“Hard to give shoot-to-kill orders to keep starving people from mobbing your food wagons,” Bradley said glumly. “If I hadn’t, though, the fast and the strong would get food, nobody else but. Can’t let that happen.”
“No, sir,” Groves agreed. Under the hard and watchful eyes of the American soldiers, their fellow citizens lined up to get the tiny handfuls of grain and beans the quartermasters had to dole out. By comparison, Depression soup kitchens had been five-star restaurants with blue-plate specials. The food then had been cheap and plain, but there’d always been plenty of it, once you swallowed enough of your pride to take charity.
Now… Watching the line snake forward, Groves realized he’d been so busy working to save the country that General Bradley’s question never once crossed his mind: what sort of country was he saving?
The more he looked around the refugee camp, the less he liked the answers he came up with.
For once in his life, Vyacheslav Molotov had to fight with every fiber of his being to maintain his stiff face.No! he wanted to scream at Joachim von Ribbentrop.Let it go, you fool! We have so much of what we came here for. If you push too hard, you’ll be like the greedy dog in the story, that dropped its bone into the river trying to grab the one its reflection was holding.
But the German foreign minister got up on his hind legs and declared, “Poland was part of the GermanReich before the coming of the Race to this world, and therefore must return to theReich as part of the Race’s withdrawal from our territory. So theFuhrer has declared.”
Hitler, actually, was quite a lot like the dog in the fable. All he understood was taking; nothing else seemed real to him. Had he only been content to stay at peace with the Soviet Union while he finished Britain, he could have gone on fooling Stalin a while longer and then launched his surprise attack, thereby contending with one foe at a time. He hadn’t waited. He couldn’t wait. He’d paid for it against the USSR. Didn’t he see he’d have to pay far more against the Lizards?
Evidently he didn’t. There was his foreign minister, mouthing phrases that would have been offensive to human opponents. Against the Lizards, who were vastly more powerful than Germany, those phrases struck Molotov as clinically insane.
Through his interpreter, Atvar said, “This proposal is unacceptable to us because it is unacceptable to so many other Tosevites with concerns in the region. It would merely prove a generator of future strife.”
“If you do not immediately cede Poland to us, it will prove a generator of present strife,” von Ribbentrop blustered.
The Lizards’ fleetlord made a noise like a leaking inner tube. “You may tell theFuhrer that the Race is prepared to take the chance.”
“I shall do so,” von Ribbentrop said, and stalked out of the Shepheard’s Hotel meeting room.
Molotov wanted to run after him, to call him back.Wait, you fool! was the cry that echoed in his mind. Hitler’s megalomania might drag everyone else down along with Germany. Even the nations with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas weren’t much more than large nuisances to the Lizards. Until they could deliver their weapons somewhere other than along the front line with the aliens, they could not threaten them on equal terms.
The Soviet foreign commissar hesitated. Did von Ribbentrop’s arrogance mean the Hitlerites had such a method? He didn’t believe it. Their rockets were better than anyone else’s, but powerful enough to throw ten tonnes across hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometers? Soviet rocket scientists assured him the Nazis couldn’t be that far ahead of the USSR.
If they were wrong… Molotov didn’t care to think about what might happen if they were wrong. If the Germans could throw explosive-metal bombs hundreds or thousands of kilometers, they were as likely to throw them at Moscow as at the Lizards.
He checked his rising agitation. If the Nazis had such rockets, they would not be so insistent about holding on to Poland. They could launch their bombs from Germany and then scoop up Poland at their leisure. This time, the scientists had to be right.
If they were right… Hitler was reacting from emotion rather than reason. What was Nazi doctrine but perverted romanticism? If you wanted a thing, that meant it should become yours, and that meant you had the right-even the duty-to go out and take itif anyone had the gall to object, you ran roughshod over him. Your will was all that mattered.
But if a man a meter and a half tall who weighed fifty kilos wanted something that belonged to a man two meters tall who weighed a hundred kilos and tried to take it, he’d end up with a bloody nose and broken teeth, no matter how strong his will was. The Hitlerites didn’t see that, though their assault on the USSR should have taught it to them.
“Note, Comrade Fleetlord,” Molotov said, “that the German foreign minister’s withdrawal does not imply the rest of us refuse to work out our remaining differences with you.” Yakov Donskoi turned his words into English; Uotat translated the interpreter’s comments into the language of the Lizards.
With a little luck, the aliens would smash the Hitlerites into the ground and save the USSR the trouble.
“Jager!” Otto Skorzeny shouted. “Get your scrawny arse over here. We’ve got something we need to talk about”
“You mean something besides your having the manners of a bear with a toothache?” Jager retorted. He didn’t get up. He was busy darning a sock, and it was hard work, because he had to hold it farther away from his face than he was used to. These past couple of years, his sight had begun to lengthen. You fell apart even if you didn’t get shot. It just happened.
“Excuse me, your magnificent Coloneldom, sir, my lord von Jager,” Skorzeny said, loading his voice with sugar syrup, “would you be so generous and gracious as to honor your most humble and obedient servant with the merest moment of your ever so precious time?”
Grunting, Jager got to his feet “All the same to you, Skorzeny, I like ‘Get your scrawny arse over here’ better.”
The SSStandartenfuhrer chuckled. “Figured you would. Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”
That meant Skorzeny had news he didn’t feel like letting anyone else hear. And that, presumably, meant all hell was going to break loose somewhere, most likely somewhere right around here. Almost plaintively, Jager said, “I was enjoying the cease-fire.”
“Life’s tough,” Skorzeny said, “and it’s our job to make it tougher-for the Lizards. Your regiment’s still the thin end of the wedge, right? How soon can you be ready to hit our scaly chums a good one right in the snout?”
“We’ve got about half our Panthers back at corps repair center for retrofitting,” Jager answered. “Fuel lines, new cupolas for the turrets, fuel pump gaskets made the right way, that kind of thing. We took advantage of the cease-fire to do one lot of them, and now that it’s holding, we’re doing the other. Nobody told me-nobody told anybody-it was breaking down.”
“I’m telling you,” the SS man said. “How long till you’re up to strength again? You need those Panthers, don’t you?”
“Just a bit, yes,” Jager said with what he thought was commendable understatement. “They should all be back here in ten days-a week. If somebody with clout goes and leans on the corps repair crews.”
Skorzeny bit his lip.“Donnerwetter! If I lean on them hard, you think they’d have your panzers up here at the front inside five days? That’s my outer limit, and I haven’t got any discretion about it. If they aren’t here by then, old chum, you just have to go without ’em.”
“Go where?” Jager demanded. “Why are you giving me orders? And not my division commander, I mean?”