Second Contact (62 page)

As she set a boiled brisket of beef on the table, Bertha Anielewicz said, “I wonder what really happened in Moscow the other day.”

“So do I,” Mordechai Anielewicz answered, picking up the serving fork and carving knife. While he cut portions for his wife, his children, and himself, he went on, “I ran into Ludmila this morning. She doesn’t know any more than we do, but she was almost dancing in the street to hear that Beria’s dead.”

“She ought to know,” Bertha said.

“That’s what I thought,” Mordechai agreed. “She said the only thing she was really sorry about was that Molotov didn’t go with him.”

“Can’t have everything,” his wife said. “The way things are, sometimes you can’t have anything.”

“And isn’t that the truth?” After a moment’s gloom, Anielewicz brightened. “David Nussboym ended up in the NKVD, remember. He ought to be sinking like a stone about now.
Nu,
can you tell that that breaks my heart?”

“Oh, of course,” Bertha answered. “Twenty years ago, he would have sunk you like a stone, too, if we hadn’t beaten him to the punch.”

Their children listened with wide eyes. Anielewicz wasn’t in the habit of hashing over things that had happened before they were born. He didn’t do it now, either, contenting himself with a nod. “We’ll have to see what goes on in Russia,” he said in an effort to pull matters back toward the present. “They say Molotov is on top again, but they say all sorts of things that turn out not to be true.”

Before Bertha could answer, the telephone rang. She got up and went into the parlor to answer it. After a moment, she called, “It’s for you, Mordechai.”

“I’m coming. At least it waited till I was almost finished with supper.” Anielewicz equated telephone calls with trouble. A lot of years had burned that equation into his mind. He took the handset from his wife, who returned to the table. “Hello?”

“Anielewicz? This is Yitzkhak, up in Glowno. We’re going to take the sheep to market tomorrow. Do you want a last look at them before they go?”

“No, you can send them without me,” Anielewicz said, to confuse anyone who might be listening despite the Germanand Lizard-made gadgets he’d had installed on his phone line to defeat would-be snoops. He operated on the assumption that, whatever the
Reich
and the Race could manufacture, they could also find a way to defeat. If he’d admitted wanting to go up to Glowno, Yitzkhak would have known something was badly wrong. To make things sound as normal as they could, he went on, “How’s your cousin doing?”

“Pretty well, thanks,” Yitzkhak answered. “She’s up on crutches now, and the cast will come off her leg in another month. Then it’s just a matter of getting the strength back into the muscles. It’ll take time, but she’ll do it.”

“Of course she will,” Mordechai said. “That’s good news.” He’d seen enough wounded men during the fighting to know it might not be so easy as Yitzkhak was saying, but only time would tell. After stepping in front of a bus, the other Jew’s cousin was lucky to have got off with only a broken leg.

After a little inconsequential talk, Yitzkhak got off the line. Anielewicz went back to the supper table. When he sat down, his wife raised a questioning eyebrow.

“That miserable flock of sheep,” he said; he couldn’t be quite sure who was listening to what he said inside his flat, either. “Yitzkhak wanted to know if I needed to check them before he got rid of them. I told him to go ahead; I’m sick of the foolish things.”

His children stared; they knew he owned no sheep and had no interest in owning any. He held up a hand to keep them from asking questions. They understood the signal, and refrained. Bertha knew what he was talking about. “Well, we have some leftovers here,” she remarked, by which Mordechai knew he’d be taking them with him for lunch when he went up to Glowno.

Sure enough, his wife had a sack waiting for him when he headed off early the next morning. He took it with a word of thanks, kissed her, and climbed aboard his bicycle. He could have ridden the bus and arrived faster and fresher, but he and his colleagues had been talking over their plans ever since the Polish nationalists tried to abscond with the explosive-metal bomb. The Jews hadn’t intended to sneak it out of Glowno in the dead of night. Anielewicz grinned—very much the opposite.

And he always liked to measure himself by exercise. His legs began to ache dully before he’d got very far outside of Lodz, but he settled into a kilometer-eating rhythm and the pain got no worse. After a while, it even receded. That marked the day as a good one. He hoped it would prove an omen.

He was not the only Jew on the road with a rifle or a submachine gun on his back. That would have been true any day, but was more true today than most. And motorcars and even lorries full of armed Jews rolled past him. Some of the men in those cars and lorries, recognizing him as one of their own, waved when they went by. Every now and then, he would take a hand off the handlebars and wave back.

By the time he got to Glowno, Jewish fighters filled the town. Signs in the windows of shops owned by Jews welcomed the militia to town and invited the fighters to come in and spend money on food or drink or soap or clothes or any of two dozen other different things.

The Poles on the streets of Glowno eyed the armed Jews with expressions ranging from resignation to alarm. A generation earlier, such a gathering of Jews would have been impossible, and would have been broken up with bloodshed if attempted. Now . . . Now, here in Glowno, the Jews would have won any fighting that started.

A crackle of rifle fire began outside of town. Anielewicz cocked his head to make sure just where it was coming from, then relaxed. The fighters had a marksmanship contest planned, and that was what he heard. A few minutes later, on the other side of Glowno, a machine gun came to deadly, raucous life. Mordechai knew the fellow handling it. He’d fought against the Germans in a machine-gun company in 1939, and had specialized in the weapons ever since. Thanks to the Lizards, the Jews had plenty of machine guns of German, Polish, and Soviet manufacture (along with a few oddities such as Austro-Hungarian Schwarzloses left over from the First World War), but not all the fighters knew how to keep them in top working order.

Loud blasts announced grenades tearing up a meadow. The man giving lessons in how to throw them was a rarity in football-mad Poland: he’d spent his childhood in the United States, and had played a lot of baseball there. Anielewicz knew next to nothing about baseball, but did understand it involved plenty of throwing.

His own role at the gathering was more theoretical. He closeted himself with leaders of Jewish militias from all around Lizardoccupied Poland and gave them the best advice he could on how to get along with the Race. “Never let the Lizards forget how badly the Poles outnumber us,” he said. “The more reason they think we have to be loyal to them, the likelier they are to give us all the toys we want and to back us if we do have trouble with the
goyim
.”

His listeners nodded sagely. A lot of them had used the same tactics over the years. Like Anielewicz, a lot of them had also intrigued with the
Reich
or the Soviet Union to keep the Lizards from gaining too dominant a position. The trick in playing that game was so simple, Mordechai didn’t bother mentioning it:
don’t get caught
.

He was drinking a stein of beer in the tavern where he’d overheard the Polish nationalists plotting to hijack the bomb when Yitzkhak found him. Yitzkhak looked like a clerk: he was short and slight and had a pinched-up face that didn’t approve of anything. Like Mordechai, he was from Warsaw. He’d fought like a madman against the Nazis, and later against the Lizards.

When he spoke, he sounded faintly accusing: “On the telephone, you said you weren’t coming up.”

“I changed my mind—is this against the law?” Anielewicz returned. Even here, they were careful of what they said and how they said it.

“Well, you can’t see your sheep,” Yitzkhak said petulantly. “The mob here, they all got sold, and I don’t know where the devil they’ve gone now. I don’t much care, either, if you want to know the truth.”

The bomb had gone, then. Mordechai let out a sigh of relief and ordered another mug of beer. The hubbub the Jewish fighters had raised in and around Glowno had let Yitzkhak and his friends get the weapon out of town with no one the wiser. Anielewicz had counted on that—and had counted on the fighters to bail Yitzkhak and his friends out of trouble if they got into any.

Aloud, he said, “Well, let me buy you a shot for all the trouble you’ve gone through on account of those damn sheep.”

“A shot doesn’t begin to do it,” Yitzkhak said, sour still, but that didn’t mean he refused the vodka. Anielewicz bought himself another beer, too. All things considered, he was of the opinion he’d earned it.

After he’d drunk it, he went out to see if anyone had stolen his bicycle. Unlike the bomb, it was still there. As he started to climb aboard it for the ride back to Lodz, he saw a couple of Lizards coming along the street. Judging what they were thinking wasn’t easy, but to him they looked horrified at seeing so many humans swaggering around with guns.

That—and the steins of beer he’d drunk—made him smile. If they weren’t used to the idea that people weren’t their slaves by now, too bad. With more than a little bravado, he waved to them, calling, “I greet you, males of the Race.”

“I greet you,” one of the Lizards said . . . cautiously. His eye turrets swung this way and that. “What is the purpose of this, ah, gathering?”

Camouflage,
Mordechai thought. Aloud, he said, “To make sure we Jews can strongly oppose anyone who tries to trouble us: Germans, Russians, Poles—or anyone else.” By that last, he could only have meant the Race.

“They
are
barbarians,” one of the Lizards said to the other. Anielewicz didn’t think he was supposed to hear, but he did.

“Barbarians, truth,” the other Lizard agreed, “but if these are the Jews, they are the barbarians who are useful to us.”

“Ah,” the first Lizard said.
Ah,
Mordechai thought. Hearing that from the Lizard was no great surprise. He knew the Race found the Jews useful. Jews found the Lizards useful, too.
And so the world goes round.
He waved to the males again, then started pedaling south and west, back toward Lodz. His legs hardly pained him at all, and, once he’d got out of town, he could go quite fast.
And so the wheels go round.
He bent his back to the work.

Nesseref felt like hissing at her Tosevite workmen in the tones of an alarm signal. “Why have you not poured the concrete, as we discussed the other day?” she demanded indignantly.

The Big Ugly foremale peered down at her from his preposterous height. He did not speak the language of the Race with any great grammatical precision, but he made himself understood: “Rain too hard,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “Ground all muddily. Pour now, not set good. Pour now, not hardly set at all.” He placed hands on his hips. The shuttlecraft pilot had never seen the gesture before, but it had to be one of defiance.

And the Big Ugly—Casimir, his name was—had a point, or she supposed he did. She’d never seen it rain so hard back on Home as it had rained here near Glowno these past couple of days. Males from the conquest fleet, the ones who didn’t keep trying to ply her with ginger, told her such things weren’t rare on this part of Tosev 3, and were even more common elsewhere.

“Very well, Casimir,” she said, yielding ground. “How long do you think it will be before we can pour the concrete for the shuttlecraft field?”

“Don’t know.” Where the Big Ugly’s hands-on-hips gesture had been alien, his shrug could almost have come from a male of the Race. “Ground dry in four, five, six days—if no more rain before then.” He shrugged again. “Don’t know nothing about rain then now. Nobody don’t know nothing about rain then now.”

That wasn’t strictly true—the Race’s meteorologists were better at forecasting Tosev 3’s weather than they had been when the conquest fleet arrived. Then, from the reports Nesseref had read, they’d wanted nothing more than to crawl back into their eggshells and hide. Their models had not been built for this world’s extremes of climate. They had improved, but remained a long way from perfect.

Casimir said, “Taste some ginger, Shuttlecraft Pilot. You feel better then.” He used another emphatic cough.

“No,” Nesseref said with an emphatic cough of her own. “Do not suggest that to me again, or this crew will have a new foremale the next instant.”

She glared at the Big Ugly. He was taller and bulkier, but she was fiercer. He turned away, mumbling, “It shall be done, superior female.” The pat phrase, unlike most of his speech, he brought out correctly.

“It had better be done,” Nesseref snapped.

She still craved ginger, craved the way it made her feel, even craved the way it brought her into her season. The more she craved, the more strongly she resisted the craving. She was, and was determined to remain, her own person, bending her will to those of others only when she had to and to a Tosevite herb not at all, not if she could help it. No matter how good it made her feel, ginger turned her into an animal. Worse, it turned the males around her into animals, too.

When she strode off, her feet squelched in the offending mud. She hissed again, wishing someone more familiar than she with conditions on this planet had got the job of laying out the shuttlecraft port.

“At least I found some land we could use,” she muttered. It was up to Bunim or his superiors to compensate the Big Uglies who had formerly owned the land. By all the signs, the Tosevites were holding the Race for ransom, or thought they were. But the Race had more resources than these peasants thought, and paying them what they thought they deserved was a tolerable expense.

The idea of having to pay them still offended Nesseref. This wasn’t one of the independent not-empires whose existence had once astonished her; the Race really had conquered this stretch of Tosev 3. But the local administrators seemed to be doing their best to deny they’d accomplished any such thing. No matter how often Bunim explained it, it still seemed wrong.