“What about Rome?” Esther and Judith asked together.
Neither their brother nor their mother answered. Rome was one of his memory snapshots; he’d been on the deck of a Greek freighter in the Tyrrhenian Sea when the Germans touched off an explosive-metal bomb they’d smuggled into the city. Now, with knowledge he hadn’t had then, he wondered how much radioactive fallout he’d been exposed to during the blast. He didn’t really want to know. He couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
Heavy booted feet pounded up the street past the house. The small windows that looked on the street were shuttered; like most houses in Jerusalem, this one preferred to peer inward onto its own courtyard than out at the wider world. Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. He’d been used to it most of his life. This once, though, he wouldn’t have minded seeing what was going on.
All of a sudden, he changed his mind. After shouts in Hebrew and Arabic, guns started hammering. A bullet slammed through a side wall, cracked past his head, and was through the other wall before his jaw got done dropping.
His mother had a better idea of what to do under such circumstances than he did. “On the floor!” she shouted. “Get down! Lie flat! The bullets will pass over us.”
When Reuven’s sisters didn’t move fast enough to suit her, she pushed them down and lay on them, ignoring their squawks. Reuven had just got down on the floor himself when a burst of fire gave the front wall some ventilation it hadn’t had before. Esther and Judith stopped squawking.
Out on the street, someone started screaming and didn’t stop. Reuven couldn’t tell whether the shrieks were in Hebrew or Arabic. Pain had no separate tongue; pain was its own universal language.
He got to his feet. “What are you doing?” his mother demanded. “Lay down again!”
“I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got to get my bag. Someone’s hurt bad out there. I’m not a doctor, not yet, but I’m closer to being one than anybody else around.”
He waited for his mother to scream at him. To his astonishment, she smiled instead: a strange, sweet, sad smile. “Your father did the same thing when the Lizards took Jerusalem away from the British. Go on, then. God watch over you.”
Reuven snatched his black leather bag out of his bedroom and hurried back to the front door. Predictably, his sisters wanted to do whatever he did. As predictably, his mother wouldn’t let them. He went out the door, certain his mother would lock and bar it after him.
Bullets still flew, though not so often now. An automobile burned at the end of the block, sending a pyre of stinking black smoke into the sky. All the flames were orange or yellow, none the almost invisible pale blue of burning hydrogen-an old motorcar, not one of the newer models on the Lizard pattern.
The screaming came from the other side of the motorcar. Feeling naked and exposed, Reuven came around the machine to do what he could for the wounded man. He’d just stopped beside him when, from behind, someone said, “What have we got here, son?”
“Hello, Father,” Reuven said as Moishe Russie got down on one knee beside him. The two of them looked very much alike there side by side-pale skin; dark hair; narrow, strong-cheekboned faces-save that Moishe was going bald. His son continued, “I haven’t even had a chance to look at him yet.”
“Don’t need any fancy Lizard tools for this diagnosis,” his father said. “A burst of three in the belly…” He pointed to the holes in the fighter’s shirt. They had some blood oozing from them, but the real flood of it came from the man’s back. Reuven gulped a little. Dissections in medical school were much neater than this, and the subjects didn’t scream. Moishe Russie spoke as if back in the classroom himself: “The entry wounds are fairly small. If you were heartless enough to turn him over, you’d see big chunks of meat blown out of the exit wounds. Prognosis, son?”
Reuven licked his lips. “He’ll keep hurting till he loses enough blood to lose consciousness, too. Then he’ll finally die.” He spoke without fear the wounded man would hear him; the fighter was lost in his private hell.
“I think you’re right.” His father rummaged in his own black bag, then pulled out a syringe. He injected the fallen fighter, then glanced over at Reuven. “Enough morphine to stop his pain. Enough to stop his heart and lungs in a couple of minutes, too.”
He waited for Reuven to say something about that. After some thought, Reuven remarked, “They don’t teach us when to do that in medical school.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” his father agreed. “For one thing, the Lizards take it for granted, much more than we do. And for another, it’s not something you can learn in school. When the time comes, you’ll know. If you’re ever wondering whether you should, the answer is simple: you shouldn’t. When you should, you don’t wonder.”
“How many times have you done it?” Reuven asked. As he spoke, the wounded fighter’s screams stopped. He stared up in dreamy surprise. Reuven wondered if he was seeing the men who knelt above him or only some interior vision. The man’s chest hitched a few more times, then respiration stopped, too.
“Morphine is a good friend and a dreadful master,” Moishe Russie murmured. Then he seemed to hear the question Reuven had asked. “How many times? I don’t know. A few. A man who does it too often isn’t wondering enough about whether he ought to. You aren’t God, son, and you never will be. Once in a while-but only once in a while-He’ll let you be His assistant.” He got to his feet. The knee of his trousers was wet with the fighter’s blood. “We’d better get back home. Your mother will be worried about us.”
“I know.”
Reuven wondered what he would have done had he come on the wounded fighter by himself. Would he have had the nerve to put the man out of his misery? He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t be sure. He also realized he’d never be sure now whether the ordinary-looking man had been a Muslim or Jew.
4
Suave as a Frenchman, the Gestapo officer smiled at Johannes Drucker. “You must understand, my dear Lieutenant Colonel, this is only an inquiry into your loyalty, not a denial that you are loyal,” he said.
“You have an easier time telling the difference than I do,” Drucker snapped. “All I know is, I’m grounded for no good reason. I want to go back into space, where I can best serve the Reich.” And where I can put hundreds-sometimes thousands-of kilometers between me and you.
“I would not call the security of the Reich ‘no good reason,’ ” the Gestapo man said, his voice silky. “We must always be on guard, lest the Volk be polluted by alien, inferior blood.”
“That’s my wife you’re talking about, you-” Drucker checked himself. Telling the son of a bitch he was a son of a bitch wouldn’t do him any good, and wouldn’t do Kathe any good, either.
“We have worked diligently to make and keep the Reich free of Jews,” the Gestapo man said with what he no doubt intended for a friendly smile. “We shall continue until the great task is complete.”
Drucker didn’t say anything. Nothing he could have said would have been any use. Anything he said would have got him into more trouble than he was in already. He had no great love for Jews. Back in the days when there were still a lot of Jews in the Greater German Reich, he hadn’t known many people with any great love for Jews.
Slaughtering them like cattle, though… He didn’t see how that had helped the Reich. If the Jews hadn’t risen up in Poland when the Lizards came, it might still belong to Germany. And, when the Lizards included in their propaganda details of what the Germans were doing, relations between the Reich and other human powers stayed delicate for a long time.