Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  It is unlike the Big Uglies to keep secrets so well, Vesstil had written. Even with their safety hanging in the balance, it is unlike them. This argues something unusual even for Tosevites went on in relation to this attack.

  Another Lizard had answered, Interesting speculation, but useless to us, and the discussion had drifted on to other things.

  “I’m not sure it is useless,” Sam muttered, deliberately using English to get himself out of the chattering among the Lizards in which he’d been immersed. In fact, he’d been collecting examples of unusual actions by the Germans and Russians in the hope that one of them would lead to more clues he could use to pin down the guilty party. It hadn’t happened yet, and didn’t look as if it would happen any time soon, but that didn’t mean he’d abandoned hope.

  Yeager also collected examples of strange American behavior: those were easier for him to come by and let him hone his analytical skills, though they had nothing to do with the colonization fleet. He wondered why one of the spacemen who flew out of Kitty Hawk had got a black mark by his name for getting too curious about the growing U.S. space station.

  He suspected he could have found out with a couple of phone calls, but playing detective through the American computer network gave him more practice at manipulating such creations, so he went at it that way. Back in the bush leagues, he’d always asked for curves from the batting-practice pitchers because he’d had more trouble hitting them than fastballs.

  He grumbled as he waited for the human-made computer to spit out the information he needed. It was slower than the one the Lizards made, and the U.S. computer network, a creation of the past five years, far smaller and more fragmented than the one the Lizards took for granted.

  As things turned out, he had to make the phone calls anyhow, because the network let him down. He really did have U.S. security clearances—unlike the ones the Lizards had flanged up for him for a lark—but they didn’t seem to be high enough to take him where he needed to go. They should have been, or so he thought, but they weren’t.

  He wondered what that meant. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have anything to do with the attack on the colonization fleet. The space station hadn’t been involved in that; the Lizards had detected a signal from a submarine that promptly submerged, and then somebody’s nasty chunk of hardware had gone into action. Somebody’s. Whose? He had no more proof than the Lizards did.

  Then he stopped worrying about it for a while, because Barbara came home with the trunk of the car full of groceries, and he had to help haul them into the house. She put away the food that went into the refrigerator, he what went into the pantries. About halfway through the job, Barbara looked over to him and said, “This is all for Jonathan, you know. There wasn’t enough room in the car for a week’s worth of groceries for him and us both. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll have to go back to the store for some food for us.”

  “You expect me to laugh and think that’s a joke,” Sam said. “Trouble is, I’ve seen the way the kid eats. I believe you, or close enough, anyhow.” He put a couple of cans of tomatoes on a shelf, then said, “Karen seems happier when she comes around here these days.”

  “Of course she does,” his wife answered at once. “Liu Mei is five thousand miles away now. I hope she and her mother have made it back to China all right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Karen hoped their ship sank. Hand me that sack of oranges, would you? They’re nice and ripe.”

  They were just finishing when the telephone rang. Barbara answered it, then called out for Sam. He took the handpiece from her and spoke: “Yeager.”

  “Good morning, Major.” The crisp voice on the other end of the line belonged to Colonel Edwin Webster, Sam’s immediate superior. “You are to report in tomorrow at 0800: no working out of the house. We have a visiting fireman who wants to see you. He’s asked for you by name, and he’s not somebody who’ll take no for an answer. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir: report in at 0800,” Yeager said in martyred tones. He much preferred working from his home, which, thanks to his personal library and his computer connection, he got to do most of the time. “Who is this fellow, anyway?” he asked, but Webster had hung up on hearing him acknowledge the order.

  Barbara was properly sympathetic. Jonathan, when he got home from classes, wasn’t. “I have to go in at eight o’clock three mornings a week this term,” he said.

  “That’s because you’re young—and if you don’t watch the way you talk, you won’t get much older,” Sam told him. With the heartlessness of youth, Jonathan laughed.

  Fortified by two cups of coffee, Yeager drove downtown the next morning. He poured himself another cup as soon as he’d reported to Colonel Webster, who looked disgustingly wide awake himself. Sam repeated the question he’d asked the day before. Webster didn’t answer it this time, either.

  Before long, though, Sam found out. Colonel Webster’s adjutant, a harried-looking captain named Markowitz, came into his cubicle and said, “Sir, if you’ll come with me . . . ?” Yeager put down his pen and forgot about the meaningless piece of busywork he was doing. He got up and followed Captain Markowitz.

  In the office to which the adjutant led him sat a three-star general smoking a cigarette with sharp, savage puffs. The general waited till Markowitz had gone and closed the door behind him, then stubbed out the butt and impaled Yeager with a glare that held him in place as a specimen pin held a preserved butterfly to a collecting board. “You have been poking your nose into places where it has no business going, Major,” he rasped. “That will cease, or your military career will, forthwith. Have you got that?”

  “Sir?” Sam said in astonishment. He’d expected a visiting fireman who wanted to know something special about the Lizards, not one who aimed to carve chunks off him and roast them over the fire. And he didn’t even know what he was supposed to have done.

  Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay didn’t keep him in suspense for long: “You have been snooping about the space station. Whatever may be going on there, it is none of your goddamn business. You are not authorized to have that information. If you try to get it from us again, you will regret it for the rest of your days. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Major Yeager?”

  “Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Yeager answered carefully, “but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.”

  “Why is not your business, Major,” LeMay said. “I’ve come a long way to give you that order, and I expect to have it obeyed. Is there any danger I am laboring under a misapprehension?” His tone warned that there had better not be. He lit another cigarette and started smoking it down to a nub.

  “No, sir,” Sam said, the only thing he could say under the circumstances. If LeMay didn’t want him taking a look at the space station, he wouldn’t . . . or he wouldn’t get caught again, anyhow. Why Lieutenant General LeMay was so vehement about the matter, he couldn’t guess—but LeMay wasn’t in the mood to answer questions.

  “You had better not,” the general growled, and seemed to notice Yeager still standing at attention in front of him. “Dismissed. Get the hell out of here.” Yeager saluted, then frankly fled.

  Straha had the best computer equipment money could buy. It wasn’t his money, either, but that of the Tosevites with whom he had chosen to make his home. The equipment, though, was regulation issue for the Race. How the Americans had got it for him, he found it wiser not to ask. But get it they had. They had also managed, in some highly unofficial fashion, to connect it to the Race’s network by way of the consulate in downtown Los Angeles. That gave Straha one more window on the way of life he had deliberately abandoned.

  It was, necessarily, a one-way window. He could observe, but did not interact. If he did interact—if he sent messages for placement on the network—he might reveal and forfeit his highly unofficial connection. In the American phrase, he stayed on the outside looking in.

  And so, when he turned on the computer and discovered he had a message waiting, his first
reaction was alarm. If the Race discovered his connection on its own, he was liable to lose that window.

  But the message, he discovered, was not from any male of the Race, or even from some new and snoopy female. It was from Major Sam Yeager, who had connections of his own. It asked nothing more dangerous than whether Yeager could come and visit the exiled shiplord at his home one day before too long.

  “Of course you may visit,” Straha said on the telephone, still not eager to send a message and make the system notice him. “I do not understand why you did not simply call, as I am doing now.”

  “I like the message system the Race uses,” replied the Tosevite, whose access to that system was somewhat—but only somewhat—more official than Straha’s. It did not seem a good enough reason to the ex-shiplord, but Straha chose not to pursue the point. He proposed a time at which Yeager might come, the Big Ugly agreed, and they both hung up.

  Yeager was punctual, as Straha had expected him to be. “I do not see your driver here,” the Tosevite remarked after he had exchanged greetings with Straha.

  “No, he is not here; I gave him the morning off, knowing I would not be going anywhere because you would be coming here,” Straha answered. “I can quickly summon him by radio link, if that is what you require.”

  “No,” Yeager said, and used an emphatic cough. “Perhaps we could go out into the back yard and talk there.”

  “It is warmer inside,” Straha said unhappily. Yeager stood quiet, not saying anything more. Straha’s eye turrets swung sharply toward him. “You think my house may be—” He broke off even before Yeager began to raise a warning hand. “Yes, let us go out into the back yard.”

  By local standards, it was not much of a yard, being dirt and rocks and sand and a few cacti rather than the green grass and gaudy flowers customary in the United States. But in essence if not in detail, it put Straha in mind of Home. Yeager said, “Shiplord, what do you know and what can you find out about the American space station?”

  “Rather less than you can, I suspect,” Straha answered. “I have access only to what the Race knows about it. Your own people, the builders, will surely have whatever detailed knowledge you may require.”

  Yeager shook his head. “I have been ordered not to inquire into it, and American computers are closed against me—indeed, are warned against me.”

  Straha needed no elaborate calculation to understand what that was liable to mean. “You have in some way triggered a security alert?” he asked.

  “Oh, you might say so,” the Big Ugly answered in English. Before Straha could grow too confused, he shifted back to the language of the Race: “That is an idiom of agreement.”

  “Is it? I thank you; I had not encountered it before,” Straha said. “But you are a military officer, and one who, because of your dealings with the Race, is privy to many secrets. Why would questions about your space station be closed to you?”

  “That is also my question,” Yeager said. “I have not found an answer for it. I have been discouraged from seeking an answer for it.”

  “Something most highly secret must be going on in connection with the space station, then,” Straha said. All at once, he wondered whether his wisecrack to the Tosevite reporter who’d questioned him held truth after all. But no. “It cannot be connected to the attack on the colonization fleet.”

  “My thoughts also ran in that direction,” Yeager said. “I agree; there can be no possible connection. And that there can be no possible connection gives me great relief. But I cannot imagine what else would be so secret as to keep me from inquiring about the station: indeed, would lead to my being discouraged from making any further inquiries along those lines.”

  Straha knew he was no expert in reading the tones in which Tosevites spoke, but he would have placed a fair-sized bet that Yeager had been strongly discouraged from making such inquiries. The exiled shiplord asked, “Are you disobeying orders in asking these questions of me?”

  “No, or not precisely,” Yeager replied. “I have been ordered not to seek more information from American sources. I do not think it occurred to anyone above me that I might seek information from other sources.”

  “Ah,” Straha said. “You are what we call in the language of the Race a beam-deflector—you twist your orders to your own purposes.”

  “I’m obeying the letter, we would say in English,” Yeager said. “As for the spirit . . .” He shrugged.

  “We would have a good deal to say to an officer who played so fast and loose with his orders,” Straha observed. “I know you Big Uglies are looser than we, but in your military, I had always believed, less so than in other areas.”

  “That is truth,” Yeager admitted. “I am at—or perhaps over—the limit of my discretion. But this is something that is kept secret when it should not be. I want to know why it is. Sometimes things are made secret for no reason at all, other times to conceal bad mistakes. My not-empire needs to know of that last, should it be true.”

  Straha studied Yeager. He spoke the Race’s language well. He could think like a male of the Race. But he was, at bottom, alien, as was the society that had hatched him.

  A large bird with a blue back and wings and a gray belly landed near one of the cacti. It turned its head toward Straha and Yeager. “Jeep!” it screeched. “Jeep! Jeep!” It hopped a couple of paces, then pecked at something in the dirt.

  “Scrub jay,” Yeager remarked in English.

  “Is that what you call it?” Straha said in the same language. Birds were alien to him, too. Back on Home, flying creatures—of which there were fewer than on Tosev 3—had membranous wings, something like Tosevite bats. But their bodies were scaly like the Race’s, not hairy like the Big Uglies’. No beasts back on Home had hair or feathers; they needed less insulation than Tosevite creatures.

  Another bird, a smaller one with a glistening green back and purple-red throat and crown, buzzed into the yard and hovered above the scrub jay, letting out a series of small, squeaky, indignant chirps. Its wings beat so fast, they were only a blur. Straha could hear the buzz they made. The jay paid no attention to the smaller bird, but went on looking for seeds and crawling things.

  “Hummingbirds don’t like jays,” Yeager said, again in English. “I suppose jays will eat their eggs and babies if they get a chance. Jays will eat just about anything if they get a chance.”

  The hummingbird finished cursing the jay and darted away. One instant it was there, the next it was gone, or so it seemed to Straha. The scrub jay pecked for a little longer, then flew off at a much more sedate pace.

  “You Big Uglies are hummingbirds, now here, now there, moving faster than the eye turret can follow,” Straha said. “We of the Race are more like the jay. We are steady. We are sure. If you know where we are at one moment, you may predict where we will be for some time to come.”

  Yeager’s mouth corners twisted upward in the expression Tosevites used to show amusement. Still speaking English, he said, “And you of the Race will eat just about any planet if you get a chance. We didn’t give you as much of a chance as you thought you’d have.”

  “That I can scarcely deny,” Straha said. He swung his eye turrets away from the jay, which had perched in a tree in a neighbor’s yard and was screeching again. Giving Yeager his full attention, he went on, “You realize my investigations, if I make them, will have to be indirect? You also realize I may alert not only your not-empire to wrongdoing, but also the Race? I ask you these things before proceeding as you requested. If you like, I will forget the request you have made.” He could not think of another Tosevite to whom he would have made that offer.

  “No, go ahead,” Yeager said. “I cannot imagine anything at the space station that would endanger your ships more than other, more secret, installations we already have in space.”

  “Indeed,” Straha said. “Since you put it in those terms, neither can I. It would be easier if I could safely have a more active presence on our computer network, but I will do what I can
by scanning and searching out messages pertaining to this subject, and by using surrogates to plant questions that may lead to interesting and informative answers.”

  “I thank you,” Yeager said. “More than that I cannot ask. Very likely, you understand, all of this will prove to be of no consequence.”

  “Of course,” Straha replied. “But then, most of my life since defecting to the United States has proved to be of no consequence, so this is not of any great concern to me.” He could not think of another Tosevite—for that matter, he could not think of a male of the Race—to whom he would have exposed his bitterness thus. He longed for a taste of ginger.

  Yeager said, “Shiplord, that is not true. Your presence here has meant a great deal to my not-empire and to all Tosevites. Thanks in no small part to you and to what we learned from you, we were able to make and for the most part to keep our armistice with the Race.” He held up a hand. “I know this may only make you think of yourself as a tremendous traitor, but that is not so. You have helped save everyone on Tosev 3: males of the conquest fleet, males and females of the colonization fleet, and Big Uglies.” He used the Race’s nickname for his kind without self-consciousness.

  “I wish I could believe everything you tell me,” Straha said slowly. “I also try to tell it to myself, but I do not believe it from my own mouth, either.”

  “Well, you should,” Yeager said, like one male encouraging another to go forward in combat. “You should, for it is truth.”

  Straha had never imagined he could be so preposterously grateful to a Big Ugly. He wondered if Yeager understood his own kind as well as he understood the Race. “You are a friend,” he said, and sounded surprised after the words came out: the idea of a Tosevite friend seemed very strange to him. But that he had one was also truth. “You are a friend,” he repeated, “and I will help you as one friend helps another.”