Second Contact (68 page)

“Stupid women!” one of the customs men shouted. “We know who you are! You are Reds! Do not deny it. You cannot deceive us.”

Liu Mei said nothing. Her face stayed expressionless, as it usually did, but her eyes blazed. She got angry at being called a Red, even though she was one. When Liu Han had time, she would laugh about that. She didn’t have time now.

“We are the people our papers say we are,” she said, over and over and over again.

“You are liars!” the boss customs man said. “I will haul you up in front of the little scaly devils. Let us see you tell your lies to them. They will know your papers are as false as a dragon’s wings on a duck.”

The threat worried Liu Han to some degree: the little scaly devils might be able to tell the papers were false where human beings could not. Underestimating their technical skill was always dangerous. But they were disastrously bad at interrogation; next to them, the Americans were paragons. And so, with a sneer, Liu Han said, “Yes, take us to the little scaly devils. I can tell them the truth and hope they will listen.” She could tell them a pack of lies and hope they believed her.

But her willingness to go before them rocked the customs man, as she’d thought it would. To most Chinese, the little devils remained objects of superstitious dread. Surely no one with anything to hide would want to talk to them. The customs man took a somewhat more conciliatory tone: “If you are not the people we think you are, how is it that you come off the American ship?”

“We got aboard in Manila,” Liu Han said for about the tenth time. The false papers said the same thing; a good many Chinese merchants lived in the Philippines. “Maybe, while you have been badgering us, the people you want, whoever they are, have gotten away. They are probably halfway to Harbin by now.”

“Harbin!” the customs man shouted. “Stupid woman! Foolish woman! Ignorant woman! The Reds are not strong in Harbin.”

“I do not know anything about that,” answered Liu Han, who knew quite a bit about it. “I have been telling you for a long, long time now, I do not know anything about that. And neither does my niece here, either.”

“You do not know anything about anything,” the customs man said. “Go on, get out of here, and your stupid turtle of a niece, too.”

“He is the stupid turtle,” Liu Mei said once they were well out of the boss customs man’s hearing.

Liu Han shook her head. “No, he did his job well—he was right to be suspicious of us, and I had to work hard to make him let us go. If he were stupid, I would have had an easier time. That was not the trouble. The trouble was that he serves the imperialist little devils—or maybe our enemies in the Kuomintang—with too much zeal.”

“Something should happen to him, then,” Liu Mei said.

“And maybe something will,” Liu Han said. “The Party here in Shanghai must know about him. And if they do not, we can pass the word from Peking. Yes, maybe something will happen to the running dog.”

The Shanghai train station stood not far from the docks: a large gray stone pile of a building, again in the Western style. Because it was not far, Liu Han and Liu Mei walked. To go with their assumption of the role of Chinese from the Philippines, they now had less baggage than they’d taken aboard the
Liberty Princess
in Los Angeles. Liu Han was glad not to have to exploit the labor of a rickshaw puller or a pedicab driver. Such work might be necessary, but it was degrading. Now that she had seen the United States, she felt that more strongly than ever.

Lines in front of the ticket sellers were not neat and orderly, as they would have been back in the USA. They were hardly lines at all. People jostled and shouted and cursed one another, all shoving forward to wave money in the faces of the clerks. Liu Han felt swamped, smothered in humanity. Shanghai was no more crowded than Peking, but her most recent standard of comparison was Los Angeles, a town far more spread out than either Chinese city. Liu Mei at her back, she elbowed her way forward.

After much bad blood, she managed to buy two second-class tickets north to Peking. The platform on which she and her daughter had to wait was as crowded as the cramped space in front of the ticket sellers. She’d expected that. The train came into the station three hours late. She’d expected that, too.

But, after she and Liu Mei fought their way to seats on the hard benches of a second-class car, she relaxed. In spite of all inconveniences, they were going home.

Johannes Drucker muttered something unpleasant under his breath as he floated weightless in
Käthe
, the upper stage of his A-45. The radio wasn’t set to transmit, so nobody down on the ground could hear him. That was doubtless just as well.

He checked himself. He hoped nobody down on the ground could hear him. He remained politically suspect, and knew it. He wouldn’t have put it past the SS to sneak a secret microphone and transmitter into
Käthe
, in the hope he would say something damning when he thought no one was listening. If he had any opinions about Heinrich Himmler and sheep, he’d be smart to pull the wool over them.

“Baah!”
he said, softly and derisively. Let the boys in the black coats figure out what that meant, if they were listening. He had more important things to worry about. Had he been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it in the direction of General Dornberger. The commandant at Peenemünde had been able to keep him in space. As far as he was concerned, this was the most fun he could have with his clothes on.

A radar ping almost bright enough to make him blink appeared on his screen.
“Du lieber Gott,”
he said, not caring at all whether anyone was listening to him. “I think the Americans are building New York City up here.” The station was noticeably bigger than it had been on his last trip up into orbit, and it had been enormous even then. Its German equivalent could not compete.

He turned his radio receiver to the bands the Americans favored. They got careless with their signals traffic every so often. Not often enough. They were up to
Wehrmacht
standards—or perhaps a little beyond—when they talked with one another. His best hope was catching them in the middle of an accident, so he could hear what they said when they weren’t thinking so much of whether he was listening.

Thinking that way made him feel a little guilty. Wishing an accident on anybody in space probably meant wishing death on him, too. Very few minor accidents happened out beyond the atmosphere—everything worked fine, or else you were dead. Drucker didn’t want anybody wishing that kind of misfortune on him.

He listened to the chatter that went on around the space station. The workers expanding it complained more than their German counterparts would have done. “I’m so damn tired, I’d be grateful to be dead,” one of them said.

That proved too much even for the other Americans. “Oh, shut up, Jerry,” one of them said, a sentiment with which Drucker heartily agreed.

After a little while, Drucker decided not to wait and see if something would happen, but to try to make something happen instead. “You certainly are getting large there,” he radioed to the American space station. “When do you intend to attack the colonization fleet again?”

That
again
made him particularly proud. If it didn’t make any listening Lizard sit up and take notice, he didn’t know what would. He must have struck a nerve inside the station, too, for the answer came back in a tearing hurry: “Go peddle your papers, you Nazi bastard! If you guys didn’t blow up the Lizards, Molotov’s boys sure as hell did, on account of it wasn’t us.”

“Ha!” Drucker said. “You Americans the crazy ones are, making this great huge . . . thing up here.” He’d done his duty by his country. Anybody who didn’t think the SS was crazy, though, didn’t know the current
Führer
’s precious pets.

And the American radio operator kept jeering at him: “You’re just jealous ’cause you don’t have a big one yourself.”

Only belatedly did Drucker realize the American might not be talking about space stations. “I have never on that score any complaints had,” he said smugly.

“Another Nazi superman, eh?” the radio operator said. “Listen up, pal—what do you think your wife is doing while you’re up here?”

“The laundry,” Drucker said. “Now your mother, I cannot for her answer.”

He smiled, listening to the American curse him. Before long, the curses faded as he went out of range and the bulge of the Earth hid the space station. He nodded to himself. He had given at least as good as he got. But then his satisfaction dribbled away. He hadn’t learned anything, which was what he’d hoped for. Like everybody else, the
Wehrmacht
paid for what you did, not for how good you looked when you didn’t do much.

Or had he learned something after all, something he would sooner not have known? When the
Reich
began fighting Poland, when the
Reich
began fighting the Bolsheviks, it had termed both campaigns counterattacks. Drucker couldn’t prove those statements were lies, but he knew few foreigners believed them. Could Himmler be lying here, too?

If Germany had launched the missiles of an orbiting weapon against the Race, she was wise to lie about it. Even bestriding Europe like a colossus, the Greater German
Reich
was the smallest independent human power, its population fearsomely concentrated. The Lizards could take a terrible revenge.

He reported his conversation with the American to a German radio relay ship in the Indian Ocean. “That is good, Lieutenant Colonel,” the radioman told him. “The Lizards do not pay enough attention to the United States. Perhaps we can persuade them to do so. For some reason, they always suspect us and accuse us instead.” His voice took on a faint whining tone. “I do not understand why.”

“I can’t imagine,” Drucker said, and then hoped the fellow down there on the ship didn’t notice how dry he sounded. But his own hope for promotion had slammed into a stone wall not for anything he’d done, but because of suspicions about his wife’s ancestry. And a lot worse than that would have happened to Käthe had the SS been able to nail their suspicions down tight.

The Lizards had to know such things. Was it any wonder they suspected the
Reich
on account of them?

“See if you can learn more still on your next pass under the space station,” the radio operator told Drucker.

“I’ll try,” he answered, and broke the connection. The signal for the attack on the colonization fleet, he remembered, had come from the Indian Ocean. It was supposed to have come from a U-boat, but was everyone dead certain of that?

Centimeter by centimeter, he made himself relax. The USA had a relay ship down there in the waters between Africa and Australia, and so did the USSR. Anyone could have done it.

As his orbit carried him over Australia, he chuckled to himself. Undoubtedly a U-boat had lobbed ginger bombs at the Lizards’ cities going up in the desert there. Nobody knew whose U-boat had done it. Drucker chuckled again, thinking of the orgy the Lizards must have had. “Killing them with kindness,” he said, and then came right out and laughed, because
kindness
didn’t begin to describe it.

Up over the long stretch of the Pacific Ocean he flew, passing not far from the island the self-styled Free French still ruled. That notion made him laugh, too, in a different way. If petty criminals and gambling lords wanted to call their little bailiwick a country, he couldn’t stop them, but that didn’t mean he had to take them seriously.

Eventually, he caught up with the space station again. When he called to report his presence in the neighborhood (not that the station wouldn’t know unless its radar was out), the same radio operator as before answered him: “Your mouth is so big, pal, I figured you’d have sucked all the air out of your cabin by now.”

“You talk about big,” Drucker said, laughing once more. “When do you take that big boat of yours onto the sea instead of leaving it in orbit docked?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the American answered.

Drucker started to make another gibe, but then he really listened to what the radioman had said. “What was that?” he asked, wanting to make sure he’d heard what he thought he had.

But the American didn’t repeat himself. Instead, he replied, “I said, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

He hadn’t said that. Drucker’s English wasn’t perfect, but he was sure the American hadn’t said that or anything like it. What did that mean? Drucker could think of only one thing: the American had slipped and was trying to cover it up. “You will never get that ugly beast moving,” he jeered, trying to rattle the radioman into another mistake.

To his sorrow, it didn’t work. “We’re doing five miles a second now,” the American said. “Eight kilometers a second for you, buddy. That’s fast enough, don’t you figure?”

“Whatever you say,” Drucker answered. “You are the one who likes to brag.”

This time, he got no answer. He hadn’t gone out of range of the space station. It still glowed like a Christmas-tree ornament on his radar screen. That had to mean the American was clamming up on purpose. And
that
had to mean the fellow had put his foot in it, and knew he had, too.

No more questions,
Drucker thought. Let the radioman think he hadn’t noticed a thing out of the ordinary. The American would be hoping he hadn’t, anyhow. Drucker sped on in delicious, thoughtful silence.

He started to radio what he’d learned—no, what he’d heard, because he wasn’t sure what he’d learned—down to the next German relay ship over which he crossed. He stopped with his index finger already on the
transmit
button. Someone, no doubt, would be monitoring his traffic with the relay ship. With a little luck, nobody’d noticed his unusual exchange with the space station. He decided to hang onto it and what it might mean till he got down.

Earth unrolled below, going now into darkness, now into light. Blue ocean, white and gray swirls of cloud, land in shades of green and brown—it was all very beautiful. Drucker wondered whether Lizard pilots with this view felt the same. From what they said, Home held more land and less water. If they thought the Sahara and the Australian outback were comfortable, their opinion of both forests and oceans was liable to be a lot lower than his.