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When we stop for the evening, he thought. I’ll taste when we stop for the evening.
They came to the vicinity of Peenemunde as light was failing. They would have gone no farther had it been early morning. Teams of the Race’s engineers had already taken possession of the principal spaceport the Deutsche used. They had also set up warning lines to keep other males from venturing too far into the radioactivity without proper protection. No site in the Reich, Nuremberg probably included, had taken as many bombs as Peenemunde.
“Nothing will grow here for a hundred years,” Yarssev predicted. “And I mean a hundred Tosevite years, twice as long as ours.”
“I suppose not,” Gorppet said. “And yet… wasn’t it here that the Big Ugly who calls himself the Deutsch not-emperor these days was holed up during the fighting?”
“I think so,” Yarssev replied. “Too bad the miserable creature came out alive, if you want to know how I feel.”
“Truth,” Gorppet said, for he agreed with all his liver. But if any Tosevite could emerge alive from the slagging the Race had given Peenemunde, that bespoke some truly formidable engineering prowess. He let out a wry hiss. The Race had seen as much in the fighting in Poland. The weapons the Deutsche used there were alarmingly close to being as good as the ones the Race owned-and the Big Uglies had had a lot more of them. If the Race hadn’t pounded their not-empire too flat to let them keep supporting their army, things might have gone even worse than they had.
As usual, field rations tasted like the mud that lined the southern shore of the local sea. Gorppet fueled himself as he would have put hydrogen into a mechanized combat vehicle. Having fueled himself, he did taste ginger. He was sure he wasn’t the only male in the small group who used the Tosevite herb. Penalties against it had grown harsher since females came to Tosev 3, but that hadn’t stopped many males. Except for making sure his troopers didn’t do anything that would get themselves and their comrades killed in combat, Gorppet didn’t try to keep them from tasting. That would hardly have been fair, not when he had the ginger habit himself.
He poured some of the herb into the palm of his hand. Even before he raised palm to mouth, the heady scent of the ginger was tickling his scent receptors. He never tired of it; it always seemed fresh and new. His tongue shot out almost of its own accord.
“Ahhh,” he murmured as bliss flowed through him. He felt bigger than a Big Ugly, faster than a starship, with more computing power between his hearing diaphragms than all the Race’s electronic network put together. Some small part of him knew the feeling was an illusion, but he didn’t care. This side of mating-maybe not even this side of mating-it was as good a feeling as a male of the Race could have.
While it lasted. Like the pleasure of mating, it didn’t last long enough. And when it faded, the crushing depression that followed was as bad as it had been good. One solution was to have another taste, and then another, and… Gorppet chose the harder road, waiting till the depression faded, too. Over the years, he’d come to take it as part of the experience connected to the herb.
When they set out again the next morning, the road along which they were traveling west came together with another, on which were about their number of Deutsch soldiers coming home from Poland. No one had disarmed the Deutsche: they still carried all their hand weapons, and several of them wore bandoliers of bullets crisscrossed on their chests.
The males in Gorppet’s unit nervously eyed the Big Uglies. The Deutsche did not have the look of defeated troops. On the contrary; they looked as if they were ready to start up the war again then and there.
They might win if they did, too, at least in this small engagement. Gorppet was uneasily aware of it. Before either side could start spraying bullets around, he stepped away from the males he commanded and strode toward the Deutsche. “I do not speak your language,” he called. “Does anyone among you speak the language of the Race?” If none of them did, he was liable to be in a lot of trouble.
But, as he’d hoped, a Deutsch male came out from among the Big Uglies and said, “I speak your language. What do you want?”
“I want my small group and your small group to pass by in peace,” Gorppet answered. “The war is over. Let it stay over.”
“You can say that,” the Tosevite replied. His face was grimy. His wrappings were filthy. He smelled powerfully of the rank odor Big Uglies soon acquired when they did not bathe. He went on, “Yes, winners can say, ‘The war is over.’ For losers, the war is never over. Winners can forget. Losers remember. We have much for which to remember the Race.”
“I have nothing to say to that,” Gorppet said. “I am not a politician. I am not a diplomat. I am only a soldier. As a soldier, I tell you this: if you attack us now, you will be sorry and your not-empire will be sorry.”
With a bark of Tosevite laughter, the Deutsch soldier said, “How can you make us sorrier, after what the Race has done to the Reich? How can you make this not-empire sorrier, after all you have done to it?”
“If you attack us, you cannot kill us all before we radio the situation to our superiors,” Gorppet replied, trying to hold his voice steady. “Helicopter gunships will punish you for fighting, and the Race will take further vengeance on the Reich for violating the surrender. Is this a truth, or is it not?”
“It is a truth,” the Big Ugly admitted. “It is a truth about which few of my males care right now. Many of them have lost their mates and hatchlings. Do you understand what this means? It means they do not greatly care if they live or die.”
“I do understand, yes,” Gorppet said, though he knew he did so only in theory. Tosevite kinship ties, and Tosevites willing to kill without thought for their own lives once those ties were broken, had complicated life for the Race since the conquest fleet landed. Gorppet tried the only real direction in which he thought he could go: “What they want to do now, they may regret later. Is this a truth, or is it not? Do you command them?”
“Yes, I command them,” the Deutsch soldier replied. “You make good sense. I almost wish you did not, for I am as ready as any of my males to seek revenge against the Race. But I will tell the soldiers what you have said. After that… we shall have to see. With the war over and lost, my hold over them is weaker than it was.”
“We shall stay alert,” Gorppet said. “We shall not attack you-the war is over. But if we are attacked, we shall fight back with all our strength.”
“I understand.” The Big Ugly walked back toward his own males, calling out in their guttural language. Some of the Deutsche shouted at him. They did not sound happy, nor anything close to it.
“Be ready for anything,” Gorppet warned the males he led. “Do not open fire on them unless they fire on us, but be ready.”
He was willing to let the Deutsche use the crossroads first, and held up his males so they could. The Tosevite officer led his Big Uglies forward. They towered over the males of the Race. Some of them shouted things. Some shook their fists. But, to Gorppet’s vast relief, they didn’t start shooting.
“Forward,” he called after the Deutsche had passed. Forward his own small group went. He kept one eye turret on the terrain, the other on the map he’d been given. Unlike the maps he’d had in the SSSR, this one seemed to know what it was talking about. When, toward evening, his males reached a town, he stopped a local and asked, “Greifswald?”
He made himself understood. The local nodded a Big Ugly affirmative and said, “Greifswald, ja.”
Gorppet turned back to his males. “We have reached our assigned station. Dismal-looking dump, isn’t it?”
3
With a curse half in Yiddish, half in Polish, Mordechai Anielewicz used the hand brake on his bicycle. “How am I supposed to get anywhere if the roads are all kaputt? ” the Jewish fighting leader muttered.
Burnt-out trucks made the asphalt impassable. These particular vehicles were of human manufacture, but he had to look closely to see which side had used them. The Lizards had pressed plenty of human-made models
into service in Poland, and most of them had been imported from Germany.
He got off the bicycle and walked it around the jam. He’d been doing that every kilometer or two on the journey down to Widawa. He’d got his family out of Lodz before the fighting started, and sent them southwest to this little town. That had kept them safe-or safer, anyhow-when the Germans hit the city with an explosive-metal bomb. But the Wehrmacht had overrun Widawa-and Bertha and Miriam and David and Heinrich were every bit as Jewish as he was, of course.
Even after he passed the wrecks, he couldn’t get back on the road right away. Someone’s airplanes had cratered it with bomblets. Anielewicz’s legs ached as he brought the bicycle forward. They’d been doing that since the last round of fighting, when he’d breathed German nerve gas. Without the antidote, he would have died then. As things were, he’d got off lucky. Of the others who’d breathed the gas, Heinrich Jager, after whom his younger son was named, had died at an early age. Ludmila Gorbunova had suffered far more from the lingering effects of the stuff than he had. Ludmila had been in Lodz. Odds were all too good-or all too bad-she wasn’t suffering at all any more.
Over the years, Mordechai had come to take his aches and pains for granted. He couldn’t do that now. The Nazis had used poison gas again in this new round of fighting. How much of it had he breathed? How much harm was it doing? Just how much residual damage did he have? Those were all fascinating questions, and he lacked answers to any of them.
And, in a most important sense, none of them mattered much, not when measured against the one question, the overriding question. What happened to my family? No, there wasn’t one question only. Another lay underneath it, one he would sooner not have contemplated. Have I still got a family?
After half a kilometer, the road stopped being too battered for a bicycle. He got back up on the bike and rode hard. The harder he worked, the worse his legs felt-till, after a while, they stopped hurting so much. He let out a sigh of relief. That had happened before. If he put in enough exercise, he could work right through the cramps. Sometimes.
