Von Ribbentrop turned to glare at Molotov, who looked back stonily. The two of them might have been allied against the Lizards, but were not and would never be friends.
“Perhaps,” Shigenori Togo said, “this situation being so irregular, both human states might agree to allow the Race to continue to possess some territory between them, serving as a buffer and aiding in the establishment and maintenance of peace all over our world.”
“Subject to negotiation of the precise territory to be retained, this may in principle be acceptable to the Soviet Union,” Molotov said. Given the Germans’ prowess not merely with explosive-metal bombs but also with nerve gas and long-range guided rockets, Stalin wanted a buffer between the Soviet border and fascist Germany. “Since the Race is already in Poland-”
“No!” von Ribbentrop interrupted angrily. “This is not acceptable to theReich. We insist on a complete withdrawal, and we will go back to war before we accept anything less. So theFuhrer has declared.”
“TheFuhrer has declared a great many things,” Anthony Eden said with relish. “ ‘The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe,’ for instance. That a declaration is made does not necessarily test its veracity.”
“When theFuhrer promises war, he delivers,” von Ribbentrop replied, a better comeback than Molotov had looked for from him.
George Marshall coughed, then said, “If we are throwing quotations around, gentlemen, let me give you one from Ben Franklin that fits the present circumstances: ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ ”
To Molotov, Yakov Donskoi murmured the translation, then added, “The pun in English I cannot reproduce in Russian.”
“Never mind the pun,” Molotov answered. “Tell them for me that Franklin is right, and that Marshall is right as well. If we are to be a popular front against the Lizards, a popular front we must be which removes the pleasure of sniping at one another.” He waited till Donskoi had rendered that into English, then went on, for the interpreter’s ears alone, “If I am to be deprived of the pleasure of telling von Ribbentrop what I think of him, I want no one else to enjoy it-but you need not translate that”
“Yes, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the interpreter said dutifully. Then he stared at the foreign commissar. Had Molotov made a joke? His face denied it. But then, Molotov’s face always denied everything.
Ussmak lifted the axe, swung it, and felt the jar as the blade bit into the tree trunk. Hissing with effort, he pulled it free, then swung again. At this rate, felling the tree would take about forever, and he would end up starving for no better reason than that he could not satisfy the quotas the Big Uglies of the SSSR insisted on setting for males of the Race.
Those quotas were the same ones they set for their own kind. Before this ignominious captivity, when Ussmak had thought of the Big Uglies, theugly part was uppermost in his mind. Now he realized how much thebig mattered. All the tools the guards gave him and his fellow males were designed for their kind, not his. They were large and heavy and clumsy in his hands. The males of the SSSR did not care. Unending toil on not enough food was making prisoners die off one after another. The guards did not care about that, either.
A brief moment’s fury made Ussmak take a savage hack at the tree. “We should have kept on refusing to work and made them kill us that way,” he said. “They mean for us to die anyhow.”
“Truth,” said another male nearby. “You were our headmale. Why did you give in to the Russkis? If we had hung together, we might have got them to do what we wanted. More food for less work sounds good to me.” Like Ussmak, he had lost so much flesh, his skin hung loose on his bones.
“I feared for our spirits,” Ussmak said. “I was a fool. Our spirits will be lost here soon enough no matter what we do.”
The other male paused a moment in his own work-and a guard raised a submachine gun and growled a warning at him. The guards didn’t bother learning the language of the Race-they expected you to understand them, and woe betide you if you didn’t The male picked up his axe again. As he swung it, he said, “We could try another work stoppage.”
“We could, yes,” Ussmak said, but his voice sounded hollow even to himself. The males of Barracks Three had tried once and failed. They would never come together as a group enough to try again. Ussmak was morbidly certain of it.
Thiswas what he had bought for mutiny against his superiors. No matter how addled he had thought them, even their worst was a hundred, a thousand, a million times better than the superiors for whom he now toiled. Had he known then what he knew now-His mouth dropped open in a bitter laugh. That was what old males always told young ones just embarking on their lives. Ussmak wasn’t old, not even counting the time he’d spent in cold sleep traveling to Tosev 3. But he had a hard-won store of bitter knowledge acquired too late.
“Work!” the guard snapped in his own language. He didn’t add an emphatic cough; it was as if he’d only made a suggestion. Ignoring that suggestion, though, might cost you your life.
Ussmak hammered away at the tree trunk Chips flew, but the tree refused to fall. If he didn’t chop it down, they were liable to leave him out here all day. The star Tosev stayed in the sky almost all the time here at this season of the Tosevite year, but still could not warm the air much past cool.
He hit two more solid strokes. The tree tottered, then toppled with a crash. Ussmak felt like cheering. If the males quickly sawed the trunk into the sections the guards required, they might yet gain-almost-enough to eat.
Emboldened, he used his halting Russki to ask the guard, “Cease-fire truth is?” The rumor had reached the camp with a fresh batch of Big Ugly prisoners. Maybe the guard would feel well enough inclined to him for having cut down the tree to give him a straight answer.
And so it proved: the Big Ugly said,“Da.” He took some crumbled leaves from a pouch he wore on his belt, rolled them in apiece of paper, lighted one end, and sucked in smoke at the other. The practice struck Ussmak as corrosive to the lung. It couldn’t possibly have been so pleasant, so enjoyable, as, say, tasting ginger.
“We go free?” Ussmak asked. The Tosevite prisoners said that could happen as part of a cease-fire. They knew far more about such things than Ussmak did. All he could do was hope.
“Chto?”the guard said: “What? You gofree?” He paused to suck more smoke and to blow it out in a harsh white cloud. Then he paused again, this time to make the barking noises Big Uglies used for laughter. “Free? You?Gavno!” Ussmak knew that meant some sort of bodily waste, but not how it applied to his question. The guard proceeded to make it perfectly, brutally, clear: “You go free?Nyet! Never!” He laughed louder, the Tosevite equivalent of laughing wider. As if to reject the very idea, he leveled his submachine gun at Ussmak. “Now work!”
Ussmak worked. When at last the guards suffered the males of the Race to return to their barracks, he trudged back with dragging stride: half exhaustion, half despair. He knew that was dangerous. He’d already seen males who’d lost hope give up and die in short order. But knowing something was dangerous was different from being able to keep from doing it.
They had made their work norm for the day. The ration of bread and salted sea creature the Big Uglies doled out was not enough to keep them going through another day of grinding toil, but it was what they got.
Ussmak toppled into his hard, comfortless bunk as soon as he had eaten. Sleep dropped over him like a thick, smothering black curtain. He knew he would not be fully recovered when the males were routed out come morning. Tomorrow would be just the same as today had been, maybe a little worse, not likely to be any better.