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“I care nothing for your views on architecture,” Molotov said. “And if this building should cease to exist, if many buildings throughout the Soviet Union should cease to exist, the Race and the buildings it cherishes would not come through unscathed.”
The Lizard’s tailstump quivered, a sign of anger. But Queek left without making any more cracks, which was probably just as well.
As soon as the door closed behind the Race’s envoy and his interpreter, Molotov rose from his chair and went into a chamber off to the side of the office. There he changed his clothes, including socks, shoes, and underwear. The Race could make extraordinarily tiny mobile surveillance devices; he did not want to take the chance of carrying them through the Kremlin.
Marshal Zhukov waited in Molotov’s own office. “You heard, Georgi Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.
“Oh, yes.” Zhukov patted the intercom speaker that had relayed the conversation to him. “I heard. You did about as well as anyone could have, Comrade General Secretary. Now we wait and see what happens.”
“Is everything in readiness to defend the rodina?” Molotov asked.
Zhukov nodded. “Strategic Rocket Forces are ready to defend the motherland. Admiral Gorshkov tells me our submarines are ready. Our ground forces are dispersed; the Lizards will not find it easy to smash large armies with single weapons. Our forces in space will do everything they can.”
“And our antimissiles?” Molotov suppressed hope from his voice as efficiently as he had suppressed fear.
With a big peasant shrug, Zhukov answered, “They will also do everything they can. How much that is likely to be, I’ve got no idea. We may knock some down. We will not knock down enough to make any serious difference in the fighting.”
“How many of ours will they knock down?” Molotov asked.
“More,” Zhukov said. “You spoke accurately. We can hurt them. Together with the United States, we can hurt them badly. They can do to us what they did to the Reich. I wish you could have learned how this trouble with the USA blew up so fast.”
“So do I.” Molotov’s smile was Moscow winter. “Do you suppose President Warren would tell me?”
“You never can tell with Americans, but I wouldn’t hold my breath,” the leader of the Red Army replied. Molotov nodded; that was also his assessment. Zhukov cursed. “I don’t want to fight the damned Lizards blind. I don’t want to fight them at all, with or without the Americans on my side.”
“Would you rather they came and fought us after beating the Americans? That looks to be our other choice,” Molotov said.
“You were right. That’s worse,” Zhukov said. “But this is not good. I wish the Lizards would have let you mediate.”
“Queek did not want mediation,” Molotov said gloomily. “Queek, unless I am very much mistaken, wanted the Americans’ blood.”
“That is not good, not good at all.” Zhukov slammed his fist down onto Molotov’s desk. “Again, I think you were right.”
The telephone rang. Molotov quickly picked it up, not least to make sure Zhukov wouldn’t. Andrei Gromyko was on the other end of the line. “Well?” the foreign commissar asked, one word that said everything necessary.
Molotov gave back one word: “Bad.”
“What are we going to do, Comrade General Secretary?” Gromyko sounded worried. When Gromyko sounded like anything, matters were serious if not worse. “The threat the Lizards present makes that of the Hitlerites in 1941 seem as nothing beside it.”
“I am painfully aware of that, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov answered. “I judge that the threat from the Race will not decrease if the Lizards are allowed to ride roughshod over the United States and then come after us. Marshal Zhukov, who is here with me, concurs. Do you disagree?”
“No, I do not. I wish I could,” Gromyko said. “All our choices are bad. Some may be worse than others.”
“Our best hope, I believe, is persuading the Race that another wan of aggression would cost them more than they could hope to gain in return,” Molotov said. “Since that is obviously true, I had no trouble making my position, the Soviet Union’s position, very plain to Queek.”
He spoke with more assurance than he felt. The phone lines to his office were supposed to be the most secure in the Soviet Union. But the Lizards were better at electronics than their Soviet counterparts. He had no guarantee they were not listening. If they were, they weren’t going to hear anything secret different from what he’d said to their ambassador’s scaly face.
Gromyko understood that. “Of course, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the foreign commissar said. He was good. No one, human or Lizard, would have said that he was using a public voice, an overly fulsome voice, to put undue stress on his words.
“Have you any further suggestions?” Molotov asked.
“No,” Gromyko replied. “I am content to leave everything in your capable hands.” Had Molotov been unsure Gromyko was content to do that, someone else would have held the foreign commissar’s job. Gromyko added, “Good-bye,” and hung up.
“Does he agree with you?” Zhukov asked.
Molotov nodded. “Da. And you?” He wanted it out in the open. If Zhukov didn’t agree, somebody else would start holding the general secretary’s job.
But the marshal, however reluctantly, nodded. “As you say, our best hope. But it is not a good one.”
“I wish I thought it were,” Molotov said. “Now we can only wait.”
Rance Auerbach spoke French slowly and with a Southern accent nothing like the one the people in the south of France used. But he read the language pretty well. Everything he saw in the Marseille newspapers made him wish he were back on the other side of the Atlantic. “Christ, I wonder if they’d let me back in the Army if I asked ’em nice.”
Penny Summers looked at him from across their room at La Residence Bompard. The hotel lay well to the west of the city center, and so had survived the explosive-metal bomb without much damage. Penny said, “What the hell were you drinking last night, and how much of it did you have? The Army wouldn’t take you back to fight off an invasion of chipmunks, let alone Lizards.”
“Never can tell,” he said. “Back when the Race first hit us, they took anybody who was breathing, and they didn’t check that real hard, either.”
“You aren’t hardly breathing night now,” Penny retorted, which was cruel but not altogether inaccurate. “I can hear you wheezing all the way over here.”
Like her previous comment, that one held an unfortunate amount of truth. Auerbach glared just the same. “You want to be over here if the Lizards try and kick the crap out of the country?”
“I’d sooner be here than there, on account of they can kick our ass from here to Sunday, and you know it as well as I do,” Penny said.
One more home truth he could have done without. Putting the best face on it he could, he said, “We’ll go down swinging.”
“That won’t do us a hell of a lot of good.” Penny walked past him to the window and looked north toward the blue, blue waters of the Mediterranean. The hotel sat on the headland west of the inlet that had prompted Greek colonists to land at Marseille what seemed a very long time ago by Earthly standards. Turning back, Penny went on, “You want to go back, go ahead. It’s no skin off my nose. You won’t see me doing it, though.”
Rance grunted. He was just gassing, and he knew it. If he’d thought the Army would take his ruined carcass, he would have gone back if he had to swim the Atlantic to do it. As things were… As things were, he wanted a drink and he wanted a cigarette. The cigarettes hereabouts were nasty items; they tasted like a blend of tobacco, hemp, and horse manure. He lit one anyway, as much an act of defiance as anything else.
He looked at his watch. “It’s half past ten,” he said. “We’re supposed to see Pierre the Turd at noon. We’d better get moving.”
“One of these days, you’re gonna call him that to his face, and you’ll be sorry,” Penny predicted.
“I still say that’
s what his name sounds like.” Rance took another quick drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out. He’d sated his craving for nicotine, and he didn’t like the taste for hell.
By writing out what he wanted, Auerbach got the concierge to call him a cab. It showed up a few minutes later: a battered Volkswagen. “Where to?” the cabby asked. He was smoking a cigarette like the one Rance had had, but he’d worked it down to a tiny little butt.
