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“Hydrogen, oxygen-who needs anything else?” he said, and then, as a concession to his passenger, “A little alien engineering doesn’t hurt, either.”
“Thank you so much,” Chris Harper said. They both laughed.
Stargard was one of the towns of northeastern Germany that the Wehrmacht and the Volkssturm had defended to the last man and the last bullet. The Lizards hadn’t expended an explosive-metal bomb on it; they’d smashed it with armor and with strikes from the air, and then gone on to larger, more important centers of resistance. Once the Reich yielded, they hadn’t bothered putting a garrison in the town between Greifswald and Neu Strelitz.
Johannes Drucker didn’t blame the Lizards for that. In their shoes, he wouldn’t have garrisoned Stargard, either. What point to it? Before war rolled through the little city, it might have held forty or fifty thousand people-about as many as Greifswald. These days? These days, he would have been astonished if even a quarter of that number tried to scratch out a living here. He knew for a fact that ruins and empty houses far outnumbered inhabited ones.
All that made Stargard a perfect place for holdouts. Drucker wondered how many other smashed-up towns throughout the Reich held company- to battalion-sized units of Wehrmacht men or brigands-sometimes the line between them wasn’t easy to draw-who would sometimes sneak out and do what they could against the occupiers of the Reich.
He doubted he’d ever find out the answer to that. He did know Stargard held such a unit. And, at the moment, the holdouts were holding him. The Lizard who’d been driving him down to Neu Strelitz was no longer among the living. Had a couple of bullets from the machine-gun burst that wrecked the motorcar and killed the driver gone a few centimeters to the left or right of their actual courses, Drucker wouldn’t have been among the living any more, either.
As things were, he remained unsure how long he’d stay among the living. The holdouts kept him in the cellar whose second story had taken a couple of direct hits from a landcruiser’s cannon. It hadn’t burned, but nobody would want to live up there, either.
With a screech of rusty hinges, the cellar door opened. Two guards came down the stairs. One carried a kerosene lamp to shed more light than the candles the holdouts gave Drucker. The other had an assault rifle. He pointed it at Drucker’s midriff. “Come with us,” he said.
“All right.” Drucker got off the cot where he’d been lying. The alternative, plainly, was being shot on the spot. “Where are we going?” he asked. They’d taken him out for questioning a couple of times, which had let him see a little of Stargard, not that there was much worth seeing.
But the fellow with the lamp had a different answer today: “To the People’s Court, that’s where. They’ll give you what you deserve, you lousy traitor.”
“I’m not a traitor.” Drucker had been saying the same thing ever since they captured him. Had the holdouts believed him, they would have let him go. Had they thoroughly disbelieved him, they would have shot him when they killed his driver. They almost had. “What do you mean, People’s Court?” he asked as he approached the stairs.
The guards both backed up. They weren’t about to let him get close enough to grab either the rifle or the lantern. The one holding the rifle said, “The People’s Court, to give out justice for the Volk.”
“To give collaborators what they deserve,” the other fellow added.
Wearily, Drucker said, “I’m not a collaborator, either.” He’d been saying that over and over, too. Had he just been saying it, it would have done him no good. But he’d also had in his wallet the telegram from Walter Dornberger. A personal message from the Fuhrer had given even the holdouts pause.
When Drucker came out onto the street, he was surprised to see it was early morning. Down in the windowless cellar, he’d lost track of day and night. He’d lost track of which day it was, too. He thought he’d been a prisoner for a couple of weeks, but he could have been off by several days either way.
Only a few people were out and about so early. None of them seemed to find the sight of a man marched along at gunpoint in any way remarkable. Drucker wondered what would happen if he shouted for help. Actually, he didn’t wonder; he had a pretty good idea. Nobody would do anything for him, and the youngster with the assault rifle would fill him full of holes. He kept quiet.
“In here,” said the fellow with the lantern. In daylight, even the murky, cloudy daylight of Stargard, it was useless.
Here had been a tobacconist’s. The plate-glass window at the front of the shop had been smashed. Drucker was morally certain not a gram of tobacco remained inside. He’d lost the craving up on the Lizards’ starship, and had never had it too strongly-smoking in the upper stage of an A-45 while in Earth orbit was severely impractical. But for the shattered window, though, the tobacconist’s looked pretty much intact.
The back room had probably kept the stock that wasn’t on display. Now it held a table and eight or ten chairs that didn’t match one another. Three men sat along one side of the table. Drucker had seen two of them before. They’d interrogated him. The third, who sat in the middle, wore a Wehrmacht major’s tunic. He was young, but had a face like a steel trap: all sharp edges and angles, without humor, without mercy. Drucker wondered why he hadn’t served in the SS rather than the Army. Whatever the reason, he feared he wouldn’t get much of a fair trial here.
“We, the Volk of the Reich, bring the accused traitor, Johannes Drucker, before the bar of justice here,” the major said.
Drucker wasn’t invited to sit down. He sat anyway. The guards growled. The major glowered, but didn’t say anything. Drucker did: “All I’ve ever wanted to do was find my family. That’s not treason. I haven’t done anything that is treason, either.”
One of his interrogators said, “A Lizard was doing you a favor. Why would the Lizards do you a favor if you weren’t a traitor?”
“We’ve been over this before,” Drucker said, as patiently as he could. “They knew who I am because I flew the upper stage of an A-45. They captured me in space, and held me till the fighting was over. I suppose they were helping me because the Fuhrer was my old commandant at Peenemunde. He was generous enough to send me that wire. I heard some of my family might be down in Neu Strelitz, so I asked the Lizards for a lift. I’d walked from Nuremberg to Greifswald. If I didn’t have to walk again, I didn’t want to. That’s all. It’s simple, really.”
It wasn’t so simple. He said not a word about Mordechai Anielewicz. If the holdouts learned he’d consorted with a Jew, he was a dead man.
By the hard-faced young major’s eyes, he was liable to be a dead man any which way. The officer-evidently the leader of this band of holdouts-said, “You were consorting with the enemy. No proper citizen of the Reich should have anything to do with the Lizards under any circumstances.”
Drucker glared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, not so patiently any more. Maybe losing his temper was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it. “I started out in the Wehrmacht when you were in short pants. I was a panzer driver. If I hadn’t been shooting up Lizard landcruisers then, you wouldn’t be here to call me a traitor now.”
“What you did in the past is gone.” The major snapped his fingers. “Gone like that. What you do now, with the Reich in peril-that is what matters. And you have not denied that you were captured in the company of a Lizard.”
“How could I deny it?” Drucker said. “I was sitting next to him when your men shot him. What I do deny is that my sitting next to him makes me disloyal to the Reich. I’m as loyal to the Fuhrer as any man here. Where’s your telegram from General Dornberger, Herr Major?”
That should have been a corker. Unfortunately, Drucker saw that it didn’t do as much corking as he’d hoped it would. Sure enough, the young major’s eyes might have come off an SS recruiting poster: they were gray-blue like ice, and every bit as cold. He said, “It is by no means certain that the Fuhrer is not a traitor to the Reich. He yielded to the Race too soon, and he yielded far
too much in the terms for what he calls peace but is in fact only appeasement.”
More royal than the king, Drucker thought. Aloud, he said, “If he hadn’t yielded, every square millimeter of Germany would be covered with radioactive glass right now. You wouldn’t be alive to tell me this nonsense. I might still be alive, because I was out in space. But I wouldn’t have gone for a ride with that Lizard, because I would have known everybody in my family was dead.”
“If you support the Fuhrer’s spinelessness, you condemn yourself out of your own mouth,” the holdouts’ leader replied in a voice as frigid as his eyes.
Drucker felt like pounding his head against the table. “If you don’t follow the policies of your own Fuhrer, of the Reich’s Fuhrer, how can you call yourself soldiers of the Reich any more? You’re not soldiers. You’re just bandits.”
“We are soldiers of the true Reich, the pure Reich, the Reich we struggle to bring back into being, the Reich that will have a Fuhrer worthy of it, not a collaborationist.” By a slight change in tone, the major suggested the Reich might not have to look too far to find such a Fuhrer. And, by the faces of the two men who’d grilled Drucker before, they agreed with him.
As far as Drucker was concerned, they were all out of their minds. Of course, nine hundred ninety-nine people out of a thousand in Munich in 1921 would have said the same thing about Hitler and his handful of followers, too. But how many would-be Hitlers had there been in Germany then? Hundreds, surely. Thousands, more likely. What were the odds this fellow was the genuine article? Slim. Very, very slim.
Genuine article or not, he had the whip hand here. And he plainly intended to use it. “By the power vested in me as an officer of the Reich- the true Reich, the uncorrupted Reich- I now pass sentence on you for treason against that Reich,” he said. “The sentence will be-”
Before he could tell Drucker what it would be, one of his young bully-boys strode into the tobacconist’s back room with a package in his hand. The major paused. Drucker wondered why he bothered. He wondered why the major bothered with the whole rigmarole in the first place, when he’d plainly decided to execute Drucker in the name of what he called people’s justice.
His bully-boy sent Drucker a curious glance. The fellow was seventeen or eighteen, with the fuzzy beginnings of a beard. Drucker’s hand started to go to his own chin; in however long he’d been in captivity, he’d raised a thicker growth than that kid owned.
The hand froze halfway to his face. The kid was staring at him, too. “Heinrich?” Drucker whispered, at the same time as the bully-boy was saying, “Father?” Drucker sprang out of his chair, the hard-faced major and his own impending death sentence utterly forgotten. He and his son jumped into each other’s arms.
“What’s going on here?” the major demanded.
“What’s going on here, sir?” Heinrich Drucker demanded in return. “I knew we’d taken a prisoner, but I didn’t know who.” By the look on his face, he was ready to fight his commander and everyone else in the world. Drucker had been the same way at the same age. Danger in his voice, Heinrich went on, “Was this a treason trial?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Drucker said. He had to grab his son to keep him from going for the major’s throat.
“Perhaps,” the holdout leader said, “in the light of this new evidence-”
“Evidence, am I?” Heinrich growled.
“In the light of this new evidence,” the major repeated, “perhaps we can justify suspending sentence for the time being. Perhaps.” Considering what had been about to happen to him, Drucker didn’t even mind the qualifier.
Felless was glad to escape Cairo and return to Marseille. She’d never imagined she would think such a thing, but it remained a truth nonetheless. She’d seen for herself that she couldn’t get rid of her ginger habit. Creating another scandal right under the eye turrets of the fleetlord of the conquest fleet would undoubtedly have got her sent to a worse place than Marseille. That not-empire called Finland, newly under the Race’s influence, was supposed to have weather abominable even by Tosevite standards.
She let out a hiss of relief that she’d touched off only one small mating frenzy in Cairo, and that word of it hadn’t got back to Atvar. She had Ttomalss to thank for that. She didn’t like being indebted to the other psychological researcher, but knew full well that she was. If he wanted something from her one of these days, she didn’t see how she could keep from giving it to him.
At least she wasn’t gravid-or she didn’t think she was. That took away one worry pertaining to ginger-induced sexuality, anyhow. And so she peered out of the small windows of her aircraft at the blue water below-such a lot of water on this world-and waited to land at the field outside Marseille.
Once the aircraft had rolled to a halt, she got out and arranged transportation to the new consulate building. Formalities were minimal; the Francais, unlike the Deutsche, didn’t go out of their way to make things difficult for the Race.
They had better not, she thought. They owe us a great deal more than I owe Ttomalss. Of course, by all indications, the Big Uglies worried a great deal less than the Race did about their debts.
All the motorcars outside the terminal building were of Tosevite manufacture and had Big Uglies driving them. She got into one and said, “To the consulate.” She spoke in her language, since she knew no other.
“It shall be done,” the driver said. He opened and closed his hands four times. “Twenty francs.” Francs, she knew, were what the local Big Uglies used for money. She had some of the little metal disks. They differed in value, depending on their size and design. Somewhere on them, no doubt, were Tosevite numerals. Felless had never bothered learning those, but she did know which size was worth ten francs. She gave the driver two of those. He made the Race’s affirmative gesture. “I thank you.”
By the time he got her to the consulate, Felless was by no means sure she thanked him. She had seen that many Tosevites drove as if they did not care whether they lived or died. This Francais male seemed to be actively courting death. He drove as if his motorcar were a missile, and guided it into tiny openings, even into imaginary openings, defying everyone around him. Back on Home, males of some animal species used such challenges to establish territories during the mating season. What purpose they served here was beyond Felless’ comprehension.
She escaped from the motorcar as if escaping prison-though she had trouble imagining a prison as dangerous as the trip from the airfield-and fled into the consulate. After exchanging greetings with some of the males and females there, she went back to her own room. The chamber she’d had at Shepheard’s Hotel had been adequate, but this was home.
She felt like having a taste of ginger to celebrate surviving her encounter with the maniacal Big Ugly, but refrained. Suppertime was coming, and she knew she would want to go down to the refectory: through some tradition probably older than the unification of Home under the Empire, aircraft never served adequate meals. The time for the herb will come, she told herself. Sooner or later, she always found a chance to taste.
When she did go to the refectory, she had trouble getting time to eat. She was too busy greeting friends and acquaintances and giving them gossip from Cairo and about her work with Straha. Everyone paid attention when she talked about that; the ex-shiplord fascinated veterans from the conquest fleet and also males and females from among the colonists. He’d fascinated Felless, too; his tale of disobedience and defection was far outside the Race’s normal pattern of behavior.
Because Felless spent so much time talking, she took a while to notice that the food wasn’t up to the quality of what she’d been eating in Cairo. She shrugged-what could one expect in a provincial place like France? She also took a while to notice that one familiar face was missing. “Where is Business Administrator Keffesh?” she asked the female sitting beside her.
“Had you not heard?” the other female exclaimed in surprise. “But no, you could not have-you were in Cairo. How foolish of me. W
ell, Business Administrator Keffesh is now Prisoner Keffesh, I am afraid. He was caught dealing ginger with a notorious Tosevite. The herb is such a nuisance.” She spoke with the smug superiority of one who had never tasted.
“Truth: the herb is indeed a nuisance,” Felless said in a hollow voice. If Keffesh was a prisoner, he’d presumably been interrogated and had presumably confessed and told all he knew in the hope of gaining leniency. Felless wondered if he’d reckoned his dealings with her important enough to mention to the authorities.
One way or the other, she would find out before long. Either nothing would happen or she would get yet another unpleasant telephone call from Ambassador Veffani. Or perhaps Veffani wouldn’t bother telephoning. Perhaps he would simply send law-enforcement officials to search her chamber and arrest her if they found any illicit ginger-a redundancy if ever there was one.
But then she made the negative gesture under the table. Veffani could have ordered her chamber searched while she was in Cairo. Had he done so, he would without a doubt have radioed an order for her arrest to the Race’s administrative center. Since he hadn’t, maybe Keffesh hadn’t implicated her after all. She could hope he hadn’t, anyhow.
She sipped at the fermented fruit juice that accompanied her meal. Alcohol was a pleasure familiar from Home, and she didn’t mind the taste of this particular Tosevite variation on the theme. Next to ginger, though, alcohol seemed pretty pallid stuff. I will taste again, she thought fiercely. I will, by the Emperor.
As she cast down her eye turrets, the irony of swearing by her sovereign when contemplating the illegal herb struck her. She shrugged. The Emperor didn’t know what he was missing. It would be many years before he found out, if he ever did.
After learning the news about Keffesh, getting out of the refectory and back to her chamber felt like escape, almost as much as getting out of the wild Big Ugly’s motorcar had. But that Francais male couldn’t have pursued her here. The telephone, that dangerous instrument, could-and did. She flinched when it hissed. “Senior Researcher Felless,” she said. “I greet you.”
