Every doctor he’d ever met told him he didn’t have the lung capacity to keep smoking. “None of the sons of bitches ever told me how to quit, though,” he said, and took another deep drag on the coffin nail.

The sun beat down from a sky of enameled brass. Shadows were pale, as if apologizing for being there at all. The air he breathed was almost as hot and almost as wet as the coffee he’d drunk. Step by painful step, he made his way down to the bus stop on the corner. He sank down onto the bench with a sigh of relief, and celebrated with another Camel. Fine American tobaccos, the pack said. He remembered the days when it had said, Fine American and Turkish tobaccos. The Lizards ruled Turkey now, though the Reich next door kept things uncomfortable for them there. Turkish tobaccos stayed home.

A bus pulled to a stop in front of the bench. Auerbach regretted sitting, because that meant he had to stand up again. Putting most of his weight on the cane, he managed. He negotiated the couple of steps up to the fare box with only a couple of cuss words for each one. He tossed a dime in the box and kept standing not far from the door.

People pushed past him, getting on and off. He leered at a couple of pretty girls who went by; the clothes women wore these days offered a lot of flesh for leering. But when a bare-chested teenage boy with his head shaved and his chest painted to imitate a Lizard rank boarded the bus, Rance had everything he could do to keep from breaking his cane over the punk’s glistening, empty head.

That’s the enemy! he wanted to shout. It wouldn’t have done any good. He’d tried it a few times, and seen as much. To the kids who didn’t remember the war, the Lizards were as permanent a fixture as human beings, and they often seemed a lot more interesting.

His stop came only a couple of blocks later. The door opened with a hiss of compressed air. The driver, who carried Rance a couple of times a week, kept it open till he’d managed to descend. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder.

“Any time, friend,” the colored man answered. With another hiss, the door closed. The bus roared away, leaving behind a cloud of noxious diesel fumes. Fort Worth wasn’t a rich town. It wouldn’t be buying any stink-free hydrogen-burning buses for quite a while yet.

Auerbach didn’t mind diesel exhaust. It was a human smell, which meant he was going to approve of it till forced to do otherwise. He shuffled along, faster than a tortoise but not much, till he got to the American Legion post halfway down the block.

The post didn’t have a lot of money, either: not enough for air-conditioning. A fan stirred the air without doing much to cool it. A tableful of men with poker chips in front of them waved to Rance when he came inside. “Always room for one more,” Charlie Thornton told him. “Your money spends as good as anybody else’s.”

“Hell of a lot you know about it, Charlie,” Auerbach said, pulling his wallet out of a hip pocket so he could buy his way into the game. “I win money off you, not the other way round.”

“Boy’s delirious,” Thornton declared, to general laughter. His white mustache showed he was a veteran of the First World War, the last time people had had the privacy to fight among themselves alone. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Lizards’ conquest fleet had headed for Earth a bare handful of years after what people had called the War to End War ended.

Auerbach didn’t like thinking about Lizard fleets heading toward Earth. He didn’t like thinking about the one that was just arriving, either. He examined the first hand he got dealt. The five cards might never have met before. Disgusted, he threw them down on the table. Even more disgusted, he said, “Before long, we’re going to be ass-deep in Lizards.”

“That’s a fact,” said Pete Bragan, who had dealt Rance the lousy hand. Pete wore a patch on his left eye and had a walk even funnier than Auerbach’s. He’d been inside a Sherman tank that had the misfortune of coming up against one of the Lizards’ machines outside of Chicago. As such things went, he’d been lucky: all of him but that one eye and the last few inches of his right leg had got out. “Damn shame, you ask me.”

One by one, the veterans around the table nodded. Except for Thornton, the old-timer, they were men the Lizards had wrecked, one way or another. Among them, they had enough chunks missing to make a pretty fair meat market. Mike Cohen, for instance, never had to shuffle and deal because he couldn’t with only one hand. None of them held down a regular job. Had they held regular jobs, they wouldn’t have been playing poker early on a Tuesday morning.

After dropping out of another hand, Auerbach won one with three nines and then, to his disgust, lost one with an ace-high straight. War stories went around with the cards. Rance had told his before. That didn’t stop him from telling them again. After a while, he lost with another straight. “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna quit coming here!” he exclaimed, staring at Pete Bragan’s full house. “My pension doesn’t stretch far enough to let me afford many of these.”

“Amen,” Mike Cohen said, for all the world as if he were Christian. “It was decent money when they set it up, but things haven’t gotten any cheaper since.”

Grousing about the pension was as much a ritual as swapping war stories. Auerbach shook his head when that thought crossed his mind. Stories about making ends meet were war stories, stories of a quiet war that never ended. He said, “They don’t give a damn about us. Oh, they talk pretty fine, but down deep they just don’t care.”

“That’s a fact,” Bragan said. “They got what they could from us, and now they don’t want to remember who saved the bacon.” He tossed a chip into the pot. “I’ll bump that up a quarter.”

“Way things are going nowadays, seems like some folks wish the Lizards had won,” Auerbach said, and described the teenager on the bus. He put in a couple of chips. “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise another quarter.”

“World’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Bragan said. When it came round to him again, he raised another quarter.

Auerbach studied his three jacks. He knew what kind of hand he held: one just good enough to lose. He wished he hadn’t raised before. But he had. Throw good money after bad — the best recipe he knew for losing the good money, too. With a grimace, he said, “Call,” and did his best to pretend the chip he flipped into the pot had got there of its own accord.

Bragan displayed three tens. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Auerbach said happily, and raked in the pot.

“Don’t reckon anybody’d notice any special change,” Bragan said, which drew a laugh. The other wounded veteran shook his head. “Yeah, world’s going to hell in a handbasket, all right. Whose deal is it?”

As it did every day, the game went on and on. Somebody limped out and bought hero sandwiches. Somebody else went out a little later and came back with beer. Occasionally, someone would get up and leave. The poker players never had any trouble finding someone else to sit in. Most of them didn’t have much else to do with their lives. Rance Auerbach knew he didn’t. He’d never married. He hadn’t had a steady woman friend for a long time. His poker buddies were in the same boat. They had their wounds and their stories and one another.

He hated the idea of going back to his apartment. But the American Legion hall didn’t have cots. He cashed in his chips, discovering he was a couple of dollars ahead on the day. If he’d had more he cared to buy, he would have felt better about that. As things were, he took it as skill’s due reward-and coffee next time he went shopping.

When he got back to the apartment building, he checked his mailbox. He had a sister married to a fellow who sold cars in Texarkana; she sometimes wrote. His brother in Dallas had probably forgotten he was alive. When his leg and his shoulder started kicking in, he wished he could forget, too.