Striking the Balance

V

Ussmak didn’t think he’d ever seen such a sorry-looking male in all his days since hatchlinghood. It wasn’t just that the poor fellow wore no body paint, although being bare of it contributed to his general air of misery. Worse was the way his eye turrets kept swiveling back toward the Big Ugly for whom he was interpreting, as if that Tosevite were the sun and he himself only a very minor planet.

“This is Colonel Boris Lidov,” the male said in the language of the Race, although the title was in the Russki tongue. “He is of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior-the NKVD-and is to be your interrogator.”

Ussmak glanced over at the Tosevite male for a moment. He looked like a Big Ugly, and not a particularly impressive one: skinny, with a narrow, wrinkled face, not much fur on the top of his head, and a small mouth drawn up even tighter than was the Tosevite norm. “That’s nice,” Ussmak said; he’d figured the Big Uglies would have questions for him. “Who are you, though, friend? How did you get stuck with this duty?”

“I am called Gazzim, and I was an automatic riflemale, second grade, before my mechanized infantry combat vehicle was destroyed and I taken prisoner,” the male replied. “Now I have no rank. I exist on the sufferance of the Soviet Union.” Gazzim lowered his voice. “And now, so do you.”

“Surely it’s not so bad as that,” Ussmak said. “Straha, the shiplord who defected, claims most Tosevite not-empires treat captives well.”

Gazzim didn’t answer. Lidov spoke in the local language, which put Ussmak in mind of the noises a male made when choking on a bite too big to swallow. Gazzim replied in what sounded like the same language, perhaps to let the Tosevite know what Ussmak had said.

Lidov put the tips of his fingers together, each digit touching its equivalent on the other hand. The strange gesture reminded Ussmak he was indeed dealing with an alien species. Then the Tosevite spoke in his own tongue once more. Gazzim translated: “He wants to know what you are here for.”

“I don’t even know where I am, let alone what for,” Ussmak replied with more than a hint of asperity. “After we yielded the base to the soldiers of the SSSR, we were packed first into animal-drawn conveyances of some sort and then into some truly appalling railroad cars, then finally into more conveyances with no way of seeing out. These Russkis are not living up to their agreements the way Straha said they would.”

When that was translated for him, Lidov threw back his head and made a peculiar barking noise. “He is laughing,” Gazzim explained. “He is laughing because the male Straha has no experience with the Tosevites of the SSSR and does not know what he is talking about.”

Ussmak did not care for the sound of those words. He said, “This does not strike me as the place of honor we were promised when we agreed on surrender terms. If I didn’t know better, I would say it reminded me of a prison.”

Lidov laughed again, this time before Ussmak’s words were translated.He knows some of our language, Ussmak thought, and resolved to be more wary about what he said. Gazzim said, “The name of this place is Lefortovo. It is in Moskva, the capital of the SSSR.”

Casually, without even seeming to think about it, Lidov reached out and smacked Gazzim in the snout. The paintless male cringed. Lidov spoke loudly to him; had the Big Ugly been a male of the Race, no doubt he would have punctuated his speech with emphatic coughs. Gazzim flinched into the posture of obedience.

When Lidov was done, the interpreter said, “I am to tell you that I am allowed to volunteer no further information. This session is to acquire knowledge from you, not to give it to you.”

“Ask your questions, then,” Ussmak said resignedly.

And the questions began-they came down like snow in the Siberian blizzards Ussmak had grown to hate. At first, they were the sort of questions he would have asked a Tosevite collaborator whose background he did not know well: questions about his military specialty and about his experience on Tosev 3 since being revived from cold sleep.

He was able to tell Colonel Lidov a lot about landcruisers. Crewmales of necessity had to know more than their own particular specialties so they could continue to fight their vehicles in case of casualties. He talked about driving the vehicle, about its suspension, about its weapons, about its engine.

From there, Lidov went onto ask him about the Race’s strategy and tactics, and about the other Big Uglies he had fought That puzzled him; surely Lidov was more familiar with his own kind than Ussmak could hope to be. Gazzim said, “He wants you to rank each type of Tosevite in order of the fighting efficiency you observed.”

“Does he?” Ussmak wanted to ask Gazzim a couple of questions before directly responding to that, but didn’t dare, not when the Big Ugly interrogator was likely to understand the language of the Race. He wondered how candid he should be. Did Lidov want to hear his own crewmales praised, or was he after real information? Ussmak had to guess, and guessed the latter: “Tell him the Deutsche fought best, the British next, and then Soviet males.”

Gazzim quivered a little; Ussmak decided he’d made a mistake, and wondered how bad a mistake it was. The interpreter spoke in the croaking Russki tongue, relaying his words to Colonel Lidov. The Tosevite’s little mouth pursed even tighter. He spoke a few words. “Tell him why,” Gazzim said, giving no indication what. If anything, Lidov thought of the answer.

Your egg should have been addled instead of hatching, Gazzim,Ussmak thought. But, having begun his course, he saw no choice but to run it through to the end. “The Deutsche keep getting new kinds of equipment, each better than the last, and they are tactically adaptable. They are better tactically than our simulators back on Home, and almost always surprising.”

Lidov spoke again in the Russki language. “He says the SSSR also discovered this, to their sorrow. The SSSR and Deutschland were at peace, were friends with each other, and the cowardly, treacherous Deutsche viciously attacked this peace-loving not-empire.” Lidov said something else; Gazzim translated: “And what of the British?”

Ussmak paused to think before he answered. He wondered what a Deutsch male would have said about the war with the SSSR. Something different, he suspected. He knew Tosevite politics were far more complicated than anything he was used to, but this Lidov had slammed home his view of the situation like a landcruiser gunner shelling a target into submission. That argued he wouldn’t care to hear anything unpleasant about his own group of Big Uglies.

Still, his question about the British gave Ussmak some time to prepare for what he would say about the SSSR. The former landcruiser driver (who now wished he’d never become anything but a landcruiser driver) answered, “British landcruisers do not match those of Deutschland or the SSSR in quality. British artillery, though, is very good, and the British were first to use poisonous gases against the Race. Also, the island of Britain is small and densely settled, and the British showed they were very good at fighting in built-up areas. They cost us many casualties on account of that.”

“Tak,”Lidov said. Ussmak turned one eye toward Gazzim-a question without an interrogative cough.

The interpreter explained: “This means ‘so’ or “Well.’ It signflies he has taken in your words but does not indicate his thoughts on them. Now he will want you to speak of the males of the SSSR.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, politely responding as if Lidov were his superior. “I will say these Russki males are as brave as any Tosevites I have encountered. I will also say that their landcruisers are well made, with good gun, good engine, and especially good tracks for the wretched ground conditions so common on Tosev 3.”

Lidov’s mouth grew a little wider. Ussmak took that as a good sign. The male from the-what was it? the NKVD, that was the acronym-spoke in his own language. Gazzim rendered his words as, “With all these compliments, why do you place the glorious soldiers of the Red Army behind those of Deutschland and Britain?”

Ussmak realized his attempt at flattery had failed. Now he would have to tell the truth, or at least some of it, with no reason to be optimistic that Lidov would be glad to hear it. The males of the SSSR had been skillful at breaking the rebellious Siberian males into smaller and smaller groups, each time with a plausible excuse. Now Ussmak felt down to his toes how alone he really was.

Picking his words with great care, he said, “From what I have seen in the SSSR, the fighting males here have trouble changing their plans to match changing circumstances. They do not respond as quickly as the Deutsche or the British.” In that way, they were much like the Race, which was probably why the Race had had such good success against them. “Communications also leave a good deal to be desired, and your landcruisers, while stoutly made, are not always deployed to best advantage.”

Colonel Lidov grunted. Ussmak didn’t know much about the noises the Big Uglies made, but that one sounded like what would have been a thoughtful hiss from a male of the Race. Then Lidov said, “Tell me of the ideological motivations behind your rebellion against the oppressive aristocracy which had controlled you up to the point of your resistance.”

After Gazzim translated that into the language of the Race, Ussmak let his mouth fall open in a wry laugh. “Ideology? What ideology? I had a head full of ginger, my crewmales had just been killed, and Hisslef wouldn’t stop screaming at me, so I shot him. After that, one thing led to another. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t. It’s been more trouble than it’s worth.”

The Big Ugly grunted again. He said, “Everything has ideological underpinnings, whether one consciously realizes it or not. I congratulate you for the blow you struck against those who exploited your labor for their own selfish benefit.”

All that did was convince Ussmak that Lidov didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was talking about. All survivors of the conquest fleet-assuming there were survivors from the conquest fleet, which looked imperfectly obvious-would be prominent, well-established males on the conquered world by the time the colonization fleet arrived. They’d have years of exploiting its resources; the first starship full of trade goods might well have headed Homeward before the colonists got here.

Ussmak wondered how much clandestine ginger would have been aboard that first starship. Even if the Big Uglies had been the animal-riding barbarians everyone thought they were, Tosev 3 would have been trouble for the Race. Thinking of ginger made Ussmak wish he had a taste, too.

Colonel Lidov said, “You will now itemize for me the ideologies of the progressive and reactionary factions in your leadership hierarchy.”

“I will?” Ussmak said in some surprise. To Gazzim, he went on, “Remind this Tosevite”-he remembered not to call the Big Ugly a Big Ugly-“that I was only a landcruiser driver. If you please. I did not get my orders straight from the fleetlord, you know.”

Gazzim spoke in the Russki tongue. Lidov listened, replied. Gazzim translated back the other way: “Tell me whatever you know of these things. Nothing is of greater importance than ideology.”

Offhand, Ussmak could have come up with a whole long list of things more important than ideology. Topping the list, at that moment, would have been the ginger he’d thought of a moment before. He wondered why the Big Ugly was so obsessed with an abstraction when there were so many genuinely important things to worry about.

“Tell him I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to answer,” Ussmak said to Gazzim. “I was never a commander of any sort. All I did was what I was told.”

“This is not good enough,” Gazzim answered after Lidov had spoken. The male sounded worried. “He believes you are lying. I must explain, so you will understand why, that a specflic ideological framework lies under the political structure of this not-empire, and serves as its center in the same way as the Emperor does for us.”

Lidov did not hit Gazzim, as he had before; evidently he wanted Ussmak to have that explanation. As he had been conditioned to do, Ussmak cast down his eyes-this in spite of having betrayed the Emperor first by mutiny and then by surrender to the Tosevites.

But he answered in the only way he could: “I cannot invent bogus ideological splits when I know of none.”

Gazzim let out a long, hissing sigh, then translated his reply for the male from the NKVD. Lidov flicked a switch beside his chair. From behind him, a brilliant incandescent lamp with a reflector in back of it glared into Ussmak’s face. He swung his eye turrets away from it. Lidov flicked on other switches. More lights to either side burned at Ussmak.

The interrogation went on from there.

“Good God almighty damn,” Mutt Daniels said with reverent irreverence. “It’s the country, bread me and fry me if it ain’t.”

“Bout time they took us out o’ line for a while, don’t you think, sir?” Sergeant Herman Muldoon answered. “They never kept us in the trenches so long at a stretch in the Great War-nothin’ like what they put us through in Chicago, not even close.”

“Nope,” Mutt said. “They could afford to fool around in France. They had the men an’ they had the initiative. Here in Shytown, we was like the Germans Over There-we was the ones who had to stand there and take it with whatever we could scrape together.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call Elgin the country.” To illustrate what he meant, Captain Stan Szymanski waved his arm to take in the factories that checked the town’s grid of streets. The wave took in what had been factories, anyhow. They were ruins now, jagged and broken against the gray sky. Every one of them had been savagely bombed. Some were just medium-sized hills of broken bricks and rubble. Walls and stacks still stood on others. Whatever they had made, though, they weren’t making it any more. The seven-story clock tower of the Elgin Watch factory, which had made a prime observation post, was now scarcely taller than any other wreckage.

Mutt pointed westward, across the Fox River. “But that’s farm country out there yonder, sir,” he said. “Ain’t seen nothin’ but houses and skyscrapers and whatnot when I look out for a long time. It’s right nice, you ask me.”

“What it is, Lieutenant, is damn fine tank country,” Szymanski said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Since the Lizards have damn fine tanks and we don’t, I can’t get what you’d call enthusiastic about it.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said. It wasn’t that Szymanski wasn’t right-he was. It was just the way these young men, born in this century, looked at the world. Born in this century, hell-odds were Szymanski’d still been pissing his drawers when Mutt climbed on a troopship to head Over There.

But no matter how young the captain was on the outside, he had a cold-blooded way of evaluating things. The farmland over across the river was good tank country and the Lizards had good tanks, so to hell with the whole landscape. One of these days, there might not be a war going on. When Mutt looked at farmland, he thought about that, and about what kind of crops you’d get with this soil and climate, and how big your yield was liable to be. Szymanski didn’t care.

“Where they gonna billet us, sir?” Muldoon asked.

“Just off of Fountain Square, not far from the watch factory,” Szymanski answered. “We’re taking over a hotel that hasn’t been bombed to smithereens: the three-story red brick building over there.” He pointed.

“Fountain Square? Yeah, I been there.” Sergeant Muldoon chuckled. “It’s a triangle, and it ain’t got no fountain. Great little place.”

“Give me a choice between a hotel an’ the places we been stayin’ at in Chicago, an’ I ain’t gonna carry on a whole lot,” Mutt said. “Nice to lie down without worryin’ about whether a sniper can pick up where you’re sleepin’ and blow your head off without you even knowin’ the bastard was there.”

“Amen,” Muldoon said enthusiastically. “ ‘Sides which-” He glanced over at Captain Szymanski, then decided not to go on. Mutt wondered what that was all about. He’d have to wander over to Fountain Square himself and see what he could see.

Szymanski didn’t notice Muldoon’ s awkward pause. He was still looking westward. “No matter what they do and what kind of armor they might bring up, the Lizards would have a tough time forcing a crossing here,” he observed. “We’re nicely up on the bluffs and well dug in. No matter how hard they pasted us from the air, we’d still hurt their tanks. They’d have to try flanking us out if they wanted to take this place.”

“Yes, sir,” Muldoon said again. The brass didn’t think the Lizards would be trying to take Elgin any time soon, or they wouldn’t have sent the company here to rest and recuperate. Of course, the brass wasn’t always right about such things, but for the moment no bullets were flying, no cannon bellowing. It was almost peaceful enough to make a man nervous.

“Come on, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “I’ll show that there hotel and__” Again, he didn’t go on; he made a production of not going on. What the devil had he found over by Fountain Square? A warehouse full of Lucky Strikes? A cache of booze that wasn’t rotgut or moonshine? Whatever it was, he sure was acting coy about it.

For a Midwest factory town, Elgin looked to be a pretty nice place. The blasted plants didn’t make up a single district, as they did so many places. Instead, they were scattered among what had been pleasant homes till war visited them with fire and sword. Some of the houses, the ones that hadn’t been bombed or burned, still looked comfortable.

Fountain Square hadn’t been hit too badly, maybe because none of the town buildings was tall enough to draw Lizard bombers. God only knew why it had the name it did, because, as Muldoon had said, it was neither square nor overburdened with fountains. What looked to be a real live working saloon greeted GIs with open doors-and with a couple of real live working MPs inside those open doors to make sure rest and recuperation didn’t get too rowdy.

Was that what Muldoon had had in mind? He could have mentioned it in front of Szymanski; the captain didn’t mind taking a drink now and then, or even more often than that.

Then Mutt spotted the line of guys in grimy olive drab snaking their way down a narrow alley. He’d seen-hell, he’d stood in-lines like that in France. “They got themselves a whorehouse goin’,” he said.

“You betcha they do,” Muldoon agreed with a broad grin. “It ain’t like I need to get my ashes hauled like I did when I was over in France, but hell, it ain’t like I’m dead, neither. I figure after we got our boys settled in at the hotel, maybe you an’ me-” He hesitated. “Might be they got a special house for officers. The Frenchies, they done that Over There.”

“Yeah, I know. I remember,” Mutt said. “But I doubt it, though. Hell, I didn’t figure they’d set up a house a-tall. Chaplains woulda given ’em holy hell if they’d tried it back in 1918.”

“Times have changed, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said.

“Yeah, a whole bunch of different ways,” Daniels agreed. “I was thinkin’ about that my own self, not so long ago.”

Captain Szymanski’s was not the only company billeted at the Gifford Hotel. Along with the beds, there were mattresses and piles of blankets on the floor, to squeeze in as many men as possible. That was fine, unless the Lizards scored a direct hit on the place. If they did, the Gifford would turn into a king-sized tomb.

When things were going smoothly there, Mutt and Muldoon slid outside and went back to Fountain Square. Muldoon gave Daniels a sidelong look. “Don’t it bother you none to have all these horny kids watch you gettin’ in line with ’em, Lieutenant?” he asked slyly. “You’re an officer now, after all.”

“Hell, no,” Mutt answered. “No way now they can figure I ain’t got any balls.” Muldoon stared at him, then broke up. He started to give Mutt a shot in the ribs with an elbow, but thought better of it before he made contact. As he’d said, even in a brothel line an officer was an officer.

The line advanced steadily. Mutt figured the hookers, however many there were, would be moving the dogfaces through as fast as they could, both to make more money and to give themselves more breathers, however brief, between customers.

He wondered if there’d be MPs inside the place. There weren’t, which probably meant it wasn’t quite official, just winked at. He didn’t care. As his foot hit the bottom of the stairway that led up to the girls, he noticed nobody was coming downstairs. They had a back exit, then. He nodded. Whether this crib was official or not, it was certainly efficient.

At the top of the stairs sat a tough-looking woman with a cash box-and a.45, presumably to keep the wages of sin from being redistributed. “Fifty bucks,” she told Mutt. He’d heard her say that a dozen times already, all with the exact same intonation; she might have been a broken record. He dug in his hip pocket and peeled greenbacks off a roll. Like a lot of guys, he had a pretty good wad of cash. When you were up in the front lines, you couldn’t do much spending.

A big blond GI who didn’t look a day over seventeen came out of one of the doors down the hall and headed, sure enough, toward a back stairway. “Go on,” the madam told Mutt. “That’s Number 4, ain’t it? Suzie’s in there now.”

Anyway, I know whose sloppy seconds I’m gettin’,Mutt thought as he walked toward the door. The kid hadn’t looked like somebody with VD, but what did that prove? Not much, and who could guess who’d been in there before him, or before that guy, or before the fellow ahead ofhim?

The door did have a tarnished brass 4 on it. Daniels knocked. Inside, a woman started laughing. “Come on in,” she said. “It sure as hell ain’t locked.”

“Suzie?” Mutt said as he went into the room. The girl, dressed in a worn satin wrap, sat on the edge of the bed. She was about thirty, with short brown hair and a lot of eye makeup but no lipstick. She looked tired and bored, but not particularly mean. That relieved Mutt; some of the whores he’d met had hated men so much, he never could figure out why they’d lie down with them in the first place.

She sized him up the same way he did her. After a couple of seconds, she nodded and tried a smile on for size. “Hello, Pops,” she said, not unkindly. “You know, maybe only one guy in four or five bothers with my name. You ready?” She pointed to a basin and a bar of soap. “Why don’t you wash yourself off first?”

It was a polite order, but an order just the same. Mutt didn’t mind. Suzie didn’t know him from Adam, either. While he was tending to it, she shrugged the wrap off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She wasn’t a Vargas girl or anything, but she wasn’t bad. She lay back on the narrow mattress while Mutt dried himself off and got out of the rest of his clothes.

He couldn’t tell if the moans she made while he was riding her were genuine or professional, which meant odds were good they were professional. She had hellacious hip action, but then she’d naturally try to bring him off in a hurry. He would have come pretty damn quick even if she’d just lain there like a dead fish; he’d been without for a long time.

As soon as he was done, he rolled off her, got up, and went over to the basin to soap himself off again. He pissed in the chamber pot by the bed, too.Flush the pipes, he thought. “You don’t take chances, do you, Pops?” Suzie said. That could have come out nasty, but it didn’t; it sounded more as if she approved of him for knowing what he was doing.

“Not a whole bunch, anyways,” he answered, reaching for his skivvies. If he hadn’t taken any chances, he wouldn’t have gone in there with her in the first place. But since he had, he didn’t want to pay any price except the one from his bankroll.

Suzie sat up. Her breasts, tipped with large, pale nipples, bobbed as she reached for the wrap. “That Rita out there, she keeps most of what you give her, the cheap bitch,” she said, her voice calculatedly casual. “Twenty for me sure would come in handy.”

“I’ve heard that song before,” Mutt said, and the hooker laughed, altogether unembarrassed. He gave her ten bucks even if he had heard the tune; she’d been pretty good, and friendlier than she had to be in an assembly-line operation like this. She grinned and stuck the bill under the mattress.

Mutt had just set his hand on the doorknob when a horrible racket started outside: men shouting and cursing and bellowing, “No!” “What the hell’s goin’ on?” Mutt said. The question wasn’t rhetorical; it didn’t sound like any brawl he’d ever heard.

Through the shouts came the sound of a woman weeping as if her heart would break. “My God,” Suzie said quietly. Mutt looked back toward her. She was crossing herself. As if to explain, she went on, “That’s Rita. I didn’t think Rita would cry if you murdered whatever family she’s got right in front of her face.”

Fists pounded, not on the door but against the wall. Mutt went out into the hallway. GIs were sobbing unashamed, tears cutting winding clean tracks through the dirt on their faces. At the cash box, Rita had her head buried in her arms. “What the hell is going on?” Mutt repeated.

The madam looked up at him. Her face was ravaged, ancient. “He’s dead,” she said. “Somebody just brought news he’s dead.”

By the way she said it, she might have been talking about her own father. But if she had been, none of the dogfaces would have given a damn. All they were here for was a fast fuck, same as Mutt. “Who’s dead?” he asked.

“The President,” Rita answered, at the same time as a corporal choked out, “FDR.” Mutt felt as if he’d been kicked in the belly. He gaped for a moment, his mouth falling open like a bluegill’s out of water. Then, to his helpless horror, he started bawling like everybody else.

“Iosef Vissarionovich, there is no reason to think the change in political leadership in the United States will necessarily bring on a change in American policy or in the continuation of the war against the Lizards,” Vyacheslav Molotov said.

“Necessarily.” Iosef Stalin spoke the word in a nasty, mocking singsong voice. “This is a fancy way to say you haven’t the faintest idea what will happen next as far as the United States is concerned.”

Molotov scribbled something on the pad he held in his lap. To Stalin, it would look as if he was taking notes. Actually, he was giving himself a chance to think. The trouble was, the General Secretary was right. The man who would have succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, was dead, killed in the Lizards’ nuclear bombing of Seattle. The Foreign Commissariat was, however, quite familiar with Cordell Hull, the new President of the United States.

The foreign commissar trotted out what they did know: “As Secretary of State, Hull consistently supported Roosevelt’s fore-doomed effort to reinvigorate the oppressive structure of American monopoly capitalism, forging trade ties with Latin America and attempting financial reform. As you well know, he also strongly supported the President in his opposition to fascism and in his conduct of the war first against the Hitlerites and then against the Lizards. As I say, I think it reasonable to assume he will continue to carry out the policies his predecessor initiated.”

“If you want someone to carry out a policy, you hire a clerk,” Stalin said, his voice dripping scorn. “What I want to know is, what sort of policies will Hull set?”

“Only the event will tell us,” Molotov replied, reluctant to admit ignorance to Stalin but more afraid to make a guess that would prove wrong soon enough for the General Secretary to remember it. With his usual efficiency, he hid the resentment he felt at Stalin’s reminding him he was hardly more than a glorflied clerk himself.

Stalin paused to get his pipe going. He puffed in silence for a couple of minutes. The reek ofmakhorka, cheap harsh Russian tobacco, filled the little room in the basement of the Kremlin. Not even the head of the Soviet Union enjoyed anything better these days. Like everyone else, Stalin and Molotov were getting by on borscht andshchi- beet soup and cabbage soup. They filled your belly and let you preserve at least the illusion that you were being nourished. If you were lucky enough to be able to put meat in them every so often, as the leaders of the Soviet Union were, illusion became reality.

“Do you think the death of Roosevelt will affect whether the Americans send us assistance for the explosive-metal bomb project?” Stalin asked.

Molotov started scribbling again. Stalin was coming up with all sorts of dangerous questions today. They were important; Molotov couldn’t very well evade them; and he couldn’t afford to be wrong, either.

At last he said, “Comrade General Secretary, I am given to understand that the Americans had agreed to assign one of their physicists to our project. Because of the increase in Lizard attacks on shipping, however, he is coming overland, by way of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. I do not believe he has yet entered Soviet territory, or I should have been apprised of it.”

Stalin’s pipe emitted more smoke signals. Molotov wished he could read them. Beria claimed he could tell what Stalin was thinking by the way the General Secretary laughed, but Beria claimed a lot of things that weren’t-necessarily-so. Telling the NKVD chief as much carried its own set of risks, though.

Hoping to improve Stalin’s mood, Molotov added, “The takeover of the Lizard base near Tomsk will ease our task in transporting the physicist once he does arrive on our soil.”

“If he does arrive on our soil,” Stalin said. “If he is still in North America, he is still subject to recall by the new regime.” Another puff of smoke rose from the pipe. “The tsars were fools, idiots, imbeciles to give away Alaska.”

That might or might not have been true, but Molotov couldn’t do anything about it any which way. Stalin often gave the impression that he thought people were persecuting him. Given the history of the Soviet Union, given Stalin’s own personal history, he often had reason for that assumption, butoften was notalways. Reminding him of that was one of the more delicate tasks presenting itself to his aides. Molotov felt like a man defusing a bomb.

Carefully, he said, “It is in the Americans’ short-term interest to help us defeat the Lizards, and when, Iosef Vissarionovich, did you ever know the capitalists to consider their long-term interest?”

He’d picked the right line. Stalin smiled. He could, when he chose, look astonishingly benevolent. This was one of those times. “Spoken like a true Marxist-Leninist, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. We shall triumph over the Lizards, and then we shall proceed to triumph over the Americans, too.”

“The dialectic demands it,” Molotov agreed. He did not let his voice show relief, any more than he had permitted himself to reveal anger or fear.

Stalin leaned forward, his face intent. “Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, have you been reading the interrogation reports from the Lizard mutineers who gave that base to us? Do you credit them? Can the creatures be so politically naive, or is this some sort ofmaskirovka to deceive us?”

“I have indeed seen these reports, Comrade General Secretary.” Molotov felt relief again: at last, something upon which he could venture an opinion without the immediate risk of its blowing up in his face. “My belief is that their naivete is genuine, not assumed. Our interrogators and other experts have learned that their history has been unitary for millennia. They have had no occasion to acquire the diplomatic skills even the most inept and feckless human government-say, for example, the quasi-fascist clique formerly administering Poland-learns as a matter of course.”

“Marshal Zhukov and General Koniev also express this view,” Stalin said. “I have trouble believing it.” Stalin saw plots everywhere, whether they were there or not: 1937 had proved that. The only plot he hadn’t seen was Hitler’s in June 1941.

Molotov knew that going against his chief’s opinion was risky. He’d done it once lately, and barely survived. Here, though, the stakes were smaller, and he could shade his words: “You may well be right, Iosef Vissarionovich. But if the Lizards were in fact more politically sophisticated than they have shown thus far, would they not have demonstrated it with a better diplomatic performance than they have given since launching their imperialist invasion of our world?”

Stalin stroked his mustache. “This could be so,” he said musingly. “I had not thought of it in those terms. If it is so, it becomes all the more important for us to continue resistance and maintain our own governmental structure.”

“Comrade General Secretary?” Now Molotov didn’t follow.

Stalin’s eyes glowed. “So long as we do not lose the war, Comrade Foreign Commissar, do you not think it likely we will win the peace?”

Molotov considered that. Not for nothing had Stalin kept his grip on power in the Soviet Union for more than two decades. Yes, he had shortcomings. Yes, he made mistakes. Yes, you were utterly mad if you pointed them out to him. But, most of the time, he had an uncArmy knack for finding the balance of power, for judging which side was stronger-or could become so.

“May it be as you say,” Molotov answered.

Atvar hadn’t known such excitement since the last time he’d smelled the pheromones of a female during mating season. Maybe ginger tasters knew something of his exhilaration. If they did, he came closer to forgiving them for their destructive addiction than he ever had before.

He turned one eye turret toward Kirel and away from the reports and analyses still flowing across his computer screen. “At last!” he exclaimed. “Maybe I needed to come down to the surface of this planet to change our luck. That luck has been so cruel to us, it is time and past time for it to begin to even out. The death of the American not-emperor Roosevelt will surely propel our forces to victory in the northern region of the lesser continental mass.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, may it be as you say,” Kirel answered.

“May it be?May it be?” Atvar said indignantly. The air of this place called Egypt tasted strange in his mouth, but it was warm enough and dry enough to suit him-quite different from that of so much of this miserable world. “Of course it will be. It must be. The Big Uglies are so politically naive that events cannot but transpire as we wish.”

“We have been disappointed in our hopes here so many times, Exalted Fleetlord, that I hesitate to rejoice before a desired event actually does take place,” Kirel said.

“Sensible conservatism is good for the Race,” Atvar said, a truism if ever there was one. He needed Kirel’s conservatism; if Kirel had been a wild radical like Straha, he wouldn’t be fleetlord now. But he went on, “Consider the obvious, Shiplord: the United States is not an empire, is it?”

“Indeed not,” Kirel said; that was indisputable.

Atvar said, “And because it is not an empire, it by definition cannot have the stable political arrangements we enjoy, now can it?”

“That would seem to follow from the first,” Kirel admitted, caution in his voice.

“Just so!” Atvar said joyfully. “And this United States has fallen under the rule of the not-emperor called Roosevelt. Thanks in part to him, the American Tosevites have maintained a steadfast resistance to our forces. Truth?”

“Truth,” Kirel said.

“And what follows from this truth does so as inevitably as a statement in a geometric proof springs from its immediate predecessor,” Atvar said. “Roosevelt is now dead. Can his successor take his place as smoothly as one Emperor succeeds another? Can his successor’s authority be quickly and smoothly recognized as legitimate? Without a preordained imperial succession, how is this possible? My answer is that it is impossible, that the American Tosevites are likely to undergo some severe disorders before this Hull, the Big Ugly who claims authority, is able to exercise it. If he ever is. So also state our political analysts who have been studying Tosevite societies since the beginning of our campaign here.”

“This does seem to be reasonable,” Kirel said, “but reason is not always a governing factor in Tosevite affairs. For instance, do I not remember that the American Big Uglies are among the minority who attempt to govern their affairs by counting the snouts of those for and against various matters of interest to them?”

Atvar had to glance back through the reports to see whether the shiplord was right When he had checked, he said, “Yes, that appears to be so. What of it?”

“Some of these not-empires use snoutcounting to confer legitimacy on leaders in the same way we use the imperial succession,” Kirel answered. “This may tend to minimize the disruption that will arise in the United States as a result of the loss of Roosevelt.”

“Ah, I see your point,” Atvar said. “Here, though, it is not valid; Roosevelt’s viceregent, a male named Wallace, also chosen through the snoutcounting farce, has predeceased him: he died in our bombing of Seattle. No not-empirewide snoutcounting has ever been perpetrated for this Hull. He must surely be reckoned an illegitimate usurper. Perhaps other would-be rulers of America will rise in various regions of the not-empire to contest his claim.”

“If that comes to pass, it would indeed be excellent,” Kirel said. “I admit, it does fit with what we know of Tosevite history and behavior patterns. But we have been disappointed so often with regard to the Big Uglies, I find optimism hard to muster these days.”

“I understand, and I agree,” Atvar said. “In this case, though, as you note, the Big Uglies’ irksome proclivities work with us, not against us as they do on most occasions. My opinion is that we may reasonably expect control over major areas of the not-empire of the United States to fall away from its unsnoutcounted leader, and that we may even be able to use the rebels who arise for our own purposes. Cooperating with the Big Uglies galls me, but the potential profit in this case seems worthwhile.”

“Considering the use the Big Uglies have got out of Straha, using their leaders against them strikes me as fitting revenge,” Kirel said.

Atvar wished Kirel hadn’t mentioned Straha; every time he thought of the shiplord who’d escaped his just punishment by fleeing to the American Tosevites, it was as if he got an itch down under his scales where he couldn’t scratch it Despite that, though, he had to admit the comparison was fair.

“At last,” he said, “we shall find where the limits of Tosevite resilience lie. Surely no agglomeration of Big Uglies lacking the stability of the imperial form can pass from one rule to another in the midst of the stress of warfare. Why, we would be hard-pressed ourselves if, during such a crisis, the Emperor happened to die and a less experienced male took the throne.” He cast down his eyes, then asked, “Truth?”

“Truth,” Kirel said.

Leslie Groves sprang to his feet and forced his bulky body into as stiff a brace as he could take. “Mr. President!” he said. “It’s a great honor and privilege to meet you, sir.”

“Sit down, General,” Cordell Hull said. He sat down himself, across from Groves in the latter’s office. Just seeing a President of the United States walk into that office jolted Groves. So did Hull’s accent: a slightly lisping Tennessee drawl rather than the patrician tones of FDR. The new chief executive did share one thing with his predecessor, though: he looked desperately tired. After Groves was seated, Hull went on, “I never expected to be President, not even after Vice President Wallace was killed and I knew I was next in line. All I ever wanted to do was go on doing my own job the best way I knew how.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said. If he’d been playing poker with Hull, he would have said the new President was sandbagging. He’d been Secretary of State since Roosevelt became President, and had been Roosevelt’s strong right arm in resisting first the human enemies of the United States and then the invading aliens.

“All right, then,” Hull said. “Let’s get down to brass tacks.”

That didn’t strike Groves as sounding very presidential; to him, Hull looked more like an aging small-town lawyer than a President, too: gray-haired, bald on top with wisps combed over to try to hide it, jowly, dressed in a baggy dark blue suit he’d plainly been wearing for a good many years. Regardless of whether he looked like a President or sounded like one, though, he had the job. That meant he was Groves’ boss, and a soldier did what his boss said.

“Whatever you need to know, sir,” Groves said now.

“The obvious first,” Hull answered. “How soon can we have another bomb, and then the one after that, and then one more? You have to understand, General, that I didn’t know a thing, not one single solitary thing, about this project until our first atomic bomb went off in Chicago.”

“Security isn’t as tight now as it used to be, either,” Groves answered. “Before the Lizards came, we didn’t want the Germans or the Japs to have a clue that we thought atomic bombs were even possible. The Lizards know that much.”

“Yes, you might say so,” Hull agreed, his voice dry. “If I hadn’t happened to be out of Washington one fine day, you’d be having this conversation with someone else right now.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said. “We don’t have to conceal from the Lizards that we’re working on the project, just where we’re doing it, which is easier.”

“I see that,” the President said. “As may be, though; President Roosevelt chose not to let me know till the Lizards came.” He sighed. “I don’t blame him, or anything of the sort. He had more important things to worry about, and he worried about them-until it killed him. He was a very great man. Christ”-he pronounced itChwist — “only knows how I’ll fill his shoes. In peacetime, he would have lived longer. With the weight of the country-by God, General, with the weight of the world-on his shoulders, moving from place to place like a hunted animal, he just wore out, that’s all there is to it.”

“That was the impression I had when he came here last year,” Groves said, nodding. “The strain was more than his mechanism could take, but he took it anyhow, for as long as he could.”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” Hull said. “But, speaking of nails, we’ve forgotten about the brass tacks. The bombs, General Groves-when?”

“We’ll have enough plutonium for the next one in a couple of months, sir,” Groves answered. “After that, we’ll be able to make several per year. We’ve about come to the limit of what we can do here in Denver without giving ourselves away to the Lizards. If we do need a lot more production, we’ll have to start a second facility somewhere else-and we have reasons we don’t want to do that, the chief one being that we don’t think we can keep it secret.”

“This place is still secret,” Hull pointed out.

“Yes, sir,” Groves agreed, “but we had everything set up and going here before the Lizards knew we were a serious threat to build nuclear weapons. They’ll be a lot more alert now-and if they catch us at it, they bomb us. General Marshall and President Roosevelt never thought the risk was worth it.”

“I respect General Marshall’s assessment very highly, General Groves,” Hull said, “so highly that I’m naming him Secretary of State-my guess is, he’ll do the job better than I ever did. But he is not the Commander-in-Chief, and neither is President Roosevelt, not any more. I am.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said. Cordell Hull might not have expected to become President, he might not have wanted to become President, but now that the load had landed on his shoulders, they looked to be wide enough to carry it.

“I see two questions in the use of atomic bombs,” Hull said. “The first one is, are we likely to need more than we can produce here at Denver? And the second one, related to the first, is, if we use all we produce, and the Lizards retaliate in kind, will anything be left of the United States by the time the war is done?”

They were both good questions. They went right to the heart of things. The only trouble was, they weren’t the sort of questions you asked an engineer. Ask Groves whether something could be built, how long it would take, and how much it would cost, and he’d answer in detail, whether immediately or after he’d gone to work with a slide rule and an adding machine. But he had neither the training nor the inclination to deal with the imponderables of setting policy. He gave the only answer he could: “I don’t know, sir.”

“I don’t know, either,” Hull said. “I’ll want you to be prepared to split off a team from this facility to start up a new one. I don’t know whether I’ll decide to do that, but if I do, I’ll want to be able to do it as quickly and efficiently as I can.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves repeated. As a contingency plan, what the new President proposed made good sense: you wanted to keep as many options as possible open for as long as you could.

“Good,” Hull said, taking it for granted that Groves would do as he’d been told. The President stabbed out a blunt forefinger. “General, I’m still getting into harness here. What should I know about this place that maybe I don’t?”

Groves chewed on that for a minute or so before he tried answering. It was another good question, but also another open-ended one: he didn’t know what Hull did or didn’t know. At last, he said, “Mr. President, it could be that nobody’s told you we’ve detached one of our physicists from the facility and sent him off to the Soviet Union to help the Russians with their atomic project.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” Hull clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Why do the Russians need help? They set off their atomic bomb before we did, before the Germans, before anybody.”

“Yes, sir, but they had help.” Groves explained how the Russians had built that bomb out of nuclear material captured from the Lizards, and how some of that same material had also helped the Germans and the United States. He finished, “But we-and the Nazis, too, by the look of things-have been able to figure out how to make more plutonium on our own. The Russians don’t seem to have managed that.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Hull said. “Under any other circumstances, I can’t think of anybody I’d less rather see with the atomic bomb than Stalin-unless it’s Hitler.” He laughed unhappily. “And now Hitler has it, and if we don’t help Stalin, then odds are the Lizards beat him. All right, we’re helping him blow the Lizards to kingdom come. If we win that one, then we worry about him trying to blow us to kingdom come, too. Meanwhile, I don’t see what choice we have but to help him. What else is there that I ought to know?”

“That was the most important thing I could think of, sir,” Groves said, and then, a moment later, “May I ask you a question, Mr. President?”

“Go ahead and ask,” Hull said. “I reserve the right not to answer.”

Groves nodded. “Of course. I was just wondering… It’s 1944, sir. How are we going to hold an election this November with the Lizards occupying so much of our territory?”

“We’ll probably hold it the same way we held Congressional elections November before last,” Hull answered, “which is to say, we probably won’t. The officials we have will go on doing their jobs for the duration, and that looks like it will include me.” He snorted. “I’m going to stay unelected a good while longer, General. It’s not the way I’d like it, but it’s the way things are. If we win this war, the Supreme Court is liable to have a field day afterwards. But if we lose it, what those nine old men in black robes think will never matter again. I’ll take the chance of their crucifying me, so long as I can put them in a position of being able to do so. What do you think of that, General?”

“From an engineering standpoint, it strikes me as the most economical solution, sir,” Groves answered. “I don’t know for a fact whether it’s the best one.”

“I don’t, either,” Hull said, “but it looks like it’s what we’re going to do. The old Romans had dictators in emergencies, and they always thought the best ones were the ones most reluctant to take over. I qualify there, no two ways about it.” He got to his feet. He wasn’t very young and he wasn’t very spry, but he did manage. Again, seeing a President not only upright but mobile in that position reminded Groves things would never be the same again.

“Good luck, sir,” he said.

“Thank you, General; I’ll take all of that I can get.” Hull started to walk toward the door, then stopped and looked back at Groves. “Do you remember what Churchill told Roosevelt when Lend-Lease was just getting rolling? ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ That’s what the United States needs from the Metallurgical Laboratory. Give us the tools.”

“You’ll have them,” Groves promised.

The white cliffs of Dover stretched a long way, and curved as they did. If one-or even two-walked along them, that one-or those two-could look down at the sea crashing against the base of those cliffs. David Goldfarb had read somewhere that. If the wave action continued with no other factor to check it, in some millions of years-he couldn’t remember how many-the British Isles would disappear and the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic commingle.

When he said that aloud, Naomi Kaplan raised an eyebrow. “The British Isles have plenty of things to worry about before millions of years go by,” she said.

The wind from off the North Sea tried to blow her words away. It did the same for her hat. She saved that with a quick grab and set it more firmly on her head. Goldfarb didn’t know whether to be glad she’d caught it or sorry he hadn’t had the chance to be gallant and chase it down. Of course, the wind might have turned and flung it over the cliff, which wouldn’t have done his chances for gallantry much good.

Feigning astonishment, he said, “Why, what ever can you mean? Just because we’ve been bombed by the Germans and invaded by the Lizards in the past few years?” He waved airily. “Mere details. Now. If we’d had one of those atomic bombs or whatever they’re called dropped on us, the way Berlin did-”

“God forbid,” Naomi said. “You’re right; we’ve been through quite enough already.”

Her accent-upper-crust British laid over German-fascinated him (a good many things about her fascinated him, but he concentrated on the accent for the moment). It was a refined version of his own: lower-middle-class English laid over the Yiddish he’d spoken till he started grammar school.

“I hope you’re not too chilly,” he said. The weather was brisk, especially so close to the sea, but not nearly so raw as it had been earlier in the winter. You no longer needed to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe spring would get around to showing up one of these days, even if not right away.

Naomi shook her head. “No, it’s all right,” she said. As if to give the lie to her words, the wind tried to flip up the plaid wool skirt she wore. She smiled wryly as she grabbed at it to keep it straight. “Thank you for inviting me to go walking with you.”

“Thanks for coming,” he answered. A lot of the chaps who visited the White Horse Inn had invited Naomi to go walking with them; some had invited her to do things a great deal cruder than that. She’d turned everybody down-except Goldfarb. His own teeth were threatening to chatter, but he wouldn’t admit even to himself that he was cold.

“It is-pleasant-here,” Naomi said, picking the adjective with care. “Before I came to Dover, I had never seen, never imagined, cliffs like this. Mountains I knew in Germany, but never cliffs at the edge of the land, straight down for a hundred meters and more and then nothing but the sea.”

“Glad you like them,” Goldfarb said, as pleased as if he were personally responsible for Dover’s most famous natural feature. “It’s hard to find a nice place to take a girl these days-no cinema without electricity, for instance.”

“And how many girls did you take to the cinema and other nice places when there was electricity?” Naomi asked. She might have made the question sound teasing. David would have been easier about it if she had. But she sounded both curious and serious.

He couldn’t fob her off with a light, casual answer, either. If he tried that, she could get the straight goods-or a large chunk of them-from Sylvia. He hadn’t taken Sylvia to the cinema, either; he’d taken her to bed. She was friendly enough to him now when he dropped into the White Horse Inn for a pint, but he couldn’t guess what sort of character she’d give him if Naomi asked. He’d heard women could be devastatingly candid when they talked with each other about men’s shortcomings.

When be didn’t answer right away, Naomi cocked her head to one side and gave him a knowing look that made him feel about two feet high. But, instead of pounding away at him on the point, as he’d expected her to do, she said, “Sylvia tells me you did something very brave to get one of your-was it a cousin? she wasn’t sure-out of Poland.”

“Does she?” he said in glad surprise; maybe Sylvia hadn’t given him such a bad character after all. He shrugged; having been born in England, he’d taken as his own at least part of the notion of British reserve. But if Naomi already knew some of the story, telling more wouldn’t hurt. He went on, “Yes, my cousin is Moishe Russie. Remember? I told you that back at the pub.”

She nodded. “Yes, you did. The one who broadcast on the wireless for the Lizards-and then against them after he’d seen what they truly were.”

“That’s right,” Goldfarb said. “And they caught him, too, and clapped him in gaol in Lodz till they figured out what to do with him. I went over with a few other chaps and helped get him out and spirited him back here to England.”

“You make it sound so simple,” Naomi said. “Weren’t you frightened?”

That fight had been his first taste of ground combat, even if it had only been against Lizard and Polish prison guards too taken by surprise to put up all the resistance they might have. Since then, he’d got sucked into the infantry when the Lizards invaded England. That had been much worse. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine why some men presumably in their right minds chose the infantry as a career.

He realized he hadn’t answered Naomi’s question. “Frightened?” he said. “As a matter of fact, I was ruddy petrflied.”

To his relief, she nodded again; he’d been afraid his candor would put her off. “When you tell me things like this,” she said, “you remind me you are not an Englishman after all. Not many English soldiers would admit to anyone who is not one of their-what do you call them? — their mates, that is it-that they feel fear or much of anything else.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that,” Goldfarb said. “I don’t understand it, either.” He laughed. “But what do I know? I’m only a Jew whose parents got out of Poland. I won’t understand Englishmen down deep if I live to be ninety, which doesn’t strike me as likely, the way the world wags these days. Maybe my grandchildren will have the proper stiff upper lip.”

“And my parents got me out of Germany just in time,” Naomi said. Her shiver had nothing to do with the sea breeze. “It was bad there, and we escaped before theKristallnacht. What-” She hesitated, perhaps nerving herself. After a moment, she finished the question: “What was it like in Poland?”

Goldfarb considered that. “You have to remember, the Nazis had been out of Lodz for a year, more or less, before I went in there.” She nodded. He went on, “Keeping that in mind, I think about what I saw there and I try to imagine how it was when the Germans were there.”

“Nu?”Naomi prodded.

He sighed. His breath smoked in the chilly air. “From everything I saw, from everything I heard, there might not be any Jews left alive there by now if the Lizards hadn’t come. I didn’t see all of Poland, of course, only Lodz and the road to and from the sea, but there might not be any Jews left in the whole country if the Lizards hadn’t come. When the Germans saidJudenfrei, they weren’t joking.”

Naomi bit her lip. “This is what I have heard on the wireless. Hearing it from someone I know who has seen it with his own eyes makes it more real.” Her frown deepened. “And the Germans, the wireless says, are pushing deeper into Poland again.”

“I know. I’ve heard that, too. My friends-mygoyishe friends-cheer when they hear news like that. When I hear it, I don’t know what to think. The Lizards can’t win the war, but the bloody Nazis can’t, either.”

“Shouldn’t,” Naomi said with the precision of one who had learned English from the outside instead of growing up with it. “They can. The Lizards can. The Germans can. They shouldn’t.” She laughed bitterly. “When I was a little girl going to school, before Hitler came to power, they taught me I was a German. I believed it, too. Isn’t that peculiar, thinking about it now?”

“It’s more than peculiar. It’s-” Goldfarb groped for the word he wanted. “What do they call those strange paintings where it’s raining loaves of bread or you see a watch dribbling down a block as if it were made of ice and melting?”

“Surreal,” Naomi said at once. “Yes, that is it. That is it exactly. Me-a German?” She laughed again, then stood to attention, her right arm rigidly outstretched.“Ein Volk ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!” she thundered in what wasn’t the worst imitation of Hitler he’d ever heard.

He thought it was meant for a joke. Maybe she’d thought the same thing when she started it. But as her arm fell limp to her side, she stared at it as if it had betrayed her. Her whole body sagged. Her face twisted. She began to cry.

Goldfarb took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. It wasn’t all right. They both knew it wasn’t all right. But if you let yourself think too much about the way it was, how could you go on doing what needed doing? With that thought, David realized he was closer to understanding the British stiff upper lip than he’d imagined.

Naomi clung to him as if he were a life preserver and she a sailor on a ship that had just taken a torpedo from a U-boat. He held her with something of the same desperation. When he tilted her face up to kiss her, he found her mouth waiting. She moaned deeply in her throat and put her hand on the back of his head, pulling him to her.

It might have been the oddest kiss he’d ever known. It didn’t stir him to lust, as so many less emphatic kisses with girls about whom he cared less had done. Yet he was glad to have it and sorry when it was over. “I ought to walk you back to your digs,” he said.

“Yes, maybe you should,” Naomi answered. “You can meet my mother and father. If you like.”

He’d fought the Lizards gun to gun. Would he quail from such an invitation now? By the slimmest of margins, he didn’t. “Capital,” he said, doing his best to sound casual. Naomi slipped her arm in his and smiled up at him, as if he’d just passed a test. Maybe he had.

A large group of dark-skinned Big Uglies formed ragged lines on a grassy meadow next to the Florida air base. Teerts watched another Tosevite of the same color stomp his way out in front of them. The pilot shivered. In his no-nonsense stride and fierce features, the Big Ugly with three stripes on each sleeve of his upper-body covering reminded him of Major Okamoto, who’d been his interpreter and keeper while the Nipponese held him captive.

The male with the stripes on his sleeve shouted something in his own language. “Tenn-hut!” was what it sounded like to Teerts. The rest of the Tosevites sprang to stiff verticality, their arms pressed tight against their sides. Given Teerts’ forward-slung posture, that only made them seem more ridiculous to him, but it seemed to satisfy, or at least to mollify, the Big Ugly with the striped upper-body covering.

That male shouted again, a whole string of gibberish this time. Teerts had picked up a good deal of Nipponese in captivity, but it didn’t help him understand the Florida locals. The Empire’s three worlds all used the same language; encountering a planet where tens of different tongues were spoken required a distinct mental leap for males of the Race.

The dark-skinned Big Uglies marched this way and that across the grassy field, obeying the commands the male with the stripes gave them. Even their feet went back and forth in the same rhythm. When that didn’t happen, the male in command screamed abuse at those who were derelict. Teerts did not have to be a savant of other-species psychology to figure out that the commanding male was imperfectly pleased.

He turned to another male of the Race who was also watching the Tosevites at their evolutions. The fellow wore the body paint of an Intelligence specialist. His equivalent rank was about the same as Teerts’. The pilot asked, “Can we truly trust these Big Uglies to fight on our behalf?”

“Our analysis is that they will fight bravely,” the male from Intelligence said. “The other local Tosevites so mistreated them that they will see us as a superior alternative to the continued authority of the lighter-skinned Big Uglies.”

Teerts tried to place the other male’s voice. “You are Aaatos, not so?” he asked hesitantly.

“Truth,” the male answered. “And you are Teerts.” Unlike Teerts’, his voice held no doubts. If he didn’t know who was who around the base, he wouldn’t be earning his keep-or preserving Intelligence’s reputation for omniscience.

That reputation had taken a beating since the Race came to Tosev 3. A lot of reputations had taken a beating since the Race came to Tosev 3. Teerts said, “I hope you will forgive me, but I will always be nervous in the presence of armed Big Uglies. We have given arms to the natives of other parts of this planet and, from what I have heard, the results have often left much to be desired.” He could think of no politer way to say that the Big Uglies had the habit of turning their guns against the Race.

Aaatos said, “Truth,” again, but went on, “We are improving control procedures, and will not permit these Tosevites to travel independently in large numbers while under arms: we shall always use signflicant cadres of males of the Race with them. They are intended to supplement our security details, not to supplant them. Thus we shall not be troubled by embarrassments such as the ones you mention-the case of Poland springs prominently to mind.”

“Poland-yes, that is one of the names I have heard,” Teerts said. He would have had trouble placing it on a map; but for Manchukuo and Nippon, which he knew in detail more intimate than he had ever wanted to acquire, his familiarity with Tosevite geography was limited.

“Nothing like that can happen here,” Aaatos said, and gave an emphatic cough to show he meant it.

“May you be proved correct.” Teerts let it go at that. What he had seen on Tosev 3 left him convinced of two things: that the Big Uglies were more devious than most males of the Race could grasp till they got their snouts rubbed in the fact, and that trying to convince those males of that fact before their snouts were rubbed in it was a losing proposition from the start.

Out on the meadow, the Big Uglies marched and marched, now reversing their course, now shifting at right angles. The male with stripes on his sleeves marched right along with them, berating them into performance ever more nearly perfect. Eventually, all of their legs were moving as if under the control of a single organism.

“This is intriguing to watch,” Teerts said to Aaatos, “but what is its function? Any males who implemented these tactics in actual ground combat would be quickly destroyed. Even I, a killercraft pilot, know males are supposed to spread wide and seek cover. This is only common sense.” He let his mouth fall open. “Not that common sense is common among the Big Uglies.”

“This marching, I am given to understand, promotes group solidarity among the Tosevites,” the male from Intelligence answered. “I do not understand exactly why this is so, but that it is so appears undeniable: every native military uses similar disciplinary techniques. One theory currently popular as to the reason why is that the Big Uglies, being a species less inherently disciplined than the Race, employ these procedures to inculcate order and conformity to commands.”

Teerts thought about that. It made more sense than a lot of theories he’d heard from Intelligence. That didn’t necessarily mean it was true-nothing necessarily meant anything on Tosev 3, as far as he could tell-but he didn’t have to keep from laughing in Aaatos’ face.

He went back to watching the marching Tosevites. After a while, they stopped marching and stood in a neat grid, still stiffly erect, as the male with stripes on his sleeves harangued them. Every so often, they would break in with chorused responses. “Do you understand their language?” Teerts asked Aaatos. “What are they saying?”

“Their leader is describing the attributes of the fighting males he wants them to become,” Aaatos said. “He is asking them whether they desire to possess and do possess these attributes. They answer in the affirmative.”

“Yes, I can see that they might,” Teerts said. “We have never had cause to doubt the fighting attributes of the Tosevites. But still I persist in wondering: will these attributes be employed for us or against us in the end?”

“I do not think the danger is so great as you fear,” Aaatos said, “and, in any case, we must take the chance or risk losing the war.” Teerts had never heard it put so bluntly. He started worrying in earnest.