Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  “Thirty seconds, Peregrine,” Control announced, and then the countdown the U.S. Air and Space Force had surely borrowed from the pulp magazines: “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .” When he’d proved he could count backwards on his fingers, the man in the blockhouse yelled, “Blastoff!” That also came straight out of the pulps. Johnson wished somebody somewhere would find a better name for it.

  Then it seemed as if three very heavy men came in and sat on him. He stopped worrying about what people ought to call a rocket leaving Earth, for he was much too intimately involved in riding one. If anything went wrong that didn’t splatter him all over the landscape, he had some hope of getting back down in one piece; like the machines the Nazis flew, his upper stage doubled as an airplane. He pitied the poor Russians, who went into space in what weren’t much more than airtight boxes. Those were easier and cheaper to build, no doubt about it, but the Red Air Force used up a lot of pilots.

  A fresh kick in the pants made him stop worrying about the Russians. “Second stage has ignited,” Control reported, as if he never would have known without the announcement. “Trajectory to planned orbit looks very good.”

  “Roger that,” Johnson said. He could see it for himself from the instruments on the Peregrine’s instrument panel, but he wasn’t allergic to reassurance.

  “How does it feel, going from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli in just a few minutes?” Control asked.

  “That’s what I get for coming out of the Marines,” Johnson said, laughing. “You never ride the real A and S boys this way.” Actually, he’d started a good deal northeast of the halls of Montezuma and he’d go over Africa even farther south of the shores of Tripoli, but who was he to trifle with a man’s poetic license?

  Then another voice came over the speaker, one not using English: “U.S. spacecraft, this is the tracking station of the Race. Acknowledge.”

  “I greet you, Dakar,” Johnson said in the Lizards’ lingo as the second-stage motor cut out and the one in the rear of his upper stage took over to finish the job of boosting him into orbit. He wasn’t over the radar or radio horizon for Dakar yet, but the Lizards’ orbital radar and satellite radio relays still beat the stuffing out of any merely human communications network. “Is that you, Hashshett?” As a Lizard would, he pronounced each sh and each t as a separate syllable.

  “It is I. And you are Glen Johnson?” Hashshett turned the last syllable of Johnson’s name into a long hiss.

  “I am. My trackers show me as good for my announced orbit. Do you confirm?” Johnson tacked on an interrogative cough.

  “Confirming,” the Lizard answered after a pause that would have let him turn an eye turret toward his instruments. “Seeing a flight path in such conformity is good.”

  As far as the Lizards were concerned, anything that conformed to the status quo ante was good. With four different powers owning orbiting nuclear weapons, people and the Lizards had grown far more punctilious than they’d once been about notifying one another of their launches. The Lizards had got very huffy very fast about wanting to be notified; persuading them that they needed to notify any mere humans of what they were up to had taken a lot more work.

  Just then, on time to the second, the upper-stage motor cut out. Johnson went weightless. His stomach tried to climb up his windpipe hand over hand. He gulped and sternly told it to get back where it belonged. After a few nervous moments, it decided to listen to him. Puking while weightless did not win a pilot luckless enough to do it the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

  Once he’d decided he wasn’t going to redecorate the inside of his cockpit, Johnson checked his own radar. He hadn’t really expected to see anything that would make him use his attitude jets to evade, but you never could tell. Space was a crowded place these days, loaded not only with manned (or Lizarded) spacecraft but also with all manner of unmanned satellites, some peaceful, some not, and with a lot of junk: discarded protective shrouds and upper stages that had reached orbit after delivering their cargo. The Lizards never stopped grumbling about the junk; not even their fancy radars and even fancier computing machines could tell the garbage from camouflaged weapons quietly floating and waiting for orders. The weapons that weren’t camouflaged maneuvered frequently, too; the longer they stayed in the same orbit, the more vulnerable they got.

  Having made sure he didn’t need to evade, Johnson studied the radar screen again. He hadn’t been up since the colonization fleet came in from Tau Ceti II. The targets the radar showed were not only distant—in relatively high orbits—but big. They looked like Christmas-tree lights on the screen. They were so big, he knew he could spot them with his Mark I eyeball as well as with his electronic senses.

  He peered in the direction the radar gave him. Sure as hell, there they were, some of them bright as Venus—brighter. Being in a lower, faster orbit, he passed them, but there were more ahead. All the way around the world, there were more ahead, with Lizards, millions upon millions of Lizards, lying in them in cold sleep like steaks in cardboard cartons on icebox shelves.

  Seeing the ships of the colonization fleet filled him with awe. He’d come a couple of hundred miles into space. The USA, the Greater German Reich, and the USSR had bases on the moon. Americans and Germans had walked on Mars (bemusing the Lizards, who couldn’t figure out why they wanted to visit such a useless world). Americans and Germans were out in the asteroid belt, too, seeing if it held anything worthwhile (the very existence of the asteroid belt bemused the Lizards; the solar systems with which they had been familiar were much tidier places).

  “Going out to see asteroids up close—that’s not bad,” Johnson muttered. But the ships he was looking at hadn’t crossed millions, or even tens of millions, of miles of space. They’d come better than ten light-years—say, sixty trillion miles. If that didn’t make you sit up and take notice, you were dead inside.

  What would it be like, crossing ten light-years? I’d pay a lot to visit Home, Johnson thought, and wondered if he’d sooner go as a tourist or as part of a fleet that would smash the Lizards’ home planet so flat, even cockroaches (or whatever Home had instead of cockroaches) couldn’t live there.

  He sighed. It didn’t matter. If the U.S. government, or any other human government, had plans for a starship, he didn’t know about them—and he kept his ear to the ground where such things were involved. He sighed again. Even if some human government did have plans for a ship that could cross interstellar space, odds were it wouldn’t be built till the turn of the century, if that soon. He’d had his fortieth birthday a couple of years before.

  “Too old to go to the stars.” He shook his head, wondering what his life would have been like if the Lizards hadn’t come, if the world had just kept moving along its normal, expected course. “Christ!” he exclaimed. “I might have been too old to go into space at all.” That was a really frightening thought.

  As long as he could come up here, as long as he was up here, he had work to do. He also had work he hoped he wouldn’t have to do. Again like its German equivalents, the Peregrine carried missiles and machine guns. The clumsy Russian spacecraft mounted machine guns, too. Even before the colonization fleet came, though, the Lizards had had far more in space than all of humankind put together. If push came to shove, they could probably knock people back inside the atmosphere. His job, and that of the other Americans in the Air and Space Force, and also that of their Nazi and Red opposite numbers, was to hurt them as much as he could before he got killed.

  The radio crackled. “Peregrine, this is Osprey. Over.”

  “Hello, Gus,” Johnson answered. “Peregrine here.” Most of the ships that flew out of Kitty Hawk were named for birds of prey. “You’ve been up here a while. Anything going on with the colonization fleet? Over.”

  “They’ve made a few flights down,” Gus Wilhelm said. “More the past couple of days than earlier. They’re trying to figure out the lay of the land, you might say. It’s not what they expected when they left Home, not
even close.”

  Johnson laughed. “I’ll say it’s not. Have you listened to some of the first radio transmissions between the colonization fleet and the ones who’re already on Earth? Bob Hope couldn’t be half as funny if he tried for a year.”

  “That’s the truth,” Gus agreed. “Yeah, I’ve heard some of those. And now they’ll know we listen in on ’em.”

  “Like they didn’t already,” Glen Johnson said. He and Gus both laughed then. He settled back onto his couch, a man on a routine mission ready to turn back into a fighter pilot in a heartbeat if the mission stopped being routine. “Over and out.”

  Through most of the long Tosevite year, Fotsev thought well of the city of Basra, where he was stationed. Oh, it got chilly in the winter, but he didn’t think there was any place on the surface of Tosev 3 that didn’t get chilly during the winter. Summers were quite pleasant; the hottest days would have been warm back on Home, too.

  Males who’d fought farther north, up in the not-empire that called itself the SSSR, had horrifying tales to tell about Tosevite winters. Fotsev hadn’t hatched out of the egg yesterday; he knew how people lied to make stories sound better and themselves more heroic. He had stories of his own from the conquest of Argentina, and he wasn’t above inflating them when they needed inflating. But some of the males produced videos to prove they weren’t lying. The mere idea of trying to fight in drifts of frozen water taller than a male was enough to make him glad he’d never had to do it.

  “Remember that Ussmak?” said a male named Gorppet, who wore a stripe of body paint on his left arm that showed he’d served in the SSSR. “I always figured it was the cold that drove him to mutiny, by the Emperor.”

  After casting his eyes down in the ritual gesture of respect, Fotsev swiveled his eye turrets every which way to make sure nobody else had heard Gorppet. The other male was doing the same thing, aware he might have said too much even to a friend.

  “I never knew much about the mutiny,” Fotsev said. Virtuously, he added, “I never wanted to know much about it, either.”

  “I cannot blame you for that,” Gorppet said. Both infantrymales shuddered, as if from the chill of the SSSR, though the local weather was perfectly respectable even by the standards of Home. Mutiny—rebellion against superiors—was vanishingly rare among the Race; males interested in such things had had to look for examples in ancientest history, long before the Empire unified Home.

  Belying his earlier words (there was a horrid fascination to the subject, after all), Fotsev said, “I wonder what happened to Ussmak after he yielded himself up to the Russkis. He is probably living as comfortably as anyone could in a not-empire full of Big Uglies, like that shiplord over on the lesser continental mass.”

  But Gorppet made a negative hand gesture. “No—oh my, no,” he said, and added an emphatic cough. “I heard this from a male the Russkis ended up freeing from one of their captives’ camps—and he was nothing but scales and skeleton after that, too, let me tell you. He told me Ussmak died in one of those camps along with spirits of Emperors past only know how many other males. If we ever fight the Tosevites again, you do not want to let the Russkis or the Deutsche capture you—or the Nipponese, either, though we have knocked them down a good deal.”

  Fotsev shuddered again. “I do not want any Big Uglies capturing me,” he said with an emphatic cough of his own. “They build factories to kill off their own—no wonder they kill us off, too, when they catch us.”

  His eye turrets kept swiveling as he spoke. He and Gorppet were patrolling the market square of Basra. In the early days of the occupation, males had disappeared not far from here. The Race’s vengeance had been brutal enough to make that stop happening, but neither of the males wanted to give it a chance to start up again through lack of alertness.

  In the square—an open area in a town of mud-brick buildings, most dun-colored, the fancier ones whitewashed—Big Uglies sold and bartered an enormous variety of goods, most of which Fotsev found distinctly unappetizing. Tosevite males wore robes and headpieces of cloth to shield themselves from the sun the males of the Race found so friendly, while the females swaddled themselves even more thoroughly. The Argentine Big Uglies, who lived in a harsher climate, wrapped fewer cloths around themselves. Fotsev had trouble understanding the reasons behind the difference.

  When he remarked on that, Gorppet answered, “Religion,” and kept on walking, as if he’d said something wise.

  Fotsev didn’t think he had. Religion and Emperor-worship were the same word in the language of the Race. They weren’t the same here on Tosev 3. The Big Uglies, not having had the benefit of tens of thousands of years of imperial rule, foolishly imagined powerful beings made in their own image, and then further imagined that those powerful beings had created them in their image rather than the other way around.

  It would have been laughable, had the Big Uglies not taken it so seriously. As far as Fotsev was concerned, it remained laughable, but he did not laugh. As experience had taught the local Tosevites not to kidnap males of the Race, experience had also taught the Race not to try to alter the beliefs the local Tosevites held, no matter how absurd they were. If they thought they had to bow down five times a day to revere the Big Ugly they had writ large in the sky, easier to let them than to try to talk them out of it. Fotsev had come to Basra to reinforce the garrison here after riots from that very source.

  Gorppet must have been thinking along related lines, for he said, “If they are going to have these absurd notions, why do they not all have the same ones, instead of arguing about who is right and who is wrong?”

  “I do not think you can expect any two Big Uglies to have the same notion about anything,” Fotsev said. “They do not even have the same words for the same things. I had finally started learning some of the Español they speak in Argentina, and not a Big Ugly around these parts knows a word of it. Hardly seems fair.”

  “Truth,” Gorppet said. “And some of the Tosevites here speak Arabic, some speak Farsi. Untidy, that is what this whole world is.”

  “Having them all mixed together like this, you mean?” Fotsev said. “It certainly is. We ought to do something about it.”

  “Like what?” Gorppet sounded interested.

  “I do not know,” Fotsev said in some exasperation. “I am just an infantrymale, same as you. I know what the Big Uglies would do: kill all the ones who spoke the language they did not want. Then they would not have to worry about them any more. Nice and neat and clean, isn’t it?”

  “Very neat and clean—if you do not look at the blood,” Gorppet said.

  Fotsev’s shrug wasn’t that different from the gesture a Tosevite would have used. The Big Uglies weren’t in the habit of looking at blood once they’d spilled it. Off to one side of the square, a crowd was gathering, mostly Tosevite males with a sprinkling of females. Fotsev pointed toward it. “Think we ought to have a look at that?”

  “What? By ourselves, do you mean?” Gorppet made the gesture of negation again. “No, thank you. If that does turn into trouble, it will turn into more trouble than the two of us can handle.”

  “Why should it turn into—?” Fotsev paused. A male Tosevite was clambering up onto some kind of platform. Fotsev was no better than most other males of the Race at telling one Big Ugly from another, but he did know the males were the ones who grew tufts of ugly hair on their faces. This one had long, gray tufts, which meant he was no longer young.

  “I have always thought these Big Uglies look foolish with rags wrapped around their heads,” Gorppet said.

  “Down in Argentina, the females wore lots funnier things than rags on their heads. Some of them looked like walking gardens.” Fotsev kept one eye turret on the old male Tosevite, who had begun haranguing the crowd. “What is he saying? That is Farsi, is it not? I cannot tell snout from tailstump in Farsi.”

  “He is talking about the Race,” Gorppet said; he knew some of the language. “Whenever these males who preach start talking about the Race, it
is usually trouble. And I think this is the one called Khomeini. He hates us worse than any of the other three put together. His egg was soaked in vinegar and brine before he hatched from it.”

  “But what is he saying?” Fotsev persisted.

  “It is trouble, may the purple itch get under his scales.” His friend cocked his head to listen. “He is saying the spirit these superstitious fools think created them did not create us. He is saying the other spirit they believe in, the evil one, created us. And—uh-oh—he is saying that if they get rid of all of us on Tosev 3 now, the males and females from the colonization fleet will not be able to land. He thinks they are evil spirits, too.”

  Fotsev made sure he had a round in the chamber of his personal weapon, a full clip attached, and more magazines where he could grab them in a hurry. Even with Gorppet by his side, he suddenly felt very much alone. “I think we had better back away,” he said, swiveling his eyes so no Big Ugly could sneak up on him with a knife or a bomb.

  “I think you are right.” Gorppet came with him. “I think we had better call for help, too—help and heavier weapons.” He spoke urgently into his radio.

  From the crowd came a great roar. “Allahu akbar!” That cry was the same in Farsi and Arabic. It meant that the ridiculous spirit in whom the benighted Big Uglies believed was a great ridiculous spirit. It also meant that the batch of Tosevites shouting it was about to explode into riot. “Allahu akbar!”

  “Here they come,” Gorppet said unnecessarily. Mouths open and screaming, the mob of Big Uglies surged toward the males of the Race. The preaching male named Khomeini stood on his platform, his hand outstretched toward those two lone males, urging his followers toward massacre.