Second Contact (71 page)

Half an hour till his next appointment. Those thirty minutes might stretch, too; Khrushchev had the time sense of the Ukrainian peasant he’d been born, not of the West. He came and went when he thought it right and fitting, not according to the bidding of any clock. Molotov pulled a report from the pile awaiting his attention, donned his spectacles, and began to read.

He remembered memoranda wondering what the United States was doing with its space station. From the report in his hands, it appeared that the
Reich
and the Lizards were wondering, too. He scratched his head. Such aggressive work seemed more likely the province of the
Reich
than of the USA. President Warren had always struck him as a cautious and capable reactionary. He hoped the man would be reelected in 1964.

But what were the Americans doing up there? From the report in front of him, even some of them were wondering—wondering and not finding out. Molotov frowned. Secrecy was unlike the Americans, too, at least for anything less vital than their nuclearexplosives project.

He scribbled a note to spur further investigation. Most of that would have to be on the ground. The Soviet Union had forced itself into space along with the Germans and the Americans, but it was not the player there that the other two independent human powers were.

On the ground . . . “Damn you, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” Molotov murmured. In the wake of Beria’s failed coup, the NKVD was being purged. That had to happen; the fallen chief’s backers had to go. But Molotov wished they didn’t have to go now. With the NKVD in disarray, he had to rely more on the GRU, the Red Army’s intelligence operation, which—again—made him more dependent on Georgi Zhukov. With two agencies doing the same job, he could play one off against the other. For the time being, he’d lost that option.

Muttering balefully under his breath, he reached out for the next report. It gave him good news: several caravans of arms had crossed the border into Lizard-occupied China and reached the People’s Liberation Army. Mao would keep the Race hopping like fleas on a griddle; Molotov was confident of that.

He worked his way through the whole report instead of contenting himself with the one-page summary stapled to the front. An eyebrow rose—with him, a sign of considerable emotion. Someone had tried to sneak something past him. The report mentioned that a shipment of U.S. arms had reached the People’s Liberation Army despite the best efforts of the Kuomintang, the Lizards, and, ever so secretly, the GRU. The report mentioned that—but the summary didn’t.

In future,
he wrote,
I expect summaries to conform more closely to the documents they are supposed to summarize. Failure in this regard will not be tolerated.
If that didn’t make some
apparatchik
’s ulcer twinge, he didn’t know what would.

Before he could reach for the next report in the stack, his secretary said, “Comrade Khrushchev is here to see you.”

Molotov glanced at his watch. Khrushchev was fifteen minutes late—not bad at all, by his standards. “Send him in,” Molotov said.

“Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” Khrushchev said, shaking hands with Molotov. He spoke Russian with a strong Ukrainian accent, turning g’s into h’s, and had a peasant drawl to boot.

“Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov echoed with a wintry smile. The rank he held in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev held in the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. “And how are the pacification efforts progressing?”

Khrushchev made a remarkably sour face. He was ugly as sin to begin with: squat, bullet-headed, snaggle-toothed, with a couple of prominent warts. When he got angry, he got uglier. “Not so good,” he answered. “The
Reich
keeps shipping the robbers arms across the Romanian border. You ought to call the sons of bitches on it.”

“I have done so, Nikita Sergeyevich,” Molotov answered. “The
Reich
states that Romania is an independent nation pursuing an independent foreign policy.” He held up a hand. “And I have protested to the Romanians, who say they are helpless to keep the Germans from shipping arms through their territory.”

“Fuck ’em,” Khrushchev said. “Fuck ’em all. The Lizards are sneaking shit in from Poland, too. We hold things down, but it’s a damn pain in the arse.”

“So long as you do hold things down,” Molotov said. “That is why you have your job, after all.”

“Don’t I know it,” Khrushchev said. “Stinking nationalist bandits. As soon as we pull one band up by the roots, another one sprouts.” He raised an eyebrow. “Anybody would think they didn’t fancy taking orders from Moscow.”

“Too bad,” Molotov said coldly. Khrushchev laughed out loud. They didn’t always agree on means, but they stood together on keeping the Ukraine a part of the USSR. Molotov asked, “You can document the fact that some of the bandits’ weapons come from the Lizards and not the fascists?”

“Oh, hell, yes, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Khrushchev exclaimed.

“Good. Give me your evidence, and I will protest to the Lizards,” Molotov said. Khrushchev nodded. Molotov went on, “When confronted with evidence, the Lizards often draw back—unlike the fascists, who are strangers to shame.”

“Unlike us, too,” Khrushchev said with a grin. “But we have the dialectic on our side, and the goddamn Nazis don’t.”

“Neither do the Lizards,” Molotov said.
And a good thing, too, or they would surely beat us,
he thought somewhere down deep.

Khrushchev departed in due course, loudly and profanely promising to give Molotov the evidence he needed to protest to the Lizards. Based on his previous performance, Molotov figured the chances he would were a little better than even money. Molotov was reaching for another report when the telephone rang. His secretary said, “Comrade General Secretary, Marshal Zhukov wishes to speak with you.”

“Put him through,” Molotov said at once, and then, “Good day, Georgi Konstantinovich.”

“Good day, Comrade General Secretary,” Zhukov said politely. “I wonder if you might be able to stop by my office some time today, to review the revised projections for the military budget in the upcoming Five-Year Plan.”

Revised upwards, he meant—revised sharply upwards. Zhukov might not want to rule the USSR, but he was taking his pound of flesh for suppressing Beria. And Molotov could not—did not dare—do anything about it. Things could have been worse, and he knew as much, but they also could have been a great deal better. With the resigned sigh of an animal in a cage too small, he answered, “I will be there directly, Marshal,” and took a petty revenge by hanging up the phone very hard.

Of all the Lizards Rance Auerbach had hoped never to see again, Hesskett topped the list. The interrogator had threatened to lock him and Penny Summers in jail and lose the key if they didn’t put that French ginger smuggler out of business for good. Rance would have liked his trip to the south of France a hell of a lot better if it hadn’t ended up in a Nazi jail.

He still didn’t think that was his fault. Hesskett took a different view of things, though, and his would be the one that counted. He turned one eye turret toward Rance, the other toward Penny. “You failed,” he said in a voice that somehow held echoes of slamming metal doors.

Penny spoke quickly: “We didn’t fail all the way, superior sir. The Germans still have that Dutourd in jail, or they did when they let us go. That puts him out of business, doesn’t it?”

“It does not,” Hesskett said, and Auerbach imagined he heard more slamming doors. “The Deutsche released him some time ago. No doubt he will soon be selling the Race ginger again.”

“That’s not our fault, dammit!” Rance said. “Now that you flew us back here to Mexico, we can’t do anything about what happens on the other side of the ocean, and you can’t hold it against us.”

“Who says I cannot?” Hesskett returned. His English wasn’t usually idiomatic. He probably didn’t intend it to be idiomatic here. “Who says I cannot?” he repeated. “The agreement was to reduce your punishment if you acted to further the interests of the Race. Can you say you have furthered the interests of the Race?”

“The agreement was to reward us if we did that,” Penny said. “You told us we’d get a big reward if we did it. Well, we did some of it—maybe not as much as you wanted, but some. So we deserve some reward, anyway.”

“That’s right,” Auerbach said. Whether it was right or not, though, he didn’t expect it to do him a plugged nickel’s worth of good.

Hesskett took him by surprise, then, by saying, “Perhaps. This Big Ugly will now also be selling drugs we supply to the Tosevites of the
Reich
. So your mission may have accomplished something, even if it was something small.”

“In that case, why are you saying we failed?” Penny demanded. “Okay, we don’t deserve the whole great big reward, but you’ve got no business keeping us locked up like this.”

“Your efforts did not bring Dutourd over to the side of the Race,” Hesskett answered. “The Deutsche released him to continue his role as a destructive menace. They did not know we would be able to turn him—to turn him to some partial degree—to our own purposes.”

“Well, what are you going to do with us, then?” Auerbach asked. “This teasing gets stale.”

“What to do with you is a puzzlement,” the Lizard said. “You did not completely fail, but you were far from complete success. And, if you are set at liberty, you are only too likely to return to your own noxious habit of ginger-smuggling.”

I wouldn’t!
Rance almost shouted it. He hadn’t had anything to do with smuggling ginger for years till Penny came back into his life. If they let him go and kept her in the calaboose, they wouldn’t hurt themselves one bit.

Without turning his head to look at her, he felt Penny’s eyes on him. She had to know what was going through his mind. She also had to know he hadn’t asked her to come back to him. She’d done it on her own, because she couldn’t find any other choice. If he walked away and sold her down the river, how much guilt would he have on his conscience?

He asked himself the same question.
Just how big a son of a bitch are you, Rance? How low have you fallen?
The clean-cut West Point cavalry officer he’d been once upon a time wouldn’t have let a pal down for anything. But he hadn’t been that fellow for a lot of years. A couple of Lizard bullets had made sure he’d never be that fellow again. And afterwards, he hadn’t even been able to make a go of it as a ginger smuggler after Penny left him the first time, even if some of his buddies had stayed in touch with him on the off chance he might be able to do something for them. He’d turned into a petty grifter, a loser, a drunk. Christ, what else had he turned into on the way down? A Judas?

He sat quietly. Over in the other chair in the interrogation chamber, too far away to touch, Penny let out a soft sigh of relief. He wondered what she would have done had their positions been reversed. Odds were he was better off not knowing.

Penny said, “Superior sir, if you do let me go, I don’t want to go back to the United States. Too many people there want me dead.”

“This is a perspective with which I have some sympathy,” Hesskett said. “It is also, you realize, an argument for keeping you imprisoned.”

“If that’s what you want to do, go ahead—go ahead for both of us.” Now Auerbach spoke before Penny could. “If you don’t care about going back on the bargain you made, go ahead and do that.”

Against a human being, he wouldn’t have had a prayer. Had he been stupid enough to try that argument on his Nazi interrogators, they might have burst a blood vessel laughing. But Lizards, whatever else you said about them, were more honest than people. They didn’t always make bargains in a hurry. When they did make them, they commonly kept them.

Hesskett didn’t show what he was thinking. Lizards rarely did, at least not in ways people could recognize. “Not spending all your lives in prison would be a reward, thinking of how much ginger the two of you had when we caught you,” he said.

Rance tried not to show what he was thinking, either, but couldn’t help leaning forward a little. He knew the start of a dicker when he heard one. “Hey, we did the best we could for you,” he said.

“That’s right,” Penny said. “It’s not our fault all the Nazis in the goddamn world came busting out of that building. And how come your fancy gadgets didn’t tell us they were there?”

“They must not have been using electronics to monitor their surroundings,” Hesskett said. “Had they been using electronics, you would have been warned.”

“Well, they weren’t, and we weren’t, and now you’re trying to blame us for it,” Auerbach said. If he had the Lizard on the defensive, and he thought he did, he’d push him hard.

“What do you think a fitting reward would be?” Hesskett asked.

“Letting us go free, that’s what,” Penny said at once.

“Let us go free someplace where they speak English,” Rance added. He didn’t want to get turned loose in Mexico, not when he knew maybe a dozen words of Spanish, and most of them swear words. He wasn’t jumping up and down at the idea of going back to the USA, either, not after he’d ventilated those goons. Their bosses wouldn’t remember him fondly.

“We do not want you going back to your friends. That would mean going back to smuggling ginger,” Hesskett said. “Where in the lands the Race rules do Big Uglies speak English? I cannot be bothered keeping track of your languages. You should have only one, like us.”

“Austr—” Penny began, but Auerbach gave her such a sharp look, she didn’t finish. Australia was going to be a place where Lizards outnumbered people, if it wasn’t already. Rance didn’t want that.

Hesskett was checking a computer screen. Turning one eye turret away from it and toward Rance and Penny, he said, “Your choices are fewer than I thought. Most of the Tosevites who speak your language are not under the rule of the Race. I do not want to add more Big Uglies to the population of Australia. That is to be our land, in particular.” Auerbach gave Penny a told-you-so look. The Lizard went on, “Perhaps South Africa. It is isolated. You would have a hard time causing the Race great trouble there—and we would be able to keep an eye turret aimed in your direction.”