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“We have now proved decisively what others began to demonstrate last year: the Lizards are not invulnerable. They can be defeated and driven back. Moreover, just as their weapons have on occasion discomfited us, we too have devised means of fighting for which they have as yet developed no countermeasures. This bodes well for future campaigns against them.”
How it boded for the soul of mankind was another question, one he felt less confident about answering. Everyone was using gas against the Lizards now, and praising it to the skies because it killed them in carload lots. But if they vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow, how long till earthly nations remembered their old quarrels and started using gas on one another? How long till the Germans started using it on the Jews they still ruled? For that matter, how did he know they weren’t using it on the Jews they still ruled? Nothing came out of Germany but what little Hitler and Gobbels wanted known.
Even as he thought about what mankind would do after the Lizards were vanquished, he realized beating them came first. And so he read on: “Wherever you who hear my voice may be, you, too, can join the fight against the alien invaders. You need not even take up a gun. You can also contribute to the war against them by sabotaging goods you produce if you work in a factory, by not paying, paying late, or underpaying the exactions they seek to impose on you, by obstructing them in any way possible, and by informing their foes of what they are about to do. With your help, we can make Earth so unpleasant for them that they will be glad to pack up and leave.”
He finished the last line of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat to show time was up. In the soundproof control room, the engineer clapped his hands, then pointed to Nathan Jacobi, who began reading the English version of Russie’s talk.
Jacobi was a consummate professional; the engineer took for granted his finishing spot on. What struck Moishe about his colleague’s reading was how much of it he understood. When he’d first begun broadcasting for the BBC, he’d had next to no English. Now he could follow it pretty well, and speak enough to get by. He felt less alien in London than he sometimes had in purely Polish sections of Warsaw.
“There, that’s done it,” Jacobi said when they were off the air. He clapped Moishe on the back. “Jolly good to be working with you again. For a while there, I doubted we should ever have the chance.”
“So did I,” Moishe said. “I have to remind myself that this is warfare, too. I’ve seen altogether too much of the real thing lately.”
“Oh, yes.” Jacobi got up and stretched. “The real thing is a great deal worse to go through, but you and I may be able to do more damage to the Lizards here than we could on campaign. I tell myself as much, at any rate.”
“So do I,” Moishe said as he too rose. “Is Eric Blair broadcasting after us, as he often does?”
“I believe so,” Jacobi answered. “You’ve taken a liking to him, haven’t you?”
“He’s an honest man,” Russie said simply.
Sure enough, Blair stood outside the studio door, talking animatedly with a handsome, dark-skinned woman who wore a plum-colored robe of filmy cotton-from India, Moishe guessed, though his knowledge of people and places Oriental had almost all been acquired since he came to England. Blair broke off to nod to the two Jewish broadcasters. “Hope you chaps have been giving the Lizards a proper hiding over the air,” he said.
“I hope we did, too,” Jacobi answered, his voice grave.
“The princess and I shall endeavor to do the same,” Blair said, dipping his head to the woman from India. His chuckle had a wheeze in it that Russie did not like. “I think that’s what they call an alliance of convenience: a princess and a socialist joining together to defeat the common foe.”
“You wanted dominion status for India no less than I did,” the woman said. Her accent, so different from Moishe’s, made her hard to understand for him. He reminded himself to tell Rivka and Reuven he’d met a princess: not something a Jew was likely to do in Warsaw-or, from what he’d seen, in London, either.
“India has more than dominion status these days,de facto if notde jure,” Eric Blair said. “It’s the rare and lucky ship that goes from London to Bombay, and even luckier the one that comes home again.”
“How are things there?” Moishe asked. One thing he’d learned since coming to England was how narrow his perspective on the world had been. He wanted to learn as much as he could about places that had been just names, if that, to him.
Blair said, “You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Gandhi has made himself as unpleasant to the Lizards as he ever was to the Britishraj.”
“The aliens do not know how to deal with masses of people who will not fight them but also refuse to labor for them,” the princess said. “Massacre has only made the Mahatma’s followers more eager to continue their nonviolent campaign against oppression and unjust rule-from anyone.”
“That last bit would have brought out the censor’s razor blades and red ink had you tried to say it before the Lizards came,” Blair said. He looked at his watch. “We’d best get in there, or we shall be late. Good to see you, Russie, Jacobi.” He and the Indian woman hurried into the studio, closing the door behind them.
The sun of early November was a cool, pale, fickle thing, scurrying through the sky low in the south and scuttling behind every cloud and bit of mist that passed. Even so, Moishe faced the weather with equanimity. In Warsaw, snow would have started falling a month earlier.
He said his good-byes to Nathan Jacobi and hurried home to his Soho flat. Having been separated from his family when the Lizards invaded England made him appreciate them all the more. But when he got up to the flat, before he could even tell his wife he’d met a princess, she said, “Moishe, someone came round here looking for you today-a man with a uniform.” She sounded worried.
Moishe didn’t blame her. That news was enough to worry anyone. When he first heard it, ice prickled up his spine. He needed a moment to remember where he was. “This is England,” he reminded Rivka-and himself. “NoGestapo here, no‘Juden heraus!’ Did he say what he wanted of me?”
She shook her head. “He did not say, and I did not ask. Hearing the knock on the door, opening it to find the man with those clothes there…” She shivered. “And then he spoke to me in German when he saw I did not understand enough English to know what he needed.”
“That would frighten anyone,” Moishe said sympathetically, and took her in his arms. He wished he could forget about the Nazis and Lizards both. He wished the whole world could forget about them both. The next wish that produced the desired effect would be the first.
Someone knocked on the door. Moishe and Rivka flew apart. It was a brisk, authoritative knock, as if the fellow who made it had a better right to make it, had a better right to come into the flat, than the people who lived there. “It’s him again,” Rivka whispered.
“We’d better find out what he’s after,” Moishe said, and opened the door. He had all he could do not to recoil in alarm after that: except for the different uniform, the man who stood there might have come straight off an SS recruiting poster. He was tall and slim and muscular and blond and had the dangerous look in his eye that was calculated to turn your blood to water if you ended up on the receiving end of it.
But instead of shouting something like,You stinking sack of shit of a Jew, he politely nodded and in soft tones asked, “You are Mr. Moishe Russie?”
“Yes,” Moishe said cautiously. “Who are you?”
“Captain Donald Mather, sir, of the Special Air Service,” the blond young soldier answered. To Russie’s surprise, he saluted.
“C–Come in,” Moishe said, his voice a little shaky. No SS man would ever have saluted a Jew, not under any circumstances. “You have met my wife, I think.”
“Yes, sir,” Mather said, stepping past him. He nodded to Rivka. “Ma’am.” Social amenities apparently complete, he turned back to Moishe. “Sir, His Majesty’s government needs your help.”
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nbsp; Alarm sirens began going off in Moishe’s mind. He slipped from English back into Yiddish: “What does His Majesty’s government think I can do for it? And why me in particular and not somebody else?”
Captain Mather answered the second question first: “You in particular, sir, because of your experience in Poland.” He left English, too, for German. Moishe’s hackles did not rise so much as they might have: Mather made an effort, and not a bad one, to pronounce it with a Yiddish intonation. He was plainly a capable man, and in some not-so-obvious ways.
“I had lots of experience in Poland,” Moishe said. “Most of it, I didn’t like at all, not even a little bit. Why does anyone think I would want to do something that draws on it?”
“You’re already doing something that draws on it, sir, in your BBC broadcasts,” Mather replied. Moishe grimaced; that was true. The Englishman continued, making his German sound more Yiddish with every sentence: “I will admit, though, we have rather more in mind for you than sitting in front of a microphone and reading from a prepared script.”
