Another congressman said, “Why shouldn’t we just send you lots of ginger, to keep the Lizards too drugged up and too horny”—Wong did have to translate that for her—“to be able to fight back?”
“Power come from barrel of a gun. War and politics never separate,” Liu Han replied. “So say Mao. He say true, I think.”
She got through the hearing. She thought she held her own. But letting an American drive her and Liu Mei down the wide but still crowded highways of Los Angeles was still a relief. She’d spent more time in motorcars here in the American city than in all her life in China. Fair enough: these foreign devils did reckon her an important personage. But so many people in the city had automobiles, had them and took them for granted. Even the way the city was built took them for granted. She’d seen that from the start. Prosperity, she thought again.
Only the richest Chinese would have been able to afford the home in which the Yeagers lived. Only those who collaborated with the little scaly devils would have been able to get the electrically powered machines that were so common in this country. “We greet you,” Barbara Yeager said in the little devils’ language when Liu Han and Liu Mei rang the doorbell (even it ran on electricity). Her husband and son nodded behind her. She went on, “Supper will be ready soon.”
Supper was an extravagantly large slab of beef served with a baked potato. Potatoes, Liu Han had found, were harmless; they took the place of rice and noodles in a lot of American cooking. The beefsteak was another declaration of U.S. affluence. Liu Han had never eaten so much meat in China as she did at almost every supper in the United States.
After supper, Major Yeager surprised her by helping his wife clean up. No Chinese man would have done such a thing, despite the Communists’ preaching of equality between the sexes. When the job was done, he went into the front room and pulled a paperbound book off a shelf. “I had to do some shopping around before I found this,” he said in English, sounding pleased with himself, “but I did.”
He handed it to Liu Han. She read English haltingly. “Nineteen Thirty-eight Spalding Official Base Ball Guide.” She looked over at him. “Why you show me this?”
“Open it at the page where I put a card in,” he answered. She did, and looked down at small pictures of men in caps of the sort Americans still sometimes wore. After a moment, one of the faces leapt out at her. She pointed. “That is Bobby Fiore.”
Major Yeager nodded. Yes, he was pleased with himself. “Truth,” he said in the scaly devils’ tongue before returning to English: “He is wearing a baseball uniform there. I wanted your daughter to have the chance to see what her father looked like.”
Liu Mei had gone off to talk with Jonathan Yeager. When she came into the room after Liu Han called, her mother looked closely to see if she was rumpled. Liu Han would not have bet American youths behaved much differently from their Chinese counterparts if they got the chance. But everything here seemed as it should.
Liu Han pointed to the photograph. “Your father,” she said, first in English and then in Chinese. Liu Mei’s eyes got very wide as she stared and stared at the picture. When at last she looked up, they were wet with tears. Liu Han understood that. She and her daughter were good Marxist-Leninists, but the ancient Chinese tradition of respect for one’s ancestors lived in both of them.
“Thank you,” Liu Mei said to Major Yeager. She’d spoken in English, but added an emphatic cough. That let her shift to the little devils’ language: “This means very much to me.”
“I am glad to do it,” Yeager replied in the same language. “He was your father, and he was my friend.” He turned to Liu Han. “Keep the book, if you want to. It will help you remember, even when you go home.”
“I thank you,” Liu Han said softly. She still believed—she had to believe—the American system was flawed, regardless of the prosperity it produced. But some of the foreign devils could be men as good as any Chinese. She’d seen that with Bobby Fiore, and now she saw it again with this other man who had been his friend.
Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Another American launch,” he remarked. “The Yanks have been busy the past couple of weeks, haven’t they?”
“Aye, sir,” Sergeant Jack McKinnon answered. He chuckled. “Likely they’ve got a lot o’ ginger to fly up to all those poor Lizards who’ve had to do without their womenfolks for so long.” He laughed at his own wit.
So did Goldfarb, but he had a harder time of it. He wished the Lizards had never discovered that ginger made their females randy. Such a discovery could only mean they’d want more of the stuff. Oh, their leaders would do their best to keep them from getting more, but those same leaders had been doing their best for a long time. They’d had little luck yet.
He didn’t think they’d have much luck in future, either. He sighed—not too loud, so the sergeant wouldn’t notice. That meant Group Captain Roundbush would keep moving the stuff by the bushel basket, which meant Roundbush was liable to ask him for more help one day before too long.
And he would have to give it. The way things were in Britain these days, he would have to do whatever Roundbush told him to do. The group captain had said he would help Goldfarb emigrate. With each passing day, that looked like a better idea . . . if Roundbush had told the truth.
Putting the group captain out of his mind—for a little while—Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Looks like they’re going hammer and tongs at that space station of theirs,” he remarked. “They’ll really have something when they finally get it done.”
“Oh, that they will, sir—summat grand.” But McKinnon, in spite of what he said, did not sound as if he agreed with Goldfarb. A moment later, he explained why: “And once they’ve got it, what will they do with it? What good will it do them? We can get our toes out into space, aye, but it really belongs to the Lizards.”
“For now it does, yes,” Goldfarb admitted. “And it doesn’t look like it’ll ever belong to Britain, does it?” Saying that pained him. Back before the Lizards came, Britain had been at the forefront of science and technology. British radar had kept the Nazis from invading in 1940. British jet engines had been well in advance of everybody else’s, including the Germans’. When space travel came, what was more natural than to assume it would come from the British Empire?
But the British Empire was only a memory now. And the British Isles lacked the resources for a space program of their own. What resources they had, they’d put into landand submarine-based rockets with which they could make any invader—Lizards, Nazis, even Americans—pay a dreadful price.
And so Britain remained independent. But the continentbestriding powers—the USA, the USSR, the Greater German Reich—also strode beyond the planets, strode on the moon, on Mars, and even on the asteroids. As a boy, Goldfarb had dreamt of being the first man on the moon, of walking beside a Martian canal.
A Nazi had been the first man on the moon. There were no Martian canals. So the Lizards said, and they turned out to be right. They still couldn’t understand why men wanted to set foot on such a useless, worthless world.
Goldfarb understood it. But, even for the Yanks who’d gone to Mars and then come home again, it must have seemed like a consolation prize. Whatever people did in space, the Lizards had done it thousands of years before.
“If we could build a ship that would pay a call on Home, that would be something,” Goldfarb said dreamily.
“It’d be summat the Lizards didn’t fancy, and go ahead and try telling me I’m wrong, sir,” McKinnon said. “That’d be the last thing they wanted: us coming to pay them a call, I mean.”
“So it would. They wouldn’t know what kind of call we aimed to pay them,” Goldfarb answered. He thought about it for a moment. “And I’m damned if I know what kind of call we ought to pay them, either. It would be nice if we could give them as much to think about as they’ve given us, wouldn’t it?”
McKinnon’s expression of naked longing reminded Goldfarb that the Scot’s relative
ly recent ancestors had been in the habit of painting themselves blue and swinging claymores as tall as they were. “Aye, wouldn’t it be sweet to drop a nice, fat atomic bomb down the Emperor’s chimney? The Lizards could scarce blame us, not after all they’ve done here.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that would stop them from blaming us.” Goldfarb’s voice was dry. “What I’d like to do, though, is send ships to other planets in the Empire and see if we could free the Rabotevs and Hallessi. They can’t like the Lizards lording it over them, can they?”
But even as he said that, he wondered. The Lizards had ruled those other two worlds for a long time. Maybe the aliens on them really did take the Empire for granted. People didn’t work that way, but the Lizards didn’t work like people, so why should their subjects? And people hadn’t ruled other people for anywhere near that many thousand years. Maybe obedience, even acquiescence, had become ingrained into the natives of Halless 1 and Rabotev 2.
“Might be worth finding out,” McKinnon said. “Pity they aren’t closer. Likely wouldn’t do, sending leaflets through space to ’em.”
“Workers of the worlds, unite!” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The joke should have gone over better than it did. McKinnon’s smile, now, looked distinctly strained. His lips moved—silently, but Goldfarb had no trouble understanding the word they shaped. Bolshie.
It could have been worse. McKinnon could have said it out loud. That might have wrecked Goldfarb’s career for good, assuming his being a Jew hadn’t already done the job. Being labeled a Bolshevik Jew in a country tilting toward the Greater German Reich wasn’t just asking for trouble. It was begging for trouble on bended knee.
“Never mind,” Goldfarb said wearily. “Never bloody mind. That’ll teach me to try to be bloody funny, won’t it?”
McKinnon stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. Goldfarb was not in the habit of making his speech so peppery. He was not in the habit of banging his head against a stone wall, either. He wondered why not. Metaphorically, he did it every day. Why not be literal about it, too?
He looked at his watch. The luminous dots by the numbers and the hands told him the time in the darkened room. “Shift’s almost over,” he remarked in something close to his normal tone of voice. “Thank heaven.”
Jack McKinnon did not argue with him. Maybe that meant the veteran sergeant would be relieved to go outside and get some fresh air, or something as close to it as Belfast’s sooty atmosphere yielded. But maybe, and more likely, it meant McKinnon would be glad to escape from being cooped up in the same room with a damned crazy Jew.
At last, after what certainly seemed like forever, McKinnon and Goldfarb’s reliefs showed up. The Scotsman hurried away without words, without even his usual, See you tomorrow. He would see Goldfarb tomorrow, whether he liked it or not. Not, at the moment, seemed ahead on points.
Shaking his head, Goldfarb got onto his bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as he could. Since everyone else in Belfast had got off at about the same time, that was not very fast. He hated traffic jams. Too many people in motorcars pretended they could not see the plebeians on bicycles. He had to swerve sharply a couple of times to keep from getting hit.
When he did get back to his flat in the married officers’ quarters, he was something a good deal less than his best. Normally patient with his children, he barked at them till they retreated in dismay. He barked at Naomi, too, something he scarcely ever did. She used a privilege denied the children and barked back. That brought him up short.
“Here,” she said with brisk practicality. “Drink this.” This was a couple of jiggers of neat whiskey poured into a glass. “Maybe it will make you decent company again. If it doesn’t, it will put you to sleep.”
“Maybe it will make me beat you,” he said, full of mock ferocity. Had there been the slightest likelihood he would actually do that, the words would never have passed his lips. But, while he might talk too much when he’d had a drop or two too many, he’d never yet turned mean.
“If you’re going to beat me, why don’t you wait till after supper?” Naomi suggested. “That way, I won’t be tempted to pour a pot of boiling potato soup in your lap.” She cocked her head to one side. “Well, not very tempted, anyhow.”
“No, eh?” he said, and knocked back the whiskey. “In that case, I’d better behave myself.”
He behaved himself to the extent of keeping quiet through the soup and through the roast chicken that followed. Then he plopped himself down in front of the televisor to watch the Cologne–Manchester football match. Most of the time, he had no use for the hooligans who came to the stadium to make trouble and to stomp anyone who showed signs of supporting the wrong team. He listened with benign approval as they cursed and booed and hissed the Germans.
“You’d better win,” a leather-lunged heckler bawled, “or it’s the gas chamber for the lot of you!”
Cologne did not win. Neither did they lose. The match ended in a 1–1 tie. Goldfarb scowled as he turned off the set. He wanted, he craved certainties, and the match, like life, offered nothing but ambiguity.
Although the Manchester coach spent several minutes explaining why the tie was really as good as a victory, he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself. Goldfarb was glad when he disappeared and the blandly handsome face of a BBC newsreader filled the screen.
“Another round of public fornication among the Lizards was observed in London today,” he remarked after touching on larger disasters. “Fortunately, in this day and age, there are few horses left to startle, and mere human beings have grown increasingly blasé in the face of the Race’s continued randiness. In fashion news—”
Goldfarb snorted. He tremendously admired traditional British restraint, not least because he had so little of it in his own makeup. He’d once thought the Lizards similarly restrained, but ginger and the arrival of females had changed his mind there. With what ginger had done to his own life, he wished the Lizards had never heard of it.
“Finally this evening,” the newsreader went on, “M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists introduced a bill in Parliament proposing to restrict the legal privileges of certain citizens of the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the bill appears to have no chance of passage, Sir Oswald said it continued an important statement of principle, and—”
With a curse, Goldfarb got up and turned off the televisor. He stood by it, shaking. Was that fury or fear? Both at once, he judged. It had started here. At last, it had started here.
12
Glen Johnson studied Peregrine’s radar screen. More than anything else up here, including his bare eyes, it told him what he needed to know. Everything was, or seemed to be, as it should have been. He didn’t know exactly what all the targets he saw were, but he hadn’t known that for some time: all three spacegoing human powers and the Lizards kept right on changing the orbits on their weapons installations.
He sighed. Everyone should have cut that crap out after whoever it was struck at the colonizing fleet. Down on Earth, somebody was laughing himself silly because he’d hit the Lizards a good lick and got away with it.
But that stunt could not work twice. The Lizards had made it very plain they wouldn’t let it work twice. Looking at things out of their eye turrets, Johnson couldn’t blame them. If anyone struck at them now, everyone would regret it. That made all the maneuvering out here seem pointless at best, provocative at worst. It went on even so.
“Stupid,” he muttered under his breath, and stupid it undoubtedly was. That didn’t mean it would stop. Who’d said, Nobody ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the American people? He couldn’t recall, but it was true, and not only of Americans.
His low, fast orbit meant he kept passing things traveling in higher, slower paths around the Earth. Several Falcon-class ships were in orbit at any given time, to make sure they kept a close eye on everything that was going on. When Johnson spotted th
e large target on his radar, he thought for a moment that it was a ship from the colonization fleet. But the orbit was wrong for that. Moreover, by its transponder signal, it didn’t belong to the Lizards at all. As a matter of fact, it was as American as the Peregrine.
He whistled softly and thumbed on his radio. “Peregrine to Space Station. Peregrine to Space Station. Over.”
The signal came back a moment later: “Go ahead, Peregrine. Over.”
“That thing is really going up there, isn’t it?” Johnson had to remember to add, “Over.”
He got laughter back. “Sure is, Peregrine. Any day now, we’re opening up our own supermarket.”
“Damned if I don’t believe you,” he said. “My last flight up, you weren’t anything special at all on my radar. This time, first thing I thought was that you belonged to the colonization fleet.”
That won him more laughter. “Pretty funny, Peregrine. We’ve got a lot we’re going to be doing up here, that’s all, so the place has to get bigger.”
“Roger that,” Johnson answered. “But what do the Lizards think about you? They don’t like anybody coming up here but them.”
“Oh, they don’t worry about us,” the radio operator on the space station said. “We’re a great, big, fat target, and we’re too damn heavy to do much in the way of maneuvering. If real trouble starts, you can call us the Sitting Duck.”
“Okay,” Johnson said. He didn’t ask what sort of weapons the space station carried. That was none of his business, and even less the business of whoever might be monitoring this frequency. “Over and out.”
Sitting Duck, eh? he thought, and shook his head. More likely the Sitting Porcupine. If that radioman hadn’t been sandbagging, he was a monkey’s uncle. The USA wouldn’t put anything so big and prominent into space without giving it some way to take care of itself. Even the Lizards weren’t that naive. They’d thought they would be facing knights in shining armor (or rusty armor—he remembered some of the pictures from their probe), but they’d come loaded for bear.
Second Contact Page 40