Second Contact (13 page)

Before he could do more than hope, something rode a trail of fire from the ground and slammed into the gunship. It slewed sideways in the air, then crashed in the middle of the market square. Its rotors flew off and cut down a last few Big Uglies.

Fotsev stared in horror. “These Big Uglies do not know how to make antiaircraft missiles!” he burst out.

“No, but they know how to buy or beg or borrow them from the Tosevites who do.” Gorppet’s voice was thoroughly grim. “By the spirits of Emperors past, there will be an accounting for this. But now, while we can, we had better get out of here.” Side by side, they skittered away from the market square. Behind them, the helicopter gunship burned and burned.

“Allahu akbar!”
A rock flew past Reuven Russie’s head. “Dog of a Jew, you suck the Lizards’ cocks. Your mother opens her legs for them. Your sister—
aii!
” The Arab’s curses dissolved in a howl of pain. Reuven had found a rock of his own, and flung it with better effect than the scrawny youth who’d been abusing him.

Jerusalem seethed like a teapot left over the fire too long. Unlike a teapot, though, the city had nowhere the steam could escape. Lizard troopers and human police—mostly Jews—might come under fire from any house, any shop. So might any passerby.

For once, Reuven almost wished he lived in the dormitory with his fellow medical students. Getting to and from the college had seemed more like running the gauntlet every day since the Muslim riots broke out. So far, he hadn’t got hurt. He knew that was as much luck as anything else, though he never would have admitted as much to his parents.

A black swastika stared at him from a wall. Some of the Arabs who hated the Lizards but weren’t religious fanatics leaned toward the
Reich
, not least because Himmler loved Jews even less than they did. Along with swastikas, red stars also blossomed on the walls—some Jews, and some Arabs, too, looked to Moscow for deliverance from the Race. But the commonest graffiti were in the sinuous squiggles of Arabic script, the letters all looking as if Hebrew block characters had run in the rain.
Allahu akbar!
seemed to scream from every other wall.

Reuven peered round a corner. The next short block looked safe enough. He hurried along it. One more block and he was home. When he checked the last block, he spied a Jewish policeman carrying a British Sten gun, one of the countless weapons left over from the last big fight. This new round of turmoil wasn’t shaping up as anything so delightful, either.

The policeman saw him, too, and started to aim the submachine gun in his direction. Then the fellow lowered the barrel. “You’re no Arab,” he said in Hebrew.

“No.” Reuven sniffed. Smoke was in the air, more than could be accounted for from cookfires. “What a mess. We haven’t seen anything like this—ever, I don’t think.”

“Bloody balls-up,” the Jewish policeman muttered in English of a sort. He went back to Hebrew: “We’ll just have to go on knocking heads together till things simmer down, that’s all. We can do it.” As if to contradict him, something—a grenade? a bomb?—blew up not too far away.

“It’s the colonization fleet,” Reuven said. “Now that it’s finally here, people are realizing all over again that we can’t make the Lizards go away by holding our breath and wishing they would.”

“I don’t care what it is. It’s a bloody balls-up.” That was English again; Hebrew, for so long a liturgical language, was woefully short on curses. The policeman went on, “And it doesn’t matter what it is, anyhow. Whatever it is, we’ve got to put a stop to it—and we will.”

“I hope so,” Reuven said, and passed on.

When he got home, his mother and his twin sisters, Esther and Judith, fell on him with glad cries. Even he couldn’t always tell Esther and Judith apart, and he’d known them the entire twelve years of their lives. One of them said, “We heard the bomb a couple of minutes ago.”

“And the machine guns a little while before that,” the other one added.

“I don’t like machine guns,” they said together. They thought so much alike, Reuven sometimes wondered if they could tell each other apart, if each of them had to consider before deciding whether she was Judith or Esther.

To try to make them stop thinking about machine guns, he said, “I’m going to experiment on the two of you, to see if there really are two of you, or just one with a mirror.”

They pointed at each other. “She’s the mirror,” they chorused.

“Not funny,” Reuven said, although, when you got down to it, it was. He turned to his mother. “You didn’t send them out to school today, did you?”

“Do I look
meshugge
?” Rivka Russie asked. “You and your father are the crazy ones, to go out on the streets in times like these.” That held an unpleasant amount of truth, though Reuven didn’t want to admit it. His mother went on, “Houses aren’t safe, either, though. Bombs, bullets—” She made a face. “We saw too much of that during the war. We saw too much of everything during the war.”

Reuven had been very young then. He remembered the German invasion of Poland and the Lizard invasion of the world in scattered sharp, horrifying images, one not connected to the next: still photographs snipped almost at random from a motion picture full of terror. “Rome,” he murmured.

“What about Rome?” Esther and Judith asked together.

Neither their brother nor their mother answered. Rome was one of his memory snapshots; he’d been on the deck of a Greek freighter in the Tyrrhenian Sea when the Germans touched off an explosive-metal bomb they’d smuggled into the city. Now, with knowledge he hadn’t had then, he wondered how much radioactive fallout he’d been exposed to during the blast. He didn’t really want to know. He couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

Heavy booted feet pounded up the street past the house. The small windows that looked on the street were shuttered; like most houses in Jerusalem, this one preferred to peer inward onto its own courtyard than out at the wider world. Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. He’d been used to it most of his life. This once, though, he wouldn’t have minded seeing what was going on.

All of a sudden, he changed his mind. After shouts in Hebrew and Arabic, guns started hammering. A bullet slammed through a side wall, cracked past his head, and was through the other wall before his jaw got done dropping.

His mother had a better idea of what to do under such circumstances than he did. “On the floor!” she shouted. “Get down! Lie flat! The bullets will pass over us.”

When Reuven’s sisters didn’t move fast enough to suit her, she pushed them down and lay on them, ignoring their squawks. Reuven had just got down on the floor himself when a burst of fire gave the front wall some ventilation it hadn’t had before. Esther and Judith stopped squawking.

Out on the street, someone started screaming and didn’t stop. Reuven couldn’t tell whether the shrieks were in Hebrew or Arabic. Pain had no separate tongue; pain was its own universal language.

He got to his feet. “What are you doing?” his mother demanded. “Lay down again!”

“I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got to get my bag. Someone’s hurt bad out there. I’m not a doctor, not yet, but I’m closer to being one than anybody else around.”

He waited for his mother to scream at him. To his astonishment, she smiled instead: a strange, sweet, sad smile. “Your father did the same thing when the Lizards took Jerusalem away from the British. Go on, then. God watch over you.”

Reuven snatched his black leather bag out of his bedroom and hurried back to the front door. Predictably, his sisters wanted to do whatever he did. As predictably, his mother wouldn’t let them. He went out the door, certain his mother would lock and bar it after him.

Bullets still flew, though not so often now. An automobile burned at the end of the block, sending a pyre of stinking black smoke into the sky. All the flames were orange or yellow, none the almost invisible pale blue of burning hydrogen—an old motorcar, not one of the newer models on the Lizard pattern.

The screaming came from the other side of the motorcar. Feeling naked and exposed, Reuven came around the machine to do what he could for the wounded man. He’d just stopped beside him when, from behind, someone said, “What have we got here, son?”

“Hello, Father,” Reuven said as Moishe Russie got down on one knee beside him. The two of them looked very much alike there side by side—pale skin; dark hair; narrow, strong-cheekboned faces—save that Moishe was going bald. His son continued, “I haven’t even had a chance to look at him yet.”

“Don’t need any fancy Lizard tools for this diagnosis,” his father said. “A burst of three in the belly . . .” He pointed to the holes in the fighter’s shirt. They had some blood oozing from them, but the real flood of it came from the man’s back. Reuven gulped a little. Dissections in medical school were much neater than this, and the subjects didn’t scream. Moishe Russie spoke as if back in the classroom himself: “The entry wounds are fairly small. If you were heartless enough to turn him over, you’d see big chunks of meat blown out of the exit wounds. Prognosis, son?”

Reuven licked his lips. “He’ll keep hurting till he loses enough blood to lose consciousness, too. Then he’ll finally die.” He spoke without fear the wounded man would hear him; the fighter was lost in his private hell.

“I think you’re right.” His father rummaged in his own black bag, then pulled out a syringe. He injected the fallen fighter, then glanced over at Reuven. “Enough morphine to stop his pain. Enough to stop his heart and lungs in a couple of minutes, too.”

He waited for Reuven to say something about that. After some thought, Reuven remarked, “They don’t teach us when to do that in medical school.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” his father agreed. “For one thing, the Lizards take it for granted, much more than we do. And for another, it’s not something you can learn in school. When the time comes, you’ll know. If you’re ever wondering whether you should, the answer is simple: you shouldn’t. When you should, you don’t wonder.”

“How many times have you done it?” Reuven asked. As he spoke, the wounded fighter’s screams stopped. He stared up in dreamy surprise. Reuven wondered if he was seeing the men who knelt above him or only some interior vision. The man’s chest hitched a few more times, then respiration stopped, too.

“Morphine is a good friend and a dreadful master,” Moishe Russie murmured. Then he seemed to hear the question Reuven had asked. “How many times? I don’t know. A few. A man who does it too often isn’t wondering enough about whether he ought to. You aren’t God, son, and you never will be. Once in a while—but only once in a while—He’ll let you be His assistant.” He got to his feet. The knee of his trousers was wet with the fighter’s blood. “We’d better get back home. Your mother will be worried about us.”

“I know.” Reuven wondered what he would have done had he come on the wounded fighter by himself. Would he have had the nerve to put the man out of his misery? He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t be sure. He also realized he’d never be sure now whether the ordinary-looking man had been a Muslim or Jew.

 4

Suave as a Frenchman, the
Gestapo
officer smiled at Johannes Drucker. “You must understand, my dear Lieutenant Colonel, this is only an inquiry into your loyalty, not a denial that you are loyal,” he said.

“You have an easier time telling the difference than I do,” Drucker snapped. “All I know is, I’m grounded for no good reason. I want to go back into space, where I can best serve the
Reich
.”
And where I can put hundreds—sometimes thousands—of kilometers between me and you.

“I would not call the security of the
Reich
‘no good reason,’ ” the
Gestapo
man said, his voice silky. “We must always be on guard, lest the
Volk
be polluted by alien, inferior blood.”

“That’s my
wife
you’re talking about, you—” Drucker checked himself. Telling the son of a bitch he was a son of a bitch wouldn’t do him any good, and wouldn’t do Käthe any good, either.

“We have worked diligently to make and keep the
Reich
free of Jews,” the
Gestapo
man said with what he no doubt intended for a friendly smile. “We shall continue until the great task is complete.”

Drucker didn’t say anything. Nothing he could have said would have been any use. Anything he said would have got him into more trouble than he was in already. He had no great love for Jews. Back in the days when there were still a lot of Jews in the Greater German
Reich
, he hadn’t known many people with any great love for Jews.

Slaughtering them like cattle, though . . . He didn’t see how that had helped the
Reich
. If the Jews hadn’t risen up in Poland when the Lizards came, it might still belong to Germany. And, when the Lizards included in their propaganda details of what the Germans were doing, relations between the
Reich
and other human powers stayed delicate for a long time.

Would the
Gestapo
officer heed him if he pointed that out? It was to laugh. And then the sardonic laugh choked off. Most Germans had no great love for Jews. Käthe’s grandfather must have loved a Jewess, if what the
Gestapo
was saying held any truth. And, had he not loved that Jewess, Käthe would never have been born.

Think about it later,
Drucker told himself. For now, he kept on hoping it wasn’t true. If it was true, his career wasn’t the only thing that would go up in smoke. So would dear, sweet Käthe, out through the stack of a crematorium. His stomach lurched, worse than it ever did when he went weightless out in space. He’d known for twenty years what the
Reich
did to Jews, known and not thought much about it. Now it hit home. It occurred to him that he should have thought more and sooner. Too late now.

As calmly as he could, he said, “I want to see her.”

He’d said that before, and been refused. He got refused again. “You must know it is impossible,” the
Gestapo
man said. “She is in detention, pending adjudication of the case. She is comfortable; please accept my personal assurances on that score. If the charges prove unfounded, all will be as it had been.”

He sounded as if he really meant it. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh in his face. Käthe was in detention—a polite word for jail or a camp. She was on trial for her life, and she couldn’t even defend herself. In the
Reich
, choosing the wrong grandparents could be a capital crime.

Drucker did dare hope she
was
comfortable. If they decided her grandmother hadn’t been a Jew after all, they would let her go. It did happen—not too often (Drucker wished he hadn’t chosen to remember that), but it did. And he, by virtue of his rank and his skill, was valuable in the machinery of the
Reich
. If they did let her go, they wouldn’t want him disaffected.

He wished he’d known her grandparents. All he’d seen of them were a few fading photographs in an old album. He didn’t remember ever thinking her grandmother looked Jewish. She’d had light hair and light eyes. When she was young, she’d been very pretty. She’d looked a lot like Käthe, in fact.

The officer, now, the officer had brown eyes and dark stubble he probably had to shave twice a day. Fixing him with a cold stare, Drucker said, “My wife’s grandmother was a better Aryan than you are.”

“I may not be pretty,” the
Gestapo
man said evenly, “but I have an impeccable German pedigree. If they started putting all the homely people in camps, we’d run out of laborers in a hurry.”

Damn,
thought Drucker, who’d wanted to anger him. The
Gestapo
man probably had something, too. There
were
too many homely people to get rid of them; it would leave a great hole in the fabric of society. Getting rid of the Jews had left no such hole. They’d made perfect scapegoats: they were few, they’d stood out, and people had already disliked them.

The officer might have been thinking along with him. He said, “That’s why the Americans just hate their niggers and don’t really do anything about it. If they did, it would be inconvenient for them.”

“Inconvenient.” The word was sickly sweet in Drucker’s mouth, like the rotten horsemeat he’d eaten on the retreat from Moscow before the Lizards came. He’d been glad to have it, too. After muttering darkly under his breath, he said, “This business of not knowing is inconvenient for me, you know.”

“Yes, of course I do.” The
Gestapo
man kept right on being smooth. “Whatever happens, your children will not be severely affected. One Jewish great-grandparent is not a legal impediment.”

“You don’t think losing their mother might affect them?” Drucker snapped. And yet, in a horrid kind of way, his interrogator had a point.
Severely affected
was a euphemism for
taken out and killed
.

“We must have pure blood.” However smooth, however suave he was, the
Gestapo
man had not a gram of compromise in him. In that, he made a good representative for the state he served. Doing his best to seem conciliatory even when he wasn’t, he added, “You have permission to leave for the time being. Your actual knowledge of your wife’s grandmother appears small.”

“I’ve been telling anyone who would listen to me as much since you people took me away from Peenemünde,” Drucker said. “The only thing wrong with that is, nobody would listen to me.”

Had he expected the
Gestapo
officer to start listening to him, he would have been disappointed. Since he didn’t, he wasn’t—or not disappointed on account of that, anyhow. He stood to stiff attention, shot out his arm, did a smart about-turn, and stalked off to his own quarters.

Those weren’t much different from the ones he’d had back at the rocket base. The
Gestapo
wasn’t treating him badly, on the off chance he might be returning to duty after all. He hoped it was rather more than an off chance, but no one cared what he hoped. He understood that only too well.

He lay back on his bunk and scratched his head. His eye fell on the telephone. He couldn’t call his wife; he didn’t know where to call. He couldn’t call his children; he’d tried, but the operator hadn’t let him. After one impossibility and one failure, he hadn’t seen much point to using the phone. Maybe he’d been wrong, though, or at least shortsighted.

He picked up the instrument. Elsewhere in the
Reich
, he would have heard a tone that told him it was all right to dial. Here, as if he’d fallen back in time, an operator inquired, “Number, please?”

He gave the number of the commandant back at Peenemünde. He didn’t know if the operator would let that call go through, either. But it was, or might have been, in the line of duty, and the
Gestapo
was no more immune to that siren song than any other German organization. After some clicks and pops, Drucker heard the telephone ring.

Fear filled him, fear that the commandant would be out having a drink or in the sack with his girlfriend (Drucker didn’t know whether he had a girlfriend, but found imagining the worst only too easy) or just encamped on a porcelain throne with a book in his hand and his pants around his ankles. Anything that kept him from Drucker would be disaster enough.

But a brisk, no-nonsense voice said, “Dornberger here.”

“Will you speak with Lieutenant Colonel Drucker, sir?” the
Gestapo
operator asked. By his tone, he found it highly unlikely.

“Of course I will,” Major General Walter Dornberger said, his own voice sharp. “Hans, are you there?”

“I’m here, General,” Drucker answered gratefully. The operator would still listen to everything he said, but he couldn’t do anything about that. “I don’t known how long I’ll have to stay off duty. They’re still trying to decide whether Käthe had a Jewish grandmother.”

Dornberger was reasonably quick on the uptake. Once Drucker had given him his cue, he played along with it, booming, “Yes, I know about that—I was there, remember? They’re taking so stinking long, it sounds like a pack of nonsense to me. Maybe you made an enemy who’s telling lies about you. Whatever’s going on, we need you back here.”

Drucker hoped the operator was getting an earful. He said, “Thank you, sir. Till this mess clears up, though, I can’t go anywhere.”

“Good thing you called me,” Major General Dornberger said. “Should have done it sooner, even. A lot of times, as I said, these accusations get started because somebody’s jealous of you and hasn’t got the nerve to show it out in the open. So the
Schweinhund
starts a filthy rumor. We’ll get to the bottom of it, don’t you worry about that. And when we do, some big-mouthed bastard is going to be sorry he was ever born.”

“From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, sir,” Drucker said. “I want to be up and out again. With the colonization fleet here, I need to be up and out.”

“Damned right you do,” Dornberger agreed. “We’ll see what we can do from this end, Hans. I wish you all the best.” He hung up.

Drucker sat there, grinning at the telephone. Yes, he hoped the SS operator had got an earful. The
Wehrmacht
was also a power in the land. If Dornberger badly wanted him back, he would come back. Without the
Reich
Rocket Force, Europe lay open, defenseless, to whatever the Lizards might choose to do.

Not quite out of a clear blue sky, Drucker wondered how many cases high-ranking officers had taken care of, regardless of whether or not the wife in question truly did have a Jewish grandparent. He wondered how many cases they’d taken care of where a man they liked had a Jewish grandmother . . . or perhaps even a Jewish mother. Once he’d started wondering, he wondered how many out-and-out Jews, quietly protected, went on serving the
Reich
because they were too useful to do without.

Before the
Gestapo
arrested Käthe and grounded him, he would have pounded a fist on the nearest table and demanded—demanded at the top of his lungs, especially if he’d had a couple of steins of beer—that each Jew be rooted out. Now . . . Now, in a cell that was comfortable but remained a cell, he laughed out loud.

“I hope they do just fine,” he said. The
Gestapo
men surely listening to his every word would think he meant Major General Dornberger and his friends. And so, in a way, he did—but only in a way.

Felless looked around Cairo with something approaching horror. “This,” she said, “this is the capital from which the Race has ruled something like half of Tosev 3 since not long after the arrival of the conquest fleet?” She added an interrogative cough, wishing the Race had something stronger along those lines: a cough of incredulous disbelief, perhaps.

“Senior Researcher, it is,” Pshing replied.

“But—” Felless struggled to put her feelings into words. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, rank relationships were ambiguous here. Her body paint was fancier than half of Pshing’s, but the other half of the male’s matched that of Atvar, the fleetlord of the conquest fleet. Pshing surely made up in influence what he lacked in formal status. For another . . . Felless blurted, “But it is still a Tosevite city, not one of ours!”