Second Contact c-1 Page 7

  “Not half it’s not,” McDowell agreed sorrowfully. He pulled a packet of Chesterfields from his breast pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and lit it. Holding the packet out to Goldfarb, he asked, “Care for a fag, sir?”

  “Thanks.” Goldfarb leaned forward to light the smoke from the one McDowell already had going. He took a drag, then blew a ragged smoke ring. After another drag, he sighed. “Doesn’t taste like much, does it?”

  “Too right it don’t,” McDowell said, even more sorrowfully than before. He too sighed. “Not a Yank brand going that tastes like much. When you lit up a Players, by God, you knew you had a cigarette in your face.”

  “That’s the truth.” Goldfarb coughed in fond reminiscence. “It’s the end of Empire, that’s what it is.” The phrase had taken on a mournful currency in Britain after the Lizards occupied most of what once was the largest empire on the face of the Earth. Cut off from much of the tobacco they’d used, British cigarette manufacturers had gone under one after another.

  McDowell’s long, lean, ruddy face got even more sour than usual. “The end of Empire it is. And do you know what’s the worst of it?” He waited for Goldfarb to shake his head, then went on, “The worst of it, sir, is that the youngsters who’ve grown up since the bloody Lizards came, they don’t care. Doesn’t matter to them that we’re shoved back onto a couple of little islands. All they want to do is lay about and drink beer, you ask me.”

  “They don’t know any better,” Goldfarb answered. “This is what they’re used to. They don’t remember how things were. They don’t remember how we kept the Nazis from invading us and how we beat the Lizards when they did.”

  Savagely, McDowell stubbed out his bland American cigarette and said, “And now we’re on the dole from the Yanks and the Nazis both. Damned if I don’t half wish the Lizards had beaten us after all. Better to go down swinging than to slip into the muck an inch at a bloody time.”

  “Something to that,” said Goldfarb, who despised the dependence on the Greater German Reich into which a Britain shorn of her colonies had been forced. “I warned that shuttlecraft pilot about the Nazis. Haven’t heard any squawks since, so I suppose he got down safe in Poland.”

  McDowell leered. “That was a shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet. How do you know a lady Lizard wasn’t flying it?”

  “I don’t,” Goldfarb admitted, blinking. “It never even occurred to me.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much, not to me and not to the Lizards, either. If their females aren’t in season, the males don’t care about chasing skirt, poor buggers.”

  “I’d pay five quid to see a lady Lizard in a skirt,” McDowell said.

  “Come to think of it, so would I,” Goldfarb answered with a chuckle. He got to his feet and stretched. “Thanks for the smoke.”

  “Any time, Flight Lieutenant,” McDowell said. “I’ve cadged more from you than you ever have from me.”

  Goldfarb shrugged again. A Jew who got a reputation for stinginess found himself in even more hot water these days than he would have a generation before. Britain didn’t go in for the madnesses of the Reich over on the Continent, but some of the Nazis’ attitudes had rubbed off, especially down in England. That was another reason Goldfarb hadn’t minded being posted to Northern Ireland.

  He walked out into watery sunshine. Belfast seldom got any other sort. Parabolic radar dishes scanned every direction. They were ever so much smaller and ever so much more powerful than the sets he’d served during the Battle of Britain and during the Lizards’ arrival-till the aliens knocked out those sets. Some of the improvement would surely have come over the course of time regardless of whether the Lizards landed on Earth. But captured equipment and training disks playable by what they called skelkwank light had kicked human technology far ahead of where it would have been otherwise.

  A couple of RAF officers strode past Goldfarb. He stiffened to attention and saluted; they both outranked him. One of them was saying, “-ce they’re all down, we’ll pay back a lot of-”

  After returning Goldfarb’s salute, the other spoke in an elegant Oxonian accent: “Now, now, old man, don’t you know?” His gaze flicked across Goldfarb as if the flight lieutenant were a speck of lint on his lapel.

  Both officers fell silent till Goldfarb was out of earshot. He went on his way, quietly steaming. Far too many officers these days gave him the glove because he was Jewish. He couldn’t do anything about it, either-or rather, he could, but anything he did was likely to make matters worse. Anti-Semitism kept wafting across the Channel like a bad smell. That Heinrich Himmler seemed so calm and rational about it, rather than ranting as Hitler had done, only made it more appealing to the aristocratic Englishman of the stiff-upper-lip school.

  “What do they think?” Goldfarb muttered. “I should get down on my knees and thank them for the privilege of saving their bacon”-an American phrase, to the point if not kosher-“from the Lizards? Not bloody likely!”

  Trouble was, too many of them did think exactly that. He knew his chances of making squadron leader were about as good as Britain’s chances of retaking India from the Lizards. If he hadn’t had a record far better than those of his competitors-and if he hadn’t had some blokes on his side back in the days when being on a Jew’s side didn’t take extraordinary moral courage-he never would have become an officer at all.

  He had become one, though. If those snooty brass hats didn’t like it, too bad for them. He wondered what sort of conversation they’d judged unsuitable for his tender ears. He’d never know. He also wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Had he lost sleep over every slight, he’d have lain awake every night.

  People on the streets of Belfast kept an eye on him as he headed for his home. He didn’t look like an Englishman or an Irishman or even a Scot; his hair was too curly, and the wrong shade of brown to boot, while his face bore a distinctly Judaic nose. Said nose itched. He scratched it. An itchy nose was supposed to be a sign he’d kiss a fool.

  When he got home, he planted a big smack on Naomi. Maybe she’d been a fool for marrying him, all those years ago. Her family had got out of Germany while some Jews still could; his had fled Polish pogroms before World War I. But she hadn’t looked down her own charming nose at him, and they remained as happy as two people could reasonably expect in this uncertain world.

  “What’s new?” she asked, her English still faintly accented though she’d been in Britain since her teens.

  He told her about the shuttlecraft from the colonization fleet, and about the warning he’d been able to pass on. Then he sighed. “It won’t do any good. The Lizards in the colonization fleet don’t know Nazis from necklaces.”

  “You did what you could,” Naomi said, and added an emphatic cough.

  Goldfarb laughed. “You caught that from our children,” he said severely, “and they caught it from the wireless and the telly.”

  “And the wireless and the telly caught it from the Lizards-maybe we are becoming a part of their Empire, one bit at a time,” his wife answered. “And speaking of such things, you have a letter from your cousin in Palestine.”

  “From Moishe?” Goldfarb said in glad surprise. “Haven’t heard from him in a couple of months. What has he got to say?”

  “I don’t know-I haven’t opened it,” Naomi said. That was standard practice in the Goldfarb household: no one ever opened mail addressed to someone else. “Here, I’ll get it for you.” He watched her go over to the sideboard-watched appreciatively, as skirts were short this year-and pluck the letter from a cut-glass dish there. She carried it back to him.

  It bore no stamp, but an adhesive label covered with Lizard squiggles. Moishe Russie had written Goldfarb’s name and address in the Roman alphabet, but the letter inside the envelope was in Yiddish. Dear Cousin David, he wrote, I hope this finds you well, as all are here in Jerusalem. Reuven has just finished exams for this term of medical school. How much more he knows of how the body works than I did at his age! He would have known more if the Lizards h
ad not come, of course, but he knows even more than he would have otherwise because they did. They understand life at a molecular level we were generations away from reaching.

  So Naomi would understand, Goldfarb read the letter aloud. She had no trouble following spoken Yiddish, but could not fight her way through the Hebraic script in which it was written. “Good that your cousin’s son will be a doctor,” she said.

  “Yes,” Goldfarb answered, thinking that the Lizards had given medicine the same sort of lift they had electronics. He read on: “ ‘The fleetlord, you know, sometimes uses me as a channel between the Race and people. This is one of those times. Something strange is going on in connection with the arrival of the colonization fleet. I do not know what it is. I do not know if he knows what it is. Whatever it is, it worries him.’ ”

  Goldfarb and his wife stared at each other. Anything that worried the fleetlord was liable to mean trouble for the whole human race-and, incidentally, for the Lizards. Why hadn’t Moishe been more explicit? Because he didn’t know much more himself, evidently. “Finish,” Naomi said.

  “ ‘Atvar likes back-channel contacts more than he did some years ago,’ ” Goldfarb read. “ ‘If you can put a flea in the ear of some of your officer friends, it might do some good. Your cousin, Moishe.’ ”

  “What will you do?” Naomi asked.

  “God knows,” Goldfarb answered. “I haven’t got that many officer friends any more, not with things like they are here. And I’m hardly the bloke to play at world politics.” Naomi looked at him. He let out a long sigh. He had no real choice, and knew it. “I’ll do what I can, of course.”

  Straha spent a lot of time touching up his body paint. He kept the complex patterns as neat as they had been back in the days when he commanded the 206th Emperor Yower. He’d been the third-ranking male in the conquest fleet, behind only Atvar and Kirel. He’d come within the breadth of a fingerclaw of toppling Atvar from fleetlord’s rank. If he’d done it, if he’d taken charge of things in place of that boring plodder…

  He hissed softly. “Had the fleet been mine, Tosev 3 would belong to the Race in its entirety,” he said. He believed that; from snout to tailstump he believed it. It didn’t matter. What might have been never mattered, save in the Big Uglies’ overactive imaginations. A good male of the Race, Straha kept his eye turrets aimed firmly at what had been and what was.

  Exile, he thought. When he failed to overthrow Atvar, the fleetlord’s revenge had been as inevitable, as inexorable, as gravity. It had also been slow-typical of Atvar, Straha thought with a sneer. Instead of waiting for it, Straha had taken the 206th Emperor Yower ’s shuttlecraft and fled to the Big Uglies.

  Exile. The word tolled mournfully in his head, just as if it were reverberating from his hearing diaphragms. In exchange for his intimate knowledge of the Race, the American Tosevites had treated him and continued to treat him as well as they knew how. Anything he asked for, they gave him. That was why he dwelt in Los Angeles these days: a climate not impossibly cold, not impossibly humid. Whenever he chose, he ate ham, which came close to a delicacy he’d known back on Home. He had video gear purchased from the Race, and electronic entertainments either purchased after the fighting or captured during it.

  Exile. When he wanted it, he even had the company of other males. But they were captives, not defectors; no one could blame them for collaborating with the Big Uglies. People could blame him, could and did. However useful traitors were, no one loved them. That had proved as true among the Tosevites as it was among the Race.

  Still, time had slipped past without too much unpleasantness till the colonization fleet came into Tosev’s solar system. Very soon now, in the lands that the Race ruled, it would set up a good facsimile of life on Home. And Straha would be-the Big Uglies had a phrase for it-on the outside looking in.

  “I do not care,” he said. But that was a lie, and he knew it. If he hadn’t fled, he would have become a part of that life. Atvar would have degraded him, even arrested him, but would not have harmed him. Big Uglies sometimes enjoyed inflicting pain. The Race didn’t, and had had ever so much trouble understanding the difference.

  Feeling pain, now, when it came to feeling pain, the Tosevites and the Race were very much alike. Straha opened the drawer of a wooden cabinet of a size to suit Big Uglies better than males of the Race, one with fixtures made for a Tosevite’s hands.

  In the drawer, among other things, lay a well-sealed glass jar full of powdered ginger cured with lime, the Race’s favorite form of the herb. The American Big Uglies gave Straha all the ginger he wanted, too, though they were much less generous about letting their own leaders enjoy unlimited drugs.

  He poured some ginger onto the fine scales covering the palm of his hand, then raised it toward his mouth. Of itself, his tongue shot out. In a couple of quick licks, the ginger disappeared.

  “Ahhh!” he hissed: a long sigh of pleasure. When ginger first lifted him, he forgot he was all alone among barbarous aliens. No, that wasn’t quite true. He remembered, but he no longer cared. With ginger coursing through him, he felt taller and stronger than any Big Ugly, and more clever than all the Big Uglies and all the other males of the Race on Tosev 3. Ideas filled his long, narrow head, each of them so brilliant it dazzled him before he could fully grasp it.

  He knew ginger only seemed to turn him tall and strong and brilliant. It didn’t actually make him any of those things. Males who acted as if what the ginger told them were true had a way of dying before their time. That was one reason he tried to keep his tasting within the bounds of moderation.

  Descending from ecstasy was the other reason. He had not felt so low going down from the 206th Emperor Yower to the surface of Tosev 3 as he did when the drug’s exaltation began to leach out of him. The harder he tried to grasp it, the more readily it slipped through his fingers. At last it was all gone, leaving him lower than he had been before he tasted, and painfully aware of how low that was.

  Sometimes, to hold the crushing depression at bay, he would taste again when the first one wore off, or even for a third time on the heels of the second. But the herb-fueled exhilaration ebbed from one taste to another right after it, while the post-tasting gloom only got worse. Unlimited ginger, however much a taster might crave such a thing, did not mean unlimited happiness.

  And so, instead of taking a second taste, Straha put the ginger jar back in the drawer and slammed it shut. He picked up the telephone. Like the cabinet, it was of Tosevite manufacture, the handset made with the distance between a Big Ugly’s mouth and absurd external ear in mind, the holes in the dial designed for blunt, clawless Tosevite fingers.

  Those holes served his fingerclaws well enough. The clicks and squawks of the electronics as the call went through were partly familiar, partly strange. The bell at the other end of the line was a purely Tosevite conceit; the Race would have used some sort of hiss instead.

  “Hello?” The voice on the other end was Tosevite, too, the greeting the one the local Big Uglies used among themselves on the telephone. Straha had picked up some English during his long years of exile, but Big Uglies who wished to speak with him commonly used the language of the Race.

  Straha used his own language now: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”

  “I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager replied, dropping English without the least hesitation. Of all the Tosevites Straha had met, he came closest to being able to think like a male of the Race. His question was very much to the point: “Feeling lonely tonight?”

  “Yes.” Straha choked back an emphatic cough. His hands folded into fists, so that fingerclaws dug into his palms. Most Big Uglies would not have noticed what he hadn’t quite said. Yeager was different. Yeager heard what wasn’t said as well as what was.

  “We have known each other a long time now, Shiplord,” the Tosevite said. “I remember thinking even in the early days, when your folk and mine were still fighting, how hard a road you had chosen for yourself.”

  “You thought further a
head than I was thinking when I left the conquest fleet,” Straha said. “I get an itch under the scales admitting such a thing to a Tosevite, but it is truth.” The Race had got where it was by planning ahead, by always thinking of the long term. Straha hadn’t done that. He’d been paying ever since for not doing it. Exile.

  As if to rub that in, Yeager said, “You always did think more like a Big Ugly than most other males of the Race I have known.” He used the Race’s slang name for his kind without taking it as an insult, the way some Tosevites did.

  “I do not think like a Big Ugly,” Straha said with dignity. “I do not wish to think like a Big Ugly. I am a male of the Race. It is merely that I am not a reactionary male of the Race, as so many officers of the conquest fleet proved to be.” Venting his anger at Atvar and Kirel to a Big Ugly was demeaning-a telling measure of just how lonely he’d become-but he couldn’t help it.

  Yeager let out a few barks of noisy Tosevite laughter. “I did not say you thought like a Tosevite, Shiplord. If you were one of us, you would be a hopeless reactionary. Even so, that makes you a radical among the Race.”

  “Truth,” Straha said. “You understand us well. How did this happen? I know of your attachment to the wild literature your kind produced before the conquest fleet arrived, but others were attached to this literature, too, and they have not your skill in dealing with the Race.”

  “In fact, Shiplord, some of our best males and females for dealing with your folk were science-fiction readers before the conquest fleet came,” Yeager replied, the key term necessarily being in English. “But I count myself lucky. I could not have stayed a paid athlete much longer, and I do not know what I would have done after that. When the conquest fleet came, it let me discover I was good at something I had not known I could do at all. Is that not strange?”

  “For the Race, it would be surpassingly strange,” Straha answered. “For you Tosevites? I doubt it. So much of everything you do seems built around lucky accidents. But not all accidents are lucky. If we had come two hundred years later-a hundred of your years, I mean-we might have found this planet dead because of nuclear war.”