Second Contact c-1 Read online

  Neither Fotsev nor Gorppet tried to talk the Tosevites into stopping or going back. They both opened up as soon as the closest Big Uglies got into range. At that range, against that crowd, they could hardly miss. Watching bullets chew comrades to rags made some of the Big Uglies hesitate. But others, a lot of others, kept coming.

  “They think they will go to a happy afterlife if they die fighting us,” Gorppet said, reloading his weapon.

  “The Emperors know their spirits not,” Fotsev answered, spraying more death into the mob. As he’d seen before, the Tosevites were recklessly brave. Soon one would get close enough to tear the weapon from his hands. Then it would be teeth and claws till the end. He hoped it would be quick.

  But then, with a thuttering roar, a helicopter gunship zoomed up from the Race’s base outside Basra. It lashed the crowd of fanatical Tosevites with rockets and rounds from a rotating-barreled cannon. Not even the Big Uglies could stand up against that kind of firepower. They broke and ran, shrieking in fear where they had shrieked in fury.

  The iron stink of blood filling the scent receptors on his tongue, Fotsev emptied a magazine at their fleeing backs. He hoped the gunship had put paid to that Khomeini, who’d stirred the mob as a male might stir a hot drink.

  Before he could do more than hope, something rode a trail of fire from the ground and slammed into the gunship. It slewed sideways in the air, then crashed in the middle of the market square. Its rotors flew off and cut down a last few Big Uglies.

  Fotsev stared in horror. “These Big Uglies do not know how to make antiaircraft missiles!” he burst out.

  “No, but they know how to buy or beg or borrow them from the Tosevites who do.” Gorppet’s voice was thoroughly grim. “By the spirits of Emperors past, there will be an accounting for this. But now, while we can, we had better get out of here.” Side by side, they skittered away from the market square. Behind them, the helicopter gunship burned and burned.

  “Allahu akbar!” A rock flew past Reuven Russie’s head. “Dog of a Jew, you suck the Lizards’ cocks. Your mother opens her legs for them. Your sister-aii! ” The Arab’s curses dissolved in a howl of pain. Reuven had found a rock of his own, and flung it with better effect than the scrawny youth who’d been abusing him.

  Jerusalem seethed like a teapot left over the fire too long. Unlike a teapot, though, the city had nowhere the steam could escape. Lizard troopers and human police-mostly Jews-might come under fire from any house, any shop. So might any passerby.

  For once, Reuven almost wished he lived in the dormitory with his fellow medical students. Getting to and from the college had seemed more like running the gauntlet every day since the Muslim riots broke out. So far, he hadn’t got hurt. He knew that was as much luck as anything else, though he never would have admitted as much to his parents.

  A black swastika stared at him from a wall. Some of the Arabs who hated the Lizards but weren’t religious fanatics leaned toward the Reich, not least because Himmler loved Jews even less than they did. Along with swastikas, red stars also blossomed on the walls-some Jews, and some Arabs, too, looked to Moscow for deliverance from the Race. But the commonest graffiti were in the sinuous squiggles of Arabic script, the letters all looking as if Hebrew block characters had run in the rain. Allahu akbar! seemed to scream from every other wall.

  Reuven peered round a corner. The next short block looked safe enough. He hurried along it. One more block and he was home. When he checked the last block, he spied a Jewish policeman carrying a British Sten gun, one of the countless weapons left over from the last big fight. This new round of turmoil wasn’t shaping up as anything so delightful, either.

  The policeman saw him, too, and started to aim the submachine gun in his direction. Then the fellow lowered the barrel. “You’re no Arab,” he said in Hebrew.

  “No.” Reuven sniffed. Smoke was in the air, more than could be accounted for from cookfires. “What a mess. We haven’t seen anything like this-ever, I don’t think.”

  “Bloody balls-up,” the Jewish policeman muttered in English of a sort. He went back to Hebrew: “We’ll just have to go on knocking heads together till things simmer down, that’s all. We can do it.” As if to contradict him, something-a grenade? a bomb? — blew up not too far away.

  “It’s the colonization fleet,” Reuven said. “Now that it’s finally here, people are realizing all over again that we can’t make the Lizards go away by holding our breath and wishing they would.”

  “I don’t care what it is. It’s a bloody balls-up.” That was English again; Hebrew, for so long a liturgical language, was woefully short on curses. The policeman went on, “And it doesn’t matter what it is, anyhow. Whatever it is, we’ve got to put a stop to it-and we will.”

  “I hope so,” Reuven said, and passed on.

  When he got home, his mother and his twin sisters, Esther and Judith, fell on him with glad cries. Even he couldn’t always tell Esther and Judith apart, and he’d known them the entire twelve years of their lives. One of them said, “We heard the bomb a couple of minutes ago.”

  “And the machine guns a little while before that,” the other one added.

  “I don’t like machine guns,” they said together. They thought so much alike, Reuven sometimes wondered if they could tell each other apart, if each of them had to consider before deciding whether she was Judith or Esther.

  To try to make them stop thinking about machine guns, he said, “I’m going to experiment on the two of you, to see if there really are two of you, or just one with a mirror.”

  They pointed at each other. “She’s the mirror,” they chorused.

  “Not funny,” Reuven said, although, when you got down to it, it was. He turned to his mother. “You didn’t send them out to school today, did you?”

  “Do I look meshugge?” Rivka Russie asked. “You and your father are the crazy ones, to go out on the streets in times like these.” That held an unpleasant amount of truth, though Reuven didn’t want to admit it. His mother went on, “Houses aren’t safe, either, though. Bombs, bullets-” She made a face. “We saw too much of that during the war. We saw too much of everything during the war.”

  Reuven had been very young then. He remembered the German invasion of Poland and the Lizard invasion of the world in scattered sharp, horrifying images, one not connected to the next: still photographs snipped almost at random from a motion picture full of terror. “Rome,” he murmured.

  “What about Rome?” Esther and Judith asked together.

  Neither their brother nor their mother answered. Rome was one of his memory snapshots; he’d been on the deck of a Greek freighter in the Tyrrhenian Sea when the Germans touched off an explosive-metal bomb they’d smuggled into the city. Now, with knowledge he hadn’t had then, he wondered how much radioactive fallout he’d been exposed to during the blast. He didn’t really want to know. He couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

  Heavy booted feet pounded up the street past the house. The small windows that looked on the street were shuttered; like most houses in Jerusalem, this one preferred to peer inward onto its own courtyard than out at the wider world. Most of the time, Reuven took that for granted. He’d been used to it most of his life. This once, though, he wouldn’t have minded seeing what was going on.

  All of a sudden, he changed his mind. After shouts in Hebrew and Arabic, guns started hammering. A bullet slammed through a side wall, cracked past his head, and was through the other wall before his jaw got done dropping.

  His mother had a better idea of what to do under such circumstances than he did. “On the floor!” she shouted. “Get down! Lie flat! The bullets will pass over us.”

  When Reuven’s sisters didn’t move fast enough to suit her, she pushed them down and lay on them, ignoring their squawks. Reuven had just got down on the floor himself when a burst of fire gave the front wall some ventilation it hadn’t had before. Esther and Judith stopped squawking.

  Out on the street, someone started scream
ing and didn’t stop. Reuven couldn’t tell whether the shrieks were in Hebrew or Arabic. Pain had no separate tongue; pain was its own universal language.

  He got to his feet. “What are you doing?” his mother demanded. “Lay down again!”

  “I can’t,” he answered. “I’ve got to get my bag. Someone’s hurt bad out there. I’m not a doctor, not yet, but I’m closer to being one than anybody else around.”

  He waited for his mother to scream at him. To his astonishment, she smiled instead: a strange, sweet, sad smile. “Your father did the same thing when the Lizards took Jerusalem away from the British. Go on, then. God watch over you.”

  Reuven snatched his black leather bag out of his bedroom and hurried back to the front door. Predictably, his sisters wanted to do whatever he did. As predictably, his mother wouldn’t let them. He went out the door, certain his mother would lock and bar it after him.

  Bullets still flew, though not so often now. An automobile burned at the end of the block, sending a pyre of stinking black smoke into the sky. All the flames were orange or yellow, none the almost invisible pale blue of burning hydrogen-an old motorcar, not one of the newer models on the Lizard pattern.

  The screaming came from the other side of the motorcar. Feeling naked and exposed, Reuven came around the machine to do what he could for the wounded man. He’d just stopped beside him when, from behind, someone said, “What have we got here, son?”

  “Hello, Father,” Reuven said as Moishe Russie got down on one knee beside him. The two of them looked very much alike there side by side-pale skin; dark hair; narrow, strong-cheekboned faces-save that Moishe was going bald. His son continued, “I haven’t even had a chance to look at him yet.”

  “Don’t need any fancy Lizard tools for this diagnosis,” his father said. “A burst of three in the belly…” He pointed to the holes in the fighter’s shirt. They had some blood oozing from them, but the real flood of it came from the man’s back. Reuven gulped a little. Dissections in medical school were much neater than this, and the subjects didn’t scream. Moishe Russie spoke as if back in the classroom himself: “The entry wounds are fairly small. If you were heartless enough to turn him over, you’d see big chunks of meat blown out of the exit wounds. Prognosis, son?”

  Reuven licked his lips. “He’ll keep hurting till he loses enough blood to lose consciousness, too. Then he’ll finally die.” He spoke without fear the wounded man would hear him; the fighter was lost in his private hell.

  “I think you’re right.” His father rummaged in his own black bag, then pulled out a syringe. He injected the fallen fighter, then glanced over at Reuven. “Enough morphine to stop his pain. Enough to stop his heart and lungs in a couple of minutes, too.”

  He waited for Reuven to say something about that. After some thought, Reuven remarked, “They don’t teach us when to do that in medical school.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” his father agreed. “For one thing, the Lizards take it for granted, much more than we do. And for another, it’s not something you can learn in school. When the time comes, you’ll know. If you’re ever wondering whether you should, the answer is simple: you shouldn’t. When you should, you don’t wonder.”

  “How many times have you done it?” Reuven asked. As he spoke, the wounded fighter’s screams stopped. He stared up in dreamy surprise. Reuven wondered if he was seeing the men who knelt above him or only some interior vision. The man’s chest hitched a few more times, then respiration stopped, too.

  “Morphine is a good friend and a dreadful master,” Moishe Russie murmured. Then he seemed to hear the question Reuven had asked. “How many times? I don’t know. A few. A man who does it too often isn’t wondering enough about whether he ought to. You aren’t God, son, and you never will be. Once in a while-but only once in a while-He’ll let you be His assistant.” He got to his feet. The knee of his trousers was wet with the fighter’s blood. “We’d better get back home. Your mother will be worried about us.”

  “I know.”

  Reuven wondered what he would have done had he come on the wounded fighter by himself. Would he have had the nerve to put the man out of his misery? He hoped so, but knew he couldn’t be sure. He also realized he’d never be sure now whether the ordinary-looking man had been a Muslim or Jew.

  4

  Suave as a Frenchman, the Gestapo officer smiled at Johannes Drucker. “You must understand, my dear Lieutenant Colonel, this is only an inquiry into your loyalty, not a denial that you are loyal,” he said.

  “You have an easier time telling the difference than I do,” Drucker snapped. “All I know is, I’m grounded for no good reason. I want to go back into space, where I can best serve the Reich.” And where I can put hundreds-sometimes thousands-of kilometers between me and you.

  “I would not call the security of the Reich ‘no good reason,’ ” the Gestapo man said, his voice silky. “We must always be on guard, lest the Volk be polluted by alien, inferior blood.”

  “That’s my wife you’re talking about, you-” Drucker checked himself. Telling the son of a bitch he was a son of a bitch wouldn’t do him any good, and wouldn’t do Kathe any good, either.

  “We have worked diligently to make and keep the Reich free of Jews,” the Gestapo man said with what he no doubt intended for a friendly smile. “We shall continue until the great task is complete.”

  Drucker didn’t say anything. Nothing he could have said would have been any use. Anything he said would have got him into more trouble than he was in already. He had no great love for Jews. Back in the days when there were still a lot of Jews in the Greater German Reich, he hadn’t known many people with any great love for Jews.

  Slaughtering them like cattle, though… He didn’t see how that had helped the Reich. If the Jews hadn’t risen up in Poland when the Lizards came, it might still belong to Germany. And, when the Lizards included in their propaganda details of what the Germans were doing, relations between the Reich and other human powers stayed delicate for a long time.

  Would the Gestapo officer heed him if he pointed that out? It was to laugh. And then the sardonic laugh choked off. Most Germans had no great love for Jews. Kathe’s grandfather must have loved a Jewess, if what the Gestapo was saying held any truth. And, had he not loved that Jewess, Kathe would never have been born.

  Think about it later, Drucker told himself. For now, he kept on hoping it wasn’t true. If it was true, his career wasn’t the only thing that would go up in smoke. So would dear, sweet Kathe, out through the stack of a crematorium. His stomach lurched, worse than it ever did when he went weightless out in space. He’d known for twenty years what the Reich did to Jews, known and not thought much about it. Now it hit home. It occurred to him that he should have thought more and sooner. Too late now.

  As calmly as he could, he said, “I want to see her.”

  He’d said that before, and been refused. He got refused again. “You must know it is impossible,” the Gestapo man said. “She is in detention, pending adjudication of the case. She is comfortable; please accept my personal assurances on that score. If the charges prove unfounded, all will be as it had been.”

  He sounded as if he really meant it. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh in his face. Kathe was in detention-a polite word for jail or a camp. She was on trial for her life, and she couldn’t even defend herself. In the Reich, choosing the wrong grandparents could be a capital crime.

  Drucker did dare hope she was comfortable. If they decided her grandmother hadn’t been a Jew after all, they would let her go. It did happen-not too often (Drucker wished he hadn’t chosen to remember that), but it did. And he, by virtue of his rank and his skill, was valuable in the machinery of the Reich. If they did let her go, they wouldn’t want him disaffected.

  He wished he’d known her grandparents. All he’d seen of them were a few fading photographs in an old album. He didn’t remember ever thinking her grandmother looked Jewish. She’d had light hair and light eyes. When she
was young, she’d been very pretty. She’d looked a lot like Kathe, in fact.

  The officer, now, the officer had brown eyes and dark stubble he probably had to shave twice a day. Fixing him with a cold stare, Drucker said, “My wife’s grandmother was a better Aryan than you are.”

  “I may not be pretty,” the Gestapo man said evenly, “but I have an impeccable German pedigree. If they started putting all the homely people in camps, we’d run out of laborers in a hurry.”

  Damn, thought Drucker, who’d wanted to anger him. The Gestapo man probably had something, too. There were too many homely people to get rid of them; it would leave a great hole in the fabric of society. Getting rid of the Jews had left no such hole. They’d made perfect scapegoats: they were few, they’d stood out, and people had already disliked them.

  The officer might have been thinking along with him. He said, “That’s why the Americans just hate their niggers and don’t really do anything about it. If they did, it would be inconvenient for them.”

  “Inconvenient.” The word was sickly sweet in Drucker’s mouth, like the rotten horsemeat he’d eaten on the retreat from Moscow before the Lizards came. He’d been glad to have it, too. After muttering darkly under his breath, he said, “This business of not knowing is inconvenient for me, you know.”

  “Yes, of course I do.” The Gestapo man kept right on being smooth. “Whatever happens, your children will not be severely affected. One Jewish great-grandparent is not a legal impediment.”

  “You don’t think losing their mother might affect them?” Drucker snapped. And yet, in a horrid kind of way, his interrogator had a point. Severely affected was a euphemism for taken out and killed.

  “We must have pure blood.” However smooth, however suave he was, the Gestapo man had not a gram of compromise in him. In that, he made a good representative for the state he served. Doing his best to seem conciliatory even when he wasn’t, he added, “You have permission to leave for the time being. Your actual knowledge of your wife’s grandmother appears small.”