Heinrich Anielewicz shook his head. So did his older brother David and their older sister Miriam. “Isn’t that peculiar?” Mordechai said. “I wonder who the fellow is and what he wants.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll find out, maybe I won’t.” He started to shrug again, then paused and sniffed instead. “What smells good?”
“Lamb tongues,” Bertha answered. “They’re usually more trouble than they’re worth, because it’s so hard to peel off the membrane-it comes away in little pieces, not in big chunks like a cow’s-but the butcher had such a good price on them that I bought them anyhow.”
David said, “I hear the Lizards have such sharp teeth, they can eat tongues and things like that without peeling them.” Heinrich and Miriam both looked disgusted, which had to be part of what he’d had in mind when he spoke up.
“If you remembered your Hebrew half as well as the things you hear on the street, you wouldn’t have to worry so much about your bar mitzvah next month,” Mordechai said.
“I’m not worried, Father,” David answered. That was probably true; he had an easygoing disposition much like his mother’s. Mordechai was worried, though. So was Bertha, even if she did her best not to let it show. They would go right on worrying till the momentous day had passed, too. Having a son who excelled at his bar mitzvah was a matter of no small pride among the Jews of Lodz.
Over the supper table, in between bites of flavorsome tongue (the lamb tongues might have been a lot of trouble to make, but turned out to be worth it), Heinrich asked, “Father, what’s an irrational number?”
“A number that drives you crazy,” David put in before his father could answer. “The way you do arithmetic, that’s most of them.”
Mordechai gave him a severe look and Heinrich a curious one. Mordechai knew something about irrational numbers; he’d studied engineering before the Germans invaded Poland and turned his life upside down. “You’re just barely nine years old,” he said to his younger son. “Where did you hear about irrational numbers?”
“A couple of my teachers were talking about them,” Heinrich answered. “I thought they sounded funny. Are they crazy numbers, or numbers that make you crazy, the way David said?”
“Well, they call them that because they used to drive people crazy,” Mordechai said. “They go on forever without repeating themselves. Three is just three, right? And a quarter is just.25. And a third is.33333… as far as you want to take it. But pi-you know about pi, don’t you?”
“Sure,” David answered. “They have us use three and a seventh when we figure with it.”
“All right.” Anielewicz nodded. “But that’s just close-you know what an approximation is, too, right?” He waited for his son to nod, then went on, “What pi really is, at least the start of it, is 3.1415926535897932… and it’ll go on forever like that, not repeating itself at all. The square root of two is the same kind of number. It’s the first one that was ever discovered. The ancient Greeks who found it kept it a secret for a while, because they didn’t think there should be numbers like that.”
“How did you remember all those decimal places for pi?” Miriam asked.
“I don’t know. I just did. I used to know a lot more, even though they’re pretty much useless after the first ten or so,” Anielewicz answered.
“I could never remember so many numbers all in a row,” his daughter said.
He shrugged. “When you play the violin, you remember which note goes after which even when you haven’t got the music in front of you. I couldn’t do that to save my life.”
“I know.” Miriam sniffed. “You can’t carry a tune in a pail.”
He would have been more offended if she’d been lying. “I can remember numbers, though,” he said. Miriam sniffed again. He could hardly blame her; set against musical talent, that didn’t seem like much. “Every once in a while, it comes in handy.” Having said that, he’d said everything he could for it.
After supper, the children went back to their books. Then Miriam practiced the violin for a while. David and Heinrich played chess; David had taught his brother how the pieces moved a few weeks before, and took no small pleasure in beating him like a drum. Tonight, though, he let out an anguished howl as Heinrich forked his king and a rook with a knight.
“Serves you right,” Mordechai told him. “Now you’ve got somebody you can play against, not somebody you can trample.” By David’s expression, he preferred trampling. He couldn’t unteach Heinrich, though. He was more than usually willing to go to bed that night.
“I’m not going to stay up, either,” Bertha said less than half an hour later. “I’m going shopping with Yetta Feldman tomorrow morning, and Yetta likes to get up at the crack of dawn.”
“All right.” Mordechai stayed put by the lamp in the front room. “I’ll finish the newspaper, then I’ll come to bed, too.” If the children were asleep and Bertha still awake, who could say what might happen then?
Before he’d finished the paper, though, someone knocked on the door. He was frowning as he went to answer it; ten past ten was late for visitors. “Who’s there?” he asked, not opening the door.
“Is this the flat of Mordechai Anielewicz?” It was a man’s voice, speaking Polish with a palatal Russian accent.
“Yes. Who’s there?” Mordechai asked again, his hand on the doorknob but still not turning it-this was an especially odd time to be receiving strangers. His eyes went to the pistol on the table by the door.
After a moment’s silence out in the hallway, he heard a faint click. His body identified the sound before his mind could-it was a safety coming off. He threw himself to the floor an instant before a burst of submachine-gun fire tore through the door at chest to head height.
Behind him, windows and a vase on the table shattered. Through and after the roar of gunfire, he heard people shouting and screaming. He waited till bullets stopped flying over him, then grabbed the pistol and pulled the door open. If the assassin was waiting around out there, he’d get an unpleasant surprise.
But the hall stood empty-for a moment. Then people poured out, many of them also carrying pistols and rifles. Behind him, Bertha exclaimed in horror at what the gunfire had done to the flat, and then in relief that it hadn’t done anything to Mordechai.
“Why would anybody start shooting at you, Anielewicz?” asked a fellow who lived across the hall from him.
He laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such a stupid question. “Why? I’m a Jew. I’m a prominent Jew. Poles don’t like me. The Lizards don’t like me. The Nazis don’t like me. The Russians don’t like me.” He ticked the answers off on his fingers as he spoke them. “How many other reasons do you need? I can probably find some more.” His neighbor didn’t ask for them. Anielewicz shivered. Why somebody had started shooting didn’t worry him so much. Who, now, who’d started shooting was a different story.
As he walked along High Street, Little Rock’s Embassy Row, Sam Yeager paused and gave a colored kid a nickel for a copy of the Arkansas Gazette. “Thank you, Major,” the kid said.
“You’re welcome.” Sam tossed him a dime. “You didn’t see that.”
The kid grinned at him. “Didn’t see what, suh?” He stuck the dime in a back pocket of his faded blue jeans, where it wouldn’t get mixed up with the money his boss had to know about.
Yeager went on down the street reading the paper. The Lewis and Clark was still front-page news, but it wasn’t the banner headline it had been a couple of days before. Everything seemed to be going just the way it should; the space-station-turned-spaceship would reach the asteroid belt faster than seemed possible. An acceleration of.01g didn’t sound like much, but it added up.
“Acceleration adds up,” Yeager muttered to himself. “It’s about the only thing that does.” He still couldn’t figure out why his own government had kept the Lewis and Clark so secret for so long. Sure, it had an atomic engine. But there were a lot more untamed atoms running around loose up in orbit than the ones that were pushing the enormous ship out toward the asteroids. The Lizards wouldn’t have pitched a fit if President Warren had told them what the USA was up to. They thought people were out of their minds for wanting to explore the rockpile that was the rest of the solar system, but they didn’t think it made people dangerous to them.