Tilting the Balance

XVI

Moishe Russie paced back and forth in his cell. It could have been worse; he could have been in a Nazi prison. They would have had special fun with him because he was a Jew. To the Lizards, he was just another prisoner, to be kept on ice like a bream until they figured out exactly what they wanted to do with him-or to him.

He supposed he should thank God they weren’t often in a hurry. They’d interrogated him after he was caught. On the whole, he’d spoken freely. He didn’t know many names, so he couldn’t incriminate most of the people who’d helped him-and he figured they were smart enough not to stay in any one place too long, either.

The Lizards hadn’t bothered questioning him lately. They just held him, fed him (at least as much as he’d been eating while he was free), and left him to fight boredom as best he could. They didn’t put prisoners in the cells to either side of his or across from it Even if they had, neither the Lizard guards nor their Polish and Jewish flunkies allowed much chatter.

The Lizard guards ignored him as long as he didn’t cause trouble. The Poles and Jews who served them still thought he was a child molester and a murderer. “I hope they cut your balls off one at a time before they hang you,” a Pole said. He’d given up answering back. They didn’t believe him, anyhow.

Some blankets, a bucket of water and a tin cup, another bucket for slops-such were his worldly goods. He wished he had a book. He didn’t care what it was; he would have devoured a manual on procedures for inspecting light bulbs. As things were, he stood, he sat, he paced, he yawned. He yawned a lot.

A Polish guard stopped in front of the cell. He shifted the club he carried from right hand to left so he could take a key out of his pocket. “On your feet, you,” he growled. “They got more questions for you, or maybe they’re just gonna chop you up to see how you got to be the kind of filthy thing you are.”

As Russie got up, he remembered there were worse things than boredom. Interrogation was one of them, not so much for what the Lizards did as for the never-ending terror of what they might do.

Crash! Something hit the side of the prison like a bomb. At first, as he staggered and clapped hands to ears, Moishe thought that was just what it was, that the Germans had landed one of their rockets right in the middle of Lodz.

Then another crash came, hard on the heels of the first. It flung the Pole headlong against the bars of Russie’s cell. The guard went down, stunned and bleeding from the nose. The key flew from his hand. In a spy story, Moishe thought, it would have had the consideration to land in his cell so he could grab it and escape. Instead, it bounced down the hall, impossibly far out of reach.

Still another crash-this one knocked Russie off his feet and showed daylight through a hole in the far wall. As he curled up into a frightened ball, he wondered what the devil was going on. The Nazis couldn’t have fired three rocket bombs so fast… could they? Or was it artillery? How could they have brought artillery through Lizard held territory to shell Lodz?

His ears rang, but not so much that he couldn’t hear the nasty chatter of gunfire. A Lizard ran down the hall, carrying one of his kind’s wicked little automatic rifles. He fired out through, the hole the shells had made in the wall. Whoever was outside returned fire. The Lizard reeled back, red, red blood spurting from several wounds.

Someone-a human-burst in through the hole. Another Lizard came running up. The man cut him down; he had a submachine gun that at close range was as lethal, as anything the aliens used. More men rushed in behind the first. One of them shouted, “Russie!”

“Here!” Moishe yelled. He uncoiled and scrambled to his feet, hope suddenly overpowering fright.

The fellow who’d called his name spoke in oddly accented Yiddish: “Stand back, cousin. I’m going to blow the lock off your door.”

Spy stories came in handy after all. Russie pointed to the floor of the corridor. “No need. There’s the key. This mamzer”-he pointed to the unconscious Pole-“was about to take me away for more questions.”

“Oy. Wouldn’t that have been a balls-up?” The last wasn’t in Yiddish; Moishe wasn’t sure what language it was in. He had precious little time to wonder, the man grabbed the key, turned it in the lock. He yanked the door open. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Moishe needed no further urging. Alarms were clanging somewhere, off in the distance; power here seemed to be out. As he ran toward the hole in the outer wall, he asked, “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m a cousin of yours from England. David Goldfarb’s my name. Now cut the talk, will you?”

Moishe obediently cut the talk. Bullets started flying again; he ran even harder than he had before. Behind him, somebody screamed. The medical student part of him wanted to go back and help. The rest made him keep running-out through the hole, out through the open space around the prison, out through a gap in the razor wire, out through the screaming, gaping people in the street.

“There are machine guns on the roof,” he gasped. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”

“Snipers,” his cousin answered. “Good ones. Shut up. Keep running. We aren’t out of this mess yet.”

Russie kept running. Then, abruptly, his companions, those who survived, threw away their weapons as they rounded a corner. When they rounded another corner, they stopped running. David Goldfarb grinned. “Now we’re just ordinary people-you see?”

“I see,” Moishe answered-and, once it was pointed out to him, he did.

“It won’t last,” said one of the gunmen who’d been with Goldfarb. “They’ll turn this town inside out looking for us. Somebody kills a Lizard, they get nasty about that.” His teeth showed white through tangled brown beard.

“Which means it’s a good idea to get away from the net before they go fishing,” Goldfarb said. “Cousin Moishe, we’re going to take you back to England.”

“Without Rivka and Reuven, I won’t go.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Russie realized how selfish and boorish they sounded. These men had risked their lives to save him; their comrades had died. Who was he to set conditions on what they did? But he didn’t apologize, because however selfish what he’d said sounded, he also realized he’d meant it.

He waited for Goldfarb to scream at him, and for the other man-who looked tough enough for anything, no matter how desperate to pound him senseless and then do whatever he chose. Instead they just kept walking along, easygoing, as if he’d made a remark about the weather. Goldfarb said, “That’s taken care of. They’ll be waiting for us along the way.”

“That’s-wonderful,” Moishe said dazedly. Too much was happening too fast for him to take it all in. He let his cousin and the other fighter lead him through the streets of Lodz while he tried to adjust to the heady joys of freedom. It made him giddy, as if he’d gulped down a couple of shots of plum brandy on an empty stomach.

A tattered poster with his face on it peered down from a wall. He rubbed his chin. The Lizards hadn’t let him use a razor, so his beard was coming back. It wasn’t as long as he’d worn it before, but pretty soon he’d look like his pictures again.

“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb said when he fretted out loud. “Once we get you out of town, we’ll take care of things like that.”

“How will you get me out?” Moishe asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Goldfarb repeated.

His nameless friend laughed and said, “Asking a Jew not to worry is like asking the sun not to rise. You can ask all you like, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get what you ask for.” That was apt enough to make Moishe laugh, too.

Before long, they walked into a block of flats. Lodz was already beginning to boil around them. The sound of explosions and gunfire carded a long way; rumor rippled out from around the prison almost as fast as the racket. The two women who went into the building just behind Moishe and his companions were already wondering who had escaped. If only they knew, he thought dizzily.

They climbed stairs. The fellow without a name rapped on a door-one, two, one again. “Spy stuff,” David Goldfarb muttered. The other fellow poked him in the ribs with an elbow, hard enough to make him give back a pace.

The door opened. “Come in, come in.” The skinny little bald man who greeted them looked like a tailor, but tailors did not commonly carry submachine guns. He looked them over, lowered the weapon. “Just you three? Where are the rest?”

“Just us,” Goldfarb answered. “A couple scattered off to the other hidey-holes, a couple others won’t be going anywhere any more. About what we figured.” The casual way he said that chilled Russie. His cousin went on, “We’re not hanging around here, either, you know. You have what we need?”

“You need to ask?” With a scornful sniff the bald little man pointed to bundles on the couch. “There-change your clothes.”

“Clothes are only part of it,” Goldfarb’s tough-looking friend said. “The rest is taken care of, too?”

“The rest is taken care of.” The bald fellow sniffed again, this time angrily. “We wouldn’t be good for much if it weren’t, would we?”

“Who knows what we’re good for?” the nameless fighter answered, but he shrugged off his shabby wool jacket and started unbuttoning his shirt. Moishe had no jacket to shrug off. He shed with a long sigh of relief the clothes he’d been wearing since he was captured. Their replacements didn’t fit as well, but so what? They were clean.

“Good thing the Lizards haven’t figured out prison uniforms; they’d have made it harder for us to do a vanishing act with you,” Goldfarb said as he, too, changed. His Yiddish was plenty fluent, but full of odd turns of phrase he didn’t seem to notice, as if he was using it to express ideas that came first in English. He probably was.

“You’re staying here, right, Shmuel?” asked the nondescript little Jew who kept the flat. The nameless fighter, now nameless no more, nodded. So did the little fellow, who turned to Moishe and Goldfarb. He handed each of them a thin rectangle of some shiny stuff, about the size of a playing card. Moishe looked at his. A picture that vaguely resembled him looked back from it. The card gave details of a life he’d never led. The bald little man said, “Don’t pull these out unless you have to. With luck, you’ll be away before they do a proper job of cordoning off the city.”

“And without luck, we’ll buy a plot,” Goldfarb said, holding up his own card “This bloke looks more like Goebbels than he does like me.”

“Best we could do,” the bald Jew said with a shrug. “That’s why you don’t want to wave it around unless somebody asks for it. But if somebody does, he probably won’t look at it; he’ll feed it into a Lizard machine-and it shows you’ve been authorized for the past two weeks to leave Lodz on a buying trip.” He clucked mournfully. “Cost us plenty to pay off a Pole who works for the Lizards to make these for us, and he’d only take the best.”

“Gold?” Russie asked.

“Worse,” the fellow answered. “Tobacco. Gold at least stays in circulation. Tobacco, you smoke it and it’s gone.”

“Tobacco.” Goldfarb sounded even more mournful than the bald Jew had. “What I wouldn’t give for a fag. It’s been a bloody long time.”

Russie didn’t care one way or the other about tobacco. He’d never got the habit, and his medical studies made him pretty sure it wasn’t good for you. But it did show how far the underground had gone to rescue him. That warmed him, especially since some people thought him a traitor for broadcasting for the Lizards. He said, “Thank you more than I know how to tell you. I-”

Shmuel cut him off: “Listen, you’d better get out of here. You want to thank us, broadcast from England.”

“He’s right,” David Goldfarb said. “Come on, cousin. Standing around chattering doesn’t up the chances of our living to collect an old age pension-not that we’re in serious danger of it at any rate, things being as they are.”

Out of the flat, out of the block of flats, they went. As they walked north, they listened to rumors swirl around them: “All the prisoners free-” “The Nazis did it. My aunt saw a man in a German helmet-” “Half the Lizards in Lodz killed, I heard. My wife’s brother says-”

“By tomorrow, they’ll be saying the Lizards dropped an atomic bomb on this place,” Goldfarb remarked dryly.

“Did you hear what he said?” someone going the other way exclaimed. “They used an atomic bomb to blow up the prison.” Russie and Goldfarb looked at each other, shook their heads, and started to laugh.

Less than an hour had gone by since the first blast (piat, Goldfarb called it, which sounded more Polish than either Yiddish or English) hit the prison, but the streets heading out of the ghetto already had checkpoints on them; the Lizards and their human henchmen, Order Service thugs and Polish bullies, had wasted not a moment. Some people took one look and decided they didn’t need to leave after all; others queued up to show they had the right.

Moishe started to get into a line that led up to a couple of Poles. Goldfarb pulled him out of it. “No, no,” he said loudly. “Come on over here. This line is much shorter.”

Of course that line was much shorter: at its head stood three Lizards. Nobody in his right mind wanted to trust his fate to them when human beings were around. Humans might be thugs, but at least they were your own kind of thugs. But Moishe couldn’t drag Goldfarb back from the line he’d chosen without making a scene, and he didn’t dare do that. Convinced his cousin was leading them to their doom, he took his place in the queue that led up to the aliens.

Sure enough, the wait to get to them was short. A Lizard turned one eye turret toward Russie, the other toward Goldfarb. “You is?” he asked in bad Yiddish. He repeated the question in worse Polish.

“Adam Zilverstajn,” Goldfarb answered at once, using the name on his new, forged identity card.

“Felix Kirshbojm,” Moishe said more hesitantly.

He waited for alarms to go off, for guns to be pointed and maybe fired. But the Lizard just stuck out his hand and said, “Card.” Again, Goldfarb promptly surrendered his. Again, Moishe paused almost long enough to draw suspicion to himself before he handed his over.

The Lizard fed Goldfarb’s card into a slot on a square metal box that sat on a table next to him. The box gulped it down as if alive. While still collaborating with the Lizards, Russie had seen enough of their astonishing gadgetry to wonder if perhaps that wasn’t so. It spat out Goldfarb’s phony card. The Lizard looked at a display-like a miniature movie screen, Moishe thought-it held in its hand. “You go on business? You be back-seven days?” it said as it returned the card to Moishe’s cousin.

“That’s right,” Goldfarb agreed.

Then Russie’s card went into the machine. He almost broke and ran as the Lizard turned an eye turret toward the handheld display; he was sure words like traitor and escapee showed up there. But evidently they didn’t, for the Lizard waited till the card came out again, then said, “You go business seven days, too?”

“Yes,” Moishe said, remembering not to tack “superior sir” onto the end.

“You both go seven days,” the Lizard said. “You go-how to say-together?”

“Yes,” Moishe repeated. He wondered if the Lizards were looking for people traveling in groups. But the guard just handed him his card and got ready to receive the next set of people passing through the checkpoint.

David Goldfarb indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” as soon as they’d walked a couple of hundred meters past the guard and out of the ghetto.

Whew! did not seem enough to Moishe. “Gottenyu,” he said, and then added, “I thought you’d killed us both when you pulled me into that line with the Lizards.”

“Oh, that.” Now Goldfarb looked jaunty. “No, I knew just what I was doing there.”

“You could have fooled me!”

“No, seriously-look at it. If we go through a line with Poles or those Order Service would-be Nazi shmucks, they’re liable to look at the pictures on the cards-and if they do that, we re dead. No matter what the machine tells them, they’ll see we don’treally look like the pictures on the cards or not enough, anyhow. But the Lizards can’t tell you from Hedy Lamarr without the machine to do it for them, That’s why I wanted them to check us.”

Moishe thought it over and found himself nodding. “Cousin,” he said admiringly “you’ve got chutzpah.”

“Never get anywhere with the girls if I didn’t,” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You ought to see a chap I served with named Jerome Jones-he had crust enough to make a pie, he did.”

Watching the way his cousin smiled put Moishe in mind of his mother. But Goldfarb also had an alienness about him that went deeper than the curious expressions peppering his Yiddish. He wasn’t automatically wary the way Polish Jews were. “So that’s what growing up really free does for you,” Moishe murmured.

“What did you say?”

“Never mind. Where will we pick up Rivka and Reuven?” Russie wondered if Goldfarb had lied to him about them just to get him moving. The man had the gall for it, no two ways about that.

But Goldfarb just asked, “Are you sure you want to find out? Suppose the Lizards catch you but kill me? The less you know, the less they can squeeze out of you.”

“They aren’t as good at squeezing as you’d think,” Moishe said. “They didn’t come close to getting everything I know out of me.” Nevertheless, he didn’t push the question. Mordechai Anielewicz’s Jewish fighters had had that don’t-ask-if-you-don’t-need-to-know rule, too. Which meant… “You were-you are-a soldier.”

Goldfarb nodded. “RAF, actually, but yes. And you were going to be a doctor, before the Nazis came. My father used to beat me over the head with that; all I ever wanted to do was fiddle around with the insides of radios and such. Made me a valuable piece of goods when the war came, though: they put me into radar training straightaway, and I kept an eye on the Jerries all through the Blitz.”

Russie didn’t follow all of that; a couple of key words were in English, of which he knew next to nothing. He was content just to walk along for a while, savoring his freedom and daring to think about staying free a while longer. If his accomplished cousin was from the British military, maybe a submarine like the one Anielewicz had sometimes summoned lay waiting off the Polish coast. He started to ask about that, then changed his mind. If he didn’t need to know, what was the point in trying to learn?

Goldfarb hurried up Krawiecka Street. He looked nervously to the right and left as he did. Finally, he said, “The sooner we’re out of Lodz, the better I’ll like it. Outside the ghetto, a Jew really sticks out around here, doesn’t he?”

“Well, of course,” Moishe answered. Then he realized it wasn’t of course, not to his cousin. Years of living in the ghetto and before that in a Poland that didn’t know how to deal with its three million Jews had made him so used to being the suspected and despised outsider that he took it for granted. Being reminded things weren’t like that all over the world came as a distinct shock. “Must be nice, seeming like everyone else,” he said wistfully.

“You mean, instead of getting slammed down just for being a Jew?” David Goldfarb said. Russie nodded. His cousin went on, “It is, I suppose. There’s a good deal of small stuff left to fret over: people have a way or taking for granted that you’re cheap or not very brave or what have you. But next to what I’ve seen here, what my folks left-blimey!” That wasn’t Yiddish, either, but Moishe had no trouble figuring out what it meant.

If the submarine came, if it whisked him and his family off to England-would he be able to deal with so much freedom? Learning a new language as a grown man wouldn’t come easy for him. Thinking thus, for a moment he was almost paralyzed with dread at the prospect of abandoning everything familiar, no matter how unpleasant it could be.

Then he and Goldfarb strode past a couple of Polish housewives chattering on a front porch. The two pretty women stopped talking and stared at them as if they expected the plague to break out in their wake. They kept on staring until the men had gone a block farther down the road.

Moishe sighed. “No, maybe I won’t be sorry to get out of here after all.”

“I know what you mean,” his cousin answered. “Everyone here keeps thinking we’re about to make off with the good silver. I shan’t be sorry to see the last of that myself. If all goes well, we should have you and yours back in England in a couple of weeks. How does that strike you?”

“The word that comes to mind is mechaieh,” Moishe said. His cousin grinned and clapped him on the back.

“Hurry up!” Ludmila Gorbunova shouted. “If I don’t get the ammunition into my machine gun, how am I supposed to shoot it at the Lizards?”

“Patience, patience,” Georg Schultz answered as he checked the belts that fed the guns. “If your weapon jams when you’re taking it into action, you might as well not have it. Do things right at first and you won’t be sorry later.”

Nikifor Sholudenko paused before he passed Schultz another belt. “The Soviet Union is not your country,” he observed. “To you it means little if Sukhinichi falls. To us it means Moscow is in danger, just as it was from your fascists in 1941.”

“Screw Moscow,” Schultz answered, sending the NKVD man a glance redolent of dislike. “If Sukhinichi falls, it probably means I get shot. You think that doesn’t matter to me, you’re crazy.”

“Enough, you two,” Ludmila said. She’d been saying that ever since the German and the security man met. She’d kept them from trying to kill each other on the tramp back to the village where they’d shot it out with the anti-Tolokonnikovites (she still didn’t know who Tolokonnikov’s was or what sort of faction he led), and sometimes kept them from sniping at each other with words for as long as half an hour.

“You be careful up there,” Schultz told her, in the not-to-be-denied tones of a field marshal giving orders-or a man who wanted to go to bed with her. She knew which only too well. Wanting to go to bed with her was the only thing on which he and Sholudenko agreed. The air base had needed a political officer when Sholudenko got there, but that wasn’t the only reason Sholudenko had arranged to stay on here, even if it was the official one.

In a way, climbing into the cockpit of her new U-2 was a relief. She didn’t have to argue with the Lizards or cajole them along; all they wanted to do was kill her. Avoiding that was a lot simpler than the passes from Schultz and Sholudenko she kept ducking.

Schultz spun the prop. He’d been right about one thing-Colonel Karpov had been so glad to have his mechanical talents back that he’d overlooked the little matter of going off without bothering to get permission first. That Schultz had actually returned with Ludmila hadn’t hurt there, either.

The Kukuruznik’s little five-cylinder radial buzzed into life. It had a note slightly different from the one she’d grown used to, but Schultz insisted that was nothing to worry about. On engines, if not many other places, Ludmila trusted his word.

She released the brake, gave the biplane full throttle, and bounced across the still-muddy steppe till she was airborne. She stayed at treetop height as she flew south and west toward the front. One rule the Red Air Force had learned: the higher you flew against the Lizards, the less likely you were to come back.

The front south of Sukhinichi was not far away, and got closer all the time whether she was in the air or not. With the coming of good weather, the Lizards were on the move again, pushing through German remnants and Soviet troops alike as they advanced on Moscow. By crackling shortwave Stalin had ordered, “Ni shagu nazad! — Not one step back!” Giving the order and being strong enough to make sure it was obeyed were not the same thing, worse luck.

The Red Army had brought up all the artillery it could to try to stem the Lizard tide. Ludmila flew past bare-chested young men in khaki trousers serving their guns for all they were worth. When a cannon, or sometimes a whole battery, discharged close by, the blast made the U-2 tremble in the air like a falling leaf caught by a gust of wind. The gun crews waved at her plane, not because they knew she was a woman, but for joy at seeing anything human-built in the air.

Tanks rumbled along the dirt roads. Some of them spewed smoke to help mask their positions. Ludmila hoped that would do some good; going up against Lizard armor was worse than facing the Germans. The Nazis had had better tactics but worse tanks. The Lizards’ tanks were better than the T-34s and KV-1s that were the pride of Soviet armored forces, and their tactics weren’t bad, either.

A curtain of dust thrown up from shell hits marked the front. Ludmila took a deep breath as she drew near; every second she spent in and around that curtain or on the other side was a second in which she was hideously more likely to die than at any other time. Her bowels clenched and loosened, her bladder felt very full though it wasn’t. She noticed none of that, not consciously.

What she did notice was the Soviet line beginning to go to pieces. Along with the dust, smoke from burning tanks filled the air and made her cough and choke when she flew through plumes of it. She didn’t see many tanks right at the front to try to halt the Lizards’ advance. Most either hunkered down where they were or pulled back toward Sukhinichi.

Ludmila shook her head. That wasn’t going to hold things together; it would probably end up costing the vital railway center, too. The Germans had had surprisingly few tanks, but they’d massed them and used them aggressively against Soviet troops. She’d thought the Red Army had grasped the principle. It didn’t seem that way, not from what she was seeing here.

Without armor to support them, the Russian infantrymen who huddled in their trenches had to take whatever the Lizards dished out without much hope of hitting back. She wondered how long they would stay and fight, even with NKVD men with submachine guns back of the line to discourage them from doing anything else.

As the soldiers at the guns had, some of the infantry waved as she flew over them. She wondered if the young peasants and workers down below appreciated the irony of her sallying forth against the Lizards in an aircraft that had seemed obsolete even against the Nazis. She doubted it. All they saw was a plane with red stars on the fuselage and wings. That was enough to give them hope.

Then she was on the other side of the line, the side the Lizards controlled. The ground below her resembled nothing so much as the craters of the moon she’d once examined in a science text: the aliens were advancing through territory that had already been fought over. If that bothered them, they didn’t show it.

Pop, pop! A couple of bullets tore through the doped fabric hat covered the U-2’s wings. Ludmila grunted in dismay. The only thing that would protect her was the aircraft’s speed, and the Kukuruznik wasn’t very fast…

Off to one side a couple of kilometers, she glimpsed the fierce tadpole shape of a Lizard helicopter gunship. She heeled he U-2 away from it and dove even closer to the deck. The gunship could fly rings around her and blow her out of the sky, and painful experience had taught that the machine guns she carried wouldn’t do anything more than scratch its paint.

Luck stayed with her: the helicopter continued on up toward he front without spying her. And her turn brought her straight toward a convoy of lorries-some Lizard-made, others captured from the Red Army or the Nazis-also moving up with troops and supplies. She never would have spotted them if she hadn’t had to evade the gunship.

With a joyful whoop, she thumbed the firing button. The Kukuruznik jerked a little as its twin machine guns began to hammer away. Orange lines of tracers showed she was scoring hits. A German-made lorry suddenly became a ball of flame.

Ludmila whooped louder.

Lizards bailed out of vehicles and started shooting at her. She got out of there as fast as she could.

After a good strafing run like that, she could have flown back to her base and truthfully reported success. But, like most good combat pilots, she lusted for more. She buzzed on, deeper into Lizard-held territory.

Back of the line, fire came her way less often. The Lizards seemed less alert, or maybe just hadn’t counted on many human planes getting through. She wished she were flying a Pe-2 bomber with a couple of thousand kilos of high explosive rather than a wheezing trainer that had had a brace of machine guns strapped onto it. But then, the Lizards shot down Pe-2s with effortless ease.

She spied more lorries-human-made ones, stopped to fuel up. She raked them with machine-gun fire, and felt a mix of terror and crazy exhilaration when flames shot so high that she had to pull up sharply, to keep from flying straight through them.

The machine guns had performed without a jam. They usually did, so she didn’t know how much Georg Schultz’s relentless perfectionism had to do with that, but it couldn’t have hurt. She swung the U-2 back toward the north; she was low on fuel and she’d used a lot of ammunition. She was willing to bet Schultz had spent the time she was flying methodically filling belts with bullets.

Coming back, she was fired on not only by the Lizards but also by jittery Soviet troops convinced anything in the air, especially if it flew over them from the other side of the line, had to be dangerous. But the Kukuruznik, not least because it was so simple, was a rugged machine: unless you hit the engine or the pilot or were lucky enough to snap a control wire with a bullet, you wouldn’t hurt it much.

Ludmila flew over advancing Lizard tanks. They were across a small river whose line the Soviets had been holding when she’d gone out on her attack run an hour or so before. She bit her lip. It was as she’d feared: in spite of everything the Red Army could do, in spite of her own pinprick successes inside Lizard-held territory, the local position was deteriorating. Sukhinichi would fall, and after that only Kaluga stood between the Lizards and Moscow.

The U-2 bounced to a stop. A couple of groundcrew men lugged jerricans of petrol toward the airplane, squelching through mud that was still pretty thick. Behind them came Georg Schultz, ammunition belts draped across his chest so that he resembled nothing so much as a Cossack bandit. He took a chunk of black bread from a pocket of the German infantry blouse he still wore, held it out to Ludmila. “Khleb,” he said, one Russian word he’d mastered.

“Spasebo,”she answered, and took a bite. Right in back of Schultz slogged Nikifor Sholudenko. Maybe he didn’t want the German spending even a moment alone with her because they were rivals, or maybe just because he was NKVD. Either way, Ludmila was glad to see him: he was someone to whom she could report, which meant she wouldn’t have to hunt up Colonel Karpov.

Or could she? The air base looked like an anthill somebody had kicked, with people running every which way to no apparent purpose. Before she could ask any questions, Schultz spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “Bolshoye drap-big skedaddle.” That was, ironically, the same term the Russians had used to describe the flight of bureaucrats from Moscow when it looked as if the Germans would capture the capital in October 1941. Ludmila wondered if Schultz was using it with malice aforethought.

That, however, mattered relatively little. “Skedaddle?” Ludmila said in dismay. “We’re puffing out of here?”

“We are indeed,” Nikifor Sholudenko said. “Orders are to shorten, consolidate, and strengthen the defensive front.” He didn’t bother to add that that was a euphemism for retreat, just as severe fighting meant a battle we’re losing. Ludmila knew that as well as he did. So, very likely, did Georg Schultz.

Ludmila said, “May I fly another mission before we pull back? I stung them the last time; they hardly had any air defenses set up.”

“Who can defend against one of these things?” Schultz said in German, setting an affectionate hand on the U-2’s cloth-covered fuselage. “They peep in through the keyhole when you’re taking a leak.”

Sholudenko snorted at that, but to Ludmila he shook his head. “Colonel Karpov’s orders are that we leave now. They came in just after you took off; if you hadn’t been airborne, we probably would have already cleared out.”

“Where are we going?” Ludmila asked.

The NKVD man pulled out a scrap of paper, glanced down at it. “They’re setting up a new base at Collective Farm 139, bearing 43, distance fifty-two kilometers.”

Ludmila translated distance and bearing into a dot on the map. “That’s right outside Kaluga,” she said unhappily.

“Just west of it, as a matter of fact,” Sholudenko agreed. “We’re going to fight the Lizards house by house and street by street in Sukhinichi to delay them while we prepare new positions between Sukhinichi and Kaluga. Then, at need, we will fight house by house in Kaluga. I hope the need does not arise.”

He stopped there; not even an NKVD man, answerable to no one at the air base but himself and perhaps, for something particularly heinous, Colonel Karpov, wanted to say too much. But Ludmila had no trouble reading between the lines. He didn’t expect whatever makeshift line the Red Army would set up north of Sukhinichi to hold the Lizards. He didn’t expect to hold them at Kaluga, either, not by the sound of what he said. And between Kaluga and Moscow lay only plains and forest-no more cities in- which to slow down and maul the invaders.

“We’re in trouble,” Georg Schultz said in German. Ludmila wondered at his naivete in speaking so freely: the Nazis might not have the NKVD, but they certainly did have the Gestapo. Didn’t Schultz know you weren’t supposed to open your mouth where people you couldn’t trust were listening?

Sholudenko gave him an odd look. “The Soviet Union is in trouble,” he conceded. “No more so than Germany, however, and no more so than any of the rest of the world.”

Before Schultz could answer, Colonel Karpov came running up the airstrip, shouting, “Get out! Get out! Lizard armor has broken through west of Sukhinichi, and they’re heading this way. We have maybe an hour to get clear-maybe not, too. Get out!”

Wearily, Ludmila climbed back into the little Kukuruznik Groundcrew men turned the plane into the wind; Georg Schultz spun the two-bladed wooden prop. The engine, reliable even if puny, caught at once. The biplane rattled down the runway and hopped into the air. Ludmila swung it northeast, toward Collective Farm 139.

Schultz, Sholudenko, and Karpov stood on the ground waving to her. She waved back, wondering if she would ever see them again. Suddenly, instead of being, the one who flew dangerous combat missions, she was the one who could escape the oncoming Lizards: If they were only an hour away, they had a good chance of overrunning the humans trying to escape from the air base.

She checked her airspeed indicator and her watch At the U-2’s piddling turn of speed, Collective Farm 139 was about half an hour away. She hoped she’d be able to spot the new base, and then hoped she wouldn’t: if the maskirovka was bad, the Lizards would notice it.

Of course, if the maskirovka was good, she’d fly around and around and probably have to set down in the wrong place because she was running out of fuel. Airspeed indicator, watch, and compass were not the most sophisticated navigational instruments around, but they were what she had.

A Lizard warplane shot by, far overhead. The howl of its jet engines put her in mind of wolves deep in the forest baying at the moon. She patted the fabric sides of her U-2. It was also an effective combat aircraft, no matter how puny and absurd alongside the jet. It had seemed puny and absurd alongside an Me-l09, too.

She was still flying along when the Lizard plane came shrieking back on the reciprocal to its former course. She wasn’t even done shifting bases, and it had already finished its mission of destruction.

Speed. The word tolled in Ludmila’s mind, a mournful bell. The Lizards had more of it at their disposal than people did: their tanks rolled faster, their planes flew faster. Because of that, they held the initiative, at least while the weather was good. Fighting them was like fighting the Germans, only worse. Nobody ever won a war by reacting to what the other fellow did.

A bullet cracked past her head, rudely slaughtering that line of thought. She shook her fist at the ground, not that it would do any good. The stupid muzhik down there was no doubt convinced that anything so clever as an airplane had to belong to the enemy. Had Stalin had the chance to continue peacefully building socialism in the Soviet Union, such ignorance might have become a thing of the past in a generation’s time. As it was…

A peasant working in a newly sown field of barley took off his jacket and waved it as she buzzed over him. The jacket had a red lining. Ludmila started to fly on by, then exclaimed, “Bozhemoi, I’m an idiot!” The Red Air Force wouldn’t send up a flare, literally or figuratively, to let her know exactly where the new base was. If they did, the Lizards would make sure said base didn’t last long. She could credit good navigation-or more likely good luck-for finding her target at all.

She wheeled the Kukuruznik through the sky. As she bled off speed and what little altitude she had, she spotted marks that cut across plowed furrows. They told her where planes were landing and taking off. She brought the U-2 around one more time, landed it in more or less the same place.

As if by magic, men appeared where she had been willing to swear only grain grew. They sprinted toward the biplane, bawling, “Out! Out! Out!”

Ludmila scrambled out. As her booted feet dug into the still-muddy ground, she began, “Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova reporting as-”

“Tell us all that shit later,” said one of the fellows who was hauling the U-2 away toward concealment, though of what sort Ludmila couldn’t imagine. He turned to a comrade. “Tolya, get her under cover, too.”

Tolya needed a shave and smelled as if he hadn’t seen soap and water in a long time. Ludmila didn’t hold it against him; she was probably just as rank, but didn’t notice it on herself any longer. “Come on, Comrade Pilot,” Tolya said. If he noticed she was a woman, or cared, he didn’t let on.

Some of his friends unrolled a broad stretch of matting that so cunningly mimicked the surrounding ground, she hadn’t even noticed it (she was glad she hadn’t tried taxiing across it). It covered a trench wide and deep enough to swallow an airplane. As soon as the Kukuruznik vanished into the trench, the mats went back on.

Tolya led Ludmila toward some battered buildings perhaps half a kilometer away. “We don’t have to do anything special for people,” he explained, “not with the stuff for the kolkhozniki still standing.”

“I’ve flown from bases where people lived underground, too,” Ludmila said.

“We didn’t have much digging time here,” her guide said, “and machines come first.”

Somebody unrolled another strip of matting and ducked under it carrying a lighted torch. “Is he starting a fire, down there?” Ludmila asked. Tolya nodded. “Why?” she said.

“More maskirovka,” he answered. “We found out the Lizards like to paste things that are warm. We don’t know how they spot them, but they do. If we give them some they can’t really hurt-”

“They waste munitions.” Ludmila nodded. “Ochen khorosho-very good.”

Even though they were alone in the middle of a field, Tolya looked around and lowered his voice before he spoke again: “Comrade Pilot, you’ve flown over the front south of Sukhinichi? How did it look to you?”

It was coming to pieces, Ludmila thought. But she didn’t want to say that, not to someone she didn’t know or trust: who knew what he might be under his baggy, peasant-style tunic and trousers? Yet she didn’t want to lie to him, either. Carefully, she replied, “Let me put it this way: I’m glad you don’t have much in the way of heavy, permanent installations here.”

“Huh?” Tolya’s brow furrowed. Then he grunted. “Oh. I see. We may have to move in a hurry, is that it?”

Ludmila didn’t answer; she just kept walking toward what was left of the collective farm’s buildings. Beside her, Tolya grunted again and asked no more questions; he’d understood her not-answer exactly as she meant it.

Alone on a bicycle with a pack on his back and a rifle slung over his shoulder: Jens Larssen had spent a lot of time and covered a lot of miles that way. Ever since his Plymouth gave up the ghost back in Ohio, he’d gone to Chicago and then all around Denver on two wheels rather than four.

This, though, was different. For one thing, he’d been on flat ground in the Midwest, not slogging his way up through a gap in the Continental Divide. More important, back then he’d had a goal: he’d been riding toward the Met Lab and toward Barbara. Now he was running away, and he knew it.

“Hanford,” he said under his breath. As far as he could tell, they all just wanted an excuse to get him out of their hair. “You’d think I was a goddamn albatross or something.”

All right, so he’d made it real clear he wasn’t happy about his wife shacking up with this Yeager bum. The way everybody acted, it was his fault, not hers. She’d run out on him, and she got the sympathy when he tried to put some sense into her thick head.

“It just isn’t right,” he muttered. “She bailed out, and I’m the one who’s stuck in the plane wreck.” He knew his work had suffered since the Met Lab crew got to Denver. That was another reason everybody was glad to get him out of town, on a bike if not on a rail. But how was he supposed to keep his eyes on calculations or oscilloscope readings if they were really seeing Barbara naked and laughing, her legs wrapped around that stinking corporal as he bucked above her?

He reached back over his right shoulder with his left hand to touch the hard, upthrust barrel of the Springfield. He’d thought about lying in wait for Yeager, ending those terrible visions for good. But he had enough sense left to realize he’d probably get caught and, even if he didn’t, blowing Yeager’s head off, however delightful that might be, wouldn’t bring Barbara back to him.

“It’s a good thing I’m not stupid,” he told the asphalt of US 40 under his wheels. “I’d be in a whole heap of trouble if I were.”

He looked back over his shoulder. He was thirty miles out of Denver now, and had gained a couple of thousand feet; he could see not only the city, but the plain beyond it that sloped almost imperceptibly downward toward the Mississippi a long way away. Down in the flatlands, the Lizards held sway. If he hadn’t gone away from the city heading west, he might have left heading east.

Looked at rationally, that made as little sense as ambushing Sam Yeager, and Jens knew it. Knowing and caring were two different critters. Instead of just getting his own back from Yeager, selling out the Met Lab project gave him vengeance wholesale rather than retail, paying back all at once everybody who’d done him wrong. The idea had a horrid fascination to it, the way the’ sharp edge of a broken tooth irresistibly lures the tongue. Feel, it seems to say. This isn’t the way it should be, but feel it anyhow.

Pushing the bike along at 7,500 feet took more out of him than making it go through the flat farming country of Indiana. He stopped every so often for a blow, and just to admire the scenery ahead. Now the Rockies loomed in every direction except right behind him. In the clear, thin air, the snowcapped peaks and the deep green cloak of pine forest below them looked close enough to reach out and touch. The sky was a deep, deep blue, with a texture to it he’d never known before.

But for the sound of his own slightly winded breathing and the rustle of bushes in the breeze, everything was quiet: no buzz and wheeze of cars, no growling rumble of trucks. Jens had passed a patient convoy of horse-drawn wagons four or five miles back, and another coming into Denver just as he was leaving, but that was about it. He knew the Lizard-induced dearth of traffic meant the war effort was going to hell, but it sure worked wonders for the tourist business.

“Except there’s no tourist business any more, either,” he said. The habit of talking to himself when he was alone on his bike had come back in a hurry.

He swung his feet back up onto the pedals, got rolling again. In a couple of minutes, he came up to a sign: IDAHO SPRINGS, 2 MILES. That made him lift one hand from the handlebars to scratch his head. “Idaho Springs?” he muttered. “This was still Colorado, last I looked.”

A few hundred yards ahead another sign said, HOT SPRINGS BATHING, 50?. VAPOR CAVES ONLY $1. That explained the springs, but left him still wondering how a chunk of Idaho had shifted south and east.

The town might have had a thousand people before the Lizards came. It straggled along a narrow canyon. A lot of the houses looked deserted, and the doors to several shops hung open. Jens had seen a lot of towns like that. But if people had fled from everyplace, where had they all gone? His reluctant conclusion was that a lot of them were dead.

Not everybody was gone from Idaho Springs. A bald man in black overalls came out of a dry-goods store and waved to Larssen. He waved back, slowed to a stop. “Where you from, mister?” the local asked. “Where you goin’?”

Jens thought about replying that it was none of Nosy Parker’s business, but his eye happened to catch a bit of motion in a second-story window that the breeze couldn’t have caused: a curtain shifted slightly, perhaps from a rifle barrel stirring behind it. The folk of Idaho Springs were ready to take care of themselves.

And so, instead of getting smart, Jens said carefully, “I’m out of Denver, heading west on Army business. I can show you a letter of authorization, if you’d like.” The letter wasn’t signed by Groves; the detested Colonel Hexham’s John Hancock was on it instead. Larssen had been tempted to wipe his backside with it; now he was glad he’d refrained.

Black Overalls shook his head. “Nah, you don’t need to bother. If you was one of them bad guys, don’t reckon you’d be so eager to show it off.” The upstairs curtain twitched again as the not-quite-unseen watcher drew back. The bald guy went on, “Anything we can do for you here?”

Jens’ stomach rumbled. He said, “I wouldn’t turn down some food-or even a drink, if you folks have some hooch you can spare. If you don’t, don’t put yourselves out on account of me,” he added hastily; in these times of scarcity, people got mighty touchy about sharing things like liquor.

But the fellow in black overalls just grinned. “We can spare a bit, I expect. We’d always stock up for the folks who’d come to visit the springs, you know, and there ain’t been many o’ them lately. You just want to ride on up ahead for another long block to the First Street Cafe. Tell Mary there Harvey says it’s okay to get you fed.”

“Thanks, uh Harvey.” Jens started the bicycle rolling again. His back itched as he rode past the window where he’d seen the curtain move, but nothing at all stirred there now. If he’d satisfied Harvey, he must have satisfied the local hired gun, too.

The Idaho Springs city hall was an adobe building with a couple of big millstones in the yard in front of it. A sign identified them as coming from an old Mexican arastra, a mule-powered gadget that ground ore as an ordinary mill ground grain. Colorado had more history than Jens had thought about.

The First Street Cafe, by contrast, looked like a bank. It had its name spelled out in gold Old English letters across a plate glass window. Jens stopped in front of it, let down the kickstand on his bike. He didn’t think bike rustlers would be as big a worry here as they were in Denver. All the same, he resolved not to eat with his back to the street.

He opened the door to the cafe. A bell jingled above his head. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside, he saw the place was empty. That amazed him, because a wonderful smell filled the air. From the room in back, a woman’s voice called, “That you, Jack?”

“Uh, no,” Jens said. “I’m a stranger here. Harvey was kind enough to say I could beg a meal from you, if you’re Mary.”

Brief silence fell, then, “Yeah, I’m Mary. Just a second, pal; I’ll be right with you.” He heard footsteps back there, then she came out behind the counter and looked him over hands on hips. Voice slightly mocking, she went on, “So Harvey says I’m supposed to feed you, huh? You’re skinny enough you could do with some feeding, that’s for sure. Chicken stew do you? It had better-it’s what I’ve got.”

“Chicken stew would be swell, thank you.” That was what was making the wonderful smell, Jens realized.

“Okay. Comin’ right up. You can sit anywhere; we ain’t what you’d call crowded.” With a laugh, Mary turned and disappeared again.

Jens chose a table that let him keep an eye on his bicycle. Plates clattered and silverware jingled in the back room; Mary softly sang something to herself that, if he recognized the tune, was a scandalous ditty he’d last heard at the Lowry Field BOQ.

From a lot of women, such lyrics would have scandalized him. Somehow they seemed to suit this Mary. On thirty seconds’ acquaintance, she reminded him of Sal, the brassy waitress with whom, among many others, the Lizards had cooped him up in a church in Fiat, Indiana. Her hair was midnight black instead of Sal’s peroxided yellow, and they didn’t look like each other, either, but he thought he saw in Mary a lot of the same take-it-or-leave-it toughness Sal had shown.

He still wished he’d laid Sal-especially considering the way everything else had turned out. It could have happened, but he’d figured Barbara was waiting for him, so he’d stayed good. Shows how much I know, he thought bitterly.

“Here you go, pal.” Mary set knife and fork and a plate in front of him: falling-off-the-bone chicken in thick gravy, with dumplings and carrots. The smell alone was enough to put ten pounds on him.

He tasted. The taste was better than the smell. He hadn’t thought it could be. He made a wordless, full-mouth noise of bliss.

“Glad you like it,” Mary said, sounding amused. A moment later she added, “Listen, it’s about dinnertime, and like I said, we ain’t exactly packed. You mind if I bring out a plate and join you?”

“Please,” he said. “Why should I mind? This is your place and your terrific food-” He thought he was going to say more, but took another bite instead.

“Be right with you, then.” She went back to get some stew of her own. Jens twisted his head to watch the way she walked. Like a woman, he thought: what a surprise. Her long gray wool skirt didn’t show much of her legs, but she had nice ankles. He wondered if she was older or younger than he. Close, either way.

She came back with not only a plate, but two glass beer mugs filled with a deep amber fluid. “You look like you could use one of these,” she said as she sat down across the table from him. “Just homebrew, but it’s not bad. Joe Simpson who makes it, he used to work down at the Coors brewery in Golden, so he knows what he’s doin’.”

Jens gulped at the beer. It wasn’t Coors-he’d drunk that in Denver-but it was a long way from bad. “Oh, Lord,” he said ecstatically. “Will you marry me?”

She paused with a forkful of dumpling halfway to her mouth, gave him a long, appraising stare. He felt himself turning red; he’d just meant it for a joke. But maybe Mary liked what she saw. With a slightly wintry smile, she answered, “I dunno, but I’ll tell you this right now-it’s the best damn offer I had today, and that’s a fact. Hell, if you was to tempt me with a cigarette, who knows what I might up and do?”

“I wish I could,” he said, regretfully for two different reasons. “I haven’t seen one in months.”

“Yeah, me neither.” She let out a long, mournful sigh. “Don’t even know why I bothered to ask. If you had smokes, I’d’ve smelled ’em on you minute you walked in.” She took another bite, then said, “Mind if I ask you what your name is?”

He told her, and discovered in turn, that her last name was Cooley. Black Irish, he thought. That fit; her eyes were very, very blue and her skin even fairer than his, transparent white rather than pink.

She might not have been able to smell tobacco smoke on him, but he was sure she could smell sweat-getting the bike here from Denver had been work, no two ways about it. It didn’t worry him the way it would have a year before. He could smell her, too, and it was amazing how fast you got used to bodies that weren’t as clean as they might have been. If most everybody needed a bath, things evened out.

He finished the stew, scraped up gravy with his fork until the plate was damn near clean again. He didn’t want to up and leave; he felt full and happy and more nearly homey than he had since, he’d found out he didn’t really have a home any more. To give himself an excuse to stay a while longer, he pointed to the mug and said, “Could I have another one of those, please? That one hit the spot, but it didn’t quite fill it up.”

“Sure thing, pal. I’ll get me one, too.” She headed for the back room again. This time, Jens thought she might have noticed him eyeing her as she walked; but if she’ had she didn’t let on. She soon came back with the beer.

“Thanks,” he said as she sat down once more. The scritch of the chair legs on the bricks of the cafe floor was almost the only sound. Jens asked, “How do you keep this place open with no customers?”

“What do you mean, no customers? You’re here, aren’t you?” Her face was full of impudent amusement. “But yeah, it’s pretty quiet at dinnertime. Supper, now, folks come for supper. And I reckon the Army would shoot me if I closed up shop; I feed a lot of their people goin’ in and out of Denver. But then, you said you’re one of them, right?”

“Yeah.” Jens took another pull at his beer. He eyed her over the top of the mug. “Bet you have to keep a shotgun by the till to keep some of the Army guys from getting too friendly.”

Mary laughed. “Spilling something hot on ’em mostly does the trick.” She drank, too. “Course, the other thing is, there’s passes and then there’s passes.”

Was that an invitation? It sure sounded like one. Jens hesitated, not least because the memory of his ignominious failure with that chippie back in Denver still stung. If he couldn’t get it up twice running, what was he supposed to do? Ride his bike off a cliff? He’d have plenty of chances, pedaling along US 40 through the mountains. Sometimes, though, leading with your chin was also a test of manhood. He stretched out his foot under the table. As if by accident, the side of his leg brushed against hers.

If she’d pulled away, he would have risen from the table feeling foolish, paid whatever she asked for the stew and the beer, and headed west. As it was, she stretched, too, slowly and languorously. He wondered if that sinuous motion came naturally or if she’d seen it in the movies and practiced. Either way, it made his heart thump like a drum.

He got up, walked around the table, and went down on one knee beside her. It was a position in which he could have proposed, although he had propositioning more in mind. He got the idea, though, that she didn’t want a lot of talk.

When he leaned forward and kissed her, she grabbed his head and pulled him to her hard enough to mash his lips against her teeth. He broke away for a moment, partly to breathe and partly to let his mouth glide to her earlobe and then down the smooth side of her neck. She arched her back like a cat and sighed deep in her throat.

His hand slid under her skirt. Her legs parted for him. He was gently rubbing at the crotch of her cotton panties when he remembered that plate-glass window. Idaho Springs wasn’t much of a town, but anybody walking by could see in. Hell, anybody walking by could walk in. “Is there someplace we can go?” he asked hoarsely.

That seemed to remind her of the big window, too. “Come on back to the kitchen with me,” she said. He didn’t want to take his hand away, but she couldn’t stand up unless he did.

She paused only a moment, to scoop up an old Army blanket from behind the counter on which the cash register sat. The stove in the kitchen, a coal-burner burning wood these days, made the place hot, but Jens didn’t care. He was plenty hot himself.

He unbuttoned the buttons that ran down the back of Mary’s white blouse and unhooked her brassiere. Her breasts filled his hands. He squeezed, not too hard. She shivered in his arms. He fumbled at the button that held her skirt closed, undid it, and yanked down the zipper beneath. The skirt made a puddle on the floor. She stepped out of it, kicked off her shoes, and pulled down her panties. Her pubic hair was startlingly dark against her pale, pale skin.

She spread the blanket on the floor while he tried not to tear his clothes getting out of them in excess haste. Everything would be all right this time-he was sure of it.

Everything was better than all right. She moaned and gasped and called his name and squeezed him with those wonderful contractions of the inner muscles so he exploded in the same instant she did. “Lord!” he said, more an exclamation of sincere respect than a prayer.

She smiled up at him, her face-probably like his-still a little slack with pleasure. “That was good,” she said. “And you’re a gentleman, you know that?”

“How do you mean?” he asked absently, not quite listening: he was hoping he’d rise again.

But she answered: “You keep your weight on your elbows.” That made him not only laugh but also slip and stop being a gentleman, at least by her standards. She squawked and wiggled, and he slid out of her. When he sat back on his knees, she reached for her discarded clothes, so she hadn’t been interested in a second round, anyhow.

Jens dressed even faster than he’d undressed. Where before he’d thought of nothing but getting his ashes hauled, now he recalled how much a stranger he was here, and what could happen to strangers when they fooled around with small-town women.

Another question formed in the back of his mind: did Mary expect to get paid? If he asked and the answer was no, he’d mortally offend her. If he didn’t ask and the answer was yes, he’d offend her a different way, one that might end up with his having a discussion he didn’t want with the gunman behind that curtained window.

After a few seconds’ thought, he found a compromise that pleased him. “What do I owe you for lunch and everything?” he asked. If she wanted to interpret and everything to mean a couple of beers, fine. If she thought it meant more than that, well, okay, too.

“Paper money?” Mary asked. Jens nodded. She said, “Thirty bucks ought to cover it.”

Given the way prices had gone crazy since the Lizards came, that wasn’t out of line for good chicken stew and two mugs of beer. Jens felt a surge of pride that she hadn’t been a pro. He dug in his pocket for a roll that would have astonished him in prewar days, peeled off two twenties, and gave them to her. “I’ll get your change,” she said, and started for the cash register.

“Don’t be silly,” he told her.

She smiled. “I said you were a gentleman.”

“Listen, Mary, when I come back from where I’m going-” he began, with the sentimentality satiation and a bit of beer can bring.

She cut him off. “If I ever see you again, tell me whatever you’re going to tell me. Till then, I’m not gonna worry about it. The war’s made everybody a little bit crazy.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” he said, and thought about Barbara for the first time since he decided to try playing footsie with Mary. Take that, bitch, he said to himself. Aloud, to Mary, he went on, “Thanks for everything-and I mean for everything. I’d better be heading out now.”

She sighed. “I know. Nobody ever stays in Idaho Springs-except me.” She took a couple of quick steps forward, pecked him on the cheek, and moved back again before he could grab her. “Wherever it is you’re going to, you be careful, hear me?”

“I will.” Suddenly he wanted to stay in Idaho Springs, a town he’d never heard of until he started planning the trip for Hanford. Amazing what a roll in the hay can do, he thought. But discipline held, aided by doubts whether Mary wanted anything more from him than that one roll, either.

The doorbell jingled again as he walked out of the First Street Cafe. He climbed onto his bicycle. “Giddyap,” he muttered as he started to pedal. The world wasn’t such a bad old place after all.

He held that view even though he needed a solid day to get to the top of Berthoud Pass, which wasn’t much more than twenty miles beyond Idaho Springs. He spent the night in the mining hamlet of Empire, then tackled the run to the pass the next morning. He didn’t think he’d ever worked so hard in this life. He’d gained a thousand feet between Idaho Springs and Empire, and picked up another three thousand in the thirteen miles between Empire and the top of the pass. Not only was he going up an ever-steeper grade, he was doing it in air that got thinner and thinner. Berthoud Pass topped out at better than eleven thousand feet: 11,315, said a sign that announced the Continental Divide.

“Whew.” Jens paused for a well-earned rest. He was covered with sweat and his heart was beating harder than it had when he’d come atop Mary Cooley, a day before and most of a mile lower. Denver had taken some getting used to. He wondered if anybody this side of an Andean Indian could hope to get used to the thin air of Berthoud Pass.

And yet signs on side roads pointed the way to ski resorts. People actually came up here for fun. He shook his head. “Me, I’m just glad it’s downhill from here on out,” he said, swigging from one of the canteens he’d filled back at Bards Creek in Empire. The kind folk there had also given him chunks of roast chicken to take along. He gnawed on a drumstick as he tried without much luck to catch his breath.

He thought he’d sweated out every drop of water in him, but emptying the canteen proved him wrong. He went off behind a boulder-not that anybody would have seen him if he’d taken a leak right out in the middle of US 40-and unzipped his fly.

The second he started to whiz, he hissed in sudden and unexpected pain; somebody might as well have lighted a match and stuck it up his joint. And along with the urine came thick yellow pus. “What the hell is that?” he burst out, and then, a moment later, as realization struck, “Jesus Christ, I’ve got the fucking clap!”

And where he’d got it was painfully obvious, in the most literal sense of the word. Not from the palm of his own hand, that was for goddamn sure. Somebody who’d lie down with one stranger passing through Idaho Springs… he wondered how many strangers she’d lain down with. One of them had left her a present, and she’d been generous enough to give it to him.

“That’s great,” he said. “That’s just wonderful.” Here he’d been on the point of rejoining the human race, and this had to happen. What he’d hoped would be his ticket out of the black gloom that had seized him ever since Barbara started laying that miserable ballplayer now turned out to be just another kick in the nuts-again, literally.

He thought about turning the bicycle around and heading back toward Idaho Springs. Give that tramp a Springfield thank-you, he thought. It would be an easy ride, too-all downhill. Down that grade, I could do twenty miles in twenty minutes. He knew he was exaggerating, but not by that much.

In the end, he shook his head. He didn’t quite have cold-blooded murder in him. Revenge was something else. As far as he was concerned, the whole human race had given him a screwing that made the dose he’d got from Mary Cooley look like a pat on the back by comparison.

Well, not quite like a pat on the back. As he climbed back onto the bicycle and started down the western slope of the Rockies, he was already dreading the next time he’d have to piss. Back before the war, sulfa had started knocking gonorrhea for a loop, if any doctor so much as had the stuff these days, he’d be saving it for matters more urgent than a case of VD.

“Hanford,” Jens muttered. His breath smoked as the word escaped his lips; even now, the snow didn’t lie that far above Berthoud Pass. He pedaled harder to get warm again.

He’d go on to Hanford. He’d see what there was to see. He’d head back for Denver and make his report. He wondered how much good it would do, or whether General Leslie hotshot Groves would pay the least bit of attention to it if he didn’t like what he said. None of the Met Lab people paid any attention to him these days. They were probably too busy laughing at him behind his back-and they’d laugh even harder when he came home with a drippy faucet. So would Barbara.

He wondered why he was wasting so much effort on sons of bitches-and one proper bitch-who wouldn’t appreciate what he did if he went out and built a bomb single-handed. But he’d said he’d go and he’d said he’d come back, and duty still counted for a lot with him.

“Hell, hadn’t been for duty, I’d still be married-yes, sir, I sure would,” he said. They’d asked him to take word about the Met Lab from Chicago to the government-in-hiding in West Virginia, and he’d gone and done it. But getting back hadn’t been so easy-and nobody’d bothered to ask his wife to keep her legs closed while he was gone.

So he’d do what he’d promised. He hadn’t made any promises about afterwards, though. He might take it into his head to ride east out of Denver after all.

He picked up speed and he rolled downhill. The thin air that blew against his face was spicy with the smell of the pines from the Arapaho National Forest all around.

“Or who knows?” he said. “I might even run into some Lizards on the way to Hanford. They’d listen to me, I bet. What do you think?” The breeze didn’t answer.