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“Who, me?” Reuven said, as innocently as he could. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s pretty funny,” Moishe Russie said. “Now tell me another one.”
“No.” Reuven shook his head. He cautiously looked out the door, then lowered his voice anyhow: “Who do you think I am, Yetta or somebody?”
His father rolled his eyes. “She does her work well. As for the rest…” He shrugged and then, in a near whisper, went on, “We might get somebody who’s a pain in the neck and doesn’t do her job well. I can put up with bad jokes.”
“I suppose so.” Reuven pulled his mind back to the business at hand. “Do you really think we’ll see a day when the Lizards start pairing off by the thousands instead of just one couple at a time? That would make this world different from all the others in the Empire in some very important ways.”
“I know,” Moishe Russie said. “I’m not sure the Race has really figured all of that out yet. And it will be years before the other planets in the Empire find out what ginger is doing here, even if it does what I think it will. It’s always going to be years between stars as far as radio goes, and even more years between them as far as travel. The Race is more patient than we are. I don’t think we could have built an empire that would hang together in spite of all the delays in giving orders and getting things done.”
“You’re bound to be right about that,” Reuven said. “Somebody who was governor on one planet would decide he wanted to be king or president or whatever he called himself, and he’d stop taking orders and set up his own government or else start a civil war.”
“That’s how we are,” his father agreed. “The Lizards here know it, too. I wonder what they think of us back on Home.”
“So do I,” Reuven said. “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be ten years out of date.”
“I know.” Moishe Russie laughed. “And by the time Home answers, it’s twenty years out of date. Atvar is just now finding out what the Emperor thinks of the truce he made with us Big Uglies.”
“And what does the Emperor think?” Reuven asked. “Has Atvar said?” He was going to use his father’s connections with the Race for all they were worth.
“He hasn’t said much,” his father answered. “I gather the Emperor knows Atvar’s the man, uh, the Lizard on the spot, and so he has to do what he thinks best. It’s a good thing the Emperor didn’t order him to go back to war with all of us, and you had best believe that’s a truth.” He’d been speaking Hebrew, but threw in an emphatic cough even so.
“Do you really think he would have done it if the Emperor had told him to?” Reuven asked. That unpleasant possibility hadn’t crossed his mind.
But his father nodded. “If the Emperor told Atvar to stick a skewer through Earth and throw it on the fire, he’d do it. I don’t think we can even imagine how well the Lizards obey the Emperor.”
“I suppose not.” Reuven knew the males of the Race with whom he’d dealt over the years didn’t understand what made him tick. He was willing to believe it worked both ways.
The front door opened. “Hello, Mr. Krause,” Yetta said. She raised her voice: “Dr. Russie, Mr. Krause is here.”
“He’s mine,” Reuven’s father said. In a soft aside, he added, “If he’d lose twenty kilos and stop drinking and smoking, he’d add twenty years to his life.”
Reuven said, “He probably thinks they’d be twenty boring years.” He got up and went back to his own office while his father was still scratching his head over that. If Mr. Krause was here, his own first patient would come through the door pretty soon, too.
Before Yetta announced that first patient’s arrival, Reuven picked up the telephone and made a call. After the phone rang a couple of times, somebody on the other end of the line, a woman, picked it up. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Radofsky?” Reuven said.
“No, she’s at work. This is her sister,” the woman answered. “Who’s calling, please?” In the background, Miriam prattled something-the sister was undoubtedly looking after her.
“This is Dr. Russie,” Reuven answered. “I’m calling to find out how her broken toe is doing.”
He wondered if the sister would simply tell him and hang up. Instead, she said, “Oh, thank you very much, Dr. Russie. Let me give you her number.”
She did. Reuven wrote it down. After he said his good-byes, he called it. “Gold Lion Furniture,” a woman said.
This time, Reuven recognized Mrs. Radofsky’s voice. He named himself, and then asked, “How’s your toe doing these days?”
“It’s still sore,” the widow Radofsky answered, “but it’s getting better. It’s not as swollen as it was, and it doesn’t hurt as much as it did, either.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, for all the world as if he, as opposed to the passage of time, had had something to do with her recovery.
“Thank you very much for calling,” she said. “I’m sure most doctors wouldn’t have done it for their patients.”
Reuven was sure he wouldn’t have done it for most of his patients, too. He also had a pretty good notion the widow Radofsky was sure of that. Even so, he nervously drummed his fingers on his desk before asking, “Would you, ah, like to go out to supper with me one of these evenings to celebrate feeling better?”
Silence on the other end of the line. He braced himself for rejection. If she said no, if she still had her dead husband and nobody else in her heart, how could he blame her? He couldn’t. For that matter, if she just wasn’t interested in him for a multitude of other reasons, how could he blame her? Again, he couldn’t.
But, at last, she said, “Thank you. I think I would like that. Call me at home, why don’t you, and we’ll make the arrangements.”
“All right,” he said. Yetta chose that moment to bawl out his name. His first patient had made an appearance after all. Reuven said his goodbyes and hung up. He was smiling. The patient had waited just long enough.
Marshal Zhukov had, or could have, more power than Vyacheslav Molotov. Molotov knew it, too. But, because of his Party office, he exercised a certain moral authority over the marshal-as long as Zhukov chose to acknowledge it, which he did.
Molotov took advantage of that now. He said, “I assume our support for the People’s Liberation Army will be altogether clandestine, Georgi Konstantinovich. It had better be, at any rate.”
“If it isn’t, Comrade General Secretary, it will be at least as big a surprise to me as it is to you,” Zhukov answered.
That was, no doubt, intended for a joke. As usual, Molotov disapproved of jokes. All they were good for, in his jaundiced opinion, was clouding the issue. He did not want this issue clouded. He wanted no ambiguity whatsoever here. “If we are detected, Comrade Marshal, very unfortunate things will spring from it. Consider the Reich. Consider the United States.”
“I do consider them. I consider them every day,” Zhukov said. “As far as the People’s Liberation Army knows, our aid has not been detected. As far as the GRU knows, it has not been detected. As far as the NKVD knows, it has not been detected. We are as secure as we can possibly be.”
His lip curled when he condescended to name the NKVD at all. The Party’s espionage and security service, as opposed to the Red Army’s (which it frequently was), had fallen on hard times since Beria’s botched coup. That was partly at Molotov’s insistence, partly at Zhukov’s-the NKVD spied on the Red Army as well as the rest of the world. It had needed purging of Beria’s henchmen, and had got it.
Even so, Molotov wished he had the NKVD running at a higher level of efficiency than it possessed right now. The GRU was a good service, but its first loyalty lay with the Army, not with the Party: with Zhukov, not with him. And he wanted more than one perspective on his course of action. Having to rely on the GRU alone left him feeling like a one-eyed man.
He said nothing of that to Zhukov, of course. It would have roused the marshal’s suspicions, and Zhukov had plenty even when they weren’t roused. H
e would have thought Molotov was trying to rebuild an independent political position. He would have been right, too.
Aloud Molotov was mild, as he had to be: “Let us hope the assessments are correct, then. Given the German arms we have been able to supply to the People’s Liberation Army, do you think they stand any serious chance of throwing off the Race’s yoke in China?”
