Tilting the Balance

XIX

London was packed with soldiers and RAF men sailors and government workers. Everyone looked worn and hungry and shabby. The Germans and then the Lizards had given the city a fearful pounding from the air. Bombs and fires had cut broad swaths of devastation through it. The phrase on everyone s lips was, “It’s not the place it used to be.”

All the same it struck Moishe Russie as a close approximation to the earthly paradise. No one turned to scowl at him as he hurried west down Oxford Street toward Number 200. In Warsaw and Lodz, gentiles had made him feel he still wore the yellow Star of David on his chest even after the Lizards drove away the Nazis. The Lizards weren’t hunting him here, either. There were no Lizards here. He didn’t miss them.

And what the English reckoned privation looked like abundance to him. People ate mostly bread and potatoes, turnips and beets, and everything was, rationed, but nobody starved. Nobody was close to starving. His son Reuven even got a weekly ration of milk: not a lot but, from what he remembered of his nutrition textbooks, enough.

They’d apologized for the modest Soho flat in which they’d set up his family, but it would have made three of the ones he’d had in Lodz He hadn’t seen so much furniture in years: they weren’t burning it for fuel here. He even had hot water from a tap whenever he wanted it.

A guard in a tin hat in front of the BBC Overseas Services building nodded as he showed his pass and went in. Waiting inside, sipping a cup of ersatz tea quite as dreadful as anything available in Poland stood Nathan Jacobi. “Good to see you, Mr. Russie,” he said in English, and then fell back into Yiddish: “And now, shall we go and give the Lizards’ little stumpy tails a good yank?”

“That would be a pleasure,” Moishe said sincerely. He pulled his script from a coat pocket. “This is the latest draft, with all the censors’ notes included. I’m ready to record it for broadcast.”

“Jolly good,” Jacobi said, again in English. Like David Goldfarb, he flipped back and forth between languages at will, sometimes hardly seeming to realize he was doing so. Unlike Goldfarb’s, his Yiddish was not only fluent but elegant and unaccented; he spoke like an educated Warsaw Jew. Russie wondered if his English was as polished.

Jacobi led the way to a recording studio. But for a couple of glass squares so the engineers could watch the proceedings, the walls were covered with sound-deadening tiles, each punched with its own square grid of holes. On the table sat a microphone with a BBC plaque screwed onto its side. A bare electric bulb threw harsh light down onto the table and the chairs in front of it.

The arrangements were as up-to-date as human technology could produce. Moishe wished they impressed him more than they did. They were certainly finer than anything the Polish wireless services had had in 1939. But that was not the standard by which Russie judged them. In the first months after the Lizards took Warsaw, he’d broadcast anti-Nazi statements for them. Compared to their equipment, the BBC gear looked angular, bulky, and not very efficient, rather like an early wind-up gramophone with trumpet speaker set alongside a modem phonograph.

He sighed as he sat down on one of the hard-backed wooden chairs and set his script in front of him. The censors’ stamps-a triangular one that said PASSED FOR SECURITY and a rectangle that read PASSED FOR CONTENT-obscured a couple of words. He bent down to peer at them and make sure he could read them without hesitation; even though the talk was being recorded for later broadcast, he wanted to be as smooth as he could.

He glanced over to the engineer in the next room. When the man suddenly shot out a finger toward him, he began to talk: “Good day, people of Earth. This is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London in free England. That I am here shows the Lizards lie when they say they are invincible and their victory inevitable. They are very strong; no one could deny that. But they are not supermen”-he’d had to borrow Ubermenschen from the German to put that across-“and they can be beaten.

“I do not intend to say anything about how I came from Poland to London, for fear of closing that way for others who may come after me. But I will say that I was rescued from a Lizard prison in Lodz, that Englishmen and local Jews took part in the rescue, and they defeated both the Lizards and their human henchmen.

“Too many men, women, and children live in parts of the world under Lizard occupation. I understand that, if you are to survive, you must to some degree go on about your daily work. But I urge you from the bottom of my heart to cooperate with the enemy as little as you can and to sabotage his efforts wherever you can. Those who serve as their prison guards and police, those who seek work in their factories to make munitions that will be used against their fellow human beings-they are traitors to mankind. When victory comes, collaborators will be remembered… and punished. If you see the chance, move against them now.”

He had his talk nicely timed-he’d practiced it with Rivka back in the flat. He was just reaching his summing-up when the engineer held, up one finger to show he had a minute left, and came to the end as the fellow drew his index finger across his throat. The engineer grinned and gave him a two-finger V for victory.

Then it was Nathan Jacobi’s turn. He read an English translation (similarly stamped with censors’ marks) of what Russie had just said in Yiddish, the better to reach as large an audience as possible. His timing was as impeccable as Moishe’s had been. This time the engineer signaled his approval with an upraised thumb.

“I think that went very well,” Jacobi said. “With any luck at all, it should leave the Lizards quite nicely browned off.”

“I hope so,” Moishe said. He got up and stretched. Wireless broadcasting was not physically demanding, but it left him worn all the same. Getting out of the studio always came as a relief.

Jacobi held the door open for him. They went out together. Waiting in the hallway stood a tall, thin, tweedy Englishman with a long, craggy face and dark hair combed high in a pompadour. He nodded to Jacobi. They spoke together in English. Jacobi turned to Moishe and switched to Yiddish: “I’d like to introduce you to Eric Blair. He’s talks producer of the Indian Section, and he goes in after us.”

Russie stuck out his hand and said, “Tell him I’m pleased to meet him.”

Blair shook hands with him, then spoke in English again. Jacobi translated: “He says he’s even more pleased to meet you: you’ve escaped from two different sets of tyrants, and honestly described the evils of both.” He added, “Blair is a very fine fellow, hates tyrants of all stripes. He fought against the fascists in Spain-almost got killed there-but he couldn’t stomach what the Communists were doing on the Republican side. An honest man.”

“We need more honest men,” Moishe said.

Jacobi translated that for Blair. The Englishman smiled, but suffered a coughing fit before he could answer. Moishe had heard those wet coughs in Warsaw more times than he cared to remember. Tuberculosis, the medical student in him said. Blair mastered the coughs, then spoke apologetically to Jacobi.

“He says he’s glad he did that out here rather than in the studio while he was recording,” Jacobi said. Moishe nodded; he understood and admired the workmanlike, professional attitude. You worked as hard as you could for as long as you could, and if, you fell in the traces you had to hope someone else would carry on.

Blair pulled his script from a waistcoat pocket and went into the studio. Jacobi said, “I’ll see you later, Moishe. I’m afraid I have a mountain of forms to fill out. Perhaps we should put up stacks of paper in place of barrage balloons. They’d be rather better at keeping the Lizards away, I think.”

He headed away to his upstairs office. Moishe went outside. He decided not to head back to his flat right away, but walked west down Oxford Street toward Hyde Park. People mostly women, often with small children in tow-bustled in and out of Selfridge’s. He’d been in the great department store once or twice himself. Even with wartime shortages, it held more goods and more different kinds of goods than were likely to be left in all of Poland. He wondered if the British knew how lucky they were.

The great marble arch where Oxford Street, Park Lane, and Bayswater Road came together marked the northeast corner of Hyde Park. Across Park Lane from the arch was the Speakers’ Corner where men and women climbed up on crates or chairs or whatever they had handy and harangued whoever would hear. He tried to imagine such a thing in Warsaw, whether under Poles, Nazis, or Lizards. The only thing he could picture was the public executions that would follow unbridled public speech. Maybe. England had earned its luck after all.

Only a handful of people listened to-or heckled-the speakers. The rest of the park was almost as crowded with people tending their gardens. Every bit of open space in London grew potatoes, wheat, maize, beets, beans, peas, cabbages. German submarines had put Britain under siege; the coming of the Lizards brought little relief. They weren’t as hard on shipping, but America and the rest of the world, had less to send these days.

The island wasn’t having an easy time trying to feed itself. Perhaps in the long run it couldn’t not if it wanted to keep on turning out war goods, too. But if the English knew they were beaten, they didn’t let on.

All through the park, trenches, some bare, some with corrugated tin roofs were scattered among the garden plots. Like Warsaw, London had learned the value of air raid shelters no matter how makeshift. Moishe had dived into one of them himself when the sirens began to wail a few days before. The old woman sprawled in the dirt a few feet away had nodded politely as if they were meeting over tea. They d stayed in there till the all clear sounded, then dusted themselves off and gone on about their business.

Moishe turned and retraced his steps down Oxford Street. He explored with caution; wandering a couple of blocks away from the streets he’d already learned had got him lost more than once. And he was always looking the wrong way, forgetting traffic moved on the left side of the street, not the right. Had more motorcars been on the road, he probably would have been hit by now.

He turned right onto Regent Street, then left onto Beak. A group of men was going into a restaurant there-the Barcelona, he saw as he drew closer. He recognized the tall, thin figure of Eric Blair in the party; the India Section man must have finished his talk and headed off for lunch.

Beak Street led Russie to Lexington and from it to Broadwick Street, on which sat his block of flats. As with much of the Soho district, it held more foreigners than Englishmen: Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Greeks-and now a family of ghetto Jews.

He turned the key in the lock, opened the door. The rich odor of cooking soup greeted him like a friend from home. He shrugged out of his jacket; the electric fire here kept the flat comfortably warm. Not sleeping under mounds of blankets and overcoats was another reward of coming to England.

Rivka walked out of the kitchen to greet him. She wore a white blouse and a blue pleated skirt that reached halfway from the floor to her knees. Moishe thought it shockingly immodest, but all the skirts and dresses she’d been given when she got to England were of the same length.

“You look like an Englishwoman,” he told her.

She cocked her head to one side, giving that a woman’s consideration. After a moment, she shook her head. “I dress like an Englishwoman,” she said, with the same precision a yeshiva student might have used to dissect a subtle Talmudic point. “But’ they’re even pinker and blonder than the Poles, I think.” She flicked an imaginary bit of lint from her own dark curls.

He yielded: “Well, maybe so. They all seem so heavy, too.” He wondered whether that perception was real or just a product of so many years of looking at people who were slowly-sometimes not so slowly-starving to death. The latter, he suspected. “That soup smells good.” In his own mind, food had grown ever so much more important than it seemed before the war.

“Even with ration books, there’s such a lot to buy here,” Rivka answered. The pantry already bulged with tins and jars and with sacks of flour and potatoes. Rivka didn’t take food for granted these days, either.

“Where’s Reuven?” Moishe asked.

“Across the hall, playing with the Stephanopoulos twins.” Rivka made a wry face. “They haven’t a word in common, but they all like to throw things and yell, so they’re friends.”

“I suppose that’s good.” Moishe did wonder, though. In Poland, the Nazis-and the Poles, too-had cared too much that Jews were different from them. No one here seemed to care at all. In its own way, that was disconcerting, too.

As if to ease his mind over something he hadn’t even mentioned, Rivka said, “David’s mother telephoned this morning while you were at the studio. We had a good chat.”

“That is good,” he said. Working phones were another thing he was having to get used to all over again.

“They want us over for supper tomorrow night,” Rivka said. “We can take the underground she gave me directions on how to do it.” She sounded excited, as if she were going on safari.

Moishe suddenly got the feeling she was adapting to the new city, the new country, faster than he was.

Teerts felt bright, alert, and happy when Major Okamoto led him into the laboratory. He knew he felt that way because the, Nipponese had laced his rice and raw fish with ginger-the spicy taste still lay hot on his tongue-but he didn’t care. No matter what created it, the feeling was welcome. Until it wore off, he would feel like a male of the Race, a killercraft pilot, not a prisoner almost as much beneath contempt as the slops bucket in his cell.

Yoshio Nishina came round a corner. Teerts bowed in Nipponese politeness; no matter how much the ginger exhilarated him, he was not so foolish as to forget altogether where he was. “Konichiwa, superior sir,” he said, mixing his own language and Nipponese.

“Good day to you as well, Teerts,” replied the leader of the Nipponese nuclear weapons research team. “We have something new for you to evaluate today.”

He spoke slowly, not just to help Teerts understand but also, the male thought, because of some internal hesitation. “What is it, superior sir?” Teerts asked. The warm buzz of ginger spinning inside his head made him not want to care, but experience with the Nipponese made him wary in spite of the herb to which they’d addicted him.

Now. Nishina spoke quickly, to Okamoto rather than directly to Teerts. The Nipponese officer translated: “We need you to examine the setup of the uranium hexafluoride diffusion system we are establishing.”

Teerts was a little puzzled. That was simple enough for him to have understood it in Nipponese. These days, Okamoto mainly reserved his translations for more complicated matters of physics. But pondering the ways of Big Uglies, even with a head full of ginger, seemed pointless Teerts bowed again and said, “It shall be done, superior sir. Show me these drawings I am to evaluate.”

He sometimes wondered how the Big Uglies managed to build anything more complicated than a hut. Without computers that let them change plans with ease and view proposed objects from any angle, they had developed what seemed like a series of clumsy makeshifts to portray three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional paper. Some of them were like single views of computer graphics. Others, weirdly, showed top, front, and side views and expected the individual doing the viewing to combine them in his mind and visualize what the object was supposed to look like. Not used to the convention, Teerts had endless trouble with it.

Now, Major Okamoto bared his teeth in the Tosevite gesture of amiability. When the scientists smiled at Teerts, they were generally sincere. He did not trust Okamoto as far. Sometimes the interpreter seemed amiable, but sometimes he made sport with his prisoner. Teerts was getting better at reading Tosevite expressions; Okamoto’s smile did not strike him as pleasant.

The major said, “Dr. Nishina is not speaking of drawings. We have erected this facility and begun processing the gas with it. We want you to examine it, not pictures of it.”

Teerts was appalled, for a whole queue of reasons. “I thought you were concentrating on production of element 94-plutonium, you call it. That’s what you said before.”

“We have decided to produce both explosive metals,” Okamoto answered. “The plutonium project at the moment goes well, but more slowly than expected. We have tried to speed up the uranium hexafluoride project to compensate, but there are difficulties with it. You will evaluate and suggest ways to fix the problems.”

“You don’t expect me to go inside this plant of yours, do you?” Teerts said. “You want me to check it from the outside.”

“Whichever is necessary,” Okamoto answered.

“But one reason you have so much trouble with uranium hexafluoride is that it’s corrosive by nature,” Teerts exclaimed in dismay, his voice turning into a guttural hiss of fright. “If I go in there, I may not come out. And I do not want to breathe either uranium or fluorine, you know.”

“You are a prisoner. What you want is of no importance to me,” Okamoto said. “You can obey or you can face the consequences.”

Ginger lent Teerts spirit he couldn’t have summoned without it. “I am not a physicist,” he shouted, loud enough for the stolid guard who accompanied Okamoto to unsling his rifle for the first time in many days. “I am not an engineer, not a chemist, either. I am a pilot. If you want a pilot’s view of what is wrong with your plant, fine. I do not think it will help you much, though.”

“You are a male of the Race.” Major Okamoto fixed Teerts with a glare from the narrow eyes in that flat, muzzleless face: never had he looked more alien, or more alarming. “By your own boasting, your people have controlled atoms for thousands of years. Of course you will know more about them than we do.”

“Honto,” Nishina said: “That is true.” He went on in Nipponese, slowly, so Teerts could understand: “I was speaking with someone from the Army, telling him what the atomic explosive would be like. He said to me, ‘If you want an explosive, why not just use an explosive?’ Bakatare-idiot!”

Teerts was of the opinion that most Big Uglies were idiots, and that most of the ones who weren’t idiots were savage and vindictive instead. Expressing that opinion struck him as impolitic. He said, “You Tosevites have controlled fire for thousands of years. If someone sent one of you to inspect a factory that makes steel, how much would your report be worth to him?”

He used Nipponese for as much of that as he could, and spoke the rest in his own language. Okamoto interpreted for Nishina. Then, much to Teerts’ delight, the two of them got into a shouting match. The physicist believed Teerts, the major thought he was lying. Finally, grudgingly, Okamoto yielded: “If you don’t think he can be trusted to be accurate, or if you think he truly is too ignorant to be reliable, I must accept your judgment. But I tell you that with proper persuasion he could give us what we need to know.”

“Superior sir, may I speak?” Teerts asked; he’d understood that well enough to respond to it. The surge of pleasure and nerve the ginger had brought was seeping away, leaving him more weary and glum than he would have been had he never set, tongue on the stuff.

Okamoto gave him another baleful stare. “Speak.” His voice held a clear warning that if Teerts’ words were not very much to the point, he would regret it.

“Superior sir, I just wish to ask you this: have I not cooperated with you since the day I was captured? I have told everything I know about aircraft to the males of your Army and Navy, and I have told everything I know-much more than I thought I knew-to these males here, whom your Professor Nishina leads”-he bowed to the physicist-“even though they are trying to build weapons to harm the Race.”

Okamoto bared his broad, flat teeth. To Teerts, they were unimpressive, being neither very sharp nor very numerous. He did, however, recognize the Big Ugly’s ugly grimace as a threat gesture. Mastering himself, Okamoto answered, “You have cooperated, yes, but you are a prisoner, so you had better cooperate. We have given you better treatment since you showed yourself useful, too: more comfort, more food-”

“Ginger,” Teerts added. He wasn’t sure whether he was agreeing with Okamoto or contradicting him. The herb made him feel wonderful while he tasted it, but the Big Uglies weren’t giving it to him for his benefit: they wanted to use it to warp him to their will. He didn’t think they had, so far-but how could he be sure?

“Ginger, hai,” Okamoto said. “Suppose I tell you that, after you go look at this uranium hexafluoride setup, we will give you not just ginger powder with your rice and fish, but pickled ginger root, as much as you can eat? You’d go then, neh?”

As much ginger as he could eat… did Tosev 3 hold that much ginger? The craving rose up and grabbed Teerts, like a hand around his throat. He needed all his will to say, “Superior sir, what good is ginger to me if I am not alive to taste it?”

Okamoto scowled again. He turned back to Nishina. “If he is not going to inspect the facility, do you have any more use for him today?” The physicist shook his head. To Teerts, Okamoto said, “Come along, then. I will take you back to your cell.”

Teerts followed Okamoto out of the laboratory. The guard followed them both. Even through the melancholy he felt after ginger’s exaltation left him, Teerts felt something akin to triumph.

That triumph faded as he went out onto the streets of Tokyo. Even more man than he had in Harbin, he felt himself a mote among the vast swarms of Big Uglies in those streets. He’d been alone in Harbin, yes, but the Race was advancing on the mainland city; had things gone well, he could have been reunited with his own kith at any time. But things had not gone well.

Here in Tokyo, even the illusion of rescue was denied him. Sea protected the islands at the heart of the Tosevite empire of Nippon from immediate invasion by the Race. He was irremediably and permanently at the mercy of the Big Uglies. They stared at him as he walked down the street; hatred seemed to rise from them in almost visible waves, like heat from red glowing iron. For once, he was glad to be between Major Okamoto and the guard.

Tokyo struck him as a curious mixture. Some of the buildings were of stone and glass, others-more and more outside the central city-of wood and what looked like thick paper. The two styles seemed incompatible, as if they’d hatched from different eggs. He wondered how and why they coexisted here.

Air-raid sirens began to wail. As if by magic, the streets emptied. Okamoto led Teerts into a packed shelter in the basement of one of the stone-and-glass buildings. Outside, antiaircraft guns started pounding. Teerts hoped all the Race’s pilots-males from his flight, perhaps-would return safely to their bases.

“Do you wonder why we hate you, when you do this to us?” Okamoto asked as the sharp, deep blasts of bombs contributed to the racket.

“No, superior sir,” Teerts answered. He understood it, well enough-and what it would do to him, sooner or later. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that. For the first time since he’d resigned himself to captivity, he began looking for ways to escape. He found none, but vowed to himself to keep looking.

Wearing His Majesty’s uniform once more felt most welcome to David Goldfarb. The ribbon of the Military Medal, in the colors of the Union Jack, held a new place of pride just above his left breast pocket. He’d imagined the only way a radarman could win a ground combat medal was to have the Jerries or the Lizards invade England. Going to Poland as a commando hadn’t been what he’d had in mind.

Bruntingthorpe had changed in the weeks he’d been away. More and more Pioneer and Meteor jet fighters sheltered in revetments. The place was becoming a working air base rather than an experimental station. But Fred Hipple’s team for evaluating Lizard engines and radars still worked here-and, Goldfarb had not been surprised to discover on his return, still shared a Nissen hut with the meteorologists. The one they had occupied was replaced, but somebody else worked in it these days.

He traded greetings with his comrades as he went in and got ready to go to work. The stuff brewing in the pot above the spirit lamp wasn’t exactly tea, but with plenty of honey it was drinkable. He poured himself a cup, adulterated it to taste, and went over to the Lizard radar unit.

It hadn’t languished while he’d been performing deeds of derring-do and speaking Yiddish. Another radarman, an impossibly young-looking fellow named Leo Horton, had made a good deal of progress on it in the interim.

“Morning to you,” Horton said in a nasal Devonshire accent.

“Morning,” Goldfarb agreed. He sipped the not-quite-tea, hoping this morning’s batch would carry a jolt. You couldn’t gauge that in advance these days. Sometimes you could drink it by the gallon and do nothing but put your kidneys through their paces; sometimes half a cup would open your eyes wide as hangar doors. It all depended on what went into the witches’ brew on any given day.

“I think I’ve made sense of some more of the circuitry,” Horton said. He was frightfully clever, with a theoretical background in electronics and physics Goldfarb couldn’t come close to matching. He also had a fine head for beer and, perhaps not least because he made them feel motherly, was cutting quite a swath through the barmaids up in Leicester. He reminded Goldfarb of an improved model of Jerome Jones, which was plenty to make him feel inadequate.

But business was business. “Good show,” Goldfarb said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

“You see this set of circuits here?” Horton pointed to an area of the disassembled radar not far from the magnetron. “I’m pretty sure it controls the strength of the signal.”

“You know, I suspected that before I got drafted away from here,” Goldfarb said. “I didn’t have the chance to test it, though. What’s your evidence?”

Horton opened a fat notebook with a cover almost the exact dark blue of his RAF uniform. “Here, look at these oscilloscope readings when I shunt power through this lead here-”

He pointed again to show which one he meant.

“I think you’re right,” Goldfarb said. “And look at the amplification.” He whistled softly. “We wouldn’t just be promoted-we’d be bloody knighted if we found out how the Lizards do this and we could fit it into our own sets.”

“Too true, but good luck,” Horton replied. “I can tell you what those circuits do, but I will be damned if I have the, slightest notion of how they do it. If you took one of our Lancs and landed it at a Royal Flying Corps base in 1914-not that you could, because no runways then were anywhere near long enough-the mechanics then would stand a better chance of understanding the aircraft and all its systems than we do of making sense of-this.” He jabbed a thumb at the Lizard radar.

“It’s not quite so bad as that,” Goldfarb said. “Group Captain Hipple and his crew have made good progress with the engines.”

“Oh, indeed. But he’d already figured out the basic principles involved.”

“We have the basic principles of radar,” Goldfarb protested. “But their radar is further ahead of ours than their jet engines are,” Horton said. “It’s just the quality of the metallurgy that drives the group captain mad. Here, the Lizards are using a whole different technology to achieve their results: no valves, everything so small the circuits only come clear under the microscope. Figuring out what anything does is a triumph; figuring out how it does it is a wholly different question.”

“Don’t I know it,” Goldfarb said ruefully. “There have been days-and plenty of ’em-when I’d sooner have kicked that bleeding radar out onto the rubbish pitch than worked on it.”

“Ah, but you have managed to get away for a bit.” Horton pointed to the Military Medal ribbon on Goldfarb’s chest. “I wish I’d had the chance to try to earn one of those.”

Remembering terror and flight, Goldfarb started to say he would have been just as glad not to have had the opportunity. But that wasn’t really true. Getting his cousin Moishe and his family out of Poland had been worth doing; he knew only pride that he’d been able to help there.

The other thing he noted, with a small shock, was the edge of genuine envy in Horton’s voice. The new radarman’s savvy had intimidated him ever since he got back to Bruntingthorpe. Finding out that Horton admired him was like a tonic. He remembered the gap that had existed back at Dover between those who went up to do battle in the air and those who stayed behind and fought their war with electrons and phosphors.

But Goldfarb had crossed to the far side of that gap. Even before he went to Poland, he’d gone aloft in a Lancaster to test the practicability of airborne radar sets. He’d taken Lizard fire then, too, but returned safely. Ground combat, though, was something else again, If one of those Lizard rockets had struck the Lanc, he never would have seen the alien who killed him. Ground combat was personal. He’d shot people and Lizards in Lodz and watched them fall. He still had nasty dreams about it.

Leo Horton was still waiting for an answer. Goldfarb said, “In the long run, what we do here will have more effect on how the war ends than anything anyone accomplishes gallivanting about with a bloody knife between his teeth.”

“You go gallivanting about with a knife between your teeth and it’ll turn bloody in short order, that’s for certain,” Horton said.

Flight Officer Basil Roundbush came in and poured himself a cup of ersatz tea. His broad, ruddy face lit up in a smile. “Not bad today, by Jove,” he said.

“Probably does taste better after you run it through that soup strainer you’ve got on your upper lip,” Goldfarb said.

“You’re a cheeky bugger, you know that?” Roundbush took a step toward Goldfarb, as if in anger. Goldfarb needed a distinct effort of will to stand his ground; he gave away three or four inches and a couple of stone in weight. Not only that, Roundbush wore a virtual constellation of pot metal and bright ribbons on his chest. He’d flown Spitfires against the Luftwaffe in what then looked to be Britain’s darkest hour.

“Just a joke, sir,” Horton said hastily.

“You’re new here,” Roundbush said, his voice amused. “I know it’s a joke, and what’s more, Goldfarb there knows I know. Isn’t that right, Goldfarb?” His expression defied the radarman to deny it.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Goldfarb answered, “Although one can’t be too certain with a man who grows such a vile caricature of a mustache.”

Leo Horton looked alarmed. Roundbush threw back his head and roared laughter. “You are a cheeky bugger, and you skewered me as neatly there as if you were Errol Flynn in one of those Hollywood cinemas about pirates.” He assumed a fencing stance and made cut-and-thrust motions that showed he had some idea of what he was about. He suddenly stopped and held up one finger “I have it! Best way to rid ourselves of the Lizards would be to challenge them to a duel. Foil, epee, saber-makes no difference. Our champion against theirs, winner take all.”

From one of the tables strewn with jet engine parts, Wing Commander Julian Peary called, “One of these days, Basil, you’really should learn the difference between simplifying a problem and actually solving it.”

“Yes, sir,” Roundbush said, not at all respectfully. Then he turned wistful: “It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it, to take them on in a contest where we might have the advantage.”

“Something to that,” Peary admitted.

Leo Horton bent over a scrap of paper, sketched rapidly. In a minute or two, he held up a creditable drawing of a Lizard wearing a long-snouted knight’s helmet (complete with plume) and holding a broadsword. Prepare to die, Earthling varlet, the alien proclaimed in a cartoon-style speech bubble.

“That s not bad,” Roundbush said. “We ought to post it on a board here.”

“That’s quite good,” Goldfarb said. “You should think of doing portrait sketches for the girls.”

Horton eyed him admiringly. “No flies on you. I’ve done that a few times. It works awfully well.”

“Unfair competition, that’s what I call it,” Basil Roundbush grumped. “I shall write my MP and have him propose a bill classing it with all other forms of poaching.”

As helpful as he’d been before, Peary said, “You couldn’t poach an egg, and I wouldn’t give long odds about your writing, either.”

About then, Goldfarb noticed Fred Hipple standing in the doorway and listening to the back-and-forth. Roundbush saw the diminutive group captain at the same moment. Whatever hot reply he’d been about to make died in his throat with a gurgle. Hipple ran a forefinger along his thin brown mustache. “A band of brothers, one and all,” he murmured as he came inside.

“Sir, if we can’t rag one another, half the fun goes out of life,” Roundbush said.

“For you, Basil, more: than half, unless I’m sadly mistaken,” Hipple said, which made the flight officer blush like a child. But Hipple’s voice held no reproof; he went on, “So long as it doesn’t interfere with the quality of our work, I see no reason for the badinage not to continue.”

“Ah, capital,” Roundbush said in relief. “That means I can include my distinguished gray-haired superior in that letter to my MP; perhaps I can arrange to have his tongue ruled a noxious substance and shipped out of the country, or at least possibly rabid and so subject to six months’ quarantine.”

Julian Peary was not about to let himself be upstaged: “If we inquire at all closely into what your tongue has been doing, Basil old boy, I dare say we’d find it needs more quarantine than a mere six months.” Roundbush had turned pink at Hipple’s gibe; now he went brick-red.

“Torpedoed at the waterline,” Goldfarb whispered to Leo Horton. “He’s sinking fast.” The other radarman grinned and nodded.

Hipple turned to the two of them. Goldfarb was afraid he’d overheard, but he just said, “How are we coming at fitting a radar set into the Meteor fuselage, gentlemen?”

“As long as we don’t fly with fuel tanks in there, we’ll be fine, sir,” Goldfarb answered, deadpan. Hipple gave him a fishy stare, then laughed-warily-and nodded. Goldfarb went on, “Horton, though, has made some exciting finds about which part of the circuitry controls signal amplitude.”

He’d expected that to excite Hipple, who had been almost as eager to learn about radar as he had been to tinker with his beloved jet engines. But Ripple just asked, “Is it something we can apply immediately?”

“No, sir,” Horton answered. “I know what they do, but not how they do it.”

“Then we’ll just have to leave it,” Ripple said. “For now, we must be as utilitarian as possible.”

Goldfarb and Horton exchanged glances. That didn’t sound like the Fred Ripple they’d come to know. “What’s up, sir?”’ Goldfarb asked. Roundbush and the other RAF officers who worked directly under the group captain also paid close attention.

But Hipple just said, “Time is not running in our favor at the moment,” and buried his nose in an engineering drawing. ‘Time for what?” Goldfarb asked Horton in a tiny voice. The other radarman shrugged. One more thing to worry about Goldfarb thought, and went back to work.

Except for being illuminated only by sunlight, Dr. Hiram Sharp’s office in Ogden didn’t seem much different from any other Jens Larssen had visited. Dr. Sharp himself, a round little man with gold-rimmed glasses, looked at Jens over the- tops of them and said, “Son, you’ve got the clap.”

“I knew that, thanks,” Jens said. Somehow he hadn’t expected such forthrightness from a doctor in Mormon, Utah. He supposed doctors saw everything, even here. After that hesitation, he went on, “Can you do anything about it?”

“Not much,” Dr. Sharp answered, altogether too cheerfully for Jens’ taste. “If I had sulfa, I could give you some of that and cure you like nobody’s business. If I had acriflavine, I could squirt it up your pipe in a bulb syringe. You wouldn’t like that for beans, but it would do you some good. But since I don’t, no point fretting over it.”

The mere thought of somebody squirting medicine up his pipe made Larssen want to cover his crotch with both hands.

“Well, what do you have that will do me some good?” he demanded.

Dr. Sharp opened a drawer, pulled out several little foil-wrapped packets, and handed them to him. “Rubbers,” he said, as if Jens couldn’t figure that out for himself. “Keep you from passing it along for a while, anyway.” He pulled out a fountain pen and a book full of ruled pages. “Where’d you get it? You know? Have to keep records, even with everything all gone to hell these days.”

“A waitress named Mary, back in Idaho Springs, Colorado.”

“Well, well.” The doctor scribbled a note. “You do get around, don’t you, son? You know this here waitress’ last name?”

“It was, uh, Cooley, I think.”

“You think? You got to know her pretty well some ways, though, didn’t you?” Dr. Sharp whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Okay, never mind that for now. You screw anybody else between there and here?”

“No.” Jens looked down at the rubbers in his hand. Next time he did end up in the sack with a woman, he might use one… or he might not. After what the bitches had done to him, he figured he was entitled to get some of his own back. “Just been a Boy Scout since you got your dose, have you?” Sharp said. “Bet you wish you were a Boy Scout when you got it, too.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Larssen said dryly. The doctor chuckled. Jens went on, “Truth is, I’ve been moving too much to spend time chasing skirt. I’m on government business.”

“Who isn’t, these days?” Dr. Sharp said. “Government’s just about the last thing left that’s working-and it isn’t working what you’d call well. God only knows how we’re supposed to hold an election for President next year, what with the Lizards holding down half the country and beating the tar out of the half.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jens admitted. It was an interesting problem from a theoretical point of view: as a theoretical physicist, he could appreciate that. The only even remotely similar election would have been the one of 1864, and by then North had pretty much won the Civil War; it wasn’t invaded itself. “Maybe FDR has volunteered for the duration.”

“Maybe he has,” Sharp said. “Damned if I know who’d run against him anyhow, or how he’d campaign if he did.”

“Yeah,” Jens said. “Look, Doc, if you don’t have any medication that’ll help me, what am I supposed to do about what I’ve got?”

Dr Sharp sighed. “Live with it as best you can. I don’t know what else to tell you. The drugs we’ve been getting the past few years, they’ve let us take a real bite out of germs for the first time ever. I felt like I was really doing something worthwhile. And now I’m just an herb-and-root man again, same as my grandpa back before the turn of the century. Oh, maybe a better surgeon than Gramps was, and, I know about asepsis and he didn’t, but that’s about it. I’m sorry, son, I don’t have anything special to give you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Larssen said. “Do you think I’m likely to find any other doctors who have the drugs you were talking about?” Even if the acriflavine treatment sounded worse than the disease it was supposed to help, at least it would be over pretty soon. You got gonorrhea for keeps.

“Nobody else here in Ogden, that’s for damn sure,” Dr Sharp answered. “We share what we have, not that it’s much. Your best bet would be some fellow in a little town who hasn’t used up all his supplies and doesn’t mind sharing them with strangers passing through. A lot of that kind, though, won’t treat anybody but the people they live with. It’s like we’re going back to tribes instead of being one country any more.”

Jens nodded. “I’ve seen that, too. I don’t much like it, but I don’t know what to do about it, either.” Before the Lizards came, he’d taken for granted the notion of a country stretching from sea to shining sea. Now he saw it was an artificial construct, built on the unspoken agreement of citizens and on long freedom from internal strife. He wondered how many other things he’d taken for granted weren’t as self-evident as they seemed to be.

Like Barbara always loving you, for instance, he thought.

Dr. Sharp stuck out a hand. “Sorry I couldn’t help you more, son. No charge, not when I didn’t do anything. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks a bunch, Doc.” Larssen picked up the rifle he propped in a corner of the office, slung it over his should and left without shaking hands. Sharp stared after him, but you didn’t want to get huffy with somebody packing a gun.

Jens had chained his bicycle to a telephone pole outside the doctor’s office. It was still there when he went out to get it. Looking up and down Washington Boulevard (which US 89 turned into when it ran through Ogden), he saw quite a few bikes parked with no chains at all. The Mormons were still trusting people. His mouth twisted. He’d been trusting, too, and look where it had got him.

“In Ogden goddamn Utah, on my way to a job nobody else wants,” he muttered. A fellow, in overalls driving a horse-drawn wagon down the street gave him a reproachful stare. He glared back so fiercely that Mr. Overalls went back to minding his own business, which was a pretty good idea any way you looked at it.

A puff of breeze from the west brought the smell of the Great Salt Lake to his nostrils. Ogden lay in a narrow stretch of ground between the lake and the forest-covered Wasatch Mountains. Larssen had grown used to the tang of the sea his grad school days out in Berkeley, but the Great Salt Lake odor was a lot stronger, almost unpleasant.

He’d heard you floated there, that you couldn’t sink even if wanted to. Wish I could throw Yeager in, and find out by experiment, he thought. And that waitress, too. I’d hold ’em under if they didn’t drown on their own.

He stowed the chain, swung up onto his bike, and started pedaling north up Washington. He rolled past City Hall Park the three-story brick pile of the Broom Hotel, with its eighteen odd, bulging windows: Another three-story building, at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street, had the wooden statue of a horse atop it, complete with a tail that streamed in the breeze.

He had to stop there to let a convoy of wagons head west down Twenty-fourth. While he waited, he turned to a fellow on horseback and asked, “You live here?” When the man nodded, went on, “What’s the story of the horse?” He pointed to the statue.

“Oh, Nigger Boy?” the man said. “He was a local racehorse, he’d beat critters you couldn’t believe if you didn’t see it. Now he’s the best weather forecaster in town.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jens said. “How’s that?”

The local grinned. “If he’s wet, you know it’s raining; if covered with snow, you know it’s been snowing. And if tail’s blowin’ around like it is now, it’s windy out.”

“Walked into that one, didn’t I?” Jens said, snorting. The wagon of the convoy creaked by. He started rolling again, soon passed Tabernacle Park. The Ogden Latter Day Saints Tabernacle was one of the biggest, fanciest buildings in town. He’d seen that elsewhere in Utah, too, the temples much more the focus of public life than the buildings dedicated to secular administration.

Separation of church and state was another of the things I taken for granted that didn’t turn out to be as automatic as he’d thought. Here in Utah, he got the feeling they separated things to keep outsiders happy, without really buying into notion that that was the right and proper way to operate. He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He had plenty of his own.

Just past the city cemetery, a concrete bridge took him over Ogden River. By then, he was just about out of town. The scrubby country ahead didn’t look any too appetizing. No wonder the Mormons settled here, he thought. Who else would be crazy enough to want land like this?

He lifted one hand to scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, what the Mormons believed was good only for a belly laugh. Even so, he’d never felt safer in all his travels than he did in Utah. Whether the doctrines were true or not, they turned out solid people.

Is that what the answer is? he wondered: as long as you seriously believe in something, almost no matter what you have a pretty good chance of ending up okay? He didn’t care for the idea. He’d dedicated his career to pulling objective truth out of the physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo wasn’t supposed to stack up against that kind of dedication.

But it did. Maybe the Mormons didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics, but they seemed pretty much content with the lives they were living, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say himself.

Putting your faith in what some book told you, without any other evidence to show it was on the right track, struck him as something right out of the Middle Ages. Ever since the Renaissance, people had been looking for a better, freer way to live. Jesus loves me! This I know! ’Cause the Bible!’ Tells me so. Jens’ lip curled derisively. Sunday school pap, that’s what it was.

And yet… When you looked at it the right way, accepting your religion could be oddly liberating. Instead of being free to make choices, you were free from making them: they’d already been made for you, and all you had to do was follow along.

“Yeah, that’s what Hitler and Stalin peddle, too,” Larssen said as he left Ogden behind. Thinking was what he did best; the idea of turning that part of him over to somebody else sent the heebie-jeebies running up and down his spine.

People looked up from whatever they were doing when he rode past. He didn’t know how they did it, but they could tell he didn’t belong here. Maybe somebody’d pinned a sign to him: I AM A GENTILE. He laughed, partly at himself, partly at Utah. Hell, even Jews were gentiles here.

Up ahead on US 89, a fellow was riding a buckboard that had probably been sitting in the barn since his grandfather’s day. As Jens put his back into pedaling and whizzed past the gray mule drawing the buggy, the man called out to him: “You headin’ up toward Idaho, stranger?”

Stranger. Yeah, they could tell, all right. Larssen almost kept going without answering, but the question hadn’t sounded hostile or suspicious. He slowed down and said, “What if I am?”

“Just that you oughta be careful, is all,” the man on the buckboard answered. “Them Lizard things, there’s some of ’em up there, I hear tell.”

“Are there?” Jens said. If he wanted to abdicate responsibility for his life, that would be the way to do it. He had enough reasons for thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, either. He owed so many people so much… “Are there? Good.” He turned on the heat, and left the fellow in the buggy staring after him.

The only way Mutt Daniels had ever wanted to see the south side of Chicago was to bring in a big-league team to play the White Sox at Comiskey Park. He’d learned, though, that what you wanted and what life handed you all too often weren’t the same thing.

Take the gold bars he wore on his shoulders. He hadn’t even changed shirts when he got ’em, because he had only one shirt. He’d just taken off the stripes with somebody’s bayonet and. put on lieutenant’s insignia instead. People from his old squad still called him Sarge. He didn’t care. He felt like a sergeant, and the platoon he was leading now had taken enough casualties that it had only two squads worth of guys, anyway.

One nice thing about turning into an officer was that he got his orders with one less layer of manure on top, and that they gave him a bigger picture of what was going on. As now: Captain Sid Klein (who’d been Lieutenant Klein till Captain Maczek got hit) drew in the dirt between the ruins of, what hadn’t been fancy apartment buildings even before the Lizards came, saying, “It may not look that way, boys, but the brass says we’ve got these scaly bastards right where we want ’em.”

“Yeah, an’ we retreated through half of Illinois to get ’em here, too,” Mutt said.

The captain was half his age; damn near everybody in the Army, seemed like, was half his age. Klein said, “You may think you’re joking, but you’re not. When it comes to maneuver, they got us licked. Their tanks and trucks are faster than ours, and they’ve got those goddamn helicopters to give it to us in the rear when we’re bent over the wrong way. But that doesn’t count for much in city fighting. Here it’s just slugging, block by block, body by body.”

Mutt’s opposite number for the company’s first platoon was a skinny midwesterner named Chester Hicks. “Puts a lot, of bodies underground,” he observed.

“Lord, you can say that again,” Daniels said. “I did some of that block-by-block stuff last fall, and it’s ugly. Even for war, it’s ugly.”

Captain Klein nodded. “You bet it is. But the brass don’t think the Lizards can afford that kind of slugging any more. When the Germans were blitzing across Russia in ‘41, they got their noses bloody when they went into the towns, not out on the plains. Maybe it’ll be the same way here.”

“And if it ain’t, so what, ’cause the Lizards drove us back here anyways,” Mutt said.

“You’re right about that.” Captain Klein sighed and ran a hand through his short, curly red hair. “We gotta do all we can, though. Go on back to your boys and give ’em the word.”

Mutt’s platoon was defending a couple of blocks of East 111th Street. Off to the west was the Gothic ornateness of the Morgan Park Military Academy. Daniels wondered if the cadets were in the line somewhere, the way the boys from the Virginia Military Institute had marched out and fought during the States War. He didn’t see anybody who looked like a cadet, but he knew that didn’t mean anything. It was a hell of a big fight.

To the east was an American strongpoint on the high ground of Pullman, and then, east of that, the marsh around Lake Calumet. If the Lizards dislodged his boys, he aimed to fall back to the east if he could. North of 111th Street stood the low, ornate buildings that housed the Pullman car shops. He’d fought through blocks of factories before. That was even worse than the trenches had been back in France, but Captain Klein was right about one thing: digging determined troops out of a warren like that would cost the Lizards plenty.

Some of the platoon’s foxholes and bits of trench were on he south side of 111th, some on the north. Some were literally in the middle of the street; bombs and shells had torn big holes in the asphalt.

Dracula Szabo waved to Daniels as he came up the broken sidewalk. Szabo was wearing the chevrons Mutt had cut off his own sleeve; Mutt’s old squad belonged to him now. Mutt was sure the men would get on better than most: as long as there were supplies to scrounge, Dracula would figure out how to scrounge them.

Now he said, “Took ya long enough to get back, Sarge-uh, I mean, Lieutenant. You’re lucky we still got more o’ what I came up with.”

“Not more fancy booze?” Mutt said. “I told you a dozen times, if it ain’t beer or bourbon, I ain’t interested-not real interested, anyways,” he amended hastily.

“Better’n booze,” Dracula said, and before Daniels could deny that anything was better than booze, he named something that was, or at least harder to come by: “I found somebody’s stash o’ cigarettes: ten bee-yoo-tee-full, lovely, cartons of Pall Malls.”

“Goddamn,” Mutt said reverently. “How’d you manage that one?”

“C’mere an’ I’ll show ya.” Proud of his exploit, Szabo led Daniels to one of the battered houses on the south side of 111th Street, then down into the basement. It was dark down there, and full of cobwebs. Mutt didn’t like it worth a damn. Dracula seemed right at home; he might have been in a Transylvanian castle.

He started stomping on the floor. “It was somewhere right around here,” he muttered, then grunted in satisfaction. “There. You hear that?”

“A hollow,” Daniels said.

“You betcha,” Szabo agreed. He flicked on his Zippo, lifted up the board, pointed. “Lined with lead, too, so it don’t get wet in, there.” He reached in, pulled out a couple of cartons, and handed them to Mutt. “Here, these are the last ones.”

The precious tobacco had disappeared into Daniels’ pack by the time he went outside again. He didn’t know whether Dracula was telling the truth, but if he tried putting the arm on him this time, he was liable never to see any more bounty.

“I want to jam a whole pack in my face all at once,” he said, “but I figure the first drag’ll be enough to do for me-or maybe do me in, I ain’t had one in so long.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Szabo said. “It’s been a while even for me.” Mutt gave him a sharp stare at that-had he been holding out on other finds? — but Szabo just gazed back, bland as a preacher. Mutt gave up.

Suddenly he grinned and headed off to a brick cottage a few hundred yards north of the front lines. The house had a big red cross painted inside a whitewashed circle on the roof and a red cross flag flying on a tall pole above it to show the Lizards what it was.

Before Mutt got halfway there, the grin evaporated. “She don’t even smoke,” he muttered to himself. “She said as much.” He stopped, kicking a stone in irresolution. Then he pressed on, even so. “I know what to do with ’em just the same.”

Perhaps because of the warning tokens, the house that held the aid station and several around it were more or less intact, though cattle could have grazed on their lawns. Here and there, untended zinnias and roses bloomed brightly. A medic on the front steps of the aid station nodded to Daniels. “Morning, Lieutenant.”

“Mornin’.” Mutt went on up the stairs past the tired-looking medic and into the aid station. Things had been pretty quiet the past couple of days the Lizards didn’t seem any too enthusiastic about the street fighting they’d have to do to take Chicago. Only a handful of injured men sprawled on the cots and couches packed into every available inch of floor space.

Lucille Potter bent over one of those men; changing a wound dressing. The fellow sucked in his breath to keep from crying out. When he was able to drive some of the rawness from his voice, he said carefully, “That hurt some, ma’am.”

“I know it did, Henry,” she answered, “but we have to keep the wound as clean as we can if we don’t want it to get infected.” Like a lot of nurses, she used the royal we when talking to patients. She looked up and saw Daniels. “Hello, Mutt. What brings you here?”

“Got a present for you, Miss Lucille,” Daniels said. Henry and a couple of the other guys in the aid station laughed. One of them managed a wheezing wolf whistle.

Lucille’s face froze. The look she gave Mutt said, You’re going to have to stay after school Charlie. She figured he was trying to get her into the sack with whatever his present turned out to be. As a matter of fact, he was, but he was smart enough to figure out that sometimes the indirect approach was the only one that stood a chance-if any approach stood a chance, which wasn’t nearly obvious.

He shrugged off his pack, reached into it, and pulled out one of the cigarette cartons. The wounded dogface who’d let out the wolf whistle whistled again, a single low, awed note. Mutt tossed the pack underhanded to Lucille. “Here you go. Share these out with the guys who come through here and want ’em.”

Flesh clung too close to the bony underpinnings of her face for it to soften much, but her eyes were warm as she surehandedly caught the carton of Pall Malls. “Thank you, Mutt; I’ll do that,” she said. “A lot of people will be glad you found those.”

“Don’t give me the credit for that,” he said. “Dracula found ’em.”

“I might have known,” she answered, smiling now. “But you were the one who thought to bring them here so I’ll thank you for that.”

“Me too, sir,” Henry said. “Ain’t seen a butt-uh, a cigarette-in a he-heck of a long time.”

“Got that right,” the whistler said. “Ma’am, can I have one now, please? I’ll be a good boy all the way till Christmas if I can, I promise.” He drew a bandaged hand over his chest in a crisscross pattern.

“Victor, you’re impossible,” Lucille said, but she couldn’t keep from laughing. She opened the carton, then opened a pack. The wounded men sighed as she took out a cigarette for each of them. Mutt could smell the tobacco all the way across the room. Lucille went through bet pockets. Her mouth twisted in annoyance. “Does anyone have a match?”

“I do.” Mutt produced a box. “Good for startin’ fires at night-and besides, you never can tell when you might come across somethin’.”

He handed the matches to Lucille. She lit cigarettes for her patients. The aroma of fresh tobacco had made his nose sit up and take notice. Real tobacco smoke, harsh and sweet at the same time, was almost too much to bear.

“Give the lieutenant one, too, ma’am,” Victor said. “Hadn’t’ve been for him, none of us’d have any.” The other wounded soldiers agreed loudly. A couple of them paused to cough in the middle of agreeing; after you hadn’t smoked for a while, you lost the knack.

Lucille brought the pack over to him. He took out a cigarette, tapped it against the palm of his hand to tamp down the tobacco, and stuck it in his mouth. He started to reach for the matches, too, but Lucille had already struck one. He bent down over it to get a light.

“Now this here’s livin’,” he said, sucking in a long, deep drag of smoke: “gettin’ your cigarette lit for you by a beautiful woman.”

The GIs whooped. Lucille sent him an I’ll-get-you-later look. He ignored it, partly on general principles, partly because he was busy coughing himself-the smoke tasted great, but it felt like mustard gas in his lungs. Spit flooded into his mouth. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, the same way he had when he first puffed on a corncob pipe back in the dying days of the last century.

“Cigarettes may be good for morale,” Lucille said primly, “but they’re extremely unhealthful.”

“What with everything out there that can kill me quick or chop me up, I ain’t gonna worry about somethin’ that’s liable to kill me slow,” Mutt said. He took another drag. This one did what it was supposed to do; his body remembered all the smoke he’d put into it after all.

The wounded soldiers laughed again. Lucille sent him that narrow-eyed stare again; if they’d been by themselves, she would have tapped her foot on the ground, too. Then a smile slowly stole across her face. “There is something to that,” she admitted.

Mutt beamed; any concessions he managed to get from her made him feel grand. He brought his right hand up to the rim of his helmet in a sketched salute. “I’m gonna get back to my platoon, Miss Lucille,” he said. “Hope those cigarettes last you a good long time, on account of that’ll mean not too many guys gettin’ hurt.”

“Thank you for your kindness, Mutt,” she answered. The soldiers echoed her. He nodded and waved and went outside. The cigarette was still hanging out of the corner of his mouth, but the medic taking a break on the front steps didn’t notice till he caught the smell of smoke. When he did, his head came up as if he were a bird dog taking a scent. He stared in disbelieving envy as Mutt smoked the Pall Mall down to where the coal singed his lips, then stubbed out the tiny butt on the sidewalk.

Everything stayed pretty quiet as Mutt made his way back to his unit. Off in the distance somewhere, artillery rumbled like far-off thunder. A couple of plumes of smoke rose, one over toward Lake Calumet, the other way off in the west. But for somebody who’d seen more close combat than he wanted to think about, that kind of stuff was hardly worth noticing.

When he got back, he discovered that a lot of his dogfaces had acquired cigarettes, too. Dracula Szabo was looking sleek and prosperous. Mutt suspected he hadn’t given his chums smokes for free. Keeping your lieutenant happy was part of the cost of doing business, but the rest of the soldiers were the guys you did business with. As long as nobody in the platoon beefed to Mutt about being gouged, he was willing to look the other way.

He sent scouts out well south of 111th Street to make sure the Lizards wouldn’t get away with pulling a fast one after darkness fell. He was sorting through ration cans to see what he’d have for supper when Lucille Potter came up.

Everyone in the platoon who saw her greeted her like an older sister or a favorite aunt or even a mom: she’d been “theirs” for a long time before the shortage of anybody who knew anything about patching up the wounded forced her out of the front line. “Got some smokes for the guys you’re taking care of, Miss Lucille,” Dracula said.

“That’s been taken care of, Bela, thank you, though you’re kind to offer.” She turned to Mutt, raised one eyebrow. “The ones you brought came from your own supply?”

“Well, yeah, Miss Lucille.” Mutt kicked at bits of broken concrete from what had been a sidewalk.

“That just makes it nicer of you,” she said, and he felt he’d done his problem on the blackboard right. “To share what Dracula passed on to you in particular-I don’t think that that many people would have done as much.”

“Wasn’t so much of a much,” he said, though under dirt and stubble he knew he was turning red. He held out a can of beef stew to Lucille. “Care to stay for some supper?”

“All right.” She pulled a can opener out of a pistol-style holster on her belt and made short work of the lid to the stew. She dug in with a spoon, then sighed. “Another cow that died of old age-and the potatoes and carrots with it.”

Mutt opened an identical can. He sighed, too, after his first taste. “You’re right about that, sure enough. But it does stick to your ribs. Better food than they gave us in France, I’ll tell you that. The trick in France was getting the Frenchies to feed you. Then you ate good. They could make horse meat taste like a T-bone.” He didn’t know what all he’d eaten Over There, but he remembered it fondly.

Before Lucille answered, Lizard artillery opened up, off to the east. Shells whistled in maybe half a mile away-not close enough to make him dive for cover. He looked over to see if they’d done any damage. At first, he didn’t notice anything new, but then he saw that the ornate water tower that had towered over the Pullman car factory wasn’t there any more.

Lucille saw that, too. She said, “I don’t think there are many people-civilian people, I mean-left in Chicago to feed us. This was the second biggest city in the United States a year ago. Now it might as well be a ghost town out West somewhere.”

“Yeah, I been by some o’ those, places like Arizona, Nevada. Whatever they used to be for isn’t around any more, and they aren’t, either. Chicago is-or was-about bringing’ things in and shippin’ ’em out, or makin’ ’em here and shippin’ ’em out. What with the Lizards, that isn’t around any more, either,” Mutt said.

As if to punctuate his words, more shells thumped in, these a little closer than the ones before. “They’re working over the front line,” Lucille Potter observed. “But, Mutt, those ghost towns out West never had more than a few hundred people, a few thousand at most. Chicago had more than three million. Where is everybody?”

“A lot of ’em are dead,” he answered bleakly, and she nodded. “A lot of ’em run off, either scared away by the fighting or on account of their factories couldn’t go on working because of the Lizards or ’cause nobody could get food to ’em here. So one way or another, they ain’t here no more.”

“You’re right,” she said. “You have a sensible way of looking at things.”

“Yeah?” Mutt glanced around. None of his men was real close; they were all going about their own business. He lowered his voice even so: “I’m so all-fired sensible, how come I got stuck on you?”

“Most likely just because we lived in each other’s pockets for too long.” Lucille shook her head. “If things were different, Mutt, it might have worked both ways. Even the way things are, I sometimes wonder-” She stopped and looked unhappy, plainly thinking she’d said too much.

Mutt unwrapped a chocolate bar. Like smoking, the simple action gave him something to do with his hands while he thought. He broke the bar in half and gave Lucille a piece. Then, ever so cautiously, he said, “You mean you might be lookin’ at-tryin’ a man?” He wasn’t sure how to phrase that to keep from offending her, but did his best.

Lucille’s face was wary, but she nodded. “Might be looking at it is about right, Mutt. I’m closer to it, I think, than I’ve ever been in my life, but I’d be lying if I said I was ready yet. I hope you can understand that and be patient.”

“Miss Lucille, you get as old as I am, some things you ain’t in a hurry about like you was when you were younger. It’s just that-” Mutt was going to say something about the uncertainty of war arguing against delay, but he never got the chance: the uncertainty of war came to him.

The hideous whistle in the air rose to a banshee shriek. His body realized the Lizard shells were aimed straight at him before his mind did. Without conscious thought, he flattened out just as they landed.

The cluster of explosions-three in all-left him stunned. They picked him up from the ground and threw him back down as if a professional wrestler had body-slammed him. The blast tore at his ears and at his insides; somebody might have been reaching in through his nose and trying to rip out his lungs. Shell fragments whistled and whined all around him.

More shells crashed home, these not quite so close. Through the ringing in his ears and the crazy hammering of his heart, Mutt heard somebody scream. Somebody else-was that Dracula’s voice? — shouted, “Miss Lucille!”

Mutt dug his face out of the dirt. “Aw, heck,” he said. “They tagged somebody.”

Lucille Potter didn’t answer. She didn’t move. One of those shell fragments that missed Mutt had neatly clipped off the top of her head. He could see her brain in there. Blood ran down into her graying hair. Her eyes were wide and staring. She’d never known what hit her, anyhow.

“Miss Lucille?” Yeah, that was Dracula calling. “We need you over here.”

Mutt didn’t say anything. He looked at her body, at the ruined Chicago neighborhood that had just had a little more ruin rained onto it. Without intending to, he started to cry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. The tears rolled down his cheeks and made tiny damp spots on the chewed-up ground. Then they soaked in and were gone as if they’d never existed.

Just like Lucille, he thought, and cried even harder.