Another Tupolev bomber blew up, not quite so spectacularly-or maybe it was just farther away. Several more were on fire. One hadn't burned, but was broken in half behind the bomb bay. Intact SB-2s were the exception, not the rule. Whatever punishment the Poles were going to get would have to come from some other airstrip today.

Sergei made himself stand up. He looked around to see what he could do that might help. Other dazed survivors were also emerging from the snow like hares coming out of their burrows. Steaming patches here and there marked big chunks of wreckage.

And bloody patches here and there marked dead and wounded men. What looked like a chunk of aileron had decapitated the best mechanic at the airstrip. Sergei swore, but nobody could do anything for that poor son of a bitch now. The fellows who thrashed and writhed still had hope. Some of them did, anyhow.

Stooping beside a groundcrew man who groaned as he clutched a shattered ankle, Sergei wondered what kind of hope the man had. If he didn't bleed to death or die of gangrene or septicemia, he'd survive. The bomber pilot was no doctor, but he didn't see how the groundcrew man would keep that foot. What kind of life did a cripple have?

You should have wondered about that sooner, he thought. But pilots seldom got crippled. If anything went wrong in the air, or if your plane got shot down, you were likely to buy the whole plot, not part of one. Nobody in the USSR bought or sold or owned land, but Soviet flyers talked the same way as their Western counterparts.

After doing what he could to bandage the groundcrew man and telling a few reassuring lies, Sergei looked northwest once more: after the long-gone Stukas. In Czechoslovakia, he'd seen the Germans were good. Now he saw how good they could be with the advantage of surprise. How smart were we to get into a war with people like this? he wondered.

Samuel Goldman passed several sheets of closely written paper to the visitor. "Here you are, Friedrich," he said, his tone an odd mixture of cringing and pride. "Everything that can be known about Xenophanes is here."

Sarah Goldman listened from the kitchen as her father and the other professor of ancient history talked. Friedrich Lauterbach had studied under her father. He still felt kindly toward him-this article for Pauly-Wissowa was a case in point. When it saw print, it would go under Lauterbach's name: he, after all, was an Aryan. But he paid Samuel Goldman for the work, and the family badly needed the money.

Now he said, "Thank you very much. I will type it myself tonight, so no secretary finds out about our…arrangement."

"Whatever you need to be safe," Sarah's father said. "Take a look at it now, if you care to. I have been very thorough." He was proud of that, too. Yes, he really might as well have been a German-except the damned Germans wouldn't let him.

"I'm sure it's fine, Samuel. Who knows your work better than I do, after all?" Lauterbach paused for a moment. "Here-let me give you this." As he always did, he sounded embarrassed about having to do business this way.

Another pause followed, a longer one. Sarah had to strain to hear her father's next words, for his voice dropped almost to a whisper: "But this is too much. This is much too much, twice as much as I could have expected for-"

"I'm giving you what I can," Lauterbach said. "There won't be any more, I'm afraid, not from me. I got my call-up papers yesterday. That's why I have to do my typing in a hurry."

"Oh," Samuel Goldman said, and then, "Stay safe. I would be with you if I could."

"You did what you had to do the last time around," the younger man said. "I know that-you could hardly walk when I studied with you."

"That isn't what's keeping me out now," Sarah's father said pointedly.

"And I know that," Lauterbach answered. "I think it's…unfortunate. But what can I do about it? I am only one man, and not a very brave one."

"As long as you don't tell the Tommies and the poilus, they won't know," Sarah's father said with a wry chuckle. "If I could fool them, so can you. You'll do fine. I'm sure of it."

"That makes one of us," Lauterbach said with a dry laugh of his own. "I'd better go, I'm afraid."

"True," Sarah's father agreed. "If they can prove you're friends with a Jew, that may be more dangerous than going up to the front."

"If things were different…" Lauterbach sighed. "But they aren't, and they aren't likely to be. Still, you've got a pretty daughter." Three or four footsteps took him to the door. It closed behind him.

He was, Sarah remembered, single. Did he mean…? She shrugged. What he meant didn't matter, because things weren't different, and they sure weren't likely to be. He was dead right about that.

She went out into the front room. Her father stood there, holding the banknotes with the eagles and swastikas. Even the money proclaimed that things weren't going to be different. Samuel Goldman looked up. "You were listening?" he asked.

"Ja." Sarah nodded. "Wasn't I supposed to?"

"It's all right." He grimaced. "I don't know what we'll do for cash when this runs out, though."

"Isn't there anyone else who will let you write for him?" Sarah asked.

"Maybe." Her father looked-and sounded-dubious. "The others have always been more nervous about it than Friedrich…and who can blame them?" His mouth twisted. "They never paid as well, either. But we do what we can, not what we want to, eh?"

"Ja," Sarah said again. What else was there to say? She did her best to find something: "Saul brings in a little money."

"As a laborer." It wasn't quite as if her father said, As a pimp, but it was close. He went on, "He has a brain. He should use it. He should have the chance to use it. Or he should be a soldier. He'd make a better one than Friedrich Lauterbach, and you can bet on that."

"He doesn't mind so much. Honest, Papa, he doesn't." Sarah knew she was right about that. Her big brother had always exulted in his strength on the soccer pitch. Working with his body instead of his brain didn't humiliate him the way it would have their father.

"Why God decided to give me a water buffalo for a son, only He knows," Samuel Goldman said, and let it go at that.

The other worry was that, even though the Goldmans had money, they couldn't buy much. Nobody in wartime Germany could buy a great deal, but Jews suffered worse than ordinary Germans. They could buy only from shops run by their fellow Jews, and those shops always had less to sell than others. Food got worse and worse. Sarah's mother was a good cook, but disguise could go only so far.

Noodles flavored with nasty cheese didn't make much of a supper. Sarah picked at hers. So did her father. Saul shoveled in everything in front of him and looked around to see what else he could get.

"You can have mine if you want," Sarah said. "I'm not really hungry." The last part of that wasn't true, but she didn't feel like eating the mess in front of her.

"Thanks!" Saul said. As Sarah passed him her plate, her mother gave her a dirty look. Hanna Goldman wanted everybody to eat a lot all the time. Maybe the noodles and cheese could have been worse, but they could have been a lot better, too. As far as Sarah was concerned, Saul was welcome to them if he wanted them so much.

And he did. By the way he glanced up after he made them disappear, he could have put away another couple of helpings. But there were no more. He sighed and said, "The coffee will be ersatz, won't it?"

"Aber naturlich," Mother answered. "Burnt barley, with a little chicory if we're lucky."

"Some luck," Father said.

"Oh, well." Saul shrugged his broad shoulders. "The Army isn't getting much better?"

"How do you know that?" Samuel Goldman always looked for evidence. In better times, Sarah had admired that. Now she wondered whether it made any difference at all. Evidence? What did the Nazis care about that? But they had the guns and the goons. With those, they made evidence of their own.