Aftershocks (44 page)

“By God!” Drucker exclaimed. “Andreas the hatter! He lives—lived—only three doors down from me. Can you have him fetched here?”

They could. They did. Half an hour later, there was skinny little Andreas, ten years older than Drucker, hurrying in to shake his hand. “Good to see you, Hans!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t know you’d made it.”

“I’m here,” Drucker answered. “What about my family? Do you know anything?”

“They gave Heinrich a rifle, same as they did me, and put him in a
Volkssturm
battalion,” Bauriedl answered. “That was when the Lizards were getting close to Greifswald, you know. If you were a man and you were breathing, they gave you a rifle and hoped for the best. It was pretty bad.”

Boys and old men,
Drucker thought. Everybody else would have already gone into the
Wehrmacht.
He asked the question he had to ask: “Do you know what happened to him?”

Bauriedl shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you, Hans. He got called in a couple of days before I did, and into a different unit. I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you more.”

Drucker sighed. He’d learned a little something, anyhow. “What about Käthe and the other children?”

“They left town right after Heinrich went in. Piled into the VW and took off.” Bauriedl frowned. “Something about Uncle Lothar? Uncle Ludwig? I was coming up the street when she drove by. She called out to me, in case I saw you. I’d tell you more, but they bombed the block a few minutes later. They got Effi, damn them. We were in different rooms, and . . .” He grimaced. “I went into the
Volkssturm
hoping I’d get killed too. No such luck.”

“I’m sorry.” Drucker hoped
he
sounded sincere. He’d heard so many stories like that. But excitement burned in him, too. “Kãthe has”—he made himself use the present tense—“an uncle down in Neu Strelitz. I think his name starts with an L. I’ll tell you one thing—I’m going to find out.” Neu Strelitz wasn’t so far away, not when he’d already walked from Nuremberg. But maybe he wouldn’t have to walk. He had connections now, and he intended to use them.

Gorppet was discovering he liked intelligence work. It was for males of a mistrustful cast of mind. It was also for males who wanted more than just to be given orders. He got to think for himself without becoming an object of suspicion.

He was writing a report on what he suspected to be underground activity among the Deutsche when a Big Ugly came into the tent and said, “I greet you, superior sir. I am Johannes Drucker, the friend of Mordechai Anielewicz.”

“And I greet you.” The Tosevite had named himself, which Gorppet found considerate. Even after so long on Tosev 3, even after his spectacular capture of that maniac of a Khomeini, he still found that most Big Uglies looked alike. Since this Drucker had announced who he was, Gorppet could proceed to the next obvious question: “And what do you want with me today?”

“Superior sir, does the Race have a garrison in the town of Neu Strelitz?”

“I have no idea,” Gorppet answered. “Say the name again, so that I can enter it into our computer and find out.” Drucker did. As best Gorppet could, he turned the odd sounds of the Deutsch language into the Race’s familiar characters. The screen displayed a map of the
Reich,
with a town south of Greifswald blinking on it. That the displayed town was blinking meant the computer system wasn’t sure of the identification. Gorppet pointed at the town with his tongue. “Is this the place you mean?”

Johannes Drucker leaned forward to get a better look at the monitor. His head went up and down in the Big Uglies’ affirmative gesture. “Yes, superior sir, that is the right place.”

“Very well.” Gorppet spoke to the computer. The light indicating Neu Strelitz stopped blinking. Gorppet interrogated the data system, then turned back to the Tosevite. “No, at present we have no males in that town. We cannot be everywhere, you know.” That was a truth that worried him. The Deutsche might well be hatching trouble under the Race’s snout—there just weren’t enough males to watch everything at once. But he said nothing of that to Drucker: no point in giving a former Deutsch officer ideas. He probably had too many already. Gorppet did ask, “Why do you wish to know that?”

“My mate and two of my hatchlings may be there,” Drucker replied. “I was hoping that, if the Race did have males in that place, I could there in one of your vehicles travel.” Every so often, he would forget about the verb till the end of a sentence. A lot of Deutsche did that when speaking the language of the Race. The Big Ugly’s sigh was amazingly like that of a male of the Race. “Now must I walk.”

“Wait.” Gorppet thought hard. Mordechai Anielewicz was a Tosevite the Race needed to keep happy. That meant keeping his friend happy, too—especially where kin were concerned. Anielewicz himself had been almost insane with joy after recovering his own hatchlings and mate. And having a former Deutsch officer owing the Race a debt of gratitude might not be the worst thing in the world, either. It might, in fact, prove very useful. Gorppet said, “Let me make a telephone call or two and I will see what I can do.”

“I thank you,” Drucker said. “Do you mind if I on the ground sit? I do not fit well inside this tent.”

Sure enough, he had to bend his head forward a little to keep from bumping the fabric of the roof, an unnatural and uncomfortable posture for a Big Ugly. “Go ahead,” Gorppet said, and made the affirmative gesture. As Drucker sat, Gorppet spoke on the telephone. Had he still been an ordinary infantry officer, he was sure the quartermaster he called would have laughed in his face. The fellow took an officer from Security more seriously. Gorppet hardly had to raise his voice. When the quartermaster broke the connection, Gorppet turned an eye turret back toward the Big Ugly. “There. I have arranged it.”

“Have you?” Drucker asked eagerly. “So thought I, but when you speak rapidly, I have trouble following.”

“I have indeed.” Gorppet sounded smug. He’d earned a little smugness. “Go three tents over and one tent up”—he gestured to show directions within the Race’s encampment—“and you will find a motorcar waiting for you. The driver will take you to this Neu Strelitz place.”

“I thank you,” the Big Ugly said again, this time with an emphatic cough to show how much. “You are generous to a male who was your enemy.”

“I am not altogether disinterested,” Gorppet said. Drucker, he judged, was smart enough to figure that out for himself. Sure enough, the Tosevite nodded once more. Gorppet went on, “You Deutsche and we of the Race should try to live together as smoothly as we can now that the war is over.”

“That is always easier for the winner than for the loser to say,” Johannes Drucker answered. “Still, I also think it is a truth. And the Race fights with honor—I cannot deny it. I almost killed a starship of yours, but your pilot accepted my surrender and did not kill me. And now this. It is very kind.”

“Go on. You will not want to keep the driver waiting, or he will be annoyed,” Gorppet said. The driver would undoubtedly be annoyed anyhow at having to take a Big Ugly somewhere, but Gorppet didn’t mention that. He did say, “I hope you find your mate and your hatchlings.”

“So do I,” Drucker said. “You have no idea how much I do.” That was bound to be literally true, given the different emotional and sexual patterns of Tosevites and members of the Race.

Drucker got to his feet. He bent into an awkward version of the posture of respect, then hurried out of the tent.

Hozzanet, the male who’d recruited Gorppet into Security, came into the tent just after Drucker had left. “Making friends with the Big Uglies?” he asked, his voice dry—but then, his voice was usually dry.

“As a matter of fact, yes, superior sir.” Gorppet explained what he’d done, and why. He waited to find out if Hozzanet would think he’d overstepped.

But the other male said, “That is good. That is very good, in fact. The more links we have with the Tosevites, the better off we are and the easier this occupation will be.”

“My thought exactly,” Gorppet said. “By all the signs, the only thing that keeps the Deutsche from rising against us is the certainty that they will lose.”

“I agree,” Hozzanet said. “Our superiors also agree. They take the idea of trouble from the Deutsche very seriously indeed. You were right, and I was right—these Big Uglies are caching weapons against a day of rebellion. We recently discovered a double ten of landcruisers, along with supplies, hidden in the galleries of an abandoned coal mine.”

“A good thing we
did
discover them,” Gorppet exclaimed. “I missed that report. The other interesting question is, what have we failed to discover? And will we find out only when it is too late?”

“Yes, that is always the interesting question.” Hozzanet shrugged. “We made this place radioactive once. We can always make it radioactive again. I do not think the Deutsche have managed to conceal any great number of explosive-metal weapons, anyhow.”

“And they surely have no long-range delivery systems left,” Gorppet said. “Whatever they have, they can only use it against us here inside the territory of the
Reich.”
He laughed a wry laugh. “How reassuring.”

“Reassuring for the Race,” Hozzanet said. “Not so reassuring for the males here—that I can hardly deny.” He swung an eye turret toward Gorppet. “Things could have been worse, you know, if you had stayed in the infantry. Then you could have been trying to fight your way up into the not-empire called the United States.”

“I am just as well pleased we avoided that fight, thank you very much,” Gorppet said. “I do not think we would have had a pleasant time trying to force our way up from the south on a front that got wider the farther we went—you see, I have been examining the maps.”

“That is what you should do. That is why they go into the databases,” Hozzanet said. “But I do not think there would have been so much ground combat on the lesser continental mass as there was here. Here, the Deutsche invaded our territory, so we had to fight them on the ground. Against the USA, we probably would have used missiles to batter the not-empire into submission, then picked up the pieces with infantrymales.”

Gorppet considered. “Yes, that sounds reasonable. But they would have used missiles against us, too, as the Deutsche did. That would have been . . . unpleasant. Just as well the war did not happen.”

He expected Hozzanet to say,
Truth!
But the other male hesitated. “I wonder,” he said. “What was hoped, of course, was that the American Big Uglies would surrender their space installations. When they gave up a city instead, that left their capacity for mischief undiminished. Sooner or later, we
will
have to deal with them.”

“I suppose so.” Gorppet sighed. “This world is doing horrible things to all of us. When I went into one of the new towns the colonists ran up, I did not fit there at all, even though it hatched out of an egg from Home. I am sick of being a soldier, but I have no idea what else I might do with my life. And if we of the conquest fleet stop being soldiers, what will the colonists do against the Big Uglies?”

Hozzanet sighed, too. “That, I am given to understand, is under discussion at levels more exalted than our own. As I see it, the colonists have two choices: they can learn to be soldiers, or they can learn to live under the rule of the Big Uglies.”

“Oh, good,” Gorppet said. “I see no other choices, either. I was wondering if you did.” He stood up from the computer monitor. “Shall we head over to the refectory tent? My insides are empty.”

“Mine, too,” Hozzanet agreed.

The refectory was serving azwaca ribs. Gorppet fell to with a will. He’d got used to eating Tosevite foods before the colonization fleet came. He’d come to like some of them, especially pork. But the meats of Home were better, without a doubt.

After eating, he went back to work. The day was drawing to a close when the telephone attachment hissed. When he answered it, the quartermaster’s face appeared in the monitor. He said, “The motorcar I sent out with the Big Ugly has not come back.”

“It should have,” Gorppet answered. “That Neu Strelitz place is not very far away.”

“Well, it cursed well has not,” the quartermaster answered. “I am worried about my driver. Chinnoss is a good male. What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Something has gone wrong.” That was all Gorppet could think of to say. Had Drucker betrayed him, or had someone betrayed Drucker?”We had better find out what.”

 
12

David Goldfarb looked up from his work as Hal Walsh sauntered back into the Saskatchewan River Widget Works after going out for lunch. Goldfarb scratched his head. His boss was a high-pressure type if ever there was one. Up till the past couple of weeks, David had never seen him saunter; he’d moved everywhere as if he needed to get there day before yesterday. That dreamy look on his face was new, too.

Seeing it made a light bulb come on above Goldfarb’s head. “You went out to lunch with my doctor again.”

To his amazement, Walsh blushed like a schoolgirl. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” he said. “Jane’s . . . quite something.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Goldfarb said, most sincerely. “If I were ten, fifteen years younger and single, I’d give you a run for your money. Maybe even if I weren’t ten, fifteen years younger.”

“Next time I see Naomi, I’ll tell her you said that,” Walsh said.

“I’m allowed to look,” Goldfarb answered. “I’m allowed to think. I’m also allowed to keep my hands to myself if I want to keep them on the ends of my arms.”

“Sounds like a sensible arrangement,” his boss said. “Oh, and speaking of your hands, Jane asked me to ask you how your finger’s doing since she took out the stitches.”

After flexing the digit in question, David said, “It’s not half bad. Still a little sore, but not half bad.” He eyed Hal Walsh. “I gather she thinks you’ll have the chance to pass this on to her some time fairly soon?”

Sure as the devil, Walsh blushed again. “That’s right.” He coughed a couple of times, then went on, “You know, cutting that finger may have been the best thing you ever did for me.”

“I like that!” Goldfarb said in mock high dudgeon. “I like that quite a lot. Here I give you the phone-number reader, and what do I get credit for?” He grinned. “For working my finger to the bone, that’s what.” He held it up again.

Walsh groaned and held up a different finger. They both laughed. Jack Devereaux came into the office just then. He saw his boss’ upraised digit. “Same to you, Hal,” he said, and used the same gesture.

“You don’t even know why you did that,” Walsh said.

“Any excuse in a storm,” Devereaux answered.

“The RAF was never like this,” Goldfarb said. The only time he’d known anything even close to such informality in the RAF had been in the days when he was working under Group Captain Fred Hipple, desperately trying to learn all he could about Lizard radars and jet engines. He’d looked back fondly on those days—till Basil Roundbush, who’d worked with him then, came back into his life.

He hadn’t heard anything from Roundbush lately, or from any of Roundbush’s Canadian associates, either. Nor had anybody tried to kill him lately. He approved of that. He would have been hard pressed to think of anything he approved of more than not getting killed, in fact. He would have been happier still had he known Roundbush had given up for good. Unfortunately, he knew nothing of the sort. And Roundbush was not the sort to give up easily.

But every day without trouble was one more day won. He’d thought that way during the war, first during the Battle of Britain when nobody’d known if the Nazis would invade, and then after the Lizards came till they did invade. With the return of peacetime, he’d been able to look further ahead again. But trouble brought him back to counting the days one at a time.

Walsh said, “Shall we see if we can get something more useful than the odd obscene gesture done today?”

“Mine wasn’t odd,” Devereaux said. “I did it right.”

“By dint of long practice, I have no doubt,” his boss replied. Goldfarb expected the French-Canadian engineer to demonstrate the gesture again, but Devereaux refrained. Walsh looked faintly disappointed. Devereaux caught David’s eye and winked. Goldfarb grinned, then coughed to give himself an excuse to put a hand in front of his face so Hal Walsh wouldn’t notice.

Eventually, they did get down to work. David had the feeling it was going to be one of those afternoons where nothing much got accomplished. He turned out to be right, too. He’d had a lot of those afternoons in the RAF, far fewer since coming to Canada. The reason for that wasn’t hard to figure out: the British government could afford them a lot more easily than the Saskatchewan River Widget Works could. But they did happen now and again.

He was, as always these days, wary when he walked home.
Nothing like almost getting killed to make you pay attention to the maniacs on the highway,
he thought. But nobody tried to run him down. All the maniacs in the big American cars were maniacal because of their native stupidity, not because they wanted to rub out one David Goldfarb.

“Something smells good,” he said when he opened the door.

From the kitchen, Naomi answered, “It’s a roasting chicken. It’ll be ready in about half an hour. Do you feel like a bottle of beer first?”

“Can’t think of anything I’d like more,” he answered. She popped the tops off a couple of Mooseheads and brought them out to the front room. “Thanks,” Goldfarb said, and kissed her. The kiss went on for a while. When it broke, he said, “Well, maybe I can think of something I’d like more. What are the children doing right now?”

“Homework.” Naomi gave him a sidelong look and doled out another word: “Optimist.”

“We made it here to Edmonton, didn’t we?” David said, and then, in what wasn’t quite a non sequitur, “The children are bound to go to bed sooner or later.” As big as they were getting, that marked him as an optimist, too.

He sat down on the sofa and sipped the beer. “That’s not bad,” he said. “It doesn’t match what a proper pub would give you, right from the barrel, but it’s not bad. You can drink it.” He took another sip, as if to prove as much.

“What’s new?” his wife asked.

“I’ll tell you what: my boss is seeing the doctor who sewed up my finger,” he said. “She’s worth seeing, too, I will say.” Smiling sweetly, Naomi put an elbow in his ribs. “Careful, there,” he exclaimed. “You almost made me spill my beer. Now I have to figure out whether to say anything about it the next time I write to Moishe in Jerusalem.”

“Why wouldn’t you say—? Oh,” Naomi said. “This is the doctor who was going with Reuven Russie, isn’t it?”

David nodded. “That’s right. She didn’t want to stay in a country the Lizards ruled, and he didn’t feel like emigrating, and so . . .” He shrugged. He suspected that, had he been close to marrying Jane Archibald and she told him she wanted to move to Siam, he would have started learning Siamese. Having already got one elbow in the ribs, he didn’t tell that to Naomi.

Instead of another elbow, he got a raised eyebrow. They’d been married twenty years. Sometimes he could get in trouble without saying a word. This looked to be one of those times.

“I’m going to check the chicken,” she said. He’d never heard that sound like a threat before, but it did now.

She’d just opened the oven door when the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” David said. “Whoever it is, he’s messed it up—he was bound to be trying to call us at suppertime.” He picked up the handset. “Hullo?”

“Hello, Goldfarb.” Ice and fire ran up David’s back: it was Basil Roundbush. Goldfarb looked to the phone-number reader. It showed the call’s origin as the United Kingdom, but no more than that: Roundbush’s blocking device was still on the job.

“What the devil do you want?” Goldfarb snarled.

“I rang to tell you that you can call off your dogs, that’s what,” Roundbush answered. He sounded ten years older than he had the last time he’d blithely threatened Goldfarb’s destruction, or maybe it was just that, for once, his voice had lost its jauntiness.

“What the hell are you talking about?” David asked. He kept his voice low so as not to alarm Naomi. That, of course, was plenty to bring her out of the kitchen to find out what was going on. He mouthed Roundbush’s name. Her eyes widened.

“I told you—call off your dogs,” the RAF officer and ginger dealer said. “I’ve got the message, believe you me I do. I shan’t be troubling you any more, so you need no longer be concerned on that score.”

“How do I know I can believe a word of that?” Goldfarb still hadn’t the faintest idea what Basil Roundbush was talking about, but he liked the way it sounded. Letting on that he was ignorant didn’t strike him as a good idea.

“Because I bloody well don’t want to get my sodding head blown off, that’s how,” Roundbush burst out. “Your little friends have come too close twice, and I know they’ll manage it properly sooner or later. Enough is enough. In my book, we’re quits.”

If he wasn’t telling the truth, he should have been a cinema actor. Goldfarb knew he was good, but hadn’t thought he was that good. “We’ll see,” he said, in what he hoped were suitably menacing tones.

“I’ve said everything I’m going to say,” Roundbush told him. “As far as I’m concerned, the quarrel is over.”

“Don’t like it so well when the shoe is on the other foot, eh?” Goldfarb asked, still trying to find out what the devil was going on. A conciliatory Basil Roundbush was as unlikely an item as a giggling polar bear.

“Bloody Nazis haven’t got enough to do now that the
Reich
has gone down the loo,” Roundbush said bitterly. “I really hadn’t thought you of all people would be able to pull those wires, but one never can tell these days, can one?” He hung up before David could find another word to say.

“Nu?”
Naomi demanded as Goldfarb slowly hung up the phone, too.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I really don’t know. He said he was going to leave me alone, and that I should call my dogs off him. He said they’d almost killed him twice. He said they were Nazis, too.”

“He’s
meshuggeh,”
Naomi exclaimed. She added one of the Lizards’ emphatic coughs for good measure.

“I think so, too,” David said. “He must have fallen foul of the Germans somehow, and he thinks I’m behind it. And do you know what? If he wants to think so, it’s fine by me.”

“But what happens if these people, whoever they are, keep going after Roundbush?” Naomi asked. “Won’t he blame you and get his friends over here to come after you again?”

“He might,” Goldfarb admitted. “I don’t know what I can do about it, though. Whoever’s going after that
mamzer,
I haven’t got anything to do with it.” He rolled his eyes. “Nazis. The only Nazis I ever knew were the ones I saw with radar during the fighting.”

“What do you think we ought to do?” Naomi asked.

Goldfarb shrugged. “I don’t know what we can do, except go on the way we’ve been going. As long as we’re careful, dear Basil’s goons won’t have an easy time getting us, anyhow.” One eyebrow climbed toward his hairline. “And who knows. Maybe those blokes, whoever they are, will put paid to him after all. I wouldn’t shed a tear, I’ll tell you that.”

“Neither would I,” Naomi said.

Warm Mediterranean sunshine poured down from a brilliant blue sky. The water was every bit as blue, only two shades darker. Gulls and terns wheeled overhead. Every so often, one of them would plunge into the sea. Sometimes it would come out with a fish in its beak. Sometimes—more often, Rance Auerbach thought—it wouldn’t.

He lit a cigarette. It was a French brand, and pretty vile, but American tobacco, even when you could get it, was impossibly expensive over here. Of course, American tobacco would have set him coughing, too, so he couldn’t blame that on the frogs. He sipped some wine. He’d never been much for the stuff, but French beer tasted like mule piss. Raising the glass, he grinned at Penny Summers. “Mud in your eye.” Then he turned to
Sturmbannführer
Dieter Kuhn, who was sharing the table at the seaside café with them.
“Prost!”

They all drank. The SS man spoke much better French than either Rance or Penny. In that good French, he said, “I regret that Group Captain Roundbush unfortunately survived another encounter with my friends.”

“Quelle dommage,”
Rance said, though he didn’t really think it was a pity. “It will be necessary to try again.” For
again,
he said
wieder,
because he could come up with the German word but not its French equivalent. He’d taken French and German both at West Point. Because he’d been using his French here in Marseille, it had less rust on it than his German did, but neither was what anybody would call fluent.