“They can’t afford the kind of losses they get when they go up against a strongpoint,” Skorzeny said shrewdly.
“I think you’re right.” Jager glanced over at the SS man in the darkness. “We could have used that nerve gas here at the front.”
“Ahh, you’d say that even if things were quiet,” Skorzeny retorted. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, right where it is.” He grunted. “I want your wireless people to be alert for any intercepts they pick up about that, too. If the Lizards don’t burn up the airwaves, I’ll eat my hat.”
“That’s fine.” Jager yawned enormously. “Right now, I’m alert for sleep. You want to crawl in under here? Safest place you can be if they start shelling again. I know damn well you snore, but I suppose I can live with it.”
Skorzeny laughed. Gunther Grillparzer said, “He’s not the only one who snores-sir.” Betrayed by his own gunner, Jager settled in for the night.
Spatters of small-arms fire woke him a couple of times. They picked up at dawn, but, as he’d predicted, the Lizards were more interested in consolidating what they’d gained the day before than in pushing on against stiffening resistance.
Otto Skorzeny hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted the wireless men to stay alert. He made sure they did, hanging around them and regaling them with what seemed like an endless stream of dirty stories. Most of them were good dirty stories, too, and some were even new to Jager, who’d thought he’d heard every story of that sort ever invented.
As morning gave way to afternoon, Skorzeny’s temper began to wear thin. He paced through the camp, kicking up dirt and sending spring flowers flying. “Damn it, we should have intercepted something from the Jews or the Lizards in Lodz by now!” he stormed.
“Maybe they’re all dead,” Jager suggested. The notion horrflied him, but might ease Skorzeny’s mind.
But the big SS man shook his head. “Too much to hope for. Somebody always lives through these things by one kind of fool luck or another.” Jager thought of Max, the foulmouthed Jew who’d lived through Babi Yar. Skorzeny was right. He went on with a muttered, “No, something’s gone south somewhere.”
“You think the timer didn’t work the way it should have?” Jager asked.
“I suppose it is possible,” Skorzeny allowed, “but fry me for aschnitzel if I ever heard of one of them failing before. They aren’t just foolproof, they’re idiotproof, and the gadget had a backup. We send out a goody like that, we want to make sure it works as advertised.” He chuckled. “That’s what people who don’t like us so well call German efficiency, eh? No, the only way that bomb could have failed would have been-”
“What?” Jager said, though he had an idea as to what. “As you say. If it had a backup timer, it was going to go off.”
“The only way that bomb could have failed-” Skorzeny repeated musingly. His gray eyes went very wide. “The only way that bomb could have failed would have been for that stinking little kike to pull the wool over my eyes, and dip me in shit if he didn’t do it!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “The bastard! The fucker! The nerve of him! Next time I see him, I’ll cut off his balls one at a time.” Then, to Jager’s amazement, he started to laugh. “He played me for a sucker. I didn’t think any man alive could do that. I’d like to shake his hand-afterhe’s castrated, not before. You thinkstupid kike and you take it for granted, and this is what it gets you. Jesus Christ!”
Also a Jew,Jager thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked, “What now? If the Jews in Lodz know what it is”-and if they do, or guess, it’s thanks to me, and how do I feel about that? — “they’ve got their hands on something they can use against us.”
“Don’t I know it.” Skorzeny sounded disgusted, maybe with the Jews, maybe with himself. He wasn’t used to failing. Then he brightened. For a moment, he looked like his old, devilish self. “Maybe we can plaster the place with rockets and long-range artillery, hope to blow up the damned thing that way, at least deny the Jews the use of it.” He made an unhappy clucking noise. “It’s bloody long odds, though.”
“Too true,” Jager said, as if sympathetically. “Those rockets pack a decent punch, but you can’t tell for sure whether they’ll hit the right town, let alone the right street.”
“I wish we had some of the toys the Lizards know how to make,” Skorzeny said, still discontented with the world. “They don’t just hit the right street. They’ll pick a room for you. Hell, they’ll fly into a closet if that’s what you want.” He scratched at his chin. “Well, one way or another, those Jews are going to pay. And when they do, I’ll be the one who collects.” He sounded very sure of himself.
Off in the next room at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, there were so many car batteries that they’d had to reinforce the floor to take the weight. Among the Lizard gadgets they powered was the radio set taken from the shuttlecraft that had brought Straha down to Earth when he defected to the United States.
Now he and Sam Yeager sat in front of that radio, flipping from one frequency to another in an effort to monitor the Lizards’ signals and find out what the Race was up to. Right now, they weren’t picking up much anywhere. Straha had the leisure to turn to Yeager and ask, “How many of our males do you have engaged in the practice of espionage and signal gathering?”
“Numbers? Who knows?” Sam answered. If he had known, he wouldn’t have told Straha. One of the things he’d had drilled into him was that you didn’t tell anybody, human or Lizard, anything he didn’t have to know. “But a lot of them, a lot of the time. Not many of us Big Uglies”-he used the Lizards’ nickname for mankind unselfconsciously-“speak your language well enough to follow without help from one of you.”
“You, Sam Yeager, I think you could succeed at this,” Straha said, which made Sam feel damn good. He thought he could have gained even more fluency in the Lizards’ language if he hadn’t also had to spend time with Robert Goddard. On the other hand, he would have learned more about rockets if he hadn’t had to spend time with Straha and the other Lizard POWs.
And he would have learned more about his baby son if he hadn’t been in the Army. That would have kept Barbara happier, too; he worried about not seeing her enough. There weren’t enough hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, to do all the things he wanted to do. That was true all the time, but trying to keep up during a war rubbed your nose in it.
Straha touched the frequency-advance toggle. The Lizard numbers in the display showed that the radio was now monitoring a frequency a tenth of a megacycle higher (or rather, something that worked out to be about an eighth of a megacycle-the Lizards naturally used their own units rather than those of mankind). A male’s voice came out of the speaker.
Yeager leaned forw
ard and listened intently. The Lizard was apparently in a rear area, and complaining about rockets falling nearby and disrupting resupply efforts for the troops pushing toward Denver. “That’s good news,” Sam said, scribbling notes.
“Truth,” Straha agreed. “Your ventures into uncharted technology are paying a handsome profit for your species. If the Race were so innovative, Tosev 3 would long since have been conquered-provided the Race had not blown itself to radioactive dust in innovative frenzy.”
“You think that’s what we would have done if you hadn’t invaded?” Sam asked.
“It is certainly one of the higher probabilities,” Straha said, and Yeager was hard-pressed to disagree with him. The ex-shiplord flipped to a new frequency. The Lizard talking now sounded angry as all get-out. “He is ordering the dismissal, demotion, and transfer of a local commander in a region called Illinois,” Straha said. Yeager nodded. The Lizard went on, “Where is this Illinois place?”
Sam showed him on a map. He was listening, too. “Something about letting a pack of prisoners escape or get rescued or something. The fellow who’s cursing him is really doing quite a job, isn’t he?”
“If said snout-to-snout, telling a male that someone shit in his egg before it hatched is guaranteed to start a fight,” Straha said.
“I believe it.” Sam listened to the radio some more. “They’re moving that incompetent officer to-upstate New York.” He wrote it down. “That’s worth knowing. With luck, we’ll be able to take advantage of his weaknesses over there, too.”
“Truth,” Straha said again, this time in bemused tones. “You Big Uglies aggressively exploit the intelligence you gather, and you gather great quantities of it. Do you do this in your own conflicts as well?”