“Baah!” he said, softly and derisively. Let the boys in the black coats figure out what that meant, if they were listening. He had more important things to worry about. Had he been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it in the direction of General Dornberger. The commandant at Peenemunde had been able to keep him in space. As far as he was concerned, this was the most fun he could have with his clothes on.

A radar ping almost bright enough to make him blink appeared on his screen. “Du lieber Gott,” he said, not caring at all whether anyone was listening to him. “I think the Americans are building New York City up here.” The station was noticeably bigger than it had been on his last trip up into orbit, and it had been enormous even then. Its German equivalent could not compete.

He turned his radio receiver to the bands the Americans favored. They got careless with their signals traffic every so often. Not often enough. They were up to Wehrmacht standards-or perhaps a little beyond-when they talked with one another. His best hope was catching them in the middle of an accident, so he could hear what they said when they weren’t thinking so much of whether he was listening.

Thinking that way made him feel a little guilty. Wishing an accident on anybody in space probably meant wishing death on him, too. Very few minor accidents happened out beyond the atmosphere-everything worked fine, or else you were dead. Drucker didn’t want anybody wishing that kind of misfortune on him.

He listened to the chatter that went on around the space station. The workers expanding it complained more than their German counterparts would have done. “I’m so damn tired, I’d be grateful to be dead,” one of them said.

That proved too much even for the other Americans. “Oh, shut up, Jerry,” one of them said, a sentiment with which Drucker heartily agreed.

After a little while, Drucker decided not to wait and see if something would happen, but to try to make something happen instead. “You certainly are getting large there,” he radioed to the American space station. “When do you intend to attack the colonization fleet again?”

That again made him particularly proud. If it didn’t make any listening Lizard sit up and take notice, he didn’t know what would. He must have struck a nerve inside the station, too, for the answer came back in a tearing hurry: “Go peddle your papers, you Nazi bastard! If you guys didn’t blow up the Lizards, Molotov’s boys sure as hell did, on account of it wasn’t us.”

“Ha!” Drucker said. “You Americans the crazy ones are, making this great huge… thing up here.” He’d done his duty by his country. Anybody who didn’t think the SS was crazy, though, didn’t know the current Fuhrer ’s precious pets.

And the American radio operator kept jeering at him: “You’re just jealous ’cause you don’t have a big one yourself.”

Only belatedly did Drucker realize the American might not be talking about space stations. “I have never on that score any complaints had,” he said smugly.

“Another Nazi superman, eh?” the radio operator said. “Listen up, pal-what do you think your wife is doing while you’re up here?”

“The laundry,” Drucker said. “Now your mother, I cannot for her answer.”

He smiled, listening to the American curse him. Before long, the curses faded as he went out of range and the bulge of the Earth hid the space station. He nodded to himself. He had given at least as good as he got. But then his satisfaction dribbled away. He hadn’t learned anything, which was what he’d hoped for. Like everybody else, the Wehrmacht paid for what you did, not for how good you looked when you didn’t do much.

Or had he learned something after all, something he would sooner not have known? When the Reich began fighting Poland, when the Reich began fighting the Bolsheviks, it had termed both campaigns counterattacks. Drucker couldn’t prove those statements were lies, but he knew few foreigners believed them. Could Himmler be lying here, too?

If Germany had launched the missiles of an orbiting weapon against the Race, she was wise to lie about it. Even bestriding Europe like a colossus, the Greater German Reich was the smallest independent human power, its population fearsomely concentrated. The Lizards could take a terrible revenge.

He reported his conversation with the American to a German radio relay ship in the Indian Ocean. “That is good, Lieutenant Colonel,” the radioman told him. “The Lizards do not pay enough attention to the United States. Perhaps we can persuade them to do so. For some reason, they always suspect us and accuse us instead.” His voice took on a faint whining tone. “I do not understand why.”

“I can’t imagine,” Drucker said, and then hoped the fellow down there on the ship didn’t notice how dry he sounded. But his own hope for promotion had slammed into a stone wall not for anything he’d done, but because of suspicions about his wife’s ancestry. And a lot worse than that would have happened to Kathe had the SS been able to nail their suspicions down tight.

The Lizards had to know such things. Was it any wonder they suspected the Reich on account of them?

“See if you can learn more still on your next pass under the space station,” the radio operator told Drucker.

“I’ll try,” he answered, and broke the connection. The signal for the attack on the colonization fleet, he remembered, had come from the Indian Ocean. It was supposed to have come from a U-boat, but was everyone dead certain of that?

Centimeter by centimeter, he made himself relax. The USA had a relay ship down there in the waters between Africa and Australia, and so did the USSR. Anyone could have done it.

As his orbit carried him over Australia, he chuckled to himself. Undoubtedly a U-boat had lobbed ginger bombs at the Lizards’ cities going up in the desert there. Nobody knew whose U-boat had done it. Drucker chuckled again, thinking of the orgy the Lizards must have had. “Killing them with kindness,” he said, and then came right out and laughed, because kindness didn’t begin to describe it.

Up over the long stretch of the Pacific Ocean he flew, passing not far from the island the self-styled Free French still ruled. That notion made him laugh, too, in a different way. If petty criminals and gambling lords wanted to call their little bailiwick a country, he couldn’t stop them, but that didn’t mean he had to take them seriously.

Eventually, he caught up with the space station again. When he called to report his presence in the neighborhood (not that the station wouldn’t know unless its radar was out), the same radio operator as before answered him: “Your mouth is so big, pal, I figured you’d have sucked all the air out of your cabin by now.”

“You talk about big,” Drucker said, laughing once more. “When do you take that big boat of yours onto the sea instead of leaving it in orbit docked?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the American answered.

Drucker started to make another gibe, but then he really listened to what the radioman had said. “What was that?” he asked, wanting to make sure he’d heard what he thought he had.

But the American didn’t repeat himself. Instead, he replied, “I said, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

He hadn’t said that. Drucker’s English wasn’t perfect, but he was sure the American hadn’t said that or anything like it. What did that mean? Drucker could think of only one thing: the American had slipped and was trying to cover it up. “You will never get that ugly beast moving,” he jeered, trying to rattle the radioman into another mistake.

To his sorrow, it didn’t work. “We’re doing five miles a second now,” the American said. “Eight kilometers a second for you, buddy. That’s fast enough, don’t you figure?”

“Whatever you say,” Drucker answered. “You are the one who likes to brag.”