Second Contact Read online

  “I hear. I understand,” Drucker said, as he had before. “I will obey, unless the punishment you give is so severe, my superiors order me to fight. In that case, I will obey them, not you.”

  “This does you credit as a warrior,” said the Lizard on the other end of the circuit. “It will not keep you from dying if you are foolish enough to fight.”

  “I serve the Reich,” Drucker answered. “I serve the Führer.” The Führer, or at least Himmler’s fair-haired boys in the SS, had treated him shabbily of late, and Käthe even worse. That didn’t mean he was ready to give up on the Greater German Reich. Without the Reich, he thought, the Lizards would surely have overrun the whole world, not just around half of it.

  “You would do better to serve the Emperor,” the Lizard said, adding another emphatic cough. Drucker had all he could do not to laugh out loud. The earnest alien sounded like nothing so much as a missionary trying to save a heathen savage’s soul. Lizards got offended when humans pointed such things out to them.

  Drucker’s radar showed several Lizard spacecraft dropping out of orbit. He estimated their courses, not bothering to feed the numbers into his computing machine. He didn’t need precision, not when he’d been ordered to sit tight. But they were heading for the Reich.

  He itched to change course and pursue them. He could knock down a couple, maybe more, before they wrecked him. The Lizards were technically proficient pilots, but they weren’t inspired. He was, or could be.

  “These are the punishment ships,” the Lizard told him. “If you could see with your eyes and not with your sensors, you would see they have been painted to include the broad green bands that symbolize punishment.”

  Drucker didn’t answer. He kept nervously watching the radar screen. The Lizards were using a lot of force for a purely symbolic punishment. Had they been lying? Were they seizing this excuse to throw a sucker punch at each of the three main human powers still standing? If they were . . . How they would pay if they were! He would be one of the men who made them pay.

  Then he got a signal from another German relay ship, one of the many that kept spacecraft in touch with the territorially limited Reich: “They have destroyed an air base near the town of Flensburg. Many aircraft have been wrecked; there are casualities. They state they intend to take no further action.”

  That sounded like more than a symbolic attack to Drucker. “What are my orders?” he asked. “Am I to retaliate?”

  A long silence followed. Had the Lizards truly intended a strike on the Reich, he realized, one logical thing for them to do would have been to sink as many of the relay ships as they could. During the fighting, they hadn’t paid so much attention to ships as they might have; later, men had discovered that seas on their home planet were small and unimportant compared to the oceans of Earth. But thinking the Lizards could not learn from experience was a deadly dangerous mistake.

  He was just starting to worry in earnest when the relay ship did respond: “No, no retaliation at this time, not unless the Lizards take some further action. The Führer has warned them in the strongest terms against thinking our forbearance will extend past this one occasion.”

  “Good,” Drucker said. “Even once is too often, if anyone cares what a pilot thinks.” He knew perfectly well that no one did. “Have they also struck at the Russians and the Americans, as they said they would?” Misery loves company, he thought.

  “Reports are coming in from the United States,” was the reply. “They also hit an air base there. Radar indicates an attack was made on the USSR, but no comment from Radio Moscow.”

  “Radio Moscow wouldn’t tell anyone the sun had risen if they couldn’t already see it for themselves,” Drucker said with a snort.

  He sighed. He wasn’t the least bit sorry the Lizards had had a good many ships from the colonization fleet blown to hell and gone. He wished they’d lost more. They kept landing more and more ships all over the territory they controlled. More and more Lizards, male and female, would be thawing out every day. The more of them there were, the harder getting rid of them would be. They’d got no better than a draw in the fighting, but they were liable to win the peace.

  When he got over the United States, the American radioman with whom he spoke was full of righteous indignation. “They had no business hitting us like that—none,” the fellow said. “We didn’t do anything to them. They didn’t even claim we did. They hit us anyhow.”

  “They did the same to the Reich,” Drucker said. “They did the same to the Russians—I think. They got to do it because they are strong. The stronger always get to do what they like against the weaker.”

  “That’s not fair,” the American said.

  “I am sure your Indians would be the first to agree with you,” Drucker said.

  “So would your Jews—if you had any left,” the American retorted. Most Germans would have laughed at that. They were just as well pleased to be Judenfrei—free of Jews. Drucker would have laughed at it himself, only a handful of weeks before. He wasn’t laughing now. Had he not figured out which strings to pull, and had he not been able to pull them, Käthe would have disappeared from his life forever. That changed the way he looked at things.

  Drucker didn’t say anything. The American radio operator kept jeering at him till he passed out of range. He had seldom been so glad to listen to a signal break up and dissolve in static.

  The Lizards who controlled Africa did not give him so hard a time as the Americans had done. Part of that was because they were more polite than Americans had ever imagined being. The other part was that they didn’t know how to get under his skin as well as a fellow human did.

  American and German radio stations were full of reports of what the Lizards had done. All the German commentators said the same thing. Dr. Goebbels would never have permitted anything less. Some of the American broadcasters presented a generally similar line, but not all. Some even said the Lizards had the right to do what they’d done. In the Reich, anyone who dared utter such a disloyal sentiment in public—let alone on the radio—would have vanished into night and fog, very likely never to be seen again. Johannes Drucker approved. Americans, in his view, were disorderly to the point of anarchy, even to the point of insanity.

  Radio Moscow played Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky. The Russian news report, when it finally came on the air, bragged of the overfulfillment of the steel quota set forth in the latest Five-Year Plan and of the anticipated bountiful harvest. As far as the broadcaster was concerned, the Lizards might as well not have existed. Drucker snorted. The Russians put him in mind of so many ostriches, burying their heads in the sand.

  He squeezed meat paste out of a tinfoil tube onto a slice of dark bread. After he ate, a few crumbs floated in the air. Eventually, the blower pushed them into one filter or another. Drucker drank fruit juice from a bladder of synthetic rubber that left a harsh, chemical taste. He wished the powers that be would let pilots take beer into space, though he understood why they didn’t.

  He sighed. “The beer would taste lousy, too, if I had to drink it out of one of those miserable squeeze toys,” he muttered. But even bad beer looked good to him now.

  He sighed again. Times were changing. He knew the Lizards didn’t like that. Trouble was, he didn’t like it, either. He’d lived most of his adult life at wary peace with the Lizards. Now that the colonization fleet was finally here, how could the peace survive?

  Rance Auerbach peered west from his bedroom window toward the great pillar of smoke rising from Carswell Air and Space Force Base, over past the outskirts of Fort Worth. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch! The Lizards really went and did it, God damn them to hell and gone.”

  Penny Summers put a hand on his arm. “They said they were going to. Did you think they were bluffing? You ought to know better than that, Rance. When they say they’re going to do something, they mean it.”

  “Oh, I know that.” Auerbach shook his head, which sent pain shooting through his rui
ned shoulder. “What really riles me is that we didn’t fire a shot when they came down and shot up the field—just lay there with our legs in the air like a yellow dog and let ’em do it.” Talking hurt, too, but he didn’t much care. He was too full of rage to care. If he didn’t let it out, it would fester like an abscess at the base of a tooth. He sucked in another breath of air.

  Before he could let it out again, the telephone rang. He limped over to the nightstand and picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Cut the broad loose, Auerbach,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Cut her loose, or else your place will end up looking just like that airstrip out there.” The man who’d called hung up. Auerbach listened to the click, and then to the dial tone that followed it. Slowly, he hung up, too.

  “Who was that?” Penny asked.

  “Friend of yours, I reckon,” he answered.

  For a moment, she simply accepted that. Then alarm washed over her face, leaving her looking older and harder than she had. “I haven’t got any friends, except maybe you,” she said bleakly. “If anybody knows I’m here, I better get the hell out. What did they say they’d do if I didn’t?” She sounded very sure they’d said something along those lines.

  And, of course, she was right. Auerbach said, “Burn the building down. You’ve gotten to know some really nice folks since you walked out on me the first time, haven’t you, Penny?”

  “You might say so,” she answered. “Yeah, you just might say so. Okay, Rance. I don’t want to put you on the spot, not if they know I’m here. This isn’t turning out to be as easy to fix as I figured it would. I’ll be out of here in an hour’s time.” Her laugh came brittle. “It’s not like I’ve got a lot to pack.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere.” Auerbach opened the nightstand drawer, took out a .45, and stuck it in the waistband of his trousers. Then he pulled out another one and offered it to Penny. “You know how to handle it?”

  “I know how,” she said. “I don’t need it. I’ve got a .357 magnum in my handbag. But I still ought to leave. What can you do if they pour gasoline all over the downstairs and toss in a match?”

  “Not much,” he admitted. “You really made some people like you a hell of a lot, didn’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “If you leave, where will you go?”

  “Somewhere,” Penny said. “Anywhere. Someplace where those bastards can’t find me. I’ve got plenty of money—not enough to make ’em happy, but plenty. You’ve seen that.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Rance agreed. “It doesn’t do a dead person much good, though. How long can you last on the run? You’ve got no place to run to, and you know it. You may as well stay here. You’ll have somebody to cover your back.”

  Penny stared at him, then looked away. “God damn you, Rance Auerbach, you just made me want to cry, and I haven’t come close to doing that in more years than you can shake a stick at. The crowd I’ve been running with isn’t what you’d call chock full of gentlemen.”

  “Gentleman, hell.” Auerbach felt himself flushing; he hadn’t been so embarrassed since the day he’d found out where babies came from. “All I am is a broken-down, busted-up cavalry captain who knows better than to let his troops get out of line.”

  Penny Summers came to attention and saluted, which jerked startled laughter out of Rance. “Call it whatever you want to call it, then. I don’t care. But I don’t want to get you into trouble on account of me.”

  “You won’t,” he answered. “Worst thing your pals can do is kill me, and two weeks out of every month I’d reckon they were doing me a favor if they did the job. I haven’t been afraid of anything since the night the Lizards shot me. Oh, I know how that sounds, but it’s the Lord’s truth.”

  “I believe you,” Penny said. “I nursed you back then, remember? I changed your bandages. I looked underneath. I know what they did to you. It’s a miracle you aren’t pushing up a lily somewhere in Colorado.”

  Cautiously, he touched his shattered leg. “If this here’s a miracle, God’s got a nasty sense of humor,” he said. He glanced toward her. “You gave me the bedpan, too.”

  “When you needed it.”

  He laughed his ruined laugh. “Every once in a while, you made like you were giving me the bedpan and then you did something else instead.”

  “When you needed it,” Penny repeated in exactly the same tone of voice. Mischief sparked in her eyes. “You think you need it now?” This time, she was the one who didn’t wait for an answer. She set a hand on his chest and pushed. He didn’t have much in the way of balance, not with one wrecked leg he didn’t. In spite of flailing his arms, he went over on his back onto the bed.

  Penny crouched above him. She undid his belt, she unzipped his fly, and she pulled down his chinos and his briefs. Then she took him in hand and bent her head low. “Jesus!” he said hoarsely as her mouth came down on him, hot and wet. “First time you did that, they set off an explosive-metal bomb outside of Denver just when I was shooting my load.”

  “Sweetheart”—she looked up again for a moment—“when I’m through with you, you’re going to feel like they set off an explosive-metal bomb inside of you.” After that, she stopped talking for the next few minutes. And she turned out to be exactly right.

  She went into the bathroom to wipe off her chin. Auerbach went in himself after she came out. When he emerged, he had a cigarette going. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “Damn things are hell on your wind,” he said, “but I don’t have much wind anyhow. And I like ’em.”

  “You had enough wind there,” Penny said. “Let me have one of those, will you?” He tossed her the pack and a book of matches. After she lit her cigarette, she smoked it in quick, nervous puffs.

  Auerbach sat down on the bed. His breath caught as his leg twinged when he shifted position, but he didn’t feel too bad once he’d stopped moving. He laughed a little. Maybe afterglow was good for aches and pains. He wished he were able to experiment more often. Had he been younger, he could have.

  But afterglow lasted only so long and meant only so much. After he stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray made from the casing of a five-inch shell, he said, “I didn’t want to pry too much before, but now that they know you’re here, I reckon I’ve earned the right to know: just who are they, anyway?”

  By the way she nodded, Penny had been expecting the question. “Yeah, you’ve got the right to know,” she agreed. “Like I pretty much said, I was a go-between for some ginger smugglers. Ginger’s not illegal here—I don’t think it’s illegal anywhere people still run their own affairs.”

  “It’s sure as hell illegal everywhere the Lizards run things, though,” Rance said.

  “Oh, I know that,” Penny said. “I didn’t have any trouble. Lizards don’t know everything there is to know about searching people, especially women. So I delivered the goods, and the Lizards paid me off, and . . .” She laughed out loud. “And I decided to go into business for myself.”

  “Did you?” Auerbach asked. “That’s not quite what you said when you showed up on my doorstep, you know. No wonder they aren’t very happy with you.”

  “No wonder at all,” Penny agreed. “But I decided to take a chance. I didn’t know if I’d ever get another one, you know what I mean? So I kept the money. Those people can do without it a hell of a lot better than I can. The only thing I wish is that they never got wise to me.”

  “I believe that.” Auerbach’s comment was completely matter-of-fact. Only after he’d spoken did he wonder how he’d come to take thieving and everything that went with it so much for granted. This wasn’t the life he’d had in mind when he went off to West Point. He’d always known he might die for his country. The idea had never fazed him. But getting shot up and discarded as useless, left to live out the rest of his days as best he could—that had never crossed his mind, not then. “God damn the Lizards,” he repeated, this time for a different reason.

  “Amen,” Penny said, “I wish there ha
d been some way for me to give ’em poison to taste instead of ginger.”

  “Yeah.” But thinking of the Lizards one way made Rance think of them another way. “Christ! Those damn chameleon-faces aren’t going to come after you along with the real people you stiffed, are they?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t think so, though. They’ve got enough trouble telling one person from another one, and they hadn’t seen me all that often.” She lit another cigarette. Rance watched her cheeks hollow as she sucked in smoke. They’d hollowed the same way while she’d been . . . She forced his mind back onto the Lizards, saying, “If they’d been after me, they’d have blown up this apartment house instead of the airfield outside of town.”

  “Different batch of Lizards,” he said, before realizing she already knew that. He chuckled. “Okay. A .45’ll stop those bastards, too, believe you me it will—knock ’em ass over teakettle. Your gun’ll do the job on a Lizard, probably better than it would on a person.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Penny said. He just looked at her and didn’t say anything. Under the rouge on her cheeks, she got redder still. If she’d been so sure she could take care of herself, she wouldn’t have come to him for help. She stubbed out the cigarette, a sharp, savage gesture. “Well, most of the time I can take care of myself, goddammit.”

  “Sure, babe. Sure.” Auerbach didn’t want to argue with her. He hadn’t particularly wanted her here—she’d walked out on him, after all, and never looked back: never till she needed him again, anyhow. Now she’d walked back in without a backwards glance, too, and he’d discovered he was glad she had. In crassest terms, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d got so much.

  “We’re all right, the two of us,” she said, as if she’d picked the thought out of his back pocket. “We’re both a couple of wrecks, and we deserve each other.”

  “Yeah,” he said, one more time. But there was a difference, and he knew it even if she didn’t. He’d been wrecked. If the Lizards hadn’t done their best to kill him, he’d probably be a colonel by now, maybe even a brigadier general if he caught some breaks along the way. Penny, now, Penny had wrecked herself. Even after she’d left him, she could have settled down. He’d always figured she had. But no—and so she was here with him.