Down to Earth

“Maybe yes, maybe no.” Anielewicz was damned if he’d admit anything. “And that brings me back to what the devil you’re doing here. If Russia’s neutral, why aren’t you back in Moscow twiddling your thumbs?”

“Formally, the Soviet Union is neutral,” David Nussboym repeated. “Informally…”

“Informally, what?” Mordechai demanded. “Do you want to split Poland with the Germans again, the way you did in 1939?”

“That was proposed, I am given to understand,” Nussboym answered. “General Secretary Molotov rejected the proposal out of hand.”

“Was it? Did he?” Mordechai thought about what that was likely to mean. “He’s more afraid of the Race than of the Nazis, then. Fair enough. If I were living in the Kremlin, I would be, too.” He thought a little more. “If Russia gives informal help here, you might even end up on the Lizards’ good side. Nobody ever said Molotov was a fool. Anybody who stayed alive all the way through Stalin’s time couldn’t be a fool.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nussboym said softly. “You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. And if you still believe in God, you can thank Him you don’t.”

Mordechai’s voice went harsh: “All right, then. Tukhus afen tish, Nussboym. What will you do? What won’t you do? How much can we count on you?” Privately, he didn’t intend to count on Nussboym at all. Counting on the USSR, though, was, or at least might be, something else again.

“We will not do anything that makes it look as though the Soviet Union is interfering in Poland,” replied the NKVD man who’d grown up in Lodz. “Short of that… Well, there’s always been a lot of smuggling along the border between White Russia and Poland. We can get you weapons. We can even get you a cadre of Polish-speaking soldiers to train new recruits.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you can,” Anielewicz said. “And you’d train them to be just the finest little Marxist-Leninists anybody could want, wouldn’t you?” He hadn’t used the jargon much since the fighting stopped, but he still remembered it.

“One of these days, the revolution will come to Poland,” Nussboym said. “One of these days, the revolution will come to Home.” He might not believe in God any more, but he still had a strong and vibrant faith.

Arguing with him struck Anielewicz as more trouble than it was worth. Instead, he asked, “How much good is all this likely to do if the Reich hits us with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas?”

“They won’t kill everyone.” Nussboym spoke with a peculiar cold-blooded confidence. German generals doubtless sounded much the same way. “Soldiers will have to come into Poland and seize the land. When they do, the survivors from among your forces can make life difficult for them.”

“You’re leaving the Lizards out of your calculations,” Anielewicz said. “Whatever else they do, they won’t sit quietly.”

“I know that,” Nussboym said. “My assumption is that they will give the Reich exactly what it deserves. That ought to make the fight in Poland easier, don’t you think? The Nazis won’t be able to support their troops the way they could in 1939.”

Again, cold calculation weighing the probable result of thousands-no, millions-of deaths. Again, that calculation, however horrific, struck Mordechai as reasonable. And wasn’t making reasonable calculations about millions of deaths perhaps the most horrific thing of all?

“The next question, of course, is what happens after the Race finishes destroying the Reich, ” Mordechai said.

“Then the Soviet Union picks up the pieces-provided there are any pieces left to pick up,” Nussboym answered. “The other half of the question is, how much damage can the Nazis do to the Lizards before going down?”

“However much it is, too much of it will be in Poland,” Mordechai predicted gloomily. “So, from my point of view, that leads to a different question: can we do anything to keep the war from starting? You’d better think about that, too, Nussboym, as long as you’re here.”

“I have been thinking about it,” David Nussboym answered. “What I haven’t been able to do is come up with anything to stop the war. And neither, I gather, have you.” He hung up before Mordechai could either curse him or tell him he was right.

Tahiti wasn’t what Rance Auerbach had expected. Oh, the weather was gorgeous: always warm and mild and just a little muggy. And he could walk along the beach under the palm trees and watch the gentle surf roll in off the blue, blue Pacific. That was all terrific, even if he did get a hellacious sunburn the first time he tried it. He’d had to slather zinc-oxide ointment all over his poor medium-rare carcass. As far as setting went, he’d had everything straight.

Papeete, now, where he and Pe

The tricolor flew everywhere in Papeete, the same way the Stars and Stripes did back in the USA on the Fourth of July. But the Stars and Stripes flew out of honest pride and strength. Rance didn’t think that was why the Free French draped their ba

Stick tapping on the sidewalk, Auerbach made his way toward his apartment building. Tahitian girls were all around, some walking like him, some on bicycles, some on the little motorbikes that turned people into more or less guided missiles. A lot of them were very pretty. Even so, Rance’s fantasy life wasn’t what it had been before a series of battered freighters brought him and Pe

One such massive Tahitian, wearing nothing but a pair of dungarees and a gun belt with a pistol on his right hip, loomed up in front of Auerbach as he walked into his building. When the fellow gri

“Not too bad, Jean-Claude,” Auerbach answered-about as much as he’d ever say these days. “You take care of that leaky toilet in our bathroom yet?”

“I do it soon,” the handyman promised. “Very, very soon.” He’d been saying that ever since Rance and Pe

A fan buzzed inside the apartment. Pe

“Doesn’t look likely,” Rance said. “Maybe the son of a bitch’ll do it if we pay him off. If we don’t, you can forget about it.”

“It’ll just have to stay leaky, then.” Pe

“Comes to something a little over forty thousand bucks,” Rance said. “That’s a pretty fair piece of change.”

But Pe