An abrupt signal came into his ship: “Spacecraft of the Reich! Spacecraft of the Reich! Acknowledge at once, spacecraft of the Reich!” That was a Lizard talking, and he wasn’t bothering to speak any human language.

“Acknowledging,” Drucker said. “Go ahead, male of the Race.”

“I have information for you, and a warning,” the Lizard said. “You will obey, or you will regret.” He gave an emphatic cough.

“Go on,” Drucker said. “I cannot say what I will do until I hear what you have to tell me.”

“Information: the Race is punishing the Reich for the murder of the males and females aboard the destroyed ships of the colonization fleet,” the Lizard said. “A warning: any attempt to interfere with the punishment will have the most severe consequences. Do you hear? Do you understand? Do you obey?”

“I hear. I understand,” Drucker answered. “I cannot say whether I obey until I speak to my superiors. I shall do that now.”

“If your superiors are wise, they will obey. If they are not wise, we shall teach them wisdom.” The Lizard broke the connection.

After checking his position, Drucker radioed a German ship in the southern Indian Ocean and relayed what the Lizard had told him. “I have not heard them sound so determined since we were fighting,” he finished. “What are my orders?”

He was as near certain as made no difference what the answer would be. The Reich could not keep its independence by knuckling under to the Lizards. He checked the radar screen for targets at which he could launch his missiles and aim his guns. He didn’t expect to last long, but he would-what was the phrase the Americans used? Go down swinging, that was it.

And then, to his astonishment, the reply came: “Take no action.”

“Repeat, please?” Drucker said, not sure he could believe his ears.

“Take no action,” came up again from the relay ship. “We are told this punishment will be only symbolic, and will also be inflicted on Russia and America. If we were misinformed, you will proceed to avenge the Vaterland on the liars.”

“Jawohl,” Drucker said. Not sure the Lizards had monitored his conversation with the ship, he switched to the frequency they had used and back to their language: “Spacecraft of the Reich calling the Race.”

“Go ahead.” The reply came back at once. “Do you hear? Do you understand? Do you obey?”

“I hear. I understand,” Drucker said, as he had before. “I will obey, unless the punishment you give is so severe, my superiors order me to fight. In that case, I will obey them, not you.”

“This does you credit as a warrior,” said the Lizard on the other end of the circuit. “It will not keep you from dying if you are foolish enough to fight.”

“I serve the Reich,” Drucker answered. “I serve the Fuhrer.” The Fuhrer, or at least Himmler’s fair-haired boys in the SS, had treated him shabbily of late, and Kathe even worse. That didn’t mean he was ready to give up on the Greater German Reich. Without the Reich, he thought, the Lizards would surely have overrun the whole world, not just around half of it.

“You would do better to serve the Emperor,” the Lizard said, adding another emphatic cough. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh out loud. The earnest alien sounded like nothing so much as a missionary trying to save a heathen savage’s soul. Lizards got offended when humans pointed such things out to them.

Drucker’s radar showed several Lizard spacecraft dropping out of orbit. He estimated their courses, not bothering to feed the numbers into his computing machine. He didn’t need precision, not when he’d been ordered to sit tight. But they were heading for the Reich.

He itched to change course and pursue them. He could knock down a couple, maybe more, before they wrecked him. The Lizards were technically proficient pilots, but they weren’t inspired. He was, or could be.

“These are the punishment ships,” the Lizard told him. “If you could see with your eyes and not with your sensors, you would see they have been painted to include the broad green bands that symbolize punishment.”

Drucker didn’t answer. He kept nervously watching the radar screen. The Lizards were using a lot of force for a purely symbolic punishment. Had they been lying? Were they seizing this excuse to throw a sucker punch at each of the three main human powers still standing? If they were… How they would pay if they were! He would be one of the men who made them pay.

Then he got a signal from another German relay ship, one of the many that kept spacecraft in touch with the territorially limited Reich: “They have destroyed an air base near the town of Flensburg. Many aircraft have been wrecked; there are casualities. They state they intend to take no further action.”

That sounded like more than a symbolic attack to Drucker. “What are my orders?” he asked. “Am I to retaliate?”

A long silence followed. Had the Lizards truly intended a strike on the Reich, he realized, one logical thing for them to do would have been to sink as many of the relay ships as they could. During the fighting, they hadn’t paid so much attention to ships as they might have; later, men had discovered that seas on their home planet were small and unimportant compared to the oceans of Earth. But thinking the Lizards could not learn from experience was a deadly dangerous mistake.

He was just starting to worry in earnest when the relay ship did respond: “No, no retaliation at this time, not unless the Lizards take some further action. The Fuhrer has warned them in the strongest terms against thinking our forbearance will extend past this one occasion.”

“Good,” Drucker said. “Even once is too often, if anyone cares what a pilot thinks.” He knew perfectly well that no one did. “Have they also struck at the Russians and the Americans, as they said they would?” Misery loves company, he thought.

“Reports are coming in from the United States,” was the reply. “They also hit an air base there. Radar indicates an attack was made on the USSR, but no comment from Radio Moscow.”

“Radio Moscow wouldn’t tell anyone the sun had risen if they couldn’t already see it for themselves,” Drucker said with a snort.

He sighed. He wasn’t the least bit sorry the Lizards had had a good many ships from the colonization fleet blown to hell and gone. He wished they’d lost more. They kept landing more and more ships all over the territory they controlled. More and more Lizards, male and female, would be thawing out every day. The more of them there were, the harder getting rid of them would be. They’d got no better than a draw in the fighting, but they were liable to win the peace.

When he got over the United States, the American radioman with whom he spoke was full of righteous indignation. “They had no business hitting us like that-none,” the fellow said. “We didn’t do anything to them. They didn’t even claim we did. They hit us anyhow.”

“They did the same to the Reich,” Drucker said. “They did the same to the Russians-I think. They got to do it because they are strong. The stronger always get to do what they like against the weaker.”

“That’s not fair,” the American said.

“I am sure your Indians would be the first to agree with you,” Drucker said.

“So would your Jews-if you had any left,” the American retorted. Most Germans would have laughed at that. They were just as well pleased to be Judenfrei — free of Jews. Drucker would have laughed at it himself, only a handful of weeks before. He wasn’t laughing now. Had he not figured out which strings to pull, and had he not been able to pull them, Kathe would have disappeared from his life forever. That changed the way he looked at things.

Drucker didn’t say anything. The American radio operator kept jeering at him till he passed out of range. He had seldom been so glad to listen to a signal break up and dissolve in static.