Upsetting the Balance

20

Jens Larssen peered out the window of the farmhouse where he’d taken shelter for the past several days. That was what he’d been doing lately: peering out the window and waiting for the searchers to give up and go away. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he muttered. “I’m too smart for them. I won’t let them catch me.”

He was pretty sure he could have outrun pursuit from Denver and made it to Lizard-held territory. Pursuit wasn’t the only problem, though. People would have been waiting for him out east. He hadn’t forgotten telegraph and telephone lines (even if those were likely to be down, could you take the chance?) and radio and even carrier pigeons. They’d know he was coming, oh yes they would.

So he’d been waiting for them to give up and quit looking for him. Sooner or later, they’d figure he’d got caught in a snowstorm and frozen to death, or that he’d managed a clean getaway, or else the war would heat up and they’d forget all about him and go off to fight. Then he’d start moving again. The time, he judged, was nearly ripe.

He laughed. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he repeated. “Hell, they were right in this house and they didn’t have a clue.”

He’d been smart. He was a physicist-he was supposed to be smart. He’d picked a house with a storm cellar in it. Whenever prying eyes came around, he’d ducked down into the cellar. He’d even tied a throw rug to a chair near the cellar door so it kept that door covered up after he went down below. He’d heard combat boots thumping up above his head, but none of the soldiers had had a hint that he was sitting in the darkness with his finger on the trigger of his Springfield in case anything had gone wrong.

He laughed again. The soldiers hadn’t had the brains to look beyond the ends of their noses. He’d expected nothing different, and he’d been right. “I usually am,” he said. “If those fools would have listened to me-” He shook his head. They hadn’t listened. The Lizards would.

Even though they hadn’t been physicists, the people who’d built this farm had been pretty smart, too. They weren’t around, though, so they hadn’t been smart enough to escape the Lizards. Or maybe they hadn’t been lucky enough. You never could tell. Whichever way it was, they were gone.

But they’d left behind that storm cellar, stocked with enough home-canned goodies to feed a platoon for a month. That was how it seemed to Jens, anyhow. Beef, pork, chicken, vegetables-they didn’t seem to have had any fruit trees, and he missed sweets till he came upon a gallon jar of tapioca pudding. The wife of the house must have made a lot more than she could use right away, and put up the rest. He ate tapioca till it started coming out of his ears.

He’d found cigarettes down there, too, but he hadn’t smoked any. The odor would linger in the house. When he got on the road again-ah, that was another matter. He looked forward to it, although the first couple of times he’d lit up after going without for a long time, he’d been like Tom Sawyer after Huck Finn gave him his first pipe.

He walked over to the window that looked across the fields toward US 40. It was snowing again, not so hard as it had back when he was a kid in Minnesota but plenty hard enough to cut way back on visibility. In a way, that was bad, because he couldn’t tell who, if anybody, was out there. He didn’t think anybody was. The highway had been quiet since that search party stomped through the house, and that was days ago now. And the snow could work for him, too. It would make him harder to spot, and harder to recognize if somebody did spot him.

“Well, then, time to get moving,” he said. He was just the Denver side of Limon. Once he made it past there, he’d be getting close to frontier country. He’d have to be careful again: the frontier meant soldiers. But unless he had it all wrong, they’d be worrying about Lizards, not about him.

And he didn’t have it all wrong. He couldn’t have it all wrong. The only mistake he’d made was not doing something like this a hell of a lot sooner. He went down into the storm cellar and hauled out his bicycle. As soon as he was on the road, he lit up a King Sano. Yeah, it made him halfway want to puke, but goddamn did it taste good.

The Russies had been buried alive before, first in the bunker under a Warsaw block of flats and then in the submarine that brought them from Poland to England. That didn’t mean Moishe enjoyed repeating the process. There were, however, worse choices these days.

A sandy-haired naval officer named Stansfield commanded the HMSSeanymph. “Welcome aboard,” he’d said as, somewhere off the coast of Portugal, or perhaps Spain, Moishe, Rivka, and Reuven transferred to his boat from the freighter that had brought them down from England. “I’d wager you’ll be glad to submerge for a spell.”

Like a lot of military types Moishe had met-Poles, Nazis, Englishmen, Lizards-he seemed almost indecently offhanded about the implications of combat. Maybe the only way he could deal with them was not to think about them. Moishe had answered, “Yes,” and let it go at that.

When the British decided to send him to Palestine, getting him and his family there hadn’t looked like a problem. The Lizards hadn’t acted very interested in attacking ships. But then the Americans had touched off atomic bombs, first in Chicago and then in Miami. When Moishe thought of Chicago, he thought of gangsters. He’d never heard of Miami before it abruptly ceased to be.

What he thought of those places didn’t much matter, though. The Lizards must have thought ships had something to do with their destruction, because from then on they’d started hitting them a lot harder than they ever had before. Moishe didn’t know how many times his eyes had flicked to the air on the long, rough haul down from England. It was, he realized, a pointless exercise. Even if he spotted a Lizard fighter-bomber, what could he do about it? That didn’t keep him from looking anyhow.

Diving with theSeanymph had seemed reassuring at first. Not only was he out of sight of the Lizards, he was also out of the waves that had made the passage something less than a traveler’s delight No rolling and pitching, down however many meters they were.

That was just as well, too, for the submarine was not only cramped but also full of pipes and projecting pieces of metal and the rims of watertight doors, all of which could bang heads or shins or shoulders. In a proper design, Moishe thought, most of those projections would have been covered over by metal sheeting or hidden away behind walls. He wondered why they hadn’t been. In his halting English, he asked Commander Stansfield.

The naval officer blinked at the question, then answered, “Damned if I know. Best guess I can give you is that S-class boats are built in such a tearing hurry, no one cares about anything past getting them out there to sink ships. Give us another couple of generations of engineering and the submarines will be much more comfortable to live in. Compared to what we had in the last war, I’m told, this is paradise.”

To Russie’s way of thinking, paradise was not to be found in a narrow, smelly, noisy metal tube lit by dim orange lights so that it resembled nothing so much as a view of the Christian hell. If this was an improvement, he pitied the men who had put to sea in submarines about the time he was born.

He, Rivka, and Reuven shared what normally would have been the executive officer’s cabin. Even by the dreadful standards of the Warsaw ghetto, it would have been cramped for one and was hideously crowded for three. When set against the sailors’ triple-decker bunks, though, it seemed a luxury flat. A blanket attached with wires to one of the overhead pipes gave some small semblance of privacy.

In Yiddish, Rivka said, “When we went from Poland to England, I was afraid to be the only woman on a ship full of sailors. Now, though, I don’t worry. They aren’t like the Nazis. They don’t take advantage.”

Moishe thought about that. After a little while, he said, “We’re on the same side as the English. That makes a difference. To the Nazis, we were fair game.”

“What’s ‘fair game’ mean?” Reuven asked. He remembered the ghetto as a time of hunger and fear, but he’d been away from it most of a year now. In the life of a little boy, that was a long time. His scars had healed. Moishe wished his own dreadful memories would go away as readily.

After being submerged for what he thought was most of a day-though time in tight, dark places had a way of slipping away from you if you didn’t hold it down-theSeanymph surfaced. Hatches let in fresh air to replace the stale stuff everyone had been breathing over and over again. They also let in shafts of sunlight that clove straight through the gloom inside the submarine. No winter sun in London or Warsaw could have shone so bright.

“We’ll lay over in Gibraltar to recharge our batteries and pick up whatever fresh produce they have for us here,” Commander Stansfield told Moishe. “Then we’ll submerge again and go on into the Mediterranean to rendezvous with the vessel that will take you on to Palestine.” He frowned “That’s what the plan is, at any rate. The Lizards are strong around much of the Mediterranean. If they’ve been as vigorous attacking ships there as elsewhere-”

“What do we do then?” Moishe asked.

Stansfield grimaced. “I don’t precisely know. I gather your mission is of considerable importance: it must be, or it wouldn’t have been laid on. But I’ve neither fuel nor supplies to take you there, I’m afraid, and I don’t really know where I should acquire more. Here, possibly, though I should have to get authority from London first. Let us hope it does not come to that.”

“Yes,” Moishe said. “Let us.”

He and his family stretched their legs on the deck of theSeanymph a few times while she resupplied. The sun beat down on them with a vigor it seldom found in summer in more northerly climes. Like those of the sailors, their skins were fish-belly pale. Before long, they began to turn pink.

The Germans and Italians had bombed Gibraltar, back when the war was a merely human affair. The Lizards had bombed it since, more persistently and more precisely. Nonetheless, it remained in British hands. No great warships used the harbor, as they had in earlier days, but Moishe spotted a couple of other submarines. One looked considerably different in lines from theSeanymph. He wondered if it was even a British boat. Could the Axis powers be using a harbor they’d tried to destroy?

When the crew dogged the hatches, Moishe felt a pang, as if he were being dragged unwilling into a cave. After the spirited Mediterranean sun, the dim interior lamps seemed particularly distressing. A couple of hours later, though, he’d got used to the orange twilight once more.

Time crawled on. The sailors were all either asleep or busy keeping the submarine running. Moishe had slept as much as he could, and he was useless on the boat. That left him as bored as he’d ever been in his life. In the bunker under the Warsaw ghetto flats, he’d passed a lot of time making love with Rivka. He couldn’t do that here.

Keeping Reuven out of mischief helped occupy him. His son was every bit as bored as he was, and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to go out and get under people’s feet “It’s not fair!” he said, again and again. He was probably right, but not right enough to be turned loose.

TheSeanymph sailed east, altogether cut off from the outside world. Moishe wondered if traveling between worlds in a Lizard spaceship was anything like this. If it was, he pitied the Lizards. They had to endure it for a lot longer than mere hours.

When the submarine surfaced, it was black night outside. That made transferring Moishe and his family safer, but also harder. “Like trying to find a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight,” Commander Stansfield grumbled. “And we’re not even certain the cat is here.”

“How well can you find where you are going when this ship is underwater?” Russie asked.

“Boat,” Stansfield corrected absently. “That is the rub, of course. If we’re a couple-or more than a couple-of miles from where we ought to be, we might as well have sailed to Colorado.” He smiled, as if at some remembered joke. Whatever it was, it made no sense to Moishe. Stansfield went on, “It’s a clear night. We can read our positions from the stars and move at need. But dawn will be coming before too long-now that we’re further south, night ends earlier than it would in British waters-and I’m not keen on being spotted around here.”

“No. I understand this,” Moishe said. “Can you sail back to Gibraltar all under the sea?”

“We’ll use the diesels to charge the batteries,” the Royal Navy man answered. After a moment, Russie realized that wasn’t a fully responsive reply. TheSeanymph had sailed into danger to take him and his family where they were supposed to go.

Stansfield was getting out the sextant when a sailor came down from the conning tower and said, “Sir, we’ve spotted a ship maybe half a mile to port. No sign she knows we’re anywhere about. Is that the one we want?”

“It’s not likely to be anybody else,” Stansfield said. “And if it happens to be, he won’t go telling tales out of school. We’ll make certain of that.” Moishe hadn’t heard the idiom before, and needed a moment to figure out what it meant. Yes, Stansfield was a military man-he talked with complete equanimity of killing people.

TheSeanymph glided quietly toward the waiting ship. Moishe wished he could go up on deck to help, but realized he would be as much underfoot there as Reuven was down below. He hated waiting for others to decide his fate. That had happened too often in his life, and here it was again.

Shoes clattered on the rungs of the iron ladder that led up to the conning tower. “Captain’s compliments, sir, ma’am,” a sailor said, “and please to get your things and come along with me.” He actually saidfings andwiv, but that didn’t bother Moishe, who had trouble with theth sound himself. He and Rivka grabbed their meager bundles of belongings and, shooing Reuven ahead of them, climbed up to the top of the conning tower.

Moishe peered out into the darkness. A tramp steamer bobbed alongside theSeanymph. Even in the darkness, even to Moishe’s inexperienced eye, it looked old and dingy and battered. Commander Stansfield came over and pointed. “There she is,” he said. “That’s theNaxos. She’ll take you the rest of the way to the Holy Land. Good luck to you.” He held out a hand. Moishe shook it.

With a rattling of chains, theNaxos lowered a boat. Moishe helped his wife and son into it, then put in what they’d brought with them, and last of all climbed in himself. One of the sailors at the oars said something in a language he didn’t understand. To his amazement, Reuven answered in what sounded like the same language. The sailor leaned forward in surprise, then threw back his head and shouted loud laughter.

“What language are you speaking? Where did you learn it?” Moishe asked his son in Yiddish.

“What do you mean, what language?” Reuven answered, also in Yiddish. “He uses the same words the Stephanopoulos twins did, so I used some of those words, too. I liked playing with them, even if they weregoyim.”

To Rivka, Moishe said, “He learned Greek.” He sounded almost accusing. Then he started to laugh. “I wonder if the Stephanopoulos boys speak Yiddish and surprise their mother.”

“They were using some of my words, too, Papa,” Reuven said. “It’s all right, isn’t it?” He seemed anxious, perhaps afraid he’d revealed too much to his friends. In the ghetto, you quickly learned giving yourself away was dangerous.

“It’s all right,” Moishe assured him. “It’s better than all right, in fact I’m proud of you for learning.” He scratched his head. “I just hope you won’t be the only one who can talk with these sailors.”

When they got up onto theNaxos’ deck, the captain tried several languages with Moishe before discovering they had German in common. “Panagiotis Mavrogordato, that’s me,” he said, thumping his chest with a theatrical gesture. “They’re your enemies, they’re my enemies, and we have to use their tongue to talk with each other.” He spat on the deck to show what he thought of that.

“Now the Lizards are everyone’s enemies,” Moishe said. The Greek rubbed his chin, dipped his head in agreement, and spat again.

TheSeanymph slid beneath the surface of the Mediterranean. That made theNaxos rock slightly in the water. Otherwise, there was no trace the submarine had ever been there. Moishe felt alone and very helpless. He’d trusted the British sailors. Who could say anything about the crew of a rusty Greek freighter? If they wanted to throw him over the side, they could. If they wanted to hand him to the first Lizards they saw, they could do that, too.

As casually as he could, he asked, “Where do we go from here?”

Mavrogordato started ticking off destinations on his fingers: “Rome, Athens, Tarsus, Haifa. At Haifa, you get off.”

“But…?” Was Mavrogordato trying to bluff him? “Rome is in the Lizards’ hands. Most of Italy is.”

“That’s why we go there.” Mavrogordato mimed licking something from the palm of his hand. “The Lizards there will be mightygamemeno glad to see us, too.”

Moishe didn’t know whatgamemeno meant. Reuven let out a shocked gasp and then a giggle, which told him what sort of word it was likely to be-not that he hadn’t figured that out for himself. Even without the word, he understood what the Greek was talking about. So he was running ginger, was he? In that case, the alienswould be glad to see him-and he was less likely to turn over a family of Jews to Lizard officialdom.

Mavrogordato went on, “They give us all kinds of interesting things in exchange for the”-he made that tasting gesture again-“we bring them, yes they do. We would have had a profitable trip already. And when the British paid us to carry you, too-” He bunched his fingertips together and kissed them. Russie had never seen anybody do that before, but he didn’t need a dictionary for it, either.

The captain of theNaxos led them to their cabin. It had one narrow bed for him and Rivka, with a pallet on the floor for Reuven. It was cramped and untidy. Next to the accommodations aboard theSeanymph they’d just left, it seemed like a country estate.

“Don’t turn on the light at night unless you shut the door and pull the blackout curtain over the porthole first,” Mavrogordato said. “If you make a mistake about that, we will be very unhappy with you, no matter how much the British paid us for you. Do you understand?” Without waiting for an answer, he squatted and spoke in slow, careful Greek to Reuven.

“Nee, nee,”Reuven said-that’s what it sounded like to Moishe, anyhow. His son was obviously impatient at being talked down to, and added,“Malakas,” under his breath.

Mavrogordato’s eyes went wide. He started to laugh. Getting to his feet in a hurry, he said, “This is a fine boy you have here. He will make a fine man if you can keep from strangling him first. We’ll have rolls and bad tea for breakfast in a couple of hours, when the sun rises. Come join us then.” With a last dip of his head, he went out of the cabin.

Rivka shut the door and used the blackout curtain. Then she clicked on the light switch. A ceiling bulb in a cage of iron bars lit up the metal cubicle. The cage was much like the ones aboard theSeanymph. The bulb, though, made Moishe squint and his eyes water. It wasn’t-it couldn’t have been-as bright as Gibraltar sunshine, but it seemed that way.

Moishe looked around the cabin. It didn’t take long. But for rivets and peeling paint and a couple of streaks of rust, there wasn’t much to see. In his mind’s eye, though, he looked farther ahead. “Halfway there,” he said.

“Halfway there,” Rivka echoed.

“Mama, Papa, I have to make apish,” Reuven said.

Moishe took his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find out where you do that here.”

Ussmak was dressed in more clothes than he’d ever worn in his life. Back on Home, he hadn’t worn anything beyond body paint and belts hung with pouches. That was the way you were supposed to go through life. But if he went out that door as if he were on Home, he’d freeze to death before he ever got to his landcruiser.

He turned an eye turret down toward the large, heavy gloves on his hands. “How are we supposed to do any sort of work on the machine in clumsy things like these?” he complained, not for the first time. “My grip has about as much precision as if I were using my tailstump.”

“We have to maintain the landcruiser, no matter how hard it is,” Nejas answered. The landcruiser commander was bundled up as thoroughly as Ussmak. “It has to be perfect in every way-no speck of dirt, no slightest roughness in the engine. If the least little thing goes wrong, the Big Uglies will swoop down and kill us before we even know they’re around.” He paused, then added, “I want a taste of ginger.”

“So do I, superior sir,” Ussmak said. He knew he’d probably saved Nejas’ life by giving him ginger when he was wounded in the invasion of Britain. But ginger fit Nejas’ personality only too well. He’d been a perfectionist before; now the least little flaw sent him into a rage. The herb also exaggerated his tendency to worry about everything and anything, especially after he’d been without it for a while.

A lot of males in this Emperor-forsaken frozen Soviet wasteland were like that. But for going on patrol and servicing their land-cruisers, they had nothing to do but sit around in the barracks and watch video reports on how the conquest of Tosev 3 was going. Even when couched in broadcasters’ cheerily optimistic phrases, those reports were plenty of incitement for any male in his right mind to worry about anything and everything.

“Superior sir, will this planet be worth having, once the war of conquest is over?” Ussmak asked. “The way things are going now, there won’t be much left to conquer.”

“Ours is not to question those who set strategy. Ours is to obey and carry out the strategy they set,” Nejas answered; like any proper male of the Race, he was as good a subordinate as a commander.

Maybe it was all the ginger Ussmak had tasted, maybe all the crewmales he’d seen killed, maybe just his sense that the Race’s broadcasters hadn’t the slightest clue about what the war they were describing was really like. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel like a proper male any more. He said, “Meaning no disrespect to the fleetlord and those who advise him, superior sir, but too much of what they’ve tried just hasn’t worked. Look what happened to us in Britain. Look at the poisonous gas and the atomic bombs the Big Uglies are using against us.”

Skoob was also climbing into the gear a male needed to survive in Siberia, the gear that turned quick death into prolonged discomfort. The gunner spoke in reproving tones: “The leaders know better than we what needs doing to finish the conquest of Tosev 3. Isn’t that right, superior sir?” He turned confidently to Nejas.

Skoob had come through the British campaign unwounded; he’d also managed to keep from sticking his tongue in the powdered ginger, though he turned his eye turrets the other way when his crewmales tasted. But for that toleration, though, he still seemed as innocent of the wiles of the Tosevites as all the males of the Race had been when the ships of the conquest fleet first came to Tosev 3. In a way, Ussmak envied him that. He himself had changed, and change for the Race was always unsettling, disorienting.

Nejas had changed, too-not as much as Ussmak, but he’d changed. With a hissing sigh, he said, “Gunner, sometimes I wonder what is in the fleetlord’s mind. I obey-but I wonder.”

Skoob looked at him as if he’d betrayed their base to the Russkis. He sought solace in work: “Well, superior sir, let’s make sure the landcruiser is in proper running order. If it lets us down, we won’t be able to obey our superiors ever again.”

“Truth,” Nejas said. “I don’t want to quarrel with you or upset you, Skoob, but I don’t want to lie to you, either. You’d think I was talking out of a video screen if I tried it.” He didn’t think much of the relentless good news that kept coming from the fighting fronts either, then.

Trying to keep the landcruiser operational was a never-ending nightmare. It would have been a nightmare even had Ussmak himself been warm. Frozen water in all varieties got in between road wheels and tracks and chassis and cemented them to one another. The intense cold made some metals brittle. It also made lubricants less than enthusiastic about doing their proper job. Engine wear had been heavy since the landcruiser was airlifted here, and spare parts were in constantly short supply.

As he thawed out the cupola lid so it would open and close, Ussmak said, “Good thing we have those captured machine tools to make some of our own spares. If it weren’t for that and for cannibalizing our wrecks, we’d never keep enough machines in action.”

“Truth,” Skoob said from back at the engine compartment So Ussmak thought, at any rate. The howling wind blew the gunner’s words away.

Ussmak took tiny, cautious sips of air. Even breathed through several thicknesses of cloth, it still burned his lungs. Little crystals of ice formed on the mask. His eyes, almost the only exposed part of him, kept trying to freeze open. He blinked and blinked and blinked, fighting to keep them working.

“Good enough,” Nejas said some endless time later. “What we really need is a flamethrower under the chassis of the landcruiser. Then we could melt the ice that freezes us to the ground in a hurry.”

The crew started back toward the barracks. Ussmak said, “I’ve been talking with some of the males who’ve been here a long time. They say this is bad, but local spring is a hundred times worse. All the frozen water melts-by the way they make that sound, it happens in the course of a day or two, but I don’t think that can be right-and whatever was on top of the ground sinks down into the mud. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can get it out again.”

“You served in the SSSR before, didn’t you?” Nejas said. “Did you see any of that for yourself?”

“I saw the mud in local fall, before I was hurt,” Ussmak answered. “That was bad. It just comes from rain falling on the ground, though. From all I’ve heard, the mud that comes in spring, when a winter’s worth of frozen water melts, is a lot worse.”

He looked around at the white expanse through which they slogged. A lot of the drifts were higher than a male was tall. Winter had a long way to go, too; all of Tosev 3’s seasons were twice as long as those of Home in any case, and here in Siberia winter seemed to rule most of the local year.

His sigh turned the air around him smoky. Softly, he said, “I hope we last long enough to see how bad the local mud is.”

Rance Auerbach stared out across the snowy east-Colorado prairie. He didn’t see anything much, which suited him fine. He wanted to be off fighting the Lizards, not making like an MP. What he wanted and the orders he got weren’t the same beast.

He wasn’t the only one on whom those orders grated, either. Lieutenant Magruder rode up to him and asked, “Who is this guy we’re supposed to be looking for again? Waste of time, if you ask me-not that anybody did.”

“Fellow’s name is Larssen, says Colonel Nordenskold.” Auerbach laughed. “One squarehead telling us to go find another one. The colonel got word from General Groves that this Larssen plugged two guys and then headed east. They don’t want him to make it into Lizard country.”

“Why do they give a damn? That’s what I want to know, and nobody’s told me yet,” Magruder said. “If he’s a bastard and he’s heading toward the Lizards, why shouldn’t we let him be their headache?”

“Colonel Nordenskold told you just as much as he told me,” Auerbach answered, “so I don’t know, either.” He could make some guesses, though. He’d led the cavalry detachment that had escorted Groves-who’d been a colonel then-all the way from the East Coast to Denver. He didn’t know for certain what Groves had carried in that heavy, heavy pack of his, but he suspected. The explosions in Chicago and Miami hadn’t done anything to make him think he was wrong, either.

If Groves wanted this Larssen stopped, it was probably because Larssen had something to do with those explosions. If he made it through to the Lizards, who could say what would happen next? The likeliest thing Auerbach could think of was Denver going up in a flash of light If that happened, the U.S.A.’s chance to beat the Lizards would probably go up with it.

If, if, if… All of it was guesswork, and he knew as much. All the same, that wasn’t why he kept quiet about it. The fewer people who knew about heavy-duty bombs, the less chance word about them had of reaching the Lizards. Other speculations he would have shared with Magruder, but not these. He wished he hadn’t been in the position to make these particular guesses himself.

Magruder changed the subject: “He’s going to get past us on abicycle?” He patted his horse’s neck. The animal whickered softly.

“He’s supposed to be good at roughing it,” Auerbach answered. “Maybe he’ll ditch the bike and try it on foot. This is a big country, and we’re spread thin. He might slip through. Hell, Bill, he might already have slipped through. And the other thing of it is, he might not be within a hundred miles of here. No way to know.”

“No way to know,” Magruder echoed. “So here we are, out beating the bushes for this one guy instead of doing something to twist the Lizards’ little scaly tails. That’s a hell of a thing. He must be one really important so-and-so if they want him caught so bad.”

“Does sound that way,” Auerbach agreed. He felt Magruder’s eyes on him, but pretended he didn’t. His lieutenant might not know as much as he did, but wasn’t bad at piecing things together.

Auerbach peered south from US 40. Somewhere a couple of miles down there was the little town of Boyero. A squad was going through there now. The rest of his men were strung out along the dirt road that led from Boyero to the highway, and north of US 40 toward Arriba on US 24. Farther north, troopers from Burlington took over for his company. One lone man shouldn’t have been able to slip through that net, but, as he’d told Magruder, it was a big country, and they were spread thin.

“One thing,” Magruder said, perhaps trying to look on the bright side: “It’s not like he’s going to be able to fool us by making like he’s somebody else. There’s nobody else on the road to pretend to be.”

“You’re right about that,” Auerbach said. “Country like this, there wouldn’t have been a lot going on even before the Lizards came. Now there’s nothing.”

Behind heavy clouds, the sun slid toward the distant-and now obscured-Rockies. Auerbach wondered if Larssen had the guts to move at night. He wouldn’t have wanted to try it, not on a bicycle. Maybe on foot… but, while that upped your chances of slipping through, it also slowed your travel and left you running the risk of being far from cover when day found you.

A rider came pounding down the dirt road toward US 40. Auerbach spotted blond hair around the edges of the helmet and nodded to himself-Rachel Hines was the most recognizable trooper in his command.

She reined in, saluted, and said, “Sir, Smitty and me, we think we seen somebody heading our way across the fields, but as soon as whoever it was spotted us, he went to ground. He couldn’t hardly think we were Lizards, so-”

“So he must have thought we were looking for him,” Auerbach finished. Excitement tingled through him. He hadn’t expected to run across Larssen, but now that he had, he was ready to run him down. “I’m with you,” he said. “We’ll pick up every other soldier on the way to where you and Smitty were at-that way, in case this turns out not to be Larssen, we won’t give him a free road east.” He turned to Magruder. “Bill, you stay here and ride herd on things. If we run into trouble, send more men after us.”

“Yes, sir,” Magruder said resignedly. “Why did I know you were going to tell me that?”

“Because you’re smart. Come on, Rachel.” With knees and reins, he urged his horse up into a fast trot. Rachel Hines had galloped to give him the news, but stayed with him now. Every few hundred yards, they’d gather up another trooper. By the time they got back to where Smitty was waiting, they headed up a squad’s worth of men.

“We’re gonna get the guy, eh, Captain?” Rachel said. Auerbach heard something of the eagerness he felt in her voice. “Don’t quite know why we want him, but we’re gonna get him.”

“Yeah, reckon we are.” Auerbach heard the question in Rachel’s voice, but if he wouldn’t give out his guesses for Magruder, he wouldn’t do it for her, either. He turned to the troopers he’d brought in his wake. “Isbell, you and Evers hold horses. If we get in trouble out there, one of you ride like hell back to the highway and tell Lieutenant Magruder to get reinforcements up here.” The men he’d designated both nodded. He peered out over the prairie. He saw no signs anybody was out there, but Larssen was supposed to know what he was doing. “Okay, let’s spread out and get him. Be on your toes. He’s got a gun and he uses it.”

Before she separated from the rest, Rachel Hines said, “Thanks for not making me stay back with the critters, Captain.”

Auerbach realized he hadn’t even thought of that. He’d accepted her as a soldier like any other. He shook his head. Would he have imagined such a thing before the war? Never in a million years.

He strode across the chilly ground. These had probably been wheatfields before the Lizards came, but they didn’t look to have been harvested the last couple of years. Even after the winter die-off, a lot of the brush was waist high. Bushes had taken root here and there among the grain, too. The country looked pretty flat, but it gave better cover than you’d think. The grain and bushes also broke up the snow on the ground, making it harder to spot somebody’s tracks.

If Larssen was smart, he’d just sit tight wherever he was and hope they’d miss him-if he was really here. But being that smart wasn’t easy-and if Auerbach turned the whole company loose on this stretch of ground, anybody hiding would get found.

He didn’t want to do that, in case he was wrong. Pulling in a raft of men would leave a hole in the screen the Army had set up to keep the fugitive from slipping east “Larssen!” Auerbach shouted. “Come out with your hands up and nobody’ll get hurt. Make it easy on yourself.”Make it easy on us, too.

Larssen didn’t come out. Auerbach hadn’t expected that he would. He took another couple of steps toward where Rachel and Smitty had seen whoever it was take cover. A bullet cracked past his ear. An instant later, he heard the sound of the gunshot. He was already throwing himself flat.

“Down!” he yelled from behind a tumbleweed. He looked around, but dead plants didn’t let him see far. He shouted orders: “Spread out to right and left and take him.” Now they knew where Larssen was. Getting him out wouldn’t be any fun, but it was something they knew how to do, tactics that came almost as automatically as breathing.

Larssen fired again, not at Auerbach this time. “You’re all against me,” he shouted, his voice thin in the distance. “I paid back two. I’ll pay back the rest of you sons of bitches if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Out on either flank, a couple of Auerbach’s troopers started shooting at Larssen, not necessarily to hit him but to make him keep his head down while their buddies slid forward. Not far from Auerbach, Rachel Hines fired a couple of shots. That was his cue to dash ahead and then flop down in back of another bush. He squeezed off three rounds from his own M-l, and heard Rachel and a couple of other troopers advancing on either side of him.

If you were being moved in on from the front and both flanks the way Larssen was, you had only two choices, both bad. You could stay where you were-and get nailed-or you could try and run-and get nailed.

Larssen sat tight. A cry from off to Auerbach’s left said he’d hit somebody. Auerbach bit his lip. Casualties came with the job. He understood that. When you went up against the Lizards, you expected not to come back with a full complement, and hoped you’d do them enough damage to make up for your own losses. But having somebody wounded-Auerbach hoped the trooper was just wounded-hunting down one guy who’d gone off the deep end… that was a waste, nothing else but.

He was within a hundred yards of Larssen now, and could hear him even when he was talking to himself. Something about his wife and a ballplayer-Auerbach couldn’t quite make out what. He fired again. Rachel Hines scurried past him. Larssen rose up, shot, flopped back down. Rachel let out a short, sharp shriek.

Larssen bounced to his feet. “Barbara?” he shouted. “Honey?”

Auerbach fired at him. Several other shots rang out at the same instant Larssen reeled backwards, collapsed bonelessly. His rifle fell to the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere, not any time soon. Auerbach ran up to Rachel Hines. She already had a wound dressing out, and was wrapping it around her hand.

She looked up at Auerbach. “Clipped the last two joints right off my ring finger,” she said matter-of-factly. “Don’t know what I’ll do about a wedding band if I ever get married.”

“You’ll figure out something.” Auerbach bent down and kissed her on the cheek. He’d never done that for a wounded noncom before. Seeing that she wasn’t seriously injured, he said, “I’m going to make sure of the son of a gun now. I think maybe hearing you yell like that startled him into breaking cover.”

“It’s not like I done it on purpose,” she answered, but she was talking to his back.

Jens Larssen was still twitching when Auerbach got up to him, but he didn’t see any point in calling for a corpsman. Larssen had taken one in the chest, one in the belly, and one in the side of the face. He wasn’t pretty and he was dead, only his body didn’t quite know it yet. As Auerbach stood over him, he let out a bubbling sigh and quit breathing.

“Well, that’s that,” Auerbach said, bending to pick up Larssen’s Springfield-no point in leaving a good weapon out to rust. “Now we can get on with the important stuff, like fighting the war.”

TheNaxos chugged on toward Rome. It flew a large red-white-and-blue tricolor Captain Mavrogordato had hauled out of the flag locker. “I want the Lizards’ airplanes to think we are French,” he explained to Moishe. “We have friends on the ground in Rome who know we are bringing them good things, but the pilots-who can say what they know? Since the Lizards hold southern France, this will help them believe we are perfectly safe.”

“What happens when we leave Rome and head for Athens and Tarsus and Haifa?” Moishe asked. “Those places, they won’t be so happy to see a ship that might have come out of Lizard-held country.”

Mavrogordato shrugged. “We have plenty of flags in the locker. When the time comes, we will pick another one that better suits our business there.”

“All right,” Russie said. “Why not?” He’d never known such a blithe swashbuckler before. Mavrogordato was smuggling things to the Lizards, undoubtedly smuggling things away from them, and was smuggling him and his family right past their scaly snouts. For all the Greek captain worried about it-airplanes aside-he might have had the whole Mediterranean to himself.

“But what if something goes wrong?” Moishe had asked him, some hundreds of kilometers back toward the west. He himself was a chronic worrier, and was also of the opinion that, considering everything that had happened to him over the past few years, he’d earned the right.

But Mavrogordato had shrugged then, too. “If something goes wrong, I’ll deal with it,” he’d answered, and that was all he would say. Moishe reluctantly concluded he didn’t say any more because he didn’t know any more. Moishe would have had plans upon plans upon plans, each one ready in case the trouble that matched it arrived.

Whether the plans would have worked was another question. Given his track record, it wasn’t obvious. But he would have had them.

“How far from Rome are we now?” he asked as the Italian countryside crawled past beyond the starboard rail.

“Thirty-five kilometers, maybe a bit less,” Mavrogordato answered. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours-in time for lunch.” He laughed.

Moishe’s stomach rumbled in anticipation. Neither the British freighter that had brought him down near Spain nor theSeanymph had had a galley that could compare to theNaxos’. Mavrogordato’s crew might have been short on shaves and clean clothes and other evidence of spit and polish, but they lived better than British seamen imagined. Russie wondered if the English had some sort of requirement denying them as much pleasure as possible. Or maybe they were just a nation of bad cooks.

“I hate to say it, but I wish the Germans were in Italy instead of the Lizards,” Moishe said. “It gives them too good a base for pushing north or east.”

“They tried pushing east into Croatia last year, and got their snouts bloodied for them,” Mavrogordato said. “But you’re right. Anybody who looks at a map can tell you as much. Hold Italy down and you’re halfway toward holding down the whole Mediterranean.”

“Mussolini didn’t have much luck with the whole Mediterranean,” Moishe said, “but we can’t count on the Lizards’ being as incompetent as he was.”

Captain Mavrogordato slapped him on the back, hard enough to stagger him. He spoke a couple of sentences in Greek before he remembered Russie didn’t know what he was talking about and shifted back to German: “We kicked the Italians right out of our country when they invaded us. The Nazis beat us, yes, but not those clowns.”

The difference between the Italians and the Germans was that between inept tyrants and effective ones. Inept tyrants roused only contempt. No one was contemptuous of the Germans, the Russians, or the Lizards. You could hate them, but you had to fear them, too.

Moishe said, “Ginger is the worst weakness the Lizards have, I think. A Lizard who gets a taste for ginger will-”

He broke off, a flash of light from the north distracting him. He wondered what it could be-it was as bright as the sun. And no, it wasn’t just a flash-it went from white to orange to red, a fireball swelling fantastically with each moment he stood there watching.

“Meter theou!”Panagiotis Mavrogordato exclaimed, and crossed himself. The gesture didn’t bother Russie; he wished he had one to match it. The captain of theNaxos went on, “Did they hit an oil tanker between us and Rome? You’d think we would have heard the airplanes, or something.”

They did hear something just then, a roar that rocked Moishe harder than Mavrogordato’s slap on the back had a few minutes earlier. A great column of smoke, shot through with crimson flames, rose into the air. Moishe craned his neck to watch it climb.

Slowly, softly, he said, “I don’t think that was anything between us and Rome, Captain. I think thatwas Rome.”

For a moment, the Greek stared at him, blank incomprehension on his face. Then Mavrogordato crossed himself again, more violently than he had before. “Is it one of those terrible bombs?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“I don’t know,” Moishe said. “I’ve never seen one before. But I don’t know what else it could be, either. Only the one blast and-that.” He nodded toward the glowing, growing cloud of dust and fire. “If God is kind, I’ll never see such a thing again.”

Captain Mavrogordato pointed out over the water. A large wave was approaching theNaxos at unnatural speed, as if flying through the air rather than being part of the sea. The freighter’s bow rose sharply, then plunged into the trough behind. The wave sped past them, out toward Corsica and Sardinia and Sicily. Moishe wondered if it would wash up against distant Gibraltar.

Mavrogordato shouted orders in Greek. TheNaxos’ engine began to work harder, the deck thrummed under Moishe’s feet and thick clouds of black smoke rose from the stack. Those clouds, though, were misshapen dwarfs when set alongside the one still swelling above Rome. Moishe could not tear his eyes away from that terrible beauty. He wondered how many people-and how many Lizards-had perished in the blast.

“There goes the Pope,” Mavrogordato said, one step ahead of him. “I’m no Catholic, but that’s a hell of a thing to do to him.”

How the Poles would wail when the news reached them! And, if they could find a way, they’d blame it on the Jews. This time, though, the Lizards and the Nazis looked to be much more likely candidates. Now, too, the Jews had guns (Moishe wondered briefly bow Mordechai Anielewicz fared these days). If the Poles started trouble, they’d get trouble back.

The bow of theNaxos began swinging away from what had been its destination. Russie glanced toward Mavrogordato, a question in his eyes. The merchant captain said, “Nobody’s going to take delivery of what we were bringing, not here, not now. I want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can. If the Lizards were hunting ships before, what will they do after this?”

“Gevalt!”Moishe said; he hadn’t thought of that.

Maybe the Greek had heard that bit of Yiddish before, or maybe tone and context let him figure out what it meant. He said, “It’ll be better once we get away from Italy; Lizard planes don’t range quite so widely in the eastern half of the Mediterranean as they do here. Only trouble is, I’m going to have to coal once before we make Athens. I would have done it at Rome, but now-”

“Will they let you go into an Italian port after this?” Moishe asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Mavrogordato answered, “and that’s to try it. I know some people-and some Lizards-in Naples. I could unload the ginger there,theou thelontos, and take on the fuel I need to get you to where you’re going. All we have to worry about is getting sunk before we make it that far. Well, friend, did you want life to be dull?”

“What difference does it make?” Moishe said. “Life hasn’t cared what I want ever since the war started.” After a moment’s thought, the Greek solemnly nodded.

Like all the other landcruiser drivers at the Siberian base, Ussmak had installed grids of electrically heated wire over his vision slits. They melted the frozen water that accumulated on the slits and let him see what he was doing. Nejas had mounted similar grids over the panoramic periscopes in the cupola. The local mechanics had slapped white paint on the landcruiser, too, to make it less visible as it ranged across the icy landscape.

Ussmak let his mouth fall slightly open in a bitter laugh. Making the landcruiser less visible was a long way from making it invisible. The Big Uglies might not realize it was there quite so soon as they would have otherwise, but they’d get the idea too quickly to suit him any which way.

“Steer a couple of hundredths closer to due south, driver,” Nejas said.

“It shall be done.” Ussmak adjusted his course. Along with two others, his landcruiser was rumbling down to smash a Soviet convoy trying to cross from one end of the break in their railroad to the other. The Russkis had probably hoped to get away with it while camouflaged by the usual Siberian blizzards, but a spell of good weather had betrayed them. Now they would pay.

Clear weather,Ussmak corrected himself.Not goodweather. From what the males unlucky enough to be longtimers at the base said, good weather in Siberia was measured in moments each long Tosevite year.

“Let’s slaughter them and get back to the barracks,” Ussmak said. “The faster we do that, the happier I’ll be.” He was warm enough inside the landcruiser, but the machine was buttoned up at the moment, too. If the action got heavy, Nejas, good landcruiser commander that he was, would open up the cupola and look around-and all that lovely heat would get sucked right out All the crewmales had on their cold-weather gear in case of that dreadful eventuality.

Wham!Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the side of the head. The round from the Soviet landcruiser hadn’t penetrated the side armor of his own machine, but it did make the inside of the land-cruiser ring like a bell.

“Turn toward it!” Nejas shouted, flipping the cupola lid. Ussmak was already steering his landcruiser to the left-you wanted to meet enemy fire head on, to present your thickest armor to the gun. He knew they’d been lucky. Soviet landcruiser cannon could pierce some spots in the side armor.

He peered through his defrosted vision slits. It was already getting cold inside the landcruiser. Where among the dark, snow-draped trees and drifts of frozen water was the enemy lurking? He couldn’t spot the Big Uglies, not till they fired again. This time the round hit one of the other landcruisers, but did no damage Ussmak saw.

“Front!” Nejas sang out.

“Identified,” Skoob answered.

But instead of smoothly going on with the target-identifying routine, Nejas made a strange, wet noise. “Superior sir!” Skoob cried, and then, in anguish, “Sniper! A sniper killed the commander!”

“No,” Ussmak whispered. Votal, his first landcruiser commander, had died that way. A good commander kept standing up in the cupola, which let him see much more than he could through periscopes and made his landcruiser a far more effective fighting machine-but which also left him vulnerable to small-arms fire he could have ignored if he’d stayed snug inside the turret.

As if the snow and ice themselves had come to malignant life, a figure all clad in white stood up not far from the landcruiser and ran toward it “Bandit!” Ussmak shouted to Skoob, and snatched for his personal weapon.

Skoob fired, but by then the camouflaged Big Ugly was too close to the landcruiser for its turret-mounted machine gun to bear on him. He tossed a grenade up and through the open cupola. It exploded inside the turret Ussmak thought he was dead. Fragments of the grenade ricocheted off the inside of the fighting compartment. One scraped his side; another tore a long, shallow cut across his right forearm. Only as he felt those small wounds did he realize the grenade somehow hadn’t touched off the ammunition inside the turret. If it had, he never would have had the chance to worry about cuts and scrapes.

He shoved the muzzle of his personal weapon out through a firing port and sprayed the Big Ugly with bullets before he could chuck another grenade into the landcruiser. Skoob was screaming: terrible cries that grated on Ussmak’s hearing diaphragms. He couldn’t help the gunner, not yet. First he had to get away from the fighting.

With one male in the turret dead and the other disabled, the land-cruiser was no longer a fighting machine. Ussmak could operate the gun or he could drive the vehicle. He couldn’t do both at once. He put it into reverse, moving away from the Soviet landcruisers in the forest.

The audio button taped to a hearing diaphragm yelled at him: “What are you doing?” The cry came from the male who commanded one of the other landcruisers. “Have your brains addled?”

“No, superior sir,” Ussmak said, though he wished for ginger to make the answer yes. In three or four short sentences, he explained what had happened to his landcruiser and its crew.

“Oh,” the other commander said when he was through. “Yes, you have permission to withdraw. Good luck. Return to base; get your gunner to treatment as soon as possible.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, above Skoob’s wails and hisses. He would have withdrawn with or without orders. Had the other commander tried ordering him to stay, he might have gone up into the turret and put a round through his landcruiser. Keeping a crewmale alive counted for more than killing Big Uglies. You could do that any time. If your crewmale died, you’d never get him back.

When he’d withdrawn far enough from the fighting (or so he hoped with all his spirit), he stopped the landcruiser and scrambled back to do what he could for Skoob. By then, the gunner had fallen silent. His blood and Nejas’ had puddled on the floor of the fighting compartment. With the cupola still open-no one had been left to close it-the puddles were starting to freeze.

As soon as he saw the wounds Skoob bore, Ussmak despaired of saving him. He bandaged the gunner all the same, and dragged him down beside the driver’s seat. Then he scrambled past Nejas’ corpse and slammed the lid of the cupola. That gave the landcruiser’s heater some chance against the stunning Siberian winter. Skoob would need every bit of help he could get.

Ussmak radioed back to the base to alert them that he was coming. The male who took the call sounded abstracted, as if he had other things on his mind, things he reckoned more important Ussmak switched off the radio and called him every vile name he could think of.

He took a large taste of ginger. He wasn’t in combat now, and decided he could use the quickened reflexes the herb gave him without endangering himself or the landcruiser. He tried to get Skoob to taste ginger, but the gunner was too far gone to extend his tongue. When Ussmak opened Skoob’s jaws to pour in the stimulant powder, he realized the gunner wasn’t breathing any more. Ussmak laid a hearing diaphragm over the gunner’s chest cavity. He heard nothing. Some time in the last little while, Skoob had quietly died.

The ginger kept Ussmak from feeling the grief that would otherwise have crushed him. What filled him instead was rage-rage at the Big Uglies, rage at the cold, rage at the base commandant for sending males out to fight in these impossible conditions, rage at the Race for establishing a base in Siberia and for coming to Tosev 3 in the first place. As the base drew near, he tasted again. His rage got hotter.

He halted the landcruiser close by the anticold airlock. The crew of mechanics started to protest “What if everybody wanted to park his machine there?” one of them said.

“What if every landcruiser came back with two crewmales dead?” Ussmak snarled. Most of the mechanics fell back from his fury. When one started to argue further, Ussmak pointed his personal weapon at him. The male fled, hissing in fright.

Still carrying the weapon, Ussmak went into the barracks. He looked down at himself as he waited for the inner door to open. The blood of Nejas and Skoob still covered the front of his protective garments. Several males inside exclaimed in startled dismay when he came into the communal chamber. More, though, were watching a televisor screen. One of them turned an eye turret toward Ussmak. “The Big Uglies just hatched another atomic egg,” he said.

Fueled by his rage and loss-and by the ginger-Ussmak shouted, “We never should have come to this stinking world in the first place. Now that we’re here, we ought to quit wasting lives fighting the Big Uglies and figure out how to go Home!”

Some of the males stared at him. Others turned their eye turrets away, as if to say he didn’t even deserve to be stared at. Somebody said, “We have been ordered to bring Tosev 3 under the rule of the Emperor, and it shall be done.”

“Truth,” a couple of males said, agreeing with the fellow.

But others shouted, “Truth!” in a different tone of voice. “Ussmak is right,” one of them added. “What have we got from Tosev 3 but death and misery?”

That brought another, louder, chorus of “Truth!” from the males who’d supported Ussmak in the first place, and from a few who hadn’t. A lot of his backers, he saw, were males who had their tongues deep in the ginger vial. Not all, though, not by any means. That made him feel good. Even full of ginger, he knew males full of ginger were not similarly full of good sense.

“We want to go Home!” he yelled, as loud as he could, and then again: “We want to goHome!” More and more males added their voices to the cry. It filled the communal chamber and echoed through the base. Having the other males follow his lead lifted Ussmak’s spirits almost the way ginger did. This had to be what the fleetlord knew, or even the Emperor himself.

A few males who refused to join the outpouring of anger fled the chamber. But more came rushing in, first to see what the commotion was about and then, more often than not, to join it. “We want to goHome!” Ussmak’s hearing diaphragms throbbed with the rhythmically repeated roar.

“Attention all males! Attention all males!” A countering shout rose from the intercom speaker on the wall: “End this unseemly display at once and return to your duties. I, Hisslef, base commandant, so order. Return to your duties at once, I say!”

One or two males meekly squeaked, “It shall be done,” and skittered away.

With ginger still in him, though, Ussmak wasn’t so inclined to pay the strict attention to subordination he would have when he first came to Tosev 3. “No!” he shouted. A lot of males in the command chamber were tasting ginger. “No!” they yelled with him. Somebody added, “Fancy body paint’s not enough!” In a moment, that became a new war cry.

Had Hisslef let the males shout and carry on till ginger exhilaration gave way to after-ginger gloom, the uprising probably would have died a natural death. Instead, he chose to stalk into the communal chamber and shout, “Who has perpetrated this outrageous conduct?”

“I have, sup-” Ussmak said. He’d automatically started to add Hisslef’s honorific, but choked it down. What honor did Hisslef deserve? Fancy body paintwasn’t enough.

“You will place yourself under arrest,” Hisslef said coldly. “You are a disgrace to the Race, and shall be punished as you deserve.”

“No,” Ussmak answered. Half the males in the communal chamber stared at him in astonishment. Disobeying an intercom speaker was one thing, disobeying a direct personal order quite another. But the repeated loss of cherished crewmales-and the ginger in him-took Ussmak to a place far outside the Race’s normal patterns. And when he went to that place, he was able to take the rest of the males in the chamber with him. After their moment of surprise, they screamed abuse at Hisslef.

The base commandant spread his hands so all the claws showed, a gesture showing he was ready to fight “You will come with menow, you egg-addled wretch,” he ground out, and took two steps toward Ussmak.

Ussmak raised the personal weapon he’d been holding ever since he frightened the mechanics with it. A ginger-quickened impulse made him squeeze the trigger. The burst crumpled Hisslef and flung him backwards like a sheet of wastepaper. Ussmak was amazed at how little he cared. With Nejas’ blood, and Skoob’s, on his coat, what did having Hisslef’s on his hands matter?

‘We’ll clean them all out!” he shouted. “The base is ours!”

Again, he’d stunned the males in the communal chamber. Again, he was able to take them with him to a place where they might never have gone otherwise. “Clean them out!” they bayed. “The base is ours!”

Atvar wished with all his spirit that the Race had never come to Tosev 3. He wished that, if the Race had to have come to Tosev 3, it would have done so under a different fleetlord. “By the Emperor, maybe Strahashould have overthrown me after the first atomic bomb the Big Uglies touched off,” he said savagely. “I’d like to see how he’d enjoy coping with these latest ones.”

“The loss of Rome was a heavy one for us in many ways, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. “Not only were military and administrative casualties heavy, the bomb also destroyed the Big Ugly who called himself 12th Pope Pius, and that male had been a leading factor in accommodating the large number of Tosevites of his theological persuasion to our rule. His traditional authority reached back almost two thousand Tosevite years, which for this planet gives most antique status.”

“Unlike a good many others on this world, he was able to recognize the advantages of cooperating with authority,” Atvar answered, “and he would not have lost all his power after the conquest, as the emperors and not-emperors here so bitterly fear. As you say, Shiplord, an unfortunate Big Ugly to lose.”

“Targeting the Deutsch city called Hamburg for retaliation seems fitting, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “it being a center for water-borne commerce.”

“Yes, we shall destroy it. In fact”-Atvar flicked one eye toward a chronometer-“it is already destroyed. Thus we avenge ourselves for Rome; thus we visit horror on Deutschland in exchange for the horror the Deutsche visited upon us.” He sighed wearily. “And for what? The Deutsche continue to resist us. This latest bomb had nuclear materials entirely of their own making. And much of the radiation from our nuclear explosions on Deutsch territory-and from that of their first weapon, the one east of Breslau-is blown east and contaminates our holdings and our males in Poland.”

“It contaminates the Deutsche first and worse, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Atvar hissed out a sad sigh. “Truth, and I thank you for trying to cheer me with it. But another truth is that the Deutsche, whether out of sheer ignorance or simply their own savagery-given some of their practices before we arrived, the latter strikes me as not at all unlikely-well, as I say, whatever the reason may be, the Deutsche do not seem to care what happens to their own males and females.”

“What happens in the generations to come will make them care,” Kirel said.

“Truth again,” Atvar answered, “and if you put this truth to the Deutsch not-emperor-theFuhrer, he calls himself-I know precisely what he would say: ‘So what?’ If something suffices for the moment, the Big Uglies care nothing for long-term consequences.”

“This irony bites us again and again,” Kirel said. “We must have a care for the future management of Tosev 3 in order to preserve it more or less intact for the settlers aboard the colonization fleet, while those native to the planet would cheerfully fling it into the cremator for the sake of a temporary advantage.”

Pshing’s face appeared on the communicator screen. “Exalted Fleetlord, excuse the interruption,” Atvar’s adjutant said, “but, per your orders, I report the successful destruction by atomic weapon of the Deutsch city of Hamburg. All aircraft involved in the mission have returned safely to base.”

“Thank you,” the fleetlord said, and Pshing’s image vanished. Atvar turned his eye turrets back toward Kirel. “The war has grown unpredictable.” No stronger curse could have come from a male of the Race. “Deutschland and the United States both continue to produce atomic weapons; the SSSR may yet succeed in building one of its own. All the Tosevite powers now use poisonous gases of various sorts against us. The Deutsche have joined them to missiles. How long will it be before they or some other empires or not-empires develop missiles whose guidance systems are more accurate than the crude ones they use, or until they make missiles large enough, or nuclear weapons small enough, to use together?”

“Those are major technological steps, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “They would require many decades, perhaps many centuries-”

“-For us,” Atvar broke in. “For the Big Uglies, who can say? Who can say, Shiplord? The more contact we have with the Tosevites, the more demoralized our males become. Where will it end? What is happening to us here?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I think-”

Before Kirel could say what he thought, he was interrupted again, not by Atvar this time but by Pshing, whose features came back on the communicator screen. Like Kirel, he began, “Exalted Fleetlord-”

Atvar knew a sinking feeling. This was not an ordered call, which meant it had to be an emergency. “Speak,” he said, dreading what his adjutant would say.

“Exalted Fleetlord-” Now Pshing hesitated on his own, searching, no doubt, for the least appalling way to frame whatever the latest disaster was. At last, he went on, “Exalted Fleetlord, we have reports a landcruiser and infantry base in the region of the SSSR known as Siberia no longer, ah, respond to orders.”

“It has fallen to the Big Uglies?” Atvar asked.

Pshing hesitated again, longer this time. “Exalted Fleetlord, it would appear not. The fragmentary communications we had before it stopped responding or transmitting suggest internal disorders instead. The base commandant, Hisslef, is believed slain.” The adjutant hissed in anguished dismay. “Exalted Fleetlord, it appears to be a-a mutiny.” He hissed again once the awful word was out.

“A mutiny?” Atvar stared at the communicator screen. He was too shocked even to be angry. That might come later, but not yet. Males of the Race-loyal, obedient, cohesive-rising up against their commanders?Killing their commanders, if the report Pshing had was correct? It could never have happened, not on any world under the Emperor’s dominion. On Tosev 3-As he had to Kirel, Atvar cried, “What is happening to us here?” His voice came out a frightened moan.