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“Of course,” Yeager said with a sigh. “What does theftaskelkwank do with the light to change it from regular toskelkwank?”
“It makes the light-” Ristin used another Lizard word.
Sam turned to the fellow with the gadget. “I’ve heard that term before, too. It means something like ‘coherent.’ I don’t know what that means here, though.”
“Coherent, yep.” Ristin liked learning new English words. “Most light, ordinary light, is of waves of all different lengths, photons-is right word? — of all different energies. Coherent light has only one length of wave, only one energy. Is all exact same color, you could say.”
“So if I put red cellophane on top of my flashlight lens, I’d have coherent light?” Sam asked, trying to figure out what the Lizard meant.
“Nep. I mean, nope.” Ristin’s mouth fell open: he was laughing at himself. “Not all photons of exact same energy, only close. Not all going in exact same direction. This is what coherent means.”
The GI with the Lizardskelkwank device said, “Okay, howdo you get this, uh, coherent light?”
“Take rod made of right kind of crystal,” Ristin answered. “Grind ends very, very flat, put on coating like mirror. Pump energy into the crystal. Coherent light will come out. Is one way. Are others.”
For all the sense he made, he might as well have suddenly started speaking Tibetan. Yeager had seen that happen before when the Lizards talked about goodies they had and people didn’t. He said, “Never mind how. What can you do witha ftaskelkwank once you’ve got it?”
“Aim it at, say, one of your landcruisers-no, tanks, you say.Skelkwank sight here sees that coherent light reflected, guides rocket or bomb straight to it. This is why we do not miss much when we use these sights.”
The soldier stuck the sight under Ristin’s snout. “How does it see the coherent light and not any other kind?”
“How?” Ristin turned one eye on the sight, the other on the soldier. He started to answer, spluttered, stopped, started over, stopped again. “I do not know how it does this. I only know that it does this.”
“He’s just a dogface like me,” Yeager said, “or a dogface like I used to be-I’ve got three stripes when I’m not in civvies. You want more than that, friend, we’ve got a couple of Lizard technicians down here who’ll talk as long as you’ll listen.”
The fellow with the sight stared at Sam. “You got this much out of an ordinary Lizard soldier? Holy Jesus, Sergeant, up north they’ve been beating around the bush with technicians who haven’t said as much in weeks as I just got in ten minutes here. You’re doing a hell of a job.”
“Thanks very much,” Sam said. “Here, let me take you over to Major Houlihan. He’ll be able to fix you up with the Lizards who can tell you the most.” He patted Ristin on his scaly shoulder. “Thanks for helping us out.”
“It is for me a pleasure, superior sir,” Ristin said.
Yeager was still grinning when he got upstairs. He told the story to Barbara, who listened while he burbled on. When he was done, she said, “Why should you be so surprised when somebody tells you you’re good at what you do?”
“Because it’s not anything like something I imagined I could be good at, and because I don’t have any education to speak of-you know that, honey-and because it’s important to the country,” he answered. “Suppose you got into riveting some kind of way, and after a little while on the job you riveted more wings onto B-17s than anybody else at the plant, even people who’ve been riveting for twenty years. Wouldn’t you be surprised about that?”
“But Sam, nobody’s been talking with the Lizards for twenty years,” Barbara reminded him. “You have more experience at that than just about anyone else here. And you may not have thought you’d be good at it, but by now you should have seen that you are.” She gave him the kind of appraising look that always made him nervous, lest she see less than she wanted. “Isn’t that what you’d call bush-league thinking, thinking you’re not good enough for the big time?”
He stared at her. “What are you doing using baseball talk on me?”
“I’m married to you, remember?” she answered, sticking her tongue out at him. “Don’t you think I’d look for some way to get ideas through your thick head?”
Sam walked over and gave her a big kiss. “I’m a heck of a lucky guy, you know that? When I got you, I wasn’t thinking bush league at all, not even a little bit.”
“That’s good,” she said. “We keep on like this for another thirty or forty years and we’ll have something pretty fine.” He nodded. She pulled back a little as his beard rasped her cheek. That, unfortunately, reminded him how unlikely they were to live another thirty or forty years, or to be free if they did live so long.
The pitching deck of a ship in the Baltic did not strike Vyacheslav Molotov as the ideal locale on which to hold diplomatic negotiations. Stalin, however, had not asked his opinion, merely sent him forth.
Being aboard ship had one advantage: it meant he could avoid flying, an experience he heartily loathed. Molotov watched the fishing vessel approach. It flew a Danish flag, white cross on red. His own ship sported the red, gold, and green ensign of Lithuania, even though that unhappy land had first been incorporated into the USSR and then overrun by the Nazis. But the Lizards were more likely to shoot at vessels displaying German and Soviet flags than those of small, weak nations.
A signal light blinked across the water from the fishing boat. “Comrade Foreign Minister, it is indeed the vessel of the German foreign minister,” the captain said. “They ask permission to come alongside.”
“I am ready to meet with von Ribbentrop,” Molotov said-not eager, but ready. “As for matters of shiphandling, that is why you are here, is it not?”
“Yes, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” The captain met icy sarcasm with wooden obedience. “I shall have them convey the foreign minister to this vessel.”
“You had better,” Molotov answered. “Anyone who thinks I am going to board that-scow-is sadly mistaken.” The Soviet ship in Lithuanian colors was a rust-bucket freighter. Next to the fishing boat now sidling up to it, it seemed a decadent capitalist luxury liner by comparison. A strong odor of stale herring made Molotov wrinkle his nose-or perhaps, he thought, it was only Ribbentrop and his Nazi policies he was smelling.
A couple of sailors let down a rope ladder to the deck of the fishing boat. The German foreign minister scrambled up to the Soviet ship like a monkey, closely followed by his interpreter, who rather resembled one. Molotov’s own interpreter appeared at his elbow. Each side guarded itself against twisted meaning from the other.
Ribbentrop turned his complacent pop-eyed face, marbled with fat like expensive beef, toward the Lithuanian flag. Half sketching a salute to that banner of a country which no longer existed, he said, “I honor the brave Lithuanian people.”
Molotov was more than a little surprised his opposite number remembered that flag represented Lithuania rather than Estonia or Latvia. He was also coldly furious, though he kept his face and voice expressionless as he replied, “If you honor them so much, why did Germany include Lithuania in the territory designated as a Soviet sphere of influence in the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, which you helped negotiate? You do recall that clause, I trust?”
Ribbentrop coughed and spluttered and turned a mottled shade of red. Thanks to Hitler’s favor, he could bluster his way through the Nazi hierarchy, but that meant nothing to Molotov. “Well, let us speak of the present and not of the past,” Ribbentrop said with the air of a man making a great concession.
“You would have been well-advised to do that from the beginning,” Molotov said.
“Do not take that tone with me,” Ribbentrop snapped, the bluster returning to his voice. What was the old saying? — The German was either at your throat or at your feet.Much truth there-no middle ground. The foreign minister went on, “Just because you have managed to set off one explosive-metal bomb, you should not count yourselves little ti
n gods. We Germans are nearly to the point of being able to do that as well, and we are also deploying other new weapons in the fight against the Lizards.”
“Your nerve gases, you mean,” Molotov said. Reluctantly, Ribbentrop nodded. Molotov remarked, “You Germans seem as reluctant to speak of your successes gassing Lizards as you were of your earlier successes gassing Jews.”
