McDowell leered. “That was a shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet. How do you know a lady Lizard wasn’t flying it?”

“I don’t,” Goldfarb admitted, blinking. “It never even occurred to me.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much, not to me and not to the Lizards, either. If their females aren’t in season, the males don’t care about chasing skirt, poor buggers.”

“I’d pay five quid to see a lady Lizard in a skirt,” McDowell said.

“Come to think of it, so would I,” Goldfarb answered with a chuckle. He got to his feet and stretched. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“Any time, Flight Lieutenant,” McDowell said. “I’ve cadged more from you than you ever have from me.”

Goldfarb shrugged again. A Jew who got a reputation for stinginess found himself in even more hot water these days than he would have a generation before. Britain didn’t go in for the madnesses of the Reich over on the Continent, but some of the Nazis’ attitudes had rubbed off, especially down in England. That was another reason Goldfarb hadn’t minded being posted to Northern Ireland.

He walked out into watery sunshine. Belfast seldom got any other sort. Parabolic radar dishes scanned every direction. They were ever so much smaller and ever so much more powerful than the sets he’d served during the Battle of Britain and during the Lizards’ arrival-till the aliens knocked out those sets. Some of the improvement would surely have come over the course of time regardless of whether the Lizards landed on Earth. But captured equipment and training disks playable by what they called skelkwank light had kicked human technology far ahead of where it would have been otherwise.

A couple of RAF officers strode past Goldfarb. He stiffened to attention and saluted; they both outranked him. One of them was saying, “-ce they’re all down, we’ll pay back a lot of-”

After returning Goldfarb’s salute, the other spoke in an elegant Oxonian accent: “Now, now, old man, don’t you know?” His gaze flicked across Goldfarb as if the flight lieutenant were a speck of lint on his lapel.

Both officers fell silent till Goldfarb was out of earshot. He went on his way, quietly steaming. Far too many officers these days gave him the glove because he was Jewish. He couldn’t do anything about it, either-or rather, he could, but anything he did was likely to make matters worse. Anti-Semitism kept wafting across the Channel like a bad smell. That Heinrich Himmler seemed so calm and rational about it, rather than ranting as Hitler had done, only made it more appealing to the aristocratic Englishman of the stiff-upper-lip school.

“What do they think?” Goldfarb muttered. “I should get down on my knees and thank them for the privilege of saving their bacon”-an American phrase, to the point if not kosher-“from the Lizards? Not bloody likely!”

Trouble was, too many of them did think exactly that. He knew his chances of making squadron leader were about as good as Britain’s chances of retaking India from the Lizards. If he hadn’t had a record far better than those of his competitors-and if he hadn’t had some blokes on his side back in the days when being on a Jew’s side didn’t take extraordinary moral courage-he never would have become an officer at all.

He had become one, though. If those snooty brass hats didn’t like it, too bad for them. He wondered what sort of conversation they’d judged unsuitable for his tender ears. He’d never know. He also wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Had he lost sleep over every slight, he’d have lain awake every night.

People on the streets of Belfast kept an eye on him as he headed for his home. He didn’t look like an Englishman or an Irishman or even a Scot; his hair was too curly, and the wrong shade of brown to boot, while his face bore a distinctly Judaic nose. Said nose itched. He scratched it. An itchy nose was supposed to be a sign he’d kiss a fool.

When he got home, he planted a big smack on Naomi. Maybe she’d been a fool for marrying him, all those years ago. Her family had got out of Germany while some Jews still could; his had fled Polish pogroms before World War I. But she hadn’t looked down her own charming nose at him, and they remained as happy as two people could reasonably expect in this uncertain world.

“What’s new?” she asked, her English still faintly accented though she’d been in Britain since her teens.

He told her about the shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet, and about the warning he’d been able to pass on. Then he sighed. “It won’t do any good. The Lizards in the colonization fleet don’t know Nazis from necklaces.”

“You did what you could,” Naomi said, and added an emphatic cough.

Goldfarb laughed. “You caught that from our children,” he said severely, “and they caught it from the wireless and the telly.”

“And the wireless and the telly caught it from the Lizards-maybe we are becoming a part of their Empire, one bit at a time,” his wife answered. “And speaking of such things, you have a letter from your cousin in Palestine.”

“From Moishe?” Goldfarb said in glad surprise. “Haven’t heard from him in a couple of months. What has he got to say?”

“I don’t know-I haven’t opened it,” Naomi said. That was standard practice in the Goldfarb household: no one ever opened mail addressed to someone else. “Here, I’ll get it for you.” He watched her go over to the sideboard-watched appreciatively, as skirts were short this year-and pluck the letter from a cut-glass dish there. She carried it back to him.

It bore no stamp, but an adhesive label covered with Lizard squiggles. Moishe Russie had written Goldfarb’s name and address in the Roman alphabet, but the letter inside the envelope was in Yiddish. Dear Cousin David, he wrote, I hope this finds you well, as all are here in Jerusalem. Reuven has just finished exams for this term of medical school. How much more he knows of how the body works than I did at his age! He would have known more if the Lizards had not come, of course, but he knows even more than he would have otherwise because they did. They understand life at a molecular level we were generations away from reaching.

So Naomi would understand, Goldfarb read the letter aloud. She had no trouble following spoken Yiddish, but could not fight her way through the Hebraic script in which it was written. “Good that your cousin’s son will be a doctor,” she said.

“Yes,” Goldfarb answered, thinking that the Lizards had given medicine the same sort of lift they had electronics. He read on: “ ‘The fleetlord, you know, sometimes uses me as a channel between the Race and people. This is one of those times. Something strange is going on in connection with the arrival of the colonization fleet. I do not know what it is. I do not know if he knows what it is. Whatever it is, it worries him.’ ”

Goldfarb and his wife stared at each other. Anything that worried the fleetlord was liable to mean trouble for the whole human race-and, incidentally, for the Lizards. Why hadn’t Moishe been more explicit? Because he didn’t know much more himself, evidently. “Finish,” Naomi said.

“ ‘Atvar likes back-channel contacts more than he did some years ago,’ ” Goldfarb read. “ ‘If you can put a flea in the ear of some of your officer friends, it might do some good. Your cousin, Moishe.’ ”

“What will you do?” Naomi asked.

“God knows,” Goldfarb answered. “I haven’t got that many officer friends any more, not with things like they are here. And I’m hardly the bloke to play at world politics.” Naomi looked at him. He let out a long sigh. He had no real choice, and knew it. “I’ll do what I can, of course.”

Straha spent a lot of time touching up his body paint. He kept the complex patterns as neat as they had been back in the days when he commanded the 206th Emperor Yower. He’d been the third-ranking male in the conquest fleet, behind only Atvar and Kirel. He’d come within the breadth of a fingerclaw of toppling Atvar from fleetlord’s rank. If he’d done it, if he’d taken charge of things in place of that boring plodder…