BLACK TULIP

Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove who has taught ancient and medieval history at Cat State  Fullerton, Cal State LA., and UCLA, and has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history has  been called the standard-bearer for alternate history, and that's certainly  true; his amazing novels, including The Guns of the South (American Civil  War), The Great War: American Front (World War I), and the Worldwar tetralogy  (World War II) have transformed, with their bravura storytelling and sheer joy  in detail, our understanding of the term. His short stories are as richly realized as his novels; when Harry first  described what he was going to do with Black Tulip, I knew that I was in for a  ride as good as his novels.

Sergei's father was a druggist in Tambov, maybe four hundred kilometers south  and east of Moscow. Filling prescriptions looked pretty good to Sergei. You  didn't have to work too hard. You didn't have to think too hard. You could get  your hands on medicines from the West, medicines that really worked, not just  the Soviet crap. And you could rake in plenty on the left from your customers,  because they wanted the stuff that really worked, too. So pharmacy school, then  a soft job till pension time. Sergei had it all figured out. First, though, his hitch in the Red Army. He was a sunny kid when he got  drafted, always looking on the bright side of things. He didn't think they could  possibly ship his ass to Afghanistan. Even after they did, he didn't think they  could possibly ship him to Bamian Province. Life is full of surprises,  even maybe especially for a sunny kid from a provincial town where nothing much  ever happens.

Abdul Satar Ahmedi's father was a druggist, too, in Bulola, a village of no  particular name or fame not far east of the town of Bamian. Satar had also  planned to follow in his father's footsteps, mostly because that was what a good  son did. Sometimes the drugs his father dispensed helped the patient. Sometimes  they didn't. Either way, it was the will of God, the Compassionate, the  Merciful. Satar was twenty he thought he was twenty, though he might have been nineteen or  twenty-one when the godless Russians poured into his country. They seized the  bigger towns and pushed out along the roads from one to another. Bamian was one  of the places where their tanks and personnel carriers and helicopters came to  roost. One of the roads they wanted ran through Bulola. On the day the first truck convoy full of infidel soldiers rumbled through the  village, Satar's father dug up an ancient but carefully greased Enfield rifle.  He thrust it at the younger man, saying, My grandfather fought the British  infidels with this piece. Take it and do to the atheists what they did to the  soldiers of the Queen. Yes, Father, Satar said, as a good son should. Before  long, he carried a Kalashnikov in place of the ancient Enfield. Before long, he  marched with the men of Sayid Jaglan, who had been a major in the Kabul puppet  regime before choosing to fight for God and freedom instead. Being a druggist's  son, he served as a medic. He was too ignorant to make a good medic, but he knew  more than most, so he had to try. He wished he knew more still; he'd had to  watch men die because he didn't know enough. The will of God, yes, of course,  but accepting it came hard.

The dragon? The dragon had lived in the valley for time out of mind before Islam  came to Afghanistan. Most of those centuries, it had slept, as dragons do. But  when it woke oh, when it woke . . .

Sergei looked out over the Afghan countryside and shook his head in slow wonder.  He'd been raised in country as flat as if it were ironed. The Bulola perimeter  wasn't anything like that. The valley in which this miserable village sat was  high enough to make his heart pound when he moved quickly. And the mountains  went up from there, dun and gray and red and jagged and here and there streaked  with snow. When he remarked on how different the landscape looked, his squadmates in the  trench laughed at him. Screw the scenery, Vladimir said. Fucking Intourist  didn't bring you here. Keep your eye peeled for dukhi. You may not see them, but  sure as shit they see you. Ghosts, Sergei repeated, and shook his head again. We shouldn't have started  calling them that. Why not? Vladimir was a few months older than he, and endlessly cynical. You  usually don't see 'em till it's too damn late. But they're real. They're alive, Sergei protested. They're trying to make us  into ghosts. A noise. None of them knew what had made it. The instant they heard it, their  AK's all lifted a few centimeters. Then they identified the distant, growing  rumble in the air for what it was. Bumblebee, Fyodor said. He had the best  ears of any of them, and he liked to hear himself talk. But he was right. Sergei  spotted the speck in the sky. I like having helicopter gunships around, he said. They make me think my  life-insurance policy's paid up. Not even Vladimir argued with that. The Mi-24 roared past overhead, red stars bright against camouflage paint. Then,  like a dog coming to point, it stopped and hovered. It didn't look like a  bumblebee to Sergei. It put him in mind of a polliwog, like the ones he'd see in  the creeks outside of Tambov in the springtime. Come to think of it, they were  camouflage-colored, too, to keep fish and birds from eating them. But the gunship had a sting any bee would have envied. It let loose .with the  rocket pods it carried under its stubby wings, and with the four-barrel Gatling  in its nose. Even from a couple of kilometers away, the noise was terrific. So  was the fireworks display. The Soviet soldiers whooped and cheered. Explosions  pocked the mountainside. Fire and smoke leaped upward. Deadly as a shark,  ponderous as a whale, the Mi-24 heeled in the air and went on its way. Some bandits there, with a little luck, Sergei said. Pilot must've spotted  something juicy. Or thought he did, Vladimir answered. Liable just to be mountain-goat tartare  now. Watch the villagers, Fyodor said. They'll let us know if that bumblebee  really stung anything. You're smart, Sergei said admiringly. If I was fucking smart, would I fucking be here? Fyodor returned, and his  squadmates laughed. He added, I've been here too fucking long, that's all. I  know all kinds of things I never wanted to find out. Sergei turned and looked back over his shoulder. The men in the village were  staring at the shattered mountainside and muttering among themselves in their  incomprehensible language. In their turbans and robes some white, some mud  brown they looked oddly alike to him. They all had long hawk faces and wore  beards. Some of the beards were black, some gray, a very few white. That was his  chief clue they'd been stamped from the mold at different times. Women? Sergei shook his head. He'd never seen a woman's face here. Bulola wasn't  the sort of village where women shed their veils in conformance to the  revolutionary sentiments of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was  the sort of place when women thought letting you see a nose was as bad as  letting you see a pussy. Places like this, girls who went to coed schools got  murdered when they came home. It hadn't happened right here he didn't think  Bulola had ever had coed schools but it had happened in the countryside. He gauged the mutters. He couldn't understand them, but he could make guesses  from the tone. I think we hit 'em a pretty good lick, he said. Vladimir nodded. I think you're right. Another ten billion more, and we've won  the fucking war. Or maybe twenty billion. Who the fuck knows?

Satar huddled in a little hole he'd scraped in the dirt behind a big reddish  boulder. He made himself as small as he could, to give the flying bullets and  chunks of shrapnel the least chance of tearing his tender flesh. If it is God's  will, it is God's will, he thought. But if it wasn't God's will, he didn't want  to make things any easier for the infidels than he had to. Under him, the ground quivered as if in pain as another salvo of Soviet rockets  slammed home. Satar hated helicopter gunships with a fierce and bitter passion.  He had nothing but contempt for the Afghan soldiers who fought on the side of  the atheists. Some Russian ground soldiers were stupid as sheep, and as helpless  outside their tanks and personnel carriers as a turtle outside its shell. Others  were very good, as good as any mujahideen. You never could tell. Sometimes you  got a nasty surprise instead of giving one. But helicopters . . . What he hated most about helicopters was that he couldn't  hit back. They hung in the air and dealt out death, and all you could do if they  spotted you was take it. Oh, every once in a while the mujahideen got lucky with  a heavy machine gun or an RPG-7 and knocked down one of Shaitan's machines, but  only once in a while. Satar had heard the Americans were going to start sending Stinger antiaircraft  missiles up to the mujahideen from Pakistan. The Americans were infidels, too,  of course, but they hated the Russians. The enemy of my enemy... In world  politics as in tribal feuds, the enemy of one's enemy was a handy fellow to  know. And the Stinger was supposed to be very good. At the moment, though, Satar and his band were getting stung, not stinging. The  gunship seemed to have all the ammunition in the world. Hadn't it been hovering  above them for hours, hurling hellfire down on their heads? Another explosion, and somebody not far away started screaming. Satar cursed the  Soviets and his comrade, for that meant he couldn't huddle in the shelter of the  boulder anymore. Grabbing his sad little medicine kit, he scrambled toward the  wounded mujahid. The man clutched his leg and moaned. Blood darkened the wool of  his robe. Easy, Abdul Rahim, easy, Satar said. I have morphine, to take away the pain.

Quickly, then, in the name of God, Abdul Rahim got out between moans. It is  broken; I am sure of it. Cursing softly, Satar fumbled in the kit for a syringe. What did a druggist's  son know of setting broken bones? Satar knew far more than he had; experience  made a harsh teacher, but a good one. He looked around for sticks to use as  splints and cursed again. Where on a bare stone mountainside would he find such  sticks? He was just taking the cover from the needle when a wet slapping sound came from  Abdul Rahim. The mujahid's cries suddenly stopped. When Satar turned back toward  him, he knew what he would find, and he did. One of the bullets from the  gunship's Gatling had struck home. Abdul Rahim's eyes still stared up at the  sky, but they were forever blind now. A martyr who falls in the holy war against the infidel is sure of Paradise,  Satar thought. He grabbed the dead man's Kalashnikov and his banana clips before  scuttling back into shelter. At last, after what seemed like forever, the helicopter gunship roared away.  Satar waited for the order that would send the mujahideen roaring down on the  Shuravi the Soviets in his home village. But Sayid Jaglan's captain called, We  have taken too much hurt. We will fall back now and strike them another time. Satar cursed again, but in his belly, in his stones, he knew the captain was  wise. The Russians down there would surely be alert and waiting. My father, I  will return, Satar thought as he turned away from Bulola. And when I do, the  village will be freed.

The dragon dreamt. Even that was out of the ordinary; in its agelong sleep, it  was rarely aware or alert enough to dream. It saw, or thought it saw, men with  swords, men with spears. One of them, from out of the west, was a little blond  fellow in a gilded corselet and crested helm. The dragon made as if to call out  to him, for in him it recognized its match: like knows like. But the little man did not answer the call as one coming in friendship should.  Instead, he drew his sword and plunged it into the dragon's flank. It hurt much  more than anything in a dream had any business doing. The dragon shifted  restlessly. After a while, the pain eased, but the dragon's sleep wasn't so deep  as it had been. It dreamt no more, not then, but dreams lay not so far above the  surface of that slumber.

Under Sergei's feet, the ground quivered. A pebble leaped out of the side of the  entrenchment and bounced off his boot. What was that? he said. The stinking  dukhi set off a charge somewhere? His sergeant laughed, showing steel teeth. Krikor was an Armenian. With his long  face and big nose and black hair and eyes, he looked more like the dukhi himself  than like a Russian. That wasn't the ghosts, he said. That was an earthquake.  Just a little one, thank God. An earthquake? That hadn't even crossed Sergei's mind. He, too  laughed nervously. Don't have those in Tambov you'd better believe it. They do down in the Caucasus, Sergeant Krikor said. Big ones are real  bastards, too. Yerevan'll get hit one of these days. Half of it'll fall down,  too mark my words. All the builders cheat like maniacs, the fuckers. Too much  sand in the concrete, not enough steel rebar. Easier to pocket the difference,  you know? He made as if to count bills and put them in his wallet. It's like that everywhere, Sergei said. 'I serve the Soviet Union!' He put  a sardonic spin on the phrase that had probably meant something in the days when  his grandfather was young. Sergeant Krikor's heavy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. Yeah, but  who gives a shit in Tambov? So buildings fall apart faster than they ought to.  So what? But if an earthquake hits a big one, I mean they don't just fall apart.  They fall down. I guess. Sergei wasn't about to argue with the sergeant. Krikor was a  conscript like him, but a conscript near the end of his term, not near the  beginning. That, even more than his rank, made the Armenian one of the top dogs.  Changing the subject, Sergei said, We hit the bandits pretty hard earlier  today. He tried to forget Vladimir's comment. Ten billion times more? Twenty  billion? Bozhemoi! Krikor frowned again, in a subtly different way. Listen, kid, do you still  believe all the internationalist crap they fed you before they shipped your  worthless ass here to Afghan? He gave the country its universal name among the  soldiers of the Red Army. Well . . . no, Sergei said. They went on and on about the revolutionary unity  of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the friendship to the Soviet  Union of the Afghan people and everybody who's been here more than twenty  minutes knows the PDPA's got more factions than it has members, and they all  hate each other's guts, and all the Afghans hate Russians. Good. You're not an idiot not quite an idiot, I mean. Sergeant Krikor murmured  something in a language that wasn't Russian: Shuravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg,  marg! For a moment, Sergei thought that was Armenian. Then he realized he'd heard it  here in Afghanistan a couple-three times. What's it mean? he asked. 'Soviets! Soviets! Death, death, death!' Krikor translated with somber  relish. He waited for Sergei to take that in, then went on, So I really don't  give a shit about how hard we hit the ghosts, you know what I mean? All I want  to do is get my time in and get back to the world in one piece, all right? Long  as I don't fly home in a black tulip, that's all I care about. Makes sense to me, Sergei agreed quickly. He didn't want to fly out of Kabul  in one of the planes that carried corpses back to the USSR, either. Okay, kid. Krikor thumped him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him.  Keep your head down, keep your eyes open, and help your buddies. Odds are,  we'll both get through. The ground shook again, but not so hard this time.

Allahu akbar! The long, drawn-out chant of the muezzin pulled Satar awake. He  yawned and stretched on the ground in the courtyard of a mud house a Russian  bomb had shattered. Ten or twelve other mujahideen lay there with him. One by  one, they got to their feet and am-bled over to a basin of water, where they  washed their hands and faces, their feet and their privates. Satar gasped as he splashed his cheeks with the water. It was bitterly cold. A  pink glow in the east said sunrise was coming soon. God is great! the muezzin repeated. He stood on the roof of another ruined  house and called out to the faithful: I bear witness, there is no God but God! I bear witness, Muhammad is the prophet of God! Come quick to prayer! Come quick to success! Prayer is better than sleep! God is great! There is no God but the one true God! The fighters spread blankets on the dirt of the courtyard. This was no mosque  with a proper qibla, but they knew in which direction Mecca lay- They bent,  shoulder to shoulder, and went through morning prayers together. After praying, Satar ate unleavened bread and drank tea thick with sugar and  fragrant with mint. He had never been a fat man; he'd grown thinner since  joining the mujahideen. The godless infidels and their puppets held the richest  parts of the countryside. But villagers were generous in sharing what they  had and some of what was grown and made in occupied parts of the country reached  the fighters in the holy war through one irregular channel or another. A couple of boys of about six strutted by, both of them carrying crude wooden  toy Kalashnikovs. One dived behind some rubble. The other stalked him as  carefully as if their assault rifles were real. When the time came for them to  take up such weapons, they would be ready. Another boy, perhaps thirteen, had a  real Kalashnikov on his back. He'd been playing with toy firearms when the  Russians invaded Afghanistan. Now he was old enough to fight for God on his own.  Boys like that were useful, especially as scouts the Shuravi weren't always so  wary of them as they were with grown men. Something glinted in the early-morning sun: a boy of perhaps eight carried what  looked like a plastic pen even more proudly than the other children bore their  Kalashnikovs, pretend and real. Assault rifles were commonplace, pens something  out of the ordinary, something special. Hey, sonny, Satar called through lips all at once numb with fear. The boy  looked at him. He nodded encouragingly. Yes, you that's right. Put your pen on  the ground and walk away from it. What? Plainly, the youngster thought he was crazy. Why should I? If he'd had  a rifle, Satar would have had to look to his life. I'll tell you why: because I think it's a Russian mine. If you fiddle with it,  it will blow off your hand. The boy very visibly thought that over. Satar could read his mind. Is this  mujahid trying to steal my wonderful toy? Maybe the worry on Satar's face got  through to him, because he did set the pen in the dirt. But when he walked away,  he kept looking back over his shoulder at it. With a sigh of relief, Satar murmured, Truly there is no God but God. Truly, someone behind him agreed. He turned. There stood Sayid Jaglan. The  commander went on, That is a mine I am sure of it. Pens are bad. I was afraid  he would take off the cap and detonate it. Pens are bad, but the ones that look  like butterflies are worse. Any child, no matter how small, will play with  those. And then be blown to pieces, Satar said bitterly. Oh, no, not to pieces. Sayid Jaglan shook his head. He was about forty, not  very tall, his pointed beard just beginning to show frost. He had a scar on his  forehead that stopped a centimeter or so above his right eye. They're made to  maim, not to kill. The Russians calculate we have to work harder to care for the  wounded than to bury the dead. Satar pondered that. A calculation straight from the heart of Shai-tan, he  said at last. Yes, but sound doctrine even so. Sometimes the officer Sayid Jaglan had been  showed through under the chieftain of mujahideen he was. You did well to  persuade the boy to get rid of that one. Taking off the cap activates it?   Satar asked. Sayid Jaglan nodded. Satar went over and picked up the pen and set  it on top of a battered wall, out of reach of children. If he was afraid of  doing it, he didn't show his fear, or even acknowledge it to himself. All he  said was, We should be able to salvage the explosive from it. Yes. Sayid Jaglan nodded again. You were a little soft when you joined us,  Satar who would have expected anything different from a druggist's son? You  never followed the herds or tried to scratch a living from the fields. But  you've done well. You have more wit than God gave most men, and your heart was  always strong. Now your body matches your spirit's strength. Satar didn't show how much the compliment pleased him, either. That was not the  Afghan way. Gruffly, he replied, If it is God's will, it will be accomplished. Yes. Sayid Jaglan looked down the valley, in the direction of Bulola. And I  think it is God's will that we soon reclaim your home village from the atheist  Shuravi. May it be so, Satar said. I have not sat beside my father for far too long.

Sergei strode up the main street, such as it was, of Bulola. Dirt and dust flew  up from under his boots at every stride. In Kabul, even in Bamian, he probably  would have felt safe enough to wear his Kalashnikov slung on his back. Here, he  carried it, his right forefinger ready to leap to the trigger in an instant. The  change lever was on single shots. He could still empty the magazine in seconds,  and he could aim better that way. Beside him, Vladimir carried his weapon ready to use, too. Staying alive in  Afghan meant staying alert every second of every minute of every day. Vladimir  glanced over at a handful of gray-bearded men sitting around drinking tea and  passing the mouthpiece of a water pipe back and forth. Laughing, he said, Ah,  they love us. Don't they just! Sergei laughed, too, nervously. The Afghans' eyes followed  Vladimir and him. They were hard and black and glittering as obsidian. If the  looks they gave us came out of Kalashnikovs, we'd be Weeding in the dust. 'Fuck em, Vladimir said cheerfully. No, fuck their wives these assholes  aren't worth it. He could make it sound funny. He could make it sound obscene. But he couldn't  take away one brute fact. They all hate us, Sergei said. They don't even  bother hiding it. Every single one of them hates us. There's a hot headline! Vladimir exclaimed. What did you expect? That they'd  welcome us with open arms the women with open legs? That they'd all give us  fraternal socialist greetings? Not fucking likely! He spat. I did think that when I first got here. Didn't you? Sergei said. Before they  put me on the plane for Kabul, they told me I was coming here to save the  popular revolution. They told me we were internationalists, and the peace-loving  Afghan government had asked us for help. They haven't changed their song a bit. They told my gang the same thing,   Vladimir said. I already knew it was a crock, though.   How? How? I'll tell you how. Because my older brother's best friend came back from  here in a black tulip, inside one of those zinc coffins they make in Kabul. It  didn't have a window in it, and this officer stuck to it like a leech to make  sure Sasha's mother and dad wouldn't open it up and see what happened to him  before they planted him in the ground. That's how. Oh. Sergei didn't know how to answer that. After a few more steps, he said,  They told me the Americans started the war. Vladimir pointed out to the mountains, to the gray and brown and red rock. You  see Rambo out there? I sure don't. We've got our own Ramboviki here, Sergei said slyly. Bastards. Fucking  bastards. Vladimir started to spit once more, but seemed too disgusted to go  through with it this time. I hate our fucking gung-ho paratroopers, you know  that? They want to go out and kick ass, and they get everybody else in trouble  when they do. Yeah. Sergei couldn't argue with that. Half the time, if you leave the ghosts  alone, they'll leave you alone, too. I know. Vladimir nodded. Of course, the other half of the time, they won't. Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes. I haven't been here real long, but I've seen that. Now  Sergei pointed out to the mountainside. A few men  Afghans, hard to see at a  distance in their robes of brown and cream  were moving around, not far from  where the bumblebee had flayed the ghosts a few days before. What are they up  to out there? No good, Vladimir said at once. Maybe they're scavenging weapons the dukhi  left behind. I hope one of the stinking ragheads steps on a mine, that's what I  hope. Serve him right. Never had Sergei seen a curse more quickly fulfilled. No sooner had the words  left Vladimir's mouth than a harsh, flat craack! came echoing back from the  mountains. He brought his Kalashnikov up to his shoulder. Vladimir did the same.  They both relaxed, a little, when they realized the explosion wasn't close by. Lowering his assault rifle, Vladimir started laughing like a loon. Miserable  son of a bitch walked into one we left out for the ghosts. Too bad. Oh, too  bad! He laughed again, louder than ever. On the mountainside, the Afghans who  weren't hurt bent over their wounded friend and did what they could for him.  Sergei said, This won't make the villagers like us any better. Too bad. Oh, too bad! Vladimir not only repeated himself, he pressed his free  hand over his heart like a hammy opera singer pulling out all the stops to emote  on stage. And they love us so much already. Sergei couldn't very well argue with that, not when he'd been the one who'd  pointed out that the villagers didn't love the Red Army men in their midst. He  did say, Here come the Afghans. The wounded man's pals brought him back with one of his arms slung over each of  their shoulders. He groaned every now and then, but tried to bear his pain in  silence. His robes were torn and splashed  soaked with red. Sergei had seen what  mines did. The Afghan's foot maybe his whole leg up to the knee would look as if  it belonged in a butcher's shop, not attached to a human being. One of the Afghans knew a little Russian. Your mine hurt, he said. Your man  help? He pointed to the Soviet medic's tent. Yes, go on, Sergei said. Take  him there. Softly, Vladimir told him.

A fleabite might not bother a sleeping man. If he'd been bitten before, though,  he might notice a second bite, or a third, more readily than he would have  otherwise. The dragon stirred restlessly.

Satar squatted on his heels, staring down at the ground in front of him. He'd  been staring at it long enough to know every pebble, every [dot] of dirt, every  little ridge of dust. A spider scuttled past. Satar watched it without caring. Sayid Jaglan crouched beside him. I am sorry, Abdul Satar Ahmedi. It is the will of God, Satar answered, not moving, not looking up. Truly, it is the will of God, agreed the commander of the mujahideen. They do  say your father is likely to live. If God wills it, he will live, Satar said. But is it a life to live as a  cripple, to live without a foot? Like you, he has wisdom, Sayid Jaglan said. He has a place in Bulola he may  be able to keep. Because he has wisdom, he will not have to beg his bread in the  streets, as a herder or peasant without a foot would. He will be a cripple! Satar burst out. He is my father! Tears stung his  eyes. He did not let them fall. He had not shed a tear since the news came to  the mujahideen from his home village. I wonder if the earthquake made him misstep, Sayid Jaglan said. Ibrahim said the earthquake was later, Satar answered. Yes, he said that, but he might have been wrong, Sayid Jaglan said. God is  perfect. Men? Men make mistakes. Now at last Satar looked up at him. The Russians made a mistake when they came  into our country, he said. I will show them what sort of mistake they made. We all aim to do that, Sayid Jaglan told him. And we will take back your  village, and we will do it soon. Our strength gathers, here and elsewhere. When  Bulola falls, the whole valley falls, and the valley is like a sword pointed  straight at Bamian. As sure as God is one, your father will be avenged. Then he  will no longer lie under the hands of the god-less ones . . . though Ibrahim did  also say they treated his wound with some skill. Jinni of the waste take Ibrahim by the hair! Satar said. If the Shuravi had  not laid the mines, my father would not have been wounded in the first place. True. Every word of it true, the chieftain of the mujahideen agreed. Satar was  arguing with him, not sitting there lost in his own private wasteland of pain.  Sayid Jaglan set a hand on Satar's shoulder. When the time comes, you will  fight as those who knew the Prophet fought to bring his truth to Arabia and to  the world.   I don't know about that. I don't know anything about that at all, Satar said.  All I know is, I will fight my best. Sayid Jaglan nodded in satisfaction. Good. We have both said the same thing.   He went off to rouse the spirit of some other mujahid.

Shuravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg, marg! The mocking cry rose from behind a  mud-brick wall in Bulola. Giggles followed it. The boy or maybe it was a  girl who'd called out for death to the Soviets couldn't have been more than  seven years old. Little bastard, Vladimir said, hands tightening on his Kalashnikov. His  mother was a whore and his father was a camel. They all feel that way, though, Sergei said. As always, he felt the weight of  the villagers' eyes on him. They reminded him of wolves Tracking an elk. No, the beast is too strong and dangerous for us to try to pull  it down right now, that gaze seemed to say. All right, then. We won't rush in.  We'll just keep trotting along, keep watching it, and wait for it to weaken. Sergeant Krikor said, How can we hope to win a war where the people in whose  name we're fighting wish they could kill us a millimeter at a time? I don't know. I don't care, either, Vladimir said. All I want to do is get  back home in one piece. Then I can go on with my life and spend the rest of it  forgetting what I've been through here in Afghan. I want to get home in one piece, too, Sergei said. But what about the poor  bastards they ship in here after we get out? They'll have it as bad as we do,  maybe worse. That isn't fair. Let them worry about it. Long as I'm gone, I don't give a shit. Vladimir pulled a fresh pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Like anyone  who'd been in Afghanistan for a while, he opened it from the bottom. That way,  his hands, full of the local filth, never touched the filter that would go in  his mouth. He scraped a match alight and cupped his free hand to shield the  flame from the breeze till he got the smoke going. Give me one of those, Sergei said. He knew cigarettes weren't good for you. He  couldn't count how many times his father and mother had tried to quit. Back in  Tambov, he never would have started. But coming to Afghanistan wasn't good for  you, either. He leaned close to Vladimir to get a light off the other cigarette,  then sucked harsh smoke deep into his lungs and blew it out. That made him cough  like a coal miner with black-lung disease, but he took another drag anyhow. Vladimir offered Krikor a smoke without being asked. Of course, Krikor was a  sergeant, not just a lowly trooper. Vladimir was no dummy. He knew whom to keep  buttered up, and how. Krikor didn't cough as he smoked. In a few savage puffs,  he got the cigarette down to the filter. Hardly a shred of tobacco was left when  he crushed the butt under his heel. To hell with me if I'll give the Afghans  anything at all to scrounge, he declared. Yeah. Vladimir treated his cigarette the same way. Sergei took a little longer  to work his way down to the filter, but he made sure he did. It wasn't so much  that he begrudged the Afghans a tiny bit of his tobacco. But he didn't want his  buddies jeering at him. The ground shook under his feet, harder than it had the first couple of times  he'd felt an earthquake. Krikor's black, furry eyebrows flew up. Some of the  villagers exclaimed. Sergei didn't know what they were saying, but he caught the  alarm in their voices. He spoke himself: That was a pretty good one, wasn't it?  If the locals and the sergeant noticed it, he could, too. Not all that big, Krikor said, but I think it must've been right under our  feet. How do you tell? Vladimir asked. When they're close, you get that sharp jolt, like the one we felt now. The ones  further off don't hit the same way. They roll more, if you know what I mean.   The Armenian sergeant illustrated with a loose, floppy up-and-down motion of his  hand and wrist. You sound like you know what you're talking about, Sergei said. Don't I wish  I didn't, Sergeant Krikor told him. Sergeant! Hey, Sergeant! Fyodor came  clumping up the dirt street. He pointed back in the direction from which he'd  come. Lieutenant Uspenski wants to see you right away. Krikor grunted. By his expression, he didn't much want to go see the lieutenant.  Miserable whistle-ass shavetail, he muttered. Sergei didn't think he was  supposed to hear. He worked hard to keep his face straight. Krikor asked Fyodor,  He tell you what it was about? No, Sergeant. Sorry. I'm just an ordinary soldier, after all. If I didn't  already know my name, he wouldn't tell me that. All right. I'll go. Krikor made it sound as if he were doing Lieutenant  Uspenski a favor. But when he came back, he looked grim in a different way. The  ghosts are gathering, he reported. Sergei looked up to the mountains on either side of Bulola, as if he would be  able to see the dukhi as they gathered. If I could see them, we could kill them,  he thought. When are they going to hit us? he asked. Before Sergeant Krikor could answer, Vladimir asked, Are they going to hit us  at all? Or is some informant just playing games to make us jump? Good question, Sergei agreed. I know it's a good question, Krikor said. Afghans lie all the time,  especially to us. The ones who look like they're on our side, half the time  they're working for the ghosts. One man in three, maybe one in two, in the  Afghan army would sooner be with the bandits in the hills. Everybody knows it. Shit, one man in three in the Afghan army is with the dukhi Vladimir said.  Everybody knows that, too. So what makes this news such hot stuff? Like as not,  the ghosts are yanking our dicks to see how we move, so they'll have a better  shot when they do decide to hit us. Krikor's broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. I don't know anything  about that. All I know is, Lieutenant Uspenski thinks the information's good.  And we'll have a couple of surprises waiting for the Bastards. He looked  around to make sure no Afghans were in earshot. You could never could tell who  understood more Russian than he let on. Sergei and Vladimir both leaned toward him. Well? Vladimir demanded. For one thing, we've got some bumblebees ready to buzz by, the sergeant said.  Sergei nodded. So did Vladimir. Helicopter gunships were always nice to have  around.  You said a couple of things, Vladimir said. What else? Krikor spoke in an excited whisper: Trucks on the way up from Bamian. They  ought to get here right around sunset plenty of time to set up, but not enough  for the ragheads here to sneak off and warn the ragheads there. Reinforcements? Sergei knew he sounded excited, too. If they actually had  enough men to do the fighting for a change . . . But Krikor shook his head. Better than reinforcements.   What could be better than reinforcements? Sergei asked. The Armenian's black  eyes glowed. He gave back one word: Katyushas. Ahhh. Sergei and Vladimir said it together. Krikor was right, and they both  knew it. Ever since the Nazis found out about them during the Great Patriotic  War, no foe had ever wanted to stand up under a rain of Katyushas. The rockets  weren't much as far as sophistication went, but they could lay a broad area  waste faster than anything this side of nukes. And they screamed as they came  in, so they scared you to death before they set about ripping you to pieces. But then Vladimir said, That'll be great, if they show up on time. Some of the  bastards who think they're so important don't give a shit whether things get  here at six o'clock tonight or Tuesday a week. We have to hope, that's all, Krikor answered. Lieutenant Uspenski did say the  trucks were already on the way from Bamian, so they can't be that late. He  checked himself. I don't think they can, anyhow. After what Sergei had seen of the Red Army's promises and how it kept them, he  wouldn't have bet anything much above a kopek that the Katyushas would get to  Bulola on time. But, for a wonder, they did. Better still, the big, snorting  six-wheeled Ural trucks machines that could stand up to Afghan roads, which was  saying a great deal arrived in the village with canvas covers over the rocket  launchers, so they looked like ordinary trucks carrying soldiers. Outstanding, Sergei said as the crews emplaced the vehicles. The ghosts won't  have spotted them from the road. They won't know what they're walking into. Outfuckingstanding is right. Vladimir's smile was altogether predatory.  They'll fucking find out.

Above the mountains, stars glittered in the black, black sky like coals and  jewels carelessly tossed on velvet. The moon wouldn't rise till just before  sunup. That made the going slower for the mujahideen, but it would also make  them harder to see when they swooped down on Bulola. A rock came loose under Satar's foot. He had to flail his arms to keep from  falling. Careful, the mujahid behind him said. He didn't answer. His ears burned as he trudged on. To most of Sayid Jaglan's  fighters, the mountains were as much home as the villages down in the valley. He  couldn't match their endurance or their skill. If he roamed these rocky wastes  for the next ten years, he wouldn't be able to. He knew it. The knowledge  humiliated him. A few minutes later, another man up ahead did the same thing Satar had done. If  anything, the other fellow made more noise than he had. The man drew several  hissed warnings. All he did was laugh. What had been shame for Satar was no more  than one of those things for him. He wasn't conscious of his own ineptitude, as  Satar was. The man in front of Satar listened to the mujahid in front of him, then turned  and said, The godless Russians brought a couple of truck-loads of new men into  Bulola this afternoon. Sayid Jaglan says our plan will not change. I understand. God willing, we'll beat them anyhow, Satar said before passing  the news to the man at his heels. Surely there is no God but God. With His help, all things may be accomplished,   the mujahid in front of Satar said. And surely God will not allow the struggle  of a million brave Afghan forebears to be reduced to nothing. No. He will not. He cannot, Satar agreed. The lives of our ancestors must not  be made meaningless. God made man, unlike a sheep, to fight back, not to  submit. That is well said, the man in front of him declared. That is very well said, the man behind him agreed. To God goes the credit, not to me, Satar said. His face heated with pleasure  even so. But the night was dark, so none of his companions saw him flush. Some time around midnight or so Satar judged by the wheeling stars the  mujahideen reached the mountain slopes above Bulola. Satar's home village was  dark and quiet, down there on the floor of the valley. It seemed peaceful. His  own folk there would be asleep. The muezzin would not call them to prayer in the  morning, not in a village the godless Shuravi held. Here and there, though,  inside houses that hadn't been wrecked, men would gather in courtyards and turn  toward Mecca at the appointed hours. Satar cursed the Soviets. If not for them, his father would still have his foot.  If not for them, he himself would never have left Bulola. But I am coming home  now, he thought. Soon the Russians will be gone, and freedom and God will return  to the village. Soon the Russians will be gone, God willing, he amended. He could not see their  trenches and forts and strongpoints, but he knew where they were, as he knew not  all the deniers of God would be sleeping. Some of the mujahideen would not enter  into Bulola. Some, instead, would go Straight to Paradise, as did all martyrs  who fell in the jihad. If that is what God's plan holds for me, be it so. But I  would like to see my father again.  He took his place behind a boulder. For all he knew, it was the same boulder  he'd used the last time Sayid Jaglan's men struck at the Shuravi in Bulola. His  shiver had nothing to do with the chill of the night. His testicles tried to  crawl up into his belly. A man who said he was not afraid when a helicopter  gunship spat death from the sky was surely a liar. He'd never felt so helpless  as under that assault. Now, though, now he would have his revenge. He clicked his Kalashnikov's change  lever from safe to full automatic. He was ready.

The night-vision scope turned the landscape to a ghostly jumble of green and  black. Shapes flitted from one rock to another. Sergei looked away from the  scope, and the normal blackness of night clamped down on him again. They're out  there, all right, he said. Through this thing, they really look like ghosts. Yeah, Vladimir agreed. Sergei could just make out his nod, though he stood  only a couple of meters away. But he'd had no trouble spotting the dukhi  sneaking toward Bulola. Vladimir went on, Sure as the Devil's grandmother,  they're going to stick their cocks in the sausage machine. Just hearing that made Sergei want to clutch himself. Fyodor said, Oh, dear!   in a shrill falsetto. Everybody laughed probably more than the joke deserved,  but Sergei and the rest of the men knew combat was coming soon. He said, Looks like Lieutenant Uspenski got the straight dope. If he got the straight dope, why didn't he share it with us? Vladimir said. I  wouldn't mind smoking some myself. More laughter. Sergei nodded. He smoked hashish every now and then, or sometimes  more than every now and then. It made chunks of time go away, and he sometimes  thought time a worse enemy in Afghanistan than the dukhi. When do we drop the hammer on them? Fyodor said. Patience. That was Sergeant Krikor's throatily accented Russian. They have to  come in close enough so they can't get away easy when we start mauling them. Time . . . Yes, it was an enemy, but it killed you slowly, second by second. The  ghosts out there, the ghosts sneaking up on, swooping down on, Bulola could kill  you in a hurry. More often than not, they were a worry in the back of Sergei's  mind. Now they came to the forefront. How much longer? He wanted to ask the question. Ask it? He wanted to scream it.  But he couldn't, not when Krikor'd just put Fyodor down. He had to wait. Seconds  seemed to stretch out into hours. Once the shooting started, time would squeeze  tight again. Everything would happen at once. He knew that. He'd seen it before. For the dozenth time, he checked to make sure he'd set the change lever on his  Kalashnikov to single shot. For the dozenth time, he found out he had. He was  ready. Sergeant Krikor bent to peer into his night-vision scope. Won't be , he began. Maybe he said long now. If he did, Sergei never heard him. Sure enough,  everything started happening at once. Parachute flares arced up into the night,  turning the mountain slopes into brightest noon. Krikor pulled his head away  from the night-vision scope with a horrible Armenian oath. Since the scope  intensified all the light there was, he might have stared into the heart of the  sun for a moment. Behind Sergei, mortars started flinging bombs at the dukhi, pop! pop! pop! The  noise wasn't very loud about like slamming a door. The finned bombs whistled as  they fell. Incoming! somebody shouted. The ghosts had mortars, too, either captured,  stolen from the Afghan army, or bought from the Chinese. Crump! The first bomb  burst about fifty meters behind Sergei's trench. Fragments of sharp-edged metal  hissed through the air. Through the rattle of Kalashnikov and machine-gun fire,  Sergei heard the ghosts' war cry, endlessly repeated: Allahu akbar! Allahu  akbar! Allahu!. . . Some of the dukhi, by now, were down off the hillsides and onto the flatter  ground near Bulola. Sergei squeezed off a few rounds. The Afghans went down as  if scythed. But they were wily warriors; he didn't know whether he'd hit them or  they were diving for cover. Bullets cracked past overhead, a distinctive, distinctively horrible sound. The  dukhi had no fire discipline. They shot off long bursts, emptying a clip with a  pull of the trigger or two. A Kalashnikov treated so cavalierly pulled high and  to the right. Accuracy, never splendid with an assault rifle, become nothing but  a bad joke. But the dukhi put a lot of lead in the air. Even worse than the sound of bullets  flying by overhead was the unmistakable slap one made when struck flesh. Sergei  flinched when he heard that sound only a few meters away. Fyodor shrieked and then started cursing. Where are you hit? Sergei asked.  Shoulder, the wounded man answered. That's not so bad, Vladimir said. Fuck you, Fyodor said through clenched teeth. It's not your shoulder. ' Get him back to the medics, Sergeant Krikor said. Come on, somebody, give  him a hand. As Fyodor slapped a thick square of gauze on the wound to slow the bleeding,  Sergei asked, Where are the bumblebees? You said we were supposed to have  bumblebees, Sergeant. He knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he couldn't  help it. Fear did strange, dreadful things to a man. And why haven't the  Katyushas opened up? Before Krikor could answer, a burst of Kalashnikov fire chewed up the ground in  front of the trench and spat dirt into Sergei's eyes. He rubbed frantically,  fearing ghosts would be upon him before he cleared his vision. And, also before  Krikor could answer, he heard the rapidly swelling thutter that said the  helicopter gunships were indeed swooping to the attack. Lines of fire stitched the night sky as the Mi-24s three of them  raked the  mountainside: thin lines of fire from their nose-mounted Gatlings, thicker ones  from their rocket pods. Fresh bursts of hot orange light rose as the rockets  slammed into the stones above Bulola. Along with cries of Allahu akbar! Sergei  also heard screams of pain and screams of terror from the dukhi music sweeter to  his ears than any hit by Alia Pugacheva or Josif Kobzon. And then, as if they'd been waiting for the bumblebees to arrive  and they  probably had the men at the Katyusha launchers let fly. Forty rockets salvoed  from each launcher, with a noise like the end of the world. The fiery lines they  drew across the night seemed thick as a man's leg. Each salvo sent four and a  half tons of high explosive up and then down onto the heads of the dukhi on the  mountainside.

Betrayed! The cry rose from more than one throat, out there in the chilly  night above Bulola. Sold to the Shuravi! They knew we were coming! With God's help, we can still beat the atheists, Sayid Jaglan shouted.  Forward, mujahideen! He who falls is a martyr, and will know Paradise forever. Forward Satar went, down toward his home village. The closer he came to the  Russians, the less likely those accursed helicopters were to spray him with  death. He paused to inject a wounded mujahid with morphine, then ran on. But as he ran, sheaves of flame rose into the air from down in the valley, from  the very outskirts of Bulola: one, two, three. They were as yellow, as tightly  bound, as sheaves of wheat. Katyushas! That cry rose from more than one  throat, too from Satar's, among others and it was nothing less than a cry of  despair. Satar threw himself flat. He clapped his hands over his ears and opened his  mouth very wide. That offered some protection against blast. Against salvos of  Katyushas . . . There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God!   Satar gasped out. Against Katyushas, prayer offered more protection than  anything else. The Russian rockets shrieked as they descended. They might have been so many  damned souls, already feeling Shaitan's grip on them. When they slammed into the  side of the mountain most of them well behind Satar the ground shook under him,  as if in torment. Roaring whooshes from down below announced that the Russians were launching  another salvo. But then the ground shook under Satar, and shook, and shook, and  would not stop shaking.

Evil dreams, pain-filled dreams, had come too often to the dragon's endless  sleep lately. It had twitched and jerked again and again, trying to get away  from them, but they persisted. Its doze grew ever lighter, ever more fitful,  ever more restless. A hundred twenty Katyushas no, the truth: a hundred eighteen, for one blew up in  midair, and another, a dud, didn't explode when it landed burst against the  mountain's flank that was also the dragon's flank. Thirteen tons of high  explosive . . . Not even a dragon asleep for centuries could ignore that. Asleep no more, the dragon turned and stretched and looked around to see what  was tormenting it.

The screams on the mountainside took on a different note, one so frantic that  Satar lifted his face from the trembling earth and looked back over his shoulder  to see what had happened. There is no God but God! he gasped, his tone  altogether different from the one he'd used a moment before. That had been  terror. This? This was awe. Wings and body the red of hot iron in a blacksmith's forge, the dragon ascended  into the air. Had it sprung from nowhere? Or had it somehow burst from the side  of the mountain? Satar didn't see it till it was already airborne, so he never  could have said for certain, which was a grief in him till the end of his days.  But the earthquakes stopped after that, which at least let him have an opinion. Eyes? If the dragon might have been red-hot iron, its eyes were white-hot iron.  Just for the tiniest fraction of an instant, the dragon's gaze touched Satar.  That touch, however brief, made the mujahid grovel facedown among the rocks  again. No man, save perhaps the Prophet himself, was meant to meet a dragon eye  to eye. As if it were the shadow of death, Satar felt the dragon's regard slide away  from him. He looked up once more, but remained on his knees as if at prayer.  Many of the mujahideen were praying; he heard their voices rising up to Heaven,  and hoped God cared to listen. But, to the godless Shuravi in the helicopter gunships, the dragon was not  something that proved His glory to a sinful mankind. It was something risen from  the Afghan countryside and, like everything else risen from the Afghan  countryside, something to be beaten down and destroyed. They swung their  machines against it, machine guns spitting fire. One of them still carried a pod  of rockets under its stubby wing. Those, too, raced toward the dragon. They are brave, Satar thought. He'd thought that about Russians before. They are  brave, but oh, by God the Compassionate, the Merciful, they are stupid. Had the helicopters not fired on it, the dragon might have ignored them, as a  man intent on his business might ignore mosquitoes or bees. But if he were  bitten, if he were stung . . . The dragon's roar of fury made the earth tremble yet again. It swung toward the  gunships that had annoyed it. Helicopters were maneuver-able. But the dragon?  The awakened dragon, like the jinni of whom the Prophet spoke, could have been a  creature of fire, not a creature of matter at all. It moved like thought, now  here, now there. One enormous forepaw lashed out. A helicopter gunship, smashed  and broken, slammed into the side of the mountain and burst into flame. Satar couldn't blame the Soviets in the other two gunships for fleeing then,  fleeing as fast as their machines would carry them. He couldn't blame them, but  it did them no good. The dragon swatted down the second helicopter as easily as  it had the first. Then it went after the last one, the one that had launched  rockets against it. Again, Satar could not have denied the gunship crew's  courage. When they saw the dragon gaining on them, they spun their machine in  the air and fired their Gatling at the great, impossible beast. Again, that courage did them no good at all. Dragons were supposed to breathe  fire. This one did, and the helicopter, burning, burning, crashed to the ground.  The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next. Down in Bulola, the Russians serving the Katyusha, launchers had had time to  reload again. Roaring like lions, roaring like the damned, their rockets raced  toward the dragon. They are brave, too, Satar thought. But I thought no one could be stupider than  the men in those gunships, and now I see I was wrong.

Sergei said, I haven't smoked any hashish lately, and even if I had, it  couldn't make me see that. Bozhemoi! Vladimir sounded like was a man shaken to the core. Not even chars  would make me see that. Sergei wasn't so sure he was right. The local narcotic, a lethal blend of opium  and, some said, horse manure, might make a man see almost anything. But Sergei  had never had the nerve to try the stuff, and he saw the scarlet dragon anyhow.  He was horribly afraid it would see him, too. Sergeant Krikor rattled off something in Armenian. He made the sign of the  cross, something Sergei had never seen him do before. Then he seemed to remember  his Russian: The people in this land have been fighting against us all along.  Now the land itself is rising up. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Vladimir demanded. Just then, the  dragon flamed the last bumblebee out of the sky, which made a better answer than  any Krikor could have given. The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next. That was when the  Katyusha crews launched their next salvos straight at the beast. Sergei had  never known them to reload their launchers so fast. That didn't fill him with delight. Noooo! he screamed, a long wail of despair. You fools! Krikor cried. Vladimir remained foulmouthed to the end: Fucking shitheaded idiots! How the  fuck you going to shoot down something the size of a mountain? Katyushas weren't made for antiaircraft fire. But, against a target that size,  most of them struck home. And they must have hurt, too, for the dragon roared in  pain and fury, where it had all but ignored the helicopter gunships' weapons.  But hurting it and killing it were very different things. With a scream that rounded inside Sergei's mind as much as in his ears; the  dragon flew down toward the Ural trucks. It breathed flame again, once, twice,  three times, and the trucks were twisted, molten metal. A couple of the men  who'd launched the Katyushas had time to scream. Somebody from the trench near Sergei squeezed off a banana clip at the dragon.  If that wasn't idiocy, he didn't know what was. Noooo! he cried again. If  Katyushas couldn't kill it, what would Kalashnikov rounds do? Nothing. Less than  nothing. No. More than nothing. Much more than nothing. The Kalashnikov rounds made the  beast notice the Red Army men in the trench. Its head swung their way. Its  great, blazing eyes met Sergei's, just for a moment. Its mouth, greater still,  opened wide. Sergei jerked his assault rifle up to his shoulder and fired off all the  ammunition he had left in the clip. It wasn't that he thought it would do any  good. But how, at that point, could it possibly hurt? Fire, redder and hotter than the sun. Blackness.

Truly, Satar said to his father, there is no God but God. Truly, the older man agreed. His left foot, his left leg halfway up to the  knee, were gone, but the wound was healing. The Russian medic  now among the  dead had done an honest job with it. Maybe Satar's father could get an  artificial foot one day. Till then, he would be able to get around, after a  fashion, on crutches. Satar said, After the dragon destroyed the Shuravi at the edge of the village,  I thought it would wreck Bulola, too. So did I, his father said. But it knew who the pious and Godfearing were, or  at least He chuckled wryly. who had the sense not to shoot at it. Well . . . yes. Satar wished his father hadn't said anything so secular. He  would have to pray to bring him closer to God. He looked around, thinking on  what they had won. Bulola is ours again. This whole valley is ours again. The  Russians will never dare come back here. I should hope not! his father said. After all, the dragon might wake up  again. He and Satar both looked to the mountainside. That streak of reddish rock . . .  That was where the dragon had come from, and where it had returned. If Satar let  his eyes drift ever so slightly out of focus, he could, or thought he could,  discern the great beast's outline. Would it rouse once more? If it is the will  of God, he thought, and turned his mind to other things.

The dragon slept. For a while, till its slumber deepened, it had new dreams.

The black tulip roared out of Kabul airport, firing flares as it went to confuse  any antiaircraft missiles the dukhi might launch. Major Chorny whose very name  meant black took a flask of vodka from his hip and swigged. He hated Code 200  missions, and hated them worst when they were like this. In the black tulip's cargo bay lay a zinc coffin. It was bound for Tambov, maybe  three hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. It had no windows. It was  welded shut. Major Chorny would have to stay with it every moment till it went  into the ground, to make sure Sergei's grieving kin didn't try to open it. For  it held not the young man's mortal remains but seventy-five kilos of sand,  packed tight in plastic bags to keep it from rustling. As far as the major knew, no mortal remains of this soldier had ever been found.  He was just . . . gone. By the time the black tulip crossed from Afghan to  Soviet airspace, Chorny was very drunk indeed. —«»—«»—«»—

He Woke in Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

Early on a cold and dark December morning—a day after I bought this tale from Harry Turtledove, and long after he’d written it—I was startled by the morning news. The synchronicity of the story on the radio about an arrest stemming from an event of decades past and the unsettling story in this magazine seems to prove that some historical incidents will haunt us for years to come. Harry’s newest book, Settling Accounts: Drive to the East will be out in August from Del Rey. He recently edited The Enchanter Completed , a tribute anthology to L. Sprague de Camp that has just been published by Baen Books.

* * * *

He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.

It shouldn’t have ended this way. He knew that, though he couldn’t say how or why. He couldn’t even say what this way was, not for sure. He just knew it was wrong. He’d always understood about right and wrong, as far back as he could remember.

How far back was that? Why, it was ... as far as it was. He didn’t know exactly how far. That seemed wrong, too, but he couldn’t say why.

Darkness lay heavily on him, unpierced, unpierceable. It wasn’t the dark of night, nor even the dark of a closed and shuttered room at midnight. No light had ever come here. No light ever would, or could. Not the darkness of a mineshaft. The darkness of ... the tomb?

Realizing he must be dead made a lot of things fall together. A lot, but not enough. As far back as he could remember ... He couldn’t remember dying, dammit. Absurdly, that made him angry. Something so important in a man’s life, you’d think he would remember it. But he didn’t, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.

He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn’t expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn’t know how he’d expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?

I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways . Again, he would have laughed if he could. Why the hell not? I’ve got all the time in the world.

* * * *

Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward Philadelphia.

A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like ... like a man knows his name, that’s how. That time without light, without self? A dream, he told himself. Must have been a dream.

Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already done a lifetime’s worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime’s worth, too.

He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn’t drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.

They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren’t going to get the chance.

Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in Mississippi. It would stay like this for months.

He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn’t help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.

“You all right, Cecil?” That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn’t want the law, or what passed for the law in Mississippi in 1964, spotting them. They’d come down from the North to give the oppressed and disenfranchised whites in the state a helping hand, and the powers that be hated them worse than anybody.

“I’m okay,” Cecil Price answered. I’m okay now, he thought. I know who I am. Hell, I know that I am. He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.

“We get to Meridian, everything’ll be fine,” Muhammad Shabazz said.

“Sure,” Cecil said. “Sure.” The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He’d taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now...

Now they had to get through NeshobaCounty. They had to get past Philadelphia. They had to run the gauntlet of lawmen who hated white people and Black Knights of Voodoo who hated whites even more—and of lawmen who were Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality’s beat-up station wagon. If RACE’s old blue Ford wasn’t the best-known car in eastern Mississippi, Price was damned if he knew another one that would be.

Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who’d come down from New York and Ohio to give his downtrodden race a hand. If the law spotted this much too spottable car...

Cecil Price wished he hadn’t had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren’s scream. Panic stabbed at him. “What do I do?” he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn’t. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn’t break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.

“Pull over.” Muhammad Shabazz’s voice was calm. “Don’t let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven’t done anything wrong, so they can’t do anything to us.”

“You sure of that, man?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.

“This is all about the rule of law,” Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. “For us, for them, for everybody.”

He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.

But Price didn’t see that he had any choice here. He pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as he brought the blue Ford to a stop. Pebbles rattled against the car’s underpanels. Red dust swirled up around it.

The black-and-white pulled up behind the Ford. A great big Negro in a deputy sheriff’s uniform got out and swaggered up toward the station wagon. Cecil Price watched him in the mirror, not wanting to turn around. That arrogant strut—and the pistol in the lawman’s hand—spoke volumes about the way things in Mississippi had been since time out of mind.

Coming up to the driver’s-side door, the sheriff peered in through sunglasses that made him look more like a machine, a hate-driven machine, than a man. “Son of a bitch!” he exploded. “You ain’t Larry Rainey!”

“No, sir,” Price said. Part of that deference was RACE training—don’t give the authorities an excuse to beat on you. And part of it was drilled into whites in the South from the time they could toddle and lisp. If they didn’t show respect, they often didn’t live to get a whole lot older than that.

Larry Rainey was older than Cecil Price and smarter than Cecil and tougher than Cecil, too. He’d been in RACE a lot longer than Cecil had. The Black Knights of Voodoo probably hated him more than any other white man from this part of the state.

But the way they hated Larry Rainey was like nothing next to the way they hated what they called the black agitators from the North. Even behind the deputy sheriff’s shades, Cecil could see his eyes widen when he got a look at Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Well, well!” he boomed, the way a man with a shotgun will when a couple of big, fat ducks fly right over his blind. “Looky what we got here! We got us a couple of buckra-lovin’ ragheads!”

“Sheriff,” Muhammad Shabazz said tightly. He didn’t wear a turban, and never had. Neither did Tariq Abdul-Rashid, who nodded like somebody trying hard not to show how scared he was. Cecil Price was scared, too, damn near scared shitless, and hoped the black man with the the gun and the Smokey-the-Bear hat couldn’t tell.

The deputy went on as if the Black Muslim hadn’t spoken: “We got us a couple of Northern radicals who reckon they’re better’n other folks their color, so they can hop on a bus and come down here and tell us how to live. And we got us one uppity buckra, too, sneakin’ around and stirrin’ up what oughta be damn well left alone. Well, I got news for y’all. That don’t fly, not in NeshobaCounty it don’t. What the hell you doin’ here, anyway?”

“We were looking at what’s left of MountZionChurch in Longdale,” Muhammad Shabazz answered.

“Yeah, I just bet you were. Fat lot your kind cares about churches,” the big black deputy jeered.

“We care about justice, sir.” Muhammad Shabazz spoke with respect that didn’t come close to hiding the anger underneath. “I do, and Mr. Abdul-Rashid does, and Mr. Price does, too. Do you, sir? Does justice mean anything to you at all?”

“It means I know better’n to call a lousy, lazy, no-account buckra Mister. Ain’t that right, Cecil?” When Price didn’t answer fast enough to suit the deputy sheriff, the man stuck the pistol in his face and roared, “Ain’t that right, boy?”

Muhammad Shabazz had nerve. If he didn’t have nerve, he never would have ridden down to Mississippi from Cleveland in the first place. “We didn’t do anything wrong, sir,” he told the deputy. “We didn’t even break any traffic laws. You have no good reason to pull us over. Why aren’t you investigating real crimes, like a firebombed church?”

To Cecil Price’s amazement, the deputy smiled the broadest, nastiest, wickedest smile he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus. “What do you reckon I’m doin’?” he said. “What the hell do you reckon I’m doin’? All three of you sons of bitches are under arrest for suspicion of arson. A charge like that, you can rot in jail the rest of your worthless lives. Serve y’all right, too, you want to know what I think.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Muhammad Shabazz exclaimed.

“We wouldn’t burn a church,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid agreed, startled out of his frightened silence. “That is crazy.”

“We’ve got no reason to do anything like that. Why would we, sir?” Cecil Price tried to make the deputy forget his comrades didn’t stay polite.

It didn’t work. He might have known it wouldn’t. Hell, he had known it wouldn’t. “Why? I’ll tell you why,” the Negro in the lawman’s uniform said. “So decent, God-fearing folks get blamed for it, that’s why. You agitators’ll try and pin it all on us, make us look bad on the TV, give the Federal government an excuse to stick its nose in affairs that ain’t none of its business and never will be. So hell, yes, you’re under arrest. Suspicion of arson, like I said. I’ll throw your sorry asses in jail right now. You drive on into Philadelphia quiet-like, or you gonna do something stupid like try and escape?”

Cecil Price didn’t need to be a college-educated fellow like the two blacks in the car with him to know what that meant. You do anything but drive straight to jail and I’ll kill all of you. “I won’t do anything dumb,” he told the deputy.

“Better not, boy, or it’s the last fuckup you ever pull.” The big black man threw back his head and laughed. “Unless you already pulled your last one, that is.” Laughing still, he walked back to the black-and-white. He opened the door, got in—the shocks sagged under his bulk—and slammed it shut.

“Let him jail us on that stupid trumped-up charge,” Muhammad Shabazz said as Price started the Ford’s engine. “It’ll do just as much to help the cause as the church bombing.”

“I hope you’re right,” Price said, pulling back onto the highway, “but he’s a mean one. The Neshoba County Sheriff’s meaner, but the deputy’s bad enough and then some.”

“You think he’s BKV?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.

“Black Knights of Voodoo?” Price shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes night-riding with a mask and a shield and a spear.”

In Philadelphia, a few people stared at the car with the white and the two blacks in it. Cecil Price didn’t care for those stares, not even a little bit. He didn’t care for any part of what was going on, but he couldn’t do a thing about it. He parked in front of the jail. The deputy’s car pulled up right behind the RACE wagon.

Another black deputy sat behind the front desk when Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked into the jail. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he asked the man who’d arrested the civil-rights workers.

“Suspicion of arson,” the first deputy answered. “I reckon they must’ve had somethin’ to do with torchin’ the white folks’ church over by Longdale.”

“That’s the—” What was the man behind the desk about to say? That’s the silliest goddamn thing I ever heard? Something like that—Cecil Price was sure of it. But then the other Negro’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck me,” he said, and pointed first to Muhammad Shabazz and then to Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Ain’t these the raghead bastards who came down from the North to raise trouble?”

“That’s them, all right,” said the deputy who’d arrested them. “And this here buckra’s Cecil Price. I thought at first I got me Larry Rainey—you know how all these white folks look alike. But what the hell? If you can’t grab a big fish, a little fish’ll do.”

“That’s a fact,” said the deputy behind the desk. “That sure as hell is a fact, all right. Yeah, lock ‘em up. We can figure out what to do with ‘em later.”

“You betcha.” The first deputy marched his prisoners to the cells farther back in the jail. “In here, you two,” he told Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid, and herded them into the first cell on the right. He stuck Cecil Price in the second cell on the right. Even at a time like this, even in a situation like this, he never thought to put a white man in with Negroes. That was part of what was wrong in Philadelphia, right there.

After Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were safely locked away, the man who’d arrested them clumped up the corridor and then out the front door. “Where you goin’?” called the man behind the desk.

“Got to see the Priest,” the first deputy answered. “Anybody asks after those assholes, you never seen ‘em, you never heard nothin’ about ‘em. You got that?”

“All right by me,” the other deputy said. The first one slammed the door after him as he went out. He seemed to have to slam any door he came to.

Cecil Price had only thought he was scared shitless before. Not letting anybody know he and his friends were in jail was bad. Going to see the Priest was a hell of a lot worse. The Priest was a tall, scrawny, bald black man who hated whites with a fierce and simple passion. He was also the chief NeshobaCounty recruiting officer for the Black Knights of Voodoo. Trouble followed him the way thunder followed lightning.

Price wondered whether Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid knew enough to be as frightened as he was. The Priest had been trouble for years, while they’d been down here only a couple of months. The Priest would still be trouble long after they went back to the North ... if they ever got the chance to go North again.

It must have been about half past five when the phone at the front desk jangled loudly. “Neshoba County Jail,” the deputy there said. He paused to listen, then went on, “No, I ain’t seen ‘em. Jesus Christ! You lose your garbage, you expect me to go pickin’ it up for you?” He slammed the phone down again.

“Deputy!” Muhammad Shabazz called through the bars of his cell. “Deputy, can I speak to you for a minute?”

A scrape of chair legs against cheap linoleum. Slow, heavy, arrogant footsteps. A deep, angry voice: “What the hell you want?”

“I’d like to make a telephone call, please.”

A pause. Cecil Price looked out of his cell just in time to see the deputy sheriff shake his head. His big, round belly shook, too, but it didn’t remind Price of a bowlful of jelly—more of a wrecking ball that would smash anything in its way. “No, I don’t reckon so,” he said. “You ain’t callin’ nobody.”

“I have a Constitutional right to make a telephone call,” Muhammad Shabazz insisted, politely but firmly.

“Don’t you give me none of your Northern bullshit,” the Negro deputy said. “Constitution doesn’t say jack shit about telephone calls. How could it? No telephones when they wrote the damn thing, were there? Were there, smartass?”

“No, but—” Muhammad Shabazz broke off.

“Constitutional right, my ass,” the deputy sheriff said. “You got a Constitutional right to get what’s comin’ to you, and you will. You just bet you will.” He lumbered back to the desk.

In a low voice, Cecil Price said, “We’re in deep now.”

“No kidding.” Muhammad Shabazz sounded like a man who wanted to make a joke but was too worried to bring it off.

“They aren’t gonna let us out of here,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. “Not in one piece, they aren’t.”

“We’ll see what happens, that’s all,” Muhammad Shabazz said. “They can’t think they’ll get away with it.” To Cecil Price, that only proved the man who’d come down from the North didn’t understand how things really worked in Mississippi. Of course the deputy sheriffs thought they’d get away with it. Why wouldn’t they? Blacks had been getting away with things against whites who stepped out of line ever since slavery days. Times were starting to change; Negroes of goodwill like Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were helping to make them change. But they hadn’t changed yet—and the deputies and their pals were determined they wouldn’t change no matter what. And so...

And so we’re in deep for sure , Cecil Price thought, fighting despair.

* * * *

The first deputy sheriff, the one who’d arrested them, returned to the jail not long after the sun went down. He walked back to the cells to look at the prisoners, laughed a gloating laugh, and then went up front again.

“What’s the Priest got to say?” asked the man at the front desk.

“It’s all taken care of,” the first deputy answered.

“They comin’ here?”

“Nah.” The first deputy sounded faintly disappointed. “It’d be too damn raw. We’d end up with the fuckin’ Feds on our case for sure.”

“What’s going on, then?”

The first deputy told him. He pitched his voice too low to let Cecil Price make it out. By the way the desk man laughed, he thought it was pretty good. Price was sure he wouldn’t.

Time crawled by on hands and knees. The phone rang once, but it had nothing to do with Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. It was a woman calling to find out if her no-account husband was sleeping off another binge in the drunk tank. He wasn’t. But it only went to show that, despite the struggle for whites’ civil rights, ordinary life in Philadelphia went on.

Around half past ten, the first deputy came tramping back to the cells again. To Cecil Price’s amazement, he had a jingling bunch of keys on a big brass key ring with him. He opened the door to Price’s cell. “Come on out, boy,” he said. “Reckon I’ve got to turn you loose.”

Price wanted to stick a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. “You sure?” he blurted.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” the deputy said. “I been askin’ around. You weren’t at the church when it went up. Neither were these assholes.” He pointed into the cell that held Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Gotta let them go, too, dammit.”

“You’ll hear from our lawyers,” Muhammad Shabazz promised. “False arrest is false arrest, even if you think twice about it later. This is still a free country, whether you know it or not.”

Although Cecil Price agreed with every word he said, he wished the Black Muslim would shut the hell up. Pissing off the deputy right when he was letting them out of jail wasn’t the smartest move in the world, not even close. But Price walked out of his cell. A moment later, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked out of theirs, too.

The deputy with the wrecking-ball belly at the front desk gave them back their wallets and keys and pocket change. “If you’re smart, you’ll get your white ass outa Philadelphia . Go on down to Meridian and never come back,” he told Cecil Price. “You cause trouble around here again, you look at a black woman walkin’ down the street around here again, you show your ugly buckra face around here again, you are fuckin’ dead meat. You hear me?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I sure do hear you,” Cecil Price said. That was how you played the game in Mississippi. Price hadn’t promised to do one thing the deputy said. But he’d heard him, all right. He couldn’t very well not have heard him.

“Go on, then. Get lost.”

The first deputy walked out into the muggy night with the white man and the two Northern blacks. A mosquito buzzed around Price’s ear. Price slapped at it. The deputy laughed. He watched while Price and the Black Muslims got into RACE’s blue Ford wagon. Price started up the car. The deputy went on watching as he put it in gear and drove away. In the rear-view mirror, Price watched him walk back into the Neshoba County Jail.

“Maybe they really are learning they can’t pull crap like that on us,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said.

“Don’t bet on it,” was Muhammad Shabazz’s laconic response. “They don’t back up unless they’ve got a reason to back up. Isn’t that right, Cecil? ... Cecil?”

Cecil Price didn’t answer, not right away. His eyes were on the rear-view mirror again. He didn’t like what he saw. This time of night, driving out of a little town like Philadelphia, they should have had the road to themselves. They should have, but they didn’t. One, then two, sets of headlights followed them out of town. Price stepped on the gas. If those cars back there weren’t interested in him and his black friends, he’d lose them.

“Hey, man, take it easy,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. “You don’t want to give the law a chance to run us in for speeding.”

“We’ve got company back there,” Price said. Speeding up hadn’t shaken those two cars. If anything, they were closer. And a third set of headlights was coming out of Philadelphia, zooming down Highway 19 like a bat out of hell.

Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz looked back over their shoulders. “You think they’re on our tail, Cecil?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.

Before Price could say anything, Muhammad Shabazz said everything that needed saying: “Gun it! Gun it like a son of a bitch!”

The old Ford’s motor should have roared when Cecil Price jammed the pedal to the metal. Instead, it groaned and grunted. Yeah, the wagon went faster, but it didn’t go faster fast enough. The two pairs of headlights behind the Ford got bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, closer and closer. And the third pair, the set that got the late start, might almost have been flying along Highway 19. That was one souped-up set of wheels, and the rustbucket Price was driving didn’t have a prayer of staying ahead. Before long, whoever was driving that hot machine got right on the wagon’s tail.

Desperate now, Price killed his lights and made a screeching, sliding right onto Highway 492. Only in Mississippi, he thought, would such a miserable chunk of asphalt merit the name of highway. But if it let him shake his pursuers, he would bless its undeserved name forevermore.

Only it didn’t. The lead pursuer, the hopped-up car that had come zooming out of Philadelphia, also made the turn. Even over the growl of his own car’s engine, Cecil Price could hear its brakes screech as it clawed around the corner. Then the pursuer’s siren came on and the red light on top of the roof began to flash.

“Jesus! It’s that damn deputy again!” Price said. “What am I gonna do?”

“Can we outrun him?” Muhammad Shabazz asked as the beat-up Ford bucketed down the road.

“Not a chance in hell,” Price answered. “He’s liable to start shooting at us if I don’t stop.” If he got hit, or if a tire got hit, the car would fly off the road and burst into flames. That was a bad way to go.

“Maybe you better stop,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said.

“Damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” Cecil Price said bitterly, but his foot had already found the brake pedal. The old blue station wagon slowed, stopped.

The deputy sheriff’s car stopped behind it, the same way it had earlier that day. This time, though, the other two cars also stopped. The big black buck of a deputy sheriff got out of his car and strode up to the Ford wagon. “I thought you were going back to Meridian if we let you out of jail.”

“We were,” Price answered.

“Well, you sure were taking the long way around. Get out of that car,” the deputy said. That was the last thing Cecil Price wanted to do. But he thought the deputy would shoot him and the two Black Muslims right there if they refused. Reluctantly, he obeyed. Perhaps even more reluctantly, Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid followed him.

Men were also getting out of the two cars stopped behind the deputy’s. Price’s heart sank when he saw them. There was the Priest, all right, black as the ace of spades. And there were ten or twelve other Negroes with him. Price recognized some of them as BKV men. He didn’t know for sure that the others were, but what else would they be? Some had guns. Others carried crowbars or tire irons or Louisville Sluggers. They all wore rubber gloves so they wouldn’t leave fingerprints.

“You don’t want to do this,” Muhammad Shabazz said earnestly. “I’m telling you the truth—you don’t. It won’t get you what you think it will.”

“Shut the fuck up, you goddamn raghead race traitor.” The deputy sheriff’s voice was hard and cold as iron. “You get in the back of my car now, you hear?”

“What will you do to us?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.

“Whatever it is, we’ll do it right here and right now if you don’t shut the fuck up and do like you’re told,” the deputy answered. “Now stop mouthing off and move, damn you.”

Numbly, as if caught in a bad dream, Cecil Price and his companions got into the back of the deputy sheriff’s car. A steel grating walled them off from the front seat. Neither back door had a lock or a door handle on the inside. Once you went in there, you stayed in there till somebody decided to let you out.

The deputy slid behind the wheel again. The men from the Black Knights of Voodoo got back into their cars, too. A couple of them aimed weapons at Cecil Price and the Black Muslims before they did. The deputy sheriff waved the BKV men away. “Not quite time yet,” he told them.

“This won’t help you. The country won’t be proud of you. They’ll go after you like you wouldn’t believe,” Muhammad Shabazz said. “If you hurt us, you help our side, and that’s nothing but the truth.”

“I don’t want to listen to your bullshit, you buckra-lovin’ raghead, and that’s nothin’ but the truth,” the deputy said. “So maybe you just better shut the fuck up.”

“Why? What difference does it make now?” the Black Muslim asked.

Instead of answering, the deputy sheriff put the car in gear. He made a Y-turn—the road was too narrow for a U—and swung back around the cars full of BKV men. Then he hit the brakes to wait while they turned around, too. Good cooperation in a bad cause, Cecil Price thought. If RACE members worked together as smoothly as these BKV bastards...

“All right,” the deputy muttered, and the black-and-white moved forward again. Now that he wasn’t chasing people at top speed, the deputy sheriff acted like a careful driver. He flicked the turn signal before making a left back onto Highway 19. Click! Click! Click! The sound seemed very loud inside the passenger compartment. What went through Price’s mind was, Measuring off the seconds left in my life.

As soon as the deputy finished the turn, of course, the clicking stopped. Price wished his mind had been going in some other direction a moment before. The deputy drove toward Philadelphia for a minute or two, then used the turn signal again. Click! Click! Click! Cecil Price cherished and dreaded the sound of those passing seconds, both at the same time. He grimaced when the deputy finished the new left turn and the indicator fell silent again.

“Where the hell are we?” Muhammad Shabazz muttered.

Before Price could answer him, the deputy did: “This here is

Rock Cut Road

. Ain’t hardly anything around these parts. That’s how come we’re here.”

“Oh, shit,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. Price couldn’t have put it better himself.

The deputy wasn’t kidding. Looking out the car’s dirty windows, Price saw nothing but a narrow red dirt road and weed-filled fields to either side. Behind the black-and-white, car doors slammed as the Black Knights of Voodoo got out and advanced.

“I’m gonna open the door and let y’all out now,” the deputy said. “You don’t want to do anything stupid, you hear?”

“What the hell difference does it make at this stage of things?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.

“Well, some things are gonna happen. They’re gonna, and I don’t reckon anything’ll change that,” the deputy sheriff said seriously. “But they can happen easy, you might say, or they can happen not so easy. You won’t like it if they happen not so easy. Believe you me, you won’t, not even a little bit.”

He got out of the car. Can we jump him when he opens the door? Price wondered. He shook his head. Not a chance in church. Not a chance in hell.

One more click!: the door opening. Heart racing a mile a minute, legs feather-light with fear, Cecil Price got out of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department car. The dirt scraped and crunched under the soles of his shoes. Is that the last thing I’ll ever feel? It didn’t seem like enough.

Two Black Knights of Voodoo grabbed Tariq Abdul-Rashid. Two others seized Muhammad Shabazz, and two more laid hold of Cecil Price. Another BKV man walked up to Tariq Abdul-Rashid, pistol in hand. The headlights of the cars behind the black-and-white picked out the globe and anchor tattooed on his right bicep.

“Go get ‘em, Wayne,” somebody said in a low, hoarse voice—the Priest, Cecil Price saw.

“I will, goddammit. I will,” answered the BKV man with the pistol. Price happened to know that Wayne Roberts, in spite of the tattoo, had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. In the Black Knights of Voodoo, though, he could be a big man.

He scowled at Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “No,” the Black Muslim whispered. “Please, no.”

“Fuck you, man,” Roberts said. “You ain’t nothin’ but a stinkin’ buckra in a black skin.” He thumbed back the revolver’s hammer and pulled the trigger.

The roar was amazingly loud. The bullet, from point-blank range, caught Tariq Abdul-Rashid in the middle of the forehead. He went limp all at once, as if his bones had turned to water. “Way to go, Wayne!” said one of the men who held him. When his captors let go, he flopped down like a sack of beans, dead before he hit the ground.

“You see?” the black deputy said. “Hard or easy. That there was pretty goddamn easy, wasn’t it?”

The BKV men who had hold of Muhammad Shabazz dragged him forward. Even as they did, he was trying to talk sense to them. “I understand how you feel, but this won’t help you,” he said in a calm, reasonable voice. “Killing us won’t do anything for your cause. You—”

“Shut up, asshole.” Wayne Roberts cuffed him across the face. “You bet this’ll do us some good. We’ll be rid of you, won’t we? Good riddance to bad rubbish.” He shot Muhammad Shabazz the same way he’d killed the other Black Muslim.

“Easy as can be,” the deputy sheriff said. “Easier’n he deserved, I reckon. Fucker never knew what hit him.” The hot, wet air was thick with the stinks of smokeless powder, of blood, of shit, of fear, of rage.

Easy or not, Cecil Price didn’t want to die. With a sudden shout that even startled him, he broke loose from the men who had hold of him. Shouting—screaming—he ran like a madman down

Rock Cut Road

.

He didn’t get more than forty or fifty feet before the first bullet slammed into his back. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his face, dirt in his mouth, more dirt in his nose. Something horrible was happening inside him. He felt on fire, only worse. When he tried to get up, he couldn’t.

Big as a mountain, hard as a mountain, the deputy sheriff loomed over him. “All right, white boy,” he ground out. “You coulda had it easy, same as your asshole buddies. Now we’re gonna do it the hard way.” He crouched down beside Price, grabbed his right arm, and broke it over his thigh like a broomstick. The sound the bones made when they snapped was just about like a breaking broomstick, too. The sound Cecil Price made ... How the BKV men laughed!

With a grunt, the sheriff got to his feet. With the arrogant strut he always used, he walked around to Price’s left side. With the coldblooded deliberation he’d shown before, he broke the white man’s left arm. Price barely had room inside his head for any new torment.

Or so he thought, till one of the Black Knights of Voodoo kicked him in the crotch. “Ain’t gonna mess with no black women now, are you, buckra?” he jeered. More boots thudded into Price’s balls. That almost made him forget about his ruined arms. It almost made him forget about the bullet in his back, except he couldn’t find breath enough to scream the way he wanted to.

After an eternity that probably lasted three or four minutes, the deputy sheriff said, “Reckon that’s enough now. Let’s finish him off and get rid of the bodies.”

“I’ll take care of it. Bet your sweet ass I will,” Wayne Roberts said. He fired at Price again, and then again. Another gun barked, too, maybe once, maybe twice. By that time, Price had stopped paying close attention.

But he didn’t fall straight into sweet blackness, the way Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid had. He lingered in red torment when the BKV men picked him up and stuffed him into the trunk of one of their cars along with the Black Muslims’ bodies.

The car jounced down the dirt road, every pothole and every rock a fresh stab of agony. At last, it stopped. “Here we go,” somebody said as a Black Knight of Voodoo opened the trunk. “This ought to do the job.”

“Oh, fuck, yes,” somebody else said. Eager gloved hands hauled Cecil Price out of the trunk, and then the corpses of his friends.

“Hell, this dam’ll hold a hundred of them.” That was the deputy sheriff, sounding in charge of things as usual. “Go on, throw ‘em in there, and we’ll cover ‘em up. Nobody’ll ever find the sons of bitches.”

Thump! That was one of the Black Muslims, going into a hollow in the ground. Thump! That was the other one. And thump! That was Cecil Price, landing on top of Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz. An Everest of pain in what were already the Himalayas.

“Fire up the dozer,” the deputy said. “Let’s bury ‘em and get on back to town. We done us a good night’s work here, by God.”

Somebody climbed up onto the bulldozer’s seat. The big yellow Caterpillar D-4 belched and farted to life. It bit out a great chunk of dirt and, motor growling, poured it over the two Black Muslims and Cecil Price. Price struggled hopelessly to breathe. More dirt thudded down on him, more and more.

Buried alive! he thought. Sweet Jesus help me, I’m buried alive! But not for long. The last thing he knew was the taste of earth filling his mouth.

* * * *

He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth seemed to fill his mouth.

He sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, heart sledgehammering in his chest as if he’d run a hundred miles. He looked around wildly. Tiny stripes of pale moonlight slipped between the slats of the Venetian blinds and stretched across the bedroom floor.

Beside him on the cheap, lumpy mattress, someone stirred: his wife. “You all right, Cecil?” she muttered drowsily.

A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. Was he all right? That was a different question, a harder question. “I guess ... I guess maybe I am,” he said, wonder in his voice.

“Then settle down and go on back to sleep. I aim to, if you give me half a chance,” his wife said. “What ails you, anyhow?”

“Bad dream,” he answered, the way he always did. He’d never said a word about what kind of bad dream it was. Somehow, he didn’t think he could say a word about what kind of bad dream it was. He’d tried two or three times, always with exactly zero luck. The words wouldn’t form. The ideas behind the words wouldn’t form, not so he could talk about them. But even if he couldn’t, he knew what the dreams were all about. Oh, yes. He knew.

He still lived in the same brown clapboard house he’d lived in on that hot summer night in 1964, the brown clapboard house he’d lived in for going on forty years. It wasn’t more than a block away from Philadelphia’s town square.

He’d been Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price then. He ran for sheriff in ‘67, when Larry Rainey didn’t go for another term, but another Klansman beat him out. Then he spent four years away, and after that he couldn’t very well be a lawman any more. Once he came back to Mississippi, he worked as a surveyor. He drove a truck for an oil company. And he wound up a jeweler and watchmaker—he’d always been good with his hands. He turned into a big wheel among Mississippi Shriners.

But the dreams never went away. If he hadn’t seen that damn Ford station wagon that afternoon ... He had, though, and what happened next followed as inexorably as night followed day. Two Yankee busybodies: Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. One uppity local nigger: James Chaney.

At the time, getting rid of them seemed the only sensible thing to do. He took care of it, with plenty of help from the Ku Klux Klan.

He wondered if the others, the ones who were still alive, had dreams like his. He’d tried to ask a couple of times, but he couldn’t, any more than he could talk about his own. Maybe they’d tried to ask him, too. If they had, they hadn’t had any luck, either.

Dreams. His started even before the damn informer tipped off the FBI about where the bodies were buried. At first, he figured they were just nerves. Who wouldn’t have a case of the jitters after what he went through, when the whole country was trying to pull NeshobaCounty down around his ears?

Well, the whole country damn well did it. Back in June 1964, who would have dreamt a Mississippi jury—a jury of Mississippi white men—would, could, convict anybody for violating the civil rights of a coon and a couple of Jews? But the jury damn well did that, too. Price got six years, and served four of them in a Federal prison in Minnesota before they turned him loose for good behavior.

He went on having the dreams up there.

Sometimes weeks went by when they let him alone, and he would wonder if he was free. And he would always hope he was, and he never would be. It was as if hoping he were free was enough all by itself for ... something to show him he wasn’t.

Did the dreams make him change? Did they just make him pretend to change? Even he couldn’t say for sure. Ten years after he got convicted, he told a reporter—a New York City reporter, no less—he’d seen Roots and liked it. When he talked about integration, he said that was how things were going to be and that was all there was to it.

He spent years rebuilding his name, rebuilding his reputation. And then, in 1999, everything fell to pieces again. He got convicted of another felony. No guns this time, no cars racing down the highway in the heat of the night: he sold certifications for commercial driver’s licensing without doing the testing he should have. A cheap little money-making scheme—except he got caught.

They didn’t jug him that time. He drew three years’ probation. But you could stay a hero—to some people—for doing what you thought you had to do to people who were trying to change the way of life you’d known since you were born. When you got busted for selling bogus certifications, you weren’t a hero to anybody, even yourself. You were just a lousy little crook.

A lousy little crook with ... dreams.

Two years later, a season after the turn of the century, he climbed up on a lift at an equipment-rental place in Philadelphia. He fell off somehow, and landed on his head. He died three days later at a hospital in Jackson—the same hospital where he’d brought the bodies of Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney for autopsy thirty-seven years earlier, after the FBI tore up the dam to get them out. He never knew that, but then, neither had they.

He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.

Copyright © 2005 by Harry Turtledove.

Trantor Falls

by Harry Turtledove

The Imperial Palace stood at the center of a hundred square miles of greenery. In normal times, even in abnormal times, such insulation was plenty to shield the chief occupant of the palace from the hurly-burly of the rest of the metaled world of Trantor.

Times now, though, were not normal, nor even to be described by so mild a word as “abnormal.” They were disastrous. Along with magnolias and roses, missile launchers had flowered in the gardens. Even inside the palace, Dagobert VIII could hear the muted snarl. Worse, though, was the fear that came with it.

A soldier burst into the command post where the Emperor of the Galaxy and his officers still groped for ways to beat back Gilmer’s latest onslaught. Without so much as a salute, the man gasped out, “ Another successful landing, sire, this one in the Nevrask sector.”

Dagobert’s worried gaze flashed to the map table. “Too close, too close,” he muttered. “How does the cursed bandit gain so fast?”

One of the Emperor’s marshals speared the messenger with his eyes. “How did they force a landing there? Nevrask is heavily garrisoned.” The soldier stood mute. “ Answer me!” the marshal barked.

The man gulped, hesitated, at last replied, “Some of the troops fled, Marshal Rodak, sir, when Gilmer’s men landed. Others” He paused again, nervously licking his lips, but had to finish: “Others have gone over to the rebel, sir.”

“More treason!” Dagobert groaned. “Will none fight to defend me?”

The only civilian in the room spoke then: “Men will fight, sire, when they have a cause they think worth fighting for. The University has held against Gilmer for four days now. We shall not yield it to him.”

“By the space fiend, Dr. Sarns, I’m grateful to your students, yes, and proud of them too,” Dagobert said. “They’ve put up a braver battle than most of my troopers. “

Yokim Sarns politely dipped his head. Marshal Rodak, however, grasped what his sovereign had missed. “Majesty, they’re fighting for themselves and their buildings, not for you,” he said. Even as he spoke, another sector of the map shone in front of him and Dagobert went from blue to red: red for the blood Gilmer was spilling allover Trantor, Sarns thought bitterly.

“Have we no hope, then?” asked the Emperor of the Galaxy.

“Of victory? None.” Rodak’s military assessment was quick and definite. “Of escape, perhaps fighting again, yes. Our air- and spacecraft still hold the corridor above the palace. With a landing at Nevrask, though, Gilmer will soon be able to bring missiles to bear on it--and on us.”

“Better to flee than to fall into that monster’s clutches,” Dagobert said, shuddering. He looked at the map again. “I am sure you have an evacuation plan ready. Implement it, and quickly.”

“Aye, sire.” The marshal spoke into a throat mike. The Emperor turned to Yokim Sarns. “Will you come with us, professor? Trantor under Gilmer’s boots will be no place for scholars.”

“‘Thank you, sire, but no.” As Sarns shook his head, strands of mouse-brown hair, worn unfashionably long, swirled around his ears. “My place is at the University, with my faculty and students.”

“Well said,” Marshal Rodak murmured, too softly for Dagobert to hear.

But the Emperor, it seemed, still had one imperial gesture left in him. Turning to Rodak, he said, “If Dr. Sarns wishes to return to the University, return he shall. Detail an aircar at once, while he has some hope of getting there in safety. “

“Aye, sire, “ the marshal said again. He held out a hand to Yokim Sarns. “ And good luck to you. I think you’ll need it.”

By the time the aircar pilot neared the University grounds, Yokim Sarns was a delicate shade of green. The pilot had flown meters--sometimes centimeters--above Trantor’s steel roof, and jinked like a wild thing to confuse the rebels’ targeting computers.

The car slammed down on top of the library. Dr. Sarns’s teeth met with an audible click. The pilot threw open the exit hatch. Sarns pulled himself together. “Er--thank you very much,” he told the pilot, unbuckling his safety harness.

“Just get out, get under cover, and let me lift off,” she snapped. Sarns scrambled away from the aircar toward an entrance. The wash of wind as the car sped away nearly knocked him off his feet.

The door opened. Two people in helmets dashed out and dragged Sarns inside. “How do we fare here?” he asked.

“Our next few graduating classes are getting thinned out,” Maryan Drabel answered somberly. Till Gilmer’s revolt, she had been head librarian. Now, Sarns supposed, chief of staff best summed up her job. “We’re still holding, though--we pushed them out of Dormitory Seven again a few minutes ago. “

“Good,” Sarns said. He was as much an amateur commander as she was an aide, but the raw courage of their student volunteers made up for much of their inexperience. The youngsters fought as if they were defending holy ground--and so in a way they were, Sarns thought. If Gilmer’s men wrecked the University, learning all over the Galaxy would take a deadly blow.

“What will Dagobert do?” asked Egril Joons. Once University dietitian, he kept an army fed these days.

Sarns had no way to soften the news. “He’s going to run.”

Under the transparent flash shield of her helmet, Maryan Drabel’s face went grim, or rather grimmer. “Then we’re left in the lurch?”

“Along with everyone else who backed the current dynasty.” Two generations, a dynasty! Sarns thought. The way the history of the Galactic Empire ran these past few sorry centuries, though, two generations was a dynasty. And with a usurper like Gilmer seizing Trantor, that history looked to run only downhill from here on out.

Maryan might have picked the thought from his mind. “Gilmer’s as much a barbarian as if he came straight from the Periphery,” she said.

“I wish he were in the Periphery,” Egril Joons said. “Then we wouldn’t have to deal with him.”

“Unfortunately, however, he’s here,” said Yokim Sarns.

The thick carpets of the Imperial Palace, the carpets that had cushioned the feet of Dagobert VIII, of Cleon II, of Stannell VI--by the space fiend, of Ammenetik the Great!--now softened the booted strides of Gilmer I, self-proclaimed Emperor of the Galaxy and Lord of All. Gilmer kicked at the rug with some dissatisfaction. He was used to clanging as he walked, to having his boots announce his presence half a corridor away. Not even a man made all of bell metal could have clanged on the carpets of the Imperial Palace.

He tipped his head back, brought a bottle to his lips. Liquid fire ran down his throat. After a long pull, he threw the bottle away. It smashed against a wall. Frightened servants scurried to clean up the mess.

“Don’t waste it,” Vergis Fenn said.

Gilmer scowled at his fleet commander. “Why not? Plenty more where that one came from. “ His scowl stabbed a servant. “Fetch me another of the same, and one for Vergis here too.” The man dashed off to do his bidding.

“There, you see?” Gilmer said to Fenn. “By the Galaxy, we couldn’t waste everything Trantor’s stored up if we tried for a hundred years. “

“I suppose that’s so,” Fenn said. He was quieter than his chieftain, a better tactician perhaps, but not a leader of men. After a moment, he went on thoughtfully, “Of course, Trantor’s spent a lot more than a hundred years gathering all this. More than a thousand, I’d guess.”

“Well, what if it has?” Gilmer said. “That’s why we wanted it, yes? By the balls Dagobert didn’t have, nobody’s ever sacked Trantor before. Now everything here is mine!”

The servant returned with the bottles. He set them on a table of crystal and silver, then fled. Gilmer drank. With all he’d poured down these last couple of days, he shouldn’t have been able to see, let alone walk and talk. But triumph left him drunker than alcohol. Gilmer the Conqueror, that’s who he was!

Vergis Fenn drank too, but not as deep. “ Aye, all Trantor’s ours, but for the University. Seven days now, and those madmen are still holding out.”

“No more of these little firefights with them, then,” Gilmer growled. “By the Galaxy, I’ll blast them to radioactive dust and have done! See to it, Fenn, at once.”

“As you would, sir--sire, but--” Fenn let the last word hang.

“But what?” Gilmer said, scowling. “If they fight for Dagobert: they’re traitors to me. And smashing traitors will frighten Trantor.” He blinked owlishly, pleased and surprised at his own wordplay.

To his annoyance, Fenn did not notice it. He said, “I don’t think they are fighting for Dagobert any more, just against us, to hold on to what they have. That might make them easier to deal with. And if we--if you--nuked the University, scholars all over the Galaxy would vilify your name forever.”

“Scholars all over the Galaxy can eat space, for all I care,” Gilmer said. But, he discovered, that wasn’t quite true. Part of being Emperor was acting the way Emperors were supposed to act. With poor grace, he backpedaled a little: “If they acknowledge me and stop fighting, I suppose I’m willing to let them live. “

“Shall I attempt a cease-fire, then?” Fenn asked.

“Go ahead, since you seem to think it’s a good idea,” Gilmer told him. “But not if they don’t acknowledge me, understand? If they still claim that unprintable son of a whore Dagobert’s Empire, blow ‘em off the face of the planet.”

“Yes, sire.” This time, Fenn did not stumble over the title. He’s my servant too, Gilmer thought.

The new Emperor of the Galaxy took a good swig from the bottle. He made as if to throw it at one of the palace flunkies, then, laughing, set it down gently as the fellow ducked.

Gilmer went down to the command post in the bowels of the Imperial Palace, the command post from which, until recently, poor stupid Dagobert VIII had battled to keep him off Trantor. Gilmer’s boots clanged most satisfactorily there. Whoever had designed the command post, in the lost days of the Galactic Empire’s greatness, had understood about commanders and boots.

The television screen in front of Vergis Fenn went blank. He swiveled his chair, nodded in surprise to see Gilmer behind him. “Sire, we have a cease-fire between our forces and those of the University,” he said. “It was easy to arrange. Our troops and theirs will both hold in place until the final armistice is arranged. “

“Good,” Gilmer said. “Well done.”

“Thank you. The leader of the University has invited you to meet him on his ground to fix the terms of the armistice. He offers hostages to ensure your safety, and says he knows what will happen to everything he’s been fighting to keep if he plays you false. Shall I call him back and tell him no anyhow?”

“‘No, I’ll go there,” Gilmer said. “‘What d’you think, I’m afraid of somebody without so much as a single starship to his name? Besides”--he smiled a greedy smile--”like as not I’ll get a look at whatever treasures they’ve been fighting so hard to hang on to. If I can’t beat ‘em out of him, I’ll tax ‘em out--that’s what being Emperor is all about. So go ahead and set up the meeting with this--what’s his name, Vergis?”

“Yokim Sarns.”

“Yokim Sarns. What do I call him when I see him? General Sarns? Admiral? Warlord?”

Fenn’s expression was faintly bemused. “The only title he claims is ‘Dean,’ sire.”

“‘Dean?” Gilmer threw back his head and laughed loud and long. “ Aye, I’ll meet with the fierce Dean Yokim Sarns, the scourge of the lecture halls. Why not? Set it up for me, Vergis. Meanwhile”--he turned away--”I’1l check how we’re doing with the rest of the planet.”

Banks of televisor screens, relaying images from all over Trantor, told him what he wanted to know. Here he saw a platoon of his troopers carrying plastic tubs full of jewels back toward their ships; there more soldiers looting a residential block; somewhere else another squad, most of the men drunk, accompanied by twice their number of Trantorian women, some scared-looking, others smiling and brassy.

Gilmer grinned. This was why he’d taken Trantor: to sack a world unsacked for fifty generations, even more than to rule it after the sack. Watching his dream unfold made that came after seem of scant importance by comparison.

Watching...His gaze went back to that third screen. All the women there would have been heart-stopping beauties on a lesser world, but they were just enlisted men’s pickings on Trantor. With so many billions of women to choose from, the ones less than spectacular were simply ignored.

Smiling in anticipation, Gilmer took the spiral slidewalk up to the Imperial bedchambers. Not even in his wildest dreams had he imagined anything like them. Thousands of years of the best ingenuity money could buy had been lavished there on nothing but pleasure.

Billye smiled too, when he came in. Her tawny hair spilled over bare shoulders. Disdaining all the elaborations the bedchamber offered, Gilmer took her in his arms and sank to the floor with her. There he soon discovered an advantage of thick carpeting he had not suspected before.

She murmured lazily and lay in his arms through the afterglow. She’d been his woman since he was just an ambitious lieutenant. He’d always thought her splendid, both to look at and to love.

He did still, he told himself. He even felt the truth of the thought. But it was not complete truth, not any more. The televisor screen had shown him that, by Trantorian standards, she was ordinary. And how in reason and justice could the Emperor of the Galaxy and Lord of All possess a consort who was merely ordinary?

He grunted, softly. “A centicredit for your thoughts,” Billye said.

“Ahh, nothing much,” he said, and squeezed her. Her voice was not perfectly sweet either, he thought.

“Here he comes.” Maryan Drabel pointed to the single figure climbing down from the aircar that had descended in the no-man’s-land between Gilmer’s lines and those held by the student-soldiers of the University.

“He’s alone,” Yokim Sarns said in faint surprise. “I told him we were willing to grant him any reasonable number of bodyguards he wanted. He has more courage than I’d thought.”

“What difference does that make, when he can’t--or won’t--control his troops?” Maryan Drabel said bitterly. “How many raped women do we have in our clinic right now?”

“Thirty-seven,” Sarns answered. “And five men.”

“And that’s just from this one tiny corner of Trantor, and only counts people who got through Gilmer’s troops and ours,” she said. “How many over the whole planet, where he has forty billion people to terrorize? How many robberies? How many fires, set just for the fun of them? How many murders, Yokim? How do they weigh in the balance against one man’s courage?”

“They crush it.” Sarns passed a weary hand across his forehead. “I know that as well as you, Maryan. But if he has courage, we can’t handle him as we would have before. “

“There is that,” she admitted. “Quiet, now--he’s almost here. “

Gilmer, Sarns thought, looked more like a barbarian chief than Emperor, even if a purple cape billowed behind him as he advanced. Beneath it he wore the coverall blotched in shades of green and brown that his soldiers used. Sarns supposed it was a camouflage suit, but in Trantor’s gleaming corridors it had more often exposed than protected the troopers. The nondescript gray of Sarns’s own coat and trousers was harder to spot here.

The usurper’s boots beat out a metallic tattoo. “Majesty,” Sarns said, knowing he should speak first and also knowing that, since Gilmer had seized Trantor, the title was true de facto if not de jure. Sarns did not approve of dealing in untruths.

“You’re Dean Sarns, eh?” Gilmer’s granite rumble should have come out of that hard, bearded countenance. The Emperor of the Galaxy scratched his nose, went on. “You’ve got some tough fighters behind you, Sarns. I tell you right now, I wouldn’t mind taking the lot of them into my fleet. “

“You are welcome to put out a call, sire, but I doubt you’d find many volunteers,” Sarns answered. “These young men and women are not soldiers by trade, but rather students. They--and I--care more for abstract knowledge than for the best deployment of a blast-rifle company. “

Gilmer nodded. “I’d heard that said. I found it hard to believe. Truth to tell, Sarns, I still do. You spend your whole lives chasing this--what did you call it?--abstract knowledge?”

“We do,” Sarns said proudly. “This is the University, after all, the distillation of all the wisdom that has accumulated over the millennia of Imperial history. We codify it, systematize it, and, where we can, add to it. “

“It seems a milk-livered way to spend one’s time,” Gilmer remarked, careless of Sarns’s feelings or--more likely--reckoning the Dean would agree with him when he pointed out an obvious truth. “What good is knowledge that you can’t eat, drink, sleep with, or shoot at your enemies?”

He is a barbarian, Sarns thought, even if he’s lived all his life inside what still calls itself, with less and less reason, the Galactic Empire. Fortunately Sarns, like any administrator worth his desk, had practice not showing what he felt. He said, ‘“Well, let me give you an example, sire: how did you and your victorious army come to Trantor?”

“By starship, of course.” Gilmer stared. “How else, man? Did you expect us to walk?” He laughed at his own wit.

Sarns smiled a polite smile. “Of course not. But what happens if one of your busbars shorts out or a hydrochron needs repair?”

‘“We fix ‘em, as best we can. Seems like nobody in the whole blasted Galaxy understands a hyperatomic motor any more,” Gilmer said, scowling. Then he stopped dead. “That’s knowledge too, isn’t it? By the space fiend, Sarns, are you telling me you’ve got a university full of technicians who really know what they’re doing? If you do, I’ll impress ‘em into the fleet and make you--and them--so rich they won’t ever miss their book-films, I promise you that.”

“We do have some people--not many, I fear--studying such things. As I said before, you are welcome to speak with them. Some may even choose to accompany you, for the challenge of working on real equipment.” Sarns paused a moment in thought. “We also have skilled doctors, computer specialists, and students of many other disciplines of value to the Empire.”

He watched Gilmer nibble the bait. “And they’d do these same kinds of things for me?” the usurper asked.

“Some might,” Sarns said. “Others--probably more--would be willing to instruct your technicians and personnel here. Of course,” he added smoothly, “they would be less enthusiastic if you shot your way in. You would also likely waste a good many of them that way.”

“Hrmmp,” Gilmer said. After a moment, he went on. “But any ships with their techs, their medics, their computer people gone--they’d be no more use to us than if they rusted away.“

“Not immediately, perhaps, but later they would be of even greater value to you than they could ever be with the inadequately trained crews I gather they have now.”

Gilmer lowered his voice. “Sarns, I can’t afford to think about later. I’d bet a million credits against a burnt-out blaster cartridge that there’s at least three fleets moving on me the same way I moved on Dagobert. Now that Trantor’s fallen, all the dogs of space will want to pick her bones--and mine.”

Privately, Sarns thought the usurper was right about that. It would only be what Gilmer deserved, too. But the dean-turned-general felt sadness wash over him all the same. No time to bother to learn anything new, no time to think about anything but the moment--that had been the disease of the Galactic Empire for far too long. Gilmer had a worse case of it than the emperors before him, but the root sickness was the same.

Sarns did not sigh. He said, “Well, in any case this has taken our discussion rather far from the purpose at hand, which is, after all, merely to arrange an armistice between your forces and the students and staff of the University, so both we and you may return to what we consider our proper pursuits. “

“Aye, that’s so,” Gilmer said.

As he had not sighed, Sarns did not smile. Show a barbarian a short-term objective and he won’t look past it, he thought. “Would you care to examine our facilities here, so you can see how harmless we are under normal circumstances?” he said.

“Why not? Lead on, Dean Sarns, and let’s see what you’ve turned into soldiers. Who knows? Maybe I’ll try to recruit you...Gilmer laughed. So, without reservation, did Yokim Sarns. He hadn’t suspected Gilmer could say anything that funny.

What first struck Gilmer inside the University was the quiet. Almost everyone went around in soft-soled shoes, soundless on the metal flooring. Gilmer’s boots clanged resoundingly as ever, even raised echoes that ran down the corridors ahead of him. But both clang and echoes were tiny pebbles dropped into an ocean of stillness.

The people were as strange as the place, Gilmer thought. Those who had fought his men were still in gray like Sarns. The rest wore soft pastels that made them seem to flit like spirits along the hallways. Their low voices added to the impression that they really weren’t quite there.

Half-remembered childhood tales of ghosts rose in Gilmer’s mind. He shivered and made sure he stayed close to his guides. “What are they doing in there?” he asked, pointing. His voice caused echoes too, echoes that swiftly died.

Sarns glanced into the laboratory. “Something pertaining to neurobiology,” he said. “One moment.” He ducked inside. “That’s right--they’re working to improve the efficiency of sleep-inducers.”

Somehow the Dean pitched his voice so that it was clear but raised no reverberations. Gilmer resolved to imitate him. “And what’s going on there?” the Emperor of the Galaxy asked. Then he frowned, for he’d managed only a hoarse whisper that sounded filled with dread.

To his relief, Sarns appeared to take no notice. “That’s a psychostatistics research group,” the Dean answered casually. He walked on, assuming Gilmer knew what psychostatistics was.

Gilmer didn’t, but was not about to let on. He pointed to another doorway. Some people in that room were working with computers, others with what looked like chunks of rock. “What are they up to?” he asked. He still could not match Yokim Sarns’s easy tone.

“Ahh, that’s one of our most fascinating projects. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.” Gilmer, who wasn’t at all sure, waited for Sarns to go on: “Using ancient inscriptions and voice synthesizers, that team of linguists is attempting to reconstruct the mythical language called English, from which our modern Galactic tongue arose thousands of years ago.”

“Oh,” was all Gilmer said. He’d never heard of English, either. Well, too bad, he thought. He knew about a lot of things these soft academics had never heard of, things like field-stripping a blast-pistol, like small-unit actions.

Yokim Sarns might have plucked the thought from his head, and then twisted it in a way he did not like: “Mainly, though, we fought you so we could protect what you’re coming to now: the Library.”

“Everything humanity has ever learned is preserved here,” said Sarns’s aide Maryan Drabel.

Gilmer caught the note of pride in her voice. “ Are you in charge of it?” he asked.

She nodded and smiled. Gilmer cut ten years off the guess he’d made of her age from her grim face and drab clothing. She said, “This chamber here is the accessing room. Students and researchers come here first, to get a printout of the book-films and journal articles available in our files on the topics that interest them.”

“Where are all your book-films?” Gilmer craned his neck. He’d visited libraries on other planets once or twice, and found himself wading in film cases. He didn’t see any here. Suspicion grew in him. Was all this some kind of colossal bluff, designed to conceal who knew what? If it was, the whole University would pay.

But Maryan Drabel only laughed. “You’re not ready to see book-films yet. Before a student can even begin to view films, he or she needs to have some idea of what’s in them: more than a title can provide. What we’re coming to now is the Abstracts Section, where people weed through their possible reading lists with summaries of the documents that seem promising to them.”

More people fiddling with more computers. Gilmer almost succeeded in suppressing his yawn. Maryan Drabel went on. “We also have an acquisition and cataloguing division, which integrates new book-films into our collection. “

“New book-films?” Gilmer said. “You mean people still write them?”

“Not as many as when the University was founded,” the librarian said sadly. “ And, of course, now that the Periphery and even some of the inner regions have broken away from the Empire, we no longer see a lot of what is written, or only get a copy after many years. But we do still try, and surely no other collection in the Galaxy comes close to ours in scope or completeness.”

They came to an elevator. Yokim Sarns pressed the button. After a moment, the door opened. “This way, please,” Sarns said as he stepped in.

Maryan Drabel and Gilmer followed, the latter with some misgivings. If these University folk wanted to assassinate him, what better place than the cramped and secret confines of an elevator? But if they wanted to assassinate him, he’d been in their power since this tour started. He had to assume they didn’t.

The elevator purred downward, stopped. The door opened again. “These are the reading rooms,” Maryan Drabel said.

Gilmer saw row on row of cubicles. Most of them were empty. “Usually. they would be much busier,” Yokim Sarns remarked. “The people who would be busy using them have been on the fighting lines instead. “

As if to confirm his words, one of the closed cubicle doors opened. The young woman who emerged wore the gray of the University’s soldiers and had a blast rifle slung on her back. She looked grubby and tired, as a front-line soldier should. Gilmer noted that she also looked as though she’d forgotten all about the fighting and her weapon: her attention focused solely on the calculator pad she was keying as she walked toward the bank of elevators.

“Do you care to look inside a reading room?” Maryan Drabel asked.

Gilmer thought for a moment, shook his head. He’d been in a few reading rooms; they were alike throughout the Galaxy. The number of them here was impressive, but one by itself would not be.

“Is this everything you have to show me?” he asked.

“One thing more,” Maryan Drabel told him. shrugging, he ducked back into the elevator with her and Sarns.

Down they went again, down and down. “You are specially privileged, to see what we are about to show you,” Yokim Sarns said. “Few people ever will, few even from the University. We thought it would help you to understand us better.”

The elevator stopped. Gilmer stepped out, stared around. “By the space fiend,” he whispered in soft wonder.

The chamber extended for what had to be kilometers. From floor to ceiling, every shelf was packed full of book-films. “The computer can access them and project them to the appropriate reading room on request,” Maryan Drabel said.

Gilmer walked toward the nearest case. His boots thumped instead of clanging. He glanced down. “This is a rock floor,” he said. “Why isn’t it metal like everything else?”

“The book-film depositories are below the built-up part of Trantor,” Yokim Sarns explained. “There wouldn’t be room for them up there--that space is needed for people. Having them down here also gives them a certain amount of extra protection from catastrophe. Even the blast of a radiation weapon set off overhead probably wouldn’t reach down here.”

“You also have to understand that this is just one book-film chamber among many,” Maryan Drabel added. “We’ve used both dispersed storage and a lot of redundancy to do our best to ensure the collection’s safety. “

Gilmer had a sudden vision of the University folk tunneling like moles for years, for centuries, for millennia, honeycombing the very bedrock of Trantor as they dug storehouses for the knowledge they hoarded. Even worse, in his mind’s eye he imagined all the weight of rock and metal over his head. He’d grown up on a farming world full of wide open spaces, and had spent most of his life in space itself. To imagine everything above collapsing, crushing him so he would leave not even a red smear, made cold sweat start on his brow.

“Shall we go back up?” he said hoarsely.

“Certainly, sire.” Yokim Sarns’s voice was bland. “I hope you do see--now--that we are solely dedicated to the pursuit of learning, and will not interfere in the political life of the Empire so long as it does not invade our campus. On those terms, I think, we can arrange an armistice satisfactory to both sides. “

All Gilmer wanted to do--now--was get away from this catacomb, return to his own men. He noticed that Sarns hadn’t thumbed the elevator button. Maybe Sarns wouldn’t, until Gilmer agreed. “Yes, yes, of course.” He could hear how quickly he spoke, but could not help it. “You have your men put down their arms, and mine will stay away from the University.”

“Good enough,” Sarns said. As if he had been absentminded before--and perhaps that was all he had been--he pushed the button that summoned the elevator. Gilmer rode up in relieved silence; every second the elevator climbed seemed to lift a myria-ton from his shoulders.

When he and his guides returned to the level from which they had begun, a man came briskly toward them with two sheets of parchmentoid. “This is Egril Joons,” Sarns said. “What do you have for us, Egril?”

“Copies of the armistice agreement, for your signature and the Emperor Gilmer’s,” Joons replied. He held out a stylus.

Gilmer took it. He skimmed through one copy of the document, signed it, and was reaching for the other from Yokim Sarns when he suddenly thought to wonder how the armistice terms could be ready now when he’d only agreed to them moments before. “You were snooping,” he growled to Egril Joons.

“My apologies, but yes,” Joons said. “Voice monitoring is part of the security system for the book-films. This time I just made use of it to prepare copies as quickly as possible. I expected that your majesty would have other concerns that would soon need his attention.”

Gilmer recalled how badly he’d wanted to get back to his own troops. “Oh, very well, put that way,” he said. He signed the second copy of the armistice accord. This Joons fellow was righter than he knew, righter than he could know. Trantor had to be made ready to defend itself from space attack, and quickly, or Gilmer the Emperor of the Galaxy would soon be Gilmer the vaporized usurper.

Gilmer the Emperor of the Galaxy rolled up his copy of the agreement, absentmindedly stuck Egril Joons’s stylus in a tunic pocket, and said, sounding quite imperial indeed, “Now if you will be so good as to escort me back to my lines”

“Certainly.” Yokim Sarns handed the other copy of the armistice to Maryan Drabel. “Come this way, if you please.”

From behind, Maryan Drabel thought, Gilmer looked much more like an emperor than from the front. The shining purple cape lent him an air of splendor that did not match the camouflage suit he wore under it. Seen from the front, the cape only seemed a sad bit of stolen booty.

“An emperor shouldn’t look like a thief, “ she said.

“Why not?” Egril loons was still feeling pangs over his purloined stylus. ”That’s what he is.”

“Wizards!” Billye shouted. “You went into the wizards’ lair, and they enspelled you!”

“There’s no such things as wizards!” Gilmer shouted back.

“No? Then why didn’t you get anything worth having out of the University, when they were at our mercy?” she said.

“I did. We aren’t shooting at them any more, and they aren’t shooting at us. They recognize me as Emperor of the Galaxy. What more could I want?”

“To put the fear of cold space and hot death in them, that’s what. If you are the Emperor of the Galaxy, they should act like subjects, not like equals. Can the Emperor have an equal? And you let them.” Billye’s hair flew around her in a copper cloud as she shook her head in bewilderment. “I can’t believe you let them. You have all your men, the whole fleet--why not just crush them for their insolence?”

“Oh, leave me be,” Gilmer said sullenly. He didn’t need to hear this from Billye; he’d already heard it, more politely but the same tune, from Vergis Fenn. Fenn had asked him why, if the University folk were willing to instruct his personnel, that willingness didn’t show up in the armistice document. He’d been sullen with his fleet commander, too, not wanting to admit he hadn’t had the nerve to ask for the change in writing. Why hadn’t he? All the real power was on his side. But still--he hadn’t.

“No, I won’t leave you be,” Billye said now. “Somebody has to put backbone in you, especially since yours looks like it’s fallen out through your--”

“Shut up!” Gilmer roared in a voice that not one of his half-pirate spacemen or troopers dared disobey.

Billye dared. “I won’t either shut up. And there are so wizards. Every other tale that floats in from the Periphery talks about them.”

“Lies about them, you mean. “ Gilmer was just as glad to change the subject, even a little. His head ached. If Billye was going to be this abrasive, maybe he would find himself some pretty little Trantorian chit who’d only open her mouth to say yes.

“They aren’t lies, “ Billye said stubbornly.

“Well, what else could they be?” Gilmer said. “There’s no such thing as a man-sized force screen. There can’t be--the Empire doesn’t have ‘em, and the Empire has everything there is. There’s no way to open a Personal Capsule without having a man’s characteristic on file. So stories that talk about things like that have to be lies. “

“Or else the magicians do those things, and do ‘em by their magic,” Billye said. “ And what else but magic could have made you show the University not just mercy but--but--I don’t know what. Treat them like the place was theirs by right, when the Emperor has charge of everything there is.”

“If he can keep it,” Gilmer muttered. He stalked out of the bedchamber--he’d get no solace here, that was plain. A scoutship message had been waiting for him when he returned from the University grounds: a fleet was gathering not ten parsecs away, a fleet that did not belong to him. If he was going to keep Trantor, he’d have to fight for it allover again. Even a pinprick from the University might hurt him at such a time.

Why couldn’t Billye see that? Rage suddenly filled Gilmer. If she couldn’t, to the space fiend with her! He pointed at the first servant he spotted. “You!”

The man flinched. Unlike Billye, he--all the palace servants--knew Gilmer was no one to trifle with. “Sire?” he asked fearfully.

“Take as many flunkies as you need to, then go toss that big-mouthed wench out of my bedchamber. Find me someone new--I expect you have ways to take care of that. Someone worthy of an Emperor, mind you. But most of all, someone quiet.”

“Yes, sire.” The servant risked a smile. “That, majesty, I think we can handle.”

A room in the Library--not a room Gilmer had seen!

Yokim Sarns, Maryan Drabel, Egril Joons...dean, librarian, dietitian...general, chief of staff, quartermaster...and rather more. They stood before a wall of equations, red symbols on a gray background. Yokim Sarns, whose privilege it was to speak first, said, “I didn’t think it would be that easy.”

“Neither did I,” Maryan Drabel agreed. “I expected--the probabilities predicted--we would have to touch Gilmer’s mind to make sure he would leave us alone here.”

“That courage we saw helped a great deal,” Sarns said. “It let him gain respect for our student-soldiers where a more purely pragmatic man would simply have brushed aside their sacrifice because it conflicted with his own interests. “

“Mix that with superstitious awe at the accumulation of ancient knowledge we represent, let him see our goals and objectives--our ostensible goals and objectives--are irrelevant to his or slightly to his advantage, and he proved quite capable of deciding on his own to let us be,” Maryan Drabel said. “We came out of what could have been a nasty predicament very nicely indeed.”

Egril Joons had been studying the numbers and symbols, the possible decision-paths that led from Hari Seldon’s day through almost three centuries to the present--and beyond. Now he said, “I do believe this will be the only round.”

“The only round of sacks for Trantor?” Yokim Sarns studied the correlation at which Joons pointed; the equations obligingly grew on the Prime Radiant’s wall so he could see them better. “Yes, it does seem so, if our data from around the planet are accurate. Gilmer has done such an efficient job of destruction that Trantor won’t be worth looting again once this round of civil wars is done. “

“That was the lower probability, too,” Joons said. “Look--there was a better than seventy percent chance of two sacks at least forty years apart, and at least a fifteen percent chance of three or more, perhaps even spaced over a century.”

“Our lives and our work will certainly be easier this way,” Maryan Drabel said. “I know we’re well protected, but a stray missile--” She shivered.

“We still risk those for a little while longer,” Sarns said. “Gilmer is so blatantly a usurper that others will try to steal from him what he stole from Dagobert. But the danger of further major damage to Trantor as a whole has declined a great deal, and will grow still smaller as word of the Great Sack spreads. “ He pointed to the figures that supported his conclusion; Maryan Drabel pondered, at length nodded.

“And with Trantor henceforward effectively removed from psychohistoric consideration, so is the Galactic Empire,” Egril Joons said.

“The First Galactic Empire,” Yokim Sarns corrected gently.

“Well, of course.” loons accepted the tiny rebuke with good nature. “Now, though, we’ll be able to work toward the Second Empire without having to worry about concealing everything we do from prying imperial clerks and agents.”

“The Empire was always our greatest danger,” Maryan Drabel said. “We needed to be here at its heart to help protect the First Foundation, but at its heart also meant under its eyes, if it ever came to notice us. In the days before we fully developed the mind-touch, one seriously hostile commissioner of public safety could have wrecked us. “

“The probability was that we wouldn’t get any such, and we didn’t,” Egril loons. said.

“Probability, yes, but psychohistory can’t deal with individuals any more than physics can tell you exactly when anyone radium atom will decay,” she said stubbornly. The truth there was so self-evident that loons had to concede it, but not so graciously as he had to Yokim Sarns.

Sarns said, “Never mind, both of you. If you’ll look here”--the Prime Radiant, taking its direction from his will, revealed the portion of the Seldon Plan that lay just ahead--”you’ll see that we’re entering a period of consolidation. As you and Maryan have both pointed out, Egril, the First Empire is dead, while it will be several centuries yet before the new Empire that will grow from the First Foundation extends its influence to this part of the Galaxy.”

“Clear sailing for a while,” loons said. “ About time, too.”

“Don’t get complacent,” Maryan Drabel said.

“A warning the Second Foundation should always bear in mind,” Yokim Sarns said. “But, looking at the mathematics, I have to agree with Egril. Barring anything unforeseen--say, someone outside our ranks discovering the mind-touch--we should have no great difficulty in steering the proper course. And”--he smiled broadly, even a little smugly--”what are the odds of that?”

Shtetl Days

Harry Turtledove

illustration by Gary Kelley

Jakub Shlayfer opened the door and walked outside to go to work. Before he could shut it again, his wife called after him: "Alevai it should be a good day! We really need the gelt!"

"Alevai, Bertha. Omayn," Jakub agreed. The door was already shut by then, but what difference did that make? It wasn’t as if he didn’t know they were poor. His lean frame, the rough edge on the brim of his broad, black hat, his threadbare long, black coat, and the many patches on his boot soles all told the same story.

But then, how many Jews in Wawolnice weren’t poor? The only one Jakub could think of was Shmuel Grynszpan, the undertaker. His business was as solid and certain as the laws of God. Everybody else’s? Groszy and zlotych always came in too slowly and went out too fast.

He stumped down the unpaved street, skirting puddles. Not all the boot patches were everything they might have been. He didn’t want to get his feet wet. He could have complained to Mottel Cohen, but what was the use? Mottel did what Mottel could do. And it wasn’t as if Wawolnice had--or needed--two cobblers. It you listened to Mottel’s kvetching, the village didn’t need one cobbler often enough.

The watery spring morning promised more than the day was likely to deliver. The sun was out, but clouds to the west warned it was liable to rain some more. Well, it wouldn’t snow again till fall. That was something. Jakub skidded on mud and almost fell. It might be something, but it wasn’t enough.

Two-story houses with steep, wood-shingled roofs crowded the street from both sides and caused it to twist here and turn there. They made it hard for the sun to get down to the street and dry up the mud. More Jews came out of the houses to go to their jobs. The men dressed pretty much like Jakub. Some of the younger ones wore cloth caps instead of broad-brimmed hats. Chasidim, by contrast, had fancy shtreimels, with the brims made from mink.

A leaning fence made Jakub go out toward the middle of the narrow street. Most of the graying planks went up and down. For eight or ten feet, though, boards running from side to side patched a break. They were as ugly as the patches on his boots. A hooded crow perched on the fence jeered at Jakub.

He had to push in tight to the fence because an old couple from the country were pushing a handcart toward him, and making heavy going of it. The crow flew away. Wicker baskets in the handcart were piled high with their fiery horseradish, milder red radishes, onions, leeks, and kale.

"Maybe you’ll see my wife today, Moishe," Jakub called.

"Here’s hoping," the old man said. His white beard spilled in waves halfway down his chest. He wore a brimless fur cap that looked something like an upside-down chamber pot.

Chamber pots . . . The air was thick with them. Shmuel Grynszpan had piped water in his house, as his wife never tired of boasting. Not many other Jews--and precious few Poles--in Wawolnice did. They said--whoever they were--you stopped noticing how a village stank once you’d lived in it for a little while. As he often did, Jakub wished they knew what they were talking about.

Signs above the tavern, the dry-goods store, the tailor’s shop, Jakub’s own sorry little business, and the handful of others Wawolnice boasted were in both Polish and Yiddish. Two different alphabets running two different ways . . . If that didn’t say everything that needed saying about how Jews and Poles got along--or didn’t get along--Jakub couldn’t imagine what would.

He used a fat iron key to open the lock to his front door. The hinges creaked when he pulled it toward him. Have to oil that, he thought. Somewhere in his shop, he had a copper oilcan. If he could find it, if he remembered to look for it . . . If he didn’t, neither the world nor even the door was likely to come to an end.

He was a grinder. Anything that was dull, he could sharpen: knives, scissors, straight razors (for the Poles--almost all the Jewish men wore beards), plowshares, harvester blades. He was a locksmith. He repaired clocks--and anything else with complicated gearing. He made umbrellas out of wire and scrap cloth, and fixed the ones he’d made before. He sold patent medicines, and brewed them up from this and that in the dark, musty back room. He would turn his hand to almost anything that might make a zloty.

Lots of things might make a zloty. Hardly anything, outside of Grynszpan’s business, reliably did. Wawolnice wasn’t big enough to need a full-time grinder or locksmith or repairman or umbrella maker or medicine mixer. Even doing all of them at once, Jakub didn’t bring home enough to keep Bertha happy.

Of course, he could have brought home more than the undertaker made and still not kept his wife happy. Some people weren’t happy unless they were unhappy. There was a paradox worthy of the Talmud--unless you knew Bertha.

Across the way, the little boys in Alter Kaczyne’s kheder began chanting the alef-bays. While Alter worked with them, their older brothers and cousins would wrestle with Hebrew vocabulary and grammar on their own. Or maybe the melamed’s father would lend a hand. Chaim Kaczyne coughed all the time and didn’t move around very well anymore, but his wits were still clear.

Jakub went to work on a clock a Polish woman had brought in. His hands were quick and clever. Scars seamed them; you couldn’t be a grinder without things slipping once in a while. And dirt and grease had permanent homes under his nails and in the creases on top of his fingers. But hands were to work with, and work with them he did.

"Here we are," he muttered: a broken tooth on one of the gears. He rummaged through a couple of drawers to see if he had one that matched. And sure enough! The replacement went into the clock. He didn’t throw out the damaged one. He rarely threw anything out. He’d braze on a new tooth and use the gear in some less demanding place.

The woman came in not long after he finished the clock. She wore her blond hair in a short bob; her skirt rose halfway to her knees. You’d never catch a Jewish woman in Wawolnice in anything so scandalously short. She nodded to find the clock ticking again. They haggled a little over the price. Jakub had warned her it would go up if he had to put in a new gear. She didn’t want to remember. She was shaking her head when she smacked coins down on the counter and walked out.

He eyed--not to put too fine a point on it, he leered at--her shapely calves as her legs twinkled away. He was a man, after all. He was drawn to smooth flesh the way a butterfly was drawn to flowers. No wonder the women of his folk covered themselves from head to foot. No wonder Jewish wives wore sheitels and head scarves. They didn’t want to put themselves on display like that. But the Poles were different. The Poles didn’t care.

So what? The Poles were goyim.

He sharpened one of his own knives, a tiny, precise blade. He often did that when he had nothing else going on. He owned far and away the sharpest knives in the village. He would have been happier if they were duller, so long as it was because he stayed too busy to work on them.

A kid carrying a basket of bagels stuck his head in the door. Jakub spent a few groszy to buy one. The boy hurried away, short pants showing off his skinny legs. He didn’t have a police license to peddle, so he was always on the dodge.

"Barukh atah Adonai, eloyahynu melekh ha-olam, ha-motzi lekhem min ha-aretz," Jakub murmured. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who makest bread to come forth from the earth. Only after the prayer did he eat the bagel.

Yiddish. Polish. Hebrew. Aramaic. He had them all. No one who knew Yiddish didn’t also know German. A man who spoke Polish could, at need, make a stab at Czech or Ruthenian or Russian. All the Yehudim in Wawolnice were scholars, even if they didn’t always think of themselves so.

Back to sharpening his own knives. It had the feel of another slow day. Few days here were anything else. The ones that were, commonly weren’t good days.

After a while, the front door creaked open again. Jakub jumped to his feet in surprise and respect. "Reb Eliezer!" he exclaimed. "What can I do for you today?" Rabbis, after all, had knives and scissors that needed sharpening just like other men’s.

But Eliezer said, "We were talking about serpents the other day." He had a long, pale, somber face, with rusty curls sticking out from under his hat brim, a wispy copper beard streaked with gray, and cat-green eyes.

"Oh, yes. Of course." Jakub nodded. They had been speaking of serpents, and all sorts of other Talmudic pilpul, in the village’s bet ha-midrash attached to the little shul. The smell of the books in the tall case there, the aging leather of their bindings, the paper on which they were printed, even the dust that shrouded the seldom-used volumes, were part and parcel of life in Wawolnice.

So . . . No business--no moneymaking business--now. Bertha would not be pleased to see this. She would loudly not be pleased to see it, as a matter of fact. But she would also be secretly proud because the rabbi chose her husband, a grinder of no particular prominence, with whom to split doctrinal hairs.

"Obviously," Reb Eliezer said in portentous tones, "the serpent is unclean for Jews to eat or to handle after it is dead. It falls under the ban of Leviticus 11:29, 11:30, and 11:42."

"Well, that may be so, but I’m not so sure," Jakub answered, pausing to light a stubby, twisted cigar. He offered one to Reb Eliezer, who accepted with a murmur of thanks. After blowing out harsh smoke, the grinder went on, "I don’t think those verses are talking about serpents at all."

Eliezer’s gingery eyebrows leaped. "How can you say such a thing?" he demanded, wagging a forefinger under Jakub’s beaky nose. "Verse 42 says, ‘Whatsoever goeth upon the belly, and whatsoever goeth upon all four, or whatsoever hath more feet among all creeping things that creep upon the earth, them ye shall not eat; for they are an abomination.’" Like Jakub, he could go from Yiddish to Biblical Hebrew while hardly seeming to notice he was switching languages.

Jakub shrugged a stolid shrug. "I don’t hear anything there that talks about serpents. Things that go on all fours, things with lots of legs. I don’t want to eat a what-do-you-call-it--a centipede, I mean. Who would? Even a goy wouldn’t want to eat a centipede . . . I don’t think." He shrugged again, as if to say no Jew counted on anything that had to do with goyim.

"‘Whatsoever goeth upon the belly . . . among all the creeping things that creep upon the earth,’" Reb Eliezer repeated. "And this same phrase also appears in the twenty-ninth verse, which says, ‘These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth;--’"

"‘ --the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.’" Jakub took up the quotation, and went on into the next verse: "‘ And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.’ I don’t see a word in there about serpents." He blew out another stream of smoke, not quite at the rabbi.

Eliezer affected not to notice. "Since when is a serpent not a creeping thing that goeth upon its belly? Will you tell me it doesn’t?"

"It doesn’t now," Jakub admitted.

"It did maybe yesterday?" Eliezer suggested sarcastically.

"Not yesterday. Not the day before yesterday, either," Jakub said. "But when the Lord, blessed be His name, made the serpent, He made it to speak and to walk on its hind legs like a man. What else does that? Maybe He made it in His own image."

"But God told the serpent, ‘Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast in the field: upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.’"

"So He changed it a little. So what?" Jakub said. Reb Eliezer’s eyebrow jumped again at a little, but he held his peace. The grinder went on, "Besides, the serpent is to blame for mankind’s fall. Shouldn’t we pay him back by cooking him in a stew?"

"Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t. But that argument isn’t Scriptural," the rabbi said stiffly.

"Well, what if it isn’t? How about this . . . ?" Jakub went off on another tangent from the Torah.

They fenced with ideas and quotations through another cigar apiece. At last, Reb Eliezer threw his pale hands in the air and exclaimed, "In spite of the plain words of Leviticus, you come up with a hundred reasons why the accursed serpent ought to be as kosher as a cow!"

"Oh, not a hundred reasons. Maybe a dozen." Jakub was a precise man, as befitted a trade where a slip could cost a finger. But he also had his own kind of pride: "Give me enough time, and I suppose I could come up with a hundred."

A sort of a smile lifted one corner of Reb Eliezer’s mouth. "Then perhaps now you begin to see why Rabbi Jokhanan of Palestine, of blessed memory, said hundreds of years ago that no man who could not do what you are doing had the skill he needed to open a capital case."

As it so often did, seemingly preposterous Talmudic pilpul came back to the way Jews were supposed to live their lives. "I should hope so," Jakub answered. "You have to begin a capital case with the reasons for acquitting whoever is on trial. If you can’t find those reasons, someone else had better handle the case."

"I agree with you." The rabbi wagged his forefinger at Jakub once more. "You won’t hear me tell you that very often."

"Gevalt! I should hope not!" Jakub said in mock horror.

Reb Eliezer’s eyes twinkled. "And so I had better go," he continued, as if the grinder hadn’t spoken. "The Lord bless you and keep you."

"And you, Reb," Jakub replied. Eliezer dipped his head. He walked out of the shop and down the street. A man came in wanting liniment for a horse. Jakub compounded some. It made his business smell of camphor and turpentine the rest of the day. It also put a couple of more zlotych in his pocket. Bertha would be . . . less displeased.

Shadows stretched across Wawolnice. Light began leaking out of the sky. The rain had held off, anyhow. People headed home from their work. Jakub was rarely one of the first to call it a day. Before long, though, the light coming in through the dusty front windows got too dim to use. Time to quit, all right.

He closed up and locked the door. He’d done some tinkering with the lock. He didn’t think anybody not a locksmith could quietly pick it. Enough brute force, on the other hand . . . Jews in Poland understood all they needed to about brute force, and about who had enough of it. Jakub Shlayfer’s mobile mouth twisted. Polish Jews didn’t, never had, and never would.

He walked home through the gathering gloom. "Stinking Yid!" The shrei in Polish pursued him. His shoulders wanted to sag under its weight, and the weight of a million more like it. He didn’t, he wouldn’t, let them. If the mamzrim saw they’d hurt you, they won. As long as a rock didn’t follow, he was all right. And if one did, he could duck or dodge. He hoped.

No rocks tonight. Candles and kerosene lamps sent dim but warm glows out into the darkness. If you looked at the papers, electricity would come to the village soon. Then again, if you looked at the papers and believed everything you read in them, you were too dumb to live.

Bertha met him at the door. Sheitel, head scarf over it, long black dress . . . She still looked good to him. She greeted him with, "So what were you and Reb Eliezer going on about today?"

"Serpents," Jakub answered.

"Pilpul." His wife’s sigh said she’d hoped for better, even if she hadn’t expected it. "I don’t suppose he had any paying business."

"He didn’t, no," the grinder admitted. "But Barlicki’s wife came in for her clock. I had to swap out a gear, so I charged her more. I told her before that I would, but she still didn’t like it."

"And God forbid you should make Barlicki’s wife unhappy." Bertha knew he thought the Polish woman was pretty, then. How long would she go on giving him a hard time about that? The next couple of days ought to be interesting. Not necessarily enjoyable, but interesting.

He did what he could to show Bertha he appreciated her. Nostrils twitching, he said, "What smells so good?"

"Soup with chicken feet," she replied, sounding slightly softened. "Cabbage, carrots, onions, mangel-wurzel . . ."

Mangel-wurzel was what you used when you couldn’t afford turnips. Chicken feet were what you put in soup when you wanted it to taste like meat but you couldn’t afford much of the genuine article. You could gnaw on them, worrying off a little skin or some of the tendons that would have led to the drumsticks. You wouldn’t rise up from the table happy, but you might rise up happier.

He stepped past her and into the small, crowded front room, with its rammed-earth floor and battered, shabby furniture. The little brass mezuzah still hung on the doorframe outside. He rarely gave it a conscious thought. Most of the time he only noticed it when it wasn’t there, so to speak. Stealing mezuzahs was one way Polish kids found to aggravate their Jewish neighbors. Not only that, but they might get a couple of groszy for the brass.

Bertha closed the front door behind him and let the bar fall into its bracket. The sound of the stout plank thudding into place seemed very final, as if it put a full stop to the day. And so--again, in a manner of speaking--it did.

Jakub walked over to the closet door. That the cramped space had room for a closet seemed something not far from miraculous. He wasn’t inclined to complain, though. Oh, no--on the contrary. Neither was Bertha, who came up smiling to stand beside him as he opened the door.

Then they walked into the closet. They could do that now. The day was over. Jakub shoved coats and dresses out of the way. They smelled of wool and old sweat. Bertha flicked a switch as she closed the closet door. A ceiling light came on.

"Thanks, sweetie," Jakub said. "That helps."

In back of the clothes stood another door, this one painted battleship gray. In German, large, neatly stenciled black letters on the hidden doorway warned AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Being an authorized person, Jakub hit the numbers that opened that door. It showed a concrete stairway leading down. The walls to the descending corridor were also pale gray. Blue-tinged light from fluorescent tubes in ceiling fixtures streamed into the closet.

Jakub started down the stairs. Bertha was an authorized person, too. She followed him, pausing only to close the hidden door behind them. A click announced it had locked automatically, as it was designed to do. The grinder and his wife left Wawolnice behind.

Men and women in grimy Jewish costumes and about an equal number dressed as Poles from the time between the War of Humiliation and the triumphant War of Retribution ambled along an underground hallway. They chatted and chattered and laughed, as people who’ve worked together for a long time will at the end of a day.

Arrows on the walls guided them toward their next destination. Explaining the arrows were large words beside them: TO THE SHOWERS. The explanation was about as necessary as a second head, but Germans had a habit of overdesigning things.

Veit Harlan shook himself like a dog that had just scrambled out of a muddy creek. That was how he felt, too. Like any actor worth his salt, he immersed himself in the roles he played. When the curtain came down on another day, he always needed a little while to remember he wasn’t Jakub Shlayfer, a hungry Jew in a Polish village that had vanished from the map more than a hundred years ago.

He wasn’t the only one, either. He would have been amazed if he had been. People heading for the showers to clean up after their latest shift in Wawolnice went right on throwing around the front vowels and extra-harsh gutturals of Yiddish. Only little by little did they start using honest German again.

When they did, the fellow who played Reb Eliezer--his real name was Ferdinand Marian--and a pimply yeshiva-bukher (well, the pimply performer impersonating a young yeshiva-bukher) went right on with whatever disputation Eliezer had found after leaving Jakub’s shop. They went right on throwing Hebrew and Aramaic around, too. And the reb and the kid with zits both kept up a virtuoso display of finger-wagging.

"They’d better watch that," Veit murmured to the woman who had been Bertha a moment before.

"I know." She nodded. She was really Kristina Söderbaum. They were married to each other out in the Reich as well as in the village. The people who ran Wawolnice used real couples whenever they could. They claimed it made the performances more convincing. If that meant Veit got to work alongside his wife, he wouldn’t complain.

The guy who played Alter the melamed caught up to Veit and Kristi from behind. In the wider world, he was Wolf Albach-Retty. "Hey, Veit. Did you see the gal who flashed her tits at me this morning?" he exclaimed.

"No! I wish I would have," Harlan answered. His wife planted an elbow in his ribs. Ignoring her, he went on, "When did that happen?"

"It was early--not long after the village opened up," Wolf said.

"Too bad. I was working on that clock for a lot of the morning. I guess I didn’t pick the right time to look up."

"A bunch of the kids did. Boy, they paid even less attention to me than usual after that," Albach-Retty said. Veit laughed. The melamed rolled his eyes. "It’s funny for you. It’s funny for the damn broad, too. But I’m the guy who had to deal with it. When I was potching the little bastards, I was potching ’em good." He mimed swatting a backside.

"Nothing they haven’t got from you before," Veit said, which was also true. Everything the villagers did in Wawolnice was real. They pretended the curious people who came to gawk at them weren’t there. But how were you supposed to pretend a nice set of tits wasn’t there (and Veit would have bet it was a nice set--otherwise the woman wouldn’t have shown them off)?

"Worse than usual, I tell you." Wolf leaned toward self-pity.

"You’ll live. So will they," Veit said. "If they don’t like it, let ’em file a complaint with the SPCA." Kristi giggled, which was what he’d hoped for. After a moment, Wolf Albach-Retty laughed, too. That was a bonus.

The corridor to the showers split, one arrow marked MEN, the other WOMEN. Veit stripped off the heavy, baggy, dark, sweaty outfit of a Wawolnice Jew with a sigh of relief. He chucked it into a cubbyhole and scratched. The village wasn’t a hundred percent realistic. They did spray it to keep down the bugs. You weren’t supposed to pick up fleas or lice or bedbugs, even if you were portraying a lousy, flea-bitten kike.

Theory was wonderful. Veit had found himself buggy as new software more than once coming off a shift. So had Kristi. So had just about all the other performers. It was a hazard of the trade, like a director who happened to be an oaf.

He didn’t discover any uninvited guests tonight. Hot water and strong soap wiped away the stinks from Wawolnice. He took showering with a bunch of other men completely for granted. He’d started as a Pimpf in the Hitler Jugend, he’d kept it up through the Labor Service and his two-year hitch in the Wehrmacht, and now he was doing it some more. So what? Skin was skin, and he didn’t get a charge out of guys.

Reb Eliezer and the yeshiva-bukher were still arguing about the Talmud in the shower. They were both circumcised. Quite a few of the men playing Jews were. Prizing realism as it did, the Reenactors’Guild gave you a raise if you were willing to have the operation. Veit kept all his original equipment. He didn’t need the cash that badly, and Kristina liked him fine the way he was.

He grabbed a cotton towel, dried himself off, and tossed the towel into a very full bin. A bath attendant in coveralls--a scared, scrawny Slavic Untermensch from beyond the Urals--wheeled the bin away and brought out an empty one. Veit noticed him hardly more than he did the tourists who came to stare at Wawolnice and see what Eastern Europe had been like before the Grossdeutsches Reich cleaned things up.

You were trained not to notice tourists. You were trained to pretend they weren’t there, and not to react when they did stuff (though Veit had never had anybody flash tits at him). It was different with the bath attendant. Did you notice a stool if you didn’t intend to sit down on it? More like that.

Veit spun the combination dial on his locker. He put on his own clothes: khaki cotton slacks, a pale green polo shirt, and a darker green cardigan sweater. Synthetic socks and track shoes finished the outfit. It was much lighter, much softer, and much more comfortable than his performing costume.

He had to twiddle his thumbs for a couple of minutes before Kristi came down the corridor from her side of the changing area. Women always took longer getting ready. Being only a man, he had no idea why. But he would have bet the ancient Greeks told the same jokes about it as modern Aryans did.

She was worth the wait. Her knee-length light blue skirt showed off her legs. Veit wasn’t the least bit sorry the Reich still frowned on pants for women. Her top clung to her in a way that would have made the real Jews on whom those of Wawolnice were based plotz. And the sheitel she had on now was attractively styled and an almost perfect match for the mane of wavy, honey-blond hair she’d sacrificed to take the role of Bertha Shlayfer.

"Let’s go home," she said, and yawned. She shook her head. "Sorry. It’s been a long day."

"For me, too," Veit agreed. "And it doesn’t get any easier."

"It never gets any easier," Kristi said.

"I know, but that isn’t what I meant. Didn’t you see the schedule? They’ve got a pogrom listed for week after next."

"Oy!" Kristi burst out. Once you got used to Yiddish, plain German could seem flavorless beside it. And Veit felt like going Oy! himself. Pogroms were a pain, even if the tourists got off on them. Sure, the powers that be brought in drugged convicts for the people playing Poles to stomp and burn, but reenactors playing Jews always ended up getting hurt, too. Accidents happened. And, when you were living your role, sometimes you just got carried away and didn’t care who stood in front of you when you threw a rock or swung a club.

"Nothing we can do about it but put on a good show." He pointed down the corridor toward the employee parking lot. "Come on. Like you said, let’s go home."

The corridor spat performers out right next to the gift shop. Another sign reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and a prominently displayed surveillance camera discouraged anyone else from moving against the stream. A ragged apple orchard screened the gift shop and the parking lot off from Wawolnice proper. That was good, as far as Veit was concerned. The gift shop was about paperbacks of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and plastic Jew noses and rubber Jew lips. Once upon a time, no doubt, the village had been about the same kinds of things. It wasn’t anymore, or it wasn’t exactly and wasn’t all the time. As things have a way of doing, Wawolnice had taken on a life of its own.

Veit opened the passenger-side door for his wife. Kristi murmured a word of thanks as she slid into the Audi. He went around and got in himself. The electric engine silently came to life. The car didn’t have the range of a gas auto, but more charging stations went up every day. Though petroleum might be running low, plenty of nuclear power plants off in the East made sure the Reich had plenty of electricity. If they belched radioactive waste into the environment every once in a while, well, that was the local Ivans’worry.

He drove out of the lot, up the ramp, and onto the Autobahn, heading east toward their flat in Lublin. A garish, brilliantly lit billboard appeared in his rearview mirror. The big letters were backwards, but he knew what they said: COME SEE THE JEW VILLAGE! ADMISSION ONLY 15 REICHSMARKS! The sinister, hook-nosed figure in black on the billboard was straight out of a cartoon. It only faintly resembled the hardworking reenactors who populated Wawolnice.

"I hate that stupid sign," Veit said, as he did at least twice a week. "Makes us look like a bunch of jerks."

"It’s like a book cover," Kristina answered, as she did whenever he pissed and moaned about the billboard. "It draws people in. Then they can see what we’re really about."

"It draws assholes in," Veit said morosely. "They hold their noses at the smells and they laugh at our clothes and they show off their titties and think it’s funny."

"You weren’t complaining when Wolf told you about that," his wife pointed out. "Except that you didn’t see it, I mean."

"Yeah, well . . ." He took one hand off the wheel for a moment to make a vague gesture of appeasement.

Lublin was about half an hour away at the Autobahn’s Mach schnell! speeds. It was clean and bright and orderly, like any town in the Grossdeutsches Reich these days. It had belonged to Poland, of course, before the War of Retribution. It had been a provincial capital, in fact. But that was a long time ago now. These days, Poles were almost as much an anachronism as Jews. The Germans had reshaped Lublin in their own image. They looked around and saw that it was good.

"Want to stop somewhere for dinner?" Veit asked as he pulled off the highway and drove into the city.

"Not really. I am tired," Kristi said. "We’ve got leftovers back at the flat. If that’s all right with you."

"Whatever you want," he said.

They could have afforded a bigger apartment, but what would the point have been? They poured most of their time and most of their energy into the village. If you weren’t going to do that, you didn’t belong at Wawolnice. They used the flat as a place to relax and to sleep. How fancy did you need to be for that?

Kristina warmed up some rolls in the oven. A few minutes later, she put sweet-and-sour cabbage stuffed with veal sausage and rice into the microwave. Veit’s contribution to supper was pouring out two tumblers of Greek white wine. "Oh, thank you," his wife said. "I could use one tonight."

"Me, too." Veit went on in Hebrew: "Barukh atah Adonai, elohaynu melekh ha-olam, bo’ re p’ ri ha-gafen." Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who bringest forth the fruit of the vine.

"Practice," Kristi said as they clinked the big, heavy glasses.

"Aber natürlich," Veit agreed. "If you don’t use a language, you’ll lose it." He assumed the flat had microphones. He’d never heard of one that didn’t. How much attention the Sicherheitsdienst paid . . . well, who could guess? Then again, who wanted to find out the hard way? If you started praying in the dead language of a proscribed Volk, better to let any possible SD ear know you had a reason.

The microwave buzzed. Kristina took out the glass tray, then retrieved the rolls. Veit poured more wine. His wife put food on the table. He blessed the bread and the main course, as he had the wine. They ate. He made his portion disappear amazingly fast.

"Do you want more?" Kristi asked. "There is some."

He thought about it, then shook his head. "No, that’s all right. But I was hungry."

She was doing the dishes when the phone rang. Veit picked it up. "Bitte?" He listened for a little while, then said, "Hang on a second." Putting his palm on the mouthpiece, he spoke over the rush of water in the sink: "It’s your kid sister. She wants to know if we feel like going out and having a few drinks."

She raised an eyebrow as she turned off the faucet. He shrugged back. She reached for the phone. He handed it to her. "Ilse?" she said. "Listen, thanks for asking, but I think we’ll pass. . . . Yes, I know we said that the last time, too, but we’re really beat tonight. And there’s a pogrom coming up soon, and we’ll have to get ready for that. They’re always meshuggeh. . . . It means crazy, is what it means, and they are. . . . Yes, next time for sure. So long." She hung up.

"So what will we do?" Veit asked.

"I’m going to finish the dishes," his wife said virtuously. "Then? I don’t know. TV, maybe. And some more wine."

"Sounds exciting." Veit picked up the corkscrew. They’d just about killed this bottle. He’d have to summon reinforcements.

They plopped down on the sofa. TV was TV, which is to say, dull. The comedies were stupid. When a story about a cat up a tree led the news, you knew there was no news. The local footballers were down 3-1 with twenty minutes to play.

And so it wasn’t at all by accident that Veit’s hand happened to fall on Kristina’s knee. She made as if to swat him, but her eyes sparkled. Instead of pulling away, he slid the hand up under her skirt. She swung toward him. "Who says it won’t be exciting tonight?"she asked.

#

Getting ready for the pogrom kept everyone hopping. The reenactors who played Wawolnice’s Jews and Poles had to go on doing everything they normally did. You couldn’t disappoint the paying customers, and the routine of village life had an attraction of its own once you got used to it. And they had to ready the place so it would go through chaos and come out the other side with as little damage as possible.

A couple of buildings would burn down. They’d get rebuilt later, during nights. Along with everyone else, Veit and Kristi made sure the hidden sprinkler systems in the houses and shops nearby were in good working order, and that anything sprinklers might damage was replaced by a waterproof substitute.

Veit also moved the Torah from the Ark in the shul. A blank substitute scroll would burn, along with a couple of drugged and conditioned convicts who would try to rescue it. The Poles would make a bonfire of the books in the bet ha-midrash--but not out of the real books, only of convincing fakes.

People slept in their village living quarters, or on cots in the underground changing areas. Hardly anyone had time to go home. They wore their costumes all the time, even though the laundry did tend to them more often than would have been strictly authentic.

Eyeing a bandage on his finger--a knife he was sharpening had got him, a hazard of his village trade--Veit Harlan grumbled, "I’m Jakub a lot more than I’m me these days."

"You aren’t the only one," Kristina said. His wife was also eligible for a wound badge. She’d grated her knuckle along with some potatoes that went into a kugel.

"We’ll get to relax a little after the pogrom," Veit said. "And it’ll bring in the crowds. Somebody told me he heard a tourist say they were advertising it on the radio."

"‘ Come see the Jews get what’s coming to them--again!’" Kristi did a fine impersonation of an excitable radio announcer. It would have been a fine impersonation, anyhow, if not for the irony that dripped from her voice.

"Hey," Veit said--half sympathy, half warning.

"I know," she answered. Her tone had been too raw. "I’m just tired."

"Oh, sure. Me, too. Everybody is," Veit said. "Well, day after tomorrow and then it’s over--till the next time."

"Till the next time," Kristi said.

"Yeah. Till then," Veit echoed. That wasn’t exactly agreement. Then again, it wasn’t exactly disagreement. Wawolnice moved in strange and mysterious ways. The Reich’s Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German Populace knew in broad outline what it wanted to have happen in the village. After all, National Socialism had been closely studying the Jewish enemy since long before the War of Retribution. Without such study, the Commissariat would never have been able to re-create such a precise copy of a shtetl. Details were up to the reenactors, though. They didn’t have scripts. They improvised every day.

The pogrom broke out in the market square. That made sense. A Polish woman screeched that a Jew selling old clothes--old clothes specially manufactured for the village and lovingly aged--was cheating her. Rocks started flying. Jews started running. Whooping, drunken Poles overturned carts, spilling clothes and vegetables and rags and leather goods and what-have-you on the muddy ground. Others swooped down to steal what they could.

When the melamed and the boys from the kheder fled, Veit figured Jakub had better get out, too. A rock crashing through his shop’s front window reinforced the message. This part of Wawolnice wasn’t supposed to burn. All those elaborate fire-squelching systems should make sure of that. But anything you could make, you could also screw up. And so he scuttled out the front door, one hand clapped to his black hat so he shouldn’t, God forbid, go bareheaded even for an instant.

Schoolchildren, plump burghers on holiday, and tourists from places like Japan and Brazil photographed the insanity. You had to go on pretending they weren’t there. A pack of Poles were stomping a man in Jewish costume to death. One of the convict’s hands opened and closed convulsively as they did him in. He bleated out the last words that had been imposed on him: "Sh’ ma, Yisroayl, Adonai elohaynu, Adonai ekhod!" Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!

Another performer playing a Pole swung a plank at Veit. Had that connected, he never would have had a chance to gabble out his last prayer. But the reenactor missed--on purpose, Veit devoutly hoped. Still holding on to his hat, he ran down the street.

"Stinking Yid!" the performer roared in Polish. Veit just ran faster. Jews didn’t fight back, after all. Then he ran into bad luck--or rather, it ran into him. A flying rock caught him in the ribs.

"Oof!" he said, and then, "Vey iz mir!" When he breathed, he breathed knives. Something in there was broken. He had to keep running. If the Poles caught him, they wouldn’t beat him to death, but they’d beat him up. They couldn’t do anything else--realism came first. Oh, they might pull punches and go easy on kicks where they could, but they’d still hurt him. Hell, they’d already hurt him, even without meaning to.

Or they might not pull anything. Just as the reenactors in Jewish roles took pride in playing them to the hilt, so did the people playing Poles. If they were supposed to thump on Jews, they might go ahead and thump on any old Jew they could grab, and then have a drink or three to celebrate afterward.

A woman screamed. The shriek sounded alarmingly sincere, even by Wawolnice standards. Veit hoped things weren’t getting out of hand there. The less the senior inspectors from Lublin or even Berlin interfered with the way the village ran, the better for everybody here. "Jews" and "Poles" both took that as an article of faith.

Veit ducked into one of the buildings where Jews lived in one another’s laps. As long as nobody could see him from outside . . . A woman in there gaped at him. "What are you doing here?" she asked--still in Yiddish, still in character.

"I got hurt. They banged on my teakettle once too often," he answered, also sticking to his role. He grabbed at his side. Would he have to start coughing up blood to convince people? He was afraid he might be able to do it.

What kind of horrible grimace stretched across his face? Or had he gone as pale as that village miracle, a clean shirt? The woman didn’t argue with him any more (for a Wawolnice Jew, that came perilously close to falling out of one’s part). She threw open her closet door. "Go on. Disappear, already."

"God bless you and keep you. I wish my ribs would disappear." He ducked inside. She closed the outer door after him. He fumbled till he found the light switch. Then he went to the inner door, identical to the one in his own crowded home. He was an authorized person, all right. On the far side of that door lay the modern underpinnings to the early-twentieth-century Polish village.

Now he didn’t have to run for his life. Slowly and painfully, he walked down the concrete stairs and along a passageway to the first-aid center. He had to wait to be seen. He wasn’t the only villager who’d got hurt. Sure as hell, pogroms were always a mess.

A medical tech prodded his rib cage. "Gevalt!" Veit exclaimed.

"You don’t have to go on making like a Jew down here," the tech said condescendingly. Veit hurt too much to argue with him. The neatly uniformed Aryan felt him some more and listened to his chest with a stethoscope, then delivered his verdict: "You’ve got a busted slat or two, all right. Doesn’t seem to be any lung damage, though. I’ll give you some pain pills. Even with ’em, you’ll be sore as hell on and off the next six weeks."

"Aren’t you even going to bandage me up?" Veit asked.

"Nope. We don’t do that anymore, not in ordinary cases. The lung heals better unconstricted. Step off to one side now for your pills and your paperwork."

"Right," Veit said tightly. The tech might as well have been an auto mechanic. Now that he’d checked Veit’s struts and figured out what his trouble was, he moved on to the next dented chassis. And Veit moved on to pharmacy and bureaucracy.

A woman who would have been attractive if she hadn’t seemed so bored handed him a plastic vial full of fat green pills. He gulped one down, dry, then started signing the papers she shoved at him. That got a rise out of her: she went from bored to irked in one fell swoop. "What are those chicken scratches?" she demanded.

"Huh?" He looked down at the forms and saw he’d been scribbling Jakub Shlayfer in backwards-running Yiddish script on each signature line. He couldn’t even blame the dope; it hadn’t kicked in yet. Maybe pain would do for an excuse. Or maybe least said, soonest mended. He muttered "Sorry" and started substituting the name he’d been born with.

"That’s more like it." The woman sniffed loudly. "Some of you people don’t know the difference between who you are and who you play anymore."

"You’ve got to be kidding." Veit wrote his own name once again. "Nobody wants to break my ribs on account of who I am. That only happens when I put on this stuff." His wave encompassed his shtetl finery.

"Remember that, then. Better to be Aryan. Easier, too."

Veit didn’t feel like arguing. He did feel woozy--the pain pill started hitting hard and fast. "Easier is right," he said, and turned to leave the infirmary. The broken rib stabbed him again. He let out a hiss any snake, treyf or kosher, would have been proud of. The medical tech had been right, dammit. Even with a pill, he was sore as hell.

#

"We have to be meshuggeh to keep doing this," Kristina said as she piloted their car back toward Lublin at the end of the day.

"Right now, I won’t argue with you." Veit wasn’t inclined to argue about anything, not right now. Changing into ordinary German clothes had hurt more than he’d believed anything could. The prescription said Take one tablet at a time every four to six hours, as needed for pain. One tablet was sending a boy to do a man’s job, and a half-witted boy at that. He’d taken two. He still hurt--and now he had the brains of a half-witted boy himself. No wonder his wife sat behind the Audi’s wheel.

She flashed her lights at some Dummkopf puttering along on the Autobahn at eighty kilometers an hour. The jerk did eventually move over and let her by. Veit was too stoned for even that to annoy him, which meant he was very stoned indeed.

Kristi sighed as she zoomed past the old, flatulent VW. "But we’ll be back at the same old stand tomorrow," she said, daring him to deny it.

"What would you rather do instead?" he asked. She sent him a reproachful side glance instead of an answer. Wawolnice offered more chances for honest performing than almost anywhere else in the Reich. Television was pap. The movies, too. The stage was mostly pap: pap and revivals.

Besides, they’d been at the village for so long now, most of the people they’d worked with anywhere else had forgotten they existed. Wawolnice was a world unto itself. Most of the kids in the kheder really were the children of performers who played Jews in the village. Were they getting in on the ground floor, or were they trapped? How much of a difference was there?

Veit didn’t feel too bad as long as he held still. With the pills in him, he felt pretty damn good, as a matter of fact. Whenever he moved or coughed, though, all the pain pills in the world couldn’t hope to block the message his ribs sent. He dreaded sneezing. That would probably feel as if he were being torn in two--which might not be so far wrong.

Moving slowly and carefully, he made it up to the apartment with his wife. He started to flop down onto the sofa in front of the TV, but thought better of it in the nick of time. Lowering himself slowly and gently was a much better plan. Then he found a football match. Watching other people run and jump and kick seemed smarter than trying to do any of that himself.

"Want a drink?" Kristi asked.

One of the warning labels on the pill bottle cautioned against driving or running machinery while taking the drugs, and advised that alcohol could make things worse. "Oh, Lord, yes!" Veit exclaimed.

She brought him a glass of slivovitz. She had one for herself, too. He recited the blessing over fruit. He wasn’t too drug-addled to remember it. The plum brandy went down in a stream of sweet fire. "Anesthetic," Kristi said.

"Well, sure," Veit agreed. He made a point of getting good and anesthetized, too.

No matter how anesthetized he was, though, he couldn’t lie on his stomach. It hurt too much. He didn’t like going to bed on his back, but he didn’t have much choice. Kristi turned out the light, then cautiously straddled him. Thanks to the stupid pain pills, that was no damn good, either. No matter how dopey he was, he took a long, long time to fall asleep.

They went back to Wawolnice the next morning. Cleanup crews had labored through the night. If you didn’t live there, you wouldn’t have known a pogrom had raged the day before. Just as well, too, because no pogrom was laid on for today. You couldn’t run them too often. No matter how exciting they were, they were too wearing on everybody--although the Ministry of Justice never ran short on prisoners to be disposed of in interesting ways.

Putting on his ordinary clothes at the apartment had made Veit flinch. He’d swallowed a pain pill beforehand, but just the same . . . And changing into his Jew’s outfit under Wawolnice hurt even more. No wonder: the left side of his rib cage was all over black-and-blue.

"That looks nasty," Reb Eliezer said sympathetically, pointing. "Are you coming to shul this morning?"

"Fraygst nokh?" Veit replied in Jakub’s Yiddish. Do you need to ask? "Today I would even if it weren’t my turn to help make the minyan."

A couple of yeshiva-bykher were already poring over the Talmud when he got to the cramped little synagogue. The real books were back in place, then. The men who made up the ten required for services ranged in age from a couple just past their bar-mitzvahs to the melamed’s thin, white-bearded father. If the old man’s cough was only a performer’s art, he deserved an award for it.

They all put on their tefillin, wrapping the straps of one on their left arms and wearing the other so the enclosed text from the Torah was between their eyes. "Phylacteries" was the secular name for tefillin. It had to do with the idea of guarding. Veit’s aching ribs said he hadn’t been guarded any too well the day before. Wrapped in his tallis, he stood there and went through the morning service’s prayers with the rest of the men.

And he had a prayer of his own to add: the Birkhas ha-gomel, said after surviving danger. "Barukh atah Adonai, eloheinu melekh ha-olam, ha-gomel lahavayim tovos sheg’ malani kol tov." Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who bestowest good things on the unworthy, and hast bestowed upon me every goodness.

"Omayn," the rest of the minyan chorused. Their following response meant May He Who has bestowed upon you every goodness continue to bestow every goodness upon you. Selah.

At the end of the services, the melamed’s father poured out little shots of shnaps for everybody. He smacked his lips as he downed his. So did Veit. The two kids choked and coughed getting their shots down. Their elders smiled tolerantly. It wouldn’t be long before the youngsters knocked back whiskey as easily and with as much enjoyment as everyone else.

One by one, the men went off to their work on the village. Reb Eliezer set a hand on Veit’s arm as he was about to leave the shul. "I’m glad you remembered the Birkhas ha-gomel," the rabbi said quietly.

Veit raised an eyebrow. "What’s not to remember? Only someone who isn’t frum would forget such a thing. And, thank God, all the Jews in Wawolnice are pious." He stayed in character no matter how much it hurt. Right this minute, thanks to his ribs, it hurt quite a bit.

Eliezer’s cat-green stare bored into him. To whom did the rabbi report? What did he say when he did? A Jew in a Polish village wouldn’t have needed to worry about such things. A performer who was a Jew in a Polish village during working hours? You never could tell what somebody like that needed to worry about.

"Thank God," Reb Eliezer said now. He patted Veit on the back: gently, so as not to afflict him with any new pain. Then he walked over to the two men studying the Talmud and sat down next to one of them.

Part of Veit wanted to join the disputation, too. But the services were over. He had work waiting at the shop: not so much work as his wife would have liked, but work nonetheless. Eliezer did look up and nod to him as he slipped out of the shul. Then the rabbi went back to the other world, the higher world, of the Law and the two millennia of commentary on it and argument about it.

The day was dark, cloudy, gloomy. A horse-drawn wagon brought barrels of beer to the tavern. A skinny dog gnawed at something in the gutter. A Jewish woman in sheitel and head scarf nodded to Veit. He nodded back and slowly walked to his shop. He couldn’t walk any other way, not today and not for a while.

A tall, plump, ruddy man in Lederhosen snapped his picture. As usual, Veit pretended the tourist didn’t exist. When you thought about it, this was a strange business. Because it was, Veit did his best not to think about it most of the time.

Every now and then, though, you couldn’t help wondering. During and after its victories in the War of Retribution, the Reich did just what the first Führer promised he would do: it wiped Jewry off the face of the earth. And, ever since destroying Jewry (no, even while getting on with the job), the Aryan victors studied and examined their victims in as much detail as the dead Jews had studied and examined Torah and Talmud. The Germans hadn’t had two thousand years to split hairs about their researches, but they’d had more than a hundred now. Plenty of time for a whole bunch of pilpul to build up. And it had. It had.

Without that concentrated, minute study, a place like Wawolnice wouldn’t just have been impossible. It would have been unimaginable. But the authorities wanted the world to see what a horrible thing it was that they’d disposed of. And so twenty-first-century Aryans lived the life of early-twentieth-century Jews and Poles for the edification of . . . fat tourists in Lederhosen.

Repairmen had installed a new front window at the shop. Remarkably, they’d also sprayed it, or painted it, or whatever the hell they’d done, with enough dust and grime and general shmutz to make it look as if it had been there the past twenty years, and gone unwashed in all that time. Wawolnice was tended with, well, Germanic thoroughness. A clean window would have looked out of place, and so in went a dirty one.

As Veit opened up, the voices of the children chanting their lessons floated through the morning air. He’d been an adult when he came to the village. Would the boys grow up to become the next generation’s tavern-keeper and rabbi and ragpicker . . . and maybe grinder and jack-of-all-trades? He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. The Reich built things to last. Chances were Wawolnice would still be here to instruct the curious about downfallen Judaism a generation from now, a century from now, five hundred years from now. . . .

You learned in school that Hitler had said he intended his Reich to last for a thousand years. You also learned that the first Führer commonly meant what he said. But then, you had to be pretty stupid to need to learn that in school. Hitler’s works were still all around, just as Augustus Caesar’s must have been throughout the Roman Empire in the second century A.D.

Something on the floor sparkled. Veit bent and picked up a tiny shard of glass the cleaners had missed. He was almost relieved to chuck it into his battered tin wastebasket. Except for the lancinating pain in his side, it was almost the only physical sign he could find that the pogrom really had happened.

He settled onto his stool, shifting once or twice to find the position where his ribs hurt least. The chanted lessons came through the closed door, but only faintly. The kid who went around with the basket of bagels--no kheder for him, even though it was cheap--came by. Veit bought one. The kid scurried away. Veit smiled as he bit into the chewy roll. Damned if he didn’t feel more at home in Yiddish than in ordinary German these days.

In came Itzhik the shokhet. "How’s the world treating you these days?" Veit asked. Yes, this rasping, guttural jargon seemed natural in his mouth. And why not--fur vos nit?--when he used it so much?

"As well as it is, Jakub, thank the Lord," the ritual slaughterer answered. He often visited the grinder’s shop. His knives had to be sharp. Any visible nick on the edge, and the animals he killed were treyf. He had to slay at a single stroke, too. All in all, what he did was as merciful as killing could be, just as Torah and Talmud prescribed. He went on, "And you? And your wife?"

"Bertha’s fine. My ribs . . . could be better. They’ll get that way--eventually," Veit said. "Nu, what have you got for me today?"

Itzhik carried his short knife, the one he used for dispatching chickens and the occasional duck, wrapped in a cloth. "This needs to be perfect," he said. "Can’t have the ladies running to Reb Eliezer with their dead birds, complaining I didn’t kill them properly."

"That wouldn’t be good," Veit agreed. He inspected the blade. The edge seemed fine to him. He said so.

"Well, sharpen it some more anyway," Itzhik answered.

Veit might have known he would say that. Veit, in fact, had known Itzhik would say that; he would have bet money on it. "You’re a scrupulous man," he remarked as he set to work.

The shokhet shrugged. "If, eppes, you aren’t scrupulous doing what I do, better you should do something else."

Which was also true of a lot of other things. After watching sparks fly from the steel blade, Veit carefully inspected the edge. The last thing he wanted was to put in a tiny nick that hadn’t been there before. At length, he handed back the slaughtering knife. But, as he did, he said, "You’ll want to check it for yourself."

"Oh, sure." Itzhik carried it over to the window--the window that might have stood there forgotten since the beginning of time but was in fact brand new. He held the knife in the best light he could find and bent close to examine the edge. He took longer looking it over than Veit had. When the verdict came, it was a reluctant nod, but a nod it was. "You haven’t got a shayla on your puppik, anyway," he admitted.

"Thank you so much," Veit said with a snort. A shayla was a mark of disease that left meat unfit for consumption by Jews. His puppik--his gizzard--probably had a bruise on it right this minute, but no shaylas.

"So what do I owe you?" Itzhik asked.

"A zloty will do," Veit said. The shokhet set the coin on the counter. After one more nod, he walked out into the street.

Those chickens will never know what hit them, Veit thought, not without pride. The knife had been sharp when Itzhik handed it to him, and sharper after he got through with it. No one would be able to say its work went against Jewish rules for slaughtering.

Jewish rules held sway here, in Wawolnice’s Jewish quarter. Out in the wider world, things were different. The Reich let the performers playing Poles here execute--no, encouraged them to execute--those convicts dressed as shtetl Jews by stoning them and beating them to death. Assume the convicts (or some of them, anyhow) deserved to die for their crimes. Did they deserve to die like that?

As Veit’s recent argument with Reb Eliezer here in the shop showed, Jewish practice leaned over backwards to keep from putting people to death, even when the letter of the law said they had it coming. He’d learned in his own Talmudic studies that an ancient Sanhedrin that executed even one man in seventy years went down in history as a bloody Sanhedrin.

Again, the modern world was a little different. Yes, just a little. The Reich believed in Schrechlichkeit--frightfulness--as a legal principle. If you scared the living shit out of somebody, maybe he wouldn’t do what he would have done otherwise. And so the Reich didn’t just do frightful things to people it caught and condemned. It bragged that it did such things to them.

Along with the quiz shows and football matches and historical melodramas and shows full of singers and dancers that littered the TV landscape, there were always televised hangings of partisans from Siberia or Canada or Peru. Sometimes, for variety’s sake, the TV would show a Slav who’d presumed to sleep with his German mistress getting his head chopped off. Sometimes she would go to the block right after him, or even at his side.

All those executions, all those contorted faces and twisting bodies, all those fountains of blood, had been a normal part of the TV landscape for longer than Veit had been alive. He’d watched a few. Hell, everybody’d watched a few. He didn’t turn them on because they turned him on, the way some people did. He’d always figured that put him on the right side of the fence.

Maybe it did--no, of course it did--when you looked at things from the Reich’s perspective. Which he did, and which everyone did, because, in the world as it was, what other perspective could there be? None, none whatsoever, not in the world as it was.

But Wawolnice wasn’t part of the world as it was. Wawolnice was an artificial piece of the world as it had been before National Socialist Germany went and set it to rights. Performing here as a Jew, living here as a Jew, gave Veit an angle from which to view the wider world he could have got nowhere else.

And if the wider world turned out to be an uglier place than he’d imagined, than he could have imagined, before he came to Wawolnice, what did that say?

He’d been wrestling with the question ever since it first occurred to him. He was ashamed to remember how long that had taken. He wasn’t the only one, either. To some of the reenactors who portrayed Jews, it was just another gig. They’d put it on their résum é s and then go off and do something else, maybe on the legitimate stage, maybe not. Down in Romania, there was a Gypsy encampment that reproduced another way of life the National Socialist victory had eliminated.

For others here, things were different. You had to be careful what you said and where you said it, but that was true all over the Reich, which amounted to all over the world. Adding another layer of caution to the everyday one you grew up with probably--no, certainly--wouldn’t hurt.

#

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the shop door swung open. In strode . . . not another village Jew, not a village Pole with something to fix that he trusted to Jakub’s clever hands rather than to one of his countrymen, not even a tourist curious about what the inside of one of these hole-in-the-wall shops looked like. No. In came a man wearing the uniform of an SS Hauptsturmf ü hrer: the equivalent of a Wehrmacht captain.

Veit blinked, not sure what he was supposed to do. The Wawolnice in which he lived and worked--in which he performed--lay buried in a past before the War of Retribution. A Wawolnice Jew seeing an SS Hauptsturmf ü hrer would not automatically be reduced to the blind panic that uniform induced in Jews during the war and for as long afterward as there were still Jews. A modern Aryan still might be reduced to that kind of panic, though, or to something not far from it.

If a modern Aryan was reduced to that kind of panic, he would be smart to try not to show it. Veit let the Hauptsturmf ü hrer take the lead. The officer wasted no time doing so, barking, "You are the performer Veit Harlan, otherwise called Jakub Shlayfer the Jew?"

"That’s right. What’s this all about?" Veit answered in Yiddish.

The SS man’s mouth twisted, as if at a bad smell. "Speak proper German, not this barbarous, disgusting dialect."

"Please excuse me, sir, but our instructions are to stay in character at all times when in public in the village," Veit said meekly, but still in the mamaloshen. He’d thought Yiddish was a barbarous dialect when he started learning it, too. The more natural it became, the less sure of that he got. You could say things in German you couldn’t begin to in Yiddish. But the reverse, he’d been surprised to discover, also held true. Yiddish might be a jaunty beggar of a language, but a language it was.

All of which cut no ice with the Hauptsturmf ü hrer . He laid a sheet of paper on the counter. "Here is a directive from your project leader, releasing you from those instructions so you may be properly questioned."

Veit picked up the paper and read it. It was what the SS man said it was. "Zu befehl, Herr Hauptsturmfü hrer!" he said, clicking his heels.

"That’s more like it," the SS officer said smugly. Veit counted himself lucky that the fellow didn’t notice obedience laid on with a trowel.

Making sure to treat his vowels the way an ordinary German would--in this shop, remembering wasn’t easy; Veit felt as if he were using a foreign language, not his own--the reenactor said, "Sir, you still haven’t told me what this is about."

"I would have, if you hadn’t wasted my time." Nothing was going to be--nothing could possibly be--the Hauptsturmfü hrer’s fault. He leaned toward Veit. No doubt he intended to intimidate, and he succeeded. "So tell me, Jew, what your rabbi meant by congratulating you on your prayer this morning."

He couldn’t have practiced that sneer on authentic Jews. Authentic Jews were gone: gone from Germany, gone from Eastern Europe, gone from France and England, gone from North America, gone from Argentina, gone from Palestine, gone from South Africa, gone even from Shanghai and Harbin. Gone. Spurlos verschwunden--vanished without a trace. Off the map, literally and metaphorically. But he must have seen a lot of movies and TV shows and plays (Jews made favorite enemies, of course), because he had it down pat.

First things first, then. Veit pulled his wallet from an inside pocket of his coat and took out his identity card. He thrust it at the SS man. "Herr Hauptsturmführer, I am not a Jew. This proves my Aryan blood. I am a performer, paid to portray a Jew."

Grudgingly, the officer inspected the card. Grudgingly, he handed it back. "All right. You are not a Jew," he said, more grudgingly yet. "Answer my questions anyhow."

"You would do better asking him." Veit pressed his tiny advantage.

"Don’t worry. Someone else is taking care of that." The officer stuck out his chin, which wasn’t so strong as he might have wished. "Meanwhile, I’m asking you."

"All right. You have to understand, I’m only guessing, though. I think he meant I played my role well. I got hurt when the village staged a pogrom yesterday--a broken rib."

"Yes, I’ve seen the medical report," the SS man said impatiently. "Go on."

"A real Jew, a pious Jew, would have given the prayer of thanksgiving for coming through danger at the next minyan he was part of. I play a pious Jew, so I did what a pious Jew would do. The actor who plays the rabbi"--Veit came down hard on that--"must have thought it was a nice touch, and he was kind enough to tell me so. Please excuse me, but you’re wasting your time trying to make anything more out of it."

"Time spent protecting the Reich’s security is never wasted." The Hauptsturmfü hrer might have been quoting the Torah. He certainly was quoting his own Holy Writ. He stabbed a forefinger at Veit. "Besides, look at the village. This is a new day. The pogrom never happened."

"Herr Hauptsturmführer, they’ve fixed up the village overnight. My ribs still hurt," Veit said reasonably. He reached into a coat pocket again. This time, he took out the plastic vial of pain pills. He displayed them in the palm of his hand.

The SS man snatched them away and examined the label. "Oh, yeah. This shit. They gave me some of this after they yanked my wisdom teeth. I was flying, man." As if embarrassed that the human being under the uniform had peeped out for a moment, he slammed the vial down on the counter.

Veit tucked the pills away. He tried to take advantage of the officer’s slip, if that was what it was: "So you see how it goes, sir. I was just playing my role, just doing my job. If I have to act like a dirty Jew, I should act like the best dirty Jew I can, shouldn’t I?"

"Dirty is right." The Hauptsturmfü hrer jerked a thumb at the window behind him. "When’s the last time somebody washed that?"

"I don’t know, sir," Veit answered, which might have been technically true. He wasn’t flying--his latest pill was wearing off--but he knew he might burst into hysterical laughter if he told the SS man that window had gone into place during the night to replace one smashed in the pogrom.

"Disgusting. And to think those pigdogs actually got off on living like this." The SS man shook his head in disbelief. "Fucking disgusting. So you remember you’re playing a fucking part, you hear?"

"I always remember," Veit said, and that was nothing but the truth.

"You’d better." The Hauptsturmfü hrer lumbered out of the shop. He slammed the door behind him. For a moment, Veit feared the glaziers would have another window to replace, but the pane held.

He wasn’t due for the next pill for another hour, but he took one anyhow, and washed it down with a slug of plum brandy from a small bottle he kept in a drawer on his side of the counter. The warnings on the vial might say you shouldn’t do that, but the warnings on the vial hadn’t been written with visits from SS men in mind.

He wondered how Reb Eliezer’s interrogation had gone. As they’d needed to, they’d picked a clever fellow to play the village rabbi. But the SS specialized in scaring you so much, you forgot you had any brains. And if they were questioning Eliezer, maybe he didn’t report to anybody after all. Maybe. All Eliezer had to do was stick to the truth here and everything would be fine . . . Veit hoped.

He also wondered if the rabbi would come over here to talk about what had happened. There, Veit hoped not. The Hauptsturmf ü hrer had proved that the shul was thoroughly bugged. No great surprise, that, but now it was confirmed. And if they’d just grilled one Jakub Shlayfer, grinder, the walls to his shop were bound to have ears, too. Would Reb Eliezer be clever enough to realize as much?

Eliezer must have been, because he didn’t show up. Before long, the potent pill and the slivovitz made Veit not care so much. He got less work done than he might have. On the other hand, they didn’t haul him off to a Vernichtungslager, either, so he couldn’t count the day a dead loss.

#

"I’m tired," Kristi said as they walked across the parking lot to their car.

"Me, too." Veit moved carefully, like an old man. The rib still bit him every few steps.

"Want me to drive again, then?" his wife asked. She’d thrown out a hint, but he’d tossed it right back.

"Please, if you don’t mind too much."

"It’s all right," she said.

Veit translated that as I mind, but not too much. He waited till they were pulling onto the Autobahn before saying, "Let’s stop somewhere in Lublin for supper."

"I’ve got those chicken legs defrosting at home," Kristi said doubtfully.

"Chuck ’em in the fridge when we get back," Veit said. "We’ll have ’em tomorrow."

"Suits me." She sounded happy. "I didn’t feel much like cooking tonight anyway."

"I could tell." That was one reason Veit had suggested eating out. It wasn’t the only one. He hadn’t told her anything about what had happened during the day. You had to assume the SS could hear anything that went on in Wawolnice. You also had to figure they could bug an Audi. But you had to hope they couldn’t keep tabs on everything that went on in every eatery in Lublin.

"That looks like a good place," he said, pointing, as they went through town.

"But--" she began. He held a vertical finger in front of his lips, as if to say, Yes, something is up. No dope, Kristi got it right away. "Well, we’ll give it a try, then," she said, and eased the car into a tight parking space at least as smoothly as Veit could have done it.

When they walked into the Boar’s Head, the ma î tre d’blinked at Veit’s flowing beard. They weren’t the style in the real world. But Veit talked like a rational fellow, and slipped him ten Reichsmarks besides. No zlotych here. They were village play money. Poland’s currency was as dead as the country. The Reichsmark ruled the world no less than the Reich did. And ten of them were plenty to secure a good table.

Veit and Kristi ordered beer. The place was lively and noisy. People chattered. A band oompahed in the background. It was still early, but couples already spun on the dance floor. After the seidels came, Veit talked about the Hauptsturmf ü hrer’s visit in a low voice.

Her eyes widened in sympathy--and in alarm. "But that’s so stupid!" she burst out.

"Tell me about it," Veit said. "I think I finally got through to him that it was all part of a day’s work. I sure hope I did."

"Alevai omayn!" Kristi said. That was a slip of sorts, because it wasn’t German, but you had to believe you could get away with a couple of words every now and then if you were in a safe place or a public place: often one and the same. And the Yiddish phrase meant exactly what Veit was thinking.

"Are you ready to order yet?" The waitress was young and cute and perky. And she was well trained. Veit’s whiskers didn’t faze her one bit.

"I sure am." He pointed to the menu. "I want the ham steak, with the red-cabbage sauerkraut and the creamed potatoes."

"Yes, sir." She wrote it down. "And you, ma’am?"

"How is the clam-and-crayfish stew?" Kristi asked.

"Oh, it’s very good!" The waitress beamed. "Everybody likes it. Last week, someone who used to live in Lublin drove down from Warsaw just to have some."

"Well, I’ll try it, then."

When the food came, they stopped talking and attended to it. Once his plate was bare--which didn’t take long--Veit blotted his lips on his napkin and said, "I haven’t had ham that good in quite a while." He hadn’t eaten any ham in quite a while, but he didn’t mention that.

"The girl was right about the stew, too," his wife said. "I don’t know that I’d come all the way from Warsaw to order it, but it’s delicious."

Busboys whisked away the dirty dishes. The waitress brought the check. Veit gave her his charge card. She took it away to print out the bill. He scrawled his signature on the restaurant copy and put the customer copy and the card back in his wallet.

He and Kristi walked out to the car. On the way, she remarked, "Protective coloration." Probably no microphones out here--and if there were, a phrase like that could mean almost anything.

"Jawohl," Veit agreed in no-doubt-about-it German. Now they’d put a couple of aggressively treyf meals in the computerized data system. Let some SS data analyst poring over their records go and call them Jews--or even think of them as Jews--after that!

Again, Veit got in on the passenger side. "You just want me to keep chauffeuring you around," Kristi teased.

"I want my ribs to shut up and leave me alone," Veit answered. "And if you do the same, I won’t complain about that, either." She stuck out her tongue at him while she started the Audi. They were both laughing as she pulled out into traffic and headed home.

#

As the medical technician had warned, getting over a broken rib took about six weeks. The tech hadn’t warned it would seem like forever. He also hadn’t warned what would happen if you caught a cold before the rib finished knitting. Veit did. It was easy to do in a place like Wawolnice, where a stream of strangers brought their germs with them. Sure as hell, he thought he was ripping himself to pieces every time he sneezed.

But that too passed. At the time, Veit thought it passed like a kidney stone, but even Kristina was tired of his kvetching by then, so he did his best to keep his big mouth shut. It wasn’t as if he had nothing to be happy about. The SS didn’t call on him anymore, for instance. He and his wife went back to the Boar’s Head again. One treyf dinner after an interrogation might let analysts draw conclusions they wouldn’t draw from more than one. And the food there was good.

He was pretty much his old self again by the time summer passed into fall and the High Holy Days--forgotten by everyone in the world save a few dedicated scholars . . . and the villagers and tourists at Wawolnice--came round again. He prayed in the shul on Rosh Hashanah, wishing everyone L’ shanah tovah--a Happy New Year. That that New Year’s Day was celebrated only in the village didn’t bother him or any of the other performers playing Jews. It was the New Year for them, and they made the most of it with honey cakes and raisins and sweet kugels and other such poor people’s treats.

A week and a half later came Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. By that extinct usage, the daylong fast began the night before at sundown. Veit and his wife were driving home from Wawolnice when the sun went down behind them. He sat behind the wheel; he’d been doing most of the driving again for some time.

When they got to their flat, Kristi turned on the oven. She left it on for forty-five minutes. Then she turned it off again. She and Veit sat at the table and talked as they would have over supper, but there was no food on the plates. After a while, Kristi washed them anyhow. Neither a mike nor utility data would show anything out of the ordinary.

How close to the ancient laws did you have to stick? In this day and age, how close to the ancient laws could you possibly stick? How careful did you have to be to make sure the authorities didn’t notice you were sticking to those laws? Veit and Kristi had played games with the oven and the dishwashing water before. In light of the call the SS Hauptsturmführer had paid on Veit earlier in the year (last year now, by Jewish reckoning), you couldn’t be too careful--and you couldn’t stick too close to the old laws.

So you did what you could, and you didn’t worry about what you couldn’t help. That seemed to fit in with the way things in Wawolnice generally worked.

At shul the next morning, Kristi sat with the women while Veit took his place among the men. How many of the assembled reenactors were fasting except when public performance of these rituals required it? Veit didn’t know; it wasn’t a safe question, and wouldn’t have been good manners even if it were. But he was as sure as made no difference that Kristi and he weren’t the only ones.

After the service ended, he asked his village friends and neighbors to forgive him for whatever he’d done to offend them over the past year. You had to apologize sincerely, not just go through the motions. And you were supposed to accept such apologies with equal sincerity. His fellow villagers were saying they were sorry to him and to one another, too.

Such self-abasement was altogether alien to the spirit of the Reich. Good National Socialists never dreamt they could do anything regrettable. Übermenschen, after all, didn’t look back--or need to.

And yet, the heartfelt apologies of an earlier Yom Kippur were some of the first things that had made Veit wonder whether what people here in Wawolnice had wasn’t a better way to live than much of what went on in the wider world. He’d come here glad to have steady work. He hadn’t bargained for anything more. He hadn’t bargained for it, but he’d found it.

You needed to ignore the funny clothes. You needed to forget about the dirt and the crowding and the poverty. Those were all incidentals. When it came to living with other people, when it came to finding an anchor for your own life . . . He nodded once, to himself. This was better. Even if you couldn’t talk about it much, maybe especially because you couldn’t, this was better. It had taken a while for Veit to realize it, but he liked the way he lived in the village when he was Jakub Shlayfer better than he liked how he lived away from it when he was only himself.

#

People who worked together naturally got together when they weren’t working, too. Not even the ever-wary SS could make too much of that. There was always the risk that some of the people you hung with reported to the blackshirts, but everyone in the Reich ran that risk. You took the precautions you thought you needed and you got on with your life.

One weekend not long after the High Holy Days, Wawolnice closed down for maintenance more thorough than repair crews could manage overnight or behind the scenes. Autumn was on the way. By the calendar, autumn had arrived. But it wasn’t pouring or freezing or otherwise nasty, though no doubt it would be before long. A bunch of the reenactors who played Jews seized the moment for a Sunday picnic outside of Lublin.

The grass on the meadow was still green: proof it hadn’t started freezing yet. Women packed baskets groaning with food. Men tended to other essentials: beer, slivovitz, shnaps, and the like.

One of Kristi’s cousins was just back from a hunting trip to the Carpathians. Her contribution to the spread was a saddle of venison. Her cousin was no shokhet, of course, but some things were too good to pass up. So she reasoned, anyhow, and Veit didn’t try to argue with her.

"Let’s see anybody match this," she declared.

"Not likely." Veit had splurged on a couple of liters of fancy vodka, stuff so smooth you’d hardly notice you weren’t drinking water . . . till you fell over.

He waited for clouds to roll in and rain to spoil things, but it didn’t happen. A little dawn mist had cleared out by midmorning, when the performers started gathering. It wasn’t a hot day, but it wasn’t bad. If shadows stretched farther across the grass than they would have during high summer, well, it wasn’t high summer anymore.

Kids scampered here, there, and everywhere, squealing in German and Yiddish. Not all of them really noticed any difference between the two languages except in the way they were written. Lots of reenactors exclaimed over the venison. Kristi beamed with pride as Reb Eliezer said "I didn’t expect that" and patted his belly in anticipation. If he wasn’t going to get fussy about dietary rules today . . .

They might have been any picnicking group, but for one detail. A car going down the narrow road stopped. The driver rolled down his window and called, "Hey, what’s with all the face fuzz?" He rubbed his own smooth chin and laughed.

"We’re the Great Lublin Beard-Growers’Fraternity," Eliezer answered with a perfectly straight face.

All of a sudden, the Aryan in the VW wasn’t laughing anymore. The official-sounding title impressed him; official-sounding titles had a way of doing that in the Reich. "Ach, so. The Beard-Growers’Fraternity," he echoed. "That’s splendid!" He put the car in gear and drove away, satisfied.

"Things would be easier if we were the Greater Lublin Beard-Growers’ Fraternity," Veit remarked.

"Some ways," Reb Eliezer said with a sweet, sad smile. "Not others, perhaps."

Alter the melamed--otherwise Wolf Albach-Retty--said, "There really are clubs for men who grow fancy whiskers. They have contests. Sometimes the winners get their pictures in the papers."

"Our whiskers are just incidental." Veit stroked his beard. "We raise tsuris instead."

Wolf hoisted an eyebrow. Yes, he made a good melamed. Yes, he was as much a believer as anyone here except Reb Eliezer. (Like Paul on the road to Damascus--well, maybe not just like that--some years before Eliezer had been the first to see how a role could take on an inner reality the Nazi functionaries who’d brought Wawolnice into being had never imagined.) All that said, everyone here except Wolf himself knew he was a ham.

If the SS swooped down on this gathering, what would they find? A bunch of men with beards, along with wives, girlfriends, children, and a few dogs running around barking and generally making idiots of themselves. A hell of a lot of food. No ham, no pig’s trotters, no pickled eels, no crayfish or mussels. No meat cooked in cream sauce or anything like that. Even more dishes than you’d normally need for all the chow.

Plenty to hang everybody here, in other words, or to earn people a bullet in the back of the neck. Suspicious security personnel could make all the case they needed from what was and what wasn’t at the picnic. And if they weren’t suspicious, why would they raid?

Someone here might also be wearing a microphone or carrying a concealed video camera. Being a Jew hadn’t stopped Judas from betraying Jesus. Even the so-called German Christians, whose worship rendered more unto the Reich than unto God, learned about Judas.

But what could you do? You had to take some chances or you couldn’t live. Well, you could, but you’d have to stay by yourself in your flat and never come out. Some days, that looked pretty good to Veit. Some days, but not today.

Reb Eliezer did what he could to cover himself. He waved his hands in the air to draw people’s notice. Then he said, "It’s good we could all get together today." He was speaking Yiddish; he said haynt for today, not the German heute. He went on, "We need to stay in our roles as much as we can. We live them as much as we can. So if we do some things our friends and neighbors outside Wawolnice might find odd, it’s only so we keep them in mind even when we aren’t up in front of strangers."

Several men and women nodded. Kids and dogs, predictably, paid no attention. What Eliezer said might save the reenactors’ bacon (Not that we’ ve got any bacon here, either, Veit thought) if the SS was keeping an eye on things without worrying too much. If the blackshirts were looking for sedition, they’d know bullshit when they heard it.

"All right, then." Eliezer went on to pronounce a brokhe, a blessing, that no one--not even the most vicious SS officer, a Rottweiler in human shape--could have found fault with: "Let’s eat!"

Women with meat dishes had gathered here, those with dairy dishes over there, and those with parve food--vegetable dishes that could be eaten with either--at a spot in between them. Veit took some sour tomatoes and some cold noodles and some green beans in a sauce made with olive oil and garlic (not exactly a specialty of Polish Jews in the old days, but tasty even so), and then headed over to get some of the venison on which his wife had worked so hard. Kristi would let him hear about it if he didn’t take a slice.

He had to wait his turn, though. By the time he got over to her, a line had already formed. She beamed with pride as she carved and served. Only somebody else’s roast grouse gave her any competition for pride of place. Veit managed to snag a drumstick from one of the birds, too. He sat down on the grass and started filling his face . . . after the appropriate blessings, of course.

After a while, Reb Eliezer came over and squatted beside him. Eliezer seemed a man in perpetual motion. He’d already talked with half the people at the picnic, and he’d get to the rest before it finished. "Having a good time?" he asked.

Veit grinned and waved at his plate. "I’d have to be dead not to. I don’t know how I’m going to fit into my clothes."

"That’s a good time," Eliezer said, nodding. "I wonder what the Poles are doing with their holiday."

He meant the Aryans playing Poles in Wawolnice, of course. The real Poles, those who were left alive, worked in mines and on farms and in brothels and other places where bodies mattered more than brains. Veit stayed in character to answer, "They should grow like onions: with their heads in the ground."

Eliezer smiled that sad smile of his. "And they call us filthy kikes and Christ-killers and have extra fun when there’s a pogrom on the schedule." Veit rubbed his rib cage. Eliezer nodded again. "Yes, like that."

"Still twinges once in a while," Veit said.

"Hating Jews is easy," Eliezer said, and it was Veit’s turn to nod. The other man went on, "Hating anybody who isn’t just like you is easy. Look how you sounded about them. Look how the Propaganda Ministry sounds all the time."

"Hey!" Veit said. "That’s not fair."

"Well, maybe yes, maybe no," Reb Eliezer allowed. "But the way it looks to me is, if we’re going to live like Yehudim, like the Yehudim that used to be, like proper Yehudim, sooner or later we’ll have to do it all the time."

"What?" Now Veit was genuinely alarmed. "We won’t last twenty minutes if we do, and you know it."

"I didn’t meant that. Using tefillin? Putting on the tallis? No, it wouldn’t work." Eliezer smiled once more, but then quickly sobered. "I meant that we need to live, to think, to feel the way we do while we’re in Wawolnice when we’re out in the big world, too. We need to be witnesses to what the Reich is doing. Somebody has to, and who better than us?" That smile flashed across his face again, if only for a moment. "Do you know what martyr means in ancient Greek? It means witness, that’s what."

Veit had sometimes wondered if the rabbi was the SS plant in the village. He’d decided it didn’t matter. If Eliezer was, he could destroy them all any time he chose. But now Veit found himself able to ask a question that would have been bad manners inside Wawolnice: "What did you do before you came to the village that taught you ancient Greek?" As far as he knew, Eliezer--Ferdinand Marian--hadn’t been an actor. Veit had never seen him on stage or in a TV show or film.

"Me?" The older man quirked an eyebrow. "I thought everyone had heard about me. No? . . . I guess not. I was a German Christian minister."

"Oh," Veit said. It didn’t quite come out Oy!, but it might as well have. He managed something a little better on his next try: "Well, no wonder you learned Greek, then."

"No wonder at all. And Hebrew, and Aramaic. I was well trained for the part, all right. I just didn’t know ahead of time that I would like it better than what had been my real life."

"I don’t think any of us figured on that," Veit said slowly.

"I don’t, either," Reb Eliezer replied. "But if that doesn’t tell you things aren’t the way they ought to be out here, what would?" His two-armed wave encompassed out here: the world beyond Wawolnice, the world-bestriding Reich.

"What do we do?" Veit shook his head; that was the wrong question. Again, another try: "What can we do?"

Eliezer set a hand on his shoulder. "The best we can, Jakub. Always, the best we can." He ambled off to talk to somebody else.

Someone had brought along a soccer ball. In spite of full bellies, a pickup game started. It would have caused heart failure in World Cup circles. The pitch was bumpy and unmown. Only sweaters thrown down on the ground marked the corners and the goal mouths. Touchlines and bylines were as much a matter of argument as anything in the Talmud.

Nobody cared. People ran and yelled and knocked one another ass over teakettle. Some of the fouls would have got professionals sent off. The players just laughed about them. Plenty of liquid restoratives were at hand by the edge of the pitch. When the match ended, both sides loudly proclaimed victory.

By then, the sun was sliding down the sky toward the horizon. Clouds had started building up. With regret, everyone decided it was time to go home. Leftovers and dirty china and silverware went into ice chests and baskets. Nobody seemed to worry about supper at all.

Veit caught up with Reb Eliezer. "Thanks for not calling Kristina’s venison treyf," he said quietly.

Eliezer spread his hands. "It wasn’t that kind of gathering, or I didn’t think it was. I didn’t say anything about the grouse, either. Like I told you before, you do what you can do. Anyone who felt differently didn’t have to eat it. No finger-pointing. No fits. Just--no game."

"Makes sense." Veit hesitated, then blurted the question that had been on his mind most of the day: "What do you suppose the old-time Jews, the real Jews, would have made of us?"

"I often wonder about that," Eliezer said, which surprised Veit not at all. The older man went on, "You remember what Rabbi Hillel told the goy who stood on one foot and asked him to define Jewish doctrine before the other foot came down?"

"Oh, sure," Veit answered; that was a bit of Talmudic pilpul everybody--well, everybody in Wawolnice who cared about the Talmud--knew. "He said that you shouldn’t do to other people whatever was offensive to you. As far as he was concerned, the rest was just commentary."

"The Talmud says that goy ended up converting, too," Eliezer added. Veit nodded; he also remembered that. Eliezer said, "Well, if the Reich had followed Hillel’s teaching, there would still be real Jews, and they wouldn’t have needed to invent us. Since they did . . . We’re doing as well as we can on the main thing--we’re human beings, after all--and maybe not too bad on the commentary. Or do you think I’m wrong?"

"No. That’s about how I had it pegged, too." Veit turned away, then stopped short. "I’ll see you tomorrow in Wawolnice."

"Tomorrow in Wawolnice," Eliezer said. "Next year in Jerusalem."

"Alevai omayn," Veit answered, and was astonished by how much he meant it.

#

They wouldn’t have needed to invent us. For some reason, that fragment of a sentence stuck in Veit’s mind. He knew Voltaire’s If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Before coming to Wawolnice, he’d been in a couple of plays involving the Frenchman. Frederick the Great had been one of Hitler’s heroes, which had made the Prussian king’s friends and associates glow by reflected light in the eyes of German dramatists ever since.

If a whole Volk had nobody who could look at them from the outside, would they have to find--or make--someone? There, Veit wasn’t so sure. Like any actor’s, his mind was a jackdaw’s nest of other men’s words. He knew the story about the dying bandit chief and the priest who urged him to forgive his enemies. Father, I have none, the old ruffian wheezed. I’ ve killed them all.

Here stood the Reich, triumphant. Its retribution had spread across the globe. It hadn’t quite killed all its enemies. No: it had enslaved some of them instead. But no one cared what a slave thought. No one even cared if a slave thought, so long as he didn’t think of trouble.

Here stood Wawolnice. It had come into being as a monument to the Reich’s pride. Look at what we did. Look at what we had to get rid of, it had declared, reproducing with typical, fanatical attention to detail what once had been. And such attention to detail had, all unintended, more or less brought back into being what had been destroyed. It was almost Hegelian.

After talking with Kristina, Veit decided to have the little operation that would mark him as one of the men who truly belonged in Wawolnice. He got it done the evening before the village shut down for another maintenance day. "You should be able to go back to work day after tomorrow," the doctor told him. "You’ll be sore, but it won’t be anything the pills can’t handle."

"Yes, I know about those." Of itself, Veit’s hand made that rib-feeling gesture.

"All right, then." The other man uncapped a syringe. "This is the local anesthetic. You may not want to watch while I give it to you."

"You bet I don’t." Veit looked up at the acoustic tiles on the treatment room’s ceiling. The shot didn’t hurt much--less than he’d expected. Still, it wasn’t something you wanted to think about; no, indeed.

Chuckling, the doctor said, "Since you’re playing one of those miserable, money-grubbing kikes, of course you’ll be happy about the raise you’re getting for going all out."

"As long as my eel still goes up after this, that’s the only raise I care about right now," Veit answered. The doctor laughed again and went to work.

Bandaging up afterward took longer than the actual procedure. As Veit was carefully pulling up his pants, the doctor said, "Take your first pill in about an hour. That way, it’ll be working when the local wears off."

"That would be good," Veit agreed. He got one more laugh from the man in the white coat. No doubt everything seemed funnier when you were on the other end of the scalpel.

He didn’t have Kristi drive home; he did it himself, with his legs splayed wide. He couldn’t feel anything--the anesthetic was still going strong--but he did even so. He dutifully swallowed the pill at the appointed time. Things started hurting anyway: hurting like hell, not to put too fine a point on it. Veit gulped another pill. It was too soon after the first, but he did it all the same.

Two pain pills were better than one, but not enough. He still hurt. The pills did make his head feel like a balloon attached to his body on a long string. What happened from his neck down was still there, but only distantly connected to the part of him that noticed.

He ate whatever Kristi put on the table. Afterward, he remembered eating, but not what he’d eaten.

He wandered out into the front room and sat down in front of the TV. He might do that any evening to unwind from a long day of being a Jew, but this felt different. The screen in front of him swallowed all of his consciousness that didn’t sting.

Which was odd, because the channel he’d chosen more or less at random was showing a string of ancient movies: movies from before the War of Retribution, movies in black and white. Normally, Veit had no patience for that. He lived in a black-and-white world in Wawolnice. When he watched the television, he wanted something brighter, something more interesting.

Tonight, though, with the two pain pills pumping through him, he just didn’t care. The TV was on. He’d watch it. He didn’t have to think while he stared at the pictures. Something called Bringing Up Baby was running. It was funny even though it was dubbed. It was funny even though he was drugged.

When it ended and commercials came on, they seemed jarringly out of place. They were gaudy. They were noisy. Veit couldn’t wait for them to end and the next old film to start.

It finally did. Frankenstein was about as far from Bringing Up Baby as you could get and still be called a movie. Some of the antique special effects seemed unintentionally comic to a modern man, even if the modern man was doped to the eyebrows. But Veit ended up impressed in spite of himself. As with the comedy, no wonder people still showed this one more than a hundred years after it was made.

He took one more green pill after the movie and staggered off to bed. He slept like a log, assuming logs take care to sleep on their backs.

When he woke up the next morning, he wasn’t as sore as he’d thought he would be. And he’d rolled over onto his side during the night and hadn’t perished, or even screamed. He did take another pill, but he didn’t break any Olympic sprint records running to the kitchen to get it.

"You poor thing," Kristi said. "Your poor thing."

"I’ll live." Veit decided he might even mean it. Once he soaked up some coffee and then some breakfast--and once that pill kicked in--he might even want to mean it.

Caffeine, food, and opiate did indeed work wonders. His wife nodded approvingly. "You don’t have that glazed look you did last night."

"Who, me?" Veit hadn’t been sure he could manage indignation, but he did.

Not that it helped. "Yes, you," Kristi retorted. "You don’t sit there gaping at the TV for three hours straight with drool running down your chin when you’re in your right mind."

"But it was good." No sooner had Veit said it than he wondered whether he would have thought so if he hadn’t been zonked. Kristina’s raised eyebrow announced louder than words that she wondered exactly the same thing.

Maybe he wouldn’t have enjoyed the silliness in Bringing Up Baby so much if he’d been fully in the boring old Aristotelian world. But Frankenstein wasn’t silly--not even slightly. Taking pieces from the dead, putting them together, and reanimating them . . . No, nothing even the least bit silly about that.

As a matter of fact . . . His jaw dropped. "Der Herr Gott im Himmel," he whispered, and then, "Vey iz mir!"

"What is it?"Kristi asked.

"Wawolnice," Veit said.

"Well, what about it?" his wife said.

But he shook his head. "You weren’t watching the movie last night." He didn’t know what she had been doing. Anything that hadn’t been right in front of him or right next to him simply wasn’t there. She’d stuck her head into the front room once or twice--probably to make sure he could sit up straight--but she hadn’t watched.

And you needed to have. Because what was Wawolnice but a Frankenstein village of Jews? It wasn’t meant to have come to life on its own, but it had, it had. So far, the outsiders hadn’t noticed. No mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks had swarmed in to destroy it--only performers playing Poles, who were every bit as artificial.

How long could they go on? Could they possibly spread? Reb Eliezer thought so. Veit wasn’t nearly as sure. But Eliezer might be right. He might. One more time, alevai omayn.

"Shtetl Days" copyright © 2011 Harry Turtledove

The House That George Built

Harry Turtledove

illustration by James Bennett

Puffing slightly, Henry Louis Mencken paused outside of George’s Restaurant. He’d walked a little more than a mile from the red-brick house on Hollins Street to the corner of Eutaw and Lombard. Along with masonry, walking was the only kind of exercise he cared for. Tennis and golf and other so-called diversions were to him nothing but a waste of time. He wished his wind were better, but he’d turned sixty the summer before. He carried more weight than he had as a younger man. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. At his age, who could hope for better than that?

He chuckled as his gloved hand fell toward the latch. Every tavern in Baltimore seemed to style itself a restaurant. Maybe that was the Germanic influence. A proud German himself, Mencken wouldn’t have been surprised.

His breath smoked. It was cold out here this February afternoon. The chuckle cut off abruptly. Because he was a proud German, he’d severed his ties with the Sunpapers a couple of weeks before, just as he had back in 1915. Like Wilson a generation before him, Roosevelt II was bound and determined to bring the United States into a stupid war on England’s side. Mencken had spent his working life taking swipes at idiots in America. Somehow, they always ended up running the country just when you most wished they wouldn’t.

The odors of beer and hot meat and tobacco smoke greeted him when he stepped inside. Mencken nodded happily as he pulled a cigar from an inside pocket of his overcoat and got it going. You could walk into a tavern in Berlin or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco and it would smell the same way. Some things didn’t, and shouldn’t, change.

“Hey, buddy! How ya doin’?” called the big man behind the bar. He had to go six-two, maybe six-three, and at least two hundred fifty pounds. He had a moon face, a wide mouth, a broad, flat nose, and a thick shock of dark brown hair just starting to go gray: he was about fifteen years younger than the journalist. He never remembered Mencken’s name, though Mencken was a regular. But, as far as Mencken could see, the big man never remembered anybody’s name.

“I’m fine, George. How are you?” Mencken answered, settling himself on a stool. He took off the gloves, stuck them in his pocket, and then shed the overcoat.

“Who, me? I’m okay. What’ll it be today?” George said.

“Let me have a glass of Blatz, why don’t you?”

“Comin’ up.” George worked the tap left-handed. He was a southpaw in most things, though Mencken had noticed that he wrote with his right hand. He slid the glass across the bar. “Here y’go.”

Mencken gave him a quarter. “Much obliged, publican.”

“Publican?” George shook his head. “You got me wrong, pal. I voted for FDR all three times.”

Mencken had voted for Roosevelt II once, and regretted it ever after. But if arguing politics with a bartender wasn’t a waste of time, he didn’t know what would be. He sipped the beer, sucking foam from his upper lip as he set the glass down.

Halfway along the bar, two cops were working on beers of their own and demolishing big plates of braised short ribs. One of them was saying, “So the dumb S.O.B tried to run away from me, y’know? I got him in the back of the head with my espantoon”--he patted the billy club on his belt--”and after that he didn’t feel like runnin’ no more.”

“That’s how you do it,” the other policeman agreed. “You gotta fill out all kindsa papers if you shoot somebody, but not if you give him the old espantoon. It’s just part of a day’s work, like.”

Hearing the familiar Baltimore word made Mencken smile. He took a longer pull from his glass, then raised his eyes to the big plaque on the wall behind the bar. Mounted on it were a baseball, a bat, and a small, old-fashioned glove. He caught the bartender’s eye and pointed to the bat. “There’s your espantoon, eh, George?”

“Damn straight,” George said proudly. Then he raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Never heard before you was a baseball fan.”

He might not remember Mencken’s name, but he knew who he was. “I used to be, back in the Nineties,” Mencken answered. “I could give you chapter and verse--hell’s bells, I could give you word and syllable--about the old Orioles. Do you know, the very first thing I ever had in print was a poem about how ratty and faded the 1894 pennant looked by 1896. The very first thing, in the Baltimore American.”

“Them was the National League Orioles,” George said. “Not the International League Orioles, like I played for.”

“Yes, I know.” Mencken didn’t tell the bartender that for the past thirty years and more he’d found baseball a dismal game. He did add, “Everybody in Baltimore knows for whom George Ruth played.” As any native would have, he pronounced the city’s name Baltm’r.

And he told the truth. People in Baltimore did recall their hometown hero. No doubt baseball aficionados in places like Syracuse and Jersey City and even Kansas City remembered his name, too. He’d played in the high minors for many years, mostly for the Orioles, and done splendidly both as a pitcher and as a part-time outfielder and first baseman.

Did they remember him in Philadelphia? In Boston? In New York, where you needed to go if you wanted to get remembered in a big way? No and no and no, and he’d played, briefly and not too well, in both Philly and Boston. Did they remember him in Mobile and in Madison, in Colorado Springs and in Wichita, in Yakima and in Fresno, in all the two-bit towns where being remembered constituted fame? They did not. And it wasn’t as if they’d forgotten him, either. They’d simply never heard of him. That was what stopping one rung shy of the top of the ladder did for you--and to you.

But this was Baltimore. Here, George Ruth was a hometown hero in his hometown. A superannuated hometown hero, but nevertheless . . . Mencken pointed to the bat on the plaque again. “Is that the one you used to hit the I Told You So Homer?” he asked.

He hadn’t been a baseball fan these past two-thirds of his life. But he was a Baltimorean. He knew the story, or enough of it. In the 1922 Little World Series--or was it 1921? or 1923?--the Kansas City pitcher facing Ruth knocked him down with a fastball. Ruth got up, dusted himself off, and announced to all and sundry that he’d hit the next one out of the park. He didn’t. The Blues’ hurler knocked him down again, almost performing a craniotomy on him in the process.

He got to his feet once more . . . and blasted the next pitch not only out of Oriole Park but through a plate glass window in a building across the street on the fly. As he toured the bases, he loudly and profanely embellished on the theme of I told you so.

A famous home run--in Baltimore. One the older fans in Kansas City shuddered to remember. A homer nobody anywhere else cared about.

Ruth turned to eye the shillelagh. He was an ugly bruiser, though you’d have to own a death wish to tell him so. Now he morosely shook his head. “Nah. That winter, some guy said he’d give me forty bucks for it, so I sold the son of a gun. You’d best believe I did. I needed the jack.”

“I know the feeling,” Mencken said. “Most of us do at one time or another--at one time and another, more likely.”

“Boy, you got that right.” George Ruth assumed the expression of an overweight Mask of Tragedy. Then he said, “How’s about you buy me a drink?”

“How’s about I do?” Mencken said agreeably. He fished another quarter from his trouser pocket and set it in on the bar. Ruth dropped it into the cash box. The silver clinked sweetly.

Ruth gave himself his--or rather, Mencken’s--money’s worth, and then some. In a mixing glass, he built a Tom Collins the size of a young lake. Lemon juice, sugar syrup, ice cubes (which clinked on a note different from the coins’), and enough gin to put every pukka sahib in India under the table. So much gin, Mencken laughed out loud. Ruth decorated the drink with not only the usual cherry but a couple of orange slices as well.

And then, as Mencken’s eyes widened behind his round-lensed spectacles, Ruth proceeded to pour it down his throat. All of it--the fruit salad, the ice cubes, the works. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, but that was as much hesitation as he gave. A pipe big enough to manage that . . . Mencken would have thought the Public Works Department needed to lay it down the middle of the street. But no.

“Not too bad. No, sirree,” Ruth said. And damned if he didn’t fix himself another Collins just as preposterous as the first one. He drank it the same way, too. Everything went down the hatch. He put the empty mixing glass down on the bar. “Boy, that hits the spot.”

Both cops were staring at him. So was Mencken. He’d done some serious boozing in his day, and seen more than he’d done. But he’d never witnessed anything to match this. He waited for Ruth to fall over, but the man behind the bar might have been drinking Coca-Cola. He’d been a minor-league ballplayer, but he was a major-league toper.

“My hat’s off to you, George,” one of the policemen said, and doffed his high-crowned, shiny-brimmed cap.

“Mine, too, by God!” Mencken lifted his own lid in salute. “You just put a big dent in this week’s profits.”

“Nahh.” Ruth shook his head. “I was thirsty, that’s all--thirsty and pissed off, know what I mean?” How he could have absorbed that much gin without showing it Mencken couldn’t imagine, but he had.

“Pissed off about what?” the journalist asked, as he was surely meant to do.

“That cocksucker Rasin. Carroll Wilson Chickenshit Rasin.” Here was a name Ruth remembered, all right: remembered and despised. “You know who that rotten prick was?”

Nobody who hadn’t lived in Baltimore for a long time would have, but Mencken nodded. “Politico--Democrat--back around the time of the last war. Had a pretty fair pile of cash, too, if I remember straight.”

“Yeah, that’s him, all right,” Ruth agreed. “Lousy four-flushing cocksucker.”

“What did he ever do to you?” Mencken had trouble envisioning circles in which both Rasin and Ruth would have traveled a generation earlier.

“Back in 1914, Jack Dunn of the Orioles, he signed me to a contract. Signed me out of St. Mary’s Industrial School, way the hell over at the west end of town.”

“All right.” If Mencken had ever heard of George Ruth’s baseball beginnings, they’d slipped his mind. “But what’s that got to do with Carroll Rasin?” He wondered if the gin was scrambling Ruth’s brains. That the big palooka could still stand up and talk straight struck him as the closest thing to a miracle God had doled out lately. Wherever the ex-ballplayer had bought his liver, Mencken wanted to shop there, too.

“Rasin talked about putting a Federal League team in town. The Baltimore Terrapins, he was gonna call ‘em. And when Dunn heard about that, he damn near shit. The Federal League, it was a major league, like.” Ruth paused to light a cigar: a cheroot that, with Mencken’s, thickened the fug in the air. After a couple of irate puffs, Ruth went on, “The International League, that was minor-league ball. With the Terrapins in town, the Orioles wouldn’t’ve drawn flies.”

Mencken remembered the Federal League only vaguely. Had Ruth not reminded him of it, he probably wouldn’t have remembered it at all. He’d long since outgrown his fandom by 1914. “So what’s that got to do with you?” he asked. “And while you’re at it, how about another beer?”

“Sure thing.” Ruth took back the glass, but waited to see money before working the tap again. As he gave Mencken the refill, he growled, “What’s it got to do with me? I’ll tell you what. If the Oriole’s ain’t drawin’ flies, Dunn ain’t makin’ any dough. How’s he supposed to keep the Orioles goin’? Hell, how’s he supposed to eat?”

“How?” Mencken lobbed another question down the middle.

“You sell your players, that’s how. Weren’t no farm teams in those days.” Ruth’s lip curled so scornfully, the cigar threatened to fall out. “Nah, none o’ that crap. The minor-league owners was out for themselves, same as the guys in the bigs. An’ they got cash by sellin’ contracts. I had people innarested in me, too, let me tell you I did. Connie Mack of the Athaletics, he was innarested, only he didn’t have no money himself then, neither. The Red Sox, they was innarested. And Cincinnati, they was makin’ noises like they wanted me.”

He reminded Mencken of an aging chorus girl, all crow’s-feet and extra chins, going on about the hot sports who’d drunk champagne from her slipper back in the day. The bloom went off a baseball player just about as fast. It was a cruel way to try to make a living. “So why didn’t you sign with one of them, then?” he asked.

Ruth snorted angrily--he’d missed something. “I couldn’t. Fuckin’ Dunn held my contract. Unless he turned me loose, I had to play for him or nobody. And that no good piece of shit of a Rasin crapped out on me. Turned out he didn’t have the moolah, or maybe didn’t wanna spend the moolah, to get into the Federal League after all. The Milwaukee Creams was the last franchise instead. The Creams! Ain’t that a crappy name for a team? And Dunn made a go of it here after all. I was stuck, is what I was. Fuckin’ stuck.”

Now that Mencken thought about it, fragments of the war between the upstart league and its established rivals came back to him. “Why didn’t you join the Federal League yourself? Plenty of players did.”

The man behind the bar threw his hands in the air, a gesture of extravagant disgust. “I couldn’t even do that, Goddamn it to fucking hell. When Dunn got me out of St. Mary’s, I was a whole hot week past my nineteenth birthday. Deal he made with the holy fathers said he was my legal guardian till I turned twenty-one. I couldn’t sign nothin’ without him givin’ the okay. An’ by my twenty-first birthday, goddamn Federal League was dead as shoe leather. I got screwed, an’ I didn’t even get kissed.”

“You did all right for yourself,” Mencken said, reasonable--perhaps obnoxiously reasonable--as usual. “You played your game at the highest level. You played for years and years at the next highest level. When you couldn’t play any more, you had enough under the mattress to let you get this place, and it’s not half bad, either.”

“It’s all in the breaks, all dumb fuckin’ luck,” Ruth said. “If Dunn had to sell me to the bigs when I was a kid, who knows what I coulda done? I was thirty years old by the time they changed the rules so he couldn’t keep me forever no more. I already had the start of my bay window, and my elbow was shot to shit. I didn’t say nothin’ about that--otherwise, nobody woulda bought me. But Jesus Christ, if I’d made the majors when I was nineteen, twenty years old, I coulda been Buzz Arlett.”

Every Broadway chorine thought she could start in a show. Every pug thought he could have been a champ. And every halfway decent ballplayer thought he could have been Buzz Arlett. Even a nonfan like Mencken knew his name. Back in the Twenties, people said they were two of the handful of Americans who needed no press agent. He came to Brooklyn from the Pacific Coast League in 1922. He belted home runs from both sides of the plate. He pitched every once in a while, too. And he turned the Dodgers into the powerhouse they’d been ever since. He made people forget about the Black Sox scandal that had hovered over the game since it broke at the end of the 1920 season. They called him the man who saved baseball. They called Ebbets Field the House That Buzz Built. And the owners smiled all the way to the bank.

Trying to be gentle with a man he rather liked, Mencken said, “Do you really think so? Guys like that come along once in a blue moon.”

Ruth thrust out his jaw. “I coulda, if I’d had the chance. Even when I got up to Philly, that dumbshit Fletcher who was runnin’ the team, he kept me pitchin’ an’ wouldn’t let me play the field. There I was, tryin’ to get by with junk from my bad flipper in the Baker Bowl, for Chrissakes. It ain’t even a long piss down the right-field line there. Fuck, I hit six homers there myself. For a while, that was a record for a pitcher. But they said anybody could do it there. An’ I got hit pretty hard myself, so after a season and a half they sold me to the Red Sox.”

“That was one of the teams that wanted you way back when, you said,” Mencken remarked.

“You was listenin’! Son of a bitch!” Ruth beamed at him. “Here, have one on me.” He drew another Blatz and set it in front of Mencken. The journalist finished his second one and got to work on the bonus. Ruth went on, “But when the Sox wanted me, they was good. Time I got to ‘em, they stunk worse’n the Phils. They pitched me a little, played me in the outfield and at first a little, an’ sat me on the bench a lot. I didn’t light the world on fire, so after the season they sold me down to Syracuse. ‘Cept for a month at the end of ‘32 with the Browns”--he shuddered at some dark memory--”I never made it back to the bigs again. But I coulda been hot stuff if fuckin’ Rasin came through with the cash.”

A line from Gray’s “Elegy” went through Mencken’s mind: Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest. A mute (or even a loudmouthed) inglorious Arlett tending bar in Baltimore? Mencken snorted. Not likely! He knew why that line occurred to him now. He’d mocked it years before: There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the imaginations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Mencken poured down the rest of the beer and got up from his stool. “Thank you kindly, George. I expect I’ll be back again before long.”

“Any time, buddy. Thanks for lettin’ me bend your ear.” George Ruth chuckled. “This line o’ work, usually it goes the other way around.”

“I believe that.” Mencken put on his overcoat and gloves, then walked out into the night. Half an hour--not even--and he’d be back at the house that faced on Union Square.

Copyright © 2009 Harry Turtledove

The Star and the Rockets

Harry Turtledove

illustration by Chris Buzelli

A chilly January night in Roswell. Joe Bauman has discovered that’s normal for eastern New Mexico. It gets hot here in the summer, but winters can be a son of a bitch. That Roswell’s high up--3,600 feet--only makes the cold colder. Makes the sky clearer, too. A million stars shine down on Joe.

One of those stars is his: the big red one marking the Texaco station at 1200 West Second Street. He nods to himself in slow satisfaction. He’s had a good run, a hell of a good run, here in Roswell. The way it looks right now, he’ll settle down here and run the gas station full time when his playing days are done.

Won’t be long, either. He’ll turn thirty-two in April, about when the season starts. Ballplayers, even ones like him who never come within miles of the big time, know how sharply mortal their careers are. If he doesn’t, the ache in his knees when he turns on a fastball will remind him.

He glances down at his watch, which he wears on his right wrist--he’s a lefty all the way. It’s getting close to nine o’clock. He looks up Second Street. Then he looks down the street. No traffic either way. People here make jokes about rolling up the sidewalks after the sun goes down. With maybe 20,000 people, Roswell seems plenty big and bustling to Joe. It’s a damn sight bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, the pissant village where he was born, that’s for sure.

He could close up and go home. Chances that he’ll have any more business are pretty slim. But the sign in the rectangular iron frame says OPEN ‘TIL MIDNIGHT. He’ll stick around. You never can tell.

And it’s not as if he’s never done this before. Dorothy will be amazed if he does come home early. He’s got a TV set--a Packard Bell, just a year old--in a back room, and a beat-up rocking chair she was glad to see the last of, and a shelf with a few books in case he doesn’t feel like staring at the television. He’s got an old, humming refrigerator in there, too (he thinks of it as an icebox more often than not), with some beer. Except for a bed, all the comforts of home.

When he goes in there, he ducks to make sure he doesn’t bang his head. He’s a great big guy--six-five, maybe 235. Maybe more like 250 now, when he’s not in playing shape. Lots and lots of afternoons in the sun have weathered the skin on his face and his forearms and especially his hands.

He leaves the door to the back room open so headlights will warn him in case anybody does come in. When he turns on the TV, the picture is snowy. He needs a tall antenna to bring it in at all, because Roswell doesn’t have a station of its own, though there’s talk of getting one. It isn’t nine yet. Milton Berle isn’t on. Joe can’t stand the program that runs ahead of him. He turns the sound down to nothing. He doesn’t turn the set off: then it would have to warm up again, and he might miss something. But he does ignore it for the time being.

To kill time till Uncle Miltie’s inspired lunacy, he pulls a book off the shelf. “Oh, yeah--the weird one,” he mutters. Something called The Supernatural Reader, a bunch of stories put together by Groff and Lucy Conklin. Groff--there’s a handle for you.

Brand-new book, or near enough. Copyright 1953. He found it in a Salvation Army store. Cost him a dime. How can you go wrong?

Story he’s reading is called “Pickup from Olympus,” by a fellow named Pangborn. The guy in the story runs a gas station, which makes it extra interesting for Joe. And there’s a ‘37 Chevy pickup in it, and damned if he didn’t learn to drive on one of those before he went into the Navy.

But the people, if that’s what you’d call them, in the pickup . . . Joe shakes his head. “Weird,” he says again. “Really weird.” He’s the kind of guy who likes things nailed down tight.

He puts The Supernatural Reader back on the shelf. With a grunt, he heaves his bulk out of the rocker, walks over to the television, and twists the volume knob to the right. When he plops himself down in the chair once more, it creaks and kind of shudders. One of these days, it’ll fall apart when he does that, and leave him with his ass on the floor. But not yet. Not yet.

A chorus of men dressed the way he would be if he really spiffed himself up--dressed like actors playing service-station jockeys instead of real ones, in other words--bursts into staticky song:

Oh, we’re the men of Texaco.
We work from Maine to Mexico.
There’s nothing like this Texaco of ours;
Our show tonight is powerful,
We’ll wow you with an hourful
of howls from a showerful of stars;
We’re the merry Texaco-men!
Tonight we may be showmen;
Tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars!

Joe sings along, even if he can’t carry a tune in a pail. Texaco is his outfit, too, even more than the Roswell Rockets are. If you’re not a big-leaguer--and sometimes even if you are--baseball is only a part-time job. He’ll get six hundred dollars a month to swing the bat this year, and a grand as a signing bonus. For a guy in a Class C league, that’s great money. But a gas station, now, a gas station is a living for the rest of his life. You get into your thirties, you start worrying about stuff like that. You’d goddamn well better, anyhow.

Out comes Milton Berle. He’s in a dress. Joe guffaws. Christ on His crutch, but Milton Berle makes an ugly broad. Joe remembers how horny he got when he was in the Navy and didn’t even see a woman for months at a time. If he’d seen one who looked like that, he would have kept right on being horny.

Or maybe not. When you’re twenty years old, what the hell are you but a hard-on with legs?

Uncle Miltie starts strumming a ukulele. If that’s not scary, his singing is. It’s way worse than Joe’s. Joe laughs fit to bust a gut. He hope the picture stays halfway decent. This is gonna be a great show.

* * *

There’s a sudden glow of headlights against the far wall of the back room. “Well, shit,” Joe mutters. He didn’t think it was real likely he’d get a customer this time of night. But he didn’t go home. Unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. Anybody who’s spent years on a baseball field will tell you that. Play long enough and you’ll see everything.

Out of the chair he comes--one more time. He doesn’t want to turn his back on Milton Berle, but he does. When you’re there to do a job, you’ve got to do it. Anybody who made it through the Depression has learned that the hard way.

Parked by the pumps is . . . Joe shakes his head, wondering about himself. Why the hell should he expect a ‘37 Chevy pickup? That damn book, he thinks. That crazy story.

But the story wouldn’t get to him the way it does if he lived in Santa Fe or Lubbock. Something funny happened in Roswell a few years before he got here. He doesn’t exactly know what. The locals don’t talk about it much, not where he can overhear. They like him and everything. He knocks enough balls over the right-field fence for the ballclub, they’d better like him. Still and all, he remains half a stranger. Roswell may be bigger than Welch, Oklahoma, but it’s still a small town.

Nobody here laughs about flying-saucer yarns, though. They do in Midland and Odessa and Artesia and the other Longhorn League towns, but not in Roswell.

Anyway, in spite of his jimjams, it’s not a ‘37 Chevy pickup stopped in front of the pumps, engine ticking as it cools down. It’s an Olds Rocket 88, so new it might have just come off the floor in Albuquerque or El Paso, the two nearest cities with Oldsmobile dealerships.

As he walks around to the driver’s side, the jingle that started off the TV show pops back into his head, God knows why. We’ll wow you with an hourful of howls from a showerful of stars. That’s what he’s singing under his breath before the guy in the Oldsmobile rolls down the window so they can talk.

Warmer air gusts out of the car; Joe feels it against his cheek. Well, of course a baby like this will come with a heater. He’s already noticed it sports a radio antenna. Probably has an automatic transmission, too, he thinks. All the expensive options.

Whoever’s in there, it’s not one of his regulars. He’s never seen this car before. And besides, his regulars are home at this time of night. If they’ve got TVs, they’re watching Uncle Miltie, same as he was. If they don’t, they’re listening to the radio or playing cards or reading a book. Or maybe they’ve already gone to bed. Not much to keep you up late in Roswell.

“What can I do for you?” he asks, trying not to sound pissed off because he’s missing his show. “Just gas? Or do you want me to look under the hood and check your tires, too?”

For a long moment, there’s no answer. He wonders if the driver savvies English. Old Mexico’s less than a hundred miles away. Roswell has a barrio. Some of the greasers are wild Rockets fans. Some of them bring their jalopies here because he plays for the team.

Because they do, he can make a stab at asking his question in Spanish. It’s crappy Spanish, sure, but maybe the guy will comprende. He’s just about to when the driver says, “Just gas, please. Five gallons of regular.”

Joe frowns. It’s a funny voice, half rasp, half squeak. And he wants to dig a finger into his ear. It’s as if he’s hearing the other guy inside his head, someplace way down deep. And . . . “You sure, Mister? You got a V-8 in there, you know. You really ought to feed it ethyl. Yeah, costs a couple cents more a gallon, but you make it back in performance and then some. Less engine wear, too.”

Another pause. Maybe the driver’s thinking it over. Joe eyes him, trying to pretend he’s not doing it. The fellow’s funny-looking, which is putting it mildly. Joe wonders if he is a guy. He’s sure not very big--he’s got the seat shoved all the way forward. His face is smooth as a girl’s, maybe even smoother. But he’s got on a white shirt, a jacket with lapels, sunglasses even though it’s nighttime, and a fedora with no hair--no hair at all--sticking out from under it. Joe sees there are two more in the car with him, one in front and one in back. They both look and dress like the fellow behind the wheel, poor bastards.

This pause lasts so long, Joe gets ready to try his half-assed Spanish again. Before he can, the driver says, “Regular, please. Less lead goes into the air that way.”

“Huh?” Joe says. Then he remembers ethyl is short for tetraethyl lead. It’s what they put in gas to make it knock less.

“Less lead,” the driver repeats. “Less air pollution.” He reaches out the window to point at the Texaco sign. His hand is tiny. It’s as smooth as his face. And it has only three fingers to go with the thumb. It doesn’t look as if he’s lost one in an accident or during the war. It looks as if he was born that way. He goes on, “You are a man of the star. You have the emblem. You have the song. You should understand such things.”

Was Joe singing the jingle loud enough for the guy to hear him? He doesn’t think so, especially since the Olds’s window was closed then. He’s not a hundred percent sure, though, so he doesn’t push it.

To hide his unease--that voice still seems to form in the middle of his head--he tries to turn it into a joke: “I’m not just a man of the star, Mac.” He also points to the Texaco sign. “I’m a man of the Rockets.”

The guy behind the wheel takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are enormous. They reflect light like a cat’s. Human eyes don’t do that. When they meet Joe’s, he tries to look away, but finds he can’t. They peer into him, as if through a window. He knows he should be scared, but he isn’t.

“A man of the star, and of the Rockets!” the little guy says. His eyes get bigger yet. Joe hasn’t believed they could. “Why, so you are! What a pleasant coincidence! In this vehicle, so are we.”

His two buddies wriggle and twitch as if he’s just come out with something way funnier than any Milton Berle one-liner. “What are you doing to me?” Joe hears his own voice as if from very far away--certainly from farther away than the driver’s. That should be impossible. But unlikely isn’t the same thing, a thought he’s had not long before. He tries again: “What are you going to do to me?”

One more pause from inside the Oldsmobile. It’s as if the driver has to translate even the simplest English into something he can understand. Martian? Joe wonders. His feet want to run, but they can’t. He’s frozen where he stands, even more than he would be by a wicked curveball.

“I am buying five gallons of regular from you,” the driver eventually answers. “That is what I am doing to you. And you are a man of the star, and of the Rockets. It is only right that you should be far-traveled in your trade, and so you shall be. And no, since you are curious, we do not speak Martian.” His friends wriggle and twitch again. He adds, “We are from farther away than that ourselves.”

What’s farther away than Mars? That thought fills Joe’s mind as the driver puts his sunglasses back on. The second he does, most of what they’ve been talking about falls right out of Joe’s mind. He finds himself staring up at the stars, the way he was before he went in to watch Milton Berle. Boy, they look a long way off tonight! He wonders why--but not for long.

“Five gallons of regular, you said, sir?” he asks the little bald guy behind the wheel.

“That’s right,” the driver answers after a hesitation Joe should find odd but somehow doesn’t. It’s almost as if he’s used to it.

He pumps the gas. It comes to a dollar thirty-five. The little guy gives him a ten-spot. He has to go inside to make change: he knows he’s only got six bucks in his own wallet. He’s just coming out when the Rocket 88 drives off. “Hey, wait!” Joe yells, money clenched in his big, beefy fist. “You forgot your . . .” His voice trails off. The car isn’t coming back. He gets a tip every once in a while, but he’s never got one like this before.

Shaking his head, he goes back in to finish watching his TV show. Uncle Miltie is spoofing The Shadow, which still runs on the radio. “I am Lamont Creampuff!” he intones. “I have the power to crowd men’s minds!” He shoves, uselessly, at two enormous actors who are crowding him. With a pathetic shrug, he goes, “Well, sometimes.”

Joe should be falling out of the chair laughing. He knows he should. For some reason he can’t fathom, though, he doesn’t find the sketch funny.

* * *

Not much to spring training, not when you play for an independent team in a Class C league. On weekends, the guys go out to Park Field to hit and to field grounders and shag flies. Joe puts in as much time as he can. He usually gets off to a slow start. Maybe this year he won’t. He can hope. You can always hope, even if you’re in the Longhorn League.

He doesn’t remember much of what happened that cold January night. Most of what he does remember is missing part of Milton Berle and getting the nice tip. Sometimes he thinks there’s more to it, but less and less as the days go by.

He doesn’t talk about it. What’s to say? Nothing that makes sense. Nothing anybody will believe. He can’t even joke about it, the way Berle made a joke out of Lamont Cranston. People in Roswell don’t laugh at jokes about flying saucers.

He boots a ground ball. It goes right between his legs. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” says the guy who hit it. “You shoulda snagged that one in your sleep.”

“Musta been thinking about something else,” Joe answers sheepishly. Why is he worrying about flying saucers? He’s never seen one in his life. He’s seen the two red taillights of that Oldsmobile receding down Second Street, though.

 ”Don’t think, for Chrissakes,” the other Rocket tells him. “You’ll only screw yourself up.”

He’s not wrong. You can’t think when you’re playing ball. You’ll be a split second late, half a step slow, if you do. You have to play and play and play till your body automatically knows what to do, and your head backs off and lets it.

Joe’s swing is like that. He’s always been a hard hitter. This year, he’s something extra special. The ball jumps off his bat, in the practices and after the season starts. Some of the shots he hits go farther than Professor Goddard’s prewar experiments that gave the Roswell Rockets their name.

He hits ‘em long. He hits ‘em early. He hits ‘em often. The Longhorn League belongs to the hitters. So do the West Texas–New Mexico League, the Big State League, and the Arizona-Texas League, all in the same part of the country. The air is thin. The weather’s hot. Pitching staffs are small, and wear down as summer grinds along. Lots of guys run up big numbers here. But even by the inflated standards people in these parts are used to, Joe has a season to remember.

They play mostly night games. During the day, when the Rockets are home, Joe pumps gas. At night, he takes dead aim at the whitewashed planks of the right-field fence at Park Field. It’s only 329 down the line. He’s smacking ‘em way farther than that. He knocks one into the rodeo grounds next to the ballpark, which interrupts the calf-roping.

He gets a free ham every time he hits one out, too: the team has a deal with a local meat-packer. He doesn’t keep most of them. Some of the Cuban kids who play for the Rockets praying a big-league organization will notice them are hungry all the time. They don’t get paid the way he does, and they need the meat.

He passes fifty homers early in August. By the end of the month, with the season winding down, he has sixty-four. That means he’s passed Babe Ruth, whose sixty has stood as the major-league mark since 1927. But the record in the minors is sixty-nine. Joe Hauser did it in 1933, and Bob Crues tied it in 1949 playing for Amarillo in the West Texas–New Mexico League. Joe Bauman played with him there a couple of years earlier.

On the night of September 1, Joe gets close. Real close. The Sweetwater Spudders are in Roswell. Their franchise is spuddering; they moved from Wichita Falls in June. And Joe has a game for the ages. Four homers. A double. Ten RBIs. Oh, yeah. The Rockets win, 15-9.

Sixty-eight. One to tie the record. Two to bust it wide open. Nobody in history has ever hit seventy, not since Abner Doubleday said “Let there be bases” and there were bases. All of a sudden, Joe’s a big story. Oh, he’s been a big story in Roswell the whole season, and in the other Longhorn League towns, too. But now he’s a story across the whole country. AP lines carry news of what he’s doing from coast to coast. When’s the last time that happened in Roswell?

Oh. The thing back in ‘47, the one people don’t care to talk about. Whenever Joe thinks about that, he shies away from it like a cat that just got a squirt in the face from a water pistol. So he doesn’t think about it much. It’s not as if he hasn’t got other things on his mind.

The next day, Pat Stasey, the manager, moves him from cleanup to the leadoff spot so he’ll get more chances to hit. But he doesn’t connect on the second. The record sits on his shoulders, heavy as a piano. He hates the flash bulbs going off every time he comes up. It’s not just the local photographers, either. Sports Illustrated has sent a guy to Roswell. So has Life. He is big news, and kind of wishes he weren’t.

The game on the third, against Midland, is the Rockets’ last one at Park Field. Joe ties the record in the seventh inning. The piano falls off. But if he’s gonna break it, he’ll have to break it on the road. Along with the rest of the guys, he climbs into the bus for the long, hot haul to Big Spring, Texas. The national shutterbugs and reporters bum lifts from the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate who usually cover Longhorn League games. A little convoy rolls east along US 380.

Not quite knowing why, Joe wonders if he’ll see a Rocket 88 pacing the rickety old bus, but he doesn’t. Is that good news or bad? He’s not even sure it’s news at all.

Big Spring is bad news. The Broncs won’t pitch to him. Time after time, he has to toss the bat aside and trot down to first base. Even the Big Spring fans boo. The Rockets have nothing else to play for. They won’t win the pennant. Artesia has already clinched it. And that’s where they head next, for a Sunday doubleheader to close out the season.

Joe played for Artesia for a couple of years before moving up to Roswell ahead of the ‘53 season because he could get the Texaco station there. The fans of the NuMexers (they were the Drillers when he played for them) razz him whenever he comes back to town.

“Whoever made this schedule’s just plain squirrely,” Stasey complains. “Two hundred miles from Roswell to Big Spring, two hundred more from Big Spring back to Artesia. But Artesia’s only forty miles south of Roswell. We shoulda gone there first, then into Texas.”

“You want things to make sense, you shouldn’t play this game,” says Vallie Eaves, the pitching coach. He’s past forty, but he still goes out on the mound every once in a while. When he was younger, he made it to the bigs--the only Rocket who can say that. He wasn’t very good, but he made it. Stasey and Joe nod.

Before the game, the Artesia manager walks over to Joe. “I heard what they done to you in Big Spring,” he says, and spits a stream of tobacco juice onto the hard-baked ground. “I think that was chickenshit. We’ll pitch to you. We won’t groove one, but we’ll give you your chance. Fair’s fair.”

“Obliged,” Joe answers. “That’s white of you.” Would the other manager say the same thing if he didn’t have the pennant sewed up? Not likely! But Joe will take what he can get.

He happens to notice three little bald guys in fedoras and sunglasses sitting in the grandstand back of first base. They look so strange, he almost points them out to the guys he plays with. Somehow, though, it slips his mind. As a matter of fact, it slips right out his mind. So do they, which is odd, because they’re down by the front. And none of the other Rockets seems to see them at all.

Joe still feels funny batting leadoff, but whatthehell, whatthehell. Though Artesia hasn’t liked him since he bailed for Roswell, the crowd cheers and stomps when the PA announcer calls his name. That, or something, makes him feel easier as he steps to the plate.

On the hill for the NuMexers is a Cuban kid, José Galardo. Their manager wasn’t kidding--he pitches to Joe. Joe takes a couple, fouls off a couple. Artesia has a big ballpark. It’s over 350 to right, and the wind blows toward the plate. If Joe breaks the record, he won’t break it with a cheap shot.

The kid comes in with a fastball on the 2-2 pitch. Joe swings. Nothing sweeter than bat hitting ball squarely. He knows it’s gone before he finishes his follow-through. No, it’s no cheap home run. It’s way the hell out of there.

“Number seventy!” the PA man yells. Like a man in a dream, Joe rounds the bases. His feet hardly seem to touch the ground. If hitting number sixty-nine was getting the piano off his back, seventy is the piano stool. When his spikes come down on the plate, he’s grinning just like Christmas.

And it’s just like Christmas another way, too. When you do something special in the Longhorn League, the fans let you know they appreciate it. They shove cash out through the chicken-wire screening that keeps foul line drives from murdering them. Joe walks down the first- and third-base lines, gathering it in.

He doesn’t count it as he collects, but it’s got to be a month’s pay, maybe more. Certainly more in effect. Because it’s cash, the IRS won’t have to hear about it.

One of the bills is a C-note. The hand that thrusts it at Joe is very small, and has only four fingers. “Well done, man of the star,” says a strange voice--half growly, half squeaky--that seems to come from inside his head. Joe blinks, like a man trying to awaken from a dream. But the dream is too sweet. He walks on down the line, grabbing more greenbacks. Photographers follow, clicking away. By the time he gets back to the dugout, he doesn’t care about the voice any more. Still a game--no, two games--to play.

Roswell wins the first one. And the Rockets murder the NuMexers, 17-0, in the nightcap. Joe launches two more in the second game, one off a guy named John Goodell and one off Frank Galardo, who happens to be José’s uncle. That lets the Rockets slide into second, half a game ahead of the Carlsbad Potashers.

So it’s a busful of happy ballplayers who go back up US 285 to Roswell. Happy reporters and photographers, too--they have their story. And the national guys are doubly happy. They can get the hell out of New Mexico and back to the big city.

When Joe comes home, Dorothy shows him a fistful of wires. They’re all congratulating him, telling him what a great guy he is. That’s nice, sure. Then he shows her all the money the Artesia fans gave him. That’s way nicer.

More wires the next morning. By then, he’s back at Joe Bauman’s Texaco, pumping gas. Almost the first thing that happens when he gets there is a Rocket 88 Olds pulls up to the pump. In it are . . . a guy with greasy hair and kind of a cute redhead. They congratulate him, too. They were at the game when he hit his sixty-ninth. He fills the Olds’s tank. He takes their money and makes change. He feels disappointed, and can’t say why.

* * *

He hopes something big will come from his record, but it doesn’t. No major-league team cares about an old first baseman who hit a ton and a half of homers in the low minors. The San Francisco Seals from the PCL call, but that doesn’t pan out, either. He plays two more years for Roswell, then hangs ‘em up for good. Pumping gas, fixing cars . . . yeah, you can make a lifetime living at that. And he does.

He always wonders if he could have hacked it. Anybody good enough to play the game for money does. Joe has better reason than most. If he’d done some things differently back in the forties. . . . Too late now.

Years go by. That thing people in Roswell didn’t talk about? Some folks decide they can make money off it. Before long, people sell funny-looking aliens with big eyes in every gift shop, every drug store, every 7-Eleven. Even in gas stations.

Joe won’t sell them. The first time he sees one, he studies it for a second, then shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “They don’t look quite like that.”

“Oh, yeah? And how do you know?” asks the poker buddy he’s with--they’re on a beer run.

He has no idea. “I just know, that’s all,” he says. The poker buddy gives him the horselaugh. He takes it. What else can he do? But, the rest of his days, he never laughs at a flying-saucer joke. Never once.

We Haven’t Got There Yet

By Harry Turtledove

illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Quotes from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by Tom Stoppard Copyright © 1967 by Tom Stoppard

Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Rushes on the floor, rustling underfoot. Fire roaring in the hearth. Something savory roasting—sometimes, something once savory but now forgotten and scorching—over the fire. On a bright morning, the shadow of St. Paul’s slowly sliding back and away as the sun climbs higher. Small, sweet curls of smoke rising now and then from a pipe of tobacco in the hand of a man of newfangled habit. Always, always, ale in the air. Sometimes, too, the acrid aftermath from a man who’s had all he can hold and one more tankard besides, and cannot dash to the street quick enough to give it back to the gutter.

Bread Street. The Mermaid Tavern. 1606. A new century taking hold, and a new king.

Sunset coming—no, sunset here. One of the serving maids goes from table to table, lighting candles from a twig she’s thrust into the fire. She is a pretty little thing, just about ripe—fifteen, maybe even sixteen. The theatre folk who’ve crowded several tables together near the hearth slow their banter for a moment to ogle her.

When the banter picks up again, someone mentions Hamlet. A player from another company looks over at William Shakespeare. “Ah, the Prince of Denmark,” he says, drinking up. “I had forgot that was yours.”

“Well, it is.” If Shakespeare sounds touchy, who can blame him? Sure as the devil, who remembers the poet? “What of it?”

“Some play to be given on the morrow called it to my mind. What names gave you that pair of Danes, the old friends to Hamlet?”

“Why, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz,” Shakespeare answers—names common as Baker and Johnson amongst the lesser Danish nobility.

“So I thought.” The player nods to himself. “The pair of ’em figure in tomorrow’s performance at the Rose.”

Rage rips through Shakespeare. “May Satan scour all whoreson cullionly barbermongers! Milk-livered, scurvy villains! They will steal, sir, an egg out of a cloister. But their filching is like an unskillful singer, for they keep not time. And meseems they pillage from Hamlet in especial.”

He hates the horrible botch a printer made of the play. The man must have got what passes for the text from an actor in the production—one who does not know it very well. And all Shakespeare can do is complain. Go to law over a pirated quarto? There is no law to go to in such cases. Even if there were, it would cost more than he can ever hope to squeeze from a rascally printer!

He turns to his friends and his fellow topers in the Mermaid. “Shall we by our silence give them leave to do what they will with mine own words? Or shall we take arms against this sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”

He cribs from himself, from the very play the wretches at the Rose purloin. Does anyone cheer his cleverness? Does anyone so much as notice? The ale has been going around for some little while, and nobody seems inclined to care about such things—not even Richard Burbage, who first gave the lines life on stage. But some muzzy shouts and raised tankards more or less promise he won’t beard the bandits alone tomorrow afternoon.

* * *

More or less. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Less today. Shakespeare waits outside the Rose. He waits, and waits, and waits some more. His friends? His fellow topers? They must have something else to do. Wherever they may be, here they are not.

“Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly,” Shakespeare mutters. Which is true. And which does him no good whatever.

The signboard mocks him. It is not put there deliberately for that purpose . . . he supposes. Or maybe it is. Without his friends—and fellow topers—at his side, at his back, he feels less sure of . . . well, of everything. Deliberately placed or not, there it is. ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD—a play by Tom Stoppard.

Shakespeare grinds his teeth, which pains him—one has started to ache. He keeps putting off a trip to the dentist. Who in his right mind does not? As well visit the torturers in the Tower, and pay for the privilege besides. But part of the hurt lies in his spirit. Not content with stealing his characters, this very superficial, ignorant, infected Stoppard has taken his line as well, and taken it for a title.

And Shakespeare has to spend a penny to get into the Rose to see precisely what Stoppard has done to him. He would like to spend a penny on the back of the bacon-fed, malmsy-nose knave, or on the blackguard’s face. Now, though, he can only hand the prentice villain at the door his coin and go in with everyone else out for an afternoon’s amusement.

He takes some somber satisfaction in noting what a tumbledown wreck the theatre is. If only it could have tumbled down altogether before offering this abortion! The Globe, no more than a furlong distant, puts it to shame. Yes, the Rose deserves a fire.

It is also small next to the Globe. To try to make up for that, they stuff it as full with folk as a tennis ball is with feathers. Shakespeare has to elbow his way through the groundlings to approach the stage.

“Have a care, thou rude unpolished hind,” warns a young man in a sailor’s spiral-striped trousers and golden ear-hoop.

Shakespeare sometimes wears an ear-hoop himself, but never one so large and gaudy. He looks down his nose at the sailor, who is several inches shorter. “Sir Patrick Spens’ fortune to thee, whipworthy rogue,” he says, and feels better for warming his wit before turning it on the day’s proper target.

A trumpet sounds—a long, blaring note. The crowd quiets, as much as a crowd ever quiets. A stout woman next to Shakespeare crunches nutmeats, one after another, as if she means to go on doing it all through the play. From the intent look on her face, she does. His cheek tooth twinges.

Two men stroll out on stage. By their clothes, they may be prosperous merchants or not so prosperous aristocrats. Are they counting the house, making sure the moment is ripe to begin? Their manner is so unaffected and natural, Shakespeare needs a moment to understand they are players.

He has never set eyes on either of them before. That also makes him slower than he might be to realize they purpose performing. He has thought he knows every player in and around London, at least by sight. Has some company from the provinces come in to strut its stuff—his stuff—on a stage in the capital, even if only on this mean one? He thinks he should have heard of it. Evidently not, though.

Both players carry leather sacks that clink, one nearly empty, the other correspondingly full. Shakespeare stands on tiptoe and leans forward, intrigued in spite of himself. It is a pretty bit of business. Nor is he the only one it draws in. Nothing like money to make a crowd pay heed.

The player with the almost-empty sack takes a coin from it. The coin flashes gold as it spins in the air. It is surely brass or gilded lead, but flashes gold regardless. The other player catches it. He gives it a brief look.

“Heads,” he announces, and drops it into his bag.

Without changing expression, the player with the starving sack takes out another coin. He tosses it. Hungry eyes follow it as it too flashes gold. Groundlings and gallery folk must know it is not real. Shakespeare knows. His eyes follow it regardless. Ah, if only it were!

Smooth as silk, the player with the stuffed sack snatches it out of the air. He looks at it, as he had with the first coin.

“Heads,” he says, and into his sack it goes. The clink is less melodious than real gold would give.

They run through the same rigmarole six or eight more times. “What’s toward here?” calls a man in a butcher’s stained leather apron. Several other groundlings, including the plump woman still crunching away, scratch their . . . heads.

Shakespeare scratches his head, too, perhaps for different reasons. What an odd way to open a play! No prologue to set the scene, no announcement of who the characters are and what they are about. He sweats blood every time he starts setting goose quill to paper. How to get across what the audience needs to know without setting it yawning?

This thieving Stoppard, whoever he may be, answers the question by not answering it. He cares not a fig for what the audience needs to know. And, somehow, he makes the audience care not a fig with him.

When one of these players declares he’s won this game seventy-six times in a row, damned if titters don’t go up from the crowd. The claim is obviously impossible. Any fool knows a coin will not turn up heads seventy-six straight times. And any fool knows no one will be fool enough to let himself lose a game seventy-six straight times. Which makes Shakespeare and anyone else at the Rose with a groat’s worth of wit wonder why these players play this game this way.

And Shakespeare suddenly wonders whether this Stoppard will tell his auditors what they need to know. Whoever the rascal is, he plainly has a cozening heart. Shakespeare almost admires him. With reluctance, he does admire him—but for the title, the unknown poet hasn’t stolen anything from him.

Yet.

No. Not poet. Playwright. The two players—the one still steadily losing coins, the other as steadily winning them—speak prose, not blank verse. Shakespeare curls his lip at that. By their dress, by their manner, these men seem too highly placed in life to speak prose. Prose, to his way of thinking, is for gravediggers and other such base mechanicals. He has a long-practiced knack for putting ideas into verse. He’s always thought any other playwright would have it, too.

Little by little, he also notices they speak a peculiar kind of prose. He has no great trouble following what they say, but more often than not wouldn’t say it that way himself. No one sentence in their disjointed maunderings about why the coins keep coming up heads seems any too odd by itself. Taken all together, they leave him frowning even more than he is already.

The players have an odd accent, too. Shakespeare has heard a good many in his time, but he can’t place this one.

After the count reaches eighty-eight, the nameless fellow who is winning says, “I’m afraid—”

“So am I,” the other, also still nameless, breaks in.

“I’m afraid this isn’t your day.”

“I’m afraid it is.”

What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Why would the player who is losing a fortune fear this is his day? What can be worse than that? If he is afraid to find out, maybe Shakespeare also should be.

When the count reaches ninety-one, the one who is losing snaps, “You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?”

“Oh, I see,” the one who is winning answers brightly. The beat he waits is well timed. “I’ve forgotten the question.”

Shakespeare snorts laughter. The woman murdering nutmeats beside him doesn’t stop chewing, but her eyes slide his way. Even as her jaw works, the corners of her mouth turn down. He sees something funny that she’s missed, and she dislikes him for it.

A bit later, the one who is losing says, “There was a messenger . . . that’s right. We were sent for.”

Shakespeare leans forward again. If they are sent for, someone has a reason to send for them. He wants to know who. He wants to know why. The playwright has intrigued him that much, anyhow. But then, maddeningly, the players go off at another tangent.

That also irks a groundling standing near Shakespeare. He throws a small cabbage at the men up on the stage. The one who keeps winning gold pieces ducks and comes out with his next line as if nothing has happened. Shakespeare smiles in spite of himself. He cannot imagine a player who lets heckling faze him.

“We were sent for,” says the player who is winning.

“Yes,” the other man agrees.

“That’s why we’re here.” A beat. “Travelling.”

“Yes.”

The player who is winning all at once takes fire. “It was urgent—a matter of extreme urgency, a royal summons, his very words: official business and no questions asked—lights in the stable-yard, saddle up and off headlong and hotfoot across the land, our guides outstripped in breakneck pursuit of our duty. Fearful lest we come too late!”

This is exciting stuff—or it would be, except that the losing player’s pause makes the excitement leak away like air from a pricked pig’s bladder. “Too late for what?” he asks.

“How do I know? We haven’t got there yet,” the winning player comes back in calm, reasonable tones.

“Well, hurry along then, and go somewhere, you dunghill grooms!” someone bawls at them from the packed mass around the outthrust stage.

Whatever else the players may do, they don’t hurry—or go anywhere. The one who is winning thinks he hears a band. Shakespeare and the rest of the audience hear nothing. The one who is losing offers up something that sounds like a logical proposition at a university debate . . . but it is utter madness. He invites the other player to demolish it. The other player ignores him.

Just when Shakespeare decides the band is another bit of madness, real instruments begin to play backstage. Out comes as sorry a troupe of tragedians as Shakespeare has ever seen. They tootle and bang away, just far enough from staying right on tune to be annoying.

Next to Shakespeare, the woman with the nutmeats chews to the beat of the drum. He is sure she has no idea she is doing it. Her fat-padded face shows fresh interest: the two strange simpletons won’t be all this play has to give, anyhow. And Shakespeare too stares more intently, remembering the title of this piece. He’d brought just such a tatterdemalion set of actors to Elsinore. Could these be . . . ?

Their boy, who will play the female roles, is a monstrous, tarted-up libel on womanhood. By contrast, the fellow who is obviously their leader swaggers enough to make Burbage jealous. But Burbage has earned his swagger; he heads a real company, not this scurvy convocation.

The leader wants the troupe to perform for the two simpletons. He wants them to perform for anybody, and the simpletons happen to be there.

“We can do you a selection of gory romances, full of fine cadences and corpses, pirated from the Italian; and it doesn’t take much to make a jingle—even a single coin has music in it,” he declares grandly, with a sweeping wave Burbage would admire. The members of the troupe flourish and bow, raggedly. “Tragedians, at your command,” the spokesman says.

“My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz,” says the man with the bulging leather sack. Now—at last!—they own names. Shakespeare is about to explode. These prose-prattling mountebanks, his characters? The fellow with the empty sack whispers in his friend’s ear. Friend nods and speaks again: “I’m sorry—his name’s Guildenstern, and I’m Rosencrantz.”

Ragged laughter rises in the Rose. Shakespeare joins in. He is too startled to stop himself. How can a man not know his own name? The befuddled soul on stage seems to have no trouble at all, and to be too troubled to have the faintest idea how troubled he is.

If his—Rosencrantz’s—trouble troubles the tragedians’ spokesman, that worthy likewise gives no sign. He merely replies, “A pleasure.” He goes back and forth with Rosencrantz, still trying to talk him out of cash in exchange for a performance. At last, after a weary bow, he says, “Don’t clap too loudly—it’s a very old world.”

That only bewilders the woman beside Shakespeare. He wishes it struck no chord in him. How many times has he played in shows that won nothing but catcalls and cabbages? How many times has he wished he could play in any show at all? Even a hurled cabbage may still have good bits. Along with a stale roll, it can make a supper of sorts. And, to a man out of sorts, even a supper of sorts looks good.

Back and forth they go, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern against the spokesman. Much of it is clever. A few lines lodge in Shakespeare’s memory. The playwright is also more open about the things some boys who play women do than any Shakespeare has heard before him. How he got his lines past the Master of the Revels . . . is a question for another day. Too many other, more urgent, questions, flood Shakespeare’s mind now.

Up on the stage, they do more with coins. Everything keeps coming up heads—against the spokesman, even Guildenstern uses this to his advantage. Then one last coin, which the spokesman tries to keep under his boot. Rosencrantz elbows him away from the golden disk and puts his own foot down on it. Disgruntled—no performance, no possible profit—the spokesman mooches away.

Rosencrantz stoops to retrieve the coin. “I say—that was lucky.”

“What?” Guildenstern asks.

“It was tails,” Rosencrantz answers.

And everything changes.

* * *

A richly dressed young woman rushes onstage. If the two strange simpletons are Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, if this play has anything to do with Hamlet, she must be Ophelia. Where the boy burlesquing a woman in the tragedians’ troupe—Alfred, he goes by—is a jape against femininity, and a sour jape at that, this player is astoundingly convincing. Shape, skin, and mannerisms are perfect, though the player does not speak. Shakespeare has seen some fine personations, but none to match this one.

Likewise, the man who hurries after her has to be Hamlet. His fancy doublet is half unlaced, his stockings dirty and ungartered. He grabs her wrist, stares into her face, and sighs like a man coming to pieces inside himself. Then he sighs cavernously, lets her go, and exits with long strides. She lightfoots off in the opposite direction.

Neither Ophelia nor Hamlet notices Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who stand transfixed, gaping at the piteous spectacle they form. After both the other players exit, Guildenstern unfreezes first. He grabs Rosencrantz’s arm. “Come on!”

Too late. Ruffles and flourishes announce another entrance, an important one. In sweep a gray-bearded king and his equally middle-aged queen: Claudius and Gertrude. Attendants trail them. Shakespeare has eyes only for the player acting Gertrude’s part. Beardless boys, with training, can imitate young women well. Women not so young, women with jowls and wrinkles, are far harder to play. Ophelia is marvelously good. For the life of him, he cannot see where Gertrude falls short of perfection.

Claudius greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by name (though he waves to the one while calling him by the other’s name). And Shakespeare grinds his teeth louder than the woman beside him chomps her nutmeats. Claudius doesn’t just speak—he speaks the words Shakespeare wrote for him in Hamlet. The player in the role has a fine feel for the blank verse, though his accent is as odd as those of the men portraying Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.

Gertrude also speaks well, and with that same accent. And if the player’s voice is not that of a woman nearing fifty, Shakespeare has never heard one that is.

“Abandoned robbers!” he shouts furiously, shaking his fist at the stage. Stoppard hasn’t just robbed him of his characters. He’s lifted a whole great chunk of Hamlet and transplanted it into his play.

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern respond, they too use blank verse—Shakespeare’s blank verse. Their air of befuddlement, bewilderment, drops away like an abandoned cloak. They are everything their creator could wish them to be . . . except for bestriding the stage in this pilfered piece of play.

The poet is not the only one to realize something is rotten in the state of Denmark. In front of him, a short, squat, pockmarked man turns to the woman beside him and says, “Have we not seen this before, Lucy?”

“Is it so?” Lucy replies. “Never can I keep all of them straight in my head, but they do help the days spin by.”

“That they do,” the pockmarked man agrees. “A fine furry robe the king’s got, eh? One like it and even you’d not complain of cold on a winter’s night.” Lucy’s sniff says she won’t admit she complains about anything.

A skinny, white-bearded man in somber black enters: Polonius. He too comes out with Shakespeare’s lines:

And I do think, or else this brain of mine
Hunts not the trail of policy so sure
As it hath used to do, that I have found
The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy. . . .

He, Claudius, Gertrude, and the attendants exit together.

Guildenstern and Rosencrantz stand alone on the stage once more. They look wildly in all directions, as if wondering what has just happened to them. When a cheapjack, gimcrack building falls down and men scramble and stagger from the ruins, their faces bear such expressions of horrified amazement. London is full of buildings like that. Shakespeare has seen such expressions before. Rarely has he seen them done so well in the theatre.

“I want to go home,” Rosencrantz says, and the plaintiveness in his voice pierces Shakespeare to the root.

The two players talk on. They are not, or they seem not to be, in Hamlet any more. They have returned to the other play, the bizarre play, the one they inhabited until Claudius and Gertrude and Polonius swept them up and carried them away and . . . left them high and dry. They might be nothing more than a couple of twigs abandoned, for the moment, by the tide. What can they do, where can they go, by themselves? Nowhere, not till that impetus, or some impetus, seizes them again.

Watching them abandoned there, Shakespeare feels his rage against this Tom Stoppard all at once fall away. “Sweet Jesu!” he whispers. Almost, almost, he crosses himself. His father followed the Romish faith in secret. Some leanings that way linger in him still. But to show them . . . to show them is to ask for a nasty end to his days.

He knows that. How can he not? Even so, he nearly betrays himself, so vast is his astonishment. No wonder his rage falls by the wayside. He has no room for it within himself, not any more. He suddenly sees why Stoppard has appropriated Hamlet for his own purposes. The stranger has found questions in drama Shakespeare knows he never would have dreamt of for himself, not if he were to live another 300 years and more.

Up on the stage, Guildenstern is saying, “A man standing in his saddle in the half-lit half-alive dawn banged on the shutters and called two names. He was just a hat and a cloak levitating in the grey plume of his own breath, but when he called we came. That much is certain—we came.”

How many messengers and knights and nobles and constables and other such folk has Shakespeare written into his plays? More than he can remember. More than he can count if he could remember. What do they do? Whatever the action requires of them. They come on stage. They say their lines and make their motions. Sometimes they exit.

Sometimes they die.

In a way, that is as it should be. The play could not advance without them. But never has Shakespeare thought to wonder what the world—the world of the play, the world within the play, the world as a whole—might look like through the eyes of such a personage. A playwright is but a lesser God. How do his smaller, less favored creatures live—do they live?—when his eye is not fully on them?

Like this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, perhaps?

They are damned. And the worst of their damnation is, they know not that they are damned. They cannot cry, with poor dead Kit’s Faustus, Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. They have to try to kick against the pricks, until . . . the play is ended.

* * *

Shakespeare waits to see how Stoppard chooses to end what he has begun. As he waits, as he watches, he sees things that escaped him earlier. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not quite the pair of identical zeds—unnecessary letters—he first took them to be. Rosencrantz has no real notion anything is wrong. Guildenstern sometimes does, but he cannot see what his troubles are or do anything about them. Which is the worse, the baser, futility? One more thing to ponder.

And, whenever the action calls for them, both Danes fall back into Hamlet’s story, in which they are trapped like flies in sticky pine sap. Their diction and manner change. They have sudden purpose—Shakespeare’s purpose. But, although they are Hamlet’s schoolmates and thus longtime acquaintances, he is no more sure which is which than was his uncle before him.

The tragedians and their spokesman also flutter on the fringes of the plot. They have more self-knowledge than Guildenstern or Rosencrantz: they know what they do. They know it from the inside out, too. Some of the words the playwright puts in the spokesman’s mouth . . .

“You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching. . . .” he howls. After a confused response (what else?) from Rosencrantz, he adds, “Don’t you see?! We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”

Shakespeare starts laughing and finds he can’t stop. The woman crunching nutmeats edges away from him. So do the pockmarked man and his ladylove Lucy. They don’t think it’s funny. They think he’s funny, and in no good fashion. He feels sorry for them. They must never have performed.

As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern likewise recoil, the spokesman dons calm like a mantle. And, as with a mantle, who knows what that calm conceals? “Think, in your head, now, think of the most . . . private . . . secret . . . intimate thing you have ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy. . . .”

He waits. Rosencrantz looks guilty. Shakespeare no doubt looks guilty, too. So do most of the groundlings around him. Who wouldn’t, thinking of something like that? A born innocent, maybe. Or a born liar.

“Are you thinking of it?” the spokesman asks softly. He springs at Rosencrantz like a lion. “Well, I saw you do it!”

“You never! It’s a lie!” Rosencrantz says, but his voice is hopeless, doom-filled. He staggers away. Only when the spokesman pursues no farther does he realize the other man couldn’t have. He giggles in relief.

So does half the crowd. Shakespeare would, but his mouth has gaped into a new O of admiration. How many players has he sent up on stage to love, to rage, to sin? Perhaps worst of all, to plot sins yet uncommitted? How many tens of thousands of eyes watched them feign both passions and solitude?

Once or twice, he has played with this. As You Like It, with boys pretending to be maidens pretending to be youths . . . But, most of the time, while he writes he acts as if what is happening inside the audience isn’t layered so closely with what happens up on the stage.

Meanwhile, this play goes on. “We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough,” Guildenstern protests. “And for all we know it isn’t even true.”

The spokesman only shrugs. “For all anyone knows, nothing is.” One more line to set the Master of the Revels’ teeth on edge!

As the tragedians begin to rehearse the play with which Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of the king, Guildenstern asks, “What is this dumbshow for?”

“It makes the action that follows more or less comprehensible,” the spokesman explains. “You understand, we are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.”

Beside Shakespeare, the woman with the bottomless sack of nutmeats screws up her face. “What’s that?” she says, as if the air will tell her. He quite likes the double mockery with the more than doubled deprecation. It is not his language, even if it is English—the intrusion of his language into this different one makes that plain. But, as the players can manage with his speech, so he can with theirs. And Tom Stoppard knows all its tricks.

The tragedians’ pantomime includes two spies sailing off to England. Because of a letter, they meet their deaths at the hands of the English king. This fails to register fully on Guildenstern or Rosencrantz, though Rosencrantz wonders. What did he say early on? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet.

But they will.

And they do. They begin the third act (which will plainly be the last—strange structure, thinks Shakespeare, who is used to plays with five) on a ship. Hamlet is with them, too, as he must be—asleep, at the moment.

Guildenstern comes as close to understanding as he ever does: “Free to move, speak, extemporise, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.”

Everything he says is true. None of it does him any good. He is trapped in the drama. Does he remember the tragedians’ pantomime, now when remembering might save him? He does not, nor will he and his comrade be saved.

Sure as sure, he and Rosencrantz sleep. Sure as sure, Hamlet lifts their letter and substitutes his own. Sure as sure, the tragedians and their spokesman emerge from barrels by the rail. They are playing the tune they used when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first met them. Shakespeare nods—a pretty touch, that.

“Incidents! All we get is incidents!” Rosencrantz cries. “Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!”

At which, of course, the pirates attack. There is a mad scramble, people screeching and running and fighting and jumping in and out of barrels. Some of it sets the groundlings howling with laughter. Will Kempe would play well in such buffoonery, Shakespeare thinks. Kempe has left the craft, though, and fallen on hard times. He was a great name in London theatre. He is . . . nobody. It can happen to anyone.

The pirates are beaten back. Hamlet goes missing—as he must, for his place in the remaining action lies in Elsinore. Is he any freer than Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, or only better written?

Without Hamlet, but still with that letter, his hapless schoolmates struggle on. Guildenstern opens the letter. He discovers, to no one’s surprise but Rosencrantz’s and his own, that it means their deaths, not Hamlet’s.

“But why? Was it all for this?” He turns to, and on, the tragedians’ spokesman. “Who are we?”

“You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That’s enough.”

Guildenstern stabs the spokesman, who dies, horribly. Even Shakespeare is impressed. Then, to the tragedians’ applause, the fellow revives. The prop knife—any company will have one—is revealed for what it is.

“We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t harm anyone,” Rosencrantz says desperately. “Did we?”

“I can’t remember,” Guildenstern says.

Rosencrantz gathers himself. “All right, then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved.” He falls through a trap door and is gone.

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.” Guildenstern looks around. He stands all alone on the front of the stage. “Rosen—? Guil—?” Like Rosencrantz before him, he prepares for the inevitable. “Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you—” A different trap opens beneath him. He too disappears.

A curtain opens, showing the tableau from the end of Hamlet. Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet all lie dead, the Prince of Denmark in Horatio’s arms. Fortinbras stands off to the side. In come two English ambassadors. One of them delivers Shakespeare’s lines:

The ears are senseless that should give us hearing
to tell him his commandment is fulfilled,
that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

“He never gave commandment for their death,” Horatio answers, and goes on with his speech. Musicians play through his words, louder and louder—yet again, the tragedians’ tune. One phrase, though, Shakespeare makes out very plainly: “Purposes mistook fallen on the inventors’ heads.”

The curtain closes again. The players step out through it for their bows and applause. They win—some. Shakespeare claps till his palms burn. The stout woman who’s eaten through the performance edges away from him again. She makes for the exit. So do almost all the groundlings, and their betters in the galleries. The Rose empties like a basin.

Shakespeare goes the other way. He has to get backstage.

* * *

He is acquainted with the bruiser at the tiring-room door. “Now, Master Will . . .” The fellow shuffles his feet in faint embarrassment. “‘Let no one in,’ they told me. And a fine, fat threepenny bit they gave me, too, to see that I hearkened.”

“Surely, Ned, they meant but the general,” Shakespeare says. “I share the craft, and I’m fain to gratulate ’em on work well done.”

“‘Let no one in,’ they said.” The bruiser is not inclined to bend. He has his reasons: “With a threepenny bit behind it, that carries weight.”

“The scales should balance, then,” Shakespeare says with a sigh, and hands him another silver threepence. He pays three times as much to reach the tiring room as he did to get into the Rose. But he doesn’t begrudge the coin . . . too much.

Ned weighs it in his hand. Has he the gall to insist the scales should better than balance? Have I the gall to name him Judas-rogue if he should? Shakespeare wonders. He is glad it does not come to that: Ned shrugs broad shoulders and opens the door he guards. “Come on, come on. Balance they do. If the players grumble, I’ll tell ’em you sneaked past me.”

Inside, the after-the-play chaos seems hearteningly familiar. Half-dressed players scrub makeup from their faces and talk in loud voices of what has just gone well and what not so well—and of anything else that pops into their heads.

But, after a heartbeat or two, it is not so familiar as all that. The players keep the sharp, unfamiliar accent they used on stage. They also keep the sharp, unfamiliar syntax that suffuses the parts of their play Shakespeare did not write. There sits the one who acted Ophelia, bantering easily with the rest. No boy ever born owns such firm, full, rosy-teated breasts.

Shakespeare blushes to the roots of his hair. It is not as if he has never seen a woman—oh, no. But a woman player? He has never dreamt of such a strange, abnormous beast. She covers herself and scratches and curses as casually as any of the men.

One of those men—the one who played poor, damned Guildenstern—notices Shakespeare. “Who the fuck’re you, Charlie?” he snaps.

Hesitantly, Shakespeare gives his name. Then, when the player cups a hand behind his ear to show he has not heard, Shakespeare gives it again, this time loud enough to pierce the din.

Silence slams down. All eyes swing his way. He has played before plenty of larger houses, but never one so attentive. “Wow! Oh, wow!” breathes the player who acted Ophelia. That is a woman’s voice. Once you see past the enormity of the notion (and once you see those ripe breasts), it becomes obvious.

“Does look a little like him—damned if it doesn’t,” says the fellow who played the tragedians’ spokesman. Several others from the company nod. Shakespeare wonders how they know, or think they know, what he looks like.

Before he can ask, the one who played Rosencrantz says, “Man, I never expected . . . this. But hey, I never expected any of this.” Again, several in the company nod. To Shakespeare, the man still sounds as bewildered as he did delivering his lines on the stage.

The player who was Guildenstern sets hands on hips. “Okay, William Shakespeare, what the hell d’you want with us? Why’d you barge in here, anyway, and how much did you pay the hired muscle outside?”

“I matched your threepence,” Shakespeare answers automatically, noting hired muscle for future use. Only then does he come back to the main question: “Why came I? To offer my praises to your clever Master Stoppard. See I him here before me?”

“Well . . . no,” says the woman who was Ophelia. Her laugh sounds distinctly nervous, those of the other players even more so. “They brought us over to London for the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern centennial, and then. . . .” Her voice trails away. She looks around the Rose’s cramped, mildewed tiring room.

“Then all this weird shit comes down on us,” one of the tragedians says. The rest of the players nod again, this time in almost perfect unison.

A couple of sentences, and they give Shakespeare more questions than he knows what to do with. He tries one: “The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . . . centennial?”

“Isn’t that a word yet?” the woman asks, which sparks more questions. She goes on, “Means the hundred-year anniversary.”

“Yes,” Shakespeare says—acknowledgment, not agreement. His mind races faster than a horse galloping downhill. Try as he will, he can’t mistake her meaning. If Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is dead itself—a century dead!—then Hamlet must be older yet. But his head had only a little more hair, and that only a little less gray, when he wrote it. An impossibility—an impossibility he has just seen staged. “How came you hither?” he inquires.

“Good question. If there are no more questions, class dismissed,” says the man who played Rosencrantz.

“Proof is left to the student. That’s what the old geometry books said, right?” adds the fellow who played Guildenstern. Maybe the responses mean something to them. Or maybe they truly are as witstruck by the strange fate that has entrapped them as were the characters they portrayed.

“We were in London,” the young woman says. “And then we were in . . . London.” She says the same name twice. By the way she says it, the second London—this London—may lie beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, or whatever is farther away than that, from the one she knows.

“When will you return thither?” Shakespeare asks.

The players eye one another. Now they all shrug together. “We don’t know,” says the graybeard who played Claudius. On the stage, he effortlessly ordered Guildenstern and Rosencrantz about. Now he is as much out of his depth as they feigned being.

Which leads Shakespeare to his next question, as inexorably as Hamlet’s disappearance led Guildenstern to open the fatal letter: “Will you return thither?”

They look at one another again. They also look at Shakespeare—as if they hate him. And if they do, who can blame them? Are some questions not better left unfaced? “We don’t know,” the graybeard says once more, in a voice like ashes.

“If we don’t know what happened to us, how are we supposed to know what’s going to happen to us?” The player who performed as Rosencrantz might have lifted his line from the play. He might have, but he hasn’t.

“How will you live whilst here?” Shakespeare comes out with another natural question.

“We’re actors.” Yes, that is the man who played the spokesman. And yes, that is a line from the play. But, Shakespeare realizes, it is also an answer. The man continues, “We’ve got stuff we can do. We won’t starve—any more than actors always starve, I mean.”

“Ah, sadness! woe! that it should be so in your strange London, even as it is here,” Shakespeare says.

“Listen, man, if there are actors in heaven—fat chance, yeah, but like I say, if—they’re starving there, too. Bet your sweet ass they are.” The player who was Guildenstern speaks with complete assurance.

Still so many things to wonder at! Shakespeare scarce knows—knows not—where to begin. The best he can do is, “What is it like in, in your London?”

Yet again, the players look at one another. This time, Shakespeare understands their glances at a glance. Let them tell him, and tell him true, and he will grasp even less than they do of his city.

But then the woman who was Gertrude speaks for the first time. And she too beyond doubt is a woman, not so young and fresh as the company’s Ophelia, but no crone, either. She has teeth marvelously clean and white. Everyone in the company seems to.

“It is full of noises,” she says softly.

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.

“Holy crap, Jessica! What a showoff!” the spokesman says.

“Teacher’s pet!” the player who was Guildenstern puts in.

Shakespeare takes no notice of them, but bows to her. He has more of an answer than he thought he would get. And . . . “Those are not the worst of verses. Whose, if I may make bold to ask?”

Coming up to him, she takes his hands in hers. “Why, they are yours, Master Shakespeare.”

With regret, he shakes his head. “Never sprang they from my pen.”

She leans forward to kiss him gently on the cheek. They are very much of a height. Her breath is sweet—how not, with those perfect teeth? “Never yet,” she whispers, and slips away.

And that, at last, is altogether too much for Shakespeare’s ravished senses. He flees the tiring room, stumbling in his haste to get away. “Cast you forth, did they?” Ned says, rough sympathy in his voice. Shakespeare gives back not a word. Will he write those lines because Gertrude—no, Jessica—gave him them? Would he have written them had he never set eyes on her? Will he not write them now because she gave them, and in the giving somehow spoiled them?

Questions. Always questions. Answers? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet. Christ, how he pities Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

* * *

Can he stay away from the Rose? That question he answers on the morrow: he cannot, and scarcely tries. The lure of the lost company from that other London is too great. Can nails resist a lodestone? Not even if their ship falls to pieces because they fly from it.

When he comes up, the signboard says they are giving something new. He nods to himself. Any company will offer a variety of its wares.

He sets a penny in the moneytaker’s palm and goes in with the groundlings. A fresh curiosity kindles. Who is this Godot, and why is someone waiting for him?

Copyright © 2009 Harry Turtledove

Vilcabamba

Harry Turtledove

illustration by Jason Chan

The President of the United States looked out of an Oval Office window at Grand Junction, Colorado. The Oval Office was square, but the President’s workplace kept its traditional name. Harris Moffatt III sighed and bent to his paperwork again. Even in Grand Junction, that never disappeared.

Washington, D.C., remained the de jure capital of the United States. Harris Moffatt III had never been there. Neither had his father, President Harris Moffatt II. His grandfather, President Harris Moffatt I, got out of Washington one jump ahead of the Krolp. That the USA was still any kind of going concern came from his ever-so-narrow escape.

Harris Moffatt III was also Prime Minister of Canada, or of that small and mountainous chunk of Canada the Krolp didn’t control. The two countries had amalgamated early on, the better to resist the invading aliens. That, of course, was before they realized how far out of their weight they were fighting.

When the enormous ships were first detected, between Mars’ orbit and Earth’s, every nation radioed messages of welcome and greeting. The Krolp ignored them all. The enormous ships landed. There were still videos--Harris Moffatt III had them on his computer--of human delegations greeting the aliens with bouquets and bands playing joyful music. At last! Contact with another intelligent race! Proof we weren’t alone in the universe!

“Better if we were,” the President muttered. When the Krolp came out, they came out shooting. Some of those fifty-year-old videos broke off quite abruptly. And “shooting” was the understatement of the millennium. Their weapons made ours seem like kids’ slingshots against machine guns.

Seeing how the Krolp wanted things to go, half a dozen militaries launched H-bomb-tipped missiles at the great ships. They couldn’t live through that, could they? As a matter of fact, they could. Most of the missiles got shot down. Most of the ones that did land on target didn’t go off. And the handful that did harmed the Krolpish ships not a bit and the rampaging, plundering aliens running around loose very little.

They weren’t invulnerable. Humans could kill them. Unless somebody got amazingly lucky, the usual cost was about two armored divisions and all their matériel for one Krolp. Back in the old days, the United States was the richest country in the world. All the pre-Krolp books said so. Not even it could spend men and equipment on that scale.

Back before the Krolp came, a fellow named Clarke had written, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know about that. What the Krolp did wasn’t magic. The best scientists in the USA--the best ones left alive, anyhow--had been studying captured or stolen Krolpish gadgets for half a century now. Their conclusion was that the aliens manipulated gravity and the strong and weak forces as thoroughly as humans exploited electromagnetism.

Humans could use Krolpish devices and weapons. They could even use them against the invaders, for as long as they kept working. What humans couldn’t do was make more such devices themselves. The machines weren’t there. Neither was the theory. And neither was the engineering to turn theory into practice.

And so Harris Moffatt III ruled an attenuated state between the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. He understood too well that he ruled here not least because the Krolp hadn’t yet taken the trouble to overrun this rump USA (and Canada).

From everything he’d heard, the United States still was the richest country in the world. The richest human-ruled country, anyhow. And if that wasn’t a telling measure of mankind’s futility in the face of the aliens, Harris Moffatt III was damned if he could figure out what would be.

• • •

His appointments secretary stuck his head into the Oval Office. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Grelch wants to see you.”

“Tell him I’ll be with him in a few minutes, Jack,” Moffatt said. “I really do need to study this appropriations bill.” Calling the economy in the independent USA rotten would have praised it too much. So would calling it hand-to-mouth. Robbing Peter to pay Paul came closest, except Paul mostly got an IOU instead.

Jack Pagliarone turned to pass the news on to Grelch--but Grelch didn’t wait to hear it. The Krolp shoved past the appointments secretary and into the office. “I see you, Moffatt,” he said--loudly--in his own language.

“I see you, Grelch,” Harris Moffatt III answered--resignedly--also in Krolpish. There was a lot of Grelch to see. He was big as a horse: bigger, because he was a tiger-striped centauroid with a head like a vampire jack-o’-lantern. He had sharp, jagged jaw edges--they weren’t exactly teeth, but they might as well have been--and enormous eyes that glowed like a cat’s. He smelled more like Limburger cheese than anything else.

“I have some things to tell you, Moffatt,” he declared. No titles of respect: the Krolp had them for one another, but rarely wasted them on humans.

“I listen,” the President said, more resignedly yet, wondering what Grelch would want this time. He was bound to want something, and he’d make trouble if he didn’t get whatever it was.

Not for the first time, Harris Moffatt III wondered what Grelch had done to be forced to flee to Grand Junction. A dozen or so alien renegades lived here. Humans had learned a lot from them, and from their predecessors. But they were deadly dangerous. They were Krolp, and had Krolpish defenses and Krolpish weapons. And they were almost all of them sons of bitches even by Krolpish standards. No alien who hadn’t done something awful to his own kind would have to stoop so low as to live with humans.

“I need snarfar, Moffatt. You’ve got to get me snarfar,” Grelch said.

“I can do that, Grelch.” The President tried to hide his relief. Some Krolp chewed snarfar. It gave them a buzz, the way nicotine or maybe cocaine did for humans. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know the details; snarfar poisoned people. He did know the aliens turned mean--well, meaner--when they couldn’t get the stuff.

But he could get it. They grew it in the flatlands of the Midwest--what had formerly been wheat and corn country. He still had connections in the lands his grandfather once governed. People and things informally slid over the border all the time. He’d arranged to bring in snarfar before. He’d known he would have to do it again, for one Krolp or another, before too long.

“You better do that, Moffatt. By the stars, you better,” Grelch snarled. He turned--which, with that four-legged carcass, needed some room--and stomped out of the Oval Office. The ripe reek that came off his hide lingered in the air.

The President sighed. “That’s always so much fun.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack Pagliarone said sympathetically. Even a renegade Krolp, an alien who’d put himself beyond the pale of his own kind, was convinced down to the bottom of whatever he used for a soul that he was better than any mere human ever born. All the evidence of fifty years of conquest and occupation said he had a point, too.

“If we didn’t need to pick their brains . . .” Harris Moffatt III sighed again. Humanity needed nothing more.

“By the stars, Mr. President, if the first big uprising had worked--” Jack sadly shook his head.

Back when Harris Moffatt III was a boy, Americans, Russians, and Chinese all rebelled against the centauroids at once. They rocked the Krolp, no doubt about it. They killed forty or fifty of them, some with stolen arms, others with poison. But close didn’t count. The Krolp crushed mankind again, more thoroughly this time.

Jack had spoken English with the President. Humans in the free USA mostly did. Even humans in Krolp-occupied America did when they talked among themselves. But the appointments secretary said By the stars anyhow.

Well, Harris Moffatt III sometimes said By the stars himself. More and more humans these days believed what the Krolp believed and tried to imitate the conquerors any way they could. Weren’t the Krolp stronger? Didn’t that prove they were wiser, too? Plenty of people thought so.

The President had when he was younger. Like his father before him, like Harris Moffatt IV now, he’d spent several years in St. Louis, the center from which the Krolp ruled most of the USA. He’d gone to what was called, with unusual politeness, a finishing school. In point of fact, he’d been a hostage for his father’s good behavior, as his older son was hostage now for his.

He’d learned Krolpish--learned it more thoroughly, that is, because he’d already started lessons in Grand Junction. He’d learned the Krolp creed, too. He’d kept company with the pampered sons and daughters of the men and women who helped the centauroids run the occupied USA. Some of them were descendants of people who’d served in the American government with Harris Moffatt I. They were all much more Krolpified than he was. They thought him a hick from the sticks, and weren’t shy about telling him so.

By the time he finished finishing school, he was much more Krolpified himself than he had been when he got there. He was so much more Krolpified, in fact, that he didn’t want to go back to the independent United States. His own people had come to look like hicks to him.

He hoped he’d got over that. He hoped Harris Moffatt IV would get over it when the kid came home. You had to hope. If you didn’t hope, you’d give up. And where would free humans be then?

Come to that, where were free humans now? In places like Grand Junction, Colorado, that was where. Happy day!

• • •

One of the men with whom the President had gone to finishing school was the grandson of an important official in the DEA. No one in the United States these days, free or occupied, worried about enforcing human drug laws. No one had time for that kind of nonsense. But Ommat--he even had a Krolpish name--knew how to get his hands on snarfar, and how to slip it discreetly over the border. Grelch got his chew. He didn’t bother Harris Moffatt III for a while.

As far as Moffatt was concerned, that was all to the good. He had other things to worry about. The Krolp in St. Louis announced that they were going to send an embassy to Grand Junction. Not that they wanted to send one, but that they were going to. Asking permission of humans wasn’t a Krolpish habit.

The U.S. Army still had a few tanks that ran. It had plenty of machine guns. And it had several dozen Krolpish weapons, which cut through a tank’s armor as if it weren’t there. As soon as one of those weapons hit it, it wasn’t.

Several suits of Krolpish body armor had fallen into American hands, too. The only trouble was, humans had no way to adapt those to their own shape. Nothing people knew how to do would cut or weld the transparent stuff. The tools . . . The science . . . The engineering . . .

Harris Moffatt III received the envoy and his retinue with a mixture of human and Krolpish ceremonial. The Stars and Stripes and the Maple Leaf flew behind him. He wore a polyester suit and tie and shirt from the days before the invaders came. Bugs and moths ignored polyester. They sure didn’t ignore wool or linen, the independent USA’s usual fabrics.

A star shone over the President’s left shoulder. That sort of display was standard among the Krolp. With them, as far as human observers and savants could tell, it was a real star, even if a tiny one. And it hung in the air with no means of support at all, visible or otherwise. The Krolp routinely did things that drove human physicists to drink.

Humans . . . imitated and improvised. This star was made from LEDs surrounding a battery pack. It hung from invisibly fine wires. It wasn’t as good as one of the originals, but it showed Harris Moffatt III claimed sovereign status. (Its weakness might say he didn’t deserve it, but he refused to dwell on that.)

A star followed the Krolp envoy, too. His name, Moffatt had been given to understand, was Prilk. His star was brighter than the human-made simulacrum, but did not float so high. He was a representative, not a sovereign.

Prilk’s overlord wasn’t the Krolpish governor of North America. He was the ruler of the Krolp, back on their home planet. He wasn’t exactly a king or a president or an ayatollah. Not being a Krolp, Harris Moffatt III didn’t understand exactly what he was. He was the boss: Moffatt understood that much. Krolp here could petition him. So could humans. Letters took months to reach the homeworld. Decisions took . . . as long as they took. Answers took more months to come back. Once in a blue moon, those answers made things better for people, not worse. It wasn’t likely, but it did happen.

Prilk’s guards kept a wary eye on the American soldiers carrying Krolpish hand weapons. Those were dangerous to them and to the envoy, unlike almost any merely human arms. Reading Krolpish body language and expressions was a guessing game for people. Harris Moffatt III’s guess was that the centauroids thought humans had no business getting their hands on real weapons. Well, too bad.

The envoy surprised Moffatt: he said, “I see you, Mr. President,” in slow, labored English.

“And I see you, Ambassador Prilk,” the President replied, also in English. He hadn’t expected to use his own language at all in this confab. He smiled broadly.

Then the envoy went back to his own harsh tongue: “I see you, Moffatt.” In Krolpish, he didn’t waste time with any polite titles. That he’d done it in English was remarkable enough.

“I see you, Envoy Prilk,” Harris Moffatt III answered, in Krolpish this time. He might not grant special honorifics to any of the renegades who were such uncomfortable guests here, but he had to give the ruler’s representative his due. The Krolp often acted as if humans offended them by existing, and especially by refusing to become Krolpified. They only got worse when they discovered real reasons for affront.

“Good,” Prilk said, continuing in his own language. Chances were he didn’t truly speak English at all: he’d memorized a phrase or two to impress the natives. And impress them he had. Now he could get down to business. He could, and he did: “We want something from you, Moffatt.”

“You can’t have the renegades. They’re under my protection,” the President said. They were what Prilk was most likely to want, as far as he could see. The Krolp didn’t like it when free humans learned from them, although their finishing schools and other academies taught people in the broad occupied zones quite a bit.

Prilk waved his hands. They looked funny by human standards: they had four fingers in the middle and a thumb on each side. The thumbs had nails. The fingers had claws. Even a weaponless and unarmored Krolp was no bargain. “I do not care about the renegades, Moffatt. We do not care about the renegades. If we cared about the renegades, you would have never seen them. Believe it. It is true.”

Maybe so, maybe not. The Krolp weren’t immune to bullshit: one more hard lesson out of so many the past fifty years had taught mankind. But if Prilk said the renegades weren’t the issue now, they weren’t. They probably aren’t, Harris Moffatt III amended to himself. Prilk might find a way to come back to them later.

Warily, the President asked, “Well, what do you want, then?”

Prilk waved his hands again, this time purposefully. A map appeared in the air between the envoy and Harris Moffatt III. It was, naturally, a Krolpish map, with the place names written in the Krolpish language. That hardly mattered. Moffatt read Krolpish as well as speaking it. And the aliens had borrowed most of the place names from English. Why not? That was easier than making up their own.

Long before the Krolp landed, Americans had borrowed a lot of place names from the Native Americans who’d lived in these parts before them. Much good that did the Native Americans, most of whom were swiftly dispossessed. And much good the English toponyms on a Krolpish map did the USA, too.

“You see this place here?” Prilk pointed. A small patch of northeastern Utah glowed red on the map. How? Harris Moffatt III didn’t know, any more than he knew how the map appeared when Prilk waved. Krolpish technology was that far ahead of anything humanity could do. Or--shit--maybe it was magic. Harris Moffatt III sure couldn’t prove it wasn’t.

“I see that place there,” Moffatt said. “What about it? I see it is in the territory that belongs to the free United States. I see that it is in territory that belongs to me. Not to you. Not to Vrank.” Vrank was Prilk’s immediate superior, the Krolpish governor of North America. The President took a deep breath. “Not to your ruler, back on your planet, either.”

There. He’d made it as plain as he could. Too plain, maybe. As far as the Krolp were concerned, anything they could get their weird hands on belonged to them. But that glowing patch lay right in the middle of what was left of the USA. Harris Moffatt III had to do whatever he could to hang on to it. If he didn’t, what point to being President?

Prilk opened his jack-o’-lantern mouth wide. It looked like a threat display--I will eat you. As a matter of fact, it was. “You say this to me, Moffatt?” he growled.

“I say this to you, Envoy Prilk,” Moffatt answered, as steadily as he could. “Flarglar agreed that this land belonged to humans. Belonged to the USA. Belonged to my father.” Flarglar had been Vrank’s next-but-one predecessor. U.S. archives still held a copy of the treaty.

How much good would showing it to Prilk do? The envoy waved once more, dismissively. “Flarglar is not here anymore. Neither is your father.”

Flarglar, sure enough, had been recalled to the homeworld in disgrace. A drunken Krolpish renegade (the Krolp, damn them, loved whiskey as well as snarfar) had killed Harris Moffatt II. He’d died for it. Not much was left of West Yellowstone, Montana, these days, but that renegade was by God dead.

“The agreement is here. Your ruler did not reject it. It is still good,” Harris Moffatt III said, with more confidence than he felt.

“We did not know everything when we made that stupid agreement. We have been here longer now. We know more,” Prilk said. “There is silver under this land, silver and some gold. We want it.”

Winter ran through the President of the United States. The Krolp took human works of art, in exactly the same way as human conquerors looted the folk they overwhelmed. And the Krolp took minerals in a way that was like nothing on Earth--which was putting things mildly.

They thought Earth was a treasure trove. It was more tectonically active than most of the planets they knew, which meant it kept recycling its riches instead of locking most of them away beyond even Krolpish reach. And the reach of the Krolp went far beyond anything humanity could match. Twenty miles down? Fifty miles? A hundred? The Krolp didn’t care. Controlling the forces they did, they could go that deep with ease.

Of course, they made kind of a mess in the process. Harris Moffatt III knew people had strip-mined whole mountains. The Krolp strip-mined whole countries. Not much worth living on was left of Spain. The Krolp had found a big deposit of mercury under there, and they’d gone after it, and they’d got it. The environment? They worried about the environment on the homeworld. Not here. No, not here.

If they went after silver under northeastern Utah, they’d trash most of what was left of the free USA. What point to being President of an uninhabitable country? “That silver is ours,” Moffatt said. “You cannot have it.”

“I give you some advice, Moffatt,” Prilk answered. “Do not say ‘cannot’ to someone who is stronger than you.”

“That silver is ours. It is not yours,” the President insisted.

This time, vast scorn informed the Krolp’s gesture. “You cannot get this silver. You did not even know it was there. You will never get at it. We can. We will. For us, it is easy.”

“Stealing is easy,” Moffatt said bitterly.

“Not stealing. Taking.” Plain, a difference existed in Prilk’s mind.

“It is ours. If you take it, that goes against the treaty. I will appeal to your ruler.” Harris Moffatt III played one of the few cards he had. He was only too aware it was liable to be the three of diamonds. That could be worth something if it filled a flush. Most of the time, it was just the goddamn three of diamonds.

“Let me show you this, Moffatt.” Prilk could snap two fingers on the same hand at the same time. When he did, the map in the air between him and the President disappeared. He waved again. A document--an appallingly official Krolpish document--sprang into being in its place. Vrank had already told the ruler the silver was there. The ruler had told Vrank to go ahead and get it.

“I can still appeal. I have learned my rights,” Moffatt said. His three of diamonds wouldn’t fill a flush this time. His main right was to do as he was told.

“You will lose.” Prilk didn’t even sound regretful. He just sounded certain, the way he would if he talked about sunrise tomorrow.

The President still had one more card. “If you come after what is not yours, I can fight. The United States can fight.”

Krolpish laughter sounded a lot like human farting. “Well, you can try. Remember how much good fighting has done you up till now,” Prilk said.

“We are still free, here in this part of the United States. Most humans are not,” Harris Moffatt III said.

“You are free because you have not been worth bothering about. Now you have again something we want. Give it and you may yet stay free.”

“Free in a place where we cannot live,” Moffatt said. “What kind of freedom is that? Better to fight.”

“You will lose. Then we will take what we want anyway,” Prilk warned.

“We have a saying--‘Live free or die,’” the President said.

“I do not know about living free. If you fight, dying can be arranged. I promise you that.” This time, it wasn’t so much that Prilk sounded matter-of-fact. He sounded as if the prospect delighted him.

“I must consult with my superiors,” Moffatt said.

“I will give you a day. It is more than you deserve, but Governor Vrank wants as little trouble with you as he can arrange,” Prilk said.

“A day,” Moffatt agreed. “In the meantime, you are our guest. We will treat you as well as we can.”

“Oh, joy.” Prilk sounded as thrilled as a human explorer offered a big bowl of stewed grubs by some tribe in the back of beyond. That was probably just how he felt. Well, too goddamn bad for him. #

Grelch and Willig--another Krolpish renegade--sat in with Harris Moffatt III’s Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Alien Affairs. The latter’s predecessors had been Secretaries of State. The new title reflected the new dispensation.

The renegades could judge Krolpish likelihoods better than people could. Grelch’s tail lashed rhythmically: back and forth, back and forth. He’d had a good chew of snarfar, then. It might cloud his wits--but then, as the President knew, Grelch didn’t have much in the way of wits to begin with. He was a ruffian, a soldier, a deserter. He would never be welcome in polite company.

But he knew all kinds of things humans had never learned. That made him valuable, if not exactly welcome.

“If we fight, we’re screwed,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said.

“If we don’t fight, we’re screwed, too,” the Secretary of Defense said.

Harris Moffatt III let out yet another sigh, a deep one. Once upon a time, somebody’d told him that two things that contradicted each other couldn’t both be true at the same time. He’d believed the poor, silly son of a bitch, too. He didn’t anymore.

The Krolp had found something here they wanted. They were going to take it. If humans didn’t care for that, tough luck for humans. The President turned toward the alien renegades. “How can we keep them from digging?” he asked.

Grelch looked at Willig. Willig looked back at Grelch. Reading Krolpish expressions might be guesswork for humans, but Harris Moffatt III had more practice at it than most people in the free USA. He didn’t like what he thought he read.

“Forget it,” Grelch said.

“Run north,” Willig agreed. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” As if conferring a great boon, he added, “We’ll come with you.”

“Of course you will,” the President said harshly. “Your own folk sure don’t want you around.”

“You insult us?” Grelch’s rumble sounded ominous. Snarfar usually calmed a Krolp, but it could also enrage. It was a lot like booze--except it wasn’t. Grelch hadn’t carried any weapons into the meeting, but that might not matter. If a renegade killed another President of the United States . . .

Harris Moffatt III drew a Krolpish hand weapon. If he fired it, it wouldn’t just steam-clean Grelch. It would take out a big part of the building, maybe enough to make the rest fall down. Even so . . . “The truth is not an insult,” he said. “If your own people did want you around, you wouldn’t be here with us.”

He waited. Plenty of Krolp wouldn’t listen to anything from humans, even the truth--especially not the truth. Grelch was right on the edge of being one of them. His tail twitched faster, with a sort of boogie-woogie beat. Moffatt relaxed fractionally. That was a good sign. Most of the time, anyhow.

“All right,” the renegade said at last. “We are losers. So are you, Moffatt. All you humans, you are losers.”

“Now you have lost,” Willig added. “You can’t fight a stand-up fight against my folk.”

The President already knew that. He couldn’t very well not know it. Humans had tried again and again, and got smashed again and again. They’d learned a lot from the Krolp these past fifty years. They’d stolen a lot, too. They could annoy the aliens. They could harass them. It didn’t come within miles--it didn’t come within light-years--of being enough.

But there were ways to make war that didn’t involve stand-up fights. Before that drunken Krolp murdered him, Harris Moffatt II had made sure Harris Moffatt III soaked up some preinvasion history. Names rang inside his head. Vietnam . . . Iraq . . . Afghanistan . . .

“We do not want to fight a stand-up fight,” he said. “Or not a stand-up fight and nothing else, anyhow. But we’ve got . . . connections . . . in the rest of America. Can we cause your folk enough trouble to make them change their minds?”

He smiled at the Secretary of Defense. That worthy’s second cousin held a prominent post in the centauroids’ administration. They kept in touch with each other through some highly unofficial channels. The Secretary of Defense’s cousin didn’t love the cheesy-smelling aliens he worked for. There were humans who worked for him who didn’t love the Krolp, either.

Multiply such cases by a hundred or a thousand. If all those humans raised hands against the invaders or simply stopped doing their jobs or started doing them wrong . . . It would screw up the Krolp, without a doubt.

Would it screw them up enough? Doubt. Big doubt.

Grelch and Willig eyed each other. “Maybe,” Willig said, in tones that meant he didn’t believe it for a minute.

“If we do that and if we fight to keep what is ours . . . ?” Harris Moffatt III said.

One more glance between the two Krolp. This time, Grelch was the one who said, “Maybe.” He also didn’t believe it.

Of course, Krolp never believed humans could do anything. Half a century of occupation gave them solid reason not to believe it, too. Every once in a while, they did get an unpleasant surprise. That they’d got a few was the main reason the free United States remained the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Of the stubborn, anyhow.

Harris Moffatt III took a deep breath. “Well, we’re going to try it,” he said.

Willig and Grelch walked out. That pretty much ended the meeting. They had scant hope, or maybe none. Harris Moffatt III had scant hope, too, but not none. Not quite. Muttering under his breath, the Secretary of Defense also left. His men would have to try to stop the invaders. When the irresistible force met the movable object . . .

The Secretary of Alien Affairs lingered. “I was poking around in the library at Mesa State the other day,” he remarked, with luck not apropos of nothing.

“Okay,” the President said. The college library held mostly human knowledge. Education in things Krolpish hadn’t trickled through the system even now. The chaos of the past half-century had a lot to do with that. Educators’ slowness had even more. Moffatt went on, “You found something interesting?”

“Might be. Might be just depressing,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs replied.

“That’s what I need, all right,” Moffatt said. “And you’re going to tell me about it, aren’t you?”

“Unless you don’t want me to, sir.”

“Oh, go ahead,” the President said. “It can’t possibly make me feel worse than I do when I think about telling Prilk no.”

“You could still tell him yes,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said.

“That doesn’t do me any good, either,” Harris Moffatt III said, shaking his head. “So go on. Say your say. Depress me some more.”

“Er . . . Yes, Mr. President. You probably know the Spaniards conquered the Incas in Peru six hundred years ago.”

“Sure.” Now Moffatt nodded. He remembered that from studying history, too. And Peru--or the mountainous, inaccessible parts of Peru--still maintained a precarious freedom from the Krolp. Moffatt had exchanged a few messages with el Presidente. That was as much as either one of them could hope to do. “What about it?”

“The Incas never knew what hit ’em. They were just starting to use bronze. They didn’t even write. The Spaniards had guns. They had armor. They had swords. They rode horses. They . . . Well, to make a long story short, they had three thousand years on the Incas. The Native Americans fought like hell, and it didn’t do ’em one goddamn bit of good.”

Harris Moffatt III felt an unpleasant frisson. Given his circumstances, how could he not? “What goes around comes around. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not exactly, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said, which wasn’t reassuring to Moffatt. His advisor went on, “The Incas who didn’t give up built a new town called Vilcabamba, in the jungle on the east side of the Andes. Their ruler--the Inca--lived there, and his court, and stuff like that. And they tried to . . . to adapt to what had happened to them.”

“What do you mean, adapt?” Moffatt asked.

“They learned whatever they could. They stole horses and swords. Some of them became Christians--mostly to keep the Spaniards off their backs, I think, but also because their own gods weren’t doing them much good. But other ways, too, littler ways. Some of the houses there had tile roofs instead of the thatch they’d always used before.”

“Huh,” the President said uneasily, remembering the LED display that aped a real Krolpish minisun. He asked the obvious question: “What happened to them?”

“They hung on for about forty years. They had trouble with their renegades, too,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said. “Then the Spaniards finally got sick of their nuisance raids and overran them.”

“We’ve lasted longer than they did, anyhow,” Harris Moffatt III said. “We’ve just got to keep on doing it, that’s all.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State replied. What else was he supposed to say?

• • •

Prilk and his guards waited impassively in the square. “Well, Moffatt, what is it going to be?”

“You can’t mine silver on our land,” Moffatt said. “You would ruin our whole country”--what’s left of our whole country--”if you did.”

“We are going to mine that silver,” the Krolpish envoy said, his voice flat and hard. “You cannot stop us from doing it. Because you cannot stop us, you cannot say in truth that the land is yours.”

“If your folk come onto our land without our leave, you will see what we can do,” Harris Moffatt III said. His son was already on his way back to the free USA from St. Louis. He hoped.

Prilk let out flatulent Krolpish laughter. “I foul myself in fear,” he said.

A sarcastic Krolp was the very last thing the President needed. “You will see,” he repeated. “Tell Governor Vrank the land is ours, the silver is ours, and he may not have it.”

Prilk leaned his torso forward, toward the President. As with humans, that meant earnestness among the Krolp. “Moffatt, you had better think again. You have no hope of winning.”

“We have no hope if you trash our country, either,” Moffatt said, which was nothing but the truth.

“But we would not interfere with you if you did not act like a fool,” Prilk said.

“If I did what you told me to do, you mean,” Moffatt replied. “And you would interfere with the United States. You would interfere badly. That interferes with me.”

“You will be sorry,” Prilk warned.

“I am already sorry. Everyone on Earth is sorry. We are sorry you ever found us,” the President said.

“Which has nothing to do with how many claws are on a franggel’s foot,” Prilk said.

Harris Moffatt III had never seen a franggel. Come to that, neither had Prilk. The Krolp had hunted them to extinction hundreds of years before. They lingered on in proverbs, though. The President had heard this one many times before. Nothing to do with the price of beer, an English-speaking human probably would have said. But he’d heard about a franggel’s foot even in English. Krolpish phrases, Krolpish ideas, gained. Human notions retreated. Pretty soon, they’d have nowhere to retreat to.

Vilcabamba.

The President hadn’t imagined he’d remember the name of the place, not while the Secretary of Alien Affairs was yakking about it. He also hadn’t imagined he would sympathize with the poor befuddled Inca holdouts who’d tried to hang on to their old way of life there. If the Krolp started strip-mining in Utah, the old American way of life, or what was left of it, was gone forever.

“Envoy Prilk, we will fight to stop you,” he repeated, his voice firmer than it had been a few minutes earlier.

“Moffatt, we will eat your brains, if you have any.” Prilk turned and walked away. His guards formed up around him. If the humans wanted to start fighting now, they were ready. Here, though, human and Krolpish customs coincided. The envoy was suffered to leave in peace. Trouble would start soon, but not yet. Not quite yet.

• • •

The free United States had to keep the Krolp away from the place in northeastern Utah under which they’d found silver. If the aliens started mining, they would turn too much of what was left of the country into a place not worth inhabiting. But the free USA also needed to show the Krolp that fighting a war for the silver would be more expensive than it was worth.

If we can, Harris Moffatt III thought gloomily. If we can.

He’d already got out of Grand Junction by then. He’d pulled north to Craig, Colorado, just in case. He sat in front of a microphone that led to an AM sending unit. AM radio had been almost extinct even on Earth when the Krolp came. To the striped centauroids, it was as one with hand axes and bows and arrows. That made it as secure a communications system as humanity had left. Smoke signals were primitive, too, but as long as the Native Americans could read them and the U.S. Cavalry couldn’t . . .

“Execute Plan Seventeen,” Moffatt said into the mike. “I repeat--execute Plan Seventeen.”

In the room next to his, an engineer flicked a switch, then lifted his thumb in the air. The order had gone out, and now the radio was off again. The cavalry could learn what smoke signals meant, and the Krolp--or the human traitors who served them--might monitor the AM band. You never could tell.

Moffatt’s mouth twisted. Oh, yes, you could. Whatever the aliens did drove more nails into the coffin of human freedom. It wasn’t even always intended to, but it did.

They didn’t attack the instant Prilk left the free USA. The President had feared they might. That would have complicated things for the United States--complicated them even worse than they were already. But, although Moffatt had feared a sudden assault, he hadn’t really expected one. The Krolp were so arrogant, they had trouble believing human beings still dared to tell them no and mean it.

He wished he could launch thermonuclear-tipped missiles at all the increasingly Krolpified cities in the occupied United States. In point of fact, he could; it wasn’t as if he didn’t have them. The only trouble was, they wouldn’t do much good. The Krolp would swat them out of the air with contemptuous ease.

No, you couldn’t stand toe to toe with the centauroids and slug. First they’d stand on your toes. Then they’d stand on you.

Well, the Native Americans couldn’t slug things out with the U.S. Cavalry. They still drove it crazy for a hell of a long time. They also lost in the end, something Harris Moffatt III didn’t care to dwell upon.

He and his Department of Defense experts monitored as many Krolpish channels as they could. They had to rely on bought and stolen devices; they could no more make the communicators the aliens used than Geronimo could have manufactured a telegraph clicker. But the aliens weren’t very good at keeping things secret from humans. They didn’t think they needed to bother, and most of the time they were right.

A major brought Moffatt a report: “The Subgovernor of the South Central Region has been taken ill. He’s in a Krolpish hospital. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him.”

“I hope it’s nothing trivial,” Moffatt said.

“Me, too, Mr. President.” The major grinned. He wore one broad red stripe on each of his collar tabs to show his rank. That was a human adaptation of the Krolpish system. Once upon a time, the USA had used rank badges of its own. Harris Moffatt III happened to know that. What they were, he couldn’t have said. He’d never seen them. A few antiquarians might know, if the free United States still boasted antiquarians.

More reports floated into the free USA. Krolp administrators and their human flunkies came down with exotic illnesses or sudden cases of loss of life. A Krolpish flyer--which bore about the same relationship to a 797 airliner as the airliner did to a paper plane--slammed into the ground, killing several aliens and injuring several more. (Most survived unharmed. The Krolp built tough.) Bridges and overpasses mysteriously--or not so mysteriously--collapsed.

We can hurt you, the free USA was saying, as loud as it could. We can cause you more trouble than you thought we could.

So far, so good. Pretty soon, though, the Krolp would have some things of their own to say. Moffatt didn’t care to listen to them. As far as the Krolp were concerned, that meant less than nothing.

The free USA was as ready as it could be. Soldiers guarded the passes through which the centauroids were likeliest to come. The ground was mined, sometimes with nuclear explosives. The blasts wouldn’t bother the Krolp much. The avalanches they were positioned to set off would do more . . . everyone hoped.

Winning wasn’t in the cards. The President knew as much. Fifty years of bitter experience had taught him as much--him and the rest of the handful of surviving independent human leaders. Living, and living free, to fight another day was as much as he could hope for.

He got reports that Krolpish forces were advancing on both the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. That didn’t sound good. Neither did the fact that one of those reports cut off all at once, as if the human sending it got interrupted. Fatally interrupted? Moffatt didn’t know. It gave him one extra thing to worry about, as if he needed any more.

And Grelch disappeared. Even Craig, Colorado, didn’t feel safe enough to suit the renegade. He had no confidence that the free USA could hold the line against his own people.

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The Krolp always underestimate us. We never would have been able to hang on this long if they didn’t.”

“I know,” Moffatt said, wishing the Cabinet official hadn’t tacked on that last sentence. In the hierarchy of wishes, though, that was only a sprat. As always, the big fish was wishing the Krolp had never found Earth. Yes, and wish for the moon while you’re at it, the President thought. Had they found anything on it they wanted, the Krolp would have strip-mined the moon, too.

Two days later, the centauroids started hitting back. That was the day after the assassination attempt against Governor Vrank failed. It took out several of his guards and quite a few merely human minions, but Vrank survived. And he was not happy, any more than a cat the mice had tried to bell.

Perhaps because the Governor of North America wasn’t happy, his soldiers slammed headlong into the free USA’s defenses. The Krolp killed far more humans than they lost themselves. They always did. But they didn’t get very far, not with that first thrust. If humans spent enough blood and laid enough traps beforehand, they could slow down the alien invaders.

They could. For a while. The idea was to make the mining scheme unprofitable for the Krolp. That was the human idea, anyhow. But the Krolp had ideas of their own. One of those ideas was not to let the backward natives get uppity and start thinking they could push their betters around.

Quite suddenly, Grand Junction ceased to exist. That wasn’t an H-bomb, though it might as well have been. But Harris Moffatt III hadn’t just slipped away from Grand Junction by himself. He’d feared the Krolp would strike his capital. People started slipping out as soon as he told Prilk he would fight. Most of them were safe. So were most of the data stored in Grand Junction, and even some of the factories that had been there.

Craig was unlikely to last long, either. Moffatt and his advisers moved farther north still, up into an even smaller town. As long as you had radio, where you were didn’t matter too much.

That all made good military sense. So did stopping the enemy when he came at you. Surprising the Krolp once hadn’t been too hard. Neither had disrupting them behind their lines. But disrupting them wasn’t the same as killing them all, and killing them all was what the free USA really needed. The centauroids shook off the disruption. They weren’t so easily surprised the second time they attacked.

And the American defenses crumbled. Human-made arms never did much against the Krolp. Captured, stolen, or bought alien hand weapons performed like--well, like hand weapons against the full weight of Krolpish military might. As well turn a .357 magnum on a tank. You could, sure, but how much good would it do you?

“We need to be able to make those gadgets for ourselves!” Harris Moffatt III raged, as his father and grandfather had before him.

“Yes, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said. No doubt his predecessors had told the two previous Presidents the same thing. Perhaps unlike his predecessors, he added, “The Incas needed to be able to make muskets and swords and armor to fight the Spaniards, too. The only trouble was, they couldn’t. They didn’t know how.”

The President knew only too well that humans couldn’t make Krolpish weapons. The principles were beyond them. Even if the principles hadn’t been, the manufacturing techniques were.

By the third day of the second attack, it wasn’t much of a war anymore. It was a rout. American troops in the mountains surrendered as fast as they could--when the Krolp let them. The centauroids made examples of some of the troops. That wasn’t pretty, either. They were as far ahead of mankind in torture technology as they were in everything else.

To add insult to injury, they started smashing northeastern Utah to smithereens as soon as they got there. They might have been saying that human resistance wasn’t even worth noticing. As a matter of fact, that was just what they were saying, both to themselves and to what was left of mankind.

• • •

Harris Moffatt III got over the former border between the USA and Canada about twenty minutes before the Krolp caught up with him. His fuel-cell-powered car was limited to paved roads. Nothing seemed to limit the Krolp. One second, he was rolling north, trying to figure out some way to keep resisting. The next, the Krolpish equivalent of an armored car appeared as if out of nowhere on the highway in front of him. The weapon it carried could smash a city without breaking a sweat; its armor laughed at nukes. For good measure, more Krolp vehicles came up from either side.

Brakes screeched as Moffatt’s wife Jessica, who was driving, stopped before the car ran into that first one. A voice filled the passenger compartment: “Give up, Moffatt!” If God spoke Krolpish and were really pissed off, He might sound like that.

The President had already made up his mind what he would do if and when the Krolp caught him. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said. “My name’s Ed Vaughn, and I raise chickens.” He had some excellent false papers to prove it, too.

Not that they did him any good. Man proposes; the Krolp dispose, the saying went. Flatulent Krolpish laughter filled the car. “Don’t waste time lying, Moffatt!” the voice roared. “We know your smell! We know your coil!” He supposed they meant his DNA. Whatever they meant, they had him, all right.

Dully, hopelessly, he got out of the car. A Krolp emerged from the armored fighting vehicle. “Here I am,” Moffatt said. “Can you get it over with fast, anyhow?”

“We do not kill you, Moffatt. The ruler does not want you killed. You are a worthless native, yes, but still you were a ruler, too. You were,” the Krolp repeated. “No more. Now your stupid United States are out of business.”

That was, if anything, an understatement. “Well, if you aren’t going to kill me, what will you do with me?” the President--no, the ex-President asked.

The Krolp gestured toward his vehicle with a massively lethal hand weapon. “Get in, you and your female. You will find out.”

They took him to St. Louis. They squeezed everything he knew about the free USA out of him. They didn’t need torture for that. Knowing when a prisoner--even a lowly human prisoner--was telling the truth was child’s play for them.

One of them told him, “If you ever fuck with us again, even a little bit, we will blow your head apart from the inside out. It will seem to take a very long time, and it will hurt more than you can imagine. Do you understand? Do you believe?”

“Yes,” Moffatt said. The Krolp could do things like that. It was the kind of thing they would do, too.

And so he and Jessica settled into exile life. Even the humans whose families had served the alien invaders since their ships came down gave him a certain amount of respect for what he had been. When the wind blew from the west, it sometimes dropped gray, gritty dust on St. Louis. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know that that came from the Krolpish strip-mining operations in Utah, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else it was likely to come from.

Once in a while, he remembered the Secretary of Alien Affairs talking about Vilcabamba. Those old Incas might have sympathized. But, really, that wouldn’t have done them or him a hell of a lot of good.

© 2010 by Harry Turtledove

Table of Contents

Black Tulip

He Woke In Darkness

Trantor Falls

Shtetl Days

The House That George Built

The Star and the Rockets

We Haven't Got There Yet

Vilcabamba