“No, I do not. I wish I could,” Gromyko said. “All our choices are bad. Some may be worse than others.”
“Our best hope, I believe, is persuading the Race that another wan of aggression would cost them more than they could hope to gain in return,” Molotov said. “Since that is obviously true, I had no trouble making my position, the Soviet Union’s position, very plain to Queek.”
He spoke with more assurance than he felt. The phone lines to his office were supposed to be the most secure in the Soviet Union. But the Lizards were better at electronics than their Soviet counterparts. He had no guarantee they were not listening. If they were, they weren’t going to hear anything secret different from what he’d said to their ambassador’s scaly face.
Gromyko understood that. “Of course, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the foreign commissar said. He was good. No one, human or Lizard, would have said that he was using a public voice, an overly fulsome voice, to put undue stress on his words.
“Have you any further suggestions?” Molotov asked.
“No,” Gromyko replied. “I am content to leave everything in your capable hands.” Had Molotov been unsure Gromyko was content to do that, someone else would have held the foreign commissar’s job. Gromyko added, “Good-bye,” and hung up.
“Does he agree with you?” Zhukov asked.
Molotov nodded. “Da. And you?” He wanted it out in the open. If Zhukov didn’t agree, somebody else would start holding the general secretary’s job.
But the marshal, however reluctantly, nodded. “As you say, our best hope. But it is not a good one.”
“I wish I thought it were,” Molotov said. “Now we can only wait.”
Rance Auerbach spoke French slowly and with a Southern accent nothing like the one the people in the south of France used. But he read the language pretty well. Everything he saw in the Marseille newspapers made him wish he were back on the other side of the Atlantic. “Christ, I wonder if they’d let me back in the Army if I asked ’em nice.”
Penny Summers looked at him from across their room at La Residence Bompard. The hotel lay well to the west of the city center, and so had survived the explosive-metal bomb without much damage. Penny said, “What the hell were you drinking last night, and how much of it did you have? The Army wouldn’t take you back to fight off an invasion of chipmunks, let alone Lizards.”
“Never can tell,” he said. “Back when the Race first hit us, they took anybody who was breathing, and they didn’t check that real hard, either.”
“You aren’t hardly breathing night now,” Penny retorted, which was cruel but not altogether inaccurate. “I can hear you wheezing all the way over here.”
Like her previous comment, that one held an unfortunate amount of truth. Auerbach glared just the same. “You want to be over here if the Lizards try and kick the crap out of the country?”
“I’d sooner be here than there, on account of they can kick our ass from here to Sunday, and you know it as well as I do,” Penny said.
One more home truth he could have done without. Putting the best face on it he could, he said, “We’ll go down swinging.”
“That won’t do us a hell of a lot of good.” Penny walked past him to the window and looked north toward the blue, blue waters of the Mediterranean. The hotel sat on the headland west of the inlet that had prompted Greek colonists to land at Marseille what seemed a very long time ago by Earthly standards. Turning back, Penny went on, “You want to go back, go ahead. It’s no skin off my nose. You won’t see me doing it, though.”
Rance grunted. He was just gassing, and he knew it. If he’d thought the Army would take his ruined carcass, he would have gone back if he had to swim the Atlantic to do it. As things were… As things were, he wanted a drink and he wanted a cigarette. The cigarettes hereabouts were nasty items; they tasted like a blend of tobacco, hemp, and horse manure. He lit one anyway, as much an act of defiance as anything else.
He looked at his watch. “It’s half past ten,” he said. “We’re supposed to see Pierre the Turd at noon. We’d better get moving.”
“One of these days, you’re gonna call him that to his face, and you’ll be sorry,” Penny predicted.
“I still say that’s what his name sounds like.” Rance took another quick drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. He’d sated his craving for nicotine, and he didn’t like the taste for hell.
By writing out what he wanted, Auerbach got the concierge to call him a cab. It showed up a few minutes later: a battered Volkswagen. “Where to?” the cabby asked. He was smoking a cigarette like the one Rance had had, but he’d worked it down to a tiny little butt.
“I would like… to go… to the refugee center… to the north… of the city.” Auerbach spoke slowly, and as carefully as he could. Sometimes the locals would understand him, sometimes not.
This time, the driver nodded. “Oui, monsieur,” he said, and opened the door so Penny and Rance could get into the back seat. Auerbach grunted and grimaced as he squeezed himself into the narrow space. He ended up knee to knee with Penny, which was pleasant, but not so pleasant as to keep him from wishing he had more room.
The road north skirted the Vieux Pont, the inlet at the heart of the city. It also skirted the worst of the wreckage from the bomb. Rance eyed the ruins with fascination. He’d seen plenty of pictures of the kind of damage explosive-metal bombs produced, but never the real thing till now. Everything looked to have been blasted out from a central point, which, he supposed, was exactly what had happened. It happened with ordinary bombs, too, but not on such a scale. He wondered how many had died when the bomb went off. Then he wondered if anybody knew, even to the nearest ten thousand.
But a lot of people remained very much alive, too. The tent city north of town was enormous. Penny wrinkled her nose. “Smells like the septic tank just backed up,” she said.
“It’s a wonder they don’t have disease.” Rance spoke with the authority of a former officer. “They will before too long, if they don’t do something about their sanitation pretty damn quick.”
“Dix-huit francs, monsieur,” the driven said as he brought the Volkswagen to a halt. Eighteen francs was about three bucks-it would have been high for the trip back in the States, but not outrageously so. Auerbach dug in his pocket and found two shiny ten-franc coins. They didn’t weigh anything to speak of; they were stamped from aluminum, which struck him as money for cheapskates. The driver seemed glad enough to get them, though. “Merci beaucoup,” he told Rance.
Then Auerbach had to tell him the same thing, because the fellow and Penny had to work together to extract him from the back seat of the VW. Rance normally hated standing up, which made his ruined leg hold more weight than it really felt like bearing. Compared to being crammed into that miserable back seat, standing up wasn’t half bad. He took as much of his weight as he could on his stick and his good leg.
A dumpy little woman a few years younger than Penny came up to them. “You are the Americans?” she asked. Rance’s eyes snapped toward her the minute she started to speak: if she didn’t have a bedroom voice, he’d never heard one. Not much to look at, but she’d be something between the sheets in the dank.
He had to remind himself he needed to answer. “Yes, we are the Americans,” he said in his slow, Texas-flavored Parisian French. “And you?”
“I’m Lucie,” she told him. “I’m Pierre’s friend. Come with me.”
They came. Even without running water, the tent city had better order than Rance would have guessed from the smell on his arrival. There were latrine trenches off in the distance. Just too many people, and they’ve been here too long, he thought. He knew about that; he and Penny had been stuck in a refugee camp for a while after the first round of fighting ended. Kids in short pants ran by, making a godawful racket. Rance almost tripped over a yappy little dog.
The tent in which Lucie and Pierre lived was a good-sized affair whose canvas had been bleached by sun and rain. Ducking through the tent flap wasn’t easy for Rance, either, but he managed, leaning on the stick. When he straightened up again, he said, “Oh, hello,” rather foolishly, in English, because another woman was in the tent with Pierre and Lucie. She was younger than the ginger dealer, but they had a family look to them-though she was better looking than old Pierre the Turd ever dreamt of being.
She surprised him by answering in English: “Hello. I am Monique Dutourd, Pierre’s soeur- his sister.”
He went back to his own bad French: “How is it that you speak English?”
“I am a professor of Roman history,” she said, and then, with a flash of bitterness, “A professor too long without a position. I read English and German much better than I speak them.” Her mouth narrowed into a thin line. “I hope never to speak German again.”
“Any language can be useful,” Pierre Dutourd said, first in English and then in the language of the Race. He went on in the latter tongue: “Is that not a truth?”
Rance and Penny had spent too much time in the company of Lizards over the past few years. They both made the Race’s affirmative hand gesture at the same time. Lucie laughed, which raised a couple of goosebumps on Rance’s arms. Penny gave him a sour look; she must have known what the Frenchwoman’s voice was doing to him.
Lucie hefted a green glass bottle. “Wine?” she asked.