Aftershocks (62 page)

“Something you wanted to say about your duty?” Webster asked.

“Uh, no, sir,” Sam answered. “I was just thinking I was glad to get back to California.”

“Okay,” his superior said crisply. “Come on. I’ve got the reports waiting for you. This is a real problem. Maybe you’ll be able to figure out what to do about it. If you can, that’ll put you a long jump ahead of everybody else.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything we
can
do about it, sir,” Yeager said, “at least if you mean in terms of stopping these beasts. We may have to see if we can make them useful to us instead. Sometimes God gives you lemons. If He does, you’d better learn to like lemonade.”

“Could be.” Webster didn’t sound convinced. “So far, nobody has any idea how to do even that much.”

“Well, azwaca and zisuili can be pretty tasty,” Sam said. “The Lizards eat ’em. No reason we couldn’t.”

“They’re ugly as sin,” Colonel Webster observed.

“So are pigs, sir,” Yeager answered. “I grew up on a farm. Nobody who ever took care of livestock thinks it’s beautiful. And the people who don’t take care of it don’t usually give a damn what it looks like. All they’ll see is the meat in the butcher case, not the animals it came from.”

“Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-oh,” Webster sang in a surprisingly melodious baritone, “and on that farm he had some azwaca, ee-i-ee-i-oh. With a
hiss-hiss
here and a
hiss-hiss
there . . .”

Sam stared at the bird colonel as if he’d never seen him before in his life. “You okay, sir?” he asked quizzically.

“How the devil should I know?” Webster answered. “Do the kind of work we do and there’s something wrong with you if you
don’t
start going a little squirrelly after a while. Or are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” Yeager said. “You want to point me at those reports now?”

“I sure will,” Colonel Webster said. “For the time being, what I want you to do is flip through ’em fast. Cover as much ground as you can in the next couple of hours, then come back to my office and we’ll talk some more.”

“Okay, I can do that,” Sam said. He didn’t have an office here, though by his rank he would have been entitled to one. What he had was a sheet-metal desk in one corner of a room filled mostly by clerks and typists. It wasn’t even exclusively his; he shared it with a couple of other itinerant officers, and his key opened only two drawers. For obvious reasons, he’d never put anything he worried about anyone else seeing inside that meager space.

“There you go.” Colonel Webster pointed to the pile of papers in the plywood IN basket at the back right corner of the desk. “Skim those and head back to me at, oh, half past ten. Go ahead and set aside any you think you’ll need to look at more later on, but I’m going to want a broad overview from you then.”

“Right.” Yeager saluted, then sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. Webster headed back to his office. Sam got to work. He nodded to himself as he grabbed the report on top of the stack. At least his boss knew exactly what he wanted. Sam hated few things more than vague orders.

He hadn’t had much to do with the spread of plants and animals from Home since getting kidnapped from Desert Center. Now, every report he read made his eyebrows rise higher. Zisuili were eating the desert bare in Arizona. Plants from Home had been spotted outside Amarillo, Texas. Barren places throughout the Southwest were getting more barren.
These creatures are worse than goats,
somebody had written. That made Sam purse his lips and blow out an almost silent whistle. He knew how bad goats were. Nobody who’d ever kept them could doubt that. Imagining beasts more destructive than they were wasn’t easy. But the photos accompanying some of the reports at least raised the possibility that that writer knew what he was talking about.

And then there were the befflem. They’d got farther from the Mexican border and raised more kinds of hell than all the Race’s meat animals put together. They killed cats. They killed some dogs, too. They raided henhouses. They stole from garbage cans. They bit people. They ran very fast for creatures with such stumpy legs, and their armored carcasses made them tough to harm.

“What will be interesting,” Sam said when he returned to Colonel Webster’s office, “will be seeing how all these animals—and the plants that are spreading, too—come through the winter. My guess is that cold weather will limit the northern range for most of them, but it’s only a guess.”

“There will be places where they can thrive year-round, though,” Webster said. “This is one of them.” He tapped his desk as if expecting a herd of ssefenji to come trampling across it.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Sam agreed. “Unless I’m wrong, we’ll have to learn to live with them as best we can.”

“What do we do if their plants start crowding out our crops?” Webster asked.

“Sir, I haven’t got any good answers for that,” Yeager said. “I don’t think anyone else does, either. Maybe the pesticide people will come up with something that kills plants from Home but leaves our stuff alone. Something like that’s liable to be our best chance.”

Colonel Webster eyed him with more than a little respect. “I happen to know that that’s being worked on right now. I don’t know when results will come, or even if they’ll come, but it is being worked on.”

“Stands to reason,” Sam said. “But do you know what I think the real trouble spot could be?” He waited for Webster to shake his head, then went on, “Befflem. They’re liable to be as much of a nuisance as rats and wild cats put together, and they don’t seem to have any natural enemies here.”

“Cold weather, like you said,” Webster suggested.

Sam shrugged. “Maybe. But I’ve looked at a couple of reports there that talk about finding them in dens with nests, so maybe cold won’t bother them as much as it would some other beasts from Home.”

Webster scrawled a note. “I’m glad I called you in, Yeager. I don’t think anybody else has mentioned that.” He paused, scratching his head. “The Lizards keep befflem for pets, don’t they? Maybe we could do the same.”

“We keep cats for pets, too—or they keep us for pets, one,” Yeager answered. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t a nuisance plenty of places.” He managed a lopsided grin. “Of course, as far as the Lizards are concerned, we’re nothing but nuisances ourselves, so I don’t think we’ll get much sympathy from them.”

“Too goddamn bad,” Webster said. Sam’s grin got wider. He nodded.

“No.” Johannes Drucker shook his head. “I don’t think we can go back to Greifswald. There’s a good-sized Lizard garrison there, and that male called Gorppet knows me much too well. We’d be under a microscope if we tried.”

“Too bad.” Both of his sons and his daughter spoke at the same time.

But his wife nodded. “I’d just as soon stay here in Neu Strelitz, or else go someplace where nobody has any idea at all who we are and start over there. Too many people back in Greifswald know why they took me away for a while.”

Drucker watched his older son. That Heinrich had joined the band of holdouts in Stargard had probably saved Drucker’s own neck; the major who commanded them had changed his mind about shooting him. But those holdouts were at least as fanatical about Party ideology as any 55 men. If they ever found out Heinrich Drucker’s mother was, or might have been, a quarter Jewish . . .

Very visibly, Heinrich figured that out for himself. He walked over and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go somewhere it’s safe for you.”

Letting out a small, silent sigh of relief didn’t show, and sigh Drucker did. The Nazis made heroes of children who turned in their parents. He hadn’t thought Heinrich would fall for such nonsense, but you couldn’t be sure till things actually started happening.

Claudia turned to him and asked, “Father, if you can’t fly into space any more, what will you do for a living?”

That was a good question. It was, in fact,
the
good question. Drucker wished he had a better answer for it. As things were, he said, “I don’t know. Something will turn up. Something always does, if you’re willing to work. I can be a mechanic, I suppose. I can make an engine sit up and do as it’s told.”

“A mechanic?” Claudia didn’t sound very happy at that. The social difference between a
Wehrmacht
officer’s daughter and a mechanic’s could be measured only in light-years.

“Honest work is honest work,” Drucker insisted, “and mechanics make pretty good money.” Claudia looked anything but convinced.

Before he could say anything else, somebody knocked on the front door to Käthe’s uncle Lothar’s house. The Druckers crowded it to the bursting point, but Lothar, a widower, didn’t seem to mind. He was Kãthe’s father’s brother, and didn’t let on that he knew anything about the possibility of Jewish blood on the other side of her family tree. Nobody talked about that where Uncle Lothar could overhear—
better safe than sorry
summed up everyone’s attitude.

He came into the back bedroom now with a frown on his face: a big, raw-boned man in his sixties, still physically strong but, like so many others, badly at sea in this new, diminished
Reich.
Nodding to Drucker, he said, “Hans, there’s a soldier out front wants to speak to you.”

“A soldier?” Suspicion roughened Drucker’s voice. “What kind of soldier?
Wehrmacht
or
Waffen-SS?”
He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to meet an SS man without an assault rifle in his hands.

But Käthe’s uncle answered, “A
Wehrmacht
lieutenant, just barely old enough to shave.”

“I’ll see him,” Drucker said with a sigh. “I wonder what he’ll make of me.” He wore one of Lothar’s old shirts, which was too big on him, and denim trousers that had seen better days. He hadn’t shaved this morning.

Sure as the devil, that wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant didn’t look as if he believed his eyes.
“You
are Colonel Johannes Drucker?” He seemed to have to remind himself to come to attention and salute.

Drucker returned the salute, though he wasn’t at all sure he remained in the
Wehrmacht
himself. “That’s right, sonny,” he answered, no doubt further scandalizing the lieutenant. “What can I do for you today?”

Visibly holding in his anger, the young officer spoke with exquisite politeness: “Sir, I am ordered to bring you to a secure telephone line and connect you to the
Führer
in Flensburg.” Every line of his body screamed that he hadn’t the faintest idea why Walter Dornberger would want to speak with such a derelict.

“A secure phone line?” Drucker said, and the lieutenant nodded. “Secure from the Lizards?” he persisted, and the kid nodded again. Drucker hadn’t known such lines survived anywhere in the
Reich,
let alone in sleepy Neu Strelitz. Maybe he wouldn’t have to be a mechanic after all. “I’ll come.”

He’d expected to be taken either to the telephone exchange or to the
Burgomeister’s
hall. Instead, the lieutenant led him to a fire station where men playing draughts looked up without much curiosity as he walked by.

The secure telephone looked like an ordinary instrument. But another
Wehrmacht
officer was in charge of it. He gave Drucker a fishy stare, too. When the lieutenant confirmed Drucker’s identity, the other officer made the call. It took a couple of minutes to go through. When it did, the officer thrust the handset at Drucker and said, “Go ahead.”

“Johannes Drucker speaking,” Drucker said, feeling like an idiot.

“Hello, Hans. Good to hear from you.” That was Walter Dornberger’s voice, all right.

“Hello, sir,” As soon as Drucker spoke, he knew he should have called Dornberger
mein Führer.
Now that the former commander at Peenemünde had the job, how seriously did he take it? Would he be offended if he didn’t get the respect he thought he deserved? Drucker plowed ahead, trying to hide his gaffe: “What can I do for you? I thought I was retired.”

“Nobody who’s still breathing is retired,” Dornberger answered. “If you’re breathing, you can still serve the
Reich.
That’s why I was so glad to hear you’d turned up in Neu Strelitz. I can use you, by God.”

“How?” Drucker asked in real confusion. “The Lizards won’t let us get back into space. Unless . . .” He paused, then shook his head. With radar watching every square centimeter of the
Reich,
clandestine launches were impossible. Weren’t they? Hoping he was wrong, he waited for the new
Führer’s
reply.

“That’s true—they won’t,” Dornberger said, which nipped his hope before it was truly born. The
Führer
went on, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t need you closer to home. I’m going to order you here to Flensburg, Hans. You’ve got no idea what a small cadre I have of men I can really trust.”

“Sir . . .” Drucker’s voice trailed away. Dornberger had him by the short hairs, and he knew it. Of course the
Reich’s
new leader could trust him. Dornberger knew why the
Gestapo
had seized Käthe. If Drucker gave him any trouble, the blackshirts could always grab her again.

“I’ll have a car there for you—for all of you—in a couple of days,” Dornberger said. He didn’t mention the sword he’d hung over Drucker’s head. Why would he? Smoother not to, smoother by far. The
Führer
continued, “You’ll be doing important work here—don’t kid yourself for a moment about that. And you’ll have the rank to go with it, too. Major general sounds about right, at least for starters.”

“Major general?” Now Drucker’s voice was a disbelieving squeak. The young lieutenant who’d brought him to the fire station stared at him. He didn’t look as if he believed it, either.

But Walter Dornberger repeated, “For starters. We’ll see how you shape in the job when you get here. I hope to see you soon—and your whole family.” He hung up. The line went dead.

“Sir . . .” The lieutenant spoke with considerably more respect than he’d given Drucker up till then. “Sir, shall I escort you back to your house?”

“No, never mind.” Drucker walked back to his wife’s uncle’s in something of a daze. He didn’t know what he’d thought Dornberger would have to say to him. Whatever it was, it didn’t come close to matching the real conversation.