Tilting the Balance

XVIII

Mordechai Anielewicz had never imagined he would be relieved that the Lizards had set up a rocket battery right outside Leczna, but he was. That gave him an excuse to stay indoors, which meant he didn’t have to see Zofia Klopotowski for a while.

“It’s not that I don’t like her, you understand,” he told Dr. Judah Ussishkin over the chessboard one night.

“No, it wouldn’t be that, would it?” Ussishkin’s voice was dry. He moved a knight. “She’s fond of you, too.”

Anielewicz’s face flamed as he studied the move. Zofia would have been more fond of him in direct proportion to any increased stamina he showed. He’d never imagined an affair with a woman who was more lecherous than he was; up till now, he’d always had to do the persuading. But Zofia would drop anything to get between the sheets-or under a wagon, or into the backseat of Dr. Ussishkin’s moribund Fiat.

Trying to keep his mind on the game, Mordechai pushed a pawn one square ahead. That kept the knight from taking a position in which, with one more move, it could fork his queen and a rook.

A beatific smile wreathed Ussishkin’s tired face. “Ah, my boy, you are learning,” he said. “Your defense has made good progress since we began to play. Soon, now, you will learn to put together an effective attack, and then you will be a player to be reckoned with.”

“Coming from you, Doctor, that’s a compliment.” Anielewicz wanted to be a player to be reckoned with, and he wanted to mount an effective attack. He hadn’t got to be head of the Jewish fighters in Lizard-occupied Poland by sitting back and waiting for things to happen; his instinct was to try to make them happen. Against Ussishkin, he hadn’t been able to, not yet.

He did his best; the midgame might have seen a machine gun rake the chessboard, so fast and furious did pieces fall. But when the exchanges were done, he found himself down a bishop and a pawn and facing another losing position. He tipped over his king.

“You make me work harder all the time,” Ussishkin said. “I got some plum brandy for stitching up a farmer’s cut hand yesterday. Will you take a glass with me?”

“Yes, thank you, but don’t ask me for another game of chess afterwards,” Mordechai said. “If I can’t beat you sober, I’m sure I can’t beat you shikker.”

Ussishkin smiled as he poured. “Chess and brandy do not mix.” The brandy came from a bottle that had once, by its label, held vodka. People still had vodka these days, but it was homemade. For that matter, the plum brandy had to be homemade, too. Ussishkin lifted his glass in salute. “L’chaym.”

“L’chaym.” Anielewicz drank. The raw brandy charred all the way down; sweat sprang out on his face. “Phew! If that were any stronger, you wouldn’t need gasoline for your automobile.”

“Ah but if I got it running, think how disappointed you and Zofia would be,” Ussishkin said. Mordechai blushed again. In the candlelight, the doctor didn’t notice, or pretended he didn’t. He turned serious. “I know telling a young man to be careful is more often than not a waste of time, but I will try with you. Do be careful. If you make her pregnant, her father will not be pleased, which means the rest of the Poles here will not be pleased, either. We and they have gotten on as well as could be expected, all things considered. I would not like that to change.”

“No, neither would I,” Mordechai said. For one thing, Leczna held a good many more Poles than Jews; strife would not be to the minority’s advantage. For another, strife among the locals was liable to draw the Lizards’ unwelcome attention to the town. They already had more interest than Anielewicz liked, for they drew their food locally. He preferred staying in obscurity.

“You seem sensible, for one so young.” Ussishkin sipped his brandy again. He didn’t cough or flush or give any other sign he wasn’t drinking water. An aspiring engineer till the war, Anielewicz guessed he’d had his gullet plated with stainless steel. The doctor went on, “You should also remember-if she does conceive, the child would be raised a Catholic. And she might try to insist on your marrying her. I doubt”-now Ussishkin coughed, not from the plum brandy but to show he did more than doubt-“she would convert. Would you?”

“No.” Mordechai answered without hesitation. Before the Germans invaded, he hadn’t been pious; he’d lived in the secular world, not that of the shtetl and the yeshiva. But the Nazis didn’t care whether you were secular or not. They wanted to be rid of you any which way. More and more, he’d decided that if he was a Jew, he’d be a Jew. Turning Christian was not an option.

“Marriages of mixed religion are sometimes happy, but more often battlegrounds,” Ussishkin observed.

Mordechai didn’t want to marry Zofia Klopotowski. He wouldn’t have wanted to marry her if she were Jewish. He did, however, want to keep on making love with her, if not quite as often as she had in mind. If he did, she’d probably catch sooner or later, which would lead to the unpleasant consequences the doctor had outlined. He knocked back the rest of his brandy, wheezed, and said, “Life is never simple.”

“There I cannot argue with you. Death is simple; I have seen so much death these past few years that it seems very simple to me.” Ussishkin exhaled, a long, gusty breath that made candle flames flutter. Then he poured fresh plum brandy into his glass. “And if I start talking like a philosopher instead of a tired doctor, I must need to be more sober or more drunk.” He sipped. “You see my choice.”

“Oh, yes.” Mordechai put an edge of irony in his voice. He wondered how many years had rolled past since Judah Ussishkin last got truly drunk. Probably more than I’ve been alive, he thought.

Far off in the distance, he heard airplane engines, at first like gnats with deep voices but rapidly swelling to full-throated roars. Then roars, these harsh and abrupt, rose from the rocket battery the Lizards had stationed out beyond the beet fields.

Ussishkin’s face grew sad. “More death tonight, this time in the air.”

“Yes.” Anielewicz wondered how many German or Russian planes, how many young Germans or Russians, were falling out of the sky. Almost as many as the Lizards had shot at-their rockets were ungodly accurate. Flying a mission knowing you were likely to run into such took courage. Even if you were a Nazi, it took courage.

Somewhere not far away, a thunderclap announced a bomber’s return to earth. Dr. Ussishkin gulped down the second glass of brandy, then got himself a third. Anielewicz raised an eyebrow; maybe he did mean to get drunk. The physician said, “A pity the Lizards can slay with impunity.”

“Not with impunity. We-” Anielewicz shut up. One glass of brandy had led him to say one word too many. He didn’t know how much Ussishkin knew about his role as Jewish fighting leader, he’d carefully refrained from asking the doctor, for fear of giving away more than he learned. But Ussishkin had to be aware he was part of the resistance, for Anielewicz was not the first man who’d taken refuge here.

In a musing voice, as if speculating about an obscure and much disputed biblical text, Ussishkin said, “I wonder if anything could be done about those rockets without endangering the townsfolk.”

“Something could probably be done,” Anielewicz said; he’d studied the site with professional interest while the Lizards prepared it “What would happen to the town afterwards is a different question.”

“The Lizards are not the hostage takers the Nazis were,” Ussishkin said, still musingly.

“I have the feeling they knew war only from books before they got here,” Mordechai answered. “A lot of the filthy stuff, no matter how well it works, doesn’t get into that kind of book.” He glanced sharply over at Ussishkin. “Or are you saying I should do something about that rocket installation?”

The doctor hesitated; he knew they were treading dangerous ground. At last he said, “I thought you might perhaps have some experience in such things. Was I wrong?”

“Yes-and no,” Anielewicz said. Sometimes you had to know when to drop your cover, too. “Playing games with the Lizards here is a lot different from what it’s like in a place like Warsaw. A lot more buildings to hide among there-a lot more people to hide among, too. Here their rocket launchers and everything they use are set up right out in the open-hard to get at without being spotted.”

“I don’t suppose the razor-wire circles around them make matters any easier, either,” Ussishkin murmured.

“They certainly don’t.” Anielewicz thought about going off in the night and trying to pot a few Lizards from long range with his Mauser. But the Lizards had gadgets that let them see in the dark the way cats wished they could. Even without those gadgets, sniping wouldn’t really hurt the effectiveness of the battery: the Lizards would just replace whatever males he managed to wound or kill.

Then, all of a sudden, he laughed out loud. “And what amuses you?” Judah Ussishkin asked. “Somehow I doubt its razor wire.”

“No, not razor wire,” Anielewicz, admitted. “But I think I know how to get through it.” He explained. It didn’t take long.

By the time he was done, Ussishkin’s eyes were wide and staring. “This will work?” he demanded.

“They had enough trouble with it in Warsaw,” Mordechai said. “I don’t know just what it will do here, but it ought to do something.”

“You’re still lying low, aren’t you?” Ussishkin said, then answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are. And even if you weren’t, I’d be a better choice to approach Tadeusz Sobieski, anyhow. He’s known me all his life; when he was born, my Sarah delivered him. I’ll talk with him first thing in the morning. We’ll see if he can be as generous to the Lizards as you have in mind.”

With that, Anielewicz had to be content. He stayed inside Dr. Ussishkin’s house. Sarah wouldn’t let him help with the cooking or cleaning, so he read books and studied the chessboard. Every day, a horse-drawn wagon rattled down the street, carrying supplies from Sobieski the grocer to the Lizards at their rocket battery.

For several days, nothing happened. Then one bright, sunny afternoon, a time when neither the Luftwaffe nor the Red Air Force would be insane enough to put planes in the air over Poland, the battery launched all its rockets, one after another, roar! roar! roar! into the sky.

Farmworkers came running in from the fields. Mordechai felt like hugging himself with glee as he listened to scraps of their excited conversation: “The things have gone crazy!” “Shot off their rockets, then started shooting at each other!” “Never seen fireworks like them in all my born days!”

Dr. Ussishkin came into the house a few minutes later. “You were right, it seems,” he said to Anielewicz. “This was the day Tadeusz laced all the supplies with as much ginger as he had. They do have a strong reaction to the stuff, don’t they?”

“It’s more than a drunk for them; more like a drug,” Mordechai answered. “It makes them fast and nervous-hair-trigger, I guess you might say. Somebody must have imagined he heard engines or thought he saw something in one of their instruments, and that would have been plenty to touch them off.”

“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Ussishkin said. “Not the ones who went berserk out there today, but the higher ranking ones who ordered the battery placed where it was.”

They didn’t have long to wait for their answer. At least one of the Lizards must have survived and radioed Lublin, for in side the hour several Lizard lorries from the urban center rolled through the streets of Leczna. When they left the next day, they took the rocket launchers with them. If the battery went up again, it went up somewhere else.

With the Lizards out of the neighborhood, Anielewicz had no more excuse for staying indoors all the time. Zofia Klopotowski waylaid him and dragged him into the bushes, or as near as made no difference. After his spell of celibacy, he kept up with her for a while, but then his ardor began to flag.

Just as he’d never imagined he’d have been relieved to see the Lizards erect their rocket battery in his own back yard, so to speak, he found equally surprising his halfhearted wish that they’d come back.

A disheveled soldier shouted frantically in Russian. When George Bagnall didn’t understand fast enough to suit him, he started to point his submachine gun at the grounded aviator.

By then, Bagnall had had a bellyful of frantic Russians. He’d even had a bellyful of frantic Germans, a species that did not exist in stereotype but proved quite common under the stress of combat. He got to his feet, knocked the gun barrel aside with a contemptuous swipe, and growled, “Why don’t you shove that thing up your arse-or would you rather I did it for you?”

He spoke in English, but the tone got across. So did his manner. The Red Army man stopped treating him like a servant and started treating him like an officer. The old saw about the Hun being either at your throat or at your feet seemed to apply even more to Russians than it did to Germans. If you gave in to them, they rode roughshod over you, but if you showed a little bulge, they figured you had to be the boss and started tugging at their forelocks.

Bagnall turned to Jerome Jones. “What’s this bloody goon babbling about? I have more Russian than I did when we got stuck here-not hard, that, since I had none-but I can’t make head nor tail of it when he goes on so blinking fast.”

“I’ll see if I can find out, sir,” Jones answered. The radar man had spoken a little Russian before he landed in Pskov; after several months-and no doubt a good deal of intimate practice with the fair Tatiana, Bagnall thought enviously-he was pretty fluent. He said something to the Russian soldier, who shouted and pointed to the map on the wall.

“The usual?” Bagnall asked.

“The usual,” Jones agreed tiredly: “wanting to know if his unit should conform to General Chill’s orders and pull back from the second line to the third one.” He switched back to Russian, calmed down the soldier, and sent him on his way. “They’ll obey, even if he is a Nazi. They probably should have obeyed two hours ago, before Ivan there came looking for us, but, God willing, they won’t have taken too many extra casualties for being stubborn.”

Bagnall sighed. “When I proposed this scheme, I thought we’d get only the serious business.” He made a face. “I was young and naive-I admit it.”

“You’d damned well better,” said Ken Embry, who was pouring himself a glass of herb-and-root tea from a battered samovar on the opposite side of the gloomy room in the Pskov Krom. “You must have thought being tsar came with the droit de seigneur attached.”

“Only for Jones here,” Bagnall retorted, which made the radarman stammer and cough. “At the time, I remember thinking two things. First was to keep the Nazis and Bolshies from bashing each other so the Lizards wouldn’t have themselves a walkover here.”

“We’ve managed that, for the moment, anyhow,” Embry said. “If the Lizards committed more tanks to this front, we’d have a dry time of it, but they seem to have decided they need them elsewhere. They get no complaints from me on that score, I assure you.”

“Nor from me,” Bagnall said. “They’re quite enough trouble as is.”

“There’s fighting on the outskirts of Kaluga, the wireless reports,” Jerome Jones said. “That’s not far southwest of Moscow, and there’s damn all between it and Red Square. Doesn’t sound what you’d call good.”

“No, that’s bad,” Embry agreed. “Makes me glad so many of the fighters here are partisans-locals-and not regular army types recruited from God knows where. If you’re fighting for your own particular home you’re less likely to want to pack it in if Moscow falls.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but I dare say you’re right,” Bagnall answered, “even if it is a most unsocialist thing to say.”

“What, that you’re gladder to fight for your own property? Well, I’m a Tory from a long line of Tories, and I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it,” Embry said. “All right, George, you didn’t want the Russians and the Jerries to go at each other. What was the other notion in what passes for your mind as to why we needed this particular headache?”

“After that raid on the Lizards outpost, I had a serious disinclination toward infantry combat, if you must know,” Bagnall said. “What of you?”

“Well, I must admit that, given the choice between another stint of it and ending up in the kip with that barmaid in Dover we all knew, I’d be likely to choose Sylvia,” Embry said judiciously. “I do believe, however, that we perform a useful function here. If we didn’t, I’d feel worse about not shouldering my trusty rifle and going out to do or die for Holy Mother Russia.”

“Oh, quite,” Bagnall agreed. “Keeping the Germans and the Soviets from each other’s throats isn’t the least contribution we could make to the war effort in Pskov.”

Lizard planes roared low overhead. Antiaircraft guns, mostly German, threw shells into the air at them, adding to the racket that pierced the Krom’s thick stone walls. None of the antiaircraft guns was stationed very close to Pskov’s old citadel. The ack-ack wasn’t good enough to keep the Lizards from hitting just about anything they wanted to hit, and drew their notice to whatever it tried to protect. Bagnall. approved of not having their notice drawn to the Krom: being buried under tons of rock was not the way of shuffling off this mortal coil he had in mind.

Lieutenant General Kurt Chill stalked into the room, followed by Brigadier Aleksandr German, one of the chiefs of what had been the partisan Forest Republic until the Lizards came. Both men looked furious. They had even more basic reasons than most in Pskov for disliking and distrusting each other: it wasn’t just Wehrmacht against Red Army with them, it was Nazi against Jew.

“Well, gentlemen, what seems to be the bone of contention now?” Bagnall asked, as if the disagreements in Pskov were over the teams to pick for a football pool rather than moves that would get men killed. Sometimes that detached tone helped calm the excited men who came for arbitration.

And sometimes it didn’t. Aleksandr German shouted, “This Hitlerite maniac won’t give me the support I need. If he doesn’t send some men, a lot of the left is going to come apart. And does he care? Not even a little bit. As long as he can keep his precious troops intact, who cares what happens to the front?”

Bagnall could barely follow the partisan brigadier’s fast, guttural Yiddish. It was close enough to German for Chill to have no trouble understanding it, though. He snapped, “The man is a fool. He wants me to commit elements of the 122nd Antitank Battalion to an area where no panzer are opposing his forces. If I send the battalion piecemeal into fights which are not its proper province, none of it will be left when it is most desperately needed, as it will be.”

“You’ve got those damned 88s,” Aleksandr German said. “They aren’t just antitank guns, and we’re getting chewed up because we don’t have any artillery to answer the Lizards.”

“Let’s look at the situation map,” Bagnall said.

“We’ve had to fall back here and here,” Aleksandr German said, pointing. “If they force a crossing of this stream, we’re in trouble, because they can nip in toward the center and start rolling up the line. We’re holding there for now, but God knows how long we can keep doing it without some help-which Herr General Chill won’t give us.”

Chill pointed at the map, too. “You have Russian units here you can draw on for reinforcements.”

“I have bodies, God knows,” Aleksandr German said, and then was seized by a coughing fit as he realized he’d twice invoked a deity he wasn’t supposed to believe in. He wiped his mouth on a sleeve and went on, “Bodies won’t do the job by themselves, though. I need to break up the Lizards’ concentrations back of their lines.”

“It’s a wasteful use of antitank troops,” Chill said.

“I’ve been wasting Russians-why should your pampered pets be any different?” Aleksandr German retorted.

“They are specialists, and irreplaceable,” the Wehrmacht man replied. “If we expend them here, they will not be available when and where their unique training and equipment are truly essential.”

Aleksandr German slammed a fist against the map. “They are essential now, in the place where I requested them,” he shouted. “If we don’t use them there, we won’t have a later for you to trot them out with all your fancy talk about right timing and right equipment. Look at the mess my men are in.”

Chill looked, then shook his head with a disdainful expression on his face.

“Maybe you should reconsider,” Bagnall told him.

The German general fixed him with a baleful stare. “I knew this piece of dumbheadedness was doomed to fail the moment it was suggested,” he said. “It is nothing more than a smokescreen to get good German troops thrown into the fire to save the Anglo-Russian alliance.”

“Oh, balls,” Bagnall said in English. Chill understood him; his face got even chillier. Aleksandr German didn’t, but he got the tone. The RAF man went on, in German again, “Not half an hour ago, I sent a Russian off confirming your-or some German’s, anyhow-order to fall back. I’m trying to do the best job I can, given my look at the map.”

“Perhaps you left your spectacles behind when you left London,” Chill suggested acidly.

“Maybe I. did, but I don’t think so.” Bagnall turned to Aleksandr German. “Brigadier, I know there aren’t many tanks on your section of the front; if the Lizards had a lot of tanks, they’d be here by now, and we’d all be dead, not bickering. But are they using those troop carriers with the turret-mounted guns?”

“Yes, we have seen a good many of them,” the partisan leader answered at once.

“There!” Bagnall said to Kurt Chill. “Are those troop carriers a good enough target for your antitank lads? You’d have to be lucky to take out a Lizard tank with an 88, but you can do all sorts of lovely things to a troop carrier with one.”

“This is so.” Chill rounded on Aleksandr German. “Why did you not say light armor was part of the threat you were facing? Had I known, I would have released units from the battalion at once.”

“Who can tell what will make up a fascist’s mind?” Aleksandr German answered. “If you’re going to send men, you’d, better go and do it.” They left the map room together, arguing now about how many men and guns and where they needed to go rather than whether to send any at all.

Bagnall indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” Jerome Jones walked over and patted him on the back.

“Nicely done,” Ken Embry said. “We are earning our keep here after all, seems to me.” He got himself a glass of hot, brownish muck from the samovar, then let one eyelid droop in unmistakable wink. “D’you suppose Comrade Brigadier German has really seen a whole fleet of armored troop carriers, or even so many as one?”

Jones gaped; his head swung from Embry to Bagnall and back again. Bagnall said, “I haven’t the foggiest notion, truth to tell. But he picked up his cue in a hurry, didn’t he? If armor rumbles into the neighborhood, even a literal-minded Jerry can hardly quarrel with rolling out the antitank guns, now can he?”

“Doesn’t look as though he can, at any rate,” Embry said. “I would have to say that hand goes to the heroic partisan.” He raised his glass in salute.

“Comrade German is one very sharp chap,” Bagnall said. “How good he is as a soldier or a leader of men I’m still not certain, but he misses very little.”

“You threw out that line sure it was a lie and expecting him to snap at it anyhow,” Jones said, almost in accusation.

“Haven’t you ever done the like, with a barmaid for instance?” Bagnall asked, and was amused to watch the radar-man turn red. “My notion was that if he said no, we’d be no worse off than we were already: Chill was going to balk, and we have nothing save whatever he uses as a sense of honor to get him to keep the promise he made to accept our decision. Giving him a reason he could swallow for doing what we wanted looked to be a good idea.”

“And next time, with luck, he’ll be likelier to go along,” Embry said. “Unless, of course, his men get wiped out and the position overrun, which is a risk in this business.”

“If that happens, it will announce itself,” Bagnall said, “most likely by artillery shells starting to land on Pskov.” He pointed to the map. “We can’t lose much more ground without coming into range of their guns.”

“Nothing to do now but wait,” Jones said. “Feels like being back at Dover, waiting for the Jerries to fly over arid show up on the radar screen: it’s a cricket match with the other side at bat, and you have to respond to what their batsman does.”

Hours passed. A babushka brought in bowls of borscht, thick beet soup with a dollop of sour cream floating on top. Bagnall mechanically spooned it up till the bowl was empty. He’d never fancied either beets or sour cream, but he fancied going hungry even less. Fuel, he told himself. Nasty-tasting fuel, but you need to top off your tanks.

Evening came late to Pskov these days: the town didn’t have the white nights of Leningrad to the north and east, but twilight lingered long. The western sky was still a bright salmon pink when Tatiana came into the map room. Just the sight of her roused all the Englishmen, who were fighting yawns: even in the shapeless blouse and baggy trousers of a Red Army soldier, she seemed much too decorative to have a rifle with a telescopic sight slung over her back.

Jerome Jones greeted her in Russian. She nodded to him, but astonished Bagnall by walking up to him and kissing him to a point just short of asphyxiation. Her clothes might have concealed her shape, but she felt all woman in his arms.

“My God!” he exclaimed in delighted amazement. “What’s that in aid of?”

“I’ll ask,” Jones said, much less enthusiastically. He started speaking Russian again; Tatiana replied volubly. He translated. “She says she’s thanking you for getting the Nazi mother-molester-her words-to move his guns forward. They hit a munitions store when they shelled the rear area, and took out several troop carriers at the front lines.”

“They really were there,” Embry broke in.

Tatiana went on right through him. After a moment, Jones fallowed her: “She says she had a good day sniping, too, thanks to the confusion the guns sowed among them, and she thanks you for that, too.”

“Looks as though we’ve held, at least for the time being,” Embry said.

Bagnall nodded, but he kept glancing over at Tatiana. She was watching him, too, as if through that rifle sight. Her gaze was smoky as the fires Pskov used for heating and cooking. It warmed Bagnall and chilled him at the same time. He could tell she wanted to sleep with him, but the only reason he could see for it was that he’d helped her do a better job of killing. The old saw about the female of the species being more deadly than the male floated through his mind. He’d heard it dozen times over the years, but never expected to run across its exemplification. He didn’t meet Tatiana’s gaze again. No matter how pretty she was, as far as he was concerned, Jerome Jones was welcome to her.

Crack! Sam Yeager took an automatic step back. Then he realized the line drive was hit in front of him. He dashed in, dove. The ball stuck in his glove. His right hand closed over to make sure it didn’t pop out. He rolled over on the grass, held up his glove to show he had the ball.

The fellow who’d smacked the drive flipped away his bat in disgust. Yeager’s teammates and, from behind the backstop, Barbara yelled and clapped. “Nice catch, Sam!” “Great play!” “You’re a regular Hoover out there.”

He threw the ball back to the PFC who was playing short, wondering what all the fuss was about. If you couldn’t make that play, you weren’t a ballplayer, not by the standards he set for himself. Of course, by those standards he was probably the only ballplayer at the Sunday afternoon pickup game. He sight not have ever come close to the big leagues, but even a Class B outfielder looked like Joe DiMaggio here.

After an error on a routine ground ball, a strikeout ended the inning. Yeager tossed his glove to the ground outside the foul line and trotted in to the chicken-wire cage that served for a dugout. He was due to lead off the bottom of the sixth.

He’d walked his first time up and swung at a bad ball the second, hitting a little bleeder that had been an easy out. The pitcher for the other side had a pretty strong arm, but he also thought he was Bob Feller-or maybe getting Yeager the last time had made him cocky. After wasting a curve down and away, he tried to bust Sam in on the fists with a fastball.

It wasn’t fast enough or far enough in. Sam’s eyes lit up as soon as he pulled the trigger. Thwack! When you hit the ball dead square, your hands hardly know it’s met the bat-but the rest of you does, and so does everybody else. The pitcher wheeled through one of those ungainly pirouettes pitchers turn to follow the flight of a long ball.

The ball would have been out of Fan’s Field or any other park in the Three-I League, but the field they were, playing on didn’t have fences. The left fielder and center fielder both chased after the drive. Sam ran like hell. He scored, standing up. His teammates pounded him on the back and slapped him on the butt.

Behind the backstop, Barbara bounced up and down. Beside her, Ullhass and Ristin hissed excitedly. They weren’t about to try going anywhere, not with so many soldiers around.

Yeager sat down on the park bench in the dugout. “Whew!” he said, panting. “I’m getting too old to work that hard.” Somebody found a threadbare towel and fanned him with it, as if he were between rounds in a fight with Joe Louis. “I’m not dead yet,” he exclaimed, and made a grab for it.

He got another hit his next time up, a line single to center stole second, and went to third when the catcher’s throw flew over the shortstop’s head. The next batter picked him up with a ground single between the drawn-in shortstop and third baseman; that was the last run in a 7–3 win.

“You beat them almost singlehanded,” Barbara said when he came around the wire fence to join her and the Lizard POWs.

“I like to play,” he answered. Lowering his voice, he added, “And this isn’t near as tough a game as I’m used to.”

“You certainly made it look easy,” she said.

“Make the plays and it does look easy, like anything else,” he said. “Mess them up and you make people think nobody could ever play it right. God knows I’ve done that often enough, too-otherwise I wouldn’t have been in the bush leagues all those years.”

“How can you hit a round ball with a round stick and have it go so far?” Ristin asked. “It seems impossible.”

“It’s a bat, not a stick,” Yeager answered. “As to how you hit it, it takes practice.” He’d let the Lizards swing at easy tosses a few times. They choked way up on the bat; they were only about the size of ten-year-olds. Even so, they had trouble making contact.

“Come on,” somebody called. “Picnic’s starting.”

It wasn’t a proper picnic, to Yeager’s way of thinking: no fire for wieners, just sandwiches and some beer. But the MPs and air raid wardens would have come down on them like a ton of bricks-if Lizard bombers hadn’t already used the point of flame as a target for some of their explosive goodies.

The sandwiches were tasty: ham and roast beef on home-baked bread. And the Coors brewery was close enough to Denver that even horse-drawn wagons brought enough into town to keep people happy. The beer wasn’t as cold as Sam would have liked, but he’d grown up in the days before iceboxes were universal, and falling back to those days wasn’t too hard for him.

The breeze kicked up as the sun went down. Yeager wouldn’t have minded a fire then, not at all: Denver nights got chilly in a hurry. Ullhass and Ristin felt it worse than he did; they put on the heavy wool sweaters they’d had knotted around their skinny, scaly waists. The sky got dark in a hurry, too, once the sun slipped behind the Rockies. Stars glittered brightly in the midnight-blue bowl of the heavens.

The ballplayers were used to having the Lizard POWs around. One of them pointed up to the points of light in the sky and asked, “Hey, Ristin, which one of those do you come from?”

“It is behind Tosev-your star for this world,” Ristin answered. “You cannot see it now.”

“The Lizards come from the second planet of Tau Ceti,” Yeager said. “They’ve got their hooks on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani and the first planet of Epsilon Indi. We were next on the list.”

“Those are the names of stars?” said the fellow who’d asked Ristin where he was from. “I’ve never heard of any of ’em.”

“I hadn’t, either, not till the Lizards came,” Sam answered. “I grew up on a farm, too-I thought I knew stars like the back of my hand. I knew the Dippers and Orion and the Dogs and the zodiac and things like that, but there’s a lot more sky than I ever figured on. And Epsilon Indi’s like the Southern Cross-too far south to see from here.”

“So what’re these places like?” the man asked.

“Tosev is hotter and brighter than the sun-the sun of Home, I mean,” Ristin said. “Rabotev-what you call Epsilon Eridani”-he hissed the name-“is like our sun, but Halless, Epsilon Indi”-another hiss-“is cooler and more orange. Next to any of the worlds the Race rules, Tosev 3 is cold and wet and not very comfortable.” He gave a theatrical shiver.

“The sun’s a type-G star, a yellow one,” Yeager added. “So is Tau Ceti but it’s at the cool end of the G range and the sun’s at the warm end. Epsilon Eridani’s at the warm end of the K range, which is the next one over from G, and Epsilon Indi’s a little fellow at the cool end of that range.”

“How much of this stuff did you know before you started riding herd on the Lizards there?” somebody asked slyly.

“Some; not all,” Yeager said. “If I hadn’t known some, I would have been lost-but then, if I hadn’t known some, I wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place.” He added, “I’ve learned a heck of a lot since then, too.” He would have made that stronger if Barbara hadn’t been sitting on the grass beside him.

She reached out and squeezed his hand. “I’m proud of how much you know,” she said. He grinned like a fool. Till Barbara, he’d never known a woman who gave a damn how smart he was-and precious few men, either. If a ballplayer read books on the train or the bus, he got tagged “Professor,” and it wasn’t the sort of nickname you wanted to have.

He climbed to his feet. “Come on, Ullhass, Ristin-time to take you back to your nice heated room.” The adjective got the Lizards moving in a hurry, as it usually did. Sam chuckled under his breath. He’d always figured white men knew more than Indians, because Columbus had found America and the Indians hadn’t discovered Europe. By that standard, the Lizards knew more than people: Sam might have flown to far planets in his mind, but the Lizards had come here for real. All the same, though, the gap wasn’t so wide that he couldn’t manipulate them.

“So long, Sam.” “See you in the morning.” “Way to play today, Slugger.” The ballplayers said their good-byes. The pitcher off whom he’d homered and singled added, “I’ll get you next time-or maybe we’ll be on the same side and I won’t have to worry about it.”

“They like you,” Barbara remarked as they picked their way across the dark University of Denver campus with Ristin and Ullhass.

Keeping an eye on them made his answer come slower than would have otherwise: “Why shouldn’t they like me? I’m a regular guy; I get along with people pretty well.”

Now Barbara walked along silently for a while. At last she said, “When I would go out with Jens, it was always as if we were on the outside looking in, not part of the crowd. This is different. I like it.”

“Okay, good,” he said. “I like it, too.” Every time she compared him favorably to her former husband, he swelled with pride. He laughed a little. Maybe she was using that the same way he used the promise of heat with the Lizards.

“What’s funny?” Barbara asked.

“Nothing’s funny. I’m happy, that’s all.” He slipped an arm around her waist. “Crazy thing to say in the middle of a war, isn’t it? But it’s true.”

He got Ristin and Ullhass settled in their secured quarters, then headed back to the apartment with Barbara. They were just coming to East Evans Street when a flight of Lizard planes roared over downtown Denver to the north. Along with the roar of their engines and the flat crummp! of exploding bombs came the roar of all the antiaircraft guns in town. Inside half a minute, the sky turned into a Fourth of July extravaganza, with tracers and bursting shells and wildly wigwagging searchlights doing duty for skyrockets and pinwheels and Roman candles.

Shrapnel pattered down like hail. “We better not stand here watching like a couple of dummies,” Sam said. “That stuff’s no good when it lands on your head.” Holding Barbara’s hand, led her across the street and into the apartment building. He felt safer with a tile roof over him and solid brick walls all around.

The antiaircraft guns kept hammering for fifteen or twenty minutes, which had to be long after the Lizards’ planes were gone. Behind blackout curtains, Sam and Barbara got ready for bed. When she turned out the light, the bedroom was dark as the legendary coal cellar at midnight.

Sam slid toward her under the cover. Even through his pajamas and the cotton nightgown she wore, the feel of her in his arms was worth all the gold in Fort Knox, and another five bucks besides. “Yeah, happy.”

“So am I.” Barbara giggled. “By the way he’s poking me there, you’re not just happy.”

She wasn’t shy about it, or upset, either. That was the good half of her having been married before: she was used to the way men worked. But Yeager shook his head. “Nah he’s horny, but I’m not really,” he answered. “I’d sooner just hold you for a while and then go, to sleep.”

She squeezed him tight enough to bring the air out in a surprised oof. “That’s a very sweet thing to say.”

“It’s a very tired thing to say,” he answered, which made her poke him in the ribs. “If I were ten years younger-ah, phooey, if I were ten years younger, you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “But I like you fine the way you are. you’really have learned an amazing amount about the Lizards in a very short time.” As if to prove her own point, she added an emphatic cough.

“Mm, I suppose so,” he said. “Not as much as I want to, though, not just for the sake of the war but because I’m curious, too. And there’s one thing I don’t begin to have a clue about.”

“What’s that?”

“How to get rid of them,” Yeager said. Barbara nodded against his chest. He fell asleep with her still in his arms.

Ussmak gunned the landcruiser toward the next Tosevite town ahead: Mulhouse, its name was. After so long going up and down the road between Besancon and Belfort, pushing past Belfort made him feel he was exploring new territory. He spoke that conceit aloud: “We might as well be part of the band of Sherran-you know, the first male to march all the way around Home.”

“We studied Sherran just out of hatchlinghood, driver,” Nejas said. “How long ago did he live? A hundred fifty thousand years, something like that-long before the Emperors unified Home under their benevolent rule.”

Ussmak cast down his eye turrets, but only for a perfunctory instant. No matter how important formalities were to the life of the Race, not getting killed counted for even more. And the more built-up the area got, the more danger the landcruiser faced and the smaller the chance he had to react to it.

A cloth whipped in the breeze above a half-burnt building: not the red, white, and blue stripes of France, but a white circle on a red background, with a twisty black symbol on the white. The Big Uglies used such flapping rags to tell one of their tiny empires from the next. Ussmak felt a certain amount of pride that the forces of the Race had at last penetrated into Deutschland.

Bullets rattled off the landcruiser’s flank and turret. The cupola up top closed with a clang. Ussmak hissed in relief: for the first time in a long while, he had himself a landcruiser commander whom he would have minded seeing dead.

“Driver halt,” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak obediently pressed on the brake pedal. “Gunner, turret bearing 030. That building with the banner above it, two rounds high explosive. The machine gun is in there somewhere.”

“Two rounds high explosive,” Skoob echoed. “It shall be done, superior sir.”

The landcruiser’s main armament spoke once, twice. Inside the hull, shielded by steel and ceramic, the reports were not especially loud, but the heavy armored fighting vehicle rocked back on its tracks after each one. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched the building, already in ruins, fly to pieces; the flag on the makeshift staff was wiped away as if it had never existed.

“Forward, driver,” Nejas said in tones of satisfaction.

“Forward, superior sir,” Ussmak acknowledged, and stepped on the accelerator. No sooner had the landcruiser begun to roll, though, than more bullets pattered off its side and rear deck.

“Shall I give them another couple of rounds, superior sir?”

Skoob asked.

“No, the infantry will dig them out soon enough,” the landcruiser commander said. “Small-arms ammunition is still in good supply, but we’re low on shells, and we’ll need high-explosive as well as armor-piercing if we have to fight inside Mulhouse.” He didn’t sound happy at the prospect. Ussmak didn’t blame him: landcruisers were made for quick, slashing attacks to cut off and trap large bodies of the enemy, not to get bogged down battling for a city one street at a time. But taking cities with infantry alone used up males at an alarming rate, even with air strikes. Armor had to help.

A cloud of dust rose not far in front of the landcruiser, dirt and asphalt rose in a graceful fountain, then pattered down again, some of it onto Ussmak’s vision slits. He hit the cleaner button to clear them. Inside the landcruiser, he needed to worry about only a lucky hit from artillery-and if a round did pierce the vehicle, he’d probably be dead before he knew it.

Night was falling when they approached the built-up area Ussmak had seen ahead. Nejas said, “We have orders to halt outside of town. This shall be done, of course.” Again the commander sounded less than pleased. As if trying to convince himself, he went on, “However good our night-vision equipment may be, our commanders do not care to go in amongst the Big Uglies’ buildings in darkness. This is no doubt a wise precaution.”

Ussmak wondered. If you lost momentum, sometimes you had trouble getting it back again. He said, “Superior sir, just this once I wish our commanders would stick their tongues in the ginger jar.” Maybe he’d have a taste himself after everything was secured for the night. Nejas had searched the landcruiser for his little vial, but he’d never found it.

The commander said, “Just this once, maybe they should. I never thought I would hear myself say that, driver, but you may well be right.”

Several landcruisers bivouacked together, under the cover of some broad, leafy trees. Not for the first time, Ussmak marveled at the spectacular profusion of plants on Tosev 3-far more varieties than Home enjoyed, or Rabotev 2, or Halless 1. He wondered if all the water on this world had something to do with that it was the most obvious difference between the planets of the Empire and the Big Uglies’ homeworld.

Even with infantry sentries all around Nejas ordered his crewmales to stay in the landcruiser till they’d finished eating. Then he and Skoob took their blankets and went under the big armored hull to sleep, which gave them almost as much protection from the alert Deutsch snipers as staying inside the turret would have. Ussmak’s seat flattened out enough to let him stay inside the forward hull section through the night.

That night should have passed peacefully, but it didn’t. He jerked awake in alarm when the turret hatches clanged open. Fearing Big Ugly raiders, he grabbed for his personal weapon and crawled back through the hull to poke his head up through the bottom of the turret ring.

The silhouette above him unmistakably belonged to a male of the Race. “What’s going on?” Ussmak said indignantly. “I could have shot you as easy as not.”

“Don’t speak to me of shooting.” Nejas sounded furious. “For a tenth of a day’s pay, I’d turn the main armament of this landcruiser on what are lyingly called our supply services.”

“Give the order, superior sir,” Skoob said. The gunner had to be even more irate than his commander. “You wouldn’t need to pay me to make me obey. I’d do it for free, and gladly. No supply service would be better than the mishatched one we have in place-or no worse, anyhow, for as best I can tell, we have no supply service in place.”

“We expended a couple of rounds of high explosive against that machine-gun nest yesterday, if you’ll recall?” Nejas said. “And we used the usual amount of armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot rounds, too-you may have noticed we’ve been fighting lately.” He sounded as sardonic as Drefsab, the most cynical male Ussmak had ever met.

The driver caught the drift of the way things were going.” We didn’t get resupplied?” he asked.

“We got resupplied,” Skoob said. Again echoing his commander, he went on sarcastically, “In their infinite wisdom and generosity, the fleetlords of the supply service have deigned to dole out to us five magnificent new rounds, one of which is actually high explosive.”

“Aii.” Ussmak let out a hiss of pain. “They’ve shorted us before, but never anywhere near so badly. If they do that for another two or three days, we won’t have any ammunition left.”

“It’s all right,” Skoob said. “Before long, they’ll stop issuing hydrogen, too, so we won’t be going anywhere anyhow.”

That alarmed Ussmak all over again. Nejas said, “It’s not quite so bad. To make hydrogen, all they need is water and energy. If Tosev 3 has too much of anything, it’s water, and energy is cheap. But ammunition needs precision manufacture, too, and the Big Uglies who can do precision manufacture, or most of them, anyhow, aren’t on our side. So we’re short on landcruiser shells. They made it sound very logical when they explained it.”

“Superior sir, I don’t care about logic like that,” the gunner retorted. “I have a logic of my own: if I don’t get rounds for my gun, and if the Race doesn’t take over some of the places here that can turn out our rounds, we’ll lose-but how can we take them if we don’t have the ammunition to do it?”

“Believe me, I wasn’t supporting what the supply service males said, just setting it forth,” Nejas said. “As far as I’m concerned, they all come out of addled eggs. If we don’t have the ammunition to do the job now, it’s just going to be tougher later.”

The gunner grunted. “Right you are, superior sir. Let’s get what they gave us stowed-the Emperor knows we’ll need it tomorrow, even if the supply service hasn’t a clue.” One after another, the five new rounds clunked into place in the racks. “Go back to sleep, driver,” Nejas said when the job was done. “That’s what we’re going to do, anyhow.”

Ussmak did his best to go back to sleep, but found himself worrying instead. Skoob’s circular logic set his own head spinning. If the Race didn’t have the munitions to overcome the Big Uglies, how were they supposed to conquer Tosev 3? For that matter, how were they supposed to conquer Mulhouse? They could fight their way into the town, but what were they supposed to do when they had no more shells and supply services had none to bring forward?

Get killed, that’s what, Ussmak thought. He’d come too close to getting killed already, he’d seen too many males die around him, to contemplate that with equanimity. He wiggled and twisted on the lowered seat, trying to find a position where he wouldn’t have to think. The manufacturers of the seat seemed to have overlooked that important design feature.

When sleep would not come no matter bow he tried to lure it, he sat up and ever so cautiously took his vial of ginger from its hiding place. Even though he was alone in the landcruiser, he let his eye turrets swivel in all directions to make sure no one was watching him. Only then did his tongue flick out to taste the precious powder.

Instantly, his worries about how the advance into Deutschland would continue fell away. Of course the Race would do whatever was required. Ussmak could see, could all but reach out and touch, the best and easiest way to smash the Big Uglies once and for all. He wished Nejas and Skoob were in here with him. His wisdom would amaze them.

But somehow, try as he would, he couldn’t make the image glittering in his ginger-filled mind turn from mere image into concrete words and plans. That was the herb’s frustration: what it showed you seemed real until you tried to make it so. Then it proved as evanescent as the steam of his breath on a chilly Tosevite morning.

“Maybe if I have another taste, everything will come clear,” Ussmak said. He reached for the vial again. Even before his hand closed on it, his tongue flicked out in anticipation.

Liu Han hated the little scaly devils’ photographs, whether they moved or stood still. Oh, they were marvelous in their way, full of lifelike color and able to be viewed from more than one perspective, almost as if they were life itself magically captured.

But they had seldom shown her anything she wanted to see. When the little devils held her prisoner on the airplane that never came down, they’d made moving pictures of the congress they’d forced her to have with men she hadn’t wanted. Then, after Bobby Fiore put a child in her, they’d terrified her with images of a black woman dying in childbirth. And now…

She stared down at the still photograph the scaly devil named Ttomalss had just handed her. A man lay on his back on the paved sidewalk of some city. His face looked peaceful, but he rested in a great glistening pool of blood and a submachine gun lay beside him.

“This is the Big Ugly male named Bobby Fiore?” Ttomalss asked in fair Chinese.

“Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said in a small voice. “Where is this picture from? May I ask?”

“From the city called Shanghai. You know this city?”

“Yes, I know this city-I know of it, I should say, because I have never been there. I have never been close to it.” Liu Han wanted to make that as plain as she could. If Bobby Fiore had been killed fighting against the scaly devils, as certainly looked likely, she didn’t want Ttomalss to suspect she was involved. Of that she was innocent.

The little devil turned one eye turret toward the photograph, the other toward her. She always found that disconcerting. He said, “This male of yours met these evil males who fight us while he was in this camp. He met with them here, in this house. We have proof of this, and you do not ever say it is a lie. If he is with the Big Ugly bandits, maybe you are with these bandits, too?” In spite of the interrogative cough, his words sounded much more like a threat.

“No, superior sir.” Liu Han used the other cough, the emphatic one. She would have been more emphatic still had she not been feeding the Communists information for weeks. Fear clogged her throat. To the little scaly devils, she was hardly more than an animal. Moreover, she was a woman, and women always ended up with the raw end of any deal.

“I think you are telling me lies.” Ttomalss used the emphatic cough, too.

Liu Han burst into tears, Part of that was strategy as calculating as any general’s. Tears bothered the little scaly devils even more than they bothered men: the little devils never cried. Seeing water from a person’s eyes affected them much as seeing smoke coming out of someone’s ears would have affected her. It distracted them and kept them from pushing as hard as they would have otherwise.

But if she forced the timing of the tears, at bottom they were real enough. Without the scaly devils, she never would have had anything to do with Bobby Fiore; he’d been just another of the men with whom they’d paired her. But he’d been as good to her as circumstances allowed-and he was the father of the child that kicked in her belly even now. Seeing him dead in a great puddle of his own blood was like a blow to the face.

And she wept for herself. Just before the little scaly devils came down from the sky, the Japanese had bombed her village and killed her husband and son. Now Bobby Fiore was gone, too. Everyone she cared about seemed to die.

She hugged herself; her forearms went around the swell of her abdomen. The baby kicked again. What would the little devils do with it once it came out into the world? Fear filled, her again.

Ttomalss said, “Stop this disgusting dripping and answer what I say. I think you are lying, I tell you. I think you know much more of these bandits than you admit… Is that the right word, admit? Good. I think you hide this from us. We do not put up with these lies forever, I promise. Maybe not for long at all.”

“Do you know what I think?” Liu Han said. “I think you have night soil where your wits should be. How am I supposed to be a bandit? I am in this camp. You put me here. You put all the people in here. If there are bandits among them, whose fault is that? Not mine, I tell you.”

She managed to startle Ttomalss enough to make him turn both eye turrets toward her. “There are bandits in this camp; I admit that. When we set it up, we did not know how many foolish and dangerous factions you Big Uglies had, so we did not weed you carefully before we planted you here. But just because the bandits are here does not mean a properly obedient person will have anything to do with them.”

The phrase he used had the literal meaning of properly respectful to one’s elders. Hearing a little devil speak of filial piety was almost enough to send Liu Han from tears to hysterical laughter. But she sensed she’d made him retreat; he spoke to her now more as equal to equal, not in the badgering way he’d used before.

She pressed her tiny advantage: “Besides, how could I have anything to do with bandits? You watch me all the time. The only place I ever go is to the market. What can I do there?”

“The bandits came here,” Ttomalss said. “This male”-he held up the photo of Bobby Fiore’s corpse-“went with them. You knew it, and you said nothing to us. You are not to be trusted.”

“I did not know where Bobby Fiore went, or why,” she returned. “I never saw him again after that-till now.” She started to cry again.

“I told you not to do that,” the little devil said peevishly.

“I can’t-help it,” Liu Han said. “You show me a horrible picture that says my man is dead, you say I did all sorts of dreadful things”- mostof which I did-“and now you want me not to cry? Too much!”

Ttomalss threw his hands in the air, much as Liu Han’s husband had when he’d given up arguing with her. She hardly mourned him and her boy any more; her life had taken too many other hammer blows since they died. The scaly devil said, “Enough! Maybe you are telling the truth. Our drug to learn this works imperfectly, and I noted that we do not want to give it to you for fear of harming the hatchling growing inside you. You Big Uglies are revolting in so many different ways, and we have to learn about all of them if we are to rule you properly.”

“Yes, superior sir.” Being bold came anything but easy for Liu Han, however useful she found it. She always breathed a silent sigh of relief when she returned to the submissive behavior that had been drilled into her since childhood.

The scaly devil said, “You will be closely watched. If you have any sense, you will act in a way that shows you’remember this.” He stalked out of Liu Han’s dwelling. Had he been a man, he would have, slammed the door behind him. Since he was a scaly devil, he left it open. Liu Han had learned that meant he thought anyone on the street was welcome to come in.

She poured herself a cup of tea from the battered brass pot that simmered above a charcoal brazier. Sipping it helped relax her-but not enough. She walked over and closed the door, but that didn’t make her feel any more secure. She was as much the little devils captive here as she had been in the metal cell on the airplane that never came down.

She wanted to scream and curse and tell Ttomalss exactly what she thought of him, but made herself hold back Screaming and cursing would make her a scandal among her neighbors, and being the little scaly devils’ creature made her scandal enough already. Besides, they might be taking talking cinema pictures of her as they had to her shame up in that metal cell if she cursed them, they could find out about it.

The baby moved inside her not a kick this time but a slow oceanic roll followed by a quick flutter Again her arms went protectively round her belly If she kept on obeying the little devils, what would the baby’s fate be?

And if she didn’t obey them, what would its fate be then? She didn’t think the Communists would disappear even if the scaly devils conquered all of China (all of the world, she added to herself something that never would have occurred to her before she spent time with Bobby Fiore). They’d kept right on fighting the Japanese; they would count on the people to hide them from the little devils. And they were very good at revenge.

In the end, fear wasn’t what made her go out of her house and walk slowly toward the prison camp marketplace. Fury was: fury with the little scaly devils for turning her life upside down, for treating her like a beast rather than a human being, or showing her, without the slightest worry over what she night feel to see him dead, the picture of the man she’d come to love-all they wanted from her was to confirm the body did belong to Bobby Fiore.

“Bean sprouts!” “Candles!” “Fine tea here!” “Carved jade!” “Peas in their pods!” “Sandals and straw hats!” “You can’t eat my tasty ducks!” “Fine silk parasols-keep your pretty skin white!” “Pork sits sweet in your belly!”

The hubbub of the market square surrounded Liu Han. Along with vendors shouting the virtues of their wares, customers shouted scorn in the age-old struggle to get a better price. The din was dreadful. Liu Han could hardly hear herself think.

Ttomalss had warned her she would be closely watched. She believed that; the little scaly devils didn’t understand people well enough to lie convincingly. But just because they watched her and listened to her, could they understand anything she said in this racket? She couldn’t understand people who were yelling right beside her, and the little devils had trouble following even the most plain-spoken Chinese. She could probably say most of what she wanted without their being any the wiser. She went slowly through the market, stopping now here, now there to haggle and gossip. Even had she been foolish enough to go straight to her contact in the marketplace, the Communists would have trained her to know better. As things were, she spent a lot of time loudly complaining about the little devils to a cadaverous-looking man who sold herbal medicines-and who worked for the Kuomintang. If the scaly devils landed on him, they’d be doing the Communists a favor.

Eventually, in the course of her wanderings, she reached the poultry dealer who had his stand next to the big-bellied pork merchant with the open vest. As she looked over the cut-up chunks of duck and chicken, she remarked, as if it were something that mattered little to her, “The little devils showed me a picture of Bobby Fiore today. They do not say so, but they put an end to him.”

“I am sorry to hear this, but we know the ghost Life-Is-Transcendent has been seeking him.” The poultry seller also spoke obliquely; that prancing ghost was a precursor of the god of death.

“He was in a city,” Liu Han said.

“May he have aided the rise of the proletarian movement,” the poultry seller answered. He paused, then asked very quietly, “Was the city Shanghai?”

“What if it was?” Liu Han was indifferent. To her, one city was just like another. She’d never lived in a place that had more people than this prison.

“If it was,” the fellow went on, “a heavy blow against oppression and for the liberty of the oppressed peasants and workers of the world was struck there not long ago. In his passing, the foreign devil may well have shown himself to be a hero of the Chinese people.”

Liu Han nodded. Since the scaly devils had the photo of Bobby Fiore dead, she’d figured they were likely the ones who had shot him-and the likeliest reason they had for shooting him was his being part of a Red raiding team. He wouldn’t have thought of himself as a hero of the Chinese people: she was sure of that. Though living with her had rubbed some of the rough edges off him, at heart he remained a foreign devil.

She didn’t much care that he had died a hero, either. She would rather have had him back at her hut, foreign and difficult but alive. She would rather have had many things that hadn’t happened.

The poultry seller said, “What other interesting gossip have you heard?” The kind of gossip he found interesting had to do with the little scaly devils.

“What do you want for these chicken backs here?” she asked, not responding right away. He named a price. She shrieked at him. He yelled back. She attacked his gouging with a fury that astonished her. Then, after a moment, she realized she’d found a safe way to vent her sorrow for Bobby Fiore.

For whatever reasons he had, the poultry seller got caught up in the squabble, too. “I tell you, foolish woman, you are too stingy to deserve to live,” he shouted, waving his arms.

“And I tell you, the little scaly devils are on especial watch for your kind, so you had better take care!” Liu Han waved her arms, too. At the same time, she watched the poultry seller’s face to make sure he understood your kind to mean Communists, not thieving merchants He, nodded. He followed that perfectly well. She wondered how long he’d been a conspirator, looking for double meanings everywhere and finding them, too.

She hadn’t been a conspirator long, but she’d managed to put a double meaning across. Even if the little devils were listening to and understanding every word she said, they wouldn’t have grasped the second message she’d given the poultry seller. She was learning the ways of conspiracy herself.