Colonization: Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  He bled his cabin air out through the escape vents, then opened the canopy and stepped out. He had more time here than he would have had trying to bail out of a burning fighter plane. An air lock opened in the space station. Tiny in the distance, a spacesuited man waved in the lock.

  His jump took him in the general direction of the lock, but not straight toward it. To correct his path, he had a pistol that looked as if it should have come from a Flash Gordon serial but fired nothing more lethal than compressed air. Before he used it, he let that length of good wire go drifting off into space. Then he fixed his aim with it and slowed himself as he neared the air lock.

  The other suited figure reached out, snagged him, and touched helmets to say something without using the radio: “That’s real smooth, sir.”

  Looking at the face bare inches from his, Johnson recognized Captain Alan Stahl. He puckered up, as if to kiss the younger man. Stahl laughed. Johnson said, “I didn’t plan on coming up here, but here I am. Can you show me around?” Lying to somebody he knew was harder than holding off a stranger would have been, but he did it anyway.

  Stahl didn’t laugh this time. He said, “I don’t know about that. We’ll have to see what Brigadier General Healey thinks.”

  “Take me to him,” Johnson said as the outer air-lock door swung shut.

  But, once he got a good look at Charles Healey, he wasn’t sure he was glad to have it. Despite looking nothing like Curtis LeMay, Healey had the same clenched-fist combativeness stamped on his face. And he knew about Johnson, growling, “You are the damned snoop who tried talking his way aboard this spacecraft before. You should have let well enough alone, Lieutenant Colonel.”

  “I didn’t have much choice, sir,” Johnson answered with as good a show of innocence as he could muster. “My main motor wouldn’t fire.”

  Save for having rubber bands holding down papers to keep them from floating away, Healey’s office might almost have belonged back on Earth. He picked up a telephone and barked into it: “Steve, go check out Peregrine. You find anything fishy, let me know.” He turned his glare back toward Johnson. “If he finds anything fishy, you’re history, just in case you were wondering.”

  Johnson didn’t say anything to that. He simply nodded and waited. He had a considerable wait. Steve seemed thorough.

  Presently, the telephone rang. Healey snatched it up, listened, and said, “Bad wiring, eh? All right. Can you fix it? You can? How long? Okay, that’s good enough. Stahl will take it downstairs again. We’ll say Johnson got sick up here and couldn’t.”

  “What?” Glen Johnson yelped.

  Brigadier General Healey glared at him. “You wanted to know so goddamn bad, didn’t you, Lieutenant Colonel? Well, now you’re going to know, by God. You’ve heard too much, you’ve probably seen too much, and you’re not going downstairs to run your mouth to anybody.” That hard face yielded a meager, a very meager, smile. “You’re part of the team now, whether you like it or not. Good thing you don’t have much in the way of family. That makes things easier. Welcome aboard, Johnson.”

  “Christ!” Johnson said. “You’re shanghaiing me.”

  “In a word, yes.” Healey had no budge in him, none at all. “You just signed up for the duration, soldier. You’re here permanently now, same as everybody else.”

  “Permanently?” Johnson spoke the word as if he’d never heard it before. What the hell had he blundered into?

  “That’s right, pal.” The general smiled again, this time with an odd sort of pride. He tapped his chest with his thumb. “That’s what you just bought. I don’t expect to set foot on Earth again, not ever. And neither should you.”

  Sam Yeager had no trouble understanding why the Lizards had given him access to some parts of their computer network. “These are the sections that don’t tell me anything much,” he muttered. That wasn’t strictly true. But it was a red-letter day when he learned anything in those areas that he couldn’t have learned from the Race’s radio or television transmissions. The stretch of the network he was allowed to roam was the stretch where the Lizards presented the world their public face.

  Even though he didn’t learn much, he dutifully skittered through it every day, so the Race could see how glad he was to have even that limited access to their computer network. But when he left, it was always with a sense of relief and anticipation, for his real work on the network started then.

  After signing off as Yeager, he signed on as Regeya. Going from himself to the artificial male of the Race he’d created was like going from Clark Kent to Superman. Regeya leapt over all the obstacles that held Yeager back on the network. He could go anywhere, do anything a real male of the Race could go and do. Yeager’s Lizard friends had done a terrific job of creating a new identity for him.

  And Yeager himself had done everything he could to make his scaly alter ego seem real to the males and females he’d met only as names and numbers on the computer screen. He’d fooled every damn one of them, as far as he could tell. To be accepted as a Lizard among Lizards . . . If that didn’t mean he’d done his homework, what could?

  Sometimes Regeya seemed real to him, too. The fictitious male of the Race was fussier and more precise than he was himself. Yeager really did think differently when he assumed that identity. Things that wouldn’t have upset him as himself became infuriating while he looked down the snout he didn’t have at the innumerable follies of the Big Uglies.

  Today, feeling very Lizardy indeed, he typed in Regeya’s name, identification number, and password (he’d chosen Rabotev 2 for a password—it was easy to remember, but did nothing to suggest Tosev or the Tosevites). He wondered if he could learn any more about Kassquit. Sometimes he thought she was another Big Ugly masquerading as a Lizard. He doubted it, though. His best guess was that she was his opposite number among the Race: a Lizard who somehow had the knack for thinking like a human being.

  He waited for the network’s road map to come up onto the screen. He admired that road map; it let a Lizard, or even a sneaky Tosevite, find his way around the whole complex structure with the greatest of ease. A telephone book with a zillion cross references was the way he’d explained it to Barbara, but that didn’t begin to convey its intricacy.

  But when the screen lit up, he didn’t see the road map. Instead, three words appeared on it in large, glowing characters: ACCESS PERMANENTLY DENIED. And then the screen went dark again, as if a Lizard had reached out and pulled the plug.

  “Oh, dear,” Sam said, or words to that effect. Wondering if the network had hiccuped, he tried again. This time, he didn’t even get the forbidding three-word message. The screen just stayed dark. “Oh, dear,” he said again, rather more pungently than before.

  He felt like kicking the Lizard computer. What the devil had gone wrong? One possibility leapt to mind: if Kassquit was a female who had a knack for understanding people, maybe she’d recognized him for what he was. That hurt his pride, but he supposed he’d live through it.

  He didn’t want to have to live through it for long, though. He telephoned Sorviss, the male who’d done most to arrange his extended access in the first place, and explained what had gone wrong.

  “I shall see what I can do,” Sorviss said—in English; he enjoyed his life among people as much as Yeager enjoyed pretending to be a Lizard. “I will call you back when I discover what the problem is.”

  “Thanks, Sorviss,” Yeager said. “Maybe we’ll have to come up with a new name for me, or something like that.” Whatever they had to do, he wanted it taken care of. He couldn’t begin to do his job without the fullest possible access to what the Lizards were thinking and saying.

  When the phone rang half an hour later, Sam sprang on it like a cat onto a mouse. It was Sorviss, all right, but he didn’t sound happy. “Restoring your access will not be easy or quick,” he said. “The Race has installed new security filters on the lines leading into the consulate here. I am not certain I will be able to find a way around them: they are well made.”
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  “Then Straha is liable to be cut off from the network, too, isn’t he?” Yeager asked.

  “He is,” Sorviss agreed.

  “He won’t like that,” Sam predicted.

  “I think you are right,” the Lizard said. “I also think this is not something I can control. If the shiplord starts biting his arms”—a Lizard idiom translated literally into English, a sin whose reverse Yeager sometimes committed—“I can only say, ‘Oh, what a pity.’ ”

  “Is that all you can say?” Yeager chuckled. A good many of the Lizards who’d chosen to stay in the USA after the fighting stopped had turned into confirmed democrats. They wanted nothing to do with the multilayered society in which they’d grown up, not any more they didn’t. Ristin and Ullhass, the males he’d known longest, were like that, too, though they stayed polite when dealing with their own kind.

  “No, I could say some other things,” Sorviss answered. “But Straha would not be happy if they got back to his hearing diaphragms.”

  “You’re right about that, I bet,” Sam said. “But I sure hope you can put me back on the network before too long. Without it, I’m like a man trying to do his job half blind. That’s not good.”

  “I understand,” Sorviss said. “But you must understand that I will have to evade many traps to restore you without drawing the notice of the Race. Maybe this can be done; I am a male of skill. But I cannot say, ‘It shall be done.’ “ The last phrase was in the Lizards’ language.

  “Okay, Sorviss. Please do everything you can. So long.” Yeager hung up, deeply discontented. He’d got along without the computer network for years. He supposed he could get along without it again for however long Sorviss needed to restore his access. That didn’t mean he was happy about it, any more than he would have been happy about having to write everything out by hand because his typewriter broke down.

  He went back and entered the network in his own proper persona once more. As long as he was recognized as a Big Ugly—and restricted because he was recognized—everything went fine. The only problem was, he couldn’t find out even a quarter of the things he wanted to know. The Lizards didn’t talk about the American space station, for instance, in any discussion area to which Sam Yeager, Tosevite, had access.

  “Dammit, they know more about what’s going on than we do,” he grumbled.

  He wondered if he ought to call Kitty Hawk again. If he did, Lieutenant General LeMay was liable to come down on him like a ton of bricks. But if he didn’t, he’d stay altogether in the dark. A Lizard would have had better sense than to bring LeMay down on him in the first place, and would have obeyed without question after getting in trouble. “Hell with that,” Yeager muttered. “I ain’t no Lizard.” Barbara, fortunately, couldn’t hear him.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the Kitty Hawk BOQ. If anybody had any good notions of what was going on up there, Glen Johnson would be the man. Sam nodded to himself as the telephone rang on the other side of the country. Back in the old days, he’d have had to go through an operator and give her Johnson’s name. Now he could just call, and leave no trace of himself behind.

  Somebody picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “I’d like to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, please,” Yeager answered. Whoever that was over there in Kitty Hawk, it wasn’t Glen Johnson. This fellow had a drawl thick enough to slice, one that turned hello into a three-syllable word.

  After a couple of seconds’ pause, the Southerner said, “Afraid you can’t do that, sir. He’s up in space right now. Who’s calling, please? I’ll leave a message.”

  He sounded very helpful—too helpful, after that little pause. Maybe, maybe not, but Sam wasn’t inclined to take chances, not after the trouble he’d just had from the Lizards. He didn’t give his name, but said, “Really? I thought he’d be down by now.” From what Johnson had told him, he knew damn well that the Marine was supposed to be down by now. “Is he all right?”

  “Oh, yes, sir, he’s fine,” the man back in North Carolina answered. “You want to leave your name and a number where he can get hold of you, I reckon he’d be right glad to have ’em. I’m sure he’ll get back to you as soon as he can.”

  Very gently, Yeager laid the telephone handset back in its cradle. Sure as hell, alarm bells were going off in the back of his mind. He didn’t think this fellow would have been so eager to get his name and number if they were tracing his call (and, thanks to Sorviss, his calls were hard, maybe impossible, for anyone with merely human equipment to trace), but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

  He sat at his desk scratching his head, wondering what the devil to do next. He wondered if there was anything he could do next. The Lizards had shut him off from whatever they knew about the space station, and his best—Jesus, his only—American source had just fallen off the map, too.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” he said, and leaned back in his chair as if he could stare through the ceiling and see not only the space station but Glen Johnson, too.

  He hoped that fellow with the Southern accent had been telling the truth when he said Johnson was okay. Sam knew people didn’t stay in space longer than they were supposed to without some pretty important reason. If the man had said the weather in Kitty Hawk was lousy so Peregrine couldn’t come down on schedule, that would have been something else. But he hadn’t. He’d made it sound as if everything were routine. That worried Sam, who knew better.

  After some thought, he fired up the U.S.-made computer on his desk. If he used it to ask questions about the space station, he’d trigger alarms. General LeMay’s visit had proved that. But if his security clearance wasn’t good enough to let him find out what was going on with Peregrine, he saw no point to having the miserable thing.

  No, sure enough, nothing tried to keep him out of these records. But what he found there made him scratch his head all over again. Unless somebody was doing still more lying, Peregrine had landed right on schedule.

  “Now what the hell does that mean?” he asked the computer. It didn’t answer. Facts it could handle. Meaning? He had to supply his own.

  Was the screen lying to him? Or had Peregrine come down while Glen Johnson stayed up? If it had, how? Space wasn’t a good place for one driver to get out of a truck and another to hop in and take it on down the line.

  “Space isn’t,” Sam said slowly. “But the space station is.” He looked up at and, in his mind’s eye, through the ceiling again. Some things he saw, or thought he saw, very clearly. Others still made no sense at all.

  One evening, after Heinrich had gone to the cinema and the younger children were asleep, Käthe Drucker asked, “How long will you go on flying into space, Hans?”

  Johannes Drucker looked at his wife in some surprise. “You never asked me that before, love,” he said. “Until they don’t want me to do it any more, I suppose, or . . .”

  Or until I blow up, he’d started to say. He would have said it lightheartedly. Somehow, he didn’t think he could have said it lightheartedly enough to make Käthe appreciate it. Peenemünde already had too many monuments to fallen (or, more often, vaporized) heroes for that. He didn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t dwell on it and do his job. If he did go, he’d probably be dead before he knew it. That consoled him. It was unlikely to console his wife.

  “Don’t you think you’ve given the Reich enough of your life?” she asked. By the look in her eye, the fallen heroes of Peenemünde were on her mind, sure enough.

  “If I didn’t like what I was doing, I would say yes,” Drucker answered truthfully. “But since I do—”

  Käthe sighed. “Since you do, I have to watch you go off and be unfaithful to me, and I have to hope your mistress decides to let you come back to my arms.”

  “That’s not fair,” Drucker said, but he couldn’t have told her how it wasn’t. He did love—he dearly loved—riding an A-45 hundreds of kilometers into the sky. He did forsake his wife whenever he went into space. And an A-45 could indeed keep him
from coming home to Käthe.

  She sighed again. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “You will anyhow.”

  “Let’s go to bed,” Drucker said. “Things will look better in the morning.”

  After telling her no, he wondered if she’d want to have anything to do with him once they got under the covers together. But if he was willing to take chances every time he rode a pillar of fire up from Peenemünde, he was also willing to take them in the dark quiet of his own bedroom. And when, in an experimental way, he set a hand on Käthe’s hip, she turned toward him and slid out of her flannel nightgown faster than he’d imagined possible. She might have been so urgent on their honeymoon in the south of France; he wasn’t sure he could remember any time since to match this one.

  “Whew!” he panted afterwards. “Call the ambulance. I think I need to go to the hospital—I’m all worn out.”

  “To have your head examined, I think,” Käthe said, pressing her warm, soft length against him. “But then, you fly rocket ships, so I should have known that already.” She took him in hand. “Maybe I really can make you too tired to be able to fly. Shall I find out?”

  He wasn’t sure he would rise to the occasion, but he managed. This time, he didn’t need to feign exhaustion when they finished. As he sank toward slumber, he remembered screwing himself silly in military brothels before dangerous missions against the Russians or the Lizards. Maybe Käthe was doing the same sort of thing, only worrying about his mission, not something she had to face herself.

  He’d almost drifted off when he remembered something he would sooner have forgotten: a lot of the women drafted into these military brothels had been Jewesses. That hadn’t meant anything to him during his visits; they’d just been warm, available flesh back then. Once he’d buttoned his trousers and left, he hadn’t given them a second thought. Now, looking back over twenty years, he wondered how long they’d lasted in the brothels and what happened to them when they couldn’t go on any more. Nothing good—he was sure of that.