Second Contact (37 page)

“Offend me? No. Why should it?” Nesseref said. “But that is not to say I believe you are right. By all appearances, you Tosevites are an impatient species. The Race is a great many things. Impatient it is not. Time is on our side. In a few thousand years, you Tosevites will be contented subjects of the Emperor.”

Bunim, the regional subadministrator in Lodz, had said much the same thing. Such confidence was unnerving. Were the Lizards right? The only thing Mordechai knew was that he wouldn’t live long enough to find out. Seeking to shake the female’s calm confidence a bit, he said, “I do wish you the best of luck finding a spot for your shuttlecraft port.”

“I thank you,” Nesseref replied. “You are well-spoken indeed, for a Tosevite.”

“And I thank you,” Mordechai said. “And now, if you will excuse me, I have to check on the security of my explosive-metal bomb.”

Nesseref’s mouth fell open. “You are a funny Big Ugly, Mordechai Anielewicz,” she said, “but you cannot fool me so easily as that.” Anielewicz shrugged. Just as well—better than just as well—she hadn’t believed him.

As much as Johannes Drucker relished going into space, he also treasured leave time with his family. He treasured it more than ever these days; he’d come too close to losing Käthe. He didn’t know what he would have done without her. He didn’t know what his children would have done, either. Heinrich was fifteen now, Claudia twelve, and Adolf ten: old enough to get through better than they would have a few years before, perhaps, but losing a mother could never be easy. And losing a mother for the reason the
Gestapo
had put forward . . .

“Go on, Father,” Heinrich said from the back seat of the Volkswagen. “The light is green. That means you can.” He would be eligible to learn to drive next year. The thought made Drucker cringe, or at least want to go back behind the steering controls of a Panther or some other panzer the next time he needed to hit the road.

He put the car into gear. It was a 1960 model, and burned hydrogen rather than gasoline. The engine was a lot quieter than those of the older buggy VWs that helped clog the streets of Greifswald. Christmas candles and lamps burned in the windows of shops and taverns and houses. They did only so much to relieve the grayness the town shared with so many others near the Baltic.

“Maybe it’s the weather,” Drucker muttered under his breath. In wintertime this far north, the sun rose late and set early and never climbed very far above the southern horizon. Mists from the sea often obscured it even during the brief hours when it condescended to appear at all. Most days from November to February, streetlights shone around the clock. But they could not make up for the sun, any more than a distant cousin could make up for a missing mother.

Drucker wished that particular figure of speech had not occurred to him. He wished he’d had no cause to think of it. He glanced over to Käthe, who sat in the front seat beside him, with the children crowded into the back. She smiled. For once, evidently, she hadn’t guessed what he was thinking.

“When we go into the shops, you will not come with me,” she said, as much at home with giving orders as Major General Dornberger. “I want your present to be a surprise.”

“All right,” he agreed, so mildly that she gave him a suspicious stare. He returned it as blandly as he had turned aside the
Gestapo
interrogation earlier in the year. “After all, I want to get you a surprise or two myself.”

“Hans—” She shook her head. Light brown curls flew. “Hans, I am here. That is your doing. What greater present could you give me?”

“Greater? I don’t know.” Drucker shrugged, and then, steering the Volkswagen as precisely as if it were the upper stage of an A-45, took for his own a parking space into which it barely fit. That done, he gave his wife his attention once more. “I can go on giving you things if I want to, I think. And I do want to.”

Käthe leaned across the gearshift and kissed him on the cheek. In the back seat, Claudia giggled. She was at the age where public displays of affection amused, horrified, and fascinated her all at the same time. Drucker supposed he ought to count his blessings. All too soon, she’d likely put on public displays of affection that would horrify him without amusing him in the slightest.

“Heinrich, for whom will you shop?” Käthe asked.

Drucker’s older son said, “Why, for you and Father, of course. And for—” He broke off, two words too late, and turned red.

“For Ilse,” Claudia said; she was becoming an accomplished tease. “When are you going to give her your Hitler Youth pin, Heinrich?” Her voice was sweet and sticky as treacle.

Heinrich turned redder still. “That’s none of your business, you little snoop. You’re not the
Gestapo
.”

“Nobody should be the
Gestapo
,” Adolf said fiercely. “The
Gestapo
doesn’t do anything but cause trouble for people.”

Privately, Drucker agreed with that. Privately, he’d said much worse than that. But Adolf was only ten. He couldn’t be relied upon to keep private what absolutely had to be kept private. Drucker said, “The
Gestapo
does do more than that. They hunt down traitors to the
Reich
and rebels and spies for the Lizards and the Bolsheviks and the Americans.”

“They tried to hunt down Mother,” Adolf said. “They can—” The phrase he used would have made a
Feldwebel
with thirty years’ experience as a noncom blush.

“Keep a civil tongue in your head, young man,” Drucker told him, hoping he sounded severe. He’d never said anything like that about the
Gestapo
, even if he agreed with the sentiment expressed. “You must always keep a civil tongue in your head, for your family may not be the only people listening to you. What would happen to you, do you suppose, if the
Gestapo
had planted a microphone in our auto?”

Adolf looked appalled. Drucker had hoped he would. Drucker also hoped—devoutly—that the
Gestapo
hadn’t planted a microphone in the VW. Such a thing was far from impossible. The snoops might have planted one to see if they could catch Käthe admitting her grandmother was a Jew. Or they might have planted it in the hope of hearing some other seditious statement.

Adults—adults with a gram of sense, anyhow—watched what they said as automatically as they breathed. Children had to learn they couldn’t shout out the first thing that came into their heads. If they didn’t learn fast, they didn’t last long.

“Just remember,” Drucker told his son—told all three of his children, actually, “no matter what you think, no matter how good your reasons for thinking it may be, what you say is a different business. Nobody can hear what you think. You never can tell who might hear what you say.” He paused a moment to let the lesson sink in, then went on, “Now let’s not say any more about it. Let’s go shopping and see what sorts of nice things the stores have in them.”

He remembered the war years and the ones right after the fighting. In those days, the stores had had next to nothing in them. They’d tried to trick out the nothing with tinsel and candles, but hadn’t had much luck. Now, though, the lean times were over. The German people could enjoy themselves again.

Käthe went off in one direction, with Claudia and Adolf in tow. Heinrich made his own way down the street. Maybe he was shopping for Ilse. Had Drucker been his son’s age, he would have gone shopping for her; he was sure of that.

As things were, he went shopping for his wife. He found an excellent buy on Limoges porcelain at a shop not far from the town council hall. The shop stocked a wide variety of goods imported from France, all at very reasonable prices. He remarked on that as he made his purchase. “Yes, sir,” the clerk said, nodding. “In Paris itself, you could not buy these things so cheap.”

“I believe it,” Drucker said. Why that might be so never entered his mind. He took it for granted that Germany was entitled to first claim on whatever France produced. Germany, after all, was the beating heart of the
Reich
.

“Would you like me to do that up in gift-wrapping, sir?” the clerk asked.

“Yes, please.” Drucker hated wrapping presents himself. “Thank you very much. And put it in a plain bag afterwards, if you’d be so kind.” He left the shop well pleased with himself. The plate, which reproduced an eighteenth-century painting of a shaded grotto, would look splendid on the mantel, or perhaps mounted on the wall.

He didn’t bother heading back toward the Volkswagen, not yet. He knew he shopped more efficiently than Käthe and the children. Instead, he window-shopped as he wandered through the streets of Greifswald. He paused thoughtfully in front of a shop that stocked goods imported not from France but from Italy. A slow smile stole across his face. He went inside and made a purchase. He had that one gift-wrapped, too. The clerk, a pretty young woman, was most obliging. By the way she smiled, she might have been obliging if he’d been interested in something other than the shop’s stock in trade. But he had no great interest in anyone but Käthe, and so did not experiment.

When he went back to the car, he found the rest of the family there ahead of him, and had to endure their teasing all the way home. “You’ll get coal for Christmas, every one of you,” he growled in mock anger, “brown coal that won’t even burn without stinking and smoking.”

On Christmas morning, before sunup, he took his family outside. They looked toward the east, not toward Bethlehem but toward Peenemünde, about thirty kilometers away. To his disappointment, the fog lay too thick to let them see the latest A-45 ascend to the heavens, but the roar of the rocket reverberated inside their bones.

“Maybe you’ll ride it one of these days, Heinrich, Adolf,” he said.

His sons’ faces glowed with pride. Claudia said, “And what about me?” The best he could do to answer her was change the subject.

They went inside and opened presents, which provided plenty of distraction. Käthe exclaimed in delight at the plate from Limoges. She’d got Drucker a fancy meerschaum, and some Turkish tobacco to smoke in it. He puffed away in delight. Heinrich got a fancy one-liter beer stein. He proceeded to fill and then empty it, after which he got sleepy and red in the face.

“Maybe we should have bought the half-liter stein after all,” Drucker said. Käthe laughed. Heinrich looked offended and woozy at the same time.

Adolf got a battery-powered Leopard panzer with a control on the end of a long wire. He blitzkrieged through the living room and around the Christmas tree, till he wrapped the wire around the tree and couldn’t undo things by reversing. Claudia squealed ecstatically when she opened her present, a blond plastic doll with a spectacular wardrobe and even more spectacular figure. That one hadn’t been cheap, since it was imported from the USA, but it made her so happy, Drucker judged it well worth the cost.

“All my friends will be jealous,” Claudia chortled, “especially Eva. She’s wanted one for weeks—practically forever.”

“Maybe she got one, too,” Drucker said. A little of Claudia’s joy evaporated; she hadn’t thought of that. But then, because it was Christmas, she brightened and made the best of it.

After a Christmas supper of fat roast goose, all her resentment went away, and, for the evening, all of Drucker’s, too. Heinrich went out to take Ilse to a party. Adolf kept destroying the
Reich
’s enemies till bedtime, while Claudia played with the American doll.

Heinrich had a key. After the younger children went to sleep, there was nothing to keep Käthe and Drucker from climbing the stairs to their own bedroom. With the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Drucker took the second gift-wrapped package from under a spare pillow in the closet and handed it to her. She let out a small shriek of happy surprise. “Why didn’t you give this to me with everything else?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he answered, and closed the bedroom door as she opened the package. She let out another small shriek: it held a pair of frilly garters and other bits of lace and near-transparency. He grinned. “Gift-wrapping for you.”

She looked at him sidelong. “And then, I suppose, you’ll expect to unwrap me.”

Before very long, he did just that. Some little while after she was unwrapped, they lay side by side, naked and happy. He toyed idly with her nipple. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

“I hope it was,” she told him, her voice arch.

“Jawohl!”
he answered, as he might have to his commanding general. He wished he could have raised a different sort of salute, but that took longer in middle age.

She lay quiet for so long, he wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Then she said “Hans?” in tones altogether different from the ones she had been using. He made a wordless noise to show he was listening. She leaned over and whispered in his ear: “My father’s mother . . . I think she really was a Jew.”

He didn’t say anything right away. Whatever he said, he knew, would touch, would shape, the rest of their lives together. Silence, on the other hand, would only alarm her. He whispered back: “As long as the
Gestapo
doesn’t think so, who cares?” She hugged him, then burst into tears, and then, very quickly, did go to sleep. After a couple of hours, so did he.

 10

“I do not understand,” Felless said. She had said that many, many times since coming to the Greater German
Reich
. Most of the time, as now, she did not mean she could not understand the translator who was rendering some official’s words into the language of the Race. For a Big Ugly, this translator spoke the language well enough. What he said, though, and what the official said, made no sense to her.

“I will repeat myself,” the security official said. He seemed patient enough, willing enough, to make himself clear. Because he had lost most of the hair on top of his head, he looked a little less alien to her than did a lot of Tosevites. Below a wide forehead, his face was narrow, with a pointed chin. He spoke in the guttural Deutsch language. The translator turned his words into those Felless could follow: “The Jews deserve extermination because they are an inferior race.”

“Yes, you have said that before,
Gruppenführer
Eichmann,” Felless said. “But saying something and demonstrating it is true are not the same. Is it not so that the Jews have given the Tosevite notempire known as the United States many able scientists? Is it not true that the Jews under the rule of the Race are thriving in Poland and Palestine and . . . and elsewhere?” She had learned some Tosevite geography, but not much.

“These things are true, Senior Researcher, yes,” Eichmann said calmly. “In fact, they prove my point.”

Felless’ jaw muscles tensed. She wanted to bite him. The urge was atavistic, and she knew it. But maybe pain would make him come out with something she recognized as sense. “
How
does it prove your point?” she demanded. “Does it not seem to prove exactly the opposite?”

“By no means,” Eichmann said. “For the purpose and highest destiny of any race is to form a—” The interpreter hesitated. He said, “The term
‘volkisch’
has no exact translation in the language of the Race. What the
Gruppenführer
means is that it is the destiny of each kind of Tosevite to form a not-empire made up of that particular kind and no other.”

A thousand questions occurred to Felless, starting with,
Why?
She suspected—indeed, she was certain—that one would not take her anywhere she wanted to go. She tried a different one instead: “How are the Jews in any way different from this?”

“They are incapable of forming a not-empire of their own,” Eichmann answered, still sounding unimpassioned, matter-of-fact. “Instead, they dwell within not-empires other, better races have created, as disease viruses dwell within a body. And, again like viruses, they poison and destroy the bodies in which they dwell.”

“Let us assume much of what you say is true,” Felless said. “Has this conclusion you draw from the data been proved experimentally? Has anyone given these Jews land on which to set up a not-empire? Have they tried and failed? What sort of experimental control could you devise?”

“They have not tried and failed,” Eichmann replied. “They have not tried at all, which demonstrates they are incapable.”

“Perhaps it only demonstrates they have not had an opportunity,” Felless said.

Eichmann shook his head back and forth, a Big Ugly gesture of negation. “There has been no independent Jewish not-empire for two thousand years.”

Felless laughed in his face. “First, this is an inadequate sample. Two thousand years—even two thousand of your long years—is no great time in terms of the history of a race or group, regardless of your opinion. Second, you are arguing in a circle. You say the Jews cannot form a not-empire because for this period of time they have had no opportunity to form a not-empire, and then you say they have had no opportunity because they cannot form a not-empire. You may have one fork of the tongue or the other on that argument; you may not have both.”

Gruppenführer
Eichmann stirred behind his desk. The translator murmured to Felless: “The
Gruppenführer
is not used to such disrespect, even from a male of the Race.”

That made Felless laugh again. “For one thing, I am not a male of the Race. I am a female of the Race, as should be obvious to you. For another, when elementary logic is classed as disrespect, I am not sure rational discussion between the
Gruppenführer
and me is possible.”
I am not sure the
Gruppenführer
is even an intelligent creature. But his kind controls explosive-metal weapons. One day soon, they may begin to try to build a starship. What do we do then?

“I have here a choice,” Eichmann said. “I can follow what you say, a female of an alien species who has no personal experience of Tosev 3 and its races and kinds. Or I can follow the words and teachings of Hitler in his famous book
My Struggle.
Hitler spent his whole life pondering these problems. I trust his solutions far more than I trust yours. If this makes me seem illogical in your eyes, I am willing to pay such a price.”

He was as impervious as landcruiser armor. From his perspective, what he said made a certain amount of sense—but only a certain amount, for his conclusions, as far as Felless could see, remained those of a lunatic. His notions—and, presumably, this Hitler’s notions—of the importance of an individual not-empire for every minutely different variety of Tosevite also struck her as absurd. Her own bias, she admitted to herself, was for the unity and simplicity of the Empire.

She tried again: “If every Tosevite faction should have its own not-empire, how do you justify the rule of the
Reich
over the Français and the Belgians and the Danes and other such different groups of—of Tosevites?” Big Uglies, she recalled just in time, sometimes took offense at being called Big Uglies to their big, ugly faces.

“That, Senior Researcher, is very simple,” Eichmann answered. “We have defeated them on the battlefield. This proves our superiority over them and demonstrates our right to rule them.”

“Is it not so that they have also defeated you on the battlefield from time to time?” Felless asked. “Are these events not random fluctuations of strength rather than tests of competitive virtue in the evolutionary sense?”

“By no means,” the Deutsch male answered through the interpreter. “Truth, at one time the Français defeated us. But that was a hundred fifty years ago, and since that time they have mongrelized themselves, thus weakening their race to the point where we were easily able to defeat them not once but three times—though in the middle conflict we were robbed of our victory by a stab in the back.”

Felless did laugh again. She couldn’t help it. “The absurdity of imagining that evolution proceeds in such a fashion, or can have profound results in so few generations, is almost beyond description.”

“What is beyond description is the arrogance of the Race in imagining it can come to our planet and presume to understand us in so short a time,” Eichmann said.

Understand the Tosevites? Especially the Deutsch Tosevites? Felless did not think she would ever do that. She said, “Even the Tosevite authorities in the other not-empires, and also those in areas ruled by the Race, disagree with the interpretation offered by the
Reich
.”

“And what would you expect?” Eichmann’s shoulders moved up and down in a Tosevite gesture of indifference similar to the one the Race used. “When Jews dominate these other not-empires—and also the areas of the planet that you administer—they will naturally try to conceal scientific fact that places them in a bad light.”

“Jews do not dominate the areas of this planet that the Race rules,” Felless said, and added an emphatic cough. “The Race dominates those areas.”

“So you think now,” the Deutsch security official said. “One day before too long, you will say something else—if you ever notice the puppet strings attached to your wrists and ankles. But perhaps you will not even realize you wear shackles.”

That did it. The idea of Big Uglies of any sort manipulating the Race without the Race’s knowledge was too absurd to contemplate. Felless rose from her chair—which, being made for Big Uglies, was none too comfortable anyhow—and said, “I see no point to further discussion along these lines. I must say, I find it strange that Tosevites who accept the Race’s superior knowledge in so many areas refuse to believe our knowledge superior in others.”

To her disappointment, Eichmann did not rise to the bait. “I agree: this is pointless,” he said. “I acceded to your request for an interview as a courtesy, nothing more. I have long been aware of the Race’s profound ignorance in matters having to do with the relations among groups of Tosevites and the menace of the Jews. Good day.”

“Good day.” Tailstump quivering with rage, Felless stalked out of Eichmann’s office, out of the bleak stone pile known as the Kaiserburg, and into the Tosevite-made vehicle waiting for her without even noticing the frozen water on the ground or the temperatures conducive to keeping water frozen. “Take me back to the embassy this instant,” she snarled to the driver. “This instant, do you hear me?”

“It shall be done, superior female,” the driver said. Wisely, he said not another word till he had delivered the researcher to the one Homelike place in all Nuremberg.

She went up to her quarters in the same high dudgeon in which she had departed from Eichmann’s workplace. Once there, she entered into the data system the conversation she’d had with the Big Ugly while it was still fresh—revoltingly fresh—in her memory. Even the acid commentary she entered along with the interview failed to relieve her temper.

I should have bitten him,
she thought.
By the Emperor, I really should have bitten him.
Then she stopped and shuddered.
By associating with Big Uglies, I am becoming as uncivilized as they are.

She went next door and asked for admittance to Ttomalss’ chamber. Instead of admittance, she got a recorded message saying he was doing field research of his own and would be back in the midafternoon.

Felless muttered and hissed discontentedly. She’d asked Ttomalss to assist her. She had not asked him to undertake autonomous research. Being around the Big Uglies, with their passion for individualism, had corrupted him, too.

Back to her own quarters she went. She remained anything but happy. Associating with Tosevites could not possibly leave anyone happy, or so she was convinced. But the depth of her own rage and frustration and despair appalled her. Ever since her premature revival, she had had nothing but bad news about Tosev 3 and its inhabitants.

Maybe she could find better news. Maybe the better news would come, in a way, from Tosev 3. The way she felt now, any change would be an improvement. Ttomalss would not approve, but, at the moment, she didn’t care what Ttomalss thought. Ttomalss had gone off to do something on his own. Felless laughed. She wondered if, when he returned—it wouldn’t be too long—he would know what she’d done. She laughed again. She doubted it. He knew plenty about Big Uglies, but that seemed to be all he knew.

She went over to her desk and opened one of the drawers. In it, after not so long on Tosev 3, she’d already stowed four or five vials of the herb called ginger. This male or that one, all of them longtimers on this dreadful, chilly world, had given the herb to her, saying it would improve the way the place looked. Up till now, she hadn’t experimented; the stuff
was
against regulations. After the meeting with the Deutsch male called Eichmann, she didn’t care. All she cared about was relief.

She poured some ginger into the palm of her hand. The odor hit her scent receptors: spicy, alien, alluring. Her tongue shot out, almost of itself. In moments, the ginger was gone. In only moments more, the herb reached Felless’ brain.

“Why did somebody not
tell
me?” she murmured through the ecstasy suffusing her. She had never imagined it could be so good. She was smarter, quicker, more powerful than she’d ever imagined being. The only sensation that compared to it was mating, which she suddenly recalled much more vividly than she had since the last time she came into her season.

Mirth and joy filled her. So did the desire for another taste. She poured more ginger onto her palm. Would Ttomalss notice? She’d find out soon.