Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  Felless stared at him. “But, superior sir—” she began, and discovered the difference between feeling brilliant and actually being brilliant. If she went out of her office now, she would turn the whole embassy topsy-turvy, let alone that chamber full of males and females with fancy body paint. But what sort of excuse could she find for not coming when the ambassador required her presence? The ginger didn’t give her any marvelous ideas. She tried her best: “Superior sir, could I not participate by telephone? I am in the midst of an exacting report, and—”

  “No,” Veffani broke in. “Conference calls with too many participants quickly grow confusing. Please come and give your insights in person.”

  He said please, but he meant it as an order. “But, superior sir . . .” Felless repeated. “That might not be the best idea right now.” Veffani knew she had a ginger habit—or rather, he knew she had had one. She hoped he would be able to hear what she wasn’t saying.

  If he could, he didn’t choose to. He said, “Senior Researcher, your presence is required here. I will see you directly.”

  Felless let out along, hissing sigh. Had he forgotten about the herb, or was he going to use this opportunity to show her up and expose her to punishment? It didn’t really matter. He’d left her no choice. She sighed again. “It shall be done, superior sir,” she said, and broke the connection.

  She knew what would happen when she stepped out into the corridor and headed for Veffani’s office. The only question was where and with whom. As things happened, she hadn’t gone more than half a dozen steps before she saw Slomikk, the science officer.

  He saw her, too. “I greet you, Senior Researcher. How are you tod . . . ?” His voice trailed away as the pheromones she couldn’t help emitting reached his scent receptors. Almost at once, he straightened till he stood nearly as erect as a Big Ugly. The scales of his crest rose along the crown of his head, too, as they did at no other time than during a mating display.

  And his visual cues affected Felless just as her scent cues affected him. She bent down till her snout all but touched the floor the mating posture was not so far removed from the posture of respect. “Hurry,” she said with the small part of her rational mind that still functioned. “I must see the ambassador.”

  Slomikk wasn’t listening. She hadn’t expected that he would be. He took his place behind her. Of itself, her tailstump moved up and out of the way. The science officer thrust his mating organ into her cloaca. The pleasure she felt was different from what she got with ginger, though she couldn’t have said how.

  She remembered from earlier matings that the pleasure would ease the slide down from the heights of ginger. Slomikk hissed in delight as he finished. Felless straightened up and hurried on toward Veffani’s office.

  Another male mated with her on the way there. Veffani’s secretary was a female, and so did not notice the pheromones coming off Felless in waves. All she said was, “Go right into the conference chamber, superior female. The ambassador is expecting you.”

  “So he is,” Felless said. But not like this. She sighed, wondering if she would lay another clutch of eggs. Matings after ginger seemed less likely to lead to gravidity than those of the normal mating season, but they easily could. She knew that from experience.

  Bracing herself for what she knew would happen, she went into the conference chamber. Veffani turned an eye turret toward the opening door. “An, here she is now,” he said. “Senior Researcher, I was just telling the males and females here from Cairo of the strides you have made in unraveling the . . .”

  As Slomikk’s had, his voice trailed away. The ventilation system swept her pheromones toward him and toward the other males and females of the Race. The females didn’t notice. The males did. Almost in unison, they sprang from their seats and stood straight up. Their crests rose. This time, they were displaying to warn off one another as well as to make Felless assume the mating posture.

  Assume it she did. One of the females from Cairo exclaimed, “Oh, by the Emperor, she has been tasting ginger!”

  Felless cast her eyes down to the ground on hearing the Emperor’s name. Since the carpet was very close to the tip of her snout, she got an excellent view of it. A male—she couldn’t tell if it was Veffani or one of the visitors from Cairo—stepped up behind her and began to mate. Two other males brawled, sending chairs flying every which way. And yet another male, inflamed by her pheromones, went into a mating display in front of a female who was not in her season. The female exclaimed in disgust.

  Felless thought every male in the chamber had coupled with her by the time the ginger ebbed from her system. Even as she straightened out of the mating posture, one of the males from Cairo was sidling around behind her to try to mate again. “Enough,” she said, and hoped she sounded as if she meant it.

  “Yes, enough.” That was Veffani, who sounded shaken to the core. Looking round the conference chamber, Felless could hardly blame him. One chair lay on top of the table. A male was rubbing at clawmarks that scored his flank, another nursing a bitten arm that dripped blood.

  Turning to Veffani, Felless assumed the posture of respect—carefully, so none of the males would take it for the mating posture. “I apologize, superior sir,” she said. “I knew something like this would happen when I came here, but you required it of me, and I had no choice but to obey.”

  “You have been tasting ginger,” Veffani said.

  “Truth.” Felless admitted what she could hardly deny. Now the after-tasting depression was on her. Whatever the ambassador chose to do to her, at the moment she felt she deserved every bit of it and more besides.

  “We depend on high-ranking females to set an example for those below them,” Veffani said. “Senior Researcher, you have failed in this fundamental obligation.”

  “Truth,” Felless repeated. Veffani was making her feel even worse than she would have anyhow. “Do with me as you will, superior sir. I do not seek to evade my responsibility.”

  Veffani swung both eye turrets toward her. “I know you have not been happy here, Senior Researcher. Accordingly, the most severe punishment I can mete out to you is that requirement that you continue your duties and your investigation of the Deutsche exactly as before.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Felless said dully. Even in the depths of her depression, she had trouble believing she deserved to be punished that harshly.

  7

  Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker was walking past Peenemünde’s liquid-oxygen plant when loudspeakers throughout the enormous rocketry complex began blaring out his name: “Lieutenant Colonel Drucker! Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Report to the base commandant’s office immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Drucker . . . !”

  “Donnerwetter!” Drucker muttered. “What the devil has gone wrong now?” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anyone so summarily summoned to Lieutenant General Dornberger’s office.

  He couldn’t report there immediately, either, not when he was closer to the Peene River side of Peenemünde’s flat, muddy peninsula while the commandant’s office lay a couple of kilometers away, hard by the Baltic. He started down the road toward the office, hoping to flag a lift along the way.

  No such luck. He made the journey by shank’s mare, and arrived about as sweaty as he could get in a cool, clammy climate like northern Germany’s. “Reporting as ordered,” he told Dornberger’s adjutant, a skinny major named Neufeld who always looked as if his stomach pained him.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Colonel. One moment, please.” Major Neufeld pressed the intercom switch and spoke two words: “He’s here.”

  “Send him in,” Walter Dornberger said, and Neufeld waved Drucker past him and into the commandant’s sanctum.

  Walter Dornberger was in his late sixties, bald but still erect and vigorous. He’d been in the artillery during the First World War, and in charge of Peenemünde since before the start of World War II. He knew as much about rockets and space flight as any man alive.

&nbs
p; “Heil Himmler!” Drucker said, and shot out his arm in the Party salute that had also become the Army salute. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

  “Heil,” General Dornberger returned, though his answering salute was more nearly a wave. “Close the door behind you, Drucker, and then take a seat.”

  “Yes, sir,” Drucker said, and obeyed. He tried to look brisk and capable and—most of all—innocent. He wondered if he was innocent. If he wasn’t, looking as if he were became all the more urgent. He tried to sound innocent, too, asking, “What’s up, sir?”

  “A letter mentioning your name in unusual circumstances came to me.” Dornberger shoved a piece of paper across the desk at him. “Tell me what you think of this, if you’d be so kind.”

  Even before Drucker picked it up, he knew what it would be. And it was: a denunciation from the pen of Gunther Grillparzer. Maybe Grillparzer hadn’t believed he was an SS man after all. Or maybe he had, and decided to get him in trouble with the Wehrmacht. I should have killed him when I had the chance, Drucker thought, him and his girlfriend, too.

  “Well?” General Dornberger asked when Drucker set the paper down again.

  “Well, what, sir?” Drucker answered. “If you want my head on a bloody platter, this gives you the excuse to take it. If you don’t, throw it in the trash can where it belongs and let’s go about our business.”

  Dornberger tapped the letter with a nicotine-stained fingernail. “So you deny these accusations, then?”

  “Of course I deny them,” Drucker exclaimed. “Only a man who wanted to commit suicide would admit to them.” He’d been brought up to fear God and tell the truth. The second sentence was nothing but the truth . . . and he feared the Gestapo, too.

  “This fellow includes some circumstantial details,” the commandant at Peenemünde observed. “If he wasn’t there, if this didn’t happen as he says, how could he make them up? I have done a little checking. This Colonel Jäger was supposed to have been arrested. Somehow, he wasn’t—somehow, he escaped, apparently to Poland. It’s believed he died there.”

  “Is it?” Drucker fought the chill of fright that ran through him. Dornberger didn’t want his head on a platter; the commandant had already proved that. But he was a conscientious man, or maybe just a good engineer—he wanted to get to the bottom of things. Drucker had never heard what had happened to his regimental commander after the lady flier from the Red Air Force took him away.

  “Yes, it is.” General Dornberger tapped Gunther Grillparzer’s letter once more. “I ask you again, Hans—what about this? What do I say when the pointy-nosed SS men come around here and start asking me the questions I’m asking you now?”

  That was a fair question—more than a fair question, if Dornberger wanted to be able to protect him. Drucker thought fast, as he had in the hallway outside Grillparzer’s flat in Weimar. “Sir,” he said, “it’s pretty plain somebody in the SS doesn’t like me, isn’t it? The way they went after my wife . . .”

  “Yes,” Dornberger said, nodding. Drucker didn’t tell him—Drucker wouldn’t tell anybody, not to his dying day—that Käthe truly did have a Jewish grandmother. Whoever’d found that out had been right, even if Drucker and Dornberger between them had managed to quash the investigation. The commandant went on, “You are suggesting this is another hoax?”

  “Yes, sir,” Drucker answered. “One way to put all sorts of details in a letter is to just make them up. The SS knows my service record; it knows the names of the men I served with. This letter makes it sound like Grillparzer was as much a murderer as I was. Do you think anybody who really did something like that would give you or the blackshirts the whole story?”

  “A point—a distinct point,” General Dornberger said.

  Drucker nodded, doing his best to look as well as sound convincing. He was convinced Gunther Grillparzer wouldn’t be in that Weimar flat any more if he or the Gestapo came knocking. The ex-gunner would probably have shed his alias and his girlfriend, too, though Friedli had been worth hanging on to. Nothing, though, was worth the risk of kicking your life away at the end of a piano-wire noose after some highly ingenious men spent a long time making you wish you were dead.

  Dornberger paused to light a cigar. He aimed it at Drucker as if it were a pistol. “You realize that, if your enemy in the SS wants you badly enough, he will simply come and take you away regardless of anything I can do.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand that,” Drucker said. He knew he sounded worried—he was worried. But anyone with a powerful enemy in the SS had every right to be worried. More than a generation of German history proved as much.

  “All right, then.” General Dornberger picked up Grillparzer’s letter, folded it in thirds, as it had been in the envelope, and then slowly and methodically tore it to pieces. “I think we will be able to carry on on that basis. You understand that Neufeld has also seen this?”

  “I would have expected that, yes, sir,” Drucker said, nodding. “But, sir, Major Neufeld wouldn’t tell his granny her own name if she happened to ask him for it.”

  Dornberger chuckled, coughed, and chuckled some more. “I won’t say you’re wrong. I will say that’s one of the reasons he’s so useful to me. If your unfriend has sent copies of this letter to people besides me—which it makes sense that he would do—we shall try to deal with them as you’ve suggested.” He took another puff on the cigar, then set it in an ashtray. Exhaling smoke, he went on, “You are dismissed, Lieutenant Colonel.”

  Drucker sprang to his feet and saluted. “Heil Himmler!” he said, as he had when he came in. For once, the words were not automatic. He wondered what he was doing hailing the man who, along with heading the Reich, also headed the outfit that had tried to execute Käthe, the outfit that had done its best to get him drummed out of the Wehrmacht, the outfit that would no doubt take another shot at him now, thanks to Gunther Grillparzer.

  But that couldn’t be helped. As long as he lived in the Greater German Reich, he had to conform to its outward usages. He made a smart about-turn and strode out of General Dornberger’s office. In the antechamber, Major Neufeld’s face revealed nothing but dyspepsia. Drucker nodded to him and walked out.

  He was just leaving the administrative center when a black Mercedes pulled to a halt in front of it. A couple of Gestapo men got out of it and hurried into the building. They took no special notice of him, but he would have bet Reichsmarks against pfennigs they hadn’t come to Peenemünde on any other business.

  To hell with you, Grillparzer, you son of a bitch, Drucker thought. If you drag me down, I’ll take you with me. He knew the alias under which the ex-panzer gunner had been living in Weimar. If the Gestapo couldn’t track the bastard with that much to go on, the boys in the black shirts weren’t worth much.

  As Drucker walked away from the administration building, he wondered if the loudspeakers would blare out his name again. The SS had wanted his scalp ever since he managed to get Käthe out of their clutches. If Dornberger couldn’t convince them to leave him alone . . .

  What would he do then? Take out his pistol and go down fighting? Take it out and kill himself, so he wouldn’t suffer whatever the blackshirts wanted to inflict on him? If he did either of those things, how would he avenge himself on Gunther Grillparzer? And what would happen to his family afterwards? But if he didn’t do it, would that save his wife and children? And what horrid indignities would be waiting for him?

  The loudspeakers kept quiet. Drucker stayed where he could keep an eye on that black Mercedes. After about forty-five minutes, the Gestapo men came out of the administrative center and got back into the car. By the way they slammed the doors, they weren’t happy with the world. The Mercedes leaped away with a screech of tires, almost flattening a couple of enlisted men who’d presumed to try to cross the road. The soldiers sprang out of the way in the nick of time.

  Drucker watched it go with the same savage joy he’d known when he stuck a pistol in Grillparzer’s face. Before then, he hadn’t felt that part
icular delight since taking out a Lizard panzer during the fighting. Somebody’d tried to ruin him, tried and failed. That was how things were supposed to work, but things didn’t work that way often enough.

  Whistling, Drucker went into the officers’ club, ordered a shot of schnapps, and knocked it back with great relish. The fellow behind the bar, a young blond corporal straight out of a recruiting poster, grinned at him. “Something good must have happened to you, sir,” he said.

  “Oh, you might say so. You just might say so,” Drucker agreed. “Let me have another one, why don’t you? There’s nothing in the world to match the feeling you get when somebody shoots at you and misses, you know that?”

  “If you say so, sir,” the bartender answered. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen combat myself, though.” Polite puzzlement was on his face: what sort of combat would Drucker have seen lately?

  But Drucker knew—and combat it was, even without a literal shot being fired. “Don’t be sorry, son,” he said. “Count yourself lucky. I wish I could say the same thing.”

  “Germans!” Monique Dutourd snarled as she walked up to her brother in the Jardin Puget, a few blocks south of Marseille’s Old Harbor. Not far away, sweaty kids booted a football toward one side’s goal.

  “Don’t start talking yet,” Pierre warned. He looked around to make sure no one else in the park was taking any notice of him, then pulled from his pocket a gadget plainly not of Earthly manufacture. Only after waving it at her and examining the lights that glowed and flickered at one end did he nod. “All right. The Boches have not planted any ears on you.”

  “Germans,” Monique said again; even the usual scornful French nickname for them didn’t let her get rid of enough anger to be satisfying. Only by calling them exactly what they were could she vent even part of the loathing she’d come to feel for the occupiers.

  To her intense annoyance, her older brother chuckled. “You just went about your business as long as they didn’t bother you too much. It’s only after they start annoying you personally that you discover you’ve hated them all along, eh?”