He was drinking a stein of beer in the tavern where he’d overheard the Polish nationalists plotting to hijack the bomb when Yitzkhak found him. Yitzkhak looked like a clerk: he was short and slight and had a pinched-up face that didn’t approve of anything. Like Mordechai, he was from Warsaw. He’d fought like a madman against the Nazis, and later against the Lizards.
When he spoke, he sounded faintly accusing: “On the telephone, you said you weren’t coming up.”
“I changed my mind-is this against the law?” Anielewicz returned. Even here, they were careful of what they said and how they said it.
“Well, you can’t see your sheep,” Yitzkhak said petulantly. “The mob here, they all got sold, and I don’t know where the devil they’ve gone now. I don’t much care, either, if you want to know the truth.”
The bomb had gone, then. Mordechai let out a sigh of relief and ordered another mug of beer. The hubbub the Jewish fighters had raised in and around Glowno had let Yitzkhak and his friends get the weapon out of town with no one the wiser. Anielewicz had counted on that-and had counted on the fighters to bail Yitzkhak and his friends out of trouble if they got into any.
Aloud, he said, “Well, let me buy you a shot for all the trouble you’ve gone through on account of those damn sheep.”
“A shot doesn’t begin to do it,” Yitzkhak said, sour still, but that didn’t mean he refused the vodka. Anielewicz bought himself another beer, too. All things considered, he was of the opinion he’d earned it.
After he’d drunk it, he went out to see if anyone had stolen his bicycle. Unlike the bomb, it was still there. As he started to climb aboard it for the ride back to Lodz, he saw a couple of Lizards coming along the street. Judging what they were thinking wasn’t easy, but to him they looked horrified at seeing so many humans swaggering around with guns.
That-and the steins of beer he’d drunk-made him smile. If they weren’t used to the idea that people weren’t their slaves by now, too bad. With more than a little bravado, he waved to them, calling, “I greet you, males of the Race.”
“I greet you,” one of the Lizards said… cautiously. His eye turrets swung this way and that. “What is the purpose of this, ah, gathering?”
Camouflage, Mordechai thought. Aloud, he said, “To make sure we Jews can strongly oppose anyone who tries to trouble us: Germans, Russians, Poles-or anyone else.” By that last, he could only have meant the Race.
“They are barbarians,” one of the Lizards said to the other. Anielewicz didn’t think he was supposed to hear, but he did.
“Barbarians, truth,” the other Lizard agreed, “but if these are the Jews, they are the barbarians who are useful to us.”
“Ah,” the first Lizard said. Ah, Mordechai thought. Hearing that from the Lizard was no great surprise. He knew the Race found the Jews useful. Jews found the Lizards useful, too. And so the world goes round. He waved to the males again, then started pedaling south and west, back toward Lodz. His legs hardly pained him at all, and, once he’d got out of town, he could go quite fast. And so the wheels go round. He bent his back to the work.
Nesseref felt like hissing at her Tosevite workmen in the tones of an alarm signal. “Why have you not poured the concrete, as we discussed the other day?” she demanded indignantly.
The Big Ugly foremale peered down at her from his preposterous height. He did not speak the language of the Race with any great grammatical precision, but he made himself understood: “Rain too hard,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “Ground all muddily. Pour now, not set good. Pour now, not hardly set at all.” He placed hands on his hips. The shuttlecraft pilot had never seen the gesture before, but it had to be one of defiance.
And the Big Ugly-Casimir, his name was-had a point, or she supposed he did. She’d never seen it rain so hard back on Home as it had rained here near Glowno these past couple of days. Males from the conquest fleet, the ones who didn’t keep trying to ply her with ginger, told her such things weren’t rare on this part of Tosev 3, and were even more common elsewhere.
“Very well, Casimir,” she said, yielding ground. “How long do you think it will be before we can pour the concrete for the shuttlecraft field?”
“Don’t know.” Where the Big Ugly’s hands-on-hips gesture had been alien, his shrug could almost have come from a male of the Race. “Ground dry in four, five, six days-if no more rain before then.” He shrugged again. “Don’t know nothing about rain then now. Nobody don’t know nothing about rain then now.”
That wasn’t strictly true-the Race’s meteorologists were better at forecasting Tosev 3’s weather than they had been when the conquest fleet arrived. Then, from the reports Nesseref had read, they’d wanted nothing more than to crawl back into their eggshells and hide. Their models had not been built for this world’s extremes of climate. They had improved, but remained a long way from perfect.
Casimir said, “Taste some ginger, Shuttlecraft Pilot. You feel better then.” He used another emphatic cough.
“No,” Nesseref said with an emphatic cough of her own. “Do not suggest that to me again, or this crew will have a new foremale the next instant.”
She glared at the Big Ugly. He was taller and bulkier, but she was fiercer. He turned away, mumbling, “It shall be done, superior female.” The pat phrase, unlike most of his speech, he brought out correctly.
“It had better be done,” Nesseref snapped.
She still craved ginger, craved the way it made her feel, even craved the way it brought her into her season. The more she craved, the more strongly she resisted the craving. She was, and was determined to remain, her own person, bending her will to those of others only when she had to and to a Tosevite herb not at all, not if she could help it. No matter how good it made her feel, ginger turned her into an animal. Worse, it turned the males around her into animals, too.
When she strode off, her feet squelched in the offending mud. She hissed again, wishing someone more familiar than she with conditions on this planet had got the job of laying out the shuttlecraft port.
“At least I found some land we could use,” she muttered. It was up to Bunim or his superiors to compensate the Big Uglies who had formerly owned the land. By all the signs, the Tosevites were holding the Race for ransom, or thought they were. But the Race had more resources than these peasants thought, and paying them what they thought they deserved was a tolerable expense.
The idea of having to pay them still offended Nesseref. This wasn’t one of the independent not-empires whose existence had once astonished her; the Race really had conquered this stretch of Tosev 3. But the local administrators seemed to be doing their best to deny they’d accomplished any such thing. No matter how often Bunim explained it, it still seemed wrong.
Nesseref glanced north and west toward Glowno, then south and east in the direction of Jezow, the other nearby Tosevite town. On the map, in fact, Jezow was closer to the site she’d chosen than was Glowno. Her eye turrets kept twisting back toward the latter town, though. The Big Ugly called Anielewicz had said he had an explosive-metal bomb there. She still didn’t know whether he’d been telling the truth. She hoped she-and the shuttlecraft port that would eventually come into being here despite the delays the ghastly weather caused-would never have to find out.
She swung her eye turrets in the direction of the Big Uglies who labored for her. Anielewicz had joked-she hoped he’d joked-about moving the bomb he might or might not have so that it could destroy her shuttlecraft port. Were any of these Tosevites his spies? She could hardly come out and ask them.