Down to Earth (65 page)

As Gorppet patrolled the streets of Cape Town, his eye turrets swiveled this way and that. He was, as always, alert for the possibility of trouble from the Big Uglies who crowded those streets. The dark-skinned Tosevites were supposed to be much more friendly to the Race than the pinkish beige ones, but he trusted none of them. To a male who’d served in the SSSR, in Basra, and in Baghdad, all Big Uglies were objects of suspicion till proved otherwise.

But Gorppet’s eye turrets swiveled this way and that for other reasons, too. He kept waiting for a male with an investigator’s commission to come up, tap him on the flank, and say, “Come along with me for interrogation.”

It hadn’t happened yet. He had trouble understanding why it hadn’t. By the spirits of Emperors past, he and his pals had got into a firefight not only with the Big Uglies who’d wanted to hi-jack his gold without giving him any ginger but also with a patrol of his own kind! For all he knew, he might have shot another male of the Race. That wasn’t mutiny, not quite, but it came too close for comfort. He knew the Race would be turning everything inside out to find out who had committed such a crime.

They haven’t caught me yet,
he thought. Maybe being officially a hero helped. He’d captured the infamous Khomeini, after all. Who could imagine that a male with such a glorious accomplishment on his record might also be a male interested in acquiring large amounts of ginger?

No one had imagined it yet. Gorppet counted himself very lucky that no one had. Any investigator with a nasty, suspicious mind would have noticed that his credit balance, which had swollen with the bonus he’d won for capturing the Tosevite fanatic, then proceeded to shrink not long after he came to Cape Town.

But it was growing again. By now, it was almost back to where it had been before he turned so much credit into gold. He’d sold a good deal of ginger. Even now, an investigator who looked only at his current balance and not at his transaction record would be unlikely to notice anything out of the ordinary.

Maybe I will get away with it,
he thought. He wouldn’t have bet a fingerclaw clipping on that when he’d returned to his barracks after the three-cornered gunfight. Had the investigators descended on him then, he would have confessed everything. Now . . . Now he intended to fight them as aggressively as if they were so many Big Ugly bandits.

He turned a corner and came onto a street where vehicle traffic had halted. Several hundred Tosevites on foot filled the street from curb to curb. Almost all of them were of the pinkish beige variety. They carried signs lettered in the angular local script, which Gorppet couldn’t read. He couldn’t understand their shouts, either, but those cries didn’t sound friendly.

A handful of males of the Race were walking along with the Big Uglies, keeping an eye turret on what they were up to. There weren’t nearly enough males, not in Gorppet’s view. From his experience in Basra, a parade of this sort always led to fights, often to gunplay.

“Suppress them!” he called to one of the males.

But the male, to his surprise, made the negative hand gesture. “It is not necessary,” he said, and then, noting Gorppet’s body paint, “It is not necessary, superior sir. I do not expect any trouble to arise from this demonstration.”

“Why not?” Gorppet exclaimed. “They will go from fighting to shooting any moment now. They always do.”

“Do I gather, superior sir, that you are new to this subregion?” the other male asked. He sounded, of all things, amused.

“Well, what if I am?” Gorppet knew how he sounded: disbelieving. No male who wasn’t addled would have sounded any other way.

“It is only that you do not know that peaceful protest was a tradition here, at least among these pale Big Uglies, before the Race conquered this area,” the other male said. “If we let them yell and fuss and release energy in this fashion, we have less trouble here than we would otherwise. Think of it as a safety valve, venting pressure that might otherwise lead to an explosion.”

In Gorppet’s experience, parades didn’t vent pressure—they manifested it. He asked, “What are they fussing and yelling about here?”

“A small increase in the tax on meat,” the other male replied.

“That is
all
?” Gorppet had trouble believing it. “What do they do if they get worked up over something really important?”

“Then they start shooting at us from ambush, and we have to take steps against them,” the other male replied. “But this is for show, nothing more. We may even end up reducing the tax increase somewhat, to give them the impression that we care about what they think even when we do not.”

“I . . . see,” Gorppet said slowly. “This has a kind of deviousness I find appealing. It is not like this, believe me, in the lands that cling to the Muslim superstition.” He used an emphatic cough. “Marches there are not for show, no indeed.”

“It is not usually like this with the dark-skinned Tosevites, either,” said the male who was keeping an eye turret on the marching Big Uglies. “When they come out into the streets, trouble often follows. But these pale ones seem to take the parade for a real action. Strange, I know, but true.”

“Very strange,” Gorppet said. “It must make them easier to administer than they would be otherwise.”

“Truth,” the other male said. “When we ended the privileges their kind had enjoyed and we enforced equal treatment far all varieties of Tosevites within this subregion, they were outraged and rebellious. But once they saw we were not to be shifted from that course—and once we quashed their uprisings—they settled down, and now the biggest trouble we have with them is ginger trafficking.”

“Ah,” Gorppet said, and his guilty conscience twinged. “Is that a severe problem here?”

“Is it not a severe problem everywhere?” the other male answered. “When it was just a matter of you or me tasting, it was not such an important business, I agree. But with females involved, it became more important. Have you never had pheromones reach your scent receptors?”

“Every now and then,” Gorppet admitted. “Sometimes more often than every now and then. It makes me feel as shameless as a Big Ugly.”

“Well, there you are, superior sir,” the other male said. “It is the same for everyone, which is why ginger is such a problem.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said, and went on his way. Ginger was not a problem for him. He’d been tasting ever since the Race first discovered what the herb could do. Oh, he’d let himself get a little addled every now and again, but most of the time he was pretty careful with his tastes. So were a large number of the males from the conquest fleet. They’d had plenty of practice with ginger. They knew what it could do for them, and they knew what it could do to them, too.

On the other fork of the tongue, the colonists were still learning—and females who bad trouble learning addled the males around them, too. Most of the really large sales Gorppet had made were to colonists seeking excess. They were fools. Gorppet was convinced they would have got into trouble regardless of whether he was the one who sold them the herb.

He looked back with one eye turret. The protesting Big Uglies went round a corner, herded along by that handful of males from the Race. For all the noise the Tosevites made, they evidently weren’t after trouble; they might as well have been a herd of azwaca driven to a fresh part of their feeding range.

Domesticated,
Gorppet thought. They weren’t completely domesticated, not the way azwaca were, but they were getting there. The Muslim Big Uglies farther north, by contrast, remained wild beasts. And what of the Tosevites in the independent not-empires? Gorppet hadn’t had much to do with them since the fighting stopped, but they’d kept on being independent. That argued they were tough customers still, and a long way from domestication or assimilation or whatever the Race wanted to call it.

So did the pugnaciousness of the not-empire called the
Reich.
Gorppet had fought Deutsch soldiers as well as Russkis in the SSSR. He hadn’t liked them then; he still didn’t. And now they had more in the way of technology than they’d enjoyed then. That went a long way toward making them more dangerous.

But when Gorppet got back to his barracks, all thoughts of Big Uglies, even pugnacious ones, disappeared from his head. A couple of males whose body paint showed they were from the inspector general’s office awaited him there. “You are Gorppet, recently promoted to the rank of small-unit group leader?” It was phrased as a question—it even came with an interrogative cough—but it was not a question.

“I am, superior sir,” Gorppet answered, more calmly than he felt. “And who are you?” If they had him, they had him. If they didn’t, he was cursed if he would make life easy for them.

“Who we are is of no consequence, nor is it any of your business,” the other male said. “We ask the questions here.” Sure enough, he had the arrogance that went with the office he served.

“Go ahead and ask, then. I have nothing to hide.” Gorppet was guilty of enough that one more lie wouldn’t hurt him in the least—if they had him. If they did, they’d have to show him they did.

The other inspector spoke up: “Are you now or have you ever been acquainted with Tosevites named Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers?”

If they knew enough to ask, they could tell whether he lied or not on that one. “I have met them a few times,” he answered. “They are more interesting than most Big Uglies, because they speak our language fairly well—the female better than the male. I have not seen them for some little while, however. Why do you wish to know?”

“We ask the questions here,” the first male repeated. “Were you aware that they were and are notorious ginger smugglers?”

“No, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “Ginger-smuggling is illegal, and we never discussed anything illegal. Discussing illegal acts is illegal in itself, is it not?”

“It is indeed,” both males from the inspectorate said together. The second one went on, “Now—when was the last time you saw these two Big Uglies?”

“I do not precisely remember,” Gorppet answered. “As I say, it was some time ago. Do you know what has become of them? I rather miss their company.” Was that too audacious? He’d find out.

Together, the two males made the negative gesture. “We were hoping you would be able to tell us,” the second one said.

Gorppet made the same gesture himself. “I am sorry, superior sir, but I cannot do it. I hope nothing unfortunate has happened to them.” That was even true, especially when he thought of Rance Auerbach. The Big Ugly had been through the worst the fighting could do, just as Gorppet had himself.

“We do not know,” the first inspector said. “We believe, however, that they were involved in the recent unfortunate incident. You do know to which matter I refer?”

“I believe so, superior sir—gossip is everywhere,” Gorppet answered. “I hope not, for their sakes.”
And you don’t know about me after all!
He felt like laughing in the inspectors’ faces.

 
17

Mordechai Anielewicz had just sat down to supper when air-raid sirens began to wail in the streets of Lodz. Bertha exclaimed in dismay and set the roast chicken she was bringing in from the kitchen down on the table. Mordechai sprang to his feet. “Grab your masks, everyone!” he said. “Then down to the cellar as fast as we can go.”

His own gas mask was right behind him. He pulled it on, wondering how much good it would do. He’d already made the acquaintance of German poison gas once. He’d been lucky then; Heinrich Jäger had had syringes of the antidote. Even so, he’d almost died. A second exposure . . . He didn’t want to think about it.

Bertha had her mask on. So did Miriam and David. Heinrich . . . Where was Heinrich? Anielewicz shouted his younger son’s name.

“I’ve got my mask, Father!” Heinrich Anielewicz shouted back from the bedroom. “But I can’t find Pancer!”

“Leave the beffel!” Mordechai exclaimed. “We’ve got to get down to the cellar!”

“I can’t leave him,” Heinrich said. “Oh—here he is, under the bed. I’ve got him.” He came out with the beffel in his arms. “All right—we can go now.”

The sirens were shrieking like lost souls. Mordechai whacked Heinrich on the backside as his son hurried past him. “You put yourself in danger and your whole family with you, on account of your pet,” he snapped.

“I’m sorry,” Heinrich said. “But Pancer saved us once, you know, so I thought I ought to save him, too, if I could.”

That wasn’t the sort of response to which Anielewicz could find an easy comeback. Heinrich didn’t see his life as more important than the beffel’s. “Come on,” Mordechai said. Bertha carefully shut the door behind them as they hurried down the hall, down the stairs, and into the cellar below the block of flats. Everyone else in the building hurried with them, men, women, and children all wearing masks that turned them from people into pig-snouted aliens.

“There, you see!” From behind his mask, Heinrich’s still-piping voice rose in triumph. “They’ve got a dog, and
they’ve
got a cat?’

“I see.” Anielewicz said. “The other thing I see is, they took chances they shouldn’t have, and so did you?’

Heinrich’s older brother had a more urgent, more important question: “If an explosive-metal bomb goes off in Lodz, how much good will hiding in the cellar do us?”

“It depends on just where the bomb goes off, David,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t know for sure how much good it will do. I do know we’ve got a better chance in the cellar than upstairs.”

By the time he and his family got in, the cellar was already packed. People talked in high, excited voices. Mordechai didn’t talk. He did worry. The cellar didn’t hold enough food and water to let people last very long before being forced to go out. He’d complained to the manager, who’d nodded politely and not done a thing. If the worst came . . .

It didn’t, not this evening. Instead, the all-clear blew, a long, steady blast of sound. “Thank God,” Bertha said quietly.

“Just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “But with things the way they are, we can’t know ahead of time, so we have to treat every one like the real thing. Let’s go upstairs. Supper won’t even be cold.” He took off his mask. Breathing unfiltered air, even in the cramped quarters of the cellar, felt far better than the seemingly lifeless stuff he got through the rubber and charcoal of the mask.

After supper, Bertha was washing dishes with Miriam helping her when the telephone rang. Mordechai picked it up. “Hello?”

“Just another drill.” David Nussboym sounded wryly amused with the world.

“Yes, just another drill,” Mordechai agreed.
“Nu?”
He didn’t know how to respond to the man whose hirelings had come unpleasantly close to killing him a couple of times.

“When do you suppose the real thing will come along?” Nussboym asked. He didn’t seem to feel the least bit guilty about what he’d done.

“What, Molotov didn’t tell you before he sent you out here?” Anielewicz jeered.

“No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t,” replied the Jew from Lodz who’d become an NKVD man. “He told me I would be the best man on the spot because of my old connections here, but that was all.”

Anielewicz wondered how to take that. “You know Molotov personally?” he said. “Sure you do, just like I know the Pope.”

“Say hello to him for me next time you see him,” Nussboym answered imperturbably. “Know Molotov personally? I don’t think anyone does, except maybe his wife. But I deal with him, if that’s what you mean. I’m the one who got him out of his cell in the middle of Beria’s coup.”

He spoke matter-of-factly enough. If he was lying, Anielewicz couldn’t prove it by his tone. “If he sent you here thinking there’d be a war, he didn’t do you any favors,” he observed.

“This thought also occurred to me,” Nussboym said. “But I serve the Soviet Union.” He spoke without self-consciousness. He’d been a Red before Anielewicz and some of the other Jewish fighters in Lodz spirited him off to the USSR because he was also too friendly with the Lizards. They’d been playing a double game with the Race and the Germans. They’d got away with it, too, but Mordechai didn’t ever want to have to take such chances again.

He said, “And what does serving the Soviet Union mean about your being here now?”

“I volunteered for this, because I know Lodz and because your interests and the Soviet Union’s coincide for the time being,” David Nussboym answered. “We both want to stop the war any way we can. This is what you get for going to bed with the fascists during the fighting.” No, he hadn’t forgotten what had happened all those years ago, either.

With a sigh, Anielewicz answered, “If the Race had beaten the Nazis then, odds are they’d have beaten the Russians, too. And what Soviet Union would you be serving these days if that had happened?”

“I don’t deal in might-have-beens,” Nussboym said, as if Mordechai had accused him of a particularly unsavory vice. “I deal in what’s real.”

“All right,” Anielewicz said amiably. “What’s real here? If the Germans come over the border, what do we do about it? Do we start yelling for Soviet soldiers to help drive them away?”

He chuckled under his breath, figuring that would get a rise out of his former colleague if anything could. And it did. “No!” Nussboym exclaimed. Had he been a Lizard, he would have used an emphatic cough. “Formally, the USSR is and will stay neutral in case of conflict.”

“Molotov doesn’t want the Germans
and
the Race landing on Russia with both feet, eh?” Behind that cynical tone, Mordechai felt a certain amount of sympathy for the Soviet leader’s position.

“Would you?” Nussboym returned, which showed he was thinking along similar lines.

“Maybe yes, maybe no.” Anielewicz was damned if he’d admit anything. “And that brings me back to what the devil you’re doing here. If Russia’s neutral, why aren’t you back in Moscow twiddling your thumbs?”

“Formally, the Soviet Union is neutral,” David Nussboym repeated. “Informally . . .”

“Informally, what?” Mordechai demanded. “Do you want to split Poland with the Germans again, the way you did in 1939?”

“That was proposed, I am given to understand,” Nussboym answered. “General Secretary Molotov rejected the proposal out of hand.”

“Was it? Did he?” Mordechai thought about what that was likely to mean. “He’s more afraid of the Race than of the Nazis, then. Fair enough. If I were living in the Kremlin, I would be, too.” He thought a little more. “If Russia gives informal help here, you might even end up on the Lizards’ good side. Nobody ever said Molotov was a fool. Anybody who stayed alive all the way through Stalin’s time couldn’t be a fool.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nussboym said softly. “You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. And if you still believe in God, you can thank Him you don’t.”

Mordechai’s voice went harsh: “All right, then.
Tukhus afen tish,
Nussboym. What will you do? What won’t you do? How much can we count on you?” Privately, he didn’t intend to count on Nussboym at all. Counting on the USSR, though, was, or at least might be, something else again.

“We will not do anything that makes it look as though the Soviet Union is interfering in Poland,” replied the NKVD man who’d grown up in Lodz. “Short of that . . . Well, there’s always been a lot of smuggling along the border between White Russia and Poland. We can get you weapons. We can even get you a cadre of Polish-speaking soldiers to train new recruits.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you can,” Anielewicz said. “And you’d train them to be just the finest little Marxist-Leninists anybody could want, wouldn’t you?” He hadn’t used the jargon much since the fighting stopped, but he still remembered it.

“One of these days, the revolution will come to Poland,” Nussboym said. “One of these days, the revolution will come to Home.” He might not believe in God any more, but he still had a strong and vibrant faith.

Arguing with him struck Anielewicz as more trouble than it was worth. Instead, he asked, “How much good is all this likely to do if the
Reich
hits us with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas?”

“They won’t kill everyone.” Nussboym spoke with a peculiar cold-blooded confidence. German generals doubtless sounded much the same way. “Soldiers will have to come into Poland and seize the land. When they do, the survivors from among your forces can make life difficult for them.”

“You’re leaving the Lizards out of your calculations,” Anielewicz said. “Whatever else they do, they won’t sit quietly.”

“I know that,” Nussboym said. “My assumption is that they will give the
Reich
exactly what it deserves. That ought to make the fight in Poland easier, don’t you think? The Nazis won’t be able to support their troops the way they could in 1939.”

Again, cold calculation weighing the probable result of thousands—no, millions—of deaths. Again, that calculation, however horrific, struck Mordechai as reasonable. And wasn’t making reasonable calculations about millions of deaths perhaps the most horrific thing of all?

“The next question, of course, is what happens after the Race finishes destroying the
Reich,
” Mordechai said.

“Then the Soviet Union picks up the pieces—provided there are any pieces left to pick up,” Nussboym answered. “The other half of the question is, how much damage can the Nazis do to the Lizards before going down?”

“However much it is, too much of it will be in Poland,” Mordechai predicted gloomily. “So, from my point of view, that leads to a different question: can we do anything to keep the war from starting? You’d better think about that, too, Nussboym, as long as you’re here.”

“I have been thinking about it,” David Nussboym answered. “What I haven’t been able to do is come up with anything to stop the war. And neither, I gather, have you.” He hung up before Mordechai could either curse him or tell him he was right.

Tahiti wasn’t what Rance Auerbach had expected. Oh, the weather was gorgeous: always warm and mild and just a little muggy. And he could walk along the beach under the palm trees and watch the gentle surf roll in off the blue, blue Pacific. That was all terrific, even if he did get a hellacious sunburn the first time he tried it. He’d had to slather zinc-oxide ointment all over his poor medium-rare carcass. As far as setting went, he’d had everything straight.

Papeete, now, where he and Penny were renting an apartment even more crowded and cramped than the one they’d had in Cape Town, Papeete was something else. The town didn’t quite know what to make of itself. Parts of it were still the sleepy, even languorous, backwater the place must have been back before the fighting started a generation earlier. The rest was what had come since: the place’s role as the capital of Free France, such as Free France was.

The tricolor flew everywhere in Papeete, the same way the Stars and Stripes did back in the USA on the Fourth of July. But the Stars and Stripes flew out of honest pride and strength. Rance didn’t think that was why the Free French draped their banner over everything that didn’t move. Rather, they seemed to be saying,
Hey, look at us! We really are a country! Honest! No kidding! See? We’ve got a flag and everything!