“Greifswald,” Drucker answered. He saw that meant nothing to anyone but him, so he made things plainer. “It’s up near Peenemunde, by the Baltic.”

“Ach, so. ” The demobilized soldier raised an eyebrow. “If it’s up near Peenemunde, is anything left of it?”

“I don’t know,” Drucker said bleakly. “I’ve got-I had, anyway-a wife and three kids. I have to see if I can track them down.”

“Good luck,” said the fellow who’d given him water. He sounded as if he thought Drucker would need luck better than merely good. Drucker was afraid he thought the same thing. After a moment, the ex-soldier remarked, “Hell of a long way from the Baltic to here. How do you propose to get there?”

“Walk, if I have to,” Drucker replied. “I’m getting an idea of what the roads are like. Are any trains running?”

“A few,” the former Wehrmacht man said. The rest of the laborers, who seemed happy to get a break, nodded. When he continued, “Not bloody many, though,” they nodded again. He waved. “And you see what the highways are like. It’s not just this one, either. They’re all the same. The stinking Lizards paralyzed us. We’ve got people starving because there’s no way to get food from here to there.”

“And everything you can get costs ten times too much,” another laborer added. “The Reichsmark isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on any more.”

“Ouch.” Drucker winced. “We went through that after the First World War. Do we have to do it again?”

The ex-soldier said, “If everybody’s got money and there’s nothing to buy, prices are going to go through the roof. That’s life.” He spat. “I’ll worry about all that Scheisse later, when I’ve got the time. Right now, I’m just glad I’m still breathing. A hell of a lot of people in the Reich aren’t.”

“Hey, Karl,” one of the other laborers said. Several men put their heads together and talked in voices too low for Drucker to make out what they were saying. They passed something back and forth among themselves. He couldn’t tell what they were doing there, either.

He was almost on the point of wondering whether he ought to turn and run like hell when they broke apart. The former Wehrmacht man-Karl-turned toward him and held out a moderately fat wad of banknotes. “Here you go, Colonel,” he said. “This’ll keep you eating for a couple-three days, anyhow.”

“Thank you very much!” Drucker exclaimed. From what he could see, none of the laborers had enough to be able to spare much. But they knew he had nothing at all, and so they’d reached into their pockets. He nodded. “Thanks from the bottom of my heart.”

“It’s nothing,” Karl said. “We all know what you’re going through. We’re all going through it, too-except for the ones who’ve been through it already. They’re trying to come out the other side. Hope you make it up to Greifswald. Hope you find your family, too.”

“Thanks,” Drucker said again. And if he didn’t find his family, he’d have to… to try to come out the other side, too. The phrase struck him as all too apt. With a last nod, he started walking again, heading north, heading home.

After the Nazis occupied Poland, they’d built an enormous death factory at Treblinka. They’d been building an even bigger one outside Oswiecim-Auschwitz, they’d called it in German-when the Lizards came. Mordechai Anielewicz had longed for revenge against the tormentors of the Jews for a generation. Now he had it. And now, having it, he discovered the folly of such wishes.

He could go anywhere he chose in the much-reduced Greater German Reich. As a leader among the Polish Jews who’d fought side by side with the Lizards against the Nazis in two wars now-and as a man who’d made sure his friends among the Lizards helped all they could-he had the backing of the Race. Before entering Germany, he’d got a document from the Race’s authorities in Poland authorizing him to call on the males occupying the Reich for assistance. He also had documents in German, to overawe burgomeisters and other functionaries.

What hadn’t occurred to him was how few German functionaries were left to overawe. The Lizards had done a truly astonishing job of pounding flat the part of Germany just west of Poland. He’d known that in the abstract. The Wehrmacht’s assault on Poland had petered out not least because the Germans couldn’t keep their invading army supplied. As he entered Germany, he saw exactly what that pounding had done.

Kreuz, where Mordechai entered the Reich, had taken an explosive-metal bomb. The center of the city had simply ceased to be, except for one church spire and most of a factory chimney, which still reached toward the heavens like the skeletal fingers of a dead man. Fused, shiny glass gradually gave way to rubble outside the center of town.

This is what the Nazis did to Lodz, Anielewicz thought. This is what they did to Warsaw, and to as many other cities as they could hit. But they’d taken worse than they’d given: that was dreadfully clear. He asked a Lizard officer, “How many Deutsch cities did the Race bomb with explosive-metal weapons?”

“I do not know, not precisely,” the male answered. “Many tens of them, without a doubt. Hundreds, very possibly. The Deutsche were stubborn. They should have yielded long before they did. They had no hope of defeating us, and merely inflicted more suffering on their own population by refusing to give up the futile fight.”

Many tens. Hundreds, very possibly. The answer was horrifying enough to Mordechai when he first heard it. It became far more so when he got to the makeshift hospital on the far side of what had been Kreuz. Tents and shacks housed people maimed or blinded or horribly burned by the explosive-metal bomb. The handful of doctors and nurses and civilian volunteers were desperately overworked and had next to nothing with which to treat their patients.

Mordechai multiplied that improvised hospital by tens, hundreds very possibly. He shivered, though the day was fine, even warm. What sort of miracle was it that any Germans survived at all?

A bespectacled doctor in a long, none too clean white coat came up to him. “You are a person of some influence with the Lizards,” he stated, his voice brooking no argument. “You must be, to be clean and well fed and traveling so.”

“What if I am?” Mordechai asked.

“You will try to obtain for us more medical supplies,” the doctor said, again as if stating a law of nature. “You see what we lack.”

Humility, Anielewicz thought. Aloud, he said, “You’d ask this of me even though I’m a Jew?” He let the German he had used slide into Yiddish. If the doctor-the Nazi doctor, he thought-couldn’t follow, too bad.

But the man only shrugged. “I would ask it if you were Satan himself,” he answered. “I need these things. My patients need these things.”

“You aren’t the only ones who do,” Anielewicz observed.

“That does not make my need any less urgent,” the doctor said.

From his point of view, he might even have been right. Germans in torment suffered no less than Jews in torment. Anielewicz wished he could deny that. If he did, though, what would he be but the mirror image of a Nazi? Roughly, he said, “I’ll do what I can.”

By the way the doctor looked at him, the man thought he was lying. But he spoke of the matter with the first Lizard officer he encountered, a couple of kilometers farther outside of Kreuz. The male responded, “I understand the physician’s difficulties, but the number of injured Deutsche far outstrips our ability to provide all physicians with all required medicaments. We shall do what we can. It may not be much and it may not be timely, but we shall make the effort.”

“I thank you,” Mordechai answered. There, he told his conscience. Relax. I’ve made the effort, too.

Every time he went into a village, he asked about soldiers bringing Jews back into Germany from Poland. Most of the time, he got only blank stares by way of reply. A few people glared at him. Nazi teachings had sunk deep. Those Germans eyed a Jew-maybe the first they’d ever seen in the flesh, surely the first they’d seen for years-as if he were Satan incarnate.

More Germans, though, groveled before him. He needed a little while to realize that was a residue of Nazi teachings, too. He had authority: therefore, he was to be obeyed. If he weren’t obeyed, something dreadful would befall the villagers. They seemed convinced of it. At times, he wished it were true.

None of the Germans he questioned knew anything about his wife and sons and daughter. None of them had seen a beffel. He made a point of asking about Pancer; the alien pet might have stuck in people’s minds where a few Jews wouldn’t have registered. The logic was good, but he had no luck with it.

He pedaled into a little town called Arnswalde as the sun was setting for the brief summer night of northern Germany. With the beating the Reichsmark had taken since the Nazis surrendered, the Polish zlotys in his wallet seemed good as gold-better. He got himself an excellent roast duck, an enormous mound of red cabbage, and all the fine lager he could drink for the price of a couple of apples back in Poland.

The fellow who served him the feast was one of those who fawned on the occupiers. “Take the leftovers with you, sir,” he said. “They’ll make you a fine breakfast, see if they don’t.”

“All right, I will. Thanks,” Mordechai said. “Do you have enough for yourself here, though?”

“Ach, ja,” the German answered with a chuckle that might have been jolly or might have been nervous. “When did you ever hear of a tavern keeper who starved to death?”

He didn’t look as if he were in any imminent danger of starving (he looked plump, as a matter of fact), so Anielewicz took the duck and some cabbage without a qualm. He even let the tavern keeper give him an old, beat-up pot in which to carry them. Either the man was generous by nature or he was a fool or the zloty was worth even more than Mordechai had thought.

Twilight lay over Arnswalde when he came out of the tavern. He’d just climbed onto his bicycle when a young blond woman walked up to him. Pointing to the pot, she came straight to the point: “You have food in there?”

“Yes,” he said, eyeing her. Not too long before, she’d probably been very pretty-a perfect Aryan princess, he thought. Now her hair was tangled and matted, her face and legs-she was wearing a short skirt, so he could see quite a lot of them-scrawny rather than pleasantly rounded. His nose wrinkled. She hadn’t bathed in a long time.