Upsetting the Balance

15

Rain drummed down out of a leaden sky. Most of the leaves were off the trees in Pskova Park; they lay, brown and forlorn, on the yellow dying grass below. As George Bagnall walked toward the PskovKrom, he thought the bare-branched beeches and birches looked sad and miserable, like skeletons with their arms held high in surrender to approaching winter.

Sheets of water ran over the concrete slabs of the pavement. Rain collected in bomb craters, turning them to muddy little ponds. If you stepped into one, not watching where you were going, you could sink deeper than your waist-or deeper than your head. Two or three people had already drowned that way, or so rumor said.

The sentries at theKrom stood inside the entrance, both to keep dry and to keep the Lizards from spotting them from the air. Pskov’s ancient fortress had taken a couple of bombs in the early days of the Lizard invasion, but the aliens had pretty much left it alone since. Everyone in town hoped they would go right on doing that.

“Who comes?” the German sentry demanded, while his Soviet opposite number raised the barrel of his submachine gun. Bagnall swept back the hood on the rain cape he was wearing. “Ah, the Englishman,” the German said, first in his own language and then in Russian. The Soviet sentry nodded and gestured with his weapon: go ahead.

“Spasebo,”Bagnall said. His German, after months of intensive practice, was pretty fluent. His Russian wasn’t, so he used it whenever he could.

He went upstairs to the office of the local German commandant,Generalleutnant Kurt Chill. “Good day, Mr. Bagnall,” Chill said in excellent English. “Brigadiers German and Vasiliev, I fear, have not yet arrived. I thank you, at least, for being punctual.”

Bagnall shrugged. If you let Russian habits of punctuality get you down, you would go mad. “They’ll be here, General,” he said. And so they would, in five minutes or half an hour or a couple of hours. The concept of having0900 mean anything more than a way of sayingsometime this morning was beyond the Russian mental horizon.

The two partisan leaders showed up at twenty of ten. If they knew why Kurt Chill was gently steaming, they didn’t show it. “So,” Nikolai Vasiliev said, “let us discuss our moves against the imperialists from another world. We should be able to drive them back from Pskov while winter conditions prevail.” His comrade, Aleksandr German, translated Russian into Yiddish, which was close enough to German for Chill-and Bagnall-to understand.

On his own, Aleksandr German added, “They are weak in winter, weaker even than you Germans were that first year.”

Chill was used to such sniping, and gave as good as he got. “We were strong enough then to hold you out of Pskov,” he said with a chilly smile, “and we have got better since. My hope is that the Lizards will not do the same.”

“I think they probably won’t,” Bagnall said in German; Aleksandr German translated for Vasiliev. “They seem to do the same old things over and over.”

“Their old ones are quite bad enough,” Vasiliev said through Aleksandr German. “They are not imaginative fighters”-which was a hell of a thing for a Russian, the product of the world’s most rigid military system, to say-“but with their weapons and machines, they do not always need to be. We are lucky to have withstood them so long.”

“For them, this is a subsidiary front,” General Chill said. “Had they put full effort into it, they might well have overrun us.”

Nikolai Vasiliev puffed out his broad chest. With his dark, curly beard, he looked like a proud bandit chieftain-which in many ways he was. The flickering lamplight only added to the impression. But he was also a Soviet citizen and proud of it, for he said, “The marvelous bomb the Great Stalin touched off south of Moscow taught the Lizards better than to risk too much against us in any one place.”

Bagnall glanced over at Lieutenant General Chill. TheWehrmacht officer looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. The Germans set great store on their scientific ingenuity. To have to listen to someone he probably thought of as a SlavicUntermensch going on about the achievements of Soviet science had to be galling-and all the more so because the Nazis hadn’t matched that bomb.

Aleksandr German said, “We cannot count on the Lizards’ holding back forever. We need to force them to retreat wherever we can, to regain the soil of therodina, the motherland. General Chill, will our men fight side by side in this, as they have the past year and more?”Except when they were shooting at one another,Bagnall glossed silently to himself.

Despite that reservation, he looked for Chill to give hearty assent. Chill had better give his assent, if any planned winter offensive was to get anywhere. The Russians had more soldiers in Pskov than the Nazis did, but their men were armed with rifles and submachine guns and a few machine guns. The Germans were the ones who had the artillery, the lorries, the carefully husbanded panzers, the even more carefully husbanded petrol.

“I shall have to examine the overall strategic situation,” was what Chill did say. “Standing on the defensive until spring may prove a wiser, more economical choice.”

Vasiliev and Aleksandr German both shouted at him.Coward was one of the kinder words they used. Bagnall found himself speechless. Up till now, Chill had always been an aggressive commander, willing, even eager, to spend lives to gain territory. Of course, a lot of the lives he’d spent around Pskov were Russian…

Not only were a lot of the lives Chill had spent Russian, so was a lot of the materiel. The German garrison at Pskov had done plenty of hard fighting, and the Lizards in Poland cut them off from theVaterland (one of these days, he’d have to think about what the differences betweenrodina andVaterland implied, but not now, not now).

As innocently as he could, Bagnall asked, “How is your supply situation, General Chill?”

“Given all we have done, it is not bad,” Chill answered. Bagnall had heard a great many more responsive replies. The German officer’s face said more; it reminded Bagnall of the look a poker player wore when he’d got himself into a big hand and had to own up to holding nothing more ferocious than a pair of nines.

From strident, Aleksandr German’s voice went soft, persuasive: “Generalleutnant,supplies from the Soviet Union would probably be available. The routes and the amounts are not always what they might be, but they do exist. Surely your well-trained men would not have much trouble getting used to Soviet weapons.”

“Hardly-we captured enough of them on the way here,” Chill said with as much aplomb as he could muster: more than Bagnall had guessed he had in him. He was indeed a formidable man. When he continued, he cut straight to the heart of the problem: “If I take Soviet supplies and grow to depend on them to keep my force in being, then before long I have to take Soviet orders, too.”

“If you don’t, then before long you have no supplies and it no longer matters whose orders you take, because you won’t be able to carry them out in any case,” Aleksandr German said.

Nikolai Vasiliev’s eyes lit up with a fierce light. “And when you have no supplies left, no point to our truce any more, either. We will restore Pskov to therodina then, and we will remember what you have done here.”

“You’re welcome to try, at any time you choose,” Chill answered calmly. “This I tell you, I do not lie: we have plenty to knock any number of partisans back into the woods, or into graves in them. By all means feel free to test what I say.” The German soldier glared fiercely back at Vasiliev. By the look inhis eye, he would sooner have killed Russians than Lizards any day of the week.

“Enough, both of you!” Bagnall exclaimed. “The only ones who gain when we bicker are the Lizards. We would do well to remember that. We can hate one another later, after the main war is won.”

Kurt Chill and Aleksandr German both stared at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Swahili. After Aleksandr German translated, Nikolai Vasiliev gave Bagnall that same dubious look. But slowly, one by one, the three leaders nodded. “This is truth,” Chill said. “Wewould do well to remember it.”

“Da,”Aleksandr German said. But he could not resist twisting the knife: “Also truth,Herr Generalleutnant, is that sooner or later, hoard them or use them, your German munitions will be exhausted. Then you will use those of the Soviet Union or you will cease being soldiers.”

Lieutenant General Chill looked as if he’d found a worm-worse, found half a worm-in his apple. The prospect of becoming not just allies but dependents on the Soviet Union, after being first overlords and then at least superior partners because of superior firepower, had to be anything but appetizing for him.

“It can work,” Bagnall insisted, not just to theWehrmacht officer but also to the partisan brigadiers. And yet it wasn’t their shaky truce that made him speak with such conviction; it was the passionate affair that German mechanic who’d come into Pskov with Ludmila Gorbunova was having with the fair Tatiana (much to Bagnall’s relief, and even more to Jerome Jones’). The pair still didn’t like each other much, but that didn’t stop them from coming together every chance they got.They should be a lesson for all of us, Bagnall thought.

“This should be a lesson for all of us,” Atvar said, looking with one eye at the video of the damage to the gas-mask factory in Albi and with the other at Kirel. “Whatever we thought of our security procedures, they have been starkly revealed as inadequate.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “And yet, the destruction was not so bad as it would have been had these mortar rounds contained explosives rather than poison gas. Now that the plant has been decontaminated, it is ready to resume full operation.”

“Ready physically, yes.” Atvar felt ready himself, ready to bite something. In lieu of an actual enemy, poor Kirel would have to do. “Of course, the decontamination cost us four irreplaceable males of the Race. Of course, the gas attack itself killed most of one entire shift of highly trained Big Uglies. Of course, the Big Uglies who work the other two shifts are afraid to go back into the plant even if it is decontaminated, for one thing because they don’t believe it truly is and for another because they fear the Deutsche will attack once more-and how can we blame them for that when we fear it ourselves? Other than these minor details, the plant is, as you said, ready to start up again.”

Kirel crouched down, as if he expected to be bitten. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is merely a matter of bringing in other Tosevites who have this skill: either that or making it plain to the locals that if they do not do this work, they will not eat.”

“Bringing Tosevites into one area from another is far more difficult than it would be on a properly civilized world,” Atvar said, “for they are not simply Tosevites, essentially the same regardless of from which part of the planet they spring. Some are Francais Tosevites, some are English Tosevites, some are Italiano Tosevites, some are Mexicano Tosevites, and so on. They all have their own foods, they all have their own languages, they all have their own customs, and they all think their ways are superior to everyone else’s, which touches off fights whenever groups from two regions come together. We’ve tried; the Emperor knows we’ve tried it.” He cast down his eyes not so much in reverence as in worn resignation. “It does not work.”

“The other approach will, then,” Kirel said. “No matter what foods they eat, all the Big Uglies must eat some foods. If they fail to produce what we require of them, they will also fail to be fed.”

“This has some merit, but, again, not so much as I would wish,” Atvar said. “The sabotage level in Tosevite factories producing goods for us is already unacceptably high. Wherever we try to coerce the workers to produce more or produce under harsher conditions, it goes higher. This is intolerable when the product under discussion is as important as a gas mask.”

“Truth,” Kirel said again, this time wearily. “The Big Uglies’ poison gas has already lowered the morale of fighting males to the point where they have shown reluctance to go into combat in areas bordering the Deutsche. And now the Americans are also beginning to deploy it in large quantities. If males cannot have confidence in their protection, their fighting spirit will plummet further, with unfortunate consequences for our efforts here.”

“Unfortunate consequences indeed,” Atvar said. What if his males simply upped and quit fighting? He’d never imagined such a thing. No commander in the history of the Race (and perhaps not in its prehistory, either) had ever had to imagine such a thing. The Race’s discipline had always proved reliable-but nothing had ever tested it as it was being tested now.

“If the males waver, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “perhaps we can bolster their spirits with the Tosevite herb known as ginger.”

Atvar stared at him.

Kirel crouched again, lower than he had before “It was intended as a joke, Exalted Fleetlord, nothing more.”

“It isnot funny,” Atvar said. It also wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever heard, not in the present circumstances. That frightened him more than anything.

The Lizards’ air-raid alarms went off in Lodz. They weren’t sirens, as they would have been had human beings made them. Instead, they reminded Mordechai Anielewicz of nothing so much as the sound of a cauldron full of sizzling fat-except the cauldron had to be half the size of Poland. They were, he gathered, an enormously amplified version of the noise a Lizard made when something frightened it.

All that ran through his mind in less time than he needed to snatch up a gas mask and stick it on his head. Then, along with the rest of the Jews in the offices above the fire station, he dashed for the sealed room. People got in one another’s way, cursing and stumbling and falling down.

He made it to the sealed room just as a Nazi rocket came down with a crash. He tried to gauge how far away it had landed by the sound of the explosion, but that was tricky these days. The rockets that carried gas didn’t make a bang nearly so big as that from the ones carrying explosives-but they were much more to be feared, even so.

“Shut the door!” four people bawled at once.

With a slam, somebody obeyed. Packed into the middle of the sardinelike crush and turned the wrong way anyhow, Mordechai couldn’t see who. He looked up at the ceiling. Fresh plaster gleamed all around its periphery, covering over the cracks between it and the walls. Similar plaster marred the paint on those walls where they joined one another and also covered the molding that had marked their separation from the floor. Even if a gas-carrying rocket hit close by, the sealed room would-everyone inside hoped-let the people it sheltered survive till the deadly stuff dissipated.

Splashes said people nearest the doorway were soaking cloths in a bucket of water and stuffing them into the cracks between the door and the wall. The German poison gas was insidious stuff. If you left a chink in your armor, the gas would find it.

The Lizards’ alarm kept hissing. Before long, the merely human air-raid siren added its wail to the cacophony. “Does that mean we’re not done, or just that people are too addled to turn those noisy things off?” one of the secretaries asked, her voice muffled by the mask she wore.

“We’ll find out,” Anielewicz said, along with three other men and a woman. Lately, the Nazis had found a new way to keep the Lizards and humans in Lodz from getting anything done: lobbing rockets at the city every so often, making people take shelter and stay there for fear of gas. Not everyone had a sealed room to which to go, and not all sealed rooms were as cramped as this one, but the ploy was good enough to tie Lodz in knots.

“I wish the Lizards would shoot down the rockets, the way they did when the Nazis first started firing them at us,” a woman said.

“The Lizards are almost out of their own rockets,” Mordechai answered. “These days, they only use them when one of the Germans’ happens to head straight for an installation of theirs.” That wasn’t an everyday occurrence; while the Lizards could make rockets that went exactly where they wanted, those of the Nazis were wildly inaccurate. Anielewicz went on, “If a rocket lands in the middle of Lodz, that’s just too bad for the people under it.”

“The Race is doing what it can for us,” David Nussboym declared. Several people nodded emphatically. Mordechai Anielewicz rolled his eyes. He suspected he wasn’t the only one, but with everybody in concealing gas masks, he couldn’t be sure. The Jewish administration and fighters in Lodz were in a delicate position. They had to cooperate with the Lizards, and some-Nussboym among them-still did so sincerely. Others, though, hurt the aliens every chance they got, so long as they could do it without getting discovered. Keeping track of who was in which camp made life more interesting than Anielewicz liked.

Another blast, this one close enough to shake the fire station. Even without a large charge of explosive, several tons of metal falling out of the sky made for a big impact. Anielewicz shivered. Working against the Lizards often meant covertly working with the Nazis, even when their poison gas was killing Jews inside Lodz. Some Jews supported the Lizards simply because they could not stomach working with the Nazis no matter what.

Anielewicz understood that. He sympathized with it, but not enough to feel the same way himself. The Nazis had been gassing Polish Jews before the Lizards arrived, and they’d kept right on doing it even after the Lizards took Poland away from them. They were without a doubt bastards; the only good thing Mordechai could think to say about them was that they were human bastards.

Minutes crawled slowly past Mordechai kept hoping, praying for the all-clear signal. Instead, another rocket landed. The siren and the alarm hiss went on and on. He drew in breath after breath of stagnant air. His feet began to hurt. The only place to sit-or rather, squat-in the sealed room was over a latrine bucket in a tiny curtained corner. Just getting there wasn’t easy.

At last the amplified hiss faded and the sirens changed to a warbling note before ceasing altogether.“Gevalt!” somebody said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Is it safe?” somebody else asked. “Just because the rockets aren’t coming, does that mean the gas has gone away?”

“We can’t stay here forever,” Mordechai said. “I’ll go out and look around, see if anyone close by is down from the gas. If I don’t come back in five minutes… you’ll know I shouldn’t have gone.” With such gallows humor, he elbowed his way toward the door.

When he got outside, he was relieved not to find people lying dead on Lutomierska Street in front of the fire station. He hadn’t expected he would find that; none of the explosions had sounded close enough to produce such a result. But the Germans’ gas was insidious stuff, and sometimes spread more in one direction than another. The minute you stopped assuming it could kill you, it probably would.

He looked around. One column of smoke was rising from the north, from the Polish part of Lodz, the area where Germans who’d called the place Litzmannstadt had settled before the Lizards came. Not many of them were left; the Poles and the Jews had had their revenge. Too bad, in a way. There would have been delicious irony in the Nazis’ gassing the Germans they’d sent out to dwell in a land that wasn’t theirs.

More smoke, though, rose from closer to home. One of the rockets had hit in the Jewish district. That must have been the second one, Mordechai thought, the one that shook the station. He snarled. Even now, fighting the Lizards, the Nazis were killing Jews. He was sure they knew it, too. They probably thought it was a hell of a good joke-and that some of the Jews were cooperating with them against the Lizards an even better one.

He went back inside before the people in the sealed room decided he’d become a casualty, too. He hurried upstairs. “It’s safe to come out,” he said. “We had a hit in the ghetto, though.” Now that the Germans were gone, it wasn’t formally a ghetto any more. It still functioned as one, though, and the name lingered.

“The fire engine will have to go tend to it,” David Nussboym said. “I volunteer to ride along.” That took courage; the Germans’ gas could kill you not only if you breathed it but if it got on your skin. Anielewicz would have preferred to think of anyone who collaborated with the Lizards as a spineless coward. Nussboym complicated his picture of the world.

He wanted to volunteer himself, to show Nussboym people who disagreed with him had spirit, too. But he made himself keep quiet. With the collaborator away from the offices, people who wanted to deal with the Lizards instead of sucking up to them could speak freely.

“Come on,” said Solomon Gruver, the big, burly man who led the fire brigade and drove the engine. His men and Nussboym ran for the stairs.

“I hope the people in the area are already hosing down the streets and the buildings,” Anielewicz said. “Between them and the engines, they should be able to flush most of the gas down the mains.” He laughed, a haunted, hollow sound inside his mask. “We’re so used to dealing with the unspeakable that we’ve got very good at developing procedures for it. Either that proves we’re clever and quick or that we’re utterly damned. Maybe both.”

The fire engine roared away, bell clanging. “Do you think we can take our masks off?” a woman named Bertha Fleishman asked. She was drab and mousy; no one, human or Lizard, took any special notice of her. That made her one of the most valuable spies the Jews in Lodz had: she could go anywhere, hear anything, and report back.

“Let’s find out.” Anielewicz pulled the mask off his head. He took a couple of deep breaths, then gasped and crumpled to the floor. Instead of crying out in alarm and dismay, people swore at him and looked around for things to throw. The first time he’d played that joke, they’d been properly horrified. Now they halfway looked for it, though he didn’t do it all the time.

The rest of the people in the sealed room took off their masks, too. “Whew!” someone said. “It’s just about as stuffy in here with them off as it is with them on.”

“What are we going to do?” Bertha Fleishman said. “If we get rid of the Lizards, we get the Germans back. For us in particular, that would be worse, even if having the Germans win and the Lizards lose would be better for people as a whole. After we’ve suffered so much, shouldn’t we be able to live a little?” She sounded wistful, plaintive.

“Why should this time be different from all other times?” Anielewicz said. The reply, so close to the first of the Four Questions from the Passover Seder but expecting a different response, brought a sigh from everyone in the room. He went on, “The real question should be, What do we do if the Lizards get sick of the Germans harassing them and decide to put everything they have into smashing theReich?”

“They tried that against the English,” a man said. “It didn’t work.”

“And thank God it didn’t,” Mordechai said, wondering if he’d sent Moishe Russie into worse danger than that from which he’d escaped. “But it’s not the same. The Lizards’ logistics in England were very bad. They had to fly all their soldiers and all their supplies up from southern France, so it was almost as if they were trying to invade by remote control. It wouldn’t be like that if they attacked the Nazis. They’re right next door to them, here and in France both.”

“Whatever they do, they probably won’t do it right away, not with snow on the ground,” Bertha Fleishman said. “They hate the cold. Come next spring, it may be something to worry about. Until then, I think they’ll hold back and try to ride out whatever the Nazis throw at them.”

Thinking about the way the Lizards did things, Anielewicz slowly nodded. “You may be right,” he said. “But that only gives us more time to answer the question. It doesn’t make it go away.”

Teerts did not like flying over Deutschland. He hadn’t liked flying over Britain, either, and for much that same reason: more and more Tosevite jets in the air, along with antiaircraft fire that seemed thick enough to let him get out of his killercraft and walk from one shell burst to the next.

His mouth dropped open in ironic laughter. Fire from the Big Uglies’ antiaircraft guns had done no more than put a couple of holes in the skin of his killercraft. As best he could figure, the one time he’d been shot down was when he’d had the colossal bad luck to suck infantrymales’ bullets into both engine turbines in the space of a couple of moments… and his luck had only got worse once he descended inside the Nipponese lines.

He never, ever wanted to be captured again. “I’d sooner die,” he said.

“Superior sir?” That was Sserep, one of his wingmales.

“Nothing,” Teerts said, embarrassed at letting his thoughts go out over an open microphone.

He checked his radar. The Deutsche had some killercraft in the air, but none close enough to his flight to be worth attacking. He also watched the Tosevites’ aircraft to make sure they weren’t pilotless machines like the ones he’d encountered over Britain. Orders on conserving antiaircraft missiles got more emphatic with every passing day. Before long, he expected the fleetlord to issue one that said something like,If you have already been shot down and killed, it is permissible to expend one missile against the enemy aircraft responsible; expenditure of two will result in severe punishment.

He spotted a dark gray plume of smoke rising up from the ground and hissed with glee. That was a railroad engine, burning one of the incredibly noxious fuels the Tosevites’ machines employed. Whatever a railroad engine was hauling-Big Uglies, weapons, supplies-it was a prime target He spoke to Sserep and Nivvek, his other wingmale, to make sure they saw it, too, then said, “Let’s go shoot it up.”

He dropped down to low altitude and reduced his airspeed to make sure he could do a proper job of raking the target. His fingerclaw stabbed at the firing button of the cannon. Flames stabbed out from the nose of his killercraft; the recoil of the cannon and the turbulence from the fired shells made it shudder slightly in the air.

He yelled with savage glee as puffs of smoke spurted from the railroad cars. As he shot over the locomotive that pulled the train, he yanked the stick back hard to gain some altitude and come around for another pass. Acceleration tugged at him; the world went gray for a moment. He swung the killercraft through a ninety-degree roll so he could look back at the train. He yelled again; either Sserep or Nivvek had hit the engine hard, and it was slowing to a stop. Now he and the other two males could finish destroying it at their leisure.

Off in the middle distance on his radar set, something-half a dozen somethings-rose almost vertically into the air. “What are those?” Nivvek exclaimed.

“Nothing to worry about, I don’t think,” Teerts answered. “If the Deutsche are experimenting with antiaircraft missiles of their own, they have some more experimenting to do, I’d say.”

“Truth, superior sir,” Nivvek said, amusement in his voice. “None of our aircraft is even in the neighborhood of those-whatever-they-ares.”

“So I see,” Teerts said. If they were missiles, they were pretty feeble. Like other Tosevite flying machines, they seemed unable to exceed the speed of sound in the local atmosphere. They climbed toward the peak of their arc in what looked to be a ballistic trajectory… whereupon Teerts forgot about them and gave his attention over to smashing up the train.

It had been carrying infantrymales, perhaps among other things. The first pass hadn’t got all of them, either; some had bailed out of the damaged coaches. The gray-green clothes they wore were hard to see against the ground, but muzzle flashes told Teerts some of them were shooting at him. Memories of the Nipponese made fear blow through him in a choking cloud-what if the Big Uglies got lucky twice with him?

They didn’t. His killercraft performed flawlessly as he flailed them with cannon fire. Shells smashed at them; they boiled like the waves of Tosev 3’s oversized oceans. He hoped he’d slaughtered hundreds of them. They weren’t Nipponese, but they were Big Uglies, and in arms against the Race. No qualms about killing civilians diluted his revenge, not here, not now.

He pulled back on his stick again. The train was afire at several places up and down its length; one more run would finish the job of destroying it. Now that the nose of his killercraft was pointing upward again, he checked the radar screen to make sure no Deutsch aircraft were approaching.

Sserep must have done the same thing at the same time, for he shouted, “Superior sir!”

“I see them,” Teerts answered grimly. The Deutsch machines he’d dismissed as experimental-and inept-antiaircraft missiles were diving on his flight of killercraft, and plainly under intelligent control. For the Tosevites, that meant they had to be piloted; the Big Uglies didn’t have automatic systems good enough for the job.

With a small shock, he saw that the Tosevite aircraft were flying faster than his own machine. At least momentarily, that let them choose terms of engagement, something rare in their air-to-air engagements with the Race. He gave his killercraft maximum power; acceleration shoved him back against the seat. The Big Uglies wouldn’t keep the advantage long.

“I am firing missiles, superior sir,” Sserep said. “After we get back to base, I’ll argue about it with the males in Supply who seem to spend all their time counting pieces of eggshell. The point is to be able to get backto base.”

Teerts didn’t argue. The missiles streaked past his killercraft, tailing thin plumes of smoke. The Tosevites’ aircraft had smoky exhaust, too, far more smoky than that of the missiles. With hideous speed, they swelled from specks to swept-wing killercraft of peculiar design-just before he stabbed his firing button with a fingerclaw, he had a fractional instant to wonder how they maintained stability without tailfins.

Whatever the details of the aerodynamics, maintain stability they did. One of them managed to sideslip a missile. Electronics would have been hard-pressed to do that; for mere flesh and blood to accomplish it was little short of a miracle. Sserep’s other missile exploded its target in a spectacular midair fireball that made Teerts’ nictitating membranes flick out to protect his eyes from the flash. What in the name of the Emperor were the Big Uglies using for fuel?

That thought, too, quickly faded. He blazed away at the strange machine heading straight for his killercraft. Winking flashes of light at its wing roots said it was shooting at him, too. Deutsch killercraft carried cannon; they could do real damage if they scored hits.

Without warning, the Big Ugly aircraft blew up as violently as the one Sserep’s missile had hit “Yes!” Teerts shouted. The only feeling that matched midair triumph was a good taste of ginger.

“Superior sir, I regret to report that my aircraft is damaged,” Nivvek said. “I waited too long before firing missiles, and they shot past the Tosevites: they were still too close to me to arm their warheads. I am losing speed and altitude, and fear I shall have to eject. Wish me luck.”

“Spirits of Emperors past go with you, Nivvek,” Teerts said, gnashing his teeth in anguish. Urgently, he added, “Try to stay away from the Big Uglies on the ground. As long as you can keep clear of them, your radio beacon gives you some chance of being rescued.” How good a chance, here in the middle of Deutschland, he tried not to think about. His own memories of captivity were too sharp and dreadful.

Nivvek did not answer. Sserep said, “He has ejected, superior sir; I saw the capsule blast free of his killercraft and the parachute deploy.” He paused, then went on, “I don’t have the fuel to loiter till rescue aircraft come.”

After a quick glance at his own gauges, Teerts said, “Neither have I,” hating every word. He checked his radar. Only one of the Deutsch killercraft was still in the air, streaking away at low altitude. Sserep and Nivvek hadn’t been idle-nor had he. He turned and expended one of his missiles. It streaked after the strange little tailless aircraft and blew it out of the sky.

“That’s the last of those,” Sserep said. “The Emperor grant that we don’t see their like again soon.”

“Truth,” Teerts said feelingly. “The Big Uglies keep coming up with new things.” He said that as if he’d been accusing them of devouring their own hatchlings. Against what they’d had when the Race landed on Tosev 3, combat had been a walkover. Only males who were unlucky-as Teerts had been-got shot down. Now, at least above the western end of the main continental mass, you had to earn your living every moment in the air.

“We won’t even be able to cannibalize spares from Nivvek’s aircraft,” Sserep said, his voice sad.

Somewhere down there in a Deutsch factory, Big Ugly technicians were welding and riveting the airframes for more of their nasty little killercraft. Somewhere down there, Big Ugly pilots were learning to fly them. The Race made do with what it had brought along. Day by day, less and less of that remained. What would happen when it was all gone? One more thing to think about.

Teerts used satellite relay to call both his base in southern France and the nearest air base the Race held east of Deutschland, in the territory called Poland. Nivvek’s rescue alarm should have been received at both of them, but Teerts was taking no chances. He got the feeling the base in Poland had more things to worry about than Nivvek; the male to whom he spoke spent half his time babbling about a Deutsch rocket attack.

Teerts wondered why antimissile missiles didn’t protect the base. The most obvious-and the most depressing-answer was that no missiles were left. If that was so… how soon would he be flying without any antiaircraft missiles? What would happen when his radar broke down and no spare parts were left?

“We’ll be even with the Big Uglies,” he said, and shuddered at the thought of it.

Liu Han stared at the row of characters on a sheet of paper in front of her. Her face was a mask of concentration; the tip of her tongue slipped out between her lips without her noticing. She gripped a pencil as if it were a dagger, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to hold it that way and shifted it back between her index and middle fingers.

Slowly, painstakingly, she copied the characters written on the sheet of paper. She knew what they said: Scaly devils, give back the baby you stole from Liu Han at your camp near Shanghai. She wanted to make sure the little devils could read what she wrote.

When she’d finished the sentence, she took a pair of shears and clipped off the strip of paper on which she’d written. Then she picked up the pencil and wrote the sentence again. She had a great bundle of strips, all saying the same thing. She was also getting a new callus, just behind the nail on her right middle finger. A lifetime of farming, cooking, and sewing had left her skin still soft and smooth there. Now that she was doing something less physically demanding than any of those, it marked her. She shook her head. Nothing was as simple as it first seemed.

She started writing the sentence yet again. Now she knew the sound and meaning of each character in it. She could write her own name, which brought her its own kind of excitement. And, when she was out on the streets andhutungs of Peking, she sometimes recognized characters she’d written over and over, and could occasionally even use them to figure out the meanings of other characters close by them. Little by little, she was learning to read.

Someone knocked on the door to the cramped little chamber she used at the rooming house. She picked up her one set of spare clothes and used them to hide what she was doing before she went to open the door. The rooming house was a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment, but not everyone was to be trusted. Even people who did support the revolution might not need to know what she was doing. Living in a village and especially in a camp had taught her the importance of keeping secrets.

But waiting outside in the hall stood Nieh Ho-T’ing. She didn’t know whether he knew the secrets of everyone in the rooming house, but he did know all of hers-all, at least, that had anything to do with the struggle against the little scaly devils. She stood aside. “Come in, superior sir,” she said, the last two words in the scaly devils’ language. No harm in reminding him of the many ways she could be useful to the people’s cause.

Nieh knew next to nothing of the little devils’ tongue, but he did recognize that phrase. It made him smile. “Thank you,” he said, walking past her into the little room. His own was no finer; anyone who could believe he had become a revolutionary for personal gain was a fool. He nodded approvingly when he noticed trousers and tunic covering up her writing. “You do well to keep that hidden from prying eyes.”

“I do not want to let people know what I am doing,” she answered. As she shut the door behind him, she laughed a little before going on. “I think I would leave it open if you were Hsia Shou-Tao.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Nieh Ho-T’ing asked, a little more sharply than her comment deserved.

“You know why perfectly well, or you should,” Liu Han said, irritated at his obtuseness.Men! she thought. “All he wants to do is see my body”-a euphemism for doing other things with it than merely seeing it.

Nieh said, “That is not all Hsia Shou-Tao wants. He is a committed people’s revolutionary, and has risked much to free the workers and peasants from the oppression first of the upper classes and then of the scaly devils.” He coughed. “He is also fond of women, perhaps too fond. I have spoken to him about this.”

“Have you?” Liu Han said, pleased. That was more action than she’d expected. “Men usually look the other way when their comrades take advantage of women.”

“Er-yes.” Nieh paced around the chamber, which did not have a lot of room for pacing. Liu Han took her spare clothes off the table. Nieh not only knew what she was doing, he had started her on the project He came over and examined what she’d done. “You form your characters more fluidly than you did when you began,” he said. “You may not have the smooth strokes of a calligrapher, but anyone who read this would think you had been writing for years.”

“I have worked hard,” Liu Han said, a truth that applied to her entire life.

“Your labor is rewarded,” he told her.

She didn’t think he had come to her room for no other reason than to compliment her on her handwriting. Usually, though, when he had something to say, he came out and said it. He would have called anything else bourgeois shilly-shallying… most of the time. What, then, was he keeping to himself?

Liu Han started to laugh. The sound made Nieh jump. She laughed harder. “What do you find funny?” he asked, his voice brittle.

“You,” she said, for a moment seeing only the man and not the officer of the People’s Liberation Army. “When I complained about Hsia Shou-Tao, that left you in a complicated place, didn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded. But he knew, he knew. She could tell by the way he paced again, harder than ever, and by the way he would not look at her.

She almost did not answer him, not directly. A proper Chinese woman was quiet, submissive, and, if she ever thought about desire between woman and man, did not openly say so. But Liu Han had been through too much to care about propriety-and, in any case, the Communists talked a great deal about equality of all sorts, including that between the sexes.Let’s see if they mean what they say, she thought.

“I’m talking about you-and about me,” she answered. “Or didn’t you come up here now to see if you could get down on the mattress with me?”

Nieh Ho-T’ing stared at her. She laughed again. For all he preached, for all the Communists preached, down deep he was still a man and a Chinese. She’d expected nothing different, and so was not disappointed.

But, unlike most Chinese men, he did have some idea that his prejudices were just prejudices, not laws of nature. The struggle on his face was a visible working out of-what did he call it? — the dialectic, that’s what the word was. The thesis was his old, traditional, not truly questioned belief, the antithesis his Communist ideology, and the synthesis-she watched to see what the synthesis would be.

“What if I did?” he said at last, sounding much less stern than he had moments before.

What if he did? Now she had to think about that. She hadn’t lain with anyone since Bobby Fiore-and Nieh, in a way, had been responsible for Bobby Fiore’s death. But it wasn’t as if he’d murdered him, only that he’d put him in harm’s way, as an officer had a right to do with a soldier he commanded. On the scales, that balanced.

What about the rest? If she let him bed her, she might gain influence over him that way. But if they quarreled afterwards, she would lose not only that influence but also what she’d gained through her own good sense. She’d won solid respect for that; the project for which she was writing her endless slips had been her own idea, after all. There, too, the scales balanced.

Which left her one very basic question: did she want him? He was not a bad-looking man; he had strength and self-confidence aplenty. What did that add up to?Not enough she decided with more than a twinge of regret.

“If I let a man take me to the mattress now,” she said, “it will be because I want him, not because he wants me. That is not enough. Never again will that be enough for me to lie with anyone.” She shuddered, remembering the time with Yi Min, the village apothecary, after the little scaly devils captured them both-and even worse times with men whose names she never knew, up in the little devils’ airplane that never came down. Bobby Fiore had won her heart there simply by being something less than brutal. She never wanted to sink so low again.

She hadn’t directly refused Nieh, not quite. She waited, more than a little anxious, to see if he’d understood what she’d told him. He smiled crookedly. “I will not trouble you any more about this, then,” he said.

“Having a man interested in me is not a trouble,” Liu Han said. She recalled how worried she’d been when her husband-before the Japanese came, before the scaly devils came and turned the world upside down-had wanted nothing to do with her while she was carrying their child. That had been a bleak and lonely time. Even so-“When a man does not listen when you say you do not want him, that is trouble.”

“What you say makes good sense,” Nieh answered. “We can still further the revolution together, even if not in congress.”

She liked him very much then, almost enough to change her mind. She’d never known-truth to tell, she’d never imagined-a man who could joke after she’d turned him down. “Yes, we are still comrades,” she said earnestly. “I want that.”I need that, she did not add, not for him to hear. Aloud she went on, “Now you know the difference between yourself and Hsia Shou-Tao.”

“I knew that difference a long time ago,” he said. “Hsia, too, is still a revolutionary, though. Do not think otherwise. No one is perfect, or even good, in all ways.”

“That is so.” Liu Han clapped her hands. “I have an idea. Listen to me: we should arrange to have our beast-show men give a couple of exhibitions for the little scaly devils where nothing goes wrong-they simply give their shows and leave. That will tell us how well the little devils search their cages and equipment and will also make the scaly devils feel safer about letting beast shows into the buildings they use.”

“I have had pieces of this thought myself,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said slowly, “but you give reasons for doing it more clearly than I had thought of them. I will discuss it with Hsia. You may talk with him about it, too, of course. It may even interest him enough to keep his mind off wanting to see your body.”

His smile said he was joking again, but not altogether. Liu Han nodded; as he’d said, Hsiawas a dedicated revolutionary, and a good enough idea for hurting the scaly devils would draw his attention away from fleshly matters… for a while.

Liu Han said, “If he likes the notion well enough, it will only make him want me more, because he will think someone who comes up with a good idea is desirable just on account of that.”

She laughed. After a moment, so did Nieh Ho-T’ing. He found an excuse to leave very soon after that. Liu Han wondered if he was angry at her in spite of what he’d said. Had he done what she’d said Hsia would do: decided he wanted her not so much because of the woman she was as in admiration of her ideas for the struggle against the little scaly devils?

Once the idea occurred to her, it would not go away. It fit in too well with what she’d seen of how Nieh Ho-T’ing’s mind worked. She went back to writing her demand on strip after strip of paper. All the while, she wondered whether she should consider Nieh’s ideologically oriented advances a compliment or an insult.

Even after she set aside pen and paper and scissors, she couldn’t make up her mind.

Behind the glass partition, the engineer pointed to Moishe Russie: you’re on! Russie looked down at his script and began to read: “Good day, ladies and gentlemen, this is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London, still the capital of the British Empire and still free of Lizards. Some of you have no idea how glad I am to be able to say that. Others have the misfortune of suffering under the Lizards’ tyranny and know for themselves whereof I speak.”

He glanced over at Nathan Jacobi, who nodded encouragement for him to go on. It was good to be working with Jacobi again; it felt like better days, the days before the invasion. Moishe took a deep breath and continued: “The Lizards sought to bring Great Britain under their direct control. I can tell you now that they have failed, and failed decisively. No Lizards in arms remain on British soil; all are either fled, captured, or dead. The last Lizard airstrip on the island, that at Tangmere in the south, has fallen.”

He hadn’t seen that with his own eyes. When it became clear the Lizards were abandoning their British toehold, he’d been recalled to London to resume broadcasting. He checked his script to see where he’d resume. It was Yiddish, of course, for broadcast to Jews and others in eastern Europe. All the same, it sounded very much like what a BBC newsreader would have used for an English version. That pleased him; he was getting a handle on the BBC style.

“We have now proved decisively what others began to demonstrate last year: the Lizards are not invulnerable. They can be defeated and driven back. Moreover, just as their weapons have on occasion discomfited us, we too have devised means of fighting for which they have as yet developed no countermeasures. This bodes well for future campaigns against them.”

How it boded for the soul of mankind was another question, one he felt less confident about answering. Everyone was using gas against the Lizards now, and praising it to the skies because it killed them in carload lots. But if they vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow, how long till earthly nations remembered their old quarrels and started using gas on one another? How long till the Germans started using it on the Jews they still ruled? For that matter, how did he know they weren’t using it on the Jews they still ruled? Nothing came out of Germany but what little Hitler and Gobbels wanted known.

Even as he thought about what mankind would do after the Lizards were vanquished, he realized beating them came first. And so he read on: “Wherever you who hear my voice may be, you, too, can join the fight against the alien invaders. You need not even take up a gun. You can also contribute to the war against them by sabotaging goods you produce if you work in a factory, by not paying, paying late, or underpaying the exactions they seek to impose on you, by obstructing them in any way possible, and by informing their foes of what they are about to do. With your help, we can make Earth so unpleasant for them that they will be glad to pack up and leave.”

He finished the last line of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat to show time was up. In the soundproof control room, the engineer clapped his hands, then pointed to Nathan Jacobi, who began reading the English version of Russie’s talk.

Jacobi was a consummate professional; the engineer took for granted his finishing spot on. What struck Moishe about his colleague’s reading was how much of it he understood. When he’d first begun broadcasting for the BBC, he’d had next to no English. Now he could follow it pretty well, and speak enough to get by. He felt less alien in London than he sometimes had in purely Polish sections of Warsaw.

“There, that’s done it,” Jacobi said when they were off the air. He clapped Moishe on the back. “Jolly good to be working with you again. For a while there, I doubted we should ever have the chance.”

“So did I,” Moishe said. “I have to remind myself that this is warfare, too. I’ve seen altogether too much of the real thing lately.”

“Oh, yes.” Jacobi got up and stretched. “The real thing is a great deal worse to go through, but you and I may be able to do more damage to the Lizards here than we could on campaign. I tell myself as much, at any rate.”

“So do I,” Moishe said as he too rose. “Is Eric Blair broadcasting after us, as he often does?”

“I believe so,” Jacobi answered. “You’ve taken a liking to him, haven’t you?”

“He’s an honest man,” Russie said simply.

Sure enough, Blair stood outside the studio door, talking animatedly with a handsome, dark-skinned woman who wore a plum-colored robe of filmy cotton-from India, Moishe guessed, though his knowledge of people and places Oriental had almost all been acquired since he came to England. Blair broke off to nod to the two Jewish broadcasters. “Hope you chaps have been giving the Lizards a proper hiding over the air,” he said.

“I hope we did, too,” Jacobi answered, his voice grave.

“The princess and I shall endeavor to do the same,” Blair said, dipping his head to the woman from India. His chuckle had a wheeze in it that Russie did not like. “I think that’s what they call an alliance of convenience: a princess and a socialist joining together to defeat the common foe.”

“You wanted dominion status for India no less than I did,” the woman said. Her accent, so different from Moishe’s, made her hard to understand for him. He reminded himself to tell Rivka and Reuven he’d met a princess: not something a Jew was likely to do in Warsaw-or, from what he’d seen, in London, either.

“India has more than dominion status these days,de facto if notde jure,” Eric Blair said. “It’s the rare and lucky ship that goes from London to Bombay, and even luckier the one that comes home again.”

“How are things there?” Moishe asked. One thing he’d learned since coming to England was how narrow his perspective on the world had been. He wanted to learn as much as he could about places that had been just names, if that, to him.

Blair said, “You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Gandhi has made himself as unpleasant to the Lizards as he ever was to the Britishraj.”

“The aliens do not know how to deal with masses of people who will not fight them but also refuse to labor for them,” the princess said. “Massacre has only made the Mahatma’s followers more eager to continue their nonviolent campaign against oppression and unjust rule-from anyone.”

“That last bit would have brought out the censor’s razor blades and red ink had you tried to say it before the Lizards came,” Blair said. He looked at his watch. “We’d best get in there, or we shall be late. Good to see you, Russie, Jacobi.” He and the Indian woman hurried into the studio, closing the door behind them.

The sun of early November was a cool, pale, fickle thing, scurrying through the sky low in the south and scuttling behind every cloud and bit of mist that passed. Even so, Moishe faced the weather with equanimity. In Warsaw, snow would have started falling a month earlier.

He said his good-byes to Nathan Jacobi and hurried home to his Soho flat. Having been separated from his family when the Lizards invaded England made him appreciate them all the more. But when he got up to the flat, before he could even tell his wife he’d met a princess, she said, “Moishe, someone came round here looking for you today-a man with a uniform.” She sounded worried.

Moishe didn’t blame her. That news was enough to worry anyone. When he first heard it, ice prickled up his spine. He needed a moment to remember where he was. “This is England,” he reminded Rivka-and himself. “NoGestapo here, no‘Juden heraus!’ Did he say what he wanted of me?”

She shook her head. “He did not say, and I did not ask. Hearing the knock on the door, opening it to find the man with those clothes there…” She shivered. “And then he spoke to me in German when he saw I did not understand enough English to know what he needed.”

“That would frighten anyone,” Moishe said sympathetically, and took her in his arms. He wished he could forget about the Nazis and Lizards both. He wished the whole world could forget about them both. The next wish that produced the desired effect would be the first.

Someone knocked on the door. Moishe and Rivka flew apart. It was a brisk, authoritative knock, as if the fellow who made it had a better right to make it, had a better right to come into the flat, than the people who lived there. “It’s him again,” Rivka whispered.

“We’d better find out what he’s after,” Moishe said, and opened the door. He had all he could do not to recoil in alarm after that: except for the different uniform, the man who stood there might have come straight off an SS recruiting poster. He was tall and slim and muscular and blond and had the dangerous look in his eye that was calculated to turn your blood to water if you ended up on the receiving end of it.

But instead of shouting something like,You stinking sack of shit of a Jew, he politely nodded and in soft tones asked, “You are Mr. Moishe Russie?”

“Yes,” Moishe said cautiously. “Who are you?”

“Captain Donald Mather, sir, of the Special Air Service,” the blond young soldier answered. To Russie’s surprise, he saluted.

“C–Come in,” Moishe said, his voice a little shaky. No SS man would ever have saluted a Jew, not under any circumstances. “You have met my wife, I think.”

“Yes, sir,” Mather said, stepping past him. He nodded to Rivka. “Ma’am.” Social amenities apparently complete, he turned back to Moishe. “Sir, His Majesty’s government needs your help.”

Alarm sirens began going off in Moishe’s mind. He slipped from English back into Yiddish: “What does His Majesty’s government think I can do for it? And why me in particular and not somebody else?”

Captain Mather answered the second question first: “You in particular, sir, because of your experience in Poland.” He left English, too, for German. Moishe’s hackles did not rise so much as they might have: Mather made an effort, and not a bad one, to pronounce it with a Yiddish intonation. He was plainly a capable man, and in some not-so-obvious ways.

“I had lots of experience in Poland,” Moishe said. “Most of it, I didn’t like at all, not even a little bit. Why does anyone think I would want to do something that draws on it?”

“You’re already doing something that draws on it, sir, in your BBC broadcasts,” Mather replied. Moishe grimaced; that was true. The Englishman continued, making his German sound more Yiddish with every sentence: “I will admit, though, we have rather more in mind for you than sitting in front of a microphone and reading from a prepared script.”

“What do you have in mind?” Moishe said. “You still haven’t answered what I asked you.”

“I was coming round to it, sir; by easy stages,” Donald Mather said. “One thing you learned in Poland was that cooperating with the Lizards isn’t always the best of notions, if you’ll forgive your understatement.”

“No, not always, but if I hadn’t cooperated with them at first, I wouldn’t be here arguing with you now,” Moishe said.

“Saving yourself and your family-” Mather began.

“-And my people,” Russie put in “Without the Lizards, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all.”

“And your people,” Captain Mather conceded. “No one will say you didn’t do what you had to do when you joined the Lizards against the Nazis. But afterwards, you saw that mankind as a whole was your people, too, and you turned against the Lizards.”

“Yes to all of this,” Moishe said, beginning to grow impatient. “But what does it have to do with whatever you want from me?”

“I am coming to that,” Mather answered calmly. No matter how well he spoke, that external calm would have marked him as an Englishman; in his place, a Jew or a Pole would have been shouting and gesticulating. He went on, “Would you agree that in His Majesty’s mandate of Palestine, no effort to exterminate the Jews is now under way, but rather the reverse?”

“In Palestine?” Moishe echoed. The mention of the name was enough to make Rivka sharply catch her breath. Moishe shook his head. “No, you aren’t doing anything like that.Nu?” Here, the multifarious Yiddish word meantcome to the point.

He would have explained that to Mather, but the captain understood it on his own. Mather said, “The nub of it is, Mr. Russie, that there are Jews in Palestine who are not content with British administration there and have been intriguing with the Lizards in Egypt to aid any advance they might make into the Holy Land. His Majesty’s government would like to send you to Palestine to talk to the Jewish fighting leaders and convince them to stay loyal to the crown, to show them that, unlike yours, their situation is not so bad as to require intervention by the aliens to liberate them from it.”

“You want to send me to Palestine?” Moishe asked. He knew he sounded incredulous, but couldn’t help it. Beside him, Rivka made an indignant noise. He corrected himself at once: “You want to send us-me and my family-to Palestine?” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. Occasionally, in Poland, he’d thought of emigrating, of makingaliyah, to the Holy Land. But he’d never taken the notion seriously, no matter how hard the Poles made life for a Jew. And, once the Nazis came, it was too late.

Now this Englishman he’d known for five minutes was nodding, telling him the long-hopeless dream of his exiled people could come true for him. “That’s just what we want to do. We can’t think of a righter man for the job.”

With a woman’s practicality, Rivka asked the next question: “How do we get there?”

“By ship,” Donald Mather answered. “We can get you down to Lisbon without any trouble. Outbound from Lisbon, your freighter will meet a submarine to take you through the Straits of Gibraltar. From the submarine, you’ll board another freighter for the journey to Haifa. How soon can you be ready to leave?”

“It wouldn’t be long,” Moishe said. “It’s not as if we have a lot to pack.” That was, if anything, an understatement. They’d come to England with only the clothes on their backs. They had more than that now, thanks to the kindness of the British and of their relatives here. But a lot of what they had wouldn’t come with them-why bring pots and pans to the Holy Land?

“If I came for you day after tomorrow this same time, you’d be ready, then?” Captain Mather asked.

Moishe almost laughed at him. If they had to leave, he and Rivka could have been ready in half an hour-assuming they found Reuven and dragged him away from whatever game he was playing or watching. A couple of days’ notice struck him as riches like those the Rothschilds were said to enjoy. “We’ll be ready,” he said firmly.

“Good. Until then-” Mather turned to go.

“Wait,” Rivka said, and the Englishman stopped. She went on, “For how long would we be going to-to Palestine?” She had to fight to say the incredible word. “How would you bring us back, and when?”

“As for how long you’d stay,Frau Russie, it would be at least until your husband completed his mission, however long that might take,” Mather answered. “Once that’s done, if you want to return to England, we’ll arrange that, and if you want to stay in Palestine, we can arrange that, too. We do remember those who help us, I promise you that. Have you any other questions? No?” He saluted, did a smart about-turn, and headed for the stairwell.

Moishe and Rivka stared at each other. “Next year in Jerusalem,” Moishe whispered. Jews had been making that prayer since the Romans sacked the Second Temple almost nineteen hundred years before. For almost all of them, it expressed nothing more than a wish that would never be fulfilled. Now-

Now Moishe seized Rivka. Together, they danced around the inside of the flat. It was more than exuberance; he felt as if he could dance on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. Rivka slowed sooner than he did. She kept a firm grasp on the essentials of the situation, saying, “They are not doing this for you, Moishe-they’re doing it for themselves. Who are these Jews conniving with the Lizards, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” Moishe admitted. “What could I know of what goes on in Palestine? But I know this much: if they want to play games with the Lizards, they’re making a mistake. The British aren’t starving them and killing them for sport, and that would be the only possible excuse for choosing the Lizards.”

“You’ve seen that for yourself,” Rivka agreed, and then turned practical once more: “We’ll have to leave a lot of these clothes behind. The Holy Land is a warmer country than England.”

“So it is.” Moishe hadn’t been thinking about such mundane things. “To pray at the Wailing Wall-” He shook his head in wonder. The idea was just starting to sink down from the front of his mind to the place where his feelings lived: he’d gone from stunned to joyful, and the joy kept growing. It was the first thing he’d ever imagined that might improve on being in love.

It had seized Rivka, too. “To live the rest of our lives in Palestine,” she murmured. “England here, this is not bad-next to Poland even before the Nazis came, it’s a paradise. But to live in a land with plenty of Jews and no one to hate us-that would really be paradise.”

“Who else lives in Palestine?” Moishe said, once again realizing his ignorance of the wider world was both broad and deep. “Arabs, I suppose. After Poles and Germans, they can’t be anything but good neighbors. If Reuven grows up in a country where no one hates him-” He paused. To a Polish Jew, that was like wishing for the moon. But here, even though he hadn’t wished for the moon, Captain Mather had just handed it to him.

“They speak Hebrew in Palestine along with Yiddish, don’t they?” Rivka said. “I’ll have to learn.”

“I’ll have a lot of learning to do myself,” Moishe said. Men read the Torah and the Talmud, so he’d learned Hebrew while Rivka hadn’t. But there was a difference between using a language to talk to God and using it to talk with your fellow men.When I get to Jerusalem, I’ll find out what the difference is, he thought, and shivered with excitement.

It occurred to him then that he owed his chance of going to the Holy Land to the Lizards. Before they came, he’d been one more Jew among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of others starving in the Warsaw ghetto. He’d been out on the streets in dead of night, trying to cadge some food to stay alive and praying to God to grant him a sign that He had not forsaken His people. He’d taken the sun-like glow of the explosive-metal bomb the Lizards had set off high above the city as an answer to that prayer.

A lot of other people had taken it the same way. Almost willy-nilly, they’d made him into their leader, though becoming one had been the last thing in his mind. Because he’d looked like a leader to his people, he’d looked like one to the Lizards, too, when they drove Hitler’s thugs out of Warsaw. Had it not been for them, he would have stayed ordinary till the day he died-and he’d probably be dead by now.

Haltingly, he spoke that thought aloud. Rivka heard him out, then shook her head. “Whatever you think you owe them, you paid it off long ago,” she said. “Yes, they saved us from the Nazis, but they did it for themselves, not for us. They just used us for their own purposes-and if it suits them to start killing us the way the Nazis did, they will.”

“You’re right, I think,” Moishe said.

“Of course I am,” she answered.

He smiled, but soon sobered. Rivka had repeatedly shown she was better at dealing with the real world than he was. If she made a pronouncement like that, he would be wise to take it seriously. Then, all at once, he started to laugh: who would have thought that going to the Holy Land was part of the real world?