Second Contact c-1 Page 9

  “Boy’s delirious,” Thornton declared, to general laughter. His white mustache showed he was a veteran of the First World War, the last time people had had the privacy to fight among themselves alone. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Lizards’ conquest fleet had headed for Earth a bare handful of years after what people had called the War to End War ended.

  Auerbach didn’t like thinking about Lizard fleets heading toward Earth. He didn’t like thinking about the one that was just arriving, either. He examined the first hand he got dealt. The five cards might never have met before. Disgusted, he threw them down on the table. Even more disgusted, he said, “Before long, we’re going to be ass-deep in Lizards.”

  “That’s a fact,” said Pete Bragan, who had dealt Rance the lousy hand. Pete wore a patch on his left eye and had a walk even funnier than Auerbach’s. He’d been inside a Sherman tank that had the misfortune of coming up against one of the Lizards’ machines outside of Chicago. As such things went, he’d been lucky: all of him but that one eye and the last few inches of his right leg had got out. “Damn shame, you ask me.”

  One by one, the veterans around the table nodded. Except for Thornton, the old-timer, they were men the Lizards had wrecked, one way or another. Among them, they had enough chunks missing to make a pretty fair meat market. Mike Cohen, for instance, never had to shuffle and deal because he couldn’t with only one hand. None of them held down a regular job. Had they held regular jobs, they wouldn’t have been playing poker early on a Tuesday morning.

  After dropping out of another hand, Auerbach won one with three nines and then, to his disgust, lost one with an ace-high straight. War stories went around with the cards. Rance had told his before. That didn’t stop him from telling them again. After a while, he lost with another straight. “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna quit coming here!” he exclaimed, staring at Pete Bragan’s full house. “My pension doesn’t stretch far enough to let me afford many of these.”

  “Amen,” Mike Cohen said, for all the world as if he were Christian. “It was decent money when they set it up, but things haven’t gotten any cheaper since.”

  Grousing about the pension was as much a ritual as swapping war stories. Auerbach shook his head when that thought crossed his mind. Stories about making ends meet were war stories, stories of a quiet war that never ended. He said, “They don’t give a damn about us. Oh, they talk pretty fine, but down deep they just don’t care.”

  “That’s a fact,” Bragan said. “They got what they could from us, and now they don’t want to remember who saved the bacon.” He tossed a chip into the pot. “I’ll bump that up a quarter.”

  “Way things are going nowadays, seems like some folks wish the Lizards had won,” Auerbach said, and described the teenager on the bus. He put in a couple of chips. “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise another quarter.”

  “World’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Bragan said. When it came round to him again, he raised another quarter.

  Auerbach studied his three jacks. He knew what kind of hand he held: one just good enough to lose. He wished he hadn’t raised before. But he had. Throw good money after bad — the best recipe he knew for losing the good money, too. With a grimace, he said, “Call,” and did his best to pretend the chip he flipped into the pot had got there of its own accord.

  Bragan displayed three tens. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Auerbach said happily, and raked in the pot.

  “Don’t reckon anybody’d notice any special change,” Bragan said, which drew a laugh. The other wounded veteran shook his head. “Yeah, world’s going to hell in a handbasket, all right. Whose deal is it?”

  As it did every day, the game went on and on. Somebody limped out and bought hero sandwiches. Somebody else went out a little later and came back with beer. Occasionally, someone would get up and leave. The poker players never had any trouble finding someone else to sit in. Most of them didn’t have much else to do with their lives. Rance Auerbach knew he didn’t. He’d never married. He hadn’t had a steady woman friend for a long time. His poker buddies were in the same boat. They had their wounds and their stories and one another.

  He hated the idea of going back to his apartment. But the American Legion hall didn’t have cots. He cashed in his chips, discovering he was a couple of dollars ahead on the day. If he’d had more he cared to buy, he would have felt better about that. As things were, he took it as skill’s due reward-and coffee next time he went shopping.

  When he got back to the apartment building, he checked his mailbox. He had a sister married to a fellow who sold cars in Texarkana; she sometimes wrote. His brother in Dallas had probably forgotten he was alive. When his leg and his shoulder started kicking in, he wished he could forget, too.

  Nothing from Kendall. Nothing from Mae, either: Rance owed her a letter. But, amid the drugstore circulars and get-rich-quick ads for suckers to sell “miracle Lizard gadgets” door-to-door, he did come across an envelope with a stamp bearing the picture of Queen Elizabeth and another showing a tough-looking fellow in a high-peaked cap and the legend GROSSDEUTSCHES REICH.

  “Well, well,” he said, looking from one of them to the other before starting the long, painful business of going upstairs. He smiled. His face almost hurt as it shifted into the new and unfamiliar expression. He might spend some of his time wishing he were dead. With any luck at all, the Lizards would spend more of theirs wishing they were.

  Monique Dutourd sometimes-often-wondered why she had studied anything as far removed from the modern world as Roman history. The best explanation she’d ever found was that the modern world had turned upside down too many times for her ever to trust it fully. She’d been eleven when the Germans overran northern France and turned her native Marseille into an appendage of Vichy, a town previously known, if it was known at all, for its water. Two years after that, the Lizards had swept the south of France into their clawed grip. And two years after that, as fighting finally ebbed, they’d withdrawn south of the Pyrenees, handing the part of France they’d held back to the Germans as casually as one neighbor might return a borrowed roasting pan to another.

  No, Monique had had enough and to spare of disasters and betrayals and disappointments in her own life. She did not want to examine them in more detail than she’d known while she was living through them. And so…

  “And so,” she said, running a brush through her thick, dark hair, “I examine the disasters and betrayals and disappointments of people two thousand years dead. Ah, this is truly an improvement.”

  It would have been funny, if only it were funny. Not a human university in the world taught a course called ancient history any more. The headquarters of the Lizard fleetlord in Cairo looked across the Nile at the Pyramids. They’d gone up more than four thousand years ago-about the time the Lizards, having long, long since unified their planet, having conquered two other neighboring worlds, began to look with covetous eyes toward Earth. To them, the entire span of human recorded history wasn’t ancient-it was more like looking back at the year before last.

  A glance at the clock on the mantel-a silent, modern electric, not the loudly ticking model she had known in her youth-made her mouth pucker into an O of dismay. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late to the university. Were a male instructor late for his lecture, he would be assumed to have a lover-and forgiven. Were she late for hers, she would be assumed to have a lover-and liable to get the sack.

  As always, she lugged her bicycle downstairs. She took modest pride in never having lost one to thieves. Having lived in Marseille all her life, she knew her fellow townsfolk were a light-fingered lot. Marseille had specialized in unofficial commerce since the Greeks founded the place more than five hundred years before the birth of Christ.

  Gulls screeched overhead as she pedaled south along Rue Breteuil toward the campus, which had gone up on a couple of blocks wrecked during the fighting between the Lizards and troops from the Vichy government. Marseille was one of the few places where Vichy troops had fough
t, no doubt because they were at least as afraid of what the locals would do to them if they didn’t as they were of what the Lizards would do to them if they did.

  A policeman in a kepi and a blue uniform waved her on across Rue Sylvabette. “Hello, sweetheart,” he called in the Provencalflavored local dialect he, like she, took for granted. “Nice legs!”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls,” Monique answered with a derisive gesture. The policeman laughed uproariously. He knew bloody well he said that to all the girls. He wasn’t bad-looking. Maybe it got him laid once a year or so.

  With unconscious skill, Monique threaded her way through the stream of bicycle, car, and lorry traffic. A sunburned blond fellow in a field-gray uniform pulled up alongside her on a motorcycle. Over the rumble of its engine, he spoke in German-accented Parisian French: “Are you going anywhere special?”

  She thought about pretending she didn’t understand. With a true Parisian, she might have done that. With a German, she didn’t quite dare. If Germans wanted to badly enough, they could make unfortunate things happen. And so she answered with the truth: “I’m on my way to work.”

  “Ach, so,” he said, and then, remembering his French, “Quel dommage.” Monique didn’t think it was a pity; she knew nothing but relief as the motorcycle zoomed away. A generation had resigned her to the Germans as masters of France, but hadn’t left her enthusiastic.

  Then she rode past the synagogue on the east side of Rue Breteuil. Its windows were shuttered, its doorway boarded up, as it had been since the Lizards left and the Germans came in. Maybe a few Jews still survived here. If they did, it was not for lack of German effort. Monique shook her head, then had to brush hair back out of her eyes. No wonder so many Jews got on so well with the Lizards.

  As if thinking of the aliens were enough to conjure them up, she saw one on the sidewalk in animated conversation with a Frenchman in a gray, collarless shirt. They might have been discussing legitimate business; some of that got done in Marseille, too. Monique wouldn’t have bet anything she didn’t care to lose on it, though.

  She parked her bicycle at a stand on the edge of the campus (which looked more like a series of apartment blocks than a proper university), chained it in place, and tipped the guard so he wouldn’t steal it himself and say someone else had. Grabbing her briefcase off the jump seat, she hurried along to her classroom.

  She had more students every semester. The large majority were Frenchmen and — women as disenchanted with the present as she was. The rest, who paid their fees to the bursar like everyone else, were Germans stationed around Marseille. Some of them had been stationed around the city long enough to learn to speak the local dialect with a guttural German accent rather than the standard French they would have been taught back in the Vaterland.

  The students, French and Germans alike, were chattering among themselves when she walked into the hall. The Germans quieted down out of respect for her as a professor. The Frenchmen quieted down because they were eyeing her legs, as the flic had done. The Frenchwomen quieted down because they were pondering her culottes, a nice compromise between modesty and display for someone who rode a bicycle.

  However she got quiet, she was glad enough to take advantage of it. “Today,” she said, “we shall continue to examine the consequences of Augustus’ failure to conquer Germania as Caesar had conquered Gallia.”

  Using the Latin names for the areas in question made the event seem more distant than it would have had she called them Allemagne and France. She did that on purpose; she did not want to have the ancient world drawn into the sphere of modern politics. If her French students took especially careful notes on this material, was it her fault? If her handful of German students took especially careful notes… That, unlike the other, was something to worry about.

  And, try as she would, she couldn’t leave out her own thoughts. “Augustus’ failure in Germania is one of those areas of history where inevitability is difficult if not impossible to discern,” she said. “Had the Roman Emperor’s abler commanders not died at inopportune times, had revolt not broken out elsewhere in the Empire, he would not have had to appoint Quinctilius Varus to head the German legions, and Arminius”-she would not say Hermann, the German equivalent of the name-“would not have been able to slaughter those legions in the forest of Teutoberg.”

  A woman raised her hand. Monique pointed to her. She asked, “How would a Roman Germany”-she said Allemagne — “have changed the history of the world?”

  It was a good, sensible question. Monique would have liked it even better had answering it not reminded her of walking through a thicket of thornbushes. Picking her words with care, she said, “A Roman Empire with its frontier on the Elbe, not the Rhine, would have had a shield against the nomads from out of the east. And Romanized Germans would surely have contributed as much to the Empire as Romanized Gauls did in the history with which we are familiar.”

  That seemed to satisfy the woman. Other answers were possible. Monique knew it. The Goths and Vandals wouldn’t have sacked Rome. The Franks wouldn’t have invaded France and given it their name. There wouldn’t have been a Germany to invade our country in 1870 or 1914 or 1940. Because an answer was possible, though, did not mean it was safe to give.

  She got through the rest of the lecture without treading on such dangerous ground. Watching the clock reach half past ten was something of a relief. “Dismissed,” she said, and put her notes back into the briefcase. She looked forward to going to her office. She finally had the references she needed to put the finishing touches on a paper tracing the growth of the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis during the first couple of centuries of the Christian era. It would, she hoped, raise some eyebrows in the small circle that cared about such things.

  A tanned fellow about her own age in an open-necked shirt and baggy pants a fisherman might have worn approached the lectern. “A very interesting lecture,” he said, nodding his approval. “Very interesting indeed.”

  He looked like a local. Monique had assumed he was a local. In the class roster, his name was down as Laforce. He wrote French as well as a local would have. When he spoke, though, he proved he wasn’t a local. He was a German. His countrymen in the class wore Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe uniforms. She wondered what he did, and hoped she wouldn’t find out the hard way. “Thank you,” she said, as if to a viper that had suddenly revealed itself among the rocks.

  He laughed, showing strong yellow teeth, and lit a Gauloise. He smoked like a local, too, letting the cigarette hang insouciantly from the corner of his mouth. “You could have been much more inflammatory than you were with your Germania and Gallia,” he remarked.

  Wary still, she studied him. “And would I have vanished into night and fog, then?” she asked. That was what happened to people who made the Reich unhappy because of what they said or what they were.

  “Maybe,” he answered, and laughed again. “Maybe not, too. You can get away with more in a lecture hall than you could on a soapbox. If you like, take some coffee with me this afternoon, and we’ll talk about it.”

  His approach could have been a lot less subtle. As an occupier, he hardly needed to make an approach at all. Because he had, Monique was bold enough to reply, “Tell me your real name and your real rank and I’ll decide whether we talk about it.”

  He dipped his head in half a bow. “Sturmbannfuhrer Dieter Kuhn, at your service, Professor Dutourd.”

  “What sort of rank is-?” Monique stopped. Before she finished the question, she realized what sort of rank it was. Kuhn-if that was really his name-belonged to the SS.

  “You can say no, if you like,” he said. “I don’t build dossiers on women who turn me down. I’d go through too many folders if I did.”

  She thought he meant it. That was one of the reasons she smiled and nodded. The other reason, though, was the lingering fear he might be lying. She got very little research done after she did go back to her office.

  Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson sat
on top of a large cylinder filled with some of the most highly inflammable substances ingenious chemists could devise. If they exploded in any way but the one for which they were designed… He whistled softly. “If they do that, folks’ll be picking up pieces of me from Baltimore down to Key West,” he muttered.

  “What’s that, Peregrine?” The radio speaker above his head in the cramped cockpit sounded tinny. Nobody’d bothered changing the design since the war. The old one worked, which was plenty good enough for military airand spacecraft. Johnson had a fancier, smoother speaker in his record player back home. That was fine, for play. When he heard squawks, he knew he was working.

  “Nothing much, Control,” he answered. “Just woolgathering.” The blockhouse here at Kitty Hawk was a long way away from his rocket. If it blew up instead of going up, the bureaucrats and technicians would be fine. He, on the other hand… well, it would be over before he noticed he was dead.

  “Cheer up, Peregrine,” the fellow on the distant other end of the microphone said. “You’ve been living on borrowed time the past twenty years anyhow.”

  “You so relieve my mind,” Johnson said with a wry chuckle. He would have laughed louder and harder if the man back at the blockhouse had been joking. He’d flown fighters against the Lizards during the war, a job where pilots had life expectancies commonly measured in minutes. He’d been shot down twice, and managed to survive both times. One forearm had some nasty burn scars on it from his second forced landing. He wore long-sleeved shirts whenever he could.

  If he hadn’t been on the shelf for a while with burns, he would have gone right back into action and probably been killed. As things were, he’d just returned to one of the last Marine air units still operating when the cease-fire came.

  After the fighting ended, he’d tested a lot of the new planes that married human and Lizard technology-in some cases (luckily none of his) marriages smeared across heaven rather than made in it. Graduating to rockets when the USA went into space in the 1950s was a natural next step.