Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  Wait Monique did. The operator frightened her out of a week’s growth by demanding another twenty-five pfennigs. She paid. The operator got off the line again.

  Another man came onto it. “Tell me your name,” he said, his voice strange and familiar at the same time.

  “Pierre? I am your sister Monique, Monique Dutourd,” she answered.

  As she hadn’t expected a woman to answer the phone, so the sigh now also took her by surprise. “Well, I might have known you would catch up with me sooner or later,” he said. “Life at the university finally got boring, eh?”

  “You know about me?” That struck her as the most unfair thing she’d ever heard.

  He laughed. “My business is knowing things, little sister. The more things you know, the better, and the more you can do with them.”

  “You sound just like the SS man who’s looking for you,” Monique said, angry enough to try to blast him out of his complacency.

  But he laughed. “He can keep looking. Go on back home. Study your inscriptions. Forget all about it. I wish Kuhn had kept his damned mouth shut, that’s all.” If he knew the German’s name, maybe he did know everything about her.

  “Be careful, Pierre,” she said. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

  “Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I—Ah, the bastards are trying to tap the line. So long.” He hung up. The phone rang. The operator demanded yet another quarter of a mark. Monique paid again. She got back on her bicycle and headed home.

  How had Pierre known what the Germans were doing? Dieter Kuhn had said he was too cozy with the Lizards to suit the Reich. Maybe they’d given him a gadget that would tell him such things. People had gained on the Lizards since the days when the conquest fleet came, but the aliens’ electronics still outdid anything mere humans made.

  Monique was struggling with an intractable inscription when the telephone in her flat rang. She guessed who it might be before she lifted the handset from its cradle. And sure enough, Dieter Kuhn spoke in precise, German-accented French: “Good afternoon, Monique. A very interesting lecture, as always, and a very interesting telephone call as well. It did not help me so much as I might have liked, but it was interesting nonetheless.”

  How much of her conversation with her brother had he heard? Had he heard any? Were his gadgets better than Pierre thought they were? Or was he running a bluff, hoping Monique would tell him more than he already knew?

  Automatic distrust for Germans made her suspect the latter. She said, “I told you I did not want you calling me any more.”

  “My dear Professor Dutourd, I am not calling on a social occasion, I assure you,” Kuhn answered, still precise, still polite, but suddenly with iron in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “I am calling in regard to the security of the Greater German Reich.” French was not in the habit of capitalizing nouns, as German was. Monique heard, or imagined she heard, capital letters thudding into place just the same.

  Picking her words with care, she said, “I don’t know anything more about the security of the Great German Reich than I did when you took me to Chez Fonfon, and I knew nothing then. You said as much yourself. The other thing I will tell you is that I do not desire to know anything more, either.”

  “Ah, Monique,” he said, trying without much luck to sound playful, “you know at least one thing more than you did then: a certain telephone number.” Before she could do any more than begin to wonder whether he really had it, he rattled it off.

  “If you already knew that number, why did you need me?” she demanded. “You could have done whatever you were going to do, and I would never have been the wiser.” Like so many in the lands the Reich occupied, she saw staying out of the eye of the authorities as the highest good.

  “For one thing, I did not have that number until the day after you did,” Kuhn answered. “For another, as I already told you, it is not so useful. It does not lead me directly to your brother. He has some verdammte Lizard machinery that relays from that telephone to wherever he happens to be. We know of this machinery, but we cannot match it.”

  “What a pity,” Monique murmured, all but hugging herself with glee at having her guess confirmed. She felt extraordinarily clever, as if she’d proved what had killed Augustus’ right-hand man Agrippa.

  “Another ten years,” the SS officer said. “Maybe less.” That brought her up short. Humanity had been at least fifty years—maybe twice that far—behind the Lizards when the conquest fleet arrived. Had the gap really narrowed so much so fast? In another generation, would the Lizards fall behind? There was an alarmingly modern thought for a Roman historian.

  But then it was gone, replaced by one more urgent at the moment: “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dieter Kuhn told her, and he actually did sound sorry. How good an actor was he? Pretty good, by everything she’d seen. He went on, “When we deal with the Lizards here inside the Reich, we want it to be on our terms, not theirs. Your brother makes that harder.”

  “When you deal with anyone anywhere, you want it to be on your terms.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did Monique wonder whether Kuhn would take that as politically irresponsible. To her, they’d seemed a self-evident truth, as much a given as tomorrow’s sunrise.

  They seemed that way to him, too. With a chuckle, he said, “Aber natürlich,” and then went back to French: “That is the way of the strong with the weak.”

  “And who is strong and who is weak, between the Reich and the Lizards?” Monique asked: almost but not quite a rhetorical question.

  “Oh, they are stronger, no doubt about it,” Dieter Kuhn answered at once, for which she reluctantly gave him credit. “But we are—or we had better be—strong enough to make the rules on our own territory. Do you want the Lizards back again?”

  “I am not a political person. It is not wise for anyone French to be a political person. And so I do not have to answer that question,” Monique said. “And now, if you will excuse me, I would like to go back to my work.”

  She started to hang up the phone. Before she could move it more than a few centimeters, Kuhn said, “Wait.” His voice had the flat snap of command. Even as she obeyed, she wondered where he’d learned it. He couldn’t be old enough to have fought against the Lizards when the conquest fleet landed.

  “What do you want with me?” she cried. She wished he’d only been trying to seduce her; that, she could have dealt with, even if he’d succeeded. Here she felt like a mouse trying not to let a rhinoceros trample it. No, two rhinoceri: Kuhn had made it plain the Lizards were in this up to their eye turrets, too.

  “Your help, for the sake of mankind,” Kuhn answered.

  Some Frenchmen wore field-gray uniforms with tricolor patches on the left sleeves and coal-scuttle helmets with tricolor shields painted on them. They thought they were serving for the sake of mankind. As far as she was concerned, they were serving for the sake of the Nazis. “Were you not listening when I said I cared nothing for politics?” she asked.

  “I listened. I chose not to hear,” Kuhn said. “Monique, it would be unfortunate if you failed to cooperate with us. It would be both professionally and personally unfortunate. I would regret that. You would regret it more.”

  “I will not betray my brother, damn you,” Monique whispered. This time, she managed to hang up before the Sturmbannführer ordered her not to.

  Afterwards, though, she stood by the phone, waiting for it to ring again, waiting for Dieter Kuhn to give her more orders in his calm, reasonable voice. No, she thought fiercely. I will not. Not for anything. You can do whatever you want to me.

  She wondered how true that was. She’d never thought of herself as the stuff from which heroes were made. The Spartan boy had smiled when the fox under his cloak gnawed his belly. She was sure she would have screamed her head off. Who wouldn’t have? Who couldn’t have? A hero—and she wasn’t.

  The telephone did not ring. Eventually, she went back to her desk and
tried to get more work done. She accomplished very little. Looking back on it, she found it startling she’d accomplished anything at all. She kept glancing over toward the phone, and toward the front door. One day soon, she would hear a ring, or a knock. She was sure of that. She could feel it in her bones. Then she would have to find out just how much of a hero hid inside her.

  As Reuven Russie came into the house, he announced, “Mother, I asked Jane Archibald if she’d have supper here with us tonight, and she said she would.”

  “All right,” Rivka Russie answered. “I’m making beef-and-barley soup. I’ll put in some more barley and onions and carrots. There’ll be plenty.” She didn’t say anything about putting in more beef. Meat was harder to come by than produce. From what Reuven had learned from the Lizards, too much meat wasn’t good for the human organism. Fat clogged the arteries, leading to heart attacks and strokes. But it tastes so good, he thought, wishing he’d skipped a lesson.

  “Esther, chop the onion,” his mother called to his twin sisters. “Judith, take care of the carrots.”

  “Maybe you could throw them in the soup pot,” Reuven suggested. Before anyone could answer, he shook his head and went on, “No, don’t bother—I know they would spoil the taste of the soup.”

  That got him a couple of almost inaudibly shrill squeals of rage, as he’d hoped it would. It also got him a dire threat: one of the twins—he couldn’t tell which—said, “Wait till you see what happens to your friend tonight. She’ll be sorry she ever came around here.”

  They’d done that before. They could be holy terrors when they chose—and even more terrifying when they chose to show how smart they were. But Reuven said, “Good luck. It’s Jane tonight. You weren’t listening—and what else is new?”

  As he’d hoped, his sisters shut up. Jane Archibald did intimidate them. For one thing, they had most of the height they’d have as adults, but almost none of the shapes they’d acquire. Jane was, most emphatically, a woman. And, for another, she was too good-natured to let them get her goat. They’d tried before, without any luck. Reuven hoped that didn’t mean they’d try especially hard tonight.

  His father came in a few minutes later. From the kitchen, his mother called, “Moishe, you have a letter from your cousin in the RAF.”

  “What’s in it?” Moishe Russie asked.

  “How should I know?” Rivka answered. “It’s in English. David speaks Yiddish well enough, he reads it, but I’ve never yet known him to try and write it.”

  “I’ll read it if you want, Father,” Reuven said. He saw the letter on the table by the sofa.

  “Never mind,” his father said. He saw the sheet of paper, too. “My English can always use practice. It’s not perfect, but I can use it.”

  “You’ll get some more practice in a little while,” Reuven said. “Jane is coming to supper, and then we’re going to study.”

  Moishe Russie raised an eyebrow. “Is that what young people call it these days?” Reuven’s ears got hot. His father went on, “Should be interesting dinner-table conversation: Hebrew, English, and bits of the Lizards’ language to fill in the cracks. Arabic, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Jane has bits, doesn’t she?”

  “Hard to live here without learning some.” Reuven made a sour face. “Allahu akbar, for instance.” He pointed to the letter, which his father had picked up. “What does your cousin have to say?”

  “He’s your cousin, too,” Moishe pointed out, “only once further removed.” He read on; glum vertical lines filled his face. “It’s getting harder for his family to get by in Britain, even in Northern Ireland. Little by little, being next door to the Reich is turning the British into anti-Semites.”

  “That’s not good,” Reuven said, and his father nodded. He went on, “He should take his family out while he still can and come here. If he can’t come here, he should go to the USA. From everything you’ve always told me, too many people stayed in Poland too long.” He wished he remembered even less of Poland than was the case.

  “We certainly stayed in Poland too long,” his father said, and tacked on an emphatic cough. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d probably all be dead. If the Lizards hadn’t come, all the Jews in Poland would probably be dead.”

  “Hitler and Himmler have certainly done their best, haven’t they?” Reuven said.

  Moishe Russie shook his head. He couldn’t be flippant about it. “I can’t imagine England going the same way, but they’re starting down the path.” He lowered the letter for a moment, and in that moment looked older and tireder than Reuven ever remembered seeing him. Then he plainly made himself go back to reading. When he frowned a moment later, it was a different sort of frown, one of puzzlement rather than mourning.

  “What is it, Father?” Reuven asked.

  “He’s wondering if I know anything about a couple of shipments of ginger that went awry,” his father answered. “It seems an officer in a position to do him either a great deal of harm or a great deal of good is somehow involved in the ginger traffic, and wants to use him to use me to find out what happened to them and how to keep it from happening again.”

  “And will you try to find out?” It was the obvious question, but still needed asking.

  “Yes, I think so,” Moishe said. “Ginger smuggling does the Lizards a lot of harm, I know that. And the Lizards have done us a lot of good. But David is family, and things are looking dark in Britain these days, so I’ll find out what I can. If it does him some good . . . He broke into a Lizard prison to get me out, so how could I help doing everything I can for him?”

  Reuven hadn’t heard that story for a long time, and had forgotten most of it. Before he could ask any questions, though, someone knocked on the front door. Whatever the questions had been, they went clean out of his head. “That will be Jane,” he said, and hurried to let her in.

  She carried books and notebooks on her back in a khaki pack a British soldier might have used before the fighting stopped. Shrugging it off, she gave a sigh of relief. Then, in accented Hebrew, she said, “Good evening, Dr. Russie.”

  “Hello, Jane,” Reuven’s father answered in English. “I will practice in your language. I do not get to speak it so often.”

  “All right by me,” Jane said. “Better than all right by me, as a matter of fact.” Her smile was bemused. “I still find it hard to believe I’m taking supper with the man my school is named for.”

  Moishe Russie shrugged. “I was in the right place at the right time—an English saying, isn’t it? But you had better be careful—you will make Reuven jealous.”

  “Thanks a lot, Father,” Reuven muttered under his breath. He’d worried that Judith and Esther might embarrass him. Well, his father had taken care of that for the evening.

  His sisters came out and stared at Jane, as if wondering what they would look like when they grew up. They wouldn’t look like her; they were both thin-faced and dark like Reuven, not pink and blond. If their figures came close to Jane’s, though, they’d need to carry clubs to hold boys at bay.

  “Supper’s ready,” Rivka Russie called a few minutes later. She made sure Jane got a couple of marrow bones in her bowl. The Australian girl didn’t waste them; she worked the marrow free with her knife and spooned it up. “That’s good,” she said. “Takes me back, it does. My mum would make a soup not a whole lot different to this.” She frowned. “I do wonder, I truly do, if the Lizards will let me go home after I finish here.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Esther asked—or maybe it was Judith.

  “Because they want Australia all to themselves,” Jane answered. “It never did have very many people in it. They killed a lot of them, and they aren’t worrying very hard about whether the others are sick or well.”

  “Humanfrei, not Judenfrei,” Reuven murmured in Yiddish. His father winced. His mother scowled at him. His sisters and Jane, perhaps fortunately, didn’t get it.

  After supper, Jane helped Rivka and Esther and Judith with the dishes. Moishe Russie lit a
cigar. Reuven gave him a reproachful look. His father flushed, but didn’t stub it out. Between puffs, he said, “I got the tobacco habit before I knew—before anybody knew—how dangerous it was. Now people do know—but I still have the habit.”

  With the ready intolerance of youth, Reuven remarked, “Well, now that you do know, why don’t you quit?”

  “Ask a Lizard ginger-taster why he doesn’t quit, too,” Moishe answered. “He’ll tell you the same thing I do: he can’t.” Reuven raised an eyebrow. He was convinced anyone could do anything if only he applied enough willpower. He had never had to test this theory himself, which helped explain why he remained convinced of it. His father said, “Of course, one of the reasons we didn’t know how dangerous tobacco was is that most people used to die of something else before it killed them.”

  “It’s a slow poison, certainly,” Reuven said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not a poison. If the Lizards made us use it, we’d scream bloody murder—and we’d have a right to.”

  “Scream bloody murder about what?” Jane asked, returning from the kitchen.

  “Tobacco,” Reuven answered.

  “Oh, of course,” she agreed—she didn’t smoke, either. “Nasty stuff.” Only then did she notice Moishe’s cigar. A little defensively, she said, “Well, it is.”

  “Do you hear me quarreling with you?” Reuven’s father asked. “I know what it is. I keep smoking anyhow.”

  “Speaking of nasty stuff . . .” Reuven pulled out his biochemistry text. “Did you understand one word of today’s lecture? He might as well have been speaking Hindustani for all the sense it made to me.”

  “I got some of it, anyhow,” Jane said. “Here, look . . .” From then on, most of the conversation was in the Lizards’ language. That effectively excluded Reuven’s mother, but she didn’t let it bother her. She sat down in the front room and embroidered for a while and then, blowing a kiss to Reuven and nodding to Jane, headed for the bedroom.