Second Contact (66 page)

His orbit was lower and therefore faster than that of the American space station. Whenever he passed below it, he paid close attention to the radio chatter coming from it. The traffic told him the station was getting yet another new load of surprises, which didn’t surprise him. So many bus drivers were going up there, the Greyhound lines probably had to shut down half their routes.

He couldn’t tell what the supplies were. That didn’t surprise him, either. If he heard exactly what was going on up there, the Lizards and the Germans and the Russians would, too. He didn’t want that. But he did want to know what was going on.

One thing he could tell, both by radar and by spotting scope: whatever those supplies were, the crew aboard the space station wasn’t letting them go to waste. Sometimes he thought it looked bigger than it had on his previous pass each time he caught up with it. It was as big as one of the Lizards’ starships these days, and showed no signs of slowing its growth.

“What the
hell
are they doing up there?” he asked a universe that did not answer. Construction in vacuum and weightlessness wasn’t easy, but the station kept shifts going around the clock.

He couldn’t ignore everything else in space, much as he would have liked to. During his tour, Peenemünde launched a couple of A-45s and brought the manned upper stages back to Earth quite a bit faster than was their usual practice. Anything out of the ordinary was suspicious, as far as Johnson was concerned—and as far as his superiors were concerned, too, even if they didn’t seem suspicious about what was going on at the American space station.

He tried pumping the Nazi spacemen about what their bosses were up to. That was doctrine. The Germans didn’t tell him doodly-squat, which was doubtless part of their doctrine. They tried pumping him about the U.S. space station, too.

“Dammit, Drucker, I don’t know what’s going on up there,” he told one of his German opposite numbers when the fellow got not just nosy but pushy to boot. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you anyway.”

Drucker laughed. “And you so angry with me got when I told you the same thing. I do not know what we are here with these test launches doing.”

Listening to the Germans, Johnson had discovered, was a matter of staying patient till they got around to the verb. He laughed, too, but sourly. “Yeah, but the difference between us is that I know I’m telling the truth, but I’ve got the nasty feeling you’re lying to me.”

“I speak truth,” Drucker declared, with a burst of static warning that they were drifting out of radio range of each other. “It is you Americans who are liars.” More static gave him the last word in the argument.

“Screw him,” Johnson muttered, and then, “On second thought, no thanks. I didn’t come up here to be Mata Hari.” Spying with his eyes and ears and instruments was one thing. Using his fair white body . . . Again, his laugh was less than wholehearted. Nobody, Nazi pilot or good old American waitress or secretary or schoolteacher, had shown much interest in his fair white body lately.

He brought the
Peregrine
down to a good landing—about as smooth as he’d ever managed—at Kitty Hawk and then went through debriefing. He remarked that the Germans were curious about what was going on up at the space station. The major taking notes just nodded and waited for him to say something else. If the fellow knew anything, he wasn’t talking.

After a while, Johnson ran dry about the Germans and Russians and Lizards in space. The first debriefer left. His replacement came in and started grilling the spaceman about the changes the mechanics and technicians had made in
Peregrine
since his last flight. He had answers and opinions, some of them strong ones, about those modifications.

When they finally let him go, he thought about heading for the bar for a bit of high-proof tension relief. Instead, he went back to the BOQ. He was shaking his head as he did it—
Christ, don’t I even have the energy to go buy myself a drink?—
but the direction in which he kept walking argued that he didn’t.

He took a shower, then went back to his room and flopped down on the bed. Instead of falling asleep, which he’d thought he would do, he lay there for a bit, then pulled a Hornblower novel out of the GI nightstand by the bed and started to read. Things had been simple back in Hornblower’s day, with only people to worry about.

The telephone on the nightstand rang, making him jump. He didn’t like jumping, especially not when he was just back in full gravity. He picked up the phone and said, “Johnson.”

“Lieutenant Colonel, I’m Major Sam Yeager, calling from Los Angeles,” the voice on the other end of the line said. He sounded as if he was calling from the other end of the country; there weren’t so many hisses and pops on the line as there would have been before the Lizards came, but enough to notice remained.

“What can I do for you, Major?” Johnson asked. Yeager’s name seemed vaguely familiar. After a moment, he placed it: a hotshot expert on the Lizards.

He expected Yeager to ask him about dealing with the Race in space. Instead, the fellow came straight out of left field: “Lieutenant Colonel, if you don’t mind my asking, did you by any chance get your ass chewed by General LeMay not so long ago?”

“How the hell did you know that?” Johnson sat up so suddenly, he knocked the Hornblower novel onto the floor.

Across three thousand miles, Major Yeager chuckled. “Because I’m in the same boat—and I think it’s the
Titanic
. General LeMay gets ants in his pants when people start asking about the space station, doesn’t he?”

“He sure does. He—” Johnson shut up with a snap. He suddenly realized he had only Yeager’s assurance that he was who and what he said he was. For all he knew, Yeager—or somebody claiming to be Yeager—might be one of LeMay’s spies, trying to catch him in an indiscretion and sink him like a battleship. In a tight voice, he said, “I don’t think I’d better talk about that.”

“I’m not after your scalp, Lieutenant Colonel,” Yeager said. Johnson went right on saying nothing. With a sigh, Yeager went on, “I don’t like this any better than you do. Whatever’s going on up there smells fishy to me. The Lizards have it on their minds, too, and I don’t like that for beans. We could end up in big trouble on account of this.”

That matched perfectly with what Glen Johnson thought: so perfectly that it made him suspicious. He picked his words with care: “Major, I don’t know you. I’m not going to talk about this business with somebody who’s only a voice.”

After a pause, Yeager answered, “Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. The general is convincing, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnson said, which might as well have meant,
Hell, yes!

Another pause. Then Yeager said, “Okay, sir, you don’t trust me, and you don’t have any reason to trust me. But I’m going to lay it on the line. The way it looks to me now, whatever the hell we’re doing up there, it’s something real big. It’s something so big, whoever’s in charge—which may be General LeMay and may be whoever
his
boss is—doesn’t want anybody, and I mean anybody, finding out about it. How does that sound to you?”

Yeager might have been echoing Johnson’s thoughts. But Johnson was damned if he’d admit it. He’d trusted Stella, and that hadn’t got him anything but pain and lawyers’ bills. If he trusted Yeager, he was liable to get his tit in a worse wringer yet. So all he said was, “This is your nickel, Major. I’m still listening.” If by some chance this wasn’t Yeager, or if it was and he was trying to get Johnson in Dutch, maybe he’d end up hanging himself instead.

“You think I’m setting you up, don’t you?” Yeager asked, which couldn’t have been a better echo of what was going on in Glen Johnson’s mind.

“It did occur to me, yeah,” Johnson said dryly.

“I wonder why.” Yeager could be dry, too. That made Johnson more inclined to believe him, not less. Maybe he’d known it would. He went on, “Listen. This isn’t how you keep a secret. The way you do that is to pretend you don’t have one, not to make a big hairy thing out of yourself and go around yelling, ‘I’ve got a secret and I won’t tell you what it is, so you’d better not ask—or else!’ Come on, Lieutenant Colonel. You’re a big boy. Am I right or am I wrong?”

Johnson laughed. He didn’t want to—he knew he was handing Yeager an edge—but he couldn’t help himself. “I tell you what,” he said. “That’s how I’d play it, anyway.”

“Me, too,” Yeager said. “Some of the big shots don’t understand anything but killing a mosquito with a tank, though. All that does is get a secret noticed. You noticed it—”

“Yeah,” Johnson broke in. Again, he couldn’t help himself. If they’d let him go up to the space station, they could have shown him around, kept him from seeing anything he wasn’t supposed to see, and sent him home. Yeager was right. They hadn’t played it smart, not even a little.

“I noticed, too,” Yeager said. “I’m not the only one, either. The Lizards have noticed something funny’s going on up there. There’s this one female of the Race named Kassquit—at least I think she’s a female of the Race; that’s a little strange—who’s real curious about things that have to do with the space station. And we don’t want the Lizards curious that way, not after what happened to the colonization fleet we don’t.”

“Amen,” Johnson said. “The next time anything goes wrong, they’re going to shoot first and ask questions later.” He listened to himself with no small surprise. Somehow or other, Major Yeager had convinced him while he wasn’t looking.

“That’s what I think, too,” Yeager said. “If you ask me, that’s what anybody with an ounce of sense would think. But that’s probably too much to ask of some people with a lot of stars on their shoulders.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said again. He’d spent a lot of time fishing for bluegill when he was a kid. He knew what setting a hook was like. Yeager had set a hook in him, all right. “Next question is, what can we do about it? Can we do anything about it?”

“I don’t know,” Yeager answered. “Part of that depends on just what they really are doing at the space station. I haven’t been able to find out, and I’ve got better and stranger connections than you might think. I got in big trouble the first time, but I didn’t know I would, so I went in straight up and didn’t bother sliding, if you follow me. I’m not playing it like that any more.”

Johnson pondered. Yeager was still taking chances, or he wouldn’t have got on the phone. But there were a lot of different ways to be sneaky. A slow grin spread over Johnson’s face. “Maybe, Major, just maybe, I can get a close-up look at that critter after all.”

Fotsev hated Basra. His reasons for hating Basra were easy to understand. The place stank. It was full of Big Uglies, and not only Big Uglies, but Big Uglies fanatically devoted to their superstition who might at any moment rise in rebellion against the Race. Patrols in Basra were never routine; any cloth-shrouded Tosevite might be an assassin, and some, expecting a happy afterlife from their preposterous outsized Big Ugly beyond the sky if they sacrificed themselves to his cause on Tosev 3, were willing, even eager, to slay themselves if only they could take males of the Race with them.

So Fotsev hated Basra. As far as he was concerned, the only decent thing about it was the weather. Compared to that of Buenos Aires, where he’d been stationed before, it seemed a delightful reminder of Home.

He let out a small, discontented hiss as he and his squad tramped through Basra’s central market square. “What is itching your tailstump?” Gorppet asked him. The male’s mouth fell open in amusement. “This place, I should not wonder. More filth and disease right here—I mean this miserable square, not the whole city: spirits of Emperors past, I don’t want to think about the whole city—than on all of Home put together.”

“You need leave again,” another male told Fotsev. “Go on out to one of the new towns and you will see how things ought to be.”

And that made Fotsev realize why he was so discontented. “I went out to the first one a while ago,” he said. “Once was enough. I have not been back. I do not want to go back. I hated the new town just about as much as I hate this place.”

“You are mad, as addled as any Tosevite ever hatched,” said the other male, a fellow named Betvoss. Only astonishment could have prompted him to come out with such a thing, for Fotsev outranked him.

A couple of males on the patrol hissed in alarm. A couple of more gestured to show they agreed with Betvoss. Fotsev could have taken offense, but he didn’t. When he spoke, he sounded more weary than anything else: “Home is an egg I have hatched out of. I am something different now. It may not be something better—I do not think it is something better. But I do not fit inside that shell any more. The males and females who live in the new towns know little of Tosev 3, and do not wish to learn. They still dwell inside the old shell. I have learned too much of Tosev 3, which I suppose is why I do not.”

Betvoss twisted his eye turrets in a way that suggested he did not understand and that there was nothing for him to understand. Fotsev had expected as much. Betvoss said, “If you hate the new town and you also hate Basra, what is left for you?”

“Nothing, probably,” Fotsev answered. “I think that will be the fate of many of us from the conquest fleet: caught betwixt and between, belonging nowhere.”

“Not me,” Betvoss said. “I like the new towns. They remind me of how things were and how they will be again.”

“I think Fotsev speaks truth,” Gorppet said, which astonished Fotsev; the dour veteran seldom took his part. Gorppet had seen much worse action during the fighting than Fotsev had, and Fotsev often thought the other male resented him for coming through so easily. But now Gorppet went on, “I went into the new town a couple of times, maybe three. I do not bother going any more, either.”

“I enjoy it,” Betvoss said. “I would sooner be there than here. I would sooner be anywhere than here.”

“They do not understand the males of the Soldiers’ Time in the new town,” Fotsev said. “They did not go through what we went through, and they cannot see why we did not deliver Tosev 3 to them as we would have if all the Big Uglies truly had ridden animals and swung swords, as the probe made us think they would.”