Striking the Balance

XVII

Atvar wished he had acquired the habit of tasting ginger. He needed something, anything, to fortify himself before going in to resume dickering with a chamber full of argumentative Big Uglies. Turning both eye turrets toward Kirel, he said, “If we are to have peace with the Tosevites, it appears we shall have to make the most of the concessions upon which they originally insisted.”

“Truth,” Kirel said in a melancholy voice. “They are certainly the most indefatigable argufiers the Race has ever encountered.”

“That they are.” Atvar twisted his body in distaste. “Even the ones with whom we need not conduct actual negotiations-the British and the Nipponese-go on with their unending quibbles, while two Chinese factions both insist they deserve to be here, though neither seems willing to admit the other does. Madness!”

“What of the Deutsche, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked. “Of all the Tosevite empires and not-empires, theirs seems to be presenting the Race with the greatest number of difficulties.”

“I admire your gift for understatement,” Atvar said acidly. “The envoy from Deutschland seems dim even for a Tosevite. The not-emperor he serves is, by all appearances, as addled as an unfertilized egg left half a year in the sun-or do you know a better way to interpret his alternating threats and cajolery?” Without waiting for an answer, the fleetlord went on, “And yet, of all these Tosevite empires and not-empires, the Deutsche may well be the most technologically advanced. Can you unravel this paradox for me?”

“Tosev 3 is a world full of paradoxes,” Kirel replied. “Among so many, one more loses its capacity to surprise.”

“This is also a truth.” Atvar let out a weary, hissing sigh. “One or another of them is liable to prove a calamity, I fear. I admit I do not know which one, though, and very much wish I did.”

Pshing spoke up: “Exalted Fleetlord, the time appointed for continuation of these discussions with the Tosevites is now upon us.”

“Thank you, Adjutant,” Atvar said, though he felt anything but grateful. “They are a punctual species, that much I will say for them. Even after so long in the Empire, the Hallessi would show up late for their own cremations if they could.” His mouth dropped open in wry amusement. “Now that I think on it, so would I. If I could.”

Regretfully, Atvar turned his eye turrets away from the males of his own kind and, with his interpreter, entered the chamber where the Tosevite representatives awaited him. They rose from their seats as he entered, a token of respect. “Tell them to sit down so we can get on with it,” Atvar said to the interpreter. “Tell them politely, but tell them.” The translator; a male named Uotat, turned his words into English.

The Tosevites returned to their chairs again, in their usual pattern. Marshall, the American male, and Eden, his British counterpart, always sat close together, though Eden was not really a formal participant in these talks. Then came Molotov, from the SSSR, and von Ribbentrop, of Deutschland. Like Eden, Togo of Nippon was more an observer than a negotiator.

“We begin,” Atvar said. The Tosevite males leaned forward, away from the rigidly upright position they preferred most of the time and toward one more like that the Race used. This was, Atvar had learned, a sign of interest and attention. He went on, “In most cases, we have agreed in principle to withdraw from the territory controlled at the time of our arrival on Tosev 3 by the U.S.A., the SSSR, and Deutschland. We have done this in spite of claims we have received from several groups of Big Uglies offering the view that the SSSR and Deutschland did not rightfully possess some of these territories. Your not-empires are the ones strong enough to treat with us; this gives your claims priority.”

Von Ribbentrop sat straight again and brushed an imaginary speck of dust from the material of the outer cloth covering of his torso. “He is smug,” Uotat said to Atvar, using an eye turret to point to the Deutsch envoy.

“He is a fool,” Atvar replied, “but you need not tell him that; if you are a fool, you derive no profit from hearing as much. I now resume with the matter at hand… Because we are gracious, we also agree to withdraw our males from the northern territory that seems to be not quite a part of either the U.S.A. or Britain.”

The toponym escaped him; Marshall and Eden supplied it together. “Canada.”

“Canada, yes,” Atvar said. The simple truth was that most of the place was too cold to be worth much to the Race under any circumstances. Marshall also seemed to think it was for all practical purposes part of the U.S.A., though it had a separate sovereignty. Atvar did not fully understand that, but it was to him a matter of small import.

“Now to the issue on which these talks paused in our last session,” Atvar said: “the issue of Poland.”

“Poland in its entirety must be ours!” von Ribbentrop said loudly. “No other solution is possible or acceptable. So theFuhrer has declared.” (Uotat added, “This is the title of the Deutsch not-emperor.” “I know,” Atvar answered.) “I have no room whatever for discussion on this matter.”

Molotov spoke. He was the only Tosevite envoy who did not use English. His interpreter translated for Uotat: “This view is unacceptable to the workers and farmers of the SSSR, who have an immediate claim on the eastern half of this region, one which I personally brokered with the Deutsch foreign minister, and also a historic claim to the entire country.”

Atvar turned his eye turrets away from both contentious Big Uglies. Neither of them would budge on the issue. Atvar tried a new tack: “Perhaps we could let the Poles and the Jews of Poland form new not-empires of their own, between those of your not-emperors.”

Molotov did not reply. Von Ribbentrop, unfortunately, did: “As I have said, theFuhrer finds this intolerable. The answer is no.”

The fleetlord wanted to let loose with a long, hissing sigh, but refrained. The Big Uglies were undoubtedly studying his behavior as closely as he and his staff of researchers and psychologists were examining theirs. He tried a different course: “Perhaps, then, it is appropriate for the Race to remain sovereign over this place called Poland.” In saying that, he realized he was meeting the ambitions of the Tosevite Moishe Russie. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but he saw now that Russie did indeed understand his fellow Big Uglies.

“This may in principle be acceptable to the Soviet Union, depending on the precise boundaries of said occupation,” Molotov said. In a low voice, Uotat added his own comment to that: “The Tosevites of the SSSR find the Deutsche no more pleasant neighbors than we do.”

“Truth,” Atvar said, amused but unwilling to show it to the Big Uglies.

Von Ribbentrop turned his head and looked at Molotov for several seconds before giving his attention back to Atvar. If that wasn’t anger the Deutsch representative was displaying, all the Race’s studies of Tosevite gestural language were worthless. But von Ribbentrop spoke without undue passion: “I am sorry to have to keep repeating myself, but this is not acceptable to Deutschland or to theFuhrer. Poland had been under and should return in its entirety to Deutsch sovereignty.”

“That is not acceptable to the Soviet Union,” Molotov said.

“The Soviet Union had control over not a particle of Polish soil at the time when-the situation changed,” von Ribbentrop retorted. He turned back to Atvar. “Poland must be returned to Deutschland. TheFuhrer has made it absolutely clear he will accept nothing less, and warns of the severest consequences if his just demands are not met.”

“Does he threaten the Race?” Atvar asked. The Deutsch envoy did not reply. Atvar went on, “You Deutsche should remember that you hold the smallest amount of territory of any party to these talks. It is conceivable that we could destroy you without wrecking the planet Tosev 3 to the point where it would be unsuitable for the colonization fleet when it arrives. Your intransigence here is liable to tempt us to make the experiment.”

That was partly bluff. The Race did not have the nuclear weapons available to turn all Deutsch-controlled territory to radioactive slag, however delightful the prospect was. The Big Uglies, however, did not know what resources the Race had and what it did not.

Atvar hoped, then, his threat would strike home. Marshall and Togo bent over the papers in front of them and both began to write furiously. The fleetlord thought that might represent agitation. Eden and Molotov sat unmoving. Atvar was used to that from Molotov. This was his first prolonged dealing with Eden, who struck him as competent but who was also in a weak bargaining position.

Von Ribbentrop said, “Then the war may resume, Fleetlord. When theFuhrer states his determination in regard to any issue, you may take it as certain that he means what he says. Am I to inform him that you flatly reject his reasonable requirement? If I do so, I warn you that I cannot answer for what will happen next.”

His short, blunt-tipped tongue came out and moistened the everted mucus membranes that ringed his small mouth. That was, the Race’s researchers insisted, a sign of nervousness among the Big Uglies. But why was von Ribbentrop nervous? Because he was running a bluff himself, at the orders of his not-emperor? Or because he feared the Deutsch leader really would resume the war if his insistence on having Poland was rejected?

Atvar picked his words with more care than he would have imagined possible when speaking to a Tosevite: “Tell this male that his demand for all of Poland is refused. Tell him further that, as far as the Race is concerned, the cease-fire between our forces and those of the Deutsche may continue while we address other issues. And tell him that. If the Deutsche are the first to break the cease-fire, the Race will retaliate forcefully. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Fleetlord, I understand,” von Ribbentrop replied through Uotat. “As I have said, theFuhrer is not in the habit of making threats he does not mean. I shall convey your response to him. Then we shall all await his reply.” The Big Ugly licked those soft, pink lips again. “I am sorry to say it, but I do not think we will be waiting long.”

Major Mon handed Nieh Ho-T’ing a cup filled with gently steaming tea. “Thank you,” Nieh said, inclining his head. The Japanese was, by his standards, acting courteously. Nieh still thought of him as an imperialist eastern devil, but one could be polite about such things.

Mori returned the half bow. “I am unworthy of your praise,” he answered in his rough Chinese. The Japanese hid their arrogance behind a facade of false humility. Nieh preferred dealing with the little scaly devils. They made no bones about what they were.

“Have you decided which course would be most expedient for you to take?” Nieh asked. Looking around the Japanese camp, he thought that should be obvious. The eastern devils were ragged and hungry and starting to run low on the munitions that were their only means of coercing supplies from the local peasants. The arrival of the little scaly devils had cut them off from the logistics train that ran back to Japan. They were better disciplined than a band of bandits, but not much stronger.

But after their major nodded, he did not give the reply Nieh had hoped to hear: “I must tell you we cannot join what you call the popular front. The little devils do not formally stop their war against us, but they also do not fight us now. If we attack them here, who can say what that will provoke them to elsewhere in the world?”

“You join with them, in effect, against the progressive forces of the Chinese people.”

Major Mori laughed at him. He stared. He had thought of many possible reactions from the Japanese, but had not expected that one. Mori said, “You have made an alliance with the Kuomintang, I see. That must be what transforms them from reactionary counterrevolutionary running dogs into progressives. A nice magic trick, I must say.”

A mosquito buzzed down and bit Nieh on the back of one wrist. Smashing it gave him a moment to collect his thoughts. He hoped he was not turning red enough for the Japanese to notice. At last, he said, “Compared to the little scaly devils, the reactionaries of the Kuomintang are progressive. I admit it, though I do not love them. Compared to the little devils, even you Japanese imperialists are progressive. I admit that, too.”

“Arigato,”the major said, giving him a politely sardonic seated bow.

“We have worked together against the scaly devils before.” Nieh knew he was pleading, and knew he should not plead. But the Japanese, man for man, were better soldiers than either the troops of the People’s Liberation Army or the forces of the Kuomintang. Having Mori’s detachment as part of the local popular front would give the little scaly devils a great deal of added grief. And so Nieh went on, “The artillery shells with which you supplied me were put to good use, and caused the little devils many casualties.”

“Personally, I am glad this is so,” Mon replied. “But at the time you got those shells from me, the little devils and Japan were at war with each other. That does not now seem to be the case. If we join in attacks against the scaly devils and are identified, any chance of peace may be destroyed. I will not do that without a direct order from the Home Islands, no matter what my feelings are.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing got to his feet. “I will return to Peking, then.” Unspoken was the warning that, if the Japanese kept him from returning or shot him, they would find themselves rather than the little devils the focus of Chinese efforts from then on.

Even though he was but an eastern devil, Mori had enough subtlety to catch the warning. He too rose, and bowed once more to Nieh. “As I say, I wish you personal good luck against the little scaly devils. But, when set against the needs of the nation, personal wishes must give way.”

He would have phrased it differently had he been a Marxist- Leninist, but the import was the same. “I bear you no personal ill-will, either,” Nieh said, and left the Japanese camp in the countryside for the hike back to Peking.

Dirt scuffed under his sandals as he trudged along. Crickets chirped in the undergrowth. Dragonflies skimmed by, darting and twisting with maneuvers impossible for any fighter plane. Farmers and their wives bent their backs in fields of wheat and millet, endlessly weeding. Had Nieh been an artist instead of a soldier, he might have paused a while to sketch.

What he was thinking about, though, had nothing to do with art. He was thinking Major Mori’s Japanese had lingered close by Peking too long already. The little scaly devils. If they ever thought to do it, could use the Japanese against the popular front in the same way the Kuomintang had used warlord forces against the People’s Liberation Army. That would let the little devils fight the Chinese without committing their own troops to the effort.

He had nothing personal against the Japanese major, no. But, because he respected Mori as a soldier, he found him all the more worrisome: he had the potential to be more dangerous. With the razor-sharp logic of the dialectic, that led to an ineluctable conclusion: Major Mori’s pocket would have to be liquidated as soon as possible.

“It might even work out for the best,” Nieh said aloud: no one to hear him but for a couple of ducks paddling in a pond. If the little scaly devils were subtle enough to understand indirect hints, the disappearance of possible allies would give them the idea that the popular front would not only prosecute a campaign against them, but would do so vigorously.

He reached Peking in the middle of the night. Off in the distance, gunfire rattled. Someone was striking a blow for the progressive cause. “What are you doing here at this hour?” a human gate guard asked.

“Coming in to see my cousin.” Nieh showed a false identity card, and handed the guard a folded banknote with it.

The guard returned the card, but not the money. “Pass in, then,” he said gruffly. “But if I see you coming around again so late, I am going to decide you’re a thief. Then it will go hard for you.” He brandished a spiked truncheon, reveling in his tiny authority.

Nieh had all he could do not to laugh in the fellow’s face. Instead, he ducked his head as if in fright and hurried past the guard into Peking. The roominghouse was not far away.

When he got there, he found Liu Han chasing Liu Mei around the otherwise empty dining room. Liu Mei was squealing with glee. She thought it a wonderful game. Liu Han looked about ready to fall over. She shook a finger at her daughter. “You go to sleep like a good girl or maybe I will give you back to Ttomalss.”

Liu Mei paid no attention. By Liu Han’s weary sigh, she hadn’t expected Liu Mei to pay any attention. Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “What will you do with the little scaly devil called Ttomalss?”

“I don’t know,” Liu Han said. “It’s good to have you back, but ask me hard questions another time. Right now I’m too tired to see straight, let alone think straight.” She ran and kept Liu Mei from overturning a chair on top of herself. “Impossible daughter!” Liu Mei thought it was funny.

“Has the scaly devil been punished enough?” Nieh persisted.

“He could never be punished enough, not for what he did to me, not for what he did to my daughter, not for what he did to Bobby Fiore and other men and women whose names I do not even know,” Liu Han said fiercely. Then she calmed somewhat “Why do you ask?”

“Because it may be useful, before long, to deliver either the little devil himself or his body to the authorities his kind have set up here in Peking,” Nieh answered. “I wanted to know which you would prefer.”

“That would be a decision for the central committee, not for me alone,” Liu Han said, frowning.

“I know.” Nieh watched her more warily than he’d ever expected when they first met. She’d come so far from the peasant woman grieving over her stolen child she’d been then. When class was ignored, when ability was allowed, even encouraged, to rise as in the People’s Liberation Army, astonishing things sometimes happened. Liu Han was one of those astonishments. She hadn’t even known what the central committee was. Now she could manipulate it as well as a Party veteran. He said, “I have not discussed the matter before the committee. I wanted to learn your opinion first”

“Thank you for thinking of my personal concerns,” she said. She looked through Nieh for a little while as she thought. “I do not know,” she went on. “I suppose I could accept either. If it helped our cause against the little scaly devils.”

“Spoken like a woman of the Party!” Nieh exclaimed.

“Perhaps I would like to join,” Liu Han said. “If I am to make myself all I might be here, I should join. Is that not so?”

“It is so,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “You shall have instruction. If that is what you want. I would be proud to instruct you myself, in fact.” Liu Han nodded. Nieh beamed. Bringing a new member into the Party gave him the feeling a missionary had to have on bringing a new convert into the church. “One day,” he told her, “your place will be to give instruction, not to receive it.”

“That would be very fine,” Liu Han said. She looked through him again, this time perhaps peering ahead into the future. Seeing her so made Nieh nervous: did she see herself ordering him about?

He started to smile, then stopped. If she kept progressing at the rate she had thus far, the notion wasn’t so unlikely after all.

The clop of a horse’s hooves and the rattle of a buggy’s iron tires always took Leslie Groves back in time to the days before the First World War, when those noises had been the normal sound of getting from one place to another. When he remarked on that, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley shook his head. “It’s not quite right, General,” he said. “Back in those days, the roads this far outside of town wouldn’t have been paved.”

“You’re right, sir,” Groves admitted. He didn’t often yield points to anyone, not even to the nuclear physicists who sometimes made the Metallurgical Laboratory such a delight to administer, but this one he had to concede. “I remember when a little town felt medium-sized and a medium-sized one felt like a big city because they’d paved all the streets downtown.”

“That’s how it was,” Bradley said. “You didn’t have concrete and asphalt all over the place, not when I was a boy you didn’t. Dirt roads were a lot easier on a horse’s hooves. It was an easier time, a lot of ways.” He sighed, as any man of middle years will when he thinks back on the days of his youth.

Almost any man. Leslie Groves was an engineer to the core. “Mud,” he said. “Dust Lap robes, so you wouldn’t be filthy by the time you got where you were going. More horse manure than you could shake a stick at. More flies, too. Give me a nice, enclosed Packard with a heater on a good, flat, straight stretch of highway any old time.”

Bradley chuckled. “You have no respect for the good old days.”

“To hell with the good old days,” Groves said. “If the Lizards had come in the good old days, they’d have smashed us to bits so fast it wouldn’t even have been funny.”

“There I can’t argue with you,” Bradley said. “And going out to a two-hole Chick Sale with a half-moon window wasn’t much fun in the middle of winter.” He wrinkled his nose. “Now that I think back on it, it wasn’t much fun in hot weather, either.” He laughed out loud. “Yeah, General, to hell with the good old days. But what we’ve got now isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, either.” He pointed ahead to show what he meant.

Groves hadn’t been out to the refugee camp before. He knew of such places, of course, but he’d never had occasion to seek them out. He didn’t feel guilty about that; he’d had plenty to do and then some. If he hadn’t done what he’d done, the U.S.A. might well have lost the war by now, instead of sitting down with the Lizards as near equals at the bargaining table.

That didn’t make the camp any easier to take. He’d been shielded from just how bad war could be for those who got stuck in the gears. Because the Met Lab was so important, he’d always had plenty to eat and a roof over his head. Most people weren’t so lucky.

You saw newsreels of things like this. But newsreels didn’t usually show the worst The people in newsreels were black and white, too. And you didn’t smell them. The breeze was at his back, but the camp smelled like an enormous version of the outhouses Bradley had mentioned all the same.

People in newsreels didn’t come running at you like a herd of living skeletons, either, eyes enormous in faces with skin stretched drum-tight over bones, begging hands outstretched. “Please!” came the call, again and again and again. “Food, sir?” “Money, sir?” “Anything you’ve got, sir?” The offers the emaciated women made turned Groves’ ears red.

“Can we do anything more for these people than we’re doing, sir?” he asked.

“I don’t see what,” Bradley answered. “They’ve got water here. I don’t know how we’re supposed to feed them when we don’t have food to give.”

Groves looked down at himself. His belly was still ample. What there was went to the Army first, not to refugees and to people from Denver whose jobs weren’t essential to the war effort. That made good, cold, hard logical sense. Rationally, he knew as much. Staying rational wasn’t easy, not here.

“With the cease-fire in place, how soon can we start bringing in grain from up north?” he asked. “The Lizards won’t be bombing supply trains the way they used to.”

“That’s so,” Bradley admitted, “but they gave the railroads a hell of a pasting when they made their big push on the city. The engineers are still trying to straighten things out. Even when the trains start rolling, though, the other question is where the grain’ll come from. The Lizards are still holding an awful lot of our bread-basket. Maybe the Canadians’ll have some to spare. The scaly bastards haven’t hit them as hard as they did us, seems like.”

“They like warm weather,” Groves said. “There are better places to find it than north of Minnesota.”

“You’re right about that,” Bradley said. “But watching people starve, right here in the middle of the United States, that’s a damned hard thing to do, General. I never thought I’d live to see the day when we had to bring in what little we do have with armed guards to keep it from being stolen. And this is on our side of the line. What’s it like in territory the Lizards have held for the last couple of years? How many people have died for no better reason than that the Lizards didn’t give a damn about trying to feed them?”

“Too many,” Groves said, wanting to quantify that but unable to with any degree of certainty. “Hundreds of thousands? Has to be. Millions? Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

Bradley nodded. “Even if the Lizards do pull out of the U.S.A. and leave us alone for a while-and that’s the most we can hope for-what kind of country will we have left? I worry about that, General, quite a lot. Remember Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the Technocrats? A man with nothing in his belly will listen to any sort of damn fool who promises him three square meals a day, and we’ve got a lot of people with nothing in their bellies.”

As if to underscore his words, three horse-drawn wagons approached the refugee camp. Men in khaki who wore helmets surrounded the supply wagons on all sides. About half of them carried tommy guns; the rest had rifles with fixed bayonets. The surge of hungry people toward the wagons halted at a respectful distance from the troops.

“Hard to give shoot-to-kill orders to keep starving people from mobbing your food wagons,” Bradley said glumly. “If I hadn’t, though, the fast and the strong would get food, nobody else but. Can’t let that happen.”

“No, sir,” Groves agreed. Under the hard and watchful eyes of the American soldiers, their fellow citizens lined up to get the tiny handfuls of grain and beans the quartermasters had to dole out. By comparison, Depression soup kitchens had been five-star restaurants with blue-plate specials. The food then had been cheap and plain, but there’d always been plenty of it, once you swallowed enough of your pride to take charity.

Now… Watching the line snake forward, Groves realized he’d been so busy working to save the country that General Bradley’s question never once crossed his mind: what sort of country was he saving?

The more he looked around the refugee camp, the less he liked the answers he came up with.

For once in his life, Vyacheslav Molotov had to fight with every fiber of his being to maintain his stiff face.No! he wanted to scream at Joachim von Ribbentrop.Let it go, you fool! We have so much of what we came here for. If you push too hard, you’ll be like the greedy dog in the story, that dropped its bone into the river trying to grab the one its reflection was holding.

But the German foreign minister got up on his hind legs and declared, “Poland was part of the GermanReich before the coming of the Race to this world, and therefore must return to theReich as part of the Race’s withdrawal from our territory. So theFuhrer has declared.”

Hitler, actually, was quite a lot like the dog in the fable. All he understood was taking; nothing else seemed real to him. Had he only been content to stay at peace with the Soviet Union while he finished Britain, he could have gone on fooling Stalin a while longer and then launched his surprise attack, thereby contending with one foe at a time. He hadn’t waited. He couldn’t wait. He’d paid for it against the USSR. Didn’t he see he’d have to pay far more against the Lizards?

Evidently he didn’t. There was his foreign minister, mouthing phrases that would have been offensive to human opponents. Against the Lizards, who were vastly more powerful than Germany, those phrases struck Molotov as clinically insane.

Through his interpreter, Atvar said, “This proposal is unacceptable to us because it is unacceptable to so many other Tosevites with concerns in the region. It would merely prove a generator of future strife.”

“If you do not immediately cede Poland to us, it will prove a generator of present strife,” von Ribbentrop blustered.

The Lizards’ fleetlord made a noise like a leaking inner tube. “You may tell theFuhrer that the Race is prepared to take the chance.”

“I shall do so,” von Ribbentrop said, and stalked out of the Shepheard’s Hotel meeting room.

Molotov wanted to run after him, to call him back.Wait, you fool! was the cry that echoed in his mind. Hitler’s megalomania might drag everyone else down along with Germany. Even the nations with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas weren’t much more than large nuisances to the Lizards. Until they could deliver their weapons somewhere other than along the front line with the aliens, they could not threaten them on equal terms.

The Soviet foreign commissar hesitated. Did von Ribbentrop’s arrogance mean the Hitlerites had such a method? He didn’t believe it. Their rockets were better than anyone else’s, but powerful enough to throw ten tonnes across hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometers? Soviet rocket scientists assured him the Nazis couldn’t be that far ahead of the USSR.

If they were wrong… Molotov didn’t care to think about what might happen if they were wrong. If the Germans could throw explosive-metal bombs hundreds or thousands of kilometers, they were as likely to throw them at Moscow as at the Lizards.

He checked his rising agitation. If the Nazis had such rockets, they would not be so insistent about holding on to Poland. They could launch their bombs from Germany and then scoop up Poland at their leisure. This time, the scientists had to be right.

If they were right… Hitler was reacting from emotion rather than reason. What was Nazi doctrine but perverted romanticism? If you wanted a thing, that meant it should become yours, and that meant you had the right-even the duty-to go out and take itif anyone had the gall to object, you ran roughshod over him. Your will was all that mattered.

But if a man a meter and a half tall who weighed fifty kilos wanted something that belonged to a man two meters tall who weighed a hundred kilos and tried to take it, he’d end up with a bloody nose and broken teeth, no matter how strong his will was. The Hitlerites didn’t see that, though their assault on the USSR should have taught it to them.

“Note, Comrade Fleetlord,” Molotov said, “that the German foreign minister’s withdrawal does not imply the rest of us refuse to work out our remaining differences with you.” Yakov Donskoi turned his words into English; Uotat translated the interpreter’s comments into the language of the Lizards.

With a little luck, the aliens would smash the Hitlerites into the ground and save the USSR the trouble.

“Jager!” Otto Skorzeny shouted. “Get your scrawny arse over here. We’ve got something we need to talk about”

“You mean something besides your having the manners of a bear with a toothache?” Jager retorted. He didn’t get up. He was busy darning a sock, and it was hard work, because he had to hold it farther away from his face than he was used to. These past couple of years, his sight had begun to lengthen. You fell apart even if you didn’t get shot. It just happened.

“Excuse me, your magnificent Coloneldom, sir, my lord von Jager,” Skorzeny said, loading his voice with sugar syrup, “would you be so generous and gracious as to honor your most humble and obedient servant with the merest moment of your ever so precious time?”

Grunting, Jager got to his feet “All the same to you, Skorzeny, I like ‘Get your scrawny arse over here’ better.”

The SSStandartenfuhrer chuckled. “Figured you would. Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

That meant Skorzeny had news he didn’t feel like letting anyone else hear. And that, presumably, meant all hell was going to break loose somewhere, most likely somewhere right around here. Almost plaintively, Jager said, “I was enjoying the cease-fire.”

“Life’s tough,” Skorzeny said, “and it’s our job to make it tougher-for the Lizards. Your regiment’s still the thin end of the wedge, right? How soon can you be ready to hit our scaly chums a good one right in the snout?”

“We’ve got about half our Panthers back at corps repair center for retrofitting,” Jager answered. “Fuel lines, new cupolas for the turrets, fuel pump gaskets made the right way, that kind of thing. We took advantage of the cease-fire to do one lot of them, and now that it’s holding, we’re doing the other. Nobody told me-nobody told anybody-it was breaking down.”

“I’m telling you,” the SS man said. “How long till you’re up to strength again? You need those Panthers, don’t you?”

“Just a bit, yes,” Jager said with what he thought was commendable understatement. “They should all be back here in ten days-a week. If somebody with clout goes and leans on the corps repair crews.”

Skorzeny bit his lip.“Donnerwetter! If I lean on them hard, you think they’d have your panzers up here at the front inside five days? That’s my outer limit, and I haven’t got any discretion about it. If they aren’t here by then, old chum, you just have to go without ’em.”

“Go where?” Jager demanded. “Why are you giving me orders? And not my division commander, I mean?”

“Because I getmy orders from theFuhrer and theReichsfuhrer-SS, not from some tinpot major general commanding a measly corps,” Skorzeny answered smugly. “Here’s what’s going to happen as soon as you’re ready to motor and the artillery boys are set to do their part, too: I blow Lodz to kingdom come, and you-and everybody else-gets to hit the Lizards while they’re still trying to figure out what’s going on. The war is back, in other words.”

Jager wondered if his message to the Jews of Lodz had got through. If it had, he wondered if they’d been able to find the bomb the SS man had hidden there somewhere. And those were the least of his worries: “What will the Lizards do to us if we blow up Lodz? They took out one of our cities for every bomb we used during the war. How many will they slag if we use one of those bombs to break a cease-fire?”

“Don’t know,” Skorzeny said. “I do know nobody asked me to worry about it, so I bloody well won’t. I have orders to blast Lodz in the next five days, so a whole raft of big-nosed kikes are going to get themselves fitted for halos along with the Lizards. We have to teach the Lizards and the people who suck up to ’em that we’re too nasty to mess with-and we will.”

“Blowing up the Jews will teach the Lizards something?” Jager scratched his head. “Why should the Lizards give a damn what happens to the Jews? And with whom are we at war, the Jews or the Lizards?”

“We’re sure as hell at war with the Lizards,” Skorzeny answered, “and we’ve always been at war with the Jews, now haven’t we? You know that. You’ve pissed and moaned about it enough. So we’ll blow up a bunch of kikesand a bunch of Lizards, and theFuhrer will be so happy he’ll dance a little jig, the way he did when the frog-eaters gave up in 1940. So-five days maximum. You’ll be ready to roll by then?”

“If I have my panzers back from the workshops, yes,” Jager said. “Like I said, though, somebody will have to lean on the mechanics.”

“I’lltake care of that,” the SS man promised with a large, evil grin. “You think they won’t hustle with me holding their toes to the fire?” Jager wouldn’t have bet against his meaning that literally. “Other thing is, I’ll make it real plain that if they don’t make me happy, they’ll tell Himmler why. Would you rather deal with me or with the little schoolmaster in his spectacles?”

“Good question,” Jager said. Taken as a man, Skorzeny was a lot more frightening than Himmler. But Skorzeny was just Skorzeny. Himmler personified the organization he led, and that organization invested him with a frightfulness of a different sort.

“The answer is, if you had your choice, you wouldn’t want to get either one of us mad at you, let alone both, right?” Skorzeny said, and Jager had to nod. The SSStandartenfuhrer went on, “As soon as the bomb goes off, you roll east. Who knows? The Lizards are liable to be so surprised, you may end up visiting your Russian girlfriend instead of the other way round. How’d you like that?” He rocked his hips forward and back, deliberately obscene.

“I’ve heard ideas I liked less,” Jager answered, his voice dry.

Skorzeny boomed laughter. “Oh, I bet you have. I just bet you have.” Out of the blue, he found a brand-new question: “She a Jew, that Russian of yours?”

He asked very casually, as a sergeant of police might have asked a burglary suspect where he was at eleven o’clock one night “Ludmila?” Jager said, relieved he was able to come back with the truth: “No.”

“Good,” the SS man said. “I didn’t think so, but I wanted to make sure. She won’t be mad at you when Lodz goes up, then, right?”

“No reason she should be,” Jager said.

“That’s fine,” Skorzeny said. “Yes, that’s fine. You be good, then. Five days, remember. You’ll have your panzers, too, or somebody will be sorry he was ever born.” He headed back toward camp, whistling as he went.

Jager followed more slowly, doing his best not to show how thoughtful he was. The SS had taken that Polish farmer apart, knowing he was involved in passing news on to the Jews in Lodz. And now Skorzeny was asking whether Ludmila was Jewish. Skorzeny couldn’t know anything, not really, or Jager wouldn’t still be at the head of his regiment. But suspicions were raising their heads, like plants pushing up through dead leaves.

Jager wondered if he could get word into Lodz by way of Mieczyslaw. He decided he didn’t dare take the chance, not now. He hoped the Jews already had the news, and that they’d found the bomb. That hope sprang partly from shame at what theReich had already done to them and partly from fear of what the Lizards would do to Germany if an atomic bomb went off in territory they held while truce talks were going on. To say he didn’t think they’d be pleased was putting it mildly.

From the moment Jager first met Mordechai Anielewicz, he’d seen the Jews had themselves a fine leader in him. If he knew Skorzeny had secreted the bomb in Lodz, he’d have moved heaven and earth to come up with it. Jager had done his damnedest to make sure the Jew knew.

Five days from now, Skorzeny would press his button or whatever it was he did. Maybe a new sun would seem to rise, as it had outside Breslau. And maybe nothing at all would happen.

What would Skorzeny do then?

Walking around out in the open with Lizards in plain sight felt unnatural. Mutt Daniels found himself automatically looking around for the nearest shell hole or pile of rubble so he’d have somewhere to take cover when firing broke out again.

But firing didn’t break out. One of the Lizards raised a scaly hand and waved at him. He waved back. He’d never been in a cease-fire quite like this one. Back in 1918, the shooting had stopped because theBoches threw in the sponge. Neither side had given up here. He knew fighting could pick up again any old time. But it hadn’t yet, and maybe it wouldn’t. He hoped it wouldn’t. By now, he’d had enough fighting to last any three men a couple of lifetimes each.

A couple of his men were taking a bath in a little creek not far away. Their bodies weren’t quite so white and pale as they had been when the cease-fire started. Nobody’d had a chance to get clean for a long time before that. When you were in the front lines, you stayed dirty, mostly because you were liable to get shot if you exposed your body to water and air. After a while, you didn’t notice what you smelled like: everybody else smelled the same way. Now Mutt was starting to get used to not stinking again.

From out of the north, back toward Quincy, came the sound of a human-made internal-combustion engine. Mutt turned around and looked up the road. Sure as hell, here came one of those big Dodge command cars officers had been in the habit of using till gas got too scarce for them to go gallivanting around. Seeing one again was a sure sign the brass thought the cease-fire would last a while.

Sure as hell, a three-star banner fluttered from the aerial of the command car. The fellow who stood in back of the pintle-mounted. 50 caliber machine gun had three stars painted on his helmet, too. He also had a bone-handled revolver on each hip.

“Heads up, boys,” Mutt called. “That there’s General Patton coming to pay us a call.” Patton had a name for being a tough so-and-so, and for liking to show off, to let everybody know how tough he was. Daniels hoped he wouldn’t prove it by squeezing off a couple of belts of ammo in the Lizards’ direction.

The command car rolled to a halt. Even before the tires had stopped turning, Patton jumped out and came up to Mutt, who happened to be standing closer to the Lizards than anybody else.

Mutt drew himself to attention and saluted, thinking the Lizards would be crazy if they didn’t have somebody with a head drawn on this aggressive-looking newcomer. Trouble was, if they started shooting at Patton, they’d be shooting at him, too.

“At ease, Lieutenant,” Patton said in a gravelly voice. He pointed across the lines toward a couple of Lizards who were busy doing whatever Lizards did. “So there is the enemy, face-to-face. Ugly devils, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said. “Of course, they say that about us, too, sir-call us Big Uglies, I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or so they say. Inmy eye, Lieutenant, those are ugly sons of bitches, and if they think me ugly, well, by God, I take it for a compliment.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said again. Patton didn’t seem inclined to start shooting up the landscape, for which he was duly grateful.

“Are they adhering to the terms of the cease-fire in this area?” the general demanded-maybe hewould start the war up again if the answer turned out to be no.

But Mutt nodded. “Sure are, sir. One thing you got to give the Lizards: they make an agreement, they stick by it. More’n the Germans and the Japs and maybe the Russians ever learned.”

“You sound like a man who speaks from experience, Lieutenant…?”

“Daniels, sir.” Mutt almost laughed. He was Patton’s age, more or less. If you didn’t have experience by the time you were pushing sixty, when the devil would you? But that probably wasn’t what the general meant. “I went through the mill around Chicago, sir. Every time we dickered a truce with the Lizards for picking up wounded and such, they stuck right with it. They may be bastards, but they’re honorable bastards.”

“Chicago.” Patton made a sour face. “That wasn’t war, Lieutenant, that was butchery, and it cost them dear, even before we used our atomic weapon against them. Their greatest advantage over us was speed and mobility, and what did they do with it? Why, they threw it away, Lieutenant, and got bogged down in endless street fighting, where a man with a tommy gun is as good as a Lizard with an automatic rifle, and a man with a Molotov cocktail can put paid to a tank that would smash a dozen Shermans in the open without breaking a sweat. The Nazis fought the same way in Russia. They were fools, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Daniels felt like one of the kids he’d managed listening to him going on about the best time to put on the hit-and-run. Patton knew war the way he knew baseball.

The general was warming to his theme, too: “And the Lizards don’t learn from their mistakes. If they hadn’t come, and if the Germans had broken through to the Volga, do you suppose they would have been stupid enough to try and take Stalingrad house by house? Do you, Lieutenant?”

“Have to doubt it, sir,” said Mutt, who’d never heard of Stalingrad in his life.

“Of course they wouldn’t! The Germans are sensible soldiers; they learn from their mistakes. But after we drove the Lizards back from Chicago winter before last, what did they do? They slogged straight on ahead again, right back into the meat grinder. And they paid. That’s why. If these talks go the way they look to be going, they’re going to have to evacuate the whole U.S.A.”

“That’d be wonderful, sir. If it happens,” Mutt said.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Patton said. “Wonderful would be killing every one of them or driving them off our world here altogether.” One thing you had to give him, Mutt realized: he didn’t think small. He went on, “Since we can’t do that, worse luck, we’re going to have to learn to live with them henceforward.” He pointed across to the Lizards. “Has fraternization after the cease-fire been peaceful in this area, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said. “Sometimes they come over and-I guess you’d call it talk shop, sir. And sometimes they want ginger. I reckon you know about that.”

“Oh, yes,” Patton said with a chuckle. “I know about that. It was good to find out we weren’t the only ones with vices. For a while there, I did wonder. And when they get their ginger, what do they use to pay for it?”

“Uh,” Mutt said. You couldn’t tell a lieutenant generaluh, though, so he continued, “This and that, sir. Souvenirs, sometimes: stuff that doesn’t mean anything to them, like us trading beads to the Indians. Medical-kit supplies sometimes, too. They got self-stick bandages that beat our kind all hollow.”

Patton’s pale eyes glittered. “They ever trade-liquor for their ginger, Lieutenant? Has that ever happened?”

“Yes, sir, that’s happened,” Mutt allowed cautiously, wondering if the sky would fall on him in the next moment.

Patton’s nod was slow. His eyes still held Daniels. “Good. If you’d told me anything different, I’d know you were a liar. The Lizards don’t like whiskey-I told you they were fools. They’ll drink rum. They’ll even drink gin. But scotch, bourbon, rye? They won’t touch ’em. So if they can forage up something they don’t want and trade it for something they do, they think they’re getting the good half of the deal.”

“We haven’t had any trouble with drunk and rowdy, sir,” Mutt said, which was close enough to true to let him come out with it straight-faced. “I ain’t tried to stop ’em from takin’ a nip when they come off duty, not since the cease-fire, but they got to be ready to fight all the time.”

“You look like a man who’s seen a thing or two,” Patton said. “I won’t complain about the way you’re handling your men so long as they’re combat-ready, as you say. The Army isn’t in the business of producing Boy Scouts, is it, Lieutenant Daniels?”

“No, sir,” Mutt said quickly.

“That’s right,” Patton growled. “It’s not. Which is not to say-which is not to say for a moment-that neatness and cleanliness aren’t of importance for the sake of discipline and morale. I’m glad to see your uniform so tidy and in such good repair, Lieutenant, and even gladder to see those men over there bathing.” He pointed to the soldiers in the creek. “Too often, men at the front lines think Army regulations no longer apply to them. They are mistaken, and sometimes need reminding of it.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said, knowing how filthy he and his uniform had been till he finally took the time to spruce up a couple of days earlier. He was glad Herman Muldoon wasn’t anywhere around-one look at Muldoon and Patton (whose chin was neatly shaved, whose uniform was not only clean but showed creases, and whose spit-shined shoes gave off dazzling reflections) would have flung him in the brig.

“From the look of things, Lieutenant, you have a first-rate outfit here. Keep ’em alert. If our talks with the Lizards go as the civilian authorities hope, we’ll be moving forward to reclaim the occupied areas of the United States. And if they don’t, we’ll grab the Lizards by the snouts and kick ’em in the tail.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said again. Patton sent a final steely-eyed glare over toward the Lizards, then jumped back into the command car. The driver started the motor. Acrid exhaust belched from the pipe. The big, clunky Dodge rolled away.

Mutt let out a sigh of relief. He’d survived a lot of contact with the Lizards, and now he’d survived contact with his own top brass, too. As any front-line soldier would attest, your own generals could be at least as dangerous to you as the enemy.

Liu Han listened with more than a little annoyance to the men of the central committee discussing how they would bring over to the side of the People’s Liberation Army the large number of peasants who flooded into Peking to work for the little scaly devils in the factories they kept open.

The annoyance must have been visible; Hsia Shou-Tao stopped in the middle of his presentation on a new propaganda leaflet to remark, “I am sorry we seem to be boring you.”

He didn’t sound sorry, except perhaps sorry she was there at all. He hadn’t displayed that kind of scornful arrogance since before he’d tried to rape her. Maybe the lesson he’d got then, like most lessons, wore off if it wasn’t repeated till it stuck.

“Everything I have heard is very interesting to me,” Liu Han replied, “but do you think it really would catch the interest of a peasant with nothing more in his mind than filling his belly and the bellies of his children?”

“This leaflet has been prepared by propaganda specialists,” Hsia said in condescending tones. “How do you presume to claim you know more than they?”

“Because I was a peasant, not a propaganda specialist,” Liu Han retorted angrily. “If someone came up to me and started preaching like a Christian missionary about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the necessity of seizing the means of production, I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and I wouldn’t have wanted to learn, either. I think your propaganda specialists are members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, out of touch with the true aspirations of the workers and especially of the peasants.”

Hsia Shou-Tao stared at her. He had never taken her seriously, or he would not have tried to force himself upon her. He hadn’t noticed how well she’d picked up the jargon of the Communist Party; she relished turning that complex, artificial set of terms against those who had devised it.

From across the table, Nieh Ho-T’ing asked her, “And how would you seek to make his propaganda more effective?” Liu Han weighed with great care the way her lover-who was also her instructor in Communist Party lore-spoke. Nieh was Hsia’s longtime comrade. Was he being sarcastic to her, supporting his friend?

She decided he wasn’t, that the question was sincerely meant. She answered it on that assumption: “Don’t instruct new-come peasants in ideology. Most of them will not comprehend enough of what you are saying. Tell them instead that working for the little devils will hurt people. Tell them the things they help the scaly devils make will be used against their relatives who are still back in the villages. Tell them that if they do work for the scaly devils, they and their relatives will be liable to repisals. These are things they can understand. And when we firebomb a factory or murder workers coming out of one, they will see we speak the truth.”

“They will not, however, be indoctrinated,” Hsia pointed out, so vehemently that Liu Han got the idea he’d written most of the leaflet she was criticizing.

She looked across the table at him. “Yes? And so what? Most important is keeping the peasants from working for the little devils. If it is easier to keep them from doing that without indoctrinating them, then we shouldn’t bother trying. We do not have the resources to waste, do we?”

Hsia stared at her, half in anger, half in amazement. Liu Han might have been an ignorant peasant a year before, but she wasn’t any more. Could others be quickly brought up to her level of political consciousness, though? She doubted that. She had seen the revolutionary movement from the inside, an opportunity most would never enjoy.

Nieh said, “We can waste nothing. We are settling in for a long struggle, one that may last generations. The little scaly devils wish to reduce us all to the level of ignorant peasants. This we cannot permit, so we must make the peasantry ideologically aware at some point in our program. Whether that point is the one under discussion, I admit, is a different question.”

Hsia Shou-Tao looked as if he’d been stabbed. If even his old friend did not fully support him-“We shall revise as necessary,” he mumbled.

“Good,” Liu Han said. “Very good, in fact. Thank you.” Once you’d won, you could afford to be gracious. But not too gracious: “When you have made the changes, please let me see them before they go to the printer.”

“But-” Hsia looked ready to explode. But when he glanced around the table, he saw the other central committee members nodding. As far as they were concerned, Liu Han had proved her ability. Hsia snarled, “If I give you the text, will you be able to read it?”

“I will read it,” she said equably. “I had better be able to read it, wouldn’t you say? The workers and peasants for whom it is intended will not be scholars, to know thousands of characters. The message must be strong and simple.”

Heads again bobbed up and down along the table. Hsia Shou-Tao bowed his own head in surrender. His gaze remained black as a storm cloud, though. Liu Han regarded him thoughtfully. Trying to rape her had not been enough to get him purged even from the central committee, let alone from the Party. What about obstructionism? If he delayed or evaded giving her the revised wording for the leaflet, as he was likely to do, would that suffice?

Part of her hoped Hsia would fulfill his duty as a revolutionary. The rest burned for a chance at revenge.

Atvar paced back and forth in the chamber adapted-not quite well enough-to the needs of the Race. His tailstump quivered reflexively. Millions of years before, when the presapient ancestors of the Race had been long-tailed carnivores prowling across the plains of Home, that quiver had distracted prey from the other end, the end with the teeth. Would that the Big Uglies could have been so easily distracted!

“I wish we could change our past,” he said.

“Exalted Fleetlord?” The tone of Kirel’s interrogative cough said the shiplord of the conquest fleet’s bannership did not follow his train of thought.

He explained: “Had we fought among ourselves more before the unified Empire formed, our weapons technology would have improved. When it came time to duplicate those antique weapons for conquests of other worlds, we would have had better arms. What was in our data banks served us well against the Rabotevs and Hallessi, and so we assumed it always would. Tosev 3 has been the crematorium of a great many of our assumptions.”

“Truth-undeniable truth,” Kirel said. “But if our own internecine wars had continued longer and with better weapons, we might have exterminated ourselves rather than successfully unifying under the Emperors.” He cast his eyes down to the soft, intricately patterned woven floor covering.

So did Atvar, who let out a long, mournful hissing sigh. “Only the madness of this world could make me explore might-have-beens.” He paced some more, the tip of his tailstump jerking back and forth. At last, he burst out, “Shiplord, are we doing the right thing in negotiating with the Big Uglies and for all practical purposes agreeing to withdraw from several of their not-empires? It violates all precedent, but then, the existence of opponents able to manufacture their own atomic weapons also violates all precedent.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I believe this to be the proper course, painful though it is,” Kirel said. “If we cannot conquer the entire surface of Tosev 3 without damaging great parts of it and having the Big Uglies damage still more, best we hold some areas and await the arrival of the colonization fleet. We gain the chance to reestablish ourselves securely and to prepare for the safe arrival of the colonists and the resources they bring.”

“So I tell myself, over and over,” Atvar said. “I still have trouble being convinced. Seeing how the Tosevites have improved their own technology in the short time since we arrived here, I wonder how advanced they will be when the colonization Fleet finally reaches this world.”

“Computer projections indicate we will retain a substantial lead,” Kirel said soothingly. “And the only other path open to us, it would appear, is the one Straha the traitor advocated: using our nuclear weapons in prodigal fashion to smash the Big Uglies into submission-which also, unfortunately, involves smashing the planetary surface.”

“I no longer trust the computer projections,” Atvar said. “They have proved wrong too often; we do not know the Big Uglies well enough to model and extrapolate their behavior with any great hope of accuracy. The rest, however, is as you say, with the ironic proviso that the Tosevites care much less about the destruction of major portions of their world than we do. That has let them wage unlimited warfare against us, while we of necessity held back.”

“ ‘Has let them’?” Kirel said. “ ‘Held back’? Am I to infer, Exalted Fleetlord, you purpose a change in policy?”

“Not an active one, only reactive,” Atvar answered. “If the Deutsche, for example, carry out the threats their Leader has made through this von Ribbentrop creature and resume nuclear warfare against us, I shall do as I warned and thoroughly devastate Deutsch-held territory. That will teach whatever may be left of the Deutsche that we are not to be trifled with, and should have a salutary effect on the behavior of other Tosevite not-empires.”

“So it should, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. He was too tactful to remark on how closely the plan resembled the one Straha had advocated, for which the fleetlord silently thanked him. Instead, he continued, “I cannot imagine the Deutsch Tosevites taking such a risk in the face of our clear and unmistakable warnings, however.”

“As a matter of fact, neither can I,” Atvar said. “But, with the Big Uglies, the only certain thing is uncertainty.”

Heinrich Jager looked around with something approaching wonder. He could not see all the panzers and other armored lighting vehicles in his regiment, of course; they were concealed along the front on which they were to attack. But he’d never expected to come so close to establishment strength, never expected to be so fully loaded with both petrol and ammunition.

He leaned out of the cupola of his Panther and nodded to Otto Skorzeny. “I wish we weren’t doing this, but if we do it, we’ll do it well.”

“Spoken like a soldier,” said an SS man standing near Skorzeny. The boys in the black shirts had drifted back up to the front line over the past few days. If Lizard Intelligence was up to keeping track of their movements, Jager would be feeding his regiment into a sausage machine. He didn’t think the Lizards were that smart, and hoped he was right. The SS man went on, “It is every officer’s duty, just as it is that of every soldier, to obey the commands of his superiors and of theFuhrer without question, regardless of his personal feelings.”

Jager stared down at the jackbooted ignoramus in silent scorn. Take his words to the logical extreme and you’d turn theWehrmacht into a bunch of automata as inflexible as the Russians or the Lizards. If you got orders that made no sense, you questioned them. If they still didn’t make sense, or if they led you into an obvious catastrophe, you ignored them.

You needed guts to do it. You put your career on the line when you disobeyed orders. But if you could convince your superiors you’d been right, or that the orders you’d got showed no real understanding of the situation in front of you, you’d survive. You might even get promoted.

Jager, now, hadn’t just disobeyed orders. If you wanted to look at things in a particular light, he’d given aid and comfort to the enemy. Any SS man who found out about what he’d done would look at it in that particular light.

For his part, he studied the weedy little fellow standing there beside Skorzeny. Had he dropped his pants and enjoyed himself with Karol’s wife, or maybe with his young daughter, while a couple of others held her down? Was he the one who’d carved SS runes into the Polish farmer’s belly? And what, in his agony, had Karol said? Was this smiling chap just waiting for the bomb to go off before he arrested Jager and started carving runes into him?

Skorzeny glanced down at his wristwatch. “Soon now,” he said. “When it goes up, we move, and the signal goes out to our armies on the other fronts, too. The Lizards will be sorry they didn’t give in to our demands.”

“Yes, and what happens afterwards?” Jager asked as he had before, still hoping he could talk Skorzeny out of pushing the fateful button. “We can be sure the Lizards will destroy at least one city of the GermanReich. They’ve done that every time anyone used an explosive-metal bomb against them in war. But this isn’t just war-it’s breaking a cease-fire. Aren’t they liable to do something worse?”

“I don’t know,” Skorzeny said cheerfully. “And you know what else? I don’t give a fuck, either. We’ve been over this ground already. The job theFuhrer’s given me is kicking the Lizards and the Jews in the balls, just as hard as I can. That’s what I’m going to do, too. Whatever happens afterwards, it damn well happens, that’s all, and I’ll worry about it then.”

“That is the National Socialist way of thought,” the other SS man declared, beaming at Skorzeny.

Skorzeny wasn’t looking back on him. TheStandartenfuhrer’s eyes were on Jager instead, up there in the cupola (the engineers and mechanics had been right-it was a vastly improved cupola) of the Panther. Without giving his black-shirted colleague a hint of what he was thinking, he made his opinion plain to the panzer colonel. If it wasn’t,What a load of pious crap, Jager would have eaten his service cap.

And yet, even if Skorzeny didn’t give a damn about the slogans under which he fought, they remained valid for him. Hitler flew him like a falcon at chosen foes. And, like a falcon, he didn’t worry about where he was flying or for what reasons, only about how to strike the hardest blow when he got there.

That wasn’t enough.

Jager had fought the same way himself, till he’d had his eyes forcibly opened to what Germany had done to the Jews in the lands it had overrun, and to what it would have done had the arrival of the Lizards not interrupted things. Once your eyes were opened, shutting them again wasn’t easy. Jager had tried, and failed.

He’d also-cautiously-tried to open the eyes of some other officers, Skorzeny among them. Without exception, everybody else had stayed willfully blind, not wanting to see, not wanting to discuss. He understood that. He even sympathized with itif you refused to notice the flaws of your superiors and your country, you could go on about your daily routine a lot more easily.

As long as he was fighting just the Lizards, Jager had no trouble suppressing his own doubts, his own worries. Nobody could doubt for even a moment that the Lizards were deadly foes not only to Germany but to all mankind. You did what you had to do to stop them. But the explosive-metal bomb in Lodz didn’t have only the Lizards in mind. It didn’t even have the Lizards primarily in mind. Skorzeny knew as much. He’d set it there after the nerve-gas bomb he’d intended for the Jews of Lodz failed. It was his-and Germany’s-revenge on the Jews for thwarting him once.

Try as Jager would, he couldn’t stomach that.

Skorzeny walked away, whistling. When he came back, he was wearing a pack like the one a wireless operator carried. In fact, it undoubtedly was a wireless operator’s pack. The handset that went with it, though, was anything but standard issue. It had only two elements: a bar switch and a large red button.

“I make the time 1100 hours,” Skorzeny said after yet another glance at his watch.

The other SS man brought his right wrist up toward his face. “I confirm the time as 1100 hours,” he said formally.

Skorzeny giggled. “Isn’t this fun?” he said. The other SS man stared at him: that wasn’t in the script. Jager just snorted. He’d seen too many times that Skorzeny was indifferent to the script. The big SS man flipped the bar switch 180 degrees. “The transmitter is now active,” he said.

“I confirm that the transmitter has been activated,” the other SS man droned.

And then Skorzeny broke the rules again. He reached up and gave Jager the handset, asking, “Do you want to do the honors?”

“Me?” Jager almost dropped it. “Are you out of your mind? Good God, no.” He handed the device back to Skorzeny. Only after he’d done so did he realize heshould have dropped it, or else contrived to smash it against the side of the panzer.

“All right, don’t let it worry you,” Skorzeny said. “I can kill my own dog. I can kill a whole great lot of sons of bitches.” His thumb came down hard on the red button.