Aftershocks (14 page)

Whenever the telephone rang these days, whether at home or at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works, David Goldfarb answered it with a certain amount of apprehension. He also answered it with pencil and paper handy, to record the phone numbers of callers. That wouldn’t do him any good with Basil Roundbush, of course, but it might help with local hired muscle, if the Englishman chose to use any. Goldfarb had no way of guessing how many scrambler sets Roundbush had brought along.

“Saskatchewan River Widgets,” he said now, pencil poised. “David Goldfarb speaking.”

“Hello, Goldfarb. We met once upon a time, a long ways away from here. Do you remember?” It wasn’t Roundbush’s voice. It wasn’t a British voice at all. That accent was American, with an odd twang. The fellow on the other end of the line also spoke in a harsh rasp, as if he hadn’t had a cigarette out of his mouth for five minutes since the day he was born.

More than anything else, that rasp reminded David Goldfarb of who the caller had to be. “Marseille,” he blurted, and then, “You’re one of the Yanks the Lizards used to try to nab Pierre Dutourd.”

“That’s right,” the American said. “Name’s Rance Auerbach, in case you don’t recollect. You ought to be interested in hearing I had supper with that fellow called Roundbush last night.”

Goldfarb already had his number written down. He could pass it on to the police with no trouble at all. Voice tight, he said, “And I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re the one who plans on finishing me off.” Anything more he could pass on to the police would be welcome, too.

But this Auerbach said, “Christ, no, you damn fool. I just wanted to make sure you knew old Basil was gunning for you. I told him to leave you the hell alone, and he told me to piss up a rope. So I’m on your side, son.”

Nobody’d been on Goldfarb’s side for a long time. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Without Jerome Jones’ help, he never would have been able to emigrate from Britain at all, and without George Bagnall, he might still be languishing in bureaucratic limbo in Ottawa. But Roundbush and his chums seemed much more determined to do him harm than anybody was to do him good. He said, “I know dear Basil is in Edmonton, thanks.”

“That’s nice,” Auerbach said. “Do you know he intends to do you in, too?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” David answered. Talking about it felt surprisingly good. “I’m taking what precautions I can.” Those were pitifully few. And he could do even less for Naomi and the children than he could for himself.

“I told the son of a bitch he’d answer to me if he tried any nasty business on you,” Rance Auerbach said. “He didn’t cotton to hearing that, but I told him anyhow. After he sent you to France, he can damn well leave you alone now.”

“Did
you?” Goldfarb was frankly amazed, and no doubt showed it. In an absent way, he wondered what sort of name Rance was; the Yanks could come up with some strange ones. But that didn’t matter. He went on, “And what did he say to that? Nothing too kind, is my guess.”

“Right the first time.” Auerbach coughed, then muttered, “Damn!” He drew in a breath whose wheezing Goldfarb could hear over the telephone before continuing, “No, he wasn’t too happy. But then, he doesn’t think I can do much.”

Remembering how physically damaged the American was, Goldfarb feared his former RAF superior was right. He didn’t want to say that. What he did say was, “What can you do?”

“Less than I’d like, dammit, on account of I’m not gonna be here real long. But I’ve already talked to some of the cops here,” Auerbach answered. “For some reason or other, Canadians take things like death threats a lot more seriously than we do down in the States.”

Was that supposed to be funny? Goldfarb couldn’t tell. He said, “You’re
supposed
to take things like that seriously, aren’t you?”

Auerbach laughed. Then he coughed again. Then he cursed again. He said, “Only goes to show you’ve never lived in Texas.” After another round of coughs and another round of soft curses, he went on, “Listen, you know where you can get your hands on a pistol without filling out forms from here to next week?”

“No,” Goldfarb answered. He’d been advised—hell, he’d been told—to leave his service weapon behind when he came to Canada. He’d done it, too, and spent the time since Basil Roundbush first called wishing he hadn’t.

“Too bad,” the American said. “The trouble with guys like good old Basil and his pals is, they don’t play by the rules. If you do, you’re liable to end up a dead duck.”

“I know,” David said unhappily. “But what can you do about all this? What can I do about it, for that matter?”

“Well, making sure you don’t get killed would be a good start,” Auerbach answered.

“I quite agree,” David Goldfarb said. “I’ve been trying to do that myself for quite some time now. What can you do about it?”

“I don’t right know. I wish I were gonna be here longer,” the American said. “I’ve got a marker or two I may be able to call in, but God only knows if they’re still worth anything. Finding out will take a little bit of doing: I haven’t tried to get ahold of these people in a long time. And I won’t be able to tell them everything about this business even if they aren’t pushing up lilies somewhere.”

David pondered that. It could add up to any number of different things, but he saw one that looked more likely than any of the others. “You know Germans?” he asked, and wondered if he really wanted to find out the answer.

For close to half a minute, he didn’t. At last, Auerbach said, “Well, you’re nobody’s fool, are you?”

“I like to think not, anyhow,” Goldfarb said. “Of course, people like to think all sorts of things that others might find unlikely.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Rance Auerbach said. “Okay, hang in there, Goldfarb. I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.

From the next desk over, Hal Walsh said, “I hope that wasn’t trouble, David,” as Goldfarb set his own phone back in its cradle.

“I don’t . . .think so,” David told his boss. Walsh nodded, not entirely convinced. Since Goldfarb wasn’t entirely convinced, either, he just shrugged and went back to work. He had to look down at the drawings in front of him for a while before he could remember what the hell he’d been trying to do.

He spent the rest of the day at half speed. He couldn’t keep his mind fully on the latest project Hal Walsh had set him. His eyes kept drifting toward the telephone. When it rang half an hour later, he jumped. But it was only Naomi, asking him to stop at the grocery for a few things on the way home from work.

“I can do that,” he said.

“I should hope so,” his wife answered. “It’s not that hard, especially now when you have sensible money to deal with.” Though she’d lived in Britain for the larger part of her life, she’d never quite come to terms with pence and shillings and pounds. Canadian dollars and cents made her much happier than the traditional currency ever had.

Goldfarb left the office about half an hour later than he might have otherwise; he was doing his best to make up for being distracted. As usual when the weather was even close to decent, he walked home: his flat was less than a mile from the Widget Works. That kept the beginnings of a middle-aged potbelly from becoming too much more than a beginning.

With a choice of several grocer’s shops on the way, he intended to stop at the one closest to his block of flats. Walking was all very well, but walking with a paper sack was something else again.

He was halfway across the street on whose far side stood the grocer’s when he heard the roar of a racing automobile engine and a couple of shouts of, “Look out!” His head whipped around. A big Chevy—an enormous auto, for one used to British motorcars—was bearing down on him, and the driver plainly had not the slightest intention of stopping.

Had he panicked, he would have died right there. He waited as long as he thought he possibly could—perhaps a whole second—then dashed forward. The Chevy’s driver couldn’t react quite fast enough. The edge of his mudguard (no, they called them fenders on this side of the Atlantic) touched Goldfarb’s jacket, but then he was past.

And then that driver had to slam on the brakes to keep from smashing into the cars stopped at the light at the next corner. He couldn’t do that quite fast enough, either, not at the speed he was going. It had been a while since David heard the crash of crumpling metal and shattering glass, but the sound was unmistakable.

Goldfarb sprinted toward the Chevy that had come to grief. He hoped the driver had gone straight through the windscreen—it never for a moment occurred to him to doubt that the fellow had tried to run him down on purpose. And if the bastard hadn’t got himself a face full of plate glass, Goldfarb wanted answers from him. Maybe the local constabulary could get them. Or maybe he’d start bouncing the bugger’s head off the pavement till he sang.

But the driver hadn’t gone through the windscreen (no, windshield here). He managed to get his door open and started to run. “Stop him!” Goldfarb shouted. “Stop that man!”

In Britain, a crowd would have taken off after the man. He didn’t know what would happen in Canada. He found out: a crowd took off after the fellow, a crowd led by the man with whose car the driver had just collided. A younger fellow brought the fleeing driver down with a tackle that would have earned him pats on the back in a rugby scrum.

“He almost killed you, buddy,” somebody said to Goldfarb. “It was like he didn’t see you at all.”

“Oh, he saw me, all right,” David said grimly. “He’s just sorry he missed.” The other man stared at him and tried to laugh, thinking he’d made a joke. When he didn’t laugh back, the other fellow went off shaking his head.

Goldfarb didn’t care, because a police car screeched around the corner and stopped. The men who piled out were dressed more like American cops than British bobbies, but that didn’t matter much. They took efficient charge of the miscreant. “He tried to kill me,” Goldfarb told one of them. “Before he smashed into that other motorcar, he almost ran me down while I was crossing the street.”

“Probably drunk,” the policeman said.

“No, I mean it literally,” David insisted. “He did try to kill me. He swerved towards me, but I managed to dodge.”

Both policemen looked at him. One of them said, “Maybe you’d better come to the station, then, sir, and give a statement.”

“I’d be glad to, if you’ll let me ring my wife when we get there, so she knows I’m all right and I’ll be late,” Goldfarb answered. The policemen nodded. He rode to the station in the front seat, the man who’d tried to run him down in the back. They didn’t say a word to each other all the way there.

Sweating in his coveralls, Johannes Drucker waited for a Lizard to open the door to his cubicle aboard the starship he’d tried to destroy. At precisely the appointed moment, the door slid open. The male—Drucker presumed it was a male—who stood in the doorway said, “Come with me.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Drucker answered.

The Lizard’s mouth fell open: the gesture the Race used for laughter. “I am a female,” she said. “My name is Nesseref. Now come. My shuttlecraft is waiting at the rotation hub of this ship.”

“It shall be done, superior
female,”
Drucker said, both stressing the word and adding an emphatic cough. That made Nesseref laugh again.

When Drucker strode out into the corridor, he found two armed Lizards waiting to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to. Now that they were finally releasing him, the German spaceman had no intention of doing that, but he would have mistrusted one of them were their roles reversed. He wished those roles had been reversed.

He followed Nesseref toward the hub of the starship. The guards followed him. With every deck they went inward, they got lighter. By the time they reached the rotation hub, they weighed nothing at all.

Nesseref entered her shuttlecraft first, then called, “Come in. I have an acceleration couch shaped for a Tosevite.”

“I thank you,” Drucker said, and obeyed. The couch looked to be of American manufacture. He strapped himself in. Nesseref wasted no time in using her maneuvering jets to get free of the starship. Drucker watched her work in silent fascination. At last, he broke the silence: “Your ship has far more in the way of computer-aided controls than the upper stage I flew.”

“A good thing, too,” the Lizard replied. “I think you Tosevites have to be addled to come up into space in your inadequate machines.”

“We used what we had,” Drucker answered with a shrug. He spoke in the past tense: the
Reich
would not be going into space again any time soon. If the Race had its way—and that was all too likely—Germans would never go into space again. He asked, “Now that I am returning to Tosev 3, where in Deutschland will you land me?”

“By the city called Nuremberg,” Nesseref answered. “Such are my orders.”

“Nuremberg?” Drucker sighed. He’d been warned, but still . . . “That is in the far south of the land, and my home is in the north. Could you not have picked a closer shuttlecraft port?”

“There are no closer functioning shuttlecraft ports,” Nesseref answered. “In fact, I am given to understand that that is at the moment the only functioning shuttlecraft port in the subregion. Had no one told you of this?”

“Well, yes,” Johannes Drucker admitted unhappily. “But it still presents great difficulties for me. How am I to travel from Nuremberg to my home? Will the railroads be working? Will folk on the ground give me money to travel?”

“I know nothing of any of this.” Nesseref’s voice held nothing but indifference. “My orders are to put you on the ground at the shuttlecraft port outside Nuremberg. I shall obey them.”

Obey them she did, with an efficiency that outdid anything merely Teutonic. A single neat burn took the shuttlecraft out of Earth orbit. After that, she hardly even had to adjust the machine’s course. Another burn halted the shuttlecraft above the tarmac of the port and let its legs kiss the ground with hardly a jar.

Nesseref opened the hatch. The mild air of German summer mingled with the hot, dry stuff the Race preferred. “Get out,” she told Drucker. “I do not want any more radioactive contamination than I can help getting.”