Second Contact Read online

  “You’ve promoted yourself,” Sam remarked. “Last week, you were a landcruiser driver, but now you’re an infantry small-unit group leader—a lieutenant, more or less.”

  Jonathan paused with his salami sandwich half built. “The old pattern was getting worn,” he answered with a shrug. “The paints you can buy aren’t nearly as good as the ones the Lizards—”

  “Nearly so good,” his mother broke in, precise as usual.

  “Nearly so good, then,” Jonathan said, and shrugged again. “They aren’t, and so I washed them off and put on this new set. I like it better, I think—brighter.”

  “Okay.” Sam shrugged, too. People his son’s age took the Lizards for granted in a way he never could. The youngsters didn’t know what the world had been like before the conquest fleet came. They didn’t care, either, and laughed at their elders for waxing nostalgic about it. Recalling his own youth, Sam did his best to be patient. It wasn’t always easy. Before he could stop himself, he asked, “Did you really have to shave your head?”

  That flicked a nerve, where talk about body paint hadn’t. Jonathan turned, sliding a hand over the smooth and shining dome of his skull. “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked, the beginning of an angry rumble in his voice. “It’s the hot thing to do these days.”

  Along with body paint, it made people look as much like Lizards as they could. Hot was a term of approval because the Lizards liked heat. The Lizards liked ginger, too, but that was a different story.

  Sam ran a hand through his own thinning hair. “I’m going bald whether I want to or not, and I don’t. I guess I have trouble understanding why anybody who’s got hair would want to cut it all off.”

  “It’s hot,” Jonathan repeated, as if that explained everything. To him, no doubt, it did. His voice lost some of that belligerent edge as he realized his father wasn’t insisting that he let his hair grow, only talking about it. When he didn’t feel challenged, he could be rational enough.

  He took an enormous bite from his sandwich. He was three or four inches taller than Sam—over six feet instead of under—and broader through the shoulders. By the way he ate, he should have been eleven feet tall and seven feet wide.

  His second bite was even bigger than the first. He was still chewing when the telephone rang. “That’s got to be Karen!” he said with his mouth full, and dashed away.

  Barbara and Sam shared looks of mingled amusement and alarm. “In my day, girls didn’t call boys like that,” Barbara said. “In my day, girls didn’t shave their heads, either. Go on, call me a fuddy-duddy.”

  “You’re my fuddy-duddy,” Sam said fondly. He slipped an arm around her waist and gave her a quick kiss.

  “I’d better be,” Barbara said. “I’m glad I am, too, because there are so many more distractions now. In my day, even if there had been body paint, girls wouldn’t have been so thorough about wearing it as boys are—and if they had been, they’d have been arrested for indecent exposure.”

  “Things aren’t the same as they used to be,” Sam allowed. His eyes twinkled. “I might call that a change for the better, though.”

  Barbara elbowed him in the ribs. “Of course you might. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with you, though. And”—she lowered her voice so Jonathan wouldn’t hear—“I’m glad Karen isn’t one of the ones who do.”

  “Well, so am I,” Sam said, although with a sigh that earned him another pointed elbow. “Jonathan and his pals are a lot more used to skin than I am. I’d stare like a fool if she came over dressed—or not dressed—that way.”

  “And then you’d tell me you were just reading what her rank was,” Barbara said. “You’d think I love you enough to believe a whopper like that. And you know what?” She poked him again. “You might even be right.”

  Felless had not expected to wake in weightlessness. For a moment, staring up at the fluorescent lights overhead, she wondered if something had gone wrong with the ship. Then, thinking more slowly than she should have because of the lingering effects of cold sleep, she realized how foolish that was. Had something gone wrong with the ship, she would never have awakened at all.

  Two people floated into view. One, by her body paint, was a physician. The other . . . Weak and scatterbrained as Felless was, she gave a startled hiss. “Exalted Fleetlord!” she exclaimed. She heard her own voice as if from far away.

  Fleetlord Reffet spoke not to her but to the physician: “She recognizes me, I see. Is she capable of real work?”

  “We would not have summoned you here, Exalted Fleetlord, were she incapable,” the physician replied. “We understand the value of your time.”

  “Good,” Reffet said. “That is a concept the males down on the surface of Tosev 3 seem to have a great deal of trouble grasping.” He swung one of his eye turrets to bear on Felless. “Senior Researcher, are you prepared to begin your duties at once?”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, I am,” Felless replied. Now the voice her hearing diaphragms caught seemed more like her own. Antidotes and restoratives were routing the drugs that had kept her just this side of death on the journey from Home to Tosev 3. Curiosity grew along with bodily well-being. “May I ask why I have been awakened prematurely?”

  “You may,” Reffet said, and then, in an aside to the physician, “You were right. Her wits are clear.” He gave his attention back to Felless. “You have been awakened because conditions on Tosev 3 are not as we anticipated they would be when we set out from Home.”

  That was almost as great a surprise as waking prematurely. “In what way, Exalted Fleetlord?” Felless tried to make her wits work harder. “Does this planet harbor some bacterium or virus for which we have had difficulty in finding a cure?” Such a thing hadn’t happened on either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1, but remained a theoretical possibility.

  “No,” Reffet replied. “The difficulty lies in the natives themselves. They are more technically advanced than our probe indicated. You being the colonization fleet’s leading expert on relations between the Race and other species, I judged it expedient to rouse you and put you to work before we make planetfall. If you need assistance, give us names, and we shall also wake as many of your subordinates and colleagues as you may require.”

  Felless tried to lever herself off the table on which she lay. Straps restrained her: a sensible precaution on the physician’s part. As she fumbled with the catches, she asked, “How much more advanced were they than we expected? Enough to make the conquest significantly harder, I gather.”

  “Indeed.” Reffet added an emphatic cough. “When the conquest fleet arrived, they were engaged in active research on jet aircraft, on guided missiles, and on nuclear fission.”

  “That is impossible!” Felless blurted. Then, realizing what she’d said, she added, “I beg the Exalted Fleetlord’s pardon.”

  “Senior Researcher, I freely give it to you,” Reffet replied. “When the colonization fleet began receiving data from Tosev 3, my first belief was that Atvar, the fleetlord on the conquest fleet, was playing an elaborate joke on us—jerking our tailstumps, as the saying has it. I have since been disabused of this belief. I wish I had not been, for it strikes me as far more palatable than the truth.”

  “But—But—” Felless knew she was stuttering, and made herself pause to gather her thoughts. “If that is true, Exalted Fleetlord, I count it something of a marvel that . . . that the conquest did not fail.” Such a thought would have been unimaginable back on Home. It should have been unimaginable here, too. That she’d imagined it proved it wasn’t.

  Reffet said, “In part, Senior Researcher, the conquest did fail. There are still unsubdued Tosevite empires—actually, the term the conquest fleet consistently uses is not-empires, which I do not altogether understand—on the surface of Tosev 3, along with areas the Race has in fact conquered. Nor have the Tosevites ceased their technical progress in the eyeblink of time since the conquest fleet arrived. I am warned that only a threat of retaliatory violence from the conquest fleet has kept them from mount
ing attacks on this colonization fleet.”

  Felless felt far dizzier than she would have from weightlessness and sudden revival from cold sleep alone. She finally managed to free herself from the restraining straps and gently push off from the table. “Take me to a terminal at once, if you would be so kind. Have you an edited summary of the data thus far transmitted from the conquest fleet?”

  “We have,” Reffet said. “I hope you will find it adequate, Senior Researcher. It was prepared by fleet officers who are not specialists in your area of expertise. We have, of course, provided links to the fuller documentation sent up from Tosev 3.”

  “If you will come with me, superior female . . .” the physician said. She swung rapidly from one handhold to another. Felless followed.

  She had to strap herself into the chair in front of the terminal to keep the ventilating current from blowing her off it. Getting back to work felt good. She wished she could have waited till reaching the surface of Tosev 3 for reawakening; that would have been as planned back on Home, and plans were made to be followed. But she would do the best she could here.

  And, as she called up the summary, a curious blend of anticipation and dread coursed through her. Wild Tosevites . . . What would dealing with wild Tosevites be like? She’d expected the locals to be well on their way toward assimilation into the Empire by now. Even then, they would have been different from the Hallessi and the Rabotevs, who but for their looks were as much subjects of the Emperor (even thinking of her sovereign made Felless cast down her eyes) as were the males and females of the Race.

  A male in body paint like Reffet’s appeared on the screen in front of her. “Welcome to Tosev 3,” he said in tones anything but welcoming. “This is a world of paradox. If you were expecting anything here to be as it was back on Home, you will be disappointed. You may very well be dead. The only thing you may safely expect on Tosev 3 is the unexpected. I daresay you who listen to this will not believe me. Were I new-come from Home, I would not believe such words, either. Before rejecting them out of claw, examine the evidence.”

  A slowly spinning globe of Tosev 3 appeared on the screen. Something over half the land area was red, the rest a variety of other colors. The red, the legend by the globe explained, showed that area of the planet the Race controlled. The other colors, which dominated the northern hemisphere, showed areas where the natives still ruled themselves.

  After Felless had just long enough to soak in the significance of that, the colors faded, leaving the land areas in more or less their natural colors. Glowing dots, some red, some blue, appeared here and there. “Red dots show explosive-metal weapons detonated by the Race, blue dots those detonated by the Tosevites,” a voice said.

  Felless let out a slow, horrified hiss. About as many dots glowed blue as red. Atvar’s head and torso reappeared on the screen. “Judging that continuing the war for total conquest might well render this planet useless to the colonization fleet, we entered into negotiations with the Tosevite not-empires possessing explosive-metal weapons, conceding their independence in exchange for a cessation of hostilities,” the leader of the conquest fleet said. “On the whole—there have been certain unpleasant exceptions—peace between the Race and the Tosevites and among the Tosevite factions has prevailed for the past thirty-four years—seventeen of this planet’s revolutions, which are just over twice as long as ours. I freely admit it is not the sort of peace I would have desired. There were, however, many times when I thought it was more than I would ever get. See for yourself what we faced even at the beginning of our struggle against the Tosevites.”

  His image faded, to be replaced by those of landcruisers of obviously alien manufacture. The tracked and armored fortresses were not a match for those of the Race, but the barbarous inhabitants of Tosev 3, by everything Felless knew, should not have been able to build landcruisers at all.

  “Three years later, we were facing these,” Atvar said.

  New landcruisers replaced those formerly on the screen. They looked more formidable. Their specifications said they were more formidable. They carried more armor and bigger guns and had more powerful engines. They still didn’t match the machines the Race used, but they were getting closer.

  “Three years,” Felless said in almost disbelieving wonder—one and a half of Tosev 3’s years. The later-model landcruisers looked to be separated from the earlier ones by a couple of hundred years of slow development. On Home, they would have been.

  Tosevite aircraft showed the same astonishing leap in technical prowess. The natives had gone from machines propelled by rotating airfoils to jets and rocket-powered killercraft in what amounted to the flick of a nictitating membrane across an eye.

  “How?” Felless murmured. “How could they have done such a thing?”

  As if answering her, Atvar said, “Explanations for the Tosevites’ extraordinary proficiency fall into two main areas, which may or may not be mutually exclusive: the geographical and the biological. Oceans and mountains break up Tosevite land masses in ways unknown on other worlds of the Empire, fostering the formation of small, competitive groups.” The globe reappeared, this time splotched in ways that struck Felless as absurdly complex. “These were the political divisions on Tosev 3 at the time the conquest fleet arrived.”

  Atvar continued, “Reproductive biology among the Tosevites is unlike that of any other intelligent race we know, and has profound effects on their society. Females are, or can be, continually receptive; males are, or can be, continually active. This leads to pair-bondings and . . .” He went on for some time.

  Long before he’d finished, Felless hissed out a single word: “Disgusting.” She wondered how so aberrant a species had ever developed intelligence, let alone a technology that let it challenge the Race.

  At last, and very much to her relief, the fleetlord of the conquest fleet chose another topic. She listened until Atvar finished, “This conquest, if it is to be accomplished, will be a matter for generations, not days as was anticipated when we left Home. The landing of the colonization fleet and settlement of the colonists will greatly aid in integrating the independent not-empires into the larger structure of the Empire. Exposure to proper examples cannot help but lead the Big Uglies”—by then, Felless had gathered that was the conquest fleet’s nickname for the Tosevites—“to emulate the high example that will be placed before them.” His image vanished from the screen.

  Felless turned to Reffet. “You were right to rouse me, Exalted Fleetlord. This will be a more challenging problem than anyone could have anticipated—and, no doubt, the conquest fleet has made its share of mistakes in dealing with these bizarre Tosevites.” She let out a hissing sigh. “I can see I shall have my work cut out for me.”

  Without false modesty, Vyacheslav Molotov knew himself to be one of the three most powerful men on the face of the Earth. Without false self-aggrandizement, he knew Atvar, the Lizards’ fleetlord, was more powerful than he or Heinrich Himmler or Earl Warren. What had not been obvious over the past two crowded decades was whether Atvar was more powerful than the leaders of the USSR, the Greater German Reich, and the USA put together.

  But soon, very soon, the Lizards’ colonization fleet would bring millions more of their kind, males and females both, to Earth. Even though the fleet was entirely civilian—the Lizards had not anticipated needing more military help when it left their home world—it would tilt the scales in their direction. It could hardly do anything else.

  As he sat in his Kremlin office, Molotov did not show what he was thinking. He had reached the top of the Soviet hierarchy, succeeding Iosif Stalin as general secretary of the Communist Party, not least by never showing what he was thinking. His stone face—poker face was the American idiom, which he rather liked— had also served him well in dealing with foreigners and with the Lizards.

  His own secretary stuck his head into the office. “Comrade General Secretary, the foreign commissar has arrived.”

  “Very well, Pyotr Maksimovich, send him in
,” Molotov answered. He glanced at his wristwatch as the secretary disappeared. Ten o’clock on the dot. Since no one could see him do it, Molotov nodded approval. Some people understood the virtue of punctuality, however un-Russian it was.

  In strode Andrei Gromyko. “Good day, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said, extending his hand.

  Molotov shook it. “And to you, Andrei Andreyevich,” he said, and gestured to the chair across the desk from his own. “Sit down.” Without any further small talk, Gromyko did. Molotov thought well of the foreign commissar not least because his craggy countenance revealed almost as little as Molotov’s own.

  Gromyko went straight to business, another trait of which Molotov approved: “Is there any change in our position of which I should be aware before we meet with the Lizards’ ambassador to the Soviet Union?”

  “I do not believe so, no,” Molotov replied. “We remain strongly opposed to their settling colonists in Persia or Afghanistan or Kashmir or any other land near our borders.”

  One of Gromyko’s shaggy eyebrows twitched. “Any other, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich?” he asked.

  Molotov grunted. Gromyko had caught him fair and square. “You are correct, of course. We have no objection whatever to their colonization of Poland, however extensive that may prove.”

  While withdrawing from most of their European conquests, the Lizards had stayed in Poland: neither Germany nor the USSR was willing to see it in the other’s hands, and neither was willing to see a Polish state revive. With the Lizards administering the area, it made a splendid buffer between the Soviet Union and Nazi-dominated Western Europe. Molotov was delighted to have the Lizards there. He feared the Greater German Reich, and hoped with all his heart that Himmler likewise feared the USSR.

  Gromyko said, “I remind you, Comrade General Secretary, that the Lizards have consistently maintained we have no right to dictate to them where they may settle on territory they rule.”