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“Anything else?” Healey barked. When Johnson said there wasn’t, the commandant broke the connection. That was in character for him, where the chuckle hadn’t been-hadn’t even come close.
“So we just go on about our business?” Lucy asked. “That won’t be so easy, not for some of the things we’ll need to do sooner or later.”
Johnson shrugged; his belt held him in his seat. He’d spent his adult life in the service; he knew how to evaluate military problems. “Yes and no,” he said. “If you know the other guy is watching, you can make sure he only sees what you want him to see, and sometimes you can lead him around by the nose. What’s really bad is when he’s watching and you don’t know he’s there. That’s when he can find out stuff that hurts you bad.”
“I can see how it would be.” The mineralogist sounded thoughtful. “You make it seem so logical. Every trade has its own tricks, doesn’t it?”
“Well, sure,” Johnson answered, surprised she needed to ask. “If we hadn’t had some notion of what we were doing, we’d all be singing the Lizard national anthem every time we went to the ballpark.”
She laughed. “Now there’s a picture for you! But do you know what? Some of the Lizard POWs who ended up settling in the States like playing baseball. I saw them on the TV news once. They looked pretty good, too.”
“I’ve heard that,” Johnson said. “I never saw film of them playing, though.”
“More important to worry about what they’re doing out here,” Lucy said. “And whatever it is, they’ll have a harder time doing it because you were on the ball. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” he said in some confusion. He wasn’t used to praise for what he did. If he carried out his assignments, he was doing what his superiors expected of him, and so didn’t particularly deserve praise. And if he didn’t carry them out, he got raked over the coals. That was the way things worked. After a moment, he added, “I never would have spotted it if you hadn’t sent me out this way, so I guess you deserve half the credit. I’ll tell General Healey so, too.”
They spent the next little while wrangling good-naturedly about who deserved what, each trying to say the other should get it. Finally, Lucy Vegetti said, “The only reason we did come out here was to get a look at that asteroid shaped like a zucchini. Can we still get over there?”
Johnson checked the gauges for the main tank and the maneuvering jets, then nodded. “Sure, no trouble at all.” He chuckled. “Now I can’t stop halfway there and say, ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but we just ran out of gas on this little country road in the middle of nowhere.’ ”
They were in the middle of nowhere, all right, far more so than they could have been anyplace on Earth. The very idea of a road, country or otherwise, was absurd here. Lucy said, “I didn’t figure you for that kind of guy anyway, Glen. You’re not shy if you’ve got something on your mind.”
“I’ve got something on my mind, all right,” he said.
“Maybe I’ve got something on mine, too,” she answered. “Maybe we could even find out-after we give this asteroid the once-over and after we get back to the Lewis and Clark.”
“Sure,” Johnson agreed, and swung the nose of the hot rod away from the Lizard spy craft and toward the asteroid that interested Lucy.
Vyacheslav Molotov had disliked dealing with Germans longer than he’d disliked dealing with Lizards. On a personal level, he disliked dealing with Germans more, too. He made allowances for the Lizards. They were honestly alien, and often were ignorant of the way things were supposed to work on Earth. The Germans had no such excuses, but they could make themselves more difficult than the Lizards any day of the week.
Paul Schmidt, the German ambassador to Moscow, was a case in point. Schmidt was not a bad fellow. Skilled in languages-he’d started out as an English interpreter-he spoke good Russian, even if he did always leave the verb at the end of the sentence in the Germanic fashion. But he had to take orders from Himmler, which meant his inherent decency couldn’t count for much.
Molotov glared at him over the tops of his reading glasses. “Surely you do not expect me to take this proposition seriously,” he said.
“We could do it,” Schmidt said. “Between us, we could split Poland as neatly as we did in 1939.”
“Oh, yes, that was splendid,” Molotov said. Schmidt recognized sarcasm more readily than a Lizard would, and had the grace to flush. Molotov drove the point home anyhow: “The half of Poland the Reich seized gave it a perfect springboard for the invasion of the Soviet Union a year and a half later. How long would we have to wait for your panzers this time? Not very, unless I miss my guess.”
“Reichs Chancellor Himmler is prepared to offer an ironclad guarantee of the integrity of Soviet territory after this joint undertaking,” the German ambassador told him.
He didn’t laugh in Schmidt’s face. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said: some vestige of bourgeois politesse, perhaps. “In view of past history, the Soviet Union is not prepared to accept German guarantees,” he said.
Schmidt looked wounded. Like any Nazi, he thought a wave of the hand sufficed to relegate history to the rubbish bin. A miracle the Americans haven’t gone Nazi, Molotov thought. But Schmidt said, “Surely you cannot say you like having the aliens on your western border.”
“I do not,” Molotov admitted. The German ambassador brightened-until Molotov added, “But I vastly prefer them to the Reich. They form a useful buffer. And what do you suppose they would do if we were rash enough to fall on their colony in Poland? They would not sit quiet, I assure you.”
“I think they might,” Schmidt said, and then qualified that by adding, “Reichs Chancellor Himmler thinks they might. They have no adjoining territory. Once lost, Poland would be difficult for them to regain. What could they do but acquiesce to the fait accompli?”
“Drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union and the Reich till both countries glow for the next thousand years,” Molotov answered. “In my considered opinion, that is exactly what they would do at such an outrageous provocation.
“Chancellor Himmler believes otherwise,” Schmidt said. This time, he didn’t say anything about what he believed. Molotov nodded to himself. He’d pegged the ambassador for an intelligent man. He might present Himmler’s proposal as part of his duty, but that didn’t mean he thought it was a good idea.
“If Chancellor Himmler believes otherwise, he is welcome to launch this attack against Poland by himself,” the Soviet leader said. “If he succeeds, he is welcome to all the spoils. I will congratulate him.” I will also begin fortifying our western frontier more strongly than ever.
“Our two great nations have cooperated before, first in rectifying the frontiers of eastern Europe in 1939 and then in the struggle against the Lizards,” Schmidt said smoothly. “What we have done once, we can do again.”
“We have also fought each other to the death in the interval between those times,” Molotov said icily. “When your predecessor, Count Schulenberg, announced that your nation had wantonly invaded mine, I asked him, ‘Do you believe that we deserved this?’ He had no answer. I do not believe you have an answer, either.”
He had never had a worse moment in his life than when the German envoy announced the start of hostilities on 22 June 1941. Stalin had never thought that day would come, which meant no one under Stalin had dared think it might come. Had the Lizards not landed, who could guess which of the two giants in Europe would have been left standing when the fighting was done?
Schmidt did his best, as his masters in Berlin would have wanted him to do. Voice still smooth, he said, “That was twenty years ago, Comrade General Secretary. Times change. Both of our governments view the Race as the greatest menace facing humanity these days, would you not agree?”
“The Race is the greatest enemy facing humanity, yes. I would agree with that.” Molotov shot out a forefinger to point at the German ambassador. “But the Reich is without a doubt the greatest menace to the peace-loving people of the S
oviet Union.”
“Chancellor Himmler does not think the Soviet Union is the greatest menace to the Reich,.” Paul Schmidt told him. “That is why he invited you-”
“To share in his own destruction,” Molotov broke in. “Do you know what would likely happen even if the Reich and the USSR did succeed in wresting Poland from the Race?”
“You have expressed your view on the matter with great clarity,” Schmidt said.
Molotov shook his head. “The view I expressed was, as you say, mine. If anything, it was also unduly optimistic. If we ousted the Lizards from Poland, they might conclude we were drawing ahead of them technically. Do you know what they might do if they came to that conclusion?”
“Respect us. Fear us,” Schmidt answered. He might be a decent enough fellow. He might be a clever fellow. But Nazi ideology had corroded his thought processes, sure enough. Too bad, Molotov thought.
“They might indeed do those things,” he said aloud. “Most especially, they might fear us. And, if they fear us enough, their ambassador here in Moscow has made it clear that they will seek to destroy us altogether so we cannot possibly become a menace to the Empire as a whole. Has not the Lizard ambassador in Nuremberg conveyed a similar message to your leaders?”
“If he has, I am not aware of it.” Schmidt looked thoughtful, an unusual expression to find on a German’s face.
Here, Molotov believed him. Regardless of the warnings the Race might have given the Nazi bigwigs, they were unlikely to take them seriously. In their arrogance, the leaders of the Reich, like so many spoiled children, still thought they could do whatever they wanted simply because they wanted to do it. Unlike spoiled children, though, they could wreck the world if they tried.
Schmidt licked his lips. “I think I had better send that message back to Nuremberg with some urgency. If it has already been communicated to my superiors, it will do no harm. If it has not, it may do some good.”
