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“That appears to be the case, yes,” Gorppet said. “And so we were hoping you might go to this town near Breslau and try to persuade the fellow members of your superstition to surrender, and to return the bomb. We are willing to promise them safe conduct and freedom from punishment, and we shall enforce this on the Deutsche.”
“Why do you suppose these Jews will listen to me?” Mordechai asked. “If they were the sort who would listen to me, they would never have taken the bomb into the Reich in the first place.”
“If they will not listen to you, to whom will they listen?” the Lizard asked in return. “Suggest a name. We would be grateful for that.”
Try as he would, Anielewicz couldn’t come up with any names. “Maybe,” he said hopefully, “they have not set off the bomb because they cannot, because it will not detonate any more.”
“No one has seemed eager to experiment along those lines,” Gorppet said. “Will you come to the environs of Breslau? If you choose to do so, both the Race and the Deutsche will obey your orders.”
“I will come,” Anielewicz said.
“Good,” Gorppet answered. “Pack whatever you need. Pack quickly. Transportation will be laid on. Farewell.” He hung up.
“What are you doing?” Bertha Anielewicz exclaimed when Mordechai started throwing clothes into the cheap cardboard suitcase that was the only one they owned. He explained as he went on packing. That made his wife exclaim again, louder than ever.
“I know,” he said. “What choice have I got?”
He hoped she would come up with one for him. She didn’t. All she said was, “You’re doing this for the Germans?”
He shook his head. “I’m doing this to keep the war from hitting Poland again. If that helps the Germans…” He shrugged. “What can you do?”
Somebody knocked on the door. Bertha opened it. A man spoke in Polish: “I’m here for Mordechai Anielewicz.”
“I’m coming,” he said, and grabbed the suitcase. He kissed his wife on the way out, then followed the man downstairs to a beat-up motorcar. They got in. The car zoomed off to a park. A helicopter waited there, rotors spinning. He scrambled into it. He didn’t fit well: it was made by and for Lizards. The helicopter roared off to an airstrip a few kilometers outside of Przemysl. A jet aircraft sat on the runway. Its motors were already running. As soon as Anielewicz boarded and sat down in one of the uncomfortable seats, the airplane took off. Half an hour later, he was on the outskirts of Breslau.
A male came up to him while he was still wondering if he’d remembered to bring a toothbrush. “I am Gorppet,” the Lizard said. “I greet you.”
“And I greet you,” Mordechai answered. “What are you doing here, if I may ask? Are you an expert on explosive-metal bombs?”
“Me?” Gorppet made the negative gesture. “Hardly. But my superiors have decided I am an expert on Johannes Drucker and Mordechai Anielewicz. That is the expertise that brought me here to meet you. Am I not a lucky male?”
“Very lucky,” Anielewicz agreed. He didn’t know how to say cynic in the language of the Race, but thought Gorppet’s picture could have illustrated the dictionary definition. “Where near Breslau do you think the bomb is hidden?”
“Somewhere in the town called Kanth. Where, no one has bothered to tell me yet,” Gorppet replied-a cynic, sure enough. “In this strange environment, it could be anywhere, and that is a truth. Altogether too much water on this world.”
The vicinity of Breslau didn’t seem so strange to Anielewicz. The city had sprawled on both sides of the Oder and over the numerous islands in the river. Dozens of bridges had spanned the Oder. These days, Breslau itself was wreckage and nothing else but, thanks to the explosive-metal bomb that had burst above the city. Considering what the Germans had visited on Poland-and anywhere else their bombs could reach-Mordechai had a certain amount of trouble feeling sympathetic.
He pointed ahead. “This little town here-Kanth? — hardly seems to have many hiding places for a bomb.”
“Easy enough to hide a bomb,” Gorppet answered. “Harder to hide that we are looking for it.”
And there, as the Race would have said, was another truth. The Lizards had set up a command post outside of Kanth. The Germans had set up another one. If there were Jews holed up in there with ten tonnes’ worth of explosive-metal bomb, they could hardly doubt they’d been noticed.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” Mordechai asked. “Go in there and ask them to come out without blowing up the town?”
“As I told you on the telephone, we and the Deutsche will obey your orders here,” Gorppet replied. “These are your followers. The presumption is that you will best know how to deal with them.”
Anielewicz wondered how good that presumption was. Any followers of his who really followed him wouldn’t have absconded with the explosive-metal bomb in the first place. But he had no better notions, and so he said, “We had both better find out where your leaders believe the bomb to be.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said, for all the world as if Mordechai were a Lizard of higher rank. “Come with me, then. We can both learn.”
Inside one of the tents the Lizards had set up, a monitor displayed a map of Kanth. The map was in German, and must have been copied from a Nazi document. A red square blinked on and off on one street near the edge of town. Anielewicz pointed to it. “Is that the place?”
“Yes, that is the place,” answered a Lizard whose body paint was similar to Gorppet’s but somewhat more ornate. He went on, “I am Hozzanet. You are the male named Anielewicz?” At Mordechai’s nod, Hozzanet went on, “What can we do to assist you in dealing with these individuals?”
“Get me a bicycle,” Mordechai answered. “I do not want to walk all that way.”
“It shall be done,” Hozzanet said, and done it was. He had no idea where the Lizards came up with the bicycle-for all he knew, they borrowed it from the Nazis-but they got it. His legs ached when he started pedaling: the never-failing legacy of German nerve gas more than twenty years before. Why am I doing this? he wondered. Why am I risking my neck to save a bunch of Germans who hate me? That was the question his wife had asked. It seemed more urgent now. But the answer still came all too clearly. Because this band of idiots is liable to make the Nazis visit more harm on people I don’t hate, on people I love.
People in Kanth stared at him as he rolled through the quiet, almost empty streets. They knew something was going on, but they had no idea what. If they started fleeing, what would the men with the bomb do? Probably try to set it off, so they could kill folk other than themselves. Anielewicz had played the role of a terrorist. He knew how such folk thought.
Here was the street. Here was the house, on the left-hand side. It had an attached garage that had probably been a stable before the turn of the century. It could easily have held the bomb. Nobody had trimmed the grass in front of the house for a long time, but that was far from unique on the Street. With fall edging toward winter, most of the grass had gone grayish yellow.
Mordechai leaned the bicycle against a beech tree with a couple of bullet holes in the trunk. As he walked up to the door, he felt eyes on him from inside. What a fool I am for coming here, he thought, and knocked on the tarnished brass knocker.
The door opened. The man who stood there aimed a submachine gun at Anielewicz’s belly. “All right, you damned traitor,” he growled in Yiddish. “Get your tukhus inside! Right now!” Mordechai went in. The door slammed shut behind him.
Ttomalss did not like using a sound-only telephone, but the Race didn’t yet have a consulate in Tours from which he could have had a proper discussion with the Tosevite historian Felless had found for him. Making the best of things, he said, “I greet you, Professor Dutourd.”
A male Big Ugly turned his words into Francais. A female Big Ugly answered, presumably in the same tongue. The male Big Ugly spoke in the language of the Race: “And she greets you.”
At least the historian and the
interpreter were on the same circuit. As far as Tosevite telephone technology went, that was no small achievement. Ttomalss said, “Professor Dutourd, I gather the Romans whom you study are an important imperial folk among the Tosevites.”
More back-and-forth between the Big Uglies. “Yes, that is a truth,” Monique Dutourd answered through the interpreter. That interpreter, Ttomalss had been given to understand, was a notorious ginger dealer. But he was also a kinsmale to the historian. Knowing from painful personal experience how intimate Tosevite ties of kinship could be, Ttomalss had prevailed upon Ambassador Veffani to allow his release. He hoped he was doing the right thing. He did not want to have to deal with a hostile historian. That would make learning what he needed to know all the more difficult.
“I gather also that these Romans ruled many different kinds of Tosevites, some of them from cultures very different from their own,” Ttomalss said. If he turned out to be wrong there, he would have to ask Felless to find him another historian.
But Monique Dutourd said, “Yes, that is also a truth.”
“Good.” Ttomalss knew he sounded relieved. He wondered if the Tosevite interpreter noticed. The very idea of different cultures had been alien to him before he came to Tosev 3. That of Home had been homogeneous since not long after the Race unified the planet. The Rabotevs and the Hallessi had quickly adopted their conquerors’ ways. He could find more differences crossing a river on this world than he could in crossing light-years of space between worlds in the Empire.
“What is it you wish to know about the Romans and these other cultures?” Monique Dutourd asked.
“I want to learn how the Romans succeeded in incorporating them into their empire and into their culture,” Ttomalss answered.
“Ah, I see,” the Tosevite historian said. “This is relevant to your present situation, is that not a truth?” Either she or her interpreter let out a couple of yips of barking Tosevite laughter. Through him, she went on, “There are those among us who say history is not relevant to anything. I am glad to find the Race disagrees.”
