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“The laundry,” Drucker said. “Now your mother, I cannot for her answer.”
He smiled, listening to the American curse him. Before long, the curses faded as he went out of range and the bulge of the Earth hid the space station. He nodded to himself. He had given at least as good as he got. But then his satisfaction dribbled away. He hadn’t learned anything, which was what he’d hoped for. Like everybody else, the Wehrmacht paid for what you did, not for how good you looked when you didn’t do much.
Or had he learned something after all, something he would sooner not have known? When the Reich began fighting Poland, when the Reich began fighting the Bolsheviks, it had termed both campaigns counterattacks. Drucker couldn’t prove those statements were lies, but he knew few foreigners believed them. Could Himmler be lying here, too?
If Germany had launched the missiles of an orbiting weapon against the Race, she was wise to lie about it. Even bestriding Europe like a colossus, the Greater German Reich was the smallest independent human power, its population fearsomely concentrated. The Lizards could take a terrible revenge.
He reported his conversation with the American to a German radio relay ship in the Indian Ocean. “That is good, Lieutenant Colonel,” the radioman told him. “The Lizards do not pay enough attention to the United States. Perhaps we can persuade them to do so. For some reason, they always suspect us and accuse us instead.” His voice took on a faint whining tone. “I do not understand why.”
“I can’t imagine,” Drucker said, and then hoped the fellow down there on the ship didn’t notice how dry he sounded. But his own hope for promotion had slammed into a stone wall not for anything he’d done, but because of suspicions about his wife’s ancestry. And a lot worse than that would have happened to Kathe had the SS been able to nail their suspicions down tight.
The Lizards had to know such things. Was it any wonder they suspected the Reich on account of them?
“See if you can learn more still on your next pass under the space station,” the radio operator told Drucker.
“I’ll try,” he answered, and broke the connection. The signal for the attack on the colonization fleet, he remembered, had come from the Indian Ocean. It was supposed to have come from a U-boat, but was everyone dead certain of that?
Centimeter by centimeter, he made himself relax. The USA had a relay ship down there in the waters between Africa and Australia, and so did the USSR. Anyone could have done it.
As his orbit carried him over Australia, he chuckled to himself. Undoubtedly a U-boat had lobbed ginger bombs at the Lizards’ cities going up in the desert there. Nobody knew whose U-boat had done it. Drucker chuckled again, thinking of the orgy the Lizards must have had. “Killing them with kindness,” he said, and then came right out and laughed, because kindness didn’t begin to describe it.
Up over the long stretch of the Pacific Ocean he flew, passing not far from the island the self-styled Free French still ruled. That notion made him laugh, too, in a different way. If petty criminals and gambling lords wanted to call their little bailiwick a country, he couldn’t stop them, but that didn’t mean he had to take them seriously.
Eventually, he caught up with the space station again. When he called to report his presence in the neighborhood (not that the station wouldn’t know unless its radar was out), the same radio operator as before answered him: “Your mouth is so big, pal, I figured you’d have sucked all the air out of your cabin by now.”
“You talk about big,” Drucker said, laughing once more. “When do you take that big boat of yours onto the sea instead of leaving it in orbit docked?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the American answered.
Drucker started to make another gibe, but then he really listened to what the radioman had said. “What was that?” he asked, wanting to make sure he’d heard what he thought he had.
But the American didn’t repeat himself. Instead, he replied, “I said, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
He hadn’t said that. Drucker’s English wasn’t perfect, but he was sure the American hadn’t said that or anything like it. What did that mean? Drucker could think of only one thing: the American had slipped and was trying to cover it up. “You will never get that ugly beast moving,” he jeered, trying to rattle the radioman into another mistake.
To his sorrow, it didn’t work. “We’re doing five miles a second now,” the American said. “Eight kilometers a second for you, buddy. That’s fast enough, don’t you figure?”
“Whatever you say,” Drucker answered. “You are the one who likes to brag.”
This time, he got no answer. He hadn’t gone out of range of the space station. It still glowed like a Christmas-tree ornament on his radar screen. That had to mean the American was clamming up on purpose. And that had to mean the fellow had put his foot in it, and knew he had, too.
No more questions, Drucker thought. Let the radioman think he hadn’t noticed a thing out of the ordinary. The American would be hoping he hadn’t, anyhow. Drucker sped on in delicious, thoughtful silence.
He started to radio what he’d learned-no, what he’d heard, because he wasn’t sure what he’d learned-down to the next German relay ship over which he crossed. He stopped with his index finger already on the transmit button. Someone, no doubt, would be monitoring his traffic with the relay ship. With a little luck, nobody’d noticed his unusual exchange with the space station. He decided to hang onto it and what it might mean till he got down.
Earth unrolled below, going now into darkness, now into light. Blue ocean, white and gray swirls of cloud, land in shades of green and brown-it was all very beautiful. Drucker wondered whether Lizard pilots with this view felt the same. From what they said, Home held more land and less water. If they thought the Sahara and the Australian outback were comfortable, their opinion of both forests and oceans was liable to be a lot lower than his.
When he was up here, he usually wanted to stay in orbit as long as he could. He liked spaceflight. And, when he was up here, he didn’t have to worry about things going wrong down below. They couldn’t do anything to him up here no matter what went wrong down below.
A moment after that comforting thought, he had one less comforting: they could, if they wanted to badly enough. Another pilot in the upper stage of an A-45 could come after him and shoot him down, just as if he were in a fighter plane.
He patted the control panel. He’d do his best to make anybody who tried that very unhappy. He thought he could manage it, too. Radar made sneaking up to shoot somebody in the back much harder.
And if anyone did come gunning for him… He patted the control panel again. With her two explosive-metal-tipped missiles, Kathe carried a lot of death. If anyone came after him and didn’t get him, he would be in a
position to exact the greatest revenge in the history of the world.
Well, maybe he would be in position. Part of that would depend on how close he was to Nuremberg and Peenemunde, and whether he could get to either one as he came out of orbit.
“Still, the Fuhrer wouldn’t want to find out the hard way,” Drucker murmured, “not if he’s smart, he wouldn’t.”
The transmitter was off. He almost wished it weren’t. The Reich trusted him to fly with atomic weapons. He wouldn’t have minded putting a flea in the ear of some Party bigwigs: a man who flew with atomic weapons was probably not a good man to annoy. Anyone with any brains should have been able to figure that out for himself. Drucker wasn’t so sure how many Party bigwigs had any brains.
Once upon a time, he’d read somewhere, the Americans had flown a rattlesnake flag with the legend don’t tread on me. Drucker slowly nodded. He had two fangs of his own. If people pushed him too hard, he might use them.
Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb felt as if he were moving back through time. He’d flown from Jerusalem to London in one of the Lizards’ jets, a machine as modern as next year. Then he’d taken the train from London to Liverpool, a technology less than a century and a half old-on Earth, anyhow. And then he’d traveled from Liverpool to Belfast on a ferry, and the waves of the Irish Sea had made him as miserably sick as any passenger in any boat since the dawn of time.
Back on solid ground, he’d recovered fast. Seeing Naomi and his children again hadn’t hurt, either. Nor had returning to work. He even seemed to have won some small amount of respect for going into Germany and coming out in one piece.
None of that, though, made him feel as if he’d put the dreadful time behind him. He knew what would. Only a matter of waiting, he thought, and didn’t expect he’d have to wait long.
