Upsetting the Balance

12

Rance Auerbach hated everything about Lamar, Colorado. It reminded him all too vividly of the medium-small west Texas town where he’d grown up, and which he’d left as soon as he could. That would have been bad enough all by itself. But just being in Lamar also reminded him the Lizards had thrown him and his men out of Lakin, Kansas.

That being so, he sneered at everything pertaining to Lamar. The town was dirtier than it had been when he and his force sallied against Lakin. It smelled of horse manure. Normally, that smell bothered him not in the least: he was a cavalryman, after all. There wasn’t a town in the United States that didn’t smell of horse manure nowadays, either. Auerbach was determined not to let facts get between him and his anger.

One thing Lamar did boast was a goodly number of watering holes. What they served these days was moonshine, liquor so raw it would have made better disinfectant than booze. No one who drank it complained, not with nothing better available.

Auerbach would not have imagined a small town like Lamar could hold surprises, but he was proved wrong about that. Coming out of one of the local watering holes was a cavalry trooper who filled a uniform in ways the Quartermaster General’s Office never would have imagined before the Lizards landed.

Seeing him, the trooper snapped to attention. “Captain Auerbach!” she said.

“At ease, Private,” Rance answered. “We’re both off duty right this minute.” He shook his head in bemusement. “And since we are off duty, do you mind if I still call you Rachel?”

“No, sir, not at all,” Rachel Hines answered, smiling.

Auerbach shook his head again. He could have picked her up with one hand, but somehow she still looked like a cavalry trooper, even if she wasn’t exactly a cavalryman. She lacked the devil-may-care relish for danger some of his men had, but she didn’t look as if she’d flinch from it, and she did look as if she wouldn’t lose her head while it was going on. But all of those things, in a way, were beside the point. He came to the point: “How the devil did you talk Colonel Nordenskold into letting you enlist?”

She smiled again. “You promise you won’t tell anybody else?” When Auerbach nodded, she lowered her voice and went on, “He tried putting his hand where it didn’t belong, and I told him that if he did it again I’d kick him right in the nuts-if he had any, that is.”

Auerbach knew he was gaping, but couldn’t help it. That wasn’t the way he’d imagined Rachel Hines persuading the colonel to sign her up: just the opposite, in fact. If she’d been smart enough to study the ground and change her plan of attack after she saw that a blatant come-on hadn’t worked with Auerbach, she had more brains than he’d figured. “My hat’s off to you,” he said, and fit action to word. “It took a little more than that, though, didn’t it?”

“I showed him I could ride, I showed him I could shoot, I showed him I could shut up and take orders,” she answered. “He was looking for people who could do those things, and we’re so short of the ones who can that he didn’t much care if I had to go at my uniform with scissors and needle and thread before it’d fit right.”

He looked her up and down. “If you don’t mind my saying so-if it won’t make you kick like a bronc-it fits you just fine.”

“Captain, you can say whatever you please,” she answered. “You got me out of Lakin, out from under the Lizards’ thumbs. I owe you more than I can figure out how to pay you back for that.”

Back when she’d offered him a roll in the hay to get what she wanted, he hadn’t been interested. Now he was-now she sounded interested in him as a person, not a stepping stone. But if she was bound and determined to be a soldier, she’d be a hell of a lot better off not going to bed with an officer. If women were going to fight, the fewer the rules that got bent out of shape, the better for everybody, women and men.

Instead of making any suggestions, then, Auerbach asked, “How’s Penny getting along these days? I hadn’t seen you since I came back here, and I haven’t seen her, either.”

Rachel Hines’ sunny face clouded. “She’s not so good, Captain. She’s moved to a room in the rooming house off the street here, and she mostly just stays in it. Even when she does come out, it’s almost like you’re watching a ghost, not a real person, if you know what I mean. Like she’s here but not quite really all here.”

“That’s what I saw before,” Auerbach said glumly. “I was hoping she’d started to snap out of it by now.”

“Me, too,” Rachel said. “She was so much fun to be with when we were in high school together.” She came to an abrupt halt. Nothing much was left of the Kearny County Consolidated High School, not after the Lizards set up their local base there, the Americans drove them out of it, and then they came back and pushed the Americans back toward the Kansas-Colorado line.

As he had before, Rance wondered what would happen to the generation of kids whose schooling the Lizards had interrupted. Even if mankind won, making up for lost time wouldn’t be easy. If the Lizards won, odds were that nobody would have an education ever again.

He didn’t care to think about that. He didn’t care to think about a lot of the ways the war was going. “Maybe I ought to go over there and see her,” he said after a moment. “It’s my fault she’s here, after all-my fault you’re here, too, come to that.”

“I wouldn’t call it a fault, Captain,” Rachel Hines said. “If we hadn’t come with you, we’d still be back in Lakin, doing what the Lizards told us. Anything is better than that.”

“Tell it to-what was his name? — Wendell Summers,” Auerbach answered harshly. “He hadn’t tried to get out of Lakin, he’d be alive back there today.”

“We all knew there was a chance of that when we went with you people-it was a chance we all wanted to take.” Auerbach didn’t know whether Rachel had seen action, but she talked and shrugged like a veteran. She continued, “Penny has taken that hard, I will say.”

“I know.” Auerbach kicked at the sidewalk. “Maybe she won’t want to see me at all. God knows I couldn’t blame her for that.”

“The worst thing she can tell you is no,” Rachel said. “If she does, how are you worse off? But if she doesn’t, you may do her some good.” She saluted again and headed up the street. Auerbach turned to watch her go, then laughed at himself. He didn’t remember admiring a cavalry trooper’s backside before.

“And a good thing, too,” he said with a snort. He walked over to the rooming house where Penny Summers was staying. The place was always packed, but with a shifting population: refugees who had been there for a while headed farther west into more securely held territory, while a continuous stream of newcomers from Kansas took their place. Penny had kept her room since not long after she’d come from Lakin, which made her well-nigh unique.

Auerbach’s nose twitched as he walked upstairs. The rooming house smelled of unwashed bodies, garbage, and stale piss. If you bottled the odor, you’d call it something like Essence of Despair. No sergeant worth his stripes would have tolerated a tenth of it for a second. But the Army had all it could handle fighting the Lizards and trying to keep itself on its feet. The civilian part of Lamar had been left to sink or swim on its own. He didn’t think that was good management, but he didn’t feel like belling the cat, either.

He knocked on Penny Summers’ door. He didn’t know whether she’d be there or not. A lot of civilians in Lamar spent their days working for the Army, one way or another. He hadn’t seen Penny busy with any of that, though, and Lamar was small enough that he thought he would have if she’d been doing it.

Somewhere down the hall, a baby started to scream. The sound ground at Auerbach’s nerves like a dentist’s drill digging into a molar. You had to be crazy to want to bring up a kid in times like these. Of course, just because you were bringing up a kid didn’t necessarily mean you wanted one, only that you had one.

He knocked on the door again. He was about to turn and go (a prospect not altogether unwelcome, because the baby was doing a pretty good impression of the noise that came from a Lizard jet fighter engine) when Penny Summers opened it. She looked surprised to see him. He got the idea she would have looked surprised to see anyone.

“Captain Auerbach,” she said, and gestured vaguely. “Come in.”

The room was cramped and, even with the window open, stiflingly hot. Dust lay thick on every surface. Auerbach thought about shouting at her like a tough sergeant, but decided it would do more harm than good. Shouting wouldn’t snap her out of the state she was in. He didn’t know what would, but he was sure of that.

He said, “I’m worried about you. You should be out and doing things, not sitting here cooped up like a canary in a cage. What do you do all day, anyhow?”

That vague gesture again. “I sit, I sew sometimes. I read my Bible.” She pointed to the book with the limp leatherette covers and gold leaf that sat on the little table next to the bed.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “There’s a whole big world out there.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” she answered, laughing. “There are all sorts of worlds out there. The Lizards showed us that, didn’t they?” He’d never heard her laugh, not since her father was blown to bits before her eyes, but this was so bitter he’d sooner never have heard it, either. “I don’t want any part of them. I just want to be left alone.”

Two things ran through Auerbach’s mind. First was Greta Garbo. Second, Texan that he was, was the defiant rallying cry of the Confederacy against the damnyankees: all we want is to be left alone. But neither one fit Penny Summers, not really. What she’d wanted was to grow up in Lakin, marry a farmer who lived nearby, raise a flock of kids, and get as old as she was going to get, all without going fifty miles from where she was born.

It might not have happened even if the Lizards hadn’t come. The war could have put her in a factory somewhere in a city, and who could guess what she might have done after that? Once you saw a city, going back to a small town or a farm often didn’t look the same. But he couldn’t tell her that her life might not have gone as she’d planned it, because here and now her life sure as hell hadn’t gone as she’d planned it.

He said, “Miss Penny, sitting here like a broody hen on a nest doesn’t do you any good. Things won’t get better on account of it. The more you go out and do things, the sooner you’ll be able to put what’s past behind you and go on with the rest of your life.”

“What difference does it make?” she answered dully. “The world can go on without me just fine, it looks like. And I don’t like what the world’s turned into. I’d sooner stay here and let things happen. If a bomb lands on this place this minute or tomorrow or a week from now, I’ll be sorry for the other people who live here, but not for me.”

He’d had troopers who talked like that after they’d been through more battle than a man could stand. Shell shock, they’d called it back in the First World War; combat fatigue was the name it went by these days. Penny had been in only that one fight, but how many troopers got to watch their fathers turned to raw meat right before their eyes? You couldn’t guess beforehand what would send any one person over the edge.

You couldn’t tell what would snap anybody out of it, either. Sometimes nothing would. Some of his men weren’t fit for anything better than taking care of horses here in Lamar. A couple had seemed well enough to ride, but didn’t bother taking any precautions when they went up against the Lizards. They weren’t around any more. And a couple of others had been through the worst of it and got better again. No way to know who would do what.

He took her by the shoulders and hugged her, hard. She was an attractive girl, but it wasn’t like holding a woman in his arms. It reminded him more of the embraces he’d given his grandfather after the old man’s wits started to wander: the body was there, but the will that directed it wasn’t minding the store.

He let her go. “You’ve got to do this for yourself, Miss Penny. Nobody on God’s green earth can do it for you.”

“I think you’d best go now,” she said. Her face hadn’t changed, not even a little bit.

Defeated, he opened the door to her room and started for the stairs. In the room down the hall, the baby was still screaming bloody murder. A couple of doors farther down, a man and a woman shouted angrily at each other.

Almost too soft for Auerbach to hear, Penny Summers called after him, “Be careful, Captain.”

He spun around. Her door was already closed. He wondered if he should go back. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed down the stairs instead. Maybe he hadn’t lost, or not completely, after all.

Since the British army was swinging southward anyhow, the better to fight the remaining Lizard forces on English soil, Moishe Russie got to go into London for a day to see if he could find his family.

The instant he reached the outskirts of the great city, he realized he could throw off his Red Cross armband and desert, and no one would ever be the wiser. London had been battered before; now it seemed nothing but ruins. A man might hide in there for years, coming out only to forage for food. By the filthy, furtive look of a good many people on the street, that was just what they did. A lot of them in better condition carried guns. Russie got the idea those weren’t only for defense against possible Lizard paratroopers.

Making his way through the rubble toward his family’s Soho flat was anything but easy. Street signs had been missing since the Nazi threat in 1940; now whole streets had disappeared, so choked with rubble and cratered by bombs as to be impassable. Worse, a lot of the landmarks he’d used to orient himself as he went about the city were no longer standing: the tower of Big Ben, the Marble Arch in Hyde Park, the Queen Victoria Memorial near Buckingham Palace. On a cloudy day like this one, even knowing which way was south was a tricky business.

He’d walked along Oxford Street for a couple of blocks before he realized where he was: no more than a block from the BBC Overseas Services studio. The brick building that housed it had not been wrecked by bomb or shell. A man with a rifle stood outside. At first Russie thought he was one of the soldiers who had guarded the studio. He needed a moment to realize Eric Blair wore a tin hat and bandolier of cartridges.

Blair took even longer to recognize Russie. As Moishe approached, the Englishman brought the rifle up in unmistakable warning. He handled the Lee-Enfield with assurance; Moishe remembered he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War. Then Blair let the stock of the rifle fall to the grimy sidewalk. “Russie, isn’t it?” he said, still not quite sure.

“Yes, that’s right,” Moishe answered in his uncertain English. “And you are Blair.” If he could put a name to the other, Blair might be less inclined to shoot him. He pointed to the doorway. “Do we still work here?”

“Not bloody likely,” the Englishman said with a shake of the head that threatened to throw off his helmet. “London’s had no power for a fortnight now, maybe longer. I’m here to ensure that no one steals the equipment, nothing more. If we were doing anything, they’d set out fitter guards than I.” He scowled. “If any fitter are left alive, that is.”

Off to the south, artillery spoke, a distant mutter in the air. The Lizards in the northern pocket were dead, fled, or surrendered, but in the south they fought on. Moishe said, “My family-have you heard anything?”

“I’m sorry.” Blair shook his head again. “I wish I could tell you something, but I can’t. For that matter, I can’t say with certainty whether my own kinsfolk are alive or dead. Bloody war.” He started to cough, held his breath till he swayed, and managed to calm the spasm. “Whew!” he said. “Those tear me to pieces when they get going-I might as well be breathing mustard gas.”

Russie started to say something to that, but at the last minute held his peace. No one who hadn’t seen the effect of the gas at close range had any business talking about it. But, by the same token, no one who hadn’t seen it would believe it.

To his surprise, Blair went on, “I know I shouldn’t be speaking of it so. Gas is a filthy business; the things we do to survive would gag Attila the Hun. But Attila, to be fair, never had to contend with invaders from another world.”

“This is so,” Russie said. “Good luck to you. I go now, see if I can find my family.”

“Good luck to you, too,” Blair said. “You should carry a weapon of some sort. The war has made beasts of us all, and some of the beasts are more dangerous to a good and decent man than the Lizards ever dreamt of being.”

“It may be so,” Moishe answered, not meaning a word of it. Blair was a good and decent man himself, but he’d never been in the clutches of the Lizards-or the Germans, either, come to that.

Russie walked south down Regent Street toward Soho. A Lizard plane darted overhead. Along with everyone else close by, he threw himself flat and rolled toward the nearest hole in the ground he could find. When the plane had passed over, he picked himself up and went on. He hardly thought about it. He’d been doing the same sort of thing since 1939.

The only difference he could find between Soho and the rest of London was that misery was expressed in more languages in the cosmopolitan district. The Barcelona, a restaurant Eric Blair favored, was still open for business on Beak Street. Boards covered what had been a glass front; from the smoke that rose from the rear of the place, the proprietor used more boards with which to cook. If London’s electricity was gone, surely no gas flowed through its mains, either.

When Moishe trudged past the Barcelona, he knew his own block of flats was not far away. He picked up the pace, desperate to find out what had become of his wife and son and at the same time dreading what he might learn.

He turned off Beak onto Lexington Street and then to Broadwick, in which his block of flats lay. No sooner had he done so than he let out a long sigh of relief: the building still stood. That did not necessarily prove anything. The neighborhood, like all London neighborhoods he’d seen, had taken heavy damage. If Rivka and Reuven had been outside at the wrong moment… He did his best not to think about that.

In the street, strewn though it was with bricks, broken chunks of concrete, and jagged shards of glass, life went on. Boys shouted as they kicked around a football. The goal posts on the improvised pitch were upright boards undoubtedly scavenged from some wrecked house or shop. The boys played with the same combination of abandon and grim intensity their Polish counterparts would have shown, shouting and laughing as they ran. Not until later would they turn into the calm, undemonstrative Englishmen Moishe found so strange.

A crowd of children, a few adults scattered through it, stood watching the football match and cheering on one team or the other. Moishe took no special notice of the adults. Seeing so many children idling on the sidewalks, though, left him sad. Even when things were worst in Warsaw, hundreds of schools had gone on under the Nazis’ noses. Children might die, but they would not die ignorant. He noted much less of that spirit here than he had in the ghetto.

One of the football teams scored a goal. One of the watching men reached into a pocket and passed a coin to the fellow behind him. The English did like to gamble. Boys swarmed onto the pitch to pummel the lad who’d sent the ball past the opponents’ goalkeeper.

Moishe ran onto the pitch, too. The boy he swept up into the air was too small to have been a player. The boy squeaked in surprise. Then he shouted, “Papa!” The word was English, not Yiddish or Polish, but Moishe didn’t care. Reuven stared at him and said, “What happened to your beard, Papa?”

“The gas mask won’t fit over it tight enough, so I shaved it off,” Russie answered. Naked cheeks, however strange they felt, were better than a lungful of mustard gas. He’d seen that. Heart pounding in his chest, he asked the next question: “Where is your mother?”

“In the flat,” Reuven said indifferently, as if to ask,Where would she be? “Could you put me down, please? They’re starting to play again, and I want to watch.”

“I’m sorry,” Moishe said, his voice full of mock humility. However important his homecoming was to him, his son seemed well able to take it in stride. Moishe got out of the street just in time to evade a football flying past his ear. Reuven squirmed and again demanded to be released. Moishe set him on the scarred sidewalk and climbed the stairs to his flat as fast as he could.

From behind the door across the hall came the sounds of a hideous row: Mr. and Mrs. Stephanopoulos were going at it hammer and tongs. Russie couldn’t understand a word of the Greek they were using to slang each other, but it made him feel at home anyway. The Stephanopouloi cared about each other, cared enough to yell. Englishmen and — women seemed much more given to cold, deadly silences.

He tried the knob to the door of his own flat. It turned in his hand. He opened the door. Rivka was bustling across the front room toward the kitchen. Her gray eyes widened in astonishment; maybe the racket the Stephanopouloi were making had kept her from hearing him in the hall. Maybe, too, she needed a moment to recognize him, clean-shaven as he was and in the khaki battledress of a British soldier.

Astonishment of one sort turned to astonishment of another. “Moishe!” she whispered, still sounding disbelieving, and ran to him. They held each other. She squeezed him so tight, he could hardly breathe. Against his shoulder, she said, “I can’t believe you’re really here.”

“I can’t believeyou’re here, you and Reuven,” he answered. “I’ve prayed you would be, but we know what prayers are worth these days. And with everything the Lizards have done to London…” He shook his head. “In this war, civilians behind the line are liable to catch it worse than soldiers at the front. We’ve seen that ever since the Nazis started bombing Warsaw. I was so afraid for you.”

“We’re all right.” Rivka’s hands flew to her hair in an automatic, altogether unconscious effort to spruce up. “The kitchen is full of soot because I’ve had to cook with wood since the gas went out, but that’s all. I was goingmeshuggeh worrying over you, there without even a gun in the middle of all the bullets and bombs and the terrible gas. The bombs here-” She shrugged. “It was terrible, yes, but nothing we haven’t known before. If they don’t land right on top of you, you’re all right. And if they do, you probably won’t know about it anyhow. That’s not so bad.”

“No,” Moishe agreed. After almost three years of slow starvation and disease in the Warsaw ghetto, such fatalism came easy. Next to them, sudden, probably painless death could look downright attractive.

Rivka said, “There’s still some-veal left from last night, if you’re hungry.”

The slight hesitation told Moishe the “veal” was probably pork, and that his wife was trying to shield him from knowingly eating forbidden food. He’d done the same for her in Warsaw. Accepting the pretense at face value, he said, “I can always eat. Field rations are thin.”

Civilian rations were even thinner, and he knew it. He left a good deal on the plate. Rivka hadn’t expected him to show up. She and Reuven would need to make a meal, or more than one, out of what she’d fixed. When he said he couldn’t possibly hold another bite, she looked knowingly at him, but did not protest as she would have before the war.

She dipped water out of a bucket to accompany the meal. It was lukewarm, and had the flat, airless taste that said it had been boiled. He smiled. “I’m glad you’re being careful with what you drink.”

“I’ve seen what happens when people aren’t careful,” she answered seriously. “Being married to a medical student taught me that much, anyhow.”

“I’m glad,” he said again. He carried plate and fork over to the sink. It was full of soapy water: even now, it made a good washbasin. He washed his dishes and set them by the sink. Rivka watched him, somewhere between amusement and bemusement. Defensively, he said, “Being apart from you, I’ve learned to do these things, you see.”

“Yes, I do see,” she said. From her tone, he couldn’t tell whether she approved or was scandalized. She went on, “What else have you learned, being apart from me?”

“That I don’t like being apart from you,” he answered. Through the window came fresh cheers from the street below; one of the boys’ football teams had just scored. In a speculative voice, Moishe remarked, “Reuven really seems to enjoy watching the match down there.”

“Enough for us to hope he won’t come upstairs for the next little while, do you mean?” Rivka asked. Moishe nodded, his head jerking up and down in hopeful eagerness. From the way his wife giggled, he suspected he looked like a perfectshlemiel. He didn’t care, especially not after she said, “I suppose we can do that. Privacy is where you find it, or make it.”

He tried to remember the last time he’d lain on a bed. It hadn’t happened more than once or twice since he’d been shoehorned into the forces fighting desperately to keep Britain free of the invading aliens. They’d given him a bag of medical supplies, a uniform, an armband, and a gas mask, and they’d sent him out to do his best. Comfort hadn’t been part of the bargain.

As if by way of experiment, Rivka kissed his bare cheek. “Bristly,” she said. “I think I like your beard better, unless you can shave your face very smooth.”

“Getting my hands on a razor hasn’t always been easy,” he answered. “I never would have done it at all, but it makes a mask fit properly.”

He didn’t want to think about gas masks and the things that could go wrong if they failed to fit properly, not when he lay beside his wife in an oasis of peace and calm in the midst of chaos and war. For the next little while, he didn’t think about anything but Rivka.

But try as you would to stretch such moments, they had to end. Rivka sat up and began to dress as fast as she could. Partly that was ingrained modesty, and partly a well-justified fear that Reuven would choose the most inconvenient time possible to walk into the flat. Both those concerns also drove Moishe back into his clothes. The shoddy serge of his battledress scraped his skin as he pulled it on.

Rivka reached behind her neck to fasten the last catch. As if that were a signal that the everyday, dangerous world had returned, she asked, “How long will you be able to stay here?”

“Just tonight,” he answered. “I have to go south tomorrow, to help the wounded in the fighting against the Lizards there.”

“How is the fight really going?” Rivka asked. “When there’s power for the wireless and when they can print newspapers, they say they’re smashing the Lizards the way Samson smote the Philistines. But Lizard planes keep on pounding London, the boom of the artillery never goes away, and shells keep falling on us. Can I believe what they claim?”

“The northern pocket is gone-kaputt,” Moishe said, borrowing a word he’d heard German soldiers use. “As for the southern one, your guess is as good as mine. All I know about the fighting is what I’ve seen for myself, and that’s like asking a fish in a pool to tell you everything about the Vistula. If England were losing the fight badly, though, you’d be talking with a Lizard right now, not with me.”

“That is so,” she said thoughtfully. “But after people-human beings-have lost so many fights, it’s hard to believe that just holding the Lizards back should count as a victory.”

“When you think of how many people couldn’t slow the Lizards down, let alone stop them, then holding them backis a victory, and a big one. I don’t ever remember them pulling back from a fight the way they did from the northern pocket. The English have hurt them.” Moishe shook his head in wonder. “For so long, we didn’t think anything or anyone could hurt them.”

The front door to the flat opened, then closed with a slam. Reuven shouted, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry!” Moishe and Rivka looked at each other and started to laugh. The noise let Reuven find them. “What’s so funny?” he demanded with the indignation of a child who knows a joke is going over his head.

“Nothing,” his father answered gravely. “We slipped one by you, that’s all.”

“One what?” Reuven said. Rivka sent Moishe a warning glance: the boy was really too young. Moishe just laughed harder. Even with the rumble of artillery always in the background, for this little while he could savor being with his wife and son. Tomorrow the war would fold him in its bony arms once more. Today he was free, and reveled in his freedom.

The silvery metal did not look like much. It was so dense that what the Metallurgical Laboratory had managed to produce seemed an even smaller amount than it really was. Appearances mattered not at all to Leslie Groves. He knew what he had here: enough plutonium, when added together with what the Germans and Russians had stolen from the Lizards and the British brought over to the U.S.A., to make an atomic bomb that would go boom and not fizzle.

He turned to Enrico Fermi. “There’s the first long, hard step, by God! After this, we have a downhill track.”

“An easier track, General, yes, but not an easy one,” the Italian physicist answered. “We still have to purify the plutonium, to shape it into a bomb, and to find a way to explode the bomb where we want it.”

“Those are all engineering concerns,” Groves said. “I’m an engineer; I know we can meet them. The physics was what worried me-I wasn’t sure we’d ever see enough plutonium metal.” He waved toward the small silver lump.

Fermi laughed. “For me, it is just the opposite. The physics, we have found, is straightforward enough. Advancing from it to the finished bomb, though, is a challenge of a different sort.”

“Whatever sort of challenge it is, we’ll meet it,” Groves declared. “We can’t afford to be like the Russians-one shot and out. We’ll hit the Lizards again and again, until we make ’em say uncle.”

“From what I understand of the Russians’ design, they are lucky to have achieved any explosion at all,” Fermi said. “A gun-type device with plutonium-” He shook his head. “It must have been a very large gun, with a very high velocity to the slab of plutonium it accelerated into the larger plug. Otherwise, fission would have begun prematurely, disrupting the mass before the full power of the nuclear reaction built up.”

“They could build it any size they wanted, I suppose,” Groves said. “They weren’t going to load it in a bomber, after all.” He laughed at that, a laugh edged with bitterness. “For one thing, they don’t have a bomber big enough to carry even a small nuclear bomb. For another, if they did, the Lizards would shoot it down before it got where it was supposed to go. So why not build big?”

“No reason I can see,” Fermi answered. “The same applies to us, in large degree: we will not be able to deliver the bomb from the air once we have it. Putting it in the proper place at the proper time will not be easy.”

“I know.” Groves rubbed his chin. He didn’t like thinking about that. “The way the Russians did it, from what they say, was to leave the bomb hidden in a position they knew the Lizards were going to overrun in a few hours. They set their timer and waited for the big boom. We’d have a harder time finding a position of that sort.”

“Chicago,” Fermi said quietly.

“Mm, yeah, maybe,” Groves admitted. “That’s a meat grinder, no mistake about it. I see two problems with it, though. Getting the bomb from here to Chicago once it’s done is one. Hell, getting a bomb from here to anywhere is going to be a problem. So that’s number one. And number two is pulling our boys back so we don’t take out one of our own divisions along with the Lizards.”

“Why should that be a problem?” the physicist asked. “They simply retreat, allowing the Lizards to move forward, and that is that.”

Leslie Groves smiled down at him. Groves had been an engineer throughout his years in the military; he’d never led troops in combat, nor wanted to. But he’d forgotten more about strategy than Fermi had ever learned-nice to be reminded there were still some things he knew more about than the eggheads he was supposed to be bossing. As patiently as he could, he answered, “Professor, we’ve been fighting the Lizards tooth and toenail outside of Chicago, and now in it, ever since they came down from space. If we all of a sudden start pulling back without an obvious good reason, don’t you think they’re going to get suspicious about why we’re changing our ways? I know I would, if I were their C.O.”

“Ahh,” Fermi said. He might have been naive, but he wasn’t dumb, not even a little bit. “I see what you mean, General. The Russians were already in full-scale retreat, so the Lizards noticed nothing out of the ordinary when they passed the point where the bomb was hidden. But if we go from stout resistance to quick withdrawal, they will observe something is amiss.”

“That’s it,” Groves agreed. “That’s it exactly. We’d have to either convince ’em that they’d licked us and we were getting out of Dodge-”

“I beg your pardon?” Fermi interrupted.

“Sorry. I mean, retreating as fast as we can go,” Groves said. Fermi spoke with a thick accent, but he usually understood what you said to him. Groves reminded himself to be less colloquial. “Either we do that or else we pull back secretly-under cover of night, maybe. That’s how I see it, anyhow.”

“To me, this is a sensible plan,” Fermi said. “If the time comes, will they think of it in Chicago?”

“They should. They’re solid professional soldiers.” But Groves wondered. Fermi was naive about the way soldiers handled their job. Every reason he should have been, too. But why should anyone assume the generals out there actually fighting the Lizards were anything but naive about what an atomic bomb could do? Calculations from a bunch of scholarly people who went around carrying slide rules instead of carbines wouldn’t mean much to them.

Groves decided he’d better sit his fanny down and bang out a memo. He couldn’t be sure anyone would pay any attention to that, either, but at least it would haveBrigadier General, U.S. Army under his name, which might make soldiers sit up and take notice. The only real thing he was sure of was that they certainly wouldn’t know what to expect if hedidn’t sit down and write. That was all a man of action needed to know.

“Excuse me, Professor Fermi,” he said, and hurried away. The typewriter was waiting.

Atvar studied the computer display of the slow track of Tosev 3 around its parent sun. “Equinox,” he said, as if it were blasphemy against the revered name of the Emperor.

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel didn’t sound any happier at the self-evident astronomical fact than had his superior. He put the reason for his distaste into words: “Winter will now approach in the northern hemisphere, where so many Tosevite not-empires remain unsubdued.”

Both high-ranking males contemplated that for a while in unhappy silence. The probe the Race had sent to Tosev 3 centuries before had warned that the planet’s weather grew extremely intemperate in winter. Still, the Race’s equipment was imperfectly adapted for such climates: the ruling assumption had been that the conquest would be over and done long before such things mattered. And no one back on Home had imagined that the Tosevites could have industrialized in the space of a few short centuries, let alone developed equipment better designed than anything the Race had for dealing with all the appalling varieties of muck and frozen water indigenous to Tosev 3 in winter.

Still gloomily, Kirel resumed, “During the last winter, we lost the strategic advantage over broad areas of the planet. When bad weather begins, the Big Uglies will assail us with more sophisticated weapons than they employed two of our years ago. This does not cause me to look on the likely results of the upcoming combat with optimism unrestrained.”

“I assure you, Shiplord, I have not looked on this conquest with optimism unrestrained since we discovered the Big Uglies knew enough to employ radio,” Atvar answered. “But we are not in an entirely disadvantageous position in regard to the Tosevites, either. We have made serious inroads on their industrial capacity; they produce far less than they did when we first arrived.”

“Our own industrial capacity on Tosev 3, however, remains effectively nil,” Kirel said. “We can produce more ammunition: all well and good, though even there we rely to some degree on captured Tosevite factories. But who in his wildest nightmares would have thought of the need to manufacture landcruisers and killercraft in large numbers to replace combat losses?”

“No one, but it remains a reality whether we thought of it or not,” Atvar said. “We have serious weaknesses in both areas, as well as in antimissile missiles. We were lucky to have brought any of those at all, but now our stocks are nearly exhausted, and demand remains unrelenting.”

“The Deutsche, may their eggshells be thinned by pest-control poisons, not only throw missiles at us but load them with their poisonous gases rather than with ordinary explosives. These missiles must be shot down before they reach their targets, or they can do dreadful damage. Our ability to accomplish this is degraded with every antimissile missile we expend.”

“We have knocked the island of Britain out of the fight against us for some indefinite time,” Atvar said. That was true, but it was also putting the best possible face on things, and he knew it. The campaign on Britain had been intended to annex the island. Like a lot of intentions on Tosev 3, that one had not survived contact with the Big Uglies. The losses in males and materiel were appalling, and certainly had cost the Race far more than the temporary neutralization of Britain could repay.

After what looked like a careful mental search, Kirel did find an authentic bright spot to mention: “It does appear virtually certain, Exalted Fleetlord, that the SSSR possessed but the single atomic weapon it used against us. Operations there can resume their previous tempo, at least until winter comes.”

“No, not until winter, not in the SSSR,” Atvar said sharply. “Long before that, the rains begin there and turn the local road network into an endless sea of gluey muck. We bogged down there badly two years ago, during the last local autumn, and then again in the spring, when all the frozen water that had accumulated there through winter proceeded to melt.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord. I had forgotten.” Kirel seemed to fold in on himself for a moment, acknowledging his error. Almost angrily, he continued, “The Big Uglies of the SSSR are a pack of lazy, incompetent fools, to build a road system unusable one part of the year in three.”

“I wish they were a pack of lazy, incompetent fools,” Atvar answered. “Lazy, incompetent fools, though, could not have built and detonated an atomic device, even if the plutonium was stolen from our stockpile. As a matter of fact, prisoner interrogations imply that the roads are so shoddy for a strategic reason: to hinder invasion from Deutschland to the west. They certainly had reason to fear such invasion, at any rate, and the measures taken against the Deutsche have also served to hinder us.”

“So they have,” Kirel hissed in anger. “Of all the Tosevite not-empires, I most want to see the SSSR overthrown. I realize that their emperor was but a Big Ugly, but to take him from his throne and murder him-” He shuddered. “Such thoughts would never have crossed our minds before we came to Tosev 3. If males ever had them, they are vanished in the prehistory of the Race. Or they were, until the Big Uglies recalled them to unwholesome life.”

“I know,” Atvar said sadly. “Even after we do conquer this world, after the colonization fleet sets down here, I fear Tosevite ideas may yet corrupt us. The Rabotevs and Hallessi differ from us in body, but in spirit the Empire’s three races might have hatched from the same egg. The Big Uglies are alien, alien.”

“Which makes them all the more dangerous,” Kirel said. “If the colonization fleet were not following us, I might think sterilizing Tosev 3 the wisest course.”

“So Straha proposed early on,” Atvar replied. “Have you come round to the traitor’s view?” His voice grew soft and dangerous as he asked that question. Straha’s broadcasts from the U.S.A. had hurt morale more than he liked to admit.

“No, Exalted Fleetlord. I said, ‘If the colonization fleet were not following us.’ But it is, which limits our options.” Kirel hesitated, then continued, “As we have noted before, the Tosevites, unfortunately, operate under no such restraints. If they construct more nuclear weapons, they will use them.”

“The other thing I doubt is the effectiveness of nuclear weapons as intimidators against them,” Atvar said. “We have destroyed Berlin, Washington, and now Tokyo. The Deutsche and Americans keep right on fighting us, and the Nipponese also seem to be carrying on. But when the Soviet Big Uglies detonated their device, they intimidated us for a long period of time. That is not how warfare against a primitive species should progress.”

“One thing the Tosevites have taught us: technology and political sophistication do not necessarily travel together,” Kirel said. “For us, dealings between empires are principles to be absorbed out of old texts from previous conquests; for the Big Uglies, they are the everyday stuff of life. No wonder, then, that they find it easier to manipulate us than we them. By the Emperor”-he cast down his eyes-“that might have been true even if they were as technologically backwards as our probes led us to believe.”

“So it might, but then they would not have had the strength to back up their deviousness,” Atvar said. “Now they do. And sooner or later, the Soviets will manage to build another nuclear weapon, or the Deutsche, or the Americans-and then more difficult choices will present themselves to us.”

“Difficult, yes,” Kirel said. “We suspect the Americans and the Deutsche and the British as well of having nuclear programs, as the Soviets surely do. But what if we cannot find the source of their production, as we were lucky enough to manage with the Nipponese? Shall we destroy one of their cities instead, taking vengeance for their nuclear attacks in that way?”

“It is to be considered,” Atvar answered. “Many things are to be considered which we had not contemplated before we came here.” That made him nervous in and of itself. Maneuvering through uncharted territory was not what the Race did best. It was seldom something the Race had to do at all, for those who led knew their kind’s weaknesses full well. But on Tosev 3, Atvar found himself with only the choice of too many choices.

The ruined gray stone castle before which Ussmak had halted his landcruiser seemed to him immeasurably old. Intellectually, he knew the frowning pile of stone could hardly have stood there for more than a couple of thousand years (half that, if you counted by Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its primary)-hardly a flick of the nictitating membrane in the history of the Race.

But his own people had not built such structures since days now more nearly legendary than historical. None survived; a hundred thousand years and more of earthquakes, erosion, and constant construction had seen to that. Chugging up the hill to the castle at Farnham, Ussmak had felt transported in time back to primitive days.

Unfortunately, the British were not so primitive now as they had been when they ran up the castle, either. Otherwise, Ussmak’s landcruiser would not have had to retreat from its attempted river crossing to aid the males in the northern pocket. The northern pocket had no males left in it now. Some had been evacuated. More were dead or captured.

Back in the turret, Nejas called out, “Front!”

Ussmak peered through his own vision slits, trying to find the target the landcruiser commander had spotted. He waited for Skoob to answer, “Identified!” Instead, the gunner said doubtfully, “What have you found, superior sir?”

“That group of Tosevite males advancing along the highway, bearing as near zero as makes no difference,” Nejas answered. “Give them a round of high explosive. It will teach them not to show themselves so openly.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Skoob said. The autoloader clanged as it slammed a shell into the branch of the landcruiser’s main armament. “On the way,” Skoob said, an instant before the big gun roared and the landcruiser rocked back on its tracks, absorbing the recoil.

The Big Uglies knew enough to move forward in open order, which left them less vulnerable to artillery fire. Even so, several males went down when the shell burst among them. Those who had not been hit quickly joined their comrades on the ground. “Well aimed, Skoob!” Ussmak exclaimed. “One round and you stopped the advance cold.”

“Thank you, driver,” Skoob answered. “I’m not used to retreating. Of course I obey for the good of the Race, but I don’t much fancy it.”

“Nor I,” Ussmak said. Every time he sneaked a taste of ginger, he was filled with the urge to charge forward into the ranks of the Big Uglies, smashing them with the landcruiser’s tracks while the gunner and commander used the weapons in the turret to work a great slaughter. He knew that was the herb doing his thinking for him, but knowing it made the urge no less urgent.

“No one fancies retreating,” Nejas said. “Landcruiser males are trained to be first into battle, to tear holes in the enemy’s force through which others may pass. Now our task is to keep the British from tearing holes in our force and to be the last ones out of battle. Difficult, I grant you, but less far removed from our basic role than you might think.”

“Truth,” Ussmak said, “but not satisfying truth. Forgive me for speaking so boldly, superior sir.”

“I do forgive you, driver, but I also remind you of our task here,” Nejas said. “The Race has but one airstrip on this island out of range of British artillery: that at the place called Tangmere south of here, not far from the sea. As long as we can hold the British away from it, we can freely bring in supplies and evacuate wounded males as well as those being withdrawn.”

“Truth,” Ussmak repeated. He followed the strategy, but giving up ground to the Tosevites still seemed strange to him. The Deutsche were probably better warriors in a technical sense than the British, but here every Tosevite, whether formally a warrior or not, was an enemy. He hadn’t felt that in the SSSR or France; some there had seemed willing to serve the Race on its terms. Not in Britain. Here they fought with everything they had.

As if thinking along with him, Nejas said, “We can’t let them get within artillery range of Tangmere. If they do, they’ll plaster the airstrip with the hideous poison gas of theirs.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “And from what I’ve heard, we have it lucky. The Deutsche are using a gas that makes this one seem tame: one good whiff and you fall over dead.”

Ussmak said, “Superior sir, if what we have here is good luck, I don’t ever want to see the bad.”

“Nor I,” Skoob agreed. To Nejas, he added, “I see more Big Uglies in the fields and along the road to the north. Shall I give them another couple of rounds of high explosive?”

“Pick your own targets, Skoob,” the landcruiser commander answered. “Remember what ammunition resupply has been like lately, though. We have to hold this position and keep on holding it till we’re ordered to fall back again. That probably won’t be until our time for evacuation comes up: they’re using armor for a shell, and pulling back all the soft meat behind it.”

“Back when we first started the campaign on Tosev 3,” Ussmak said, his words punctuated by the deep rumble of the landcruiser’s main armament, “one of our landcruisers could sit out in the middle of open country and dominate as far as its cannon could reach.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “It’s not like that any more.”

“Not here, that’s certain,” Nejas said. “Britain hardly has open spaces worthy of the name. There are always trees or hedgerows or stone fences or buildings to give cover to the Big Uglies. When we first landed, too, they didn’t have any antilandcruiser weapons worthy of the name: nothing this side of big guns, anyway, and big guns are easy to spot and neutralize. But now any sneaking infantrymale can carry a rocket or one of those spring-launched egg-addlers the British use. They still can’t hurt us from the front, but from the sides or rear… we’ve lost too many landcruisers that way.”

Skoob traversed the turret a couple of hundredths and fired again. Two other landcruisers held positions slightly lower on the hill that led up to Farnham Castle. They also sent high-explosive rounds into the loose ranks of the oncoming British males. Again and again, the British went to ground. Again and again, the survivors got up and kept moving forward.

“I wish we had more infantrymales in the ruins of the town down there,” Ussmak said. “Some of those Big Uglies will get in among them-as you said, superior sir-and work their way toward us.”

Neither of his crewmales argued with him. He wondered if this was what the Tosevites had felt at the outset of the campaign, when for a while the Race swept all before it: the numbing sense that, try as you would to stop it, something would go wrong and you’d end up dead or maimed on account of it.

A flight of killercraft roared low overhead from out of the south, dropping bombs on the Big Uglies and strafing them with their cannon. A series of runs like that, by multiple flights, would have ruined the British, but the Race had neither the aircraft nor the munitions to expend in such lavish quantities.

That meant the British would not be ruined. It also probably meant the Race’s forces in Britain would. Ussmak desperately wanted a taste of ginger. Without the herb, the world was a depressing, gloomy, cold place-not that he’d ever found Tosev 3 anything but cold, even with a taste or two inside him. But the cloud that settled over his spirit when he’d gone too long without ginger made the world feel even worse than it was and defeat seem a certainty.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than something exploded against the side armor of one of the landcruisers farther down the hill. One of the revolting things about the British spring-launched antilandcruiser bombs was that they gave no clue about their launch site, as, say, a missile did.

This bomb, by good fortune, did not penetrate the landcruiser’s armor, perhaps because it hadn’t landed squarely. After the initial blast, no smoke mounted skyward. No escape hatches popped open. No males bailed out of the landcruiser. Instead the turret slewed rapidly through a quarter of a circle. The machine gun coaxial with the main armament chattered angrily. But if anything in the ruins of Farnham stirred, Ussmak didn’t see it.

“The Big Uglies’ weapons get better all the time,” he said. “We have the same ones we started out with, and we don’t have as many of them. The Tosevite substitutes we’re getting are shoddy, and we don’t have enough of those, either. Why can’t we be the ones who invent something new for a change?”

Neither Nejas nor Skoob answered him. They did not need to answer him; he had already answered himself. The Race looked warily on invention. When it did happen, the results were fed into the culture of the Empire a tiny bit at a time, so as not to create instability. Steadiness counted for more than quickness. The past hundred thousand years, that had worked well. It did not work well on Tosev 3.

His crewmales also had another, less abstract reason for not answering him: they were trying to spot the Big Ugly who’d launched the bomb at the nearby landcruiser. Ussmak peered through his own vision slits, but his field of view was too narrow to offer him much hope of getting a glimpse of the dangerous Tosevite.

He heard a metallic rasp from the turret: Nejas was sticking his head out for a direct look around. That was what a good landcruiser commander was supposed to do. Looking out at the world through the periscopes that ringed the cupola didn’t let you see enough to be sure you were safe.

But if you did stand up in the cupola, by definition you were no longer safe. The moment Nejas emerged, British males started shooting at him. Two bullets ricocheted off the turret and another cracked past before he ducked back down and slammed the cupola lid with a clang.

“I didn’t see any Big Uglies,” he said, the words punctuated by swift, harsh breathing. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t see me. By the Emperor, I hope that other landcruiser took out the male with the bomb launcher. If he didn’t-”

“If he didn’t, we’ll find out quite soon,” Skoob said. The silence that followed probably meant his mouth had fallen open in a laugh. He went on, “I haven’t come close to spotting him. He’s good at what he does. By now, on this planet, the males who aren’t good warriors are mostly dead, on their side and ours both.”

Ussmak was still alive, so he supposed he was good at what he did, by Skoob’s standard, at any rate. He wished he could taste some ginger. Then he’d feel alive, too. He hissed bemusedly. Even when he tasted, he imagined himself triumphantly wielding weapons, never inventing them. Somehow fantasy and hard work in a laboratory failed to come together.

Was that movement in the rubble, right at the edge of his field of vision? He moved his head to one side, trying to look farther in that direction. If it had been movement, it was stopped now.

He opened his mouth to speak up about it anyhow.Better safe was a motto drilled into the Race from hatchlinghood. Back on Home, it usually meant avoiding annoyance or discomfort. Here, it had more to do with preventing agony and gruesome death.

Before he could say anything, Skoob’s machine gun started rattling away. Hot brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor. “Gothim!” Skoob shouted, almost as excitedly as if he’d tasted ginger himself. “Tosevite male with a rifle-probably one of the ones who was shooting at you, superior sir.”

“Good riddance to him,” Nejas said.

The turret of the landcruiser that had taken the bomb hit swung back toward the north. The landcruiser started shelling the advancing British males once more. The flames that spurted from the muzzle, the smoke and dirt that flew with each shellburst, impressed Ussmak less than they had before. Armed Tosevites were already inside Farnham, sneaking toward the landcruisers like biters looking to slide needle-nosed mouths between a male’s scales. Swat as you would, you never could quite get rid of all of them. For that, you needed a spray-but here on Tosev 3, the biters were the ones with the poisonous gas.

Clang-pow!For a moment, Ussmak thought the main armament had fired. But this jolt slewed the landcruiser sideways. Warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel. A klaxon started to hoot, loud enough to make his hearing diaphragms feel like vibrating drumheads. That meant fire loose in the engine compartment in spite of everything the extinguishers could do, which in turn meant the landcruiser could brew up at any moment. Hydrogen wasn’t so enthusiastically explosive as the hydrocarbon fuels the Big Uglies used, but it burned. Oh, it burned…

All of that went through Ussmak’s mind far faster than conscious thought. Even before Nejas screamed “Bail out!” Ussmak had the hatch over his head open. He paused only to grab his little jars of ginger, stuff them into a belt pouch, and, almost as an afterthought, pick up his personal weapon. Then he was scrambling up and out, fast as legs and arms would propel him.

A rifle bullet whined past his head, close enough for him to feel, or imagine he felt, the wind of its passage. He skittered across the smooth, sloping surface of the glacis plate, jumped down, and landed heavily on torn-up asphalt, the bulk of the landcruiser between him and the Tosevite guns.

Skoob already sprawled there. “We can’t stay here,” he said, his eyes swiveling wildly as he looked for danger every which way at once. “This thing is liable to go up whenever the fire gets to the ammunition, or to the fuel, or if that cursed Big Ugly sends another bomb into the fighting compartment.”

“Tell me something I didn’t know,” Ussmak answered. “Where’s the commander?”

Just then, Nejas jumped down on both of them. Blood dripped from a surprisingly neat hole in his left forearm. “They hit me when I started to climb out,” he said, barely opening his mouth so as to show as little pain as he could. Skoob reached for a bandage, but Nejas waved him off. “We have to get clear first.”

The commander scurried away from the hull of the stricken landcruiser, keeping it between himself and the Tosevites. Ussmak and Skoob followed. Ussmak wanted to spray bullets back at the Big Uglies, but that would have reminded them he was there. He would sooner have had them forget all about him.

Clang-pow!The sound was quite different from outside the landcruiser, but unmistakable all the same. Another of those spring-launched bombs-Ussmak and his crewmates had got away just in time. Turning one eye backwards, he saw flame race over the whole vehicle. Then ammunition started cooking off inside. A perfect black smoke ring shot out through the opening atop the cupola.

The pyrotechnics finally alerted the crews of the other two landcruisers that something had gone wrong behind them. They both broke off shelling the advancing British Big Uglies and lashed the ruins of Farnham with fire, trying to rout out the fighting males already sneaking through those ruins.

Ussmak doubted they would succeed in exterminating the Tosevites. He was past the point of caring. As long as they made the Big Uglies lie low long enough to let him find shelter, that would do. He’d given up hoping for anything better than temporary respite.

Nejas dove behind a couple of gray stone blocks that had been blasted off the wall of Farnham’s castle. Ussmak and Skoob followed him to earth as if they were hunted beasts.We might as well be hunted beasts, Ussmak thought. In combat and out of his landcruiser, he felt naked and soft and hideously vulnerable, like some crawler cruelly torn from its shell.

“Let’s see that now, superior sir,” Skoob said, pointing to Nejas’ wound.

Nejas held out the arm. His eyes wandered vaguely. When he opened his mouth to speak, only a wordless hiss came out. The interior of his mouthparts was a pale, pale pink. He hadn’t lost that much blood, but he did not look good. “Shock,” Ussmak said, his voice worried.

“Truth,” Skoob said. He wrapped a wound bandage around the landcruiser commander’s arm. “I hope one of those other crews will radio for an evacuation helicopter; our own set just went up in flames.” He turned both eyes toward Nejas. “If we have to walk out-and I’m afraid we will-he’ll be a burden unless he comes out of it.”

No rescue helicopter appeared. Nejas sank further into sludgy semiconsciousness. Ussmak grew more and more sure they would have to retreat on foot. If they were going to do that, they needed Nejas on his legs and moving. Trying to carry him, they’d be separately slowed, and easy meat for any armed Big Uglies whose path they chanced to cross. Abandoning the landcruiser commander never crossed Ussmak’s mind; for all he’d been through, he was still in some ways a well-drilled male of the Race.

But how to get Nejas up on his legs? Skoob was looking around helplessly, perhaps for some males to lend them a hand. Ussmak did not think anyone would magically materialize, not unless another landcruiser got killed, in which case the crewmales would likely have wounded of their own.

He got an idea of a different sort. He reached into the pouch in which he’d stored his ginger, took out a vial, and poured some of the powdered herb into the palm of his hand. Skoob stared at him in astonishment. He ignored the gunner. Holding his hand just in front of the tip of Nejas’ muzzle, he said, “Superior sir? Taste this.”

His greatest fear was that Nejas was too far gone to hear him, or to respond if he did. But the commander’s bifurcated tongue flicked out, almost of itself, and brought into his mouth a fair-sized taste of ginger. Ussmak waited tensely to see if it would do any good.

The membranes that had fallen halfway across Nejas’ pupils suddenly peeled back, leaving the landcruiser commander’s eyes bright and alert. His tongue shot forth again, and cleared the last of the ginger from Ussmak’s palm. “By the Emperor, what is that stuff?” he demanded. “Whatever it is, it’s marvelous.”

Skoob spoke before Ussmak could: “That’s the Tosevite herb, isn’t it? The one we’ve had so much trouble with, I mean.” He turned one eye from Nejas toward Ussmak. “What are you doing with it? Possession of ginger is against regulations and subject to punishment.”

“What do you think I’m doing with it?” Ussmak snapped, irritated by the manifest stupidity of the question. “I’m a ginger taster, that’s what. And it was the only thing I could think of to get the commander moving again.” He shifted his eyes to Nejas. “I’m sorry, superior sir. This way, we can sort things out later. If I hadn’t given it to you, I didn’t think there’d be a later.”

“You were right,” Nejas declared, which silenced Skoob. The landcruiser commander’s voice was vibrant, full of life. Moments before, his wound had left him all but unconscious. Now he seemed to have forgotten he’d been hurt. “Where’s my personal weapon?” he asked, looking around for it. “If I can get my hands on it, the three of us should be plenty to drive all the Big Ugly fighting males out of this damp, grimy little town.”

Now Skoob stared at him, as if certain the ginger had robbed him of his wits. And so, in a way, it had. Ussmak recognized the symptoms from his own first tastes of ginger: the certainty that you could do anything, regardless of the odds. He still felt that when he tasted, but now he knew it was the herb’s illusion. Nejas didn’t have the experience to recognize it for what it was.

Gently, Ussmak said, “Superior sir, you remain yourself, nothing more, however powerful the herb may make you feel. Use logic, if you can: if we could not drive the Big Uglies from Farnham from inside our landcruiser, we won’t do it now that the machine is wrecked. We need to get out of here and get you and your wounded arm seen to.”

Ginger made you think faster than you did without it. It also made you think you were thinking better than you did without it, though that wasn’t always so. After only the briefest pause, Nejas said, “Truth. We must leave. Logic.” Ussmak wasn’t sure how clear his commander’s wits really were, but he wanted to get Nejas moving and get all three of them out of Farnham before the ginger’s exhilaration wore off and the first dreadful depression crashed down to take its place.

Without warning, Nejas broke cover, skittering southward toward another pile of rubble. A bullet kicked up earth between his feet; another struck sparks from the stonework behind him. With a headlong leap, he reached the new shelter. “Come on!” he called to his crewmales. “Nothing to it!”

Ussmak wished he’d also tasted; it would have helped nerve him for the dash across open, empty space. “Go on,” Skoob said. “I’ll cover you.” He fired a few shots as Ussmak poised, sprinted, dove. Ussmak returned the favor when Skoob made the dangerous crossing.

From rubble to wreckage, from wreckage to house, they made their way south out of Farnham. The houses, those few of them that hadn’t been ruined in the fighting, looked tidy and comfortable, at least by Tosevite standards. As he scurried from one of them to the next, always wondering when a bullet he never heard would hit him, Ussmak began to see how a Big Ugly who was faced with the loss of such comfort might fight hard to keep it.

Houses thinned out and gave way to open country. That worried Ussmak. It gave him and his crewmales fewer hiding places than they’d had in town. And untold enemies could lurk behind the hedgerows that separated one miniature field from the next. Ussmak eyed those hedgerows with mingled fear and respect. Some of them had been growing for the Emperor only knew how long; even a land-cruiser had trouble crashing through them.

Hedgerows, however, were not his only concern. As he’d known it would, Nejas’ ginger charge wore off, leaving the landcruiser commander very much a drained battery. Nejas slumped bonelessly to the rough asphalt of the road. “I can’t go on,” he moaned, after-tasting depression holding him in its teeth. “And even if I could, what good would it do?”

“Here, superior sir, taste this.” Ussmak got out more ginger. He didn’t know if a brand-new user could stand having so much course through him, but he did know the alternative was abandoning Nejas. He’d had commanders he would have happily abandoned, but Nejas wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t want it,” Nejas said; now he knew what Ussmak was giving him. But Ussmak had never heard a more obvious lie. Nejas’ eyes never moved from the palm that held the ginger. When Ussmak brought his hand close to the other male’s muzzle, Nejas’ tongue flicked out and licked it clean.

Quietly, Skoob said to Ussmak, “We ought to report you for punishment when we get to an area where such things are possible.”

“Do whatever you’re going to do,” Ussmak answered, as weary as he ever remembered being. “The point is that we get to one of those places, not what we do afterwards.”

“Let’s go.” Nejas surged to his feet again. His eyes had a hectic glow to them, as if fires burned uncontrolled in his brain. Ussmak knew about those fires, and the herbal wind that fanned them. He hoped he hadn’t given the commander too much ginger. Voice crackling with unassailable certainty, Nejas pointed south. “That way. Before long we shall surely encounter one of our bases intended to hold down this land.”

Unless we encounter Big Ugly infiltrators first,Ussmak thought.If they were in Farnham, no reason they can’t have slipped south of it. They’re good at such things. After all, this is their planet. Over the days since the Race came to Tosev 3, he’d got a thorough education as to what that meant.

Something moved at the bottom of a hedgerow. He didn’t pause to wonder about what it might be; males who hesitated once seldom got the chance to hesitate twice. He fired a short burst, his first bullet an instant ahead of Skoob’s.

Only after his finger came off the trigger did he see what he and the landcruiser gunner had been shooting at: a round little spiny animal with a pointed snout. It was dead now, dead and torn and bleeding, its tiny black eyes staring up in blind reproach. For the first time since he woke up from cold sleep on Tosev 3, Ussmak felt guilty about killing something.