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“This is true,” Flynn agreed. “On the other hand, I could refer you to the late Doctor Ernst Kaltenbrunner-if he weren’t late, of course. He was senseless, and now he is and will remain permanently senseless.”
Johnson grimaced and protested, “Yeah, but the Nazis have been off the deep end ever since Hitler started slaughtering Jews. We aren’t like that. We’ve always played straight.” He hesitated. “We played straight with everything I know about except the Lewis and Clark, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s not us,” Healey said. “I have been assured of that. Had it been us, the Race has had plenty of chances to take us off the board.”
And that was also true. Then Johnson said, “What if we haven’t played straight with things nobody up here knows anything about?”
“Like what?” Walter Stone asked.
“How should I know?” Johnson answered. “If I did know, it wouldn’t be something nobody knew about.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Flynn murmured.
“What if, what if, what if,” Brigadier General Healey snarled. “What we need are facts. The only fact we’ve got is that the Race is leaning on the United States. If it leans too hard, we’ve got to fight back or knuckle under. We’re not about to knuckle under.”
“Well, there’s one other fact, too,” Johnson said. “If the USA goes to war with the Lizards now, we lose. And no matter how many drills we hold, the Lewis and Clark is lunch.” He waited-he hoped for-Healey to argue with him. The commandant didn’t.
“Why on earth are the Lizards gearing up for war against the United States?” Reuven Russie asked his father over the supper table. “Has everybody in the whole world gone meshuggeh?”
Moishe Russie said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the only explanation that makes much sense.”
“Have you talked with the fleetlord?” Reuven’s sister Judith asked.
“I’ve called him several times,” Reuven’s father answered. “Most of them, he hasn’t wanted to talk to me. When he has been willing to talk on the phone, he hasn’t had anything much to say.”
“But what could the United States have done to get the Race so angry?” Reuven asked. “With the Germans, everybody else had plenty of good reasons to hate them. But the USA has just sat there and minded its own business. What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know,” his father said. “Since he won’t really talk to me, I’m having a devil of a time finding out, too. But I can tell you this-Straha is back in the Race’s territory, and that’s not anything I thought I’d see while I was alive.”
It was also something that meant very little to Reuven. “Straha?” He put the name into a question half a beat before his sisters could.
Moishe Russie’s smile was half amused, half wistful. “You were only a little boy when he defected to the Americans, Reuven,” he said. “Esther and Judith, you weren’t even imagined yet, let alone here. He was something like the third- or fourth-highest ranking male in the conquest fleet. He tried some sort of coup against Atvar, and it didn’t work, and he fled.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to ask the fleetlord about the details now,” Reuven said.
His mother laughed. “See what your fancy education does for you?”
“Mother!” he said indignantly. His father made cracks like that all the time. His sisters made them whenever they thought they could get away with them. For Rivka Russie to make one, too, felt like a betrayal.
“But the point,” his father said, “the point is that he’s left the United States and come to Cairo-I think he’s in Cairo. He had to know something important, or else he’d be imprisoned somewhere, and he’s not.”
“And it’s probably something that has to do with the United States, since he lived there so long,” Reuven said.
“Very good, Sherlock.” That was Esther, who’d been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in Hebrew translation. “Now all you have to do is figure out what he knows.”
Reuven looked at his father. Moishe Russie shrugged and said, “I already told you, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all find out one day before too long. I’m hoping we never find out, because that will mean the trouble’s gone away.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Reuven took another bite of beefsteak. He raised his wineglass. “Here’s to ignorance!”
Everyone drank the toast. Amid laughter, Reuven’s father said, “That’s probably the first time anyone has ever made that toast inside a Jewish house. Alevai, it’ll be the last time, too.” His face clouded. “Alevai, we won’t need to make that kind of toast again.”
“Omayn.” Reuven and his mother spoke together.
After supper, Reuven asked his father, “If the United States and the Lizards go to war, what do we do?”
“We here in Palestine, you mean?” Moishe Russie asked, and Reuven nodded. His father sighed. “About the same thing we did when the Race fought the Germans: sit tight and hope the Americans don’t manage to land a missile on Jerusalem. I think that would be less likely in this fight than in the war with the Nazis. The Americans don’t particularly hate Jews, so they don’t have any big reason for aiming a missile here-and most of their missiles are farther away than the ones the Germans fired at us.”
“How do you know that?” Reuven asked. “They may have three submarines sitting right off the coast. How would we know?”
“We wouldn’t, not until something either happened or didn’t,” his father said. “I told you what I thought was likely. If you don’t like that, come up with your own answers.”
“I like it fine. I hope you’re right,” Reuven said. “Actually, I hope we’re all worrying over nothing, and that there won’t be a war.”
This time, his father said, “Omayn!”
When they walked to work the next morning, someone had painted new black swastikas on several walls, and the phrase Allahu akbar! by them. Reuven laughed to keep from cursing. “Haven’t the Arabs noticed that that firm’s gone out of business?”
“Who can say?” Moishe Russie answered. “Maybe they wish it were still operating. Or maybe it is still operating, but being quiet about it. That wouldn’t surprise me. Once some things get loose, they’re hard to kill.”
“I thought Dornberger was supposed to be a relatively civilized man,” Reuven said.
“Compared to Hitler, compared to Himmler, compared to Kaltenbrunner-how much praise is that?” his father asked. “He’s still a German. He’s still a Nazi. If he can find some way to make the Lizards unhappy, don’t you think he’ll use it? Getting the Arabs to erupt is one easy way to do it.”
“And if he incites them against us, too, all the better,” Reuven said. His father didn’t contradict him. He wished Moishe Russie had.
Once they got to the office, Yetta showed them their appointments. Reuven sighed. When he’d been studying at the Moishe Russie Medical College, human physiology and biochemistry had looked like important subjects. And they’d looked like fascinating subjects. Seeing them exemplified in the persons of his patients was much less exciting. A lot of the answers he got were ambiguous. Sometimes he couldn’t find any answers at all. And even a lot of the ones that were perfectly clear weren’t very interesting. Yes, sir, that boil will respond to antibiotics. Yes, ma’am, that toe is broken. No, it doesn’t matter if we put a cast on it or not. It’ll do the same either way, and yes, it will hurt for a few weeks.
He gave a tetanus shot. He removed a splinter of metal that had got lodged in a construction worker’s leg. He took the cast off a broken wrist his father had set a few weeks before. He swabbed a four-year-old’s throat to see if the girl was coming down with a streptococcus infection. He injected local anesthetic and stitched up a cut arm. Every bit of that needed doing. He did it well. But it wasn’t what he’d imagined a physician’s career was like.
He was putting a clean dressing on the cut arm when Yetta stuck her head into the room and said, “Mrs. Radofsky just telephoned. Her daughter
is screaming her head off-she thinks it’s an earache. Can you fit her in?”
A screaming toddler-just what I need, Reuven thought. But he nodded. “One way or another, I’ll manage.”
“That’s good,” the receptionist said. “I asked your father, but he said he was too busy and told me to go to you instead.” Yetta was plain to the point of frumpishness, but at the moment she looked almost comically amused. “I’ll tell her she can bring Miriam in to you in an hour, if that’s all right.”
