“We can match that,” Cordell Hull said placidly. “We may even beat it.”
That was more than Molotov had heard from Ribbentrop. He wondered if it was more than Ribbentrop knew. For that matter, he was always amazed when Ribbentrop knew anything. “If that is so, the war against the Lizards will take on an entirely different tone,” he observed.
“So it will,” Hull said. “You Russians should have more of these weapons coming up soon, too, shouldn’t you?”
“So we should.” Molotov let it go at that. Unfortunately, just because the Soviet Union should have had more explosive-metal bombs coming into production didn’t mean itwould have them. He wondered how long the physicists would have before Stalin started liquidating them out of frustration. The Great Stalin’s virtues were multifarious-he would tell you as much himself. Patience, however, was not among them.
Lord Halifax said, “If we show the Lizards we are their match in destructive power, my hope is that we shall then be able to negotiate a just and equitable peace with them.”
Once an appeaser, always an appeaser,Molotov thought.“My hope is that we shall drive them off our world altogether,” he said. “Then the historical dialectic can resume from the point where it was interrupted.”And its processes can finish throwing Britain onto the rubbish heap.
“That would not be easy under the best of circumstances,” Lord Beaverbrook said. “And circumstances are not of the best. The Lizards, as you will probably recall, have a colonization fleet traveling toward Earth, much as theMayflower brought Englishmen and — women to what we then called the New World. Will their military forces flee, leaving the colonists nowhere to land? I think not.”
Molotov hadn’t considered it from that perspective. He was certain Stalin hadn’t, either. And yet it made sense, even in dialectical terms. The Lizards were imperialists. So much was obvious. But what did the imperialists do? They didn’t just conquer locals. They also established colonies-and would fight to protect what they saw as their right to do so.
Slowly, he said, “I do not wish to accept the permanent presence of these aliens on our world.”
“I daresay the Red Indians weren’t overjoyed at the prospect of Pilgrim neighbors either,” Beaverbrook answered. “We must first make certain we aren’t simply overwhelmed, as they were.”
“That’s an important point,” Cordell Hull said. “And one of the reasons the Indians got overwhelmed is that they never-or not often enough, anyway-put up a common fight against the white men. If a tribe had another tribe next door for an enemy, they wouldn’t think twice about joining with the new settlers to clear ’em out. And then, a few years later, it would be their turn, and they probably wondered what the devil happened to them. We can’t afford that, and we have to remember it. No matter how bad we think our neighbors are, living under the Lizards would be a damn sight worse.”
Molotov thought not of Red Indians but of the tsars expanding Russian might at the expense of the nomads of the steppe and the principalities in the Caucasus. The principle, though, remained the same. And Hull was right: all the world’s leaders, even the Great Stalin, needed to remember it.
“I shall convey your thoughts, and my agreement with them, to the General Secretary,” Molotov said.
Cordell Hull beamed. “Thank you, Comrade Foreign Commissar. I hope you won’t mind my saying that this is, I believe, the first time you’ve expressed a personal opinion in all our talks.”
Molotov considered. Slowly, he nodded. “You are correct, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I apologize for the error. It was inadvertent, I assure you.”
Heinrich Jager accepted three francs in change from a shopkeeper after he bought a couple of meters of twine. Two were solid prewar coins. The third, instead of Marianne on the obverse, had a double-headed axe, two stalks of wheat, and the legendETAT FRANCAIS. It was made of aluminum, and felt weightless in his hand.
The shopkeeper must have noticed the sour stare he sent the franc. “Vichy says we have to use them,” the fellow said with a shrug. “So do the Lizards.”
Jager just shrugged and stuck the coin in his pocket. The less he had to put his halting French on display in Albi, the happier he was. He and Otto Skorzeny had already been here longer than they wanted. Other raids Skorzeny planned had run like clockwork. Here, the clock was slow.
He rolled up his twine and walked out of the shop onto the Avenue du Marechal Foch. As always when he looked about in Albi, a line from some English poet sprang to mind. “A rose-red city half as old as time.” Pink and red brickwork predominated hereabouts, though brown and muddy yellow added to the blend. If one-or, here, two-had to rusticate, there were worse places than Albi in which to do it.
The aluminum coin from Marshal Petain’s mint went when he bought a kilo ofharicots verts. He carried the beans back to the flat he and Skorzeny were sharing.
He hoped his comrade in arms hadn’t brought home another tart. When Skorzeny had a mission directly before him, he was all business. When he didn’t, his attention wandered and he needed something else to keep him interested in the world. He’d also been drinking an ungodly lot lately.
But when Jager got back to the flat, he found Skorzeny alone, sober, and beaming from ear to ear. “Guess what?” the big SS man boomed. “Good old Uncle Henri finally shipped us the last piece we need to put our toy together.”
“Did he? That’s first-rate,” Jager said. A mortar was not an impressive-looking piece of lethal hardware, especially disassembled: a sheet-metal tube, an iron base plate, three legs for the tripod, and some straps and screws and a sight. Any individual component could go through the still-functional mails of Vichy France without raising a Gallic eyebrow. But now that the base plate had finally come, they could turn everything back into a mortar in a matter of minutes.
“Let’s go do it now,” Skorzeny said excitedly.
“In daylight?” Jager shook his head. That idea still appalled him. “The plant runs three shifts. We’ll do just as much damage if we hit it at night, and we’ll have a better chance of getting away clean.”
“Sometimes, Jager, you’re a bore,” Skorzeny said.
“Sometimes, Skorzeny, you’re a crazy man,” Jager retorted. He’d long since learned that you couldn’t let Skorzeny grab any advantage, no matter how tiny. If you did, he’d ride roughshod over you. The only thing he took seriously was a will whose strength matched that of his own, and God hadn’t turned out a whole lot of those.
Now Skorzeny laughed, a raucous note that filled the little furnished flat “A crazy man? Maybe I am, but I have fun and the Lizards don’t.”
“They’ll have even less fun once we’re through with them,” Jager said. “Shall we walk by the factory one last time, make sure we’re not overlooking anything?”
“Now you’re talking!” The prospect of action, of facing danger, always got Skorzeny’s juices flowing. “Let’s go.”
“First smear that glop over your scar,” Jager said, as he did whenever Skorzeny was about to go out in public in Albi. The Lizards were terrible at telling people apart, but that scar and the SS man’s size made him stand out. They made him stand out for human collaborators, too.
“Bore,” Skorzeny repeated, but he rubbed the brown makeup paste over his cheek. It left him looking as if his face had been burned, but the Lizards weren’t looking for a man with a burn. They were after a man with a scar-and they won’t be shy about snapping up any friends he has along, either,Jager thought.
Baggy trousers, a tweed jacket, a cloth cap… to Jager, they made Skorzeny look like a German in down-at-the-heels French clothes rather than a down-at-the-heels Frenchman, but he did know the Lizards were a less demanding audience. He thought the beret he wore made him look dashing. Skorzeny insisted it looked like a cowflop on his head. He took the chaffing in good part; wearing a beret in France these days meant you supported Vichy, which was exactly the impression he was trying to create.