Aftershocks (48 page)

“And I greet you, Reuven Russie,” Shpaaka answered. “It is good to see you again, even if you decided that your superstition precluded you from finishing your studies with us.”

“I thank you. It is good to see you, too.” Seeing Shpaaka reminded Reuven how much he missed the medical college, something he tried not to think about most of the time. Trying not to think about it now, he asked, “How can I help?”

His father coughed a couple of times. “I think I will let Shpaaka explain it to you, as he had begun to explain it to me.”

“Very well,” Shpaaka said, though by his tone it was anything but very well. He looked about as uncomfortable as Reuven had ever seen a male of the Race.
It’s something to do with sex,
he thought.
It has to be.
And, sure enough, the Lizard physician said, “I called your father, Reuven Russie, to discuss a case of perversion.”

That made Moishe Russie speak up: “It would be better, Doctor, if you discussed the case itself and let us draw the value judgments, if any.”

“Very well, though I find it difficult to be dispassionate here,” Shpaaka said. “The problem concerns a pair from the colonization fleet, a female named Ppurrin and a male called Waxxa. They were best friends back on Home, and they resumed that close friendship after coming to Tosev 3. Unfortunately, after coming to Tosev 3, both of them also became addicted to ginger, that most pernicious of all herbs.”

“Uh-oh,” Reuven said to his father. “Do I know what’s coming next?”

“Half of it, maybe,” Moishe Russie answered. “That’s about how much I guessed.”

Shpaaka said, “May I continue?” as if they’d talked out of turn during one of his lectures. When they looked back toward the monitor, he went on, “As you might imagine, the two of them began to mate with each other when Ppurrin tasted ginger. And, due to these repeated matings, they have conceived a passion for each other altogether inappropriate for members of the Race. After all, during a proper mating season, how is one partner much different from another?”

“You understand, superior sir, that we Tosevites feel rather differently about such things.” Reuven did his best not to sound anything but dispassionate himself. He didn’t use an emphatic cough. He didn’t burst into laughter, either.

“I said the same thing,” his father remarked.

“Of course I understand that,” Shpaaka said impatiently. “It is exactly why I am consulting with you. You see, Ppurrin and Waxxa are so blatant in their perverse behavior that they seek a formal, exclusive mating arrangement, such as is the custom among your species.”

“They want to get married?” Reuven exclaimed. He said it first in Hebrew, which Shpaaka didn’t follow. Then he translated it into English, a tongue the Lizard physician did know fairly well.

And, sure enough, Shpaaka made the affirmative gesture. “That is exactly what they want to do. Can you imagine anything more disgusting?”

Before answering him, Reuven spoke quickly to his father: “Well, you were right. I didn’t think of
that.”
Then he returned to the language of the Race and said, “Superior sir, I gather you are not simply punishing them because they use ginger.”

“We could do that,” Shpaaka admitted, “but both of them, aside from this sexual perversion, perform their jobs very well. Still, sanctioning permanent unions of this sort would surely prove destructive of good order. Why, next thing you know, they would probably want to rear their hatchlings themselves and teach them the same sort of revolting behavior.”

This time, Reuven did laugh. He couldn’t help it. He made himself grow serious again, saying, “We Tosevites do not consider any of the behavior you have mentioned to be disgusting, you know.”

“I would agree. It is not disgusting—for Tosevites,” Shpaaka said. “We of the Race found it disgusting in you when we first learned of it, but that was some time ago now. We have come to see that it is normal for your kind. But we do not want our males and females imitating it, any more than you would want your males and females imitating our normal practices.”

“Some of our males might enjoy your mating seasons, while their stamina lasted,” Moishe Russie said. “Most of our females, I agree, would not approve.”

“You are being irrelevant,” Shpaaka said severely. “I had hoped for assistance, not mockery and sarcasm. Except for their drug addiction and perverse attraction to each other, Ppurrin and Waxxa, as I say, are excellent members of the Race.”

“Why not just ignore what they do in private, then?” Reuven asked.

“Because they refuse to keep it private,” Shpaaka answered. “As I told you, they have requested formal recognition of their status. They are proud of what they do, and predict that, on account of ginger, most males and females of the Race on Tosev 3 will eventually find permanent, exclusive sexual partners.”

“Missionaries for monogamy, “Moishe Russie murmured.

Reuven nodded. “What if they are right?” he asked Shpaaka.

His former mentor recoiled in horror. “In that case, the colonists on Tosev 3 will become the pariahs of the Empire when the truth is learned back on Home,” he answered. “I think it altogether likely that the spirits of Emperors past would turn their backs on this whole world as a result.”

He means it,
Reuven realized. The Lizards dismissed his religion as a superstition. He sometimes did the same with theirs. Here, that would be a mistake.

He said, “If you do not wish to punish them and you do wish to silence them, why not suggest that they emigrate to one of the independent not-empires?—to the United States, perhaps. Ginger is legal there and”—of necessity, he dropped into English—“they could get married, too.”

“That is a
good
idea.” Moishe Russie used an emphatic cough. “That is a very good idea. It would get this couple out from under your scales, too, Shpaaka, so they cannot agitate among the colonists any more.”

“Perhaps.” Shpaaka turned an eye turret toward Reuven. “I thank you, Reuven Russie. It is, at any rate, an idea we had not thought of for ourselves. We shall consider it. Farewell.” His image disappeared from the screen.

“Lizards who want to get married!” Reuven turned to his father. Now he could laugh as much as he wanted to, and he did. “I never would have believed that.”

“They’ve made people change a lot since they got to Earth,” Moishe Russie said. “They’re just starting to find out how much they’ve changed, too. As far as they’re concerned, changing us is fine. But they don’t like it so well when the shoe is on the other foot. Nobody does.”

“If they could stamp out ginger, they’d do it in a minute,” Reuven said.

“If we could stamp out alcohol and opium and a lot of other things, a lot of us would do it, too,” his father said. “We’ve never managed it. I don’t think they’ll have an easy time getting rid of ginger, either.”

“You’re probably right, especially since we use it so much in food,” Reuven answered. “One of these days, though, they may try—try seriously, I mean. That will be interesting.”

“There’s one word for it.” Moishe Russie winked. “If these Lizards do get married, who’d give the bride away?”

Before Reuven could reply, the ordinary telephone rang. He went over and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Dr. Russie?” A woman’s voice, one with pain in it. “This is Deborah Radofsky. I’m sorry to bother you, but I just kicked the wall by accident, and I’m afraid I’ve broken my toe.”

Reuven started to tell her that a doctor couldn’t do much for a broken toe no matter what—news that always delighted his patients. He started to tell her to come to the office in the morning if she really wanted to get it examined. Instead, he heard himself saying, “Remind me of your address, and I’ll come over and have a look at it.” His father blinked.

“Are you sure?” the widow Radofsky asked. Reuven nodded, a useless thing to do over a phone without a video attachment. After he gave her assurances she could hear, she gave him an address. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes’ walk away; Jerusalem was an important city, but not on account of its size.

“A house call?” Moishe Russie asked when Reuven hung up. “I admire your energy, but you don’t do that very often.”

“It’s Mrs. Radofsky,” Reuven answered. “She thinks she’s broken her toe.”

“Even if she has, you won’t be able to give her much help, and you know it perfectly well,” his father said. “I don’t see why you didn’t just tell her to come to the office tomorrow morn . . .” His voice trailed off as he made the pieces fit together. “Oh. Mrs. Radofsky. The widow Radofsky. Well, go on, then.”

After grabbing his doctor’s bag, Reuven was glad to get out of the house. His father didn’t mind his paying a professional call on a nice-looking widow. His mother probably wouldn’t mind when his father told her, either. What the twins would say—no, he didn’t want to contemplate that. At romantic fifteen, they thought he was a fool for not having gone to Canada with Jane Archibald. About three days a week, he thought he was a fool, too.

He had no trouble finding the widow Radofsky’s little house. When he knocked on the door, he had to wait a bit before she opened it. The way she limped after he came inside showed why. “Sit down,” he told her. “Let me have a look at that.”

She did, in an overstuffed chair under a lamp, and held up her right foot. She winced when he slid the slipper off it. Her fourth toe was swollen up to twice its size, and purple from base to tip. She hissed when he touched it, and hissed again and shook her head when he asked her if she could move it. “I have broken it, haven’t I?” she said.

“I’m afraid so,” Reuven answered. “I can put a splint on it, or I can leave it alone. It’ll heal the same either way.”

“Oh,” she said unhappily. “It’s like that, is it?”

“I’m afraid so,” he repeated, and tried to make her think about something besides his inability to help: “What’s your daughter doing?”

“She’s gone to sleep,” the widow Radofsky answered. She wasn’t easily distracted. “Why did you bother coming here, if you knew you wouldn’t be able to do much? You could have told me to wait till morning.”

“It’s all right—it might have been just a nasty bruise. It’s not, but it might have been.” Reuven hesitated, then added, “And—I hope you don’t mind my saying so—I was glad for the chance to see you, too.”

“Were you?” After a pause of her own, she said, “No, I don’t mind.”

 
13

“Scooter calling
Columbus.
Scooter calling
Columbus,”
Glen Johnson radioed as he approached the second American constant-acceleration spaceship to reach the asteroid belt. “Come in,
Columbus.”

“Go ahead, Scooter,” the radio operator aboard
Columbus
said. “We have you on our radar. You’re cleared to approach airlock number two. The lights will guide you.”

“Thanks,
Columbus.
Will do. Out.” The lights aboard the spaceship had been guiding him for a little while now. He’d hardly needed the chatter. But the
Columbus’
radio operator on duty was a woman with a nice, friendly voice. He enjoyed listening to her, and so talked more than he might have otherwise.

He had no idea whether he would enjoy looking at her; they’d never met in person. He knew he enjoyed looking at the
Columbus. That’s doing things right,
he thought. The
Lewis and Clark
had started out as a space station, and had had to be expanded and revised before leaving Earth orbit. It had reached the vicinity of Ceres, yes, and done what it was supposed to do once it got here, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the spacegoing equivalent of a garbage scow.

By contrast, the
Columbus
had been designed and built as an interplanetary spacecraft from the inside out. It wasn’t quite so elegant a piece of engineering as a Lizard starship, but it was on the right track. It was a series of spheres: one for the crew, then a boom, another sphere for the reaction mass, then a second boom, and finally, in lonely splendor, the nuclear engine that heated and discharged the mass. It was a better job in just about every way than the
Lewis and Clark.
And the spaceship that came after the
Columbus
would be better still. Human technology wasn’t static, the way the Race’s was.

Using eyeballs and the scooter’s radar, Johnson killed almost all of his velocity relative to the
Columbus
and drifted forward at a rate better measured in inches per second than in feet. He made further minute adjustments with his little maneuvering rockets as he slid into airlock number two, which was big enough to accommodate the scooter.
“Columbus,
I’m all the way inside,” he reported. “Velocity . . . zero.”

“Roger that.” It wasn’t the radio operator who answered, but the airlock officer, a man. The outer door slid shut behind the scooter. Once it had securely closed, the inner door slid open. The airlock officer said, “We have pressure for you, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. You can open the top and come out for a bit.”

“Thanks,” Glen said. “Don’t mind if I do.” He had to equalize pressure before the canopy would come off; the
Columbus
kept its internal pressure a little higher than either the
Lewis and Clark
or the scooter. When Johnson did emerge, he was wearing a grin. “Always good to see an unfamiliar face.”

“I believe that,” the airlock officer said. “Hell, it’s good for me to see you, and I’ve only been stuck aboard this madhouse for a few months.”

“You don’t know what a madhouse is,” Johnson said, loyally slandering his own shipmates.

“Well, maybe you’re right,” the other fellow admitted. “You folks even had a stowaway, didn’t you? Somebody who wasn’t supposed to be aboard, I mean.”

“We sure did.” Glen Johnson would have drawn himself up in pride, but didn’t see much point in weightlessness. “As a matter of fact, you’re looking at him.”

“Oh,” the airlock officer said. “I’m sorry. No offense.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Johnson said easily. “After all the different things Brigadier General Healey has called me over the past couple of years, you’d have a hard time getting me mad.” He pushed off against the scooter and grabbed the nearest handhold. The corridors of the
Columbus,
like those of the
Lewis and Clark,
were designed so that people could impersonate chimpanzees.

“Doctor Harper should be along any minute now,” the airlock officer said.

“It’s all right. I’m not in any big hurry,” Johnson answered. “We don’t have scheduled flights yet—that’ll have to wait for a while. Not enough traffic that we have to worry about it, either. As soon as he gets here, I’ll take him where he needs to go.”

“She. Her,” the fellow from the
Columbus
said. “Doctor Chris Harper is definitely of the female persuasion.”

“Okay. Better than okay, in fact,” Johnson said. “I figured anybody who’s a doctor of electrical engineering was odds-on to be a guy, even if Chris is one of those names that can go either way. Not sorry to find out I’m wrong, though.”

“We brought along as even a mix as we could, same as the
Lewis and Clark
did,” the airlock officer replied. “It’s not fifty-fifty—more like sixty-forty.”

“That’s better than our blend—we’re closer to two to one,” Johnson said. He wondered if the larger number of newly arrived women would change the social rules that had developed aboard the
Lewis and Clark. Time will tell,
he thought with profound unoriginality.

From what the airlock officer had said, he’d expected Dr. Chris Harper to be a beautiful blonde who might have gone into the movies instead of electrical engineering. She wasn’t; she had light brown hair, chopped off pretty short, and wasn’t anywhere near beautiful.
Cute
was the word that sprang to Johnson’s mind: again, something less than original. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and stuck out the hand he wasn’t using to hold on.

“Same to you, I’m sure,” she said. “You’re supposed to take me to Dome 22, isn’t that right?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “They’re just about ready for you there. They probably could have gotten things going by themselves, but we’ll be able to get twice as much done—maybe more than twice as much done—with more people doing it.”

“That’s the idea,” Dr. Harper said. She pointed toward the scooter. “And what am I supposed to do here?”

“Get in, sit in the back seat, and fasten your belt,” Johnson answered. “Fare is seventy-five cents, fare box is on the right-hand side. Because of company policy, your driver’s not allowed to accept tips.”

She snorted and grinned. “They kept telling us the people who came out on the
Lewis and Clark
were a little strange. I see they were right.”

Before Johnson got the chance to deny everything with as much mock indignation as he could, the airlock officer pointed at him and said, “He’s the stowaway.”

Dr. Harper’s eyes widened. “You mean there really was one? When we heard about that, I thought it was like a lefthanded monkey wrench or striped paint—something they pulled on the new people.” She swung her attention back to Glen Johnson. “Why did you stow away?
How
did you stow away?”

“I didn’t quite,” he said, “I was flying orbital patrol, and I came aboard the
Lewis and Clark—
the space station, it still was then—when my main engine wouldn’t ignite.” He’d arranged the engine trouble himself, but he’d never told that to anybody, and didn’t intend to start here. “I got there just before the ship was going to leave Earth orbit, and the commandant didn’t want anybody who wasn’t in on the secret going back down and saying something he shouldn’t, letting the Lizards know what was up. So he kept me aboard, and I came along for the ride.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s not as exciting as hiding in a washroom or something, is it?”

“Afraid not,” Johnson answered. Now he pointed to the scooter. “Shall we get going?” He pushed off from the wall and glided toward the little cockpit. Dr. Harper did the same. She was good in weightlessness, but she still didn’t take it quite so much for granted as did the crewfolk of the
Lewis and Clark.
She scrambled in behind him and strapped herself down.

He sealed the canopy, double-checked to make sure it
was
sealed, and waved to the airlock officer to show he was ready to go. The officer nodded and touched a button. The inner door to the lock closed. Pumps pulled most of the air back into the
Columbus.
The outer door opened. Using tiny burns with his maneuvering jets, Johnson eased the scooter out of the airlock. The outer door closed behind him.

“You’re good at this,” Chris Harper remarked.

“I’d better be,” Johnson answered, swinging the scooter’s nose in the direction of Dome 22. Once he’d done that, he decided he ought to elaborate a little more: “I was a fighter pilot when the Lizards got here, and then, like I said, I did a lot of orbital patrolling. And I’ve been out here a while now, too. So I’ve had more practice at this kind of thing than just about anybody.”

“I always enjoy watching somebody who knows what he’s doing, no matter what it is,” she said. “You do. It shows.”

“Glad you think so,” he said. “Now I have to make extra sure not to let any little rocks bounce off us, or anything stupid like that.”

Dome 22 had been set up on an asteroid about half a mile across at its thickest point. “This is the one they’re going to use as a test, isn’t that right?” Chris Harper asked as they drew near the drifting chunk of rock and metal.

“Yeah, I think so,” he answered. “That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? For a last look to make sure everything goes the way it should?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Dr. Harper agreed. “Do you suppose the Lizards will notice when we do test?”

“Everyone’s assuming they will, or at least that they’ll notice the beginning,” he said. “Of course, they may stop paying any attention to this asteroid once we shut down the dome and take everybody off. We’re hoping that’s what they do, but don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose on it.”

“Fair enough,” she said briskly, and then, to his surprise, tapped him on the shoulder. “I know you said it was against the rules to tip the driver, but I’ve got something for you, if you want it.”

He wondered what she had in mind. The cockpit of a scooter wasn’t the ideal place for some of the things that leaped into
his
mind, especially not when they’d come so close to the dome. “Well, sure,” he said in tones as neutral as he could make them. He might have been wrong, after all.

And he was. She said, “Here, then,” and handed him a couple of things. They were small enough for both of them to fit in the palm of his hand: a roll of Lifesavers and a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. They weren’t her reasonably fair white body, but he exclaimed, “Thank you!” just the same.

“You’re welcome,” Dr. Harper answered. “My guess was that you people had probably run out of things like that a while ago.”

“And you’re right, too,” he said. “As far as teeth and such go, we’re probably better off on account of it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the hell out of these. Cherry Lifesavers . . . Jesus.”

He was close enough to the asteroid now to let him see all the construction that had gone on alongside of Dome 22. He clenched the candy and gum. In a way, that was what the construction was all about: so the USA could go right on making such frivolous things. He laughed at himself.
If you don’t sound like something out of a recruiting film, what does?

“Hydrogen, oxygen—who needs anything else?” he said, and then, as a concession to his passenger, “A little alien engineering doesn’t hurt, either.”

“Thank you so much,” Chris Harper said. They both laughed.

Stargard was one of the towns of northeastern Germany that the
Wehrmacht
and the
Volkssturm
had defended to the last man and the last bullet. The Lizards hadn’t expended an explosive-metal bomb on it; they’d smashed it with armor and with strikes from the air, and then gone on to larger, more important centers of resistance. Once the
Reich
yielded, they hadn’t bothered putting a garrison in the town between Greifswald and Neu Strelitz.

Johannes Drucker didn’t blame the Lizards for that. In their shoes, he wouldn’t have garrisoned Stargard, either. What point to it? Before war rolled through the little city, it might have held forty or fifty thousand people—about as many as Greifswald. These days? These days, he would have been astonished if even a quarter of that number tried to scratch out a living here. He knew for a fact that ruins and empty houses far outnumbered inhabited ones.