Down to Earth (57 page)

“You did what?” Nesseref could imagine depravity, but such utter indifference was beyond her comprehension. “By the Emperor, what would Tosevites do with hatchlings? What would they do
to
hatchlings?”

“I do not know, and I do not much care,” the other female said. “I do know that I got enough ginger for the eggs to keep me happy for a long time. But now I have gone through it all, and I wish I had some more.”

“Disgraceful,” Nesseref said. “I ought to report you to the authorities.”

“Go ahead,” the female said. “Go right ahead. I will deny everything. How do you propose to prove any of this whatsoever?”

Nesseref had no good answer for that, however much she wanted one. She turned both eye turrets away from the other female, as if denying her the right to exist. The direct insult did what she wanted; the other female’s toeclaws clicked on the hard floor as she went away. The almost equally hard cot on which Nesseref slept wasn’t the only reason she passed a restless, uncomfortable night.

She had an uncomfortable flight back to Poland, too. She’d expected the local Big Uglies to stone the vehicle that took her to the airfield, and they did. Had that been all, she would have accepted it as an ordinary nuisance and thought little more about it. But it wasn’t all—far from it.

As soon as her aircraft entered the
Reich’s
air space, a Deutsch killercraft met it and kept pace with it, so close that Nesseref could seethe Big Ugly in the cockpit of the lean, deadly looking machine. Had he chosen to launch missiles or use his cannon, he could have shot down the aircraft in which she flew as easily as he pleased.

He didn’t. When the aircraft left the
Reich
and flew into Polish air space, the Deutsch Tosevite peeled off and went back to one of his own airbases. But even the Deutsche had not offered such provocations for a long time. Nesseref was very happy indeed when her machine rolled to a stop outside of Warsaw and she got off.

Living in Lodz, not far from the eastern border of the Greater German
Reich,
meant Mordechai Anielewicz could receive German television programming. Speaking Yiddish, and having studied German in school, he understood the language well enough. That didn’t mean he turned his receiver to the channels coming from the
Reich
very often. Football games were worth watching; the Germans and the nations subject to them fielded some fine clubs. But the interminable Nazi propaganda shows ranged from boring to savagely offensive.

Since Himmler’s death, though, Mordechai had started paying more attention to German propaganda. He’d never imagined he would miss the SS chief and
Führer
who’d done the Jews so much harm. With something approaching horror, he realized he did. Himmler had been a known quantity—a known
mamzer
much of the time, certainly, but not someone who was likely to go off half-cocked. The Committee of Eight, on the other hand . . .

“Look at this!” Anielewicz exclaimed. His wife came over to the sofa in front of the television and dutifully looked. Mordechai pointed at the clumsy-looking panzers with crosses painted on them rolling across the screen. “Do you see what they’re doing, Bertha?”

“Looks like another war film to me,” she answered with a yawn. “May I go back and finish the dishes now?”

“Well, it is.” Anielewicz clicked his tongue between his teeth. “But I don’t like it when they start showing films about invading Poland. It’s liable to mean they’re gearing up to try it again.”

“They wouldn’t!” Bertha said. “They have to know they’ll get smashed if they try.”

“If they’ve got any sense, they have to know that,” Mordechai answered. “But who says they’ve got any sense? When they start going on about provocations and insults, what are they doing but getting their people ready for trouble? That’s what they did in 1939, after all.”

On the screen, the German panzers mowed down charging Polish lancers wearing square hats. Bertha said, “It won’t be that easy this time, if they’re
meshuggeh
enough to try again.”

“You know that. I know that. I think even Himmler knew that,” Anielewicz said. “From what I’ve heard, the Lizards warned him off not so long ago, and he listened to them. But these fools?” He shook his head.

“What can we do?” Bertha asked.

That was more easily asked than answered. “I don’t know,” Mordechai said unhappily. “I know what I’d like to do—I’d like to put Jewish fighters on alert, and I’d like to get in touch with the Poles, too, so I know they’ll be ready to move in case the Nazis really do intend to go after us here.”

“Will the Poles listen to you?” his wife asked.

Anielewicz shrugged. “I don’t know that, either. As far as they’re concerned, what am I? Just a damned Jew, that’s all. But they certainly won’t listen to me if I don’t get in touch with them.” His smile looked cheerful, but wasn’t. “
Gottenyu,
I don’t even know if the Jews in Warsaw will pay any attention to me. As far as they’re concerned, Poland
is
Warsaw, and the rest of the country can
geh in drerd
.”

“But you came from Warsaw!” Bertha’s voice quivered with indignation.

“I’ve been away a long time—plenty long enough for them to forget where I came from,” Mordechai replied. His laugh didn’t sound amused, either. “Of course, with some of those people you can walk around the corner for a loaf of bread and they’ll forget about you by the time you get back.”

“Ingrates, that’s what they are?” Bertha made a wife as loyal as any man could want. She was also a long way from a fool, asking, “Do you suppose they’ve forgotten about the explosive-metal bomb?”

“No, they’ll remember that,” Mordechai admitted. “I’m the one who wishes he could forget about it.” He went into the kitchen and came back with a couple of glasses of slivovitz. Sipping from one, he handed Bertha the other. “I don’t know if it will work, and God forbid I should ever have to find out.”

“If you do, it won’t be the only explosive-metal bomb going off, will it?” Bertha asked. When Anielewicz shook his head, she knocked back her plum brandy like a farm laborer. She said, “That won’t be all that happens, either.”

“Oh, no. Poison gas and panzers and who can say what all else?” Anielewicz poured down his brandy, too. “The other thing I’d better do is, I’d better talk with Bunim. I’m about as happy with that as I am with a trip to the dentist, and that Lizard loves me every bit as much as I love him. But if we’re going to fight on the same side, we’d better have some notion of what we’ll be trying to do.”

“That makes good sense.” His wife’s mouth twisted. “Of course, if the whole world goes mad, whether or not anything makes sense stops mattering very much, doesn’t it?”

Before Mordechai could answer her, the telephone rang. He walked over to the shabby end table on which it sat and picked it up. Everything in the flat was shabby: other people’s hand-me-downs, charity after the arson fire that had forced the Anielewiczes from the building where they’d lived so long. “Hello?” he said, and then spent the next ten minutes in intense conversation, some in Yiddish, some in Polish.

When he hung up, his wife asked, “Was that Warsaw? Have they decided they need to worry about the
Reich
after all?”

He shook his head in some bemusement. “No. You would have thought so from the way I was talking, wouldn’t you? That was the
Armia Krajowa,
the Polish Home Army. They want to cooperate with us, even if the learned fellows back in Warsaw haven’t figured out there’s anybody to cooperate against.”

“The Poles want to cooperate with us?” Bertha sounded astonished. Mordechai didn’t blame her; he was astonished himself. Her gaze sharpened. “You’d better go see Bunim—do it first thing tomorrow morning, too. If you don’t get there ahead of the Home Army, who knows how much mischief the Poles may be able to stir up?”

“You’re right,” Mordechai said at once. “You always were the best politician we ever had in Lodz.”

“Feh!”
Bertha tossed her head, a most dismissive gesture. “You don’t need to be a politician to see this. As long as you’re not blind, it’s there.”

With tea warm inside him, with his greatcoat pulled tight around him, Anielewicz strode through snow-clogged streets to the Race’s administrative offices overlooking the Bialut Market Square. As soon as the Lizards let him in, he shed the coat, folded it, and carried it over his arm: the Race kept their buildings heated not only to but past the point humans found pleasantly warm.

That Bunim was willing to see him with essentially no advance notice told him the Lizards were worried about the Greater German
Reich,
too. “I greet you, Regional Subadministrator,” Mordechai said in the language of the Race.

“Good day,” Bunim answered in fair Polish. The human language he spoke best was German. Neither he nor Anielewicz seemed to want to use it now. Having politely used a human language, the Lizard went back to his own: “And what is it you want to see me about?”

“What do you suppose?” Mordechai answered. “The increasing threat from the
Reich,
of course. Do you not agree that we will be better off if we prepare joint action well in advance of any certain need?”

More often than not, Bunim looked down his snout at the idea of cooperating with humans. Now, though, he said only, “Yes, that might be wise. What sort of notions do you have for unifying your forces, those of the
Armia Krajowa,
and our own to withstand whatever attacks may come from the west and south?”

Mordechai Anielewicz stared at him. “You
do
take these threats seriously,” he blurted.

“Yes,” Bunim said, and underscored that with an emphatic cough. “You know as well as I that the Deutsche can destroy this region. We cannot prevent it. We can only make it unpleasantly expensive.”

“You are blunt about it,” Mordechai said.

“Truth is what truth is,” the regional subadministrator answered. “We do not change it by turning our eye turrets away from it. Tosevites sometimes seem to have trouble understanding this. The Deutsche, for example, see that they can overrun and wreck Poland. They refuse to see the price they will pay for doing so. If you have any suggestions for getting the point across to them, I would be grateful.”

“I am the wrong Tosevite to ask, I fear,” Anielewicz said. “As you know, the only thing that would delight the Deutsche is my death. I do not know how to dissuade them, or if anyone or anything can dissuade them. What I wanted to plan with you was how best to fight them.”

“I understand,” Bunim said. “Talks are also ongoing with your colleagues in Warsaw, and with the various Polish Tosevite factions. Had you not come to me, I would have called you in a few days.”

“Would you?” That surprised Anielewicz, too. “After all the time you have spent saying that Big Uglies have no place in the defense of Poland?”

Bunim made the affirmative gesture. “You too are a leader, Mordechai Anielewicz. Have you never had to hold a position with which you did not personally agree? Have circumstances never forced you to change a position?”

“Many times,” Mordechai admitted. “But I did not think it would also be so for the Race.”

“Strange things hatch from strange eggs,” Bunim said, which sounded as if it ought to be a proverb among the Race, something on the order of,
Politics make strange bedfellows.
The regional subadministrator went on, “If you can bring the forces under your control to full alert, I will be in touch with you on ways in which we can integrate them into the defense of this region. Is it agreed?”

“It is agreed,” Anielewicz said, but then he held up a forefinger. “It is agreed, with the exception of our explosive-metal bomb. That stays under our control, no one else’s.”

“As you wish,” Bunim said, which, more than anything else, told Mordechai how worried the Lizards were. “If you have this weapon, I trust you will use it against the Deutsche, who are your most important foes. I bid you good day.”

“Good day,” Mordechai said, accepting the dismissal more meekly than he’d dreamt he would. Still almost dazed, he went outside. A nondescript little man fell into step beside him. Somehow, that left him unsurprised, too. He nodded, almost as if to an old friend. “Hello, Nussboym. What brings you back to Lodz?”

“Trouble with the Nazis—what else?” David Nussboym answered, his Yiddish flavored these days by all the years he’d spent in the Soviet Union. He looked up at Mordechai, who was perhaps ten centimeters taller. “And I’m not so sorry as I was that we didn’t quite manage to knock you off, either.”

“That you—?” Anielewicz stopped in his tracks. “I ought to—”

“But you won’t,” Nussboym said. “You know damned well you won’t. We’ve got the Germans to worry about first, right?” The worst of it was, Mordechai had to nod.

 
15

David Goldfarb had thought Ottawa’s climate unfortunate. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t just thought it—he’d been right. But compared to the weather Edmonton enjoyed—or rather, didn’t enjoy—Ottawa might as well have been the earthly paradise. Blizzards came down off the Rockies one after another. Only some truly amazing machinery kept the city from coagulating for days at a time after a storm swept through.

But, of all the places in the Dominion of Canada, this was the one where electronics were booming. And so it was the place to which Goldfarb had moved his family, once he was finally able to move them anywhere. Escaping from the detention center near the Ministry of Defense felt so good, he was willing to overlook a few minor deficiencies in the weather.

As he crunched through snow on his way to work, he did wonder why Edmonton, of all places, had become Canada’s electronic heartland. One answer readily springing to mind was that it was the most northerly big city Canada boasted, and so the one least likely to attract the Lizards’ attention.

He almost got killed when he crossed 103rd Street while walking along Jasper Avenue. He was still in the habit of looking right first when crossing the street—but Canadians, like their American cousins to the south, drove on the right. They drove big American cars, too. The Chevrolet that came to a halt with blasting horn and a rattle of tire chains probably could have smashed the life out of Goldfarb without even getting dented.

He sprang back up onto the curb. “Sorry,” he said with a weak smile. The fellow who’d almost run him down couldn’t have heard him; the Chevy’s windows were all up to give the heater a fighting chance. The car rolled on.

On his second try, Goldfarb got across 103rd Street without nearly committing suicide. He made a point of looking left first. When he made a point of it, he had no trouble. When he didn’t, he acted from habit, and habit didn’t work here.

The Saskatchewan River Widget Works, Ltd., operated out of a second-floor—Goldfarb would have called it a first-floor—suite of offices on Jasper near 102nd Street. The name of the firm had drawn him even before he had the faintest notion what a widget was. The short answer was that it was anything some ingenious engineer said it was.

He shed his overcoat with a sigh of relief. “Hello, Goldfarb,” said Hal Walsh, the ingenious engineer who’d founded the firm. “Isn’t it a lovely day out?”

“If you’re a polar bear, possibly,” Goldfarb said. “Otherwise, no.”

Walsh and several other engineers, all of them Edmontonians, jeered at him. They took their beastly climate for granted. Goldfarb, used to something approaching moderation in his weather, didn’t and couldn’t. He jeered back.

One of the engineers, an alarmingly clever young fellow named Jack Devereaux, said, “It’s bracing, that’s what it is. Puts hair on your chest.”

“Fur would do better,” Goldfarb retorted. “And I’m sure the Eskimos up at the North Pole say the same thing, Jack. That’s only a couple of miles outside of town, isn’t it? We could go and check for ourselves.”

The chaffing went on as he fixed himself a cup of tea and got to work. He’d thought that, coming out of the RAF, he would know more about electronics than these civilians did. It hadn’t worked out like that. They took Lizard technology for granted in ways he didn’t.

“But you’ll learn,” Walsh had told him, not unkindly, a few days after he was hired. “The difference is, the military—yours, mine, everybody’s—has spent the past twenty years grafting the Lizards’ technology onto our own to keep some sort of continuity with what we had before.”

“Well, of course,” said Goldfarb, who’d watched that happen—and who’d helped make it happen. “How else would you go about it?”

“Junk what we had before,” his new boss had answered. “The more we steal from the Race, the more we develop what we’ve stolen from the Race, the better the widgets we come up with. That other stuff, that stuff we used to have, all belongs in the museum-with buggy whips and gas lamps and whalebone corsets.”

Goldfarb hadn’t thought of it like that. He didn’t care to think of it like that. But the Saskatchewan River Widget Works came up with gadgets he wouldn’t have imagined possible in his long years with the RAF The one that hooked up a little electronic gizmo—adapted from one the Lizards used—to a battery hardly bigger—stolen from a Lizard pattern—to make a children’s book that included sound effects when the right buttons were pressed left him shaking his head. He wasn’t surprised to find it had been Jack Devereaux’s idea.

“Hardly seems right to use all that fancy technology for something to keep three-year-olds happy for a few hours,” he remarked.

“Why not?” Devereaux asked around a big mouthful of lunchtime sandwich. “That’s what this stuff is
for
, for heaven’s sake. The military uses are all very well, but the Lizards live with these electronics every minute of the day and night. They make their lives better. They make them more interesting. They make them more fun, too. They can do the same for us.”

He sounded very sure of himself, like a missionary spreading the word of God to the benighted heathen. And, the longer Goldfarb thought about it, the more convinced he was that the brash young engineer had a point. Britain had been a garrison state, arming itself to the teeth against the Lizards—and, incidentally, to make sure the
Reich
stayed friendly ally and mentor, not conqueror. Canada was different. Shielded by the USA from danger at the hands of the Race, Canadians could, as Devereaux said, have fun with the new technology. They could, and they did.

Sitting there at a drawing board with bins of electronic parts all around for him to play with, Goldfarb had to work at the notion that having fun was all right, that he wasn’t betraying mankind by not working on some weapon that would make every Lizard on Earth shrivel up and turn purple. Designing a little plastic top that lit up and played music when you spun it struck him as absurdly frivolous.

When he said as much, Hal Walsh gave him an odd look and asked, “Are you sure you’re not a Protestant?”

Goldfarb snorted. “I’m not sure of a great many things, but that’s one of them.”

“Well, okay.” His boss laughed. “But look at it from a different angle. Suppose you took that top you’re working on back to your radar station in 1940. Suppose you spun it on the floor there and it did what it’s supposed to do. What would your chums have thought of it? What would
you
have thought of it back then?”

“Hmm.” Goldfarb rubbed his chin. “The battery would have been impossible. The sound square would have been impossible. The light and the plastic would just have been improbable. Offhand, I’d say we’d have thought the Martians had landed.”

“You wouldn’t have been so far wrong, either, would you?” Walsh laughed some more. “Now suppose you gave it to your father when he was a little boy. What would his mother and father have thought?”

“Back in Warsaw before the turn of the century?” Goldfarb thought about that. “Jews don’t burn people at the stake for witchcraft, but that’s about the only thing that would have kept me in one piece.” He got another chuckle from Walsh, but he hadn’t been joking.

His boss was about to say something more when the telephone by Goldfarb’s table rang. Walsh waved and went off. Goldfarb picked up the phone. Before he could even say hello, the fellow on the other end of the line announced, “It’s not over yet. You may think it’s over, but it’s not.”

“What?” Goldfarb said. “Who is this?”

“Who do you suppose?” the caller answered. “We don’t forget. We do get even. You’ll find out.” The line went dead.

Goldfarb stared at the phone for a moment, then put the handset back in its cradle. “Who was that?” Walsh asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“Maybe I did,” Goldfarb said.

He waited for his boss to ask more questions, but Walsh surprised him by doing nothing of the kind, but turning away and going back to his own work. An Englishman might have done that, but Goldfarb hadn’t expected it on this side of the Atlantic. From all the American films he’d seen, people over here were a lot more brash about sticking their noses into other people’s business.

After a moment, he realized American films came out of the United States, not Canada. The Canadians who’d grilled him had done it out of duty, not because they were personally nosy. The reserve wasn’t quite so strong as the notorious British stiff upper lip, but it was there.

He got back to work waiting all the while for the phone to ring again. That was how these things worked, wasn’t it? The bad eggs played on their victim’s fear, and sometimes managed to drive him round the bend without even doing anything to him.

And, sure as the devil, the phone did ring again half an hour later. When Goldfarb picked it up, all he heard on the other end was silence. He listened for a little while, then hung up. Nobody’d drive him round the bend, by God, but someone had made a good start on getting his goat.

Somebody . . . He had no idea who, though whoever it was had to be a Canadian pal of Basil Roundbush’s. Suddenly, he grinned and turned to Hal Walsh. “Mr. Widget, sir!”

Walsh grinned back. “At your service, Mr. Goldfarb. And what can I do for you today?”

“You’re in the widget business,” Goldfarb said. “Can you tell me if anyone’s ever invented a widget that shows the number a telephone call is made from?”

“A fast and easy kind of tracer, you mean?” Walsh asked. “Something better than the police and the telephone company use?”

Goldfarb nodded. “That’s what I’m talking about. Shouldn’t be too hard, not if we put some of the Lizards’ information-processing gadgets on the job. Suppose you could see at a glance it was your brother-in-law on the other end of the line, and you didn’t want to talk to him because you owed him twenty quid—uh, fifty dollars. It’d be handy.”

“You’re right. It would.” If Walsh was wondering why Goldfarb chose this exact moment to ask about that invention, he didn’t let on. “And no, I don’t think anything like that is on sale now, and yes, I can see how it might be popular.” He looked past Goldfarb, or maybe through him. “I can see how you might do it, too.”

“So can I,” Goldfarb said, excitement kindling in him. Roundbush’s nasty friends might have thought they were putting a scare in him, but, with a little luck, they’d just gone a long way toward making him a rich man. He started bouncing ideas off his boss, who also had some good ones of his own. Goldfarb was a tinkerer, and largely self-taught; Hal Walsh understood more about theory than he would if he lived to be ninety.

Both men started scribbling notes after the first couple of minutes. After half an hour, Goldfarb was hoping the nasty boys would call back again, and do it soon. Once he had their telephone number, he could pass it on to the police. Then they’d be out of his hair for good. From an office full of people who thought the same way he did, everything looked very simple.

When the telephone rang, Käthe Drucker answered it. After a moment, she turned and said, “It’s for you, Hans.”

“Who?” Johannes Drucker asked, setting down his newspaper and getting to his feet. His wife shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t anybody she knew. Drucker tried to hide his worries as he walked to the phone. If that damned Gunther Grillparzer was raising more trouble . . . If Grillparzer was doing that, he’d just have to deal with it as best he could. He took the phone from Käthe. “Drucker here.”

“Your leave is canceled,” said a crisp voice on the other end of the line. “All leaves are canceled, by order of the Committee of Eight. Report to your duty station at Peenemünde immediately.”

“Jawohl!”
Drucker said, fighting the urge to come to attention. The line went dead. He hung up the telephone.

“What is it?” Käthe asked—she could see it was something. When he told her, her eyes went wide. “Does that mean what I’m afraid it means?”

“That the balloon’s going up on account of Poland?” he asked, and she nodded. He answered the only way he could: with a shrug. “I don’t know. No one tells me anything. I’ll say this—I hope not. But whether it is or not, I have to report in.” He raised his voice: “Heinrich!”