Brigadier General Healey nodded as if he and Johnson hadn’t had words a few minutes before. The riddle facing him was a bigger source of irritation than even his number-three pilot. “You’re right—and that doesn’t make any sense, either.”
“Nothing makes sense if you don’t know the answers,” Mickey Flynn observed. “The people who do know the answers must have, or think they have, good reason to make sure nobody else finds out. We call them senseless. They call us ignorant. Odds are, we and they are both right.”
“They’d better not be senseless, or all of us—and an awful lot of people and Lizards back on Earth—are in a ton of trouble,” Johnson said.
“This is true,” Flynn agreed. “On the other hand, I could refer you to the late Doctor Ernst Kaltenbrunner—if he weren’t late, of course. He was senseless, and now he is and will remain permanently senseless.”
Johnson grimaced and protested, “Yeah, but the Nazis have been off the deep end ever since Hitler started slaughtering Jews. We aren’t like that. We’ve always played straight.” He hesitated. “We played straight with everything I know about except the Lewis and Clark, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s not us,” Healey said. “I have been assured of that. Had it been us, the Race has had plenty of chances to take us off the board.”
And that was also true. Then Johnson said, “What if we haven’t played straight with things nobody up here knows anything about?”
“Like what?” Walter Stone asked.
“How should I know?” Johnson answered. “If I did know, it wouldn’t be something nobody knew about.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Flynn murmured.
“What if, what if, what if,” Brigadier General Healey snarled. “What we need are facts. The only fact we’ve got is that the Race is leaning on the United States. If it leans too hard, we’ve got to fight back or knuckle under. We’re not about to knuckle under.”
“Well, there’s one other fact, too,” Johnson said. “If the USA goes to war with the Lizards now, we lose. And no matter how many drills we hold, the Lewis and Clark is lunch.” He waited—he hoped for—Healey to argue with him. The commandant didn’t.
“Why on earth are the Lizards gearing up for war against the United States?” Reuven Russie asked his father over the supper table. “Has everybody in the whole world gone meshuggeh?”
Moishe Russie said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the only explanation that makes much sense.”
“Have you talked with the fleetlord?” Reuven’s sister Judith asked.
“I’ve called him several times,” Reuven’s father answered. “Most of them, he hasn’t wanted to talk to me. When he has been willing to talk on the phone, he hasn’t had anything much to say.”
“But what could the United States have done to get the Race so angry?” Reuven asked. “With the Germans, everybody else had plenty of good reasons to hate them. But the USA has just sat there and minded its own business. What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t know,” his father said. “Since he won’t really talk to me, I’m having a devil of a time finding out, too. But I can tell you this—Straha is back in the Race’s territory, and that’s not anything I thought I’d see while I was alive.”
It was also something that meant very little to Reuven. “Straha?” He put the name into a question half a beat before his sisters could.
Moishe Russie’s smile was half amused, half wistful. “You were only a little boy when he defected to the Americans, Reuven,” he said. “Esther and Judith, you weren’t even imagined yet, let alone here. He was something like the third- or fourth-highest ranking male in the conquest fleet. He tried some sort of coup against Atvar, and it didn’t work, and he fled.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to ask the fleetlord about the details now,” Reuven said.
His mother laughed. “See what your fancy education does for you?”
“Mother!” he said indignantly. His father made cracks like that all the time. His sisters made them whenever they thought they could get away with them. For Rivka Russie to make one, too, felt like a betrayal.
“But the point,” his father said, “the point is that he’s left the United States and come to Cairo—I think he’s in Cairo. He had to know something important, or else he’d be imprisoned somewhere, and he’s not.”
“And it’s probably something that has to do with the United States, since he lived there so long,” Reuven said.
“Very good, Sherlock.” That was Esther, who’d been reading a lot of Arthur Conan Doyle in Hebrew translation. “Now all you have to do is figure out what he knows.”
Reuven looked at his father. Moishe Russie shrugged and said, “I already told you, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll all find out one day before too long. I’m hoping we never find out, because that will mean the trouble’s gone away.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” Reuven took another bite of beefsteak. He raised his wineglass. “Here’s to ignorance!”
Everyone drank the toast. Amid laughter, Reuven’s father said, “That’s probably the first time anyone has ever made that toast inside a Jewish house. Alevai, it’ll be the last time, too.” His face clouded. “Alevai, we won’t need to make that kind of toast again.”
“Omayn.” Reuven and his mother spoke together.
After supper, Reuven asked his father, “If the United States and the Lizards go to war, what do we do?”
“We here in Palestine, you mean?” Moishe Russie asked, and Reuven nodded. His father sighed. “About the same thing we did when the Race fought the Germans: sit tight and hope the Americans don’t manage to land a missile on Jerusalem. I think that would be less likely in this fight than in the war with the Nazis. The Americans don’t particularly hate Jews, so they don’t have any big reason for aiming a missile here—and most of their missiles are farther away than the ones the Germans fired at us.”
“How do you know that?” Reuven asked. “They may have three submarines sitting right off the coast. How would we know?”
“We wouldn’t, not until something either happened or didn’t,” his father said. “I told you what I thought was likely. If you don’t like that, come up with your own answers.”
“I like it fine. I hope you’re right,” Reuven said. “Actually, I hope we’re all worrying over nothing, and that there won’t be a war.”
This time, his father said, “Omayn!”
When they walked to work the next morning, someone had painted new black swastikas on several walls, and the phrase Allahu akbar! by them. Reuven laughed to keep from cursing. “Haven’t the Arabs noticed that that firm’s gone out of business?”
“Who can say?” Moishe Russie answered. “Maybe they wish it were still operating. Or maybe it is still operating, but being quiet about it. That wouldn’t surprise me. Once some things get loose, they’re hard to kill.”
“I thought Dornberger was supposed to be a relatively civilized man,” Reuven said.
“Compared to Hitler, compared to Himmler, compared to Kaltenbrunner—how much praise is that?” his father asked. “He’s still a German. He’s still a Nazi. If he can find some way to make the Lizards unhappy, don’t you think he’ll use it? Getting the Arabs to erupt is one easy way to do it.”
“And if he incites them against us, too, all the better,” Reuven said. His father didn’t contradict him. He wished Moishe Russie had.
Once they got to the office, Yetta showed them their appointments. Reuven sighed. When he’d been studying at the Moishe Russie Medical College, human physiology and biochemistry had looked like important subjects. And they’d looked like fascinating subjects. Seeing them exemplified in the persons of his patients was much less exciting. A lot of the answers he got were ambiguous. Sometimes he couldn’t find any answers at all. And even a lot of the ones that were perfectly clear weren’t very interesting. Yes, sir, that boil will respond to antibiotics. Yes, ma’am, that toe is broken. No, it doesn�
�t matter if we put a cast on it or not. It’ll do the same either way, and yes, it will hurt for a few weeks.
He gave a tetanus shot. He removed a splinter of metal that had got lodged in a construction worker’s leg. He took the cast off a broken wrist his father had set a few weeks before. He swabbed a four-year-old’s throat to see if the girl was coming down with a streptococcus infection. He injected local anesthetic and stitched up a cut arm. Every bit of that needed doing. He did it well. But it wasn’t what he’d imagined a physician’s career was like.
He was putting a clean dressing on the cut arm when Yetta stuck her head into the room and said, “Mrs. Radofsky just telephoned. Her daughter is screaming her head off—she thinks it’s an earache. Can you fit her in?”
A screaming toddler—just what I need, Reuven thought. But he nodded. “One way or another, I’ll manage.”
“That’s good,” the receptionist said. “I asked your father, but he said he was too busy and told me to go to you instead.” Yetta was plain to the point of frumpishness, but at the moment she looked almost comically amused. “I’ll tell her she can bring Miriam in to you in an hour, if that’s all right.”
“Fine,” Reuven said. He almost asked her what was so funny, but held off at the last minute because he saw a possible answer. She thinks my father is trying to fix me up with a pretty widow, he realized. That almost started him laughing. Then he wondered what was so laughable about it. With Jane gone to Canada, he wouldn’t have minded getting fixed up with anybody.
As if Mrs. Radofsky cares about you for anything but whether you can make her little girl feel better, he thought. That didn’t bother him. That was the way things were supposed to be.
Even back in his examination room, he could tell when the widow Radofsky brought her daughter into the office. The racket Miriam was making left no possible doubt. Reuven was looking at another widow, a little old lady named Goldblatt whose varicose veins were troubling her. “Gevalt!” she said. “That one’s not very happy.”
“No, she’s not,” Reuven agreed. “I’m going to recommend an elastic bandage on that leg to help keep those veins under control for you. I don’t think they’re bad enough to need surgery now. If they bother you more, though, come back in and we’ll have another look at them.”
“All right, Doctor, thank you,” Mrs. Goldblatt said. Reuven hid his smile. I’m learning, he thought. If he’d told her straight out that she was fussing over very little, she’d have left in a huff. As things were, she seemed well enough pleased, even though all he’d done was sugarcoat essentially the same message.
“Can you see Mrs. Radofsky and Miriam now?” Yetta asked.
“Why not?” Reuven raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been hearing them—or Miriam, anyhow—for a while now.” The receptionist sniffed. No, she didn’t care for anyone’s jokes but her own.
A moment later, the young widow carried her daughter into the examination room. Miriam was still howling at the top of her lungs, and was tugging at the lobe of her left ear and trying to stick her finger into it. That would have been diagnostic all by itself. Mrs. Radofsky gave Reuven a wan smile and tried to talk through the din: “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. She woke up like this at four in the morning.” No wonder her smile was wan.
Reuven grabbed his otoscope. “We’ll see what we can do.”
Miriam didn’t want to let him examine her, not for beans she didn’t. She screeched, “No!”—a two-year-old’s favorite word anyway, as Reuven remembered from his sisters—and tried to grab the otoscope and keep it away from her ear.
“Can you hold her, please?” Reuven asked her mother.
“All right,” the widow Radofsky said. Even in his brief time in practice, Reuven had discovered that almost no mother would hold her precious darling tight enough to do a doctor one damn bit of good. He’d thought about investing in pediatric straitjackets, or even manufacturing them and making his fortune from grateful physicians the world around. He expected to do half the holding himself this time, too.
But he got a surprise. Mrs. Radofsky battled Miriam to a standstill. Reuven got a good look inside a red, swollen ear canal. “She’s got it, sure enough,” he said. “I’m going to give her a shot of penicillin, and I’m going to prescribe a liquid for her. You have an icebox to keep it cold?” Most people did, but not everybody.
To his relief, Miriam’s mother nodded. She rolled her daughter onto her stomach on the examining table so Reuven could give her the shot in the right cheek. That produced a new set of screams, almost supersonically shrill. When they subsided, the widow Radofsky said, “Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome.” Reuven felt like sticking a finger in his ear, too. “She should start getting relief in twenty-four hours. If she doesn’t, bring her back. Make sure she takes all the liquid. It’s nasty, but she needs it.”
“I understand.” Mrs. Radofsky didn’t have to shout, for Miriam, finally exhausted, hiccuped a couple of times and fell asleep. Her mother sighed and said, “Life is never as simple as we wish it would be, is it?” She brushed back a lock of dark hair that had come loose.
“No,” Reuven said. “All you can do is your best.” Miriam’s mother nodded again, then sent him a sharp look. Is she noticing me and not just the man in the white coat? he wondered, and hoped she was.
9
“Queek and his interpreter are here, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov’s secretary told him.
“Very well, Pyotr Maksimovich. I am coming.” It wasn’t very well, and Molotov knew it. He’d hated the Reich, but he missed it now that it was reduced to a battered shadow of itself. And the United States was in trouble. If the Race found an excuse for smashing the USA, how long could the USSR last after that? No matter what the dialectic said about inevitable socialist victory, Molotov didn’t want to have to find out for himself.
He hurried into the office reserved for visits from the Race’s ambassador. A couple of minutes later, his secretary led in Queek and the Pole who translated his words into Russian. “Good day,” Molotov told the human. “Please convey my warm greetings to your principal.” His words were as warm as a Murmansk blizzard, but he’d observed the forms.
The Pole spoke to the Lizard. The Lizard hissed and popped back at him. “He conveys similar greetings to you, Comrade General Secretary.”
Queek’s greetings were probably as friendly as Molotov’s, but the Soviet leader couldn’t do anything about that. He said, “I thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”
“That is my duty,” Queek replied. “Now that I am here, I will ask why you have summoned me.” His interpreter made it sound as if Molotov would find himself in trouble if he didn’t have a good reason.
He thought he did. “If at all possible, I want to use my good offices to help the Race and the United States come to a peaceful resolution of the dispute that has arisen between them.” He didn’t know why the dispute had arisen, which frustrated him no end, but that didn’t matter.
Queek gestured. The interpreter said, “That means he rejects your offer.”
Molotov hadn’t expected anything so blunt. “Why?” he asked, fighting to keep astonishment from his voice.
“Because this dispute is between the Race and the United States,” Queek replied. “Do you truly wish to include your not-empire and suffer the consequences of doing so?”
“That depends on the circumstances,” Molotov said. “If the Soviet Union were to include itself on the side of the United States, do you doubt that the Race would also suffer certain consequences?”
When the interpreter translated that, Queek made the boiling and bubbling noises he used to show he was an unhappy Lizard. The interpreter didn’t translate them, which might have been just as well. After half a minute or so, the Race’s ambassador started spluttering less. Now the Pole turned his words into Russian: “You would destroy yourselves if you were mad enough to attempt such a thing.”
“Possibly.” Eve
n for Molotov, sounding dispassionate while speaking of his country’s ruin didn’t come easy, but he managed. “If, however, the Race attacked first the United States and then the peace-loving peasants and workers of the Soviet Union, our destruction would be even more certain. If you think the Germans hurt you, you had better think very hard on what the United States and the Soviet Union could do together.”
“Do you threaten me, Comrade General Secretary?” Queek asked.
“By no means, Ambassador,” Molotov replied. “I warn you. If you leave the Soviet Union out of your calculations, you make a serious mistake. This government cannot be, is not, and will not be blind to the danger the Race poses to the other chief independent human power, and thus to all of mankind.”
“I assure you that, whatever the danger in which the United States finds itself, it is a danger that that not-empire has abundantly earned,” Queek said. “I also assure you that it is none of your business.”
“If you assure me it is none of my business, I have no way to examine your other assurances,” Molotov said. “Therefore, I must assume them to be worthless.”
“Assume whatever you please,” Queek said. “We are not interested in your efforts to mediate. If we ever do seek mediation, we shall inquire of you. And as for your threats, you will find that you cannot intimidate us.”
“I have no intention of intimidating you,” Molotov said, glad he had the knack of lying with a straight face. “You will follow your interests, and we shall follow ours. But I did want to make sure you understood what the Soviet Union considers to be in its interest.”
“The Soviet Union does not understand what is in its interest, not if it courts destruction like—” The interpreter broke off and went back and forth with Queek in the Lizards’ language. Then he returned to Russian: “The expression people would use is ‘like a moth flying into a flame.’ ”
“It is possible that we might be defeated.” Molotov knew it was as near certain as made no difference that the Soviet Union would be defeated. Sometimes, though, a demonstrated willingness to fight made fighting unnecessary. Switzerland had never become a part of the Greater German Reich. “Think carefully, Ambassador, on whether you and the Race care to pay the price.”
Colonization: Aftershocks Page 29
