Second Contact (45 page)

And he would have to give it. The way things were in Britain these days, he would have to do whatever Roundbush told him to do. The group captain had said he would help Goldfarb emigrate. With each passing day, that looked like a better idea . . . if Roundbush had told the truth.

Putting the group captain out of his mind—for a little while—Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Looks like they’re going hammer and tongs at that space station of theirs,” he remarked. “They’ll really have something when they finally get it done.”

“Oh, that they will, sir—summat grand.” But McKinnon, in spite of what he said, did not sound as if he agreed with Goldfarb. A moment later, he explained why: “And once they’ve got it, what will they do with it? What good will it do them? We can get our toes out into space, aye, but it really belongs to the Lizards.”

“For now it does, yes,” Goldfarb admitted. “And it doesn’t look like it’ll ever belong to Britain, does it?” Saying that pained him. Back before the Lizards came, Britain had been at the forefront of science and technology. British radar had kept the Nazis from invading in 1940. British jet engines had been well in advance of everybody else’s, including the Germans’. When space travel came, what was more natural than to assume it would come from the British Empire?

But the British Empire was only a memory now. And the British Isles lacked the resources for a space program of their own. What resources they had, they’d put into landand submarine-based rockets with which they could make any invader—Lizards, Nazis, even Americans—pay a dreadful price.

And so Britain remained independent. But the continentbestriding powers—the USA, the USSR, the Greater German
Reich
—also strode beyond the planets, strode on the moon, on Mars, and even on the asteroids. As a boy, Goldfarb had dreamt of being the first man on the moon, of walking beside a Martian canal.

A Nazi had been the first man on the moon. There were no Martian canals. So the Lizards said, and they turned out to be right. They still couldn’t understand why men wanted to set foot on such a useless, worthless world.

Goldfarb understood it. But, even for the Yanks who’d gone to Mars and then come home again, it must have seemed like a consolation prize. Whatever people did in space, the Lizards had done it thousands of years before.

“If we could build a ship that would pay a call on Home, that would be something,” Goldfarb said dreamily.

“It’d be summat the Lizards didn’t fancy, and go ahead and try telling me I’m wrong, sir,” McKinnon said. “That’d be the last thing they wanted: us coming to pay them a call, I mean.”

“So it would. They wouldn’t know what kind of call we aimed to pay them,” Goldfarb answered. He thought about it for a moment. “And I’m damned if I know what kind of call we ought to pay them, either. It would be nice if we could give them as much to think about as they’ve given us, wouldn’t it?”

McKinnon’s expression of naked longing reminded Goldfarb that the Scot’s relatively recent ancestors had been in the habit of painting themselves blue and swinging claymores as tall as they were. “Aye, wouldn’t it be sweet to drop a nice, fat atomic bomb down the Emperor’s chimney? The Lizards could scarce blame us, not after all they’ve done here.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that would stop them from blaming us.” Goldfarb’s voice was dry. “What I’d like to do, though, is send ships to other planets in the Empire and see if we could free the Rabotevs and Hallessi. They can’t like the Lizards lording it over them, can they?”

But even as he said that, he wondered. The Lizards had ruled those other two worlds for a long time. Maybe the aliens on them really did take the Empire for granted. People didn’t work that way, but the Lizards didn’t work like people, so why should their subjects? And people hadn’t ruled other people for anywhere near that many thousand years. Maybe obedience, even acquiescence, had become ingrained into the natives of Halless 1 and Rabotev 2.

“Might be worth finding out,” McKinnon said. “Pity they aren’t closer. Likely wouldn’t do, sending leaflets through space to ’em.”

“Workers of the worlds, unite!” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The joke should have gone over better than it did. McKinnon’s smile, now, looked distinctly strained. His lips moved—silently, but Goldfarb had no trouble understanding the word they shaped.
Bolshie.

It could have been worse. McKinnon could have said it out loud. That might have wrecked Goldfarb’s career for good, assuming his being a Jew hadn’t already done the job. Being labeled a Bolshevik Jew in a country tilting toward the Greater German
Reich
wasn’t just asking for trouble. It was begging for trouble on bended knee.

“Never mind,” Goldfarb said wearily. “Never bloody mind. That’ll teach me to try to be bloody funny, won’t it?”

McKinnon stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. Goldfarb was not in the habit of making his speech so peppery. He was not in the habit of banging his head against a stone wall, either. He wondered why not. Metaphorically, he did it every day. Why not be literal about it, too?

He looked at his watch. The luminous dots by the numbers and the hands told him the time in the darkened room. “Shift’s almost over,” he remarked in something close to his normal tone of voice. “Thank heaven.”

Jack McKinnon did not argue with him. Maybe that meant the veteran sergeant would be relieved to go outside and get some fresh air, or something as close to it as Belfast’s sooty atmosphere yielded. But maybe, and more likely, it meant McKinnon would be glad to escape from being cooped up in the same room with a damned crazy Jew.

At last, after what certainly seemed like forever, McKinnon and Goldfarb’s reliefs showed up. The Scotsman hurried away without words, without even his usual,
See you tomorrow.
He would see Goldfarb tomorrow, whether he liked it or not.
Not,
at the moment, seemed ahead on points.

Shaking his head, Goldfarb got onto his bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as he could. Since everyone else in Belfast had got off at about the same time, that was not very fast. He hated traffic jams. Too many people in motorcars pretended they could not see the plebeians on bicycles. He had to swerve sharply a couple of times to keep from getting hit.

When he did get back to his flat in the married officers’ quarters, he was something a good deal less than his best. Normally patient with his children, he barked at them till they retreated in dismay. He barked at Naomi, too, something he scarcely ever did. She used a privilege denied the children and barked back. That brought him up short.

“Here,” she said with brisk practicality. “Drink this.”
This
was a couple of jiggers of neat whiskey poured into a glass. “Maybe it will make you decent company again. If it doesn’t, it will put you to sleep.”

“Maybe it will make me beat you,” he said, full of mock ferocity. Had there been the slightest likelihood he would actually do that, the words would never have passed his lips. But, while he might talk too much when he’d had a drop or two too many, he’d never yet turned mean.

“If you’re going to beat me, why don’t you wait till after supper?” Naomi suggested. “That way, I won’t be tempted to pour a pot of boiling potato soup in your lap.” She cocked her head to one side. “Well, not very tempted, anyhow.”

“No, eh?” he said, and knocked back the whiskey. “In that case, I’d better behave myself.”

He behaved himself to the extent of keeping quiet through the soup and through the roast chicken that followed. Then he plopped himself down in front of the televisor to watch the Cologne–Manchester football match. Most of the time, he had no use for the hooligans who came to the stadium to make trouble and to stomp anyone who showed signs of supporting the wrong team. He listened with benign approval as they cursed and booed and hissed the Germans.

“You’d better win,” a leather-lunged heckler bawled, “or it’s the gas chamber for the lot of you!”

Cologne did not win. Neither did they lose. The match ended in a 1–1 tie. Goldfarb scowled as he turned off the set. He wanted, he craved certainties, and the match, like life, offered nothing but ambiguity.

Although the Manchester coach spent several minutes explaining why the tie was really as good as a victory, he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself. Goldfarb was glad when he disappeared and the blandly handsome face of a BBC newsreader filled the screen.

“Another round of public fornication among the Lizards was observed in London today,” he remarked after touching on larger disasters. “Fortunately, in this day and age, there are few horses left to startle, and mere human beings have grown increasingly blasé in the face of the Race’s continued randiness. In fashion news—”

Goldfarb snorted. He tremendously admired traditional British restraint, not least because he had so little of it in his own makeup. He’d once thought the Lizards similarly restrained, but ginger and the arrival of females had changed his mind there. With what ginger had done to his own life, he wished the Lizards had never heard of it.

“Finally this evening,” the newsreader went on, “M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists introduced a bill in Parliament proposing to restrict the legal privileges of certain citizens of the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the bill appears to have no chance of passage, Sir Oswald said it continued an important statement of principle, and—”

With a curse, Goldfarb got up and turned off the televisor. He stood by it, shaking. Was that fury or fear? Both at once, he judged. It had started here. At last, it had started here.

 12

Glen Johnson studied
Peregrine
’s radar screen. More than anything else up here, including his bare eyes, it told him what he needed to know. Everything was, or seemed to be, as it should have been. He didn’t know exactly what all the targets he saw were, but he hadn’t known that for some time: all three spacegoing human powers and the Lizards kept right on changing the orbits on their weapons installations.

He sighed. Everyone should have cut that crap out after whoever it was struck at the colonizing fleet. Down on Earth, somebody was laughing himself silly because he’d hit the Lizards a good lick and got away with it.

But that stunt could not work twice. The Lizards had made it very plain they wouldn’t let it work twice. Looking at things out of their eye turrets, Johnson couldn’t blame them. If anyone struck at them now, everyone would regret it. That made all the maneuvering out here seem pointless at best, provocative at worst. It went on even so.

“Stupid,” he muttered under his breath, and stupid it undoubtedly was. That didn’t mean it would stop. Who’d said,
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people?
He couldn’t recall, but it was true, and not only of Americans.

His low, fast orbit meant he kept passing things traveling in higher, slower paths around the Earth. Several
Falcon
-class ships were in orbit at any given time, to make sure they kept a close eye on everything that was going on. When Johnson spotted the large target on his radar, he thought for a moment that it was a ship from the colonization fleet. But the orbit was wrong for that. Moreover, by its transponder signal, it didn’t belong to the Lizards at all. As a matter of fact, it was as American as the
Peregrine
.

He whistled softly and thumbed on his radio. “
Peregrine
to Space Station.
Peregrine
to Space Station. Over.”

The signal came back a moment later: “Go ahead,
Peregrine.
Over.”

“That thing is really going up there, isn’t it?” Johnson had to remember to add, “Over.”

He got laughter back. “Sure is,
Peregrine.
Any day now, we’re opening up our own supermarket.”

“Damned if I don’t believe you,” he said. “My last flight up, you weren’t anything special at all on my radar. This time, first thing I thought was that you belonged to the colonization fleet.”

That won him more laughter. “Pretty funny,
Peregrine.
We’ve got a lot we’re going to be doing up here, that’s all, so the place has to get bigger.”

“Roger that,” Johnson answered. “But what do the Lizards think about you? They don’t like anybody coming up here but them.”

“Oh, they don’t worry about us,” the radio operator on the space station said. “We’re a great, big, fat target, and we’re too damn heavy to do much in the way of maneuvering. If real trouble starts, you can call us the
Sitting Duck
.”

“Okay,” Johnson said. He didn’t ask what sort of weapons the space station carried. That was none of his business, and even less the business of whoever might be monitoring this frequency. “Over and out.”

Sitting Duck,
eh?
he thought, and shook his head.
More likely the
Sitting Porcupine. If that radioman hadn’t been sandbagging, he was a monkey’s uncle. The USA wouldn’t put anything so big and prominent into space without giving it some way to take care of itself. Even the Lizards weren’t that naive. They’d thought they would be facing knights in shining armor (or rusty armor—he remembered some of the pictures from their probe), but they’d come loaded for bear.

What impressed him most about the space station wasn’t its likely armament but, as he’d told the radio operator, how fast it was growing. An awful lot of launches had to be ferrying men and supplies up there. As far as he was concerned, that sort of spaceflight was bus driver’s work, but there was a lot of bus driver’s work going on to make the station expand so quickly.

He scratched his chin, wondering if he’d be able to finagle a ride up there himself, to see with his own eyes what was going on. After a moment, he nodded. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange.

A Lizard radar station called from the ground to inform him his orbit was satisfactory. “I thank you,” he answered in the language of the Race. The Lizard on the radio had sounded sniffy, as Lizards had a way of doing. If his orbit hadn’t been satisfactory, the Lizard would have been screaming his head off.

Johnson suddenly laughed. “That’s what it is!” he exclaimed, speaking aloud to enjoy the joke more. “There’s thousands of tons of powdered ginger up there, and they’re going to drop it on the Lizards’ heads. Wouldn’t that produce some satisfied customers?”

He knew he was anthropomorphizing. When the Lizards didn’t have it, they didn’t miss it the way people would. But when they were interested, they were a lot more interested than anybody above the age of nineteen could hope to understand.

“Hello, American spacecraft. Over.” The call was in crisp, gutturally flavored English. “Who are you?”

“
Peregrine
here, Johnson speaking,” Johnson answered. “Who are you, German spacecraft?” The German equivalents of his ship had orbits with about the same period as his own, but, because Peenemünde was a lot farther north than Kitty Hawk, they swung farther north and south than he did, and met only intermittently.

“Drucker here, in
Käthe
,” the flier from the
Reich
answered. “And I wish I were in Käthe right now, and not up here. Do I say this right
auf Englisch
?”

“If you mean what I think you mean, yeah, that’s how you say it,” Johnson replied with a chuckle. “Wife or girlfriend, Drucker? I forget.”

“Wife,” Drucker answered. “I am a lucky man, I know, to be still in love with the woman I married. Have you a wife, Johnson?”

“Divorced,” Johnson said shortly. “Spent too much time away from her, I guess. She got fed up with it.” She’d run away with a traveling salesman, was what Stella had done, but Johnson didn’t advertise that. Unless somebody asked him about her, he didn’t think of her twice a month. He wasn’t a man inclined to dwell on his mistakes.

“I am sorry that to hear,” Drucker said. “Here is to peace between us and confusion to the Lizards.”

“Yeah, I’ll drink to that any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Johnson said. “Every day I’m not up here, I mean.”

“They think all I have here is water and ersatz coffee and a horrible powder that turns water into something that is supposed to taste like orange juice,” Drucker said. “They are wrong.” He sounded happy they were wrong.

“Somebody’s listening to you,” Johnson warned.

“They will not shoot me for saying I do not like the tang of their orange drink,” the German answered. “They need a better reason than that.”

For once, Johnson wished the radio speaker in the
Peregrine
weren’t so tinny. He thought Drucker’s voice had an edge to it, but couldn’t be sure. He was probably imagining things. Spacemen were part of the Nazi elite. The
Gestapo
wouldn’t go after them. It would pick some poor, beat-up foreigners who couldn’t even complain.

After a pause that stretched, Drucker went on, “You and I and even the Bolsheviks in their flying tin cans—if we were not here, the Lizards would be able to do whatever they chose.”

“That’s so,” Johnson agreed. “Doesn’t mean we get along with each other, though.”

“Well enough not to use the rockets and bombs we have all built,” Drucker said. “That is well enough, when you think of how the world is.”

His signal was starting to break up as his flight path carried him south of the
Peregrine
. Glen Johnson found himself nodding. “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, pal. Safe landing to you.”

“Safe . . .” A burst of static drowned out the last of the German’s words.

The rest of Johnson’s tour was uneventful. He approved of that. Events in space meant things going wrong—either in
Peregrine
, which was liable to kill him, or outside the ship, which was liable to mean the whole world and most of the spacecraft in orbit around it would go up in smoke.

He got down to Kitty Hawk in one piece. After the usual interrogation—almost as if he were a captured prisoner and not an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps—the bright young captain who’d grilled him asked, “And do you have any questions of your own, sir?”

It was, for the most part, a ritualistic question. Past the latest sports scores, what would a returning pilot want to know about what had happened during the mission he’d just completed? He knew better than anybody.

But, this time, Johnson said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” The captain’s eyes widened; Johnson had taken him by surprise. But he recovered quickly, using a gracious gesture to urge the
Peregrine
’s pilot to go ahead. And Johnson did: “What are they throwing into that space station to make it grow so fast?”

“Sorry, sir, but I really don’t know a thing about that,” the captain replied. “Not my area of responsibility.”

“Okay,” Johnson said with a smile and a shrug. He got to his feet. So did the young captain, who gave him a precise salute. He did an about-face and left the interrogation room. As soon as he got outside, he scratched his head. Unless everything he’d learned about human nature over a lot of tables with poker chips on them was wrong, that bright young captain had been lying through his shiny white teeth.

Johnson scratched his head again. He could think of only one reason why the captain would lie: whatever was going on aboard the space station was secret. It had to be a pretty juicy secret, too, because the captain didn’t want him to know it was there at all. Had the fellow just said,
Sorry, sir—classified,
Johnson would have shrugged and gone about his business. Now, though, his bump of curiosity itched. What were they hiding, up there a few hundred miles?

Something the Lizards wouldn’t like.
He didn’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out. He couldn’t see the Race breaking out in a sweat about whatever it was, though, not when they had starships from two different fleets practically blanketing the Earth.

“Security,” Johnson muttered, making it into a dirty word. And at that, he had it good. He wouldn’t have traded places with the Nazi in the upper stage of that A-45, not for all the tea in China he wouldn’t. And Russia was no better place to live than Germany, not if half of what people said was true.

Let’s hear it for the last free country in the world,
he thought as he headed toward the bar to buy himself a drink to celebrate being alive. Even England was slipping these days. Johnson sadly shook his head. Who would have thought, back in the days when the limeys battled Germany singlehanded, they would have ended up sliding toward the
Reich
an inch at a time?

He shrugged again. Who would have thought . . . a whole lot of things over the past twenty years? If the United States had to get secret to stay free, he didn’t see anything in the whole wide world wrong with that.

He was on his second whiskey before the irony there struck him. By the time he’d started his third one, he’d forgotten all about it.

Atvar was glad to return to Australia. It was late summer in this hemisphere now, and the weather was fine by any standards, those of Home included. Even in Cairo, though, the weather had been better than bearable. What pleased him more was how far the colony had come since his last visit.

“Then, all we had were the starships,” he said to Pshing. “Now look! A whole thriving city! Streets, vehicles, shops, a power plant, a pipeline to the desalination center—a proper city for the Race.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant replied. “Before very much longer, it will be like any city back on Home.”

“Indeed it will,” Atvar said with an emphatic cough. “This is going according to plan. When we proceed according to plan, we can move at least as fast as the Big Uglies. And here in the center of Australia, we shall have no Big Uglies interfering with our designs, except for the occasional savage like the one I saw the last time I was here. But this is and shall forevermore be
our
place on Tosev 3.”