Down to Earth (40 page)

“I hope both you and the Deutsche never have to find out,” Anielewicz answered. “You may tell that to your superiors, too.” After more than twenty years, he didn’t know whether the bomb the Nazis had meant for Lodz would work, either. He too hoped he would never have to find out.

Most Lizards would have kept on grilling him about the explosive-metal bomb. This one didn’t. Instead of pounding away at an area where he wouldn’t get any answers, he adroitly changed the subject. Pointing west, he asked, “Do you observe anything that, in your opinion, requires special vigilance on our part?”

“No,” Mordechai admitted, not altogether happily. He laughed at himself. “I am not altogether sure whether coming to the border was a waste of time, but I did it anyhow. Still, you of the Race can observe from high over the heads of the Deutsche.” He pointed up into space. “You can see far more than I could hope to from this little hill.”

“But if you saw something, you would be more likely to do so with full understanding,” the officer said. “We have been deceived before. No doubt we shall be deceived again and again, until such time as this world at last fully becomes part of the Empire.”

Just when Anielewicz began to think this Lizard did understand people after all, the male came out with something like that. “Do you really believe the Race will conquer the independent not-empires?”

“Yes,” the Lizard answered. “For you Tosevites, a few years seem a long time. Over hundreds of years, over thousands of years, we are bound to prevail.”

He spoke of the Race’s triumph with the certainty a Communist would have used to proclaim the victory of the proletariat or a Nazi the dominance of the
Herrenvolk
. Anielewicz said, “We may not think in the long terms as well as the Race does, but we also change more readily than the Race does. What will happen if, before hundreds or thousands of years pass, we go ahead of you?”

“You had better not,” the Lizard replied. “This is under discussion among us, and you had better not.”

He sounded as if he were warning Anielewicz in person. “Why not?” the Jewish fighting leader asked. “What will happen if we do?”

“The consensus among our leaders is, we will destroy this entire planet,” the male said matter-of-factly. “If you Tosevites are a danger to the Race here on Tosev 3, you are an annoyance—a large annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. If you seem likely to be able to trouble the other worlds of the Empire, you are no longer an annoyance. You are a danger, a deadly danger. We do not intend to let that happen.” He added an emphatic cough.

“What about your colonists?” Mordechai asked, ice running through him. Not even the Germans spoke so calmly of destruction.

He’d seen before that Lizards shrugged much as men did. “That would be most unfortunate. We might have done very well on this world. But the Empire as a whole is more important.”

Humans would have had a hard time thinking so dispassionately. Anielewicz stared after the officer, who got back into his vehicle. As it clattered off, Mordechai looked east after it, and then into the
Reich
once more. He shivered. He’d suddenly got a brand-new reason to worry about the Germans.

Gorppet bent into the posture of respect. “After so many years as a simple infantrymale, superior sir, I never expected to be promoted to officer’s rank.”

“You have earned it,” answered the officer sitting across the table from him. “By capturing Khomeini, you have earned not only the promotion, not only the stated reward, but almost anything else you desire.”

“For which I thank you, superior sir.” Gorppet knew he’d have a harder time collecting on the promise than the officer did making it. But he was going to try, anyhow. “I have served in this region of the main continental mass since what is called the end of the fighting, and I fought in the SSSR before that.”

“I know your record,” the officer—
the other officer
, Gorppet thought—said. “It does you credit.”

“And I thank you once more, superior sir.” As far as Gorppet was concerned, his record showed he remained alive and intact only by a miracle. “Having served in such hazardous posts, what I would like most of all is a transfer to an area where the conditions are less intense.”

“I understand why you say this, but could I not persuade you to ask for a different boon?” the officer said.
I knew it
, Gorppet thought. The other male went on, “Your experience makes you extremely valuable here. Without it, in fact, you would hardly have been able to recognize and capture the wily Khomeini.”

“No doubt that is a truth, superior sir, but I am beginning to feel I have used up about all the luck I ever had,” Gorppet answered. “You asked what I wanted. I told you. Are you telling me I may not have it?”

The officer sighed and waggled his eye turrets in a way that suggested Gorppet was asking for more than he had any right to expect. The newly promoted trooper held his ground. The officer sighed again. He had not expected Gorppet to request a transfer or to insist on getting it. Gorppet didn’t care what the officer had expected. He knew what he wanted. If he had a chance for it, he would grab with both hands.

With one more sigh, the officer turned his swiveling chair half away from Gorppet to use the computer. Gorppet turned his eye turrets toward the screen, but he was too far away and at too bad an angle to be able to read anything on it. And the officer did not speak to the machine, but used the keyboard. Gorppet’s suspicions rose. If the other male told him no posts elsewhere were available, he would raise as big a fuss as he could. He wished he’d been wise enough to record this conversation. He might well need the evidence to support his claims of promises denied.

But, at last, the officer turned back to him. “There is a position available in the extreme south of the main continental mass,” the male said unwillingly.

“I will take it, superior sir,” Gorppet said at once. “Get my acceptance into the computer, if you would be so kind.”

“Very well.” No, the officer did not sound happy. “How much do you know about this place called South Africa?” he asked as he clicked keys.

“Nothing whatsoever,” Gorppet answered cheerfully. “But I am sure it cannot possibly be worse than Basra and Baghdad.”

“The climate is worse,” the officer warned. “As far as climate goes, this is one of the best parts of Tosev 3.”

“No doubt you are right, superior sir,” Gorppet said—openly disagreeing with a superior did not do . . . and the other male
was
right. This area of Tosev 3 did have good weather. Still, Gorppet continued, “As far as the Big Uglies go, though, this is one of the worst parts of the planet. I have had more than enough of them.”

“I doubt you will find the Big Uglies in South Africa much of an improvement,” the officer said. “The ones with light skins hate and resent us for making the ones with dark skins, who outnumber them, their equals. The ones with the dark skins hate and resent us because we do not let them massacre the ones with the light skins.”

“I am willing to take my chances with them, dark and light,” Gorppet said. “As long as they are not so fanatical as to kill themselves so they can harm us, they are an improvement on the Tosevites hereabouts.” He pushed things a little: “I very much look forward to receiving my transfer orders.”

With a snorted hiss full of angry resignation, the officer turned back to the computer, although he kept one eye turret on Gorppet, as if afraid Gorppet would steal something if he gave the machine all his attention. After a little while, a sheet of paper came out of the printer by the computer. The officer thrust it at Gorppet. “There is a flight from Baghdad to Cairo tomorrow. You will be on it. There is a flight from Cairo to Cape Town the day after. You will be on it, too.”

Gorppet read the travel document to make sure it said what the officer told him it did. He’d stopped taking officers’ words on trust shortly after he started fighting in the SSSR. That was one of the reasons the spirits of Emperors past hadn’t yet greeted his spirit. These orders, however, read as they were supposed to.

“I thank you for your help, superior sir,” he said, though the officer had done everything he could to thwart him. “I will be on that flight tomorrow.”

“See that you are,” the other male said distantly, as if he were doing his best to forget Gorppet had ever stood before him. “I dismiss you.”

Gorppet went back to the barracks and packed his belongings. That wasn’t a hard job; everything he owned—except for his new and much improved credit balance—he could sling on his back. Just for a moment, he wondered if that was a fitting reward for having gone through so much danger. He shrugged. That wasn’t the sort of question a soldier’s training made him fit to answer.

He said his goodbyes to his squad. He would miss some of them, though not all: if he ever thought of Betvoss again, it would be with annoyance.

He was at the airfield long before his aircraft would leave.
Nothing must go wrong,
he thought, and nothing did. The flight took off on time, had little turbulence, and landed in Cairo on time. He got ground transport to a transient barracks to wait for his next flight. The Big Uglies on the streets of this city might have come from Baghdad. A couple of them, concealed by the crowd, threw stones at the vehicle in which Gorppet was riding.

“Does that happen very often?” he asked the driver.

“Only on days when the sun comes up in the morning,” the other male assured him. They both laughed, and spent the rest of the journey through the crowded streets swapping war stories.

More Big Uglies threw rocks at the vehicle that took Gorppet back to the Cairo airfield the next day. “You ought to teach them manners with your machine gun,” he told the male at the wheel of this machine.

“Orders are to hold our fire unless they start using firearms against us,” the driver answered with a resigned shrug. “If we started shooting at them for rocks, we would have riots every day.”

“Or else they might learn they are not supposed to do things like that,” Gorppet said. The driver shrugged again, and did not reply. Gorppet outranked him
—now
Gorppet outranked him—but he had to do as local authority told him to do.

No one fired at the vehicle. Gorppet carried his gear into the aircraft that would take him to this place called South Africa. He wondered what it would be like.
Different from Baghdad
was what he wanted. The officer back there had told him the Big Uglies in the new place were different. That was good, as far as he was concerned. The officer had also told him the weather was different. That wasn’t so good, but couldn’t be helped. After a winter in the SSSR, Gorppet doubted anything less would unduly faze him.

Peering out the window, he saw the aircraft pass over terrain desolate even by the standards of Home. Afterwards, though, endless lush green vegetation replaced the desert. Gorppet stared down at it in revolted fascination. It seemed almost malignant in the aggressiveness of its growth. Only a few scattered river valleys and seasides back on Home even came close to such fertility.

So much unrelieved green proved depressing. Gorppet fell asleep for a while. When he woke again, the jungle was behind him, replaced by savanna country that gave way in turn to desert once more. Then, to his surprise, more fertile country replaced the wasteland. The aircraft descended, landed, and came to a stop.

“Welcome to South Africa,” the pilot said over the intercom to Gorppet and to the males and females who’d traveled with him. “You had better get out. Nothing but sea after this, sea and the frozen continent around the South Pole.”

Gorppet shouldered his sack and went down the ramp black-skinned Big Uglies had wheeled over to the aircraft. He’d seen few of that race up till now. They looked different from the lighter Tosevites, but were no less ugly. When they spoke, he discovered he couldn’t understand anything they said. He sighed. Knowing what the Big Uglies back in Basra and Baghdad were talking about had helped keep him alive a couple of times. He would have to see how many languages the local Tosevites spoke and how hard they were to learn.

Sack still shouldered, he trudged toward the airfield terminal. The weather
was
on the chilly side; the officer back in Baghdad hadn’t lied about that. But Gorppet didn’t see any frozen water on the ground, and even the broad, flat mountain to the east of the airfield and the nearby city was free of the nasty stuff.
It will not be too bad,
he told himself, and hoped he was right.

In the terminal, as he’d expected, was a reassignment station. A female clerk turned one eye turret toward him. “How may I help you, Small-unit Group Leader?” she asked, reading his very new, very fresh body paint.

After giving his name and pay number, Gorppet continued, “Reporting as ordered. I need quarters and a duty assignment.”

“Let me see whether your name has gone all the way through the system,” the female said. She spoke to the computer and examined the screen. After a moment, she made the affirmative hand gesture. “Yes, we have you. You are assigned to Cape Town, as a matter of fact.”

“And where in this subregion is Cape Town?” Gorppet asked.

“This city here is Cape Town,” the clerk answered. “Did you not study the area to which you would be transferred?”

“Not very much,” Gorppet admitted. “I got the order a couple of days ago, and have spent my time since either traveling or staying in transit barracks.”

“No reason you could not have examined a terminal there,” the female clerk said primly. “I would have thought an officer would show more interest in the region to which he has been assigned.”

That took Gorppet by surprise. He wasn’t used to being an officer. He wasn’t used to thinking like an officer, either. As an infantrymale, he’d gone where he was ordered, and hadn’t worried about it past that. Fighting embarrassment, he spoke gruffly: “Well, I am here now. Let me have a printout of my billet and assignment.”

“It shall be done,” the clerk said, and handed him the paper.

He rapidly read the new orders. “City patrol, is it? I can do that. I have been doing it for a long time, and this is a relatively tranquil region.”