Aftershocks Read online

  David pondered that. It could add up to any number of different things, but he saw one that looked more likely than any of the others. “You know Germans?” he asked, and wondered if he really wanted to find out the answer.

  For close to half a minute, he didn’t. At last, Auerbach said, “Well, you’re nobody’s fool, are you?”

  “I like to think not, anyhow,” Goldfarb said. “Of course, people like to think all sorts of things that others might find unlikely.”

  “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Rance Auerbach said. “Okay, hang in there, Goldfarb. I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.

  From the next desk over, Hal Walsh said, “I hope that wasn’t trouble, David,” as Goldfarb set his own phone back in its cradle.

  “I don’t . . .think so,” David told his boss. Walsh nodded, not entirely convinced. Since Goldfarb wasn’t entirely convinced, either, he just shrugged and went back to work. He had to look down at the drawings in front of him for a while before he could remember what the hell he’d been trying to do.

  He spent the rest of the day at half speed. He couldn’t keep his mind fully on the latest project Hal Walsh had set him. His eyes kept drifting toward the telephone. When it rang half an hour later, he jumped. But it was only Naomi, asking him to stop at the grocery for a few things on the way home from work.

  “I can do that,” he said.

  “I should hope so,” his wife answered. “It’s not that hard, especially now when you have sensible money to deal with.” Though she’d lived in Britain for the larger part of her life, she’d never quite come to terms with pence and shillings and pounds. Canadian dollars and cents made her much happier than the traditional currency ever had.

  Goldfarb left the office about half an hour later than he might have otherwise; he was doing his best to make up for being distracted. As usual when the weather was even close to decent, he walked home: his flat was less than a mile from the Widget Works. That kept the beginnings of a middle-aged potbelly from becoming too much more than a beginning.

  With a choice of several grocer’s shops on the way, he intended to stop at the one closest to his block of flats. Walking was all very well, but walking with a paper sack was something else again.

  He was halfway across the street on whose far side stood the grocer’s when he heard the roar of a racing automobile engine and a couple of shouts of, “Look out!” His head whipped around. A big Chevy—an enormous auto, for one used to British motorcars—was bearing down on him, and the driver plainly had not the slightest intention of stopping.

  Had he panicked, he would have died right there. He waited as long as he thought he possibly could—perhaps a whole second—then dashed forward. The Chevy’s driver couldn’t react quite fast enough. The edge of his mudguard (no, they called them fenders on this side of the Atlantic) touched Goldfarb’s jacket, but then he was past.

  And then that driver had to slam on the brakes to keep from smashing into the cars stopped at the light at the next corner. He couldn’t do that quite fast enough, either, not at the speed he was going. It had been a while since David heard the crash of crumpling metal and shattering glass, but the sound was unmistakable.

  Goldfarb sprinted toward the Chevy that had come to grief. He hoped the driver had gone straight through the windscreen—it never for a moment occurred to him to doubt that the fellow had tried to run him down on purpose. And if the bastard hadn’t got himself a face full of plate glass, Goldfarb wanted answers from him. Maybe the local constabulary could get them. Or maybe he’d start bouncing the bugger’s head off the pavement till he sang.

  But the driver hadn’t gone through the windscreen (no, windshield here). He managed to get his door open and started to run. “Stop him!” Goldfarb shouted. “Stop that man!”

  In Britain, a crowd would have taken off after the man. He didn’t know what would happen in Canada. He found out: a crowd took off after the fellow, a crowd led by the man with whose car the driver had just collided. A younger fellow brought the fleeing driver down with a tackle that would have earned him pats on the back in a rugby scrum.

  “He almost killed you, buddy,” somebody said to Goldfarb. “It was like he didn’t see you at all.”

  “Oh, he saw me, all right,” David said grimly. “He’s just sorry he missed.” The other man stared at him and tried to laugh, thinking he’d made a joke. When he didn’t laugh back, the other fellow went off shaking his head.

  Goldfarb didn’t care, because a police car screeched around the corner and stopped. The men who piled out were dressed more like American cops than British bobbies, but that didn’t matter much. They took efficient charge of the miscreant. “He tried to kill me,” Goldfarb told one of them. “Before he smashed into that other motorcar, he almost ran me down while I was crossing the street.”

  “Probably drunk,” the policeman said.

  “No, I mean it literally,” David insisted. “He did try to kill me. He swerved towards me, but I managed to dodge.”

  Both policemen looked at him. One of them said, “Maybe you’d better come to the station, then, sir, and give a statement.”

  “I’d be glad to, if you’ll let me ring my wife when we get there, so she knows I’m all right and I’ll be late,” Goldfarb answered. The policemen nodded. He rode to the station in the front seat, the man who’d tried to run him down in the back. They didn’t say a word to each other all the way there.

  Sweating in his coveralls, Johannes Drucker waited for a Lizard to open the door to his cubicle aboard the starship he’d tried to destroy. At precisely the appointed moment, the door slid open. The male—Drucker presumed it was a male—who stood in the doorway said, “Come with me.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Drucker answered.

  The Lizard’s mouth fell open: the gesture the Race used for laughter. “I am a female,” she said. “My name is Nesseref. Now come. My shuttlecraft is waiting at the rotation hub of this ship.”

  “It shall be done, superior female,” Drucker said, both stressing the word and adding an emphatic cough. That made Nesseref laugh again.

  When Drucker strode out into the corridor, he found two armed Lizards waiting to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to. Now that they were finally releasing him, the German spaceman had no intention of doing that, but he would have mistrusted one of them were their roles reversed. He wished those roles had been reversed.

  He followed Nesseref toward the hub of the starship. The guards followed him. With every deck they went inward, they got lighter. By the time they reached the rotation hub, they weighed nothing at all.

  Nesseref entered her shuttlecraft first, then called, “Come in. I have an acceleration couch shaped for a Tosevite.”

  “I thank you,” Drucker said, and obeyed. The couch looked to be of American manufacture. He strapped himself in. Nesseref wasted no time in using her maneuvering jets to get free of the starship. Drucker watched her work in silent fascination. At last, he broke the silence: “Your ship has far more in the way of computer-aided controls than the upper stage I flew.”

  “A good thing, too,” the Lizard replied. “I think you Tosevites have to be addled to come up into space in your inadequate machines.”

  “We used what we had,” Drucker answered with a shrug. He spoke in the past tense: the Reich would not be going into space again any time soon. If the Race had its way—and that was all too likely—Germans would never go into space again. He asked, “Now that I am returning to Tosev 3, where in Deutschland will you land me?”

  “By the city called Nuremberg,” Nesseref answered. “Such are my orders.”

  “Nuremberg?” Drucker sighed. He’d been warned, but still . . . “That is in the far south of the land, and my home is in the north. Could you not have picked a closer shuttlecraft port?”

  “There are no closer functioning shuttlecraft ports,” Nesseref answered. “In fact, I am given to understand that that is at the moment t
he only functioning shuttlecraft port in the subregion. Had no one told you of this?”

  “Well, yes,” Johannes Drucker admitted unhappily. “But it still presents great difficulties for me. How am I to travel from Nuremberg to my home? Will the railroads be working? Will folk on the ground give me money to travel?”

  “I know nothing of any of this.” Nesseref’s voice held nothing but indifference. “My orders are to put you on the ground at the shuttlecraft port outside Nuremberg. I shall obey them.”

  Obey them she did, with an efficiency that outdid anything merely Teutonic. A single neat burn took the shuttlecraft out of Earth orbit. After that, she hardly even had to adjust the machine’s course. Another burn halted the shuttlecraft above the tarmac of the port and let its legs kiss the ground with hardly a jar.

  Nesseref opened the hatch. The mild air of German summer mingled with the hot, dry stuff the Race preferred. “Get out,” she told Drucker. “I do not want any more radioactive contamination than I can help getting.”

  “It shall be done.” Drucker scrambled down the ladder and let himself drop to the soil of the Vaterland.

  No one, Lizard or human, came across the tarmac to greet him. Now that he was here, he was on his own. He looked toward what had been the famous skyline of Nuremberg. No more: that skyline had been truncated, abridged. Some of the massive buildings were simply gone, others were wreckage half as tall as they had been. He shook his head and let out a soft, sad whistle. No matter how harshly the Reich had used him and his family, it was still his country. Seeing it brought low like this tore at him.

  I shouldn’t have bothered attacking that starship, he thought. The war was already lost by then. I should have landed the upper stage of my A-45 in some neutral country—the USA, maybe England—and let myself be interned.

  Too late now. Too late for everything now. He’d expected to go out in a blaze of glory when he made the attack run on the Lizard ship. No such luck. Now he had to deal with the consequences of living longer than he’d thought he would.

  He glanced around the tarmac again. No, nobody cared he was here. He didn’t have ten pfennigs in his pocket: what point to taking money into space? Where would he spend it? But he faced different questions here: how would he get along without it? Where would he find his next meal? If he did find a meal, how would he pay for it?

  Where would he find his next meal? Somewhere to the north, that was all he knew. As the crow flew, Greifswald was about five hundred kilometers from Nuremberg. He wasn’t a crow, and he didn’t think he’d do much in the way of flying any time soon. He’d be walking, and likely walking a lot more than five hundred kilometers.

  Who was it who’d said, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step? Somebody Chinese, he thought. He took the first step on the way back toward Greifswald. Before long, he was off the tarmac of the shuttlecraft port. He soon discovered the Lizards had machine-gun and artillery and missile emplacements around it. None of the males—he presumed they were males, though he’d been wrong with the shuttlecraft pilot—paid him any attention. He was authorized to be there. He didn’t care to think what would have happened if he hadn’t been.

  Before long, he came on a road leading northeast. He started tramping along it. That was the direction in which he wanted to go. Pretty soon, he’d either come to a village or farmhouse or he’d pass a stream or a pond. Any which way, he’d get himself a drink.

  He wondered how much radioactivity he’d take in from the local water. For that matter, he wondered how much he was taking in every time he inhaled. However much it was, he couldn’t do anything about it.

  And he wondered why he saw no motor traffic on the road. He didn’t need long to find the answer to that: the Lizards had cratered it with dozens of little bomblets. He remembered those weapons from the earlier round of fighting. He’d driven panzers then, and hadn’t worried so much about roads. But wheeled vehicles couldn’t go anywhere without them.

  After a couple of kilometers, he came upon a gang filling in craters the bomblets had left behind. No bulldozers, no tractors, no powered equipment of any kind. Just men with shovels and picks and mattocks and crowbars, slowly and methodically getting rid of one hole after another. By their clothes, some were local farmers, others demobilized Wehrmacht men still in grimy field-gray. It was hard to tell which group seemed more weary and dejected.

  A soldier picked up a bucket and raised it to his mouth. That was all Drucker needed to see. He waved and broke into a shambling trot and called, “Hey, can I have a swig out of that bucket?”

  “Who the devil are you?” asked the fellow who’d just drunk. Water dribbled down his poorly shaved chin. He pointed. “And what kind of crazy getup is that?”

  Drucker glanced down at his coveralls. The Reich had had a thousand different dress and undress uniforms, almost as many as the Race had different styles of body paint. Nobody could keep track of all of them. Drucker gave his name, adding, “Lieutenant colonel, Reichs Rocket Force. I was captured out in space; the Lizards just turned me loose. Tell you the truth, I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”

  “Rocket Force, huh?” The Wehrmacht man paused to wipe his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. “Fat lot of good you buggers did anybody.” But he picked up the bucket and handed it to Drucker. The water was barely cool, but went down like dark beer. When Drucker set down the bucket, the fellow who’d given it to him asked, “So where are you headed, Herr Rocket Man?”

  “Greifswald,” Drucker answered. He saw that meant nothing to anyone but him, so he made things plainer. “It’s up near Peenemünde, by the Baltic.”

  “Ach, so.” The demobilized soldier raised an eyebrow. “If it’s up near Peenemünde, is anything left of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Drucker said bleakly. “I’ve got—I had, anyway—a wife and three kids. I have to see if I can track them down.”

  “Good luck,” said the fellow who’d given him water. He sounded as if he thought Drucker would need luck better than merely good. Drucker was afraid he thought the same thing. After a moment, the ex-soldier remarked, “Hell of a long way from the Baltic to here. How do you propose to get there?”

  “Walk, if I have to,” Drucker replied. “I’m getting an idea of what the roads are like. Are any trains running?”

  “A few,” the former Wehrmacht man said. The rest of the laborers, who seemed happy to get a break, nodded. When he continued, “Not bloody many, though,” they nodded again. He waved. “And you see what the highways are like. It’s not just this one, either. They’re all the same. The stinking Lizards paralyzed us. We’ve got people starving because there’s no way to get food from here to there.”

  “And everything you can get costs ten times too much,” another laborer added. “The Reichsmark isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on any more.”

  “Ouch.” Drucker winced. “We went through that after the First World War. Do we have to do it again?”

  The ex-soldier said, “If everybody’s got money and there’s nothing to buy, prices are going to go through the roof. That’s life.” He spat. “I’ll worry about all that Scheisse later, when I’ve got the time. Right now, I’m just glad I’m still breathing. A hell of a lot of people in the Reich aren’t.”

  “Hey, Karl,” one of the other laborers said. Several men put their heads together and talked in voices too low for Drucker to make out what they were saying. They passed something back and forth among themselves. He couldn’t tell what they were doing there, either.

  He was almost on the point of wondering whether he ought to turn and run like hell when they broke apart. The former Wehrmacht man—Karl—turned toward him and held out a moderately fat wad of banknotes. “Here you go, Colonel,” he said. “This’ll keep you eating for a couple-three days, anyhow.”

  “Thank you very much!” Drucker exclaimed. From what he could see, none of the laborers had enough to be able to spare much. But they knew he had nothing at all, and so they’d reached
into their pockets. He nodded. “Thanks from the bottom of my heart.”

  “It’s nothing,” Karl said. “We all know what you’re going through. We’re all going through it, too—except for the ones who’ve been through it already. They’re trying to come out the other side. Hope you make it up to Greifswald. Hope you find your family, too.”

  “Thanks,” Drucker said again. And if he didn’t find his family, he’d have to . . . to try to come out the other side, too. The phrase struck him as all too apt. With a last nod, he started walking again, heading north, heading home.

  After the Nazis occupied Poland, they’d built an enormous death factory at Treblinka. They’d been building an even bigger one outside Oswiecim—Auschwitz, they’d called it in German—when the Lizards came. Mordechai Anielewicz had longed for revenge against the tormentors of the Jews for a generation. Now he had it. And now, having it, he discovered the folly of such wishes.

  He could go anywhere he chose in the much-reduced Greater German Reich. As a leader among the Polish Jews who’d fought side by side with the Lizards against the Nazis in two wars now—and as a man who’d made sure his friends among the Lizards helped all they could—he had the backing of the Race. Before entering Germany, he’d got a document from the Race’s authorities in Poland authorizing him to call on the males occupying the Reich for assistance. He also had documents in German, to overawe burgomeisters and other functionaries.

  What hadn’t occurred to him was how few German functionaries were left to overawe. The Lizards had done a truly astonishing job of pounding flat the part of Germany just west of Poland. He’d known that in the abstract. The Wehrmacht’s assault on Poland had petered out not least because the Germans couldn’t keep their invading army supplied. As he entered Germany, he saw exactly what that pounding had done.