Those quotas were the same ones they set for their own kind. Before this ignominious captivity, when Ussmak had thought of the Big Uglies, theugly part was uppermost in his mind. Now he realized how much thebig mattered. All the tools the guards gave him and his fellow males were designed for their kind, not his. They were large and heavy and clumsy in his hands. The males of the SSSR did not care. Unending toil on not enough food was making prisoners die off one after another. The guards did not care about that, either.
A brief moment’s fury made Ussmak take a savage hack at the tree. “We should have kept on refusing to work and made them kill us that way,” he said. “They mean for us to die anyhow.”
“Truth,” said another male nearby. “You were our headmale. Why did you give in to the Russkis? If we had hung together, we might have got them to do what we wanted. More food for less work sounds good to me.” Like Ussmak, he had lost so much flesh, his skin hung loose on his bones.
“I feared for our spirits,” Ussmak said. “I was a fool. Our spirits will be lost here soon enough no matter what we do.”
The other male paused a moment in his own work-and a guard raised a submachine gun and growled a warning at him. The guards didn’t bother learning the language of the Race-they expected you to understand them, and woe betide you if you didn’t The male picked up his axe again. As he swung it, he said, “We could try another work stoppage.”
“We could, yes,” Ussmak said, but his voice sounded hollow even to himself. The males of Barracks Three had tried once and failed. They would never come together as a group enough to try again. Ussmak was morbidly certain of it.
Thiswas what he had bought for mutiny against his superiors. No matter how addled he had thought them, even their worst was a hundred, a thousand, a million times better than the superiors for whom he now toiled. Had he known then what he knew now-His mouth dropped open in a bitter laugh. That was what old males always told young ones just embarking on their lives. Ussmak wasn’t old, not even counting the time he’d spent in cold sleep traveling to Tosev 3. But he had a hard-won store of bitter knowledge acquired too late.
“Work!” the guard snapped in his own language. He didn’t add an emphatic cough; it was as if he’d only made a suggestion. Ignoring that suggestion, though, might cost you your life.
Ussmak hammered away at the tree trunk Chips flew, but the tree refused to fall. If he didn’t chop it down, they were liable to leave him out here all day. The star Tosev stayed in the sky almost all the time here at this season of the Tosevite year, but still could not warm the air much past cool.
He hit two more solid strokes. The tree tottered, then toppled with a crash. Ussmak felt like cheering. If the males quickly sawed the trunk into the sections the guards required, they might yet gain-almost-enough to eat.
Emboldened, he used his halting Russki to ask the guard, “Cease-fire truth is?” The rumor had reached the camp with a fresh batch of Big Ugly prisoners. Maybe the guard would feel well enough inclined to him for having cut down the tree to give him a straight answer.
And so it proved: the Big Ugly said,“Da.” He took some crumbled leaves from a pouch he wore on his belt, rolled them in apiece of paper, lighted one end, and sucked in smoke at the other. The practice struck Ussmak as corrosive to the lung. It couldn’t possibly have been so pleasant, so enjoyable, as, say, tasting ginger.
“We go free?” Ussmak asked. The Tosevite prisoners said that could happen as part of a cease-fire. They knew far more about such things than Ussmak did. All he could do was hope.
“Chto?”the guard said: “What? You gofree?” He paused to suck more smoke and to blow it out in a harsh white cloud. Then he paused again, this time to make the barking noises Big Uglies used for laughter. “Free? You?Gavno!” Ussmak knew that meant some sort of bodily waste, but not how it applied to his question. The guard proceeded to make it perfectly, brutally, clear: “You go free?Nyet! Never!” He laughed louder, the Tosevite equivalent of laughing wider. As if to reject the very idea, he leveled his submachine gun at Ussmak. “Now work!”
Ussmak worked. When at last the guards suffered the males of the Race to return to their barracks, he trudged back with dragging stride: half exhaustion, half despair. He knew that was dangerous. He’d already seen males who’d lost hope give up and die in short order. But knowing something was dangerous was different from being able to keep from doing it.
They had made their work norm for the day. The ration of bread and salted sea creature the Big Uglies doled out was not enough to keep them going through another day of grinding toil, but it was what they got.
Ussmak toppled into his hard, comfortless bunk as soon as he had eaten. Sleep dropped over him like a thick, smothering black curtain. He knew he would not be fully recovered when the males were routed out come morning. Tomorrow would be just the same as today had been, maybe a little worse, not likely to be any better.
So would the day after that, and the day after that, and the day afterthat. Free? Once more, the guard’s barking laughter seemed to reverberate from his heating diaphragms. As sleep overcame him, he thought how sweet never waking up would be.
Ludmila Gorbunova looked to the west, not in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the evening star (in any case, Venus was lost in the skirts of the sun) but longingly nonetheless.
From right beside her elbow, a voice said, “You would fly another mission into theWehrmacht lines in a moment, wouldn’t you?”
She jumped; she hadn’t heard Ignacy come up. She also felt no small anger and embarrassment. Wearing her heart on her sleeve was the last thing she wanted to do, especially when it was given to a Nazi panzer colonel.A Germanpanzer colonel, she thought, correcting herself. That sounded better to her-and besides, could any man who called a medal he’d won “Hitler’s fried egg” be a dedicated fascist? She doubted it, though she knew her objectivity was suspect.
“You do not answer me,” Ignacy said.
She wanted to pretend the guerrilla leader hadn’t spoken, but she couldn’t very well do that. Besides, since his Russian was better than anyone else’s hereabouts, ignoring him would cut her off from the person to whom she could most readily speak. So she replied with something that was true but not responsive: “What I want does not much matter. With the cease-fire in place between the Germans and the Lizards, I will have no occasion to fly over there, will I? If the Germans have any sense, they will not do anything to make the Lizards lose patience with them and start fighting again.”
“If the Germans had any sense, would they be Germans?” Ignacy returned. Ludmila would not have cared to take piano lessons from such a cynical man; perhaps the war had revealed to him his true calling. After pausing a moment to let the jab sink in, he went on, ‘The Germans will, I think, encourage unrest in the parts of Poland they do not control.”
“Do you really?” Ludmila embarrassed herself all over again by how eager she sounded.
Ignacy smiled. It was not altogether pleasant, that curl of lips, not in a plump face in a land full of thin ones, not when it didn’t quite light up his eyes. She hadn’t told him anything of her meeting with Jager; as far as she was concerned, that was her business and nobody else’s. But whether she’d told him or not, he seemed to have drawn his own conclusions, most of them disconcertingly accurate. He said, “As a matter of fact, I am trying to arrange-ever so discreetly, of course-to get my hands on some German antitank rockets. Would you be interested in transporting those if I succeed?”