Second Contact (77 page)

The Geiger counter Drucker had along started chattering. He listened to it with pursed lips. Here he was off-axis to the unit at the end of the boom, and he was still picking up this much radiation? How much would he have taken had he gone right behind it, as he’d planned? More. A lot more. He owed the U.S. radio operator a good turn. So did Käthe. He had the bad feeling Peenemünde’s memorial would have got a new name on it had the American kept quiet.

He wasn’t sorry when his orbit took him away from the space station, but he did some furious calculating for a burn that would bring him back to its neighborhood as fast as possible. Spaceflight was like the rest of the
Werhmacht
in some ways. Hurry up and wait was one of them. He had to wait till the proper time to make the burn, and then again till his changed trajectory brought him toward the space station.

And, as he began the approach, he stared first at his radar and then out the window of the A-45’s upper stage—for the space station, far and away the biggest and heaviest human-made object in Earth orbit, was nowhere near where it was supposed to be.

To her surprise, Kassquit discovered she missed Regeya. No one came right out and told her, but she gathered he really was a Big Ugly. Because he was one, he had no place on the Race’s computer network. But the chatter about the American space station was less interesting without him. He’d known a lot, and he’d had a knack for asking interesting questions. After he was purged from the network, discussion faltered.

Not long after Regeya vanished, Kassquit got an electronic message relayed through the Race’s consulate in some city or another in the Tosevite not-empire known as the United States.
I greet you,
it read.
I do not know that I much like you, but I greet you anyhow. Unless I am wrong, you are the one who figured out I was nothing but a miserable Big Ugly looking where he should not. Congratulations, I suppose. Even as a Big Ugly, I do have access to some of your network, which is how I am sending you this. Best regards, Sam Yeager.

She read the message through several times. Then, slowly, she made the affirmative hand gesture. Sam Yeager the Tosevite sounded exactly like Regeya, the purported male of the Race.

He still took her for a female of the Race. That gave her a certain amount—a large amount—of pleasure, pleasure of the same sort she’d known when she made the hateful researcher Tessrek back down. In those moments, life looked like a game, a game in which she’d just won a turn.

“How do I answer?” she murmured to herself. It wasn’t an easy question. She’d never exchanged words with a wild Tosevite before, not knowingly. If she kept doing it, would he realize she was a Tosevite, too? He was a clever male; she’d seen that. Could she stand being discovered? What would he think of her?

I greet you,
she wrote in reply. Her back straightened. She stuck out her chin. No matter what the Tosevite thought of her, she was proud of herself. No, she wouldn’t let him know she was anything but a female of the Race. He wouldn’t find out anything different. She’d make sure he didn’t, by the Emperor.
Your spying was doomed to fail,
she went on.
You cannot pretend to be what you are not.
Her mouth fell open in amusement—here she was, pretending to be what she was not.
Now that you openly admit to being what you are, perhaps we shall become friends, as much as two so different can.

She studied that, then decided to transmit it. She did not think the wild Big Ugly would take it for undue familiarity. He might not belong to the Race, but he did show considerable understanding of it. He had, in fact, fooled males and females who truly came from eggs.

I hope we shall become friends, you and I,
Yeager responded.
Tosevites and the Race are going to be sharing this planet for a long time. I have said it before—we need to get along with each other.
Kassquit made the affirmative gesture again. Then the Tosevite wrote,
I have a question for you: why, when you thought I was Regeya, did you say you would not talk with me on the telephone?

Kassquit studied those words with dismay. No, this Tosevite was anything but a fool. He noticed discrepancies and put them together. And he knew she was a female, even if not of which species. She couldn’t say, for instance, that she was a veteran with a horrible scar she didn’t like to display on the screen.

Yeager sent another message while waiting for her reply.
You would have found out for sure I was a Tosevite if we had talked on the telephone,
he wrote.
I speak the language of the Race pretty well, but there are some sounds I cannot make quite right no matter how hard I try, because my mouth is the wrong shape.

“I know,” Kassquit whispered. “Oh, I know.” The language of the Race was the only one she knew, but she spoke it mushily, too. She couldn’t help it. Like this Yeager’s, her mouth was the wrong shape.

Again, she asked herself how she was supposed to answer that.
Telephones are too spontaneous,
she wrote at last.
I might have given away something I should not have.
And that was true—she’d have given away that she was a Big Ugly by birth. But Yeager would think (she hoped he’d think) she was talking about security.

All right, then,
he replied.
I hope whatever it is you cannot talk about goes well for you.
He was friendlier than most males of the Race. Of course, they looked down their snouts at her because she was a Tosevite. This Sam Yeager—she wondered why he had two names—wouldn’t do that, anyhow.

She was pondering her reply when a flashing red star appeared in the lower right-hand corner of her computer screen. That meant an urgent news flash. She gave up on her message—the Tosevite could wait. She wanted to find out what was going on.

The image that appeared on her screen when she switched to the news feed made her exclaim in surprise. She’d seen video of the American Big Uglies’ space station before, and had spent a lot of time discussing it on the network. Now here it was—and it was moving. She saw a faint glowing stream of expelled reaction mass emerging from the lump at the end of the new boom.

A commentator from the Race was saying, “—is the first known use by the Big Uglies of a motor powered by atomic energy. It appears to be a fission motor, not the far more efficient and energetic fusion reactors we have used for so long. Acceleration is feeble, hardly more than one part of gravity per hundred. Nevertheless, as you see, it moves.”

Kassquit watched the American ship—space station no longer. But for the exhaust, she could not have proved it moved. The motion she saw might as easily have come from the camera.

“We have sent urgent queries to President Warren, leader of the not-empire known as the United States,” the commentator said. “Fine details of his reply are still being translated, but he asserts that the ship was built for no warlike purpose, but solely for the exploration of this solar system.”

“How can we trust that?” Kassquit said, as if someone were standing beside her insisting that she trust it. “They built the ugly thing without telling us what they were up to.”

“Their ship is too slow and ungainly to make a likely weapons platform.” The commentator might have been answering her. “It is also moving away from Tosev 3. But investigation will continue until its nature may be precisely ascertained.”

“Its nature should have been ascertained a long time ago,” Kassquit said. “Security has done a slipshod job.”

Again, she was arguing with the commentator. This time, he did not even seem to pay attention to her. He said, “Fleetlord Atvar of the conquest fleet and Fleetlord Reffet of the colonization fleet have issued a joint statement affirming that there is no cause for alarm in this new development, and expressing relief that this ship does appear to be no more than an oversized exploration vessel, as the ruler of the not-empire known as the United States has declared.”

“And if we start blindly accepting a Big Ugly’s word, where will we be?” Kassquit answered her own question: “In trouble, nowhere else.”

But the commentator sounded convinced everything was fine. “The subject of the American space station has been on the minds of males and females in recent times, as the computer discussion areas show,” he said. “Now we see that much of the anxious speculation was misinformed, as anxious speculation commonly is.”

“How do you know we see anything of the sort?” Kassquit demanded, as if the male could hear her.

The U.S. spacecraft disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a graphic showing its projected course. “As you can observe, the craft is headed for none of the major planets of this solar system. It is not heading toward Home or any other world of the Empire. And, with its feeble acceleration, it must lack the fuel capacity to be a starship. Its most likely destination appears to be one of the many useless and insignificant rocks orbiting between Tosev 4, a small world, and Tosev 5, a gas giant larger than any in Home’s system. The American Big Uglies have previously sent chemically powered exploration rockets out among these minor planets, as the Tosevites term them. Now it appears they are visiting them on a larger scale. As far as the Race is concerned, they are welcome to them.”

There, for once, Kassquit agreed with the noisy male. Here as in so many other ways, the star Tosev’s solar system was different from those of other stars in the Empire: it held far more such debris. No one was sure why; speculation centered on Tosev’s greater mass.

How typical of Big Uglies,
she thought,
to spend so much time and so many resources going off to examine what is not worth examining in the first place.
Feeling obstreperous (and hoping that feeling was not a product of her own Tosevite heritage), she decided to send Sam Yeager a message.
So this, then, is what so concerned you,
she wrote.
A large, clumsy spaceship that was not worth being kept secret.

I agree,
he wrote back a little later.
It was not worth being kept secret. In that case, why was it?

Who can tell, with Tosevites?
Kassquit answered.

This time, Yeager did not reply. She wondered if she’d insulted him. She didn’t want to do that by accident. When she offended, she aimed to get full value from it.

Then she began to wonder if he’d been trying to tell her something else, something she would miss if she weren’t paying attention. If the American space station or spaceship or whatever it turned out to be had been kept so secret without there being any need for that, all that implied was that Big Uglies were fools, a notion Kassquit was prepared to take on faith.

But not all Big Uglies were fools all the time. She didn’t like believing that so well, but the conclusion was inescapable. Tosev 3, or some parts of Tosev 3, had come too far too fast for her to doubt it. Suppose the American Tosevites had had good reason to keep their project secret. What then?

Then, by logic inescapable as that of geometry, their spacecraft wasn’t so harmless as it now seemed. They had to have something in mind beyond what the Race was seeing.

“But what?” Kassquit wondered aloud. “Their atomic motor?”

Maybe. The idea appealed to her. Having fought the Race with explosive-metal bombs, the American Tosevites had to know the Race would be less than delighted at their using nuclear energy in space. Before the space station turned into a ship, the United States could have shouted its peaceful intentions as often as it liked, but it would have had a hard time convincing the Race it was telling the truth.

Was the United States telling the truth now? Had the Big Ugly named Sam Yeager, the Big Ugly who was and was not Regeya, hinted otherwise? Or was Kassquit reading too much into what he had written? And even if she read him aright, was he really in any position to know?

Those were good questions. Kassquit wished she knew the answers to all of them. As things were, she didn’t know the answer to any of them. She sighed. As she came into adulthood, she was discovering that such frustrations were part of life.

  20

Fotsev’s head came up sharply. His eye turrets swung now this way, now that, as he prowled through the streets of Basra. “Something is wrong here,” he said in a voice that came out flat because he forced all the nervousness from it. “Something does not taste the way it should.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets were moving unnaturally fast, too. That he thought something wasn’t the way it should be helped ease Fotsev’s mind. With the combat Gorppet had seen, he ought to have a knack for recognizing trouble before it became obvious.

“Everything seems quiet to me,” Betvoss said.

“I wish you seemed quiet to me,” Gorppet told him.

Betvoss liked to contradict for the fun of contradicting. Fotsev had seen that before. But, this time, the other male’s words helped Fotsev see where the trouble lay. “Everything does seem quiet,” he said. Gorppet gave him a reproachful look till he went on, “Everything seems too quiet.”

“Yes, it does.” Gorppet used an emphatic cough. “That is it exactly! Not many Big Uglies on the street, not even many of the cursed yapping creatures they use for pets.”

“Not many weapons, either.” Betvoss kept right on contradicting. “Usually the local Tosevites have about as much firepower as we do. If anyone thinks I am sorry to see something different for once, he is an addled egg.”

“If something is different, that is likely to mean something is wrong,” Fotsev said. His opinion sprang partly from the innate conservatism of the Race, partly from his own experience on Tosev 3.

Gorppet made the affirmative hand gesture. “If things go quiet all of a sudden, you always wonder what the Big Uglies are hiding. Or you should.”

“And it could be anything,” Fotsev said gloomily. “It could be anything at all. Remember the riots we had to put down when the colonization fleet started landing? If I never hear one more Big Ugly wrapped in rags screaming
‘Allahu akbar!’
I will be the happiest male on the face of this planet.”

Betvoss didn’t argue with that. Fotsev didn’t see how even Betvoss could have argued with that. Another male on patrol said, “Hardly any of the little half-grown beggars around today. And if that does not prove something is wrong, what would?”

“Truth,” Fotsev said. “They act like parasites—or they do most of the time. But where are they this morning?”

“Not at their lessons, that is certain,” Gorppet said with a nasty laugh. Most of the local Tosevite hatchlings had no lessons to attend. The ones who did receive what the locals considered an education learned to add and subtract a little, to write in their language, and to read from the manual of the superstition dominant hereabouts. Maybe that was better than nothing. Fotsev would not have bet anything he cared to lose on it.

When the patrol came into the central market square, he saw for himself that things were not right. On almost every day, the pandemonium in the market square outdid the rest of Basra put together. Not today. Today, hardly any merchants displayed food or cloth or brasswork or the other things they made. Today, males and females of the Race from the new towns out in the desert outnumbered Tosevites as customers.

“Too quiet,” Gorppet said.

“Much too quiet,” Fotsev agreed. He waited for Betvoss to weigh in on the opposite side, but the other male said not a word.

Horrible electrified squawkings burst from the towers attached to the buildings where the local Big Uglies practiced their superstition. “The call to prayer,” Gorppet said, and Fotsev made the affirmative gesture. “Now we shall see how many of them come out,” Gorppet went on. “If they stay home for this . . . well, they never have, not in all the time I have been here.”

Sure enough, robed Big Uglies emerged from houses and shops and streamed toward the mosques of Basra. “Praying is not the only thing they do in those buildings,” Fotsev said worriedly. “The males who lead them in prayer are also known to lead them in rebellion against the Empire.”

“We ought to go in there and make sure they say only things that have to do with their foolish beliefs,” Betvoss said. “Those males have no business meddling in politics. They should be punished if they try.”

“We have punished some of them,” Fotsev said. “Others keep popping up.”

“The other fork of the tongue is, they have no notion where their superstition ends and politics begins,” Gorppet added. “For them, the two are not to be separated.”

“We should instruct them, then.” Betvoss flourished his rifle to show what kind of instruction he had in mind. “We should go into those houses of superstition and kill the Big Uglies who preach against us, kill them or at least take them away and imprison them so they cannot inflame the others.”

“We tried that, not long after we occupied these parts,” Gorppet said. “It did not work: it created more turbulence than it suppressed. And so many of these Tosevites are experts in the fine points of their foolish belief that new leaders arose almost at once to replace the ones we captured.”

“Too bad,” Betvoss said, and there, for once, Fotsev couldn’t disagree with him.

With most of the Big Uglies worshiping, the patrol prowled down streets even more deserted than before. “Too easy,” Fotsev muttered under his breath. “Too easy, too quiet.”

His eye turrets kept on sliding now this way, now that, looking for places from which the Tosevites might ambush the patrol, and also for good defensive positions in case of trouble. That there was no sign of trouble except for things being calmer than usual did nothing to deter him. He felt like a hatchling still in the egg that trembled when it heard a predator’s footsteps. It could not see danger, but knew danger was there nonetheless. Fotsev thought it was here, too.

His telephone hissed. The sound, designed to get his attention, made him start with alarm, though danger on Tosev 3 was likelier to start with angry shouts from Big Uglies or with the frightened yappings of their animals. He put the phone to a hearing diaphragm, listened, said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and set the instrument back on his belt.

“What shall be done?” Gorppet asked.

“I knew trouble was stirring somewhere,” Fotsev answered. “The Big Uglies have captured a bus on its way into Basra from one of the new towns and kidnapped all the females who were riding in it. The suspicion is that they intend to hold them for ransom.”

“Clever of the authorities to figure that out,” Gorppet said with heavy sarcasm. “Lesser minds would have been incapable of it.”

“Why kidnap only females?” Betvoss said. “Males are more dangerous to them, for there are no female soldiers.”

“That is not how the Big Uglies think,” Gorppet said. “Females matter more to them, because they are always in season. And besides, females do not know how to fight back. If they captured males, they might capture a trained soldier, one who could harm them.”

“That makes sense,” Betvoss said—he was being unusually reasonable today. “If we can find them, we can probably earn promotions.”

“If we see some evidence that we are near these kidnapped females, of course we shall try to rescue them,” Fotsev said. “But we must not forget everything else while we search for them.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. “Otherwise, the Tosevites will make us regret it.”

“Onward, then,” Fotsev said.

Onward they went, through the narrow, winding streets of Basra. A breeze sprang up, sending new and different stinks onto their scent receptors. After a while, the Big Uglies came out of their houses of worship. Gorppet, who spoke their language, called out to some of them. A few—only a few—answered. “They deny knowing anything about these females,” he said.

“Did you expect anything different?” Fotsev asked.

“Expect? No,” Gorppet answered. “But you never can tell. I might have been lucky. The Tosevites have feuds among themselves. Had I found a male at feud with the kidnappers, he might have told us what we need to know.”

For a small stretch of time, the Big Uglies returning from their worship filled the streets. Then they might have disappeared off the face of Tosev 3. Everything grew quiet again—much too quiet, as far as Fotsev was concerned. Something simmered under the surface, though he couldn’t tell what. That sense of walking on uncertain ground gnawed at him.

The breeze picked up and swirled dust into his face. His nictitating membranes flicked back and forth, back and forth, protecting his eyes from the grit. “Weather reminds me of a windy day back on Home,” he remarked, and a couple of the other males made the affirmative hand gesture.

Then, all at once, the breeze blew him a scent that also reminded him of Home. “By the Emperor!” he said softly. He was not the only male in the patrol to smell those pheromones, of course. Everyone else started standing more nearly erect, too.

“She’s close,” Betvoss said hoarsely. “She’s very close.”

“She . . . maybe they,” Gorppet said. “The scent is
strong
.” His voice was hot and hungry, and he added an emphatic cough.

“I wonder if these are the kidnapped females.” Fotsev reluctantly reached for his telephone to report the possibility.

“Investigate with caution,” a male back at the barracks told him.

“It shall be done,” Fotsev replied. But that other male, that distant male, did not have a cloud of pheromones blowing into his face. When Fotsev relayed the order to the rest of the patrol, what he said was, “We have permission to go forward.”

A couple of males exclaimed in delight. Betvoss said, “It will probably be a couple of ginger-addled females from the new towns. But if they are ginger-addled, they will want to mate, and smelling them certainly makes me want to mate. And so . . .” He hurried in the direction the delicious scent led him. So did Fotsev. So did the whole patrol. They were investigating, but had forgotten all about caution.

Rounding a corner, Fotsev saw a couple of females at the dark dead end of an alleyway. The pheromones came off them in waves. He and his comrades rushed toward them. Only when he got very near did his lust-impaired senses note they were bound and gagged.

He tried to make himself stop. “It is a trap!” he shouted. The realization came just too late for him. Big Uglies concealed in houses on either side of the alley had already opened up with rifles and automatic weapons. Males fell as if scythed down. Fotsev screamed for help into his telephone. Then something struck him a heavy blow in the flank. He found himself on the ground without knowing how he’d got there. It didn’t hurt—yet.

The Tosevites swarmed out of their hiding places to try to finish off the patrol.
“Allahu akbar!”
they shouted. A male fired at them, and some fell. The rest kept shouting,
“Allahu akbar!”
It was the last thing Fotsev ever heard.

“Allahu akbar!”
The cry echoed through Jerusalem once more. Reuven Russie hated it. It meant horror and terror and death. He’d seen that before. Now he and the city he loved—the only city he’d ever loved—were seeing it again.

In the most hackneyed, clichéd fashion possible, he wished he’d listened to his mother. If he hadn’t gone in to the Russie Medical College this morning, he wouldn’t be worrying now about how he was going to get home in one piece. Things hadn’t been so bad this morning. He hadn’t wanted to miss the day’s lectures or the biochemistry lab—especially not the latter, whose equipment and techniques far outdid anything human technology could offer.

And so he’d come, and he hadn’t had too hard a time doing it. People had been shouting
“Allahu akbar!”
even then, and there were occasional spatters of gunfire, the
pop-pop-pop
s sounding like fireworks. But Reuven had gone through the empty market square without so much as seeing a man with a rifle or a submachine gun. The shopkeepers who’d stayed home and merchants who hadn’t set up their stalls, though, had known something he hadn’t.

The Race, as a matter of course, efficiently soundproofed the buildings it put up. Reuven approved; distractions were the last thing he needed when trying to keep up with a Lizard physician lecturing as quickly as he would have for students of his own species. He and his fellows never heard Jerusalem’s ordinary street noise, which could be pretty raucous.