If he’d hoped to wound the guard, he was disappointed. “Life’s tough all over,” the fellow answered indifferently. He gestured with the submachine gun. “Now put it in gear.”
He might have been an SS man. Moishe wondered if he’d learned his military manner from the genuine article. He’d seen that in Poland, after the Jews and Poles helped the Lizards chase out the Germans. Quite a few Jews, suddenly become soldiers, imitated the most impressive, most ferocious human warriors they’d known. If you tried pointing that out to them, though, you were liable to get yourself killed. Moishe maintained a prudent silence here.
He didn’t know exactly where
Most of the time, other things were on his mind. Chief among them was how to keep the Lizards from walking on this holy soil. He’d quoted the Bible at the Jewish underground leaders:
Very few people cared about what he wanted, worse luck. The local Jews, fools that they were, reckoned the British here as oppressive as the Nazis in Poland-or so they said, anyhow. Some of them had escaped from Poland after the Nazis conquered it, so they should have known better.
“Turn,” the guard said: unnecessarily, for Moishe knew the way to the interrogation chamber as well as a rat knew how to run through a familiar maze. He never got rewarded with a piece of cheese for doing it right, though; maybe his handlers hadn’t heard of Pavlov.
When he got to the right doorway, the guard stood back and motioned for him to work the latch. That never failed to amuse him: his captors took him for a dangerous man who would seize a weapon and wreak havoc with it if he got the slightest chance. If
He opened the door, took one step into the room, and stopped in surprised dismay. There at the table, along with Begin and Stern and the other usual questioners, sat a Lizard. The alien swung an eye turret toward him. “This is the one? I have a hard time being sure,” he said in fair German.
Moishe stared at him. The body paint he wore was far drabber than that which Moishe remembered, but no denying the voice was familiar “Zolraag!”
“He knows me,” the former Lizard governor of Poland said. “Either you have coached him well or he is indeed the male who gave the Race such a difficult time in Poland.”
“He’s Russie, all right,” Stern said. He was a big, dark fellow, a fighter rather than a thinker if looks mattered, which wasn’t always so. “He says we should steer clear of you, no matter what.” He spoke German, too, with a Polish accent.
“And I say to you that we will give you quite a lot to have him in our claws again,” Zolraag answered. “He betrayed us-he betrayed me-and he should pay for this betrayal.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Moishe didn’t like the way Zolraag looked or sounded. He hadn’t thought the Race worried about such things as revenge, either. If he was wrong there, he would have been happier not knowing it.
“Nobody said anything about turning him over to you,” Menachem Begin said in Yiddish. “That was not why we brought you here.” He was short and slight, not a whole lot bigger than a Lizard himself. He was nothing much to look at, but when he spoke you had to take him seriously. He shook a finger at Zolraag. “We hear what you have to say, we hear what he has to say, and then we decide what to do.”
“You would be well advised to take the Race and its desires more seriously,” Zolraag answered, his voice cold. As he had back in Poland, he assumed his concerns were more important than mankind’s simply because they were his. Had he been blond and blue-eyed instead of green-brown and scaly, he would have made a good SS man himself: the Race certainly had the notion of the
He did not succeed in impressing Begin. “You would be well advised to remember where you are,” the underground leader replied imperturbably. “We can always sell you to the British, and maybe get more from them for you than your people would give us for Russie here.”
