Tilting the Balance

II

Ludmila Gorbunova did not care for Moscow. She was from Kiev, and thought the Soviet capital drab and dull. Her impression of it was not improved by the endless grilling she’d had from the NKVD. She’d never imagined the mere sight of green collar tabs could reduce her to fearful incoherence, but it did.

And, she knew, things could have been worse. The chekists were treating her with kid gloves because she’d flown Comrade Molotov, second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, and a man who loathed flying, to Germany and brought him home in one piece. Besides, the rodina-the motherland-needed combat pilots. She’d stayed alive through most of a year against the Nazis and several months against the Lizards. That should have given her value above and beyond what she got for ferrying Molotov around.

Whether it did, however, remained to be seen. A lot of very able, seemingly very valuable people had disappeared over the past few years, denounced as wreckers or traitors to the Soviet Union or sometimes just vanished with no explanation at all, as if they had suddenly ceased to exist…

The door to the cramped little room (cramped, yes, but infinitely preferable to a cell in the Lefortovo prison) in which she sat came open. The NKVD man who came in wore three crimson oblongs on his collar tabs. Ludmila bounced to her feet. “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” she said, saluting.

He returned the salute, the first time that had happened since the NKVD started in on her. “Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” he acknowledged. “I am Boris Lidov.” She blinked in surprise; none of her questioners had bothered giving his name till now, either. Lidov looked more like a schoolmaster than an NKVD man, not that that meant anything. But he surprised her again, saying, “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, thank you very much, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” she answered-quickly, before he changed his mind. The German attack had deranged the Soviet distribution system, that of the Lizards all but destroyed it. These days, tea was rare and precious.

Well, she thought, the NKVD will have it if anyone does. And sure enough, Lidov stuck his head out the door and bawled a request. Within moments, someone fetched him a tray with two gently steaming glasses. He took it, set it on the table in front of Ludmila. “Help yourself,” he, said. “Choose whichever you wish; neither one is drugged, I assure you.”

He didn’t need to assure her; that he did so made her suspicious again. But she took a glass and drank. Her tongue found nothing in it but tea and sugar. She sipped again, savoring the taste and the warmth. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. It’s very good,” she said.

Lidov made an indolent gesture, as If to say she didn’t need to thank him for anything so small. Then he said idly, as if making casual conversation, “You know, I met your Major Jager-no, you’ve said he’s Colonel Jager now, correct? — your Colonel Jager, I should say, after you brought him here to Moscow last summer.”

“Ah,” Ludmila said, that being the most noncommittal noise she could come up with. She decided it was not enough.

“Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, as I have said before, he is not my colonel by any means.”

“I do not necessarily condemn,” Lidov said, steepling his fingers. “The ideology of the fascist state is corrupt, not the German people. And”-he coughed dryly-“the coming of the Lizards has shown that progressive economic systems, capitalist and socialist alike, must band together lest we all fall under the oppression of the ancient system wherein the relationship is slave to master, not worker to boss.”

“Yes,” Ludmila said eagerly. The last thing she wanted to do was argue about the dialectic of history with an NKVD man, especially when his interpretation seemed to her advantage.

Lidov went on, “Further, your Colonel Jager helped perform a service for the people of the Soviet Union, as he may have mentioned to you.”

“No, I’m afraid he didn’t. I’m sorry, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, but we talked very little about the war when we saw each other in Germany. We-” Ludmila felt her face heat. She knew what Lidov had to be thinking. Unfortunately-from her point of view-he was right.

He looked down his long, straight nose at her. “You like Germans well, don’t you?” be said sniffily. “This Jager in Berchtesgaden, and you attached his gunner”-he pulled out a scrap of paper, checked a name on it-“Georg Schultz, da, to the ground crew at your airstrip.”

“He is a better mechanic than anyone else at the airstrip. Germans understand machinery better than we do, I think. But as far as I am concerned, he is only a mechanic,” Ludmila insisted.

“He is a German. They are both Germans.” So much for Lidov’s words about the solidarity of peoples with progressive economic systems. His flat, hard tone made Ludmila think of a trip to Siberia on an unheated cattle car, or of a bullet in the back of the neck. The NKVD man went on, “It is likely that Comrade Molotov will dispense with the services of a pilot who forms such un-Soviet attachments.”

“I am sorry to hear that, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” Ludmila said, though she knew Molotov would have been glad to dispense with the services of any pilot, given his attitude about flying. But she insisted, “I have no attachments to Georg Schultz save those of the struggle against the Lizards.”

“And to Colonel Jager?” Lidov said with the air of a man calling checkmate. Ludmila did not answer, she knew she was checkmated. The lieutenant-colonel spoke as if pronouncing sentence: “Because of this conduct of yours, you are to be returned to your former duties without promotion. Dismissed, Comrade Senior Lieutenant.”

Ludmila had been braced for ten years in the gulag and another five of internal exile. She needed a moment to take in what she’d just heard. She jumped to her feet. “I serve the Soviet state, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” Whether you believe me or not, she added to herself.

“Prepare yourself for immediate departure for the airport,” Lidov said, as if her mere presence polluted Moscow. An NKVD flunky must have been listening outside the door or to a concealed microphone, for in under half a minute a fellow in green collar tabs brought in a canvas bag full of her worldly goods.

Before long, a troika was taking her from the Kremlin to the airport on the edge of Moscow. The sleigh’s runners and the hooves of the three horses that drew it kicked up snow gone from white to gray thanks to city soot. Only when her beloved little U-2 biplane came into view on the runway did she realize she’d been returned to this duty, which she wanted more than any other, as if it were a punishment. She chewed on that a long time, even after she was in the air.

“I’m bloody lost,” David Goldfarb said as he pedaled his RAF bicycle through the countryside south of Leicester. The radarman came to an intersection. He looked for signs to tell him where he was-and looked in vain, because the signs taken down in 1940 to hinder a feared German invasion had never gone back up.

He was trying to get to the Research and Development Test Flying Aerodrome at Bruntingthorpe, to which he’d been ordered to report. South from the village of Peatling Magna, his directions read. The only trouble was, nobody had bothered to tell him (for all he knew, nobody was aware) two roads ran south from Peatling Magna. He’d taken the right-hand track, and was beginning to regret it.

Peatling Magna hadn’t looked magna enough to boast two roads when he rolled through it; he wondered if there could possibly be a Peatling Minima, and, if so, whether it was visible to the naked eye.

Ten minutes of steady pedaling brought him into another village. He looked around hopefully for anything resembling an aerodrome, but nothing he saw matched that description. A matronly woman in a scarf and a heavy wool coat was trudging down the street. “Begging your pardon, madam,” he called to her, “but is this Bruntingthorpe?”

The woman’s head whipped around-his London accent automatically made him out to be a stranger. She relaxed, a little, when she saw he was in RAF dark blue and thus had an excuse for poking his good-sized nose into a place where he didn’t belong. But even though she used the broader vowels of the East Midlands, her voice was sharp as she answered, “Bruntingthorpe? I should say not, young man. This is Peatling Parva. Bruntingthorpe lies down that road.” She pointed east.

“Thank you, madam,” Goldfarb said gravely. He bent low over his bicycle, rode away fast so she wouldn’t hear him start to snicker. Not Peatling Minima-Peatling Parva. The name fit; it had looked a pretty parva excuse for a village. Now, though, he was on the right track and-he looked at his watch-near enough on time that he could blame his tardiness on the train’s getting into Leicester late, which it had.

He hadn’t gone far toward Bruntingthorpe when he heard a screaming roar, saw an airplane streak across the sky at what seemed an impossible speed. Alarm and fury coursed through him-had he come here just in time to see the Lizards bomb and wreck the aerodrome?

Then he played in his mind the film of the aircraft he’d just seen. After the Lizards destroyed the radar station at Dover, he’d been an aircraft spotter the old-fashioned way, with binoculars and field telephone, for a while. He recognized the Lizards’ fighters and fighter-bombers. This aircraft, even if it flew on jets, didn’t match any of them. Either they’d come up with something new or the plane was English.

Hope replaced anger. Where was he more likely to find English jet aircraft than at a research and development aerodrome? He wondered why the powers that be wanted him there. He’d find out soon.

The village of Bruntingthorpe was no more prepossessing than either of the Peatlings. Not far away, though, a collection of tents, corrugated-iron Nissen huts, and macadamized runways marred the gently rolling fields that surrounded the hamlets. A soldier with a tin hat and a Sten gun demanded to see Goldfarb’s papers when he pedaled up to the barbed-wire fence and gate around the RAF facility.

He surrendered them, but could not help remarking, “Seems a fairish waste of time, if anyone wants to know. Not bloody likely I’m a Lizard in disguise, is it?”

“Never can tell, chum,” the soldier answered. “Besides, you might be a Jerry in disguise, and we’re not dead keen on that even if the match there won’t be played to a finish.”

“Can’t say I blame you.” Goldfarb’s parents had got out of Russian-ruled Poland to escape pogroms against the Jews. By all accounts, the Nazis’ pogroms after they conquered Poland had been a hundred times worse, bad enough for the Jews there to make common cause with the Lizards against the Germans. Now, from the reports that leaked out, the Lizards were beginning to make things tough on the Jews. Goldfarb sighed. Being a Jew wasn’t easy anywhere.

The sentry opened the gate, waved him through. He rode over to the nearest Nissen hut, got off his bicycle, pushed down the kickstand, and went into the hut. Several RAF men were gathered round a large table there, studying some drawings by the light of a paraffin lamp hung overhead. “Yes?” one of them said.

Goldfarb stiffened to attention: the casual questioner, though just a couple of inches over five feet tall, wore the four narrow stripes of a group captain. Saluting, Goldfarb gave his name, specialization, and service number, then added, “Reporting as ordered sir!”

The officer returned the salute. “Good to have you with us, Goldfarb. We’ve had excellent reports of you, and we’re confident you’ll make a valuable member of the team. I am Group Captain Fred Hipple; I shall be your commanding officer. My speciality is jet propulsion. Here we have Wing Commander Peary, Flight Lieutenant Kennan, and Flight Officer Roundbush.”

The junior officers all towered over Hipple, but he dominated nonetheless. He was a dapper little fellow who held himself very erect; he had slicked-down wavy hair, a closely trimmed mustache, and heavy eyebrows. He spoke with almost professional precision: “I am told that you have been flying patrols aboard a radar-equipped Lancaster bomber in an effort to detect Lizard aircraft prior to their reaching our shores.”

“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” Goldfarb said.

“Capital. We shall make great use of your experience, I assure you. What we are engaged in here, Radarman, is developing a jet-propelled fighter aeroplane to be similarly equipped with radar, thus facilitating the acquisition and tracking of targets and, it is to be hoped, their destruction.”

“That’s-splendid, sir.” Goldfarb had always thought of radar as a defensive weapon, one to use to detect the enemy and send properly armed planes after him. But to mount it on a fighter already formidably armed in its own right… He smiled. This was a project in which he would gladly take part.

Flight Officer Roundbush shook his head. He was as big and blond and blocky as Hipple was spare and dark. He said, “It’d be a lot more splendid if we could make the bloody thing fit in the space we have for it.”

“Which is, at the moment, essentially nil,” Ripple said with a rueful nod. “The jet fighter you may have seen taking off a few moments ago, that little Gloster Pioneer, is not what one would call lavishly equipped with room. It was, in fact, in the air more than a year before the Lizards came.” Bitterness creased his face. “As I had produced a working jet engine as far back as 1937, I find the delay unfortunate, but no help for it now. When the Lizards descended, the Pioneer, though intended only as an experimental aircraft, was rushed into production to give us as much of an equalizer as was possible.”

“Might as well be tanks,” Roundbush murmured. Both the German invasion of France and the fighting in the North African desert had shown severe deficiencies in British armor, but the same old obsolescent models kept getting made because they did work, after a fashion, and England had no time to tool up to build anything better.

Group Captain Hipple shook his head. “It’s not as bad as that, Basil. We have managed to get the Meteor off the ground, after all.” He turned back to Goldfarb. “The Meteor is more a proper fighter than the Pioneer. The latter carries a single jet engine placed in back of the cockpit, whereas the former has two, of an improved design, mounted on the wings. The improvement in performance is considerable.”

“We also have a considerable production program laid on for the Meteor,” Flight Lieutenant Kennan said. “With luck, we should be able to put large numbers of jet fighters into the air by this time next year.”

“Yes, that’s so, Maurice,” Hipple agreed. “Of all the great powers, we and the Japanese have proved most fortunate, in that the Lizards did not invade either island nation. From the depths of space, I suppose we seemed too small to be worth troubling over. We’ve endured a worse blitz than the Jerries gave us, but life does go on despite a blitz. You should know that, eh, Goldfarb?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. “It got a bit lively at Dover now and again, but we came through.” Though only a first-generation Englishman, he had a knack for understatement.

“Exactly.” Hipple’s nod was vehement, as If Goldfarb had said something important. The group captain went on, “As Flight Lieutenant Kennan and I have noted, our industrial capacity is still respectable, and we shall be able to get considerable numbers of Meteors airborne within a relatively short period. What point to it, however, if,once airborne, they are shot down again in short order?”

“Which is where you come in, Goldfarb,” Wing Commander Peary said. He was a slim fellow of medium height with sandy hair starting to go gray; his startling bass voice seemed better suited to a man of twice his bulk.

“Exactly,” Hipple said again. “Julian-the wing commander-means we need a chap with practical experience in airborne radar to help us plan its installation in Meteors as quickly as possible. Our pilots must be able to detect the enemy’s presence at a distance comparable to that at which he can ‘see’ us. D’you follow?”

“I believe so, sir,” Goldfarb said. “From what you say, I gather you intend the Meteor to have a two-man cockpit, pilot and radar observer. With the sets we have, sir, a pilot would be hard-pressed to tend to them and fly the aircraft at the same time.”

The four RAF officers exchanged glances. Goldfarb wondered if he’d just stuck his foot in it. That would be lovely, a lowly radarman affronting all his superiors within five minutes of arriving at a new posting.

Then Julian Peary rumbled, “This is a point which was much debated during the design of the aircraft. You may be interested to know that the view you just expressed is the one which prevailed.”

“I’m-pleased to hear that, sir,” Goldfarb said, with such transparent relief that Basil Roundbush, who seemed not overburdened with military formality, broke into a large, toothy grin.

Group Captain Hipple said, “Having established your level of expertise with such dispatch, Radarman, you give me hope you will also be able to assist us in reducing the size of the radar set to be carried. The fuselage of the Meteor is rather less spacious than the bomb bay of the Lancaster where you were previously ensconced. Perhaps you’ll have a look at these drawings with us so you can get a notion of the volume involved-”

Goldfarb stepped up to the table. With no more fanfare than that, he found himself a part of the team. He said, “I don’t know the solution to one problem we faced in the Lanc.”

“Which is?” Ripple asked.

“Of course, the Lizards’ guided rockets can knock down a plane at longer range than any guns that we have can hit back. One of those rockets definitely seems to home in on our radar transmissions-probably the same sort the Lizards used to knock out our ground stations. Turning off the set made that particular rocket go wild, but it also left us blind-something I shouldn’t fancy if I were in the midst of a dogfight.”

“Indeed not.” Ripple nodded vigorously. “Even under ideal circumstances, the Meteor does not pull us level with the Lizards; it merely reduces our disadvantage. We remain deficient in speed and, as you say, in armament as well. To have to engage enemy aircraft without being able to detect them past the range of the pilot’s eye would be a dreadful handicap. I do not pretend to be an expert in radar; as I said, engines are my speciality.” He turned to the other officers. “Suggestions, gentlemen?”

Basil Roundbush said, “Can your airborne radar set emit more than one frequency, Goldfarb? If so, perhaps switching between one and the next might, ah, confuse the rocket and cause it to miss without losing radar capacity.”

“That might work, sir, I honestly don’t know,” Goldfarb said. “We weren’t any too keen on experimenting, not up above Angels Twenty, if you know what I mean.”

“No quarrel there,” Roundbush assured him. “We’d have to try it on the ground first: if a transmitter there survived by shifting frequencies, the result might be worth testing in aircraft as well.”

He paused to scribble some notes. Goldfarb was delighted research and development had not stopped because of wartime emergencies, and even more delighted to be a part of the effort at Bruntingthorpe. But he’d already promised himself that, when the radar-equipped Meteors flew, he’d be in the rear seat of one of them. Having become part of an aircrew, he knew he’d never again be content to stay on the ground.

Moishe Russie was tired of staying underground. The irony of his position hit him in the teeth like a rifle butt in the hands of an SS man. When the Lizards came to Earth, he’d thought they were the literal answer to his prayers; absent their arrival, the Nazis would have massacred the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and in the others they’d set up throughout Poland.

The Jews had been looking for a miracle then. When Moishe declared that he’d had one, he gained enormous prestige in the ghetto; before, he’d been just another medical student slowly starving to death along with everyone else. He’d urged the Jews to rise, to help throw the Germans out and let the Lizards in.

And so he’d become one of the Lizards’ favorite humans. He’d broadcast propaganda for them, telling-truthfully-of the horrors and atrocities the Nazis had committed in Poland. The Lizards came to think he would say anything for them. They’d wanted him to praise their destruction of Washington, D.C., and say it was as just as the devastation that had fallen on Berlin.

He’d refused… and so he found himself here, hiding in a ghetto bunker that had been built with the Nazis, not the Lizards, in mind.

His wife Rivka picked that moment to ask, “How long have we been down here?”

“Too long,” their son Reuven chimed in.

He was right; Moishe knew he was right. Reuven and Rivka had been cooped up in the bunker longer than he had; they’d gone into hiding so the Lizards couldn’t use threats against them to bend him to their will. After that, the Lizards put a gun to his head to make him say what they wanted. He did not think of himself as a brave man, but he’d defied them even so. They hadn’t killed him. In a way, what they did was worse-they killed his words; broadcasting a twisted recording that made him seem to say what they wanted even when he hadn’t.

Russie had had his revenge; he’d made a recording in a tiny studio in the ghetto that detailed what the Lizards had done to him, and the Jewish fighters had managed to smuggle it out of Poland to embarrass the aliens. After that, he’d had to disappear himself.

Rivka said, “Do you even know, Moishe, whether it’s day or night up there?”

“No more than you do,” he admitted. The bunker had a clock; both he and Rivka had been faithful about keeping it wound. But the clock had only a twelve-hour dial, and after a while they’d lost track of which twelve hours they were in. Even by candlelight, he could see the dial from where he stood: it was a quarter past three. But did that mean bustling afternoon or dead of night? He had no idea. All he knew was that, at the moment, everyone here was awake.

“I don’t know how much longer we can stand this,” Rivka said. “It’s no fit life for a human being, hiding down here in the darkness like a rat in its hole.”

“But if it’s the only way we can go on, then go on we will,” Moishe answered sharply. “Life in wartime is never easy-do you think you’re in America? Even if we are underground, we’re better off now than when the Nazis ruled the ghetto.”

“Are we?”

“I think so. We have plenty of food-” Their other child, a daughter, had died during the Nazi occupation, of dysentery aggravated by starvation. Moishe had known what he needed to do to save her, but without food and medicine he’d been helpless.

But now Rivka said, “So what? We could see our friends before, share our troubles. If the Germans beat us on the streets, it was just because we happened to be there. If the Lizards spy us, they’ll shoot us on sight.”

Since that was manifestly true, Moishe chose the only ploy left to him: he changed the subject. “Even now, our people are better off under the Lizards than they were under the Germans.”

“Yes, and that’s thanks in large part to you,” Rivka retorted. “And what have you got for it? Your whole family, buried alive!” So much anger and bitterness clogged her voice that Reuven started to cry. Even as he comforted his son, Moishe blessed the little boy for short-circuiting the argument.

After he and Rivka got Reuven calmed down again, Moishe said carefully, “If you feel you must, I suppose you and Reuven can go back above ground. Not that many people knew you by sight; with God’s help, you might go a long time before you were betrayed. Anyone who wanted to curry favor with the Lizards could gain it by turning me in. Or a Pole might do it for no better reason than that he hates Jews.”

Rivka sighed. “You know we won’t do that. We won’t leave you, and you’re right, you can’t come up. But if you think we’re well off here, you’re meshuggeh.”

“I never said we were well off,” Russie answered after a brief pause to search his memory and make sure he really hadn’t said anything so foolish. “I only said things could be worse, and they could.” The Nazis could have shipped the whole Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka or that other extermination camp they were just finishing when the Lizards came, the one they called Auschwitz. He didn’t mention that to his wife. Some things, even if true, were too horrific to use as fuel in a quarrel.

The argument petered out. Reuven got sleepy, so they put him to bed. That meant they needed to go to bed themselves not much later; they couldn’t get much sleep when the boy was awake and bouncing off the walls of the cramped bunker.

Noises woke Rivka first, then Moishe. Reuven snored on, even when his parents sat up. Noises in the cellar of the block of flats that concealed the bunker were always frightening. At times, Jewish fighters whom Mordechai Anielewicz led came down with fresh supplies for the Russies, but Moishe always wondered if the next appearance would be the one that brought the knock on the plasterboard panel hiding the doorway.

Rap, rap, rap! The sharp sound echoed through the bunker. Russie started violently. Beside him, Rivka’s lips pulled back from her teeth, her eyes widened, and the skin all over her face tightened down onto the bones in a mask of fear. Rap, rap, rap!

Russie had vowed he wouldn’t go easily. Moving as quiet as he could, he slid out of bed, grabbed a long kitchen knife, and blew out the last lamp, plunging the bunker into darkness blacker than any above-ground midnight.

Rap, rap, rap! Shoving and scraping noises as the plasterboard panel was dislodged and pushed aside. The bunker door itself was barred from the inside. Moishe knew it wouldn’t hold against anyone determined to break it down. He raised the knife high. The first one who came through-Jewish traitor or Lizard-would take as much steel as he could give. That much he promised himself.

But instead of booted feet pounding on the door or a battering ram crashing against it, an urgent Yiddish voice called, “We know you’re in there, Reb Moishe. Open this verkakte door, will you? We have to get you away before the Lizards come.”

A trick? A trap? Automatically, Moishe looked toward Rivka. The darkness he’d made himself stymied him. “What to do?” he called softly.

“Open the door,” she answered.

“But-”

“Open the door,” Rivka repeated. “Nobody in the company of the Lizards would have sworn at it that way.”

It seemed a slim reed to snatch. If it broke, it would pierce more than his hand. But how could he hold the invaders at bay? All at once, he realized they didn’t have to come in after him. Suppose they just stood back and sprayed the bunker with machinegun bullets… or started a fire and let him and his wife and child roast? He let the kitchen knife clatter to the floor, fumbled blindly for the bar, lifted it out of its rest, and pushed the door open.

One of the two Jews in the cellar carried an oil-burning lantern and a pistol. The lantern wasn’t very bright, but dazzled Moishe anyhow. The fighter said, “Took you long enough. Come on. You have to hurry. Some mamzer talked where he shouldn’t, and the Lizards’ll be here soon.”

Belief took root in Russie. “Get Reuven,” he called to his wife.

“I have him,” she answered. “He’s not quite awake, but he’ll come-won’t you, dear?”

“Come where?” Reuven asked blurrily.

“Out of the bunker,” Rivka said, that being all she knew. It was plenty to galvanize the boy. He let out a wild whoop and bounded out of bed. “Wait!” Rivka exclaimed. “You need your shoes. In fact, we all need our shoes. We were asleep.”

“At half past eight in the morning?” the Jew with the lantern said. “I wish I was.” After a moment, though, he added, “Not down here, though, I have to admit.”

Moishe had forgotten he wore only socks. As he pulled on shoes and tied the laces, he asked, “Do we have time to take anything with us?” The books on a high shelf had become more like siblings than friends.

But the other Jew impatiently waiting outside, the one with a German Mauser slung on his back, shook his head and answered, “Reb Moishe, if you don’t get moving, you won’t have time to take yourself.”

Even the low-ceilinged cellar seemed spacious to Moishe. He started to pant on his way up the stairs; he’d had no exercise at all in the bunker. The gray, leaden light at the top of the stairwell made him blink and set his eyes to watering. After so long with candles and oil lamps, even a distant hint of daylight was overwhelming.

Then he walked out onto the street. Thick clouds hid the sun. Dirty, slushy snow lay in the gutters. The air was hardly less thick and smoky than it had been in his underground hideaway. All the same, he wanted to throw his arms wide and dance like a Chasid to let loose his delight. Reuven did caper, coltlike; with a child’s compressed grasp of time, he must have felt he’d been entombed forever. Rivka walked steadily beside him, but her pale face was alight with joy and wonder, too.

Pale-Moishe looked down at his own hands. Beneath dirt, they were white and transparent as skimmed milk. His wife and son were just as pale. Everyone grew pallid through a Polish winter; but if he and his family lost any more color, they’d disappear.

“What’s the date?” he asked, wondering how long he’d been cooped up in the bunker.

“Twenty-second of February,” the Jew with the lantern answered. “A month till spring.” He snorted. Spring seemed more likely a year away than mere weeks.

The first Lizard Moishe saw on the street made him want to run back to the bunker. The alien, though, paid him no special attention. Lizards had as much trouble telling humans apart as people did with Lizards. Moishe glanced over to Reuven and Rivka. The aliens’ difficulties in that regard had helped the Jews spirit the two of them away from right under their snouts.

“In here,” the fighter with the pistol said. The Russies obediently went up a stairway and into another block of flats. The halls smelled of cabbage and unwashed bodies and urine. In an apartment at the back of the third floor, more of Anielewicz’s warriors waited. They whisked Moishe and his family inside.

One of them grabbed Moishe by the arm and hustled him over to a table set out with a bar of yellow-tan soap, an enameled basin, a pair of shears, and a straight razor. “The beard, Reb Moishe, has to come off,” he said without preamble.

Moishe drew back in dismay. A protective hand rose to cover his chin. The SS had cut off the beards-and sometimes the ears and noses-of Jews in the ghetto for sport.

“I’m sorry,” the fellow-bearded himself-said. “We’re going to move you, we’re going to hide you. Look at yourself now.” He picked up a fragment of what might once have been a full-length mirror, thrust it in Moishe’s face.

Moishe perforce looked. He saw-himself, paler than usual, his beard longer and fuzzier than usual because he hadn’t bothered trimming it while in the bunker, but otherwise the same rather horse-faced, studious-looking Jew he’d always been.

The fighter said, “Now imagine yourself clean-shaven. Imagine a Lizard with a photograph of you as you are now looking at you-and walking on to look at someone else.”

The closest Moishe could come to seeing himself beardless was remembering what he’d looked like before his whiskers sprouted. He had trouble bringing the youth across the years and putting that face on the man he’d become.

Then Rivka said, “They’re right, Moishe. It will make you different, and we need that. Please, go ahead and shave.”

He sighed deeply, a token of surrender. Then he took the mirror from the fighter and leaned it on a shelf so he could see what he was doing. He picked up the shears and rapidly clipped as short as he could the beard he’d worn his whole adult life. What he knew about shaving was all theoretical. He splashed his face with water, then lathered the strong-smelling soap, and spread it over cheeks and chin and neck.

Reuven snickered. “You look funny, Father!”

“I feel funny.” He picked up the razor. The bone grip molded itself to his hand, like the handle of a scalpel. The comparison seemed even more apt a few minutes later. He thought he’d seen less blood flow at an appendectomy. He nicked his ear, the hollow under his cheekbone, his chin, his larynx, and he made a good game try at slicing off his upper lip. When he rinsed himself, the water in the basin turned pink.

“You look funny, Father,” Reuven said again.

Moishe peered into the scrap of mirror. A stranger stared back at him. He looked younger than he had with the beard, but not really like his earlier self. His features were sharper-edged, bonier, more defined. He looked tougher than he’d expected. The dried blood here and there on his face might have had something to do with that; it gave him the air of a boxer who’d just lost a tough match.

The fellow who’d handed him the mirror patted him on the back and said, “Don’t worry, Reb Moishe. They say it gets easier with practice.” He wasn’t speaking from experience; his own gray-brown beard reached halfway down his shirtfront.

Russie started to nod, then stopped and stared. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d have to do this more than once. But of course the fighter was right-if he wanted to keep up his disguise, he’d have to go on shaving. It struck him as a great waste of time. Even so, after he rinsed and dried the razor, he stuck it into a pocket of his long, dark coat.

The man with the pistol who’d plucked him from the bunker said, “All right, I think we can get you out of here now without too many people recognizing you.”

His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him… but she was dead, like his daughter, of intestinal disease aggravated by starvation. He said, “If I stay in Warsaw, sooner or later I’ll be spotted.”

“Of course,” the fighter said. “So you won’t stay in Warsaw.”

It made sense. It was like a kick in the belly just the same. He’d spent his whole life here. Till the Lizards came, he’d been sure he would die here, too. “Where will I-where will we-go?” he asked quietly.

“Lodz,” the fellow answered.

The word tolled through the room like the deep chime of a funeral bell at a Catholic church. The Germans had done their worst to the Lodz ghetto, second largest in Poland after Warsaw’s, just before the Lizards came. Many of the quarter million Jews who had lived there were shipped to Chelmno and Treblinka, never to come out again.

Russie’s newly bared face must have shown his thoughts all too clearly. The Jewish fighter said, “I understand how you feel, Reb Moishe, but it’s the best place. No one, not even, God willing, a Lizard, would think to look for you there, and if you’re needed, we can bring you back in a hurry.”

He could not fault the logic, but when he looked at Rivka, he saw the same sick dread in her eyes that he felt himself. The Jews of Lodz had passed into the valley of the shadow of death. Going to live in a town where that shadow had fallen…

“Some of us still survive in Lodz,” the fighter said. “We’d not send you there otherwise, you may be sure of that.”

“Let it be so, then,” Russie said with a sigh.

The fighter with the pistol drove the horse-drawn wagon out of Warsaw. Russie sat beside him, feeling horribly visible and vulnerable. Rivka and Reuven huddled in back along with several other women and children amid scraps and rags and odd-shaped pieces of sheet metal: the stock of a junkman’s trade.

The Lizards had a checkpoint on the highway just outside of town. One of the males there carried a photograph of Russie with his beard. His heart thuttered in alarm. But after a cursory glance, the Lizard turned to his comrade and said in his own language, “Just another boring bunch of Big Uglies.” The comrade waved the wagon ahead.

After a couple of kilometers, the fighter pulled over to the side of the road. The women and children who had served to camouflage Reuven and Rivka got down and started walking back to Warsaw. The fighter flicked the reins, clucked to the horse. The wagon rattled down the road toward Lodz.

Liu Han looked mistrustfully at the latest assortment of canned goods the little scaly devils had brought into her cell. She wondered what was most likely to stay down this time. The salty soup with noodles and bits of chicken, perhaps, and the canned fruit in syrup. She knew she wouldn’t touch the stew with the thick gravy; she’d already given that back twice.

She sighed. Being pregnant was hard enough anywhere. It was even worse imprisoned here in this airplane that never came down. Not only was she alone in the little metal room except when the scaly devils brought Bobby Fiore to her, but almost all her food was put up by foreign devils like him and not to her taste.

She ate what she could, wishing she were back in her Chinese village or even in the prison camp from which the little scaly devils had plucked her. In either place, she would have been among her own kind, not caged all alone like a songbird for the amusement of her captors. If she ever got out of here, she vowed she would free every bird she could.

Not that getting out seemed likely. She shook her head-no indeed. Her straight black hair tumbled over her, face, over her bare shoulders-the scaly devils, who wore no clothes themselves, allowed their human prisoners none and kept the cell too warm to make them comfortable anyhow-and across her newly tender breasts. Her hair hadn’t been long enough to do that when the little devils brought her up here. It was now, and growing toward her waist.

She belched uncomfortably and got ready to dash for the plumbing hole. But what she’d eaten decided to stay where it belonged. She wasn’t sure exactly how far gone she was, not in here where the little scaly devils never turned off the light to let her reckon the passage of days. But she wasn’t throwing up as much as she had at first. Her belly hadn’t started to swell, though. Getting close to four months was the best guess she could make.

Part of the floor, instead of being metal like the rest, was a raised mat covered with slick gray stuff that looked more like leather than anything else but didn’t smell like it. Her body, sweaty in the heat, stuck to the mat when she lay down on it, but it was still better for resting than anywhere else in the cell. She closed her eyes, tried to sleep. She’d been sleeping a lot lately, partly because she was pregnant and partly because she had nothing better to do.

She was just dozing off when the door to her cell hissed open again. She opened one eye, sure it would be the little devil who came in to take away the cans after every meal. Sure enough, in he skittered, but several others came with him. A couple of them had body paint more ornate than she was used to seeing.

One, to her surprise, spoke Chinese after a fashion. Pointing to her, he said, “You come with us.”

She quickly got to her feet. “It shall be done, superior sir,” she said, using one of the phrases she’d learned of the little devils’ language.

The devils fell in around her at more than arm’s length. She was on the small side, an inch or so above five feet, but she towered over the scaly devils, enough so to make them nervous around her. She joined them eagerly enough; any trip out of her cell was unusual enough to count as a treat. And maybe, better still, they would take her to Bobby Fiore.

They didn’t; they led her in the opposite direction from his cell. She wondered what they wanted with her. Wondering made her hopeful and anxious by turns. They might do anything at all to her, from setting her free to taking her away from Bobby Fiore and giving her to some new man who would rape and beat her. She had no say. She was just a prisoner.

What they did reached neither extreme. They took her down an oddly curved stairway to another deck. She felt lighter there than she should have; her stomach didn’t like it. But much of her fear went away. She knew they’d brought Bobby Fiore here, and nothing too bad had happened to him.

The scaly devils escorted her into a chamber full of their incomprehensible gadgetry. The devil sitting behind the desk surprised her by speaking fair Chinese: “You are the female human Liu Han?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Who are you, please?” Her own language tasted sweet in her mouth. Even with Bobby Fiore, she spoke a curious mixture of Chinese, English, and the little devils’ tongue, eked out with much gesture and dumb show.

“I am called Nossat,” the scaly devil answered. “I am a-I do not know it, your language has an exact word for it-I am a male who studies how you humans think. I am colleague to Tessrek, who spoke with your mate Bobby Fiore.”

“Yes, I understand,” Liu Han said. That was the little scaly devil with whom Bobby Fiore had spoken down here. What had he called the devil Tessrek? English had a name for what that devil did-psychologist, that was it. Liu Han relaxed. Talking could not be dangerous.

Nossat said, “You are going to lay an egg in the time to come? No, your kind does not lay eggs. You are going to give birth? Is that what you say, ‘give birth’? You will have a child?”

“I am going to have a child, yes,” Liu Han agreed. Of themselves, the fingers of her right hand spread fanlike over her belly. She had long since resigned herself to being naked in front of the scaly devils, but she remained automatically protective of the baby growing inside her.

“The child is from matings between Bobby Fiore and you?” Nossat said. Without waiting for her to reply, he stuck one of his thin, clawed fingers into a recess on the desk. A screen, as if for motion pictures, lit up behind him. The picture that moved upon it was of Bobby Fiore thrusting atop Liu Han.

She sighed. She knew the little scaly devils took pictures of her while she made love, as well as any other time they chose. They had mating seasons like farm animals, and were utterly uninterested in matters of the flesh at any other time. The way people mated the whole year round seemed to fascinate and appall them.

“Yes,” she answered as the picture played on, “Bobby Fiore and I made love to start this baby.” Before long, it would begin to kick inside her, hard enough to feel. She remembered what a marvel that was from the boy she’d borne her husband before the Japanese killed him and the child.

Nossat stuck his finger into a different recess. Liu Han was not sorry to see the picture of her joined gasping to Bobby Fiore fade. A different moving picture took its place, this one of an immensely pregnant black woman giving birth to her baby. Liu Han watched the woman with more interest than the birth process: she knew about that, but she’d never before seen a black, man or woman. She hadn’t known the palms of their hands and soles of their feet were so pale.

“This is how your young are born?” Nossat said as the baby’s head and then shoulders emerged from between the straining woman’s legs.

“What else could it possibly be?” To Liu Han, the little scaly devils were an incomprehensible blend of immense and terrifying powers on the one hand and childishly abysmal ignorance on the other.

“This is-dreadful,” Nossat said. The motion picture kept running. The woman delivered the afterbirth. It should have been over then. But she kept on bleeding. The blood was hard to see against her dark skin, but it spread over and soaked into the ground where she lay. The little scaly devil went on, “This female died after the young Tosevite came out of her body. Many females in the land we hold have died bearing their young.”

“That does happen, yes,” Liu Han said quietly. It was not something she cared to think about. Not just bleeding, but a baby trying to come out while in the wrong position, or fever afterwards… so many things could go wrong. And so many babies never lived to see their second birthday, their first outside their mother.

“But it’s not right,” Nossat exclaimed, as if he held her personally responsible for the way people had their babies. “No other kind of intelligent creature we know puts its mothers in such danger just to carry on life.”

Liu Han had never imagined any kind of intelligent creatures but human beings until the little scaly devils came. Even after she knew of the devils, she hadn’t thought there could be still more varieties of such creatures. Irritation in her voice, she snapped, “Well, how do you have your babies, then?” For all she knew, the little devils might have been assembled in factories rather than born.

“Our females lay eggs, of course,” Nossat said. “So do those of the Rabotevs and Hallessi, over whom we rule. Only you Tosevites are different.” His weird eyes swiveled so that one watched the screen behind him while the other stayed accusingly on Liu Han.

She fought to keep from laughing, fought and lost. The idea of making a nest-out of straw, maybe, like a chicken’s-and then sitting on it till the brood hatched was absurd enough to tickle her fancy. Hens certainly didn’t seem to have trouble laying eggs, either. It might be an easier way to do the job. But it wasn’t the way people did it.

Nossat said, “Your time to have the young come out of your body is now about a year away?”

“A year?” Liu Han stared at him. Didn’t the little scaly devils know anything?

But the devil said, “No-this is my mistake, for two years of the Race, more or less, make one of yours. I should say-should have said-you are half a year from your time?”

“Half a year, yes,” Liu Han said. “Maybe not quite so long.”

“We have to decide what to do with you,” Nossat told her. “We have no knowledge of how to help you when the young is born. You are only a barbarous Tosevite, but we do not want you to die because we are ignorant. You are our subject, not our enemy.”

Fear blew through Liu Han, a cold wind. Give birth here, in this place of metal, with only scaly devils beside her, without a midwife to help her through her pangs? If the least little thing went wrong, she would die, and the baby, too. “I will need help,” she said, as plaintively as she could. “Please get some for me.”

“We are still planning,” Nossat said, which was neither yes nor no. “We will know what we do before your time comes.”

“What if the baby is early?” Liu Han said.

The little devil’s eyes both swung toward her. “This can happen?”

“Of course it can,” Liu Han said. But nothing was of course for the little scaly devils, not when they knew so little about how mankind-and, evidently, womankind-functioned. Then, suddenly, Liu Han had an idea that felt so brilliant, she hugged herself in delight. “Superior sir, would you let me go back down to my own people so a midwife could help me deliver the baby?”

“This had not been thought of.” Nossat made a distressed hissing noise. “I see, though, from where you stand, it may have merit. You are not the only female specimen on this ship who will have young born. We will-how do you say? — consider. Yes. We will consider.”

“Thank you very much, superior sir.” Liu Han looked down at the floor, as she had seen the scaly devils do when they meant to show respect. Hope sprang up in her like rice plants in spring.

“Or maybe,” Nossat said, “maybe we bring up a-what word did you use? — a midwife, yes, maybe we bring up a midwife to this ship to help you here. We will consider that, too. You go now.”

The guards took Liu Han out of the psychologist’s office, led her back to her cell. She felt heavier with each step up the curiously curving stairway that returned her to her deck-and also because the hope which had sprouted now began to wilt.

But it didn’t quite die. The little scaly devils hadn’t said no.

A blank-faced Nipponese guard shoved a bowl of rice between the bars of Teerts’ cell. Teerts bowed to show he was grateful. Feeding prisoners at all was, in Nipponese eyes, a mercy: a proper warrior would die fighting rather than let himself be captured. The Nipponese were in any case sticklers for their own forms of courtesy. Anyone who flouted them was apt to be beaten-or worse.

Since the Nipponese shot down his killercraft, Teerts had had enough beatings-and worse-that he never wanted another (which didn’t mean he wouldn’t get one). But he hated rice. Not only was it the food of his captivity, it wasn’t something any male of the Race would eat by choice. He wanted meat, and could not remember the last time he’d tasted it. This bland, glutinous vegetable matter kept him alive, although he often wished it wouldn’t.

No, that was a falsehood. If he’d wanted to die, he had only to starve himself to death. He did not think the Nipponese would force him to eat; if anything, he might gain their respect by perishing this way. That he cared whether these barbarous Big Uglies respected him showed how low he had sunk.

He lacked the nerve to put an end to himself, though; the Race did not commonly use suicide as a way out of trouble. And so, miserably, he ate, half wishing he never saw another grain of rice, half wishing his bowl held more.

He finished just before the guard came back and took away the bowl. He bowed again in gratitude for that service, though the guard would also have taken it even if he hadn’t finished.

After the guard left, Teerts resigned himself to another indefinitely long stretch of tedium. So far as he knew he was the only prisoner of the Race the Nipponese held here at Nagasaki. No cells within speaking distance of him held even Big Ugly prisoners, lest he somehow form a conspiracy with them and escape. He let his mouth fall open in bitter laughter at the likelihood of that.

Six-legged Tosevite pests scuttled across the concrete floor. Teerts let his eye turrets follow the creatures. He had nothing in particular against them. The real pests on Tosev 3 were the ones who walked upright.

He drilled away into a fantasy where his killercraft’s turbofans hadn’t tried to breathe bullets instead of air. He could have been back at a comfortably heated barracks talking with his comrades or watching the screen or piping music through a button taped to a hearing diaphragm. He could have been snapping bites off a chunk of dripping meat. He could have been in his killercraft again, helping to bring the pestilential Big Uglies under the Race’s control.

Though he heard footsteps coming down the corridor toward him, he did not swing his eyes to see who was approaching. That would have returned him to grim reality too abruptly to bear.

But then the maker of those footsteps stopped outside his cell. Teerts quickly put fantasy aside, like a male saving a computer document so he can attend to something more urgent. His bow was deeper than the one he’d given the guard who fed him. “Konichiwa, Major Okamoto,” he said in the Nipponese he was slowly acquiring.

“Good day to you as well,” Okamoto answered in the language of the Race. He was more fluent in it than Teerts was in Nipponese. Learning a new tongue did not come naturally to males of the Race; the Empire had had but one for untold thousands of years. But Tosev 3 was a mosaic of dozens, maybe hundreds, of languages. Picking up one more was nothing out of the ordinary for a Big Ugly. Okamoto had been Teerts’ interpreter and interrogator ever since he was captured.

The Tosevite glanced down the hall. Teerts heard jingling keys as a warder drew near. Another round of questions, then, the pilot thought. He bowed to the warder to show he was grateful for the boon of leaving the cell. Actually he wasn’t as long as he stayed in here, no one hurt him. But the forms had to be observed.

A soldier with a rifle tramped right behind the warder. He covered Teerts as the other male used the key. Okamoto also drew his pistol and held it on Teerts. The pilot would have laughed, except it wasn’t really funny. He only wished he were as dangerous as the Big Uglies thought he was.

The interrogation room was on an upper floor of the prison. Teerts had seen next to nothing of Nagasaki. He knew it lay by the sea; he’d come here by ship after being evacuated from the mainland when Harbin fell to the Race. He didn’t miss seeing the sea. After that nightmare voyage of storms and sickness, he hoped he’d never see-much less ride upon-another overgrown Tosevite ocean again.

The guard opened the door. Teerts walked in, bowed to the Big Uglies inside. They wore white coats rather than uniforms like Okamoto’s. Scientists, not soldiers, Teerts thought. He’d come to realize the Tosevites used clothing to indicate job and status as the Race used body paint. The Big Uglies, however, were much less systematic and consistent about it-typical of them, he thought.

Nonetheless, he was glad not to face another panel of officers. The military males had been much quicker than scientists to resort to the instruments of painful persuasion in the interrogation room.

One of the men in white addressed Teerts in barking Nipponese, much too fast for him to follow. He turned both eye turrets toward Major Okamoto, who translated: “Dr. Nakayama asks whether, as has been reported, all members of the Race who have come to Tosev 3 are male.”

“Hai,” Teerts answered. “Honto.” Yes, that was the truth.

Nakayama, a slim male on the small side for a Tosevite, asked another long question in his own tongue. Okamoto translated again: “He asks how you can hope to keep Tosev 3 with males alone.”

“We don’t, of course,” Teerts answered. “We who are here make up the conquest fleet. Our task is to subjugate this world, not to colonize it. The colonization fleet will come. It was being organized even as we set out, and will arrive in this solar system about forty years from now.”

So long a gap should have given the males of the conquest fleet plenty of time to get Tosev 3 into good running order for the colonists. It would have done just that, had the Big Uglies been the pre-industrial savages the Race thought they were. Teerts still thought they were savages, but, worse luck, they were anything but pre-industrial.

All three Nipponese in white started talking volubly at one another. Finally one of them put a question to Teerts. “Dr. Higuchi wants to know whether you mean your years or ours.”

“Ours,” Teerts said; would he waste his time learning Tosevite measurements? “Yours is longer-I don’t remember how much.”

“So, then, this colonization fleet, as you call it, will arrive on our planet in fewer than forty years’ time as we reckon it?” Higuchi said.

“Yes, superior sir.” Teerts suppressed a sigh. It should have been so easy: smash the Big Uglies, prepare the planet for full exploitation, then settle down and wait till the colonists arrived and were thawed out. When at last he smelled mating pheromones again, Teerts might even have sired a couple of clutches of eggs himself. Raising hatchlings, of course, was females’ work, but he liked thinking of passing on his genes so he could contribute to the future of the Race.

The way things looked now, this world might still be troublesome when the colonization fleet got here. And even if it wasn’t, his own chance of being around to join the colony’s gene pool wasn’t big enough to be visible to the naked eye-he couldn’t see it, at any rate.

He had a while to think of such things, because the Nipponese were chattering furiously among themselves again. Finally the male who hadn’t addressed him before spoke through Major Okamoto: “Dr. Tsuye wishes to know the size of the colonization fleet as opposed to that of the conquest fleet.”

“The colonization fleet is not opposed to the conquest fleet,” Teerts said. Clearing up the idiom took a couple of minutes. Then he said, “The colonization fleet is larger, superior sir. It has to be: it carries many more males and females as well as what they will need to establish themselves here on Tosev 3.”

His answer produced more sharp colloquy among the Nipponese. Then the one named Tsuye said, “This colonization fleet-is it, ah, as heavily armed as your invasion fleet?”

“No, of course not. There would be no need-” Teerts corrected himself. “There was thought to be no need for including many weapons with the colonization fleet. It was assumed that you Tosevites would already be thoroughly subdued by the time the colonists arrived here. We hadn’t counted on your resisting so ferociously.” I hadn’t counted on being shot down, the pilot added to himself.

His words seemed to please the Nipponese. They bared their flat, square teeth in the facial gesture they used to show they were happy. Major Okamoto said, “All Tosevites are brave, and we Nipponese the bravest of the brave.”

“Hai,” Teerts said. “Honto.” The interrogation broke up not long after that. Okamoto and the guard, who had waited outside, escorted Teerts back, to his cell. That evening, he found small chunks of meat mixed in with his rice. That had only happened a couple of times before. Flattery, he thought as he gratefully swallowed them down, had got him something.

Mutt Daniels looked at his hand: four clubs and the queen of hearts. He discarded the queen. “Gimme one,” he said.

“One,” Kevin Donlan agreed. “Here you go, Sarge.” The new card was a diamond. None of the other soldiers in the game would have known it from Mutt’s face. He’d played countless hours of poker on trains and bus rides as a minor-league (and, briefly, major-league) catcher and as a longtime minor-league manager. He’d played in the trenches in France, too, in the last war. He didn’t care to risk a big roll of money when he gambled, but he won more often than he lost. Every so often he’d stolen a pot on a busted flush, too.

Not tonight, though. One of the privates in his squad, a big hunkie named Bela Szabo who was universally called Dracula, had drawn three cards and raised big when it was his turn to bet. Mutt pegged him for at least three of a kind, maybe better. When the action came round to him, he tossed in his cards. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said philosophically.”

Kevin Donlan, who couldn’t possibly have been as young as he looked, hadn’t learned that yet. Calling Szabo was okay if you had two little pair, but raising back struck Mutt as foolhardy. Sure as hell, Dracula was holding three kings. He scooped up the folding money.

“Son, you gotta watch what the other guy’s doin’ better’n that,” Daniels said. “Like I told you, you ain’t gonna win ’em all.” If nothing else, years of managing in the minors had pounded that home as a law of nature. Mutt chuckled. The life he’d lived beat the hell out of the one he’d have had if he hadn’t played ball. Likely he’d still be watching a mule’s hind end on the Mississippi farm where he’d been born and raised.

Like trains in the distance, shells rumbled by overhead. Everybody looked up, though the roof of the barn where they sheltered held the sky at bay. Szabo cocked his head, gauging the sound. “Southbound,” he said. “Those are ours.”

“Probably landing on the Lizards in Decatur right now,” Kevin Donlan agreed. A moment later, he added, “What’s funny, Sarge?”

“I reckon I’ve said I was managing the Decatur team in the Three-I League when the Lizards came,” Mutt answered. “Matter of fact, I was on the train from Madison to Decatur when we got strafed right outside o’ Dixon, upstate. This here’s the closest I’ve come to makin’ it to where I was goin’ since, and most of a year’s gone by now.”

“This here”-the barn-was on a farm just south of Clinton, Illinois, about halfway between Bloomington and Decatur. The Americans had taken Bloomington in an armored blitz. Now it was slow, tough work again, trying to push the Lizards farther back from Chicago.

More shells hissed through the sky, these from the south. “Goddamn, the Lizards are quick with counterbattery fire,” Donlan said.

“They’re dead on, too,” Mutt said. “I hope our boys moved their guns before those little presents came down on ’em.”

The poker game went on by lantern light, shelling or no shelling. Mutt won a hand with two pair, lost expensively to a straight when he was holding three nines, didn’t waste money betting on a couple of others. Another American battery opened up, this one a lot closer. The, thunder of the big guns reminded Mutt of bad weather back home.

“Hope they blow all the Lizards in Decatur straight to hell,” Szabo said.

“Hope one of ’em lands on second base at Fan’s Field and blows the center-field fence out to where it belongs,” Daniels muttered. It was 340 down each foul line at the Decatur ball-park, a reasonable poke, but dead center was only 370, a pain in the ERA to every Commodore pitcher who took the mound.

Small-arms fire rattled only a few hundred yards away, some M-Is and Springfields, some from the automatic rifles the Lizards carried. Before Mutt could say a word, everybody in the latest hand grabbed his money from the pot, stuffed it into a pocket, and reached for his weapon. Someone blew out the lantern. Someone else pushed the barn door open. One by one, the men emerged.

“You want to be careful,” Mutt said quietly. “The Lizards have those damn night sights, let ’em see like cats in the dark.”

Dracula Szabo laughed, also softly. “That’s why I got me this here Browning Automatic Rifle, Sarge. Put out enough lead and some of it’ll hit somebody.” He wasn’t much older than Donlan, young enough to be gut-sure no bullet could possibly find him. Mutt knew better. France had convinced him he wasn’t immortal, and several months fighting the Lizards drove the lesson home again.

“Spread out, spread out,” Daniels called in an urgent whisper. To his ear, the men sounded like a herd of drunken rhinos. Several were new recruits; by virtue of having lived through several encounters with the Lizards, Mutt was reckoned suitable for showing others how to do likewise.

“How many Lizards you think there are, Sarge?” Kevin Donlan asked. Donlan wasn’t eager any more; he’d been through enough of the tough defensive fighting outside Chicago to be sure his number could come up. The question came in a tone of intelligent professional concern.

Daniels cocked his head, listened to the firing. “Damfino,” he said at last. “Not a whole bunch, but I wouldn’t peg it tighter’n that. Those rifles o’ theirs shoot so fast, just a couple can sound like a platoon.”

Off to one side lay the concrete ribbon of US 51. A couple of soldiers charged straight down it. Daniels yelled at them, but they kept going. He wondered why they didn’t paint big red-and-white bull’s-eyes on their chests, too. He dodged from bush to upended tractor to hedgerow, making himself as tough a target as he could.

That wasn’t the only reason he fell behind most of the squad. He had fifty-odd years and a pot belly under his belt, though he was in better shape now than he had been before the Lizards came. Even in his long-gone playing days, he’d been a catcher, so he’d never moved what anybody would call fast.

He was panting and his heart thudded in his chest by the time he half jumped, half fell into a shell hole at the edge of the American firing line. Somebody not far away was screaming for a medic and for his mother; his voice was ebbing fast.

Cautiously, Mutt raised his head and peered into the night to see if he could pick up muzzle flashes from the Lizards’ rifles. Over there, a yellow-white flicker… He raised his Springfield to his shoulder, squeezed off a round, worked the bolt, fired again. Then he threw himself flat again.

Sure enough, bullets cracked by, just above the hole where he hid. If he could pick up the Lizards’ muzzle flashes, they could find his as well. And if he fired again from here, he was willing to bet some turret-eyed little scaly sharpshooter would punch his ticket for him. The Lizards weren’t human, but they were pretty fair soldiers.

He scrambled out of the hole and crawled across cold ground over to something made of bricks-a well, he realized when he got behind it. Szabo was making a hell of a racket with that BAR; if he wasn’t hitting the Lizards, he was sure making them keep their heads down. Even more warily than before, Daniels looked south again.

He saw a flash, fired at it. In the night, it was the next closest thing to shooting blind. No more flickers of light came from that spot, but he never found out whether it was because he’d scored a hit or the Lizard moved to a new firing spot, as he’d done himself.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the firing faded. The Americans slowly moved forward to discover the Lizards had pulled out. “Just a recon patrol,” said another sergeant who, like Mutt, was trying to round up his squad and not having much luck.

“Don’t rightly recall the Lizards doin’ a whole lot o’ that, not at night and not on foot,” Daniels said with a thoughtful frown. “Ain’t been their style.”

“Maybe they’re learning,” the other noncom answered. “You don’t really know what the other fellow’s doing till you sneak around and see it with your own eyes.”

“Yeah, sure, but the Lizards, they mostly fight one way,” Mutt said. “Don’t know as how I like ’em learnin’ how to do their job better. That’ll mean they got more chance of shootin’ my personal, private ass off.”

The other sergeant laughed. “Somethin’ to that, pal. I don’t know what we can do about it, though, short of giving their patrols enough lumps to make ’em try something else instead.”

“Yeah,” Mutt said again. He blew air out through his lips to make a whuffling noise. This hadn’t been too bad-just a little skirmish. As far as he could tell, he didn’t have anybody dead or even hurt. But if the Lizards were skirmishing outside of Clinton, it was liable to be a good long while yet before he saw Decatur.