He waved back, then said to Sylvia, “Pint of bitter, and are all the pieces from those birds spoken for yet?” He pointed toward the fireplace.

“No, not yet,” the redheaded barmaid answered. “Which d’you fancy-legs or breasts?”

“Well, I think I’d like a nice, juicy thigh,” he answered-and then caught the double entendre. Sylvia laughed uproariously at the look on his face. She poured him his beer. He raised the pint pot to his mouth in a hurry, not least to help mask himself.

“You’re blushing,” Sylvia chortled.

“I am not,” he said indignantly. “And even if I was, you’d have the devil’s own time proving it by firelight.”

“So I would, so I would,” Sylvia said, laughing still. She ran her tongue over her upper lip. Goldfarb was urgently reminded-as he was intended to be reminded-they’d been lovers not that long before. She might as well have been telling him,See what you’re missing? She said, “I’ll get you that chicken now.” When she headed toward the fireplace, she put even more sway in her walk than she usually did.

Naomi came over a minute later. “What were you two laughing about?” she asked. To Goldfarb’s relief, she sounded curious, not suspicious. He told her the truth; if he hadn’t, Sylvia would have. Naomi laughed, too. “Sylvia is very funny,” she said, and then, in a lower voice, “Sometimes, maybe, too much for her own good.”

“Whose own good?” Sylvia asked, returning with a steaming chicken leg on a plate. “Has to be me. I tell too many jokes for my own good? Likely I do, by Jesus. But I’m not joking when I tell you that chicken’s going to cost you two quid.”

Goldfarb dug in his pocket for the banknotes. Prices had climbed dizzyingly high since the Lizard invasion, and his radarman’s pay hadn’t come close to keeping up. Even so, there were times when the rations he got grew too boring to stand.

“Besides,” he said as he set the money on the bar, “what better have I got to spend it on?”

“Me,” Naomi answered. Had that been Sylvia talking, the response would have been frankly mercenary. Naomi didn’t really care that he couldn’t spend like an air vice marshal. That was one of the things that made her seem wonderful to him. She asked, “Have you got more word of your cousin, the one who did the wireless broadcasts for the Lizards?”

He shook his head. “My family found that he lived through the invasion: that much I do know. But not long after that, he and his wife and their son might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody knows what’s become of them.”

“Somebody knows,” Naomi said with conviction as Goldfarb dug into the chicken leg. “No one may be talking, but someone knows. In this country, people do not disappear for no reason. Sometimes I think you do not know how lucky you are that this is so.”

“I know,” Goldfarb said, and after a moment Naomi nodded, conceding the point. He smiled at her, even if crookedly. “What’s the matter? Did you take me for an Englishman again?” Looking a little flustered, she nodded once more. He dropped into Yiddish to say, “If we win the war, and if I have children, or maybe grandchildren, they’ll take that for granted. Me-” He shook his head.

“If you have children, or maybe grandchildren-” Naomi began, and then let it drop. The war had loosened everyone’s standards, but she still wasn’t what you’d call forward. Sometimes Goldfarb regretted that very much. Sometimes he admired it tremendously. Tonight was one of those nights.

“Let me have another pint, would you please?” he said. Sometimes quiet talk-or what they could steal of it while she was also busy serving other customers-was as good as anything else, maybe better.

He hadn’t thought that with Sylvia. All he’d wanted to do with her was to get her brassiere off and her panties down. He scratched his head, wondering where the difference was.

Naomi brought him the bitter. He took a pull, then set the pot down. “Must be love,” he said, but she didn’t hear him.

Artillery was harassing the Race in a push north from their Florida base. The Big Uglies were getting smart about moving their guns before counterbattery fire found them, but they couldn’t do much about attack from the air. Teerts had two pods of rockets mounted under his killercraft. They were some of the simplest weapons in the arsenal of the Race. They weren’t even guided: if you saturated an area with them, that did the job. And, because they were so simple, even Tosevite factories could turn them out in large quantities. The armorers loved them these days, not least because they had plenty.

“I have acquired the assigned target visually,” Teerts reported back to his commanders. “I now begin the dive on it.”

Acceleration pressed him back in his seat. The Big Uglies knew he was there. Antiaircraft shells burst around his killercraft. Many more, he guessed, were bursting behind him. Try as they would, the Tosevites rarely gave jet aircraft enough lead when they fired at them. That helped keep the Race’s pilots alive.

He fired a pod of the rockets. A wave of fire seemed to leap from the killercraft toward the artillery positions. The killercraft staggered slightly in the sky, then steadied. The autopilot pulled it out of the dive. He swung it around so he could inspect the damage he’d done. If he hadn’t done enough, he’d make another pass with the second rocket pod.

That wouldn’t be necessary, not today. “The target is destroyed,” he said in some satisfaction. An antiaircraft gun was still popping away at him, but that didn’t much matter. He went on, “Request new target.”

The voice that answered wasn’t his usual flight controller. After a moment, he recognized it all the same: it belonged to Aaatos, the male from Intelligence. “Flight Leader Teerts, we have a… bit of a problem.”

“What’s gone wrong now?” Teerts demanded. What felt like an eternity in Nipponese prisons-to say nothing of the ginger habit he’d developed there-had left him with no patience for euphemism.

“I’m glad you’re airborne, Flight Leader,” Aaatos said, apparently not wanting to give a straight answer. “Do you remember our talk not so long ago in that grassy area not far from the runways?”

Teerts thought back. “I remember,” he said. Sudden suspicion blossomed in him. “You’re not going to tell me the dark-skinned Big Uglies have mutinied against us, are you?”

“Evidently I don’t have to,” Aaatos said unhappily. “You were correct at the time to distrust them. I admit this.” For a male from Intelligence to admit anything was an enormous concession. “Their unit was placed in line against American Big Uglies, and, under cover of a masking firefight, has allowed enemy Tosevites to infiltrate.”

“Give me the coordinates,” Teerts told him. “I still have a good supply of munitions, and adequate fuel as well. I gather I am to assume any Tosevites I see in the area are hostile to the Race?”

“That is indeed the operative assumption,” Aaatos agreed. He paused, then went on, “Flight Leader, a question. If I may? You need not answer, but I would be grateful if you did. Our estimates were that these dark-skinned Big Uglies would serve us well and loyally in the role we had assigned to them. These estimates were not casually made. Our experts ran computer simulations of a good many scenarios. Yet they proved inaccurate and your casual concern correct. How do you account for this?”

“My impression is that our alleged experts have never had to learn what good liars the Big Uglies can be,” Teerts answered. “They have also never been in a situation where, from weakness, they have to tell their interrogators exactly what those males most desire to hear. I have.” Again, memories of his days in Nipponese captivity surged to the surface; his hand quivered on the killercraft’s control column. “Knowing the Tosevites’ capacity for guile, and also knowing the interrogators were apt to be getting bad data on which to base their fancy simulations, I drew my own conclusions.”