“This thought has crossed my mind,” Embry admitted. “Do recall, though, the Lizards must have left all sorts of rubbish behind when their invasion failed. If we don’t have a goodly number of theseskelkwank readers and the disks that go with them, I’ll be very much surprised.”
“You have a point,” Bagnall said. “The trouble is, of course, it’s rather like-no, it’s exactly like-having a library scattered at random across the landscape. You never can tell beforehand which book will have the pretty picture you’ve been looking for all along.”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” Embry lowered his voice; some Red Army men and a fair number from theWehrmacht could follow English. “I’d like to see the Germans and the Russians-to say nothing of the bloody Lizards-scattered at random across the landscape. You couldn’t make me much happier than that.”
“Nor me.” Bagnall looked around at the map-lined chamber where they regularly kept the Nazis and Bolsheviks from going for each other’s throats. The readers and disks were stored there not least because it was tenuously neutral ground, with neither side likely to try to steal everything for itself from it. He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever see England again. Not likely, I’m afraid.”
“I fear you’re right.” Embry sighed, too. “We’re doomed to grow old and to die in Pskov-or, more likely, doomed not to grow old and to die in Pskov. Only blind luck’s kept us intact thus far.”
“Blind luck and not getting infatuated with any snipers of the female persuasion, unlike poor Jones,” Bagnall said. He and Embry both laughed, though it wasn’t funny, not really. Bagnall added, “Being around the fair Tatiana is likelier to make certain you don’t grow old and die in Pskov than any other single thing I can think of offhand.”
“How right you are,” Embry said feelingly. He would have gone on in that vein for some time, but Aleksandr German chose that moment to walk into the chamber. He went from English to halting Russian: “Good day, Comrade Brigadier.”
“Hello.” German did not look like a brigadier. With his red mustache, long, unkempt hair, and blazing black eyes, he looked half like a bandit, half like an Old Testament prophet (which occasionally made Bagnall wonder how much distinction there was between those two). Now he looked over at the Lizards’ reading machines. “Marvelous devices.” He said it first in Russian, then in Yiddish, which Bagnall followed better.
“That they are,” Bagnall answered in German, which German the partisan leader also understood.
The brigadier tugged at his beard. He continued in Yiddish, in musing tones: “Before the war, you know, I was not a hunter or a trapper or anything of the sort. I was a chemist here in Pskov, making medicines that did not so much good.” Bagnall hadn’t known that; Aleksandr German usually said but little of himself. His eyes still on the reader, he went on, “I was a boy when the first airplane came to Pskov. I remember the cinema coming, and the wireless, and the talking cinema. How could anything be more modern than the talking cinema? And then the Lizards come and show us we are children, playing with children’s toys.”
“I had this same thought not long ago,” Bagnall said. “I also had it when the first Lizard fighter plane flew past my Lancaster. It was worse then.”
Aleksandr German stroked his beard again. “That is right; you are a flier.” His laugh showed bad teeth and missing ones. “Very often I forget this. You and your comrades”-he nodded to Embry, and with the plural included Jones, too-“have done such good work here keeping us and the Nazis more angry at the Lizards than at each other that I do not recall it is not why you came to Pskov.”
“Sometimes we have trouble remembering that ourselves,” Bagnall said. Embry nodded emphatically.
“They have never tried to involve you with the Red Air Force?” German said. Before either Englishman could speak, he answered his own question: “No, of course not. The only aircraft we’ve had around these parts areKukuruzniks, and they wouldn’t bother foreign experts over such small and simple things.”
“I suppose not,” Bagnall said, and sighed. The biplanes looked as if they flew themselves, and as if anyone with a spanner and a screwdriver could repair them. Having him work on one would have been like calling out the head of the Royal College of Surgeons for a hangnail, but he wouldn’t have minded fiddling about with any kind of aircraft.
Aleksandr German studied him. He’d had a lot of Russians and Germans study him since he’d got to Pskov. Most of the time, he had no trouble figuring out what they were thinking: how can I use this chap for my own advantage? They were usually so obvious about it, it wasn’t worth getting annoyed over. He couldn’t so readily fathom the partisan brigadier’s expression.
At last, perhaps talking as much to himself as to Bagnall, Aleksandr German said, “If you cannot use your training against the Lizards here, you might do well with the chance to use it someplace else. So you might.”
Again, he didn’t wait for a reply. Scratching his head and muttering under his breath, he strode out of the chamber. Bagnall and Embry both stared after him. “You don’t suppose he meant he could get us back to England-do you?” Embry whispered, sounding afraid to mention the thought aloud.
“I doubt it,” Bagnall answered. “More likely, he’s just wondering if he can turn us into a couple of Stalin’s Hawks. Even that wouldn’t be so bad-bit of a change from what we’ve been doing, what? As for the other-” He shook his head. “I don’t dare think about it.”
“Wonder what’s left of Blighty these days,” Embry murmured. Bagnall wondered, too. Now he knew he would keep on wondering, and wondering if there really was a way to get home again. No point dreaming about what you knew you couldn’t have. But if you thought you might somehow-Hope was out of its box now. It might disappoint him, but he knew he’d never be without it again.
The Tosevite hatchling was out of its box again, and all-seeing spirits of Emperors past only knew what it would get into next. Even with his swiveling eye turrets, Ttomalss had an ever more difficult time keeping track of the hatchling when it started crawling on the laboratory floor. He wondered how Big Ugly females, whose vision had a field of view far more limited than his own, managed to keep their hatchlings away from disaster.
A lot of them didn’t. He knew that. Even in their most technologically sophisticated not-empires, the Big Uglies lost appalling numbers of hatchlings to disease and accident. In the less sophisticated areas of Tosev 3, somewhere between a third and a half of the hatchlings who emerged from females’ bodies perished before the planet had taken one slow turn around its star.
The hatchling crawled out to the doorway that opened onto the corridor. Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open in amusement. “No, you can’t get out, not these days,” he said.
As if it understood him, the hatching made the irritating noises it emitted when frustrated or annoyed. He’d had a technician make a wire mesh screen he could set in the doorway and fasten to either side of it. The hatchling wasn’t strong enough to pull down the wire or clever enough to unscrew the mounting brackets. It was, for the moment, confined.
“And you won’t risk extermination by crawling off into Tessrek’s area,” Ttomalss told it. That could have been funny, but wasn’t. Ttomalss, like most males of the Race, had no particular use for Big Uglies. Tessrek, though, had conceived a venomous hatred for the hatchling in particular, for its noise, for its odor, for its mere existence. If the hatchling went into his territory again, he might bring himself to the notice of the disciplinarians. Ttomalss didn’t want that to happen; it would interfere with his research.
The hatchling knew none of that. The hatching knew nothing about anything; that was its problem. It pulled itself upright by clinging to the wire and stared out into the corridor. It made more little whining noises. Ttomalss knew what they meant: I want to go out there.