Aftershocks (27 page)

“And what would she do if she did come down here?” Karen demanded. “Whatever it was, would she do it with you?”

Jonathan’s ears heated. That had nothing to do with the weather, even though the day, like a lot of allegedly early-autumn days in Los Angeles, was well up into the eighties. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s research, is what it is.”

“Is that what you call it?” Karen said. “How would you like it if I were doing
research
like that?” She laced the word with scorn.

And Jonathan knew he wouldn’t like it for hell. He took a deep breath. “There’s one way that wouldn’t happen, even if Kassquit did come down to Earth,” he said.

“Sure there is—if she landed in Moscow,” Karen said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jonathan said. “Not even close. She knows about marriage—I don’t think she really understands it, but she knows what it means. That’s why”—he blushed again—“that’s why my dad wasn’t up there being experimental, if you know what I mean.”

“And so?” Karen said.

“And so . . .” Jonathan plunged: “And so, if I were engaged to you, it wouldn’t be the same as married, but it would be on the way to the same thing, and she’d see that it meant she and I couldn’t do, uh, anything any more.” He brought the words out in a quick, almost desperate rush.

Karen’s eyes widened—widened more, in fact, than Jonathan had ever seen them do. Ever so slowly, she said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”

“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded, feeling very much as if he’d just gone off the high board without bothering to see if there was any water in the pool. “I guess that kind of is what I’m doing. Will you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” Karen shook her head, not in rejection but in bemusement. “If you’d asked me before you went up to the starship the last time, I’d’ve said yes in a minute. Now . . . ? Now it sounds more like you’re asking me to marry you to give you an excuse not to fool around with Kassquit than for any other reason, and I don’t think I like that very much.”

“That isn’t why,” Jonathan protested, though it had sounded like why to him, too. He did his best to make it sound like something else: “It was the only way I could think of to tell you I’m sorry about what happened up there and that there isn’t anybody but you I want to spend my life with.” His mother wouldn’t have approved of his ending a sentence with a preposition. Right this minute, he didn’t care whether his mother would have approved or not.

And this time he’d said the right thing, or something close to it. Karen’s expression softened. “That’s . . . very sweet, Jonathan,” she said. “I’ve thought for a long time that we might one day. Like I say, I used to like the idea—but things changed when you went up there. I’m going to have to sort that out.”

“We weren’t engaged or anything.” Jonathan thought about adding that he’d used some of the things Karen had taught him with Kassquit. But, not being of a suicidal bent, he didn’t.

“No, not really,” Karen said, “but we were as close as makes no difference—I thought so, anyway.”

That had teeth, sharp ones. Jonathan considered explaining again how he’d done everything he’d done with Kassquit purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Again, he thought better of it. What he did say was just as inflammatory, though he didn’t realize it at the time: “Come to think of it, maybe you’d better not marry me. It might not be safe for you.”

“What do you mean, not safe?” Karen asked. “I know you’re crazy, but I never thought you were especially dangerous.”

“Thanks—I think.” He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t told her about this when he found out about it after he got back from the starship. He hadn’t told anybody. The son of an officer, he knew secrets could leak if you started running your mouth. But he was afraid his father had disappeared because of what he knew. Didn’t that mean he, Jonathan, had an obligation to make sure the secret couldn’t be wiped out? And Karen could be counted on. After all, she knew about the hatchlings, didn’t she?

The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. His father had insisted on that for as long as he could remember. Here as other places, his old man looked to have a point.

“You still haven’t told me what you meant,” Karen reminded him.

“Well . . .” Jonathan did his best to temporize. “I’ve got some idea of why my dad disappeared, and it has to do with something he knew and something he told me.”

“Something he knew?” Karen echoed, while people worrying about nothing but classes and lunch walked back and forth only a few feet away. “Something he knew that he wasn’t supposed to, you mean? Sounds like something out of a spy story.”

“I know it does. I’m sorry,” Jonathan answered. “You’re liable to be in trouble just because you know me. I’m sorry.” He realized he was repeating himself. He also wondered how the devil the conversation had got so far away from his proposal so fast.

Karen said, “You know something?” That was just an ordinary question; she waited for him to shake his head before going on, “You’re going to have to tell me now. If you want me to marry you, I mean. You can’t have that kind of great big secret from somebody you’re married to.”

“Hey! That’s not fair. You don’t even know what you’re asking for,” Jonathan protested. “You don’t know how much trouble you might get into, either. Remember the guy who tried to firebomb our house? As far as we could find out, nothing ever happened to him.”

Karen only folded her arms across her chest—across that ridiculously unconcealing halter top—and waited. She said one word: “Talk.”

And Jonathan saw that, having come this far, he couldn’t do anything but talk. He leaned close to her so none of the happy, unconcerned students going by would hear anything out of the ordinary. Telling what he knew didn’t take long. When he was done, he said, “There. Are you satisfied?”

“My God,” Karen said quietly. “Oh, my God.” She looked around the bright, sun-splashed UCLA campus as if she’d never seen it before. “What do we do now?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out,” Jonathan replied. “I still don’t have any answers I like. And speaking of answers, you still owe me one for the question I asked you a little while ago.”

“What? Oh, that.” Karen’s voice remained far away. “I’ll worry about that later, Jonathan. This is more important.”

Jonathan wondered if he ought to be insulted. He wondered if he ought to get angry. He discovered he couldn’t do either. The trouble was, he agreed with her.

Mordechai Anielewicz had imagined any number of things in his search for his family. Having a German along, though, a German who was interested in helping him, had never once crossed his mind. But Johannes Drucker had a missing family, too. Anielewicz had always had trouble imagining Germans as human beings. How could they be human and have done what they’d done? But if a man desperately searching for his wife and sons and daughter wasn’t a human being, what was he?

What was funny, in a horrid, macabre sort of way, was that what Drucker had thought about Jews pretty much mirrored what he himself had thought about Nazis. “I never worried my head about the enemies of the
Reich,”
he told Mordechai one evening. “If my leaders said they were enemies, I went out and dealt with them. That was my job. I never cared about rights or wrongs till Käthe got in trouble.”

“Nothing like the personal touch.” Anielewicz’s voice was dry.

“You think you’re joking,” the German spaceman said.

“No, dammit, I’m not joking.” Now Mordechai couldn’t help letting some of his anger show. “If every other German had a Jewish grandmother or grandfather, none of that murderous nonsense would have happened.”

Drucker sighed and looked around the little tavern in which they were drinking beer and eating a rather nasty stew. There wasn’t much to see; only the fireplace gave light and heat. “Hard to say you’re wrong,” he admitted, and then laughed without much humor. “Hard to imagine I’m sitting here talking with a Jew. I can’t remember the last time I did that.”

“Oh? What about your wife?” Anielewicz asked acidly. He watched the German flush. But maybe that wasn’t altogether fair; again, he had the feeling that one of them was looking out of a mirror at the other.

Drucker said, “I didn’t mean it like that, dammit. I meant with somebody who really believes.”

“What difference does that make?” Mordechai said. “The taint is in the blood, not in the belief, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have cared about your wife. They wouldn’t have cared about converts. They wouldn’t have—
ahhh!”
He made a disgusted noise. “Why do I waste my time?”

He took another pull at the pilsner in his stein. It was thin and sour, a telling measure of the
Reich’s
troubles. Across the table from him, Johannes Drucker bit his lip. “You don’t make this easy, do you?”

“Should I?” Mordechai returned. “How easy was it for us when you held Poland? How easy was it for us when you invaded Poland again this spring? Explosive-metal bombs, poison gas, panzers—what did we do to deserve that?”

“You sided with the Lizards instead of mankind,” Drucker answered.

There was just enough truth in that to sting. But it wasn’t the whole truth, nor anything close to it. “Oh, of course we did,” Anielewicz said. “That’s why I came looking for your Colonel Jäger, because I sided with the Lizards all the time.”

Drucker sighed again. “All right. Things weren’t simple. Things are never simple. Just getting here, or trying to, taught me that.”

Jews, Anielewicz thought, were born knowing that. He didn’t say as much to the German—what point to it? What he did say was, “We’ve both been through the mill. If we start fighting with each other now, it won’t do us any good, and it won’t make it any easier for us to find our families.”

“If they’re there,” Drucker said. “What are the odds?” He poured down his remaining beer in a couple of long, dispirited gulps.

“I’ve pulled the wires I know how to pull looking for my family,” Mordechai said. “I didn’t have any luck, but I’ll pull them again for yours. And I’ll help you get in touch with your
Führer”—am I really saying this?
he wondered—“so you can pull your wires for your family.”

“And for yours,” Drucker said.

“Yes. And for mine.” Anielewicz wondered whether the
Reich
would have bothered keeping records of Jews kidnapped in the fighting in Poland. With anyone but the Germans, he would have had his doubts. As a matter of fact, he still did have his doubts, big ones. But the possibility remained. He’d seen German efficiency and German bureaucracy in action in the Warsaw ghetto. If any battered, beaten, retreating army would have kept track of the prisoners with whom it was falling back, the
Wehrmacht
was that force.

The next morning, after a breakfast about as unpleasant as supper had been, Anielewicz led Drucker to the little garrison the Race used to watch the refugee camp. There he ran into Lizard bureaucracy, which turned out to be every bit as inflexible as the German variety. “No,” said the male to whom he addressed his request. “I have not the authority to take any such action. I am sorry.” In the best tradition of bureaucrats regardless of species, he sounded not in the least sorry.

Trying to conceal his exasperation, Mordechai demanded, “Well, who does have the authority, and where do I find him?”

“No one here,” the Lizard replied. Again, like any good bureaucrat, he seemed to take pleasure in thwarting those who came before him.

Johannes Drucker proved fluent in the language of the Race: “You did not fully answer the Jewish fighting leader’s question. Where can we find someone with that authority?” He didn’t use Anielewicz’s religion as a slur but as a goad, reminding the Lizard he wasn’t helping an ally.

It got through, too. With a resentful hiss, the male said, “The closest officers with the authority to treat with the upper echelons of the
Reich
are based near the place called Greifswald.” He made a hash of the pronunciation, but it wasn’t a name easy to mistake for any other.

Anielewicz turned to Drucker. “Back where we started from. I’ve got a seat on the rear of my bicycle.”

“Must be close to twenty kilometers,” Drucker answered. “We can split the pedaling.”

“I won’t argue,” Mordechai said. Drucker wasn’t far from his own age, and very likely had stronger legs. Odds were he’d never breathed in nerve gas, anyhow.

They returned to Greifswald in the early afternoon, after going back through some of the flattest, dullest terrain Mordechai had ever seen. Bomb craters gave it most of the relief it had. None of them was from an explosive-metal bomb, but he still wondered how much radioactivity he was picking up. He’d wondered that ever since he came into Germany. For that matter, he’d wondered back in Poland. He tried to make himself stop wondering. He couldn’t do anything about it.

Drucker was pedaling as they rode into the Lizard encampment. Over his shoulder, he said, “Do you suppose these males will give us the runaround, too?”

“I hope not,” was all Anielewicz could say. If the Lizards chose to be difficult, he couldn’t do much about that, either.

But they didn’t. One of the males in their communications section turned out to have fought alongside some of the Jewish fighters Mordechai had commanded. “Your males helped save my unit several times,” he said, folding into the posture of respect. “Anything you require, you have but to ask.”

“I thank you,” Mordechai answered, a little taken aback at such wholehearted cooperation. He introduced Drucker and explained why the German spaceman needed to be connected to the leader of what was left of the
Reich.

“It shall be done,” the Lizard said. “I do not fully understand this business of intimate kinship, but I know of its importance to you Tosevites. Come with me. I shall arrange this call.”

Drucker stared at Anielewicz in something close to amazement. “This is too easy,” he said in German. “Something will go wrong.”

“You’d better be careful,” Mordechai answered in the same language. “You keep saying things like that and people will start thinking you’re a Jew yourself.” Drucker laughed, though Anielewicz again hadn’t been joking.