She saw him and the officer’s cap he was wearing, climbed down out of the biplane, and walked up to him. Saluting, she said, “Comrade, I am Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, reporting to Pskov as ordered with the German sergeant Georg Schultz, a tank gunner and highly capable mechanic.”
Fumblingly, Bagnall explained he wasn’t really a Red Army officer, and who he really was. Without much hope, he added,“Vuy gavoritye po-angliski?”
“No, I don’t speak English,” she replied in Russian, but then she did switch languages:“Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich kann Deutsch ein wenig sprechen.”
“I speak a little German also. Perhaps more than a little now,” he answered in the same tongue.
Hearing German, Georg Schultz came up and greeted Bagnall with a stiff-arm salute and a loud,“Heil Hitler.”
Bugger Hitler,was the first thought that came to Bagnall’s mind. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, he and Schultz-and, for that matter, Schultz and Ludmila Gorbunova-would have been at each other’s throats. The Germans made even more uncomfortable allies than the Russians.
Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova looked pained. “He is a dedicated fascist, as you hear. But he has also done very good work for the Red Air Force. With tools in his hand, he is a genius.”
Bagnall studied Schultz. “He must be,” he said slowly. If the Nazi hadn’t been bloody good, the Communists would have got rid of him on general principles. That they hadn’t was probably a measure of their own desperate situation.
Men came running up to drag the biplane as far in among the trees over to one side of the park as its wings would permit. Others draped it with camouflage netting. Before long, it had all but disappeared.
“Thatmay do,” Ludmila said, casting a critical eye its way. She turned back to George Bagnall. “I think I am glad to meet you. You English here in Pskov, you are-” She ran out of German, then tried a couple of Russian words Bagnall didn’t understand. Finally he got the idea she meant something likearbitrators.
“Yes, that is right,” Bagnall answered in German. “When theWehrmacht commander and the partisan brigadiers cannot agree, they bring their arguments for us to decide.”
“What if they don’t like what you decide?” Georg Schultz asked. “Why should they listen to a pack of damned Englishmen?” He stared at Bagnall with calculated insolence.
“Because they were killing each other here before they started listening to us,” Bagnall answered. Schultz looked like one very rugged customer, but Bagnall took a step toward him anyhow. If he wanted a scrap, he could have one. The flight engineer went on, “We do need to stick together against the Lizards, you know.”
“That is part of why the two of us were sent here,” Ludmila Gorbunova said. “We are German and Russian, but we have worked well with each other.”
Schultz leered at her. Bagnall wondered if she meant they were sleeping together. He hoped not. She wasn’t as pretty as Tatiana, but on three minutes’ acquaintance she seemed much nicer. Then she noticed Schultz’s slobbering stare, and answered it with one that would have made any longsuffering English barmaid proud.
It also made the world seem a much more cheerful place to George Bagnall “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you to theKrom, where both sides have their headquarters.” Ludmila Gorbunova smiled at him as she nodded. He felt like bursting into song.
7
“Do you know what one of the troubles with Big Uglies is?” Atvar said to his English-speaking interpreter as they waited for the emissary from the United States to be shown into the conference chamber.
“They have so many, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter answered. “Which in particular are you thinking of today?”
“They areuntidy creatures,” Atvar said with distaste. “Their clothes flap about them like loose skins, the tufts they grow on their heads either flap about, too, or else are held down with enough oil to lubricate a landcruiser engine, and they spew water from their hides instead of panting, as proper people should. They are disgusting.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” the interpreter said gravely.
Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, came on one of the communications screens. “Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevite from the United States is here. I remind you, his name is Cordell Hull; his title is Secretary of State. Before we came, he was the chief aide in dealing with other Big Ugly empires for his not-empire’s leader.”
“Send him in,” Atvar said.
Cordell Hull looked uncomfortable in weightlessness, but made a good game show of pretending he wasn’t. Even for a Big Ugly, he was long, though not especially wide. The tuft of fuzz on top of his head was almost white. Atvar knew that meant he was aging. So did the wrinkles and sags in his integument. He was not attractive, but then, to Atvar’s eyes, no Big Ugly was.
After the polite greetings customary even between enemies, Atvar plunged straight in: “I demand from you the immediate return of the traitorous shiplord Straha, who fled to you in violation of all law.”
Cordell Hull spoke a single sharp word: “No.” The translator indicated that that was a negative; Atvar had suspected as much. Hull went on at some length afterwards: “The United States does not give back people who come to us seeking shelter. My land is made up of people who came seeking freedom. We welcomed them; we did not turn them away.”
“You welcomed criminals?” Atvar said, and then, in an aside to the interpreter. “It does not surprise me a bit, though you needn’t tell him that.”
“We did,” Hull answered defiantly. “Many things that were called crimes were really nothing more than disagreeing with the leaders of the lands they left.” His eyes, though sunk deep in his head like any Tosevite’s, bored into Atvar’s with disconcerting keenness.
The fleetlord said, “Do you not call stealing a shuttlecraft a crime? Straha is a robber as well as a traitor. Is your not-empire also in the habit of keeping stolen goods? We demand the shuttlecraft’s return, too.”
“Go ahead and demand,” Hull replied. “In war, if one side is generous enough to help the other, it doesn’t get its toys back.”
“In war, the side that is losing is usually wise enough to deal politely with the side that is winning,” Atvar said. “So the ancient records of the Race tell us, at any rate; the Race has never lost a war against another species.”
“If you think we’re losing, look at Chicago,” Hull said. In his own way, he was as exasperating an opponent as the SSSR’s Molotov. The latter Big Ugly was as inflexible as a poorly programmed machine, mechanically rejecting everything Atvar said. Hull instead tried to twist things.
Atvar said, “Look at Chicago yourself. Our forces continue to advance through the city. The large factories you defended for so long are now practically cleared of Tosevites, and soon our victorious males will reach the shore of the lake by which the city lies.”
“Bully for them,” Hull answered, which caused the interpreter considerable confusion. After the misunderstanding was straightened out, the U.S. Secretary of State said, “Some of your victorious males may make it to Lake Michigan, but how many of ’em won’t? How many of ’em are dead and stinking in the streets of Chicago?”
“Far fewer than the males you throw away like wastepaper in a futile effort to halt us,” Atvar snapped. He didn’t like being reminded of the casualties the conquest of Chicago was costing the Race.
Cordell Hull’s face twisted into one of the leers the Big Uglies used to show emotion. (“This is an expression of amusement and irony,” the interpreter told Atvar in a brief aside.) He said, “We have more men to spend than you do, and more of everything else, too. Before long, you’re going to have to start robbing Peter to pay Paul if you want reinforcements.”