Second Contact (17 page)

“So do I,” Reffet muttered. “All three of these leading notempires have said they will war against us if we punish them for the deed without proof of their guilt. One has had the effrontery to say this knowing it is in fact guilty, but never mind that. Do they speak the truth?”

“There, I fear they do,” Ttomalss replied, knowing he was again disappointing the fleetlord of the colonization fleet. “If a Big Ugly says he will not fight, he may well be lying. If he says he will fight, he is sure to be telling the truth.”

“These are not the answers I sought from you,” Reffet said.

“If you wanted answers that pleased you, Exalted Fleetlord, you could have had them from many others, and without interrupting me at my work,” Ttomalss said. “I thought you summoned me because you wanted the truth.”

“You sound rather like a Big Ugly yourself,” Reffet remarked.

He did not mean it as a compliment, but it was the first perceptive thing Ttomalss had heard him say. “Inevitably, that which is observed and the observer interact,” the researcher said. “Over these past years, we have influenced the Tosevites and they have influenced us.”

“Not for the better, in my view,” Reffet said. “Can you offer no advice on how to learn which group of Tosevites is lying?”

“Very little, I fear,” Ttomalss said. “The Big Uglies are far more practiced liars than we—as is natural, since they lie to one another so often.”

“I have heard you,” Reffet said heavily. “I have heard you and I dismiss you. Go back and learn more.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Inside, Ttomalss was laughing as he left Reffet’s presence. Reffet might despise Tosev 3 and all the Big Uglies on it, but they were influencing him, too, whether he wanted them to or not. Otherwise, he would have been more interested in hearing the truth and less in hearing only what he wanted to hear—a Tosevite characteristic if ever there was one.

“Sir,” Major Sam Yeager asked, “are you looking to hear the truth, or only what you want to hear?”

President Earl Warren blinked. With his long, jowly, wrinkled face, pink skin, and white hair, he looked like everyone’s favorite grandfather. “Major, the day I don’t want to hear the truth is the day I should no longer be president of the United States.”

Yeager wondered how sincere Warren was. Well, he’d find out in a minute. “Okay, Mr. President,” he said. “Truth is, I don’t know how we’re going to keep the Lizards from hitting us a lick. They said they would. By their way of thinking, that means they have to, whether they want to or not.”

“That is unjust,” Warren said unhappily. “If I permit it, I show cowardice in the face of the enemy.”

“Yes, sir,” Yeager agreed. “But if you go and hit them another lick afterwards—well, where does it stop?”

Warren eyed him. “A good question. The only question, as far as I can see: certainly the one on which a president earns his salary. Seeing that it is the question is not so hard. I mean no offense when I say any reasonably intelligent man could frame it. Answering it, though—ay, there’s the rub.”

Yeager wasn’t insulted when the president called him a reasonably intelligent man. He was, if anything, flattered. He wouldn’t have had a chance to meet a president if the Lizards hadn’t come. The most he could have hoped for was big-league coach, if one of his buddies got lucky and made manager. Part-time scout or high-school coach somewhere struck him as a lot more likely.

He said, “Mr. President, sir, if the Lizards wanted to blow up one of our cities, the way they kept doing during the fighting, they could have done it by now. Seems to me that Atvar wants to do something that would let him save face with his own people but doesn’t want to touch off a war with us.”

Earl Warren rubbed his chin as he pondered that. “You’re saying he might be satisfied with a symbolic act of destruction, Major, and would be willing to forgo something so brutal as to force us to respond in kind?”

“Yes, sir, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Yeager didn’t try to hide the relief in his voice. Having a boss who understood what he was talking about was liable to make life easier for the whole planet.

On the other hand, it might not, too. Warren said, “I regret permitting even a symbolic act of destruction on our soil if we have done nothing to deserve it. It sets a dangerous precedent.”

“Right now, sir, the shiplords in the colonization fleet—and in the conquest fleet, too—will be screaming their heads off at Atvar to get him to blow a city here and one in the
Reich
and one in Russia to kingdom come,” Sam said. He didn’t try to hide his desperation, either. “If Atvar settles for something symbolic, they’ll all be shouting that he’s set a dangerous precedent—and the Lizards take precedent a lot more seriously than we do.”

“A point,” the president said, “and one I’m glad you reminded me of. I tend to think of the Lizards as always seeing things in the same light and speaking with a single voice. I have the same trouble with the Germans and the Russians, probably for the same reason: because their politics are less open than ours, I need to remind myself they have politics at all.”

“I don’t know about the Nazis and the Reds, sir, but the Lizards sure have politics,” Yeager answered. “They had ’em even before the colonization fleet came. Now they’re worse, because the ones who’ve been here for twenty years have started to understand a little bit about us, but the new ones don’t believe half of what the old-timers tell ’em and don’t want to believe any of it.”

“Is that last your opinion, Major, or have you got data to back it up?” Warren asked sharply. He’d been a politician a long time, and a lawyer for a long time before that; he understood the difference between evidence and hearsay.

“Sir, it’s the unanimous opinion of all the defectors and prisoners I’ve talked to, from Straha on down,” Sam said, “and some of the communications intercepts we’ve picked up show the same thing. We don’t have as many as we’d like; the Lizards are still ahead of us when it comes to keeping signals secure.”

Warren sighed and looked weary. His wits remained keen; his body, now and then, forcibly reminded him it was past seventy. And, from the days of FDR on, the presidency had grown into a job of man-killing importance and complexity. “I will consult with officials from the Departments of State and the Interior,” Warren said at last. “If they concur in your view, Major, perhaps we’ll dicker with the Lizards over a suitable symbolic act. If your good offices are required there, I will call on you.”

“That’s fine, Mr. President. That’s better than fine, in fact,” Yeager said enthusiastically. He also realized he’d just been dismissed. Saluting, he turned to go.

Before he could leave, though, President Warren said, “Wait.” Sam did as smart an about-face as he had in him. Warren asked, “Whom do the Lizards believe to be the responsible party?”

“Sir, the way they handicap it is, the Nazis first, the Reds second, and us trailing but not out of the running.” Yeager hesitated, then risked a question of his own: “How does it look to you?”

“I know about us, of course, which the Lizards would, too, if they had an ounce of sense,” Warren answered. Sam waited, not sure whether the president would tell him anything more. After a few seconds, Warren went on, “If I were a gambling man, I would bet on the
Reich
ahead of the Soviet Union, too. Molotov is a very cool customer—or a cold fish, whichever you like. He holds his cards so close to his chest, they’re inside his shirt. He would never dare anything so wild. The Nazis . . .” He shook his head. “No one can tell what the Nazis will do till they do it. Half the time, I don’t think they know themselves.”

“That’s what the Lizards say about all of us,” Yeager said.

“So I’ve heard. But it happens to be true of the Germans. Less so now than when Hitler ran them, maybe, but still true.” The president sighed again. “And I wish Britain hadn’t started cozying up to the Greater German
Reich
after the Lizards took away her empire. I don’t know how much we could have done about that—the
Reich
is on the other side of the Channel, and we’re on the other side of the Atlantic—but I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“You get no argument from me, sir,” Yeager said. “For that matter, I don’t like the idea of propping up the Japs. I remember Pearl Harbor too well.”

“So do I, Major,” Warren said. “I was attorney general of California at the time. I helped get the Japs off the West Coast and into camps. But if we don’t prop them up now, they’ll look to the Russians, which would be bad, or else to the Lizards in China, which would be worse. And so—” He made an unhappy face.

“By what I’ve heard, sir, the Lizards aren’t having a very happy time in China,” Sam said.

“They’ve got the same problem the Japanese did before them: too many Chinese to try to hold down with not enough soldiers.” Warren looked up at the ceiling. “In a quiet sort of way, we try to keep the Lizards from having too happy a time in China. It’s easier for the Russians to do that than it is for us, but we manage.” He glanced toward Yeager. “Unofficially, of course.”

“Oh, of course, sir.” Sam saluted again. This time, President Warren let him go.

Before the Lizards came, what people called the White House these days had been the governor’s residence, not far from the State Capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas. People kept talking about rebuilding on the site of Washington, D.C., but they were more willing to talk than they were to spend money. Some people also said the Lizards had known just what they were doing when they dropped an explosive-metal bomb on Washington. Sam had been known to say that a time or two himself.

He rather liked Little Rock, even the larger, more hectic city that had sprung up around and in the midst of the town he’d known during and right after the fighting. It was larger and more hectic than it had been, but still small and staid alongside Los Angeles. It was also much greener than Los Angeles, and full of trees. Both the Californian he was and the farm boy from the prairie he had been appreciated that.

Down the block, only a few embassies stood: that of the Lizards, biggest of all; those of Germany and the USSR, rival concrete cubes; smaller structures from Britain and Japan; those of Canada and Ireland and New Zealand and Germany’s vassals: Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria; and ones from the island nations of the Caribbean—Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The Lizards had swallowed down the rest, with the exception of some the Germans had swallowed instead.

A man in a German uniform and a Lizard strolled down the street in earnest conversation. A colored fellow went past them the other way without even turning his head. Yeager chuckled to himself. Twenty years earlier, the local would either have tried to shoot both of them or run like hell. Sophistication had come to Little Rock, whether the Arkansans particularly wanted it or not.

Yeager stopped in a café for a hamburger. Endless years on the road had given him a connoisseur’s appreciation of the differences between burgers. This was a good one, better than he was likely to have found in his ballplaying days: meaty, on a fresh, tasty bun, with equally fresh pickle and lettuce and tomato. He enjoyed every bite.

He also enjoyed the beer with which he washed down the burger. It was a local brew, rich and hoppy. With their deliveries disrupted by the Lizard invasion, the national breweries had lost some of their hold on the country. When local beers were good, they made Schlitz and Miller High Life and the rest taste like dishwater. When they were bad, of course, they bore a strong resemblance to horse piss. Bad local beers didn’t last. Good ones seemed to be flourishing.

A lot of the signs on the table, Sam left air-conditioning and went out into the muggy heat again. His face was thoughtful. As far as he was concerned, whoever had attacked the ships of the colonization fleet was a cold-blooded murderer. Whatever the Lizards did when they found out who it was, he wouldn’t mind. He might have thought differently had there been any way to drive the Lizards out of the solar system and make sure they didn’t come back. Since there wasn’t . . .

“We’ve got to live with them,” he said, and then, more softly, “I hope to God they nail the bastards.” As far as he was concerned, Lizards were people, too.

 5

Mordechai Anielewicz rattled east across Poland on a train. The steam engine threw a black plume of coal smoke into the air; undoubtedly, it had been built before the Germans invaded, let alone the Lizards. The Race seemed horrified that such stinking survivals persisted. But trains moved people and goods more cheaply than Poland’s inadequate road network, and so they kept on running.

Sharing the compartment with him were a farmer; a salesman who kept trying to sell his fellow passengers cheese graters, egg slicers, potato peelers, and other cheap metal goods; and a moderately pretty young woman who might have been either Polish or Jewish. Anielewicz kept trying to decide till she got out a couple of stops past Warsaw, but came to no conclusion.

He stayed aboard all the way to Pinsk. The border with the USSR lay just a few kilometers east of the city. The first thing Mordechai did when he got off the train was swat a mosquito. The Pripet Marshes surrounded Pinsk. He sometimes thought every mosquito in the world lived in the marshes. He might have been wrong, though; maybe only some of them lived there, with the rest coming to visit on holidays.

Swatting still, he made for the privies in the station. He’d eaten black bread and drunk tea all the way across Lizard-occupied Poland, and a man could do only so much of that without reaching the bursting point. The privies stank of stale piss. He didn’t care. He left them much relieved.

Lizard soldiers prowled the streets of Pinsk. They were not happy Lizards. Twenty years of learning more about Lizards than he’d ever thought he would want to know had taught Anielewicz as much. They stalked along with furious delicacy, like cats that had been soaked with a hose.

He understood their language pretty well, and had long since mastered the art of listening without seeming to. “If I don’t come down with the purple itch or one of these horrible local fungi, it’s not because I haven’t been squelching through the mud the past four days,” one of them said.

“Truth,” another agreed with an emphatic cough. “Impossible to do a proper job of patrolling that swamp. We’d need ten times the sensors and twenty times the males to have a chance of doing it right.”

“We have to try,” a third male said. “If we didn’t patrol the paths, who knows how much worse the smuggling would be?”

“Right now, I don’t much care,” the first male said. “I want to get back to the barracks and—” He lifted a claw-tipped hand to his face. His tongue shot out for a moment. The other males’ mouths dropped open in laughter. They probably wouldn’t have minded a taste of ginger, either.

A lot of the signs in Pinsk were in the Cyrillic alphabet Byelorussians used. Mordechai was less at home with it than he was with the Lizards’ script. Some of the signs were in Yiddish. Pinsk had been in the Nazis’ hands only a few months before the Lizards landed. The Jews here had had a hard time of it, but not so hard as the ones farther west, who’d lain under the German yoke for two and a half years.

R
OZENZWEIG
’
S
B
AKERY
. That sign was written in Yiddish, Byelorussian, and, as an afterthought, in Polish in letters half the size of those of the other two languages. Anielewicz went in. The good smell of baking bread and cakes and rolls and muffins almost made him fall over. Saliva gushed into his mouth. He reminded himself he hadn’t been too hungry before he came inside. Remembering that wasn’t easy.

A gray-haired man with a bushy mustache looked up from the bagels he was dusting with poppy seeds. “You want something?” he asked in Yiddish.

“Yes,” Mordechai said. “My name is Kaplan. You’ve got a special order for me in the back, don’t you?”

The code phrase wasn’t fancy, but it did the job. The baker eyed Anielewicz, then nodded. “Yeah, it’s here,” he said. “You want to come look it over before you take it home?”

“I think I’d better, don’t you?” Anielewicz said. He wondered what the Russians wanted, to have summoned him across Poland to handle it. If it wasn’t important, he’d give the NKVD man or whoever his contact was a piece of his mind. He’d dealt with a good many Russians. He knew this one wouldn’t care what he did or said. But it would make him feel better.

“Here,” Rozenzweig said. “Talk. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about.” He turned and went back to his poppy seeds.

“Nu?”
Mordechai asked the fellow sitting in the baker’s back room: a nondescript, rather scrawny man not far from his own age, with a thin face and dark, intelligent eyes.
Another Jew,
Anielewicz thought. He’d dealt with a good many who worked for the Soviets. Every one, without exception, acted as a Soviet first and a Jew second if at all.

“Hello, Mordechai. Been a long time, hasn’t it?” the man from the USSR asked in Yiddish that sounded as if it came from western Poland, not any part of the Soviet Union.

“Am I supposed to know you?” Anielewicz asked. He did his best to keep track of all the agents he met, but he’d met a lot of them. Every once in a while, he slipped up. He’d stopped worrying about it. He wasn’t perfect, no matter how hard he tried to be.

The Soviet laughed and cocked his head to one side. He looked sly, like a man convinced he was smarter than everyone around him. And, where Anielewicz hadn’t recognized him before, he did now.

“My God! David Nussboym!” he exclaimed. “I might have known you’d turn up again.” His mouth hardened. “Bad pennies usually do.”

“You shipped me off to the gulags to die, you and your collaborationist pals,” Nussboym said. “I wouldn’t be a
tukhus-lekher
for the Nazis, so you got rid of me.”

“You were going to sell us out to the Lizards,” Anielewicz said. “They might have won the war if you had. Where would we be then?”

They stared at each other with a loathing apparently undimmed since the fighting ended. Nussboym said, “The camps chew you up and spit you out dead. Russians, Jews, Lizards . . . it doesn’t matter. Some people get by, though. The first denunciation I signed, I was sick for a week afterwards. The second left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But do you know what? After a while, you don’t care. If you get the better rations; if you get the other bastard’s job; if, after a while, you get out of the camp—you don’t care any more.”

“I believe
you
don’t,” Mordechai said, looking at him as he might have looked at a cockroach in his salad.

Nussboym looked back steadily, without showing he was insulted, with a small, superior smile, as if to say,
You haven’t been where I have. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
And that was true. Anielewicz thanked God it was true. But he still thought that, even in the gulag, he would have found some way to fight back. Some people must have managed it.

He shrugged. It didn’t really matter. “So what do you want?” he asked harshly.

“I want you to know”—by which Nussboym meant his Russian bosses wanted Anielewicz to know—“the Germans were the ones who blew up the ships from the Lizards’ colonization fleet.”

“You brought me all the way over here to tell me that?” Mordechai didn’t laugh at him, but that took an effort. “You sneaked over the border to tell me that?” He was sure Nussboym hadn’t crossed officially. Had Nussboym done so, they wouldn’t have met in Rozenzweig’s bakery. “Why would it matter to me, even if it’s true?”

“Oh, it’s true.” David Nussboym sounded very sure. Of course, his job was to sound sure. He would be nothing but a recording, mouthing the words his bosses—NKVD men, probably—had impressed on him.

“I have contacts with the Nazis, too,” Anielewicz said.

“Of course you do.” Now heat came into Nussboym’s voice—he was speaking for himself here, not for his bosses. “Why do you think I couldn’t stomach working with you twenty years ago?”

“So you work for Molotov, who got into bed with Hitler and blew out the light—on Poland,” Mordechai said, and had the dubious pleasure of watching Nussboym’s sallow features flush. He went on, “The Nazis say Russia did it.”

“And what would you expect?” Nussboym returned. “But we have the evidence. I could give it to you—”

“Why would you?” Anielewicz asked. “If you’ve got it, give it to the Lizards.”

Nussboym coughed a couple of times. “For some reason, the Lizards don’t always trust things they get straight from us.”

“Because you lie all the damned time, just like the Nazis?” Anielewicz suggested. David Nussboym did not dignify that with a reply; Mordechai hadn’t really expected that he would. The question he’d asked was a serious one, though, and Nussboym hadn’t answered it, either. That meant Anielewicz had to do some thinking on his own. “So you want the Lizards to get this from us, do you?”

“They would be likelier to believe you than us, yes,” Nussboym said.

“Well, what if they do?” Anielewicz knew he was thinking out loud; if his old rival didn’t like it, too bad. “That might embroil them against the
Reich
—probably would, as a matter of fact. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “And if they did go at it, the Nazis would do their best to wipe Poland off the face of the Earth. I thought Molotov liked having a buffer between him and the swastika.”

“I have not spoken with him about that,” Nussboym said.

Did that mean he had spoken with Molotov about other things? How important a cog in the machine had he become? How important a cog did he want Anielewicz to think he’d become? How much of a difference was there between those last two?

Those were interesting questions. They were also beside the point. Anielewicz had no trouble seeing what the point was: “You don’t care what the
Reich
does to Poland, because you want to make the Lizards jump on the Nazis with both feet. If they do, the
Reich
won’t be strong enough to worry you any more.”

He watched Nussboym closely. The skinny little man hadn’t given away much when Anielewicz knew him before. He gave away nothing whatever now; he might have been carved from stone. But his very immobility was an answer of sorts.

Nodding, Mordechai said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to do your own dirty work on this one.”

Nussboym raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t believe the Nazis did it?”

Anielewicz shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I do believe it. Even with Hitler dead, they’re crazier than your bosses are. What I don’t believe is that you’ve got any evidence to prove they did it. If the Lizards haven’t been able to come up with any, how are you supposed to?”

“The Lizards are very good with science and machines and instruments,” Nussboym answered. “When it comes to people—no. We do that better.”

He was probably right. The Lizards had improved with people as time passed, but they weren’t good. They’d probably never be good. They weren’t people, after all. Even so . . . “You’ll have to do your own dirty work,” Anielewicz repeated. Nussboym studied him in turn, then got up and left the bakery without another word.

There were times when Straha wondered whether the Tosevites who lived in the not-empire called the United States and who, for a reason he’d never grasped, styled themselves Americans had any more sense when it came to larger matters. Reporters were a prime example. These days, his telephone rang constantly.

“Straha here,” the ex-shiplord would answer in his own language. He had, in fact, learned a fair amount of English. He used the language of Home as a testing gauge. His working assumption was that no one ignorant of it would be able to tell him anything worth hearing.

Some Big Uglies, hearing the Race’s hisses and pops, would hang up. That suited him fine. Some would try to go on in English. When they did, he would hang up. That also suited him fine.

But, even when reporters did know and used the language of the Race, they used it in a Tosevite fashion and for Tosevite purposes. “I greet you, Shiplord,” one of them said after Straha had announced himself. “I am Calvin Herter. I write for the
New York Times
. I would like to ask you a few questions, if I may.”

“Go ahead,” Straha said. Herter spoke his language fairly well—not so well as a real expert like Major Yeager, but well enough. “Ask. I will answer as best I can.” It would pass the time.