All the while, instead of watching what he was doing, he kept his eyes on the two males of the Race. Nervously, Ttomalss said to Saltta, “He would sooner be doing that to us than to the animal that shares some of our attributes.”

“Truth,” Saltta said. “Troth, no doubt. But these Big Uglies are still wild and ignorant. Only with the passage of generations will they come to see us as their proper overlords and the Emperor”-he lowered his eyes, as did Ttomalss-“as their sovereign and the solace of their spirits.”

Ttomalss wondered if the conquest of Tosev 3 could be accomplished. Even if it was accomplished, he wondered if the Tosevites could be civilized, as the Rabotevs and Hallessi had been before them. It was refreshing to hear a male still convinced of the Race’s power and the rightness of the cause.

North of the market, the streets were narrow and jumbled. Ttomalss wondered how Saltta found his way through them. The comfortable warmth was a little less here; the Big Uglies, for whom it was less comfortable, built the upper stories of their homes and shops so close together that they kept most of Tosev’ s light from reaching the street itself.

One building had armed males of the Race standing guard around it. Ttomalss was glad to see them; walking through these streets never failed to worry him. The Big Uglies were so-unpredictable was the kindest word that crossed his mind.

Inside the building, a Tosevite female held a newly emerged hatching to one of the glands on her upper torso so it could ingest the nutrient fluid she secreted for it. The arrangement revolted Ttomalss; it smacked of parasitism. He needed all his scientific detachment to regard it with equanimity.

Saltta said, “The female is being well compensated to yield up the hatching to us, superior sir. This should prevent any difficulties springing from the pair bonding that appears to develop between generations of Tosevites.”

“Good,” Ttomalss said. Now he could get on with his experimental program in peace-and if snivelers like Tessrek did not care for it, too bad. He switched to Chinese to speak to the Big Ugly female: “Nothing bad will happen to your hatching. It will be well fed, well cared for. All its needs will be met. Do you understand? Do you agree?” He was getting ever more fluent; he even remembered not to use interrogative coughs.

“I understand,” the female said softly. “I agree.” But as she held out the hatching to Ttomalss, water dripped from the corners of her small, immobile eyes. Ttomalss recognized that as a sign of insincerity. He dismissed it as unimportant. Compensation was the medicine to heal that wound.

The hatchling wiggled almost bonelessly in Ttomalss’ grasp and let out an annoying squawk. The female turned her head away. “Well done,” Ttomalss said to Saltta. “Let us take the hatching back to our own establishment here. Then I shall remove it to my laboratory, and then the research shall begin. I may have been thwarted once, but I shall not be thwarted twice.”

To make sure he was not thwarted twice, four guards accompanied him and Saltta back toward the Race’s base in the little island in the Pearl River. From there, a helicopter would take him and the hatching to the shuttlecraft launch site not far away-and from there, he would return to his starship.

Saltta retraced in every particular the route by which he had come to the female Big Ugly’s residence. Just before he, Ttomalss, and the guards reached the marketplace with the strange creatures in it, they found their way forward blocked by an animal-drawn wagon as wide as the lane down which they were coming.

“Go back!” Saltta shouted in Chinese to the Big Ugly driving the wagon.

“Can’t,” the Big Ugly shouted back. “Too narrow to turn around. You go back to the corner, turn off, and let me go by.”

What the Tosevite said was obviously true: he couldn’t turn around. One of Ttomalss’ eye turrets swiveled back to see how far he and his companions would have to retrace their steps. It wasn’t far. “We shall go back,” he said resignedly.

As they turned around, gunfire opened up from two of the buildings that faced the street. Big Uglies started screaming. Caught by surprise, the guards crumpled in pools of blood. One of them squeezed off an answering burst, but then more bullets found him and he lay still.

Several Tosevites in ragged cloth wrappings burst out of the buildings. They still carried the light automatic weapons with which they’d felled the guards. Some pointed those weapons at Ttomalss, others at Saltta. “You come with us right now or you die!” one of them screamed.

“We come,” Ttomalss said, not giving Saltta any chance to disagree with him. As soon as he got close enough to the Big Uglies, one of them tore the Tosevite hatching from his arms. Another shoved him into one of the buildings from which the raiders had emerged. In the back, it opened onto another of Canton’s narrow streets. He was hustled along through so many of them so fast, he soon lost any notion of where he was.

Before long, the Big Uglies split into two groups, one with him, the other with Saltta. They separated. Ttomalss was alone among the Tosevites. “What will you do with me?” he asked, fear making the words have to fight to come forth.

One of his captors twisted his mouth in the way Tosevites did when they were amused. Because he was a student of the Big Uglies, Ttomalss recognized the smile as an unpleasant one-not that his current situation made pleasant smiles likely. “We’ve liberated the baby you kidnapped, and now we’re going to give you to Liu Han,” the fellow answered.

Ttomalss had only thought he was afraid before.

Ignacy pointed to the barrel of the FieselerStorch’s machine gun. “This is of no use to you,” he said.

“Of course it’s not,” Ludmila Gorbunova snapped, irritated at the indirect way the Polish partisan leader had of approaching things. “If I’m flying the aircraft by myself, I can’t fire it, not unless my arms start stretching like an octopus’. It’s for the observer, not the pilot.”

“Not what I meant,” the piano-teacher-turned-guerrilla-chief replied. “Even if you carried an observer, you could, not fire it. We removed the ammunition from it some time ago. We’re very low on 7.92mm rounds, which is a pity, because we have a great many German weapons.”

“Even if you had ammunition for it, it wouldn’t do you much good,” Ludmila told him. “Machine-gun bullets won’t bring down a Lizard helicopter unless you’re very lucky, and the gun is wrongly placed for ground attack.”

“Again, not what I meant,” Ignacy said. “We need more of this ammunition. We have a little through the stores the Lizards dole out to their puppets, but only a little is redistributed. So-we have made contact with theWehrmacht to the west. If, tomorrow night, you can fly this plane to their lines, they will put some hundreds of kilograms of cartridges into it. When you return here, you will be a great help in our continued resistance to the Lizards.”

What Ludmila wanted to do with theStorch was hop into it and fly east till she came to Soviet-held territory. If she somehow got it back to Pskov, Georg Schultz could surely keep it running. Nazi though he was, he knew machinery the way a jockey knew horses.

Schultz’s technical talents aside, Ludmila wanted little to do with theWehrmacht, or with heading west. Comrades in aims though the Germans were against the Lizards, her mind still shoutedenemies! barbarians! whenever she had to deal with them. All of which, unfortunately, had nothing to do with military necessity.

“I take it this means you have petrol for the engine?” she asked, grasping at straws. When Ignacy nodded, she sighed and said, “Very well, I will pick up your ammunition for you. The Germans will have some sort of landing strip prepared?” The Fieseler-156 wouldn’t need much, but putting down in the middle of nowhere at night wasn’t something to anticipate cheerfully.