Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  “Of course I know that,” Nesseref said indignantly. “Do you think I hatched out of my eggshell yesterday? This is not for me—it is for a friend who has a beffel. Does that meet with your approval, superior female?”

  Nesseref was in fact of far higher rank than the other female. But the pet-shop proprietor seemed to have trouble recognizing sarcasm. She answered, “I suppose you can get one if you really want to.”

  “Thank you so much,” Nesseref said. “My friend, by the way, is a Tosevite. He likes his beffel very much.”

  “A Big Ugly with a beffel?” The other female stared in undisguised horror. “What is this world coming to?”

  She meant it as a rhetorical question, but Nesseref answered it anyhow: “Something no one on Home expected—a true blending of the Race and the Tosevites.”

  “I do not like it,” the other female said firmly.

  Although Nesseref wasn’t so sure she liked it, either, she said, “It may just turn out to be . . . interesting.”

  David Goldfarb thought the Canadian shipping line that ran the Liberty Hot Springs might have changed the ship’s name after acquiring her from the USA, but no one had bothered. He asked a sailor about it one day as the ship steamed west across the Atlantic.

  “No, we wouldn’t do that,” the fellow answered. “Hadn’t been for the Americans, we’d be bowing down to the Emperor five times a day, too, or whatever it is the Lizards do.”

  He sounded like an American himself, at least to Goldfarb’s ear. The RAF officer—no, the ex-RAF officer, he reminded himself—could gauge the home region and status of anyone from the British Isles just by listening to him for a couple of minutes. But American accents only put him in mind of evenings at the cinema, and all Yanks seemed to him to talk the same way.

  But when he remarked that the sailor sounded like an American screen actor, the fellow laughed at him. “You can tell the difference once you learn how,” he said. “We say zed and shedule, the same as you do in England. On the other side of the border, they say zee and skedule. And when they go through a door, they go owt”—he exaggerated the pronunciation—“but we go oat.”

  “Now that you tell me, I can hear the difference,” Goldfarb admitted, “but I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.”

  The Canadian shrugged. Was that rueful? Resigned? Amused? Something of all three? Goldfarb wasn’t sure. The sailor said, “Getting harder and harder for us to tell differences these days. Since the fighting stopped, we’ve looked more and more south to the USA and less and less across the ocean to England. Meaning no offense, pal, but you’ve had other things on your mind than us.”

  “I know,” Goldfarb said bitterly. “Britain’s looking south more and more these days, too—south across the Channel to the Greater German Reich. The UK is turning into a pack of little Nazis because it’s next door to the big ones.”

  “Yes, it’s a shame,” the sailor said. He sounded sympathetic but distant—what happened to the United Kingdom didn’t matter much to him. And the Reich wasn’t the biggest danger loose in the world, and hadn’t been for a long time. Next to the Lizards, who cared about Germans?

  And, next to the sailor’s duties, he didn’t care much about keeping a passenger entertained. Oh, he was polite; he tipped his cap as he went on his way. But go on his way he did, leaving Goldfarb alone on the deck of the Liberty Hot Springs, with the Atlantic all around him.

  The only long sea voyages he’d made before were to Poland and back during the fighting, when he’d rescued his cousin Moishe Russie from a Lizard gaol. He’d gone by submarine then, and hadn’t had much—hadn’t had any—chance to look out. Traveling from Liverpool to Belfast for his last RAF posting hadn’t been the same, either, for he’d hardly gone out of sight of land. Now . . .

  Now, for the first time in his life, he got a sense of how truly vast the ocean was. The ship didn’t seem to move on it. Nothing came up over the western horizon, nothing vanished below the eastern horizon. From what his senses told him, the Liberty Hot Springs might sail on forever without seeing land again.

  Goldfarb wondered if it was the same out in space. Airplanes were different. He knew about them. The sense of motion was never absent in them; neither was the sense that the journey, which by the nature of things could last only hours, would soon end. Traveling across the solar system as the Lewis and Clark had done, or from star to star as the Lizards did . . . Those were wider oceans than the Liberty Hot Springs was meant to sail.

  A couple of other sailors hurried past him, intent on business of their own. On this ship, passengers were an afterthought. On a liner, they wouldn’t have been, but Goldfarb wouldn’t have been able to afford passage across the Atlantic on a liner. Serving his country all his adult life hadn’t made him rich.

  He wondered what serving his country all his adult life had got him. In some small ways, he’d helped make sure Britain wouldn’t be occupied by the Germans or the Lizards, but he doubted that would have changed much had he stayed in London’s East End instead of volunteering for the RAF.

  Of course, if he’d played along with the ginger smugglers in the RAF, he might well be on his way toward getting rich now. But that wasn’t why he’d joined. He might not know many things, but he was certain of that.

  Some sort of bird flew by the ship. Pointing to it, a passing sailor said, “Land in a couple of days.”

  “Really?” Goldfarb said, and the Canadian nodded. Goldfarb felt foolish; he knew when the journey had started and how long it was supposed to last, and shouldn’t have needed the bird to remind him when they would approach Canada. Using it as a sign took him back to the days before steam engines, back even to the days before chronometers, when accurately gauging a ship’s position was impossible and such portents really mattered.

  Naomi came up from below and looked around. Seeing Goldfarb, she waved and made her way over to him. She’d always been very fair; in the moderately rough seas they’d met earlier in the journey, she’d gone pale as skimmed milk. She didn’t have a whole lot of color now, either, come to that.

  “Won’t be too much longer,” David said, and spoke of the bird as if it, and not the steady thud of the ship’s engine, meant they would be coming to Canada soon.

  Naomi accepted the news in the spirit with which he’d offered it. “Danken Gott dafür,” she said. “It’s seemed like forever.” A voyage that had been timeless in one sense for Goldfarb had been timeless in a very different sense for her. She gathered herself and went on, “The children will be disappointed.”

  “Yes, they’ve had a fine time,” Goldfarb agreed. “They won’t want to get off the ship when we get to Montreal.”

  Naomi rolled her eyes. “If I have to, I’ll drag them off,” she said. “Who would have thought my children would turn out to be good sailors?” She sounded as if they’d betrayed her by not getting sick.

  When the Liberty Hot Springs reached Canadian waters, Goldfarb got another surprise: the scale of the country. The Gulf of St. Lawrence, protected from the greater sea by Newfoundland and the headland of Nova Scotia, was impressive, but nothing had prepared him for the St. Lawrence River itself. He had trouble seeing both banks at the same time when the ship first entered it: where gulf stopped and river began seemed very much a matter of opinion. Even when it eventually narrowed, it remained awe-inspiringly large.

  “There must be as much water going through here as there is in all the rivers in England put together,” Goldfarb remarked to a sailor.

  “Oh, more than that,” the Canadian said smugly.

  And, fighting against the St. Lawrence’s fierce current, the Liberty Hot Springs took two and a half days to get to Montreal after entering the river. That journey alone was about as far as it was from the Isle of Wight in southern England to the Orkneys off the northern coast of Scotland—but it took in only a small bite of the vastness that was Canada. Goldfarb’s notions of scale got revised again.

  Only Montreal itself failed to overwhelm him. It was a
fair-sized city, sure enough. But to a man born and raised in London, that was all it was. Britain might be small, but it had plenty of people.

  When longshoremen tied the ship up at a quay, he gave a long sigh of relief. “We’re here,” he said to Naomi. “We can start over now.”

  “Let’s not be so happy till we get through customs,” his wife answered. She’d been a refugee before, fleeing the Reich. If that wasn’t enough to ingrain pessimism in someone, Goldfarb didn’t know what would be.

  But he said, “Well, our papers are in order, so we shouldn’t have any trouble.” As she had up on deck a few days before, his wife rolled her eyes.

  Clutching papers and suitcases and children, he and Naomi went over the gangplank, off the ship, and onto Canadian soil. He’d wondered if, in Montreal, he would have to deal with officials who spoke French. But the fellow to whose post he came wore a name badge that said V. WILLIAMS and used English of the same sort as the sailors on the Liberty Hot Springs.

  “So you are immigrating to our country, eh?” he said, examining passports and immigration forms.

  “Yes, sir.” A lifetime in the RAF had taught Goldfarb the shortest answers were the best.

  “Reason for leaving Great Britain?” Williams asked.

  “Too many people getting too chummy with Himmler,” Goldfarb said dryly.

  Whatever Williams had expected by way of reply, that wasn’t it. He was about Goldfarb’s age; he might well have seen action against the Germans himself. “Er, yes,” he said, and scribbled a note on the form in front of him. “So your claim would involve political liberties, then? We don’t often see that from the mother country.”

  Naomi said, “You will see more of it, I think, as England comes closer to the Reich.”

  “It could be so, ma’am,” the immigration officer said, and wrote another note. He turned back to David. “Now, then—what skills do you bring to Canada?”

  “I’m just retired from the RAF,” Goldfarb answered. “I served since 1939, and I’ve been working with radars all that time. I’ll gladly pass along anything I happen to know that you don’t, and I’ll be looking for civilian work in electronics or at an airport.”

  “I see.” Williams turned away and shuffled through some papers. He pulled one out, read it, and nodded. “I thought your name was familiar. You’re the fellow who was involved in that ginger-smuggling mess last year, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” Goldfarb answered with a sinking feeling.

  His old chum Jerome Jones had managed to clear away the obstacles to his emigration from Britain. What obstacles had Basil Roundbush and his pals managed to throw up against his immigration into Canada?

  Williams tapped the eraser end of his pencil against his front teeth, “You and your family are to be permitted into the country,” he said, still eyeing that sheet of paper. “You are to be permitted entry, but you are also to be transported to Ottawa for a thorough interrogation. Until that interrogation is completed to the satisfaction of the authorities, you are to remain under the authority of the Canadian government.”

  “What precisely does that mean?” Goldfarb asked. I should have known this wouldn’t be easy. Gevalt, Naomi knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  “What it says, more or less,” the immigration officer answered. “You are not free to settle until this process is finalized.” He sounded every inch a bureaucrat.

  Voice brittle, Naomi asked, “And how long is that likely to take?”

  Williams spread his hands. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t the least idea. That’s not my bailiwick at all, I’m afraid.” Yes, he was a bureaucrat, all right.

  “We’re prisoners, then,” David Goldfarb said.

  “Not prisoners—not exactly, anyhow,” Williams answered.

  “But not free, either.”

  The immigration officer nodded. “No, not free.”

  9

  Glen Johnson peered out through the spacious glass canopy of his hot rod. That was the name that seemed to have stuck on the little auxiliary rockets the crew of the Lewis and Clark used to go exploring in the neighborhood of Ceres. He had radar and an instrument suite almost as complete as the one aboard Peregrine, but the Mark One eyeball was still his instrument of first choice.

  Just for a moment, he glanced toward the shrunken sun. It showed only a tiny disk, barely a third the size it would have from Earth’s orbit. Lots of pieces of rock in the neighborhood looked bigger.

  He watched the rocks and he watched the radar screen. At the moment, he was out ahead of Ceres, and moving away from it. Most of what he had to worry about was stuff he was approaching. He’d have to be more careful on the return trip, when he’d be swimming against the tide, so to speak. Hot rods were built to take it, but he didn’t want to put that to the test.

  From the back seat, Lucy Vegetti said, “That dark one over to the left looks like it ought to be interesting. The one that looks like a squash, I mean.”

  To Johnson, it looked like just another floating chunk of rock, with a long axis of perhaps a quarter of a mile. He shrugged. “You’re the mineralogist,” he said, and used the hot rod’s attitude jets to turn toward the little asteroid. “What do you hope we’ll find there?”

  “Iron, with luck,” she answered.

  He chuckled. “Here I am, alone with a pretty girl”—all the women on the Lewis and Clark looked good to him by now, even the sour assistant dietitian—“and all she wants to do is talk about rocks.”

  “This is work,” Lucy said.

  “Well, so it is.” Johnson glanced to the radar screen. He grunted in surprise, looked out the canopy, and grunted again. “What the devil?” he said.

  “Is something wrong?” Lucy Vegetti asked.

  “I dunno.” He looked down at the radar screen again. “The instruments are reporting something my eyes aren’t seeing.” He scratched his chin. “As far as I can tell, the set’s behaving the way it’s supposed to.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “Either it’s misbehaving in a way I don’t know about, or else my eyes need rewiring,” he answered.

  Lucy laughed, but he wasn’t kidding, or not very much. He didn’t like it when what his eyes saw didn’t match what the radar saw. If the instrument was wrong, it needed fixing. If it wasn’t wrong . . . He rubbed his eyes, not that that would do a whole lot of good.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to try to find out what’s going on,” he said. “No offense, but your rock isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Go ahead,” Lucy Vegetti said, though she had to know he’d asked her permission only as a matter of form.

  Ever so cautiously, Johnson goosed the hot rod toward what the radar insisted was there but his eyes denied. And then, after a bit, they stopped denying it. “Will you look at that?” he said softly. “Will you just look at that? Something’s getting in the way of the stars.” He pointed to show Lucy what he meant.

  She nodded. “So it is. I see it, now that you’ve shown it to me, but I didn’t before. What do you suppose it could be?”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” As Peregrine had back in Earth orbit, the hot rod mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns. He had teeth. He didn’t know if he’d need to use them, but knowing they were there helped reassure him. He slowed the hot rod’s acceleration—whatever this thing was, it didn’t seem to be under acceleration itself.

  “No wonder we couldn’t see it before,” Lucy breathed as they got closer and the mystery object covered more and more of the sky. “It’s all painted flat black.”

  “It sure is,” Johnson agreed. “And that’s a better flat black than anything we could turn out, which means . . .”

  The mineralogist finished the sentence for him: “Which means the Lizards have sent something out to take a look at what we’re up to.”

  When the hot rod got within a couple of hundred yards of the spacecraft, Johnson stopped its progress and peered through binoculars. From that range, he
could see the sun sparkling off lenses here and there, and could also make out antennas aimed back toward Earth—much smaller and more compact than those the Lewis and Clark carried.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Lucy asked.

  Johnson’s first impulse was to cut loose with the machine guns the hot rod carried. He didn’t act on that impulse. Pulling a sour face, he answered, “I’m going to ask Brigadier General Healey what he wants me to do.” He didn’t like Healey, not even slightly. The commandant of the Lewis and Clark had hauled him aboard for the crime of excess curiosity, a crime that had just missed being a capital offense.

  He had no trouble raising the Lewis and Clark; he would have been astonished and alarmed if he had. But convincing the radioman he really did need to talk to the commandant took a couple of minutes. At last, Healey said, “Go ahead, Johnson. What’s on your mind?”

  His suspicions about the pilot had eased, but hadn’t gone away. Johnson got the idea Healey’s suspicions never went away. Well, he was going to feed one that had nothing to do with him. “Sir,” he answered, “I’ve found a Lizard spy ship.” He explained how that had happened.

  When he was done, Healey let out along, clearly audible sigh. “I don’t suppose we ought to be surprised,” the commandant said at last. “The scaly sons of bitches have to be wondering what we’re up to out here.”

  “Shall I shoot it up, sir?” Johnson asked. “That would give ’em a good poke in the eye turret.”

  To his surprise, Healey said, “No. For one thing, we don’t know if this is the only machine they’ve sent out. They’re suspenders-and-belt . . . critters, so odds are it isn’t. And if you do, they’ll know what’s happened to it. We don’t want to give them any excuse to start a war out here, because odds are we’d lose it. Hold fire. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir. Hold fire,” Johnson agreed. “What do I do, then? Just wave to the Lizards and go on about my business?”

  “That’s exactly what you do,” Healey answered. “If you’d opened up on it without asking for orders, I would have been very unhappy with you. You did the right thing, reporting in.” Maybe he sounded surprised Johnson had done the right thing. Maybe the radio speaker in the hot rod was just on the tinny side. Maybe, but Johnson wouldn’t have bet on it.