A little later, he passed about twenty kilometers below the German space station. Through Zeiss field glasses, it seemed almost close enough to touch. The job of converting it to a spaceship was going much more smoothly than it had for the Americans. But they’d kept what they were up to a secret, while the Reich was making no bones about what it had in mind. If the Lizards didn’t like it, they could start a war. Such was Himmler’s attitude, anyhow.

The swastikas painted on the space station were big enough to be easily visible. Straining his eyes, Drucker imagined he could read Goring’s name above them, but he really couldn’t, or not quite. He chuckled a little. Down on Earth, the late Reichsmarschall was a bad joke, the Luftwaffe moribund and subservient to the Wehrmacht and the SS. But Goring’s name would go traveling farther than the pudgy, drug-addled founder of the German air force could ever have imagined.

And the Lizards couldn’t-or at least they’d better not-try to forbid a German spacecraft from going where an American one had already gone. That would mean trouble, big trouble. It might even mean war.

Back when he’d been driving a panzer against the Lizards, Drucker would have given his left nut to control the kind of firepower he had at his fingertips now. He’d been so outgunned then… and he was outgunned up here, too. He sighed. The Lizards had more and better weapons. Odds were they would for a long time to come. But the Reich could hurt them. That was the essence of German foreign policy. And he, Johannes Drucker, could hurt them with his nuclear-tipped missiles.

He hoped he wouldn’t have to. They would surely blow him out of the sky the instant after he launched. The one thing he didn’t think they’d do was try to blow him out of the sky before he could launch. They’d attacked Earth without provocation, but hadn’t staged any unprovoked assaults since the fighting ended.

Maybe that made them more trustworthy than human beings. Maybe it just made them more naive. Drucker never had figured that out.

His radio crackled into life. “Relay ship Hoth to spacecraft Kathe. Urgent. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledging,” Drucker said. “Was ist los, Hoth?” The relay ship, down in the South Atlantic, kept spacecraft in touch with the Reich even when they were out of direct radio range. All the spacefaring human powers used relay ships. The Lizards, with their world-bestriding lands, didn’t have to.

“Urgent news bulletin,” the radio operator down below answered.

“Go ahead?’ Drucker did his best to hide the alarm that surged through him. But surely his superiors wouldn’t order him into battle with a news bulletin… would they?

Plainly reading from text in front of him, the radio operator said, “Radio Nuremberg has announced the death of Heinrich Himmler, Chancellor of the Greater German Reich. The Chancellor, on duty to his last breath, suffered a coronary thrombosis while working on state papers. No date for services celebrating his life has yet been set, nor has a successor been named.”

“Gott im Himmel,” Drucker whispered. Things would be hopping down in Nuremberg now. Even more than Hitler before him, Himmler had stayed strong because he let no one around him have any strength. Nor has a successor been named was liable to cover some vicious infighting in the days to come.

“Have you got that, Kathe?” the radioman asked.

“I’ve got it,” Drucker said. This is liable to be the safest place I could find, he thought. He almost said it aloud, but thought better of that.

And then the fellow down below said it for him: “Staying a few thousand kilometers away when the big boys squabble isn’t so bad, eh?”

“That’s the truth, sure enough,” Drucker answered. “Well, I don’t give orders. All I do is take them. Whoever the new Fuhrer is, he’ll tell me what to do and I’ll do it. That’s the way things work.”

Without a doubt, someone aboard the Hoth was recording every word he said. Without a doubt, the Gestapo would be listening to make sure he sounded properly loyal to the Reich and to its Fuhrer, whoever that turned out to be. Drucker knew as much. He was no fool. He also knew his loyalty was liable to be suspect. That meant he had to be especially careful to say all the right things.

And the radioman aboard the Hoth said, “That’s how we all feel, of course. Our loyalty is to the state, not to any one man.”

He said all the right things, too. And Drucker made a point of agreeing with him: “That’s how it is, all right. That’s how it has to be.”

As he flew along, as the signal from the Hoth faded, he wondered who would take over for the late, unlamented (at least by him) Heinrich Himmler. The SS would naturally have a candidate. So would the Wehrmacht. And Joseph Goebbels, passed over when Hitler died, would want another try at ruling the Reich. There might be others; Drucker did his best not to pay attention to politics. Maybe that was a mistake. More and more these days, politics kept paying attention to him. His orbit swept him up toward the Reich. By the time his tour ended, everything was likely to be over.

12

Vyacheslav Molotov felt harassed. That was not the least common feeling he’d ever had, especially after Marshal Zhukov rescued him while smashing Beria’s coup. Every American presidential election made him nervous, too. The prospect of dealing with a new man every four years was enough to make anybody nervous when that man could start a nuclear war just by giving an order. But Warren seemed likely to beat Humphrey, which would give Molotov a breathing space before he had to start getting nervous about the USA again.

Now, though, Himmler had had to go and die. Molotov thought that most inconsiderate of the Nazi leader. Himmler had been a bastard, no doubt about it. But, on the whole (the recent aborted lunge at Poland aside), he’d been a predictable bastard. Who would manage to throw his fundament into the seat he’d occupied?

What sort of madman will I have to deal with next? was how Molotov phrased the question in his mind. American presidential candidates, at least, spelled out what they had in mind before taking office. You could plan for a man like that, even if he looked likely to be unfortunate. But the only qualification for Fuhrer that Molotov could see was a quick, sharp knife.

He did not dwell on how a German politico might view the process of succession in the USSR. He took his own country, his own system, for granted.

His secretary looked into the office. “Comrade General Secretary, the foreign commissar is here for his ten o’clock appointment.”

As usual, Molotov glanced at the clock on the wall. Gromyko was precisely on time. He always was. Few Soviet officials imitated him. Despite two generations of Soviet discipline, most Russians seemed constitutionally unable to take the notion of precise time seriously. “Send him in, Pyotr Maksimovich,” Molotov said.

Gromyko, craggy features impassive as usual, strode past the secretary and into the office. He leaned across the desk to shake hands with Molotov. “Good day, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said.

“And to you, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov replied. He waved Gromyko to a chair. They both lit cigarettes, Molotov’s Russian-style in a long paper holder, Gromyko’s an American brand. After a couple of puffs, Molotov said, “You will, no doubt, have a good notion of why I want to see you.”

“What ever gave you that idea?” Gromyko had a good deadpan, all right. “It’s not as if the Reich were of any great concern to us.”

“No, of course not.” Molotov wouldn’t let the foreign commissar win the palm for irony without a fight. “Why, for the past generation Germany has scarcely mattered to us at all.”