"You're supposed to be a hot translator, aren't you? You'll run questions and answers back and forth between me and Vesstil. Between what we already know and what he can tell us-it'll be a while before we get s.p.a.ceships of our own, I expect, but even big rockets like the ones the Germans have would help us a lot. Hitting the Lizards from a couple of hundred miles away is a lot better than going at 'em face-to-face."

"That's true, sir." Sam wondered how big a rocket would have to be to carry an atomic bomb. He didn't ask. Vesstil had no business hearing of such things, and he didn't know whether G.o.ddard was cleared for them, either.

He laughed a little. The United States didn't have a big rocket, and it didn't have atomic bombs, either-and here he was, putting the two together. From everything he'd seen of the Lizards, they didn't make leaps of imagination like that-which was why human beings still had a chance to win this war.

.14.

Nieh Ho-T'ing glowered at Liu Han. "You are the most exasperating woman in the history of the world," he snarled.

Liu Han smiled back across the table at the dingy Peking rooming house. She sipped tea, nibbled at a rice cake, and said nothing. She'd been saying nothing ever since she'd let him know she had a good idea weeks before. He still had no notion what her idea was. She'd wanted to keep more control over it than he was willing to give: basically, she wanted to become one of the leaders in the Communists' Peking underground. Nieh hadn't been willing to pay that kind of price.

Beside him, Hsia Shou-Tao laughed raucously. "You sound like you're in love with her, for heaven's sake," he said. Nieh glowered at him, too. Hsia thought of everything in terms of his crotch, not economics. But he also thought he knew how to get what he wanted. "If she won't open up, we can always liquidate her. No one would miss her, that's certain."

Nieh glanced over to Liu Han to see if the threat had put her in fear. He didn't think it had, and he was expert in gauging such things. She said, "If you kill me, you will never find out what I have in mind."

"We don't have to kill you," Hsia said, his voice all the more frightening because he sounded so genial. "All we have to do is hurt you for a while."

"Do what you want with me," Liu Han said. "But who will trust you with his ideas if you torture me?"

That made Nieh wince. Mao had written that guerrillas should be like a fish concealed within the school of the people. If they scared the people away from them, they would stand alone and exposed to the wrath of the little scaly devils. Sighing, he made his first retreat: "I will give you what you ask, but only if I think your idea is good enough."

"Then you will tell me you think it is bad, ignore me, and use it anyhow," Liu Han said.

"I could do that now: make all the promises in the world and then break them," Nieh Ho-T'ing reminded her. "If you want your idea used against the little devils, sooner or later you will have to tell me what it is. And if you want your reward, you will have to trust a promise that you will get it."

Liu Han looked thoughtful when he was through. But then she said, "Any time anyone has promised me anything-men and little scaly devils both-it's turned out to be a lie. Why should you be any different?"

"Because we are comrades in a fight against the same enemy," Nieh answered. "If you show me a way to hurt the scaly devils, you will will be rewarded. The People's Liberation Army does not exploit the women who fight side by side with their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers." He kicked Hsia Shou-Tao under the table. He had spoken sound doctrine, and wished Hsia were better at living up to it. be rewarded. The People's Liberation Army does not exploit the women who fight side by side with their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers." He kicked Hsia Shou-Tao under the table. He had spoken sound doctrine, and wished Hsia were better at living up to it.

Hsia, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut. And, after keeping silent so long, Liu Han at last wavered. "I wish I could do this on my own," she muttered. "Then I wouldn't have to believe another pack of lies. But if I want to hurt the little devils-and I do-I need help. So-"

She talked for some time. The longer Nieh Ho-T'ing listened to her low-voiced description of what she had in mind, the more impressed he got. Hsia Shou-Tao said "A beast show!" in disparaging tones, but Nieh kicked him again. He wanted to hear every word of this.

When Liu Han finished, he dipped his head to her and said, "I think you may deserve everything you have been saying you wanted for so long. If it works as it should, this will let us get in among the scaly devils: to spy certainly, and maybe, as you say, to kill."

"That is what I want," Liu Han said. "I want the little devils to know I did it to them, too. They will know my name. It is in their records, and the machines that think for them will find it. They stole my child, my tiny daughter. Maybe I can force them to give her back."

Nieh Ho-T'ing sent her a severe look. "And if they returned the child to you, you would abandon the campaign against the scaly imperialist aggressors?" he demanded. If she said yes to that, he would throw her out of the rooming house and think hard about having her liquidated. The dialectic of the cla.s.s struggle was more important than merely personal concerns.

But Liu Han shook her head. "Nothing would make me stop fighting the little scaly devils. I owe them too much for that. You Communists seem to be doing more to fight them than anyone except maybe the j.a.panese, and I hate the eastern devils, too. So I will work with you whether or not I have my child-but I want her back."

"Good enough," Nieh said, relaxing. Injuries suffered at the hands of oppressors often led folk to the People's Liberation Army. Once they learned the true doctrines the Communist Party espoused, they were likely to remain loyal members all their lives, and to be eager to help others escape from similar maltreatment.

Liu Han said, "Our best chance to smuggle weapons and explosives in amongst the little scaly devils, I think, is to use the men who display dung beetles and mice. The scaly devils, I have seen, are squeamish about these little creatures. They will not search the containers that carry them as thoroughly as they would if something else were inside."

"That is a very good thought," Nieh said.

"That is a very very good thought," Hsia Shou-Tao echoed. He looked at Liu Han as if he'd never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn't, in any real sense of the word. He certainly hadn't taken her seriously until this moment. good thought," Hsia Shou-Tao echoed. He looked at Liu Han as if he'd never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn't, in any real sense of the word. He certainly hadn't taken her seriously until this moment.

"The idea has one weakness," Nieh Ho-T'ing said. "If the scaly devils search only by hand, we shall defeat them, and yours is a good way to do it. But if they use the machines that see into things, we shall be discovered."

"That is true of any scheme for bringing weapons in among the little devils," Liu Han said. Nieh Ho-T'ing nodded; she was right.

"Two weaknesses," Hsia said. "The other is that those who will use the guns and grenades probably will not come out alive. It is hard to find men willing to die like that. Every time you use them up, too, finding more like them gets harder."

"Do not tell the men giving the shows what we're loading in among their creatures," Liu Han said.

Nieh and Hsia both laughed. "You're ruthless enough, that's plain," Nieh said. "But bombs and grenades aren't light and are bulky. They would know the containers for their beetles or mice had been altered."

"They would not know why, though," Liu Han answered. "If the explosives were in a metal case painted black, we could say it was one of the scaly devils' machines for making the films that they show on their little cinema screens. The animal-show men will be honored to believe that, and they probably will not ask the little devils about it."

Nieh and Hsia Shou-Tao looked at each other. "This woman has the spirit of a people's commissar in her," Nieh Ho-T'ing said admiringly.

"Maybe she does, maybe she does," Hsia said. He leered at Liu Han across the table. "She has other a.s.sets, too."

Nieh wished Hsia would stop evaluating women princ.i.p.ally on how beddable they were. He, too, had noticed that Liu Han was far from bad-looking, but that did not mean he thought she was beddable. He had the idea that any man who tried to force his way through her Jade Gate was likely to end up a eunuch like one of those who had served at the court of the old, corrupt Ch'ing emperors. If Hsia wasn't smart enough to realize as much, he might have to find out the hard way.

"You have the idea now-I've given it to you," Liu Han said, sounding unsure whether or not that had been wise. "Now to use it."

"Now to use it," Nieh Ho-T'ing agreed. "First we need to find the animal-show men we will need, and to get them to cooperate with us. Then we have to spread this idea far and wide throughout China. We need to learn of some great holiday the little scaly devils will be celebrating, and to attack them in many places at the same time. Each time we come up with a way to get inside their quarters, we can only use it once. We want to wring the most advantage we can from this."

"Yes," Liu Han said. "That would be a good beginning to my revenge."

Nieh sipped tea as he studied her. A good beginning to her revenge? Most people would have been satisfied with that as the whole of it. He nodded thoughtfully. The demands she'd made of him before she would reveal her idea seemed more and more reasonable. Even if she was a woman, she had a soldier's ruthless spirit.

He lifted the handleless cup in salute to her. "To the people's revolution and to liberation from all oppression!" he said loudly. She smiled at him and drank to the toast.

A new idea slid through his mind: if a woman was already a revolutionary, did that not give wanting her a sound ideological basis? It was, he told himself, purely a theoretical question. Had he not already told himself Liu Han was not beddable? He glanced her way again. It was a pity...

The freighter drew close to New York City. Vyacheslav Molotov stared at the great towers with loathing and envy he concealed behind his usual expressionless facade. As he had when he visited Hitler in Berlin, he felt he was entering a citadel of the enemy of everything he and the Soviet Union stood for. Molotov on Wall Street! If that wasn't an acting-out of the struggle inherent in the historical dialectic, he didn't know what was.

And yet, just as fascist Germany and the Soviet Union had found common cause a few years before, so now the Soviet Union and the United States, already allies against Hitlerism, joined forces against a worse invader. When you looked at life without the dialectic to give it perspective, it could be very strange.

Pointing ahead to the arrogant, decadent skyline, Molotov's interpreter said, "The Americans have taken their share of damage in this war, Comrade Foreign Commissar."

"So they have," Molotov said. Most of the gla.s.s in the windows of the tall, thrusting skysc.r.a.pers had been shattered. Black scorchmarks running up the sides of the buildings showed where fires had blazed out of control. A couple leaned drunkenly to one side, as if unlikely to stand much longer. Molotov surveyed the scene with a cold eye, then added, "Only fit that they be reminded they are in a war. Against the Germans, they did the building and we did the dying."

A tugboat came puffing out to greet the freighter. A man with a megaphone stood at the bow and bellowed something in English. The interpreter translated: "He says, 'Ahoy, Lithuanian ship! You're a long way from home.' This, I believe, is intended as a joke."

"Heh, heh," Molotov said, just like that. He'd forgotten his vessel still flew the extinct gold, green, and red banner of what was now, and rightfully, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (he also managed to forget that the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic had been under n.a.z.i occupation till the Lizards came, and still showed no delight at the prospect of bowing to the authority of Moscow).

"How shall I reply?" the interpreter asked.

Molotov was tempted to send the American greetings in the name of the Lithuanian Congress of People's Deputies, but refrained. "Tell him I greet him in the name of the Soviet people and of General Secretary Stalin."

More shouts in English. The interpreter said, "This time he replies correctly. He says we are to let him a.s.sist us in berthing."

"Then we shall do so," Molotov answered. "Take this up with the ship's officers, not with me. I had thought they might bring proper diplomatic personnel to meet with us here, but if this is not the case, we shall proceed into New York." He spoke as if he were about to enter some jungle filled with wild and savage tribesmen. That was how he felt: to him, capitalists were no more than predatory wild beasts, and New York their princ.i.p.al lair.

Following the lead of the tug, the freighter sailed into the East River. The battered ship left behind the Statue of Liberty, standing tall and proud on Bedloe's Island. Molotov had nothing in principle against the ideals the statue epitomized, but thought the United States, with its exploitation of Negroes by whites, of poor by rich, of proletarians by capitalists (which was not quite the same thing), did a poor job of living up to them.

The freighter tied up at Pier 11, quite near the sh.o.r.e. The interpreter pointed to a sign in English. "Comrade Foreign Commissar, do you know what there is between this and Pier 12, the next one over?" he said, his voice quivering with indignation. "There is what is called the Munic.i.p.al Skyport, where the rich capitalists can land their private seaplanes conveniently close to their Wall Street offices."

"That any man should be rich enough to own his own seaplane-" Molotov shook his head. How many men went hungry so a handful could afford these useless luxuries?

But he had not come here to mock the capitalists, he had come to deal with them. He'd dealt with the n.a.z.is; he could stand this. He looked around at the bustling activity on the docks. Even invaded, America remained formidably productive and economically strong. He even saw some petrol-powered lorries hauling goods away once they'd been taken off their ships. Back in the USSR, every drop of petrol and diesel fuel went directly to the war effort, to tanks and airplanes. Donkeys and horses and strong backs hauled goods from one place to another.

Waiting on the pier was, not a taxicab as he'd half expected, but a horse-drawn buggy of American design. Molotov was not insulted at failing to rate a motorcar of his own. The Lizards had a habit of strafing automobiles, on the a.s.sumption that whoever was in them was liable to be important. As a result, people who were genuinely important traveled for the most part in horse-drawn conveyances, like everyone else.

When Molotov and his interpreter climbed aboard the carriage, the driver surprised him by greeting him in good Russian: "Dobry den, Gospodin Molotov." "Dobry den, Gospodin Molotov."

"Good day to you as well, but I am Tovarishch Tovarishch Molotov, if you please," the foreign commissar answered. Molotov, if you please," the foreign commissar answered. Gospodin Gospodin was what you would have called an aristocrat before the Revolution. The simple was what you would have called an aristocrat before the Revolution. The simple comrade comrade showed proper egalitarianism. showed proper egalitarianism.

"However you like," the driver said, equably enough. Molotov did not think him a native Russian-speaker; he had a trace of the sibilant accent English gave to Russian. Perhaps his parents had come to the United States and he'd learned his ancestral language from them-or he could have been an American who'd studied Russian thoroughly, as Molotov's interpreter had studied English.

The interpreter leaned forward in his seat as the carriage began rolling. He looked petulant. Molotov understood that: if the interpreter was not useful, he would soon be performing a function where he was, most likely a function that involved carrying a rifle, living on whatever he could scrounge, and trying to survive against superior Lizard firepower.

"You are going to the Subtreasury Building, Comrade Foreign Commissar," the driver said. "Our first president, George Washington, took his oath of office in front of the old city hall that used to stand there. Inside, in a gla.s.s case, is the very stone he stood on."

"How interesting," Molotov lied.

"Comrade Foreign Commissar," the interpreter said hoa.r.s.ely, pointing to a sign on a corner, "we are traveling down Wall Street at this very moment." He looked around in alarm, as if he expected an a.s.sault from a regiment of swag-bellied plutocrats in toppers, cutaways, and spats, each one sporting a diamond ring bigger than the last and puffing a fat cigar.

Molotov looked around, too. Some of the people on the fabled street did wear business suits, but more were in workmen's clothes or uniforms. They didn't look quite so shabby as men on the street in war-ravaged Moscow, but they didn't seem wildly wealthy, or even prosperous, either.

In a helpful tone of voice, the driver said, "The Subtreasury Building is right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange." Had Molotov's interpreter had an apotropaic amulet, he would have taken it out and brandished it at the mention of that tool of the Soviets' ideological devil.

The Subtreasury Building was a dignified structure in the Greek Revival style of the previous century. To Molotov, for whom socialist realism was as much an article of faith as the doctrine of the Incarnation was to Pope Pius XII, having a building pretend to be something it wasn't summed up the dishonesty of the capitalist system. That the skysc.r.a.pers along Wall Street dwarfed the Subtreasury Building told him everything he needed to know about where economic power in the United States really lay.

A bronze statue of a man in outmoded clothing stood on the steps. As Molotov went past it, his interpreter said, "There is George Washington, the first president of the United States."

Molotov dismissed the first president in half a dozen words: "He is dressed like an aristocrat." The offhand condemnation made the man who had driven him to the Subtreasury Building mutter something under his breath. Behind the impa.s.sive mask Molotov always wore, he chuckled to himself.

Inside, a smiling flunky led him and the interpreter to a large, airy, well-lit chamber. The men waiting behind the tables there rose politely as he came in. "Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar," Cordell Hull said. "Excellent to see you again."

"I am pleased to have this opportunity to consult with my allies in the joint struggle against the imperialist aggressors from the stars," Molotov answered, keeping any dealing on a personal level to a minimum. "It is also good to have representatives of Great Britain here, after the heroic resistance her people have shown against the aliens' invading forces."

"Do you know Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Halifax?" the American Secretary of State asked.

"I had the honor of meeting Lord Beaverbrook in Moscow two years ago, when he headed the Anglo-American mission on sending aid to the Soviet Union after the unprovoked and perfidious fascist attack," Molotov said, nodding to the present British Minister of Supply.

"Good to see you again, Molotov," Lord Beaverbrook said, sticking out his hand. He was a tall, ruddy, balding man in his mid-sixties, with a shrewd, blunt-featured face and an air of energy that would have done credit to someone half his age.

"You will introduce me to Lord Halifax?" Molotov said. "We have never met in the flesh."

What he did know about Halifax, he did not fancy. The British amba.s.sador to the United States had been Foreign Secretary under Neville Chamberlain before war broke out and during most of its first year, till the Chamberlain government fell in the aftermath of disasters in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. All through his time in office, he'd advocated appeasing the Hitlerite beast by tossing one country after another into its ravening maw.

Now, though, he nodded civilly to Molotov and extended his right hand. The left sleeve of his coat hung limp; his left arm had been withered from birth, and lacked a hand. "A pleasure to meet you at last," he murmured.

"Indeed," Molotov said, looking up at him. He was taller and balder than Beaverbrook-he had to be within a few centimeters of two meters tall. Most men, though, were taller than Molotov; he refused to let that, or anything else, intimidate him. "Now that we have dealt with the formalities, shall we move on to the business at hand?"

"Yes, yes, by all means." With his own hands, Cordell Hull pulled out a chair for Molotov, and then another for his interpreter. Molotov felt faintly scandalized; that was not proper work for a man whose rank matched his own. The American pa.s.sion for showing equality of upper and lower cla.s.ses even-sometimes especially-where that equality did not in truth exist always struck him as hypocritical.

But diplomacy without hypocrisy was almost a contradiction in terms. Molotov said, "Let us review the present state of our alliance and plan our future moves against the common foe."

"Not all such planning is practicable," Lord Beaverbrook put in. "The d.a.m.ned Lizards have plans of their own, as we found out to our sorrow this past summer."

"We were invaded first by the n.a.z.is, then by the Lizards," Molotov said. "We know in great detail what you have experienced."

"Russia being a large state-" Lord Halifax began.

Molotov corrected him with icy precision: "The Soviet Union being a large state-"

"Yes. Quite. Er, the Soviet Union being a large state," Lord Halifax resumed, "you enjoyed the luxury of trading s.p.a.ce for time, which allowed you more strategic options than were available to us."

"Thus your immediate use of poison gas," Molotov said. "Yes. That, like our bomb from explosive metal, does seem to have been something which found the Lizards ill-prepared."

He watched Halifax and Beaverbrook preen, as if they'd been personally responsible for throwing mustard gas at the Lizards. Maybe Beaverbrook actually had had something to do with the decision; he'd been active in weapons development. Molotov reckoned poison gas an altogether mixed blessing. Not long after the English started using it, the Germans also did-a more lethal species, too. And the Germans had rockets to throw their gas farther than they could directly reach. Not for the first time, Molotov was glad the Lizards had landed in Poland. He would have liked their landing in Germany even better.

The n.a.z.is' poison gas also seemed to be on Beaverbrook's mind, for he said, "Technical cooperation among the allies is still not all it might be. We have yet to receive from Berlin-"

"You won't get anything from Berlin, any more than you would from Washington," Cordell Hull said. "Or Tokyo, either, come to that."

"From the Germans, I should say," Lord Beaverbrook replied. "Ahem. We've not received from the Germans the specifics of their new suffocating gas, nor indeed any word from them on their progress toward nuclear weapons for some time."

"We and they were enemies before; our present alliance with them is nothing more than a convenience," Molotov said. "We should not be surprised when it creaks." The Anglo-American-Soviet alliance against the Hitlerites had also been one of convenience, as had the n.a.z.i-Soviet pact before that. You didn't stay wedded to an alliance because it was there; you stayed because it was useful for you. What had Austria said, refusing to help Russia during the Crimean War after the Romanovs rescued the Hapsburg throne? "We shall astonish the world by our ingrat.i.tude"-something like that. If you were in the game, you knew it had slippery rules. The British had some clues along those lines. Molotov wondered about the Americans, though.

Because he still worried about the Germans almost as much as he did about the Lizards, Molotov said, "We have reports that the n.a.z.is will be ready to begin using those bombs next spring." He didn't say he'd heard that himself, straight from Ribbentrop's mouth. The United States and Britain endangered the future of the Soviet Union hardly less than the n.a.z.is.

"We can match that," Cordell Hull said placidly. "We may even beat it."

That was more than Molotov had heard from Ribbentrop. He wondered if it was more than Ribbentrop knew. For that matter, he was always amazed when Ribbentrop knew anything. "If that is so, the war against the Lizards will take on an entirely different tone," he observed.

"So it will," Hull said. "You Russians should have more of these weapons coming up soon, too, shouldn't you?"

"So we should." Molotov let it go at that. Unfortunately, just because the Soviet Union should have had more explosive-metal bombs coming into production didn't mean it would would have them. He wondered how long the physicists would have before Stalin started liquidating them out of frustration. The Great Stalin's virtues were multifarious-he would tell you as much himself. Patience, however, was not among them. have them. He wondered how long the physicists would have before Stalin started liquidating them out of frustration. The Great Stalin's virtues were multifarious-he would tell you as much himself. Patience, however, was not among them.