“Finally this evening,” the newsreader went on, “M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists introduced a bill in Parliament proposing to restrict the legal privileges of certain citizens of the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the bill appears to have no chance of passage, Sir Oswald said it continued an important statement of principle, and-”

With a curse, Goldfarb got up and turned off the televisor. He stood by it, shaking. Was that fury or fear? Both at once, he judged. It had started here. At last, it had started here.

12

Glen Johnson studied Peregrine ’s radar screen. More than anything else up here, including his bare eyes, it told him what he needed to know. Everything was, or seemed to be, as it should have been. He didn’t know exactly what all the targets he saw were, but he hadn’t known that for some time: all three spacegoing human powers and the Lizards kept right on changing the orbits on their weapons installations.

He sighed. Everyone should have cut that crap out after whoever it was struck at the colonizing fleet. Down on Earth, somebody was laughing himself silly because he’d hit the Lizards a good lick and got away with it.

But that stunt could not work twice. The Lizards had made it very plain they wouldn’t let it work twice. Looking at things out of their eye turrets, Johnson couldn’t blame them. If anyone struck at them now, everyone would regret it. That made all the maneuvering out here seem pointless at best, provocative at worst. It went on even so.

“Stupid,” he muttered under his breath, and stupid it undoubtedly was. That didn’t mean it would stop. Who’d said, Nobody ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people? He couldn’t recall, but it was true, and not only of Americans.

His low, fast orbit meant he kept passing things traveling in higher, slower paths around the Earth. Several Falcon — class ships were in orbit at any given time, to make sure they kept a close eye on everything that was going on. When Johnson spotted the large target on his radar, he thought for a moment that it was a ship from the colonization fleet. But the orbit was wrong for that. Moreover, by its transponder signal, it didn’t belong to the Lizards at all. As a matter of fact, it was as American as the Peregrine.

He whistled softly and thumbed on his radio. “Peregrine to Space Station. Peregrine to Space Station. Over.”

The signal came back a moment later: “Go ahead, Peregrine. Over.”

“That thing is really going up there, isn’t it?” Johnson had to remember to add, “Over.”

He got laughter back. “Sure is, Peregrine. Any day now, we’re opening up our own supermarket.”

“Damned if I don’t believe you,” he said. “My last flight up, you weren’t anything special at all on my radar. This time, first thing I thought was that you belonged to the colonization fleet.”

That won him more laughter. “Pretty funny, Peregrine. We’ve got a lot we’re going to be doing up here, that’s all, so the place has to get bigger.”

“Roger that,” Johnson answered. “But what do the Lizards think about you? They don’t like anybody coming up here but them.”

“Oh, they don’t worry about us,” the radio operator on the space station said. “We’re a great, big, fat target, and we’re too damn heavy to do much in the way of maneuvering. If real trouble starts, you can call us the Sitting Duck.”

“Okay,” Johnson said. He didn’t ask what sort of weapons the space station carried. That was none of his business, and even less the business of whoever might be monitoring this frequency. “Over and out.”

Sitting Duck, eh? he thought, and shook his head. More likely the Sitting Porcupine. If that radioman hadn’t been sandbagging, he was a monkey’s uncle. The USA wouldn’t put anything so big and prominent into space without giving it some way to take care of itself. Even the Lizards weren’t that naive. They’d thought they would be facing knights in shining armor (or rusty armor-he remembered some of the pictures from their probe), but they’d come loaded for bear.

What impressed him most about the space station wasn’t its likely armament but, as he’d told the radio operator, how fast it was growing. An awful lot of launches had to be ferrying men and supplies up there. As far as he was concerned, that sort of spaceflight was bus driver’s work, but there was a lot of bus driver’s work going on to make the station expand so quickly.

He scratched his chin, wondering if he’d be able to finagle a ride up there himself, to see with his own eyes what was going on. After a moment, he nodded. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange.

A Lizard radar station called from the ground to inform him his orbit was satisfactory. “I thank you,” he answered in the language of the Race. The Lizard on the radio had sounded sniffy, as Lizards had a way of doing. If his orbit hadn’t been satisfactory, the Lizard would have been screaming his head off.

Johnson suddenly laughed. “That’s what it is!” he exclaimed, speaking aloud to enjoy the joke more. “There’s thousands of tons of powdered ginger up there, and they’re going to drop it on the Lizards’ heads. Wouldn’t that produce some satisfied customers?”

He knew he was anthropomorphizing. When the Lizards didn’t have it, they didn’t miss it the way people would. But when they were interested, they were a lot more interested than anybody above the age of nineteen could hope to understand.

“Hello, American spacecraft. Over.” The call was in crisp, gutturally flavored English. “Who are you?”

“Peregrine here, Johnson speaking,” Johnson answered. “Who are you, German spacecraft?” The German equivalents of his ship had orbits with about the same period as his own, but, because Peenemunde was a lot farther north than Kitty Hawk, they swung farther north and south than he did, and met only intermittently.

“Drucker here, in Kathe,” the flier from the Reich answered. “And I wish I were in Kathe right now, and not up here. Do I say this right auf Englisch?”

“If you mean what I think you mean, yeah, that’s how you say it,” Johnson replied with a chuckle. “Wife or girlfriend, Drucker? I forget.”

“Wife,” Drucker answered. “I am a lucky man, I know, to be still in love with the woman I married. Have you a wife, Johnson?”

“Divorced,” Johnson said shortly. “Spent too much time away from her, I guess. She got fed up with it.” She’d run away with a traveling salesman, was what Stella had done, but Johnson didn’t advertise that. Unless somebody asked him about her, he didn’t think of her twice a month. He wasn’t a man inclined to dwell on his mistakes.

“I am sorry that to hear,” Drucker said. “Here is to peace between us and confusion to the Lizards.”

“Yeah, I’ll drink to that any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Johnson said. “Every day I’m not up here, I mean.”

“They think all I have here is water and ersatz coffee and a horrible powder that turns water into something that is supposed to taste like orange juice,” Drucker said. “They are wrong.” He sounded happy they were wrong.

“Somebody’s listening to you,” Johnson warned.

“They will not shoot me for saying I do not like the tang of their orange drink,” the German answered. “They need a better reason than that.”

For once, Johnson wished the radio speaker in the Peregrine weren’t so tinny. He thought Drucker’s voice had an edge to it, but couldn’t be sure. He was probably imagining things. Spacemen were part of the Nazi elite. The Gestapo wouldn’t go after them. It would pick some poor, beat-up foreigners who couldn’t even complain.

After a pause that stretched, Drucker went on, “You and I and even the Bolsheviks in their flying tin cans-if we were not here, the Lizards would be able to do whatever they chose.”