Tilting the Balance

XVII

Atvar stood on sand, looking out to sea. “This is a most respectable climate,” the fleetlord said. “Decently warm, decently dry-” The wind blew bits of grit into his eyes. They bothered him not in the least; his nictitating membranes flicked them out of the way without conscious thought on his part.

Kirel came crunching up beside him. “Even this northern Africa is not truly Home, though, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said. “It grows beastly cold at night-and winter here, by the reports, is almost as hideous as anywhere else on Tosev 3.”

“Not winter now.” For a moment, Atvar turned an eye turret toward the star the Race called Tosev. As always, its light struck him as too harsh, too white, not quite like the mellow, sunshine of Home. “I thought I would come down to the planet’s surface to see it at its best, not its worst.”

“It is well-suited to us here,” Kirel admitted. “Reports say the Tosevites from Europe there”-he pointed north across the blue, blue water-“who were fighting here when we arrived, spent most of their time complaining about how hot and dry this part of their planet was. Even the natives don’t care for the area during summer.”

“I have long since given up trying to fathom the Big Uglies’ tastes,” Atvar said. “I would call them revoltingly ignorant, except that, were they only a little more ignorant, our conquest would have been accomplished some time ago.”

“With the return of good-well, bearable-weather to the lands of our principal foes, the optimism I felt at the outset of our campaign here begins to return as well,” Kirel said. “We’ve gained against the Deutsche from both east and west we’re driving toward the capital of the SSSR, this Moskva being an important rail and transport center along with an administrative site; we continue to consolidate our hold on China despite bandits behind our lines; and the Americans fall back on the lesser continental land mass.”

“All true,” Atvar agreed, more happily than he’d spoken of the military situation on Tosev 3 for some time. “I begin to hope the colonists may yet find a pacified world awaiting their settlement. During the past winter in this hemisphere, I wouldn’t have put much credit in that.”

“Nor I, Exalted Fleetlord. But if our munitions hold out, I think we can successfully complete the conquest and settle down to administering rather than fighting.”

Atvar wished the shiplord hadn’t added that qualifying phrase. Munitions were a continuing problem. Provident as usual, the Race had given the conquest fleet far more supplies and weapons systems than it had expected the warriors to need against the animal-riding, sword-swinging savages the probes had shown inhabiting Tosev 3.

The only troubles was that, while Atvar still reckoned the Big Uglies savages, these days they made landcruisers, fired automatic weapons, and were beginning to fly jet aircraft and launch missiles. What would have been lavish supplies against primitives had to be carefully rationed to keep from running out before the Tosevites did. Atvar knew such care slowed the war effort, but he lacked the munitions to shut down all the Big Uglies’ industrial areas and keep them shut down.

“It does make things harder,” Kirel said when Atvar spoke of his concern. “Still, I count us ahead of the game in that we’ve not had to use nuclear weapons to any great degree. Wrecking the planet for the colonists would not leave our names in good odor in the annals of the Race.”

Would not leave Atvar’s name in good odor, was what he meant, though he was too polite to say so. The fleetlord won the glory-if any glory was to be won. If not, he won the blame. Atvar didn’t intend to win any blame.

“Some males-Straha, for instance,” he observed, “would destroy Tosev 3 in order to conquer it. They might as well be Big Uglies themselves, for all the care they give to the future.”

“Truth in your words, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said; he didn’t care for Straha, either. But he was also a thoroughgoing and conscientious officer, so he added, “In truth, though, sometimes the Tosevites are exasperating enough to make me wonder if we shouldn’t exterminate them to keep them from troubling us later. Take this latest trouble with-what was that Big Ugly’s name? — Moishe Russie.”

“Oh yes-that.” Atvar stuck out his tongue, as at a bad smell. “I thought it had to be one of Skorzeny’s exploits till intelligence reminded me Russie belonged to one of the groups the Deutsche were busy slaughtering until we came to Tosev 3. Computer analysis makes it unlikely they would have tried to rescue one of their foes, and I must say I agree with the machines here.”

“As do I,” Kirel said with a hissing sigh. “But don’t you think dismissing Zolraag as governor of the province was a trifle harsh? Other than when dealing with Russie and matters concerning him, his record was good enough.”

“What he’s cost us in those matters outweighs the rest,” Atvar said. “He petitioned for a reconsideration; I denied it. We hold too much of Tosev 3 only because the locals submit to us out of fear. If we are made to look like idiots, we shall no longer be objects of fear, and we shall have to divert forces from serious fighting to hold down areas now quiet. No, Zolraag deserved sacking, and sacking he got.”

Kirel cast his eyes to the ground in obedience to the fleetlord’s will. Another male came up to him and Atvar, one whose rather drab body paint made him seem out of place in such august company. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord, Superb Shiplord,” he said. His words were perfectly correct, his voice held the proper deference, and yet Atvar doubted his sincerity even so.

“I greet you, Drefsab,” the fleetlord returned, swinging one eye turret toward the intelligence operative. Drefsab’s motions were quick and jerky. With another male, that might have betrayed a ginger habit, but Drefsab had moved that way even before he became addicted to the Tosevite herb; he had a Big Ugly’s restlessness trapped in a body that belonged to the Race. Atvar said, “I presume you have come to report on the progress of your project in-what is the name of that Emperorless land?”

“Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska-the Independent State of Croatia,” Drefsab answered. His clawed fingers twitched restlessly, a sure sign of disgust. “Do you know, Exalted Fleetlord, there are times when the Big Uglies are as easy to manipulate as hatchlings still wet from the juices of their eggs?”

“I wish there were more such times,” Kirel observed.

“So do we all,” Atvar said. “How have you managed to manipulate the-Croats? — then?”

“They’re subordinates of the Deutsche, of course,” Drefsab said. “The Deutsche gained their support by giving them weapons and a free hand against their local enemies, which essentially means anyone who lives nearby and is not a Croat. All I had to do was promise more and better weapons and an even freer hand, and all at once they became most cooperative.”

Atvar felt faintly sick. The guidelines on conquering Tosev 3 he’d brought from Home, tomes composed thousands of years before, after the Race subjected first the Rabotevs and then the Hallessi, suggested playing local groups against one another. That sounded clean and logical. The reality, at least on Tosev 3, was apt to be sordid and soaked in blood.

Drefsab went on, “When measured against Tosev 3 as a whole-as opposed to Tosev 3 as a hole, which the Emperor surely knows it is-the Independent State of Croatia is of no importance whatever, being barely visible to the naked eye. But its position gives it importance to the Deutsche, who do not want us gaining influence there at their expense. And we have deliberately kept our effort there on a small scale, confining it to the coastal city of Split.”

“If you can damage the Deutsche in this Croatia place, why make only a small effort?” Kirel asked. “They are among the most dangerous, of the Tosevites.”

“To us, though, Superb Shiplord, Croatia has no great significance” Drefsab said. “And, in any case, I am seeking to elicit a specific response from the Deutsche. I don’t want them flooding the area with males; the terrain inland is mountainous and very bad for both armor and aircraft. I want them to bring in their own specialists in sabotage and destruction, and then I want to trap and destroy those specialists.”

“This is the lure you have prepared for Skorzeny,” Atvar exclaimed.

“Exalted Fleetlord, it is,” Drefsab agreed. “As you pointed out, he has embarrassed the Race too many times. Soon he will do so no more.”

“Eliminating Skorzeny will go a long way toward getting rid of a weakness you just finished discussing, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said excitedly. “Big Uglies around the world will have new reason to fear us once we take him out of play.”

“Exactly so.” Atvar turned his eye turrets back toward Drefsab. “How fares your other battle?”

“The one against the Tosevite herb, you mean?” Drefsab let out a long hiss. “I still taste now and again; that far, the addiction keeps its hold. I continue to struggle not to let it master all my thoughts. It has my body, but I work to keep my mind as free as I can.”

“Another lonely battle, and a brave one,” Atvar said. “So many yield both to ginger.”

“As free as I can, I said,” Drefsab answered. Dropping his eyes in. deference, he went on, “Emperor knows the craving never leaves, not altogether. Under the worst circumstances, who knows what I might do for a taste? For that very reason, I attempt to avoid placing myself in those circumstances.”

Atvar and Kirel also looked down at the yellow-brown sand. When the fleetlord raised his eyes once more, he said, “Your discipline in the face of this adversity does you great credit. Because of it, I am all the more certain you will succeed in eliminating that menace, Skorzeny.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done,” Drefsab said.

Vyacheslav Molotov peered between the backs of Stalin and his generals to study the map pinned down on the table in front of them. From the way things looked, Soviet forces were effectively pinned down, too.

“Comrade General Secretary, if Moscow is to be held, we need more men, more armor, more aircraft, and above all more time to place our assets in proper position,” Marshal Georgi Zhukov said. “Absent these, I do not see how we are to prevail.”

Few men dared speak so boldly to Stalin; Zhukov had won the right by his successes first in Mongolia against the Japanese, then defending Moscow from the Germans, and finally in holding the Lizards at bay through the winter just past. Stalin sucked on his pipe. It was empty; not even he could get tobacco these days. He said, “Georgi Konstantinovich, you saved this city once. Can you not do it again?”

“Then I had fresh troops from Siberia, and the fascists were at the end of their tether,” Zhukov answered. “Neither applies here. Without some special miracle, we shall be defeated-and the dialectic does not allow for miracles.”

Stalin grunted. Like so many revolutionaries, especially Georgian ones, he’d had seminary training. Now he said, “The dialectic may not allow for miracles, Comrade Marshal, but nevertheless I think I may be able to furnish you with one.”

Zhukov scratched his head. He was a blocky, round-faced man, much more typically Russian in looks than the slender Molotov “What sort of miracle do you have in mind?” he asked.

Molotov had wondered the same thing, but all at once he knew. Fear coursed through him. “Iosef Vissarionovich, we have discussed the reasons for not using this weapon,” he said urgently. “As far as I can see, they remain valid.”

That was as close as he’d come in years to criticizing Stalin.

The general secretary whirled around in surprise, the pipe jumping in his mouth. “If the choice is between going down to defeat after using every weapon we have and yielding tamely without making every effort to hit back at the enemy, I prefer the former.”

Zhukov didn’t say anything. Ivan Koniev asked, “What weapon is this? If we have a weapon that will let us hurt the Lizards, I say we use it-and to the devil’s grandmother with the consequences.”

After Zhukov, Koniev was the best general Stalin had. If he didn’t know about the explosive-metal bomb project, the secrecy was even more extraordinary than Molotov had imagined. He asked Stalin, “May we speak freely of this weapon?”

The pipe waggled again. “The time has come when we must speak freely of this weapon,” Stalin answered. He turned to Koniev. “We have, Ivan Stepanovich, a bomb of the sort the Lizards used on Berlin and Washington. If they break through at Kaluga and advance on Moscow, I propose to use it against them.”

With his crooked front teeth, Koniev looked even more like a middle-aged peasant than Zhukov did. “Bozhemoi,” he said softly. “If we have such-you are right, Comrade General Secretary: if we have such bombs, we should use them against the foe.”

“We have one such bomb,” Molotov said, “and no prospect of getting more for some time. No one knows how many of these bombs the Lizards have-but we may be about to find out by experiment.”

“Oh,” Koniev said, and then again, in a whisper, “Bozhemoi.” Glancing nervously at Stalin, he went on, “This is a choice we must face with great seriousness. One of these bombs, by report, can devastate a city as thoroughly as several weeks of unchallenged bombardment by an ordinary air force.” Now the pipe worked angrily in Stalin’s mouth. Before he could speak, Molotov said, “These reports are true, Comrade General. I have seen photographs of both Washington and Berlin. The melted stump of the Washington Monument-” He did not go on, both from the remembered horror of the photographs and for fear of further antagonizing Stalin. But he was too afraid of what would happen if explosive-metal bombs began to be used freely to keep silent.

Stalin paced back and forth. He did not put down the incipient rebellion at once, which was unusual. Maybe, Molotov thought, he has doubts, too. Stalin nodded to Zhukov. “How say you, Georgi Konstantinovich?”

Zhukov and Stalin were the same sort of military team as Molotov and Stalin were a political team: Stalin the guiding will, the other man the instrument that shaped the will to practical ends. Zhukov licked his lips; plainly he was of two minds, too. At last he said, “Comrade General Secretary, if we do not use this weapon, I see nothing that will keep us from being overrun. We may be able to continue partisan warfare against the Lizards, but not much more. How can what they do to us after we use the weapon be worse than what they will do to us if we do not use it?”

“Have you seen the pictures of Berlin?” Molotov demanded. By then, he was certain he had raised Stalin’s wrath, but he was too upset even to be frightened. That was most unusual; he would have to examine the feeling later. No time now.

Zhukov nodded. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I have. They are terrible. But have you seen pictures of Kiev after first the fascists and then the Lizards went through it? They are just as bad. This bomb is a more efficient means of destruction, but destruction will take place with it or without it.”

As always, Molotov held his features immobile. Behind that unsmiling mask, his heart sank. It sank still further when General Koniev asked, “How do we deliver this bomb? Can we drop it from an airplane? If we can do that, can we have some hope of putting an airplane where we most need it without the Lizards’ shooting it down?”

“Before we examine ways and means, we still need to consider whether we should take this course.” Molotov’s impassive voice concealed the desperation that grew inside him Stalin pretended he had not spoken and answered Koniev instead: “Comrade, the bomb is too bulky to fit into any of our bombers, and, as you say, the Lizards shoot them down too readily to make them a good way to deliver it anyhow. But planes are for taking bombs to an enemy who is far away if the enemy is instead coming to you-” He let the sentence hang.

Molotov scratched his head, not sure where Stalin was going with that. It must have made sense to Zhukov and Koniev though they both chuckled. Zhukov finished the phrase for Stalin:“-you put the bomb where he will be and wait.”

“Just so,” Stalin said happily. In fact, we shall encourage him to concentrate in the sector where we shall place the bomb to make sure we do him as much damage as we can. Now it made sense to Molotov too, but it didn’t t make him any happier.

Koniev said “Two risks here. The first is that the weapon will be discovered; past maskirovka, I don’t see what we can do about that. The second is that a weapon left behind won’t go off when we want it to. How do we make sure that does not happen?”

“We have multiple devices to set it off,” Stalin answered. “One is by radio signal, one is with a battery, and one is with a clockwork manufactured by German prisoners in our employ.” He spoke utterly without irony; Molotov had no doubt those prisoners were no longer among the living. “They did not know to what device the clockwork would be affixed, of course. But it has been tested repeatedly; it is most reliable.”

“Just as well, considering the use to which it will be put.” But Koniev nodded. “You are right, Comrade General Secretary: however vile the fascists may be, they make excellent mechanical devices. This clockwork or one of the other means you noted should definitely be able to set off the bomb at a time of our choosing.”

“So the engineers and scientists have assured me,” Stalin said with a slight purr in his voice that told what would happen if the engineers and scientists were wrong. Molotov would not have wanted to be in the shoes of the men who labored on that kolkhoz outside of Moscow.

He pushed forward between Zhukov and Koniev. Both officers looked at him in surprise; he was usually a good deal less assertive at military conferences, which he attended mostly so he would know how developments on the battlefield affected the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. He studied the map. Red units represented Soviet forces, green the Lizards, and occasional pockets of blue German troops that still fought on in the land they had invaded almost two years before.

Even to his unsoldierly eye, the situation looked grim. The makeshift line patched together between Sukhinichi and Kaluga wasn’t going to hold. He could see that already; not enough Red Army forces were in place to hold back the advancing Lizard armor. And once the line was pierced, it was fall back or get cut off from your comrades and surrounded. Nazi panzers had done that to Soviet troops again and again in the desperate summer and fall of 1941.

Nonetheless, he stabbed a hesitant finger out toward Kaluga. “Cannot we stop them here?” he asked. “Any effort, it seems to me, would be better than using the explosive metal bomb and facing whatever retaliation the Lizards may choose to inflict.”

“Even Kaluga is too close to Moscow, far too close,” Stalin said. “From airstrips behind the city, they can smash us to pieces.” But he glanced at Zhukov before he went on, “If they don’t come past Kaluga, we shall not deploy the bomb.”

“That is an excellent decision, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said fulsomely. Zhukov and Koniev both nodded. Molotov felt sweat under the armpits of his white cotton shirt. He wondered if the Tsar’s courtiers had had to tread so carefully in guiding their sovereign toward a sensible course. He doubted it-not since the days of Peter the Great, anyhow, or maybe Ivan the Terrible.

When Stalin spoke again, his voice held some of the steel that had given Iosef Dzhugashvili his revolutionary sobriquet: “If the Lizards advance past Kaluga, however, the bomb will be used against them.”

Molotov looked to Koniev and Zhukov for support. He found none. The marshal and the general were both nodding, perhaps without enthusiasm but. without hesitation, either. Molotov made his own head go up and down. Useless to argue with Stalin, he told himself Useless to antagonize him. He kept on nodding, though in his heart winter’s chill had returned to oust the bright spring day.

Heinrich Jager glanced up at the, sun before he raised the binoculars to his eyes. In the afternoon, the Lizards down in Split might have been able to spot reflections from the lenses. The hill-fortress of Klis in which he sheltered sat only a few kilometers inland from the city on the Adriatic coast.

The Zeiss optics brought Split leaping almost within arm’s length. Sixteen hundred years after it was built, Diocletian’s palace still dominated Jager’s view of the city. Fortress is a better word he thought. Actually, it was in essence a Roman legionary camp transformed into stone: a rough rectangle with sides of 150 to 200 meters, each one pierced by a single, central gate. Three of the four towers at the corners of the rectangle were still standing.

Jager lowered the binoculars. “Not a place I’d care to try attacking, even nowadays, without heavy artillery on my side,” he said.

Beside him, Otto Skorzeny grunted. “I can see why you, went into armor, Jager: you have no head for the subtleties.”

“What’s that Hungarian curse? — a horse’s cock up your arse?” Jager said. Both men laughed. Jager peered through the binoculars again. Even they couldn’t make the Lizard sentries on the walls of the palace and in positions around it seem much more than little moving antlike specks. They were well sited, no doubt about that; in set-piece situations, the Lizards were quite competent.

Skorzeny chuckled again. “I wonder if our scaly friends down there know that we have better plans of their strongpoint than they do.”

“They wouldn’t have picked it if they did,” Jager answered. The plans hadn’t come out of the archives of the German General Staff, but from the Zeitschrift fur sudosteuropaischen Archaologie. Skorzeny found that vastly amusing, and called Jager “Herr Doktor Professor” every chance he got. But even Skorzeny had to admit that the quality of the plans couldn’t have been better had military engineers drafted them.

“I think you’re right,” the SS man said. “To them it’s just the strongest building in town, so naturally it’s where they moved in.”

“Yes.” Jager wondered if the Lizards had a concept of archaeology. Word filtering out of intelligence said they were conservative by nature (which he’d already discovered from fighting against them) and that they’d had their own culture as a going concern since the days when people were barbarians if not downright (and barely upright) savages. That made Jager think they wouldn’t reckon any building a mere millennium and a half old worth studying as a monument of antiquity.

“So, what are you, going to do about getting those cursed creatures out of there?” Marko Petrovic asked in fluent if accented German. The Croatian captain’s khaki uniform contrasted with the field gray the Germans wore. Even though Petrovic wore a uniform, being around him made Jager nervous-he seemed more bandit chief than officer. His thick black beard only added to the effect. It did not, however, completely conceal facial scars that made the one seaming Skorzeny’s cheek a mere scratch by comparison.

Skorzeny turned to the Croat and said, “Patience, my friend. We want to do the job properly, not just quickly.”

Petrovic scowled. His beard and scars made that scowl fearsome, but the look in his eye chilled Jager more. To Petrovic, it wasn’t just a military problem; he took it personally. That would make him a bold fighter, but a heedless one: Jager performed the evaluation as automatically as he breathed.

“What’s the complication?” the Croat demanded. “We’re in easy shelling range of the place now. We move in some artillery, open up, and-”

The idea of shelling a building that had stood since the start of the fourth century sickened Jager, but that wasn’t why he shook his head. “Artillery wouldn’t root them all out, Captain, and it would give them an excuse to expand their perimeter to take in these hills. They’re staying in town; I’d just as soon keep them down there as long as they’re willing to sit quietly.”

“You would not be bleating ‘patience’ if Split were a town in the Reich,” Petrovic said.

He had a point; Hitler waxed apoplectic over German territory lost. Jager was not about to admit that, though. He said, “We have a chance to drive them out, not just annoy them. I aim to make certain we don’t waste it.”

Petrovic glowered-like a lot of the, locals, he had a face that was made for glowering:, long and bony, with heavy eyebrows and deep set eyes-but subsided. Skorzeny swatted him on the back and said, “Don’t you worry. We’ll fix those miserable creatures for you.” He, sounded breezy and altogether confident.

If he convinced Petrovic, the Croat captain did a good job of hiding it. He said, “You Germans think you can do everything. You’d better be right this time, or-” He didn’t say or what, but walked off shaking his head.

Jager was glad he’d gone. “Some of these Croats are scary bastards,” he said in a low voice. Skorzeny nodded, and anyone who worried him enough for him to admit it was a very rugged customer indeed. Jager went on, “We’d better get the Lizards out of there, because if we don’t, Ante Pavelic and the Ustashi will be just as happy in bed with them as with us, as long as the Lizards let them go on killing Serbs and Jews and Bosnians and-”

“-all their other neighbors,” Skorzeny finished for him. He didn’t acknowledge that the Germans had done the same thing on a bigger scale all through the east. He couldn’t have been ignorant of that; he just deliberately didn’t think about it. Jager had seen that with other German officers. He’d been the same way himself, until he saw too much for him to ignore. To him, a lot of his colleagues seemed willfully blind.

Skorzeny pulled a flask off his belt, unstoppered it, took a healthy belt, and passed it to Jager. It. was vodka, made from potatoes that had died happy. Jager drank, too. “Zhiveli,” he said, one of the few words of Serbo-Croatian he’d picked up.

Skorzeny laughed. “That probably means something like ‘here’s hoping your sheep is a virgin,’ ” he said, which made Jager cough and choke. The SS man had another swig, then stowed the flask again. He glanced around with a skilled imitation of casual uninterest to make sure nobody but Jager was in earshot, then murmured, “I picked up something interesting n town yesterday.”

“Ah?” Jager said.

The SS colonel nodded. “you’remember when I went into Besancon, I had the devil’s own time finding any Lizards to do business with, because one of their high mucky-mucks had gone through there and cleaned out a whole raft of the chaps who’d gotten themselves hooked on ginger?”

“I remember your saying so, yes,” Jager answered. “It didn’t seem to stop you.” He also remembered his own amazement and then awe as the bulky Skorzeny writhed his way out of a Lizard panzer several sizes too small for him.

“That’s my job, not getting stopped,” Skorzeny said with a mug grin that twisted the scar on his cheek. “Turns out the name of that mucky-muck was Drefsab, or something like that. Half the Lizards in Besancon thought he was wonderful for doing such a good job of clearing out the ginger lickers; the other half hated him for doing such a good job.”

“What about it?” Jager said, then paused. “Wait a minute, let me guess-This Dref-whoever is down there in Split now?”

“You’re clever, you know that?” The SS man eyed him half in annoyance at having his surprise spoiled, half in admiration.

“I wasn’t stupid to bring you along here, either. That’s it exactly, Jager the very same Lizard.”

“Coincidence?”

“Anything is possible.” Skorzeny’s tone said he didn’t believe it for a minute. “But by what he did back in France, he’s got to be one of their top troubleshooters. And there aren’t any ginger lickers down there. The locals would be selling to them if there were, and the ten kilos I brought with me is gathering dust here in Klis. And if it’s not about ginger, what’s he doing down there?”

“Dickering with the Croats?”

Skorzeny rubbed his chin. “That makes more sense than anything I’ve come up with. The Lizards need to do some dickering, not just to get their toehold here but also because the Italians were occupying Split until they surrendered to the Lizards. Then the Croats threw ’em out. The scaly boys might be making a deal for Italy as well as for themselves. But it’s like a song that’s a little out of tune-it doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow.”

Jager was indignant at having his brainchild criticized.

“Why not?”

“What this Drefsab did in Besancon, that was police work, security work-call it whatever you like. But would you send a Gestapo man to negotiate a treaty?”

Now Jager looked around to make certain neither Captain Petrovic nor any of his merry men could overhear. “If I were negotiating with Ante Pavelic and his Croatian thugs, I just might.”

Skorzeny threw back his head and bellowed laughter. A couple of riflemen in the khaki of the Independent State of Croatia glanced over to see what was so funny. Wheezing still, Skorzeny said, “Wicked man! I’ve told you before, you were wasted in panzers.”

“You’ve told me lots of things. That doesn’t make them true,” Jager said, which made the SS man give him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. He elbowed back, more to remind Skorzeny he couldn’t be pushed around than because he felt like fighting. Jager gave away, centimeters, kilograms, and nasty attitude in any scrap with him; he didn’t think Skorzeny knew what quit meant, either.

“Here dig out those plans again,” Skorzeny said. “I think I know what I want to do, but I’m not quite sure yet.” Jager obediently dug. Skorzeny bent over the drawings, clucking like a mother hen. “I like these underground galleries. We can do things with them.”

The halls to which he pointed lay below the southern part of Diocletian’s palace. “There used to be upper halls above them, too, with the same plan, but those are long gone,” Jager said.

“Then screw them.” Skorzeny didn’t care about archaeology, just military potential. “What I want to know is, what’s in these galleries?”

“Back in Roman days, they used to be storerooms,” Jager said. “I’m not so sure what’s in there now. We need to talk to our good and loyal Croatian allies.” He was proud of himself; that came out without a hint of irony.

“Yes, indeed,” Skorzeny said, accepting the advice in the spirit in which it was given. “What I’m thinking is, maybe we can dig a tunnel from outside the wall into one of those galleries-”

“Always making sure we don’t happen to tunnel into the Lizards’ barracks.”

“That would make things more complicated.” Skorzeny chuckled. “But if we can do that, we have our good and loyal allies make a nice, loud, showy attack on the walls, draw any Lizard who happens to be underground up to the top… and then we bring in some of our lads through the tunnel and up, and-what was that? The horse’s cock up the arse?”

“Yes,” Jager said. “I like that.” Then, like a proper devil’s advocate, he started picking holes in the plan: “Moving men and weapons into the city and into the place that houses the tunnel or at least somewhere close by it isn’t going to be easy and we’ll need a lot of men. That’s a big palace down there, big enough for a church and a baptistry and a museum to fit inside, plus God knows what all else. The Lizards will have packed a lot of fighters into it.”

“I’m not worried about the Lizards,” Skorzeny said. “If these Croats decide to hop into bed with them, though, that’ll nail our hides to the wall. We have to keep that from happening, no matter what; I don’t give a damn what we have to give Pavelic to keep him on our side.”

“Free rein would probably do it, and he has that already, pretty much,” Jager said with distaste. The Independent State of Croatia seemed to have only one plan for staying independent: hammering all its neighbors enough to make sure nobody close by got strong enough to take revenge.

If Skorzeny felt the same revulsion Jager did, he didn’t show it. He said, “We can promise him more chunks of the coast that the Italians are still occupying. He’ll like that-it’ll give him fresh traitors to get rid of.” He spoke without sarcasm; he might have been talking about the best way to sweeten the deal for a secondhand car.

Jager couldn’t be so cold-blooded. Very softly, he said, “That Schweinhund Pavelic runs a filthy regime.”

“You bet he does, but he’s our Schweinhund, and we want make sure he stays that way,” Skorzeny answered, just as quietly. “If it does, every one of these Lizards, that Drefsab included, is ours, too.” He brought a fist down onto his knee. “That will happen.”

Compared to yielding to the Lizards, making deals with Ante Pavelic seemed worthwhile. Compared to anything else, Jager found it most repugnant. And yet, before the Lizards came, Pavelic had been a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the German Reich. Jager wondered what that said about Germany. Nothing good, he thought.

Shanghai amazed Bobby Fiore. Much of the town was pure Chinese, and reminded him of a large-scale, rowdier version of the prison camp where he’d lived with Liu Han. So far, so good; he’d expected as much. What he hadn’t expected was the long streets packed full of European-style buildings from the 1920s. It was as if part of Paris, say, had been picked up, carried halfway round the world, and dropped down smack in the middle of China. As far as Fiore was concerned, it didn’t fit.

The other thing that amazed him was how much damage the city had taken. You walked around, you knew they’d been in a war here. The Japs had bombed the place to hell and gone, and then burned it when they took it in 1937; he still remembered the news photo of the naked little burned Chinese boy sitting up and crying in the ruins. When he first saw it, he’d been ready to go to war with Japan right then. But he’d cooled down, and so had everybody else. Then Pearl Harbor came along and said he’d been right the first time.

When the Lizards took Shanghai away from the Japs, they hadn’t exactly’ given it a peck on the cheek, either. Whole blocks were leveled, and human bones still lay here and there. The Chinese weren’t what you’d call eager to bury Japanese remains. Their attitude was more on the order of let ’em rot.

In spite of everything, though, the town, especially the Chinese part of it, kept right on humming. The Lizards made their headquarters in some of the Western-style buildings; the rest remained ruins. In the Chinese districts, things were going up faster than you could shake a stick at them.

But since the Lizards mostly stayed in the International Settlement, Bobby Fiore mostly stayed there, too. The job he’d taken on for the Reds was to keep on looking as much like a Chinaman as he could, to keep his ears open, and to report to Nieh Ho-T’ing anything interesting he heard. The Red officer had promised he’d get to go along when the guerrillas tried a raid based on what he’d learned.

So far, that hadn’t happened. “And I’m not gonna worry about it, neither,” Fiore muttered under his breath. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind nailing a few of those scaly bastards, but I didn’t hire out to be no hero.”

He walked across the Garden Bridge over Soochow Creek from the Bund to the Hongkew district to the north. Soochow Creek itself was filled with junks and other small Chinese boats whose names Fiore didn’t know: from all he’d heard, people were born and raised and grew up and died on those boats. Some of them made their living fishing on the creek; others worked on land but didn’t have anyplace else to stay.

The Hongkew district, in spite of its Chinese name, was part of the International Settlement. The Lizards had an observation post, and probably a machine-gun nest, in the clock tower of the Head Post Office, which lay along Soochow Creek between Broadway and North Szechuen Road.

Bobby Fiore was tempted to duck into the Temple of the Queen of Heaven just a few yards north of the Garden Bridge, even though the Chinese didn’t mean the Virgin. In the temple’s inner court were the images of the gods Lin Tsiang Ching, who was supposed to see everything within a thousand li of Shanghai, and Ching Tsiang Ching, who was supposed to hear everything within the same distance.

Fiore glanced up toward heaven. “They’re just patron saints, kind of,” he murmured to the Catholic God he assumed to be glancing down at him. The heavens remained mute. He walked past the Temple of the Queen of Heaven this time, though he’d gone in before.

Streets and sidewalks were crowded. No cars and trucks were running except Lizard models and human-made ones taken over by the Lizards, but people, rickshaws, pedicabs, and draft animals took up the slack. Beggars staked out squares of sidewalk; some of them chalked on the paving stones messages of woe Fiore couldn’t read. They reminded him of the poor out-of-work bastards who’d hawked apples on streetcorners when the Depression was at its worst.

If the streets had been crowded, the Hongkew marketplace, at the corner of Boone and Woosung Roads, was jammed. Fishermen from Soochow Creek, farmers, butchers-all cried their wares at something just over the top of their lungs. If the market in the prison camp where he’d stayed with Liu Han was Fan’s Field in Decatur, this place had to be Yankee Stadium.

Not only locals shopped here, either. Lizards made their skittering, herky-jerky progress from one stall to another. They could simply have taken whatever they, wanted; from what Nieh Ho-T’ing had said, they’d done that at first.

“Now they pay,” he’d said. “They learn that if they give nothing to get something, it is not in the market square the next time they want it.”

Sure enough, a Lizard bought a live, kicking lobster and paid the stall keeper in Chinese silver dollars, which, for reasons Fiore could not fathom, were also called Mex dollars. The Lizard’s companion said to him, “These are tasty creatures. Go on, Ianxx, buy several more. We can cook them for the commandant’s midday reception tomorrow.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” said the lobster buyer, presumably Ianxx. He went back to bargaining with the fisherman.

Fiore bent his head down and did his best to look Chinese. The brim of his conical straw hat covered his nose and too-round eyes; he wore drab, dark cottons that reminded him of pajamas, just like most other people. The Lizards should have no reason to notice his skin wasn’t exactly the right color.

They didn’t. They went off with their purchases, holding them carefully to avoid the lobsters’ flailing claws. Bobby Fiore followed them back across the Garden Bridge. The Lizards paid no attention to him; as far as they were concerned, he was just another Big Ugly.

Now which commandant were you talking about? he asked them silently. They went through the Public Garden near the south edge of the Garden Bridge, and then on to the British Consulate. Fiore skinned back his teeth in a fierce grin; that was where the Lizard commandant for all Shanghai had his headquarters.

Not all of the International Settlement was posh buildings full of foreigners-or rather, now, full of Lizards. In an alley off Foochow Road, jammed in between other equally unpretentious erections, was a dilapidated place called the Sweetheart; the door had the name in English and what he presumed to be its equivalent in Chinese characters. When Fiore went inside, he was greeted by a blast of scratchy jazz from a phonograph and by the multilingual chatter of the working girls in the front lounge.

He snorted laughter. Nieh Ho-T’ing was one smart cookie. The Reds had a reputation for being bluenoses. Who would have figured one of their big wheels would set up shop in a whorehouse?

As far as Bobby knew, Nieh didn’t go to bed with any of the girls. He didn’t mind if Fiore enjoyed himself, though, and some of the Russians, girls whose parents had been on the losing side of the Revolution and had to get out one step ahead of Lenin’s bully boys, were simply gorgeous. He wondered what they thought of being in cahoots with a Red now. He hadn’t tried finding out; he’d learned to keep his mouth shut when he wasn’t sure about the person he was talking to.

He opened the door to the lounge. The jazz got louder. The chatter, on the other hand, suddenly stopped. Then the girls recognized him and started gabbing again.

He looked around like a kid in a candy store. Russians, Eurasians, Chinese, Koreans, some in European-style lingerie, others in clinging dresses of Chinese silk slit up to here and sometimes down to there too… just being a fly on the wall at the Sweetheart was almost as good as getting laid at some of the dismal sporting houses he’d been to back in the States.

“Is Uncle Wu around?” he asked; that was the name Nieh Ho-T’ing used hereabouts. Another wonderful thing about the Sweetheart was that he could speak English. Almost all the girls understood it, and two or three of them were about as fluent as he was.

One of the Russians, a blonde in a silk dress slit up to here and then a couple of inches farther, pointed to the stairway and said, “Da, Bobby, he is in his room now.”

“Thanks, Shura.” Bobby made himself look away from the display of creamy thigh and head for the stairs.

Up on the second floor, he made sure he knocked on the third door on the left. If he’d picked the wrong one by mistake, he might have interrupted somebody who didn’t want to be interrupted. Too many people in Shanghai carried guns to make that a good idea.

As a matter of fact, when Nieh Ho-T’ing opened the door, he was holding a submachine gun himself. He relaxed when he saw Fiore-or relaxed as far as he ever did, which wasn’t much. “Come in,” he said, and closed the door behind Fiore. “What do you have for me?”

Bobby hated shifting from English to his halting Chinese, but he knew Nieh Ho-T’ing would burst a blood vessel if he suggested using one of the hookers to interpret. The Red officer waved him to a chair. On either wall, multitudes of mirrored images of him also sat down: this was a room in a brothel, sure enough.

He told Nieh Ho-T’ing what he’d heard in the Hongkew market. Nieh listened, asked questions, and finally nodded. “Luncheon tomorrow for their commandant in the British Consulate, you say?” he mused when Fiore was done. “Maybe we can make it a livelier occasion than the little scaly devils expect, eh?”

“Yeah,” Bobby Fiore said; one of his frustrations in speaking Chinese was that he couldn’t qualify anything. He had to go thumbs-up or thumbs-down, with nothing in the middle.

Nieh Ho-T’ing smiled, not altogether pleasantly. He said, “I was wise to use you and not liquidate you out in the countryside. You have brought information I can employ, and which I could not have had without you.”

“That’s nice,” Fiore said with an uneasy answering smile. Liquidate wasn’t a Chinese word he’d figured he’d pick up in ordinary conversation, but Nieh used it a lot. The Reds were in deadly earnest about what they did. You weren’t with them, you’d better have your life insurance paid up.

The really crazy part of it was, whenever Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t make like a revolutionary or a Mafia soldier, he was as nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet. It was as if he put all the murderous stuff in a box and took it out whenever he needed it, but when he wasn’t using it, you wouldn’t guess it was there.

Now his smile was broad and happy, as if such things as liquidation had never crossed his mind. He said, “I’m going to do you a favor in return for the one you did me. I am sure you will take it in the intended spirit.”

“Yeah? What kind of favor?” Fiore asked suspiciously. Favors always sounded good. Sometimes they were, as when Nieh had said it was okay for him to fool around with the girls’ downstairs. But sometimes…

This was one of those times. Still beaming, Nieh said, “I am going to keep the promise I made you: you will be part of our raiding team.”

“Uh, thank you.” That was the best Fiore could do in Chinese. If he’d been speaking English, it would have, come out, Oh boy, thanks a lot.

If Nieh Ho-Ting noticed the irony and lack of enthusiasm, he didn’t show it. “Aiding in the fight against the imperialist devils from another world is surely the duty of every human being. Those who do not join in the struggle are the devils’ running dogs, and we know the fate of running dogs, eh?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Bobby Fiore muttered. Talk about stuck between a rock and a hard place! If he came along for the ride, the Lizards would shoot him. If he didn’t, the Chinese Reds would take care of the job. Either way, he could forget about finding out how the latest serial over at the Nanking on Avenue Edward VII was going to end.

Musingly, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “Your pistol is not a good enough weapon for this work. We will make certain you have a submachine gun.” He held up a hand. “No, don’t thank me. It is for the mission as much as for yourself.”

Bobby hadn’t planned on thanking him. He wished he were back in the Lizard prison camp with Liu Han, and that he’d never, ever tried to teach that Chinaman named Lo how not to throw like a girl.

With a slight curl to his lip-he really was a bluenose at heart-Nieh said, “Why don’t you go downstairs and amuse yourself for a time, if you have nothing better to do? I need to find out if we can do what needs doing on such short notice, and the best way to do it if we can.”

Fiore didn’t need any more urging to go downstairs. If he was going off to get shot at (he carefully didn’t think of it as to get shot) tomorrow, he’d have fun tonight. Not much later, he ended up back in one of those mirrored rooms with Shura the White Russian blonde. By any objective standard, she was prettier and better in the sack than Liu Han had been, so he wondered why he didn’t feel as happy as he might have when he went back to the room where he slept.

The only thing he could think of was that he’d cared about Liu Han and she about him, but Shura was just going through the motions, even if she played the mattress the way Billy Herman played second base. “Goddamn,” he muttered sleepily. “I guess it was love.” Next thing he knew, the sun was up.

He went down to breakfast like a condemned man heading off for his last meal. Even eyeing the girls couldn’t snap him out of his funk. He was finishing his cup of tea When Nieh HoT’ing stuck his head into the kitchen and waved to him. “Come here. We have things to talk about.”

Bobby came. Nieh handed Fiore a rattan suitcase. It was heavy. When Fiore opened it, he found a Russian submachine gun, several magazines of ammunition, and four potato-masher grenades.

“You will not go in with us,” Nieh said. “You loiter across from the front entrance to the British Consulate. When the time comes-you will know, I assure you-kill the guards there if you can and help any human beings who come out through those doors.”

“Okay,” Fiore said in English when he was sure he understood what Nieh wanted from him. The Red nodded; he got that. Fiore switched to his lousy Chinese: “How will you get in the consulate? How will you bring more guns in?”

“I should not tell you-security.” But Nieh Ho-T’ing looked too pleased with himself to keep his mouth shut altogether. He went on, “This much I will say: the consulate will have some new human cooks and waiters today, and they will be bringing in ducks to go with the lobsters for the commandant’s feast.”

He clammed up again-if Bobby couldn’t work it out from there, that was his tough luck. But he could, and started to laugh when he thought about how those ducks would be stuffed. No wonder Nieh looked so smug! “Good luck,” Fiore said. He stuck out his hand, but yanked it back; Chinamen didn’t go in for handshakes.

Nieh Ho-T’ing surprised him, though, by reaching out and taking his hand. “My Soviet comrades have this custom; I know what it means,” he said, then looked at his watch. “Take your place at noon. The banquet is supposed to begin at half past the hour, and will not last long.”

“Okay,” Fiore said. If he’d been in a town where he spoke the language, he would have thought about taking it on the lam with the arsenal. Getting the Reds mad at him, though, seemed a worse bet than taking his chances on the Lizards.

He had plenty of time for another screw before he took off. Shura came back upstairs with him willingly enough. Afterwards, she blinked when he gave her an extra couple of dollars Mex; he was usually as cheap as he could get away with. “You rob a bank, Bobby?” she asked.

“Two of ’em, babe,” he said, deadpan, as he started to dress. She blinked again, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

Suitcase in hand, he headed for the Bund. He knew Nieh Ho-T’ing and his buddies were taking the real risk; if the Lizards inside the British Consulate were on their toes, the scheme was dead in the water.

He got to Number 33, the Bund, just as clocks were striking twelve. Nieh would be pleased with him; when he said noon, he meant on the dot. Now Bobby had to hang around and look inconspicuous till the fireworks started. He bought a bowl of watery soup from a passing vendor, then had an inspiration and bought the bowl itself. He sat down on the pavement with it beside him and made like a beggar.

Every once in a while, somebody tossed a copper in the bowl, or even some silver. Bobby kept track-when the shooting started, he had just over a dollar, Mex.

The British Consulate was a large, imposing building. Not even its stonework, though, could muffle the rattle of automatic weapons fire. The Lizard guards at the main entrance whirled around and stared, as if unsure what to do next and unable to believe the ears they didn’t have.

Fiore didn’t give them much of a chance to think it over. As soon as he heard guns, he opened the suitcase, yanked out a grenade, unscrewed the metal cap at the bottom, pulled the porcelain bead inside to work the friction igniter, and let fly as if he were making a throw to the plate.

Had there been a runner, he would have been out. The grenade landed right in the middle of the four Lizards. When it went off a second later, people who had been exclaiming over the shots inside the consulate started screaming and running instead.

The only trouble was, it didn’t knock out all the Lizards. A couple of them started shooting, even if they didn’t know just where it had come from. The screams along the Bund turned into shrieks. Fiore dove behind a solid bench of wood and iron; he opened up with the submachine gun. He hoped he didn’t hit anybody on the street, but he wasn’t going to lose any sleep if he did-those Lizards had to go down. And down they went.

More shots from inside the British Consulate, then those entry doors burst open. Nieh and half a dozen other Chinamen, some wearing cooks’ clothes the rest looking like penguins in fancy waiter getup (though waiters didn’t commonly tote automatic weapons), sprinted down the steps and then down the street.

Lizards opened up on them from the roof and from second-story windows. The fleeing humans started spinning and dropping and kicking, like flies swatted not quite hard enough to die right away. “You just talked about the bastards at the door, goddammit,” Bobby muttered, as if Nieh Ho-T’ing were close enough to hear. “You didn’t say nothin’ about the rest of ’em.”

He raised the submachine gun and blazed away at the Lizards till his magazine ran dry. He grabbed another one, slammed it into the weapon, and had just started shooting again when a burst of three bullets stitched across his chest. The submachine gun fell out of his hands. He tried to reach for it, found he couldn’t. He didn’t hurt. Then he did. Then he didn’t, ever again.

Brigadier General Leslie Groves strode across the campus of the University of Denver with his head down, as if he were a bull looking to trample anyone who got in his way. That hard-charging attitude had been instinctive in him until one day he noticed and deliberately cultivated it. Thanks in no small part to that, not a whole lot of people got in his way these days.

“Physicists,” he snorted under his breath, again bullishly. The trouble with them was they were so lost in their own rarefied world a lot of the time that they didn’t always feel the pressure he put on them, let alone yield to it.

He didn’t note anything out of the ordinary about the day until he walked into the Science building and discovered he didn’t recognize any of the soldiers crowding the downstairs lobby. That made him frown; Sam Yeager and the rest of the dogface with the Met Lab crew were as familiar to him as his shoelaces.

He looked around for the highest-ranking officer he could find. “Why have we been invaded, Major?” he asked.

The fellow with the gold oak leaves on his shoulders saluted. “If you’d be so kind as to come with me, General-” he said in the polite phrases lower-ranking officers use to give their superiors orders.

Groves was so kind as to come with him until he figured out where he was going, which didn’t take long. “Major, if I need an escort to find my own office, I’m the wrong man to head this project,” he growled. The major didn’t answer, he just kept walking. Groves fumed but followed. Sure enough, they were heading for his office. In front of it stood a couple of men who looked as tough and alert as soldiers but wore medium-snappy civilian suits. A light went on in Groves’ head. He turned to the major and asked, “Secret Service?”

“Yes, sir.”

One of the T-men, after checking Groves’ face against a little photo he held in the palm of his hand, nodded to the other.

The second one opened the door and said, “General Groves is here, sir.”

“Well, he’d better come in, then, hadn’t he?” an infinitely familiar voice replied from within. “It being his office, after all.”

“Why the devil didn’t I get any warning President Roosevelt was coming to Denver?” Groves hissed to the major.

“Security,” the other officer whispered back. “We have to assume the Lizards monitor everything we broadcast, and we’ve lost couriers, too. The less we say, the safer FDR is. Now go on in; he’s been waiting for you.”

Groves went in. He’d met Roosevelt before, and knew the President wasn’t as vibrant in person as he appeared in the newsreels: being cooped up in a wheelchair would do that to you. But since the last time he’d seen FDR, a year earlier at White Sulphur Springs, the change was shocking. Roosevelt’s flesh seemed to have fallen in on his bones; he might have aged a decade or more in that year. He looked like a man worn to death’s door.

For all that, though, his grip was still strong when he reached out to shake General Groves’ hand after the engineer had saluted. “You’ve lost weight, General,” he observed, amusement in his eyes-his body might be falling to pieces around it, but his mind was still sharp.

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. Roosevelt had lost weight, too, but he wasn’t about to remark on it.

“Sit down, sit down.” The President waved him to the swivel chair behind his desk. Groves obediently sat. Roosevelt turned the wheelchair to face him. Even his hands had lost flesh; the skin hung loose on them. He sighed and said, “I wish to God I had a cigarette, but that’s neither here nor there-certainly not here, worse luck.” FDR sighed again. “Do you know, General, when Einstein sent me that letter of his back in ‘39, I had the feeling all his talk of nuclear weapons and bombs that could blow up the world was likely to be so much moonshine, but I couldn’t take the chance of being wrong. And, it turns out, I was right-and how I wish I hadn’t been!”

“Yes, sir,” Groves repeated, but then added, “If you hadn’t been right, though, sir, we’d have been in no position to resist the Lizards and to copy what they’ve done.”

“That’s true, but it’s not what I meant,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I’d been right, and that all the talk about nuclear weapons and atomic power and who knows what were so much moonshine. Then all I’d have to worry about would be beating Hitler and Hirohito, and the Lizards would be back on the second planet of the star Tau Ceti where they belong, and people wouldn’t meet them for another million years, if we ever did.”

“Is that where they’re from?” Groves asked with interest. “I’ll have to have our liaison man put the question to the Lizard POWs we have here.”

FDR made a gesture of indifference. “As you like, and if you have the time; otherwise don’t trouble yourself about it. These Lizards are an astonishing intelligence resource, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said enthusiastically. “The ones we have here have been extremely cooperative.”

“Not just them, General. With what we’re learning from systematic interrogation of all our captives, we’ll leap forward by decades, maybe centuries.” Roosevelt’s expression, which had brightened, turned cloudy again. “If we win the war, that is-which is what I came to talk about. What I want to know is, how soon will we have nuclear weapons of our own to use against the Lizards?” He leaned forward in his chair, intently awaiting Groves’ reply.

Groves nodded; he’d expected the question. “Sir, I am told we can have one nuclear bomb fairly soon. England supplied us with enough plutonium that we need to manufacture only a few more kilograms of our own to have enough for a bomb. Within a. year, the scientists here tell me.”

“That’s not soon enough.” Roosevelt made a sour face. “It may do, but every day they shave off it will bring the country one day closer to being saved. How long for more after the first?”

Now it was Groves’ turn to look unhappy. “You understand, sir, that we have to come up with all the explosive material for them on our own. The pile-that’s, what they call it-the Met Lab staff has built here isn’t ideally designed for that, although we are improving it as we gain experience. And one of our physicists is scouting a site where we can build a pile that will give us larger amounts of plutonium.” He wondered how Jens Larssen was doing.

“I know about Hanford,” Roosevelt said impatiently. “I don’t need the technical details, General-that’s why you’re here. But I do need to know how long I have to wait for my weaponry so I can make sure there’s a country left when I get it.”

“I understand,” Groves said. “If all goes well-if the pile goes up on schedule and works as advertised, and if the Lizards don’t overrun Hanford or wherever we put it-you should have more bombs starting about six months after the first one: by the end of 1944, more or less.”

“Not soon enough,” Roosevelt repeated. “Still, we’re better off than the rest. The Germans might have been right there with us, but you’ve no doubt heard about the mistakes they made with their pile. The British are relying on us; we’re passing information to the Japanese, who are well behind us; and the Russians-I don’t know about the Russians.”

Groves’ opinion of Soviet scientific prowess was not high. Then he remembered the Russians had got some plutonium from that raid on the Lizards, too. “A wild card,” he said.

“That’s right.” Roosevelt nodded emphatically. His famous jaw still had granite in it, no matter how badly the rest of his features had weathered. “I’ve been in touch with Stalin. He’s worried-the Lizards are pushing hard against Moscow. If it falls, who can say whether the Russians will keep on listening to their government, and if they don’t, we’ve lost a big piece of the war.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said. Although he was as security-conscious as a man in his position had to be, he also had a well-honed curiosity-and how often did you get to pick the brain of the President of the United States? “How bad is it over in the Soviet Union, sir?”

“It’s not good,” FDR said. “Stalin told me that if I had any men to spare, he’d leave them under their own officers, leave them under my direct personal command if that was wanted, as long as they went over there and fought the Lizards.”

Groves’ lips puckered into a soundless whistle. That was a cry of pain if ever he’d heard one. “He’s not just worried, sir, he’s desperate. What did you tell him?”

“I answered no, of course,” Roosevelt said. “We have a few small differences with the Lizards on our own soil at the moment.” The high-pitched laugh so familiar from the radio and the newsreel screen filled the office. As it had so often in the past, it lifted Groves’ spirits-but only for a moment. The danger facing-filling-the United States was too great to be laughed off. The President continued, “For instance, the Lizards are pushing hard against Chicago, too. They have us cut in half along the Mississippi almost as badly as the North did with the South during the Civil War, to say nothing of the other areas they’ve carved out of the country. It hinders us every way you can think of, militarily and economically both.”

“Believe me, sir, I understand that,” Groves said, remembering how he’d had to bring the plutonium to Denver by way of Canada. “What can we do about it, though?”

“Fight ’em,” Roosevelt answered. “If they’re going to beat us, they’ll have to beat us, no other way. From what we hear from prisoners we’ve captured, they’ve taken over two other whole worlds before they attacked us, and they’ve ruled them for thousands of years. If we lose, General, if we lay down and. give up, it’s for keeps. That’s why I came to talk about the atomic bomb: if I have any weapon I can use against those dastardly creatures, I want to know about it.”

“I’m sorry I can’t give you better news, sir.”

“So am I.” Roosevelt hunched his shoulders and let out another long sigh. His shirt and jacket both seemed a couple of sizes too big. The burden of the war was killing him; Groves realized with a jolt that that was literally true. He wondered where Vice President Henry Wallace was and what sort of shape he was in.

He couldn’t t say that to the President. What he did say was “The trick will be to get through the time between using the one bomb we can make fairly quickly and the rest, which will take longer.”

“Yes indeed,” FDR said. “I‘d hoped that would be a shorter gap. As it is we’ll have to be very careful picking the time when we use the first one. you’re right that we would be very vulnerable to whatever atomic response the Lizards make.”

Groves had seen pictures of the slag heap the Lizards had made of Washington, D.C. He heard men who’d seen it talk about the incongruous beauty of the tall cloud of dust and hot gas that had sprouted over the city like a gigantic, poisonous toadstool. He imagined such toadstools springing into being above other cities across the United States, across the world. A bit of Latin from his prep school days came back to haunt him: they make a desert and they call it peace.

When he murmured that aloud, the President nodded and said, “Exactly so. And in a curious way, that may turn out to be one of our greatest strengths. Our Lizard prisoners insist to a man-well, to a Lizard-that they don’t want to use their atomic weapons here on a large scale. They say it would do too much damage to the planet: they want to control Earth and settle colonists on it, not just smash us by any means that come to hand.”

“Whereas, we can do anything we have to, to get rid of them,” Groves said. “Yes, sir, I see what you mean. Odd that we should have fewer constraints on our strategy than they do when they have the more powerful weapons.”

“That’s just what I mean,” Roosevelt agreed. “If we-humanity, that is-can say, ‘If we don’t get to keep our world, you won’t use it, either,’ that will give our scaly friends something new and interesting to think about. Their colonization fleet will be here in a generation’s time, and I gather it can’t be conveniently recalled. If the Lizards lay Earth to waste, the colonists are like somebody invited to a party at a house that’s just burnt to the ground: all dressed up with no place to go.”

“And no one to pass them a hose to put out the fire, either,” Groves observed.

That won a chuckle from FDR. “Nice to know you were paying attention when I made my Lend-Lease speech.”

Any military man who didn’t pay attention to what his commander-in-chief said was an idiot, as far as Groves was concerned. He replied, “The question is how far we can push that line of reasoning, sir. If the Lizards are faced with the prospect of either losing the war or hurting us as badly as we hurt them, which will they choose?”

“I don’t know,” Roosevelt said, which made Groves respect his honesty. “I tell you this, though, General: compared to the problems we have right now, I shouldn’t mind facing that one at all. I want you and your crew here to exert every effort possible to producing that first atomic bomb and then as many more as fast as you can. If we go down, I’d sooner go down with guns blazing than with our hands in the air.”

“Yes, sir, so would I,” Groves said. “We’ll do everything we can, sir.”

“I’m sure you will, General.” Roosevelt turned his wheelchair and rolled toward the door. He got to it and opened it before Groves could come around the desk to do the job for him. That made the old jaunty look come back to his haggard features, just for a moment. He liked to preserve as much independence as his circumstances allowed.

And in that, Groves thought, he was a good representative for the whole planet.