At this point, Sam had two choices of his own. He could say something like, Anything happens to me, you’ll be sorry. Or he could just sit tight. He decided to sit tight. These guys struck him as the sort who would take a warning as a sign of weakness, not as a sign of strength.
He wondered if Straha had yet decided he was really missing, and whether the ex-shiplord had looked at the papers he’d given him. Sam had his doubts. If Straha had seen those papers, wouldn’t he have got them to the Lizards in Cairo just as fast as he could? Yeager’s bet was that he would have. And if he had, the fur would have started flying by now. Sam was sure of that.
Maybe his captors had been expecting him to speak up and warn them. When he sat tight, they didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Were they unused to people who could bargain from a position of strength? Or were they just too dumb—and too far down on the totem pole—to realize he had some strength in this bargaining match?
Fred was the one who looked to have a clue. He gathered up the other two by eye and said, “I think we need to talk about this.”
They couldn’t go off into another room and leave Sam unattended. If they did, he was liable to be out the door like a shot. He didn’t know where the next closest house was—he’d come here at night, and had no idea how big a farm this was—but he might well make life difficult for these guys. Of course, they might shoot him if they caught up with him. It would be too bad if they did, too bad for him and, very possibly, too bad for the USA and the whole world.
He wondered if he could slide out of here while they talked among themselves. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than John said, “Don’t even think about it, buddy.” Yeager wondered how he’d given himself away. Had his eyes slid longingly toward the door? Whatever the answer, he sat where he was.
After a couple of minutes, his guards broke apart. “Tell you what we’re going to do,” Fred said, his voice so full of sweet reason, Sam instantly grew suspicious. “We’re going to do just like you say, Lieutenant Colonel. We’ll pass your request along, and we’ll see what comes of it. If it gets turned down, it’s not our fault. Is that fair?” He beamed at Yeager.
“I don’t think kidnapping me in the first place was exactly fair,” Sam answered. “Besides, how do I know I can believe you? You can say you’ll pass it along and then just forget about it. How would I know you’re telling the truth?”
“What do you want us to do?” John asked. “Put it in writing?”
“That’d be nice,” Yeager said dryly.
Everybody laughed, as if they were good buddies sitting around shooting the breeze somewhere. Nobody was going to put anything in writing. If some people hadn’t put this, that, and the other thing in writing, Sam wouldn’t have been where he was now. In a lot of different ways, he wished he weren’t.
He decided to press just a little: “When you do pass the word along, you might want to let people know it’s already liable to be later than they think.”
“Crap,” Charlie said again.
“If you say so,” Sam answered. “But I think it’s important for the president to know everything that’s going on.”
“Now you listen up, Lieutenant Colonel,” John said. “You aren’t in a real good place to start telling people what to do. Nothing’s happened to your family—yet. You want to make real sure nothing does, you know what I mean?”
“Why, you son of a—” Sam surged to his feet.
He took half a step forward, but only half a step. All three of his watchdogs packed Army .45s. All three of them had the pistols out and pointed at his brisket in less time than he would have imagined possible. The difference between these guys and the small-town muscle he’d known in his younger days suddenly became obvious. The small-town punks had been minor leaguers, same as he’d been in those days. These fellows could have played in Yankee Stadium, and made the all-star team every year, too. Yeah, they were bastards, but they were awfully damn good at what they did.
Very slowly, Yeager sat down again. John nodded. “Smart boy,” he said. His .45 disappeared again. So did Fred’s. Charlie held on to his. He looked disappointed that Sam hadn’t given him the chance to use it. John went on, “You really don’t want to get your ass in an uproar, Lieutenant Colonel, honest to God you don’t. We said we’d pass things along, and we will.”
Sam studied him. “Saying things is easy. Really doing them—that’s something different. I’m telling you, President Warren needs to talk to me. He doesn’t know how much trouble he may end up in if he doesn’t.”
“Talk is cheap,” John said.
“That’s what I just told you,” Yeager answered. “But how many laws are you guys breaking by holding me here like this, not letting me see my lawyer, not letting me know what the charges against me are, or even if there are any charges against me?”
“National security,” Charlie intoned, as if reciting Holy Writ.
Yeager might have guessed he would say that. Yeager had, in fact, guessed he would say that. And he had a comeback ready: “If it turns out you’re right and everything works out okay, you guys are heroes. But if things go wrong, who’s going to end up with egg on his face? You guys will, because whoever’s over you sure as hell isn’t going to sit still and take the blame.”
“That’s not for you to worry about, Lieutenant Colonel,” Fred said. “That’s for us to worry about—and do we look worried?”
“No,” Sam admitted. “But the point is, maybe you ought to.”
“Crap,” Charlie said: a man of strong opinions and limited vocabulary. John and Fred didn’t contradict him—and, dammit, they didn’t look worried. Sam had to hope he’d planted some seeds of doubt . . . and that planting seeds of doubt mattered.
Because of the time he’d spent in space, Jonathan Yeager was going to graduate from UCLA a couple of quarters later than he would have otherwise. That had been the biggest thing on his mind when he got back to Gardena—till his father disappeared. He and his mother both knew, or thought they knew, why his father had disappeared. If they went to the papers, they might raise enough of a stink to get his dad released. They hadn’t done it, not yet. The stink they would raise might turn out to be a lot bigger and messier than that.
And so, now that classes had started again, Jonathan drove up to Westwood every day feeling as if he were in limbo. He didn’t know where his dad was, or when—or if—he might return. The police were supposed to be looking for Sam Yeager. So was the Army. So was the FBI. Nobody’d had any luck. Jonathan feared nobody was likely to have any luck, either.
He felt in limbo at UCLA, too. Because he’d dropped a couple of quarters behind, he wasn’t in so many classes with his friends—they’d gone on, and he hadn’t. What he’d learned from Kassquit and from the Race was and would be immensely valuable to him, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that fit into the university curriculum.
That was on his mind as he left his modern political science class—modern, of course, meaning since the coming of the Lizards—and headed out to the grass between Royce Hall and Powell Library to eat the ham sandwich and orange and cookies he’d brought from home. Brown-bagging it was cheaper than buying lunch from any of the campus greasy spoons, and his mom had started watching every penny since his dad hadn’t come home from Desert Center. “After all,” she’d said once, “you never know, I might disappear next.”
He was just sitting down when Karen walked by. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he waved. “Hi!” he said. “You got a few minutes?”
She paused, obviously thinking it over. They’d been an item—they’d been more than an item; they’d been drifting toward getting married—till he went up to the starship to instruct Kassquit about Tosevite sexual customs. Since then . . . since then, things had been tense, no two ways about it. He’d known they would be when he rode the shuttlecraft into space. He hadn’t known the war between the Reich and the Race would strand him up there for so long—which only made things between Karen and him that much
tenser.
At last, though frowning, she nodded. “How are you?” she asked, leaving the walkway to sit down beside him. “Any word about your father?” She sounded genuinely worried there. They’d known each other since high school, and she’d always got on well with his folks.
“Nothing,” Jonathan answered with a grimace. “Zero. Zip. Zilch. I wish to God there were.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and brushed a lock of red hair back from her face. Freckles dusted her nose and cheeks and shoulders; she sunburned if you looked at her sideways. Despite that, she wore a flesh-colored halter top to show off the body paint that alleged she was a military communications specialist: like a lot of people of their generation, she was as passionately interested in the Lizards as was Jonathan. After a moment, she found another safe question to ask: “How are Mickey and Donald?”
She’d been there when they hatched from their eggs. Jonathan supposed that was a breach of security, but he hadn’t cared at the time, and his father had let him get away with it. “They’re fine,” he answered. “Growing like weeds, and learning new words all the time.” He hesitated, then plunged: “You know they always think it’s hot when you come over to see them.”
“Do they?” Karen’s voice wasn’t hot; it was colder than winter in Los Angeles ever got. “I like seeing them. I like seeing your mom, too. You . . . that hasn’t worked out so well since you got back, and you know it hasn’t.”
Jonathan’s sack lunch lay by him, forgotten. “Go easy,” he said. “I’ve told you and told you—what happened up there wasn’t what I thought it was going to be when I left.”
“I know,” she said. “It lasted longer, so you had more fun than you figured you would when you left. But you went up there intending to have fun. That’s the long and short of things, isn’t it, Jonathan?”
He admitted what he could scarcely deny: “That’s some of it, yeah. But it’s not all. It was almost like what fooling around with a real Lizard would be. We both learned a lot from it.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Karen said.
“I didn’t mean it like that, darn it,” Jonathan said. “Now she’s thinking about coming down here to see what life among the Big Uglies is like, and all she ever wanted to do before was stay on the starship and pretend she was a Lizard.”
“And what would she do if she did come down here?” Karen demanded. “Whatever it was, would she do it with you?”
Jonathan’s ears heated. That had nothing to do with the weather, even though the day, like a lot of allegedly early-autumn days in Los Angeles, was well up into the eighties. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’s research, is what it is.”
“Is that what you call it?” Karen said. “How would you like it if I were doing research like that?” She laced the word with scorn.
And Jonathan knew he wouldn’t like it for hell. He took a deep breath. “There’s one way that wouldn’t happen, even if Kassquit did come down to Earth,” he said.
“Sure there is—if she landed in Moscow,” Karen said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Jonathan said. “Not even close. She knows about marriage—I don’t think she really understands it, but she knows what it means. That’s why”—he blushed again—“that’s why my dad wasn’t up there being experimental, if you know what I mean.”
“And so?” Karen said.
“And so . . .” Jonathan plunged: “And so, if I were engaged to you, it wouldn’t be the same as married, but it would be on the way to the same thing, and she’d see that it meant she and I couldn’t do, uh, anything any more.” He brought the words out in a quick, almost desperate rush.
Karen’s eyes widened—widened more, in fact, than Jonathan had ever seen them do. Ever so slowly, she said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”
“Yeah.” Jonathan nodded, feeling very much as if he’d just gone off the high board without bothering to see if there was any water in the pool. “I guess that kind of is what I’m doing. Will you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you.” Karen shook her head, not in rejection but in bemusement. “If you’d asked me before you went up to the starship the last time, I’d’ve said yes in a minute. Now . . . ? Now it sounds more like you’re asking me to marry you to give you an excuse not to fool around with Kassquit than for any other reason, and I don’t think I like that very much.”
“That isn’t why,” Jonathan protested, though it had sounded like why to him, too. He did his best to make it sound like something else: “It was the only way I could think of to tell you I’m sorry about what happened up there and that there isn’t anybody but you I want to spend my life with.” His mother wouldn’t have approved of his ending a sentence with a preposition. Right this minute, he didn’t care whether his mother would have approved or not.
And this time he’d said the right thing, or something close to it. Karen’s expression softened. “That’s . . . very sweet, Jonathan,” she said. “I’ve thought for a long time that we might one day. Like I say, I used to like the idea—but things changed when you went up there. I’m going to have to sort that out.”
“We weren’t engaged or anything.” Jonathan thought about adding that he’d used some of the things Karen had taught him with Kassquit. But, not being of a suicidal bent, he didn’t.
“No, not really,” Karen said, “but we were as close as makes no difference—I thought so, anyway.”
That had teeth, sharp ones. Jonathan considered explaining again how he’d done everything he’d done with Kassquit purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry. Again, he thought better of it. What he did say was just as inflammatory, though he didn’t realize it at the time: “Come to think of it, maybe you’d better not marry me. It might not be safe for you.”
“What do you mean, not safe?” Karen asked. “I know you’re crazy, but I never thought you were especially dangerous.”
“Thanks—I think.” He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He hadn’t told her about this when he found out about it after he got back from the starship. He hadn’t told anybody. The son of an officer, he knew secrets could leak if you started running your mouth. But he was afraid his father had disappeared because of what he knew. Didn’t that mean he, Jonathan, had an obligation to make sure the secret couldn’t be wiped out? And Karen could be counted on. After all, she knew about the hatchlings, didn’t she?
The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. His father had insisted on that for as long as he could remember. Here as other places, his old man looked to have a point.
“You still haven’t told me what you meant,” Karen reminded him.
“Well . . .” Jonathan did his best to temporize. “I’ve got some idea of why my dad disappeared, and it has to do with something he knew and something he told me.”
“Something he knew?” Karen echoed, while people worrying about nothing but classes and lunch walked back and forth only a few feet away. “Something he knew that he wasn’t supposed to, you mean? Sounds like something out of a spy story.”
“I know it does. I’m sorry,” Jonathan answered. “You’re liable to be in trouble just because you know me. I’m sorry.” He realized he was repeating himself. He also wondered how the devil the conversation had got so far away from his proposal so fast.
Karen said, “You know something?” That was just an ordinary question; she waited for him to shake his head before going on, “You’re going to have to tell me now. If you want me to marry you, I mean. You can’t have that kind of great big secret from somebody you’re married to.”
“Hey! That’s not fair. You don’t even know what you’re asking for,” Jonathan protested. “You don’t know how much trouble you might get into, either. Remember the guy who tried to firebomb our house? As far as we could find out, nothing ever happened to him.”
Karen only folded her arms across her chest—across that ridiculously unconcealing halter top—and waited. She said one word: “Talk.”
&n
bsp; And Jonathan saw that, having come this far, he couldn’t do anything but talk. He leaned close to her so none of the happy, unconcerned students going by would hear anything out of the ordinary. Telling what he knew didn’t take long. When he was done, he said, “There. Are you satisfied?”
“My God,” Karen said quietly. “Oh, my God.” She looked around the bright, sun-splashed UCLA campus as if she’d never seen it before. “What do we do now?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out,” Jonathan replied. “I still don’t have any answers I like. And speaking of answers, you still owe me one for the question I asked you a little while ago.”
“What? Oh, that.” Karen’s voice remained far away. “I’ll worry about that later, Jonathan. This is more important.”
Jonathan wondered if he ought to be insulted. He wondered if he ought to get angry. He discovered he couldn’t do either. The trouble was, he agreed with her.
Mordechai Anielewicz had imagined any number of things in his search for his family. Having a German along, though, a German who was interested in helping him, had never once crossed his mind. But Johannes Drucker had a missing family, too. Anielewicz had always had trouble imagining Germans as human beings. How could they be human and have done what they’d done? But if a man desperately searching for his wife and sons and daughter wasn’t a human being, what was he?
What was funny, in a horrid, macabre sort of way, was that what Drucker had thought about Jews pretty much mirrored what he himself had thought about Nazis. “I never worried my head about the enemies of the Reich,” he told Mordechai one evening. “If my leaders said they were enemies, I went out and dealt with them. That was my job. I never cared about rights or wrongs till Käthe got in trouble.”
“Nothing like the personal touch.” Anielewicz’s voice was dry.
Colonization: Aftershocks Page 24
