Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  When he got up to the flat, he asked his wife if anybody speaking Polish with a Russian accent had come around looking for him. “Not that I know of,” Bertha answered. She turned to their children, who were doing homework at the kitchen table. “Has anyone with a funny accent been asking for your father?”

  Heinrich Anielewicz shook his head. So did his older brother David and their older sister Miriam. “Isn’t that peculiar?” Mordechai said. “I wonder who the fellow is and what he wants.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll find out, maybe I won’t.” He started to shrug again, then paused and sniffed instead. “What smells good?”

  “Lamb tongues,” Bertha answered. “They’re usually more trouble than they’re worth, because it’s so hard to peel off the membrane—it comes away in little pieces, not in big chunks like a cow’s—but the butcher had such a good price on them that I bought them anyhow.”

  David said, “I hear the Lizards have such sharp teeth, they can eat tongues and things like that without peeling them.” Heinrich and Miriam both looked disgusted, which had to be part of what he’d had in mind when he spoke up.

  “If you remembered your Hebrew half as well as the things you hear on the street, you wouldn’t have to worry so much about your bar mitzvah next month,” Mordechai said.

  “I’m not worried, Father,” David answered. That was probably true; he had an easygoing disposition much like his mother’s. Mordechai was worried, though. So was Bertha, even if she did her best not to let it show. They would go right on worrying till the momentous day had passed, too. Having a son who excelled at his bar mitzvah was a matter of no small pride among the Jews of Lodz.

  Over the supper table, in between bites of flavorsome tongue (the lamb tongues might have been a lot of trouble to make, but turned out to be worth it), Heinrich asked, “Father, what’s an irrational number?”

  “A number that drives you crazy,” David put in before his father could answer. “The way you do arithmetic, that’s most of them.”

  Mordechai gave him a severe look and Heinrich a curious one. Mordechai knew something about irrational numbers; he’d studied engineering before the Germans invaded Poland and turned his life upside down. “You’re just barely nine years old,” he said to his younger son. “Where did you hear about irrational numbers?”

  “A couple of my teachers were talking about them,” Heinrich answered. “I thought they sounded funny. Are they crazy numbers, or numbers that make you crazy, the way David said?”

  “Well, they call them that because they used to drive people crazy,” Mordechai said. “They go on forever without repeating themselves. Three is just three, right? And a quarter is just .25. And a third is .33333 . . . as far as you want to take it. But pi—you know about pi, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” David answered. “They have us use three and a seventh when we figure with it.”

  “All right.” Anielewicz nodded. “But that’s just close—you know what an approximation is, too, right?” He waited for his son to nod, then went on, “What pi really is, at least the start of it, is 3.1415926535897932 . . . and it’ll go on forever like that, not repeating itself at all. The square root of two is the same kind of number. It’s the first one that was ever discovered. The ancient Greeks who found it kept it a secret for a while, because they didn’t think there should be numbers like that.”

  “How did you remember all those decimal places for pi?” Miriam asked.

  “I don’t know. I just did. I used to know a lot more, even though they’re pretty much useless after the first ten or so,” Anielewicz answered.

  “I could never remember so many numbers all in a row,” his daughter said.

  He shrugged. “When you play the violin, you remember which note goes after which even when you haven’t got the music in front of you. I couldn’t do that to save my life.”

  “I know.” Miriam sniffed. “You can’t carry a tune in a pail.”

  He would have been more offended if she’d been lying. “I can remember numbers, though,” he said. Miriam sniffed again. He could hardly blame her; set against musical talent, that didn’t seem like much. “Every once in a while, it comes in handy.” Having said that, he’d said everything he could for it.

  After supper, the children went back to their books. Then Miriam practiced the violin for a while. David and Heinrich played chess; David had taught his brother how the pieces moved a few weeks before, and took no small pleasure in beating him like a drum. Tonight, though, he let out an anguished howl as Heinrich forked his king and a rook with a knight.

  “Serves you right,” Mordechai told him. “Now you’ve got somebody you can play against, not somebody you can trample.” By David’s expression, he preferred trampling. He couldn’t unteach Heinrich, though. He was more than usually willing to go to bed that night.

  “I’m not going to stay up, either,” Bertha said less than half an hour later. “I’m going shopping with Yetta Feldman tomorrow morning, and Yetta likes to get up at the crack of dawn.”

  “All right.” Mordechai stayed put by the lamp in the front room. “I’ll finish the newspaper, then I’ll come to bed, too.” If the children were asleep and Bertha still awake, who could say what might happen then?

  Before he’d finished the paper, though, someone knocked on the door. He was frowning as he went to answer it; ten past ten was late for visitors. “Who’s there?” he asked, not opening the door.

  “Is this the flat of Mordechai Anielewicz?” It was a man’s voice, speaking Polish with a palatal Russian accent.

  “Yes. Who’s there?” Mordechai asked again, his hand on the doorknob but still not turning it—this was an especially odd time to be receiving strangers. His eyes went to the pistol on the table by the door.

  After a moment’s silence out in the hallway, he heard a faint click. His body identified the sound before his mind could—it was a safety coming off. He threw himself to the floor an instant before a burst of submachine-gun fire tore through the door at chest to head height.

  Behind him, windows and a vase on the table shattered. Through and after the roar of gunfire, he heard people shouting and screaming. He waited till bullets stopped flying over him, then grabbed the pistol and pulled the door open. If the assassin was waiting around out there, he’d get an unpleasant surprise.

  But the hall stood empty—for a moment. Then people poured out, many of them also carrying pistols and rifles. Behind him, Bertha exclaimed in horror at what the gunfire had done to the flat, and then in relief that it hadn’t done anything to Mordechai.

  “Why would anybody start shooting at you, Anielewicz?” asked a fellow who lived across the hall from him.

  He laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such a stupid question. “Why? I’m a Jew. I’m a prominent Jew. Poles don’t like me. The Lizards don’t like me. The Nazis don’t like me. The Russians don’t like me.” He ticked the answers off on his fingers as he spoke them. “How many other reasons do you need? I can probably find some more.” His neighbor didn’t ask for them. Anielewicz shivered. Why somebody had started shooting didn’t worry him so much. Who, now, who’d started shooting was a different story.

  As he walked along High Street, Little Rock’s Embassy Row, Sam Yeager paused and gave a colored kid a nickel for a copy of the Arkansas Gazette. “Thank you, Major,” the kid said.

  “You’re welcome.” Sam tossed him a dime. “You didn’t see that.”

  The kid grinned at him. “Didn’t see what, suh?” He stuck the dime in a back pocket of his faded blue jeans, where it wouldn’t get mixed up with the money his boss had to know about.

  Yeager went on down the street reading the paper. The Lewis and Clark was still front-page news, but it wasn’t the banner headline it had been a couple of days before. Everything seemed to be going just the way it should; the space-station-turned-spaceship would reach the asteroid belt faster than seemed possible. An acceleration of .01g didn’t sound like much, but it added up.


  “Acceleration adds up,” Yeager muttered to himself. “It’s about the only thing that does.” He still couldn’t figure out why his own government had kept the Lewis and Clark so secret for so long. Sure, it had an atomic engine. But there were a lot more untamed atoms running around loose up in orbit than the ones that were pushing the enormous ship out toward the asteroids. The Lizards wouldn’t have pitched a fit if President Warren had told them what the USA was up to. They thought people were out of their minds for wanting to explore the rockpile that was the rest of the solar system, but they didn’t think it made people dangerous to them.

  He sighed. Nobody’d asked his opinion. Somebody should have. If he didn’t know about the Race, who did? He sighed again. Whoever’d been in charge of that project had decided secrecy was a better way to go. Secrecy so blatant it put everybody’s backs up, Lizards and Nazis and Reds? Evidently. It made no sense to Sam.

  Still chewing on it—he wasn’t particularly quick-witted, but was as stubborn a man as was ever born (if eighteen years in the low and middle minors didn’t prove that, what would?)—he walked past the Arkansas State Capitol and on toward what newspapers called the White House, even if it was built of golden local sandstone. President Warren hadn’t given him any details about why he’d been ordered out of California. If it didn’t turn out to have something to do with the Lizards, though, he’d be surprised.

  The president wants to know what I think, Sam thought. But some damnfool general doesn’t care. He wondered if he could get Curtis LeMay and whoever LeMay’s boss was in trouble. He rather hoped so.

  At President Warren’s official residence, a guard checked his ID and passed him on to a secretary. The secretary said, “The president’s running a few minutes late. Why don’t you just sit down here and make yourself comfortable? He’ll see you as soon as he’s free, Major.”

  “All right,” Sam said—he could hardly say no. A few minutes turned into three-quarters of an hour. He would have been more annoyed if he’d been more surprised.

  In due course, the flunky did escort him into the president’s office. “Hello, Major,” Earl Warren said as they shook hands. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “It’s all right, sir,” Yeager answered. He’d long since learned not to pick fights where it couldn’t do him any good.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Warren said. “Would you like coffee or tea?” After Sam shook his head, the president went on, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you to hop on an airplane and pay me a call.”

  “Well, yes, sir, a little bit,” Yeager agreed. “I suppose it has to do with settling the Lizards’ feathers after the Lewis and Clark got moving, though.”

  “As a matter of fact, it doesn’t,” the president said. “It hasn’t got a single, solitary thing to do with that. From what I hear, you kept looking in that direction till you got your ears pinned back for you.”

  “Uh, yes, Mr. President.” Sam had kept looking in that direction after he’d got his ears pinned back, too. President Warren didn’t seem to know that. A good thing, too, Sam thought. No, he wouldn’t get LeMay into hot water. He was lucky not to be in hot water himself.

  “All right, then. We’ll say no more about it.” Warren sounded like the prosecutor he’d once been letting some petty criminal off with a warning because taking him to court would be more trouble than it was worth. “Now, then: are you even the least bit curious why I did ask you to come back East?”

  Presidents didn’t ask; they ordered. But Sam could only answer, “Yes, sir. I sure am.” And that was the truth. He was even more curious now than he had been before. While he was coming out from California, he’d thought he knew what Warren had on his mind. Discovering he’d been wrong piqued his curiosity.

  “Okay. I can take care of that.” Warren flicked the switch on an intercom, then bent low to speak into it: “Willy, would you bring the crate in, please?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered someone on the other end of the line. The crate? Sam wondered. He didn’t ask. He simply waited, as he’d sat in the dugout and waited out any number of rain delays.

  A side door to President Warren’s office opened. In came a blocky little man—Willy?—pushing what looked like a metal box on wheels. An electric cord trailed after it. As soon as the fellow stopped, he plugged the cord into the nearest outlet. At that point, Sam’s curiosity got the better of him. “Mr. President, what the he—uh, heck—is that thing?”

  Warren smiled. Instead of answering directly, he turned to the man who’d brought in the box. “Open the lid.” As the assistant obeyed, Warren gestured to Sam. “Go on over and have a look.”

  “I sure will.” When Yeager stepped up and peered into the box, he had to blink because he was looking at a couple of bare lightbulbs that put out a good deal of light and heat. They illuminated a pair of large eggs with speckled yellow shells. Sam looked back at the president. “It’s an incubator.”

  “That’s right.” Earl Warren nodded.

  Sam started to ask a question, then stopped. His mouth fell open. He came closer to losing his upper plate in public than he had for many years. Only one kind of egg could account for his being summoned from Los Angeles to Little Rock. “Those . . . came from a Lizard, didn’t they?” he asked hoarsely.

  President Warren nodded again. “That’s right,” he repeated.

  “My God.” Yeager stared at the eggs. “How did we ever manage to get our hands on them?”

  “How doesn’t concern you,” the president said crisply. “I am only going to tell you that once, and you had better get it through your head. It is none of your business. I hope you’ve learned your lesson about things that are none of your business.” He gave Sam a severe look.

  “Yes, sir.” Sam wasn’t looking at the president as he spoke. His eyes kept going back to those incredible, sand-colored . . .

  “All right,” Warren said. “How would you like to take those eggs back to California with you and raise the babies when they hatch? Raise them up like people, I mean, or as much like people as you can. Finding out just how much alike we and the Lizards are and how and where we differ will be very important as time passes, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, sir!” Sam said—no polite acquiescence now but hearty, delighted agreement. “And thank you, sir! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!”

  “You’re welcome, Lieutenant Colonel Yeager,” President Warren said, chuckling at his enthusiasm.

  “Lieut—” Yeager stared, then snapped to attention and saluted. “Thank you again, sir!” He felt like turning handsprings. He hadn’t thought he’d ever see the oak leaves on his shoulder straps go from gold to silver. For somebody who’d started out as a thirty-five-year-old buck private, he’d turned out to have a pretty fair career.

  “And you’re welcome again,” Warren answered. “You’ve done very well for us, and now you’re taking on another assignment that won’t be easy. You deserve this promotion, and I’m pleased to be able to give it to you. As a matter of fact . . .” He reached into a desk drawer and took out a jewelry box. “Here are your new insignia.”

  Sam wondered how many lieutenant colonels had got their rank badges from the hand of the president of the United States. Not a whole lot, or else he was Babe Ruth. He paused, bemused. When it came to Lizards, he pretty much was Babe Ruth. His eyes slid back to the incubator. “How long till those eggs hatch, sir?”

  Willy answered for President Warren: “We think about three weeks, Lieutenant Colonel, but we might be off ten days or so either way.”

  “Okay.” Yeager knew a different sort of bemusement. “It’ll feel funny, being a new father again at my age.” President Warren and Willy both laughed. Then something else occurred to Sam. “Lord! I wonder what Barbara’s going to think of becoming a new mother again.” That was liable to be more interesting than he cared for.

  But the president said, “This is for the country. She’ll do her duty.” He rubbed his chin. “And we’ll give her a
civil-service promotion, too. You’re right—she’ll earn it.”

  “That’s fair.” And Yeager thought Warren was right. Barbara would pitch in and help. Chances to learn about the Race like this didn’t grow on trees. Sam suddenly grinned. Jonathan would pitch in, too. He’d leap at the chance, where he’d run screaming from the idea of taking care of a human baby.

  “You should have some fascinating times ahead of you—and busy ones, too,” Warren said. “In a way, I envy you. You’ll be doing something no one has ever done before, not in all the history of the world.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said dreamily. But this time, when his gaze went back to the incubator, he turned practical again. “You’ll either need to fly that out to L.A. in a pressurized cabin or ship it by train. We don’t want to take any chances with those eggs.”

  “No, indeed,” President Warren agreed. “And that has been taken care of. A military charter will get into Los Angeles an hour after your return flight. That should give you time enough to meet it and accompany the truck that will bring the incubator to your home.”

  “Sounds good, sir,” Yeager said. “Sounds great, in fact. You’re a couple of steps ahead of me. Better that way than to find out you’re a couple of steps behind.”

  “I don’t think anyone who serves the United States can care to an excessive degree about details—that is, there is no degree of care that could be too large,” the president said, with a precision of which Barbara would have approved.

  “All right.” Sam didn’t want to leave the incubator even for a moment. He laughed at himself. After the eggs hatched, he’d be praying for free time. He remembered that from the days when Jonathan was a baby. He didn’t think two Lizards would be less demanding than one human had been.