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Even with field glasses, which he didn’t have, he couldn’t have seen a great deal. No tanks rumbled toward the border from the west, as they had in 1939. The only visible German soldiers were a couple of sentries pacing their routes. One of them was smoking a cigarette; a plume of smoke drifted after him.
In a way, the calm was reassuring: the Wehrmacht didn’t look ready to come charging toward Lodz. In another way, though, this land was war’s home. It was low and flat and green-ideal country for panzers. In front of the smoking sentry lay barbed wire thicker than either side had put down in the First World War. Concrete antitank obstacles stood among the thickets of barbed wire like great gray teeth. More of them farther from the frontier worked to channel armored fighting vehicles to a handful of routes, at which the German troops no doubt had heavy weapons aimed.
This side of the frontier, the Polish side, was less ostentatiously fortified. The Nazis went in for large, intimidating displays; the Race didn’t. More of the Lizards’ installations were camouflaged or underground. But Mordechai knew how the Race could fight, and also knew both the Poles and the Jews would fight at the Lizards’ side to keep the Reich from returning to Poland.
He raised his eyes and looked farther west, past the immediate border region. Mist and distance blocked his gaze. He wouldn’t have been able to see the German rockets aimed at Poland anyhow-rockets tipped with explosive-metal bombs. The Jews and Poles couldn’t do anything about them. Anielewicz hoped the Lizards could, either by knocking down the German rockets or by sending so many into the Reich as to leave it a lifeless wasteland.
With such gloomy thoughts in his mind, he didn’t hear the mechanized combat vehicle coming up behind him till it got very close. It was much quieter than a human-made machine of the same type would have been; the Lizards had had not a couple of decades but tens of thousands of years to refine their designs. They were splendid engineers. An engineering student himself back in the days before the world went mad, Anielewicz understood that. But they moved in little steps, not the great leaps people sometimes took.
The combat vehicle stopped at the top of the hill. A Lizard-an officer, by his body paint-got out and peered west as Mordechai had been doing. He had field glasses, of odd design by human standards but perfectly adapted to the shape of his head and to his eye turrets.
After lowering the binoculars, he turned one eye toward Anielewicz. “What are you doing here?” he asked in fair Polish.
“Looking at what the enemy may be up to-the same as you, I suspect,” Anielewicz answered in the language of the Race.
“If there is any trouble, we will defend Poland,” the Lizard said, also in his own language. “You need not concern yourself about it.”
Anielewicz laughed in the arrogant male’s face. The Lizard, plainly startled, drew back a pace. Anielewicz said, “We Tosevites fought alongside you to expel the Deutsche from this region.” They’d also helped the Germans against the Race in a nasty balancing act Mordechai hoped never to have to try again. Not mentioning that, he went on, “We will fight alongside you if the Deutsche attack now. If you do not understand that, you must be very new to the region.”
He almost laughed at the Lizard again. Had the male been a human being, he would have looked flabbergasted. The Race had less mobile features, but the way the officer held himself proclaimed his astonishment. He asked, “Who are you, to speak to me so?”
“My name is Mordechai Anielewicz,” Anielewicz answered, wondering if the Lizard was so new to Poland that that wouldn’t mean anything to him. But how could he be, if he spoke Polish?
And he wasn’t. “Ah, the Tosevite fighting leader!” he exclaimed. “No wonder you have an interest in the Deutsche, then.”
“No wonder at all,” Anielewicz agreed dryly. “What I do wonder about is your foolish insistence before that Tosevites were not fighters. I hope you know better. I hope your superiors know better.”
“I am sorry,” the Lizard said, a rare admission from his kind. Then he spoiled it: “I took you for an ordinary, lazy Big Ugly, not one of the less common sort.”
“Thank you so much,” Mordechai said. “Are you sure you are a male of the Race and not a male of the Deutsche?” Few Germans could have been more open in their scorn for Polish and Jewish Untermenschen — but the Lizard applied his scorn to the whole human race. Remember, he’s an ally, Anielewicz reminded himself.
“Of course I am sure,” the male said; whatever he was, he had no sense of humor and no sense of irony. “I am also sure that the Deutsche will not dare attack us, not after the warnings we have given them. You may take this to your fighters and tell them to rest easy.”
“There have been warnings, then?” Mordechai asked, and the Lizard made the affirmative hand gesture. That was news Anielewicz hadn’t heard before-and, as far as he was concerned, good news. He said, “The one thing I will tell you is that the Deutsche can be treacherous.”
“All Big Uglies can be treacherous,” the male answered. “We have learned this, to our sorrow, ever since the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3.”
To him, that obviously included Anielewicz. He had some reason for his suspicions, too: with luck, he didn’t know how much. Mordechai said, “We Jews will fight with the Race against the Deutsche.”
“I know this. This is good. You will fight harder against the Reich than you would against the SSSR,” the Lizard officer said. “But the Poles, while they will also fight for us against the Reich, might well fight harder against the SSSR. Is this not a truth? You will know your fellow Tosevites better than I can.”
“You know them well enough, or so it seems,” Anielewicz said-the Lizard had a good grasp of local politics. “Some of us reckon one side a worse enemy, some the other. We all have reasons we think good.”
“I know that.” The male let out a hiss of discontent. “This trying to deal with every tiny grouping of Tosevites as if it were an empire has addled a good many of us. It is but one way in which you are such a troublesome species.”
“I thank you,” Anielewicz said, straight-faced.
“You thank me?” After his interrogative cough, the Lizard spread his hands to show more perplexity. “I do not understand.”
“Never mind,” Mordechai said resignedly.
“Is it a joke?” No, the Lizard wasn’t able to tell. He went on, “If it is, I warn you to be careful. Otherwise, one day the joke will be on you.” Before Anielewicz could come up with an answer for that, the officer continued, “Since you are who you are, I suppose you have come to the border here to spy on the Deutsche.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.” Mordechai saw no point in denying the obvious. “You may tell your superiors that you met me here, and you may tell them that we Jews are in the highest state of readiness with all our weapons. We will resist the Deutsche with every means at our disposal-every means.”
As he’d intended, the male got his drift-this was indeed an alert, clever Lizard, even if one without a sense of humor. “Does that include explosive-metal weapons?” he asked.
“I hope both you and the Deutsche never have to find out,” Anielewicz answered. “You may tell that to your superiors, too.” After more than twenty years, he didn’t know whether the bomb the Nazis had meant for Lodz would work, either. He too hoped he would never have to find out.
Most Lizards would have kept on grilling him about the explosive-metal bomb. This one didn’t. Instead of pounding away at an area where he wouldn’t get any answers, he adroitly changed the subject. Pointing west, he asked, “Do you observe anything that, in your opinion, requires special vigilance on our part?”
“No,” Mordechai admitted, not altogether happily. He laughed at himself. “I am not altogether sure whether coming to the border was a waste of time, but I did it anyhow. Still, you of the Race can observe from high over the heads of the Deutsche.” He pointed up into space. “You can see far more than I could hope to from this little hill.”
“But if you saw some
thing, you would be more likely to do so with full understanding,” the officer said. “We have been deceived before. No doubt we shall be deceived again and again, until such time as this world at last fully becomes part of the Empire.”
Just when Anielewicz began to think this Lizard did understand people after all, the male came out with something like that. “Do you really believe the Race will conquer the independent not-empires?”
“Yes,” the Lizard answered. “For you Tosevites, a few years seem a long time. Over hundreds of years, over thousands of years, we are bound to prevail.”
He spoke of the Race’s triumph with the certainty a Communist would have used to proclaim the victory of the proletariat or a Nazi the dominance of the Herrenvolk. Anielewicz said, “We may not think in the long terms as well as the Race does, but we also change more readily than the Race does. What will happen if, before hundreds or thousands of years pass, we go ahead of you?”
“You had better not,” the Lizard replied. “This is under discussion among us, and you had better not.”
