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“Nuremberg?” Drucker sighed. He’d been warned, but still… “That is in the far south of the land, and my home is in the north. Could you not have picked a closer shuttlecraft port?”
“There are no closer functioning shuttlecraft ports,” Nesseref answered. “In fact, I am given to understand that that is at the moment the only functioning shuttlecraft port in the subregion. Had no one told you of this?”
“Well, yes,” Johannes Drucker admitted unhappily. “But it still presents great difficulties for me. How am I to travel from Nuremberg to my home? Will the railroads be working? Will folk on the ground give me money to travel?”
“I know nothing of any of this.” Nesseref’s voice held nothing but indifference. “My orders are to put you on the ground at the shuttlecraft port outside Nuremberg. I shall obey them.”
Obey them she did, with an efficiency that outdid anything merely Teutonic. A single neat burn took the shuttlecraft out of Earth orbit. After that, she hardly even had to adjust the machine’s course. Another burn halted the shuttlecraft above the tarmac of the port and let its legs kiss the ground with hardly a jar.
Nesseref opened the hatch. The mild air of German summer mingled with the hot, dry stuff the Race preferred. “Get out,” she told Drucker. “I do not want any more radioactive contamination than I can help getting.”
“It shall be done.” Drucker scrambled down the ladder and let himself drop to the soil of the Vaterland.
No one, Lizard or human, came across the tarmac to greet him. Now that he was here, he was on his own. He looked toward what had been the famous skyline of Nuremberg. No more: that skyline had been truncated, abridged. Some of the massive buildings were simply gone, others were wreckage half as tall as they had been. He shook his head and let out a soft, sad whistle. No matter how harshly the Reich had used him and his family, it was still his country. Seeing it brought low like this tore at him.
I shouldn’t have bothered attacking that starship, he thought. The war was already lost by then. I should have landed the upper stage of my A-45 in some neutral country-the USA, maybe England-and let myself be interned.
Too late now. Too late for everything now. He’d expected to go out in a blaze of glory when he made the attack run on the Lizard ship. No such luck. Now he had to deal with the consequences of living longer than he’d thought he would.
He glanced around the tarmac again. No, nobody cared he was here. He didn’t have ten pfennigs in his pocket: what point to taking money into space? Where would he spend it? But he faced different questions here: how would he get along without it? Where would he find his next meal? If he did find a meal, how would he pay for it?
Where would he find his next meal? Somewhere to the north, that was all he knew. As the crow flew, Greifswald was about five hundred kilometers from Nuremberg. He wasn’t a crow, and he didn’t think he’d do much in the way of flying any time soon. He’d be walking, and likely walking a lot more than five hundred kilometers.
Who was it who’d said, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step? Somebody Chinese, he thought. He took the first step on the way back toward Greifswald. Before long, he was off the tarmac of the shuttlecraft port. He soon discovered the Lizards had machine-gun and artillery and missile emplacements around it. None of the males-he presumed they were males, though he’d been wrong with the shuttlecraft pilot-paid him any attention. He was authorized to be there. He didn’t care to think what would have happened if he hadn’t been.
Before long, he came on a road leading northeast. He started tramping along it. That was the direction in which he wanted to go. Pretty soon, he’d either come to a village or farmhouse or he’d pass a stream or a pond. Any which way, he’d get himself a drink.
He wondered how much radioactivity he’d take in from the local water. For that matter, he wondered how much he was taking in every time he inhaled. However much it was, he couldn’t do anything about it.
And he wondered why he saw no motor traffic on the road. He didn’t need long to find the answer to that: the Lizards had cratered it with dozens of little bomblets. He remembered those weapons from the earlier round of fighting. He’d driven panzers then, and hadn’t worried so much about roads. But wheeled vehicles couldn’t go anywhere without them.
After a couple of kilometers, he came upon a gang filling in craters the bomblets had left behind. No bulldozers, no tractors, no powered equipment of any kind. Just men with shovels and picks and mattocks and crowbars, slowly and methodically getting rid of one hole after another. By their clothes, some were local farmers, others demobilized Wehrmacht men still in grimy field-gray. It was hard to tell which group seemed more weary and dejected.
A soldier picked up a bucket and raised it to his mouth. That was all Drucker needed to see. He waved and broke into a shambling trot and called, “Hey, can I have a swig out of that bucket?”
“Who the devil are you?” asked the fellow who’d just drunk. Water dribbled down his poorly shaved chin. He pointed. “And what kind of crazy getup is that?”
Drucker glanced down at his coveralls. The Reich had had a thousand different dress and undress uniforms, almost as many as the Race had different styles of body paint. Nobody could keep track of all of them. Drucker gave his name, adding, “Lieutenant colonel, Reichs Rocket Force. I was captured out in space; the Lizards just turned me loose. Tell you the truth, I’m trying to figure out what to do next.”
“Rocket Force, huh?” The Wehrmacht man paused to wipe his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. “Fat lot of good you buggers did anybody.” But he picked up the bucket and handed it to Drucker. The water was barely cool, but went down like dark beer. When Drucker set down the bucket, the fellow who’d given it to him asked, “So where are you headed, Herr Rocket Man?”
“Greifswald,” Drucker answered. He saw that meant nothing to anyone but him, so he made things plainer. “It’s up near Peenemunde, by the Baltic.”
“Ach, so. ” The demobilized soldier raised an eyebrow. “If it’s up near Peenemunde, is anything left of it?”
“I don’t know,” Drucker said bleakly. “I’ve got-I had, anyway-a wife and three kids. I have to see if I can track them down.”
“Good luck,” said the fellow who’d given him water. He sounded as if he thought Drucker would need luck better than merely good. Drucker was afraid he thought the same thing. After a moment, the ex-soldier remarked, “Hell of a long way from the Baltic to here. How do you propose to get there?”
“Walk, if I have to,” Drucker replied. “I’m getting an idea of what the roads are like. Are any trains running?”
“A few,” the former Wehrmacht man said. The rest of the laborers, who seemed happy to get a break, nodded. When he continued, “Not bloody many, though,” they nodded again. He waved. “And you see what the highways are like. It’s not just this one, either. They’re all the same. The stinking Lizards paralyzed us. We’ve got people starving because there’s no way to get food from here to there.”
“And everything you can get costs ten times too much,” another laborer added. “The Reichsmark isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on any more.”
“Ouch.” Drucker winced. “We went through that after the First World War. Do we have to do it again?”
The ex-soldier said, “If everybody’s got money and there’s nothing to buy, prices are going to go through the roof. That’s life.” He spat. “I’ll worry about all that Scheisse later, when I’ve got the time. Right now, I’m just glad I’m still breathing. A hell of a lot of people in the Reich aren’t.”
“Hey, Karl,” one of the other laborers said. Several men put their heads together and talked in voices too low for Drucker to make out w
hat they were saying. They passed something back and forth among themselves. He couldn’t tell what they were doing there, either.
He was almost on the point of wondering whether he ought to turn and run like hell when they broke apart. The former Wehrmacht man-Karl-turned toward him and held out a moderately fat wad of banknotes. “Here you go, Colonel,” he said. “This’ll keep you eating for a couple-three days, anyhow.”
“Thank you very much!” Drucker exclaimed. From what he could see, none of the laborers had enough to be able to spare much. But they knew he had nothing at all, and so they’d reached into their pockets. He nodded. “Thanks from the bottom of my heart.”
“It’s nothing,” Karl said. “We all know what you’re going through. We’re all going through it, too-except for the ones who’ve been through it already. They’re trying to come out the other side. Hope you make it up to Greifswald. Hope you find your family, too.”
“Thanks,” Drucker said again. And if he didn’t find his family, he’d have to… to try to come out the other side, too. The phrase struck him as all too apt. With a last nod, he started walking again, heading north, heading home.
After the Nazis occupied Poland, they’d built an enormous death factory at Treblinka. They’d been building an even bigger one outside Oswiecim-Auschwitz, they’d called it in German-when the Lizards came. Mordechai Anielewicz had longed for revenge against the tormentors of the Jews for a generation. Now he had it. And now, having it, he discovered the folly of such wishes.
He could go anywhere he chose in the much-reduced Greater German Reich. As a leader among the Polish Jews who’d fought side by side with the Lizards against the Nazis in two wars now-and as a man who’d made sure his friends among the Lizards helped all they could-he had the backing of the Race. Before entering Germany, he’d got a document from the Race’s authorities in Poland authorizing him to call on the males occupying the Reich for assistance. He also had documents in German, to overawe burgomeisters and other functionaries.
