Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  “So it was,” the commandant at Peenemünde said. “And I called in a lot of markers to do the job. I had enough pull left to keep from throwing you out in the street, but not enough to let you keep rising as you should. I’m sorry, old man, but if you haven’t learned by now that life isn’t always fair, you’re a luckier fellow than most your age.”

  One of the things Drucker had on his record—the one he bore in his head and heart, fortunately not the one that went down on paper—was joining with the rest of his panzer crew in murdering a couple of SS men in a forest near the Polish-German border to let their colonel and commander go free. As long as that old crime remained undiscovered, he was ahead of the game. That made the present injustice easier to tolerate, though not much.

  With a sigh, he said, “I suppose you’re right, sir, but it still seems dreadfully unfair. I’m not that old, and I had hoped to advance in the service of the Reich.” That was true. Considering what the Reich had done to him and tried to do to his family, though, he wondered why it should be true.

  If it weren’t for the Reich, we would all be the Lizards’ slaves today. That was also likely to be true. So what? Drucker wondered. He’d always set the personal and immediate ahead of the broad and general. Maybe, because he’d done that, he didn’t deserve to make brigadier, or even colonel. But that would have been a real reason, not the put-up job Dornberger was forcing on him.

  “I can give you a consolation prize, if you like,” the base commandant said. Drucker raised a skeptical eyebrow. Dornberger said, “You will fly more this way than you would have had you gone on to promotion.”

  Rather to his own surprise, Drucker nodded. “That’s true, sir. Only a consolation prize, though.”

  “Yes, I understand as much,” Dornberger said. “But there are people in Nuremberg who are not at all fond of you. That you have come away with a consolation prize is in a way a victory. It is for you now as it was for the Reich and the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of the fighting: we kept what we had, but had to yield what we were not directly holding.”

  “And we have been plotting ever since to see what sort of changes to that arrangement we can make,” Drucker said. “Very well, sir, I will accept this for now—but if you think I will stop trying to change it, you are mistaken.”

  “I understand. I wish you all good fortune,” Major General Dornberger said. “You may even succeed, though I confess it would surprise me.”

  “Yes, sir. May I please have the report back?” Drucker said. Dornberger pushed it across the desk to him. Drucker took a pen from his breast pocket and filled out the space on the form reserved for the evaluated officer’s comments with a summary of the reasons he thought the report inadequate. Nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that section of the form stayed blank even on the worst fitness reports. It was universally regarded as being the space where an officer could give his superiors more rope with which to hang him. Having already been hanged, Drucker did not see that he had anything left to lose.

  When he finished, he passed the report back to Major General Dornberger. The base commandant read Drucker’s impassioned protest, then scrawled one sentence below it. He held up the sheet so the A-45 pilot could see: I endorse the accuracy of the above. W.R.D.

  That took nerve, especially in view of the pressure to which he’d partially yielded when he wrote the fitness report. “Thank you, sir,” Drucker said. “Of course, most likely the report will go straight into my dossier with no one ever reading it again.”

  “Yes, and that may be just as well, too,” Dornberger said. “But now you are on the record, and so am I.” He glanced toward a framed photograph of his wife and children on his desk, then added, “I wish I could have gone further for you, Drucker.”

  He said no more, but Drucker understood what he meant. If he hadn’t yielded to at least some of the pressure, he might never have seen his family again. Even major generals could prove little more than pawns in the game of power within the Reich. Drucker sighed again. “It shouldn’t be this way, sir.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t, but it is. Sometimes we do what we can, not what we want.” Dornberger took out another cigar. “Dismissed.”

  “Heil Himmler!” Drucker said as he rose. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth. He saluted and left the commandant’s office.

  Outside the office, outside the administration building, Peenemünde bustled on as it had for the past twenty years and more. A breeze blew in from the Baltic, full of the odors of mud and slowly spoiling seaweed. Somewhere along the barbed-wire perimeter of the base, a guard dog yelped excitedly. It was, Drucker knew, more likely to have seen a stray cat than a spy.

  Everything at Peenemünde was camouflaged as well as German ingenuity could devise, not so much against spies on the ground as against satellite reconnaissance. Many of the buildings weren’t buildings at all, but dummies of cloth and boards. Some of those even had heaters burning inside, to make them appear as they should to infrared detectors. And all the real buildings were elaborately disguised to seem like nothing but pieces of landscape overhead.

  In a way, all that ingenuity was wasted. If the Lizards—or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks or the Americans—ever decided to attack Peenemünde, they weren’t likely to be clinical about it. An explosive-metal bomb would wreck camouflaged and uncamouflaged alike . . . although some of the reinforced-concrete installations underground would stand up to anything but a hit right on top of them.

  Drucker shook his head. Everything here was as it had been. Only he’d changed. No, even he hadn’t changed. It was only that the Reich had just told him his adult lifetime of service to his country didn’t amount to a pile of potatoes. That hurt. He’d never dreamt how much it would hurt.

  Officers of junior grade and enlisted men still stiffened to attention and saluted as he went past. They didn’t notice any changes: as far as they were concerned, a lieutenant colonel remained a figure of godlike authority. His mouth twisted. Eventually, he would be saluting some of them, for his place in the firmament was fixed now, while they might keep on rising.

  Drizzle started falling, which perfectly suited his mood. He strode on through the base. A couple of A-45s stood at their gantries, in different stages of preparation for launch. Drucker nodded toward them. They were, in a way, the only friends he had left at Peenemünde. Major General Dornberger’s fitness report, as the commandant pointed out, did leave him clear to keep going into space. That was something: less than he would have liked, but something.

  He gave the immense rockets another nod. In an odd way, they looked less futuristic than the old A-10s—vengeance weapons, Hitler had called them. A-10s had had the sharp noses and graceful curves everyone in the pre-Lizard days had thought necessary for rocket ships. The A-45s were simple cylinders, the upper stages as blunt-nosed as Bavarians. Blunt noses had more area with which to absorb the heat of atmospheric friction; cylinders were easier and cheaper to manufacture than the fancier chunks of sheet metal that had flown in the early days.

  Drucker sighed. Here as elsewhere, reality proved less romantic than dreamers had thought it would be. He shook his head. Maybe things would have been better had the Lizards never come. With the Russians beaten and rolled back across the Urals, the Reich would have had all the Lebensraum it needed to show what it could do in Europe. Maybe he and Käthe and the children, instead of living near here, would be growing wheat or maize on the boundless plains of the Ukraine today.

  A moment later, the daydream turned to nightmare. The SS could have plucked her off the plains of the Ukraine as readily as from Greifswald. As a simple farmer, he wouldn’t have had friends in high places. They’d have shot her or thrown her in a gas chamber. He’d kept that from happening in the real world. If he was upset at the fitness report’s wrecking his chances for further promotion, how would he have felt with Käthe liquidated?

  That thought spawned another one, a blacker one. Liquidating Käthe for having a Jewi
sh grandmother struck Drucker as outrageously unjust, but that was because he knew her and loved her. What about other people with one Jewish grandparent? Was liquidating them just? What about people with two Jewish grandparents? What about people with three? With four? What about people who were out-and-out Jews?

  Where did you draw the line?

  The Reich drew it at one Jewish grandparent. That left Käthe in danger and her children safe. Drucker hadn’t been able to see the sense in it. Would there have been more sense in drawing it at two Jewish grandparents? That would have left Käthe safe, but . . . Was there any sense in liquidating anybody because he was Jewish or partly Jewish?

  The Reich thought so. Up till the trouble over Käthe, Drucker hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. Now . . . Now he remembered that Colonel Heinrich Jäger, for whom his elder son was named, for whom he’d helped murder a couple of SS Schweinhunde, had never had anything good to say about such massacres.

  He’d helped Jäger disappear into Poland with that pretty Russian pilot, and never heard of or from him since. Now, solemnly, he turned to the east—the southeast, actually—and saluted. “Colonel,” he said, “I think you may have been smarter than I was.”

  Fotsev strode into the administrative offices of his barracks complex. A clerk looked up from his computer screen. “Name and pay number?” the male asked. “Purpose for coming here?”

  “Purpose for coming here is to report before commencing three days’ leave, superior sir.” Fotsev put what was uppermost in his mind first. That done, he gave the clerk his name and the number that separated him from every other Fotsev ever hatched.

  After entering the name and pay number into the computer, the male gave the affirmative hand gesture. “Your leave is confirmed: three days,” he said. “Will you be going into the new town?”

  “Of course, superior sir,” Fotsev answered. “I have been away from Home, and from the way life was on Home, for a very long time now. I look forward to being reminded of it. From what other males have said, the new town is the best antidote possible for the mud and the stinks and the mad Tosevites of Basra.”

  “I have heard the same,” the clerk said. “My leave time has not yet come, but it is approaching. When it arrives, I too shall go to the new town.” He pointed out the door. “The shuttle bus leaves from there. It should arrive very soon.”

  “I thank you.” Fotsev knew where the shuttle bus left. He knew when, too. With barracks cleverness, he had timed the beginning of his leave to spend as little time as he could manage waiting for transportation.

  As usual, the bus rolled up on time. Had it been late, he would have suspected Tosevite terrorism. Being late through inefficiency was a failing of the Big Uglies, not the Race. Fotsev and a small knot of similarly canny males waited for the fellows returning from leave to descend, then filed aboard.

  With a rumble, the bus—of Tosevite manufacture, and so noisy and smelly and none too comfortable—rolled off down the new highway leading southwest. Big Ugly farmers grubbing in their fields would sometimes look up as it passed. Before long, though, it left the region river water irrigated and entered more barren country that put Fotsev in mind of Home. The plants that did grow here were different from the ones he’d known before going into cold sleep, but not all that different, not from the window of a bus.

  He twisted, trying to find as comfortable a position as he could. After a while, he wrestled a window open, and sighed with pleasure as the mild breeze blew across his scales. This was the weather the Race was made for. With the Big Uglies and their noxious city and their even more noxious habits and superstitions fading behind him, he was ready to enjoy himself until he had to return to unpleasant, mundane duty.

  “Look!” Another male pointed. “You can see the ships of the colonization fleet ahead in the distance. There is a sight to make a male feel good.”

  “Truth!” Several troopers spoke at the same time. A volley of emphatic coughs rang through the bus.

  “They were smart,” Fotsev said. “They gave the ships and the new town a good safety zone, so the local Tosevites will have a hard time sneaking up on them and doing anything frightful.” The converse of that was, all three independent Tosevite not-empires doubtless had explosive-metal-tipped missiles aimed at the ships and the town. But Fotsev chose not to dwell on the converse. He was on leave.

  He thought about tasting ginger, but decided to wait till he got to the new town. Since finding out what the herb did to females, officers had acted like males with the purple itch. The driver was too likely to be watching for that sort of thing.

  “No pheromones in my scent receptors,” another trooper remarked. “Such a relief to feel normal again, not to have mating in the back of my mind all the time. I can think straight again.”

  Not one of the other males argued with him. Several voiced loud agreement. Fotsev didn’t, but he didn’t think the fellow was wrong, either.

  The ships from the colonization fleet dwarfed the buildings of the new town, even the taller ones, so those buildings didn’t come into view till the males on the bus had seen the ships for some little while. When Fotsev spied the buildings, he let out a hiss of pleasure. “By the Emperor,” he said softly, “it really is a piece of Home dropped down onto Tosev 3.”

  With a squeal of brakes, the bus stopped in the middle of the new town. The driver said, “You males have yourselves a good time.”

  “How can we help it?” Fotsev said as he descended from the bus and rapturously stared this way and that. With every motion of his eye turrets, he catalogued new marvels. Paved streets. Better yet—clean paved streets. Buildings like the practical, functional cubes he’d known from hatchlinghood till the day when, in a Soldiers’ Time, he was made a soldier. Males and females of the Race strolling those streets and going into and out of those buildings. No guards, or at least no obtrusive ones. Perhaps best of all, no Big Uglies.

  He sighed with delight. As he inhaled afterwards, he caught the pheromones of a distant female. She’d surely been tasting ginger. He sighed again, on a different note: half stimulation, half resignation. He shouldn’t have been surprised the chief vice for the Race on Tosev 3 had reached the new city, but somehow he was.

  After a moment, he laughed at himself, a laugh full of mockery. He’d brought ginger here himself, to help make the leave more pleasant. If he’d done it, other males had done it. If other males had done it, some of the new colonists would have got ginger by now. And half those colonists, more or less, were females.

  Instead of tasting as soon as he found a quiet place, as he’d intended, he strolled along the streets, looking into shop windows. Restaurants and places to drink alcohol were open and doing well. So were the establishments of males and females who sold services: physicians, brokers, and the like.

  Few manufactured goods were yet on sale. After a moment, Fotsev corrected himself about that. Few goods manufactured by the Race were yet on sale. Factories hadn’t had a chance to start producing. He did see Tosevite goods for sale, imported from one or another of the not-empires whose technical standards were higher than those prevailing around Basra.

  He made a discontented noise. He wouldn’t have wanted to watch a Tosevite televisor, even if the Big Uglies had borrowed, or rather stolen, the technology from the Race. On the other fork of the tongue, if it was a choice between a Tosevite televisor and none, as it would be for a while . . . He made another discontented noise. If the Big Uglies could manufacture televisors more cheaply than the Race, what would the males and females who would have made them do? That was not a problem the colonization fleet would have worried about before leaving Home. As far as anyone knew then, the Big Uglies had no manufacturing capacity.

  If only it were so, Fotsev thought. He’d had too many painful lessons about what the Tosevites could do. And he hadn’t had a particularly hard time of it, not as the fighting went. Other males told stories much worse than any he had.

  Still, thinking about what h
e’d seen over the years since the conquest fleet arrived was enough to tempt him to reach for one of the vials of ginger he carried in his belt pouch. With a distinct effort of will, he checked himself. He’d have time later. He wouldn’t have tasted back on Home, and he was trying his best to pretend he was there now.

  What would he have done? He would have gone and drunk some distilled potation. He could do that here, easily enough. He strolled into one of the places that sold such potations.

  As per custom immemorial, it was dark and quiet inside. What light there was suited his eyes better than the somewhat harsher glare of the star Tosev. Several males from the new city sat on chairs and stools, talking about work and friends, as they would have back on Home.

  Fotsev walked up to the server. The bottles behind the male were all of Tosevite manufacture. Fotsev supposed he shouldn’t have been disappointed. As with realizing ginger had reached the new town, he was. He gave the server his account card. “Let me have a glass from that one there,” he said, pointing to the drink he wanted. “I have had it before, and it is not bad.”

  The server billed his card, then gave him the drink. The price he had to pay for it disappointed him, too. He could have got the like from a Big Ugly in Basra for half as much in barter. He’d heard the local Tosevites’ superstition forbade them from drinking alcohol, but had seen little proof of it.

  But some of the things he was paying for here were a room that suited his kind and getting away from the Big Uglies. He raised his glass in salute. “To the Emperor!” he exclaimed, and drank.

  “To the Emperor,” the server echoed, and cast down his eyes, as he should have done. Then, after reading Fotsev’s body paint, he said, “I would have thought you soldiers would forget the Emperor after so many years on this miserable planet.”