Second Contact (6 page)

Below and to either side were the bulges of his missile tubes, a thermonuclear sting in each of them. If he got the order, he could blow a couple of Lizards or Russians or Americans out of the sky—or, for that matter, aim the missiles at land targets.

Sun sparkled off the titanium wings on which he’d ride back to Earth. The swastikas on the wings were due for repainting; this upper stage had made several landings since the last time they’d been slapped on. He shrugged. That sort of stuff was for people down on the ground to worry about. Up here, as in any combat assignment, what you did counted. What you looked like didn’t.

Drucker lightly touched the control stick. “Just a damn driver,” he muttered. “That’s all I’ve ever been, just a damn driver.” He’d driven panzers against the French, against the Russians, and then against the Lizards before setting his sights higher both figuratively and literally. This upper stage—he’d named it
Käthe
, after his wife— responded far more smoothly and easily than the big grunting machines he’d formerly guided.

Of course, if a shell slammed into a panzer, he had some chance of bailing out. If anyone ever decided to expend a missile on him here, odds were a million to one he’d never know what hit him.

His wireless set crackled to life. “German pilot, this is the U.S. tracking facility in Hot Springs. Do you read me? Over.” A moment later, the American radioman switched from English to badly accented German.

Like most who flew into space, Drucker spoke some English and Russian—and some of the Lizards’ language—along with his German. “Hot Springs tracking, this is the German rocket,” he said. “How do I look? Over.”

It wasn’t an academic question. By his own navigation, he was in the orbit calculated for him. If American radar showed otherwise, though, things might get sticky. Unexpected changes in course from a spacecraft carrying nuclear weapons had a way of making people nervous.

But the American answered, “In the groove,” which let him relax. Then the fellow said, “How’s the weather up there, Hans? Over.”

“Very bad,” Drucker answered seriously. “Rain last night, and a snowstorm ahead. Is that you, Joe? Over.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Joe said with a laugh at Drucker’s attempt at humor: weather was one thing—maybe the only thing—he didn’t have to worry about in space. “You’ll be coming down from your tour in another few orbits, won’t you? Over.”

“I do not answer this sort of question,” Drucker said. “You know I do not answer this sort of question. Your pilots do not answer this sort of question when we ask. Over.”

“You stay nosy, though, and so do we,” Joe answered, not in the least put out. “Have yourself a safe landing. I’ll talk to you some more when you come up for another turn. Over and out.”

“Thank you—over and out,” Drucker said. The American’s signal had started to break up before strengthening. Like the
Reich
and the Soviet Union, the USA had strings of ships that relayed transmissions to pilots wherever above the Earth they might be. The Lizards were the only ones who didn’t need to bother with that. For one thing, they had more communications satellites and other spacecraft in orbit than all the human powers put together. For another, they had ground stations around the world, which no human power did.

Drucker scowled. And now their colonization fleet was beginning to join the conquest fleet. The colonists had set out from Tau Ceti II about the time the conquest fleet reached Earth. They’d expected a world subdued and waiting for them.
Hitler didn’t let that happen,
Drucker thought proudly. Could he have done so without harming the Greater German
Reich
, he would have blasted every Lizard spacecraft out of the sky. He couldn’t. No human could. What would happen when the colonists started coming down to Earth was something he didn’t like to think about.

What would happen when he came back to Earth was less important to human history, but much more immediately urgent to him. Joe’s
Have yourself a safe landing
hadn’t been idle chatter. The upper stage Drucker rode, like all manmade spacecraft, was an uneasy blend of human and Lizard technology. The Wall of Heroes at Peenemünde had all too many names inscribed on it. Despite the handsome pension that would accrue to his widow, Drucker did not want his added to it.

He slid over the Atlantic in a matter of minutes, and then across Africa. The whole continent belonged to the Lizards. Some small rebellion still simmered in what had been the Union of South Africa, enough to keep the Lizards from exploiting the minerals there as fully as they might have. Other than that, the whole great land mass was theirs to do with as they would.

When his orbit swung north of the equator once more, he got a call from a Soviet radar station. The Russians also confirmed that he was where they expected him to be. His conversation with them, unlike the one with the American radioman, was coldly formal. He would have got rid of them, too, could he only have done it safely, and he knew they felt the same way about him. He scowled again. If only the Lizards hadn’t come along when they did, the
Reich
would have put paid to Bolshevism once for all.

He couldn’t do anything about that, either. The world, when you got down to it, could be a pretty unsatisfactory place.

An orbit and a half before he was supposed to land, he radioed a German relay ship and confirmed that he was coming back to Earth. He spoke in clear—code made listeners nervous, and the Lizards certainly were monitoring his transmissions, the Americans and Russians probably were, and the British and Japanese might be.

A touch of a button fired the retarding rockets in the nose of his spacecraft. As soon as they had burned long enough to slow the craft and take him out of orbit, he shut them down. The touch of another button slid covers over the openings to their motors. He breathed easier when sensors confirmed all three covers were in place. A motor opening left unsealed would have wrecked his aerodynamics, his spacecraft, and him.

As he slid back into the atmosphere, the nose of the craft and the leading edges of the wings glowed red. The ablative coating on them was a Lizard invention that all three human nations that put men into space had stolen. Little by little, the stick came alive in Drucker’s hands. Before long, he was flying the upper stage like a large, heavy glider.

Germany’s Baltic coastline was anything but interesting, especially after so many of the Earthly marvels he’d seen from space: nothing but low, flat land sloping ever so gradually downward toward the gray, shallow sea.

Another reassuring sound was that of the landing gear coming down. Drucker landed the upper stage on a long concrete runway. After two weeks of weightlessness, he felt as if he had someone—or maybe two or three someones—sitting on his chest. Moving like an old, old man, he climbed out of the hatch set into the side of the spacecraft and down a little ladder to the runway.

Having fire trucks standing by was normal. Having groundcrew men jogging up to take charge of the upper stage was also normal. So was having the base commandant, a major general with the silver-gray
Waffenfarb
of the Rocket Force coming up to greet him. Having a couple of SS men in long black coats accompanying the general, though, was anything but normal.

Drucker’s eyes narrowed. His dislike for the SS went back almost half a lifetime, to a day when he and other enlisted men of his panzer crew had cheated them of their chosen prey. No one he knew liked the SS. Everyone he knew feared the SS. He feared the SS himself, and feared the men in black the more because his past, if it ever came out, left him vulnerable to them even after all these years.

As they came up to him, their right arms shot out and up in perfect unison. “
Heil
Himmler!” they chorused.

“Heil!”
Drucker returned the salute. He turned to Major General Dornberger, a decent enough fellow. “What’s up, sir?”

Before Dornberger could speak, one of the SS men said, “You are Drucker, Johannes, lieutenant colonel, pay number—” He rattled it off.

“I am.” Drucker would much sooner not have been standing there. His feet hurt, his back hurt, even his hair seemed to hurt. He wanted to go somewhere, sit down—or, better yet, lie down—and make his report. After riding a rocket into space, wasn’t he entitled to a little comfort? A bottle of schnapps would have been nice, too. “Who are you?” he asked, as cuttingly as he dared.

The SS man ignored him. “You are to consider yourself removed from the roster of approved
Reich
Rocket Force pilots, effective this date and pending investigation and interrogation,” he droned.

“What?” Drucker stared. “Why? What did I do? What in blazes could I have done? I’ve been out in space, in case you hadn’t noticed.” Inside, he shivered. Had his past risen up to bite him after all?

“You will come with us immediately for interrogation and evaluation,” the SS man said. “We have discovered reliable evidence that your wife’s paternal grandmother was a Jew.” Drucker’s jaw fell open. Käthe had never said a word about that, not in all the years he’d known her. He wondered if she’d known herself. “Come,” the SS man snapped. Numbly, Drucker came.

Mordechai Anielewicz whistled as he rode a bicycle along a road not far from the border between Lizard-occupied Poland and the Greater German
Reich
. A farmer was weeding not far from the side of the road. Anielewicz waved to him. “Have you stopped beating your wife, Boleslaw?” he called.

The Pole waved to him. “Devils will roast you in hell, you damned Jew.”

They both laughed. Anielewicz kept pedaling up the road toward Lodz. If Poland wasn’t the most peculiar country in the world, he couldn’t imagine what was. Just for starters, it was the only place he could think of where most of the inhabitants were happier to have the Lizards in charge than they would have been with human beings. Of course, given that the choices in human overlords were limited to the
Reich
and the Soviet Union, that made better sense in Poland than it did most other places.

Oh, some Poles went on and on about regaining their independence. They fondly imagined they could keep that independence more than about twenty minutes if the Lizards ever decided to leave. They’d managed to keep it for twenty years after World War I, but both their big neighbors had been weak then. The USSR and, to Mordechai’s regret, Germany weren’t weak now.

And the Jews who survived in Poland weren’t weak these days, either. Anielewicz had a submachine gun slung across his back. A lot of men and even women, both Poles and Jews, still went armed these days. Mordechai had seen a lot of Westerns from Hollywood, some dubbed into Polish, others into Yiddish. He understood them much better now than he had when he’d been a Warsaw engineering student before the Germans invaded in 1939. A gun was an equalizer.

Hidden away somewhere not too far from Lodz, the Jews had the ultimate equalizer: an explosive-metal bomb, captured from the Nazis who’d intended to turn the city and its large ghetto into a mushroom cloud. Anielewicz didn’t know whether the bomb would still work after all these years. His technicians had done their best to maintain it, but how good was that? The Poles couldn’t be sure. Neither could the Lizards. And neither could the Germans or the Russians.

He started whistling again, a loud, cheery tune. “Not being too certain is good for people,” he said to no one in particular. “It keeps them from going ahead and doing things they’re sorry for later.”

As he got closer to Lodz, his legs started aching. He was up into his forties now, not a young man as he had been during the war. He’d been riding a good long way, too, up from Belchatow. But whenever he got aches and pains he didn’t think he ought to have, he wondered if the nerve gas he’d breathed while keeping the Germans from blowing up Lodz was still having its way with him. He’d had the antidote; without it, he would have just quietly stopped breathing and died. Even so, his health had never been the same since.

That sort of doubt made him pedal harder than ever, to prove to himself that he did have something left. Sweat streamed down his face. The modern suburbs around Lodz whizzed past in a blur. So did a Lizard radar station, one dish scanning toward the west, toward Germany, the other toward the south, in the direction of German-dominated Hungary. If trouble came this way, it could get here in a hurry.

If trouble came this way and didn’t get knocked down, he would probably die before he knew it arrived. That was a consolation of sorts, but he declined to be consoled. Most of the people in the neighborhood around the radar station were Jews. They waved to Mordechai as he rode past. He waved back, and called out the same sort of insults he’d traded with Boleslaw the Pole. Along with most of the Jews in Poland, he switched back and forth between Yiddish and Polish, sometimes hardly noticing he was doing it.

Traffic got heavier as he rode up Franciszkanska Street into the city: horse-drawn wagons, lorries, motorcars—some old gasoline-burners, others hydrogen-powered—and swarms of bicycles. Anielewicz was glad to have an excuse to slow down.

New and old commingled inside Lodz. It had suffered in the German invasion, and again in the Lizards’ conquest of the area, and yet again when the Nazis started lobbing rockets at it. In the intervening years, fresh construction had replaced most of the buildings wrecked in one round or another of fighting. Some new structures were of brick or pale tan sandstone that harmonized with their older neighbors. Others, especially those the Lizards had run up for themselves, were so boxy and utilitarian, they might as well have been alien invaders—and so, in fact, they were.

Anielewicz still lived in what had been the Lodz ghetto, not far from the fire station that had housed the ghetto’s only motorized vehicle, a fire engine. He could have lived anywhere in the city— indeed, anywhere in Poland—he chose. His flat suited him well enough, and his wife, Bertha, had lived her whole life in Lodz. He sometimes thought about moving, but without great urgency.

An old friend waved as he rolled to a stop in front of the block of flats and put his feet down on the ground. Mordechai waved back. “How are you today, Ludmila?” he asked with real concern.