“You will pay special attention to the American space station,” said Major Thomas Ehrhardt, the briefing officer: a fussily precise little man with a bright red Hitler-style mustache. “You are authorized to change your orbit for a close inspection, if you deem that appropriate.”
“Really?” Drucker raised an eyebrow. “I would love to do it—I will do it—but I have never had this sort of authorization before. Why have things changed?”
He wondered if Ehrhardt would invoke the great god Security and tell him that was none of his business. But the briefing officer answered candidly: “I will tell you why, Lieutenant Colonel. There has been unusual emission of radioactivity from the station over the past few weeks. We are still trying to learn the reasons behind this emission. As yet, we have not succeeded. Perhaps yours will be the mission that finds out what we need to know.”
“I hope so,” Drucker said. “I’ll do everything I can.” He got to his feet and shot out his right forearm. “Heil Himmler!”
“Heil!” Ehrhardt returned the salute.
The A-45 on which Drucker rode into space carried strap-on motors attached to either side of the main rocket’s first stage. They boosted him into a higher orbit than the A-45 could have achieved by itself. Any deviation from the norm was bound to make the Lizards and the Americans suspicious (the Bolsheviks, he assumed, were always suspicious). But the Rocket Force Command must have warned the other spacefarers that he would be taking an unusual path, because the questions he got were curious, not hostile.
He enjoyed the new perspective he got on the world from a couple of hundred kilometers higher than usual. He’d seen nearly everything there was to see from the orbit Käthe normally took. The wider view was interesting. It made him feel almost godlike.
And he enjoyed the better view of the U.S. space station he got from this higher orbit. Even before he tried to approach it, his Zeiss binoculars gave him a closer look than he’d ever had. The only drawback to the situation was that, because he moved more slowly than he would have in a closer orbit, he didn’t come up to the station as often as he would have otherwise.
“Having fun, snoop?” the space station’s radioman asked as he did approach from behind.
“Of course,” Drucker answered easily. “I would even more fun have if you had pretty girls at every window undressing.”
“Don’t I wish!” the American said. “It’s supposed to be something special when you’re weightless, too, you know what I mean?”
“I have heard this, yes,” Drucker said. “I do not about it know in person.”
“Neither do I,” the radio operator said. “This is something that needs research, dammit!”
Drucker tried to imagine such goings-on at the Reich’s space station. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Had Göring become Führer after Hitler died . . . then, maybe. No—then, certainly. Göring would have had himself flown up there to make the first experiment. But the Fat Boy had disgraced himself instead, and gray, cold Himmler frowned on fooling around for its own sake—all he thought it was good for was making more Germans. With a small mental sigh, Drucker swung back from sex to espionage: “With so much room, you Americans should try to find out.”
“Not enough gals up here,” the radioman said in disgusted tones.
That was interesting. Drucker hadn’t known the American space station held any women at all. He wasn’t sure anyone in the Greater German Reich knew the Americans were sending women into space. The Russians had done it a couple of times, but Drucker didn’t much care what the Russians did. Their pilots were just along to push buttons; ground control did all the real work. Unless war suddenly broke out, a well-trained dog could handle a Russian spacecraft.
“Maybe your women don’t like the radiation,” Drucker said. American radiomen liked to run their mouths; maybe he could get this one to talk out of turn.
He couldn’t. The fellow not only didn’t say anything about radiation, he clammed up altogether. After a while, Drucker passed out of radio range. He muttered in frustration. He’d learned something that might be important, but it wasn’t what he’d come upstairs to learn.
He made some calculations, then radioed down to the ground to make sure he—and Käthe’s computer—hadn’t dropped a deci-mal point anywhere. Once satisfied he had everything straight, he waited till the calculated time, then fired up the motor on the upper stage of the A-45 for a burn that would change his orbit to one passing close to the American space station.
When he came into radar range of the station, the radio operator jeered at him: “Not just a snoop, a goddamn Peeping Tom.”
“I want to know what you are doing,” Drucker answered stolidly. “For my country’s sake, it is my business to learn what you are doing.”
“It’s not your business,” the American said. “It never was, and it never will be.” He hesitated, then went on, “Looks like you’re going to pass about half a mile astern of our boom.”
“Yes,” Drucker said. “I will not to you lie. I want to see what you are at the end of it there making.”
“I noticed.” The radioman’s voice was dry. He hesitated again. “Listen, pal, if you’re smart, you’ll change your trajectory a bit, on account of if you don’t it won’t be healthy for you. You know what I’m saying? You don’t want to pass right astern of that boom, not unless you don’t have any family you care about.”
“Radiation?” Drucker asked. The radioman didn’t answer, as he hadn’t answered his last question about radiation. Drucker thought it over. Was he being bluffed? If it weren’t for radiation, he wouldn’t have been up here this far. “Thank you,” he said, and used his attitude jets to change course.
What the devil were the Americans doing? He couldn’t see as well as he would have liked, not even through the viewfinder of his camera with the long lens attached. One thing he did see: the boom looked very stiff and strong. He didn’t know what that meant, but he noted it—in space, nobody built any stronger, any heavier, than he had to.
The Geiger counter Drucker had along started chattering. He listened to it with pursed lips. Here he was off-axis to the unit at the end of the boom, and he was still picking up this much radiation? How much would he have taken had he gone right behind it, as he’d planned? More. A lot more. He owed the U.S. radio operator a good turn. So did Käthe. He had the bad feeling Peenemünde’s memorial would have got a new name on it had the American kept quiet.
He wasn’t sorry when his orbit took him away from the space station, but he did some furious calculating for a burn that would bring him back to its neighborhood as fast as possible. Spaceflight was like the rest of the Werhmacht in some ways. Hurry up and wait was one of them. He had to wait till the proper time to make the burn, and then again till his changed trajectory brought him toward the space station.
And, as he began the approach, he stared first at his radar and then out the window of the A-45’s upper stage—for the space station, far and away the biggest and heaviest human-made object in Earth orbit, was nowhere near where it was supposed to be.
To her surprise, Kassquit discovered she missed Regeya. No one came right out and told her, but she gathered he really was a Big Ugly. Because he was one, he had no place on the Race’s computer network. But the chatter about the American space station was less interesting without him. He’d known a lot, and he’d had a knack for asking interesting questions. After he was purged from the network, discussion faltered.
Not long after Regeya vanished, Kassquit got an electronic message relayed through the Race’s consulate in some city or another in the Tosevite not-empire known as the United States. I greet you, it read. I do not know that I much like you, but I greet you anyhow. Unless I am wrong, you are the one who figured out I was nothing but a miserable Big Ugly looking where he should not. Congratulations, I suppose. Even as a Big Ugly, I do have access to some of your network, which is how I am sending you this. Best regards, Sam Yeager.
She read the message through s
everal times. Then, slowly, she made the affirmative hand gesture. Sam Yeager the Tosevite sounded exactly like Regeya, the purported male of the Race.
He still took her for a female of the Race. That gave her a certain amount—a large amount—of pleasure, pleasure of the same sort she’d known when she made the hateful researcher Tessrek back down. In those moments, life looked like a game, a game in which she’d just won a turn.
“How do I answer?” she murmured to herself. It wasn’t an easy question. She’d never exchanged words with a wild Tosevite before, not knowingly. If she kept doing it, would he realize she was a Tosevite, too? He was a clever male; she’d seen that. Could she stand being discovered? What would he think of her?
I greet you, she wrote in reply. Her back straightened. She stuck out her chin. No matter what the Tosevite thought of her, she was proud of herself. No, she wouldn’t let him know she was anything but a female of the Race. He wouldn’t find out anything different. She’d make sure he didn’t, by the Emperor. Your spying was doomed to fail, she went on. You cannot pretend to be what you are not. Her mouth fell open in amusement—here she was, pretending to be what she was not. Now that you openly admit to being what you are, perhaps we shall become friends, as much as two so different can.
She studied that, then decided to transmit it. She did not think the wild Big Ugly would take it for undue familiarity. He might not belong to the Race, but he did show considerable understanding of it. He had, in fact, fooled males and females who truly came from eggs.
I hope we shall become friends, you and I, Yeager responded. Tosevites and the Race are going to be sharing this planet for a long time. I have said it before—we need to get along with each other. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture again. Then the Tosevite wrote, I have a question for you: why, when you thought I was Regeya, did you say you would not talk with me on the telephone?
Kassquit studied those words with dismay. No, this Tosevite was anything but a fool. He noticed discrepancies and put them together. And he knew she was a female, even if not of which species. She couldn’t say, for instance, that she was a veteran with a horrible scar she didn’t like to display on the screen.
Yeager sent another message while waiting for her reply. You would have found out for sure I was a Tosevite if we had talked on the telephone, he wrote. I speak the language of the Race pretty well, but there are some sounds I cannot make quite right no matter how hard I try, because my mouth is the wrong shape.
“I know,” Kassquit whispered. “Oh, I know.” The language of the Race was the only one she knew, but she spoke it mushily, too. She couldn’t help it. Like this Yeager’s, her mouth was the wrong shape.
Again, she asked herself how she was supposed to answer that. Telephones are too spontaneous, she wrote at last. I might have given away something I should not have. And that was true—she’d have given away that she was a Big Ugly by birth. But Yeager would think (she hoped he’d think) she was talking about security.
All right, then, he replied. I hope whatever it is you cannot talk about goes well for you. He was friendlier than most males of the Race. Of course, they looked down their snouts at her because she was a Tosevite. This Sam Yeager—she wondered why he had two names—wouldn’t do that, anyhow.
She was pondering her reply when a flashing red star appeared in the lower right-hand corner of her computer screen. That meant an urgent news flash. She gave up on her message—the Tosevite could wait. She wanted to find out what was going on.
The image that appeared on her screen when she switched to the news feed made her exclaim in surprise. She’d seen video of the American Big Uglies’ space station before, and had spent a lot of time discussing it on the network. Now here it was—and it was moving. She saw a faint glowing stream of expelled reaction mass emerging from the lump at the end of the new boom.
A commentator from the Race was saying, “—is the first known use by the Big Uglies of a motor powered by atomic energy. It appears to be a fission motor, not the far more efficient and energetic fusion reactors we have used for so long. Acceleration is feeble, hardly more than one part of gravity per hundred. Nevertheless, as you see, it moves.”
Kassquit watched the American ship—space station no longer. But for the exhaust, she could not have proved it moved. The motion she saw might as easily have come from the camera.
“We have sent urgent queries to President Warren, leader of the not-empire known as the United States,” the commentator said. “Fine details of his reply are still being translated, but he asserts that the ship was built for no warlike purpose, but solely for the exploration of this solar system.”
“How can we trust that?” Kassquit said, as if someone were standing beside her insisting that she trust it. “They built the ugly thing without telling us what they were up to.”
“Their ship is too slow and ungainly to make a likely weapons platform.” The commentator might have been answering her. “It is also moving away from Tosev 3. But investigation will continue until its nature may be precisely ascertained.”
“Its nature should have been ascertained a long time ago,” Kassquit said. “Security has done a slipshod job.”
Again, she was arguing with the commentator. This time, he did not even seem to pay attention to her. He said, “Fleetlord Atvar of the conquest fleet and Fleetlord Reffet of the colonization fleet have issued a joint statement affirming that there is no cause for alarm in this new development, and expressing relief that this ship does appear to be no more than an oversized exploration vessel, as the ruler of the not-empire known as the United States has declared.”
“And if we start blindly accepting a Big Ugly’s word, where will we be?” Kassquit answered her own question: “In trouble, nowhere else.”
But the commentator sounded convinced everything was fine. “The subject of the American space station has been on the minds of males and females in recent times, as the computer discussion areas show,” he said. “Now we see that much of the anxious speculation was misinformed, as anxious speculation commonly is.”
“How do you know we see anything of the sort?” Kassquit demanded, as if the male could hear her.
The U.S. spacecraft disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a graphic showing its projected course. “As you can observe, the craft is headed for none of the major planets of this solar system. It is not heading toward Home or any other world of the Empire. And, with its feeble acceleration, it must lack the fuel capacity to be a starship. Its most likely destination appears to be one of the many useless and insignificant rocks orbiting between Tosev 4, a small world, and Tosev 5, a gas giant larger than any in Home’s system. The American Big Uglies have previously sent chemically powered exploration rockets out among these minor planets, as the Tosevites term them. Now it appears they are visiting them on a larger scale. As far as the Race is concerned, they are welcome to them.”
There, for once, Kassquit agreed with the noisy male. Here as in so many other ways, the star Tosev’s solar system was different from those of other stars in the Empire: it held far more such debris. No one was sure why; speculation centered on Tosev’s greater mass.
How typical of Big Uglies, she thought, to spend so much time and so many resources going off to examine what is not worth examining in the first place. Feeling obstreperous (and hoping that feeling was not a product of her own Tosevite heritage), she decided to send Sam Yeager a message. So this, then, is what so concerned you, she wrote. A large, clumsy spaceship that was not worth being kept secret.
I agree, he wrote back a little later. It was not worth being kept secret. In that case, why was it?
Who can tell, with Tosevites? Kassquit answered.
This time, Yeager did not reply. She wondered if she’d insulted him. She didn’t want to do that by accident. When she offended, she aimed to get full value from it.
Then she began to wonder if he’d been trying to tell her something else, something she would miss if she were
n’t paying attention. If the American space station or spaceship or whatever it turned out to be had been kept so secret without there being any need for that, all that implied was that Big Uglies were fools, a notion Kassquit was prepared to take on faith.
But not all Big Uglies were fools all the time. She didn’t like believing that so well, but the conclusion was inescapable. Tosev 3, or some parts of Tosev 3, had come too far too fast for her to doubt it. Suppose the American Tosevites had had good reason to keep their project secret. What then?
Then, by logic inescapable as that of geometry, their spacecraft wasn’t so harmless as it now seemed. They had to have something in mind beyond what the Race was seeing.
“But what?” Kassquit wondered aloud. “Their atomic motor?”
Maybe. The idea appealed to her. Having fought the Race with explosive-metal bombs, the American Tosevites had to know the Race would be less than delighted at their using nuclear energy in space. Before the space station turned into a ship, the United States could have shouted its peaceful intentions as often as it liked, but it would have had a hard time convincing the Race it was telling the truth.
Was the United States telling the truth now? Had the Big Ugly named Sam Yeager, the Big Ugly who was and was not Regeya, hinted otherwise? Or was Kassquit reading too much into what he had written? And even if she read him aright, was he really in any position to know?
Those were good questions. Kassquit wished she knew the answers to all of them. As things were, she didn’t know the answer to any of them. She sighed. As she came into adulthood, she was discovering that such frustrations were part of life.
20
Fotsev’s head came up sharply. His eye turrets swung now this way, now that, as he prowled through the streets of Basra. “Something is wrong here,” he said in a voice that came out flat because he forced all the nervousness from it. “Something does not taste the way it should.”
Second Contact Page 69
