Striking the Balance

VII

“All right, God damn it, where the hell is he?” That booming bad-tone, that look-out-world-here-I-am arrogance, could only have belonged to one man of Heinrich Jager’s acquaintance. He had not expected to hear from that one man while campaigning against the Lizards in western Poland.

He got to his feet, careful not to overturn the little aluminum stove on which his supper simmered. “Skorzeny!” he called. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“The devil’s work, my lad; the devil’s work,” SSStandartenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny answered, folding Jager into a rib-crunching bearhug. Skorzeny towered over Jager by fifteen centimeters, but dominated most men not because of his size but by sheer physical presence. When you fell under his spell, you wanted to charge out to do whatever he told you to, no matter how impossible the rational part of your brain knew it was.

Jager had been on several missions with Skorzeny: in Russia, in Croatia, in France. He marveled that he remained in one piece after them. He marveled even more that Skorzeny did. He also set himself to resist whatever blandishments Skorzeny hurled his way. If you stood up to the SS man, you got respect. If you didn’t, you got run over.

Skorzeny thumped his belly. The scar that furrowed his left cheek pulled up the corner of his mouth as he asked, “Got any food around these parts, or do you aim to starve me to death?”

“You’re not wasting away,” Jager said, looking him over with a critical eye. “We have some stew-pork and turnips-and some ersatz coffee. Will they suit your majesty?”

“No truffled pheasant, eh? Well, stew will do. But fuck ersatz coffee and the dying horse that pissed it out.” Skorzeny pulled a canteen off his belt, undid the stopper, and passed the canteen to Jager. “Have a snort.”

Jager drank warily. With Skorzeny’s sense of humor, you had to be wary. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Where did you come by this?”

“Not a bad cognac, eh?” Skorzeny answered smugly. “Courvoisier VSOP five-star, smoother than the inside of a virgin’s twat.”

Jager took another sip, this one with appropriate reverence, then handed the felt-covered aluminum flask back to Skorzeny. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know where you found it. If you tell me, I’ll desert and go there myself. Wherever it is, it’s a nicer place than this.”

“Which isn’t saying one hell of a lot, when you get down to it,” Skorzeny said. “Now, where’s that stew?” When he’d filled the metal bowl from his own mess kit, he gulped the stuff down, then sent a shot of cognac after it. “Shame to chase anything so vile, but the hooch doesn’t do me any good if I don’t drink it, eh?” He gave Jager a shot in the ribs with his elbow.

“Whatever you say,” Jager answered. If you let the SS man sweep you away, you were in trouble-he kept reminding himself of that. Of course, since Skorzeny was here, he was going to find himself in trouble anyway; Skorzeny brought it with him, along with heavenly cognac. What sort of trouble, now, that varied from mission to mission. Jager got up and stretched as lazily as he could, then said, “Let’s go for a little walk, shall we?”

“Oh, you just want to get me alone,” Skorzeny said in a shrill, arch falsetto. The panzer crewmen still eating their suppers guffawed in delight. Gunther Grillparzer swallowed wrong and started to choke; somebody had to pound him on the back before he could breathe straight again.

“If I were that desperate, you big ugly lunk, I think I’d shoot myself first,” Jager retorted. The troopers laughed again. So did Skorzeny. He dished it out, but he could take it, too.

He and Jager strode away from the encampment: not far enough to get lost, but out of earshot of the soldiers. Their boots squelched in mud. The spring thaw had done as much as the Lizards to slow the German advance. Off in a pond not far away, one of the first frogs of the new year let out a loud, mournful croak.

“He’ll be sorry,” Skorzeny said. “An owl will get him, or a heron.” He sounded as if he thought the frog had it coming.

Jager didn’t care about frogs one way or the other. “The devil’s work, you said. What sort of deviltry have you got in mind, and where do I fit into it?”

“Don’t even know if you do or not,” Skorzeny answered. “Have to see how things go. But as long as I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop by and say hello.” He bowed from the waist. “Hello.”

“You’re impossible,” Jager said with a snort. By the way Skorzeny beamed, he took that for a compliment. Holding onto his patience with both hands, Jager went on, “Let’s try it again. Why are you in the neighborhood?”

“I’m going to deliver a present, as soon as I figure out the best way to do it,” the SS man said.

“Knowing the kind of presents you deliver, I’m sure the Lizards will be delighted to have this one,” Jager told him. “Anything I can do to tie a bow on the package, you know you have only to ask.” There. He’d gone and said it. One way or another, odds were it would get him killed.

He waited for the SSStandartenfuhrer to go into extravagant, probably obscene detail about the latest plan for making the Lizards’ lives miserable. Skorzeny took a childish delight in his murderous schemes (Jager got a sudden mental image of him as a child of six inLederhosen, opening a package of tin soldiers; somehow the child Skorzeny in his mind had a scarred face, too). Now, though, he sent Jager a hooded look before answering, “It’s not for the Lizards.”

“No?” Jager raised an eyebrow. “Well. If it’s for me, what are you doing giving me fair warning?” He suddenly sobered; officers who displeased the High Command had been known to disappear from the face of the earth as if they had never been. What had he done to displease anyone save the foe? “If you’re carrying a pistol with one bullet in it, you’d better tell me why.”

“Isthat what you’re thinking?Gott im Himmel, no!” Skorzeny held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “Nothing like that, I swear. Not you, not anybody you command or who commands you-no Germans at all, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, all right, then,” Jager said in considerable relief. “So what are you getting all coy with me for? The enemies of theReich are the enemies of theReich. We’ll smash them and go on.”

Skorzeny’s face grew unreadable again. “You say that now, but it’s not the song you’ve always sung. Jews are enemies of theReich, nicht wahr?”

“If they weren’t beforehand, we’ve certainly done enough to make them so,” Jager said. “Even so, we’ve had good cooperation from the ones in Lodz, keeping the Lizards from using the city as a staging point against us. When you get down to it, they’re human beings,ja?”

“We’ve had cooperation from them?” Skorzeny said, not answering Jager’s question. “I’ll tell you who’s had cooperation from them: the Lizards, that’s who. If the Jews hadn’t stabbed us in the back, we’d hold a lot more of Poland than we do.”

Jager made a tired gesture. “Why do we need to get into all of that? You know what we were doing to the Jews in Poland and Russia. Is it any wonder they don’t love us for the good Christians we are?”

“No, it’s probably no wonder,” Skorzeny said without any rancor Jager could hear. “But if they want to play that game with us, they’re going to have to pay the price. Now-do you want me to go on with what I have to say, or would you sooner not listen so you don’t have to know a thing?”

“Go ahead,” Jager said. “I’m not an ostrich, to stick my head in the sand.”

Skorzeny grinned at him. The scar on his cheek pulled half his face into a grimace that might have come from a gargoyle sitting somewhere high on a medieval cathedral-or maybe that was just Jager’s mind, pulling horror from the SS man’s words: “I’m going to set off the biggest damned nerve-gas bomb the world has ever seen, and I’m going to do it right in the middle of the Lodz ghetto. So what do you think of that? Are you a colonel, or just a scoutmaster in the wrong uniform?”

“Fuck you, Skorzeny,” Jager said evenly. As the words came out of his mouth, he remembered a Jewish partisan who’d used that invitation about every other sentence. SS men had shot the Jew-Max, his name was-at a place called Babi Yar, outside of Kiev. They’d botched the job, or Max wouldn’t have had the chance to tell his story. God only knew how many they hadn’t botched.

“That’s not an answer,” Skorzeny said, as immune to insult as a Lizard panzer was to machine-gun bullets. “Tell me what you think.”

“I think it’s stupid,” Jager answered. “The Jews in Lodz have been helping us. If you start killing off the people who do that, you run out of friends in a hurry.”

“Ahh, those bastards are playing both ends against the middle, and you know it as well as I do,” Skorzeny said. “They kiss whichever ass is closest to them. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, anyhow. I’ve got my orders, and I’m going to carry them out.”

Jager came to attention and flipped up his right arm.“Heil Hitler!” he said.

He had to give Skorzeny credit: the big bruiser recognized it was sarcasm, not acquiescence. Not only that, he thought it was funny. “Come on, don’t be a wet blanket,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. You can give me a lot of help this time, too.”

“Yes, I’d make a splendid Jew,” Jager said, deadpan. “How long do you suppose a circumcision takes to heal up?”

“You didn’t used to be such a smartmouth,” Skorzeny said, rocking back on his heels and sticking thumbs into trouser pockets so he looked like a young lout on a streetcorner. “Must be senility coming on, eh?”

“If you say so. How am I supposed to help, though? I’ve never been inside Lodz. In fact, the offensive steered wide around it so we wouldn’t get bogged down in street fighting there. We can’t afford to go losing panzers to Molotov cocktails and things like that; we lose too many of them to the Lizards as is.”

“Yeah, that’s the line you sent back to division, and division sent it back to army group headquarters, and the High Command bought it,” Skorzeny said with a nod. “Bully for you. Maybe you’ll get red stripes on your trousers like a General Staff officer.”

“And it’s worked, too,” Jager said. “I saw more street fighting in Russia than I ever wanted. Nothing in the world chews up men and machines like that, and we don’t have them to waste.”

“Ja, ja, ja,”Skorzeny said with exaggerated patience. He leaned forward and glared at Jager. “And I also happen to know that one of the reasons we swung around Lodz in two prongs is that you cut a deal with the Jewish partisans there. What do you have to say to that, Mr. General Staff Officer?”

It might have stopped snowing, but it was anything but warm. All the same, Jager felt his face heat. If Skorzeny knew that, it was in an SS dossier somewhere… which did not bode well for his long-term survival, let alone his career. Even so, he answered as calmly as he could: “I say it was military necessity. This way, we have the partisans on our side and driving the Lizards crazy instead of the other way round. It’s worked out damned well, so you can take your ‘I also happen to know’ and flush it down the WC.”

“Why? What does Winston Churchill want with it?” Skorzeny said with a leer. The joke would have been funnier if the Germans hadn’t been making it on the radio from the day Churchill became prime minister to the night the Lizards arrived. The SS man went on, “You have to understand, I don’t really give a damn. But it does mean you have connections with the Jews. You ought to be able to use those to help me get my little toy right to the center of town.”

Jager stared at him. “And you pay me thirty pieces of silver afterwards, don’t you? I don’t throw away connections like that. I don’t murder them, either. Why not ask me to betray my own men while you’re at it?”

“Thirty pieces of silver? That’s pretty good. Christ was a damn kike, too, remember. And a whole fat lot of good it did him. So.” Skorzeny studied Jager. “The more help we get from your little chums, the easier the job will be, and I’m in favor of easy jobs whenever I can get ’em. They pay me to risk my neck, but they don’t pay me to stick it out when I don’t have to.”

This from a man who’d blown up a Lizard panzer by jumping onto it and throwing a satchel charge between turret and hull. Maybe Skorzeny called that a necessary sort of risk; Jager had no way of knowing. He said, “You touch off a nerve-gas bomb in there, you’re going to kill a lot of people who don’t have thing one to do with the war.”

This time, Skorzeny’s laugh was rude. “You fought in Russia, same as I did. So what?” He thumped Jager in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen and listen good. I’m going to do this with you or without you. It’d make my life easier if it was with you. But my life has been tough before. If it’s tough again, believe me, I’ll cope. So what do you say?”

“I don’t say anything right now,” Jager answered. “I’m going to have to think this one over.”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down in a parody of sweet reason. “Think all you want. Just don’t take too long doing it.”

The guard pointed a Sten gun at Moishe Russie’s middle. “Come on, get moving,” he said, his voice harsh and merciless.

Russie rose from the cot in his cell. “The Nazis put me in the ghetto, the Lizards put me in gaol,” he said. “I never thought Jews would treat me the same way.”

If he’d hoped to wound the guard, he was disappointed. “Life’s tough all over,” the fellow answered indifferently. He gestured with the submachine gun. “Now put it in gear.”

He might have been an SS man. Moishe wondered if he’d learned his military manner from the genuine article. He’d seen that in Poland, after the Jews and Poles helped the Lizards chase out the Germans. Quite a few Jews, suddenly become soldiers, imitated the most impressive, most ferocious human warriors they’d known. If you tried pointing that out to them, though, you were liable to get yourself killed. Moishe maintained a prudent silence here.

He didn’t know exactly wherehere was. Somewhere in Palestine, of course, but he and his family had been brought in tied and blindfolded and concealed under straw. The outer walls of the compound were too high for him to see over them. He could tell he was in a town from the noises that came through the golden sandstone: smiths pounding on metal, wagons rattling by, the distant babel of a marketplace. Wherever he was, he was surely walking on soil mentioned in the Torah. Whenever he remembered that, awe prickled through him.

Most of the time, other things were on his mind. Chief among them was how to keep the Lizards from walking on this holy soil. He’d quoted the Bible at the Jewish underground leaders: Thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed. Isaiah had been talking about the Egyptians, and the Lizards were in Egypt now. Russie didn’t want them to follow Moses across the Sinai and into Palestine.

Very few people cared about what he wanted, worse luck. The local Jews, fools that they were, reckoned the British here as oppressive as the Nazis in Poland-or so they said, anyhow. Some of them had escaped from Poland after the Nazis conquered it, so they should have known better.

“Turn,” the guard said: unnecessarily, for Moishe knew the way to the interrogation chamber as well as a rat knew how to run through a familiar maze. He never got rewarded with a piece of cheese for doing it right, though; maybe his handlers hadn’t heard of Pavlov.

When he got to the right doorway, the guard stood back and motioned for him to work the latch. That never failed to amuse him: his captors took him for a dangerous man who would seize a weapon and wreak havoc with it if he got the slightest chance. Ifonly it were so,he thought wryly. Give him a swatter and he might be dangerous to a fly. Past that… past that, the members of the underground were letting their imaginations run away with them.

He opened the door, took one step into the room, and stopped in surprised dismay. There at the table, along with Begin and Stern and the other usual questioners, sat a Lizard. The alien swung an eye turret toward him. “This is the one? I have a hard time being sure,” he said in fair German.

Moishe stared at him. The body paint he wore was far drabber than that which Moishe remembered, but no denying the voice was familiar “Zolraag!”

“He knows me,” the former Lizard governor of Poland said. “Either you have coached him well or he is indeed the male who gave the Race such a difficult time in Poland.”

“He’s Russie, all right,” Stern said. He was a big, dark fellow, a fighter rather than a thinker if looks mattered, which wasn’t always so. “He says we should steer clear of you, no matter what.” He spoke German, too, with a Polish accent.

“And I say to you that we will give you quite a lot to have him in our claws again,” Zolraag answered. “He betrayed us-he betrayed me-and he should pay for this betrayal.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Moishe didn’t like the way Zolraag looked or sounded. He hadn’t thought the Race worried about such things as revenge, either. If he was wrong there, he would have been happier not knowing it.

“Nobody said anything about turning him over to you,” Menachem Begin said in Yiddish. “That was not why we brought you here.” He was short and slight, not a whole lot bigger than a Lizard himself. He was nothing much to look at, but when he spoke you had to take him seriously. He shook a finger at Zolraag. “We hear what you have to say, we hear what he has to say, and then we decide what to do.”

“You would be well advised to take the Race and its desires more seriously,” Zolraag answered, his voice cold. As he had back in Poland, he assumed his concerns were more important than mankind’s simply because they were his. Had he been blond and blue-eyed instead of green-brown and scaly, he would have made a good SS man himself: the Race certainly had the notion of theHerrenvolk down solid.

He did not succeed in impressing Begin. “You would be well advised to remember where you are,” the underground leader replied imperturbably. “We can always sell you to the British, and maybe get more from them for you than your people would give us for Russie here.”

“I took this risk when I let you bring me up to this part of the continental mass,” Zolraag said; he had courage, whatever you thought of him and his kind. “I still have hopes, though, of persuading you that aligning with the Race, the inevitable victors in this conflict, will serve you best in the long run.”

Moishe spoke for the first time: “What he really hopes is to get back his old rank. His body paint is very plain these days.”

“Yes, and that is your fault,” Zolraag said with an angry hiss like that of a venomous serpent “It was through you that the province of Poland passed from being peaceful to becoming restive, and you turned on us and blamed us for policies of similar nature to those you had previously praised.”

“Bombing Washington was not the same as bombing Berlin,” Moishe answered, picking up the old argument. “And now you cannot hold a rifle to my head to try to make me sing your praises and then use your machines to twist my words when I refuse. I was ready to die to tell the truth, and you would not let me. Of course I exposed you when I got the chance.”

“Ready to die to tell the truth,” Zolraag echoed. He swung his eye turrets toward the Jews who might lead Palestine into rebellion for his people and against the British. “You are sensible, rational Tosevites, sirs. You must see the fanaticism, the futility of this attitude.”

Moishe started to laugh. He didn’t intend to, but couldn’t help himself. The degree to which Zolraag misunderstood people in general and Jews in particular was breathtaking. The folk who had given the world Masada, who had stubbornly stayed Jews when slaughtered for sport or for refusing to convert to Christianity… and he expected them to choose the path of expedience? No, Russie couldn’t help but laugh.

Then Menachem Begin laughed, too, and then Stern, and then all the underground leaders. Even the guard with the Sten gun, at first glance as humorless amamzer as was ever spawned, chuckled under his breath. The idea of Jews choosing rationality over martyrdom was too deliciously absurd to resist.

Now the underground leaders glanced at one another. How could you explain Zolraag’s unintentional irony? Nobody tried. Maybe you couldn’t explain it, not so it made sense to him. Didn’t that show the essential difference between Lizards and human beings? Moishe thought so.

Before he could drive the point home, Stern said, “We will not turn Russie over to you, Zolraag. Get used to that idea. We take care of our own.”

“Very well,” the Lizard answered. “We also do this. Here I think your behavior may be more stubborn than necessary, but I comprehend it. Your mirth, however, I find beyond understanding.”

“You would have to know more of our history for it to make sense to you,” Moishe told him.

That set Zolraag to making unhappy-teakettle noises again. Russie hid a grin. He’d said that with malice aforethought The Lizards had a history that reached far back into the depths of time, to the days when men still lived in caves and fire was the great new invention of the age. As far as they were concerned, mankind had no history to speak of. The idea that they should concern themselves with human ephemera hit a nerve.

Menachem Begin spoke to Zolraag: “Suppose we do rise against the British. Suppose you help us in the fight. Suppose that helps you come into Palestine afterwards. What do we get from it besides a new master to lord it over us in place of the master we have now?”

“Are you now as free as any Tosevites on this planet?” Zolraag asked, adding an interrogative cough to the end of the sentence.

“If we were, the British wouldn’t be our masters,” Stern answered.

“Just so,” the Lizard said. “After the conquest of Tosev 3 is over, though, you will be raised to the same status as any other nation under us. You will have the highest degree of-what is the word? — autonomy, yes.”

“Which is not much,” Moishe put in.

“You be silent!” Zolraag said with an emphatic cough.

“Why?” Russie jeered when none of the Jewish underground leaders chose to back the Lizard. “I’m just being truthful, which is sensible and rational, isn’t it? Besides, who knows if the conquest of Tosev 3 will ever be over? You haven’t beaten us yet, and we’ve hurt you badly.”

“Truth,” Zolraag admitted, which disconcerted Moishe for a moment. The Lizard went on, “And among the Tosevite not-empires that has hurt us worst is Deutschland, which also hurt you Jews worst. Do you cheer on the Deutsche now where you fought them before?”

Russie tried not to show his wince. Zolraag might have had no notion of what the history of the Jews was like, but he knew mentioning the Nazis to Jews was like waving a red flag before a bull: he did it to take away their power of rational thought. Reckoning him a fool did not do.

“We are not talking about the Germans now,” Moishe said. “We’re talking about the British, who have treated Jews well on the whole, on the one hand, and your chances for conquering the world, which do not look as good as they might, on the other.”

“Of course we shall conquer Tosev 3,” Zolraag said. “The Emperor has ordered it”-he looked down at the floor for a moment-“and it shall be done.”

He didn’t sound particularly sensible or rational himself there. What he sounded like was an ultrapious Jew who got everything he knew from the Torah and the Talmud and rejected all secular learning: his faith sustained him in the face of all obstacles. Sometimes that kept you going through bad times. Sometimes it blinded you to things you should see.

Moishe studied his captors. Would they see Zolraag’s blind spot, or would their own blind them to it? He picked a different argument: “If you choose to deal with the Lizards, you’ll always be a little fish next to them. They may think you’re useful now, but what happens after they have Palestine and they don’t need you any more?”

Menachem Begin showed his teeth in what was not a grin of amusement. “Then we start giving them a hard time, the same as we do the British now.”

“This I believe,” Zolraag said. “It would certainly follow the Polish pattern.” Did he sound bitter? Hard to tell with a Lizard, but that would have been Moishe’s guess.

“If the Race conquers the whole world, though, who will back you against us?” he asked Begin. “What can you hope to gain?”

Now Begin started to laugh. “We are Jews. No one will back us. We will gain nothing. And we will fight anyway. Do you doubt it?”

“Not even slightly,” Moishe said. For a moment, captive and captor understood each other perfectly. Moishe had been Zolraag’s captive, too. They had stared at each other across a gap of incomprehension wide as the black gulf of space that separated the Lizards’ world from Earth.

Zolraag did not fully follow what was going on now, either. He said, “What is your answer, Tosevites? If you must. If there is fire for him in your innards because he is of your clutch of eggs, keep this Russie. But what do you say about the bigger question? Will you fight alongside us when we move forward here and punish the British?”

“Do you Lizards decide things on the spur of the moment?” Stern demanded.

“No, but we are not Tosevites, either,” Zolraag answered with evident relish. “You do everything quickly, do you not?”

“Not everything,” Stern said, chuckling a little. “This we have to talk about. We’ll send you back safe-”

“I was hoping to bring an answer with me,” Zolraag said. “This would not only help the Race but improve my own status.”

“But we don’t care about either of those, except insofar as they help us,” Stern said. He nodded to Russie’s guard. “Take him back to his room.” He didn’t call it a cell; even Jews used euphemisms to sugar-coat the things they did. Stern went on, “You can let his wife and son visit, or just his wife. If he’d rather. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“Right. Come on, you,” the guard said to Moishe, as usual punctuating his orders with a jerk of the Sten gun’s barrel. As they walked down the corridor toward the chamber-however you wanted to describe it-in which Russie was confined, the fellow added, “No, you aren’t going anywhere-not alive, you’re not.”

“Thank you so much. You do reassure my mind,” Moishe replied. For one of the rare times since the Jewish underground had stolen him from the British, he heard that hard-nosed guard laugh out loud.

Ice was still floating in the Moscow River. A big chunk banged into the bow of the rowboat in which Vyacheslav Molotov sat, knocking the boat sideways. “Sorry, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the fellow at the oars said, and put the rowboat back on its proper course upstream.

“It’s all right,” Molotov answered absently. Of course, the oarsman belonged to the NKVD. But he had such a heavy, bovineokane- a Gorky accent that turned a’s into o’s until he sounded as if he himself had been turned out to pasture-that no one, hearing him for the first time, could possibly take him seriously. A nice bit ofmaskirovka, that’s what it was.

A couple of minutes later, another piece of ice ran into the boat. The NKVD man chuckled. “Bet you wish you’d taken apanje wagon to thekolkhoz now, eh, Comrade?”

“No,” Molotov answered coldly. He waved a gloved hand over to the riverbank to illustrate why he said what he said. Apanje wagon pulled by atroika of horses slowly struggled along. Even the Russian wagons, with their tall wheels and boatlike bottoms, had a tough time getting through the mud of the springrasputitsa. The muddy season would vary in the fall, depending on how heavy the rains were. In spring, when a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted, the mud was always thick enough to seem bottomless.

Not a bit put out at his abruptness, the rower chuckled again. When he wanted to, he showed skill with the oars, dodging more pieces of drift ice with almost a ballerina’s adroitness. (Molotov thought of Anastas Mikoyan, caught by rain at a party to which he’d come without an umbrella. When the hostess exclaimed that he would get wet, he’d just smiled and said, “Oh, no, I’ll dance between the raindrops.” If any man could do it, Mikoyan was the one.).

Like a lot of riverside collective farms,Kolkhoz 118 had a rickety pier sticking out into the turbid brown water of the river. The NKVD boatman tied up the rowboat at the pier, then scrambled up onto it to help Molotov out. When Molotov started toward the farm building, the oarsman didn’t follow him. The foreign commissar would have been astonished if he had. He might have been NKVD, but he surely didn’t have the security clearance he’d need for this project.

Cows lowed, which made Molotov think again of the rower’s intonation. Pigs grunted. They didn’t mind mud-on the contrary. Neither did ducks and geese. Chickens struggled, puffing one foot out of the muck and then the other and looking down with little beady black eyes as if wondering why the ground kept trying to grab them.

Molotov wrinkled his nose. Thekolkhoz had a fine barnyard odor, no doubt about that. Its buildings were typical for those of collective farms, too: unpainted and badly painted wood, all looking decades older than they were. Men in cloth caps, collarless shirts, and baggy trousers tucked into boots tramped here and there, some with pitchforks, some with shovels.

It was allmaskirovka, carried out with Russian thoroughness. When Molotov rapped on the door to the barn, it opened quickly.“Zdrast’ye, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” his welcomer said, closing the door behind him. For a moment, he was in complete darkness. Then the man opened the inner door of what might as well have been an airlock, and bright electric light from inside flooded into the chamber.

Molotov shed his coat and boots in there. Igor Kurchatov nodded approvingly. The nuclear physicist was about forty, with sharp features and a pointed chin beard that gave his handsome face almost a satanic aspect. “Hello, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” he repeated, his tone somewhere between polite and fawning. Molotov had pushed his enterprise and had kept Stalin from gutting it when results flowed more slowly than he liked. Kurchatov and all the other physicists knew Molotov was the only man between them and thegulag. They werehis.

“Good day,” he answered, as always disliking the time polite small talk wasted. “How is progress?”

“We are working like a team of super-Stakhanovites, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Kurchatov answered. “We advance on many fronts. We-”

“Do you yet produce this plutonium metal, which will yield the large explosions the Soviet Union desperately requires?” Molotov interrupted.

Kurchatov’s devilish features sagged in dismay. “Not yet,” he admitted. His voice went high and shrill: “I warned you when this project began that it was a matter of years. The capitalists and fascists were ahead of us in technique when the Lizards came to Earth, and they remain ahead of us. We tried and failed to separate U-235 from U-238. The best chemical for this is uranium hexafluoride, which is as poisonous as mustard gas and hideously corrosive to boot. We do not have the expertise we need for that separation process. We have had no other choice but to seek to manufacture plutonium, which has also proved difficult.”

“I am painfully aware of this, I assure you,” Molotov said. “Iosef Vissarionovich is also painfully aware of it. But if the Americans succeed. If the Hitlerites succeed, why do you continue to fail?”

“Design of the requisite pile is one thing,” Kurchatov answered. “There the American’s arrival has already helped us. Having worked with one in full running order, Maksim Lazarovich has given us many valuable insights.”

“I hoped he might,” Molotov said. Learning that Max Kagan had reachedKolkhoz 118 was what had brought him up here. He hadn’t yet told Stalin the Americans had chosen to send a clever Jew. Stalin was no Russian, but had a thoroughly Russian dislike for what he called rootless cosmopolites. Being married to a clever Jew himself, Molotov didn’t. Now he went on, “This is one problem. What others have you?”’

“The worst one, Comrade, is getting both the uranium oxide and the graphite in the nuclear pile free enough from impurities to serve our purposes,” Kurchatov said. “There Kagan, however learned and experienced he is in his own field, cannot help us, much as I wish he could.”

“You know the measures your producers are required to take to furnish you with materials of requisite purity?” Molotov asked. When Kurchatov nodded, Molotov asked another question: “The producers know they will suffer the highest form of punishment if they fail to meet your demands?” He’d scribbled VMN-forvysshaya mera nakazamiya- beside the names of plenty of enemies of the Revolution and the Soviet state, and they’d been shot shortly thereafter. Such deserved-and got-no mercy.

But Kurchatov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar. If you liquidate these men, their less experienced successors will not deliver improved supplies to us. The required purities, you see, are on the very edge-perhaps just over the edge-of what Soviet chemistry and industry can achieve. We are all doing everything we can in the fight against the Lizards. Sometimes what we do is not enough.Nichevo- it can’t be helped.”

“I refuse to acceptnichevo from an academician in a time of crisis, any more than I would accept it from a peasant,” Molotov said angrily.

Kurchatov shrugged. “Then you will go back and tell the General Secretary to replace us, and good luck to you and therodina with the charlatans who will take over this laboratory.” He and his men were in Molotov’s power, true, for Molotov held Stalin’s wrath at bay. But. If Molotov exercised that power, he would hurt not only the physicists but the Soviet motherland. That made for an interesting and unpleasant balance between him and the laboratory staff.

He exhaled angrily, a show of temper as strong with him as pounding a shoe on a desk would have been for another man. “Have you any more problems standing between you and building these bombs?”

“Yes, one small one,” Kurchatov answered with an ironic glint in his eye. “Once some of the uranium in the atomic pile is transmuted to plutonium, we have to get it out and shape it into the material required for a bomb-and we have to do all this without letting any radioactivity leak into the air or the river. We knew this already, and Maksim Lazarovich has been most insistent on it.”

“Why is it a difficulty?” Molotov asked. “I confess, I am no physicist, to understand subtle points without explanation.”

Kurchatov’s smile grew most unpleasant. “This point is not subtle. A leak of radioactivity is detectable. If it is not only detectable but detected by the Lizards, this area will become much more radioactive shortly thereafter.”

Molotov needed a moment to realize exactly what Kurchatov meant. When he did, he nodded: a single sharp up-and-down jerk of his head. “The point is taken, Igor Ivanovich. Can you bring Kagan here to me or take me to him? I wish to extend to him the formal thanks of the Soviet workers and peasants for his assistance to us.”

That was business of a different sort. “Please wait here, Comrade Foreign Commissar. I will bring him. Do you speak English or German? No? Never mind; I will interpret for you.” He hurried down along a white-painted corridor utterly alien to the rough-hewn exterior of the laboratory building.

Kurchatov returned a couple of minutes later with another fellow in a white lab coat in tow. Molotov was surprised at how young Max Kagan looked; he couldn’t have been much past thirty. He was a medium-sized man with curly, dark brown hair and intelligent Jewish features.

Kurchatov spoke to Kagan in English, then turned to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I present to you Maksim Lazarovich Kagan, the physicist on loan from the Metallurgical Laboratory project of the United States.”

Kagan stuck out his hand and vigorously pumped Molotov’s. He spoke in voluble English. Kurchatov did the honors: “He says he is pleased to meet you, and that he aims to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. This is an idiom, and means about what you would think.”

“Tell him I share his aspirations and hope they are realized,” Molotov answered. He eyed Kagan and was bemused to find Kagan eyeing him back. Soviet scientists were properly deferential to the man who was second in the USSR only to the General Secretary of the Communist Party. To judge by Kagan’s attitude, he thought Molotov was just another bureaucrat to deal with. In small doses, the attitude was bracing.

Kagan spoke in rapid-fire English, Molotov had no idea what he was saying, but his tone was peremptory. Kurchatov answered hesitantly in the same language. Kagan spoke some more, slamming a fist into an open palm to emphasize his point. Again, Kurchatov’s answer sounded cautious. Kagan threw his hands in the air in obvious disgust.

“Tell me what he is saying,” Molotov said.

“He is complaining about the quality of the equipment here, he is complaining about the food, he is complaining about the NKVD man who accompanies him whenever he goes outside-he attributes to the man unsavory sexual practices of which he can have no personal knowledge.”

“In any case, he has strong opinions,” Molotov remarked, hiding his amusement. “Can you do anything about the equipment of which he complains?”

“No, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Kurchatov answered. “It is the best available in the USSR.”

“Then he will have to use it and make the best of it,” Molotov said. “As for the others, thiskolkhoz already has better food than most, but we shall see what we can do to improve it. And if he does not want the NKVD man to accompany him, the NKVD man will not do so.”

Kurchatov relayed that to Max Kagan. The American answered at some length. “He will do his best with the equipment, and says he will design better,” Kurchatov translated. “He is on the whole pleased with your other answers.”

“Is that all?” Molotov asked. “It sounded like more. Tell me exactly what he said.”

“Very well, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Igor Kurchatov spoke with a certain sardonic relish: “He said that, since I was in charge of this project, I ought to be able to take care of these matters for myself. He said I should be able to do more than wipe my own arse without a Party functionary’s permission. He said that having the NKVD spy on scientists as if they were wreckers and enemies of the people would turn them into wreckers and enemies of the people. And he said that threatening scientists with the maximum punishment because they have not fulfilled norms impossible of fulfillment is the stupidest thing he has ever heard of. These are his exact words, Comrade.”

Molotov fixed his icy stare on Max Kagan. The American glared back, too ignorant to know he was supposed to wilt. A little of his aggressive attitude was bracing. A lot of it loose in the Soviet Union would have been a disaster.

And Kurchatov agreed with Kagan. Molotov saw that, too. For now, the state and the Party needed the scientists’ expertise. The day would come, though, when they didn’t. Molotov looked forward to it.

If you were going to keep your clothes on, you couldn’t have a whole lot more fun than riding a horse down a winding road through a forest in new springtime leaf. The fresh, hopeful green sang in Sam Yeager’s eyes. The air had that magical, spicy odor you didn’t get at any other season of the year: it somehow smelled alive and growing. Birds sang as if there was no tomorrow.

Yeager glanced over to Robert Goddard. If Goddard sensed the spring magic, he didn’t show it. “You okay, sir?” Yeager asked anxiously. “I knew we should have put you in a buggy.”

“I’m all right,” Goddard answered in a voice thinner and raspier than Yeager was used to hearing from him. His face was more nearly gray than the pink it should have been. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then made a small concession to the evils the flesh is heir to: “Not much farther, eh?”

“No, sir,” Sam answered, as enthusiastically as he was able. Actually, they had another day of hard riding ahead of them, maybe two days if Goddard didn’t get over being poorly. “And when we do get there, we’ll give the Lizards’ stumpy little tails a hell of a tweak, won’t we?”

Goddard’s smile wasn’t altogether exhausted. “That’s the plan, Sergeant. How well it works remains to be seen, but I do have hopes.”

“It’s got to work, sir, doesn’t it?” Yeager said. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to hit the Lizards’ spaceships any other way but long-range rockets. A lot of brave men have died trying, anyhow-that’s a fact.”

“So it is-a melancholy one,” Goddard said. “So now we see what we can do. The only problem is, the aiming on these rockets could be a lot finer.” He let out a wry chuckle. “It couldn’t be much worse, when you get down to it-and that’s another fact.”

“Yes, sir,” Yeager said. All the same, he still felt like somebody in the middle of a John Campbell story: invent the weapon one day, try it the next, and put it into mass production the day after that. Goddard’s long-range rockets weren’t quite like that. He’d had help on the design not only from the Lizards but also from the Germans, and they hadn’t been built in a day any more than Rome was. But they had come along pretty darn quick, and Sam was proud to have had a hand in that.

As he’d feared, they didn’t make it into Fordyce by sunset. That meant camping by the side of US 79. Yeager didn’t mind for himself, but he worried about what it was doing to Goddard, even with sleeping bags and a tent among their gear. The rocket scientist needed all the pampering he could get, and, with the war on, he couldn’t get much.

He was as game as they came, and didn’t complain. He had some trouble choking down the rations they’d packed, but drank a couple of cups of the chicory brew that made do for coffee. He even made jokes about mosquitoes as he slapped at them. Sam joked, too, but wasn’t fooled. When Goddard got into his sleeping bag after supper, he slept like a dead man.

Not even more of the chicory ersatz got him out of first gear the next morning, either. But, after he’d managed to heave himself up into the saddle, he said, “Today we give the Lizards a surprise.” That seemed to hearten him where rest and not-quite-coffee hadn’t.

Fordyce, Arkansas, bustled in a way Yeager had seen in few towns since the Lizards came. It boasted several lumber mills and cotton-ginning establishments and a casket factory. Wagons hauled away the output of the last-named establishment, which had never had slack time even during the lost days of peace and probably stayed busy round the clock these days.

The country south and west of Fordyce along US 79 looked to be a hunter’s paradise: stands of oak and pine that had to be full of deer and turkey and who could say what all else. They’d given Sam a tommy gun before he set out from Hot Springs. Hunting with it wasn’t what you’d call sporting, but when you were hunting for the pot sportsmanship went out the window anyhow.

Four or five miles outside of Fordyce, a fellow sat on the rusted hood of an abandoned Packard, whittling something out of a stick of pine. The guy had on a straw hat and beat-up overalls and looked like a farmer whose farm had seen a lot of better days, but he didn’t have a drawl or a hillbilly twang in his voice when he spoke to Yeager and Goddard: “We been waitin’ for youse,” he said in purest Brooklyn.

“Captain Hanrahan?” Yeager asked, and the disguised New Yorker nodded. He led Goddard and Yeager off the highway into the woods. After a while, they had to dismount and tie their horses. A soldier in olive drab appeared as if from nowhere to look after the beasts. Sam worried about looking after Goddard. Tromping through the woods was not calculated to make him wear longer.

After about fifteen minutes, they came to a clearing. Hanrahan waved to something-a camouflaged shape-under the trees on the far side. “Dr. Goddard’s here,” he shouted. By the reverence in his voice, that might have been,God’s here.

A moment later, Sam heard a sound he’d long since stopped taking for granted: a big diesel engine starting up. Whoever was inside the cabin let it get warm for a minute or two, then drove it out into the middle of the clearing. Things started happening very quickly after that. Soldiers dashed out to strip off the branch-laden tarp that covered the back of the truck.

Captain Hanrahan nodded to Goddard, then pointed to the rocket revealed when the tarp came off. “Dere’s your baby, sir,” he said.

Goddard smiled and shook his head. “Junior’s been adopted by the U.S. Army. I just come visit to make sure you boys know how to take care of him. I won’t have to do that much longer, either.”

A smooth, silent hydraulic ram started raising the rocket from horizontal to vertical. It moved much more slowly than Sam would have liked. Every second they were out in the open meant one more second in which the Lizards could spot them from the air or from one of those instrument-laden artflicial moons they’d placed in orbit around the Earth. A fighter plane had shot up the woods a couple of launches ago, and scared him into the quivering fidgets: only fool luck the rockets hadn’t wrecked a lot of this scraped-together equipment.

As soon as the rocket was standing straight up, two smaller trucks-tankers-rolled up to either side of it. “Douse your butts!” a sergeant in coveralls shouted, though nobody was smoking. A couple of soldiers carried hoses up the ladder that was part of the launch frame. Pumps started whirring. Liquid oxygen went into one tank, 200-proof alcohol into the other.

“We’d get slightly longer range from wood alcohol, but good old ethanol is easier to cook up,” Goddard said.

“Yes, sir,” Hanrahan said, nodding again. “This way, the whole crew gets a drink when we’re done, too. We’ll have earned it, by God.”Oined was what he really said. “And the Lizards over by Greenville, they get a hell of a surprise.”

Ninety miles,Yeager thought,maybe a few more. Once it went off-if it didn’t do anything stupid like blowing up on the launcher-it would cross the Mississippi River and land in Mississippi in the space of a couple of minutes. He shook his head. If that wasn’t science fiction, what was it?

“Fueled!” the driver of the launch truck sang out-he had the gauges that let him see how the rocket was doing. The soldiers disconnected the hoses, climbed down the ladder, and got the hell out of there. The two fuel tankers went back into the woods.

The launcher had a rotating table at the base. It turned slightly, lining up the azimuth gyro with the planned course east to Greenville. The driver stuck his fist out the window and gave a thumbs-up: the rocket was ready to fly.

Goddard turned to Captain Hanrahan. “There-you see? You didn’t need me here. I could have been back at Hot Springs, playing tiddlywinks with Sergeant Yeager.”

“Yeah, when everything goes good, it goes great,” Hanrahan agreed. “But when it’s snafu, you like having the guy who dreamed up the gadget around, you know what I mean?”

“Sooner or later, you’ll be doing it without me,” Goddard said, absently scratching at the side of his neck. Sam looked at him, wondering how he’d meant that. Probably both ways-he knew he was a sick man.

Hanrahan took the statement at face value. “Whatever you say, Doc. Now whaddaya say we get the hell out of here?” Before Hanrahan could do that, he had to make a connection at the base of the rocket. Then, trailing a wire after him, he loped for the cover of the woods where the rest of the crew already waited. Goddard’s trot was slow but dogged. Sam stayed with him. When they were out of the clearing, Hanrahan gave Goddard the control box. “Here you go, sir. You wanna do the honors?”

“I’ve done it before, thanks.” Goddard passed the box to Sam. “Sergeant, why don’t you take a turn?”

“Me?” Sam said in surprise. But why not? You didn’t need to know atomic physics to figure out how the control box worked. It had one large red button, right in the middle. “Thank you, Dr. Goddard.” He pushed the button, hard.

Flame spurted from the base of the rocket, blue for a moment then sun-yellow. The roar of the engine beat at Yeager’s ears. The rocket seemed to hang unmoving above the launcher for a moment. Sam nervously wondered if they were far enough away-when one of those babies blew, it blew spectacularly. But it didn’t blow. All at once, it wasn’t hanging any more, it was flying like an arrow, like a bullet, like nothing on God’s green earth. The roar sank down toward the merely unbearable.

The blast shield at the base of the launcher kept the grass from catching fire. The driver sprinted out toward the cab of the truck. The launcher sank back toward the horizontal once more.

“Now we get the hell outta here,” Hanrahan said. “Come on, I’ll take youse back to your horses.”

He set a brisk pace. Yeager needed no urging to keep up. Neither did Goddard, though he was breathing harshly by the time they reached the soldier in charge of the animals. Yeager had just swung one foot into the stirrup when a flight of helicopters buzzed by overhead and started lashing the clearing from which the rocket had flown and the surrounding woods with gunfire and little rockets of their own.

None of the ordnance came close to him. He grinned at Goddard and Captain Hanrahan as the helicopters headed east, back toward the Mississippi. “They don’t like us,” he said.

“Hey, don’t blame me,” Hanrahan said. “You’re the guy shot that thing off.”

“Yeah,” Yeager said, almost dreamily. “How about that?”

“This is unacceptable,” Atvar declared. “That the Deutsch Tosevites fire missiles at us is one thing. That some other Big Uglies have now acquired the art presents us with severe difficulties.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “This one impacted uncomfortably close to the17th Emperor Satla, and would surely have destroyed it had the targeting been better.” He paused, then tried to look on the bright side: “Like the Deutsch rockets, it is very inaccurate-more an area weapon than a pinpoint one.”

“If they fire enough of them, that ceases to matter,” Atvar snapped. “The Deutsche have killed a starship, though I don’t believe their intelligence realizes as much: if they knew such a thing, they would boast of it. But those losses we absolutely cannot afford.”

“Nor can we hope to prevent them altogether,” Kirel said. “We have expended the last of our antimissile missiles, and close-in weapons systems offer only a limited chance of a target kill.”

“I am all too painfully aware of these facts.” Atvar felt uncomfortable, unsafe, on the surface of Tosev 3. His eye turrets nervously swiveled this way and that. “I know we are a long distance from the nearest sea, but what if it occurs to the Big Uglies to mount their missiles on those ships they use to such annoying effect? We have not been able to sink all of them. For all we know, a missile-armed ship may be approaching Egypt while we are holding this conversation.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, this is indeed possible, but strikes me as unlikely,” Kirel said. “We have enough genuine concerns to contemplate without inventing fresh ones.”

“The Tosevites use missiles. The Tosevites use ships. The Tosevites are revoltingly ingenious. This does not strike me as an invented concern,” Atvar said, adding an emphatic cough. “This whole North African region is as salubrious to us as any on the planet. If all of Tosev 3 were like it, it would be a far more pleasant world. I do not want our settlements here to come into danger from Big Ugly waterborne assaults.”

“No male would, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel drew back from the implied criticism he’d aimed at Atvar. “One way to improve our control over the area would be to annex the territory to the northeast of us, the region known as Palestine. I regret that Zolraag did not succeed in gaining the allegiance of the rebellious males there; they would reduce requirements for our own resources if they rose against the British.”

“Truth,” Atvar said, “but only part truth. Tosevite allies have a way of becoming Tosevite enemies. Look at the Mexicanos. Look at the Italianos. Look at the Jews and Poland-and are these Big Uglies not Jews, too?”

“They are, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied. “How these Jews pop up in such widely separated areas is beyond my understanding, but they do.”

“They certainly do, and they cause trouble wherever they appear, too,” Atvar said. “Since the ones in Poland were so unreliable, I entertain no great hope that we shall be able to count on the ones in Palestine, either. They would not turn Moishe Russie over to Zolraag, for instance, which makes me doubt their good faith, however much they try to ascribe their failure to group solidarity.”

“We may yet be able to use them, though, even if we cannot trust them,” Kirel said, a sentiment the Race had employed with regard to a large variety of Big Uglies since coming to Tosev 3. The shiplord sighed. “A pity the Jews discovered the tracking device Zolraag planted in their conference chamber, or we could have swept down on the building that housed it and plucked Russie away from them.”

“It is a pity, especially when the device was so small that their crude technology cannot come close to duplicating it,” Atvar agreed. “They must be as suspicious of us as we are of them.” His mouth dropped open in a wry chuckle. “They also have a nasty sense of humor.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Finding that the tracker led directly to the largest British base in Palestine was-a disappointment.”

Males of the Race had been saying that about a large variety of things since they came to Tosev 3, too.

When Mordechai Anielewicz left Lodz, as had been true when he’d left Warsaw, he was reminded that the Jews, however numerous they were in Poland, remained a small minority of its population. Most of them had guns now, and they could call on their militias, which could bring heavier weapons to bear, but they were thin on the ground.

That meant dealing with the Poles when he went out into the countryside, and dealing with the Poles made him nervous. A large majority of Poles had either done nothing or applauded when the Nazis shut the Jews away in big-city ghettos or massacred them in the towns and villages. A lot of those Poles hated the Lizards not for having driven out the Germans but for arming the Jews who’d helped them do it.

And so, when a message came into Lodz that a Polish peasant urgently needed to speak to him, Mordechai wondered if he was walking into a trap. Then he wondered who might be setting the trap. If it was such. The Poles might want his scalp. So might the Lizards. So, for that matter, might the Germans. If they wanted to rid the Jews of a fighting leader. And the Jews who worried about the Nazis more than the Lizards might want revenge on him for shipping David Nussboym off to the Russians.

Bertha Fleishman had spelled out all those possibilities in detail when the request for a meeting came in. “Don’t go,” she’d urged. “Think of all the things that can go wrong, and how few can go right.”

He’d laughed. Back inside what had been the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, among his own people, laughter had come easily. “We didn’t get out from under the Nazis’ thumbs by being afraid to take chances,” he’d said. “What’s one more, among so many?” And so he’d prevailed, and so here he was, somewhere north of Lodz, not far from where Lizard control gave way to German.

And so here he was, regretting he’d come. Now, when the only people in the fields were Polish, everyone sent a stranger suspicious looks. He himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, but he’d seen on previous travels that he couldn’t readily pass for a Pole among Poles, either.

“Fourth dirt road north of that miserable little town, go west, fifth farm on the left. Then ask for Tadeusz,” he muttered to himself. He hoped he’d counted the roads rightly. Was that little track supposed to be one, or not? He’d find out. His horse was ambling toward the fifth farmhouse on the left.

A big burly blond man in overalls was forking beet tops into a manger for his cows. He didn’t bat an eyebrow as Mordechai, German rifle slung over his shoulder, rode up. A Mauser identical to Anielewicz’s leaned against the side of the barn. The fellow in overalls could grab it in a hurry if he had to. He stabbed the pitchfork into the ground and leaned on it. “You want something?” he asked, his deep voice wary but polite.

“I’m looking for Tadeusz,” Anielewicz answered. “I’m supposed to tell him Lubomir says hello.”

“Fuck hello,” the Pole-presumably Tadeusz-said with a big, booming laugh. “Where’s the five hundred zlotys he owes me?”

Anielewicz swung down off his horse: that was the recognition signal he was supposed to get back. He stretched. His back creaked. He rubbed at it, saying, “I’m a little sore.”

“I’m not surprised. You ride like a clodhopper,” Tadeusz said without rancor. “Listen, Jew, you must have all sorts of weird connections. Leastways, I never heard of any other clipcocks a German officer was trying to get hold of.”

“A German officer?” For a moment, Mordechai simply stared. Then his wits started working again. “A panzer officer? A colonel?” He still didn’t trust the big Pole enough to name names.

Tadeusz’s head bobbed up and down, which made his bushy golden beard alternately cover and reveal the topmost brass fastener on his overalls. “That’s the one,” he said. “From what I gather, he would have come looking for you himself, except that would have given him away.”

“Given him away to whom? The Lizards?” Mordechai asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

Now Tadeusz’s head went from side to side, and so did the tip of his beard. “I don’t think so. Way I got the story, it’s some other stinking Nazi he’s worried about.” The Pole spat on the ground. “To hell with all of ’em, I say.”

“To hell with all of ’em is easy to say, but we have to deal with some of them, though God knows I wish we didn’t,” Anielewicz said. Off to the north and east, artillery lire rumbled. Mordechai pointed in that direction. “You see? That’s the Germans, likely aiming at the railroad or the highway into Lodz. The Lizards have trouble getting supplies in there now, and a devil of a time fighting out of the place-not that we haven’t done our bit as far as that goes.”

Tadeusz nodded. Shaded by a shapeless, almost colorless cloth cap, his eyes-a startlingly bright blue-were very keen. Mordechai wondered if he’d been a peasant before the war broke out, or perhaps something like an army major. Under the German occupation, Polish officers had had plenty of incentive to make themselves invisible.

His suspicion gained intensity when Tadeusz said, “The Lizards won’t just be having trouble bringing in military supplies, either. Your people will be getting hungry by and by.”

“That’s so,” Mordechai admitted. “Rumkowski’s noticed it-he’s hoarding everything he can for the bad times ahead. The bastard will lick the boots of anybody over him, but he can smell trouble, I give thealter kacker that much.”

Tadeusz had no trouble understanding the couple of words of Yiddish in the middle of the Polish conversation. “Not the worst thing for a man to be able to do,” he remarked.

“No,” Anielewicz said reluctantly. He tried to wrench matters back to those at hand. “Do you have any idea who this other Nazi is? If I knew that, I might have a better notion of why the panzer officer was trying to warn me. What do you know?”What will you tell me? If Tadeusz was a Polish officer lying low, he was liable to have the full measure of aristocratic contempt for Jews. If, on the other hand, he really was a peasant, he was even more liable to have a simple but even more vivid hatred running through his veins.

And yet. If that were so, he wouldn’t have relayed Jager’s message in the first place. Mordechai couldn’t let his own ingrained distrust of the Poles get in the way of the facts. Now Tadeusz tugged at his beard before answering, “You have to remember, I got this fourth, maybe fifth-hand. I don’t know how much of it to trust myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Anielewicz said impatiently. “Just tell me whatever you got, and I’ll try and put the pieces together. This German could hardly rig up a field telephone and call right into Lodz, now could he?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Tadeusz said, and Mordechai, remembering some of his own telephone calls out of the city, had to nod. The Pole went on, “All right, this is everything I got told: whatever’s going to happen-and I don’t know what that is-it’s going to happen in Lodz, and it’s going to happen to you Jews in Lodz. Word is, they’ve brought in some kind of an SS man with a whole bunch of notches on his gun to do the job.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Mordechai said. “It’s not just that we’re not doing anything to the Nazis: we’re helping them, for God’s sake. The Lizards haven’t been able to do much of anything out of Lodz, and it isn’t because they haven’t tried.”

Tadeusz looked at him with what he first took for scorn and then realized was pity. “I can give you two good reasons why the Nazis are doing what they’re doing. For one thing, you’re Jews, and then, for another thing, you’re Jews. You know about Treblinka, don’t you?” Without waiting for Anielewicz to nod, he finished, “They don’t care about what you do; they care about what you are.”

“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong,” Anielewicz replied. He had a Polish Army canteen on his belt. He took it off, removed the stopper, and offered it to Tadeusz. “Here. Wash the taste of that out of your mouth.”

The Pole’s larynx worked as he took several long, blissful swallows.Shikker iz ein goy, ran through Mordechai’s head: the gentile is a drunk. But Tadeusz stopped before the canteen was empty and handed it back to him. “If that’s not the worst applejack I’ve ever drunk, I don’t know what is.” He thumped his belly; the sound was like someone hitting a thick, hard plank. “Even the worst, though, is a damn sight better than none.”

Mordechai swigged from the canteen. The raw spirit charred its way down his gullet and exploded like a 105mm shell in his stomach. “Yeah, you could strip paint with just the fumes from that, couldn’t you? But you’re not wrong-as long as it has the kick, that’s what you need.” He could feel his skin flush and his heart start racing. “So what am I supposed to do when this SS man shows up in Lodz? Shooting him on the spot doesn’t sound like the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

Tadeusz’s eyes were slightly crossed. He’d taken a big dose on an empty stomach, and perhaps hadn’t realized how strong the stuff was till he’d got outside it. People who drank a lot were like that sometimes: they were used to strong, so they didn’t notice very strong till too late. The Pole’s eyebrows drew together as he tried to gather his wits. “What else did your Nazi chum say?” he wondered aloud.

“He’s no chum of mine,” Anielewicz said indignantly. But maybe that wasn’t true. If Jager hadn’t thought something lay between them, he wouldn’t have sent a message, even a garbled one, into Lodz. Anielewicz had to respect that, whatever he thought of the uniform Jager wore. He took another cautious sip of applejack and waited to see if Tadeusz’s brains would start working again.

After a while, they did. “Now I remember,” the Pole said, his face lighting up. “I don’t know how much to trust this, though-like I said, it came through a lot of mouths before it got to me.” What came through his mouth was a loud and unmistakable hiccup. “God and the Virgin and the saints only know if it came through the way it was supposed to.”

“Nu?”Mordechai said, trying to get Tadeusz moving forward once more instead of sideways.

“All right, all right.” The Pole made pushing motions, as if to fend off his impatience. “If it came to me straight, what he said was that, next time you saw him, you shouldn’t believe anything he told you, because he’d be lying through his teeth.”

“He sent a message to tell me he’d be lying?” Anielewicz scratched his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Not my problem, God be praised,” Tadeusz answered. Mordechai glared at him, then turned, remounted his horse, and rode back toward Lodz without another word