Colonization: Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  “So he kept telling us.” Barbara hardly bothered hiding her bitterness “But he’s living under our roof—”

  “Not at the moment,” Sam put in.

  “And whose fault is that?” his wife demanded. “He couldn’t have gone if you hadn’t let him.”

  “It would have been harder,” Yeager admitted. “But I think he would have managed it. And if we had put our feet down, he’d be mad at us for years. When would this chance have come along again?”

  “This chance for what?” Barbara asked. “To go into space, or to go into . . . ?” She broke off, grimacing. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”

  “Sooner or later, the Nazis will run out of upper stages and orbiting bombs,” Sam said. “Then it’ll be safe for the Lizards to let Jonathan come home.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll go out of my mind worrying,” Barbara said.

  “He’s fine,” Yeager said. “He’ll be fine.” He’d been saying that all along. Sometimes, on good days, he managed to convince himself for a little while. Most of the time, he was as nearly out of his mind with worry as his wife was. Long training in the minor leagues and in the Army had taught him not to show whether or not things were going his way at any given moment. That didn’t mean he lacked feelings, only that he kept them inside more than Barbara did.

  “He never should have gone up there.” Barbara glanced at the message-the very reassuring message—on the computer screen, shook her head, and strode out of the study.

  Yeager left the connection to the Race’s electronic network and went back to review messages he’d received in the past. The one he’d got from Straha a little before the Germans attacked Poland stuck in his mind. He examined it yet again, trying to extract fresh meaning from the shiplord’s oracular phrases.

  He had no great luck. He’d been wondering for some time whether his own superiors had it in for him. He had to wonder, since none of the people who’d tried to do bad things to his family and him suffered any great punishment. Some of those people hadn’t suffered anything at all that he knew of—the fellow with the Molotov cocktail, for instance.

  And how had Straha got wind of this? Probably from the hard-nosed fellow who did his errands for him. Sam wouldn’t have wanted to wind up on that guy’s bad side, not even a little he wouldn’t.

  The next interesting question was, how much did the Lizard’s man Friday know about such things? Sam realized he might know a great deal. To work for Straha, he had to have a pretty high security clearance. He also had to know a good deal about the Race. Put those together, and the odds were that he knew quite a bit about Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager.

  “How can I find out what he knows?” Yeager muttered. Inviting the fellow over and pumping him while they drank beer didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He didn’t think it would do any good, and it would make the man suspicious. Of that Sam had no doubt whatever. Anybody who did what Straha’s factotum did was bound to be suspicious for a living.

  I’ll have to operate through Straha, Yeager realized. He started to telephone the defector, but then checked himself. Straha hadn’t phoned him, but had used the Race’s electronic network to pass on the message. Did that mean Straha thought his own phone was tapped, or did he worry about Yeager’s? Sam didn’t know, and didn’t care for either alternative.

  He reconnected to the Lizards’ network and asked, Did you learn of my difficulties with my superiors from your driver?

  He stared at the screen, as if expecting the answer to appear immediately. As a matter of fact, he had expected the answer to appear immediately, and felt foolish because of it. Straha had a right to be doing something other than sitting around waiting for a message from a Big Ugly named Sam Yeager.

  As long as Yeager was hooked up to the Race’s electronic network, he checked the news feeds the Lizards were giving one another. By what they were saying, they’d squashed Germany flat, and everything was over but for the mopping up. Scattered Deutsch units still refuse to acknowledge their inevitable defeat, but their resistance must soon come to an end.

  That wasn’t the song the Nazis were singing. The Race hadn’t been able to knock out all their radio transmitters. They claimed they were still advancing in Poland. They also claimed to have smashed the ground attacks the Lizards had made into southern France. Since the Lizards had stopped talking about those attacks a couple of days before, Yeager suspected German radio was telling the truth there.

  It probably didn’t matter, though. A map came up on the screen, showing where the Lizards had tossed explosive-metal bombs at the Reich. Showing where the Race hadn’t sent them probably would have resulted in fewer marks on the display. Germany and its European puppets were going to glow in the dark for a long time to come. Before long, the Nazis would have to run out of men and equipment . . . wouldn’t they?

  The Race didn’t show maps of where German explosive-metal bombs had hit. With his connections, Sam had seen some: rather more accurate versions than the papers were printing. Poland was wrecked, of course, but the Germans’ submarines had managed surprisingly heavy blows against the new cities that had sprung up in Australia and the Arabian peninsula and North Africa—with the strong German presence in the Mediterranean, those last had been hit repeatedly. Without a doubt, the Reich had suffered and was suffering worse, but the Lizards had taken a pounding.

  While that thought was still going through his mind, he got the warning hiss that told of an electronic message arriving. He checked to see who’d sent it: it could have been from Straha from Kassquit, relaying news from Jonathan; or from Sorviss, the Lizard exile who’d first gained access to the network for him. He hadn’t yet used what he’d got from Sorviss, so he couldn’t very well give him any proper answer.

  But the message turned out to be from Straha. Yes, I received this information, this warning, from Gordon, the ex-shiplord wrote. I hope you will use it wisely.

  I thank you, Yeager wrote back. I think I can do that.

  He chuckled under his breath. “What a liar I’m getting to be in my old age,” he muttered. He knew what Straha meant by using the information wisely: staying out of things his own superiors thought were none of his business. He’d never been good at that, not when his itch to know wanted scratching. If things went wrong with what he was about to try, he’d land in even more hot water.

  With a snort, he shook his head. People had already tried to kill him and burn down his house. How could he get into worse trouble than that?

  After turning off the Lizard-made computer he used to join the Race’s electronic network, he removed his artificial finger-claws and turned on the larger, clumsier American-built machine he used much less often. Its only advantage he could see was that it used a keyboard much like an ordinary typewriter’s.

  Even though it was made in the USA, it used a lot of technology adapted from what the Race also used. When he inserted the skelkwank disk he’d got from Sorviss, the computer accepted it without any fuss. The Lizard was convinced his coding would defeat any traps mere inexperienced humans could devise. Sam was interested in seeing if he was right.

  Somewhere in the rudimentary American computer network lay an archive he’d tried to access a couple of times before, an archive of communications and radio intercepts covering the time just before and after the surprise attack that had done the colonization fleet so much harm. Less harm than the Germans have done it now, he thought, but that wasn’t really what mattered, not any more. What mattered was that he’d tried repeatedly to access the archive and failed every time. And bad things had happened after every try, too.

  By now, he wanted to know what was in there as much for his own sake as because he wanted to see whoever’d bombed the colonization fleet punished. Curiosity killed the cat, he thought. His own curiosity might well have come close to killing him. But the proverb had another line, too. Satisfaction brought it back.

  There was the archive. He’d made it this far a couple of times—and the screen
had gone blank as he’d been disconnected from the network. The first time, he’d thought that an accident. He didn’t think so any more.

  His computer started making small purring noises. He suspected he knew what that was: Sorviss’ coding at war against the measures the government had set up to keep unwelcome visitors out of the archive. If humans had learned more about computers than Sorviss thought, Sam might be in live steam, not just hot water.

  For a second, the screen started to go dark. He cursed—softly, so Barbara wouldn’t notice. But then it cleared. ENTRY AUTHORIZED, it read. PROCEED. Proceed he did. As he read, his eyes got wider and wider. He finished, then left the archive at once. For good measure, he turned off the computer, too.

  “Jesus!” he said, shaken as he hadn’t been since watching a teammate get beaned. “What the hell do I do now?”

  The first thing Nesseref did when she got up in the morning was check her computer monitor. That was the first thing she did any morning, of course, to see what the news was and what electronic messages had come in during the night. But she had a more urgent reason for checking it today: she wanted to find out what the fallout level was, to see if she could safely leave her block of flats.

  She let out an unhappy hiss. It was very radioactive out there this morning. Were it not for the filters and scrubbers newly installed in the heating and air purification systems, it would have been very radioactive inside the apartment, too. The Deutsche were taking quite a pounding. In the abstract, Nesseref didn’t mind that at all. But the prevailing winds on Tosev 3 blew from west to east. They brought the radioactive ashes from the Reich’s funeral pyre straight into Poland.

  And the Deutsche had also managed to detonate several explosive-metal bombs of their own inside Poland. Those only made the fallout level worse. They’d also done a lot of damage to Tosevite centers and to those of the Race in this subregion.

  Lodz had gone up in a hideous, beautiful cloud. Nesseref wondered if the Big Ugly called Mordechai Anielewicz remained among the living. She hoped so. She also wished his youngest hatchling well—she’d met young Heinrich, after all, and heard about his beffel. Her concern for the rest of Anielewicz’s family was considerably more abstract. They mattered to her not for their own sakes but because her friend would be concerned if anything happened to them.

  Orbit came up and turned an eye turret toward the screen, as if the tsiongi were examining the fallout levels, too. His other eye turret swung toward Nesseref. When she made no move to take him outside for a walk, he let out a dismayed hiss of his own. No matter how he looked at the monitor, he couldn’t understand what the numbers displayed on it meant.

  Unfortunately, Nesseref could. “We cannot go walking today,” she said, and scratched him between the eye turrets. She’d said that so often lately, Orbit was starting to know what it meant. This time, the look he gave her was halfway between dismayed and speculative, as if he was wondering whether biting her on the tail-stump might get her to change her mind. She waggled a forefinger at him. “Do not even think about it. I am the mistress. You are the pet. Remember your place in the hierarchy.”

  Orbit hissed again, as if to remind her that, while inferiors were bound to respect superiors, superiors had responsibilities to inferiors. One of her responsibilities was taking the tsiongi for a walk whenever she could. She’d never been home and still failed to take him out for such a longtime. As far as he could see, she was falling down on the job.

  The trouble was, Orbit couldn’t see far enough. “Suppose I feed you?” Nesseref told him. “Will that make you happier?”

  He wasn’t smart enough to understand what she’d said, but he followed her out of the bedchamber and into the kitchen. When she pulled a tin of food from the shelf reserved for him, his tail lashed up and down, slapping the floor again and again. He knew what that meant.

  She opened the tin. The food plopped into his dish. He started eating, then paused and turned an eye turret toward her. “I know,” she said. “It is not just what you would get back on Home. It is made from the flesh of Tosevite animals, and it probably tastes funny to you. But it is what I have. You can eat it, or you can go hungry. Those are your only choices. I cannot give you what I do not have.”

  Orbit kept on giving her that reproachful stare, but he kept on eating, too: he kept on eating till the bowl was empty. Nesseref knew the food was nutritionally adequate for tsiongyu; the label on the tin assured her of that. But Orbit hadn’t evolved eating the beasts from which the food was made. Animals were even more conservative than males and females of the Race. If something was unfamiliar to them, they were inclined to reject it.

  Nesseref heated a slice of smoked and salted pork for herself. She found ham and bacon quite tasty, even if they weren’t salty enough to suit her. After she’d eaten, she went back into the bedroom and ordered an exercise wheel for Orbit. It would take up a lot of space in the apartment, but it would also go a long way toward keeping the tsiongi healthy and happy.

  When she entered her name and location, a signal flashed onto the screen. Due to the present unfortunate emergency, it read, delivery of the ordered item is subject to indefinite delay.

  “Oh, go break an egg!” she snarled at the monitor. If only she could get out of her apartment, she could walk to the pet shop where she’d bought Orbit, buy an exercise wheel, and carry it back. But if she could walk to the pet shop, she could walk Orbit, too, and then she wouldn’t need the wheel.

  Your account will not be debited until the ordered item is delivered, the computer told her. Thank you for your patience and cooperation during the present unfortunate emergency.

  “It is not an emergency,” she said. “It is a war.” She knew a war when she got stuck almost in the middle of one. She’d never expected to do that, not when she’d gone into cold sleep in orbit around Home. Everything about Tosev 3 had turned out to be different from what she’d expected.

  She went over to the window and looked out to the streets that were so silently, so invisibly, dangerous. Far fewer motorcars and other vehicles moved in them than they usually held. The ones that did move had all their windows rolled up. Some of them, she knew, boasted air-filtration systems of their own. Even so, she was glad to be inside here.

  At the moment, she couldn’t launch out of the local shuttle-craft port even had she wanted to. Deutsch aircraft had pounded the site, doing their best to smash up all of the once-smooth landing surface. Repair efforts were supposed to be under way, but the radioactivity had inhibited them, and airfields had higher priority because more supplies and reinforcements went through them than through shuttlecraft ports, and there was generally too much to do and not enough with which to do it.

  She was still peering out the window when a convoy of ambulances came racing into the new town from out of the west. Warning lights flickered atop them. Even through the double-paned insulated window, their alarm hisses hammered Nesseref’s hearing diaphragms. They sped on toward the hospital a few blocks away. She marveled that the hospital hadn’t been overwhelmed; war produced injuries on a scale she’d never imagined till now.

  Orbit came up and stood on his hind legs, leaning his forepaws on the glass so he could get his head up high enough to see out. Nesseref scratched him on the muzzle; he shot out his tongue and licked her hand. She wondered what he made of the view, and thought he’d come over mostly because he wanted companionship: like befflem, tsiongyu paid more attention to scent than to sight.

  Other alarms began to hiss. A voice from the computer monitor shouted stridently: “Air raid! Take cover! Deutsch air raid! Take cover at once!”

  Nesseref said, “Come on, Orbit!” She dove under the bed. The new town had been attacked before; she knew how terrifying that could be.

  Antiaircraft missiles roared out of launchers around the town. Antiaircraft guns—some made by the Race, others of Tosevite manufacture but pressed into service all the same—began to bark and crash.

  And then, above those barking crashes
, she heard the screams from the jet engines of several Deutsch killercraft. That the Deutsche should have killercraft with jet engines still struck her as wrong, unnatural, even though she’d been on Tosev 3 for several years now. That she should be a target for those killercraft stuck her as a great deal worse. If one of the bombs they dropped struck her building, if one of the shells they fired struck her . . .

  She didn’t want to think about that. It was hard not to, though, when bombs burst in the town and when shells started slamming into the building. It shuddered, as if in an earthquake. Fortunately, it was harder to set on fire than a Tosevite structure. But fallout is getting in, Nesseref thought.

  Even before the all-clear sounded, she left the shelter that probably wouldn’t have done her much good and stuffed plastic sheeting under the door. She didn’t know how much it would help; if polluted air was getting in through the ducts, it wouldn’t do much of anything. But it couldn’t hurt.

  Orbit was intrigued. Nesseref had to speak sharply to keep the tsiongi from dragging away the plastic she’d used. The animal’s answering stare was reproachful. She’d had the fun of putting the plastic down. Why wouldn’t she let him have the fun of pulling it up again?

  “Because it might not be healthy for either one of us if you did,” Nesseref told her pet. That made no sense at all to Orbit. She’d known it wouldn’t.

  An ambulance hissed up in front of her building. Along with its flashing lights, she saw, it also had a red cross painted on top of it. That was no symbol the Race used; it belonged to the Big Uglies. It meant the vehicle was used only to aid the sick and injured, and so was not a proper military target.

  Workers leaped out of the ambulance and ran skittering into the apartment building. When they came out again, they carried wounded males and females on stretchers or helped them get into the ambulance under their own power. The wounded left behind streaks and pools of blood Nesseref could see even from her upper-story flat. She turned away, more than a little sickened. She’d never imagined seeing so much blood, except perhaps at a rare traffic accident.