Aftershocks c-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “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 Jager, 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 Fuhrer”-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.

  But nothing went wrong. Inside of a couple of minutes, the Lizard was talking with a male of the Race in Flensburg, a not too radioactive town near the Danish border from which General Dornberger was administering the broken Reich. A couple of minutes after that, Dornberger’s image appeared on the screen. He was older than Anielewicz had expected he would be: old and bald and, by all appearances, tired unto death.

  “Ah, Drucker,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re alive. Not many who went up into orbit came down again.”

  “Sir, I was lucky, if you want to call it that,” the spaceman answered. “If I’d killed my starship instead of failing, I’m sure the Lizards would have killed me, too.”

  “We need every man we have to rebuild,” Walter Dornberger said, a sentiment that struck Anielewicz as almost too sensible to come from the mouth of a German Fuhrer. Dornberger went on, “Who’s that with you, Hans?”

  Anielewicz spoke for himself: “I’m Mordechai Anielewicz, of Lodz.” He waited to see what reaction that brought.

  All Dornberger said was, “I’ve heard of you.” Hitler would have pitched a fit at the idea of talking to a Jew. Himmler, no doubt, would have been quietly furious. Dornberger just asked, “And what can I do for the two of you?”

  “We’re looking for our families,” Anielewicz answered. “Drucker’s is missing from Greifswald, and mine was kidnapped from Widawa by retreating German troops.” He’d said it so many times, it hurt less than it had before. “If anyone can order German records examined to help us find them, you’re the man.” He startled himself; he’d almost added sir.

  Dornberger’s hand disappeared from the screen for a moment. It came back with a cigar, which he puffed. “How is it that the two of you have become friends?”

  “Friends?” Mordechai shrugged. “That may go too far,” he said, to which Drucker no
dded. The Jewish fighting leader went on, “But we both knew, and we both liked, a panzer officer named Heinrich Jager.”

  “You knew and liked…” Walter Dornberger’s expressions sharpened. “Jager. The deserter. The traitor.”

  “Sir”-now Anielewicz did say it-“he saved Germany from getting in 1944 what you got in 1965. He also saved my life, but you’d probably think that was a detail.”

  “That may be true,” Dornberger replied. “It doesn’t make him any less a deserter or a traitor.”

  “Sir, he was a deserter,” Drucker said, “but a traitor, never.”

  “Et tu, Brute?” the German Fuhrer murmured. His eyes swung back to Mordechai. “And if I don’t help you, I suppose you’ll tell your friends the Lizards on me.”

  “Sir, it’s my family,” Anielewicz said tightly. “I’ll do whatever I can, whatever I have to, to get them back. Wouldn’t you?”

  Dornberger sighed. “Without a doubt. Very well, gentlemen, I will do what I can. I do not know how much that will be. Things being as they are, our records are in no small degree of chaos. Good-bye.” His image vanished.

  “Hope,” Mordechai said as he and Drucker left the tent from which they’d spoken with the new Fuhrer.

  “I know,” Drucker said. “Is it a blessing or a curse?” He cocked his head to one side. “What’s that funny noise?”

  Had he not asked, Anielewicz might not even have noticed the small, whistling beep. But when it came again, the hair prickled upright on his arms and at the nape of his neck. “My God,” he whispered. “That’s a beffel.”

  “What’s a beffel?” Drucker asked. But Mordechai didn’t answer. He’d already started running.

  Straha watched his driver take the motorcar off on an errand that would keep him gone for at least an hour. The ex-shiplord let out a hiss of satisfaction. He hurried into the bathroom and scrubbed off his body paint with rubbing alcohol, as he would have if he were going to redo it.

  But instead of repainting himself as the male of third-highest rank in the conquest fleet, he chose the much simpler pattern of a shuttlecraft pilot. The job he did wasn’t of the best, but it would serve. Neither the Big Uglies nor his own kind would be likely to recognize him at once.

  As he carried an attache case of Tosevite manufacture out the front door of his house, he turned one eye turret back toward the building, wondering if he would ever see it again, and if it would still be standing in a few days’ time. A considerable portion of him wished Sam Yeager had never entrusted him with this burden.

  But Yeager had, and the Big Ugly must have known the likely consequences of that. Sighing, Straha walked down to the end of the block, turned right, and walked two more blocks. In front of a small grocery store stood a public telephone in a booth of glass and aluminum.

  Straha had never used a Tosevite public phone before. He read the instructions and followed them, letting out a relieved hiss when he was rewarded with a dial tone after inserting a small coin. He dialed the number he had memorized back at the house. The phone rang three times before someone answered it. “Yellow Cab Company.”

  “Yes. Thank you.” Straha spoke the best English he could: “I am at the corner of Rayen and Zelzah. I wish to go to downtown, to the consulate of the Race.”

  He waited, wondering if he’d have to repeat himself. But the female on the other end of the line just echoed him: “Rayen and Zelzah. Yes, sir. About five minutes.”

  “I thank you,” Straha said, and hung up.

  The cab took about twice as long as the predicted time to arrive, but not so long as to make Straha much more nervous than he was already. The driver hopped out and opened a rear door for him. “Hello!” the Big Ugly said. “Don’t pick up a male of the Race every day.” When he spoke again, it was in Straha’s language: “I greet you, superior sir.”

  “And I greet you,” Straha replied in the same tongue. “How much of my language do you speak?”

  “Not much. Not well,” the Tosevite answered. “I like to try. Where you want to go?” His accent was indeed thick, but comprehensible.

  “To the consulate.” Straha repeated it in English, to make sure he was not misunderstood, and gave the address in English, too.

  “It shall be done,” the driver said, and proceeded to do it. Straha had judged his regular driver a Tosevite who cared less for safety on the road than he might have. Next to this fellow, the other male Big Ugly was a paragon of virtue. How the cab driver arrived at the consulate with his motorcar uncrumpled baffled Straha, but it was a fact. “Here we are,” he remarked cheerfully as he pulled up in front of the building.

  “I thank you,” Straha answered, though he was feeling anything but thankful. He gave the Big Ugly a twenty-dollar bill, which more than covered journey and gratuity. American money had never felt quite real to him, and odds were good-one way or another-he would never have to worry about it again.

  A couple of Tosevites who reminded Straha of his regular driver stood outside the consulate. They glanced at him as he walked inside, but did nothing more. He wondered if his driver had yet discovered him missing. If so, the Big Uglies would be looking for a shiplord, not a shuttlecraft pilot. Straha hurried up to the reception desk.

  “Yes?” asked the male at that desk, swinging an eye turret his way. “How may I help you, Shuttlecraft Pilot?” He too saw only what he expected to see, what Straha wanted him to see.

  Now, with more than a little pleasure, Straha threw off the disguise. “I am not a shuttlecraft pilot,” he replied. “I am a shiplord: Shiplord Straha, commanding-well, formerly commanding-the 206th Emperor Yower of the conquest fleet.”

  His mouth flew open in a laugh at the receptionist’s startled jerk. The other male recovered fairly quickly, saying, “If you are who you claim to be, you must know there is and has been an order for your arrest.”

  “I am who I say I am,” Straha answered. “I am certain you have a database with the scale patterns of my snout and palm included in it. You are welcome to take those patterns from me and compare them.”

  “To verify such an incendiary claim, we would of course have to do that,” the receptionist said. “But if you are who you say you are, why would you subject yourself to arrest and certain punishment after so many years of treason?”

  Straha hefted the attache case. “What I have in here will protect me from punishment. Once he sees it, once he understands what it means, even Atvar will recognize as much.” He had better, Straha thought. Not even his malice against me could withstand this… could it? Half of him wanted to flee the consulate. But he’d already come too far for that. Now he was in trouble with the Americans as well as the Race.

  “I do not know anything about that.” The receptionist would not give him his proper title, but was talking into a telephone attachment to the computer. After a moment, he swung his eye turrets toward Straha. “Please go to the Security office on the second floor. Your identity will be ascertained there.”

  “It shall be done,” Straha said.

  When he got to the Security office, he found the males and females there almost jumping out of their hides. Their tailstumps quivered with excitement. Most of them hadn’t been anywhere near Tosev 3 when he staged his spectacular defection, but they all knew of it. “This will not take long,” the senior Security officer said, advancing on him with a couple of trays full of waxy greenish plastic. “I have to take the impressions and then scan the patterns into the computer.”

  “I am familiar with the procedure, I assure you,” Straha replied. He let the officer press the plastic to his snout and left palm, then waited for him to finish the scanning and comparison. By the way the officer stiffened when the data came up on the monitor, Straha knew he’d proved he was himself. He said, “You will now please be so kind as to take me to the consul here. I believe his name is Tsaitsanx-is that not correct?”

  Absently, the Security officer made the affirmative gesture. “It shall be done.” He sounded dazed. “Although perhaps I
should formally place you under arrest first.”

  “No. Not while I have this.” Straha waved the attache case. “If Tsaitsanx is not fluent in written English, it would be wise to have a male or female-I suppose a male from the conquest fleet-who is fluent with us.”

  “The consul does read the local language, yes,” the Security male said. He ordered a couple of his subordinates to escort Straha to Tsaitsanx’s office, as if afraid the former shiplord would do something nefarious if allowed to walk the corridors unattended.

  Tsaitsanx proved to have come with the conquest fleet, though Straha had not known him. The consul said, “I always knew you lived in my area: indeed, I have spoken with males and females who met you at functions given by, ah, more legitimate expatriates. But I never expected to make your acquaintance here, and I do not know whether to greet you or not.”

  “You had better greet me.” Straha opened the attache case and pulled out the papers Sam Yeager had given him. “Examine these, if you would be so kind. I assure you, they are genuine. I would not be here if they were not. They were given to me by one of those rare creatures, a Tosevite with a conscience.”

  “Examine them I shall,” Tsaitsanx replied. “What have we here…” He read with great attention for a little while. Then, as if of their own accord, his eye turrets lifted from the papers in front of him and focused intently on Straha. “By the Emperor, Shiplord, do you know what these papers mean?”

  “I know exactly what they mean, Consul. Exactly,” Straha said. “I would not be here if I did not.”

  “I believe that.” Tsaitsanx returned to his reading, but not for long. “Have I your permission to scan these documents and transmit them to Cairo?”

  “You have.” Straha was sure the consul would have done so without his permission had he withheld it, but he did appreciate being asked.

  After sending the papers on their electronic way, Tsaitsanx said, “That brings me to the next question: what to do about you, Shiplord. I cannot scan you and transmit you to Cairo.”