Second Contact (11 page)

As if thinking of the aliens were enough to conjure them up, she saw one on the sidewalk in animated conversation with a Frenchman in a gray, collarless shirt. They might have been discussing legitimate business; some of that got done in Marseille, too. Monique wouldn’t have bet anything she didn’t care to lose on it, though.

She parked her bicycle at a stand on the edge of the campus (which looked more like a series of apartment blocks than a proper university), chained it in place, and tipped the guard so he wouldn’t steal it himself and say someone else had. Grabbing her briefcase off the jump seat, she hurried along to her classroom.

She had more students every semester. The large majority were Frenchmen and -women as disenchanted with the present as she was. The rest, who paid their fees to the bursar like everyone else, were Germans stationed around Marseille. Some of them had been stationed around the city long enough to learn to speak the local dialect with a guttural German accent rather than the standard French they would have been taught back in the
Vaterland
.

The students, French and Germans alike, were chattering among themselves when she walked into the hall. The Germans quieted down out of respect for her as a professor. The Frenchmen quieted down because they were eyeing her legs, as the
flic
had done. The Frenchwomen quieted down because they were pondering her culottes, a nice compromise between modesty and display for someone who rode a bicycle.

However she got quiet, she was glad enough to take advantage of it. “Today,” she said, “we shall continue to examine the consequences of Augustus’ failure to conquer Germania as Caesar had conquered Gallia.”

Using the Latin names for the areas in question made the event seem more distant than it would have had she called them
Allemagne
and
France
. She did that on purpose; she did not want to have the ancient world drawn into the sphere of modern politics. If her French students took especially careful notes on this material, was it her fault? If her handful of German students took especially careful notes . . . That, unlike the other, was something to worry about.

And, try as she would, she couldn’t leave out her own thoughts. “Augustus’ failure in Germania is one of those areas of history where inevitability is difficult if not impossible to discern,” she said. “Had the Roman Emperor’s abler commanders not died at inopportune times, had revolt not broken out elsewhere in the Empire, he would not have had to appoint Quinctilius Varus to head the German legions, and Arminius”—she would not say
Hermann
, the German equivalent of the name—“would not have been able to slaughter those legions in the forest of Teutoberg.”

A woman raised her hand. Monique pointed to her. She asked, “How would a Roman Germany”—she said
Allemagne
—“have changed the history of the world?”

It was a good, sensible question. Monique would have liked it even better had answering it not reminded her of walking through a thicket of thornbushes. Picking her words with care, she said, “A Roman Empire with its frontier on the Elbe, not the Rhine, would have had a shield against the nomads from out of the east. And Romanized Germans would surely have contributed as much to the Empire as Romanized Gauls did in the history with which we are familiar.”

That seemed to satisfy the woman. Other answers were possible. Monique knew it.
The Goths and Vandals wouldn’t have sacked Rome. The Franks wouldn’t have invaded France and given it their name. There wouldn’t have been a Germany to invade our country in 1870 or 1914 or 1940.
Because an answer was possible, though, did not mean it was safe to give.

She got through the rest of the lecture without treading on such dangerous ground. Watching the clock reach half past ten was something of a relief. “Dismissed,” she said, and put her notes back into the briefcase. She looked forward to going to her office. She finally had the references she needed to put the finishing touches on a paper tracing the growth of the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis during the first couple of centuries of the Christian era. It would, she hoped, raise some eyebrows in the small circle that cared about such things.

A tanned fellow about her own age in an open-necked shirt and baggy pants a fisherman might have worn approached the lectern. “A very interesting lecture,” he said, nodding his approval. “Very interesting indeed.”

He looked like a local. Monique had assumed he was a local. In the class roster, his name was down as Laforce. He wrote French as well as a local would have. When he spoke, though, he proved he wasn’t a local. He was a German. His countrymen in the class wore
Wehrmacht
or
Luftwaffe
uniforms. She wondered what he did, and hoped she wouldn’t find out the hard way. “Thank you,” she said, as if to a viper that had suddenly revealed itself among the rocks.

He laughed, showing strong yellow teeth, and lit a Gauloise. He smoked like a local, too, letting the cigarette hang insouciantly from the corner of his mouth. “You could have been much more inflammatory than you were with your Germania and Gallia,” he remarked.

Wary still, she studied him. “And would I have vanished into night and fog, then?” she asked. That was what happened to people who made the
Reich
unhappy because of what they said or what they were.

“Maybe,” he answered, and laughed again. “Maybe not, too. You can get away with more in a lecture hall than you could on a soapbox. If you like, take some coffee with me this afternoon, and we’ll talk about it.”

His approach could have been a lot less subtle. As an occupier, he hardly needed to make an approach at all. Because he had, Monique was bold enough to reply, “Tell me your real name and your real rank and I’ll decide whether we talk about it.”

He dipped his head in half a bow. “
Sturmbannführer
Dieter Kuhn, at your service, Professor Dutourd.”

“What sort of rank is—?” Monique stopped. Before she finished the question, she realized what sort of rank it was. Kuhn—if that was really his name—belonged to the SS.

“You can say no, if you like,” he said. “I don’t build dossiers on women who turn me down. I’d go through too many folders if I did.”

She thought he meant it. That was one of the reasons she smiled and nodded. The other reason, though, was the lingering fear he might be lying. She got very little research done after she did go back to her office.

Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson sat on top of a large cylinder filled with some of the most highly inflammable substances ingenious chemists could devise. If they exploded in any way but the one for which they were designed . . . He whistled softly. “If they do that, folks’ll be picking up pieces of me from Baltimore down to Key West,” he muttered.

“What’s that,
Peregrine
?” The radio speaker above his head in the cramped cockpit sounded tinny. Nobody’d bothered changing the design since the war. The old one worked, which was plenty good enough for military airand spacecraft. Johnson had a fancier, smoother speaker in his record player back home. That was fine, for play. When he heard squawks, he knew he was working.

“Nothing much, Control,” he answered. “Just woolgathering.” The blockhouse here at Kitty Hawk was a long way away from his rocket. If it blew up instead of going up, the bureaucrats and technicians would be fine. He, on the other hand . . . well, it would be over before he noticed he was dead.

“Cheer up,
Peregrine
,” the fellow on the distant other end of the microphone said. “You’ve been living on borrowed time the past twenty years anyhow.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Johnson said with a wry chuckle. He would have laughed louder and harder if the man back at the blockhouse had been joking. He’d flown fighters against the Lizards during the war, a job where pilots had life expectancies commonly measured in minutes. He’d been shot down twice, and managed to survive both times. One forearm had some nasty burn scars on it from his second forced landing. He wore long-sleeved shirts whenever he could.

If he hadn’t been on the shelf for a while with burns, he would have gone right back into action and probably been killed. As things were, he’d just returned to one of the last Marine air units still operating when the cease-fire came.

After the fighting ended, he’d tested a lot of the new planes that married human and Lizard technology—in some cases (luckily none of his) marriages smeared across heaven rather than made in it. Graduating to rockets when the USA went into space in the 1950s was a natural next step.

“One minute,
Peregrine
,” the blockhouse warned.

“One minute, roger,” Johnson said. Just a couple of miles from here, back when his dad was a boy, the Wright brothers had coaxed a motorized kite into the air. Johnson wondered what they would have thought of the craft he flew. Orville, like Johnson an Ohioan, had survived the Lizards’ occupation of his home state and lived on till 1948—only a handful of years too soon to see Americans going not only into the air but above it.

“Thirty seconds,
Peregrine
,” Control announced, and then the countdown the U.S. Air and Space Force had surely borrowed from the pulp magazines: “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .” When he’d proved he could count backwards on his fingers, the man in the blockhouse yelled, “Blastoff!” That also came straight out of the pulps. Johnson wished somebody somewhere would find a better name for it.

Then it seemed as if three very heavy men came in and sat on him. He stopped worrying about what people ought to call a rocket leaving Earth, for he was much too intimately involved in riding one. If anything went wrong that didn’t splatter him all over the landscape, he had some hope of getting back down in one piece; like the machines the Nazis flew, his upper stage doubled as an airplane. He pitied the poor Russians, who went into space in what weren’t much more than airtight boxes. Those were easier and cheaper to build, no doubt about it, but the Red Air Force used up a lot of pilots.

A fresh kick in the pants made him stop worrying about the Russians. “Second stage has ignited,” Control reported, as if he never would have known without the announcement. “Trajectory to planned orbit looks very good.”

“Roger that,” Johnson said. He could see it for himself from the instruments on the
Peregrine
’s instrument panel, but he wasn’t allergic to reassurance.

“How does it feel, going from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli in just a few minutes?” Control asked.

“That’s what I get for coming out of the Marines,” Johnson said, laughing. “You never ride the real A and S boys this way.” Actually, he’d started a good deal northeast of the halls of Montezuma and he’d go over Africa even farther south of the shores of Tripoli, but who was he to trifle with a man’s poetic license?

Then another voice came over the speaker, one not using English: “U.S. spacecraft, this is the tracking station of the Race. Acknowledge.”

“I greet you, Dakar,” Johnson said in the Lizards’ lingo as the second-stage motor cut out and the one in the rear of his upper stage took over to finish the job of boosting him into orbit. He wasn’t over the radar or radio horizon for Dakar yet, but the Lizards’ orbital radar and satellite radio relays still beat the stuffing out of any merely human communications network. “Is that you, Hashshett?” As a Lizard would, he pronounced each
sh
and each
t
as a separate syllable.

“It is I. And you are Glen Johnson?” Hashshett turned the last syllable of Johnson’s name into a long hiss.

“I am. My trackers show me as good for my announced orbit. Do you confirm?” Johnson tacked on an interrogative cough.

“Confirming,” the Lizard answered after a pause that would have let him turn an eye turret toward his instruments. “Seeing a flight path in such conformity is good.”

As far as the Lizards were concerned, anything that conformed to the
status quo ante
was good. With four different powers owning orbiting nuclear weapons, people and the Lizards had grown far more punctilious than they’d once been about notifying one another of their launches. The Lizards had got very huffy very fast about wanting to be notified; persuading them that they needed to notify any mere humans of what they were up to had taken a lot more work.

Just then, on time to the second, the upper-stage motor cut out. Johnson went weightless. His stomach tried to climb up his windpipe hand over hand. He gulped and sternly told it to get back where it belonged. After a few nervous moments, it decided to listen to him. Puking while weightless did not win a pilot luckless enough to do it the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Once he’d decided he wasn’t going to redecorate the inside of his cockpit, Johnson checked his own radar. He hadn’t really expected to see anything that would make him use his attitude jets to evade, but you never could tell. Space was a crowded place these days, loaded not only with manned (or Lizarded) spacecraft but also with all manner of unmanned satellites, some peaceful, some not, and with a lot of junk: discarded protective shrouds and upper stages that had reached orbit after delivering their cargo. The Lizards never stopped grumbling about the junk; not even their fancy radars and even fancier computing machines could tell the garbage from camouflaged weapons quietly floating and waiting for orders. The weapons that weren’t camouflaged maneuvered frequently, too; the longer they stayed in the same orbit, the more vulnerable they got.

Having made sure he didn’t need to evade, Johnson studied the radar screen again. He hadn’t been up since the colonization fleet came in from Tau Ceti II. The targets the radar showed were not only distant—in relatively high orbits—but
big
. They looked like Christmas-tree lights on the screen. They were so big, he knew he could spot them with his Mark I eyeball as well as with his electronic senses.

He peered in the direction the radar gave him. Sure as hell, there they were, some of them bright as Venus—brighter. Being in a lower, faster orbit, he passed them, but there were more ahead. All the way around the world, there were more ahead, with Lizards, millions upon millions of Lizards, lying in them in cold sleep like steaks in cardboard cartons on icebox shelves.