Second Contact (2 page)

“Head for Jose’s!” Win or lose, that cry rang out after a game. Winning would make the tacos and beer even better. Sam and Barbara piled into their Buick and drove over to the restaurant. It was only a few blocks from the park.

The Buick ran smoothly and quietly. Like more and more cars every year, it burned hydrogen, not gasoline—technology borrowed from the Lizards. Sam coughed when he got stuck behind an old gas-burner that poured out great gray clouds of stinking exhaust. “Ought to be a law against those miserable things,” he complained.

Barbara nodded. “They’ve outlived their usefulness, that’s certain.” She spoke with the precision of someone who’d done graduate work in English. Yeager minded his p’s and q’s more closely than he would have had he not been married to someone like her.

At Jose’s, the team hashed over the game. Sam was ten years older than anybody else and the only one who’d ever played pro ball, so his opinions carried weight. His opinion in other areas carried weight, too; Eddie, the pitcher, said, “You deal with the Lizards all the time, Major. What’s it going to be like when that big fleet gets here?”

“Can’t know for sure till it does get here,” Yeager answered. “If you want to know what I think, I think it’ll be the biggest day since the conquest fleet came down. We’re all doing our best to make sure it isn’t the bloodiest day since the conquest fleet came down, too.”

Eddie nodded, accepting that. Barbara raised an eyebrow—just a little, so only Sam noticed. She saw the logical flaw the young pitcher missed. If all of mankind wanted the colonization fleet to land peacefully, that would happen. But no one on this side of the Atlantic could guess what Molotov or Himmler might do till he did it—if he did it. And the Nazis and the Reds—and the Lizards—would be worrying about President Warren, too.

After Sam finished his glass of Burgermeister, Barbara said, “I don’t want to rush you too much, but we did tell Jonathan we’d be home when he got back.”

“Okay.” Yeager got up, set a couple of bucks on the table to cover food and drink, and said his goodbyes. Everybody—including Jose from behind the counter—waved when he and Barbara took off.

They lived over in Gardena, one of the suburbs on the west side of L.A. that had burgeoned since the end of the fighting. When they got out of the car, Barbara remarked, as she often did, “Cooler here.”

“It’s the sea breeze,” Sam answered, as he often did. Then he plucked at his flannel uniform top. “It may be cooler, but it’s not that cool. I’m going to hop in the shower, is what I’m going to do.”

“That would be a very good idea, I think,” Barbara said. Yeager stuck out his tongue at her. They both laughed, comfortable with each other.
Why not?
Sam thought. They’d been together since late 1942, only a few months after the conquest fleet arrived. Had the Lizards not come, they never would have met. Sam didn’t like thinking about that; Barbara was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

To keep from dwelling on might-have-beens, he hurried into the house. Photographs in the hallway that led to the bathroom marked the highlights of his career: him in dress uniform just after being promoted from sergeant to lieutenant; him weightless, wearing olive-drab undershirt and trousers, aboard an orbiting Lizard spaceship—overheated by human standards—as he helped dicker a truce after a flare-up; him in a spacesuit on the pitted surface of the moon; him in captain’s uniform, standing between Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon.

He grinned at that last one, which he sometimes had to explain to guests. If he hadn’t been reading the science-fiction pulps, and especially
Astounding
, he never would have become a specialist in Lizard-human relations. Having been overrun by fact, science fiction wasn’t what it had been before the Lizards came, but it still had some readers and some writers, and he’d never been a man to renounce his roots.

He showered quickly, shaved even more quickly, and put on a pair of chinos and a yellow cotton short-sleeved sport shirt. When he got a beer from the refrigerator, Barbara gave him a piteous look, so he handed it to her and grabbed another one for himself.

He’d just taken his first sip when the door opened. “I’m home!” Jonathan called.

“We’re in the kitchen,” Yeager said.

Jonathan hurried in. At eighteen, he hurried everywhere. “I’m hungry,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.

“Make yourself a sandwich,” Barbara said crisply. “I’m your mother, not your waitress, even if you do have trouble remembering it.”

“Take your tongue out of the ginger jar, Mom. I will,” Jonathan said, a piece of slang that wouldn’t have meant a thing before the Lizards came. He wore only shorts that closely matched his suntanned hide. Across that hide were the bright stripes and patterns of Lizard-style body paint.

“You’ve promoted yourself,” Sam remarked. “Last week, you were a landcruiser driver, but now you’re an infantry small-unit group leader—a lieutenant, more or less.”

Jonathan paused with his salami sandwich half built. “The old pattern was getting worn,” he answered with a shrug. “The paints you can buy aren’t nearly as good as the ones the Lizards—”

“Nearly so good,” his mother broke in, precise as usual.

“Nearly so good, then,” Jonathan said, and shrugged again. “They aren’t, and so I washed them off and put on this new set. I like it better, I think—brighter.”

“Okay.” Sam shrugged, too. People his son’s age took the Lizards for granted in a way he never could. The youngsters didn’t know what the world had been like before the conquest fleet came. They didn’t care, either, and laughed at their elders for waxing nostalgic about it. Recalling his own youth, Sam did his best to be patient. It wasn’t always easy. Before he could stop himself, he asked, “Did you really have to shave your head?”

That flicked a nerve, where talk about body paint hadn’t. Jonathan turned, sliding a hand over the smooth and shining dome of his skull. “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked, the beginning of an angry rumble in his voice. “It’s the hot thing to do these days.”

Along with body paint, it made people look as much like Lizards as they could.
Hot
was a term of approval because the Lizards liked heat. The Lizards liked ginger, too, but that was a different story.

Sam ran a hand through his own thinning hair. “I’m going bald whether I want to or not, and I don’t. I guess I have trouble understanding why anybody who’s got hair would want to cut it all off.”

“It’s hot,” Jonathan repeated, as if that explained everything. To him, no doubt, it did. His voice lost some of that belligerent edge as he realized his father wasn’t insisting that he let his hair grow, only talking about it. When he didn’t feel challenged, he could be rational enough.

He took an enormous bite from his sandwich. He was three or four inches taller than Sam—over six feet instead of under—and broader through the shoulders. By the way he ate, he should have been eleven feet tall and seven feet wide.

His second bite was even bigger than the first. He was still chewing when the telephone rang. “That’s got to be Karen!” he said with his mouth full, and dashed away.

Barbara and Sam shared looks of mingled amusement and alarm. “In my day, girls didn’t call boys like that,” Barbara said. “In my day, girls didn’t shave their heads, either. Go on, call me a fuddy-duddy.”

“You’re my fuddy-duddy,” Sam said fondly. He slipped an arm around her waist and gave her a quick kiss.

“I’d better be,” Barbara said. “I’m glad I am, too, because there are so many more distractions now. In my day, even if there had been body paint, girls wouldn’t have been so thorough about wearing it as boys are—and if they had been, they’d have been arrested for indecent exposure.”

“Things aren’t the same as they used to be,” Sam allowed. His eyes twinkled. “I might call that a change for the better, though.”

Barbara elbowed him in the ribs. “Of course you might. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with you, though. And”—she lowered her voice so Jonathan wouldn’t hear—“I’m glad Karen isn’t one of the ones who do.”

“Well, so am I,” Sam said, although with a sigh that earned him another pointed elbow. “Jonathan and his pals are a lot more used to skin than I am. I’d stare like a fool if she came over dressed—or not dressed—that way.”

“And then you’d tell me you were just reading what her rank was,” Barbara said. “You’d think I love you enough to believe a whopper like that. And you know what?” She poked him again. “You might even be right.”

Felless had not expected to wake in weightlessness. For a moment, staring up at the fluorescent lights overhead, she wondered if something had gone wrong with the ship. Then, thinking more slowly than she should have because of the lingering effects of cold sleep, she realized how foolish that was. Had something gone wrong with the ship, she would never have awakened at all.

Two people floated into view. One, by her body paint, was a physician. The other . . . Weak and scatterbrained as Felless was, she gave a startled hiss. “Exalted Fleetlord!” she exclaimed. She heard her own voice as if from far away.

Fleetlord Reffet spoke not to her but to the physician: “She recognizes me, I see. Is she capable of real work?”

“We would not have summoned you here, Exalted Fleetlord, were she incapable,” the physician replied. “We understand the value of your time.”

“Good,” Reffet said. “That is a concept the males down on the surface of Tosev 3 seem to have a great deal of trouble grasping.” He swung one of his eye turrets to bear on Felless. “Senior Researcher, are you prepared to begin your duties at once?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I am,” Felless replied. Now the voice her hearing diaphragms caught seemed more like her own. Antidotes and restoratives were routing the drugs that had kept her just this side of death on the journey from Home to Tosev 3. Curiosity grew along with bodily well-being. “May I ask why I have been awakened prematurely?”

“You may,” Reffet said, and then, in an aside to the physician, “You were right. Her wits are clear.” He gave his attention back to Felless. “You have been awakened because conditions on Tosev 3 are not as we anticipated they would be when we set out from Home.”

That was almost as great a surprise as waking prematurely. “In what way, Exalted Fleetlord?” Felless tried to make her wits work harder. “Does this planet harbor some bacterium or virus for which we have had difficulty in finding a cure?” Such a thing hadn’t happened on either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, but remained a theoretical possibility.

“No,” Reffet replied. “The difficulty lies in the natives themselves. They are more technically advanced than our probe indicated. You being the colonization fleet’s leading expert on relations between the Race and other species, I judged it expedient to rouse you and put you to work before we make planetfall. If you need assistance, give us names, and we shall also wake as many of your subordinates and colleagues as you may require.”

Felless tried to lever herself off the table on which she lay. Straps restrained her: a sensible precaution on the physician’s part. As she fumbled with the catches, she asked, “How much more advanced were they than we expected? Enough to make the conquest significantly harder, I gather.”

“Indeed.” Reffet added an emphatic cough. “When the conquest fleet arrived, they were engaged in active research on jet aircraft, on guided missiles, and on nuclear fission.”

“That is impossible!” Felless blurted. Then, realizing what she’d said, she added, “I beg the Exalted Fleetlord’s pardon.”

“Senior Researcher, I freely give it to you,” Reffet replied. “When the colonization fleet began receiving data from Tosev 3, my first belief was that Atvar, the fleetlord on the conquest fleet, was playing an elaborate joke on us—jerking our tailstumps, as the saying has it. I have since been disabused of this belief. I wish I had not been, for it strikes me as far more palatable than the truth.”

“But—But—” Felless knew she was stuttering, and made herself pause to gather her thoughts. “If that is true, Exalted Fleetlord, I count it something of a marvel that . . . that the conquest did not fail.” Such a thought would have been unimaginable back on Home. It should have been unimaginable here, too. That she’d imagined it proved it wasn’t.

Reffet said, “In part, Senior Researcher, the conquest
did
fail. There are still unsubdued Tosevite empires—actually, the term the conquest fleet consistently uses is
not-empires
, which I do not altogether understand—on the surface of Tosev 3, along with areas the Race has in fact conquered. Nor have the Tosevites ceased their technical progress in the eyeblink of time since the conquest fleet arrived. I am warned that only a threat of retaliatory violence from the conquest fleet has kept them from mounting attacks on this colonization fleet.”

Felless felt far dizzier than she would have from weightlessness and sudden revival from cold sleep alone. She finally managed to free herself from the restraining straps and gently push off from the table. “Take me to a terminal at once, if you would be so kind. Have you an edited summary of the data thus far transmitted from the conquest fleet?”

“We have,” Reffet said. “I hope you will find it adequate, Senior Researcher. It was prepared by fleet officers who are not specialists in your area of expertise. We have, of course, provided links to the fuller documentation sent up from Tosev 3.”

“If you will come with me, superior female . . .” the physician said. She swung rapidly from one handhold to another. Felless followed.

She had to strap herself into the chair in front of the terminal to keep the ventilating current from blowing her off it. Getting back to work felt good. She wished she could have waited till reaching the surface of Tosev 3 for reawakening; that would have been as planned back on Home, and plans were made to be followed. But she would do the best she could here.

And, as she called up the summary, a curious blend of anticipation and dread coursed through her. Wild Tosevites . . . What would dealing with wild Tosevites be like? She’d expected the locals to be well on their way toward assimilation into the Empire by now. Even then, they would have been different from the Hallessi and the Rabotevs, who but for their looks were as much subjects of the Emperor (even thinking of her sovereign made Felless cast down her eyes) as were the males and females of the Race.