor damned Poles in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He laughed again. “There’s the story of Poland in a sentence,nicht wahr? The poor damned Poles, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I presume you have authorization for this?” Jager said, not presuming any such thing. If anybody could lay hands on an atomic bomb for his own purposes, Otto Skorzeny was the man.

But not this time. Skorzeny’s big head went up and down. “You bet your arse I do: from theReichsfuhrer-SS and straight from the Fuhrer himself. Both of ’em in my attache case. You want to gape at fancy autographs?”

“Never mind.” In a way, Jager was relieved-if Himmler and Hitler had signed off on this, at least Skorzeny wasn’t running wild… or no wilder than usual, at any rate. Still-“Strikes me as a waste of a bomb. There’s nothing threatening coming out of Lodz. Look what happened the last time the Lizards even tried sending something up our way through the town: it got here late and chewed up, thanks to what happened down there.”

“Oh, yes, the Jews did us a hell of a favor.” Skorzeny rolled his eyes. “When they hit the Lizards, the bastards all wore German uniforms, so they didn’t get blamed for it-we did. I did in particular, as a matter of fact. The Lizards bribed a couple of Poles with scope-sighted rifles to come up here and go Skorzeny-hunting to see if they could pay me back.”

“You’re still here,” Jager noted.

“You noticed that, did you?” Skorzeny made as if to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re such a clever boy. And both the Poles are dead, too. It took a while-we know to the zloty how big their payoff was.” His smile showed teeth; maybe he was remembering how the Poles perished. But then he looked grim. “Lieutenant-Colonel Brockelmann is dead, too. Unlucky son of a whore happened to be about my size. One of the Poles blew off the top of his head from behind at about a thousand meters. Damn fine shooting, I must say. I complimented the fellow on it as I handed him his trigger finger.”

“I’m sure he appreciated that,” Jager said dryly. Associating with Skorzeny had rubbed his nose in all the uglier parts of warfare, the parts he hadn’t had to think about as a panzer commander. Mass murder, torture… he hadn’t signed up for those. But they were part of the package whether he’d signed up for them or not. Was destroying a city where the people were doing theReich more good than harm? Was their being Jews reason enough? Was their having piqued Skorzeny for not letting him destroy them on his first try reason enough? He’d have to think about that-and he couldn’t waste too much time doing it, either. Meanwhile, he asked, “So what am I supposed to do about all this? What’s the favor you have in mind? I’ve never been into Lodz, you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know that.” Skorzeny stretched like a tiger deciding he was too full to go hunting right now. “If you had been in Lodz, you’d be talking with theSicherheitsdienst or theGestapo now, not me.”

“I’ve talked with them before.” Jager shrugged, trying not to show the stab of alarm he felt.

“I know that, too,” Skorzeny answered. “But they would be asking more-pointed questions this time, and using more pointed tools. Never mind all that. I don’t want you to go into Lodz.” The tiger became more alert. “I’m not sure I’d trust you to go into Lodz. I want you to lay on a diversionary attack, make the Lizards look someplace else, while I trundle on down the road with my band of elves and make like St. Nicholas.”

“Can’t do it tomorrow. If that’s what you have in mind,” Jager answered promptly-and truthfully. “Every time we fight, it hurts us worse than the Lizards, a lot worse. You know that. We’re sort of putting things back together here right now, bringing up new panzers, new men, getting somewhere close-well, closer-to establishment strength. Give me a week or ten days.”

He expected Skorzeny to blow up, to demand action yesterday if not sooner. But the SS man surprised him-Skorzeny spent a lot of time surprising him-by nodding. “That’s fine. I still have some arrangements of my own to work out. Even for elves, hauling in a bloody big crate takes a bit of planning. I’ll let you know when I need you.” He thumped Jager on the back. “Now you can go back to thinking about your Russian with her clothes off.” He walked away, laughing till he wheezed.

“What the devil was all that in aid of, sir?” Gunther Grillparzer asked.

“The devil indeed.” Jager glanced toward the panzer gunner, whose eyes followed Skorzeny as if he were some cinema hero. “He’s found some new reasons for getting a bunch of us killed, Gunther.”

“Wunderbar!”Grillparzer said with altogether unfeigned enthusiasm, leaving Jager to contemplate the vagaries of youth. He came up with a twisted version of the Book of Ecclesiastes: vagary of vagaries, all is vagary. It seemed as good a description of real life as the more accurate reading.

“Ah, good to see you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Iosef Stalin said as Molotov entered his Kremlin office.

“And you, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov answered. Stalin had a purr in his voice that Molotov hadn’t heard in a long time: not since just after the previous Soviet atomic bomb, as best he could remember. The last time he’d heard it before that was when the Red Army threw the Nazis back from the gates of Moscow at the end of 1941. It meant Stalin thought things were looking up for the time being.

“I presume you have again conveyed to the Lizards our non-negotiable demand that they cease their aggression and immediately withdraw from the territory of the peace-loving Soviet Union,” Stalin said. “Perhaps they will pay more attention to this demand after Saratov.”

“Perhaps they will, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said. Neither of them mentioned Magnitogorsk, which had ceased to exist shortly after Saratov was incinerated. Measured against the blow dealt the Lizards, the loss of any one city, even an important industrial center like Magnitogorsk, was a small matter. Molotov went on, “At least they have not rejected the demand out of hand, as they did when we made it on previous occasions.”

“If once we get them to the conference table, we shall defeat them there,” Stalin said. “Not only does the dialectic predict this, so does their behavior at all previous conferences. They are too strong for us to drive them from the world altogether, I fear, but once we get them talking, we shall free the Soviet Union and its workers and peasants of them.”

“I am given to understand they have also received withdrawal demands from the governments of the United States and Germany,” Molotov said. “As those are also powers possessing atomic weapons, the Lizards will have to hear them as seriously as they hear us.”

“Yes.” Stalin filled a pipe withmakhorka and puffed out a cloud of acrid smoke. “It is the end for Britain, you know. Were Churchill not a capitalist exploiter, I might have sympathy for him. The British did a very great thing, expelling the Lizards from their island, but what has it got them in the end? Nothing.”

“They could yet produce their own atomic weapons,” Molotov said. “Underestimating them does not pay.”

“As Hitler found, to his dismay,” Stalin agreed. For his part, Stalin had underestimated Hitler, but Molotov did not point that out. Stalin sucked meditatively on the pipe for a little while before going on, “Even if they make these bombs for themselves, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, what good does it do them? They have already saved their island without the bombs. They cannot save their empire with them, for they have no way of delivering them to Africa or India. Those will stay in the Lizards’ hands from this time forward.”

“A cogent point,” Molotov admitted. You endangered yourself if you underestimated Stalin’s capacity. He was always brutal, he could be naive, foolish, shortsighted. But when he was right, as he often was, he was so breathtakingly right as to make up for the rest.

He said, “If the German fascists persuade the Lizards to withdraw from territory that had been under their occupation before the aliens invaded, it will be interesting to see how many of those lands eagerly return to Nazi control.”

“Much of the land the fascists occupied was ours,” Molotov said. “The Lizards did us a favor by clearing them from so much of it.” Nazi-held pockets persisted in the north and near the Romanian frontier, and Nazi bands one step up from guerrillas still ranged over much of what the Germans had controlled, but those were manageable problems, unlike the deadly threats the fascists had posed and the Lizards now did.

Stalin sensed that, too, saying, “Personally, I would not be brokenhearted to see the Lizards remain in Poland. With peace, better them on our western border than the fascists: having made a treaty, they are more likely to adhere to it.”

He had underestimated Hitler once; he would not do it twice. Molotov nodded vigorously. Here he agreed with his superior. “With the Nazis’ rockets, with their gas that paralyzes breathing, with their explosive-metal bombs, and with their fascist ideology, they would make most unpleasant neighbors.”

“Yes.” Stalin puffed out more smoke. His eyes narrowed. He looked through Molotov rather than at him. It was not quite the hooded look he gave when mentally discarding a favorite, consigning him to thegulag or worse. He was just thinking hard. After a while, he said, “Let us be flexible, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Let us, instead of demanding withdrawal before negotiations, propose a cease-fire in place while negotiations go on. Perhaps this will work, perhaps it will not. If we are no longer subject to raids and bombings, our industry and collective farms will have the chance to begin recovery.”

“Shall we offer this proposal alone, or shall we try to continue to maintain a human popular front against the alien imperialists?” Molotov asked.

“You may consult with the Americans and Germans before transmitting the proposal to the Lizards,” Stalin said with the air of a man granting a great boon. “You may, for that matter, consult with the British, the Japanese, and the Chinese-the small powers,” he added, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. “If they are willing to make the Lizards the same offer at the same time, well and good: we shall go forward together. If they are unwilling… we shall go forward anyway.”

“As you say, Comrade General Secretary.” Molotov was not sure this was the wisest course, but imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he got the despatch announcing the new Soviet policy-and, better yet, imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he had to bring Hitler the news-came close to making it all worthwhile. “I shall begin drafting the telegram at once.”

Heinrich Jager was getting to be a pretty fair horseman. The accomplishment filled him with less delight than it might have under other circumstances. When you had to climb on a horse to go back and visit corps headquarters, that mostly proved you didn’t have enough petrol to keep your utility vehicles operational. Since theWehrmacht barely had enough petrol to keep its panzers operational, the choice lay between visiting corps headquarters on a bay mare or on shank’s mare. Riding beat the devil out of walking.

The road through the forest forked. Jager urged the mare south, down the right-hand fork. That was not the direct route back to his regiment. One of the good things-one of the few good things-about riding a horse as opposed to aVolkswagen was that you did it by yourself, without a driver. Jager didn’t want anyone to know he was turning down the right-hand fork. If anyone found out, in fact, he would soon be having intimate discussion with the SS, the SD, theGestapo, theAbwehr, and any other security or Intelligence service that could get its hands (to say nothing of assorted blunt, sharp, heated, and electrically conductive instruments) on him.

“Why am I doing this?” he said in the middle of forest stillness broken only by the distant rumble of artillery. The mare answered with a snort.

He felt like snorting himself. He did know the answer: partly the debt he felt to Anielewicz personally, partly that Anielewicz and his Jewish fighters had kept their side of the bargain they’d made with him and didn’t deserve incineration, partly the way his stomach knotted whenever he thought about what the forces of theReich had done to the Jews of eastern Europe before the Lizards came-and were still doing to the Jews remaining in the territory they controlled. (He remembered all too vividly the Jewish and homosexual prisoners who worked on the atomic pile underSchloss Hohentubingen till they died, which seldom took long.).

Was all that reason enough to violate his military oath? The head of the SS and theFuhrer himself had authorized Skorzeny to visit atomic fire upon Lodz. Who was Colonel Heinrich Jager to say they were wrong?

“A man,” he said, answering the question no one had asked aloud. “If I can’t live with myself, what good is anything else?”

He sometimes wished he could turn off his mind, could numb himself to everything that happened in war. He knew a good many officers who were aware of the horrors theReich had committed in the east but who refused to think about them, who sometimes even refused to admit they were aware of them. Then there was Skorzeny, who knew but didn’t give a damn. Neither path suited Jager. He was neither an ostrich, to stick his head in the sand, nor a Pharisee, to pass by on the other side of the road.

And so here he was riding down this side of this road, a submachine gun on his knee, alert for Lizard patrols, German patrols, Polish brigands, Jewish brigands… anyone at all. The fewer people he saw, the better he liked it.

His nerves jumped again when he came out of the forest into open farm country. Now he was visible for kilometers, not just a few meters. Of course, a lot of men got around on horseback these days, and a lot of them were in uniform and carried weapons. Not all of those were soldiers, by any means. The times had turned Poland as rough as the cinema made the America Wild West out to be. Rougher-the cowboys didn’t have machine guns or panzers.

His eyes swiveled back and forth. He still didn’t see anybody. He rode on. The farm wasn’t far. He could leave his message, boot the mare up into a trot, and be back with his regiment at the front only an hour or so later than he should have been. Given how erratic any sort of travel was these days, no one would think twice over that.

“Here we go,” he said softly, recognizing the well-kept little grove of apple trees ahead. Karol would pass the word to Tadeusz, Tadeusz could get it to Anielewicz, and that would be that.

Everything was quiet ahead. Too quiet? The hair prickled up on the back of Jager’s neck. No chickens ran in the yard, no sheep bleated, no pigs grunted. For that matter, no one was in the fields, no toddlers played by the house. Like a lot of Poles, Karol was raising a great brood of children. You could always spot them-or hear them, anyhow. Not now, though.

His horse snorted and sidestepped, white showing around her eyes. “Steady,” Jager said, and steady she was. But something had spooked her. She was walking forward, yes, but her nostrils still flared with every breath she took.

Jager sniffed, too. At first he noted nothing out of the ordinary. Then he too smelled what was bothering the mare. It wasn’t much, just a faint whiff of corruption, as if aHausfrau hadn’t got round to cooking a joint of beef until it had stayed in the icebox too long.

He knew he should have wheeled the horse around and ridden out of there at that first whiff of danger. But the whiff argued that the danger wasn’t there now. It had come and gone, probably a couple of days before. Jager rode the ever more restive mare up to the farmhouse and tied her to one of the posts holding up the front porch. As he dismounted, he flipped the change lever on his Schmeisser to full automatic.

Flies buzzed in and out through the front door, which was slightly ajar. Jager kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jager bounded into the house.

The first two bodies lay in the kitchen. One of Karol’s daughters, maybe seven years old, had been shot execution-style in the back of the neck. His wife lay there, too, naked, on her back. She had a bullet hole between the eyes. Whoever had been here had probably raped her a few times, or more than a few, before they’d killed her.

Biting his lip, Jager walked into the parlor. Several more children sprawled in death there. The visitors had served one of them, a little blond of about twelve whom Jager remembered as always smiling, the same way they had Karol’s wife. The black bread he’d had for breakfast wanted to come back up. He clamped his jaw and wouldn’t let it.

The door to Karol’s bedroom gaped wide, like his wife’s legs, like his daughter’s. Jager walked in. There on the bed lay Karol. He had not been slain neatly, professionally, dispassionately. His killers had taken time and pains on their work. Karol had taken pain, too, some enormous amount of it, before he was finally allowed to die.

Jager turned away, partly sickened, partly afraid. Now he knew who had visited this farmhouse before him. They’d signed their masterpiece, so to speak: on Karol’s belly, they’d burned in the SS runes with a redhot poker or something similar. The next interesting question was, how much had they asked him before they finally cut out his tongue? He didn’t know Jager’s name-the panzer colonel called himself Joachim around here-but if he’d described Jager, figuring out who he was wouldn’t take the SS long.

Whistling tunelessly, Jager went outside, unhitched the mare, and rode away. Where to ride troubled him. Should he flee for his life? If he could get to Lodz, Anielewicz and the Jews would protect him. That was loaded with irony thick enough to slice, but it was also probably true.

In the end, though, instead of riding south, he went north, back toward his regiment. Karol and his family had been dead for days now. If the SS did know about him, they would have dropped on him by now. And, never mind the Jews, he still had the war against the Lizards to fight.

When he did get back to the regimental encampment, Gunther Grillparzer looked up from a game of skat and said, “You look a little green around the gills, sir. Everything all right?”

“I must have drunk some bad water or something,” Jager answered. “I’ve been jumping down off this miserable creature”-he patted the horse’s neck-“and squatting behind a bush about every five minutes, all the way back from corps headquarters.” That accounted not only for his pallor but also for getting back here later than he should have.

“The galloping shits are no fun at all, sir,” the panzer gunner said sympathetically. Then he guffawed and pointed to Jager’s mare. “The galloping shits! Get it, sir? I made a joke without even noticing.”

“Life is like that sometimes,” Jager said. Grillparzer scratched his head. Jager just led away the horse. He’d ridden it a long way; it needed seeing to. Grillparzer shrugged and went back to his card game.

Nieh Ho-T’ing and Hsia Shou-Tao passed the little scaly devils’ inspection and were allowed into the main part of the tent on the island in the lake at the heart of the Forbidden City. “Good of you to invite me here with you today,” he said, “instead of-” He stopped.

Instead of your woman, the one I tried to rape.Nieh completed the sentence, perhaps not exactly as his aide would have. Aloud, he answered, “Liu Mei has some sort of sickness, the kind babies get. Liu Han asked the central committee for permission to be relieved of this duty so she could care for the girl. Said permission having been granted-”

Hsia Shou-Tao nodded. “Women need to look after their brats. It’s one of the things they’re good for. They’re-” He stopped again. Again, Nieh Ho-T’ing had no trouble coming up with a likely continuation.They’re also good for laying, which causes the brats in the first place. But Hsia, while he might have thought that, hadn’t come out and said it. His reeducation, however slowly it proceeded, was advancing.

“Liu Han has all sorts of interesting projects going on,” Nieh said. Hsia Shou-Tao nodded once more, but did not ask him to amplify that. Where women were not involved, Hsia was plenty clever. He would not allude to the whereabouts of the scaly devil Ttomalss where other little devils might hear.

Nieh had thought that by this time he would be delivering small pieces of Ttomalss to the little devils one at a time. It hadn’t worked out that way. The capture of the little devil who’d stolen Liu Han’s child had gone off as planned-better than planned-but she hadn’t yet taken the ferocious revenge she and Nieh had anticipated. He wondered why. It wasn’t as if she’d become a Christian or anything foolish like that.

A couple of chairs were the only articles of human-made furniture inside the tent. Nieh and Hsia sat down in them. A moment later, the little scaly devil named Ppevel and his interpreter came out and seated themselves behind their worktable. Ppevel let loose with a volley of hisses and pops, squeaks and coughs. The interpreter turned them into pretty good Chinese: “The assistant administrator, eastern region, main continental mass, notes that one of you appears to be different from past sessions. Is it Nieh Ho-T’ing or Liu Han who is absent?”

“Liu Han is absent,” Nieh answered. The little devils had as much trouble telling people apart as he did with them.

Ppevel spoke again: “We suspect a link between her and the disappearance of the researcher Ttomalss.”

“Your people and mine are at war,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. “We have honored the truce we gave in exchange for Liu Han’s baby. We were not required to do anything more than that. Suspect all you like.”

“You are arrogant,” Ppevel said.

That, coming from an imperialist exploiter of a little scaly devil, almost made Nieh Ho-T’ing laugh out loud. He didn’t; he was here on business. He said, “We have learned that you scaly devils are seriously considering cease-fires without time limits for discussion of your withdrawal from the territory of the peace-loving Soviet Union and other states.”

“These requests are under discussion,” Ppevel agreed through the interpreter. “They have nothing to do with you, however. We shall not withdraw from China under any circumstances.”

Nieh stared at him in dismay. He had been ordered by Mao Tse-Tung himself to demand China’s-and, specifically, the People’s Liberation Army’s-inclusion in such talks. Having the little scaly devils reject that out of hand before he could even propose it was a jolt. It reminded Nieh of the signs the European foreign devils had put up in their colonial parks: NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED.

“You shall regret this high-handed refusal,” he said when he could speak again. “What we have done to you is but a pinprick beside what we might do.”

“What you might do is a pinprick beside the damage from an explosive-metal bomb,” Ppevel replied. “You have none. We are strong enough to hold down this land no matter what you do. We shall.”

“If you do, we’ll make your life a living hell,” Hsia Shou-Tao burst out hotly. “Every time you step out on the street, someone may shoot at you. Every time you get into one of your cars or trucks or tanks, you may drive over a mine. Every time you travel between one city and another, someone may have a mortar zeroed on the road. Every time you bring food into a city, you may have to see if it is poisoned.”

Nieh wished his aide hadn’t given the little devils such bald threats. Liu Han would have known better, she was, as Nieh had discovered to his own occasional discomfiture, a master at biding her time till she was ready to attack a target full force. But Nieh did not disagree with the sentiments Hsia had expressed.

Ppevel remained unimpressed. “How is this different from what you are doing now?” he demanded. “We hold the centers of population, we hold the roads between one of them and another. Using these, we can control the countryside.”

“You can try,” Nieh Ho-T’ing told him. That was the recipe the Japanese had used in occupying northeastern China. It was almost the only recipe you could use if you lacked the manpower-or even the devilpower-to occupy a land completely. “You will find the price higher than you can afford to pay.”

“We are a patient people,” Ppevel answered. “In the end, we shall wear you down. You Big Uglies are too hasty for long campaigns.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing was used to thinking of the Europeans and Japanese as hasty folk, hopelessly out of their depth in dealing with China. He was not used to being perceived as a blunt, unsubtle barbarian himself. Pointing a finger at Ppevel, he said, “You will lose more fighters here in China than you would from an explosive-metal bomb. You would do better to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal of your forces now than to see them destroyed piecemeal.”

“Threats are easy to make,” Ppevel said. “They are harder to carry out.”

“Conquests are sometimes easy to make, too,” Nieh replied. “They are harder to keep. If you stay here, you will not be facing the People’s Liberation Army alone, you know. The Kuomintang and the eastern devils-the Japanese-will struggle alongside us. If the war takes a generation or longer, we shall accept the necessity.”

He was sure he spoke the truth about the Kuomintang. Chiang Kai-shek had betrayed the Chinese revolution, but he was as wily a politician as any in the land. Even after the Japanese invaded, he’d saved the bulk of his strength for the conflict against the People’s Liberation Army, just as Mao had conserved force to use against him. Each of them recognized the need for protracted war to gain his own objectives.

What the Japanese would do was harder to calculate. Without a doubt, though, they hated the little scaly devils and would fight them ferociously, even if without any great political acumen.

Ppevel said, “As I told you before, we are going to keep this land. Your threats we ignore. Your pinpricks we ignore. We recognize only true force. You are far too backward to build an explosive-metal bomb. We have no need to fear you or anything you might do.”

“Maybe we cannot build one,” Hsia Shou-Tao hissed, “but we have allies. One of these bombs might yet appear in a Chinese city.”

This time, Nieh felt like patting Hsia on the back. That was exactly the right thing to say. Nieh knew-he did not think Hsia did-that Mao had sent Stalin a message, asking for the use of the first bomb the Soviet Union did not urgently require in its own defense.

The interpreter translated. Ppevel jerked in his chair as if he’d sat on something sharp and pointed. “You are lying,” he said. Yet the interpreter’s Chinese sounded uncertain. And Nieh did not think Ppevel sounded confident, either. He wished after all that he’d had Liu Han along; she would have been better at gauging the little devil’s tone.

“Are we lying when we say we have allies?” Nieh replied. “You know we are not. The United States was allied with the Kuomintang and the People’s Liberation Army against the Japanese before you scaly devils came here. The Soviet Union was allied with the People’s Liberation Army against the Kuomintang. Both the U.S.A. and the USSR have explosive-metal bombs.”

He thought the chances that one of those bombs would make its way to China were slim. But he did not have to let Ppevel know that. The more likely the little devil reckoned it to be, the better the bargain the People’s Liberation Army would get.

And he’d rocked Ppevel too. He could see as much. The high-ranking scaly devil and his interpreter went back and forth between themselves for a couple of minutes. Ppevel finally said, “I still do not altogether believe your words, but I shall bring them to the attention of my superiors. They will pass on to you their decision on whether to include you Chinese in these talks.”

“For their own sake and for yours, they had best not delay,” Nieh said, a monumental bluff if ever there was one.

“They will decide in their own time, not in yours,” Ppevel answered. Nieh gave a mental shrug: not all bluffs worked. He recognized a delaying tactic when he saw one. The little devils would discuss and discuss-and then say no. Ppevel went on, “The talks between us now are ended. You are dismissed, pending my superiors’ actions.”

“We are not your servants, to be dismissed on your whim,” Hsia Shou-Tao said, anger in his voice. But the interpreter did not bother translating that; he and Ppevel retreated into the rear area of the enormous orange tent. An armed little devil came into what Nieh thought of as the conference chamber to make sure he and Hsia departed in good time.

Nieh was thoughtful and quiet till he and his aide left the Forbidden City and returned to the raucous bustle of the rest of Peking: partly because he needed to mull over what Ppevel had so arrogantly said, partly because he feared the little scaly devils could listen if he discussed his conclusions with Hsia Shou-Tao anywhere close to their strongholds.

At last he said, “I fear we shall have to form a popular front with the Kuomintang and maybe even with the Japanese as well if we are to harass the little devils to the point where they decide staying in China is more trouble than it’s worth.”

Hsia looked disgusted. “We had a popular front with the Kuomintang against the Japanese. It was just noise and speeches. It didn’t mean much in the war, and it didn’t keep the counterrevolutionaries from harassing us, too.”

“Or we them,” Nieh said, remembering certain exploits of his own. “Maybe this popular front will be like that one. But maybe not, too. Can we truly afford the luxury of struggle among ourselves while we also combat the little scaly devils? I have my doubts.”

“Can we convince the Kuomintang clique and the Japanese to fight the common enemy instead of us and each other?” Hsia retorted. “I have my doubts of that.”

“So do I,” Nieh said worriedly. “But if we cannot, we will lose this war. Who will come to our rescue then? The Soviet Union? They share our ideology, but they have been badly mauled fighting first the Germans and then the scaly devils. No matter what we told Ppevel, I do not think the People’s Liberation Army will get an explosive-metal bomb from the USSR any time soon.”

“You’re right there,” Hsia said, spitting in the gutter. “Stalin kept the treaty he made with Hitler till Hitler attacked him. If he makes one with the little scaly devils, he will keep it, too. That leaves us fighting a long war all alone.”

“Then we need a popular front-a true popular front,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. Hsia Shou-Tao spat again, perhaps at the taste of the idea. But, in the end, he nodded.