In a way, all that ingenuity was wasted. If the Lizards-or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks or the Americans-ever decided to attack Peenemunde, they weren’t likely to be clinical about it. An explosive-metal bomb would wreck camouflaged and uncamouflaged alike… although some of the reinforced-concrete installations underground would stand up to anything but a hit right on top of them.

Drucker shook his head. Everything here was as it had been. Only he’d changed. No, even he hadn’t changed. It was only that the Reich had just told him his adult lifetime of service to his country didn’t amount to a pile of potatoes. That hurt. He’d never dreamt how much it would hurt.

Officers of junior grade and enlisted men still stiffened to attention and saluted as he went past. They didn’t notice any changes: as far as they were concerned, a lieutenant colonel remained a figure of godlike authority. His mouth twisted. Eventually, he would be saluting some of them, for his place in the firmament was fixed now, while they might keep on rising.

Drizzle started falling, which perfectly suited his mood. He strode on through the base. A couple of A-45s stood at their gantries, in different stages of preparation for launch. Drucker nodded toward them. They were, in a way, the only friends he had left at Peenemunde. Major General Dornberger’s fitness report, as the commandant pointed out, did leave him clear to keep going into space. That was something: less than he would have liked, but something.

He gave the immense rockets another nod. In an odd way, they looked less futuristic than the old A-10s-vengeance weapons, Hitler had called them. A-10s had had the sharp noses and graceful curves everyone in the pre-Lizard days had thought necessary for rocket ships. The A-45s were simple cylinders, the upper stages as blunt-nosed as Bavarians. Blunt noses had more area with which to absorb the heat of atmospheric friction; cylinders were easier and cheaper to manufacture than the fancier chunks of sheet metal that had flown in the early days.

Drucker sighed. Here as elsewhere, reality proved less romantic than dreamers had thought it would be. He shook his head. Maybe things would have been better had the Lizards never come. With the Russians beaten and rolled back across the Urals, the Reich would have had all the Lebensraum it needed to show what it could do in Europe. Maybe he and Kathe and the children, instead of living near here, would be growing wheat or maize on the boundless plains of the Ukraine today.

A moment later, the daydream turned to nightmare. The SS could have plucked her off the plains of the Ukraine as readily as from Greifswald. As a simple farmer, he wouldn’t have had friends in high places. They’d have shot her or thrown her in a gas chamber. He’d kept that from happening in the real world. If he was upset at the fitness report’s wrecking his chances for further promotion, how would he have felt with Kathe liquidated?

That thought spawned another one, a blacker one. Liquidating Kathe for having a Jewish grandmother struck Drucker as outrageously unjust, but that was because he knew her and loved her. What about other people with one Jewish grandparent? Was liquidating them just? What about people with two Jewish grandparents? What about people with three? With four? What about people who were out-and-out Jews?

Where did you draw the line?

The Reich drew it at one Jewish grandparent. That left Kathe in danger and her children safe. Drucker hadn’t been able to see the sense in it. Would there have been more sense in drawing it at two Jewish grandparents? That would have left Kathe safe, but… Was there any sense in liquidating anybody because he was Jewish or partly Jewish?

The Reich thought so. Up till the trouble over Kathe, Drucker hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. Now… Now he remembered that Colonel Heinrich Jager, for whom his elder son was named, for whom he’d helped murder a couple of SS Schweinhunde, had never had anything good to say about such massacres.

He’d helped Jager disappear into Poland with that pretty Russian pilot, and never heard of or from him since. Now, solemnly, he turned to the east-the southeast, actually-and saluted. “Colonel,” he said, “I think you may have been smarter than I was.”

Fotsev strode into the administrative offices of his barracks complex. A clerk looked up from his computer screen. “Name and pay number?” the male asked. “Purpose for coming here?”

“Purpose for coming here is to report before commencing three days’ leave, superior sir.” Fotsev put what was uppermost in his mind first. That done, he gave the clerk his name and the number that separated him from every other Fotsev ever hatched.

After entering the name and pay number into the computer, the male gave the affirmative hand gesture. “Your leave is confirmed: three days,” he said. “Will you be going into the new town?”

“Of course, superior sir,” Fotsev answered. “I have been away from Home, and from the way life was on Home, for a very long time now. I look forward to being reminded of it. From what other males have said, the new town is the best antidote possible for the mud and the stinks and the mad Tosevites of Basra.”

“I have heard the same,” the clerk said. “My leave time has not yet come, but it is approaching. When it arrives, I too shall go to the new town.” He pointed out the door. “The shuttle bus leaves from there. It should arrive very soon.”

“I thank you.” Fotsev knew where the shuttle bus left. He knew when, too. With barracks cleverness, he had timed the beginning of his leave to spend as little time as he could manage waiting for transportation.

As usual, the bus rolled up on time. Had it been late, he would have suspected Tosevite terrorism. Being late through inefficiency was a failing of the Big Uglies, not the Race. Fotsev and a small knot of similarly canny males waited for the fellows returning from leave to descend, then filed aboard.

With a rumble, the bus-of Tosevite manufacture, and so noisy and smelly and none too comfortable-rolled off down the new highway leading southwest. Big Ugly farmers grubbing in their fields would sometimes look up as it passed. Before long, though, it left the region river water irrigated and entered more barren country that put Fotsev in mind of Home. The plants that did grow here were different from the ones he’d known before going into cold sleep, but not all that different, not from the window of a bus.

He twisted, trying to find as comfortable a position as he could. After a while, he wrestled a window open, and sighed with pleasure as the mild breeze blew across his scales. This was the weather the Race was made for. With the Big Uglies and their noxious city and their even more noxious habits and superstitions fading behind him, he was ready to enjoy himself until he had to return to unpleasant, mundane duty.

“Look!” Another male pointed. “You can see the ships of the colonization fleet ahead in the distance. There is a sight to make a male feel good.”

“Truth!” Several troopers spoke at the same time. A volley of emphatic coughs rang through the bus.

“They were smart,” Fotsev said. “They gave the ships and the new town a good safety zone, so the local Tosevites will have a hard time sneaking up on them and doing anything frightful.” The converse of that was, all three independent Tosevite not-empires doubtless had explosive-metal-tipped missiles aimed at the ships and the town. But Fotsev chose not to dwell on the converse. He was on leave.

He thought about tasting ginger, but decided to wait till he got to the new town. Since finding out what the herb did to females, officers had acted like males with the purple itch. The driver was too likely to be watching for that sort of thing.