Having got to Greifswald, Johannes Drucker rather wished he hadn’t. The town where he and his family had lived hadn’t taken an explosive-metal bomb, but it had been heavily fought over. And nearby Peenemunde and Stralsund and Rostock had taken any number of hits from explosive-metal weapons, so the radioactivity level remained high.

Few people still dwelt among the ruins. The ones who did might have slipped back in time several hundred years. Instead of coal or gas, they burned wood from the wrecked buildings all around them. They had no running water. They stank, and so did the city.

The neighborhood where the Druckers had lived was even more ruinous than the rest of the town. No one seemed to live there these days; gangs of scavengers prowled through the wreckage, after whatever they could find. Nobody admitted to hearing of Drucker or his family.

“Try the Red Cross shelters, pal,” one heavily armed forager told him. “Maybe you’ll have some luck there.”

“Try the graveyards,” the forager’s sidekick added. “Plenty of new people staying there these days.” He laughed. So did his comrade.

Drucker wanted to kill them both. He had a pistol, too, a comforting weight on his right hip. But the ruffians looked very alert. He gave a curt nod and walked off through the rubble-strewn streets.

Checking the Red Cross shelters was actually a good idea. Drucker had done that every time he passed one on the long road up from Nuremberg. But, even having done so, he knew too well that he might have missed his family. He couldn’t go through the endless tents and huts one by one looking for Kathe and Heinrich and Claudia and Adolf. He had to rely on the records in each camp headquarters, and the records were in a most shocking state of disarray-anyone who expected the usual German efficiency, as he had, was out of luck.

It’s the war, he thought. At last-and for the first time since Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I unified Germany-the Reich had run into a catastrophe too large for it to cope with. Surviving from day to day took precedence over keeping the files that would have made administering the state over the long haul so much easier. Drucker understood that without liking it. It made his life too difficult for him to like it, even a little.

Checking the graveyards also wasn’t the worst idea in the world, he realized glumly. Or it wouldn’t have been, if so many bodies hadn’t been bulldozed or just flung into mass graves without headstones of any sort-and if so many others didn’t still lie under rubble, and if so many hadn’t simply been vaporized.

Someone rode past on a bicycle-the way things were now, a sign of prosperity. The man knew how valuable that bicycle was, too; he had an assault rifle slung on his back, and looked extremely ready to use it. Drucker called out to him: “Excuse me, but where is the Red Cross shelter closest to town?”

“North,” the man answered. “On the road to Stralsund, not quite halfway there, not far from the damned Lizards’ camp.” He started to pedal on, but then grudged a few more words: “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”

“Thanks,” Drucker said. “So do I.”

He trudged up the road. To his right, the gray, ugly Baltic rolled up the flat, muddy beach and then sullenly retreated again. He smelled salt water and stale seaweed and dead fish: the odors of home. And, when he got to the shelter in the late afternoon, he smelled ordure and unwashed humanity, the same stinks he’d known in every camp and in every town on his way up from Bavaria.

More Lizard troopers prowled around this Red Cross shelter than he’d seen at most of the others. They looked jumpier and more alert than the males he’d seen elsewhere, too. He came up to one of them and said, “I greet you,” in the language of the Race.

“And I greet you,” the Lizard answered. It wasn’t much of a greeting; the male looked ready to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. “What do you want?” His hissing voice was hard with suspicion.

“I am looking for my mate and hatchlings, from whom I am long separated,” Drucker said. The answer, and the fluency with which he used the Race’s language, made the Lizard relax a little. He went on, “And I am also curious why you watch the refugees in this particular camp so closely.”

“Why? I will tell you why,” the male said. “Because there are many Deutsch soldiers here, males against whom we fought in Poland. We do not trust them. We have no great reason to trust them.”

“I see,” Drucker said slowly. He nodded. He’d been running into occupation troops up till now: Lizards who’d come into the Reich after the surrender, and who hadn’t done any fighting beforehand. But the males here had been combat soldiers. No wonder they didn’t trust anything or anybody. Drucker risked one more question: “Where is the administrative center for this camp?”

“That way, where the flag flies,” the Lizard answered, pointing with the muzzle of his weapon. “You may proceed.”

“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker said. The Lizard didn’t wish him any sort of luck finding his family. Some of that, no doubt, was because Lizards didn’t think in terms of families. And the rest? He was an enemy. Why should a male of the Race waste any sympathy on him?

He was just coming up to the large tent above which the Red Cross flag flew when a man not far from his own age rode up on a bicycle. The fellow carried an impressive collection of lethal hardware. He swung down from the bicycle, grunted and stretched, and started to walk it into the tent.

A woman standing in the entranceway exclaimed, “You can’t do that! It is forbidden!”

“Too bad,” the man answered in German flavored by Polish and something else. “I’m not going to have it stolen. If you don’t like it, that’s rough.”

“He’s right,” Drucker said. “There’s no place to chain it up out here, and it’ll disappear without a trace if he just leaves it.”

“Most irregular,” the woman sniffed. She didn’t seem to see that things were different in the Reich nowadays. But, after another glance at the weaponry festooning the other fellow, she stopped arguing.

“Thanks, pal,” the stranger said to Drucker. “Appreciate it. Some people have trouble getting the idea that times have changed through their thick heads.”

After a moment, Drucker placed the man’s secondary accent. He’d heard it before, thicker, in Poland and the Soviet Union before the Lizards landed. Yiddish, that was it. “You’re a Jew,” he blurted.

With an ironic bow, the other man nodded. “And you’re a German. I love you, too,” he said. “Mordechai Anielewicz, at your service. I’m trying to find my family after some of you Nazi bastards hauled them out of Poland.”

All Drucker said was, “I’m trying to find my family, too. They were in Greifswald, but they aren’t any more, and not much of the town is left.” He paused, staring at the other man. “Mordechai Anielewicz? Jesus: I know you. A million years ago”-actually, back in the first round of fighting against the Race-“I was Colonel Heinrich Jager’s panzer driver.” He gave his own name.

“Were you?” Anielewicz’s eyes narrowed. “Gottenyu, maybe you were. And if you were, maybe you’re not quite a Nazi bastard after all. Maybe. My younger son is named for Heinrich Jager.”

“My older son is,” Drucker said. “What happened to him after that Russian pilot took him off to Poland?” He didn’t mention how he and his fellow tank crewmen had killed several SS men to make Jager’s escape possible.

“He married her,” the Jew answered. “He’s dead now. You know the explosive-metal bomb Skorzeny tried to set off inside Lodz? We stopped that, he and Ludmila and I. We all breathed in some nerve gas doing it, too. It hit him hardest; he was never quite right afterwards, and he died twelve, thirteen years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Drucker said, “but thanks for telling me. He was a good man-one of the best officers I ever served under-and I always wondered what happened to him once he got away.”

“He was one of the best.” Mordechai Anielewicz eyed Drucker. “You drove a panzer then. What have you been doing since?”

“I stayed in the Wehrmacht, ” Drucker replied. “I ended up in the upper stage of an A-45. The Lizards captured me after I shot two missiles at one of their starships. If they hadn’t knocked both of them down, I don’t suppose they would have bothered taking me alive, but they did. Eventually, they set me down in Nuremberg. I had a devil of a time getting here, but I managed. Now if I could manage to find my wife and kids…”

Anielewicz looked at him as if he’d failed a test. “You served under Heinrich Jager, and you stayed in the Wehrmacht? He had the sense to get away.”

“Don’t get high and mighty with me,” Drucker snapped. “I know something about what the Reich was doing to Jews. I didn’t do any of that. I had it done to me, in fact.”

“You had it done to you?” Anielewicz snarled. “You son of a bitch, you”-he cursed in Yiddish and Polish-“what do you know about it?” He looked ready to grab one of his weapons and start shooting. Drucker had thought him a dangerous man a generation before, and saw no reason to change his mind now. He slid his legs into a position from which he could better open fire, too.

But, instead of grabbing for his pistol, he answered Anielewicz in a low, urgent voice: “I’ll tell you what I know about it. The SS grabbed my wife because they got wind she had a Jewish grandmother, that’s what.” He’d never thought he would tell that to anyone, but who in the Reich ever imagined talking with a Jew?

And it worked. Mordechai Anielewicz relaxed, suddenly and completely. “All right, then,” he said. “You do know something.” He cocked his head to one side. “From what you’ve said, you got her back. How’d you manage that? I know a thing or two about the SS.”

“How?” Drucker chuckled mirthlessly. “I told you-I was an A-45 pilot. I had connections. My CO was General Dornberger-he’s Fuhrer now, wherever the devil he is. I had enough pull to bring it off. Officially, Kathe got a clean pedigree.”

“If you have pull, you should use it,” Anielewicz agreed. His face clouded again. “Back in the 1940s, there were an awful lot of Jews who didn’t have any.”

Drucker didn’t know how to reply to that. All he could do was nod. He hadn’t thought much about Jews, or had much use for them, before Kathe got in trouble with the blackshirts. At last, he said, “The only thing I want to do now is find out if my family is alive, and get them back if they are.”