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Reuven snatched his black leather bag out of his bedroom and hurried back to the front door. Predictably, his sisters wanted to do whatever he did. As predictably, his mother wouldn’t let them. He went out the door, certain his mother would lock and bar it after him.
Bullets still flew, though not so often now. An automobile burned at the end of the block, sending a pyre of stinking black smoke into the sky. All the flames were orange or yellow, none the almost invisible pale blue of burning hydrogen-an old motorcar, not one of the newer models on the Lizard pattern.
The screaming came from the other side of the motorcar. Feeling naked and exposed, Reuven came around the machine to do what he could for the wounded man. He’d just stopped beside him when, from behind, someone said, “What have we got here, son?”
“Hello, Father,” Reuven said as Moishe Russie got down on one knee beside him. The two of them looked very much alike there side by side-pale skin; dark hair; narrow, strong-cheekboned faces-save that Moishe was going bald. His son continued, “I haven’t even had a chance to look at him yet.”
“Don’t need any fancy Lizard tools for this diagnosis,” his father said. “A burst of three in the belly…” He pointed to the holes in the fighter’s shirt. They had some blood oozing from them, but the real flood of it came from the man’s back. Reuven gulped a little. Dissections in medical school were much neater than this, and the subjects didn’t scream. Moishe Russie spoke as if back in the classroom himself: “The entry wounds are fairly small. If you were heartless enough to turn him over, you’d see big chunks of meat blown out of the exit wounds. Prognosis, son?”
Reuven licked his lips. “He’ll keep hurting till he loses enough blood to lose consciousness, too. Then he’ll finally die.” He spoke without fear the wounded man would hear him; the fighter was lost in his private hell.
“I think you’re right.” His father rummaged in his own black bag, then pulled out a syringe. He injected the fallen fighter, then glanced over at Reuven. “Enough morphine to stop his pain. Enough to stop his heart and lungs in a couple of minutes, too.”
He waited for Reuven to say something about that. After some thought, Reuven remarked, “They don’t teach us when to do that in medical school.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” his father agreed. “For one thing, the Lizards take it for granted, much more than we do. And for another, it’s not something you can learn in school. When the time comes, you’ll know. If you’re ever wondering whether you should, the answer is simple: you shouldn’t. When you should, you don’t wonder.”
“How many times have you done it?” Reuven asked. As he spoke, the wounded fighter’s screams stopped. He stared up in dreamy surprise. Reuven wondered if he was seeing the men who knelt above him or only some interior vision. The man’s chest hitched a few more times, then respiration stopped, too.
“Morphine is a good friend and a dreadful master,” Moishe Russie murmured. Then he seemed to hear the question Reuven had asked. “How many times? I don’t know. A few. A man who does it too often isn’t wondering enough about whether he ought to. You aren’t God, son, and you never will be. Once in a while-but only once in a while-He’ll let you be His assistant.” He got to his feet. The knee of his trousers was wet with the fighter’s blood. “We’d better get back home. Your mother will be worried about us.”
“I know.”
Reuven wondered what he would have done had he come on the wounded fighter by himself. Would he have had the nerve to put the man out of his misery? He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t be sure. He also realized he’d never be sure now whether the ordinary-looking man had been a Muslim or Jew.
4
Suave as a Frenchman, the Gestapo officer smiled at Johannes Drucker. “You must understand, my dear Lieutenant Colonel, this is only an inquiry into your loyalty, not a denial that you are loyal,” he said.
“You have an easier time telling the difference than I do,” Drucker snapped. “All I know is, I’m grounded for no good reason. I want to go back into space, where I can best serve the Reich.” And where I can put hundreds-sometimes thousands-of kilometers between me and you.
“I would not call the security of the Reich ‘no good reason,’ ” the Gestapo man said, his voice silky. “We must always be on guard, lest the Volk be polluted by alien, inferior blood.”
“That’s my wife you’re talking about, you-” Drucker checked himself. Telling the son of a bitch he was a son of a bitch wouldn’t do him any good, and wouldn’t do Kathe any good, either.
“We have worked diligently to make and keep the Reich free of Jews,” the Gestapo man said with what he no doubt intended for a friendly smile. “We shall continue until the great task is complete.”
Drucker didn’t say anything. Nothing he could have said would have been any use. Anything he said would have got him into more trouble than he was in already. He had no great love for Jews. Back in the days when there were still a lot of Jews in the Greater German Reich, he hadn’t known many people with any great love for Jews.
Slaughtering them like cattle, though… He didn’t see how that had helped the Reich. If the Jews hadn’t risen up in Poland when the Lizards came, it might still belong to Germany. And, when the Lizards included in their propaganda details of what the Germans were doing, relations between the Reich and other human powers stayed delicate for a long time.
Would the Gestapo officer heed him if he pointed that out? It was to laugh. And then the sardonic laugh choked off. Most Germans had no great love for Jews. Kathe’s grandfather must have loved a Jewess, if what the Gestapo was saying held any truth. And, had he not loved that Jewess, Kathe would never have been born.
Think about it later, Drucker told himself. For now, he kept on hoping it wasn’t true. If it was true, his career wasn’t the only thing that would go up in smoke. So would dear, sweet Kathe, out through the stack of a crematorium. His stomach lurched, worse than it ever did when he went weightless out in space. He’d known for twenty years what the Reich did to Jews, known and not thought much about it. Now it hit home. It occurred to him that he should have thought more and sooner. Too late now.
As calmly as he could, he said, “I want to see her.”
He’d said that before, and been refused. He got refused again. “You must know it is impossible,” the Gestapo man said. “She is in detention, pending adjudication of the case. She is comfortable; please accept my personal assurances on that score. If the charges prove unfounded, all will be as it had been.”
He sounded as if he really meant it. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh in his face. Kathe was in detention-a polite word for jail or a camp. She was on trial for her life, and she couldn’t even defend herself. In the Reich, choosing the wrong grandparents could be a capital crime.
Drucker did dare hope she was comfortable. If they decided her grandmother hadn’t been a Jew after all, they would let her go. It did happen-not too often (Drucker wished he hadn’t chosen to remember that), but it did. And he, by virtue of his rank and his skill, was valuable in the machinery of the Reich. If they did let her go, they wouldn’t want him disaffected.
He wished he’d known her grandparents. All he’d seen of them were a few fading photographs in an old album. He didn’t remember ever thinking her grandmother looked Jewish. She’d had light hair and light eyes. When she
was young, she’d been very pretty. She’d looked a lot like Kathe, in fact.
The officer, now, the officer had brown eyes and dark stubble he probably had to shave twice a day. Fixing him with a cold stare, Drucker said, “My wife’s grandmother was a better Aryan than you are.”
“I may not be pretty,” the Gestapo man said evenly, “but I have an impeccable German pedigree. If they started putting all the homely people in camps, we’d run out of laborers in a hurry.”
Damn, thought Drucker, who’d wanted to anger him. The Gestapo man probably had something, too. There were too many homely people to get rid of them; it would leave a great hole in the fabric of society. Getting rid of the Jews had left no such hole. They’d made perfect scapegoats: they were few, they’d stood out, and people had already disliked them.
The officer might have been thinking along with him. He said, “That’s why the Americans just hate their niggers and don’t really do anything about it. If they did, it would be inconvenient for them.”
“Inconvenient.” The word was sickly sweet in Drucker’s mouth, like the rotten horsemeat he’d eaten on the retreat from Moscow before the Lizards came. He’d been glad to have it, too. After muttering darkly under his breath, he said, “This business of not knowing is inconvenient for me, you know.”
“Yes, of course I do.” The Gestapo man kept right on being smooth. “Whatever happens, your children will not be severely affected. One Jewish great-grandparent is not a legal impediment.”
“You don’t think losing their mother might affect them?” Drucker snapped. And yet, in a horrid kind of way, his interrogator had a point. Severely affected was a euphemism for taken out and killed.
“We must have pure blood.” However smooth, however suave he was, the Gestapo man had not a gram of compromise in him. In that, he made a good representative for the state he served. Doing his best to seem conciliatory even when he wasn’t, he added, “You have permission to leave for the time being. Your actual knowledge of your wife’s grandmother appears small.”
