“Oh, he has his uses, sir,” Flynn said. “After all, whose money would we take in card games if he weren’t here?”

That was slander; Johnson more than held his own. But it distracted the commandant-and Johnson, too. Stone continued the work of changing the subject: “If the Lizards are angry enough at us now, what we might be able to do in a few years doesn’t matter. Remember the Hermann Goring.” The Reich’s imitation of the Lewis and Clark had been blown to atoms during the last round of fighting. Stone went on, “So why the devil are the Lizards ticked at us?”

Brigadier General Healey shook his head. “I do not have that information. I already told you I don’t have it. I wish to God I did.” Every inch of him screamed that he thought he was entitled to the information, and that he blamed people back on Earth for withholding it from him. “The Lizards are playing it close to their scales, too, dammit. You’d think they’d be screaming from the housetops if they caught us doing something we weren’t supposed to, but they aren’t.”

Thoughtfully, Stone said, “Sounds like they will fight if they’re pushed, but they don’t want to do it unless they decide they have to.”

“But they’re pushing us,” Healey said. “That’s what makes this such a confusing mess.”

“Have they given us any demands?” Flynn asked.

“Nothing I’ve heard.” The commandant sounded all the more frustrated. “And I should hear, God damn it to hell. How am I supposed to do my job if I don’t know what the devil is going on?”

“What it sounds like is, if anybody admitted what the fuss was about, everything would go up in smoke right then and there,” Johnson said.

Brigadier General Healey nodded as if he and Johnson hadn’t had words a few minutes before. The riddle facing him was a bigger source of irritation than even his number-three pilot. “You’re right-and that doesn’t make any sense, either.”

“Nothing makes sense if you don’t know the answers,” Mickey Flynn observed. “The people who do know the answers must have, or think they have, good reason to make sure nobody else finds out. We call them senseless. They call us ignorant. Odds are, we and they are both right.”

“They’d better not be senseless, or all of us-and an awful lot of people and Lizards back on Earth-are in a ton of trouble,” Johnson said.

“This is true,” Flynn agreed. “On the other hand, I could refer you to the late Doctor Ernst Kaltenbrunner-if he weren’t late, of course. He was senseless, and now he is and will remain permanently senseless.”

Johnson grimaced and protested, “Yeah, but the Nazis have been off the deep end ever since Hitler started slaughtering Jews. We aren’t like that. We’ve always played straight.” He hesitated. “We played straight with everything I know about except the Lewis and Clark, as a matter of fact.”

“It’s not us,” Healey said. “I have been assured of that. Had it been us, the Race has had plenty of chances to take us off the board.”

And that was also true. Then Johnson said, “What if we haven’t played straight with things nobody up here knows anything about?”

“Like what?” Walter Stone asked.

“How should I know?” Johnson answered. “If I did know, it wouldn’t be something nobody knew about.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Flynn murmured.

“What if, what if, what if,” Brigadier General Healey snarled. “What we need are facts. The only fact we’ve got is that the Race is leaning on the United States. If it leans too hard, we’ve got to fight back or knuckle under. We’re not about to knuckle under.”

“Well, there’s one other fact, too,” Johnson said. “If the USA goes to war with the Lizards now, we lose. And no matter how many drills we hold, the Lewis and Clark is lunch.” He waited-he hoped for-Healey to argue with him. The commandant didn’t.

“Why on earth are the Lizards gearing up for war against the United States?” Reuven Russie asked his father over the supper table. “Has everybody in the whole world gone meshuggeh?”

Moishe Russie said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the only explanation that makes much sense.”

“Have you talked with the fleetlord?” Reuven’s sister Judith asked.

“I’ve called him several times,” Reuven’s father answered. “Most of them, he hasn’t wanted to talk to me. When he has been willing to talk on the phone, he hasn’t had anything much to say.”

“But what could the United States have done to get the Race so angry?” Reuven asked. “With the Germans, everybody else had plenty of good reasons to hate them. But the USA has just sat there and minded its own business. What’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Since he won’t really talk to me, I’m having a devil of a time finding out, too. But I can tell you this-Straha is back in the Race’s territory, and that’s not anything I thought I’d see while I was alive.”

It was also something that meant very little to Reuven. “Straha?” He put the name into a question half a beat before his sisters could.

Moishe Russie’s smile was half amused, half wistful. “You were only a little boy when he defected to the Americans, Reuven,” he said. “Esther and Judith, you weren’t even imagined yet, let alone here. He was something like the third- or fourth-highest ranking male in the conquest fleet. He tried some sort of coup against Atvar, and it didn’t work, and he fled.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to ask the fleetlord about the details now,” Reuven said.

His mother laughed. “See what your fancy education does for you?”

“Mother!” he said indignantly. His father made cracks like that all the time. His sisters made them whenever they thought they could get away with them. For Rivka Russie to make one, too, felt like a betrayal.

“But the point,” his father said, “the point is that he’s left the United States and come to Cairo-I think he’s in Cairo. He had to know something important, or else he’d be imprisoned somewhere, and he’s not.”

“And it’s probably something that has to do with the United States, since he lived there so long,” Reuven said.

“Very good, Sherlock.” That was Esther, who’d been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in Hebrew translation. “Now all you have to do is figure out what he knows.”

Reuven looked at his father. Moishe Russie shrugged and said, “I already told you, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all find out one day before too long. I’m hoping we never find out, because that will mean the trouble’s gone away.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Reuven took another bite of beefsteak. He raised his wineglass. “Here’s to ignorance!”

Everyone drank the toast. Amid laughter, Reuven’s father said, “That’s probably the first time anyone has ever made that toast inside a Jewish house. Alevai, it’ll be the last time, too.” His face clouded. “Alevai, we won’t need to make that kind of toast again.”

“Omayn.” Reuven and his mother spoke together.

After supper, Reuven asked his father, “If the United States and the Lizards go to war, what do we do?”

“We here in Palestine, you mean?” Moishe Russie asked, and Reuven nodded. His father sighed. “About the same thing we did when the Race fought the Germans: sit tight and hope the Americans don’t manage to land a missile on Jerusalem. I think that would be less likely in this fight than in the war with the Nazis. The Americans don’t particularly hate Jews, so they don’t have any big reason for aiming a missile here-and most of their missiles are farther away than the ones the Germans fired at us.”

“How do you know that?” Reuven asked. “They may have three submarines sitting right off the coast. How would we know?”

“We wouldn’t, not until something either happened or didn’t,” his father said. “I told you what I thought was likely. If you don’t like that, come up with your own answers.”

“I like it fine. I hope you’re right,” Reuven said. “Actually, I hope we’re all worrying over nothing, and that there won’t be a war.”

This time, his father said, “Omayn!”

When they walked to work the next morning, someone had painted new black swastikas on several walls, and the phrase Allahu akbar! by them. Reuven laughed to keep from cursing. “Haven’t the Arabs noticed that that firm’s gone out of business?”

“Who can say?” Moishe Russie answered. “Maybe they wish it were still operating. Or maybe it is still operating, but being quiet about it. That wouldn’t surprise me. Once some things get loose, they’re hard to kill.”

“I thought Dornberger was supposed to be a relatively civilized man,” Reuven said.

“Compared to Hitler, compared to Himmler, compared to Kaltenbrunner-how much praise is that?” his father asked. “He’s still a German. He’s still a Nazi. If he can find some way to make the Lizards unhappy, don’t you think he’ll use it? Getting the Arabs to erupt is one easy way to do it.”

“And if he incites them against us, too, all the better,” Reuven said. His father didn’t contradict him. He wished Moishe Russie had.

Once they got to the office, Yetta showed them their appointments. Reuven sighed. When he’d been studying at the Moishe Russie Medical College, human physiology and biochemistry had looked like important subjects. And they’d looked like fascinating subjects. Seeing them exemplified in the persons of his patients was much less exciting. A lot of the answers he got were ambiguous. Sometimes he couldn’t find any answers at all. And even a lot of the ones that were perfectly clear weren’t very interesting. Yes, sir, that boil will respond to antibiotics. Yes, ma’am, that toe is broken. No, it doesn’t matter if we put a cast on it or not. It’ll do the same either way, and yes, it will hurt for a few weeks.

He gave a tetanus shot. He removed a splinter of metal that had got lodged in a construction worker’s leg. He took the cast off a broken wrist his father had set a few weeks before. He swabbed a four-year-old’s throat to see if the girl was coming down with a streptococcus infection. He injected local anesthetic and stitched up a cut arm. Every bit of that needed doing. He did it well. But it wasn’t what he’d imagined a physician’s career was like.

He was putting a clean dressing on the cut arm when Yetta stuck her head into the room and said, “Mrs. Radofsky just telephoned. Her daughter is screaming her head off-she thinks it’s an earache. Can you fit her in?”