Second Contact (32 page)

“We’re a sinful lot, all right,” Johnson said, and Julius nodded. The pilot went on, “Good thing we are, too. We tricked the Lizards as often as we beat ’em fair and square—more often than we beat ’em fair and square, I shouldn’t wonder.” He pointed to the black man. “That’s what your unit did, or most of them, anyway.”

“Yeah, most of ’em.” Julius took another small sip from the drink Johnson had bought him. “Some o’ those boys, they didn’t care how the Lizards treated them, long as they treated white folks the same way.”

Johnson thought it was a good time to finish his own drink. Negroes still didn’t get treated like white men in the United States. He said the most he could say: “It’s better than it used to be.” He didn’t know that from his own experience before the war; up till then, he’d seen only a handful of Negroes. He waited to see how the bartender would respond.

Julius chose his words with care; Johnson got the idea that Julius always chose his words with care. “Yeah, it’s better than it used to be,” the bartender said at last. “But it ain’t as good as it ought to be, you don’t mind my sayin’ so. Doctor King say that, too, an’ he’s
right
.”

“Nothing here is as good as it ought to be,” Glen Johnson said at once. “That’s what the USA is about—making things better, I mean. The Lizards think what they’ve got is perfect. We know better. We aren’t at the top, but we’re trying to get there.”

The bartender ran his rag over the already-gleaming surface of the bar. “I think you’re right, Lieutenant Colonel, suh, but you got to remember, some of us is closer to the top than the rest.”

Since he didn’t have a good comeback to that one, Johnson asked for another drink instead. He looked around at the empty stools and the empty chairs around the tables. “Slow tonight,” he remarked. “Real slow tonight, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes, suh,” Julius said, giving him another glass of scotch. “You’re about all that’s keepin’ me in business. Otherwise I’d just pack up and go home and see if there was anything good on the TV.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said. He got partway through his third drink before realizing a colored man who’d had some pointed things to say—and with justice—about the inequalities of life in the United States owned a television set. Ten years earlier, that would have been unlikely. Twenty years earlier, it would have been unimaginable, even if the Lizards hadn’t come.

Johnson was about to finish the scotch and head on over to the barracks when Captain Gus Wilhelm came in, spotted him, waved, and sat down beside him. “Looks like you’re ahead of me,” he remarked. “Have to do something about that. Martini might help.” He set coins on the bar. Julius made them disappear.

“I said things were slow tonight,” Johnson told his fellow pilot. “Now they just went and got slower.”

“Heh,” Wilhelm said, and then, remembering protocol, “Heh—sir.” He was in his mid-thirties, and had just got into the Army when the fighting stopped. He raised his glass in salute. “Confusion to the Lizards.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Johnson said, and did. “That’s what this whole planet is—confusion to the Lizards, I mean.”

“Good thing, too,” Wilhelm said. “If they understood us a little better, they would have kicked the crap out of us, and where would we be then? ‘It shall be done, superior sir’ ”—he used the Lizards’ language for the phrase—“that’s where. No way in hell we’d be out in space yet.”

“I won’t argue with that,” said Johnson, who wasn’t inclined to argue with much of anything. He lifted his own glass on high. “Confusion to the Lizards, yeah—and a big thank-you to ’em, too, for making us want to get ourselves off the ground.” Solemnly, both men drank.

“Sir,” Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb said, “I’ve just had a letter back from my cousin in Palestine.”

“Ah, that’s first-rate, Goldfarb,” Basil Roundbush answered. “There. Do you see? I knew you could do it.” He waved to the Robinsons barmaid. “Another round here, darling.” She smiled and nodded and swayed away to draw two more pints of Guinness. The group captain watched her with the innocent pleasure of a tot in a toy shop.

“Yes, sir.” Goldfarb suppressed a sigh. He hadn’t wanted to get involved in this whole highly unofficial business. Not for the first time in his military career, no one had cared whether he wanted to get involved. “It appears—my cousin had to be careful with the questions he asked, so he’s not perfectly sure—it appears, I say, that things got disarranged in Marseille.”

“Disarranged, eh? That’s not bad.” Roundbush tugged at his mustache. “And Marseille? Why am I not surprised? Was it the bloody Frenchmen or the Nazis who made free with what doesn’t belong to them?”

Goldfarb would have said
the Frenchmen or the bloody Nazis.
In 1940, Basil Roundbush would have, too. Not now. He would no doubt have said he’d changed with the times. Goldfarb hadn’t. He was glad he hadn’t.

He said, “Moishe doesn’t know that, I’m afraid. Which means the Lizards he was talking to don’t know, either.”

“Well, if they don’t know, they can’t get too upset with us for not knowing,” Roundbush said. The barmaid returned and set their pints of stout in front of them. “Ah, thank you, sweetheart.” He beamed up at her, then turned his attention back to Goldfarb. “You’ve been a good deal of help, old man. You will not find us ungrateful.”

“Thank you, sir,” Goldfarb said, which was not at all what he was thinking.
You won’t find us so ungrateful as to murder your wife, or maybe your children. You won’t find us so ungrateful as to trump up a charge to drum you out of the RAF and keep you from finding honest work anywhere else.
Roundbush’s friends were generous men, all right. By the standards of today’s Britain, they were extraordinarily generous.
Which says more about today’s Britain than it does about generosity.

“Marseille.” Roundbush spoke the name as if it were an off-color word in a language he didn’t speak well. “All sorts of things can go wrong there, no doubt about it. I wonder which one has. I shouldn’t have thought Pierre would play such a shabby trick, but one never can tell.”

“Pierre, sir?” Goldfarb asked. An instant later, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The less he knew about his former colleague’s business, the less risk he ran of being drawn into that business.

“Pierre moves things hither and yon,” Roundbush explained. That much, Goldfarb had gathered for himself. The senior RAF officer went on, “He has a finger in every pie in Marseille—and that’s a good many fingers. If he’s taken up thievery, we may have to whisper in the ears of some chums we have there.”

Some German chums we have there.
Goldfarb had no trouble figuring out what he meant. He took a long pull at his Guinness to disguise what he was thinking. What had the world come to, if a couple of Jews were helping Englishmen turn Germans loose on Frenchmen?

No. What had come to the world? The Lizards had, and things would, could, never be the same.

“It’s a rum old world,” he said, a sentiment fueled both by his thoughts of a moment before and by the Guinness he’d drunk.

“Too right it is, old man,” Basil Roundbush agreed. Why he should agree, with his good looks, his rank, and his upper-crust accent, was beyond Goldfarb. He went on, “What we have to make sure of is that it’s even more of a rum old world for the Lizards than it is for us.”

“Right,” Goldfarb said tightly. He shouldn’t have gone through the latest pint so fast, for he burst out, “And if we have to get into bed with the Nazi bastards who murdered all my kin they could catch, we just turn out the bloody lights and do it, because we have to pay the Lizards back first.”

Well, that’s torn it,
he thought. Whatever Roundbush and his friends decided to do, he hoped they’d do it to him and not to his family. If anything happened to his wife or his children, he didn’t know what he’d do. On second thought, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly what he’d do. He’d go hunting. He didn’t know how many he’d get, but it would be as many as he could.

To his surprise, Group Captain Roundbush nodded in evident sympathy. “I can see how you would feel that way,” he said. “Can’t say that I blame you, even, not sitting where you sit. But can you see there are others who might push the Lizards up to the front of the queue and leave the Jerries behind them?”

“Oh, yes, I can see that. I haven’t even got trouble with it,” Goldfarb answered. If he could speak his mind to Roundbush without the world’s ending, he damn well would: “But what I can’t see is the people who push the Lizards up to the front of the queue and then cozy up to the Jerries because they don’t like the Lizards, either. And there are too damned many of that lot.” He looked defiantly at Roundbush. If the other RAF officer wanted to make something of it, he was ready.

But Roundbush again kept his tone mild. “We haven’t got the empire any more,” he said, as if to a schoolchild. “We aren’t strong enough to pretend the
Reich
isn’t there, right across the Channel from us.”

“I know that, too.” The other thing Goldfarb knew was that he was floundering; he hadn’t expected these smooth answers. He fell back on an argument with which no one—no one decent—could disagree, or so he was convinced: “Too bloody many people too high up like the Nazis too bloody well.”

“You’ll never make a practical man,” Basil Roundbush said. “But that’s all right, too; you’ve already done the practical men who drive the Lizards crazy a good turn, and we shan’t forget. I’ve already said that, and I mean it.”

“One of the most practical things you and your practical friends could do would be to help my family and me emigrate to Canada or the United States,” Goldfarb said, his voice bitter. “My kin and my wife’s have been lucky to get out of places where the trouble was bad before it got as bad as it could. It’s looking more and more like things will just keep getting worse here.”

“I hope not,” Roundbush said. “I do hope not.” He even sounded as if he meant it. “But if that’s what you want, old boy, I daresay it could be arranged.”

He didn’t even blink. Goldfarb thought he might have deserved some token surprise, something like,
Wouldn’t you sooner stay, in view of your service to the country?
But no. If he wanted to go, Roundbush would wave bye-bye.

Or maybe he wouldn’t even do that. He said, “One thing you must bear in mind, though, wherever you turn up, is that people may still ask you to do things for them from time to time. You’ve helped once. Easier to unscramble an egg than to stop helping now.”

Goldfarb looked him straight in the eye. “I took the King’s shilling, sir. I never took yours.”

Roundbush rummaged in his pockets till he found a silver coin. He set it in front of David Goldfarb. “Now you have.”

And Goldfarb did not have the nerve to send the shilling flying across the pub. “Damn you,” he said quietly. He was trapped, and he knew it.

“Don’t fret about it,” Roundbush advised him. “We shall do our best not to make our requests”—he didn’t even say
demands
—“too onerous.” Oh, the trap had velvet jaws. That did not mean it bit any the less.

Tossing back the last of his Guinness, Goldfarb got to his feet. “I’d better head on home, sir. My wife will be wondering what’s become of me.” Naomi knew he was going to have this meeting with Roundbush, but Roundbush didn’t need to know she knew. Roundbush already knew altogether too much about Goldfarb’s affairs.

He didn’t argue now, saying, “Give her my best. You are a lucky dog; if you must stay with one woman, you couldn’t have picked a finer one. One of these days before too long, I may have another small bit of business on which you can lend a hand. Until then—” He gave Goldfarb an affable nod.

Goldfarb stalked out of Robinsons and retrieved his bicycle from the rack in front of the pub. He couldn’t even be properly angry at Roundbush; getting angry at him was like beating the air with your fists. It accomplished nothing.

He pedaled away from the pub at a slow, deliberate pace. With several pints of Guinness in him, it was the best pace he could manage. He didn’t particularly notice the pack of punks on bicycles till they’d surrounded him. “All right, buddy, which is it? Protestant or Catholic?” one of them snarled.

If he guessed wrong, they’d stomp him for the pleasure of putting down heresy. If he guessed right, they might stomp him even so, just for the hell of it. If he laughed in their faces—what would they do then? He tried it.

They looked astonished. That made him laugh harder than ever. “Sorry, boys,” he said when he got some of his breath back. “You can’t have me. The goddamn Nazis have first claim.”

“Bloody hebe,” one of the punks muttered. They all looked disgusted. He realized he wasn’t out of the woods yet. They might decide to stomp him for spoiling their fun. But they didn’t. They rode off. Some of them threw curses over their shoulders as they went, but he’d heard worse in London.

When he got home, he spoke of that first with Naomi. She laughed. “It is better here than in England,” she said. “In England, you would have got into trouble anyhow. Here, they let you go.”

“I wasn’t what they were after, that’s all,” he answered. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t after somebody. And besides, I’ve got more important people after me.” He told his wife of what had passed with Basil Roundbush.

“They will help us emigrate if we must?” Naomi asked. “This could be very important.” Her family had got out of Germany just before the
Kristallnacht
. She knew everything she needed to know about leaving and not looking back.

“They’ll help me if I keep helping them,” Goldfarb said. “If I keep helping them, the Nazis are going to give it to some poor Frenchman in the neck.”

Naomi spoke with ruthless practicality. “If he is a ginger smuggler, he is not a poor Frenchman. He is much more likely to be a rich Frenchman. No one who trades with the Lizards stays poor long.”

“Truth,” Goldfarb said in the language of the Race. He returned to English: “But I still don’t want to be the one who put the
Gestapo
on his tail.”

“I don’t want a lot of the things that have happened to have happened,” his wife answered. “That does not mean I can do anything about them.”