Jews and Poles stood on the corner of Inflancka and Franciszkanska and in the streets themselves, chatting, chaffering, and carrying on their business as they would have on any other day. It was a scene that might almost have come from the time before the war, save that so many of the men-and a few of the women-had rifles on their backs or in their hands. Cheating, these days, was liable to meet with swift and summary punishment.
About fifteen minutes before the convoy was due to come through, human policemen, some Jews, some Poles, began trying to clear the street. Anielewicz watched them-especially the Jews-with undisguised loathing. The Jewish police-thugs would have been a better word for them-owed allegiance to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had been Eldest of the Jews when the Lodz ghetto was in Nazi hands and still ran it for the Lizards. They still wore the long coats, shiny-brimmed caps, and red-white-and-black rank armbands the Germans had given them, too. Maybe it made them feel important. It made everyone else despise them.
They didn’t have much luck with their street clearing, either. They were armed with nothing better than truncheons. That had been intimidating back in the days when the Nazis held Lodz. It did not do much, though, to shift men with rifles. Anielewicz knew the Jewish police had been screaming at the Lizards for guns of their own. What had been in place before the Lizards arrived, though, seemed to be like the Torah to them: not to be changed or interfered with by mere mortals. The police remained without firearms.
An old Jewish man driving a horse-drawn wagon that carried tables stacked four and five high tried to cross Franciszkanska on Inflancka just as a Polish lorry-driver rumbled down Franciszkanska with a load of empty tin milk cans. The Pole tried to slow down, but seemed to be having trouble with his brakes. His lorry crashed into the old Jew’s wagon.
The racket that immediately followed the collision was louder than the crash itself. The rear gate of the lorry hadn’t been well secured, so milk cans clattered down onto the pavement and started rolling away. As best Mordechai could see, the load of tables hadn’t been secured at all. They landed in the street, too. Some of them broke, some didn’t.
By what looked like a miracle, the wagon driver hadn’t been hurt. Surprisingly agile for an old man, he jumped down from his beast and ran up to the driver’s side of the lorry, screaming abuse in Yiddish.
“Shut up, you damned kike!” the Pole answered in his own language. “Stinking old Christ-killer, you’ve got your nerve, yelling at me.”
“I’d yell at your father, except even your mother doesn’t know who he is,” the Jew retorted.
The Polish lorry-driver jumped out of the cab and grabbed the Jew. In a moment, they were wrestling on the ground. Jews and Poles both ran toward the altercation. Here and there, some of them bumped into one another and started fresh trouble.
Policemen-Jews and Poles-blew furiously on whistles and waded into the crowd, trying to clear it. Some of them got drawn into fistfights, too. Mordechai Anielewicz and Bertha Fleishman watched the unfolding chaos with eyebrows raised high.
Into the chaos came the Lizards’ motor convoy. Some of their lorries were of their own manufacture, others human products they’d appropriated. A Lizard lorry horn made a noise that reminded Mordechai of what you’d get if you dropped a bucket of water onto a red-hot iron plate. When you added in the klaxons from the Opels and other human-made lorries, the din became truly dreadful.
No one in the street paid the least attention to it. As far as the Jews and Poles were concerned, the impatient Lizards might have been back on the far side of the moon, or wherever it was they came from. “What a pity,” Mordechai said. “It looks like the Lizards are going to be delayed.”
“That’s terrible,” Bertha said in the same solemn tones he’d used. Without warning, both of them started to laugh. In a low voice, Bertha went on, “This worked out even better than we thought it would.”
“So it did,” Anielewicz agreed. “Yitzkhak and Boleslaw both deserve those statues the Americans give their best cinema actors every year.”
Bertha Fleishman’s brown eyes twinkled. “No, they couldn’t have played that much better if they’d rehearsed it for years, could they? The rest of our people-and also theArmija Krajowamen,” she admitted, “are doing nicely, too.”
“Good thing most of the people at this corner really do belong to us or the Polish Home Army,” Mordechai said. “Otherwise we’d have a real riot on our hands, not a scripted one.”
“I am glad no one’s decided to pull a rifle off his back and use it,” Bertha said. “Not everybody here knows we’re playing a game.”
“That’s true,” Anielewicz said. “The police don’t, and the Lizard lorry drivers don’t, either.” He pointed back to the rear of the long, stalled column of motor vehicles. “Oh, look. Some of them look like they’re trying to turn around and use a different route to get out of town.”
Bertha shaded her eyes so she could see better. “So they are. But they seem to be having some trouble, too. I wonder who started an argument way down there. Whoever it was, he certainly managed to pull a lot of people into the street in a hurry.”
“He certainly did.” Mordechai grinned at her. She was grinning back. Maybe she wasn’t beautiful, but he certainly liked the way she looked when she was happy like this. “I don’t think those poor Lizard lorries will be able to go anywhere for quite a while.”
“I’m afraid you’re right.” Bertha sighed theatrically. “Isn’t it a pity?” She and Mordechai laughed again.
Lizards weren’t what you’d call big to begin with. Even as Lizards went, Straha was on the shortish side; a husky nine-year-old would have overtopped him. With Lizards as with people, though, size had little to do with force of personality. Whenever Sam Yeager got to talking with the former shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower, he needed only a couple of minutes to forget that Straha was hardly more than half his size.
“By not falling at once, you Big Uglies presented Atvar the brain-addled fleetlord with a problem he will not be able to solve,” Straha declared. “At the time, I urged him to strike a series of blows against you so strong that you would have no choice but to yield to the Race. Did he heed me? He did not!” Straha’s emphatic cough was a masterpiece of rudeness.
“Why didn’t he?” Yeager asked. “I’ve always wondered about that. The Race never seemed to want to turn up the pressure more than one notch at a time. That let us-how would I say it? — I guessadapt is the word I want.”
“Truth,” Straha said, with another emphatic cough. “One thing we did not realize until far later than we should have was how adaptable you Tosevites are. Fool that he is, Atvar always intended to come as close as he could to the campaign we would have fought had you been the preindustrial savages we expected you to be
. Even his eye turrets are not entirely locked in place, and he did conclude a greater effort would be called for, but he always did his best to keep the increases to a minimum, so as to have the least possible distortion in the plan with which we came to Tosev 3.”
“Most of you Lizards are like that, aren’t you?” Sam used mankind’s disparaging name for the Race as casually as Straha used the Race’s handle for humanity. “You don’t much care for change, do you?”
“Of course not,” Straha said-and, for a Lizard, he was a radical. “If you are in a good situation where you are, why. If you have any sense, would you want to alter it? It would be only too likely to get worse. Change must be most carefully controlled, or it can devastate an entire society.”
Sam grinned at him. “How do you account for us, then?”
“Our scholars will spend thousands of years attempting to account for you,” Straha answered. “It could be that, had we not arrived, you would have destroyed yourselves in relatively short order. You were, after all, already working to develop your own atomic weapons, and with those you would have had no trouble rendering this planet uninhabitable. Almost a pity you failed to do so.”
“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said. “We really love you Lizards a whole bunch, too.” He added an emphatic cough to that, even though he wasn’t sure whether the Race used them for sardonic effect. Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement, so maybe they did-or maybe the ex-shiplord was laughing at the way Sam mangled his language.
Straha said, “Like most males of the Race, Atvar is a minimalist.You Big Uglies, now, you are maximalists. In the long term, as I pointed out, this will probably prove disastrous for your species. I cannot imagine you Tosevites building an empire stable for a hundred thousand years. Can you?”
“Nope,” Sam admitted. The years Straha used were only about half as long as their earthly equivalents, but still-Fifty thousand years ago, people had been living in caves and worrying about mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. Yeager couldn’t begin to imagine what things would be like in another fifty years, let alone fifty thousand.