Part 41 (1/2)

He was about to call Marshal Zhukov when the telephone rang. He was something less than astonished when his secretary told him the marshal waited on the other end of the line. ”Put him through, Pyotr Maksimovich,” he said, and then, a moment later, ”Good day, Comrade Marshal.” Best to remind Zhukov he was still supposed to be subservient to the Party. Molotov wished theory and practice coincided more closely.

Sure enough, all Zhukov said was, ”Well?”

Suppressing a sigh, Molotov summarized the conversation with Queek. He added, ”This means, of course, that we cannot even think about Operation Proletarian Vengeance for some time. It would not be safe.”

”No. It was always risky.” Zhukov agreed. ”We would have had to blame the bomb on the n.a.z.is or the Americans, and we might well not have been believed. Now we can only hope the Germans don't give Mao a bomb and blame it on us.” That was a horrifying thought. Before Molotov could do more than note it, Zhukov went on, ”The west is more important. We are prepared for anything, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, as best we can be.”

”Good. Very good,” Molotov said. ”Now we hope the preparations are needless.” He hung up. Zhukov let him get away with it. Why not? If things went wrong, who would get the blame? Molotov would, and he knew it.

Reuven Russie was examining the cyst on the back of a stocky old lady's calf when the air-raid sirens began to howl. ”Gevalt!” ”Gevalt!” the woman exclaimed, startled back into Yiddish from the Hebrew they'd been using. ”Is it starting all over again, G.o.d forbid?” the woman exclaimed, startled back into Yiddish from the Hebrew they'd been using. ”Is it starting all over again, G.o.d forbid?”

”It's probably just a drill, Mrs. Zylbring,” Reuven answered the rea.s.suring tones that came in so handy in medicine were useful in other ways, too. ”We've been having a lot of them lately, you know, just in case.”

”And would we have them if we didn't need them?” Mrs. Zylbring retorted, to which he lacked such a rea.s.suring comeback.

Yetta the receptionist said, ”No matter what it is, we'd better head for the bas.e.m.e.nt.” She'd stayed in the examining room to make sure Reuven didn't get fresh with Mrs. Zylbring. He couldn't imagine himself that desperate, but protocol was protocol. He also had no comeback for her.

His father and the fat, middle-aged man Moishe Russie'd been looking at came out of the other examination room. They too headed for the bas.e.m.e.nt. As Reuven went down the steps, he wondered if hiding down there would save him from an explosive-metal bomb. He doubted it. He'd been a little boy on a freighter outside of Rome when the Germans smuggled in a bomb and blew the Eternal City's Lizard occupiers-and, incidentally, the papacy-to radioactive dust. That had been a horror from a lot of kilometers away. Close up? He didn't like to think about it.

He'd just gone into the shelter when the all-clear sounded. His father's patient said several pungent things in Arabic, from which the Jews of Palestine had borrowed most of their swear words: as a language used mostly in prayer for two thousand years, Hebrew had lost much of its own nastiness.

”It could be worse,” Reuven told him. ”It might have been the real thing.”

”If they keep having alarms when no one's there, though, n.o.body will take shelter when it is the real thing:” the man answered, which was also true.

He kept on grumbling as they all went back upstairs. Once they'd returned to the examination room, Mrs. Zylbring asked Reuven, ”Well, what can you do about my leg?”

”You have two choices,” he answered. ”We can take out the cyst, which will hurt for a while, or we can leave it in there. It's not malignant; it won't get worse. It'll just stay the way it is.”

”But it's an ugly lump!” Mrs. Zylbring said.

”Getting rid of it is a minor surgical procedure,” Reuven said. ”We'd do it under local anesthetic. It wouldn't hurt at all while it was happening.”

”But it would hurt afterwards. You said so.” Mrs. Zylbring made a sour face. ”And it would be expensive, too.”

Reuven nodded politely. The training he'd had at the Lizards' medical college hadn't prepared him for dealing with dilemmas like this. He suspected he was a good deal more highly trained than he needed to be to join his father's practice. No, he didn't suspect it: he knew it. But he was also trained in some of the wrong things.

The old lady waggled a finger at him. ”If it were your leg, Doctor, what would you do?”

He almost burst out laughing. The Lizards had never asked him a question like that. But it wasn't a bad question, not really. Mrs. Zylbring a.s.sumed he had all the answers. That was what a doctor was for, wasn't it-having answers? Answering what kind of condition she had was easy. Knowing what to do about it was a different question, a different kind of question, one Shpaaka and the other physicians from the Race hadn't got him ready to handle.

He temporized: ”If the fact that it doesn't disturb function satisfies you, leave it alone. If the way it looks bothers you, I can get rid of it inside half an hour.”

”Of course the way it looks bothers me,” she said. ”If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have come here. But I don't like the idea of you cutting on me, and I don't have a whole lot of money, either. I don't know what to do.”

In the hope Yetta would have a good idea, Reuven glanced over to her. She rolled her eyes in a way suggesting she'd seen patients like Mrs. Zylbring a million times before but didn't know what to do about them, either. In the end, the old woman went home with her cyst. Reuven wished he'd tried harder to talk her into getting rid of it; his urge was always to do something, to intervene. If he hadn't had that urge, he probably wouldn't have wanted to follow in his father's footsteps.

But when he said as much to his father, Moishe Russie shook his head. ”If it's not really hurting the woman, it doesn't matter one way or another. She'd have been unhappy at the pain afterwards, too, mark my words. If she'd wanted you to do it, that would have been different.”

”The pain would be the same either way,” Reuven said.

”Yes-but at the same time no, too,” his father said. ”The difference is, she'd have accepted it better if she'd been the one urging you to have the thing out. She wouldn't blame you for it, if you know what I mean.”

”I suppose so,” Reuven said. ”Things aren't so cut-and-dried here as they were back in the medical college. You were always supposed to come up with the one right answer there, and you got into trouble if you didn't.”

His father's chuckle had a reminiscent feel to it. ”Oh, yes. But the real world is more complicated than school, and you'd better believe it.” He got up from behind his desk, came around it, and clapped Reuven on the shoulder. ”Come on. Let's go home. You haven't got homework any more, anyhow.”

”That's true.” Reuven grinned. ”I knew I must have had some good reason for getting out of there.”

Moishe Russie laughed, but soon sobered. ”You did have a good reason, a very good one. And I'm proud of you.”

”Can't you get the fleet lord to do anything about that?” Reuven asked as they left the office-Moishe Russie locked up behind them-and started for home.

Late-afternoon sunlight gleamed off Moishe Russie's bald crown as he shook his head. ”I've tried. He won't listen. He wants everybody to reverence the spirits of Emperors past”-he said the phrase in the Lizards' language-”so we'll get used to bowing down to the Race.”

”He'd better not hold his breath, or he'll be the bluest Lizard ever hatched,” Reuven said.

”I hope you're right. With all my heart, I hope you're right,” his father said. ”But the Race is stubborn, and the Race is very patient, too. That worries me.”

”How much is patience worth if we all blow up tomorrow?” Reuven asked. ”That's what worries me.”

Moishe Russie started to step off the curb, then jumped back in a hurry to avoid an Arab hurtling past on a bicycle. ”It worries me, too,” he said quietly, and then switched to Yiddish to add, ”G.o.d d.a.m.n the stupid n.a.z.is.”

”Everyone's been saying that for the past thirty years,” Reuven said. ”If He's going to do it, He's taking His own sweet time about it.”

”He works at His speed, not ours,” Moishe Russie answered.

”If He's there at all,” Reuven said. There were days-commonly days when people were more stupid or vicious than usual-when belief came hard.

His father sighed. ”The night the Lizards came to Earth, I was-we all were-starving to death in the Warsaw ghetto. Your sister Sarah already had. I'd gone out to trade some of the family silver for a pork bone. I threw a candlestick over the wall around the ghetto, and the Pole threw me the bone. He could have just cheated me, but he didn't. As I was walking back to our flat, I prayed to G.o.d for a sign, and an explosive-metal bomb went off high in the sky. I thought I was a prophet, and other people did, too, for a while.”

”Sarah...” Reuven felt a sudden rush of shame. He hadn't thought about his dead sister in years. ”I hardly remember her.” He couldn't have been more than three when she died. All he really had was a confused recollection of not being the only child in the family. Unlike his parents, he brought little in the way of memories with him from Poland.

”She was very sweet and very mischievous, and I think she would have been beautiful,” Moishe Russie said, which was about as much as he'd ever talked about the girl who'd died before the Lizards came.

”She sounds like the twins,” Reuven said. He walked on again.

”Nu? Why not?” his father said. ”There's something to this genetics business, you know. But maybe G.o.d really was giving me a sign, there in Warsaw that night. If the Lizards hadn't come, we'd surely be dead now. So would all the Jews in Poland-all the Jews in Europe, come to that.” Why not?” his father said. ”There's something to this genetics business, you know. But maybe G.o.d really was giving me a sign, there in Warsaw that night. If the Lizards hadn't come, we'd surely be dead now. So would all the Jews in Poland-all the Jews in Europe, come to that.”

”Instead, it's only a big chunk that are, and the rest who are liable to be,” Reuven said. ”Maybe that's better, but it's a long way from good.”

Moishe Russie raised an eyebrow. ”So what you're accusing G.o.d of, then, is sloppy workmans.h.i.+p?”

Reuven thought about it. ”Well, when you get right down to it, yes. If I do a sloppy job of something, I'm only human. I make mistakes. I know I'll make mistakes. But I expect better from G.o.d, somehow.”

”Maybe He expects better from you, too.” His father didn't sound reproachful. He just sounded thoughtful, thoughtful and a little sad.