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“Well, making sure you don’t get killed would be a good start,” Auerbach answered.
“I quite agree,” David Goldfarb said. “I’ve been trying to do that myself for quite some time now. What can you do about it?”
“I don’t right know. I wish I were gonna be here longer,” the American said. “I’ve got a marker or two I may be able to call in, but God only knows if they’re still worth anything. Finding out will take a little bit of doing: I haven’t tried to get ahold of these people in a long time. And I won’t be able to tell them everything about this business even if they aren’t pushing up lilies somewhere.”
David pondered that. It could add up to any number of different things, but he saw one that looked more likely than any of the others. “You know Germans?” he asked, and wondered if he really wanted to find out the answer.
For close to half a minute, he didn’t. At last, Auerbach said, “Well, you’re nobody’s fool, are you?”
“I like to think not, anyhow,” Goldfarb said. “Of course, people like to think all sorts of things that others might find unlikely.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Rance Auerbach said. “Okay, hang in there, Goldfarb. I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.
From the next desk over, Hal Walsh said, “I hope that wasn’t trouble, David,” as Goldfarb set his own phone back in its cradle.
“I don’t…think so,” David told his boss. Walsh nodded, not entirely convinced. Since Goldfarb wasn’t entirely convinced, either, he just shrugged and went back to work. He had to look down at the drawings in front of him for a while before he could remember what the hell he’d been trying to do.
He spent the rest of the day at half speed. He couldn’t keep his mind fully on the latest project Hal Walsh had set him. His eyes kept drifting toward the telephone. When it rang half an hour later, he jumped. But it was only Naomi, asking him to stop at the grocery for a few things on the way home from work.
“I can do that,” he said.
“I should hope so,” his wife answered. “It’s not that hard, especially now when you have sensible money to deal with.” Though she’d lived in Britain for the larger part of her life, she’d never quite come to terms with pence and shillings and pounds. Canadian dollars and cents made her much happier than the traditional currency ever had.
Goldfarb left the office about half an hour later than he might have otherwise; he was doing his best to make up for being distracted. As usual when the weather was even close to decent, he walked home: his flat was less than a mile from the Widget Works. That kept the beginnings of a middle-aged potbelly from becoming too much more than a beginning.
With a choice of several grocer’s shops on the way, he intended to stop at the one closest to his block of flats. Walking was all very well, but walking with a paper sack was something else again.
He was halfway across the street on whose far side stood the grocer’s when he heard the roar of a racing automobile engine and a couple of shouts of, “Look out!” His head whipped around. A big Chevy-an enormous auto, for one used to British motorcars-was bearing down on him, and the driver plainly had not the slightest intention of stopping.
Had he panicked, he would have died right there. He waited as long as he thought he possibly could-perhaps a whole second-then dashed forward. The Chevy’s driver couldn’t react quite fast enough. The edge of his mudguard (no, they called them fenders on this side of the Atlantic) touched Goldfarb’s jacket, but then he was past.
And then that driver had to slam on the brakes to keep from smashing into the cars stopped at the light at the next corner. He couldn’t do that quite fast enough, either, not at the speed he was going. It had been a while since David heard the crash of crumpling metal and shattering glass, but the sound was unmistakable.
Goldfarb sprinted toward the Chevy that had come to grief. He hoped the driver had gone straight through the windscreen-it never for a moment occurred to him to doubt that the fellow had tried to run him down on purpose. And if the bastard hadn’t got himself a face full of plate glass, Goldfarb wanted answers from him. Maybe the local constabulary could get them. Or maybe he’d start bouncing the bugger’s head off the pavement till he sang.
But the driver hadn’t gone through the windscreen (no, windshield here). He managed to get his door open and started to run. “Stop him!” Goldfarb shouted. “Stop that man!”
In Britain, a crowd would have taken off after the man. He didn’t know what would happen in Canada. He found out: a crowd took off after the fellow, a crowd led by the man with whose car the driver had just collided. A younger fellow brought the fleeing driver down with a tackle that would have earned him pats on the back in a rugby scrum.
“He almost killed you, buddy,” somebody said to Goldfarb. “It was like he didn’t see you at all.”
“Oh, he saw me, all right,” David said grimly. “He’s just sorry he missed.” The other man stared at him and tried to laugh, thinking he’d made a joke. When he didn’t laugh back, the other fellow went off shaking his head.
Goldfarb didn’t care, because a police car screeched around the corner and stopped. The men who piled out were dressed more like American cops than British bobbies, but that didn’t matter much. They took efficient charge of the miscreant. “He tried to kill me,” Goldfarb told one of them. “Before he smashed into that other motorcar, he almost ran me down while I was crossing the street.”
“Probably drunk,” the policeman said.
“No, I mean it literally,” David insisted. “He did try to kill me. He swerved towards me, but I managed to dodge.”
Both policemen looked at him. One of them said, “Maybe you’d better come to the station, then, sir, and give a statement.”
“I’d be glad to, if you’ll let me ring my wife when we get there, so she knows I’m all right and I’ll be late,” Goldfarb answered. The policemen nodded. He rode to the station in the front seat, the man who’d tried to run him down in the back. They didn’t say a word to each other all the way there.
Sweating in his coveralls, Johannes Drucker waited for a Lizard to open the door to his cubicle aboard the starship he’d tried to destroy. At precisely the appointed moment, the door slid open. The male-Drucker presumed it was a male-who stood in the doorway said, “Come with me.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Drucker answered.
The Lizard’s mouth fell open: the gesture the Race used for laughter. “I am a female,” she said. “My name is Nesseref. Now come. My shuttlecraft is waiting at the rotation hub of this ship.”
“It shall be done, superior female,” Drucker said, both stressing the word and adding an emphatic cough. That made Nesseref laugh again.
When Drucker strode out into the corridor, he found two armed Lizards waiting to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to. Now that they were finally releasing him, the German spaceman had no intention of doing that, but he would have mistrusted one of them were their roles reversed. He wished those roles had been reversed.
He followed Nesseref toward the hub of the starship. The guards followed him. With every deck they went inward, they got lighter. By the time they reached the rotation hub, they weighed nothing at all.
Nesseref entered her shuttlecraft first, then called, “Come in. I have an acceleration couch shaped for a Tosevite.”
“I thank you,” Drucker said, and obeyed. The couch looked to be of American manufacture. He strapped himself in. Nesseref wasted no time in using her maneuvering jets to get free of the starship. Drucker watched her work in silent fascination. At last, he broke the silence: “Your ship has far more in the way of computer-aided controls than the upper stage I flew.”
“A good thing, too,” the Lizard replied. “I think you Tosevites have to be addled to come up into space in your inadequate machines.”
“We used what we had,” Drucker answered with a shrug. He spoke in the past tense: the Reich would not be going into space
again any time soon. If the Race had its way-and that was all too likely-Germans would never go into space again. He asked, “Now that I am returning to Tosev 3, where in Deutschland will you land me?”
“By the city called Nuremberg,” Nesseref answered. “Such are my orders.”
