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It was, of course, a Lizard talking. No human being would have been so arrogant. No human nation could have afforded to be so arrogant to the Greater German Reich. But the Race could. However strong the Reich was, the Race was stronger. Every trip into space rubbed Drucker’s nose in that unpalatable fact.
“Acknowledging,” he said, shortly, using the language of the Race himself. Some of the Lizards with whom he dealt were decent enough sorts; with them, he went through the polite I greet you s. To the ones who only snapped at him, he snapped in return.
“Your orbit is acceptable,” the Lizard told him. The Lizard would have been not just arrogant but furious had his orbit been anything else.
“You so relieve my mind,” Drucker responded. That was sarcasm and truth commingled. Weapons were tracking him now. They would have been ready to go after Kathe had an unannounced orbital change made the Race nervous.
“See that you stay where you ought to be,” the Lizard said. “Out.”
Drucker chuckled. “Not even a chance to get the last word.” He chuckled again. “Probably a female of the Race.” The real Kathe, had she heard that slur on womankind, would have snorted and stuck an elbow in his ribs. He probably would have deserved it, too.
He glanced down at Earth below. He was sweeping along above the western Pacific; a nasty storm was building there, with outlying tendrils of cloud already stretching out over Japan and reaching toward China. The Reich, the Americans, and the Race all sold meteorological photos to countries without satellites of their own. Back when Drucker was a child, people had been at the mercy of the weather. They still were, but to a lesser degree. They couldn’t change it, but at least they had some idea of what was on the way. That made a difference.
Down toward the equator Kathe flew at better than 27,000 kilometers an hour. The velocity sounded enormous, but wasn’t enough to escape Earth orbit, let alone travel from star to star. That bothered Drucker more than usual. He wanted to go out farther into the solar system, wanted to and couldn’t. Some German spacecraft had gone to Mars, but he hadn’t been aboard any of them. And they were only rockets, hardly more potent than the A-45 that had lifted him into orbit.
“Calling the German spacecraft! Calling the German spacecraft!” Another peremptory signal, but this one in German, and one he was glad to answer.
“Kathe here, with Drucker aboard,” he said. “How goes it, Hermann Goring?”
“Well enough,” the radio operator aboard the German space station replied. “And with you?”
“Not too bad,” Drucker said. “And when do you take off and start rampaging through outer space?”
“Would day after tomorrow suit you?” The radioman laughed. So did Drucker. Up above them, some Lizard listening to their transmission would probably have started tearing out his hair, if only he’d had any to tear.
“Day after tomorrow wouldn’t suit me at all,” Drucker said, “because then I couldn’t be aboard when you left. And I want to go traveling.”
“I don’t blame you,” the radio operator said. “The frontier is out this way. If the Americans are going to explore it, we had better do the same.”
“Not just the Americans,” Drucker said, and said no more. The Lizards already knew the Reich mistrusted them. For that matter, the mistrust ran both ways, no doubt with good reason.
Drucker wondered just how soon the Hermann Goring really would be leaving Earth orbit for something more worthwhile. Sooner than it would have if the Americans hadn’t lit a fire under the Reich ’s space program-he was sure of that. He was also sure the Race would be horrified to have not one but two Earthly nations on the way toward genuine spacecraft.
A little later, he passed about twenty kilometers below the German space station. Through Zeiss field glasses, it seemed almost close enough to touch. The job of converting it to a spaceship was going much more smoothly than it had for the Americans. But they’d kept what they were up to a secret, while the Reich was making no bones about what it had in mind. If the Lizards didn’t like it, they could start a war. Such was Himmler’s attitude, anyhow.
The swastikas painted on the space station were big enough to be easily visible. Straining his eyes, Drucker imagined he could read Goring’s name above them, but he really couldn’t, or not quite. He chuckled a little. Down on Earth, the late Reichsmarschall was a bad joke, the Luftwaffe moribund and subservient to the Wehrmacht and the SS. But Goring’s name would go traveling farther than the pudgy, drug-addled founder of the German air force could ever have imagined.
And the Lizards couldn’t-or at least they’d better not-try to forbid a German spacecraft from going where an American one had already gone. That would mean trouble, big trouble. It might even mean war.
Back when he’d been driving a panzer against the Lizards, Drucker would have given his left nut to control the kind of firepower he had at his fingertips now. He’d been so outgunned then… and he was outgunned up here, too. He sighed. The Lizards had more and better weapons. Odds were they would for a long time to come. But the Reich could hurt them. That was the essence of German foreign policy. And he, Johannes Drucker, could hurt them with his nuclear-tipped missiles.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to. They would surely blow him out of the sky the instant after he launched. The one thing he didn’t think they’d do was try to blow him out of the sky before he could launch. They’d attacked Earth without provocation, but hadn’t staged any unprovoked assaults since the fighting ended.
Maybe that made them more trustworthy than human beings. Maybe it just made them more naive. Drucker never had figured that out.
His radio crackled into life. “Relay ship Hoth to spacecraft Kathe. Urgent. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledging,” Drucker said. “Was ist los, Hoth?” The relay ship, down in the South Atlantic, kept spacecraft in touch with the Reich even when they were out of direct radio range. All the spacefaring human powers used relay ships. The Lizards, with their world-bestriding lands, didn’t have to.
“Urgent news bulletin,” the radio operator down below answered.
“Go ahead?’ Drucker did his best to hide the alarm that surged through him. But surely his superiors wouldn’t order him into battle with a news bulletin… would they?
Plainly reading from text in front of him, the radio operator said, “Radio Nuremberg has announced the death of Heinrich Himmler, Chancellor of the Greater German Reich. The Chancellor, on duty to his last breath, suffered a coronary thrombosis while working on state papers. No date for services celebrating his life has yet been set, nor has a successor been named.”
“Gott im Himmel,” Drucker whispered. Things would be hopping down in Nuremberg now. Even more than Hitler before him, Himmler had stayed strong because he let no one around him have any strength. Nor has a successor been named was liable to cover some vicious infighting in the days to come.
“Have you got that, Kathe?” the radioman asked.
“I’ve got it,” Drucker said. This is liable to be the safest place I could find, he thought. He almost said it aloud, but thought better of that.
And then the fellow down below said it for him: “Staying a few thousand kilometers away when the big boys squabble isn’t so bad, eh?”
“That’s the truth, sure enough,” Drucker answered. “Well, I don’t give orders. All I do is take them. Whoever the new Fuhrer is, he’ll tell me what to do and I’ll do it. That’s the way things work.”
Without a doubt, someone aboard the Hoth was recording every word he said. Without a doubt, the Gestapo would be listening to make sure he sounded properly loyal to the Reich and to its Fuhrer, whoever that turned out to be. Drucker knew as much. He was no fool. He also knew his loyalty was liable to be suspect. That meant he had to be especially careful to say all the right things.
And the radioman aboard the Hoth said, “That’s how we all feel, of course. Our loyalty is to the state, not to any one man.”
He said all the right things, too. And D
rucker made a point of agreeing with him: “That’s how it is, all right. That’s how it has to be.”
As he flew along, as the signal from the Hoth faded, he wondered who would take over for the late, unlamented (at least by him) Heinrich Himmler. The SS would naturally have a candidate. So would the Wehrmacht. And Joseph Goebbels, passed over when Hitler died, would want another try at ruling the Reich. There might be others; Drucker did his best not to pay attention to politics. Maybe that was a mistake. More and more these days, politics kept paying attention to him. His orbit swept him up toward the Reich. By the time his tour ended, everything was likely to be over.
12
Vyacheslav Molotov felt harassed. That was not the least common feeling he’d ever had, especially after Marshal Zhukov rescued him while smashing Beria’s coup. Every American presidential election made him nervous, too. The prospect of dealing with a new man every four years was enough to make anybody nervous when that man could start a nuclear war just by giving an order. But Warren seemed likely to beat Humphrey, which would give Molotov a breathing space before he had to start getting nervous about the USA again.
Now, though, Himmler had had to go and die. Molotov thought that most inconsiderate of the Nazi leader. Himmler had been a bastard, no doubt about it. But, on the whole (the recent aborted lunge at Poland aside), he’d been a predictable bastard. Who would manage to throw his fundament into the seat he’d occupied?
