“What’s up?” Reuven asked.
“I hear Ppurrin and Waxxa really have gone to the United States,” Moishe Russie answered.
“Have they?” Reuven said. “Well, that’s one problem solved for old Atvar, then, and some credit for us because we came up with the idea for him.”
“Credit for us, yes,” his father said. “A problem solved? I don’t know. I wouldn’t bet on it, though for the time being I think Atvar thinks he won’t have to worry about it any more.”
“What do you mean?” Reuven said. “The Americans will let those Lizards stay. They may be perverts to the Race, but not to us.”
“I’m sure the Americans will let them stay, yes.” His father nodded. “That’s not the problem, or not as I see it, anyhow.”
Reuven scratched his head. “What is, then? I’m sorry, Father, but I’m not following you at all.”
No? Moishe Russie grinned. “All right. Let’s put it like this: do you think Ppurrin and Waxxa will be the only pair of what the Lizards call perverts that they’ll have? A lot of Lizards taste ginger.”
“Oh,” Reuven said, and then, in an altogether different tone of voice, “Oh.” He gave his father an admiring look. “You think those two are just the tip of the iceberg, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” his father returned. “The colonists haven’t been here very long, after all, and this is already starting to happen. What will things be like when you’re my age? What will things be like when your children are my age?”
Most times, Reuven would have pointed out with some heat that he had no children at present. Today, though, he nodded thoughtfully. “They’ll have to change a lot of things to adjust to that, won’t they? I mean, if they really do start forming permanent mated pairs.”
“Start falling in love and getting married,” Moishe Russie said, and Reuven nodded, accepting the correction. His father went on, “It will be as hard for them to get used to the idea of pairs settling down together as it would be for us to get used to the idea of being promiscuous all the time.” He wagged a finger at his son. “And wipe that dirty grin off your face.”
“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. He 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?”
“Probably not, but they can make enormous nuisances of themselves, and when was Mao ever good for any more than that?” Zhukov answered, proving Molotov did not have the exclusive franchise for cynicism among the Soviet leaders. “Besides, even if the Chinese do seem on the brink of expelling the Lizards, the Race has explosive-metal bombs, and the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t.”
“Not from us, anyhow,” Molotov agreed. “But life gets more difficult and more complicated now that the Japanese do have them.”
Zhukov nodded. “They had imperialist designs on China before the Lizards showed up. They haven’t forgotten, either. They still think of it as their rightful sphere of influence.”
“That is part of it, Georgi Konstantinovich, but only part.” Molotov was glad the marshal did leave him control over foreign policy. Zhukov was a long way from stupid, but he didn’t always see the subtleties. “The rest is, the Race may also hesitate longer before using explosive-metal weapons now that they have to take the Japanese more seriously.”
“Maybe.” Zhukov didn’t sound convinced. “The Lizards didn’t give a fart about what we thought when they pounded the Nazis flat. We’re going to be worrying about fallout in the Baltics and Byelorussia and the western Ukraine for years to come.”
“Not all of that fallout is from the Lizards’ bombs,” Molotov said. “Some of it comes from the ones the Germans used on Poland.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Marshal Zhukov insisted. “The point is the same either way: they’ll do what they think needs doing, and they’ll worry about everything else later. If the rebels in China look like winning, their cities will start going up in smoke.” He waved his hand. “Do svidanya, Mao.”
Molotov considered. Maybe he’d looked for subtleties and missed a piece of the big picture. “It could be,” he admitted.
“There are times I wouldn’t miss him, believe you me there are,” Zhukov said. “He’s as arrogant as Stalin ever was, but Stalin did plenty to earn the right. Mao’s nothing but a jumped-up bandit chief, and a lot of the jumping up is only in his own mind.”
More than the foolish joke earlier, that did tempt Molotov to smile. It also made him look nervously around the office. He noticed Zhukov doing the same thing. “We’re both afraid Iosef Vissarrionovich is listening,” he said.
“He’s been dead twelve years and more,” Zhukov said. “But if anybody could still be listening after all that time, he’s the one.”
“That is the truth,” Molotov agreed. “Very well, then. Do your best to get still more weapons to the Chinese. If they are going to annoy the Lizards, we want them to do it on a grand scale. The more attention the Race pays to China, the less it will be able to pay to anything else—including us.”
“And the less attention the Race pays to us, the better we shall like it.” Zhukov nodded; he saw the desirability of that as plainly as Molotov did. After another nod, he got to his feet. “All right, Comrade General Secretary. We’ll continue on the course we’ve set.” A grin spread over his broad peasant features. “And with any luck at all, the Nazis will get the blame.”
“Yes, that would break my heart,” Molotov said, which made Zhukov laugh out loud. The marshal’s salute was unusually sincere. He did a smart about-turn and left the general secretary’s office.
Molotov scratched his chin. Little by little, he was, or thought he was, regaining some of the authority he’d had to yield to Marshal Zhukov after the Red Army crushed Beria’s abortive coup. He hadn’t really tried to exert it; he could have been wrong. One of these days, though, he might have to try. He wouldn’t live forever. He didn’t want his successor as beholden to the Army as he was. Of course, what he wanted might end up having nothing to do with the way things turned out.
His secretary stuck his head into the office. “Your next appointment is here, Comrade General Secretary,” he said. “It’s—”
“I know who it is, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov snapped. “I do keep track of these things, you know. Send him in.”
“Yes, Comrade General Secretary.” His secretary retreated in a hurry, which was what Molotov had in mind.
David Nussboym came into the office. “Good day, Comrade General Secretary.”
“Good day, David Aronovich,” Molotov answered automatically. Then even his legendary impassivity cracked. “Sit down. Take it easy. Here, I will get you some tea.” As he rose to do that, he added, “How are you feeling?”
“I have been better,” Nussboym allowed. He sounded as battered as he looked. The last time Molotov had seen him—when he’d given Nussboym permission to go into Poland—the Jewish NKVD man had been thin and bald and nondescript. He was thinner now: skeletally lean. And he was balder: he had not a hair on his head, not even an eyebrow or an eyelash. No Lizard could have had less hair than he did. And he was no longer nondescript, either: with his skin a pasty yellowish white, anyone who saw him would remember him for a long time, though possibly wishing he wouldn’t.
“Here.” Molotov gave him the tea, into which he’d dumped a lot of sugar. “Would you care for a sweet roll, too?”
“No, thank you, Vyacheslav Mikhaibovich.” Nussboym shook his head. Even so small a motion seemed to take all his strength. “I’m afraid I still haven’t got much in the way of an appetite.” His rhythmic Polish accent gave his Russian the appearance of a vitality lacking in truth.
“I had heard you were suffering from radiation sickness,” Molotov said, returning to his desk after the unusual show of solici
tude, “but I had no idea . . .”
Nussboym’s shrug looked effortful, too. “By everything the doctors tell me, I ought to be dead from the dose of radiation I took.” He shrugged again. “I’m still here. I intend to be here a while longer. They say I’m a lot likelier now to get cancer later on, but I can’t do anything about that, either. Who knows? Maybe I’ll beat the odds one more time.”
“I hope so,” Molotov said, on the whole sincerely. Nussboym hadn’t had to get him out of the cell where Beria had imprisoned him, but he’d done it. Afterwards, the NKVD man had been reasonable in the rewards he’d requested. And so Molotov did wish him well. He was useful, after all.
“Thank you,” Nussboym said. “In the meantime, I serve the Soviet Union.”
“Good.” Molotov nodded approval. “Spoken like an Old Bolshevik.” Stalin, of course, had purged most of the Old Bolsheviks, the men who’d made the Russian Revolution. At need, Molotov could always purge Nussboym. Knowing that was reassuring. The general secretary went on, “Speak to me of the situation in Poland.”
“You will—or you had better—have more up-to-date information than I can give,” Nussboym replied. “I’ve spent most of the past few months on my back with needles and tubes sticking into me.”
Molotov had always been a scrawny, even a weedy, little man—which might well have helped keep him safe during Stalin’s tenure, for Iosef Vissarionovich hadn’t been any too big, either. Despite looking anything but robust, though, he’d always been healthy. The idea of going into a hospital—of entrusting his physical well-being to a physician he could not fully control—gave him the cold chills. Doing his best not to think about that, he said, “You were on the spot for some time, and you survived the fighting, which a good many of our operatives did not. And, of course, you are a native of Poland. Your impressions of what is going on there, then, will be of particular value to me.”
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