Second Contact (41 page)

Monique burst into tears. Through them, she pointed to the door. “Get out.” Rather to her surprise, Kuhn left. She cried for a long time even so.

Straha turned one eye up from the documents and photographs Major Sam Yeager had given him toward the Tosevite himself. “You are confirming what my sources in lands ruled by the Race have already reported to me,” he said. “I find it highly amusing. Would you not agree?”

“I just might, Shiplord,” Yeager answered. “For the past twenty years, the Race has been calling us sexually wild, and now your males and females are mating whenever they get the chance. Yes, that is pretty funny, all right.”

“Atvar will be shedding his skin in patches,” Straha said with a certain morbid relish. “Females coming into heat outside the proper mating season will be something new and unexpected. The Race is not at its best dealing with the new and unexpected.” He added an emphatic cough. “And Atvar is not good at dealing with the new and unexpected even for a male of the Race.”

Yeager said, “If you already knew this, Shiplord, I am sorry I had you come down to my house to look at these things.”

“Do not concern yourself,” Straha answered. “I know that one of the things I am is a Tosevite tool. I chose the role myself, if you will recall.” He laughed a small laugh. “How strange that the herb which gives males so much pleasure turns out to give females and males even more.”

“Shiplord, that is one of the things I wanted to ask you,” Yeager said. “There are a couple of females of the Race in Los Angeles now. If we were to arrange to give them some ginger while you were around . . . if you want us to do that, we can take care of it for you. You have done a lot for us over the years.”

Straha thought about it, then made the negative hand gesture. “You mean this generously, I have no doubt. I believe a Big Ugly who had gone without a female for as long as I have would be inclined to accept. But a male of the Race, you must understand, has no desire until his scent receptors catch the odor of a female in her season.”

“No, I do understand that,” Yeager answered. “If we gave one of these females ginger, you would smell that odor. I wondered if you wanted to, is all.”

“Again, I say thank you, but no,” Straha said. “I am content to remain as I am. If I could join fully in the colonies now forming, it might be something else, but I know it will never be permitted.”

Exile.
Once more, the word beat at him. It was what he was. He would never be anything else. He could never be anything else. If Atvar died tomorrow, his replacement would be Kirel, who might as well have hatched from the same egg. And Reffet, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet, was too new-come to Tosev 3 to understand what had driven Straha to do as he did.

Suppose he had succeeded in overthrowing Atvar, after the Big Uglies set off their first explosive-metal bomb. Suppose he had gone on to conquer the whole chilly, miserable planet. What would he do now?—for surely some females would taste ginger under his regime. He longed for a taste himself right now, as he sat here talking with Yeager.

He truly did not know what he would do. He did know Atvar was welcome to the problem. Whatever Atvar did would probably be a half measure, too little and too late. That was Atvar’s way. Straha said as much.

“It is not easy to figure out what he might do,” Yeager said, echoing Straha’s thought. “A lot of ginger goes into the parts of Tosev 3 the Race occupies, and a lot gets grown there, too. I do not see how the Race will be able to stop females from tasting it. And when they do . . .”

“Indeed, Sam Yeager,” Straha said. “Preventing that will be difficult. And I have heard that females continue to give off the pheromones for some time after first being stimulated to do so by the herb.”

“I had not heard that. I had better write it down.” Yeager did. The chimes at his front door pealed. He got to his feet. “Excuse me.” He hurried out to see who was there; he had no intercom to check from back here in his study.

After the door opened, Straha heard Yeager speaking English: “Oh, hello, Karen. Come on in. Jonathan’s back in his bedroom. Chemistry tonight, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, Mr. Yeager. He’s got to help me on this one—he’s better at it than I am.” This voice was higher and thinner than Yeager’s: it came, Straha judged, from a female Big Ugly. And, sure enough, the Tosevite who walked past the doorway wore her coppery hair long and possessed—and, indeed, displayed—prominent mammary glands. She also displayed a lot of skin, which was painted in a good imitation of the pattern a mine-clearance underofficer wore.

Straha did not know what to make of young Big Uglies imitating the Race like that. The first time he’d seen it, a couple of years before, he’d been offended. Now he was more nearly resigned, and hoped it meant assimilation in action. Even Sam Yeager’s offspring decorated himself so.

“Oh,” the young Tosevite said, seeing him. She assumed the posture of respect about as well as a Big Ugly could and shifted from English to the language of the Race: “I greet you, superior sir.”

“I greet you, Mine-Clearance Underofficer,” Straha replied with wry amusement. “My proper title is Shiplord.”

“Ship—?” The female’s small eyes went as wide as they could. Still in the posture of respect, she said, “I meant no offense.”

“I do not reckon myself insulted.” Straha watched her staring at his ornate body paint, and wondered if she would be sporting something like it soon. “You speak and understand my language well,” he said. “Now go and study your chemistry. It may prove useful to you later in life.”

From behind the young female, Sam Yeager spoke again in English: “Yeah, run along, Karen. I’m talking shop here, I’m afraid.” On she went, that bright hair shining. Yeager came back into the study. “I hope she did not disturb you too much, Shiplord.”

“By her presence? No,” Straha replied. “I spoke truth when I said she spoke well. But I hope you will not be insulted when I say I would sooner have a more experienced underofficer in charge of securing a mined area.”

“As a matter of fact, I agree with you.” Yeager shook his head, a gesture of bemusement Straha understood. “But I sometimes think a lot of young males and females would sooner belong to the Race than to their own kind.” He laughed a loud Tosevite laugh. “Even the ones who imitate the Race most closely, though, forget how different your mating habits are from ours. Imitating those would not be easy for them.”

“As things seem to have turned out, your young females and males would say they are imitating our females and males under the influence of ginger,” Straha observed. “That would let them do anything they like in matters pertaining to mating.”

“They already come too close to doing anything they like,” Yeager answered. “It was not like this when I was an adolescent. And my father could have said the same thing before me, and his father before him.”

“There in a sentence you have the difference between your species and mine,” Straha replied. “With us, everything is always the same from one generation to the next.” He paused. “Though I do wonder whether that will hold as true on Tosev 3 as it has on the other worlds we rule. Everything we do here seems built on sand.”

“If you cannot change on this world, you are going to have problems, sure enough,” Sam Yeager said.

“Changing our mating habits will not be easy,” Straha said. “But I can also see that keeping from changing our mating habits will not be easy, either. I crave ginger right now. Surely females will crave it as much as males. If at each taste it stimulates them to give off the pheromones that indicate they are in season . . . life on this planet will grow even more complicated for us than it is already.”

“You had better get used to the idea, then,” Yeager said. “How do you suppose it will change your society?”

“I do not know. In the absence of data, I would sooner not try to guess,” Straha replied. “My kind is not so given to reckless speculation as is yours.” He pointed to the Tosevite. “I will tell you this, however: life for you independent Big Uglies has also grown more complicated than it used to be.”

“How do you mean?” Yeager asked, and then checked himself. “Oh. Of course. The attack against the colonization fleet.”

“Yes, the attack against the colonization fleet,” Straha agreed. “You Big Uglies learn quickly, but you also forget quickly. The Race is different. If, two hundred years from now, the Race learns which not-empire is guilty of that attack, we will punish that not-empire. And we will be searching for the truth through all those two hundred years.”

“I understand,” Yeager said, but Straha wondered if he really did. He was, after all, a Tosevite himself, even if he had unusual insight into the way the Race thought.

“Is there anything else?” Straha asked him. Yeager shook his head again, this time in negation. Typical Tosevite inefficiency, Straha thought, to have one gesture do duty for two separate meanings. The exile shiplord got to his feet. “Then I shall depart. I now have much to think about, and so, I would imagine, have you.”

“Truth,” said Yeager. He walked with Straha to the front door, and stood watching till the male had got into the Tosevite vehicle in which he was conveyed from one point to another in this city—which was not small even by the standards of the Race.

“Take me back to my home,” he told the Big Ugly who was his driver and guard.

“It shall be done, Shiplord.” The fellow started the vehicle’s motor. As he did so, he remarked, “That was an attractive female who went into Major Yeager’s house.” He appended an emphatic cough.

“If you say so,” Straha answered. “I am glad you found something to amuse you while I was talking with the major. On me, I assure you, the attractiveness, if any, of the female was wasted. I did note, however, that she made a most improbable mine-clearance underofficer.”

His driver laughed. “I believe it!” He glanced back at Straha, a habit the shiplord wished he would forget while the motorcar was moving. “How do you judge if a female of the Race is attractive?”

“By scent more than by sight,” Straha answered absently. He wondered if he should have told Yeager he wanted to mate with a female after all. If he was lucky, his eggs would join in the new society the Race was building here, even if he could not. He shrugged. Mating simply was not the urgent matter with him that it was for Tosevites. He missed it not at all. Getting home to his ginger struck him as much more urgent. “Do not dawdle,” he told the driver, and the motorcar went faster.

 11

Rance Auerbach’s laugh, a harsh rasp, sounded almost as much like a death rattle as like honest mirth. “You think it’s true?” he asked Penny Summers. “You reckon ginger really does make those scaly bastards come into heat like it was springtime?”

“Too many people saying it for it to be a lie,” Penny answered. “I think it’s funny as hell, too, matter of fact. Sort of pays them back for all the nasty things they’ve thought about us, you know what I mean?” She lit a Raleigh.

“Give me one of those, will you?” Auerbach said. After he got it going and helped take one more step in wrecking his already damaged lungs, he went on, “Yeah, turnabout’s fair play, all right.”

That made him look out the bedroom window of his Fort Worth apartment, just to see if he noticed anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t. The people whose money Penny had walked off with had promised some turnabout, too. They hadn’t delivered. He was beginning to hope that meant they wouldn’t.

Penny said, “Ought to get some more ginger and smuggle it down into Mexico. Lots of females there, I hear.”

“Think you can?” If Rance didn’t sound dubious, it wasn’t from lack of effort. “There’s some people who aren’t real fond of you, remember?”

“It doesn’t take a whole lot of work to get ginger,” Penny said with a curl to her lip. “Hell, I can buy some down at the grocery store. But I’d want to lime-cure it, make it so the Lizards get all hot and bothered for it, before I took it down. The really tricky part is selling in someone else’s territory. You’re not careful about that, someday somebody’ll find you floating in an irrigation ditch.”

“Why take the chance, then?” Auerbach asked. Ever since the Lizards filled him full of holes, he’d been a lot less enthusiastic about taking chances than back in his Army days.

But Penny’s eyes glittered. “To get a really big stake, why else? I’ve got a good start on one, after I went and stiffed the boys back in Detroit. But I want more. I want enough so I can just go somewhere, get away from everything, and not have to worry about where my next dime is coming from for the rest of my days.”

“Like where?” Rance said, dubious again. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

Penny shook her head. “No, I really mean it. How’s Tahiti sound? About as far away from Kansas as you can get, this side of Oz, anyway.”

Rance grunted thoughtfully. The outfit calling itself Free France still ran Tahiti and the neighboring islands. Neither the USA nor Japan had bothered gobbling them up, partly because that would have set the two at loggerheads, partly because the Free French made themselves very useful: they did business with everybody, people and Lizards alike, and didn’t ask questions of anybody.

“How would you like that?” Penny asked. “You could lay on the beach all day, suck up rum like it was going out of style, and smile at the native girls when they go by without their shirts on. And if you do anything more than smile at ’em, I’ll kick you right in the nuts.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” Auerbach said, and Penny laughed. Before he could say anything else, somebody knocked on the door. “Who the hell’s that?” he muttered, and made his slow way toward it. “It’s not like I get a whole lot of company.”

When he opened the door, he found two men standing in the hallway. One of them, a broad-shouldered, meaty fellow, put a big hand in the center of his chest and pushed, hard. With one bad leg under him, he went over backwards as if he’d been shot. As he fell, the muscular guy’s skinny pal said, “Don’t fuck with us, gimpy, and you’ll keep breathing. We’ve got some business to finish up with your lady friend. I bet you even know what we’re talking about, don’t you?”

Both bruisers started past him, certain Penny was there and also certain he was no danger to them. They’d likely been casing the joint, so their first certainty was accurate. Their second certainty, however, had some flaws. Rance had got used to wearing that .45 in the waistband of his trousers, and the reflexes he’d honed in the Army still worked. Even though both his leg and his shoulder bellowed at him when he hit, he had the heavy pistol in his hand less than a heartbeat later.

He fired without a word of warning. The .45 bucked in his grip. A hole appeared in the back of the heavy man’s jacket. Gore and guts blew out a much bigger hole in the front of his belly—the sort of hole, Auerbach knew from experience, you could throw a dog through.

The bruiser let out a hoarse scream and crumpled. His friend whirled, hand darting for a trouser pocket. He had commendably quick reflexes, but not quick enough to let him outdraw a gun already aimed at him. Auerbach’s first bullet caught him in the chest. He looked very surprised as he stood there swaying. Auerbach shot him again, this time in the face, and the back of his head exploded. He fell on top of the other thug, who was still writhing and shrieking. Auerbach smelled blood and shit and smokeless powder.

Penny came around the corner from the bedroom, pistol in her hand. She didn’t scream or puke or faint. She aimed the pistol at the head of the heavyset ruffian, the one Auerbach had shot from behind, plainly intending to finish him off.

“Don’t,” Rance told her. “Put your piece away. Go back into the bedroom and call the cops. If half a dozen people haven’t done it already, I’m a Chinaman. These two bastards broke in here intending to rob us or whatever the hell, and I plugged ’em. We don’t have to say a word about ginger.”

“Okay, Rance.” She nodded. The broad-shouldered goon had stopped moaning, anyhow; with a wound like that, he wouldn’t last long. “Keep an eye on ’em anyhow, just in case.”

“I will.” With his usual slow, painful movements, Auerbach levered himself up into a chair. He took a look at the carnage, then shook his head. “What do you want to bet the goddamn landlord tries to stick me with the bill for cleaning this up?”

Penny didn’t answer; she’d already gone back into the bedroom to use the telephone. One of Rance’s neighbors stuck her head into his apartment through the open doorway. She saw him before noticing anything else, and started to talk: “Howdy, Rance. Lucille said there was gunshots somewheres, but I told her it wasn’t nothin’ but firecra—” That was when she noticed the two blood-drenched corpses at the back of the living room. She turned white. “Oh, sweet, suffering Jesus!” she blurted, and got the hell out of there.

Auerbach laughed, but he sounded shaky even to himself. He felt shaky, too, as he had after combat against the Lizards.
Reaction setting in,
he thought. He
was
shaky; the .45 trembled in his hand. Deciding neither of the thugs was going to give him any more trouble, he put the safety back on.

From the bedroom, Penny called, “Cops are on the way. You were right—I wasn’t the first one who got through to them.” A minute or so later, Rance heard sirens coming closer. The police cars stopped in front of the apartment building.

Four cops in blue uniforms came running up the stairs, all of them carrying pistols. The first policeman into the apartment looked, whistled, and said over his shoulder, “We ain’t gonna need the ambulance, Eddie, just the coroner’s meat wagon.” He turned to Auerbach. “All right, buddy, what the hell happened here?”

Rance told him what had happened, though he made it sound as if he thought the dead men in his living room were a couple of ordinary robbers, not hired muscle for the ginger smugglers. Another policeman—Eddie?—stepped around the bodies and went to talk with Penny in the bedroom. After a while, he and the cop who’d been talking with Auerbach (his name was Charlie McMillan) put their heads together.

McMillan said, “You and your lady friend tell the same story. I don’t reckon we’ve got any reason to charge you with anything, not when those boys came busting into your place.”

One of the other Fort Worth policemen had stooped beside the bodies. He said, “They’re both packing, Charlie.”

“Okay.” McMillan eyed Rance in a speculative way. “Mighty fine shooting for somebody who’d just got knocked on his ass. Where’d you learn to handle a weapon like that?”

“West Point,” Auerbach answered, which made the policeman’s eyes widen. “I was in the Army till the Lizards shot me up a few months before the fighting stopped. I can’t get around very fast any more—hell, I can’t hardly get around at all any more—but I still know what to do with a .45 in my hand.”

“He sure as hell does,” the cop by the body said. “These boys are history. I don’t make either one of them. You recognize ’em, Charlie?”

McMillan sauntered over and looked at the corpses. As he lit a cigarette, he shook his head. “Sure don’t. They’ve got to be from out of town. I’d know any strongarm boys of our own who were trying to pull jobs like this.” He turned back toward Auerbach. “They picked the wrong guy to start on, that’s for sure.”

“That’s a fact,” the other cop agreed. “You’re not going to charge these folks?”

“Charge ’em? Hell, no.” McMillan shook his head almost hard enough to make his hat fall off. “Ought to be a bounty on sons of bitches like these. All I’m going to do is take Mr. Auerbach’s formal statement, and his lady friend’s, and then wait for the coroner to come take his pictures and haul the bodies away.”

“Okay. Sounds good to me,” the cop by the corpses said. It sounded good to Auerbach, too.
Off the hook,
he thought.

McMillan took out a notebook and a pen. Before he started taking the statement, he remarked, “Maybe their prints’ll tell us who they are. Little Rock may know, even if we don’t.” He stubbed out his cigarette, then said, “All right, Mr. Auerbach, tell it to me again, only slow and easy this time, so I can get it down on paper.”

Auerbach was less than halfway through his statement when a rangy fellow the policemen all called Doc ambled into his apartment. He had a physician’s black bag in one hand and a camera with a flash in the other. After looking at the bodies, he sadly shook his head and said, “That rug’s never gonna be the same.”

As if his words were some kind of signal, Rance’s landlord came in on his heels. He took one look and said, “You get the cleaning bill, Auerbach.”

“I knew you’d tell me that, Jasper,” Auerbach answered. “Have a heart. If they’d shot me, you’d have to pay it yourself.”

“They damn well didn’t, so you can damn well fork over,” the landlord said. The cops rolled their eyes. Auerbach let out a racking sigh. This was a fight he knew he was going to lose.

A couple of husky coroner’s assistants carried the bodies downstairs one at a time on stretchers. The coroner left with them. Jasper was already gone; he’d said what he came to say. Charlie McMillan finished getting statements. Then he and his pals took off, too, leaving Auerbach alone in the apartment with the blood-soaked carpeting.

After putting a couple of ice cubes in a glass, Rance poured whiskey over them. While Penny was building her own drink, he took a long pull at his and said, “You know what? Tahiti sounds pretty goddamn good.”

“Amen,” Penny said, and finished her whiskey at a gulp.

Kassquit wished Ttomalss would return from the surface of Tosev 3. He had never been gone for so long before. None of the other males on the orbiting starship truly treated her like a member of the Race. Up till now, Ttomalss had served as a buffer between her and them. Now, whenever she let herself out of her compartment, she had to deal with them herself. As a result, she left the compartment as seldom as she could.

Even worse than the long-familiar researchers were the males and females from the colonization fleet. As far as they were concerned, she was nothing but a Big Ugly—a barbarian at best, a talking animal at worst. She’d pined for Home; everything she’d read and viewed made her pine for Home. But the males and females new-come from the world at the center of the Empire were far more callous toward her than those more familiar with Tosev 3 and its natives. That hurt.

It hurt so much, she would have spent all her time in her compartment if she could. Unfortunately for her, the Race had long ago determined it was more efficient to gather males and females in one place to eat than to distribute food to each compartment in which someone dwelt or worked.

She’d taken to eating her meals at odd times, times shifted away from those during which males and females normally crowded the galley. That minimized friction with those who did not care for her. Try as she would, though, she could not eliminate it altogether.