He rather liked Little Rock, even the larger, more hectic city that had sprung up around and in the midst of the town he’d known during and right after the fighting. It was larger and more hectic than it had been, but still small and staid alongside Los Angeles. It was also much greener than Los Angeles, and full of trees. Both the Californian he was and the farm boy from the prairie he had been appreciated that.
Down the block, only a few embassies stood: that of the Lizards, biggest of all; those of Germany and the USSR, rival concrete cubes; smaller structures from Britain and Japan; those of Canada and Ireland and New Zealand and Germany’s vassals: Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria; and ones from the island nations of the Caribbean-Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The Lizards had swallowed down the rest, with the exception of some the Germans had swallowed instead.
A man in a German uniform and a Lizard strolled down the street in earnest conversation. A colored fellow went past them the other way without even turning his head. Yeager chuckled to himself. Twenty years earlier, the local would either have tried to shoot both of them or run like hell. Sophistication had come to Little Rock, whether the Arkansans particularly wanted it or not.
Yeager stopped in a cafe for a hamburger. Endless years on the road had given him a connoisseur’s appreciation of the differences between burgers. This was a good one, better than he was likely to have found in his ballplaying days: meaty, on a fresh, tasty bun, with equally fresh pickle and lettuce and tomato. He enjoyed every bite.
He also enjoyed the beer with which he washed down the burger. It was a local brew, rich and hoppy. With their deliveries disrupted by the Lizard invasion, the national breweries had lost some of their hold on the country. When local beers were good, they made Schlitz and Miller High Life and the rest taste like dishwater. When they were bad, of course, they bore a strong resemblance to horse piss. Bad local beers didn’t last. Good ones seemed to be flourishing.
A lot of the signs on the table, Sam left air-conditioning and went out into the muggy heat again. His face was thoughtful. As far as he was concerned, whoever had attacked the ships of the colonization fleet was a cold-blooded murderer. Whatever the Lizards did when they found out who it was, he wouldn’t mind. He might have thought differently had there been any way to drive the Lizards out of the solar system and make sure they didn’t come back. Since there wasn’t…
“We’ve got to live with them,” he said, and then, more softly, “I hope to God they nail the bastards.” As far as he was concerned, Lizards were people, too.
5
Mordechai Anielewicz rattled east across Poland on a train. The steam engine threw a black plume of coal smoke into the air; undoubtedly, it had been built before the Germans invaded, let alone the Lizards. The Race seemed horrified that such stinking survivals persisted. But trains moved people and goods more cheaply than Poland’s inadequate road network, and so they kept on running.
Sharing the compartment with him were a farmer; a salesman who kept trying to sell his fellow passengers cheese graters, egg slicers, potato peelers, and other cheap metal goods; and a moderately pretty young woman who might have been either Polish or Jewish. Anielewicz kept trying to decide till she got out a couple of stops past Warsaw, but came to no conclusion.
He stayed aboard all the way to Pinsk. The border with the USSR lay just a few kilometers east of the city. The first thing Mordechai did when he got off the train was swat a mosquito. The Pripet Marshes surrounded Pinsk. He sometimes thought every mosquito in the world lived in the marshes. He might have been wrong, though; maybe only some of them lived there, with the rest coming to visit on holidays.
Swatting still, he made for the privies in the station. He’d eaten black bread and drunk tea all the way across Lizard-occupied Poland, and a man could do only so much of that without reaching the bursting point. The privies stank of stale piss. He didn’t care. He left them much relieved.
Lizard soldiers prowled the streets of Pinsk. They were not happy Lizards. Twenty years of learning more about Lizards than he’d ever thought he would want to know had taught Anielewicz as much. They stalked along with furious delicacy, like cats that had been soaked with a hose.
He understood their language pretty well, and had long since mastered the art of listening without seeming to. “If I don’t come down with the purple itch or one of these horrible local fungi, it’s not because I haven’t been squelching through the mud the past four days,” one of them said.
“Truth,” another agreed with an emphatic cough. “Impossible to do a proper job of patrolling that swamp. We’d need ten times the sensors and twenty times the males to have a chance of doing it right.”
“We have to try,” a third male said. “If we didn’t patrol the paths, who knows how much worse the smuggling would be?”
“Right now, I don’t much care,” the first male said. “I want to get back to the barracks and-” He lifted a claw-tipped hand to his face. His tongue shot out for a moment. The other males’ mouths dropped open in laughter. They probably wouldn’t have minded a taste of ginger, either.
A lot of the signs in Pinsk were in the Cyrillic alphabet Byelorussians used. Mordechai was less at home with it than he was with the Lizards’ script. Some of the signs were in Yiddish. Pinsk had been in the Nazis’ hands only a few months before the Lizards landed. The Jews here had had a hard time of it, but not so hard as the ones farther west, who’d lain under the German yoke for two and a half years.
ROZENZWEIG’S BAKERY. That sign was written in Yiddish, Byelorussian, and, as an afterthought, in Polish in letters half the size of those of the other two languages. Anielewicz went in. The good smell of baking bread and cakes and rolls and muffins almost made him fall over. Saliva gushed into his mouth. He reminded himself he hadn’t been too hungry before he came inside. Remembering that wasn’t easy.
A gray-haired man with a bushy mustache looked up from the bagels he was dusting with poppy seeds. “You want something?” he asked in Yiddish.
“Yes,” Mordechai said. “My name is Kaplan. You’ve got a special order for me in the back, don’t you?”
The code phrase wasn’t fancy, but it did the job. The baker eyed Anielewicz, then nodded. “Yeah, it’s here,” he said. “You want to come look it over before you take it home?”
“I think I’d better, don’t you?” Anielewicz said. He wondered what the Russians wanted, to have summoned him across Poland to handle it. If it wasn’t important, he’d give the NKVD man or whoever his contact was a piece of his mind. He’d dealt with a good many Russians. He knew this one wouldn’t care what he did or said. But it would make him feel better.
“Here,” Rozenzweig said. “Talk. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about.” He turned and went back to his poppy seeds.
“Nu?” Mordechai asked the fellow sitting in the baker’s back room: a nondescript, rather scrawny man not far from his own age, with a thin face and dark, intelligent eyes. Another Jew, Anielewicz thought. He’d dealt with a good many who worked for the Soviets. Every one, without exception, acted as a Soviet first and a Jew second if at all.
“Hello, Mordechai. Been a long time, hasn’t it?” the man from the USSR asked in Yiddish that sounded as if it came from western Poland, not any part of the Soviet Union.
“Am I supposed to know you?” Anielewicz asked. He did his best to keep track of all the agents he met, but he’d met a lot of them. Every once in a while, he slipped up. He’d stopped worrying about it. He wasn’t perfect, no matter how hard he tried to be.
The Soviet laughed and cocked his head to one side. He looked sly, like a man convinced he was smarter than everyone around him. And, where Anielewicz hadn’t recognized him before, he did now.