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“You see?” Heinrich said. “You see? He likes you. Pancer likes you.”
“Pancer, eh?” Mordechai raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to call him Tank in Polish?”
“Sure,” his son replied. “Why not? With scales all over him, he’s armored like a tank.”
“All right. You’ve got all the answers, it seems.” In an experimental sort of way, Anielewicz scratched the beffel’s head. “What do you think of that, Pancer?”
“He likes this better,” Heinrich said, and rubbed the beffel under the chin. The beffel put its head up so he could rub it more easily. Its tail thumped the carpet. If it wasn’t enjoying itself, it put on a mighty fine act. Maybe Heinrich really did have all the answers.
“How did you find out it likes that?” Mordechai asked.
“I don’t know.” His son sounded impatient. “I just did, that’s all.” He rubbed Pancer some more. In ecstasy, the beffel rolled over onto its back. Heinrich scratched its belly, whose scales were a couple of shades paler than those on its back. It wriggled around and let out several more preposterous squeaks.
David watched all this in fascination, Bertha with an expression that said she was a long way from reconciled to having the creature in the flat. Miriam chose that moment to come home from her music lesson. Pancer squeaked at her, too. She didn’t squeak. She squawked. She squawked even louder when she found out the beffel would be staying.
“Oh, Mother, how could you?” she cried, and retreated to her room. The beffel started to follow her. Heinrich held on to it. That was one of the wiser things he’d done in his young life.
Anielewicz asked, “Since you magically know all about this creature, do you happen to know what it eats?”
“I gave it some salted herrings,” Heinrich answered. “It liked them fine. I bet it’ll eat chicken, too.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mordechai admitted. “All right, we’ll feed it like a pet and see how things go.” He remembered the first beffel he’d seen, and what it had been doing when he saw it. “If that doesn’t work, we can start giving it the neighbors’ cats.”
His wife said: “One more thing: if we find out that it belongs to some particular Lizard who wants it back, we’ll give it back to him. We’d do the same thing if we took in a stray cat or dog.”
Heinrich sent a look of appeal to Anielewicz. But Mordechai only nodded. “Your mother’s right. That’s fair.” And if Bertha had sounded a little too hopeful such a thing might happen, then she had, that was all.
Pancer ate boiled beef with enthusiasm. The beffel wouldn’t touch carrots, but ate potatoes with the same almost thoughtful air it had had after licking Mordechai: as if it wasn’t sure what to make of them but would give them the benefit of the doubt. Having eaten, the little scaly creature prowled around under the dining-room table. Toward the end of supper, Miriam squealed and sprang up out of her chair. “It licked my ankle,” she said in a high, shrill voice.
“This is not the end of the world,” Anielewicz told her. “Sit down and finish eating.”
She didn’t. “You don’t care,” she burst out. “You don’t care at all. We’ve got this ugly, horrible, Lizardy thing in here, and you think it’s funny.” She stormed off to her room again. The rest of the meal passed in silence, punctuated by occasional squeaks.
To Bertha’s obvious disappointment, no Lizard posted a notice offering a reward for the return of a missing beffel. Mordechai wondered if the beast had got lost in Lodz, or if it had wandered into the city from one of the new Lizard settlements to the east. From what he’d seen of the other one in the alley, befflem were more than able to take care of themselves.
As one day followed another, he got used to having Pancer around. Heinrich was in heaven, and didn’t even mind changing the cat box the beffel quickly learned to use. David liked the creature, too. Even Bertha stopped complaining about it. Only Miriam stayed unhappy. Anielewicz had trouble understanding why she did; it was as good-natured a pet as anyone could have wanted.
“It’s ugly,” she said the one time he asked her about it, and said no more. He gave up. The beffel didn’t strike him as ugly, but he didn’t think anything he said along those lines would make her change her mind.
A couple of nights after that, Heinrich shook him out of a sound sleep. “Father, I think there’s a fire in the building,” the boy said urgently. “Pancer woke me up. He’s never done that before. I was going to be mad at him, but then I smelled smoke.”
Anielewicz smelled it, too. Bertha was sitting up beside him. “Get out to the fire escape,” he told her. “Take Heinrich with you.”
“And Pancer,” Heinrich said. “I’ve got him right here.”
“And Pancer,” Mordechai agreed. “I’ll get the other children.”
“David’s already getting Miriam,” Heinrich said, which made Anielewicz feel useless and inefficient.
But he didn’t just smell smoke. He could see flames now-they were burning through the door. “Go on, then, both of you-and Pancer,” he said, and ran up the hall to make sure David and Miriam were coming. They were; he had to stop abruptly to keep from running into them. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Bertha’s feet and Heinrich’s were already rattling on the cast iron of the fire escape. Mordechai shoved his older son and daughter out onto the escape ahead of him. He hurried after them; flames were starting to lick across the carpet, and the smoke was getting thick.
As he stepped out of the flat, he paused a moment, sniffing. Along with the smoke, he smelled something else, something familiar, something he didn’t expect to smell inside the block of flats. After a heartbeat’s worth of puzzlement, he recognized it. “Gottenyu!” he exclaimed. “That’s gasoline!”
He didn’t know if anyone heard him. His family-and other people in the block of flats-were hurrying down the iron stairs. They let down the last leg of the stairway with a screech of unoiled metal and reached the street. More people spilled out the front door, but cries and shrieks from above warned that not everyone who lived in the building would be able to get out.
A clanging announced the arrival of the fire engine, which had to come from only a couple of blocks up Lutomierska Street. The firemen started playing water on the blazing building. Mordechai turned to Bertha and said, “That fire didn’t just happen. Somebody set it.” He explained what he’d smelled and what it had to mean.
“Vey iz mir!” his wife exclaimed. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he answered, “but whoever tried to shoot me not so long ago is a pretty good guess, I’d say. And I’d also say the mamzer, whoever he is, doesn’t care how many other people he kills as long as he gets me.” In the flickering light of the flames, Bertha’s eyes were wide with horror as she nodded.
Heinrich, meanwhile, rounded on Miriam. “If it hadn’t been for Pancer, we might never have woken up at all,” he said, and thrust the beffel in Miriam’s face. After a moment’s hesitation, she bent down and gave it a quick kiss on the snout. Pancer squeaked.
Nesseref was glad she had her tsiongi. He was better company than a lot of the males and females she knew. He didn’t argue with her. He didn’t try to get her to taste ginger so he could mate with her. He didn’t give her stupid orders. He lived contentedly in her apartment, and enjoyed going for walks when she took him out.
She’d named him Orbit, partly because she was a shuttlecraft pilot, partly because he had at first liked to walk around her on his leash if she gave him the chance. Little by little, she was training him out of that unfortunate habit. Pretty soon Orbit would be as fine a companion on the street as he was in the apartment-with a couple of other exceptions.
One of those exceptions was as ancient as the history of domestication back on Home. Ever more befflem roamed the streets of the new town outside Jezow. Whenever Orbit saw one of them, the tsiongi seemed to think he was duty-bound to try to kill the little squeaking beast. As often as not, t
he befflem were ready to squabble, too.
That, Nesseref could have dealt with. The Race had been dealing with squabbling tsiongyu and befflem since before civilization hatched from the egg of barbarism. She had more trouble with Orbit’s encounters with Tosevite flying creatures.
She supposed she could hardly blame the tsiongi. The little feathered beasts were so slow and awkward on the ground, they looked as if they ought to be the easiest prey imaginable. And so, joyously, Orbit would rush at them-and they would fly away.
The tsiongi would leap at them, miss, and then turn an indignant eye turret toward Nesseref, as if to say, They are not supposed to be able to do that. To Orbit, the unexpected abilities of the birds were as confusing and demoralizing as the unexpected abilities of the Big Uglies had been to the males of the conquest fleet.
