Down to Earth (60 page)

His father sighed. “The night the Lizards came to Earth, I was—we all were—starving to death in the Warsaw ghetto. Your sister Sarah already had. I’d gone out to trade some of the family silver for a pork bone. I threw a candlestick over the wall around the ghetto, and the Pole threw me the bone. He could have just cheated me, but he didn’t. As I was walking back to our flat, I prayed to God for a sign, and an explosive-metal bomb went off high in the sky. I thought I was a prophet, and other people did, too, for a while.”

“Sarah . . .” Reuven felt a sudden rush of shame. He hadn’t thought about his dead sister in years. “I hardly remember her.” He couldn’t have been more than three when she died. All he really had was a confused recollection of not being the only child in the family. Unlike his parents, he brought little in the way of memories with him from Poland.

“She was very sweet and very mischievous, and I think she would have been beautiful,” Moishe Russie said, which was about as much as he’d ever talked about the girl who’d died before the Lizards came.

“She sounds like the twins,” Reuven said. He walked on again.

“
Nu?
Why not?” his father said. “There’s something to this genetics business, you know. But maybe God really was giving me a sign, there in Warsaw that night. If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d surely be dead now. So would all the Jews in Poland—all the Jews in Europe, come to that.”

“Instead, it’s only a big chunk that are, and the rest who are liable to be,” Reuven said. “Maybe that’s better, but it’s a long way from good.”

Moishe Russie raised an eyebrow. “So what you’re accusing God of, then, is sloppy workmanship?”

Reuven thought about it. “Well, when you get right down to it, yes. If I do a sloppy job of something, I’m only human. I make mistakes. I know I’ll make mistakes. But I expect better from God, somehow.”

“Maybe He expects better from you, too.” His father didn’t sound reproachful. He just sounded thoughtful, thoughtful and a little sad.

“I don’t like riddles.” Reuven, now, Reuven sounded reproachful.

“No?” Moishe Russie’s laugh came out sad, too. “What is life, then? You won’t find the answer to that one till you can’t tell anybody.” He quoted from the Psalms: “ ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?’ God has riddles, too.”

“Words,” Reuven fleered, sounding even more secular than he felt. “Nothing but words. Where’s the reality behind them? When I work with patients, I know what is and what isn’t.” He scowled, remembering Mrs. Zylbring. Things weren’t always simple with patients, either.

From the Bible, his father swung to Kipling, whom he quoted in Yiddish translation: “ ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’ ” He laughed again. “Or more likely you’re just a younger man. We’re almost home. I wonder what your mother’s making for supper.” He set a hand on Reuven’s shoulder, hurrying him along as if he were a little boy. Reuven started to shrug it off, but in the end let it stay.

When they got home, the odor of roasting lamb filled their nostrils. So did the excitement of the twins, who, like Jacob with the angel of the Lord, were wrestling with algebra. “It’s fun,” Judith said.

“It’s fun after you figure out what’s going on, anyhow,” Esther amended.

“Till then, your head wants to fall off,” Judith agreed. “But we’ve got it now.”

“Good,” Reuven said; he hadn’t liked mathematics that much himself. “Will you still have it next week, when they show you something new?”

“Of course we will,” Esther declared, and Judith nodded confidently. He started to laugh at them, then caught himself. All at once, he understood why his father had trouble taking his cocksure certainty seriously.

As Einstein had been, the Race was convinced nothing could travel faster than light. The crew of the
Lewis and Clark,
though, had discovered something that did: rumor. And so, having caught the news from someone who knew someone who knew a radio operator, Glen Johnson felt no hesitation in asking Mickey Flynn, “Do you think it’s true?”

“Oh, probably,” the number-two pilot answered. “But I’d have a better notion if I knew what we were talking about.”

“That the Germans have sent
Hermann Göring
out this way,” Johnson said.

“Last I heard, he was dead,” Flynn remarked.

If he didn’t have the deadest pan on the ship, Johnson was damned if he knew who did. He restrained himself from any of several obvious comments, and contented himself with saying, “No, the spaceship.”

“Oh, the
spaceship
,” Flynn said in artfully sudden enlightenment. “No, I hadn’t heard that. I hadn’t heard that it’s not heading for this stretch of the asteroid belt, either, so you’d better tell me that, too.”

Johnson snorted. That propelled him ever so slowly away from Flynn as they hung weightless just outside the control room. “I didn’t think they could get it moving so soon,” he said, reaching for a handhold.

“Life is full of surprises,” Flynn said. “So is
Look,
but
Life
has more of them in color.”

“You’re impossible,” Johnson said. Flynn regally inclined his head, acknowledging the compliment. Johnson went on, “What do you think it means that they pushed their schedule so hard? Do you think they think the hammer’s going to drop back home, and they’re sending the ship out so they don’t have all their eggs in one basket?”

Maybe the number-two pilot considered launching another joke. Johnson couldn’t tell, not with his poker face. If Flynn was considering it, he didn’t do it. Some things were too big to joke about. After a few seconds, Flynn said, “If they do think that way, they’re fools. The Lizards can go after them out here, too.”

“Sure they can,” Johnson agreed. “But we have defenses. The Nazis’ll have ’em, too. They might even have better ones than ours—the bastards are awfully damn good with rockets.”

Flynn nodded. “Okay, say they’re twice as good as we are at knocking down whatever the Race sends after ’em. How often are you taking out the Lizards’ missiles in our drills?”

“A little more than half the time.”

“Sounds about right.” Flynn nodded again. “Suppose they’re getting eighty percent, then. I don’t think they can do that well myself, but suppose. Now suppose the Lizards send ten pursuit missiles after them. How many are the Aryan supermen likely to stop?” He looked around, as if at an imaginary audience. “Come on, come on, don’t everybody speak up at once. Did I make the statistics too hard?”

Fighting back laughter, Johnson said, “Odds are they’ll knock down eight.”

“That’s true. Which leaves how many likely to get through?” Mickey Flynn held up two fingers, giving a broad hint. Before Johnson could suggest what he might do with those fingers, he went on, “And how many of those missiles need to get through to give everybody an unhappy afternoon?” Johnson wondered if he’d fold down his index finger to give the answer, but he decorously lowered his middle finger instead, getting the message across by implication rather than overtly.

“And even if they knock down all ten—” Johnson began.

“Chances of that are a little better than ten percent, on the assumptions we’re using,” Flynn broke in.

“If you say so. Remind me not to shoot craps with you, if we ever get somewhere we can shoot craps.” Johnson tried to remember where he’d been going. “Oh, yeah. Even if the Germans knockdown all ten, the Lizards have a lot more than ten to send after ’em. And they only have to screw up once. They don’t get a second chance.”

“That’s about the size of it, I’d say. The Germans can run, but it’ll be a long time before they can hide.” Flynn paused meditatively, then added, “And the Germans are liable to be looking over their shoulders all the way out here, anyhow. We took the Race by surprise. They had to be pretty sure of what the master race was up to.”

“If the Lizards were human, I’d stand up and cheer if they whaled the stuffing out of the Nazis, you know what I mean?” Johnson said. “Even though they aren’t, I don’t think my heart would break.”

Flynn pondered that. “The two questions are, how badly do we—people, I mean—get hurt if everything west of Poland goes up in smoke, and how badly can the Germans hurt the Lizards before they go down swinging?”

“Bombs in orbit.” Johnson spoke with authority there; he’d kept an eye on the Nazis and Reds as well as the Lizards. Idly, he wondered how Hans Drucker was doing; he hadn’t been a bad fellow, even if he did have a tendency to paw the air with his hooves and whinny whenever they played
Deutschland über Alles.
“Missiles inside the
Reich.
Submarines in the Mediterranean and prowling off Arabia and Australia, and every one of ’em loaded for bear. Not all the missiles would get through . . .”

“No. The Race has better defenses, and more of ’em, than we do,” Flynn said. “But building missiles has been the German national sport for a long time.”

“Heh,” Johnson said, though it was anything but funny. “And the Nazis aren’t the sort to stop shooting as long as they’ve got any bullets in the gun, either. They’d just as soon go out in a blaze of glory.”

“I wish I could say I thought you were wrong.” Flynn answered. “Actually, I can say it, but it would sully my reputation for truthfulness. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to earn my paycheck.” He pushed off from his own handhold and glided into the control room.

Gloomily, Johnson went in the opposite direction, into the bowels of the
Lewis and Clark.
He hated war with the sincerity of a man who’d known it face-to-face. Even if it was a couple of hundred million miles away, even if it wouldn’t directly involve the United States, he still hated it. And a war between the Lizards and the Germans would be big enough and nasty enough that the USA couldn’t possibly be unaffected even if no American soldiers went into battle.

And, if the Lizards decided to get rid of the
Hermann Göring
, what would they do about the
Lewis and Clark
? Doing anything would get them into a war with the USA, but would they care if they were already fighting the
Reich
? In for a penny, in for a pound.

He wished the
Lewis and Clark
had a bar. He would have liked to go and sit and have a couple of drinks. Things would have looked better after that. So far as he knew, nobody had rigged up a still yet. It was probably only a matter of time. Brigadier General Healey would pitch a fit, but not even he could stop human nature.

“Human nature,” Johnson muttered. If that wasn’t what was pushing the Nazis into trouble, what was? Original sin? Was there any difference?

Human nature reared its head in a different way when Lucy Vegetti came swinging down an intersecting corridor. The
Lewis and Clark
’s traffic rules had grown up from those back in the USA. Little octagonal STOP signs were painted on the walls at every corner, to warn people to be alert when crossing. Johnson always paid attention to them; you got going fast enough to hurt somebody when you barreled along without a care in the world—and some people did just that.

Lucy stopped, too. She smiled at Johnson. “Hi, Glen. How are you?” Before he could answer, she took a second look at him and said, “You don’t seem very happy.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been better—sort of wondering whether things would blow up back home.”

“Doesn’t sound good, does it?” she said soberly. “Maybe we’re lucky to be way out here—unless the Lizards decide to clean us up as long as they’re busy back on Earth. Sooner or later, we’ll spread out too much to make that easy, but—”

“But we haven’t done it yet,” Johnson broke in. “Yeah.” His chuckle was flat and harsh. “Can’t even go out and get drunk. Nothing to do but sit tight and wait and see.”

“I know what you mean.” Lucy hesitated, then said, “When I came up from Earth, I brought along a quart of scotch. If you promise not to be a pig, you can have a sip with me. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”

Solemnly, Johnson crossed his heart “Hope to die,” he said. He hadn’t brought anything with him when he came up from Earth. Of course, he hadn’t intended to stay aboard the
Lewis and Clark,
and she had.

“Come on, then.” She swung off toward her tiny cubicle. Johnson followed. He knew the way, even though they still weren’t anything more than friends.
But if she asks me in for a drink . . . I can hope, can’t I?

Lucy opened the door to the cubicle, then closed it after them. The place was crowded for two—hell, it was crowded for one. But closing the door didn’t have to mean anything except that Lucy didn’t want to advertise her whiskey. Johnson wouldn’t have.

She took the bottle out of a duffel bag mostly full of clothes. Cutty Sark—not great scotch, but a hell of a lot better than no scotch. The bottle was almost full. She undid the screw top and replaced it with a perforated cork with a piece of glass tubing doing duty for a straw. “Go ahead,” she said, and passed him the bottle.

“Thanks,” he said from the bottom of his heart. He sucked up what he judged to be not quite a shot’s worth of whiskey. It tasted so good, he wanted a lot more. Instead, he put his thumb over the top of the tubing and gave the bottle back to Lucy Vegetti. “Trust my germs?”

“If this stuff won’t kill ’em, what will?” She drank about as much as he had, then yanked out the cork, put on the lid, and stowed away the scotch. An amber globule the size of a pea still floated in the air in the middle of the cubicle. Lucy and Johnson both moved toward it at the same time.

Johnson nodded to her. “Go ahead. It’s yours.”

“A gentleman.” Lucy opened her mouth. The droplet of scotch disappeared. Then she leaned forward a couple of inches farther and kissed him.

Seemingly of themselves, his arms slipped around her. The kiss went on and on. “Jesus,” he said when they finally broke apart. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

“So have I,” Lucy said. “Now I have a better notion that I can . . . I don’t know, trust you isn’t quite right, but it’s close enough.”

He wondered what she would have done—if she’d have done anything—had he been a pig with the bottle or stolen that floating drop of Cutty for himself. Then he stopped wondering, because she unzipped her coverall and wriggled out of it. She wore bra and panties underneath. A lot of women had stopped bothering with brassieres—what point to them in weightlessness?—but not her. Either she was too stubborn to care or she didn’t want to put herself on display like that. Johnson was too busy getting out of his own clothes to worry about it.