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“Why, I am a tourist, of course. I have a passport and visa to prove it,” the SS man replied with another of those not quite charming smiles.
“And what are you here to see?” Monique’s wave took in ruin and reconstruction. “There isn’t much left to see.”
“Oh, but Marseille is still the home of so many wonderful herbs,” Kuhn said blandly. Christ, Monique thought. He’s still in the ginger business. The Reich is still in the ginger business. He’ll be looking for Pierre. And if I start working for Pierre, he’ll be looking for me, too.
Every time David Goldfarb crossed a street, he didn’t just look both ways. He made careful calculations. If a car suddenly sped up, could it get him? Or could he scramble up onto the sidewalk and something close to safety? Nothing like almost getting killed to make one consider such things.
Of course, that fellow who’d tried to run him down wasn’t the first driver in Edmonton who’d almost killed him-just the first one who’d meant to. David had a lifetime of looking left first before stepping off the curb. But Canadians, like their American cousins, drove on the right. That was a recipe for attempted suicide. Goldfarb didn’t try to do himself in quite so often as he had after first crossing the Atlantic, but it still happened in moments of absentmindedness.
This morning, he got to the Saskatchewan River Widget Works unscathed by either would-be murderers or drivers he didn’t notice till too late. “Hello, there,” Hal Walsh said. As usual, the boss was there before any of the people who worked for him. He pointed to a Russian-style samovar he’d recently installed. “Make yourself some tea, get your brains lubricated, and go to town.”
As usual, Goldfarb complained about the samovar: “Why couldn’t you leave the honest kettle? That damn thing is a heathen invention.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about heathens, pal,” Walsh retorted. Every now and again, he would make cracks about David’s Judaism. Things being as they were in Britain, that had made Goldfarb nervous. But Hal Walsh, unlike Sin Oswald Mosley and his ilk, didn’t mean anything nasty by it. He gave Jack Devereaux a hand time about being French-Canadian, and also derided his own Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestors. Goldfarb had decided he could live with that.
He did get himself a cup of tea. “Bloody miracle you set out milk for it,” he said. “With this contraption, I’d think you’d want us to drink it Russian-style, with just sugar. My parents do that. Not me, though.”
“You’re acculturated,” Walsh said. Goldfarb must have looked blank, because his boss explained: “England was your mother country, so you got used to doing things the way Englishmen do.”
“Too right I did,” Goldfarb said, and explained how he was in danger of doing himself an injury every time he tried to cross the street.
Walsh laughed, then stopped abruptly. “My brother went to London a couple of years ago, and I remember him complaining because he kept looking the wrong way. I hadn’t thought about your being in the same boat here.”
“What boat’s that?” asked Jack Devereaux. He made straight for the samovar and got himself a cup of tea. He didn’t worry that the gleaming gadget was un-British; he wasn’t British himself, not by blood, though he spoke English far more fluently than French. “David, did you take the Titanic?”
“Of course, and you’re daft if you think I didn’t have fun rigging a sail on the iceberg afterwards so I could finish getting over here,” Goldfarb retorted.
Devereaux gave him a quizzical look. “What all have you got in that teacup?” he asked, and then, before David could answer, “Can I have some, too?”
“We don’t need spirits to lift our spirits,” Walsh said, “or we’d damn well better not, anyhow.” He didn’t mind people drinking beer with lunch-he’d drink beer with lunch himself-but frowned on anything more than that. He led by example, too. Since he worked himself like a slave driven, the people who worked for him could hardly complain when he expected a lot from them. He tilted back his cup to drain it, then said, “What’s on the plate for today?”
“I’m still trying to work the bugs out of that skelkwank — light reader,” Devereaux answered. “If I can do it, we’ll have a faster, cheaper gadget than the one the Lizards have been using since time out of mind. If I can’t…” He shrugged. “You don’t win every time you bet.”
“That’s true, however much you wish you did,” Walsh said. “What about you, David?”
“I’ve got a couple of notions to improve the phone-number reader,” Goldfarb said, “but they’re just notions, if you know what I mean. If I get a chance, I’ll do some drawings and play with the hardware, but odds are I’ll spend a lot of my time giving Jack a hand. I think he’s pretty close to getting where he wants to go.”
“As opposed to getting where you want me to go,” Devereaux said with a grin.
“The climate’s better there in winter than it is here, but probably not in summer,” Goldfarb said.
“That would be funny, if only it were funny,” Walsh said. “It’s not by accident we call our football team the Eskimos.”
Goldfarb didn’t call what the Canadians played football at all. It was, to him, one of the most peculiar games imaginable. Of course, the Canadians didn’t call the game he was used to football, either. To them, it was soccer, and they looked down their noses at it. He didn’t care. More of the world agreed with him than with them.
Walsh fixed himself a second cup of tea, then said, “Let’s get going.”
There were times when David was reminded he was a jumped-up technician, not a properly trained engineer. This morning gave every sign of being one of those times. He got only so far looking at drawings of the phone-number reader he’d devised. Then, muttering, he went back to the hardware and started fiddling with it. Cut-and-try often took him further fasten than study. He knew that could also be true for real engineers, but it seemed more emphatically so for him.
He wasn’t altogether sorry when Jack Devereaux looked up and said, “David, what about that hand you promised?” Goldfarb applauded him. Devereaux groaned. “I suppose I asked for that. Doesn’t mean I had to get it, though.”
“Of course it does,” Goldfarb said, but he made a point of hurrying over to see what he could do for-rather than to-the other engineer.
The motors that turned the Lizards’ silvery skelkwank — light disks-a technology mankind had copied widely-all operated at the same speed. As far as anyone human knew, they’d been operating at that same speed for as long as the Race had been using them. It worked. It was fast enough. Why change? That was the Lizards’ attitude in a nutshell, or an eggshell.
People, now, people weren’t so patient. If you could make the disks turn faster, you could get the information off them faster, too. Seeing that was obvious. Getting a motor anywhere near as compact and reliable as t
he ones the Lizards used was a different question, though. Expectations for quality had gone up since the Race came to Earth. People didn’t come so close to insisting on perfection as the Lizards did, but breakdowns they would have taken for granted a generation earlier were unacceptable nowadays.
“It runs fine,” Devereaux said, “but it’s too goddamn noisy.” He glared at the motor, which was indeed buzzing like an angry hive.
“Hmm.” Goldfarb eyed the motor, too. “Maybe you could just leave it the way it is and soundproof the case.” He knew that was a technician’s solution, not an engineer’s, but he threw it out to see what Devereaux would make of it.
And Devereaux beamed. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he said reverently. “Let’s do it. Let’s see if we can do it, anyhow.”
“What measurements will we need for the case?” David asked, and answered his own question by measuring the motor. “Let me cut some sheet metal. We ought to have some sort of insulation around here, too. That’ll give us an idea of whether this’ll be practical.”
He’d got used to flanging up this, that, or the other thing in the RAF. Cutting sheet metal to size was as routine as sharpening a pencil. But when he was carrying the metal back to the motor, his hand slipped. He let out a yelp.
“What did you do?” Devereaux asked.
“Tried to cut my bloody finger off,” Goldfarb said. It was indeed bloody; he added, “I’m bleeding on the carpet,” and grabbed for his handkerchief.
Hal Walsh hurried over. “Let’s have a look at that, David,” he said in commanding tones. Goldfarb didn’t want to take off the handkerchief. The blood soaking through told its own story, though. Walsh clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You’re going to need stitches with that. There’s a new doctor’s office that’s opened up in the building next door, and a good thing right now. Come along with me.”
