Down to Earth (17 page)

“If they and the Yanks turn you down, yes,” Paston answered. “Your friend already considered that possibility. You’re lucky to have so many people looking out for your interests.”

“I suppose I am, sir,” David said. He didn’t point out to Paston that, since he was a Jew, he automatically had a lot more people doing their best to give him a knee in the ballocks. The group captain wouldn’t understand that, and wouldn’t believe it, either. Goldfarb shrugged. He knew what he knew. And one of the things he knew was that he was getting out. At last, he was getting out.

One thing Johannes Drucker appreciated about his long service to the
Reich:
he had no trouble getting his hands on a firearm. Rifles and especially pistols were hard to come by for civilians in the
Reich.
Every officer, though, had his own service weapon. Drucker would have preferred a pistol not so easily traced back to him, but, with any luck, no one would associate Gunther Grillparzer’s untimely demise with him anyhow.

He tried to read a copy of
Signal
as the train rolled southwest toward Thuringia. By what the magazine said, everyone in Europe was delighted to live under the benevolent rule of the
Reich
and to labor to make Germany greater still. Drucker hoped that was true, which didn’t necessarily mean he believed it.

As usual, the compartment was tightly shut up against the outside air. The atmosphere was full of smoke from cigarettes and a couple of cigars. In the forward compartment of this car, there’d been a screaming row earlier in the trip. Someone—a foreigner, without a doubt—had had the nerve to open up a window. Everyone else had pitched a fit till a conductor, quite properly, shut it again and warned the miscreant he’d be put off the train if he opened it again.

The interior remained unsullied by fresh air until a conductor came through the car calling, “Weimar! All out for Weimar!” as the train slowed to a stop at the station. Drucker grabbed his carpetbag—all the luggage he had with him—and descended from the car.

Weimar’s station had a shabby, run-down look to it. As Drucker carried the bag out to the street to flag a taxi, he saw that the whole town looked as if it had seen better days. The
Reich
and the National Socialists did not love the place where the preceding unhappy German republic had been born.

Drucker discovered he didn’t need a cab after all. He could see the Hotel Elephant from where he was standing. He hurried toward and into it. A clerk nodded to him from behind the desk. “Yes, sir. May I help you?”

“I am Johann Schmidt,” Drucker said, using the voice an officer used toward an enlisted man to hide his nervousness. “I have a room reserved.”

That tone worked wonders, as it so often did in the
Reich.
The desk clerk flipped pages in the register. “Yes, sir,” he said, nodding. He handed Drucker a key. “You’ll be in 331, sir. I hope you enjoy your stay with us. We’ve been here on the Marktplatz for more than two hundred years, you know. Bach and Liszt and Wagner have stayed here.”

Not wanting to drop his air of lordly superiority, Drucker said, “I hope the plumbing is better now than it was in those days.”

“Oh, yes, sir,
Herr
Schmidt,” the clerk said. “You will find everything to your satisfaction.”

“We’ll see.” Having established a personality, Drucker played it to the hilt. “Oh. One thing more. Where is the central post office?”

“On Dimitroffstrasse, sir, just west of the square here,” the desk clerk answered. “You can’t miss it.”

That seemed worth another sneer. Having delivered it, Drucker climbed the hotel’s sweeping staircase to the third floor. Once he got there, he discovered the bath was at the end of the hall. He felt like going down and complaining. It would have been in character. With a shrug, though, he let himself into the room. Except for the lack of private bath, it seemed comfortable enough.

He changed into fresh shirt and trousers and as nondescript a jacket as he owned. The jacket’s one virtue was that it had big, roomy pockets. He put the pistol in one and a paperbound book in another, then went downstairs and headed across the square to Dimitroffstrasse.

For a wonder, the clerk had got it right: he couldn’t have missed the post office, for it lay only a couple of buildings away from the Gothic church that dominated Weimar’s skyline. The post-office building, on the other hand, was severely utilitarian. Drucker sat down inside on a bench that gave him a good look at the bank of postal boxes, pulled out the book, and began to read.

A Postal Protection NCO in field-gray uniform with orange piping strolled by and eyed him. The
Postschutz
was a branch of the SS, and had been since a couple of months before the Lizard invasion. Drucker kept on reading with a fine outward appearance of calm. The NCO paused between one step and another, then shrugged and walked on, his booted feet clicking on the marble floor. Drucker wasn’t a bum or a drunk. He didn’t look as if he intended causing trouble. If he felt like reading in a post office . . . well, there was no regulation against it.

Drucker kept a surreptitious eye on Box 127. He’d mailed Gunther Grillparzer—or rather, Grillparzer’s alias, Maxim Kipphardt—his first payment two days earlier; it should be reaching Grillparzer today. By the way Grillparzer had sounded, he wouldn’t let it sit around in the postal box for long. No, he’d spend it, either to keep a roof over his head or, perhaps more likely, on schnapps.

Maybe I should have worn a disguise,
Drucker thought. But the idea of putting on false whiskers had struck him as absurd. And all the false whiskers he’d ever seen
looked
false. In the end, he’d decided that being what he was—an ordinary-looking middle-aged German in ordinary clothes—made as good a disguise as any. The ex-panzer gunner wouldn’t have seen him for more than twenty years, after all.

The Postal Protection NCO tramped past him again. Drucker not only pretended to be absorbed in his book—a study of what people knew, or thought they knew, about Home—but actually got interested in it. That was an acting triumph of which he hadn’t thought himself capable. The
Postschutz
man didn’t even bother pausing this time. He’d accepted Drucker as part of the landscape.

A fat man came up and opened a postal box. It wasn’t 127. When the fat man pulled out an envelope, he muttered something sulfurous under his breath. Drucker couldn’t see the envelope. Was it a past-due bill? A letter from an ex-wife? A writer’s rejection slip? He’d never know. Still muttering, the fat man went away. Drucker returned to his book.

When someone did come to Box 127, Drucker almost didn’t notice: it wasn’t Gunther Grillparzer but a blond woman—quite a good-looking one-in her mid- to late twenties. She took out an envelope—
the
envelope, the one Drucker had sent—and left the post office.

“Scheisse,”
Drucker muttered under his breath as he got to his feet, stuck the book in his pocket, and went out after the woman. Things weren’t going as he’d planned.
No plan survives contact with the enemy,
he thought, all the while wishing Grillparzer hadn’t found a way to complicate his life.

He hadn’t been trained in shadowing people. Had the woman looked back over her shoulder, she would have spied him in the blink of an eye. But she didn’t. She stood at a street corner, waiting for the trolley. Drucker decided to wait for the trolley, too.
What am I supposed to do now?
he wondered. He had no qualms about killing Gunther Grillparzer, none whatever. But a pretty stranger who might not even know what she was carrying in her handbag? That was a different business.

Here came the streetcar, clanging its bell. She got on. So did Drucker. He didn’t know the right fare, and had to fumble in a pocket—not the one that held the pistol—for change. The trolley driver gave him a severe look. Feeling absurdly sheepish, he went back and sat down beside the young woman. She nodded politely and then ignored him. He marveled that she couldn’t hear his heart pounding in his chest.

The streetcar rattled along for several blocks, heading into as seedy apart of town as Weimar had. When it stopped, the woman murmured, “Excuse me,” and walked past Drucker and out. He didn’t get out with her. That would have been giving himself away. Instead, he stared out the window, hoping to see where she headed.

He got lucky. A lorry on the cross street blocked the intersection for fifteen seconds or so. No matter how angrily the motorman clanged, the truck didn’t—likely couldn’t—move. That let Drucker see the woman go into a block of flats whose brick front was streaked with coal soot.

He got out at the next stop and hurried back to the apartment building. In the lobby, as he’d expected, he found a brass bank of mailboxes. None said
Gunther Grillparzer.
None said
Maxim Kipphardt,
either. Before he started knocking on doors at random—a desperation ploy if ever there was one—Drucker noticed that the one for 4E did say
Martin Krafft.
In detective novels, people often used aliases whose initials matched their real names. Martin Krafft wasn’t Grillparzer’s real name, but he’d said he’d been using a false one for a while. Without any better ideas—without any better hopes—Drucker started up the stairs.

Panting a little, wishing the place had a lift, he stood in the fourth-floor hallway, which smelled of cabbage and spilled beer. There was 4E, opposite the stairway. Drucker slipped his right hand into the pocket with the pistol. He thought fast as he advanced on the doorway and used his left hand to knock.

“Who is it?” The woman’s voice. His knees sagged with relief: one right guess.

Drucker grimaced. Now he had to take another chance. “Telegram for Herr Krafft,” he said. If Grillparzer wasn’t there, life would get more difficult still. But, a moment later, the door opened and there stood the ex-panzer gunner, middle-aged and podgy fat and looking more than a little bottle-weary. He needed a couple of seconds to recognize Drucker, and that was a couple of seconds too long: by then, the pistol was aimed at his face. “Let me in, Gunther,” Drucker said. “Don’t do anything stupid, or you’ll never do anything at all ever again. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“You won’t get away with this,” Grillparzer said as he backed away. Drucker came in and kicked the door shut behind him. His former comrade went on, “I thought you’d be a smart boy and pay me off. When I denounce you—”

Drucker laughed in his face. He tapped one of the buttons on his coat. “You fool—the SS is listening to you run your mouth now, thanks to my transmitter here.” Grillparzer looked horrified. Drucker
was
horrified—at the bluff he was running. But, as Hitler had said, the bigger the lie, the better. “I
am
the SS, and you, my friend, have cooked your own goose—and your girlfriend’s, too.”

If the woman standing in back of Grillparzer had been his wife or his kid sister, Drucker wouldn’t have looked infallible, and he might have had to start shooting. But the ex-gunner only grimaced. “Christ, what a pack of lies you must have told to get yourself into the SS, you murdering bastard.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and you can’t prove I do—it’s your word against mine,” Drucker answered. “I do know, and I have evidence”—he tapped the button again—“that you’ve tried to blackmail me. Cough up the cash. You can’t use it, anyhow. The banks have the serial numbers of all the notes on their watch list. As soon as you spent one, it’d just be another nail in your coffin.”

He sounded convincing as hell. He would have believed himself. And Grillparzer believed him—or believed the pistol. Turning his head, he said, “Hand it over, Friedli. The son of a bitch has got us, dammit.”

The woman had only to reach onto the cheap pine table behind her to retrieve the envelope. Drucker took it by one corner with his left hand. “Both your fingerprints are on this now, of course,” he said cheerfully. The envelope had been opened, but still weighed about what it had when he’d posted it. Grillparzer and—Friedli?—hadn’t had the chance to do much plundering. “Remember, if you even think of giving me grief again, you’ll be sorrier than you can imagine.”

“Christ, why didn’t you just tell me over the phone you were a blackshirt along with being a spaceman?” Grillparzer asked. By the look in Friedli’s eyes, he was going to be sorrier than he could imagine even if Drucker had nothing to do with it.

Cheerful still, Drucker answered, “You’ll remember the lesson longer this way.
Auf wiedersehen.”
And out the door he went.

 
5

Sam Yeager sighed. He’d drafted his son to feed Mickey and Donald breakfast, and Jonathan often gave the Lizard hatchlings supper, too. For their lunch, though, the kid was at school. That meant Sam needed to do the job himself.

Well, he could have given it to Barbara, but his pride prevented that. President Warren had assigned him the job of raising the baby Lizards, so he couldn’t very well palm all of it off on his family. Besides, the critters were interesting. “I’ve been in the Army too long, he said as he stood in the kitchen slicing ham. “Even if it’s fun, I don’t want to do anything I have to.”

“What did you say, honey?” Barbara called from their bedroom, which was at the other end of the house.

“Nothing, really—just grousing,” he answered, a little embarrassed that she’d heard him. He looked at how much meat he’d cut. Just after the Lizards hatched, it would have kept them going for a couple of days. Now it was just one meal, or would be after he put a couple of more slices on the plate. Donald and Mickey were almost five months old now, and a lot bigger than when they’d fought their way out of their eggshells.

He took the plate piled high with ham down the hail to the Lizards’ room. They still liked to bolt whenever they got the chance, so he shut the door at the end of the hall before opening theirs. These days, they didn’t quite make the mad dash for freedom they had when they were smaller. It seemed more a game of the sort puppies or kittens might play. No matter what it was, though, he didn’t feel like running after them, not at his age he didn’t.

When he did open the door to their room, he found them rolling on the floor clawing and snapping at each other. They rarely did any damage: again, they could have been a couple of squabbling puppies. From what he’d learned on the Race’s computer network, these brawls were normal for hatchlings of their age. He didn’t give his leather gauntlets a workout by pulling them apart, the way he had the first few times he’d caught them tangling.

Even though he didn’t try to separate them, they sprang apart when he stepped inside. “You know I don’t like you doing that, don’t you?” he said to them. He talked to them whenever he fed them—whenever he had anything to do with them at all. They didn’t pick up language and meaning as readily as human babies did. But he’d already seen they were a lot smarter than dogs or cats. That did make sense. By the time they grew up, they’d be at least as smart as he was, maybe smarter.

For the time being, they were more interested in him as the dinner wagon than in him as a person. Their eye turrets focused on the plate of sliced ham to the exclusion of everything else. They let out little excited hisses and snorts. Maybe it was Sam’s imagination, but he thought he caught some humanlike sounds among their noises. Were they trying to imitate him and his family? He supposed he would have to listen to a comparison recording of the noises of Lizard-raised hatchlings to be certain.

“Come and get it, boys,” he said, though Mickey and Donald might have been girls for all he knew. He crooked his finger in the come-here gesture people used.

It wasn’t a normal Lizard gesture. When they wanted to tell someone to come, they used a twist of the eye turret to get the message across. But Yeager watched Mickey crook one of his skinny, scaly, claw-tipped tiny fingers in just the same way as he hurried forward to get his lunch.

Sam felt like cheering. Instead, he gave Mickey the first piece of ham. That usually went to Donald, who was a little larger and a little quicker. Mickey made the ham disappear in a couple of quick snaps. He cocked his head to one side and turned an eye turret up at Yeager, who was feeding Donald his first slice of meat.

What wheels were spinning inside Mickey’s head? Sam had wondered that since the day the Lizard hatched. Lizards thought as well as people, but they didn’t think like people in a lot of ways. And did hatchlings, could hatchlings, really think at all in the strict sense of the word when they had no words with which
to
think?

Quite deliberately, Mickey bent his finger into that purely human come-here gesture again. “You little son of a gun!” Yeager exclaimed. “You figured out that that means you get extra, didn’t you?” He rewarded the hatchling with another piece of ham.

Donald had one eye turret on Sam, the other on Mickey. He saw the reward his—brother? sister?—had got. When he crooked his finger, he was imitating Mickey, not Yeager.

“No, you fellows aren’t dumb at all,” Sam said, and gave Donald some meat. From then on, both Lizards kept making come-hither gestures till Yeager ran out of ham. “Sorry, boys, that’s all there is,” he told them. They didn’t understand that, any more than puppies or kittens would have. But their little bellies bulged, so they weren’t in imminent danger of starving to death. He looked from one of them to the other. “I don’t know. I have the feeling you guys may start talking sooner than you would if you were around a bunch of other Lizards. What have you got to say about that?”

They didn’t have anything to say about that. Jonathan wouldn’t have had anything to say about it at five months old, either. Physically, the Lizards were a long way ahead of where Jonathan had been at their age—he couldn’t even sit up unsupported then, let alone run and jump and fight. Yeager had always thought they were developing more slowly when it came to mental processes.

Now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. All right: maybe they wouldn’t talk as fast as a human baby would. But, plainly, a lot was going on inside their heads. It might not come out in words. One way or another, though, it looked as if it would come out.

“See you later,” Sam told them, and waved goodbye. To his disappointment, they didn’t try to imitate that. Of course, it didn’t have food attached to its meaning. Maybe the big difference between the way they thought and the way people thought was just that they were a lot more practical.

He went back to the kitchen, washed the plate, and set it in the dish drainer. Then he went back to the bedroom. “Those little guys are getting smarter,” he told Barbara, and explained what the hatchlings had done.

“That
is
interesting,” she said. “I think you’re right. Something is definitely going on inside their heads—more than I would have expected, since they don’t have words with which to form concepts.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Sam answered: not surprising, considering that they were married and considering that he’d learned from her a lot of what he knew about the way languages worked. Something else was on his mind. “When do you suppose we can start letting them go around the house more?”

“When we can teach them not to tear up the furniture so much,” Barbara replied promptly, as if she were talking about a couple of kittens that enjoyed sharpening their claws on the sofa. She went on, “If you’re right, though, we really might be able to start trying to teach them.”

“Might be worth doing. They’d enjoy it.” Yeager was about to say something more, but paused, hearing footsteps on the front porch. If he could hear them, whoever was making them could hear him. A moment later, the mail slot in the front door opened. Envelopes landed on the rug. The footsteps went away. Sam said, “Let’s see . . . to whom we owe money today.” He wagged a finger under Barbara’s nose. “You were going to nail me if I said, ‘who we owe money to today.’ ”

“Of course I was,” she answered. “That kind of grammar deserves it.” But she was laughing; she didn’t take herself too seriously, and didn’t mind teasing about what she admitted to be her obsession. They went out together to check the mail.

“No bills,” Yeager said with some relief, shuffling the envelopes. “Just ads and political junk.”

“I won’t be sorry to see the primary come,” Barbara said. “It’s still six weeks away, and look at everything we’re getting. ‘Junk’ is right.”

Yeager held up a flyer extolling the virtues of President Warren. “I don’t know why his people bother to mail this stuff. He’s going to get reelected in a walk, let alone renominated. Christ, I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Democratic primary, too.”

“He’s done a good job,” Barbara agreed.

“I’ll vote for him again, no doubt about it,” Sam said. “And one of the reasons I’ll vote for him again is that he doesn’t take a lot of chances—which is probably why he has his people send this stuff out in carload lots.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Barbara said. “But, since we already know what we’re going to do . . .” She took the political flyers and the advertising circulars into the kitchen and pitched them in the trash.

“Good for you,” Sam called after her. She was death on traveling salesmen, too. If they didn’t back away in a hurry, they’d get their noses smashed when she slammed the door in their faces. Having grown up on a farm, where such visitors were always made welcome, Sam liked to chat with them. Half the time, he’d buy things from them, too. Barbara and he didn’t have many arguments, but that could touch one off.

He went into the study and turned on the human-built computer that shared desk space with—and used more of it than—the Lizards’ machine he preferred. But the Lizards didn’t have access to the rather fragmentary network that had grown up in the United States over the past few years. He certainly hoped they didn’t, anyhow. Still, if he could sneak around through their electronic playground, they were bound to be trying to sneak around through the USA’s.

Waiting for the screen to come to life (which also took longer than it did in the Lizard-built computer), he wondered how good his country’s electronic security really was. He’d got in Dutch when he poked his nose in where it didn’t belong—he’d bought himself a royal chewing-out from a three-star general when he tried to find out what was going on with the
Lewis and Clark
before the United States was ready to let anybody know the answer.

With any luck at all, the Race would have as much trouble. But he hadn’t tried to be sneaky. He supposed the Lizards would. And they’d been using computers as long as people had been counting on their fingers. How sneaky could they be if they put their minds to it?

That wasn’t his problem. No: it
was
his problem, but he couldn’t do anything about solving it. He had other things on his mind, anyway. In his spare time—a concept ever more mythical, now that Mickey and Donald were around—he kept poking around, trying to find leads that would show either the
Reich
or the USSR had blown up the ships from the colonization fleet. If he ever did find anything, he intended to pass it on to the Lizards. As far as he was concerned, that attack had been murder, and could have touched off a nuclear war. He wouldn’t shed a tear if the Nazis or the Reds got hammered on account of it.

Thanks to his dealings with the Race, he had a security clearance that let him go almost anywhere on the U.S. network (not quite, as he’d found out when he went snooping after data on the
Lewis and Clark
). He’d found a couple of interesting archives of signals received just after the orbiting weapon, whosever it was, launched its warheads at the orbiting ships of the colonization fleet.

The screen went dark. After a moment, a message appeared:
CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN
. Disgustedly, he whacked the computer. That happened all too often with it. “Miserable half-assed piece of junk,” he growled.

Few men in the history of the world—no, of the solar system—had enjoyed the view Glen Johnson had now. There was Ceres below him: mostly dust-covered rock, with a little ice here and there. It was the biggest asteroid in the whole damn belt, but not big enough to be perfectly round; it looked more like a roundish potato than anything else. The landscape put Johnson in mind of the heavily cratered parts of the moon. Rocks of all sizes had been slamming into Ceres for as long as it had been out there.

Colonel Walter Stone had a different way of looking at things. “That’s the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen,” he said.

“Yeah, any kid with that many zits wouldn’t like high school a whole hell of a lot,” Johnson agreed.

“None of the other asteroids can tease Ceres, though,” his mentor observed. “They’re all just as ugly and just as pockmarked—or if there are any that aren’t, we haven’t found ’em yet. Still, no matter how ugly it is, we’re in business here, and that’s what counts.”