Drucker said, “I didn’t mean it like that, dammit. I meant with somebody who really believes.”
“What difference does that make?” Mordechai said. “The taint is in the blood, not in the belief, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have cared about your wife. They wouldn’t have cared about converts. They wouldn’t have-ahhh!” He made a disgusted noise. “Why do I waste my time?”
He took another pull at the pilsner in his stein. It was thin and sour, a telling measure of the Reich’s troubles. Across the table from him, Johannes Drucker bit his lip. “You don’t make this easy, do you?”
“Should I?” Mordechai returned. “How easy was it for us when you held Poland? How easy was it for us when you invaded Poland again this spring? Explosive-metal bombs, poison gas, panzers-what did we do to deserve that?”
“You sided with the Lizards instead of mankind,” Drucker answered.
There was just enough truth in that to sting. But it wasn’t the whole truth, nor anything close to it. “Oh, of course we did,” Anielewicz said. “That’s why I came looking for your Colonel Jager, because I sided with the Lizards all the time.”
Drucker sighed again. “All right. Things weren’t simple. Things are never simple. Just getting here, or trying to, taught me that.”
Jews, Anielewicz thought, were born knowing that. He didn’t say as much to the German-what point to it? What he did say was, “We’ve both been through the mill. If we start fighting with each other now, it won’t do us any good, and it won’t make it any easier for us to find our families.”
“If they’re there,” Drucker said. “What are the odds?” He poured down his remaining beer in a couple of long, dispirited gulps.
“I’ve pulled the wires I know how to pull looking for my family,” Mordechai said. “I didn’t have any luck, but I’ll pull them again for yours. And I’ll help you get in touch with your Fuhrer”-am I really saying this? he wondered-“so you can pull your wires for your family.”
“And for yours,” Drucker said.
“Yes. And for mine.” Anielewicz wondered whether the Reich would have bothered keeping records of Jews kidnapped in the fighting in Poland. With anyone but the Germans, he would have had his doubts. As a matter of fact, he still did have his doubts, big ones. But the possibility remained. He’d seen German efficiency and German bureaucracy in action in the Warsaw ghetto. If any battered, beaten, retreating army would have kept track of the prisoners with whom it was falling back, the Wehrmacht was that force.
The next morning, after a breakfast about as unpleasant as supper had been, Anielewicz led Drucker to the little garrison the Race used to watch the refugee camp. There he ran into Lizard bureaucracy, which turned out to be every bit as inflexible as the German variety. “No,” said the male to whom he addressed his request. “I have not the authority to take any such action. I am sorry.” In the best tradition of bureaucrats regardless of species, he sounded not in the least sorry.
Trying to conceal his exasperation, Mordechai demanded, “Well, who does have the authority, and where do I find him?”
“No one here,” the Lizard replied. Again, like any good bureaucrat, he seemed to take pleasure in thwarting those who came before him.
Johannes Drucker proved fluent in the language of the Race: “You did not fully answer the Jewish fighting leader’s question. Where can we find someone with that authority?” He didn’t use Anielewicz’s religion as a slur but as a goad, reminding the Lizard he wasn’t helping an ally.
It got through, too. With a resentful hiss, the male said, “The closest officers with the authority to treat with the upper echelons of the Reich are based near the place called Greifswald.” He made a hash of the pronunciation, but it wasn’t a name easy to mistake for any other.
Anielewicz turned to Drucker. “Back where we started from. I’ve got a seat on the rear of my bicycle.”
“Must be close to twenty kilometers,” Drucker answered. “We can split the pedaling.”
“I won’t argue,” Mordechai said. Drucker wasn’t far from his own age, and very likely had stronger legs. Odds were he’d never breathed in nerve gas, anyhow.
They returned to Greifswald in the early afternoon, after going back through some of the flattest, dullest terrain Mordechai had ever seen. Bomb craters gave it most of the relief it had. None of them was from an explosive-metal bomb, but he still wondered how much radioactivity he was picking up. He’d wondered that ever since he came into Germany. For that matter, he’d wondered back in Poland. He tried to make himself stop wondering. He couldn’t do anything about it.
Drucker was pedaling as they rode into the Lizard encampment. Over his shoulder, he said, “Do you suppose these males will give us the runaround, too?”
“I hope not,” was all Anielewicz could say. If the Lizards chose to be difficult, he couldn’t do much about that, either.
But they didn’t. One of the males in their communications section turned out to have fought alongside some of the Jewish fighters Mordechai had commanded. “Your males helped save my unit several times,” he said, folding into the posture of respect. “Anything you require, you have but to ask.”
“I thank you,” Mordechai answered, a little taken aback at such wholehearted cooperation. He introduced Drucker and explained why the German spaceman needed to be connected to the leader of what was left of the Reich.
“It shall be done,” the Lizard said. “I do not fully understand this business of intimate kinship, but I know of its importance to you Tosevites. Come with me. I shall arrange this call.”
Drucker stared at Anielewicz in something close to amazement. “This is too easy,” he said in German. “Something will go wrong.”
“You’d better be careful,” Mordechai answered in the same language. “You keep saying things like that and people will start thinking you’re a Jew yourself.” Drucker laughed, though Anielewicz again hadn’t been joking.
But nothing went wrong. Inside of a couple of minutes, the Lizard was talking with a male of the Race in Flensburg, a not too radioactive town near the Danish border from which General Dornberger was administering the broken Reich. A couple of minutes after that, Dornberger’s image appeared on the screen. He was older than Anielewicz had expected he would be: old and bald and, by all appearances, tired unto death.
“Ah, Drucker,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re alive. Not many who went up into orbit came down again.”
“Sir, I was lucky, if you want to call it that,” the spaceman answered. “If I’d killed my starship instead of failing, I’m sure the Lizards would have killed me, too.”
“We need every man we have to rebuild,” Walter Dornberger said, a sentiment that struck Anielewicz as almost too sensible to come from the mouth of a German Fuhrer. Dornberger went on, “Who’s that with you, Hans?”
Anielewicz spoke for himself: “I’m Mordechai Anielewicz, of Lodz.” He waited to see what reaction that brought.
All Dornberger said was, “I’ve heard of you.” Hitler would have pitched a fit at the idea of talking to a Jew. Himmler, no doubt, would have been quietly furious. Dornberger just asked, “And what can I do for the two of you?”
“We’re looking for our families,” Anielewicz answered. “Drucker’s is missing from Greifswald, and mine was kidnapped from Widawa by retreating German troops.” He’d said it so many times, it hurt less than it had before. “If anyone can order German records examined to help us find them, you’re the man.” He startled himself; he’d almost added sir.
Dornberger’s hand disappeared from the screen for a moment. It came back with a cigar, which he puffed. “How is it that the two of you have become friends?”
“Friends?” Mordechai shrugged. “That may go too far,” he said, to which Drucker nodded. The Jewish fighting leader went on, “But we both knew, and we both liked, a panzer officer named Heinrich Jager.”
“You knew and liked…” Walter Dornberger’s expressions sharpened. “Jager. The deserter. The traitor.”
“Sir”-now Anielewicz did say it-“he saved Germany from getting in 1944 what you got in 1965. He also saved my life, but you’d probably think that was a detail.”
“That may be true,” Dornberger replied. “It doesn’t make him any less a deserter or a traitor.”
“Sir, he was a deserter,” Drucker said, “but a traitor, never.”
“Et tu, Brute?” the German Fuhrer murmured. His eyes swung back to Mordechai. “And if I don’t help you, I suppose you’ll tell your friends the Lizards on me.”
“Sir, it’s my family,” Anielewicz said tightly. “I’ll do whatever I can, whatever I have to, to get them back. Wouldn’t you?”
Dornberger sighed. “Without a doubt. Very well, gentlemen, I will do what I can. I do not know how much that will be. Things being as they are, our records are in no small degree of chaos. Good-bye.” His image vanished.
“Hope,” Mordechai said as he and Drucker left the tent from which they’d spoken with the new Fuhrer.
“I know,” Drucker said. “Is it a blessing or a curse?” He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that funny noise?”
Had he not asked, Anielewicz might not even have noticed the small, whistling beep. But when it came again, the hair prickled upright on his arms and at the nape of his neck. “My God,” he whispered. “That’s a beffel.”