Second Contact (21 page)

He hadn’t known she’d been in Detroit. “You know who you want me to write to?” he asked, and wasn’t surprised when she nodded. She knew about him, whether he knew about her or not. “Okay, I can write the letters,” he said, “if you’re not lying to me, and you really will fix this up.” He stuck his tongue in the palm of his hand, as if he were a Lizard tasting ginger.

“Good guess,” Penny said. “All I need is a little time to straighten it out. I swear to God that’s the truth.”

Once upon a time, she’d read the Bible a lot. Now . . . now he judged she’d swear whatever was convenient, same as most people. He shrugged, which hurt a little, then came to the point again: “Only one bed in the bedroom.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “That’s what I’m paying for, isn’t it?—room and broad, I mean?” Her smile was a lot harder, a lot more knowing, than it had been in the old days. Auerbach laughed even so.

“I hate this,” Fotsev said. “How are we supposed to find one male Big Ugly among all the ones who live here? For all we know, the miserable fanatic does not live here any more. If he has any sense, he does not.”

“If he had any sense, he would not be a miserable fanatic,” his friend Gorppet pointed out, a point with which Fotsev could hardly disagree. “For that matter, if he had any sense, he would not be a Tosevite.”

Fotsev couldn’t disagree with that, either, and didn’t. His eye turrets swept the Basra street along which he and his small group were advancing—a narrow, stinking, muddy track between two rows of buildings, some whitewashed, more not, made from mud themselves. They showed only slits for windows, and had the look, though not really the strength, of fortresses.

“He is a crazy Big Ugly for preaching the way he does,” Fotsev said, “and the rest of the Big Uglies are just as crazy for listening to him. And I can tell you somebody else who is crazy, too.”

“Who is that?” Gorppet asked.

Before Fotsev could answer, sudden movement from around a corner made him swing the muzzle of his personal weapon to cover it. A moment later, he relaxed. It was only one of the four-legged hairy creatures, part scavenger, part companion, that the Big Uglies kept as symbionts. It sat back on its haunches and yapped at him and his comrades.

“Miserable creature,” Gorppet said. “I do not like dogs at all. Up in the SSSR, they used to train them to run under landcruisers with explosives on their backs. Nasty to use animals that way. They do not know what they are doing.” He paused. “But you were going to tell me who else is crazy. That is always worth hearing.”

“Truth,” one of their comrades said. “Who else is crazy, Fotsev?”

“The shiplord of the colonization fleet,” Fotsev answered. “With the Big Uglies on this part of the planet all stirred to a boil, why does he think he needs to bring any ships from the colonization fleet down here?”

“To keep the Big Uglies who know what they are doing from blowing up any more of them?” Gorppet suggested.

“Because the weather here is better than it is in most places on Tosev 3?” another male added.

Fotsev hissed in annoyance; those were both good answers. In his mind, though, they weren’t good enough. He said, “That madmale Khomeini is still stirring up the local Big Uglies. How much do you want to bet that they manage to wreck a colonization ship or two? They are so addled, a lot of them do not care whether they live or die.”

“It is that business of thinking they will get a happy afterlife if they die fighting us,” Gorppet said. “We have given enough of them the chance to find out whether they are right or wrong lately, and that is truth.”

A male Tosevite came out of his house. Speaking the language of the Race with a rasping, guttural accent, he said, “He is not here. Go away.”

“You do not tell us what to do,” Fotsev said. “We tell you what to do.” The Big Uglies had had many years to figure that out. That they hadn’t was, in Fotsev’s view, a telling proof of their stupidity.

“He is not here,” the Big Ugly repeated. Swathed in his robes, he looked as much like a ragpile as an intelligent being.

“If a Big Ugly says something is not so, that makes it more likely to be so,” Gorppet said.

“You are right, of course,” Fotsev said. “We had better search that house.”

The Big Ugly let out a howl of protest. Fotsev and the other males of the Race ignored it. Fotsev, as orders required, radioed back to the barracks that he and his comrades were entering a building. If they needed help, they would get it in a hurry. If they needed help, they would, very likely, get it too late no matter how fast it arrived. Fotsev chose not to dwell on that.

He pointed his personal weapon at the Tosevite. “Open the door and go in ahead of us,” he ordered—if the local spoke his language, he was going to take advantage of it. “If you have friends in there with guns, you had better tell them not to shoot, or they and we will surely shoot you.”

Against the Race, that would have been a perfect threat. Against a Big Ugly, it was a good one, but not, Fotsev knew, perfect. Too many Big Uglies all over Tosev 3 had proved themselves ready to die for what they reckoned important.

Without another word, the Tosevite turned and threw the door wide. Only after he had gone inside did he turn back and say, “Here, do you see? There is no danger. And the male you seek is not here, as I told you before.”

Fotsev’s mouth fell open in bitter laughter. No danger? He had been in danger every moment since coming down to the surface of Tosev 3—and he had not been in the worst of the fighting. But he never expected to know another instant in which he was
not
looking now this way, now that, always anxious lest trouble see him before he saw it. The Emperor had called for a Soldiers’ Time, and soldiers he had got. Fotsev did not think even the Emperor had the power to make soldiers back into ordinary males of the Race. He and his fellows had seen too much, done too much, had too much done to them, for that.

Such gloomy reflections did not keep him from doing his job. As he searched the house, he turned one eye turret back toward Gorppet and asked, “Can you imagine living like this?”

“I would rather not,” his friend replied.

No computers. No televisor screens. Not even a radio receiver. No electricity of any sort; the walls held brackets for torches, and were stained black with soot above them. Fotsev saw only one book, printed in the sinuous squiggles of the alphabet used hereabouts. He knew what that book would be, too: the instruction manual for the local superstition. Most of the Big Uglies in this part of Tosev 3 who could read at all had that book and no others.

A couple of female Tosevites—even more thoroughly muffled in cloth wrappings than the males—squealed as males of the Race came into the kitchen. Fotsev looked at the pot bubbling over the fire. He could see the marks of hammering on it; it had been made by hand. The stew inside smelled good. Whatever had gone into it, though, hadn’t been refrigerated beforehand, and Tosevite pests would have been free to walk over it and lay their eggs in it.
No wonder so many Big Uglies die sooner than they might,
he thought.

His scent receptors caught the tangy odor of ginger in the stew. It was just a cooking spice to the Big Uglies, not a drug. Fotsev pitied them for that, as for many other things. He was no fiend for ginger; he’d seen too many males endanger themselves and their comrades because they couldn’t keep their tongues out of the ginger jar. The herb and duty simply did not mix. But, when he didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything for a while . . .

He made himself ignore that temptingly delicious scent. A couple of other males seemed to be looking for excuses to get near the stew pot. One of the female Big Uglies hefted a large iron spoon in what was plainly a warning gesture; the Tosevites did not have so much food as to take lightly the idea of losing any.

Fotsev said, “We are not here to steal. We are not here to stick out our tongues. We are here to see if that miserable Khomeini male is anywhere close by. Remember it, or else you will have something else to remember.”

His small group did as thorough a job as it could of ransacking the house. He did not think a male of the Race could have hidden from them, let alone one of the larger Tosevites. They did not discover the hairy Big Ugly who had stirred up so much hatred and unrest against the Race.

“Do you see?” said the Big Ugly who had asserted Khomeini was not there. “I told the truth. And what did I get for it? You have torn my home to pieces.”

“You Tosevites have done plenty to us,” Fotsev replied. “You cannot blame us if we want to keep you from doing more.”

“Cannot blame you?” The Tosevite yipped out the laughter of his kind. “Of course we can blame you. We will blame you for a thousand years. We will blame you for ten thousand years.” He added an emphatic cough.

However emphatic he was, he spoke as if a thousand years were a very long time, ten thousand years an impossibly long time. Even if the years by which they reckoned were twice as long as those of the Race, Fotsev knew perfectly well that that was not so. “Twenty thousand years from now,” he said, “your descendants will be contented subjects of the Empire.”

The Big Ugly’s small, deeply set eyes went as wide as they could. He said several things in his own tongue that did not sound like compliments. Then he returned to the language of the Race: “You are as wrong as you were wrong when you thought the great Khomeini was here.”

“Our descendants will know.” Fotsev raised his voice: “The Big Ugly male who preaches is not in this house. Let us go and see if we can find him elsewhere.” He doubted they would. But they did have some hope of keeping order in Basra, which was also important.

When he and his small group went out into the street, helicopters rumbled overhead. Alarm ran through him—what had the Big Uglies gone and done now? Then he heard and saw killercraft, some roaring low over the city, others high enough to scribe vapor trails in the upper atmosphere.

“What now?” Gorppet demanded. “They have not needed killercraft in this part of Tosev 3 for a long time.”

Before Fotsev could answer, a new and different rumble filled his hearing diaphragms: a great endless roar of cloven air. He had not heard the like for many years. He looked into the sky. Sure enough: what he had thought he would see, he saw. At first, those specks were at the very edge of visibility, but they swelled rapidly. Before long, even if they never came too close to Basra, they swelled enough to let him gauge how truly huge they were.

“Ah,” Gorppet said.

“Yes.” Fotsev watched the globes descend toward bare ground south and west of the town. “Whether in wisdom or not, the colonization fleet begins to land.”

 6

David Goldfarb studied the radar screen with something between admiration and horror. He’d known how immense the Lizards’ colonization fleet was, of course; he’d been seeing the echoes of those ships since they first began going into orbit around the Earth. But he’d grown used to them up in high orbit: they made a sort of background noise on his set. When they started dropping out of orbit, one detachment at a time, they actively impinged on his awareness once more.

“Will you
look
at the bloody things?” he exclaimed as yet another squadron, bound for Poland, passed over his station in Northern Ireland. “How many Lizards have they got packed in each of those ships? Enough so they’ll be stepping on each other’s toes, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Aye, no doubt you’re right, sir,” Sergeant Jack McDowell answered. “And if they aren’t stepping on their own toes, then they will step on the Nazis’.”

“That breaks my heart,” Goldfarb said. The sergeant chuckled; no, he didn’t hold Goldfarb’s being a Jew against him. If only the same held true for Goldfarb’s superiors, he would have been a happier man. With Britain ever more closely aligned to the
Reich
, though, that wasn’t in the cards. At least he hadn’t been booted out of the RAF and into a concentration camp.

“They’ll be low over German territory before they land, too,” he said with a certain sardonic satisfaction. “Here’s hoping Heinrich Himmler’s hiding under the bed.”

McDowell nodded. He wasn’t too far from Goldfarb’s age: old enough to remember the Blitz, to remember the days when the Nazis were the worst enemies the British Empire had. To new recruits, the Greater German
Reich
might always have been the big, strong brother on the Continent. They had no sense of the past, or of what a nasty fellow the big, strong brother still was.

Of course, a fair number of the new recruits were as taken with the Lizards as they were with the Germans. Goldfarb let out a sigh. It hadn’t been that way when he was a kid joining the RAF. He sighed again. For how many generations had people been complaining about the younger set? Enough for formidable antiquity even by Lizard standards, no doubt.

McDowell said, “They’re right where they ought to be, right where they said they’d be. The Germans haven’t any excuse for throwing a rocket at them.”

“Except bloody-mindedness,” Goldfarb said. “Never forget about sheer bloody-mindedness, especially when you’re dealing with Germans.”

“They’ll pay dear if they get gay this time,” McDowell said. The Lizards had made that very plain to the
Reich
, the USSR, and the USA: any attack on the ships of the colonization fleet as they landed would start up the fighting that had lain dormant for eighteen years. Goldfarb didn’t think they were bluffing. His opinion counted for little. By all the signs, though, Himmler and Molotov and Warren agreed with him.

The Lizards hadn’t bothered publicly warning either Britain or Japan to leave their colonization fleet alone. They didn’t formally treat with either island nation as an equal, even if they had got their snouts bloodied when they invaded England.

Goldfarb followed the track of the ships from the colonization fleet till the curve of the Earth hid them from the prying eye of his radar. “Doesn’t look like the
Reich
will give this lot any trouble,” he said.

“Good, sir. That’s good,” McDowell said. “If the fighting starts up again, there won’t be anything left of any of us when it’s over.”

“Truth,” Goldfarb said in the Lizards’ language. McDowell nodded; he understood those hisses and pops and coughs. For him, as for Goldfarb, learning them meant being able to do his job better. A lot of people half their age liked the Lizards’ language for its own sake.
No accounting for taste,
Goldfarb thought.

After the alert caused by the descent of the detachment from the colonization fleet, the rest of Goldfarb’s tour at the radar screen was uneventful. He preferred days like that; he’d had enough excitement when he was younger to last him a lifetime. He made his report to the flight lieutenant who replaced him at the radar, then escaped with a sigh of relief.

A cigarette in the pale sunlight outside took the edge off his tension. A pint of bitter, he knew, would do an even better job, or maybe Guinness from the Irish Republic. He was heading for his bicycle so he could let a specialist administer the proper dose—and perhaps even repeat it—when a shout made him whip his head around: “Goldfarb!”

He stared in surprise. A good many years had gone by since he’d seen that handsome, ruddy face, but the only change in it he could see was that the handlebar mustache adorning the upper lip was streaked with gray. He stiffened to attention and saluted. “Yes, sir!” he said loudly.

“Oh, in the bloody name of heaven, as you were,” Basil Roundbush said, returning the salute. “I want to buy you a bloody pint, not put you on report.”

“Thank you, sir,” Goldfarb said, and extended his hand. Roundbush shook it; he still had a grip like a bear trap. Goldfarb eyed the four stripes on each sleeve of his gray-blue uniform. “Thank you very much, Group Captain.”

Roundbush waved airily, as if the rank—the RAF’s equivalent to colonel—meant nothing to him. Maybe it did mean nothing to him. He had the right accent; he’d gone to the right public school and the right university—Goldfarb couldn’t recall if it was Oxford or Cambridge, but which hardly mattered. And, smiling his film-star smile, he said, “You’ve done rather smashingly well yourself, Flight Lieutenant.” He didn’t add,
For a Jew from the East End of London,
as he might have done. He didn’t even look as if he thought it, which was rather remarkable. Instead, he went on, “That’s why I came over here to chat you up.”

Goldfarb’s eyes widened again. “You came to Belfast to . . . see me, sir?” he said slowly, wondering if he’d heard straight.

“I did indeed,” Roundbush answered, for all the world as if traveling to Northern Ireland to talk with a Jewish junior officer were the most normal thing in the world. “Now—I’ve got a motorcar laid on, and you know this town, which I bloody well don’t. Go fling your bicycle in the boot, and then tell me where we can get a pint.”

“Protestant pub or Catholic?” Goldfarb asked. “It doesn’t matter much to me, but . . .” He let his voice trail away. Maybe, after so long, Roundbush needed reminding about his faith.

He didn’t. “I know what you are,” he said. “If you weren’t, you’d not have caught that lovely lady of yours. I might have caught her myself, as a matter of fact.” He’d always had phenomenal luck with women. Goldfarb glanced at his left hand. He still wore no wedding band. Maybe that didn’t signify, but maybe it did, too: could a tomcat change his stripes? He grinned at Goldfarb. “I’m not fussy. Whichever you think is the best place.”

“There’s the Crown Liquor Saloon on Great Victoria, sir, not far from the university, or Robinsons next door. Robinsons has the finest Guinness in town, I think.”

“Robinsons it is, then.” Roundbush spoke with decision befitting a senior officer. “Guinness comes close to justifying the existence of Ireland, and I can’t think of many other things that do. Come on, old man.”

Once ensconced in a snug with a pint of stout in front of him, Goldfarb asked what he knew was the obvious question: “And now, sir, what’s all this in aid of?”

“Twisting the Lizards’ nasty little tails—what else?” Roundbush answered, sucking foam out of that perfectly waxed mustache. “One of the things we do on the sly, you know, is encourage them to stick their tongues in the ginger jar. A drugged Lizard is a long way from being a Lizard at his best.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would be,” Goldfarb agreed, “but—is it cricket?”

“Fine old tradition,” Basil Roundbush said. “Goes back to the Opium Wars, you might say. It worked then, and it’s working now. Oh, it’s not working perfectly; we’ve had a spot of trouble with someone over in the States, but I do think that’s being fixed. And we have hopes of getting some of our own back from Grand High Panjandrum Atvar and his scaly chums.”

Goldfarb didn’t say anything at all to that. As far as he was concerned, Britain’s survival was miracle enough. Dreams of resurrecting the old British Empire could only be just that: dreams. He did ask, “How do I fit into this, sir?” If he sounded cautious, it was because he felt cautious.

“You’ve got connections in Poland, and you’ve got connections in Palestine, too,” Roundbush replied. “We’ve had a couple of shipments go awry lately—this is apart from that business in the USA, mind you. Anything you can do to find out why would serve Queen and country, and might line your pockets quite nicely, too.” He made money-counting motions and then, as if suddenly noticing his glass was empty, signaled to the barmaid.

“Right away, dearie,” she said, and put something extra into her walk. Goldfarb shook his head in bemused amusement; whatever the group captain had had, he still retained it.

But that was beside the point. “Is this RAF business, sir, or is it private business?” he asked. “I’ve been happy enough here—more than happy enough. I’m not dead keen on turning my life upside down and inside out.”

“Of course you’re not, old man,” Roundbush said soothingly. “Of course you’re not. That’s why there’d be a little something special—or maybe more than a little something special—in it for you if you’d look into the matter for us. We do take care of our own; you needn’t fret about that.”

The barmaid brought back fresh pints. Goldfarb paid her; Roundbush had bought the first round. Goldfarb always tipped generously—he couldn’t afford a reputation for meanness. But despite scooping up his coins, the barmaid had eyes only for his companion.

“Cheers,” Roundbush said after she finally swayed away, and raised the new pint to his lips.

“Cheers,” Goldfarb echoed. He stared across the cramped little snug at the senior officer. “Who exactly is ‘we,’ sir?”

“My colleagues,” Roundbush said: an answer that was not an answer. “My notion was, a chap in your situation can use all the help”—he made that money-counting motion again—“and all the friends he can find.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Goldfarb said. Oh, yes, Roundbush remembered he was a Jew, all right, and knew just how tenuous things were for Jews in Britain these days. “And what would you want me to do?” he asked.

“Nose about a bit, see if you can find out how those shipments went wrong,” Roundbush answered. “It’s safe as houses.”

Goldfarb hadn’t asked if it was safe as houses. Half a lifetime in the RAF convinced him that, if anyone told him it was safe as houses without his asking, it was most unlikely to be anything of the sort. If someone looked him up after some years to assure him it was safe as houses, it couldn’t possibly be.

He took a pull at his Guinness. “No, thank you, sir,” he said.

“Tut, tut,” Basil Roundbush said. “That’s the wrong answer. Believe you me, old man, whatever might happen to you if you say yes, something worse will happen to you if you say no. And you wouldn’t want it to happen to your lovely family, too, now would you? That would be very sad.”

A nasty chill of alarm ran through Goldfarb. Roundbush and whatever friends he had were ideally placed to wreck his career if they wanted to badly enough. And if they wanted to play other sorts of games, how much help from the authorities could Goldfarb count on? The answer seemed only too plain. He gulped down the rest of his stout in a couple of swallows. “I think I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

“Ah, capital.” Roundbush beamed. “You won’t regret it.”

“I regret it already,” Goldfarb said. The other RAF man laughed, just as if he’d been joking.

These days, Monique Dutourd was concentrating more on carved stones than on the Lizards’ colonization fleet. She couldn’t do anything about the fleet. If she pieced together enough interesting inscriptions, she could finally finish that paper on the cult of Isis hereabouts. She did look forward to reactions when it saw print. It was a more thorough synthesis than anyone had tried before, and might eventually lead to a promotion.

She was glad her field of specialization centered on the Mediterranean provinces in the early days of the Roman Empire rather than, for instance, the Germanic invasions. No matter what a French scholar had to say about the Germanic invasions, the modern Germanic invaders were only too likely to decide it was wrong. And the Germans were not in the habit of giving those with whom they disagreed a chance to revise their opinions.