Aftershocks (32 page)

And that was also true. Then Johnson said, “What if we haven’t played straight with things nobody up here knows anything about?”

“Like what?” Walter Stone asked.

“How should I know?” Johnson answered. “If I did know, it wouldn’t be something nobody knew about.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Flynn murmured.

“What if, what if, what if,” Brigadier General Healey snarled. “What we need are facts. The only fact we’ve got is that the Race is leaning on the United States. If it leans too hard, we’ve got to fight back or knuckle under. We’re not about to knuckle under.”

“Well, there’s one other fact, too,” Johnson said. “If the USA goes to war with the Lizards now, we lose. And no matter how many drills we hold, the
Lewis and Clark
is lunch.” He waited—he hoped for—Healey to argue with him. The commandant didn’t.

“Why on earth are the Lizards gearing up for war against the United States?” Reuven Russie asked his father over the supper table. “Has everybody in the whole world gone
meshuggeh?”

Moishe Russie said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the only explanation that makes much sense.”

“Have you talked with the fleetlord?” Reuven’s sister Judith asked.

“I’ve called him several times,” Reuven’s father answered. “Most of them, he hasn’t wanted to talk to me. When he has been willing to talk on the phone, he hasn’t had anything much to say.”

“But what could the United States have done to get the Race so angry?” Reuven asked. “With the Germans, everybody else had plenty of good reasons to hate them. But the USA has just sat there and minded its own business. What’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Since he won’t really talk to me, I’m having a devil of a time finding out, too. But I can tell you this—Straha is back in the Race’s territory, and that’s not anything I thought I’d see while I was alive.”

It was also something that meant very little to Reuven. “Straha?” He put the name into a question half a beat before his sisters could.

Moishe Russie’s smile was half amused, half wistful. “You were only a little boy when he defected to the Americans, Reuven,” he said. “Esther and Judith, you weren’t even imagined yet, let alone here. He was something like the third- or fourth-highest ranking male in the conquest fleet. He tried some sort of coup against Atvar, and it didn’t work, and he fled.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to ask the fleetlord about the details now,” Reuven said.

His mother laughed. “See what your fancy education does for you?”

“Mother!” he said indignantly. His father made cracks like that all the time. His sisters made them whenever they thought they could get away with them. For Rivka Russie to make one, too, felt like a betrayal.

“But the point,” his father said, “the point is that he’s left the United States and come to Cairo—I think he’s in Cairo. He had to know something important, or else he’d be imprisoned somewhere, and he’s not.”

“And it’s probably something that has to do with the United States, since he lived there so long,” Reuven said.

“Very good, Sherlock.” That was Esther, who’d been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in Hebrew translation. “Now all you have to do is figure out what he knows.”

Reuven looked at his father. Moishe Russie shrugged and said, “I already told you, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all find out one day before too long. I’m hoping we never find out, because that will mean the trouble’s gone away.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Reuven took another bite of beefsteak. He raised his wineglass. “Here’s to ignorance!”

Everyone drank the toast. Amid laughter, Reuven’s father said, “That’s probably the first time anyone has ever made that toast inside a Jewish house.
Alevai,
it’ll be the last time, too.” His face clouded.
“Alevai,
we won’t need to make that kind of toast again.”

“Omayn.”
Reuven and his mother spoke together.

After supper, Reuven asked his father, “If the United States and the Lizards go to war, what do we do?”

“We here in Palestine, you mean?” Moishe Russie asked, and Reuven nodded. His father sighed. “About the same thing we did when the Race fought the Germans: sit tight and hope the Americans don’t manage to land a missile on Jerusalem. I think that would be less likely in this fight than in the war with the Nazis. The Americans don’t particularly hate Jews, so they don’t have any big reason for aiming a missile here—and most of their missiles are farther away than the ones the Germans fired at us.”

“How do you know that?” Reuven asked. “They may have three submarines sitting right off the coast. How would we know?”

“We wouldn’t, not until something either happened or didn’t,” his father said. “I told you what I thought was likely. If you don’t like that, come up with your own answers.”

“I like it fine. I hope you’re right,” Reuven said. “Actually, I hope we’re all worrying over nothing, and that there won’t be a war.”

This time, his father said,
“Omayn!”

When they walked to work the next morning, someone had painted new black swastikas on several walls, and the phrase
Allahu akbar!
by them. Reuven laughed to keep from cursing. “Haven’t the Arabs noticed that that firm’s gone out of business?”

“Who can say?” Moishe Russie answered. “Maybe they wish it were still operating. Or maybe it is still operating, but being quiet about it. That wouldn’t surprise me. Once some things get loose, they’re hard to kill.”

“I thought Dornberger was supposed to be a relatively civilized man,” Reuven said.

“Compared to Hitler, compared to Himmler, compared to Kaltenbrunner—how much praise is that?” his father asked. “He’s still a German. He’s still a Nazi. If he can find some way to make the Lizards unhappy, don’t you think he’ll use it? Getting the Arabs to erupt is one easy way to do it.”

“And if he incites them against us, too, all the better,” Reuven said. His father didn’t contradict him. He wished Moishe Russie had.

Once they got to the office, Yetta showed them their appointments. Reuven sighed. When he’d been studying at the Moishe Russie Medical College, human physiology and biochemistry had looked like important subjects. And they’d looked like fascinating subjects. Seeing them exemplified in the persons of his patients was much less exciting. A lot of the answers he got were ambiguous. Sometimes he couldn’t find any answers at all. And even a lot of the ones that were perfectly clear weren’t very interesting. Yes, sir, that boil will respond to antibiotics. Yes, ma’am, that toe is broken. No, it doesn’t matter if we put a cast on it or not. It’ll do the same either way, and yes, it will hurt for a few weeks.

He gave a tetanus shot. He removed a splinter of metal that had got lodged in a construction worker’s leg. He took the cast off a broken wrist his father had set a few weeks before. He swabbed a four-year-old’s throat to see if the girl was coming down with a streptococcus infection. He injected local anesthetic and stitched up a cut arm. Every bit of that needed doing. He did it well. But it wasn’t what he’d imagined a physician’s career was like.

He was putting a clean dressing on the cut arm when Yetta stuck her head into the room and said, “Mrs. Radofsky just telephoned. Her daughter is screaming her head off—she thinks it’s an earache. Can you fit her in?”

A screaming toddler—just what I need,
Reuven thought. But he nodded. “One way or another, I’ll manage.”

“That’s good,” the receptionist said. “I asked your father, but he said he was too busy and told me to go to you instead.” Yetta was plain to the point of frumpishness, but at the moment she looked almost comically amused. “I’ll tell her she can bring Miriam in to you in an hour, if that’s all right.”

“Fine,” Reuven said. He almost asked her what was so funny, but held off at the last minute because he saw a possible answer.
She thinks my father is trying to fix me up with a pretty widow,
he realized. That almost started him laughing. Then he wondered what was so laughable about it. With Jane gone to Canada, he wouldn’t have minded getting fixed up with anybody.

As if Mrs. Radofsky cares about you for anything but whether you can make her little girl feel better,
he thought. That didn’t bother him. That was the way things were supposed to be.

Even back in his examination room, he could tell when the widow Radofsky brought her daughter into the office. The racket Miriam was making left no possible doubt. Reuven was looking at another widow, a little old lady named Goldblatt whose varicose veins were troubling her.
“Gevalt!”
she said. “That one’s not very happy.”

“No, she’s not,” Reuven agreed. “I’m going to recommend an elastic bandage on that leg to help keep those veins under control for you. I don’t think they’re bad enough to need surgery now. If they bother you more, though, come back in and we’ll have another look at them.”

“All right, Doctor, thank you,” Mrs. Goldblatt said. Reuven hid his smile.
I’m learning,
he thought. If he’d told her straight out that she was fussing over very little, she’d have left in a huff. As things were, she seemed well enough pleased, even though all he’d done was sugarcoat essentially the same message.

“Can you see Mrs. Radofsky and Miriam now?” Yetta asked.

“Why not?” Reuven raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been hearing them—or Miriam, anyhow—for a while now.” The receptionist sniffed. No, she didn’t care for anyone’s jokes but her own.

A moment later, the young widow carried her daughter into the examination room. Miriam was still howling at the top of her lungs, and was tugging at the lobe of her left ear and trying to stick her finger into it. That would have been diagnostic all by itself. Mrs. Radofsky gave Reuven a wan smile and tried to talk through the din: “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. She woke up like this at four in the morning.” No wonder her smile was wan.

Reuven grabbed his otoscope. “We’ll see what we can do.”

Miriam didn’t want to let him examine her, not for beans she didn’t. She screeched, “No!”—a two-year-old’s favorite word anyway, as Reuven remembered from his sisters—and tried to grab the otoscope and keep it away from her ear.

“Can you hold her, please?” Reuven asked her mother.

“All right,” the widow Radofsky said. Even in his brief time in practice, Reuven had discovered that almost no mother would hold her precious darling tight enough to do a doctor one damn bit of good. He’d thought about investing in pediatric straitjackets, or even manufacturing them and making his fortune from grateful physicians the world around. He expected to do half the holding himself this time, too.

But he got a surprise. Mrs. Radofsky battled Miriam to a standstill. Reuven got a good look inside a red, swollen ear canal. “She’s got it, sure enough,” he said. “I’m going to give her a shot of penicillin, and I’m going to prescribe a liquid for her. You have an icebox to keep it cold?” Most people did, but not everybody.

To his relief, Miriam’s mother nodded. She rolled her daughter onto her stomach on the examining table so Reuven could give her the shot in the right cheek. That produced a new set of screams, almost supersonically shrill. When they subsided, the widow Radofsky said, “Thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome.” Reuven felt like sticking a finger in his ear, too. “She should start getting relief in twenty-four hours. If she doesn’t, bring her back. Make sure she takes all the liquid. It’s nasty, but she needs it.”

“I understand.” Mrs. Radofsky didn’t have to shout, for Miriam, finally exhausted, hiccuped a couple of times and fell asleep. Her mother sighed and said, “Life is never as simple as we wish it would be, is it?” She brushed back a lock of dark hair that had come loose.

“No,” Reuven said. “All you can do is your best.” Miriam’s mother nodded again, then sent him a sharp look.
Is she noticing me and not just the man in the white coat?
he wondered, and hoped she was.

 
9

“Queek and his interpreter are here, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov’s secretary told him.

“Very well, Pyotr Maksimovich. I am coming.” It wasn’t very well, and Molotov knew it. He’d hated the
Reich,
but he missed it now that it was reduced to a battered shadow of itself. And the United States was in trouble. If the Race found an excuse for smashing the USA, how long could the USSR last after that? No matter what the dialectic said about inevitable socialist victory, Molotov didn’t want to have to find out for himself.

He hurried into the office reserved for visits from the Race’s ambassador. A couple of minutes later, his secretary led in Queek and the Pole who translated his words into Russian. “Good day,” Molotov told the human. “Please convey my warm greetings to your principal.” His words were as warm as a Murmansk blizzard, but he’d observed the forms.

The Pole spoke to the Lizard. The Lizard hissed and popped back at him. “He conveys similar greetings to you, Comrade General Secretary.”

Queek’s greetings were probably as friendly as Molotov’s, but the Soviet leader couldn’t do anything about that. He said, “I thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”

“That is my duty,” Queek replied. “Now that I am here, I will ask why you have summoned me.” His interpreter made it sound as if Molotov would find himself in trouble if he didn’t have a good reason.

He thought he did. “If at all possible, I want to use my good offices to help the Race and the United States come to a peaceful resolution of the dispute that has arisen between them.” He didn’t know why the dispute had arisen, which frustrated him no end, but that didn’t matter.

Queek gestured. The interpreter said, “That means he rejects your offer.”

Molotov hadn’t expected anything so blunt. “Why?” he asked, fighting to keep astonishment from his voice.

“Because this dispute is between the Race and the United States,” Queek replied. “Do you truly wish to include your not-empire and suffer the consequences of doing so?”

“That depends on the circumstances,” Molotov said. “If the Soviet Union were to include itself on the side of the United States, do you doubt that the Race would also suffer certain consequences?”

When the interpreter translated that, Queek made the boiling and bubbling noises he used to show he was an unhappy Lizard. The interpreter didn’t translate them, which might have been just as well. After half a minute or so, the Race’s ambassador started spluttering less. Now the Pole turned his words into Russian: “You would destroy yourselves if you were mad enough to attempt such a thing.”

“Possibly.” Even for Molotov, sounding dispassionate while speaking of his country’s ruin didn’t come easy, but he managed. “If, however, the Race attacked first the United States and then the peace-loving peasants and workers of the Soviet Union, our destruction would be even more certain. If you think the Germans hurt you, you had better think very hard on what the United States and the Soviet Union could do together.”

“Do you threaten me, Comrade General Secretary?” Queek asked.

“By no means, Ambassador,” Molotov replied. “I warn you. If you leave the Soviet Union out of your calculations, you make a serious mistake. This government cannot be, is not, and will not be blind to the danger the Race poses to the other chief independent human power, and thus to all of mankind.”

“I assure you that, whatever the danger in which the United States finds itself, it is a danger that that not-empire has abundantly earned,” Queek said. “I also assure you that it is none of your business.”

“If you assure me it is none of my business, I have no way to examine your other assurances,” Molotov said. “Therefore, I must assume them to be worthless.”

“Assume whatever you please,” Queek said. “We are not interested in your efforts to mediate. If we ever do seek mediation, we shall inquire of you. And as for your threats, you will find that you cannot intimidate us.”

“I have no intention of intimidating you,” Molotov said, glad he had the knack of lying with a straight face. “You will follow your interests, and we shall follow ours. But I did want to make sure you understood what the Soviet Union considers to be in its interest.”

“The Soviet Union does not understand what is in its interest, not if it courts destruction like—” The interpreter broke off and went back and forth with Queek in the Lizards’ language. Then he returned to Russian: “The expression people would use is ‘like a moth flying into a flame.’ ”

“It is possible that we might be defeated.” Molotov knew it was as near certain as made no difference that the Soviet Union would be defeated. Sometimes, though, a demonstrated willingness to fight made fighting unnecessary. Switzerland had never become a part of the Greater German
Reich.
“Think carefully, Ambassador, on whether you and the Race care to pay the price.”

“I assure you, Comrade General Secretary, that our discussions shall revolve around that very subject,” Queek replied. “I think we have now said everything that needs saying, one of us to the other. Is that not a truth?”

“It is,” Molotov said.

Queek rose. So did the interpreter—
like a well-trained hound,
Molotov thought scornfully. “Perhaps I shall see you again,” the ambassador said. “Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this ugly building will cease to exist in the not too distant future. It would be no enormous loss if that came to pass.”

“I care nothing for your views on architecture,” Molotov said. “And if this building should cease to exist, if many buildings throughout the Soviet Union should cease to exist, the Race and the buildings it cherishes would not come through unscathed.”

The Lizard’s tailstump quivered, a sign of anger. But Queek left without making any more cracks, which was probably just as well.

As soon as the door closed behind the Race’s envoy and his interpreter, Molotov rose from his chair and went into a chamber off to the side of the office. There he changed his clothes, including socks, shoes, and underwear. The Race could make extraordinarily tiny mobile surveillance devices; he did not want to take the chance of carrying them through the Kremlin.

Marshal Zhukov waited in Molotov’s own office. “You heard, Georgi Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.

“Oh, yes.” Zhukov patted the intercom speaker that had relayed the conversation to him. “I heard. You did about as well as anyone could have, Comrade General Secretary. Now we wait and see what happens.”

“Is everything in readiness to defend the
rodina?”
Molotov asked.

Zhukov nodded. “Strategic Rocket Forces are ready to defend the motherland. Admiral Gorshkov tells me our submarines are ready. Our ground forces are dispersed; the Lizards will not find it easy to smash large armies with single weapons. Our forces in space will do everything they can.”

“And our antimissiles?” Molotov suppressed hope from his voice as efficiently as he had suppressed fear.

With a big peasant shrug, Zhukov answered, “They will also do everything they can. How much that is likely to be, I’ve got no idea. We may knock some down. We will not knock down enough to make any serious difference in the fighting.”

“How many of ours will they knock down?” Molotov asked.

“More,” Zhukov said. “You spoke accurately. We can hurt them. Together with the United States, we can hurt them badly. They can do to us what they did to the
Reich.
I wish you could have learned how this trouble with the USA blew up so fast.”

“So do I.” Molotov’s smile was Moscow winter. “Do you suppose President Warren would tell me?”

“You never can tell with Americans, but I wouldn’t hold my breath,” the leader of the Red Army replied. Molotov nodded; that was also his assessment. Zhukov cursed. “I don’t want to fight the damned Lizards blind. I don’t want to fight them at all, with or without the Americans on my side.”

“Would you rather they came and fought us after beating the Americans? That looks to be our other choice,” Molotov said.

“You were right. That’s worse,” Zhukov said. “But this is not good. I wish the Lizards would have let you mediate.”

“Queek did not want mediation,” Molotov said gloomily. “Queek, unless I am very much mistaken, wanted the Americans’ blood.”

“That is not good, not good at all.” Zhukov slammed his fist down onto Molotov’s desk. “Again, I think you were right.”

The telephone rang. Molotov quickly picked it up, not least to make sure Zhukov wouldn’t. Andrei Gromyko was on the other end of the line. “Well?” the foreign commissar asked, one word that said everything necessary.

Molotov gave back one word: “Bad.”

“What are we going to do, Comrade General Secretary?” Gromyko sounded worried. When Gromyko sounded like anything, matters were serious if not worse. “The threat the Lizards present makes that of the Hitlerites in 1941 seem as nothing beside it.”

“I am painfully aware of that, Andrei Andreyevich,” Molotov answered. “I judge that the threat from the Race will not decrease if the Lizards are allowed to ride roughshod over the United States and then come after us. Marshal Zhukov, who is here with me, concurs. Do you disagree?”

“No, I do not. I wish I could,” Gromyko said. “All our choices are bad. Some may be worse than others.”

“Our best hope, I believe, is persuading the Race that another wan of aggression would cost them more than they could hope to gain in return,” Molotov said. “Since that is obviously true, I had no trouble making my position, the Soviet Union’s position, very plain to Queek.”

He spoke with more assurance than he felt. The phone lines to his office were supposed to be the most secure in the Soviet Union. But the Lizards were better at electronics than their Soviet counterparts. He had no guarantee they were not listening. If they were, they weren’t going to hear anything secret different from what he’d said to their ambassador’s scaly face.

Gromyko understood that. “Of course, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the foreign commissar said. He was good. No one, human or Lizard, would have said that he was using a public voice, an overly fulsome voice, to put undue stress on his words.

“Have you any further suggestions?” Molotov asked.

“No,” Gromyko replied. “I am content to leave everything in your capable hands.” Had Molotov been unsure Gromyko was content to do that, someone else would have held the foreign commissar’s job. Gromyko added, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

“Does he agree with you?” Zhukov asked.

Molotov nodded.
“Da.
And you?” He wanted it out in the open. If Zhukov didn’t agree, somebody else would start holding the general secretary’s job.

But the marshal, however reluctantly, nodded. “As you say, our best hope. But it is not a good one.”

“I wish I thought it were,” Molotov said. “Now we can only wait.”

Rance Auerbach spoke French slowly and with a Southern accent nothing like the one the people in the south of France used. But he read the language pretty well. Everything he saw in the Marseille newspapers made him wish he were back on the other side of the Atlantic. “Christ, I wonder if they’d let me back in the Army if I asked ’em nice.”

Penny Summers looked at him from across their room at La Résidence Bompard. The hotel lay well to the west of the city center, and so had survived the explosive-metal bomb without much damage. Penny said, “What the hell were you drinking last night, and how much of it did you have? The Army wouldn’t take you back to fight off an invasion of chipmunks, let alone Lizards.”

“Never can tell,” he said. “Back when the Race first hit us, they took anybody who was breathing, and they didn’t check that real hard, either.”

“You
aren’t hardly breathing night now,” Penny retorted, which was cruel but not altogether inaccurate. “I can hear you wheezing all the way over here.”

Like her previous comment, that one held an unfortunate amount of truth. Auerbach glared just the same. “You want to be over here if the Lizards try and kick the crap out of the country?”

“I’d sooner be here than there, on account of they can kick our ass from here to Sunday, and you know it as well as I do,” Penny said.