Second Contact (76 page)

“Dammit, they know more about what’s going on than we do,” he grumbled.

He wondered if he ought to call Kitty Hawk again. If he did, Lieutenant General LeMay was liable to come down on him like a ton of bricks. But if he didn’t, he’d stay altogether in the dark. A Lizard would have had better sense than to bring LeMay down on him in the first place, and would have obeyed without question after getting in trouble. “Hell with that,” Yeager muttered. “I ain’t no Lizard.” Barbara, fortunately, couldn’t hear him.

He picked up the phone and dialed the Kitty Hawk BOQ. If anybody had any good notions of what was going on up there, Glen Johnson would be the man. Sam nodded to himself as the telephone rang on the other side of the country. Back in the old days, he’d have had to go through an operator and give her Johnson’s name. Now he could just call, and leave no trace of himself behind.

Somebody picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“I’d like to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, please,” Yeager answered. Whoever that was over there in Kitty Hawk, it wasn’t Glen Johnson. This fellow had a drawl thick enough to slice, one that turned
hello
into a three-syllable word.

After a couple of seconds’ pause, the Southerner said, “Afraid you can’t do that, sir. He’s up in space right now. Who’s calling, please? I’ll leave a message.”

He sounded very helpful—too helpful, after that little pause. Maybe, maybe not, but Sam wasn’t inclined to take chances, not after the trouble he’d just had from the Lizards. He didn’t give his name, but said, “Really? I thought he’d be down by now.” From what Johnson had told him, he knew damn well that the Marine was supposed to be down by now. “Is he all right?”

“Oh, yes, sir, he’s fine,” the man back in North Carolina answered. “You want to leave your name and a number where he can get hold of you, I reckon he’d be right glad to have ’em. I’m sure he’ll get back to you as soon as he can.”

Very gently, Yeager laid the telephone handset back in its cradle. Sure as hell, alarm bells were going off in the back of his mind. He didn’t think this fellow would have been so eager to get his name and number if they were tracing his call (and, thanks to Sorviss, his calls were hard, maybe impossible, for anyone with merely human equipment to trace), but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

He sat at his desk scratching his head, wondering what the devil to do next. He wondered if there was anything he
could
do next. The Lizards had shut him off from whatever they knew about the space station, and his best—Jesus, his only—American source had just fallen off the map, too.

“What the hell
is
going on up there?” he said, and leaned back in his chair as if he could stare through the ceiling and see not only the space station but Glen Johnson, too.

He hoped that fellow with the Southern accent had been telling the truth when he said Johnson was okay. Sam knew people didn’t stay in space longer than they were supposed to without some pretty important reason. If the man had said the weather in Kitty Hawk was lousy so
Peregrine
couldn’t come down on schedule, that would have been something else. But he hadn’t. He’d made it sound as if everything were routine. That worried Sam, who knew better.

After some thought, he fired up the U.S.-made computer on his desk. If he used it to ask questions about the space station, he’d trigger alarms. General LeMay’s visit had proved that. But if his security clearance wasn’t good enough to let him find out what was going on with
Peregrine
, he saw no point to having the miserable thing.

No, sure enough, nothing tried to keep him out of these records. But what he found there made him scratch his head all over again. Unless somebody was doing still more lying,
Peregrine
had landed right on schedule.

“Now what the hell does that mean?” he asked the computer. It didn’t answer. Facts it could handle. Meaning? He had to supply his own.

Was the screen lying to him? Or had
Peregrine
come down while Glen Johnson stayed up? If it had, how? Space wasn’t a good place for one driver to get out of a truck and another to hop in and take it on down the line.

“Space isn’t,” Sam said slowly. “But the space station is.” He looked up at and, in his mind’s eye, through the ceiling again. Some things he saw, or thought he saw, very clearly. Others still made no sense at all.

One evening, after Heinrich had gone to the cinema and the younger children were asleep, Käthe Drucker asked, “How long will you go on flying into space, Hans?”

Johannes Drucker looked at his wife in some surprise. “You never asked me that before, love,” he said. “Until they don’t want me to do it any more, I suppose, or . . .”

Or until I blow up,
he’d started to say. He would have said it lightheartedly. Somehow, he didn’t think he could have said it lightheartedly enough to make Käthe appreciate it. Peenemünde already had too many monuments to fallen (or, more often, vaporized) heroes for that. He didn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t dwell on it and do his job. If he did go, he’d probably be dead before he knew it. That consoled him. It was unlikely to console his wife.

“Don’t you think you’ve given the
Reich
enough of your life?” she asked. By the look in her eye, the fallen heroes of Peenemünde were on her mind, sure enough.

“If I didn’t like what I was doing, I would say yes,” Drucker answered truthfully. “But since I do—”

Käthe sighed. “Since you do, I have to watch you go off and be unfaithful to me, and I have to hope your mistress decides to let you come back to my arms.”

“That’s not fair,” Drucker said, but he couldn’t have told her how it wasn’t. He
did
love—he dearly loved—riding an A-45 hundreds of kilometers into the sky. He did forsake his wife whenever he went into space. And an A-45 could indeed keep him from coming home to Käthe.

She sighed again. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “You will anyhow.”

“Let’s go to bed,” Drucker said. “Things will look better in the morning.”

After telling her no, he wondered if she’d want to have anything to do with him once they got under the covers together. But if he was willing to take chances every time he rode a pillar of fire up from Peenemünde, he was also willing to take them in the dark quiet of his own bedroom. And when, in an experimental way, he set a hand on Käthe’s hip, she turned toward him and slid out of her flannel nightgown faster than he’d imagined possible. She might have been so urgent on their honeymoon in the south of France; he wasn’t sure he could remember any time since to match this one.

“Whew!” he panted afterwards. “Call the ambulance. I think I need to go to the hospital—I’m all worn out.”

“To have your head examined,
I
think,” Käthe said, pressing her warm, soft length against him. “But then, you fly rocket ships, so I should have known that already.” She took him in hand. “Maybe I really can make you too tired to be able to fly. Shall I find out?”

He wasn’t sure he would rise to the occasion, but he managed. This time, he didn’t need to feign exhaustion when they finished. As he sank toward slumber, he remembered screwing himself silly in military brothels before dangerous missions against the Russians or the Lizards. Maybe Käthe was doing the same sort of thing, only worrying about his mission, not something she had to face herself.

He’d almost drifted off when he remembered something he would sooner have forgotten: a lot of the women drafted into these military brothels had been Jewesses. That hadn’t meant anything to him during his visits; they’d just been warm, available flesh back then. Once he’d buttoned his trousers and left, he hadn’t given them a second thought. Now, looking back over twenty years, he wondered how long they’d lasted in the brothels and what happened to them when they couldn’t go on any more. Nothing good—he was sure of that.

He didn’t fall asleep right away after all.

For all his doubts, for all its horrors, he still served the
Reich
. A few days after Käthe failed to persuade him to stop going into space, he sat in a briefing room at the Peenemünde rocket base, learning what the powers that be particularly wanted to learn from his latest missions.

“You will pay special attention to the American space station,” said Major Thomas Ehrhardt, the briefing officer: a fussily precise little man with a bright red Hitler-style mustache. “You are authorized to change your orbit for a close inspection, if you deem that appropriate.”

“Really?” Drucker raised an eyebrow. “I would love to do it—I will do it—but I have never had this sort of authorization before. Why have things changed?”

He wondered if Ehrhardt would invoke the great god Security and tell him that was none of his business. But the briefing officer answered candidly: “I will tell you why, Lieutenant Colonel. There has been unusual emission of radioactivity from the station over the past few weeks. We are still trying to learn the reasons behind this emission. As yet, we have not succeeded. Perhaps yours will be the mission that finds out what we need to know.”

“I hope so,” Drucker said. “I’ll do everything I can.” He got to his feet and shot out his right forearm. “
Heil
Himmler!”

“Heil!”
Ehrhardt returned the salute.

The A-45 on which Drucker rode into space carried strap-on motors attached to either side of the main rocket’s first stage. They boosted him into a higher orbit than the A-45 could have achieved by itself. Any deviation from the norm was bound to make the Lizards and the Americans suspicious (the Bolsheviks, he assumed, were always suspicious). But the Rocket Force Command must have warned the other spacefarers that he would be taking an unusual path, because the questions he got were curious, not hostile.

He enjoyed the new perspective he got on the world from a couple of hundred kilometers higher than usual. He’d seen nearly everything there was to see from the orbit
Käthe
normally took. The wider view was interesting. It made him feel almost godlike.

And he enjoyed the better view of the U.S. space station he got from this higher orbit. Even before he tried to approach it, his Zeiss binoculars gave him a closer look than he’d ever had. The only drawback to the situation was that, because he moved more slowly than he would have in a closer orbit, he didn’t come up to the station as often as he would have otherwise.

“Having fun, snoop?” the space station’s radioman asked as he did approach from behind.

“Of course,” Drucker answered easily. “I would even more fun have if you had pretty girls at every window undressing.”

“Don’t I wish!” the American said. “It’s supposed to be something special when you’re weightless, too, you know what I mean?”

“I have heard this, yes,” Drucker said. “I do not about it know in person.”

“Neither do I,” the radio operator said. “This is something that needs research, dammit!”

Drucker tried to imagine such goings-on at the
Reich
’s space station. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Had Göring become
Führer
after Hitler died . . . then, maybe. No—then, certainly. Göring would have had himself flown up there to make the first experiment. But the Fat Boy had disgraced himself instead, and gray, cold Himmler frowned on fooling around for its own sake—all he thought it was good for was making more Germans. With a small mental sigh, Drucker swung back from sex to espionage: “With so much room, you Americans should try to find out.”

“Not enough gals up here,” the radioman said in disgusted tones.

That was interesting. Drucker hadn’t known the American space station held any women at all. He wasn’t sure anyone in the Greater German
Reich
knew the Americans were sending women into space. The Russians had done it a couple of times, but Drucker didn’t much care what the Russians did. Their pilots were just along to push buttons; ground control did all the real work. Unless war suddenly broke out, a well-trained dog could handle a Russian spacecraft.

“Maybe your women don’t like the radiation,” Drucker said. American radiomen liked to run their mouths; maybe he could get this one to talk out of turn.

He couldn’t. The fellow not only didn’t say anything about radiation, he clammed up altogether. After a while, Drucker passed out of radio range. He muttered in frustration. He’d learned something that might be important, but it wasn’t what he’d come upstairs to learn.

He made some calculations, then radioed down to the ground to make sure he—and
Käthe
’s computer—hadn’t dropped a deci-mal point anywhere. Once satisfied he had everything straight, he waited till the calculated time, then fired up the motor on the upper stage of the A-45 for a burn that would change his orbit to one passing close to the American space station.

When he came into radar range of the station, the radio operator jeered at him: “Not just a snoop, a goddamn Peeping Tom.”

“I want to know what you are doing,” Drucker answered stolidly. “For my country’s sake, it is my business to learn what you are doing.”

“It’s not your business,” the American said. “It never was, and it never will be.” He hesitated, then went on, “Looks like you’re going to pass about half a mile astern of our boom.”

“Yes,” Drucker said. “I will not to you lie. I want to see what you are at the end of it there making.”

“I noticed.” The radioman’s voice was dry. He hesitated again. “Listen, pal, if you’re smart, you’ll change your trajectory a bit, on account of if you don’t it won’t be healthy for you. You know what I’m saying? You don’t want to pass right astern of that boom, not unless you don’t have any family you care about.”

“Radiation?” Drucker asked. The radioman didn’t answer, as he hadn’t answered his last question about radiation. Drucker thought it over. Was he being bluffed? If it weren’t for radiation, he wouldn’t have been up here this far. “Thank you,” he said, and used his attitude jets to change course.

What the devil were the Americans doing? He couldn’t see as well as he would have liked, not even through the viewfinder of his camera with the long lens attached. One thing he did see: the boom looked very stiff and strong. He didn’t know what that meant, but he noted it—in space, nobody built any stronger, any heavier, than he had to.