She was sauteeing liver and onions on the hot plate when she realized she ought to be doing more to help get Pierre out of the Lizards’ jail. He’d pulled wires for her, after all. But she didn’t have any wires to pull, not really. Rance Auerbach might, but he was already pulling them on her behalf. How could she ask him to do more? The answer, unfortunately, was plain: she couldn’t.
If she bribed him with her body, would he help her with Pierre? Angrily, she flipped the liver over with a spatula and slammed it down into the pan. She never would have started thinking like that if it hadn’t been for Dieter Kuhn. And she never would have had to worry about Kuhn if she hadn’t been Pierre’s sister. That struck her as a good reason to let her brother stay right where he was.
A couple of evenings later, she was writing yet another letter of application-who could guess whether or not Felless would come through? — when someone knocked on the door. She didn’t hesitate about answering it, as she would have before the Nazis had to leave France. The only thing she worried about was robbers, and robbers, she reasoned, had to know there were more lucrative targets than an upper-floor room in a cheap boardinghouse.
When she opened the door, she stared in astonishment. Her brother nodded to her. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want to come in?” Pierre Dutourd asked.
“Come in,” Monique said automatically. As automatically, she shut the door behind him. Then, a little at a time, her wits started to work. She asked the first question that popped into them: “What are you doing here?”
“I came to say thank you,” Pierre answered, as seriously as she’d ever heard him speak. “I’m not going to ask you what you had to do to get Dieter Kuhn to help me get out of that damned cell. I probably don’t want to know. You probably don’t want to tell me. I’m sure it wasn’t anything you wanted to do-I know what Kuhn is. But you did it anyway, even though you’ve got to think I’m more a nuisance than a brother. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.” His nod was almost a bow.
And now Monique’s stare was one of complete bewilderment. “But I didn’t do anything,” she blurted. “He came around here the other day-sniffing after me, nothing to do with you-and I told him to go to hell.”
“He has connections, even now,” Pierre said. “He used them. I thought it was on account of you. If I’m wrong…” He shrugged, his face a frozen mask now. “If I’m wrong, I won’t trouble you any more. That would probably suit you best anyhow. Au revoir.” Before Monique could find anything to say, he went out the door. He didn’t even bother slamming it after him.
Monique sank into one of the two ratty chairs in the room. She couldn’t believe Dieter Kuhn had done that to gain her favor. He had to have some motive of his own, and what it might be seemed pretty obvious. The more trouble the Lizards had with ginger, the less trouble they would be able to give the Reich. Even so, she wondered if the Sturmbann fuhrer would come around seeking the hero’s reward. If he does, she thought, he isn’t going to get it.
But the one who came around, a few days later, was Rance Auerbach. He was waiting outside her dress shop when she left for home. Monique’s heart started to pound. She couldn’t help it. “Well?” she demanded.
He grinned. He knew she was impatient. He wasn’t angry, either. “How does the University of Tours sound?” he asked.
“Tours?” she said. It was in the north, southwest of Paris but still unquestionably the north-more an Atlantic than a Mediterranean town. She’d sent a letter there-she’d sent letters everywhere. She’d got no answer. Now she had one. “They want me?” she whispered.
“They’ll take you,” he answered.
That wasn’t quite the same thing, but it would do. “Thank you!” she said. “Oh, thank you!” She kissed him. If he’d wanted something more, she probably would have gone up to her room with him right that minute. But all he did was grin wider than ever. Dear God in heaven, she thought. I have my life back again. Now what do I do with it?
Atvar was studying the daily news reports when he came upon something of a new and different sort. He called in his adjutant for a look. “Here is something you will not see every day, Pshing,” he said.
“What is it, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked.
“Turn an eye turret this way,” Atvar answered. “Photographs-necessarily, long-distance, highly magnified photographs-of a major meteoric impact on the worthless fourth planet.”
“It looks as if a large explosive-metal bomb had hit there,” Pshing said.
“From what the astronomers say, the impact was a good deal more energetic than that,” Atvar said.
“Tosev’s solar system is an untidy place, especially compared to the one in which Home orbits,” Pshing said. “Imagine if such a rock had struck Tosev 3 instead of the worthless Tosev 4. It would have been most unfortunate, especially in or near a populated area.”
“Such bombardment is a fact of life in this solar system,” Atvar said. “Look at any of the bodies here. The only one without immediately obvious evidence of these impacts is Tosev 3, and that because it is so geologically active.”
“The atmosphere must protect this world to some degree,” Pshing said.
“No doubt. But one that size would have got through,” the fleetlord said. “And, as you remarked, the results would have been unfortunate.”
“Indeed.” Pshing made the affirmative gesture. “And now, Exalted Fleetlord, if you will excuse me…” He went back to his own desk.
After one last look at the new crater on Tosev 4, Atvar went on to other matters his staff thought worthy of his notice. Northern India was facing more and more riots as plants from Home spread through the fields there. That subregion’s climate was ideal for their propagation, and they were cutting into the Big Uglies’ food supplies-which, in that part of Tosev 3, were no better than marginal at the best of times.
It is of course necessary to make Tosev 3 as Homelike as possible, an ecologist wrote. In doing so, however, we may cause as many casualties among the Big Uglies from environmental change as we did in the course of the fighting. This is unfortunate, but appears unavoidable.
Atvar sighed. If the conquest did finally succeed, he feared historians would not look kindly upon him. If he didn’t get a sobriquet like Atvar the Brutal, he would be surprised. But he didn’t know what to do about the Tosevites in India, past suppressing their riots. He couldn’t get rid of the plants from Home now even if he wanted to. They would flourish in that subregion; it was reasonably warm and reasonably dry, and they had no natural enemies there. The local ecosystem would be transformed, and not to the Tosevites’ advantage.
He wondered if he could move some of the Big Uglies from the affected areas to those where Tosevite ecologies remained more or less intact. But no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than certain difficulties became obvious. The Tosevites of northern India might not want to be moved; Big Uglies were reactionary that way. Wherever he moved them, the current inhabitants were all too likely to prove less than welcoming. They might not have excess food, either; Tosevite agriculture was at best imperfectly efficient. And ecological change would come to many more areas of the planet, even if it hadn’t yet.
He sighed again. Some problems simply had no neat, tidy solutions. That would have been an unacceptable notion back on Home. A hundred thousand years of unified imperial history argued that the Race could solve anything. But the Big Uglies and their world presented challenges different from, and worse than, any the Race had known since the days of its ancientest history-and maybe worse than any it had known then, too.
The fleetlord went on to the next item in the daily briefing. It made him hiss in alarm. Superstitious fanatics from the main continental mass had traveled to the lesser continental mass and mounted an attack on the fortress where that maniac of a Khomeini was imprisoned.
“By the Emperor!” Atvar exclaimed, and let out yet another sigh, this one of relief, when he discovered the attack had failed. “Would that not have been a disaster-Khomeini on the loose again!” There would surely have been uprisings throughout the areas were the Muslim superstition predominated… including Cairo itself. Atvar had seen enough such disturbances-too many, in fact.
I commend the males who prevented Khomeini’s escape, he wrote. I also commend the Tosevite constabulary officials who fought side by side with our males. And I particularly commend the individual who thought to incarcerate Khomeini in a region inhabited by Big Uglies of a superstition different from his. That helped to insure the loyalty of local protective officials.
Next on the agenda was a note that, with two spaceships in the belt of minor planets, the American Tosevites were spreading rapidly and were busy at so many sites that the Race’s surveillance probes could not keep track of everything they were doing. Shall we let them continue unobserved, being more or less sure they can find no way to harm us from such a distance? the head of the surveillance effort asked. Or shall we expend the resources to continue keeping an eye turret turned in their direction?