Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “At half past ten?” Goldfarb raised an eyebrow. “Someone calling to harass me, more likely. Well, I can always hang up on the blighter.” He got out of bed and went to the telephone. “Goldfarb here.” His voice was hard with suspicion.

  Whoever was on the other end of the line sounded more like an Englishman than a Canadian; to Goldfarb’s unpracticed ear, Canadians, however much they pointed out the differences in accent, still sounded like Yanks. “You’re the Goldfarb who used to mess about with radars, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” Goldfarb agreed. “Who’s this?”

  He didn’t get a straight answer; he’d grown resigned to not getting straight answers. “You have an appointment at the Defense Ministry at eleven tomorrow. You’d do well to show up fifteen or twenty minutes early.”

  “Who is this?” Goldfarb repeated. This time, he not only got no answer, but the line went dead. He scratched his head as he hung up the telephone.

  “Who was it?” Naomi asked when he came back to bed.

  “Hanged if I know,” he answered, and gave her the abbreviated conversation.

  “Are you going to do what he told you?” she asked when he’d finished.

  “I don’t know that, either,” he admitted, not very happily. “Fellow might have been trying to set me up.” He saw in his mind’s eye a couple of gunmen waiting outside the Defense Ministry. But they could be waiting as easily at eleven o’clock as at a quarter till. He sighed. “I suppose I will. I don’t see how things could get any worse if I do. Now, though…” He turned out the light on the nightstand. “Now, I’m going to bed.”

  And, when he left the next morning, he left early enough to get to the Defense Ministry building near the Ottawa River well before the time scheduled for his latest round of grilling. Frigid air smote his face and burned in his lungs as soon as he left the block of flats where he’d been quartered. He turned up his greatcoat collar to protect some of his face from the ghastly weather, but the garment hadn’t really been made to stand up against a Russian-style winter.

  Had he been going more than half a dozen blocks up Sussex Drive, he would have tried to flag a taxi. But he might have stood there waiting for one-and, incidentally, freezing-longer than the walk would take him. Ottawa was a national capital, but it was nowhere near so richly supplied with cabs as London, or Belfast, either.

  Even the ten-minute walk showed him many other differences between the capital of the country he’d left and that of the country that wasn’t sure it wanted him as a part of it. Most of Ottawa was laid out on a sensible grid pattern, and all of it, to Goldfarb’s eye; was new. No pubs dating back to the fifteenth century-and some looking as if they hadn’t been swept up since-here. It was less than a hundred years since Victoria had chosen this town-till then a little lumbering village-as the capital of the new Dominion of Canada. Everything dated since then, and most since the turn of the century.

  Off to the west, on Parliament Hill by the Ottawa River, stood the splendid buildings where the Canadian government deliberated. They weren’t, in Goldfarb’s no doubt prejudiced opinion, a patch on the Houses of Parliament in London, but they did stand out from the square boxes that dominated the city’s architecture.

  The Defense Ministry was one of those boxes. It replaced what had probably been a more imposing structure till the Lizards bombed it during the fighting. Ottawa hadn’t suffered too badly then. Nor, for that matter, had most of Canada; just as the winter weather was too chilly to suit Goldfarb’s overcoat, it was also too chilly to suit the Race. The USA had taken a worse beating.

  A sentry in a uniform about halfway between U.S. and British styles took Goldfarb’s name at the entrance. After checking it against a list, he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “They’ll want you in room 327. Go to the west wing, then take the stairs or the elevator.”

  “Thanks,” Goldfarb said, reminded anew he was in a foreign country; back home, someone would have urged him onto the lift. But, back home, too many people would have urged him to a very warm clime indeed because of who his ancestors were.

  He hadn’t been to room 327 before, and had to wander the corridors for a little while before he found it. When he went through the door with the frosted-glass window with 327 on it, he found himself in an antechamber. A fellow in RCAF uniform a few years older than he sat there, leafing through a magazine. The officer looked up, then got to his feet, a smile on his face. “Goldfarb, isn’t it?” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. The man’s rank badges proclaimed him a colonel, which still struck Goldfarb as odd; the Canadians had gone their own way on air force ranks a few years before. There were more urgent things he didn’t know, though, such as why this bloke recognized him. “I’m afraid I can’t quite…” He stopped and took a second, longer, look at the officer. His jaw dropped. “George Bagnall, by God! Good to see you, sir!” He pumped the proffered hand with enthusiasm.

  “That’s right,” Bagnall said, smiling more widely. He was good-looking in the horsey British way, and had the proper accent, too, only slightly diluted by however long he’d spent in Canada. “Been a while since you shoved one of your bloody radars into the Lanc I was flight officer for, hasn’t it?”

  “You might say so, yes, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “You were in Russia after that, weren’t you? We met in a Dover pub. Some of the stories you were telling would make anybody’s knees knock.”

  “And you joined the infantry when the Lizards invaded England,” Bagnall said, “so you’ve got stories of your own. But that’s all water over the dam. Rather more to the point here, I was in Russia with a certain-often very certain-chap by the name of Jerome Jones.”

  Something unfamiliar ran through Goldfarb’s spirit. After a moment, he recognized it: hope. He wondered if he ought to let himself feel it. Disappointment, he knew, would only hurt more now. But he couldn’t help asking, “So you’re in touch with Jones, are you, sir?”

  “I wasn’t,” Bagnall answered. “Hadn’t been for years. I came over to this side of the Atlantic in ‘49; I could see the writing on the wall even then. Come to think of it, I was on one of the first ships-maybe the first ship-carrying heavy water from German-occupied Norway to England, though I hadn’t the faintest notion what heavy water was in those days. So I knew the Reich and the U.K. were getting friendly, and I didn’t like it worth a damn.”

  “Who did?” Goldfarb said. But the trouble was, altogether too many people did. He made himself stick to the business at hand: “You weren’t in touch with Jones, you said. But you are now?”

  “That’s right.” George Bagnall nodded. “He hunted me down, wrote me about the trouble you’d been having with the ginger smugglers, and about how they’d bollixed up your trip over here.”

  That was hope, by God; nothing else could produce such a pounding in the chest, such a lump in the throat. But, despite hope, asking the question that wanted asking took every ounce of courage Goldfarb had: “Can you… Can you do anything about it, sir?”

  “Possibly, just possibly,” Bagnall said, with such maddening English reserve that Goldfarb wasn’t sure whether to take him literally or to think things were in the bag. Then he went on, “You’re here to see Colonel McWilliams, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” David said. “You know him?”

  “Possibly, just possibly,” Bagnall repeated, but this time he couldn’t keep the smile from sneaking back. “He was best man at my wedding, and I was a groomsman at his-his brother was best man for him.”

  “God bless Jerome Jones,” David Goldfarb murmured. He’d intended it for a joke, but it came out sounding quite reverent.

  Bagnall chuckled. “I hope God’s listening-He probably doesn’t hear that very often. But now, let’s go have a word with Freddy, shall we?” He steered Goldfarb toward Colonel McWilliams’ office, and Goldfarb was glad to let himself be steered.

  Rance Auerbach shook his finger at Penny Summers. “You’re getting it
chy,” he said. “I can feel you getting itchy, goddammit. It’s summertime down here, and you’re looking to make a deal. You’re sweating to make a deal, any old kind of deal.”

  “Of course I’m sweating.” Penny took off her straw hat and fanned herself with it. “It’s hot outside.”

  “Not so bad,” Auerbach said. “It’s a dry kind of heat, more like L.A. than Fort Worth.” He coughed, which hurt, and which also brought him back to what he’d been saying. “You’re not going to distract me. You want to make a deal with you-know-who for you-know-what.”

  He wished he could have been more specific than that, but-when he remembered to-he operated on the assumption that the Lizards were likely to be listening in on whatever Penny and he said in their apartment. So did she; she exclaimed, “I’d never do any such thing. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  Lizards often missed the tone in human conversations. Any Lizard monitoring this one, though, would have to be extraordinarily tone-deaf to miss the obvious fact that Penny was lying through her teeth. Rance didn’t miss it. His rasping laugh turned into a rasping cough that felt as if it were going to tear his chest apart from the inside out. One day, maybe it would. Then he’d stop hurting.

  “Serves you right,” Penny said, which showed him how much sympathy he was likely to get from her.

  “Bring me a beer, will you?” he asked, and she went and got him a Lion Lager from the icebox, and one for herself, too. He took a long pull at his. It helped cool the fire inside him. Then he lit a cigarette. That started it up again, but he didn’t care. He offered Penny the pack-the packet, they called it here in Cape Town. She took one, leaning forward to light it from his.

  After a couple of puffs, she said, “You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid like that, Rance.”

  He laughed. “There’s a hot one. You’d do anything you thought you could get away with.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Penny said. “But if I don’t think I can get away with it, I’m not going to try it, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” Rance admitted. “Trouble is, you always think you’re going to get away with it. If you were right all the damn time, we’d still be in Texas, or more likely in Tahiti.”

  She gave him a dirty look. “I didn’t hear you telling me not to run that ginger down into Mexico. I didn’t see you staying back in Texas when I did it, neither. If you had, you’d still be in that apartment by your lonesome, pouring your life down a bottle one day at a time.”

  “Maybe,” he said, though he knew damn well she wasn’t wrong. “So I’m here instead. If I hadn’t been along, you’d probably still be in a Lizard jail. Of course, if I hadn’t been around, you’d probably be dead now, but you don’t think about that, not any more you don’t.”

  Penny’s scowl got fiercer. “All right, I’ve screwed some up before, but I really don’t see what can go wrong this time.”

  Rance laughed again-he laughed till it hurt again, which didn’t take long. “So there’s nothing going on, and there’s nothing that can go wrong with whatever is going on. I like that, I’ll go to hell if I don’t.”

  “God damn you,” she said furiously. “You weren’t supposed to know anything about it.” They were both barely remembering the microphones they figured the Lizards had hidden in the apartment, if they were remembering at all.

  “That’s what the gal who’s cheating on her husband always says, too, and she never thinks he’s going to find out,” Auerbach said. He didn’t have the energy to get as mad as she was. “Just remember, if your boat springs a leak down here, I drown, too. And I don’t feel like drowning, so you’d better level with me.”

  He could tell what was going on behind her blazing blue eyes. She was deciding whether to stay where she was and talk or walk out the door and never come back. Rather to his surprise, she kept on talking to him, even if what she had to say didn’t directly bear on the argument. “Come on down to the Boomslang,” she said. “We can hash it out there.”

  “Okay,” he answered, and limped over to pick up his stick. He didn’t feel like hobbling to the tavern, but he didn’t feel like having the Lizards listen in on an argument about smuggling ginger, either. Even with the cane, his bad leg gave him hell as he went downstairs, and kept on barking when he got down onto the sidewalk. It would do worse when he had to go back upstairs, and he knew it. Something to look forward to, he thought.

  A Lizard patrol was coming up the street toward him. The male in charge was even newer in town than he and Penny were. Auerbach waved; there were good Lizards and bad Lizards, same as there were good people and bad people, and this male seemed to be a pretty good egg. “I greet you, Gorppet,” Rance called in the language of the Race.

  “And I greet you, Rance Auerbach,” the Lizard said. “You are easy to recognize because of the way you walk.” He waved, too, and then led the patrol past Rance and away along the street.

  As soon as the Lizards were out of earshot, Penny said, “If you know Gorppet, what are you getting your bowels in an uproar about over this ginger deal? He’s not the kind of Lizard who’d rat on us. Anybody can see that.”

  “You’re cooking up a deal with him?” Rance said, and Penny nodded. He stopped in his tracks; standing still hurt marginally less than walking. Before he said anything more, he paused to think. Penny wasn’t wrong. Gorppet struck him as a Lizard who’d done a lot and seen a lot and wouldn’t blab any of it. Still… “He’s not that high-ranking. If he makes a deal with you, can he hold up his end of it?”

  “Has he got the cash, you mean?” Penny asked, and Rance nodded. She said, “You don’t have to be a general to be a big-time ginger smuggler, sweetie. A lot of the big ones are just clerks. They don’t buy the stuff with their salaries-they buy it with what they make selling it to their buddies.”

  “Okay,” Auerbach said after more thought. “I guess that makes sense. But Gorppet doesn’t strike me as the type who’d do a lot of tasting. Didn’t he get transferred down here on account of he’s some kind of hero?”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been tasting for years-I asked him,” Penny said. You would, Rance thought. She went on, “He hasn’t been in the selling end of the business till now, though. You’re right about that. Part of what he got for being a hero, along with this transfer and his promotion, was a hell of a big reward for catching some Arab or other.”

  “Can he turn it into any kind of cash we can use?” Rance inquired.

  “We, huh?” Penny said, and he felt foolish. She let him down easy by answering the question: “It’s not that hard here in South Africa, you know. Everything turns into gold if you work it a little.”

  She was right about that. He couldn’t deny it. “Only trouble with gold,” he said slowly, “is that it’s heavy if we’ve got to leave town in a hurry.”

  “It’s heavy, yeah, but it doesn’t take up much space,” Penny replied. All of a sudden, she grabbed him and kissed him. A little black kid walking past smoking a cigarette giggled around it. She took no notice. When she was done with the kiss, she said, “And now you’re starting to sound like somebody who might be interested in this deal after all.”

  “Who, me?” Auerbach looked back over his shoulder, as if Penny might be talking to somebody else. She made as if to hit him in the head. He ducked, then winced when his shoulder twinged. “I don’t know what the devil gave you that idea.”

  “Can’t fool me-I know you too well,” Penny said. Since that was probably true, he didn’t answer. She went on, “We can do it-I know we can. And when we do, Tahiti here we come.”

  Not for the first time, Rance thought of warm, moist tropical breezes and warm, moist native girls. But his long-ago West Point days made him also think of logistics. “How do we get there from here? Either way we go, it’s through Lizard-held territory. They sent us down here to be good little boys and girls, remember? They’re liable not to want to let us loose again.”

  “If we’ve got the cash to get to Free France and live there,
we’ll have the cash to pay off whoever we need to pay off to get us the hell out of here,” Penny said, and Rance could hardly deny that was odds-on to be true. She continued, “Come on, let’s get over to the Boomslang. I’ve got to talk to Frederick.”

  Alarm bells clanged in Auerbach’s mind. “What do you need to talk to him about?” He didn’t like Frederick much, not least because he thought the Negro might like Penny a little too well.

  She set her hands on her hips. “I’ve got to get the ginger from somebody, don’t I?” she said patiently. “Frederick’s got ginger, but he doesn’t have the connections with the Lizards for anything more than nickel-and-dime deals. I damn well do.”

  “Frederick’s got connections with the local tough guys, though,” Rance said, “or I figure he does, anyhow. He probably would have woke up dead one morning if he didn’t. How’s he going to like you pulling off a big score on his home turf?”

  “He’ll get enough to keep him sweet-plenty for everybody,” Penny said. “Rance, honey, this’ll work. It will.”

  Her confidence was infectious-and Rance didn’t feel like living in South Africa for the rest of his life. It might be better than a Lizard jail, but it wasn’t a patch on the States. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to the Boomslang.” He wondered how much trouble he was getting into. He’d find out. He was all too sure of that.

  Penny kissed him again. Nobody on the street snickered this time. “You won’t be sorry,” she promised.

  “I’m sorry already,” Rance said, which wasn’t quite true but wasn’t quite a lie, either.

  Frederick wasn’t in the saloon when Rance and Penny went inside. That surprised him; from everything he’d seen, Frederick damn near lived in the Boomslang. But, sure enough, the big black man breezed in before they’d got very far into their drinks. He sat down beside them as if he expected to talk business. And so he probably did-Penny must have started setting up this deal a while ago.