Second Contact (52 page)

“It could be so. I had hoped it would be so,” Ttomalss answered. “But I must confess, I am still puzzled by Kassquit’s reaction on learning you and I had mated.” He’d spent a good deal of the time since that unfortunate telephone conversation trying to repair the bond he had formerly established with the Tosevite fosterling. He remained unsure how far he had succeeded.

Felless said, “Mating, as I have been forcibly reminded of late, is not a rational behavior among us. Things relating to it must be even less subject to rational control among the Big Uglies.”

“Now that, superior female, is an insight worth having,” Ttomalss said enthusiastically. “It shows why you were chosen for your present position.” It was, in fact, the first thing he’d noted that showed why Felless was chosen for her present position, but that was one more thing he did not mention.

“You flatter me,” Felless said. As a matter of fact, Ttomalss
did
flatter her, but she offered the sentence as a conversational commonplace, and so he did not have to rise to it.

He had just finished recording Felless’ remark when the computer announced he had a telephone call. He started to instruct it to record a message, but Felless motioned for him to accept it. With a shrug, he did. The computer screen showed a familiar face. Kassquit said, “I greet you, superior sir.”

“I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said, and waited for the sky to fall: she would be seeing not only his image but also Felless’.

To make matters worse, Felless added, “And I greet you, Kassquit.”

“I greet you, superior female,” Kassquit said in tones indicating she would sooner have greeted the female researcher as pilot of a killercraft equipped with tactical explosive-metal missiles.

“What do you want, Kassquit?” Ttomalss asked, hoping he could keep the conversation short and peaceful.

“It was nothing of great importance, superior sir,” the Tosevite he’d raised from a hatchling replied. “I see that you are busy with more important matters, and so will call back another time.”

Had he taught her to flay him with guilt in that fashion? If he hadn’t, where had she learned it? She reached for the switch that would break the connection. “Wait!” Ttomalss said. “Tell me what you want.” Only later, much later, would he wonder if she had moved more slowly than she might have, to make him beg her to stay on the line.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” she said now, and even her obedience wounded. “I was wondering if you, in the capital of the Deutsch not-empire, could hope to have any influence over the smuggling of the illegal herb ginger through the territory of the Greater German
Reich
.”

“I do not know,” Ttomalss said. “The Deutsche, like other Tosevites, have a habit of ignoring such requests. They would doubtless want something from us in exchange for acting otherwise, and might well want something we do not care to yield to them.”

“Still, the notion might be worth considering,” Felless said. Ttomalss had studied Kassquit for a long time. He knew her expressions as well as anyone of a different species could. This was, he thought, the first approval Felless had won from her.

Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker looked from his fitness report to Major General Walter Dornberger’s face. “Sir, if you can explain to me why my marks have slipped from ‘excellent’ to ‘adequate’ in the past year, I would appreciate it.”

That that was all he said, that he didn’t scream at Dornberger about highway robbery struck him as restraint above and beyond the call of duty. He was, he knew perfectly well, one of the best and most experienced pilots at Peenemünde. A fitness report like this said he’d stay a lieutenant colonel till age ninety-two, no matter how good he was.

Dornberger didn’t answer at once, pausing instead to light a cigar. When the base commandant leaned back in his chair, it squeaked. Unlike some—unlike many—in high authority in the
Reich
, he hadn’t used his position to aggrandize himself. That chair, his desk, and the chair in front of it in which Drucker sat were all ordinary service issue. The only ornaments on the walls were photographs of Hitler and Himmler and of the A-10, the A-45’s great-grandfather, ascending to the heavens on a pillar of fire, soon to come down on the Lizards’ heads.

After a couple of puffs and a sharp cough, Major General Dornberger said, “You should know, Lieutenant Colonel, that I was strongly urged to rate you as ‘inadequate’ straight down the line and drum you out of the
Wehrmacht
.”

“Sir?” Drucker coughed, too, without the excuse of tobacco smoke in his lungs. “For the love of God, why, sir?”

“Yes, for the love of God,” Dornberger said, as if in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. “If you think along those lines for a moment, a possible explanation will come to you.”

A moment was all Drucker needed. “Käthe,” he said grimly, and Dornberger nodded. Drucker threw his hands in the air. “But she was cleared of those ridiculous charges!” They weren’t so ridiculous, as he knew better than he would have liked. He chose a different avenue of attack: “And it was thanks to your good offices that she was cleared, too.”

“So it was,” the commandant at Peenemünde said. “And I called in a lot of markers to do the job. I had enough pull left to keep from throwing you out in the street, but not enough to let you keep rising as you should. I’m sorry, old man, but if you haven’t learned by now that life isn’t always fair, you’re a luckier fellow than most your age.”

One of the things Drucker had on his record—the one he bore in his head and heart, fortunately not the one that went down on paper—was joining with the rest of his panzer crew in murdering a couple of SS men in a forest near the Polish-German border to let their colonel and commander go free. As long as that old crime remained undiscovered, he was ahead of the game. That made the present injustice easier to tolerate, though not much.

With a sigh, he said, “I suppose you’re right, sir, but it still seems dreadfully unfair. I’m not that old, and I had hoped to advance in the service of the
Reich
.” That was true. Considering what the
Reich
had done to him and tried to do to his family, though, he wondered why it should be true.

If it weren’t for the
Reich
, we would all be the Lizards’ slaves today.
That was also likely to be true.
So what?
Drucker wondered. He’d always set the personal and immediate ahead of the broad and general. Maybe, because he’d done that, he didn’t deserve to make brigadier, or even colonel. But that would have been a real reason, not the put-up job Dornberger was forcing on him.

“I can give you a consolation prize, if you like,” the base commandant said. Drucker raised a skeptical eyebrow. Dornberger said, “You will fly more this way than you would have had you gone on to promotion.”

Rather to his own surprise, Drucker nodded. “That’s true, sir. Only a consolation prize, though.”

“Yes, I understand as much,” Dornberger said. “But there are people in Nuremberg who are not at all fond of you. That you have come away with a consolation prize is in a way a victory. It is for you now as it was for the
Reich
and the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of the fighting: we kept what we had, but had to yield what we were not directly holding.”

“And we have been plotting ever since to see what sort of changes to that arrangement we can make,” Drucker said. “Very well, sir, I will accept this for now—but if you think I will stop trying to change it, you are mistaken.”

“I understand. I wish you all good fortune,” Major General Dornberger said. “You may even succeed, though I confess it would surprise me.”

“Yes, sir. May I please have the report back?” Drucker said. Dornberger pushed it across the desk to him. Drucker took a pen from his breast pocket and filled out the space on the form reserved for the evaluated officer’s comments with a summary of the reasons he thought the report inadequate. Nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that section of the form stayed blank even on the worst fitness reports. It was universally regarded as being the space where an officer could give his superiors more rope with which to hang him. Having already been hanged, Drucker did not see that he had anything left to lose.

When he finished, he passed the report back to Major General Dornberger. The base commandant read Drucker’s impassioned protest, then scrawled one sentence below it. He held up the sheet so the A-45 pilot could see:
I endorse the accuracy of the above. W.R.D.

That took nerve, especially in view of the pressure to which he’d partially yielded when he wrote the fitness report. “Thank you, sir,” Drucker said. “Of course, most likely the report will go straight into my dossier with no one ever reading it again.”

“Yes, and that may be just as well, too,” Dornberger said. “But now you are on the record, and so am I.” He glanced toward a framed photograph of his wife and children on his desk, then added, “I wish I could have gone further for you, Drucker.”

He said no more, but Drucker understood what he meant. If he hadn’t yielded to at least some of the pressure, he might never have seen his family again. Even major generals could prove little more than pawns in the game of power within the
Reich
. Drucker sighed again. “It shouldn’t be this way, sir.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t, but it is. Sometimes we do what we can, not what we want.” Dornberger took out another cigar. “Dismissed.”

“
Heil
Himmler!” Drucker said as he rose. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth. He saluted and left the commandant’s office.

Outside the office, outside the administration building, Peenemünde bustled on as it had for the past twenty years and more. A breeze blew in from the Baltic, full of the odors of mud and slowly spoiling seaweed. Somewhere along the barbed-wire perimeter of the base, a guard dog yelped excitedly. It was, Drucker knew, more likely to have seen a stray cat than a spy.

Everything at Peenemünde was camouflaged as well as German ingenuity could devise, not so much against spies on the ground as against satellite reconnaissance. Many of the buildings weren’t buildings at all, but dummies of cloth and boards. Some of those even had heaters burning inside, to make them appear as they should to infrared detectors. And all the real buildings were elaborately disguised to seem like nothing but pieces of landscape overhead.

In a way, all that ingenuity was wasted. If the Lizards—or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks or the Americans—ever decided to attack Peenemünde, they weren’t likely to be clinical about it. An explosive-metal bomb would wreck camouflaged and uncamouflaged alike . . . although some of the reinforced-concrete installations underground would stand up to anything but a hit right on top of them.

Drucker shook his head. Everything here was as it had been. Only he’d changed. No, even he hadn’t changed. It was only that the
Reich
had just told him his adult lifetime of service to his country didn’t amount to a pile of potatoes. That hurt. He’d never dreamt how much it would hurt.

Officers of junior grade and enlisted men still stiffened to attention and saluted as he went past. They didn’t notice any changes: as far as they were concerned, a lieutenant colonel remained a figure of godlike authority. His mouth twisted. Eventually, he would be saluting some of them, for his place in the firmament was fixed now, while they might keep on rising.

Drizzle started falling, which perfectly suited his mood. He strode on through the base. A couple of A-45s stood at their gantries, in different stages of preparation for launch. Drucker nodded toward them. They were, in a way, the only friends he had left at Peenemünde. Major General Dornberger’s fitness report, as the commandant pointed out, did leave him clear to keep going into space. That was something: less than he would have liked, but something.

He gave the immense rockets another nod. In an odd way, they looked less futuristic than the old A-10s—vengeance weapons, Hitler had called them. A-10s had had the sharp noses and graceful curves everyone in the pre-Lizard days had thought necessary for rocket ships. The A-45s were simple cylinders, the upper stages as blunt-nosed as Bavarians. Blunt noses had more area with which to absorb the heat of atmospheric friction; cylinders were easier and cheaper to manufacture than the fancier chunks of sheet metal that had flown in the early days.

Drucker sighed. Here as elsewhere, reality proved less romantic than dreamers had thought it would be. He shook his head. Maybe things would have been better had the Lizards never come. With the Russians beaten and rolled back across the Urals, the
Reich
would have had all the
Lebensraum
it needed to show what it could do in Europe. Maybe he and Käthe and the children, instead of living near here, would be growing wheat or maize on the boundless plains of the Ukraine today.

A moment later, the daydream turned to nightmare. The SS could have plucked her off the plains of the Ukraine as readily as from Greifswald. As a simple farmer, he wouldn’t have had friends in high places. They’d have shot her or thrown her in a gas chamber. He’d kept that from happening in the real world. If he was upset at the fitness report’s wrecking his chances for further promotion, how would he have felt with Käthe liquidated?

That thought spawned another one, a blacker one. Liquidating Käthe for having a Jewish grandmother struck Drucker as outrageously unjust, but that was because he knew her and loved her. What about other people with one Jewish grandparent? Was liquidating them just? What about people with two Jewish grandparents? What about people with three? With four? What about people who were out-and-out Jews?

Where did you draw the line?

The
Reich
drew it at one Jewish grandparent. That left Käthe in danger and her children safe. Drucker hadn’t been able to see the sense in it. Would there have been more sense in drawing it at two Jewish grandparents? That would have left Käthe safe, but . . . Was there any sense in liquidating
anybody
because he was Jewish or partly Jewish?