Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  “From where you sit, maybe,” David said. From where he sat himself, the United Kingdom tilted more toward the Greater German Reich with every passing day. With most of the British Empire in the Lizards’ scaly hands, with the USA still rebuilding after the fighting, and with the Reich just across the Channel, he supposed that tilt was inevitable. That didn’t mean he thought it was anything but disastrous.

  “I also hear your superiors have taken unfair advantage of you. Officers are nasty that way—think they’re little tin gods, what?” Jones chuckled. “I always thought that. Back when I was wearing RAF blue, though, there was damn all I could do about it. Things are different now. If I ring the minister of defense, I expect he’ll listen to me. He’d damn well better; his son is married to my first cousin.”

  “My God.” Goldfarb’s voice was hoarse. “You really mean it.”

  “Well, of course I do,” Jones answered. “What’s the point of having influence if you don’t get to use it? I’d have rung you up sooner, but I only heard of your difficulties a few days ago.”

  “That’s all right,” David said vaguely. Back when they’d served in the RAF together, he’d thought about Jerome Jones’ secure upper-class upbringing and his own roots in East End London. Then he’d thought the most he could aspire to was a little wireless-repair shop. After the fighting ended, staying in the RAF looked like a road to a better life. It had been, for a little while.

  “I’ll ring you back directly I know something,” Jones told him. “Be good in the meanwhile.” He hung up. The line went dead.

  Goldfarb stared at the telephone handset before slowly returning it to the cradle. The young aircraftman was long gone. Goldfarb went back to the radar screens by himself, his head whirling.

  A few days later, he was watching the glowing green screens again. They showed a Soviet spacecraft passing north of the U.K. The Americans and Germans—and likely the Race, too—laughed at the craft the Russians flew; the Americans called them flying tin cans. Because of the limits to their craft, Soviet spacemen couldn’t do nearly so much up there as their counterparts from the USA and the Reich. But they were flying. Britain had no spacemen. Watching everyone else go by above his head, Goldfarb acutely felt the lack.

  He was about to remark on it to Sergeant McDowell when a fresh-faced enlisted man stuck his head into the room and said, “The base commandant’s compliments, Flight Lieutenant, and he’ll see you in his office fast as you can get there.”

  Taking the privilege of long acquaintance, McDowell asked, “What have you gone and done now, sir?”

  “I don’t know,” David answered, “but I expect I’ll find out before long. Don’t let that Russian land in Belfast—people would talk.” Before the Scotsman could find a comeback, Goldfarb headed for Group Captain Burton Paston’s office.

  Paston was doing paperwork when he walked in. The commandant’s face, normally dyspeptic, now grew less happy still. “Oh, it’s you, Goldfarb,” he said, as if he’d been expecting someone else—perhaps the Spanish Inquisition—instead.

  “Reporting as ordered, sir,” Goldfarb said, coming to attention and saluting as he waited to discover what sort of new trouble he was in.

  “Yes.” Distaste filled Paston’s voice, too. “Some little while ago, you attempted to resign from the Royal Air Force.”

  “Yes, sir, I did, but I’ve performed my duties since to the best of my ability,” Goldfarb said. If Group Captain Paston thought he’d be able to hang a bad-conduct discharge on him, he had another think coming.

  But Paston waved that away. “You seem to have friends as well as enemies in high places,” he remarked. “Why so many people would get themselves exercised over a flight lieutenant up from the ranks is beyond me, but that’s neither here nor there. The point of the matter is, I have been instructed in no uncertain terms to reconsider your resignation. Having done so, I’ve elected to accept it after all.”

  “Have you, sir?” David breathed. No matter what Jerome Jones said, he hadn’t dreamt his old pal really did have so much clout, nor that he could work so fast. He also noted that Paston had tacitly admitted he’d been under pressure to reject the resignation before. Gloating would have felt good, but wouldn’t have helped; Goldfarb could see as much. All he said was, “Thank you very much.”

  “I’m not nearly certain you’re welcome,” the base commandant answered. “You’re the most experienced radar operator we’ve got, and I’m damned if I know where we’ll come up with another one even half as good.”

  If he’d put something like that on a fitness report, Goldfarb might have risen higher than flight lieutenant. On the other hand, he couldn’t do anything about being a Jew, so he might not have, too. He said, “I do appreciate this, from the bottom of my heart.” Now that he’d got what he wanted, he could afford to be gracious. He couldn’t very well afford to be anything else.

  Burton Paston shoved forms across the desk at him. “I’m going to need your signature on all of these.”

  “Yes, sir.” David signed and signed and signed.

  When he was done, the base commandant handed him a copy of one of the forms. “If you take this to the Canadian consulate, it will serve to notify them that you have in fact separated yourself from the RAF, and that no impediment stands in the way of your emigration.”

  “That’s splendid. Thanks.” Goldfarb reflected on what influence could do. Before, Paston would sooner have thrown him in the guardhouse than let him leave Her Majesty’s service. Now, he was practically laying down a red carpet to help speed Goldfarb out the door. So much cooperation got Goldfarb worried. “Suppose, sir, that the blokes who don’t like me so much have got to the Canadians. If they turn me down, will I be able to rescind this resignation? I don’t fancy being down and out with no hope for any job in sight.”

  “If they and the Yanks turn you down, yes,” Paston answered. “Your friend already considered that possibility. You’re lucky to have so many people looking out for your interests.”

  “I suppose I am, sir,” David said. He didn’t point out to Paston that, since he was a Jew, he automatically had a lot more people doing their best to give him a knee in the ballocks. The group captain wouldn’t understand that, and wouldn’t believe it, either. Goldfarb shrugged. He knew what he knew. And one of the things he knew was that he was getting out. At last, he was getting out.

  One thing Johannes Drucker appreciated about his long service to the Reich: he had no trouble getting his hands on a firearm. Rifles and especially pistols were hard to come by for civilians in the Reich. Every officer, though, had his own service weapon. Drucker would have preferred a pistol not so easily traced back to him, but, with any luck, no one would associate Gunther Grillparzer’s untimely demise with him anyhow.

  He tried to read a copy of Signal as the train rolled southwest toward Thuringia. By what the magazine said, everyone in Europe was delighted to live under the benevolent rule of the Reich and to labor to make Germany greater still. Drucker hoped that was true, which didn’t necessarily mean he believed it.

  As usual, the compartment was tightly shut up against the outside air. The atmosphere was full of smoke from cigarettes and a couple of cigars. In the forward compartment of this car, there’d been a screaming row earlier in the trip. Someone—a foreigner, without a doubt—had had the nerve to open up a window. Everyone else had pitched a fit till a conductor, quite properly, shut it again and warned the miscreant he’d be put off the train if he opened it again.

  The interior remained unsullied by fresh air until a conductor came through the car calling, “Weimar! All out for Weimar!” as the train slowed to a stop at the station. Drucker grabbed his carpetbag—all the luggage he had with him—and descended from the car.

  Weimar’s station had a shabby, run-down look to it. As Drucker carried the bag out to the street to flag a taxi, he saw that the whole town looked as if it had seen better days. The Reich and the National Socialists did not love the place where the preced
ing unhappy German republic had been born.

  Drucker discovered he didn’t need a cab after all. He could see the Hotel Elephant from where he was standing. He hurried toward and into it. A clerk nodded to him from behind the desk. “Yes, sir. May I help you?”

  “I am Johann Schmidt,” Drucker said, using the voice an officer used toward an enlisted man to hide his nervousness. “I have a room reserved.”

  That tone worked wonders, as it so often did in the Reich. The desk clerk flipped pages in the register. “Yes, sir,” he said, nodding. He handed Drucker a key. “You’ll be in 331, sir. I hope you enjoy your stay with us. We’ve been here on the Marktplatz for more than two hundred years, you know. Bach and Liszt and Wagner have stayed here.”

  Not wanting to drop his air of lordly superiority, Drucker said, “I hope the plumbing is better now than it was in those days.”

  “Oh, yes, sir, Herr Schmidt,” the clerk said. “You will find everything to your satisfaction.”

  “We’ll see.” Having established a personality, Drucker played it to the hilt. “Oh. One thing more. Where is the central post office?”

  “On Dimitroffstrasse, sir, just west of the square here,” the desk clerk answered. “You can’t miss it.”

  That seemed worth another sneer. Having delivered it, Drucker climbed the hotel’s sweeping staircase to the third floor. Once he got there, he discovered the bath was at the end of the hall. He felt like going down and complaining. It would have been in character. With a shrug, though, he let himself into the room. Except for the lack of private bath, it seemed comfortable enough.

  He changed into fresh shirt and trousers and as nondescript a jacket as he owned. The jacket’s one virtue was that it had big, roomy pockets. He put the pistol in one and a paperbound book in another, then went downstairs and headed across the square to Dimitroffstrasse.

  For a wonder, the clerk had got it right: he couldn’t have missed the post office, for it lay only a couple of buildings away from the Gothic church that dominated Weimar’s skyline. The post-office building, on the other hand, was severely utilitarian. Drucker sat down inside on a bench that gave him a good look at the bank of postal boxes, pulled out the book, and began to read.

  A Postal Protection NCO in field-gray uniform with orange piping strolled by and eyed him. The Postschutz was a branch of the SS, and had been since a couple of months before the Lizard invasion. Drucker kept on reading with a fine outward appearance of calm. The NCO paused between one step and another, then shrugged and walked on, his booted feet clicking on the marble floor. Drucker wasn’t a bum or a drunk. He didn’t look as if he intended causing trouble. If he felt like reading in a post office . . . well, there was no regulation against it.

  Drucker kept a surreptitious eye on Box 127. He’d mailed Gunther Grillparzer—or rather, Grillparzer’s alias, Maxim Kipphardt—his first payment two days earlier; it should be reaching Grillparzer today. By the way Grillparzer had sounded, he wouldn’t let it sit around in the postal box for long. No, he’d spend it, either to keep a roof over his head or, perhaps more likely, on schnapps.

  Maybe I should have worn a disguise, Drucker thought. But the idea of putting on false whiskers had struck him as absurd. And all the false whiskers he’d ever seen looked false. In the end, he’d decided that being what he was—an ordinary-looking middle-aged German in ordinary clothes—made as good a disguise as any. The ex-panzer gunner wouldn’t have seen him for more than twenty years, after all.

  The Postal Protection NCO tramped past him again. Drucker not only pretended to be absorbed in his book—a study of what people knew, or thought they knew, about Home—but actually got interested in it. That was an acting triumph of which he hadn’t thought himself capable. The Postschutz man didn’t even bother pausing this time. He’d accepted Drucker as part of the landscape.

  A fat man came up and opened a postal box. It wasn’t 127. When the fat man pulled out an envelope, he muttered something sulfurous under his breath. Drucker couldn’t see the envelope. Was it a past-due bill? A letter from an ex-wife? A writer’s rejection slip? He’d never know. Still muttering, the fat man went away. Drucker returned to his book.

  When someone did come to Box 127, Drucker almost didn’t notice: it wasn’t Gunther Grillparzer but a blond woman—quite a good-looking one-in her mid- to late twenties. She took out an envelope—the envelope, the one Drucker had sent—and left the post office.

  “Scheisse,” Drucker muttered under his breath as he got to his feet, stuck the book in his pocket, and went out after the woman. Things weren’t going as he’d planned. No plan survives contact with the enemy, he thought, all the while wishing Grillparzer hadn’t found a way to complicate his life.

  He hadn’t been trained in shadowing people. Had the woman looked back over her shoulder, she would have spied him in the blink of an eye. But she didn’t. She stood at a street corner, waiting for the trolley. Drucker decided to wait for the trolley, too. What am I supposed to do now? he wondered. He had no qualms about killing Gunther Grillparzer, none whatever. But a pretty stranger who might not even know what she was carrying in her handbag? That was a different business.

  Here came the streetcar, clanging its bell. She got on. So did Drucker. He didn’t know the right fare, and had to fumble in a pocket—not the one that held the pistol—for change. The trolley driver gave him a severe look. Feeling absurdly sheepish, he went back and sat down beside the young woman. She nodded politely and then ignored him. He marveled that she couldn’t hear his heart pounding in his chest.

  The streetcar rattled along for several blocks, heading into as seedy apart of town as Weimar had. When it stopped, the woman murmured, “Excuse me,” and walked past Drucker and out. He didn’t get out with her. That would have been giving himself away. Instead, he stared out the window, hoping to see where she headed.

  He got lucky. A lorry on the cross street blocked the intersection for fifteen seconds or so. No matter how angrily the motorman clanged, the truck didn’t—likely couldn’t—move. That let Drucker see the woman go into a block of flats whose brick front was streaked with coal soot.

  He got out at the next stop and hurried back to the apartment building. In the lobby, as he’d expected, he found a brass bank of mailboxes. None said Gunther Grillparzer. None said Maxim Kipphardt, either. Before he started knocking on doors at random—a desperation ploy if ever there was one—Drucker noticed that the one for 4E did say Martin Krafft. In detective novels, people often used aliases whose initials matched their real names. Martin Krafft wasn’t Grillparzer’s real name, but he’d said he’d been using a false one for a while. Without any better ideas—without any better hopes—Drucker started up the stairs.

  Panting a little, wishing the place had a lift, he stood in the fourth-floor hallway, which smelled of cabbage and spilled beer. There was 4E, opposite the stairway. Drucker slipped his right hand into the pocket with the pistol. He thought fast as he advanced on the doorway and used his left hand to knock.

  “Who is it?” The woman’s voice. His knees sagged with relief: one right guess.

  Drucker grimaced. Now he had to take another chance. “Telegram for Herr Krafft,” he said. If Grillparzer wasn’t there, life would get more difficult still. But, a moment later, the door opened and there stood the ex-panzer gunner, middle-aged and podgy fat and looking more than a little bottle-weary. He needed a couple of seconds to recognize Drucker, and that was a couple of seconds too long: by then, the pistol was aimed at his face. “Let me in, Gunther,” Drucker said. “Don’t do anything stupid, or you’ll never do anything at all ever again. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “You won’t get away with this,” Grillparzer said as he backed away. Drucker came in and kicked the door shut behind him. His former comrade went on, “I thought you’d be a smart boy and pay me off. When I denounce you—”

  Drucker laughed in his face. He tapped one of the buttons on his coat. “You fool—the SS is listening to
you run your mouth now, thanks to my transmitter here.” Grillparzer looked horrified. Drucker was horrified—at the bluff he was running. But, as Hitler had said, the bigger the lie, the better. “I am the SS, and you, my friend, have cooked your own goose—and your girlfriend’s, too.”

  If the woman standing in back of Grillparzer had been his wife or his kid sister, Drucker wouldn’t have looked infallible, and he might have had to start shooting. But the ex-gunner only grimaced. “Christ, what a pack of lies you must have told to get yourself into the SS, you murdering bastard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and you can’t prove I do—it’s your word against mine,” Drucker answered. “I do know, and I have evidence”—he tapped the button again—“that you’ve tried to blackmail me. Cough up the cash. You can’t use it, anyhow. The banks have the serial numbers of all the notes on their watch list. As soon as you spent one, it’d just be another nail in your coffin.”

  He sounded convincing as hell. He would have believed himself. And Grillparzer believed him—or believed the pistol. Turning his head, he said, “Hand it over, Friedli. The son of a bitch has got us, dammit.”

  The woman had only to reach onto the cheap pine table behind her to retrieve the envelope. Drucker took it by one corner with his left hand. “Both your fingerprints are on this now, of course,” he said cheerfully. The envelope had been opened, but still weighed about what it had when he’d posted it. Grillparzer and—Friedli?—hadn’t had the chance to do much plundering. “Remember, if you even think of giving me grief again, you’ll be sorrier than you can imagine.”

  “Christ, why didn’t you just tell me over the phone you were a blackshirt along with being a spaceman?” Grillparzer asked. By the look in Friedli’s eyes, he was going to be sorrier than he could imagine even if Drucker had nothing to do with it.

  Cheerful still, Drucker answered, “You’ll remember the lesson longer this way. Auf wiedersehen.” And out the door he went.