Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “It depends on just where the bomb goes off, David,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t know for sure how much good it will do. I do know we’ve got a better chance in the cellar than upstairs.”

  By the time he and his family got in, the cellar was already packed. People talked in high, excited voices. Mordechai didn’t talk. He did worry. The cellar didn’t hold enough food and water to let people last very long before being forced to go out. He’d complained to the manager, who’d nodded politely and not done a thing. If the worst came…

  It didn’t, not this evening. Instead, the all-clear blew, a long, steady blast of sound. “Thank God,” Bertha said quietly.

  “Just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “But with things the way they are, we can’t know ahead of time, so we have to treat every one like the real thing. Let’s go upstairs. Supper won’t even be cold.” He took off his mask. Breathing unfiltered air, even in the cramped quarters of the cellar, felt far better than the seemingly lifeless stuff he got through the rubber and charcoal of the mask.

  After supper, Bertha was washing dishes with Miriam helping her when the telephone rang. Mordechai picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Just another drill.” David Nussboym sounded wryly amused with the world.

  “Yes, just another drill,” Mordechai agreed. “Nu?” He didn’t know how to respond to the man whose hirelings had come unpleasantly close to killing him a couple of times.

  “When do you suppose the real thing will come along?” Nussboym asked. He didn’t seem to feel the least bit guilty about what he’d done.

  “What, Molotov didn’t tell you before he sent you out here?” Anielewicz jeered.

  “No, as a matter of fact, he didn’t,” replied the Jew from Lodz who’d become an NKVD man. “He told me I would be the best man on the spot because of my old connections here, but that was all.”

  Anielewicz wondered how to take that. “You know Molotov personally?” he said. “Sure you do, just like I know the Pope.”

  “Say hello to him for me next time you see him,” Nussboym answered imperturbably. “Know Molotov personally? I don’t think anyone does, except maybe his wife. But I deal with him, if that’s what you mean. I’m the one who got him out of his cell in the middle of Beria’s coup.”

  He spoke matter-of-factly enough. If he was lying, Anielewicz couldn’t prove it by his tone. “If he sent you here thinking there’d be a war, he didn’t do you any favors,” he observed.

  “This thought also occurred to me,” Nussboym said. “But I serve the Soviet Union.” He spoke without self-consciousness. He’d been a Red before Anielewicz and some of the other Jewish fighters in Lodz spirited him off to the USSR because he was also too friendly with the Lizards. They’d been playing a double game with the Race and the Germans. They’d got away with it, too, but Mordechai didn’t ever want to have to take such chances again.

  He said, “And what does serving the Soviet Union mean about your being here now?”

  “I volunteered for this, because I know Lodz and because your interests and the Soviet Union’s coincide for the time being,” David Nussboym answered. “We both want to stop the war any way we can. This is what you get for going to bed with the fascists during the fighting.” No, he hadn’t forgotten what had happened all those years ago, either.

  With a sigh, Anielewicz answered, “If the Race had beaten the Nazis then, odds are they’d have beaten the Russians, too. And what Soviet Union would you be serving these days if that had happened?”

  “I don’t deal in might-have-beens,” Nussboym said, as if Mordechai had accused him of a particularly unsavory vice. “I deal in what’s real.”

  “All right,” Anielewicz said amiably. “What’s real here? If the Germans come over the border, what do we do about it? Do we start yelling for Soviet soldiers to help drive them away?”

  He chuckled under his breath, figuring that would get a rise out of his former colleague if anything could. And it did. “No!” Nussboym exclaimed. Had he been a Lizard, he would have used an emphatic cough. “Formally, the USSR is and will stay neutral in case of conflict.”

  “Molotov doesn’t want the Germans and the Race landing on Russia with both feet, eh?” Behind that cynical tone, Mordechai felt a certain amount of sympathy for the Soviet leader’s position.

  “Would you?” Nussboym returned, which showed he was thinking along similar lines.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Anielewicz was damned if he’d admit anything. “And that brings me back to what the devil you’re doing here. If Russia’s neutral, why aren’t you back in Moscow twiddling your thumbs?”

  “Formally, the Soviet Union is neutral,” David Nussboym repeated. “Informally…”

  “Informally, what?” Mordechai demanded. “Do you want to split Poland with the Germans again, the way you did in 1939?”

  “That was proposed, I am given to understand,” Nussboym answered. “General Secretary Molotov rejected the proposal out of hand.”

  “Was it? Did he?” Mordechai thought about what that was likely to mean. “He’s more afraid of the Race than of the Nazis, then. Fair enough. If I were living in the Kremlin, I would be, too.” He thought a little more. “If Russia gives informal help here, you might even end up on the Lizards’ good side. Nobody ever said Molotov was a fool. Anybody who stayed alive all the way through Stalin’s time couldn’t be a fool.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nussboym said softly. “You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. And if you still believe in God, you can thank Him you don’t.”

  Mordechai’s voice went harsh: “All right, then. Tukhus afen tish, Nussboym. What will you do? What won’t you do? How much can we count on you?” Privately, he didn’t intend to count on Nussboym at all. Counting on the USSR, though, was, or at least might be, something else again.

  “We will not do anything that makes it look as though the Soviet Union is interfering in Poland,” replied the NKVD man who’d grown up in Lodz. “Short of that… Well, there’s always been a lot of smuggling along the border between White Russia and Poland. We can get you weapons. We can even get you a cadre of Polish-speaking soldiers to train new recruits.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet you can,” Anielewicz said. “And you’d train them to be just the finest little Marxist-Leninists anybody could want, wouldn’t you?” He hadn’t used the jargon much since the fighting stopped, but he still remembered it.

  “One of these days, the revolution will come to Poland,” Nussboym said. “One of these days, the revolution will come to Home.” He might not believe in God any more, but he still had a strong and vibrant faith.

  Arguing with him struck Anielewicz as more trouble than it was worth. Instead, he asked, “How much good is all this likely to do if the Reich hits us with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas?”

  “They won’t kill everyone.” Nussboym spoke with a peculiar cold-blooded confidence. German generals doubtless sounded much the same way. “Soldiers will have to come into Poland and seize the land. When they do, the survivors from among your forces can make life difficult for them.”

  “You’re leaving the Lizards out of your calculations,” Anielewicz said. “Whatever else they do, they won’t sit quietly.”

  “I know that,” Nussboym said. “My assumption is that they will give the Reich exactly what it deserves. That ought to make the fight in Poland easier, don’t you think? The Nazis won’t be able to support their troops the way they could in 1939.”

  Again, cold calculation weighing the probable result of thousands-no, millions-of deaths. Again, that calculation, however horrific, struck Mordechai as reasonable. And wasn’t making reasonable calculations about millions of deaths perhaps the most horrific thing of all?

  “The next question, of course, is what happens after the Race finishes destroying the Reich, ” Mordechai said.

  “Then the Soviet Union picks up the pieces-provided there are any pieces left to pick up,”
Nussboym answered. “The other half of the question is, how much damage can the Nazis do to the Lizards before going down?”

  “However much it is, too much of it will be in Poland,” Mordechai predicted gloomily. “So, from my point of view, that leads to a different question: can we do anything to keep the war from starting? You’d better think about that, too, Nussboym, as long as you’re here.”

  “I have been thinking about it,” David Nussboym answered. “What I haven’t been able to do is come up with anything to stop the war. And neither, I gather, have you.” He hung up before Mordechai could either curse him or tell him he was right.

  Tahiti wasn’t what Rance Auerbach had expected. Oh, the weather was gorgeous: always warm and mild and just a little muggy. And he could walk along the beach under the palm trees and watch the gentle surf roll in off the blue, blue Pacific. That was all terrific, even if he did get a hellacious sunburn the first time he tried it. He’d had to slather zinc-oxide ointment all over his poor medium-rare carcass. As far as setting went, he’d had everything straight.

  Papeete, now, where he and Penny were renting an apartment even more crowded and cramped than the one they’d had in Cape Town, Papeete was something else. The town didn’t quite know what to make of itself. Parts of it were still the sleepy, even languorous, backwater the place must have been back before the fighting started a generation earlier. The rest was what had come since: the place’s role as the capital of Free France, such as Free France was.

  The tricolor flew everywhere in Papeete, the same way the Stars and Stripes did back in the USA on the Fourth of July. But the Stars and Stripes flew out of honest pride and strength. Rance didn’t think that was why the Free French draped their banner over everything that didn’t move. Rather, they seemed to be saying, Hey, look at us! We really are a country! Honest! No kidding! See? We’ve got a flag and everything!

  Stick tapping on the sidewalk, Auerbach made his way toward his apartment building. Tahitian girls were all around, some walking like him, some on bicycles, some on the little motorbikes that turned people into more or less guided missiles. A lot of them were very pretty. Even so, Rance’s fantasy life wasn’t what it had been before a series of battered freighters brought him and Penny here from South Africa. What he hadn’t considered was that a lot of those pretty Tahitian girls had hulking, bad-tempered Tahitian boyfriends, some of whom carried knives and some of whom were a lot more heavily armed than that.

  One such massive Tahitian, wearing nothing but a pair of dungarees and a gun belt with a pistol on his right hip, loomed up in front of Auerbach as he walked into his building. When the fellow grinned, he showed very white teeth-and a hole where one in front had been till he lost it in a brawl. “Allo, Rance. How you are today?” he asked in English flavored by both French and Tahitian.

  “Not too bad, Jean-Claude,” Auerbach answered-about as much as he’d ever say these days. “You take care of that leaky toilet in our bathroom yet?”

  “I do it soon,” the handyman promised. “Very, very soon.” He’d been saying that ever since Rance and Penny moved in a couple of weeks before. Sometimes it was hard to tell tropical languor from being a lazy bum, but Rance didn’t feel easy about leaning on a guy half his age who outweighed him almost two to one and packed a pistol to boot.

  A fan buzzed inside the apartment. Penny Summers sat in a chair, letting the stream of moving air play on her face and neck. She turned her head when Rance came in. “We ever gonna get that toilet fixed?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t look likely,” Rance said. “Maybe the son of a bitch’ll do it if we pay him off. If we don’t, you can forget about it.”

  “It’ll just have to stay leaky, then.” Penny said. She made a weary, unhappy gesture. “We took a hundred pounds of gold away from Cape Town, near enough. Who would’ve figured that wouldn’t do the job?”

  “Comes to something a little over forty thousand bucks,” Rance said. “That’s a pretty fair piece of change.”

  But Penny shook her head. A lock of blond hair escaped a hairpin and fell down in front of one eye. She brushed it back with an impatient gesture. “We had to spend like it was going out of style just to get here, and more to keep from getting handed over to the Lizards. And everything here costs more than anybody in his right mind’d believe.”

  “Of course it does,” Auerbach said. “This is the boondocks, the ass end of nowhere. Nobody makes anything here; everything gets shipped in from places where they really do make stuff. No wonder we pay through the nose.”

  “Hey, they do make one thing here,” Penny said.

  Rance raised a dubious eyebrow. “Yeah? What’s that, sweetheart?”

  “Trouble,” Penny answered with a grin. “And they make it in great big carload lots, too. Why else would we be here?”

  “But we don’t have enough money to make all the trouble we want,” Auerbach said. “If we’d brought a hundred pounds of hundred-dollar bills-”

  “Where was Gorppet going to get his hands on hundred-dollar bills in Cape Town?” Penny broke in. “Don’t make me laugh. We’ve got a stake; we just can’t afford to get fancy till we run it up some.”

  “I know, I know,” Rance said.

  “If we don’t run it up, we’re ruined when what we’ve got runs out,” Penny said flatly. “If there’s one thing this place runs on, it’s cold, hard cash. They don’t give a damn about whose cash it’s supposed to be, either.”

  “I know that, too?’ Auerbach paused and lit a cigarette. He coughed as he sucked in smoke, which made his ruined chest hurt. And that wasn’t the only ache the coffin nails gave him here. Holding up the pack, he said, “You know how much these goddamn things cost?”

  “You bet I do,” Penny answered. “Give me one, will you?” He took one out and handed it to her, then awkwardly bent forward, putting a lot of weight on his stick, so she could start it on his. Her cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Listen, I’ve got a line on a guy who’ll sell us some ginger. Now all we need to do is get a Lizard to buy and we’re in business for a while longer.”

  “Who’s the guy?” Rance asked. “Somebody new, or do you know him from before?”

  “From before-I dealt with him back when I was working with those people in Detroit,” Penny said. “His name’s Richard.” She pronounced it Ree-shard, which meant the fellow was a Frenchman.

  “Is he pals with the guys you used to work for?” Rance asked. “If he is, he’s liable to want you dead after the way you stuffed them.”

  “Nobody’s really pals with anybody in the ginger racket,” Penny said; from what Auerbach had seen of it, she wasn’t far wrong. “I didn’t stiff Richard, so him and me won’t be anything but business.”

  “Here’s hoping you’re right.” Auerbach limped into the kitchen, poured himself a drink of the nasty local brandy, and cut it with a little water; the stuff was too harsh and too potent for anybody in his right mind to want to drink it straight. He poured a knock for Penny, too.

  She grinned and blew him a kiss when she saw the drinks in his hands. When he gave her one, she raised the glass and said, “Mud in your eye.”

  “Yeah.” Rance sipped, wheezed, and, for a wonder, managed not to cough. “Jesus, that stuff kicks like a mule.” As Penny also drank, he studied her. If he were this Richard, how far would he trust her? About as far as I can throw her, he decided. The fellow selling the ginger would have to be wondering where she’d got the cash this time, and whether she’d try to cheat him. He’d be a jerk if he didn’t come loaded for bear.

  For once, Penny didn’t seem to know where his thoughts were going. She said, “We get ourselves a discount on the herb for paying in gold.”

  “Do we?” Auerbach thought about that, too. Not all his thoughts were pleasant. “We’d better talk with Jean-Claude, then, or with somebody. We’ll want some firepower along so your pal doesn’t try redistributing the wealth.”

  He watched Penny. She took a deep breath. He knew exactly what she was g
oing to say: something along the lines of, Oh, he wouldn ‘t do anything like that. Rance intended to land on her with both feet if she did. But she didn’t; instead, she looked sheepish and answered, “Yeah, we’d better do something about that, hadn’t we?”

  He let out a rasping sigh of relief. “Oh, good. You remember Frederick after all.”

  “Yeah.” Her mouth twisted. “That stupid, greedy son of a bitch. You even told him there was plenty for everybody, and you were dead right, too. But would he listen? Hell, no. Of course, Frederick was an amateur; and Richard’s a pro. He’s been doing this for a long time.”

  “Anybody can get greedy?’ Rance spoke with great conviction. “Best way to make him think twice is to show he’d pay for it if he tried.”

  “Well, I won’t try and tell you you’re wrong, because I think you’re right,” Penny said. “You want to talk to Jean-Claude, or would you rather I did it?”

  “Go ahead. Bat your baby blues. You’ll get a better deal out of him than I could.” Rance wasn’t particularly worried about Penny fooling around with the Tahitian muscleman. For one thing, Jean-Claude was only in his mid-twenties, so he wasn’t all that likely to find her appealing. And, for another, Jean-Claude had a girlfriend of formidable proportions and equally formidable temper. Auerbach wouldn’t have wanted to cross her, and he didn’t think Jean-Claude did, either.

  Now Penny was following his thoughts, for she stuck out her tongue at him. He laughed and said, “You don’t want to do that at a native; it’s sort of like asking for a fight. Now, the next question is, once we’ve got the ginger, how much trouble will we have selling it to a Lizard?”

  “We should manage,” Penny said. “There’s always plenty of ’em around. This place draws shady characters the way honey draws flies.” She took another sip from her brandy. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Uh-huh. I wondered when you’d mention that,” Rance said.

  But she was right. The Free French ran a wide-open outfit. They stayed in business by skimming a little off the top of the deals that got made in their territory, by not asking a whole lot of inconvenient questions, and by keeping the Japanese, the Americans, and the Lizards all too busy eyeing one another for any of them to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.