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“Strange things hatch from strange eggs,” Bunim said, which sounded as if it ought to be a proverb among the Race, something on the order of, Politics make strange bedfellows. The regional subadministrator went on, “If you can bring the forces under your control to full alert, I will be in touch with you on ways in which we can integrate them into the defense of this region. Is it agreed?”
“It is agreed,” Anielewicz said, but then he held up a forefinger. “It is agreed, with the exception of our explosive-metal bomb. That stays under our control, no one else’s.”
“As you wish,” Bunim said, which, more than anything else, told Mordechai how worried the Lizards were. “If you have this weapon, I trust you will use it against the Deutsche, who are your most important foes. I bid you good day.”
“Good day,” Mordechai said, accepting the dismissal more meekly than he’d dreamt he would. Still almost dazed, he went outside. A nondescript little man fell into step beside him. Somehow, that left him unsurprised, too. He nodded, almost as if to an old friend. “Hello, Nussboym. What brings you back to Lodz?”
“Trouble with the Nazis-what else?” David Nussboym answered, his Yiddish flavored these days by all the years he’d spent in the Soviet Union. He looked up at Mordechai, who was perhaps ten centimeters taller. “And I’m not so sorry as I was that we didn’t quite manage to knock you off, either.”
“That you-?” Anielewicz stopped in his tracks. “I ought to-”
“But you won’t,” Nussboym said. “You know damned well you won’t. We’ve got the Germans to worry about first, right?” The worst of it was, Mordechai had to nod.
15
David Goldfarb had thought Ottawa’s climate unfortunate. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t just thought it-he’d been right. But compared to the weather Edmonton enjoyed-or rather, didn’t enjoy-Ottawa might as well have been the earthly paradise. Blizzards came down off the Rockies one after another. Only some truly amazing machinery kept the city from coagulating for days at a time after a storm swept through.
But, of all the places in the Dominion of Canada, this was the one where electronics were booming. And so it was the place to which Goldfarb had moved his family, once he was finally able to move them anywhere. Escaping from the detention center near the Ministry of Defense felt so good, he was willing to overlook a few minor deficiencies in the weather.
As he crunched through snow on his way to work, he did wonder why Edmonton, of all places, had become Canada’s electronic heartland. One answer readily springing to mind was that it was the most northerly big city Canada boasted, and so the one least likely to attract the Lizards’ attention.
He almost got killed when he crossed 103rd Street while walking along Jasper Avenue. He was still in the habit of looking right first when crossing the street-but Canadians, like their American cousins to the south, drove on the right. They drove big American cars, too. The Chevrolet that came to a halt with blasting horn and a rattle of tire chains probably could have smashed the life out of Goldfarb without even getting dented.
He sprang back up onto the curb. “Sorry,” he said with a weak smile. The fellow who’d almost run him down couldn’t have heard him; the Chevy’s windows were all up to give the heater a fighting chance. The car rolled on.
On his second try, Goldfarb got across 103rd Street without nearly committing suicide. He made a point of looking left first. When he made a point of it, he had no trouble. When he didn’t, he acted from habit, and habit didn’t work here.
The Saskatchewan River Widget Works, Ltd., operated out of a second-floor-Goldfarb would have called it a first-floor-suite of offices on Jasper near 102nd Street. The name of the firm had drawn him even before he had the faintest notion what a widget was. The short answer was that it was anything some ingenious engineer said it was.
He shed his overcoat with a sigh of relief. “Hello, Goldfarb,” said Hal Walsh, the ingenious engineer who’d founded the firm. “Isn’t it a lovely day out?”
“If you’re a polar bear, possibly,” Goldfarb said. “Otherwise, no.”
Walsh and several other engineers, all of them Edmontonians, jeered at him. They took their beastly climate for granted. Goldfarb, used to something approaching moderation in his weather, didn’t and couldn’t. He jeered back.
One of the engineers, an alarmingly clever young fellow named Jack Devereaux, said, “It’s bracing, that’s what it is. Puts hair on your chest.”
“Fur would do better,” Goldfarb retorted. “And I’m sure the Eskimos up at the North Pole say the same thing, Jack. That’s only a couple of miles outside of town, isn’t it? We could go and check for ourselves.”
The chaffing went on as he fixed himself a cup of tea and got to work. He’d thought that, coming out of the RAF, he would know more about electronics than these civilians did. It hadn’t worked out like that. They took Lizard technology for granted in ways he didn’t.
“But you’ll learn,” Walsh had told him, not unkindly, a few days after he was hired. “The difference is, the military-yours, mine, everybody’s-has spent the past twenty years grafting the Lizards’ technology onto our own to keep some sort of continuity with what we had before.”
“Well, of course,” said Goldfarb, who’d watched that happen-and who’d helped make it happen. “How else would you go about it?”
“Junk what we had before,” his new boss had answered. “The more we steal from the Race, the more we develop what we’ve stolen from the Race, the better the widgets we come up with. That other stuff, that stuff we used to have, all belongs in the museum-with buggy whips and gas lamps and whalebone corsets.”
Goldfarb hadn’t thought of it like that. He didn’t care to think of it like that. But the Saskatchewan River Widget Works came up with gadgets he wouldn’t have imagined possible in his long years with the RAF The one that hooked up a little electronic gizmo-adapted from one the Lizards used-to a battery hardly bigger-stolen from a Lizard pattern-to make a children’s book that included sound effects when the right buttons were pressed left him shaking his head. He wasn’t surprised to find it had been Jack Devereaux’s idea.
“Hardly seems right to use all that fancy technology for something to keep three-year-olds happy for a few hours,” he remarked.
“Why not?” Devereaux asked around a big mouthful of lunchtime sandwich. “That’s what this stuff is for, for heaven’s sake. The military uses are all very well, but the Lizards live with these electronics every minute of the day and night. They make their lives better. They make them more interesting. They make them more fun, too. They can do the same for us.”
He sounded very sure of himself, like a missionary spreading the word of God to the benighted heathen. And, the longer Goldfarb thought about it, the more convinced he was that the brash young engineer had a point. Britain had been a garrison state, arming itself to the teeth against the Lizards-and, incidentally, to make sure the Reich stayed friendly ally and mentor, not conqueror. Canada was different. Shielded by the USA from danger at the hands of the Race, Canadians could, as Devereaux said, have fun with the new technology. They could, and they did.
Sitting there at a drawing board with bins of electronic parts all around for him to play with, Goldfarb had to work at the notion that having fun was all right, that he wasn’t betraying mankind by not working on some weapon that would make every Lizar
d on Earth shrivel up and turn purple. Designing a little plastic top that lit up and played music when you spun it struck him as absurdly frivolous.
When he said as much, Hal Walsh gave him an odd look and asked, “Are you sure you’re not a Protestant?”
Goldfarb snorted. “I’m not sure of a great many things, but that’s one of them.”
“Well, okay.” His boss laughed. “But look at it from a different angle. Suppose you took that top you’re working on back to your radar station in 1940. Suppose you spun it on the floor there and it did what it’s supposed to do. What would your chums have thought of it? What would you have thought of it back then?”
“Hmm.” Goldfarb rubbed his chin. “The battery would have been impossible. The sound square would have been impossible. The light and the plastic would just have been improbable. Offhand, I’d say we’d have thought the Martians had landed.”
“You wouldn’t have been so far wrong, either, would you?” Walsh laughed some more. “Now suppose you gave it to your father when he was a little boy. What would his mother and father have thought?”
“Back in Warsaw before the turn of the century?” Goldfarb thought about that. “Jews don’t burn people at the stake for witchcraft, but that’s about the only thing that would have kept me in one piece.” He got another chuckle from Walsh, but he hadn’t been joking.
His boss was about to say something more when the telephone by Goldfarb’s table rang. Walsh waved and went off. Goldfarb picked up the phone. Before he could even say hello, the fellow on the other end of the line announced, “It’s not over yet. You may think it’s over, but it’s not.”
“What?” Goldfarb said. “Who is this?”
