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As soon as Felless had come into the room, Ttomalss closed the door behind her. Not much air from the corridor could have come in with her, but he still got a whiff of pheromones. For a bad moment, he thought they were hers, and that she had lied to him. Then he realized he did not smell them strongly enough to send him into the full frenzy of the season, only enough to make him jumpy and edgy and acutely aware she was a female, where in normal times he would have ignored the sex difference.
“I greet you, superior female,” he said, as dispassionately as he could.
“I greet you,” Felless returned. Then she pointed. “The scales of your crest are trying to rise. I am not in my season now.”
With an effort of will, Ttomalss was able to make the offending scales lie flat. He did his best to quell the turmoil he could not help feeling. “No doubt it is someone else’s pheromones I smell, then, superior female,” he said. “And how may I help you today?”
Part of what he meant was, Could you have sent me a message and not disturbed me by coming in person? The pheromones had not-quite-addled him enough to make him say that out loud.
If Felless understood the subtext of the question, she gave no sign of it, which was probably just as well. She said, “I want to discuss with you the ideology of the Deutsch Big Uglies as it relates to their policy of massacring other groups of Tosevites of whom, for whatever obscure reasons, they fail to approve.”
“Ah,” Ttomalss said. “As it happens, I was just recording a few notes on that very topic.” She’d made him forget what he was going to say next, too, but he was not so pheromone-addled as to tell her that, either.
“I should be grateful for your insights,” Felless said, sounding more like a working member of the Race and less like a female in heat than she had for some time. Maybe she really was fighting the urge to taste ginger.
“Insights?” Ttomalss shrugged. “I am far from sure I have any of significance. I do not pretend to be an expert on the Deutsche, only a student of Tosevites in general who is attempting with limited success to apply that general knowledge to a particular situation more unusual than most.”
“You do yourself too little credit,” Felless said. “I have heard males speak of Tosevites with unusual insight into the Race. I think your experience in rearing Big Ugly hatchlings makes you the converse to these.”
“It could be so. I had hoped it would be so,” Ttomalss answered. “But I must confess, I am still puzzled by Kassquit’s reaction on learning you and I had mated.” He’d spent a good deal of the time since that unfortunate telephone conversation trying to repair the bond he had formerly established with the Tosevite fosterling. He remained unsure how far he had succeeded.
Felless said, “Mating, as I have been forcibly reminded of late, is not a rational behavior among us. Things relating to it must be even less subject to rational control among the Big Uglies.”
“Now that, superior female, is an insight worth having,” Ttomalss said enthusiastically. “It shows why you were chosen for your present position.” It was, in fact, the first thing he’d noted that showed why Felless was chosen for her present position, but that was one more thing he did not mention.
“You flatter me,” Felless said. As a matter of fact, Ttomalss did flatter her, but she offered the sentence as a conversational commonplace, and so he did not have to rise to it.
He had just finished recording Felless’ remark when the computer announced he had a telephone call. He started to instruct it to record a message, but Felless motioned for him to accept it. With a shrug, he did. The computer screen showed a familiar face. Kassquit said, “I greet you, superior sir.”
“I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said, and waited for the sky to fall: she would be seeing not only his image but also Felless’.
To make matters worse, Felless added, “And I greet you, Kassquit.”
“I greet you, superior female,” Kassquit said in tones indicating she would sooner have greeted the female researcher as pilot of a killercraft equipped with tactical explosive-metal missiles.
“What do you want, Kassquit?” Ttomalss asked, hoping he could keep the conversation short and peaceful.
“It was nothing of great importance, superior sir,” the Tosevite he’d raised from a hatchling replied. “I see that you are busy with more important matters, and so will call back another time.”
Had he taught her to flay him with guilt in that fashion? If he hadn’t, where had she learned it? She reached for the switch that would break the connection. “Wait!” Ttomalss said. “Tell me what you want.” Only later, much later, would he wonder if she had moved more slowly than she might have, to make him beg her to stay on the line.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” she said now, and even her obedience wounded. “I was wondering if you, in the capital of the Deutsch not-empire, could hope to have any influence over the smuggling of the illegal herb ginger through the territory of the Greater German Reich.”
“I do not know,” Ttomalss said. “The Deutsche, like other Tosevites, have a habit of ignoring such requests. They would doubtless want something from us in exchange for acting otherwise, and might well want something we do not care to yield to them.”
“Still, the notion might be worth considering,” Felless said. Ttomalss had studied Kassquit for a long time. He knew her expressions as well as anyone of a different species could. This was, he thought, the first approval Felless had won from her.
Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker looked from his fitness report to Major General Walter Dornberger’s face. “Sir, if you can explain to me why my marks have slipped from ‘excellent’ to ‘adequate’ in the past year, I would appreciate it.”
That that was all he said, that he didn’t scream at Dornberger about highway robbery struck him as restraint above and beyond the call of duty. He was, he knew perfectly well, one of the best and most experienced pilots at Peenemunde. A fitness report like this said he’d stay a lieutenant colonel till age ninety-two, no matter how good he was.
Dornberger didn’t answer at once, pausing instead to light a cigar. When the base commandant leaned back in his chair, it squeaked. Unlike some-unlike many-in high authority in the Reich, he hadn’t used his position to aggrandize himself. That chair, his desk, and the chair in front of it in which Drucker sat were all ordinary service issue. The only ornaments on the walls were photographs of Hitler and Himmler and of the A-10, the A-45’s great-grandfather, ascending to the heavens on a pillar of fire, soon to come down on the Lizards’ heads.
After a couple of puffs and a sharp cough, Major General Dornberger said, “You should know, Lieutenant Colonel, that I was strongly urged to rate you as ‘inadequate’ straight down the line and drum you out of the Wehrmacht.”
“Sir?” Drucker coughed, too, without the excuse of tobacco smoke in his lungs. “For the love of God, why, sir?”
“Yes, for the
love of God,” Dornberger said, as if in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. “If you think along those lines for a moment, a possible explanation will come to you.”
A moment was all Drucker needed. “Kathe,” he said grimly, and Dornberger nodded. Drucker threw his hands in the air. “But she was cleared of those ridiculous charges!” They weren’t so ridiculous, as he knew better than he would have liked. He chose a different avenue of attack: “And it was thanks to your good offices that she was cleared, too.”
“So it was,” the commandant at Peenemunde said. “And I called in a lot of markers to do the job. I had enough pull left to keep from throwing you out in the street, but not enough to let you keep rising as you should. I’m sorry, old man, but if you haven’t learned by now that life isn’t always fair, you’re a luckier fellow than most your age.”
One of the things Drucker had on his record-the one he bore in his head and heart, fortunately not the one that went down on paper-was joining with the rest of his panzer crew in murdering a couple of SS men in a forest near the Polish-German border to let their colonel and commander go free. As long as that old crime remained undiscovered, he was ahead of the game. That made the present injustice easier to tolerate, though not much.
With a sigh, he said, “I suppose you’re right, sir, but it still seems dreadfully unfair. I’m not that old, and I had hoped to advance in the service of the Reich.” That was true. Considering what the Reich had done to him and tried to do to his family, though, he wondered why it should be true.
If it weren’t for the Reich, we would all be the Lizards’ slaves today. That was also likely to be true. So what? Drucker wondered. He’d always set the personal and immediate ahead of the broad and general. Maybe, because he’d done that, he didn’t deserve to make brigadier, or even colonel. But that would have been a real reason, not the put-up job Dornberger was forcing on him.
“I can give you a consolation prize, if you like,” the base commandant said. Drucker raised a skeptical eyebrow. Dornberger said, “You will fly more this way than you would have had you gone on to promotion.”
