Aftershocks c-3 Read online

  Walsh said, “That notion you had for showing telephone numbers is a winner, David. We just got an order from the Calgary police, an order big enough that I think you’ve earned yourself another bonus check.”

  “Any time Calgary buys from Edmonton, you know we’ve got something good,” Jack Devereaux added. “They don’t love us, and we don’t love them. It’s like Toronto and Montreal, or Los Angeles and San Francisco down in the States.”

  “Glasgow and Edinburgh,” Goldfarb murmured, picking an example from the British Isles. He nodded to Walsh, doing his best not to seem very pleased at the news of the bonus. The money was welcome; in this world, money was always welcome. But, as a Jew, he didn’t want to seem excited about it. He cared what gentiles thought about his people, and didn’t want to give them an excuse to think nasty thoughts.

  After a little more chat, each of the engineers fixed a cup of tea and took it to his desk. Goldfarb had been pleasantly surprised to find tea so common in Canada; he’d assumed the Dominion, like the USA, was a land that preferred coffee. He was glad he’d been wrong.

  Fortified, he studied the latest piece of hardware Hal Walsh had given him. It had, his boss assured him, come from the engine of a Lizard landcruiser. What it did in the motor was rather less certain: he just had the widget, not the engine of which it was a part. He thought it was the electronic controller for the fuel-injection system that took the place carburetors had in Earthly internal-combustion engines.

  “You know what the trouble is, don’t you?” he said to Jack Devereaux.

  “Of course I do,” his fellow engineer answered. “Our gadgets look like they do what they do. These Lizard creations are nothing but electronic components slapped together. They aren’t obvious, the way our technology is.”

  “That’s it!” Goldfarb nodded gratefully. “The very thing I was thinking of. We have to work hard to figure out what they’re good for, and what they could be good for if we tweaked them a little.”

  He glowered at the control unit. It had a highly specialized job to do, and, if it was anything like most Lizard widgets, did that job extremely well. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the Americans and Germans and Russians had copied it for their tanks-not that the Germans were allowed any panzers these days. The collapse of the Reich left him altogether undismayed.

  Back in his days with the RAF, his work with Lizard technology had been perfectly straightforward. If it had to do with matters military, and especially with matters pertaining to radar, he’d done his best to adapt it to related human uses. If it didn’t, he’d either ignored it or passed it on to someone whose bailiwick it was.

  Things didn’t work like that at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. Here, the more outlandish his ideas, the better. Anybody could come up with direct conversions of Lizard gadgets to their nearest human equivalents. Sometimes that was worth doing-his system for reading phone numbers was a case in point. But thinking lefthanded was liable to pay off more in the long run.

  Bloody wonderful, he thought. How do I go about thinking lefthanded? He couldn’t force it; whenever he tried, he failed. Turning his mind away from the widget in front of him, letting his thoughts drift as they would, worked better. But that was a relative term. Sometimes inspiration simply would not strike.

  He’d feared Hal Walsh would sack him if he failed to come up with something brilliant his first couple of days on the job. But Walsh, who’d been doing this sort of directed woolgathering a lot longer than he had, took dry spells in stride. And now Goldfarb had one solid achievement under his belt. Having seen that he could do it, his boss was less inclined to insist that he do it to order.

  David spent the whole day playing with the Lizard control gadget, and by quitting time had come up with nothing in the least resembling inspiration. Walsh slapped him on the back. “Don’t lose any sleep about it,” he advised. “Give it another shot tomorrow. If it’s still not going anywhere, we’ll pull another gadget out of the bin and see what your evil, twisted imagination does with that.”

  “All right.” At the moment, Goldfarb didn’t find his imagination either evil or twisted. He had enough trouble finding it at all.

  The sun still stood high in the sky when he started home. In summer, daylight lingered long here. Edmonton was farther north than London, almost as far north as Belfast, his last posting in the RAF. In winter, of course, the sun hardly appeared at all. But he didn’t want to think about winter with long days to enjoy.

  When he got back to his flat-they called them apartments in Edmonton, in the American style-he broke into a grin. “Roast chicken!” he exclaimed. “My favorite.”

  “It’ll be ready in about twenty minutes,” his wife called from the kitchen. “Would you like a bottle of beer first?”

  “I’d love one,” he answered. As far as he was concerned, Canadian taverns couldn’t come close to matching proper British pubs, but Canadian beer in bottles was better than its British equivalents. He smiled at Naomi when she brought him a bottle of Moosehead. “You’ve got one for yourself, too, have you?”

  “And why not?” she answered saucily, her accent British on top of the faint German undertone she still kept after escaping from the Reich in her teens, not long before no more Jews got out of Germany alive. She took a sip. “It’s not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all.” Was she comparing it to the British brews she remembered, or to the German ones from long ago? David Goldfarb didn’t have the nerve to ask.

  Dinner was only a couple of minutes away when the telephone rang. Muttering under his breath, Goldfarb got up and answered it. “Hullo?” If it was some cheeky salesman, he intended to give the bugger a piece of his mind.

  “Hullo, David, old chum! So good to catch up with you again!” The voice on the other end of the line was cheerful, English, educated-and familiar. Recognizing it at once, Goldfarb wished he hadn’t.

  “Roundbush,” he said, and then, his voice harsh, “What do you want with me?”

  “You’re a smart lad. I daresay you can figure that out for yourself,” Basil Roundbush answered cheerfully. “You didn’t do as you were told, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to pay for that.”

  Automatically, Goldfarb’s eyes went to the gadget that showed the numbers of incoming calls. If he knew where the RAF officer who’d given him so much trouble was, he might be able to do something about him, or have the authorities do something about him. But the screen on the device showed no number at all. As far as it was concerned, nobody was on the other end of the call.

  With a laugh, Roundbush said, “I know you’ve flanged up something from the Lizards’ telephone switching gear. That won’t help you. You know I’ve got plenty of chums among the Race. There are times when they need to neutralize such circuits, and they haven’t any trouble doing it.”

  He obviously knew whereof he spoke. “Sod off and leave me alone,” Goldfarb growled. “I don’t want anything to do with you, and I don’t want anything to do with your bleeding chums, either.”

  “You’ve made that plain enough.” Roundbush still sounded happy. “But no one cares very much about your view of things, you know. You’ve been uncooperative, and now you’re going to have to pay the price. I rather wish it were otherwise: you had promise. But such is life.” He hung up.

  So did Goldfarb, cursing under his breath. “Who was that?” Naomi called as she set the table.

  “Basil Roundbush.” Goldfarb wished he could have come up with a comforting, convincing lie.

  The gentle clatter of plates and silverware stopped. His wife hurried out into the living room. “What did he want?” she asked. “I thought we were rid of him for good.”

  “I thought we were, too,” David answered. “I wish we were, but no such luck.” He sighed. “He didn’t come right out and say what he wanted, but he didn’t have to, not really. I already know that: he wants a piece of my hide.” His right hand folded into a fist. “He’ll have a devil of a time getting it, that’s all I’ve got t
o say.”

  Glen Johnson stared into space. From the control room of the Lewis and Clark, in solar orbit not far from the asteroid Ceres, there was a lot of space to see. The stars blazed clear and steady against the black sky of hard vacuum. The glass that held the vacuum at bay had been coated to kill reflections; except for knowing that it kept him alive, Johnson could ignore it.

  Turning to Mickey Flynn, the Lewis and Clark’s second pilot-the man just senior to him-he said, “I wonder how many of those stars you could see from Earth on a really clear night.”

  “Sixty-three percent,” Flynn answered at once.

  “How do you know that?” Johnson asked. He was prepared to take the figure as gospel truth. Flynn collected strange statistics the way head hunters collected heads.

  “Simple,” he said now, beaming as if the entire magnificent show out there beyond the window had been created for his benefit alone. “I made it up.”

  He had a splendid deadpan; if he’d claimed he’d read it somewhere or done some arcane calculations to prove it, Johnson would have believed him.

  As things were, Johnson snorted. “That’ll teach me to ask you a serious question.”

  “No,” Flynn said. “It’ll teach me to give you a serious answer. If I’d been any more serious, I would have been downright morose.” His face donned moroseness as he might have donned a sweater.

  All it got him was another snort from Glen Johnson. Johnson peered ahead toward Jupiter, on which Ceres and the Lewis and Clark were slowly gaining. “I keep thinking I ought to be able to see the Galilean moons with the naked eye.”

  “When Jupiter’s in opposition in respect to us, you will be able to,” Flynn told him. “We’ll only be two astronomical units away then, more or less-half as far as we would be back on Earth. But for now, we have the same sort of view we would from back home… minus atmosphere, of course.” Before Johnson could say anything, the other pilot held up a hand, as if taking an oath. “And that, I assure you, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “So help you Hannah,” Johnson said, at which Flynn assumed an expression of injured innocence. Nevertheless, Johnson believed him; the numbers felt right. Flynn and Walter Stone, the first pilot, both knew the mathematics of space travel better than he did. He’d flown fighter planes against the Lizards and then upper stages into Earth orbit-other people had done the thinking while he’d done the real piloting. If he hadn’t got overly curious about what was going on aboard the American space station, he never would have been shanghaied when the space station turned out to be a spaceship. He hadn’t wanted to come along, but he wasn’t going back, not after two and a half years in weightlessness.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson!” His name rang out over the Lewis and Clark’s PA system. Oh, Christ! he thought. What have I done to piss off the commandant now? But it wasn’t the commandant: the PA operator went on, “Report to scooter launching bay one immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Johnson. Lieutenant Colonel-”

  “See you later,” Johnson said to Flynn as he pushed off from a chair and glided out of the control room.

  “And I’ll be glad to be seen,” Flynn called after him. Johnson was already swinging from one corridor handhold to the next: in weightlessness, imitating chimpanzees swinging through the trees was the best way to get around. Corridor intersections had mirrors mounted to cut down on collisions.

  “What’s going on?” Johnson asked when he got to the launch bay.

  A technician was giving the scooter-a little rocket with a motor mounted at the front and another at the rear-a once-over. He said, “There’s some kind of medical trouble in Dome 27, on that rock with the big black vein through it.”

  “Okay, I know the one you mean,” Johnson said. “About twenty miles rearward of us, right?” He waited for the tech to nod, then went on, “Is it bad enough that they want me to bring a doctor over?” One of the things going out into space had done was let people find new ways to maim themselves.

  But the technician said, “No. What they want you to do is bring the gal back here so the doc can look her over, see what’s going on.”

  “Gal?” Johnson clicked his tongue between his teeth. Women made up only about a third of the Lewis and Clark’s crew. Losing anybody hurt. Losing a woman… The idea shouldn’t have hurt twice as much, but somehow it seemed to. “What’s wrong with her? She hurt herself?”

  “No,” the tech said again. “Belly pain.”

  “Okay. I’ll go get her.” The Lewis and Clark had a chamber that could be spun to simulate gravity-only about.25g, but that was enough for surgery. Operating in weightlessness, with blood floating everywhere, wasn’t even close to practical. The chamber, so far as Johnson knew, hadn’t been used yet, but there was a first time for everything.

  “You’re ready,” the tech said. “You’re fully fueled, oxygen supply is full, too, batteries are good, radio checks are all nominal.”

  “Let me in, then.” Johnson glided past the technician and into the scooter. After he closed the gas-tight canopy, he ran his own checks. It was his neck, after all. Everything looked the way the tech said it was. Johnson would have been astonished-and furious-had that proved otherwise. As things were, he spoke into the radio mike: “Ready when you are.”

  “Okay.” A gas-tight door slid shut behind the scooter. A moment later, another one slid open in front of it. A charge of compressed air pushed the little rocket out of its bay. Johnson waited till it had drifted far enough away from the Lewis and Clark, then lit up his attitude jets and his rear motor and started off toward Dome 27.

  He smiled in enormous pleasure as he made the trip. Mickey Flynn and Walter Stone were both much more qualified to pilot the Lewis and Clark than he was. If he ever got stuck with that assignment, it would only be because something had gone drastically wrong somewhere. In a scooter, though…

  “In a scooter, I’m the hottest damn pilot in the whole solar system,” he said after making sure he wasn’t transmitting. Without false modesty, he knew he was right. His years as a combat flier and in Earth-orbital missions gave him a feel for the little rocket nobody else aboard the Lewis and Clark came close to matching. This was spaceflight, too, spaceflight in its purest form, spaceflight by the seat of his pants.

  He made only one concession to his instruments: he kept an eye on the radar screen, to make sure his Mark One eyeball didn’t miss any tumbling rocks that might darken his day if they smacked into the scooter. He had to be especially watchful heading toward Dome 27, since he was going, so to speak, against the flow.

  He spied one large object on the radar that he couldn’t see at all, but he didn’t let it worry him. He supposed it was inevitable that the Lizards should have sent out unmanned probes to keep an eye (or would it be an eye turret?) on what the Americans were doing in the asteroid belt. That made life difficult, but not impossible. And, as the Americans ran up more and more domes and spread farther and farther away from the Lewis and Clark, the Lizards’ surveillance job got harder and harder.

  Their spy ship was well off the track between the Lewis and Clark and Dome 27, so Johnson didn’t waste more than a moment’s thought on it. He fired up the radio once more: “Dome 27, this is the scooter. I say again, Dome 27, this is the scooter. I understand you have a pickup for me. Over.”

  “That’s right, Scooter,” said whoever was manning the radio at the pressure dome. “Liz Brock’s hurting pretty bad. We’re hoping it’s her appendix-anything else would be worse. Estimate your arrive time twenty minutes.”

  “Sounds about right,” Johnson agreed. “I’ll get her back, and the doc’ll figure out what’s going on with her. Hope everything turns out okay. Out.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Liz Brock-that’s not so good.” She was the ship’s number-one expert on electrolyzing ice to get oxygen for breathing and fuel and hydrogen for fuel. She was also a nice-looking blonde. She’d never shown the least interest in Johnson, but he didn’t believe
in wasting valuable natural resources.

  He used his forward rocket motor to kill his velocity relative to the little asteroid on which Dome 27 had gone up, then guided the scooter into the dome’s airlock with tiny, delicate bursts from his attitude jets. Ever so slowly, the scooter settled toward the floor of the airlock: the gravity of the asteroid (which was less than a mile across) seemed almost as much rumor as reality.

  As soon as the outer airlock door closed and his gauges showed there was pressure outside, Johnson unsealed the scooter’s canopy. He didn’t have to wait long. Two people floated into the airlock: Liz Brock and a man who was helping her. He said, “We’ve loaded her up with as much codeine as she can hold, and then maybe a little more for luck.”

  “Doesn’t help,” the electrolysis expert said. Her voice was slow and dragging. “Doesn’t help much, I mean. I feel like I’m drunk. I feel like my whole head’s weightless. But I still hurt.” She looked like it. She had lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there the last time Johnson saw her. Skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. She kept one hand on the right side of her belly, though she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.

  After she got into the scooter, Johnson fastened her safety harness when she didn’t do anything but fumble with it. Anxiously, he asked the fellow who’d helped her into the airlock, “She’s not throwing up, is she?”

  “No,” the man answered, which relieved him: dealing with vomit in the scooter was the last thing he wanted to do.

  He used his attitude jets to slide out of the airlock, then went back to the Lewis and Clark faster than he’d gone away. When he returned to the ship, Dr. Miriam Rosen was waiting at the inner airlock door to the shuttle bay. “Come on, Liz, let’s get you over to the X-ray machine,” she said. “We’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on in there.”

  “All right.” Liz Brock sounded altogether indifferent. Maybe that was the codeine talking. Maybe, too, it was the pain talking.