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“Hello, American spacecraft. Over.” The call was in crisp, gutturally flavored English. “Who are you?”
“Peregrine here, Johnson speaking,” Johnson answered. “Who are you, German spacecraft?” The German equivalents of his ship had orbits with about the same period as his own, but, because Peenemunde was a lot farther north than Kitty Hawk, they swung farther north and south than he did, and met only intermittently.
“Drucker here, in Kathe,” the flier from the Reich answered. “And I wish I were in Kathe right now, and not up here. Do I say this right auf Englisch?”
“If you mean what I think you mean, yeah, that’s how you say it,” Johnson replied with a chuckle. “Wife or girlfriend, Drucker? I forget.”
“Wife,” Drucker answered. “I am a lucky man, I know, to be still in love with the woman I married. Have you a wife, Johnson?”
“Divorced,” Johnson said shortly. “Spent too much time away from her, I guess. She got fed up with it.” She’d run away with a traveling salesman, was what Stella had done, but Johnson didn’t advertise that. Unless somebody asked him about her, he didn’t think of her twice a month. He wasn’t a man inclined to dwell on his mistakes.
“I am sorry that to hear,” Drucker said. “Here is to peace between us and confusion to the Lizards.”
“Yeah, I’ll drink to that any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Johnson said. “Every day I’m not up here, I mean.”
“They think all I have here is water and ersatz coffee and a horrible powder that turns water into something that is supposed to taste like orange juice,” Drucker said. “They are wrong.” He sounded happy they were wrong.
“Somebody’s listening to you,” Johnson warned.
“They will not shoot me for saying I do not like the tang of their orange drink,” the German answered. “They need a better reason than that.”
For once, Johnson wished the radio speaker in the Peregrine weren’t so tinny. He thought Drucker’s voice had an edge to it, but couldn’t be sure. He was probably imagining things. Spacemen were part of the Nazi elite. The Gestapo wouldn’t go after them. It would pick some poor, beat-up foreigners who couldn’t even complain.
After a pause that stretched, Drucker went on, “You and I and even the Bolsheviks in their flying tin cans-if we were not here, the Lizards would be able to do whatever they chose.”
“That’s so,” Johnson agreed. “Doesn’t mean we get along with each other, though.”
“Well enough not to use the rockets and bombs we have all built,” Drucker said. “That is well enough, when you think of how the world is.”
His signal was starting to break up as his flight path carried him south of the Peregrine. Glen Johnson found himself nodding. “I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, pal. Safe landing to you.”
“Safe…” A burst of static drowned out the last of the German’s words.
The rest of Johnson’s tour was uneventful. He approved of that. Events in space meant things going wrong-either in Peregrine, which was liable to kill him, or outside the ship, which was liable to mean the whole world and most of the spacecraft in orbit around it would go up in smoke.
He got down to Kitty Hawk in one piece. After the usual interrogation-almost as if he were a captured prisoner and not an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps-the bright young captain who’d grilled him asked, “And do you have any questions of your own, sir?”
It was, for the most part, a ritualistic question. Past the latest sports scores, what would a returning pilot want to know about what had happened during the mission he’d just completed? He knew better than anybody.
But, this time, Johnson said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.” The captain’s eyes widened; Johnson had taken him by surprise. But he recovered quickly, using a gracious gesture to urge the Peregrine ’s pilot to go ahead. And Johnson did: “What are they throwing into that space station to make it grow so fast?”
“Sorry, sir, but I really don’t know a thing about that,” the captain replied. “Not my area of responsibility.”
“Okay,” Johnson said with a smile and a shrug. He got to his feet. So did the young captain, who gave him a precise salute. He did an about-face and left the interrogation room. As soon as he got outside, he scratched his head. Unless everything he’d learned about human nature over a lot of tables with poker chips on them was wrong, that bright young captain had been lying through his shiny white teeth.
Johnson scratched his head again. He could think of only one reason why the captain would lie: whatever was going on aboard the space station was secret. It had to be a pretty juicy secret, too, because the captain didn’t want him to know it was there at all. Had the fellow just said, Sorry, sir-classified, Johnson would have shrugged and gone about his business. Now, though, his bump of curiosity itched. What were they hiding, up there a few hundred miles?
Something the Lizards wouldn’t like. He didn’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out. He couldn’t see the Race breaking out in a sweat about whatever it was, though, not when they had starships from two different fleets practically blanketing the Earth.
“Security,” Johnson muttered, making it into a dirty word. And at that, he had it good. He wouldn’t have traded places with the Nazi in the upper stage of that A-45, not for all the tea in China he wouldn’t. And Russia was no better place to live than Germany, not if half of what people said was true.
Let’s hear it for the last free country in the world, he thought as he headed toward the bar to buy himself a drink to celebrate being alive. Even England was slipping these days. Johnson sadly shook his head. Who would have thought, back in the days when the limeys battled Germany singlehanded, they would have ended up sliding toward the Reich an inch at a time?
He shrugged again. Who would have thought… a whole lot of things over the past twenty years? If the United States had to get secret to stay free, he didn’t see anything in the whole wide world wrong with that.
He was on his second whiskey before the irony there struck him. By the time he’d started his third one, he’d forgotten all about it.
Atvar was glad to return to Australia. It was late summer in this hemisphere now, and the weather was fine by any standards, those of Home included. Even in Cairo, though, the weather had been better than bearable. What pleased him more was how far the colony had come since his last visit.
“Then, all we had were the starships,” he said to Pshing. “Now look! A whole thriving city! Streets, vehicles, shops, a power plant, a pipeline to the desalination center-a proper city for the Race.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant replied. “Before very much longer, it will be like any city back on Home.”
“Indeed it will,” Atvar said with an emphatic cough. “This is going according to plan. When we proceed according to plan, we can move at least as fast as the Big Uglies. And here in the center of Australia, we shall have no Big Uglies interfering with our designs, except for the occasional savage like the one I saw the last time I was here. But this is and shall forevermore be our place on Tosev 3.”
“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “My only concern is that we are, in certain areas, still vulnerable to sabotage from the Tosevites. The desalination plant and pipeline spring to mind.”
“I am assured the security plans are good,” Atvar said. “They had better be good; we have had enough painful lessons from the Big Uglies on how to construct them and where our vulnerabilities lie.”
He did not want to think about security plans and sabotage, not now. He wanted to walk along the sidewalks of the growing city, to watch males and females peacefully going about their business and getting on with their lives. Before too many generations, if all went well, they would rule the whole planet, not just a little more than half. And the Empire could get on with the job of civilizing another world.
If all went well…
Very faintly, he could smell the pheromones that meant a female so
mewhere upwind was ripe for mating. He tried to ignore the odor. He couldn’t quite. For one thing, it made him a little more irritable than he would have been otherwise. Even here, in the heart of the Race’s haven on Tosev 3, the Tosevite herb had come. He sighed. The troubles this world brought seemed inescapable.
All over the town, alarms began hissing. Amplified voices shouted: “Missile attack! Incoming missile attack! Take cover against missile attack!”
