Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  She grinned and blew him a kiss when she saw the drinks in his hands. When he gave her one, she raised the glass and said, “Mud in your eye.”

  “Yeah.” Rance sipped, wheezed, and, for a wonder, managed not to cough. “Jesus, that stuff kicks like a mule.” As Penny also drank, he studied her. If he were this Richard, how far would he trust her? About as far as I can throw her, he decided. The fellow selling the ginger would have to be wondering where she’d got the cash this time, and whether she’d try to cheat him. He’d be a jerk if he didn’t come loaded for bear.

  For once, Penny didn’t seem to know where his thoughts were going. She said, “We get ourselves a discount on the herb for paying in gold.”

  “Do we?” Auerbach thought about that, too. Not all his thoughts were pleasant. “We’d better talk with Jean-Claude, then, or with somebody. We’ll want some firepower along so your pal doesn’t try redistributing the wealth.”

  He watched Penny. She took a deep breath. He knew exactly what she was going to say: something along the lines of, Oh, he wouldn ‘t do anything like that. Rance intended to land on her with both feet if she did. But she didn’t; instead, she looked sheepish and answered, “Yeah, we’d better do something about that, hadn’t we?”

  He let out a rasping sigh of relief. “Oh, good. You remember Frederick after all.”

  “Yeah.” Her mouth twisted. “That stupid, greedy son of a bitch. You even told him there was plenty for everybody, and you were dead right, too. But would he listen? Hell, no. Of course, Frederick was an amateur; and Richard’s a pro. He’s been doing this for a long time.”

  “Anybody can get greedy?’ Rance spoke with great conviction. “Best way to make him think twice is to show he’d pay for it if he tried.”

  “Well, I won’t try and tell you you’re wrong, because I think you’re right,” Penny said. “You want to talk to Jean-Claude, or would you rather I did it?”

  “Go ahead. Bat your baby blues. You’ll get a better deal out of him than I could.” Rance wasn’t particularly worried about Penny fooling around with the Tahitian muscleman. For one thing, Jean-Claude was only in his mid-twenties, so he wasn’t all that likely to find her appealing. And, for another, Jean-Claude had a girlfriend of formidable proportions and equally formidable temper. Auerbach wouldn’t have wanted to cross her, and he didn’t think Jean-Claude did, either.

  Now Penny was following his thoughts, for she stuck out her tongue at him. He laughed and said, “You don’t want to do that at a native; it’s sort of like asking for a fight. Now, the next question is, once we’ve got the ginger, how much trouble will we have selling it to a Lizard?”

  “We should manage,” Penny said. “There’s always plenty of ’em around. This place draws shady characters the way honey draws flies.” She took another sip from her brandy. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Uh-huh. I wondered when you’d mention that,” Rance said.

  But she was right. The Free French ran a wide-open outfit. They stayed in business by skimming a little off the top of the deals that got made in their territory, by not asking a whole lot of inconvenient questions, and by keeping the Japanese, the Americans, and the Lizards all too busy eyeing one another for any of them to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

  And so, even as Penny and he went to meet Richard along with Jean-Claude and several other large, beefy pieces of hired muscle, Auerbach saw half a dozen Lizards on the streets of Papeete, all of them in conversation with humans who looked shady. Takes one to know one, he thought.

  Richard was small and lithe and surrounded by bodyguards who looked a lot nastier than the ones Rance and Penny had along. He spoke English with an accent partly French, partly southwestern, as if he’d learned the language by watching a lot of horse operas. “You got the goods?” he asked—the subject under discussion might have been wagon wheels, not gold.

  “Sure do,” Penny answered. “Do you?”

  “You bet,” Richard said, and gestured to one of his henchmen. The burly Tahitian held up a parcel wrapped in twine. At Richard’s gesture, he opened it. The spicy tang of ginger tickled Rance’s nose. Richard gestured again, this time to Penny. “Check it—go right ahead. No false weight. No false measure. I’m a straight dealer.”

  Had he said he was a straight shooter, Auerbach would have believed that, too. Penny did check, tasting the herb and probing to make sure the package held nothing but ginger. When satisfied, she turned to Auerbach. “Pay him, Rance.”

  With a nod, he passed a little case—it didn’t have to be a big one—holding ten pounds of gold to Richard. This was the nasty moment. As soon as the case was out of his hand, that hand slid down toward his own pistol. The temptation to keep the ginger and grab the gold had to be there—had to be there on both sides, in fact, for Richard and his bodyguards were awfully intent themselves.

  But here, unlike the Cape Town park, everything went smoothly. The Frenchman examined the gold as carefully as Penny had checked the ginger. When he said, “C’est bon,” his bully boys visibly relaxed. Then he returned to English: “Good luck unloading that stuff. Enjoyed doing business with you.” And off he went.

  “We’d better unload it,” Rance muttered. They’d just traded away a lot of what they were living on. They couldn’t buy groceries with ginger, not directly. If things went wrong . . .

  “Relax,” Penny said. “We’re in business again.” She sounded confident. But then, she always sounded confident. Rance sighed. He had to hope she was right.

  “Two, please,” Reuven Russie said in Hebrew to the ticket-seller at the cinema. The man gave him a blank stare. He repeated the request in Arabic and handed the fellow a banknote. The ticket-seller’s face lit up. He passed Reuven two tickets, then quickly and accurately made change. “Thanks,” Reuven told him, again in Arabic. He switched to English: “Come on, Jane. Still should be plenty of good seats.”

  “Right,” Jane Archibald said, also in English. She went on, “That bloke should know more Hebrew.”

  “He’s probably just come from some little country village in the middle of nowhere,” Reuven answered. “He’ll learn, I expect.”

  He paused at the snack counter inside the building to buy a couple of rolled papers full of fried chickpeas and two glasses of Coca-Cola. Nibbling and drinking, he and Jane went through the curtains and into the theater itself. They did get good seats, but it was filling faster than Reuben had expected. The crowd was about two-thirds Jews, one-third Arabs. And . . .

  “Will you look at that?” Reuven pointed to three or four Lizards who sat in the front row so they wouldn’t have to peer over and around taller people in seats in front of them. “Why do you suppose they want to watch The Battle of Chicago? Their side lost, after all.”

  “Maybe they think it’s funny. But them losing is good enough reason for me to want to see it.” Jane’s voice took on the grim edge it always held when she talked about the Lizards. She sighed. “I only wish they could make that kind of film about the fighting in Australia.”

  “I know.” Reuven didn’t have the same attitude about the coming of the Race. But then, the Lizards had conquered Jane’s homeland, while they’d freed his people from almost certain death when they drove the Nazis out of Poland. He reached out and took her hand. She smiled at him and squeezed his. He went on, “What surprises me is that the Lizards are letting people here see the film.”

  Jane shrugged. “If the Americans ever conquer the world, it’ll be on account of their cinema, not their guns.”

  Before Reuven could find a good answer for that, the house lights dimmed and the cartoon started. It too was American, with Donald Duck rampaging across the screen. He spoke—spluttered, rather—in English, with Hebrew and Arabic subtitles. Children obviously too young to read, who obviously didn’t speak English, giggled at his antics. So did Reuven. Anybody who couldn’t laugh at Donald Duck had to have something wrong with him somewhere.

  He also kept glancing over at Jane,
her elegant profile illuminated by the flickering light from the screen. She was laughing, too. But after the cartoon ended and the main feature started, her features grew solemn, intent. As far as Reuven was concerned, The Battle of Chicago was just another shoot-’em-up, with tanks and airplanes instead of galloping horses and six-shooters. He paid more attention to the pretty blond French actress who played a nurse in an improbably tight, improbably skimpy uniform than he did to rattling machine guns and spectacular explosions.

  Not so Jane. Whenever the Lizards looked as if they were on the point of breaking through, she squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. And she whooped and cheered every time the Americans rallied. When the explosive-metal bomb went off and blew the Lizards’ army to kingdom come, she leaned over and kissed him. For that, he would have put up with a much longer, much duller film.

  “If only we could have done it to them in a lot more places,” she said with another sigh as the credits rolled across the screen.

  “Well, the Germans may try it again,” Reuven answered. “Do you really like the notion of air-raid drills and more nuclear explosions and poison gas and who can guess what all else? I don’t, not very much.”

  Jane thought for several seconds before saying, “If another war would get rid of the Lizards once and for all, I’d be for it no matter what else it might do. But I don’t think that will happen, no matter how much I wish it would. And the bloody Nazis wouldn’t be any better than the Race as top dogs, would they?”

  “Worse, if you ask me,” Reuven said. “Of course, they’d throw me in an oven first and ask questions later.”

  Jane got up and started for the exit. “Hard to believe they really did that to people-that it’s not just Lizard propaganda, I mean.”

  “I wish it were.” Reuven said. “But if you don’t believe me, talk to my father. He saw a couple of their murder factories with his own eyes.” This was, he knew, not the ideal sort of conversation when out for a good time with a very pretty girl. But The Battle of Chicago and the present world situation had put such thoughts in both their minds. He went on, “If the Lizards hadn’t come, there probably wouldn’t be any Jews left in Poland.” I wouldn’t be alive, was what that meant, though he shied away from thinking of it in those terms. “If the Germans had won the war, there probably wouldn’t be any Jews left anywhere.”

  They walked out into the night, past people coming in for the next show. Slowly, Jane said, “When I was a little girl, we used to think Jews were traitors because they got on so well with the Lizards. I never really understood why you did till I came here to Palestine to study at the medical college.”

  Reuven shrugged. “If the only choices you’ve got are the Reich and the Race, you’re caught between—between . . .” He snapped his fingers in annoyance. “What are you caught between in English? I can’t remember.”

  “The devil and the deep blue sea?” Jane suggested.

  “That’s it. Thanks,” Reuven said. “What would you like to do now? Shall I walk you back to the dormitory?”

  “No,” Jane said, and used one of the Race’s emphatic coughs. “Between the dorm and the college, I feel like I’m in gaol half the time. This is your city; you get to go out and about in it. I don’t, not nearly enough.”

  “All right, then,” Reuven said. “Let’s go to Makarios’ coffeehouse. It’s only a couple of blocks away.” Jane nodded eagerly. Smiling, Reuven slid his arm around her waist. She snuggled against him. His smile got broader.

  Run by a Greek from Cyprus, Makarios’ was as close to neutral ground as Jerusalem had. Jews and Muslims and Christians all drank coffee—and sometimes stronger things—there, and ate stuffed grape leaves, and chatted and argued and dickered far into the night. Lizards showed up there, too, every now and again. Rumor was that Makarios sold ginger out the back door of the coffeehouse; Reuven didn’t know if that was true, but it wouldn’t have surprised him.

  He and Jane found a quiet little table off in a corner. The coffee was Turkish style, thick and sweet and strong, served in small cups. Jane said, “Well, I won’t have to worry about sleeping any more tonight.” She opened her eyes very wide to show what she meant.

  Reuven laughed. He drained his own demitasse and waved to the waiter for a refill. “Evkharistô,” he said when it arrived. He’d learned a few words of Greek from children he’d played with in London during the fighting. Thank you was one of the handful of clean phrases he remembered.

  He and Jane didn’t leave Makarios’ till after midnight. The streets of Jerusalem were quiet, almost deserted; it wasn’t a town that hummed around the clock. Reuven put his arm around Jane again. When she moved toward him instead of pulling back, he kissed her. Her arms went around him, too. She was as tall as he was and very nearly as strong—she all but squeezed the breath out of him.

  His hands cupped her bottom, pulling her against him. She had to know what was going through his mind—and through his endocrine system. And she did. When at last the kiss broke, she murmured, “I wish there were somewhere we could go.”

  If they went back to the medical students’ dormitory, they’d hatch gossip, maybe even scandal. Reuven didn’t know which hotels turned a blind eye to couples who wanted to check in without baggage. He imagined making love to Jane in the parlor of his family’s house and having the twins interrupt at the worst possible moment.

  And then, instead of despair, inspiration struck. “There is!” he exclaimed, and kissed her again, as much from delight at his own cleverness as from desire—although desire was there, too: oh, indeed it was.

  “Where?” Jane asked.

  “You’ll see,” Reuven answered. “Come along with me.”

  He feared she’d said what she said because she thought they really didn’t have anywhere to go, and that she would balk when she found they did. But she held his hand till he got out his keys and used one he’d certainly never thought he would need at this time of night. She gurgled laughter then. In a small, arch voice, she said, “I’m not your patient, Dr. Russie.”

  “And a good thing, too, Dr. Archibald,” he answered, closing the outer door to the office behind them and locking it again. “If you were, this would be unethical.”

  It wasn’t a perfect place; neither high, hard, narrow examining couches nor chairs made an adequate substitute for a bed. But it was quiet and private, and they managed well enough. Better than well enough, Reuven thought dizzily as Jane crouched in front of him as he sat in one of the chairs, then rose from her knees, sat down on his lap, and impaled herself upon him.

  It was as good as he’d thought it would be. Considering all his imaginings about Jane, that made it very fine indeed. He did his best to please her, too, letting his mouth glide from hers to the tips of her breasts and stroking between her legs as she rode him. She threw back her head and let out a couple of sharp, explosive gasps of pleasure. A moment later, he groaned as he too spent himself.

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the end of the nose. With one arm round her back and his other hand resting on her smooth, bare thigh, he thought of something he realized should have crossed his mind sooner. “I should have worn a rubber,” he blurted. He had stayed hard inside her; that was alarming enough to make him lose his ardor and slide out.

  “Not too much to worry about,” Jane said. “My period’s due in a couple of days. I’d have fretted a good deal more a week or ten days ago.”

  “All right.” Reuven ran a hand along the curves of her flank and hip. He didn’t want to let go of her—but at the same time he began to wonder what would, or what ought to, happen next. “Not just friends anymore,” he said.

  “No.” Jane chuckled, then kissed him again. “Your family won’t approve. Oh, your sisters might, but your mother and father won’t. What are you going to do about that?”

  It was a good question, and one Reuven heard with a certain amount of relief. She might have said, Now are you going to ask me to marry you? He was a long way from sure he wanted to marr
y Jane; that was a notion very different from wanting to lay her. And, even though she’d made love with him, he wasn’t at all sure she wanted to marry him, either.

  “Right now, I just don’t know,” he answered slowly. “We have to figure out what we want to do after this before we worry about my family, I think.”

  He hoped that wouldn’t anger her. It didn’t; she nodded and got off him. “Fair enough,” she answered. “I didn’t know if you wanted to play it by ear, but that suits me well enough for now. And,” she added with brisk practicality, “we’d better make sure we don’t leave any spots on the chair or the carpet, or else your father will know a lot sooner than we want him to.”

  Money of my own, Monique Dutourd thought. It was less money than it would have been had she been able to take the grand prize the Lizards tried to press on her. That still rankled. They should have been willing to give her the full cash value of the house she couldn’t accept. Who would have thought there were cheapskates among the Race?

  She had a fine mental picture of herself accepting the house and moving in. She might have stayed there by herself for five minutes before Standartenführer Dieter Kuhn started pounding on the door and demanding that she take him back to the bedroom. On the other hand, she might not have, too.

  But twenty thousand Reichsmarks was a tidy little sum. And, best of all, Pierre didn’t know she had the money—or she didn’t think he did, anyhow. As far as she could tell, her brother didn’t search her room. I can do what I want with it, she thought. What I want, not what anybody else wants. If I can get a passport under a name that’s not my own, I can even get out of the Reich altogether.

  From the bellicose rantings in the newspapers, that struck her as a better idea every day. The Germans seemed as intent on attacking Poland as they had when she was a girl. She thought they were insane, but she’d seen a lot of German insanity over the past generation. More wouldn’t surprise her.

  The only trouble was, if the Germans got into a war with the Lizards, the Lizards wouldn’t care that Marseille was properly a part of France. To them, it would be just another city in the Greater German Reich—in other words, a target.