Aftershocks (12 page)

Pursing his absurdly mobile lips, the Big Ugly let out a soft, low whistle. The sound was utterly different from anything the Race could produce. Straha had needed a long time to figure out what it meant: something on the order of resignation. At last, his driver said, “Well, we shall just have to go on exerting pressure of our own if we intend to survive—is that not also a truth?”

“Yes, I should say so,” Straha answered. “The question is whether you Tosevites will be able to discover and to use effective forms of pressure.”

“I think we shall manage,” his driver said. “If there is one thing we Big Uglies are good at, it is making nuisances of ourselves.”

Straha could hardly quarrel with that. Had the Tosevites not been good at making nuisances of themselves, their world would be firmly under the dominion of the Race today. The ex-shiplord turned an eye turret toward the driver and found a way in which to change the subject: “Are you not letting the hairs between your mouth and your snout escape from cutting?”

“I’m growing a mustache, yes,” the Big Ugly replied in English.

“Why?” Straha asked. “I have seen other male Tosevites with such adornments, and I do not have a high opinion of them. When yours is complete, you will look as if you have a large, dark brown moth”—that last, necessarily, was an English word—“perched on your upper lip.”

His driver laughed: loud, noisy Tosevite laughter.
“I
think it’ll look good,” he said, still in English. “If I decide I don’t like it, I can always shave the damn thing off, you know.”

“I suppose so,” Straha said. “We of the Race would not be so casual about altering our appearance.”

“I know that.” The driver returned to the language of the Race. “It is one of the advantages we Tosevites still have over you. Ginger is another.” He held up a fleshy hand to keep Straha from interrupting. “I do not mean its effect on males. I mean its effect on females. Like it or not, you are becoming more and more like us in matters pertaining to mating.”

Straha’s thoughtful hiss was the Race’s equivalent of the driver’s low whistle. The American authorities had not saddled him with a fool. Life would have been easier if they had. Slowly, the ex-shiplord said, “We are doing our best to resist these changes, and may yet succeed.”

“And we
may
succeed in keeping your domestic animals out of the United States,” his driver said, “but I do not think that is the way to bet. Besides, you are not thinking in the long term here, Shiplord. How long before some enterprising male or female sends a big crate of ginger back to Home aboard a starship? What will happen then, do you suppose?”

This time, Straha’s hiss was more dismayed than thoughtful. Once commerce between Tosev 3 and Home got going, half the males and females involved in it would want to smuggle ginger for the sake of the profits involved in it. Only items of enormous value and low bulk traveled between the stars: nothing else made economic sense. And, without the tiniest shred of doubt, the Tosevite herb fit the bill in every particular.

Interstellar smuggling between Home and either Rabotev 2 or Halless 1 had never amounted to much. Between Home and Tosev 3 . . . ?
Well,
Straha thought,
however large that problem may become, it is not one about which I shall have to worry.

Winter in Edmonton had put David Goldfarb in mind of Siberia—not that he’d ever been to Siberia, of course, but he was used to the mild temperatures of the British Isles. A great many words might have described winter in Edmonton, but mild wasn’t any of them.

Goldfarb had almost dreaded summer, wondering if it would rise above the subarctic. To his surprise and relief, it did. It got as warm as London ever did, and even a bit warmer. At the end of June, it soared into the eighties, and stayed there for more than a week.

“I should be wearing a pith helmet and shorts,” he told his boss when he came into the Saskatchewan River Widget Works, Ltd.

Hal Walsh grinned at him. “I wouldn’t lose any sleep if you did,” he answered. “But you’d look like a jerk if it decided to snow while you were dressed that way.”

To Goldfarb’s still inexperienced ear, Walsh sounded like a Yank. An Englishman would have said something like
a right chump
in place of the widgetmaster’s American slang. But that, when you got right down to it, was beside the point.
“Could
it snow?” Goldfarb asked in a small voice.

Jack Devereaux spoke before Walsh could: “It doesn’t snow in summer here more than every other year.”

For a horrid moment, Goldfarb thought he was serious. When Hal Walsh’s grin made it plain the other engineer didn’t mean it, Goldfarb glared at Devereaux. “If you pull my leg any harder, it’ll come off in your hand,” he said, doing his best to seem the picture of affronted dignity.

All he accomplished was to make Walsh and Devereaux both laugh at him. His boss said, “If you can’t look at the world cross-eyed, you shouldn’t be working here, you know.”

“Really?” Every once in a while, British reserve came in handy. “I never should have noticed.”

This time, Walsh stared at him, wondering whether to believe. Jack Devereaux was quicker on the uptake. “Okay, David,” he said. “Now
you
can let go of
my
leg.”

“Fair enough.” New boy on the block, Goldfarb often felt he had to make a stand and defend his own turf. He turned to Hal Walsh. “What’s on the plate for this morning?”

“The usual,” Walsh replied: “Trying to steal more secrets from the Lizards’ gadgetry and turning it into things people can use.”

“If you’re very, very good, sometimes you’re even allowed to have an idea all your own,” Devereaux added. “But you’re not supposed to let on that you did. Then everybody else might start having ideas, too, and where would we be if that happened?”

“About where we are, if the ideas we come up with are better than the other blokes’,” Goldfarb answered.

Walsh said, “That notion you had for showing telephone numbers is a winner, David. We just got an order from the Calgary police, an order big enough that I think you’ve earned yourself another bonus check.”

“Any time Calgary buys from Edmonton, you know we’ve got something good,” Jack Devereaux added. “They don’t love us, and we don’t love them. It’s like Toronto and Montreal, or Los Angeles and San Francisco down in the States.”

“Glasgow and Edinburgh,” Goldfarb murmured, picking an example from the British Isles. He nodded to Walsh, doing his best not to seem very pleased at the news of the bonus. The money was welcome; in this world, money was always welcome. But, as a Jew, he didn’t want to seem excited about it. He cared what gentiles thought about his people, and didn’t want to give them an excuse to think nasty thoughts.

After a little more chat, each of the engineers fixed a cup of tea and took it to his desk. Goldfarb had been pleasantly surprised to find tea so common in Canada; he’d assumed the Dominion, like the USA, was a land that preferred coffee. He was glad he’d been wrong.

Fortified, he studied the latest piece of hardware Hal Walsh had given him. It had, his boss assured him, come from the engine of a Lizard landcruiser. What it did in the motor was rather less certain: he just had the widget, not the engine of which it was a part. He thought it was the electronic controller for the fuel-injection system that took the place carburetors had in Earthly internal-combustion engines.

“You know what the trouble is, don’t you?” he said to Jack Devereaux.

“Of course I do,” his fellow engineer answered. “Our gadgets look like they do what they do. These Lizard creations are nothing but electronic components slapped together. They aren’t
obvious,
the way our technology is.”

“That’s it!” Goldfarb nodded gratefully. “The very thing I was thinking of. We have to work hard to figure out what they’re good for, and what they could be good for if we tweaked them a little.”

He glowered at the control unit. It had a highly specialized job to do, and, if it was anything like most Lizard widgets, did that job extremely well. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the Americans and Germans and Russians had copied it for their tanks—not that the Germans were allowed any panzers these days. The collapse of the
Reich
left him altogether undismayed.

Back in his days with the RAF, his work with Lizard technology had been perfectly straightforward. If it had to do with matters military, and especially with matters pertaining to radar, he’d done his best to adapt it to related human uses. If it didn’t, he’d either ignored it or passed it on to someone whose bailiwick it was.

Things didn’t work like that at the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. Here, the more outlandish his ideas, the better. Anybody could come up with direct conversions of Lizard gadgets to their nearest human equivalents. Sometimes that was worth doing—his system for reading phone numbers was a case in point. But thinking lefthanded was liable to pay off more in the long run.

Bloody wonderful,
he thought.
How do I go about thinking lefthanded?
He couldn’t force it; whenever he tried, he failed. Turning his mind away from the widget in front of him, letting his thoughts drift as they would, worked better. But that was a relative term. Sometimes inspiration simply would not strike.

He’d feared Hal Walsh would sack him if he failed to come up with something brilliant his first couple of days on the job. But Walsh, who’d been doing this sort of directed woolgathering a lot longer than he had, took dry spells in stride. And now Goldfarb had one solid achievement under his belt. Having seen that he
could
do it, his boss was less inclined to insist that he do it to order.

David spent the whole day playing with the Lizard control gadget, and by quitting time had come up with nothing in the least resembling inspiration. Walsh slapped him on the back. “Don’t lose any sleep about it,” he advised. “Give it another shot tomorrow. If it’s still not going anywhere, we’ll pull another gadget out of the bin and see what your evil, twisted imagination does with that.”

“All right.” At the moment, Goldfarb didn’t find his imagination either evil or twisted. He had enough trouble finding it at all.

The sun still stood high in the sky when he started home. In summer, daylight lingered long here. Edmonton was farther north than London, almost as far north as Belfast, his last posting in the RAF. In winter, of course, the sun hardly appeared at all. But he didn’t want to think about winter with long days to enjoy.

When he got back to his flat—they called them apartments in Edmonton, in the American style—he broke into a grin. “Roast chicken!” he exclaimed. “My favorite.”

“It’ll be ready in about twenty minutes,” his wife called from the kitchen. “Would you like a bottle of beer first?”

“I’d love one,” he answered. As far as he was concerned, Canadian taverns couldn’t come close to matching proper British pubs, but Canadian beer in bottles was better than its British equivalents. He smiled at Naomi when she brought him a bottle of Moosehead. “You’ve got one for yourself, too, have you?”

“And why not?” she answered saucily, her accent British on top of the faint German undertone she still kept after escaping from the
Reich
in her teens, not long before no more Jews got out of Germany alive. She took a sip. “It’s not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all.” Was she comparing it to the British brews she remembered, or to the German ones from long ago? David Goldfarb didn’t have the nerve to ask.

Dinner was only a couple of minutes away when the telephone rang. Muttering under his breath, Goldfarb got up and answered it. “Hullo?” If it was some cheeky salesman, he intended to give the bugger a piece of his mind.

“Hullo, David, old chum! So good to catch up with you again!” The voice on the other end of the line was cheerful, English, educated—and familiar. Recognizing it at once, Goldfarb wished he hadn’t.

“Roundbush,” he said, and then, his voice harsh, “What do you want with me?”

“You’re a smart lad. I daresay you can figure that out for yourself,” Basil Roundbush answered cheerfully. “You didn’t do as you were told, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to pay for that.”

Automatically, Goldfarb’s eyes went to the gadget that showed the numbers of incoming calls. If he knew where the RAF officer who’d given him so much trouble was, he might be able to do something about him, or have the authorities do something about him. But the screen on the device showed no number at all. As far as it was concerned, nobody was on the other end of the call.

With a laugh, Roundbush said, “I know you’ve flanged up something from the Lizards’ telephone switching gear. That won’t help you. You know I’ve got plenty of chums among the Race. There are times when they need to neutralize such circuits, and they haven’t any trouble doing it.”

He obviously knew whereof he spoke. “Sod off and leave me alone,” Goldfarb growled. “I don’t want anything to do with you, and I don’t want anything to do with your bleeding chums, either.”

“You’ve made that plain enough.” Roundbush still sounded happy. “But no one cares very much about your view of things, you know. You’ve been uncooperative, and now you’re going to have to pay the price. I rather wish it were otherwise: you had promise. But such is life.” He hung up.

So did Goldfarb, cursing under his breath. “Who was that?” Naomi called as she set the table.

“Basil Roundbush.” Goldfarb wished he could have come up with a comforting, convincing lie.

The gentle clatter of plates and silverware stopped. His wife hurried out into the living room. “What did he want?” she asked. “I thought we were rid of him for good.”

“I thought we were, too,” David answered. “I wish we were, but no such luck.” He sighed. “He didn’t come right out and say what he wanted, but he didn’t have to, not really. I already know that: he wants a piece of my hide.” His right hand folded into a fist. “He’ll have a devil of a time getting it, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

Glen Johnson stared into space. From the control room of the
Lewis and Clark,
in solar orbit not far from the asteroid Ceres, there was a lot of space to see. The stars blazed clear and steady against the black sky of hard vacuum. The glass that held the vacuum at bay had been coated to kill reflections; except for knowing that it kept him alive, Johnson could ignore it.