Second Contact (23 page)

Nieh Ho-T’ing pointed. “We are staying at the inn yonder. They have a room waiting for the two of you.”

“Good,” Liu Han said. “When will we meet?”

Nieh chuckled. “You have not changed much, have you? Business first, everything else afterwards.” Liu Han did not answer; she stood there in the street, arms folded across her chest. Nieh shifted from foot to foot, then finally said, “We will meet tomorrow morning, early. Mao is always up early; he never sleeps well.”

“Yes, I know,” Liu Han said. She turned to her daughter. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of room it is.”

It turned out to be about what she’d expected: well away from the main hall of the lodging house (what better did women deserve?), small, dark, but with enough blankets and with plenty of fuel for the
kang
, the low, thick, clay hearth on which they could lie to take greatest advantage of its warmth.

“It will be good to see Mao again,” Liu Mei said. “It has been a few years.”

“He will be glad to see you, too,” Liu Han said. She wondered just how glad Mao would be to see her daughter. He had—and, she knew, deserved—a reputation for being attracted to young girls. He was especially fond of young, ignorant peasant girls, though: to them, as leader of China’s hopes, he was the next thing to a god, or maybe not the next thing. Liu Mei had had the best education Liu Han was able to give her. She might admire and respect Mao, but she did not and would not worship him.

Liu Han had gone through a spell of worshiping Mao. She was glad she’d got over it. Some never did, not even after Mao cast them aside. Liu Han hadn’t had the sort of education she’d got for her daughter, but her own hard core of common sense had never quite deserted her: or not for long, anyhow.

Next morning, she and Liu Mei came out to have breakfast. Sitting in the main hall, chatting up a serving girl, was Hsia Shou-Tao. He scowled when Liu Han came in. He’d been subjected to stiff self-criticism any number of times, but his habits never changed.

By the way he looked at Liu Mei, he was imagining her body under her clothes. By the way he looked at Liu Han, he realized she knew what he was doing. His smile was half embarrassed, half afraid. Liu Han wished it were all afraid, but it would have to do. With it still on his face, Hsia said, “Good morning, Comrade . . . er, Comrades.”

“Good morning,” Liu Han said before Liu Mei could reply—she did not want her daughter speaking to the lecher. “Take me to the meeting place.”

She spoke like one who had the right to give orders. Hsia Shou-Tao obeyed as if she had that right, too. Since Liu Mei would not be at the meeting, he couldn’t try to do anything with her—or to her—for a while. And he knew better than to bother Liu Han.

“Behold the palace of the proletariat,” he said sourly, pointing to a barn that had seen better days.

Inside, sitting on a mat on the dirt floor, were Mao Tse-tung, Chu Te, Nieh Ho-T’ing, and Lin Piao. After brief greetings, Mao came straight to the point: “We have not received most of the weapons our comrades in the Soviet Union have promised us. Molotov tells me this is because the little scaly devils have intercepted several caravans lately.”

“That is very bad,” Hsia Shou-Tao said: for once, a remark of his with which Liu Han could not disagree.

“It is worse than very bad,” Mao said, running his hand through his hair. He was close to seventy; it had receded in front, leaving his forehead looking high and domed. As if to make up for that, he let his hair grow fuller in the sides and back than most Chinese men wore it. He went on, “Molotov is lying to me. Most of those caravans were never sent.”

Liu Han exclaimed. That was news to her, and very bad news. By the horrified reactions of all her colleagues save Lin Piao, it was news to them, too. Lin said, “As Lenin asked, what is to be done?”

“We must have weapons,” Mao said, to which everyone nodded. Without weapons, the fight against the imperialist scaly devils would surely be lost. The Chinese revolutionary leader went on, “The USSR seeks to curry favor with the little devils so they will not punish the Soviet Union for the attack on the ships of the colonization fleet. In my view, the USSR should have attacked these ships regardless of the cost, but Molotov is too much a reactionary to agree.”

“He betrays the international solidarity of the workers and peasants,” Hsia Shou-Tao thundered.

“So he does.” Mao’s voice was dry. “And all we can do about it is . . . remember.” He shook his head. “No. That is all we can do to the USSR. But we must get weapons, whether Molotov supplies them to us or not.”

“That is the truth,” Chu Te said. He looked like an aging peasant, but he held the People’s Liberation Army together no less than Mao did the Communist Party. If he said something military was so, then it was.

“Where else can we get weapons now?” Nieh asked. “The Japanese?” He made a face to show what he thought of that. “I do not want to give the eastern dwarfs a toehold in China again.”

“Nor I,” Mao said. “They probably would not help us, though. They are not like the USSR or the USA or the
Reich
. They have no explosive-metal bombs. The scaly devils tolerate their independence, but do not admit they are equals. Dreadful things could happen to Japan very quickly, and the Japanese can do relatively little to resist.”

“In any case, if they helped anyone in China, they would help the Kuomintang,” Lin Piao said. “Reactionaries love reactionaries.” Everyone nodded. Along with battling the scaly devils, the Chinese kept fighting among themselves. Liu Han thought Chiang Kai-shek would sooner have surrendered to the little devils than to Mao.

“We must have weapons,” Mao repeated. “None of the three independent powers can truly want to see China altogether lost to the little scaly devils. The USSR will not help us for now. The
Reich
is not well placed, and is the most reactionary of the three; Hitler aided the Kuomintang during the 1930s. That leaves the United States.”

“America would sooner help the Kuomintang, too,” Hsia Shou-Tao said.

“Probably,” Mao said, “but that does not mean America will not also help us. We had U.S. help in the fight against Japan. We have had some quiet help in the fight against the little devils, too. Now we need more.”

“How are we to get it? Japan and the islands Japan rules block us off from the USA.” Liu Han was proud she knew that. Back in her days in the village near Hankow, she hadn’t even known the world was round.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, we must send an envoy to beg,” Mao said. “Against the Lizards’ imperialism, the U.S. capitalists will aid even revolutionaries—if we humble ourselves enough. In the cause of revolution, I have no pride.”

“A good example for us all,” Chu Te murmured.

Mao’s gaze swung toward Liu Han. “You, Comrade, not only are you a woman, and thus likely to appeal to bourgeois sentimentality, but you have an American connection none of the rest of us can match.”

For a moment, Liu Han did not understand what he was talking about. Then, all at once, she did. “My daughter!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, Liu Mei and her American father, now conveniently and heroically dead,” Mao agreed, as if Bobby Fiore had had no more importance in Liu Han’s life than his present convenience. “If I can arrange the ways and means, I will send both of you to the United States with begging bowls. Do you remember any English?”

“Not more than one or two words,” Liu Han answered. The scaly devils had taken her into space. She’d survived that. If Mao sent her to America, she would go. “I will see how much I can learn before I leave.”

Johannes Drucker was glad to be back in space, not only because that meant he’d managed to free his wife from the specter of a Jewish grandmother lurking in her family tree but also because he—unlike a good many—enjoyed weightlessness and because he could better serve the Greater German
Reich
here than anywhere else—certainly better than in
Gestapo
detention.

An abrupt signal came into his ship: “Spacecraft of the
Reich
! Spacecraft of the
Reich
! Acknowledge at once, spacecraft of the
Reich
!” That was a Lizard talking, and he wasn’t bothering to speak any human language.

“Acknowledging,” Drucker said. “Go ahead, male of the Race.”

“I have information for you, and a warning,” the Lizard said. “You will obey, or you will regret.” He gave an emphatic cough.

“Go on,” Drucker said. “I cannot say what I will do until I hear what you have to tell me.”

“Information: the Race is punishing the
Reich
for the murder of the males and females aboard the destroyed ships of the colonization fleet,” the Lizard said. “A warning: any attempt to interfere with the punishment will have the most severe consequences. Do you hear? Do you understand? Do you obey?”

“I hear. I understand,” Drucker answered. “I cannot say whether I obey until I speak to my superiors. I shall do that now.”

“If your superiors are wise, they will obey. If they are not wise, we shall teach them wisdom.” The Lizard broke the connection.

After checking his position, Drucker radioed a German ship in the southern Indian Ocean and relayed what the Lizard had told him. “I have not heard them sound so determined since we were fighting,” he finished. “What are my orders?”

He was as near certain as made no difference what the answer would be. The
Reich
could not keep its independence by knuckling under to the Lizards. He checked the radar screen for targets at which he could launch his missiles and aim his guns. He didn’t expect to last long, but he would—what was the phrase the Americans used? Go down swinging, that was it.

And then, to his astonishment, the reply came: “Take no action.”

“Repeat, please?” Drucker said, not sure he could believe his ears.

“Take no action,” came up again from the relay ship. “We are told this punishment will be only symbolic, and will also be inflicted on Russia and America. If we were misinformed, you will proceed to avenge the
Vaterland
on the liars.”

“Jawohl,”
Drucker said. Not sure the Lizards had monitored his conversation with the ship, he switched to the frequency they had used and back to their language: “Spacecraft of the
Reich
calling the Race.”

“Go ahead.” The reply came back at once. “Do you hear? Do you understand? Do you obey?”

“I hear. I understand,” Drucker said, as he had before. “I will obey, unless the punishment you give is so severe, my superiors order me to fight. In that case, I will obey them, not you.”

“This does you credit as a warrior,” said the Lizard on the other end of the circuit. “It will not keep you from dying if you are foolish enough to fight.”

“I serve the
Reich
,” Drucker answered. “I serve the
Führer
.” The
Führer
, or at least Himmler’s fair-haired boys in the SS, had treated him shabbily of late, and Käthe even worse. That didn’t mean he was ready to give up on the Greater German
Reich
. Without the
Reich
, he thought, the Lizards would surely have overrun the whole world, not just around half of it.

“You would do better to serve the Emperor,” the Lizard said, adding another emphatic cough. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh out loud. The earnest alien sounded like nothing so much as a missionary trying to save a heathen savage’s soul. Lizards got offended when humans pointed such things out to them.

Drucker’s radar showed several Lizard spacecraft dropping out of orbit. He estimated their courses, not bothering to feed the numbers into his computing machine. He didn’t need precision, not when he’d been ordered to sit tight. But they were heading for the
Reich
.

He itched to change course and pursue them. He could knock down a couple, maybe more, before they wrecked him. The Lizards were technically proficient pilots, but they weren’t inspired. He was, or could be.

“These are the punishment ships,” the Lizard told him. “If you could see with your eyes and not with your sensors, you would see they have been painted to include the broad green bands that symbolize punishment.”

Drucker didn’t answer. He kept nervously watching the radar screen. The Lizards were using a lot of force for a purely symbolic punishment. Had they been lying? Were they seizing this excuse to throw a sucker punch at each of the three main human powers still standing? If they were . . . How they would pay if they were! He would be one of the men who made them pay.

Then he got a signal from another German relay ship, one of the many that kept spacecraft in touch with the territorially limited
Reich
: “They have destroyed an air base near the town of Flensburg. Many aircraft have been wrecked; there are casualities. They state they intend to take no further action.”

That sounded like more than a symbolic attack to Drucker. “What are my orders?” he asked. “Am I to retaliate?”

A long silence followed. Had the Lizards truly intended a strike on the
Reich
, he realized, one logical thing for them to do would have been to sink as many of the relay ships as they could. During the fighting, they hadn’t paid so much attention to ships as they might have; later, men had discovered that seas on their home planet were small and unimportant compared to the oceans of Earth. But thinking the Lizards could not learn from experience was a deadly dangerous mistake.

He was just starting to worry in earnest when the relay ship did respond: “No, no retaliation at this time, not unless the Lizards take some further action. The
Führer
has warned them in the strongest terms against thinking our forbearance will extend past this one occasion.”

“Good,” Drucker said. “Even once is too often, if anyone cares what a pilot thinks.” He knew perfectly well that no one did. “Have they also struck at the Russians and the Americans, as they said they would?”
Misery loves company,
he thought.

“Reports are coming in from the United States,” was the reply. “They also hit an air base there. Radar indicates an attack was made on the USSR, but no comment from Radio Moscow.”