Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  “Well, yes, so I would,” she admitted. “Ambassador Veffani holds a grudge against me.” She preferred not to dwell on whether her disgrace had given the ambassador good reason to hold a grudge against her, but continued, “Still, I would sooner the Race were strong enough to make it safe for me to stay here than to have to go.”

  “We are strong. We are stronger than we were when the conquest fleet arrived,” Kazzop said. As he was a male from that fleet, he knew whereof he spoke. He went on, “The trouble lies not in ourselves or in our strength, but in the Big Uglies. They are far stronger now than they were when we first came here, too, and infinitely stronger than we imagined they could be when we left Home.”

  “It is humiliating that the males of the conquest fleet cannot guarantee our safety here,” Felless said. “Humiliating and disgraceful.”

  “Superior female, we are not being evacuated from Marseille because we are in any particular danger from the Deutsche,” Kazzop said. “The Big Uglies will not harm us even in the event of war. They know we could retaliate against their males and females serving as diplomats or otherwise living in parts of Tosev 3 ruled by the Race. The Tosevites have developed elaborate and surprisingly sophisticated rules for exchanging individuals under these circumstances. Because of their own frequent conflicts, they have needed such rules.”

  “What then?” Felless said. “Perhaps you are correct. Perhaps I truly do not understand why we are being evacuated.”

  “I will make the eggshell clear, so you may see the hatching truth within.” Kazzop sounded as if he was taking an almost Tosevite glee in explaining things to a superior as if she were a hatchling. “We are being evacuated because Marseille will make an important target for the Race if war breaks out. Explosive-metal bombs, unfortunately, are not very selective.”

  “Oh,” Felless said in a small voice. “Please understand that I am new to the idea of war and to everything involved with it. I expected the conquest would have been completed before I woke from cold sleep.”

  “Life on Tosev 3 is full of surprises,” the science officer said dryly.

  “That is also a truth—and how I wish it weren’t,” Felless said. “Of course, Veffani also gets to leave the Reich. Since he has been stuck here much longer than I have, I am sure he will welcome the opportunity to escape.”

  But Kazzop made the negative gesture. “Veffani will not leave, any more than the Deutsche will call their ambassador back from Cairo. By Tosevite custom, ambassadors do not leave other lands until war breaks out.”

  Of all the things Felless had never imagined, a reason to feel sympathy toward Veffani certainly ranked high on the list. “Poor fellow,” she said, and then, “But the only announcement of the war is liable to be the launch of missiles tipped with explosive-metal bombs. How can he be sure of safe evacuation?”

  “He cannot,” Kazzop answered, which surprised Felless all over again.

  She said, “You males of the conquest fleet cannot always have had an easy time of it.” She could hear the surprise in her own voice. She spent most of the time resenting the males of the conquest fleet because they hadn’t given the colonization fleet so completely subdued a world as the newcomers had anticipated. Only rarely, as now, did she stop to think about the difficulties the males had faced and continued to face.

  “Superior female, that is a great truth,” Kazzop said. “It is also a truth few females or males of the colonization fleet ever realize. I am glad you have realized it, and I hope you will cling to the memory here.”

  “I shall not forget,” Felless said. And then, as she sometimes did, she thought about the clutch of eggs she’d laid at Nuremberg. “I presume arrangements have been made to bring hatchlings out of the Reich.”

  “I believe so, yes,” Kazzop said. “Some of us have to be responsible for them, or the species would perish, after all.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Felless agreed. “I have never felt the urge to any great degree myself. Slomikk, the science officer at the embassy, did a far better job with the hatchlings than I could have. As far as I am concerned, he is welcome to it. Adults, now, adults are interesting. Hatchlings?” After the interrogative cough, she used the negative hand gesture.

  “Slomikk is a very capable male in many ways. I have known him for a long time,” Kazzop said. “I can see how he would be good with hatchlings. My own attitude, I confess, is more like yours. You do of course realize that the Tosevites are far more centered on their offspring than we are on ours.”

  “I have gathered that, yes.” This time, Felless used the affirmative gesture. “I gather also that the reasons behind it are primarily biological. When the Big Uglies hatch, or rather, when they emerge from the bodies of the females who bear them”—Felless spoke with fastidious disgust—“they are much less developed, much less able to care for themselves, than are our hatchlings. If adult Big Uglies were not genetically programmed to care for them, they would perish in short order.”

  “Just so,” Kazzop said. “These strong personal bonds permeate Tosevite society to a degree we can understand only intellectually, not emotionally. They are no small part of what makes the Big Uglies so vengeance-prone and so generally difficult to administer.”

  “I have also heard this from Senior Researcher Ttomalss,” Felless said.

  “Ah. Yes, I can see how you would have,” Kazzop replied. “Ttomalss is very sound, very sound indeed, when it comes to Tosevite psychology. Why, he might almost be a Big Ugly himself, he understands Tosevites so well.”

  Having had her share of problems with Ttomalss, Felless did not care to hear him praised in such extravagant terms. “I have heard this about the Big Uglies,” she repeated, “but I am not altogether convinced it is truth. It seems a very foolish principle on which to organize a society.”

  “But the Big Uglies use it constantly,” Kazzop said. “Take the Reich, for example. You must know that its ruling ideology holds the Deutsche to be superior to other Tosevites by reason of their genetics.”

  “From every available bit of evidence, this is an ideology unsupported by truth,” Felless pointed out.

  “Oh, of course,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “But the existence and popularity of an ideology are truths of their own, independent of the truth—if any—at the yolk of the ideology. And this one asserts that the Deutsche are part of a large family grouping descended from a common ancestor—derived, you see, from Tosevite family patterns.”

  “Well, perhaps,” Felless admitted. “This is certainly not an organizing principle we would use for ourselves.”

  “No, among us it would be madness,” Kazzop said. “Our matings are nonexclusive, after all. We could not tell family lines even if we wanted to, in most instances. But if you ignore the ways the Big Uglies differ from us, you will never come to a satisfactory understanding of them. That is where Ttomalss’ insights have proved so useful, so valuable.”

  “Is it?” Felless said tonelessly.

  Before she could add anything less complimentary to Ttomalss, and before Kazzop could further irritate her by praising him, the consul-general spoke over the intercom, his voice filling the entire building: “We must evacuate! We must evacuate! We can delay no longer. I am told negotiations between the Race and the Reich have broken down. It is no longer safe for us to remain here. We must evacuate.”

  Kazzop sighed. “So many opportunities for research going to waste.”

  “Oh, indeed,” Felless said. “And so many opportunities for getting killed now becoming available.” Kazzop started to answer, but thought better of it. Instead, he went off to see to his packing.

  Felless had already seen to hers. She had little in the way of personal belongings, having pruned her possessions before coming from Nuremberg to Marseille. Body paint took up far less room than the wrappings traveling Tosevites had to bring with them. All the data she’d collected in the Greater German Reich had already gone into the Race’s electronic storage system; they were saf
er than she was. All she really had to worry about was . . .

  She checked. As she’d thought, she had plenty of ginger. She wanted a taste, but restrained herself. She knew she would get in trouble if she started mating with males on the way out of Marseille. I can wait, she thought. I will not have to wait forever. The herb will be there when we get wherever we are going. She’d long since given up the idea of telling herself she would never taste again. It was a lie, as she knew all too well. Telling herself she would wait, though, worked well enough. Sooner or later, she could enjoy the herb she craved.

  “Report to the front entrance immediately!” the intercom bellowed, adding a loud emphatic cough. “Repeat, report to the front entrance immediately! Ground transportation to our aircraft is now waiting.”

  Armed and uniformed Big Uglies stood guard outside the consulate. Felless had seen their like in Nuremberg. They put her in mind of trained tsiongyu waiting to bite anyone who went where he shouldn’t. One after another, the males and females from the consulate boarded buses and motorcars under their cold, watchful stares.

  And a good many males and females of the Race who were not part of the consular staff were also boarding those buses and motorcars. Kazzop said, “If anyone wants to know my opinion, we ought to leave most of those fast-talking cheats and thieves behind. They come to Marseille to buy ginger and to sell drugs to the Big Uglies. Even if an explosive-metal bomb vaporized them all, the Race would be just as well off, and probably better.”

  Felless knew she would have felt the same way if she weren’t a ginger taster herself. She said, “Some of them may have legitimate business here. We cannot be sure which ones are criminals and rogues?’

  “Few who have only legitimate business come to Marseille,” Kazzop replied. But he said no more than that. The fast-talking males and females got aboard, which made all the vehicles taking the Race out of Marseille more crowded than they would have been otherwise. Deutsch soldiers on motorized cycles that made a dreadful racket escorted the procession to the aircraft waiting at the field outside the city.

  Because so many interlopers were fleeing Marseille, the aircraft was as crowded as the ground transportation had been. But it had no trouble taking off. Felless let out a long, happy sigh. “Going back to civilization at last,” she murmured. The male sitting next to her made the affirmative gesture. She laughed. Going off to somewhere I can taste again, too. From looking at that male, she thought he would have agreed with her, but she didn’t try to find out.

  Walter Stone looked pleased with himself as he peered out from the control room of the Lewis and Clark. “We’re spreading out.” he said, as if he’d done all the spreading himself, possibly with a manure cart.

  Most times, Glen Johnson would have laughed at the senior pilot. Now he just nodded. “The more spread out we are, the more working bases we’ve got on every little chunk of rock near Ceres, the better off we’ll be, because every separate base makes it that much harder for the Lizards to wipe us off the map.”

  “We always knew we’d be up against that,” Stone said.

  Johnson nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “But we didn’t figure we’d be up against it so hard so soon. Stupid goddamn Nazis.”

  “Those bastards seem bound and determined to go out in a blaze of glory, don’t they?” Stone said.

  “They’ve sure got a wild hair up their ass about Poland, anyhow, if half of what we hear on the radio is true,” Johnson said. “And I’ll tell you something else: I wouldn’t give you a plug nickel to be aboard the Hermann Göring right now, either.”

  Stone’s chuckle was not a happy sound. “Me, neither. Can you say ‘bull’s-eye’? How many missiles do you suppose the Lizards have aimed at that baby?”

  Remembering his conversation with Mickey Flynn, Johnson answered, “Enough to do the job—and probably about another ten more besides.”

  “That sounds about right,” Stone agreed. “The Race doesn’t like doing things by halves—which is one reason it’s God’s own miracle they didn’t finish the fight back in the Forties.”

  “It was a question of who’d finish who,” Johnson said. “They wanted the colonization fleet to have a planet worth landing on.” His chuckle didn’t show much in the way of good humor, either. “So now they can blow things up with the colonists here. Hot damn.”

  “Hot damn is right,” Stone said. “Real hot.”

  “What worries me is, they might decide to go after us if they’re going after the Hermann Göring,” Johnson said. “In for a penny, in for a pound, you know what I mean? As long as they’ve got a war on their hands . . .”

  “It’d be a lot bigger one if they’re fighting us, too,” Stone said. “Yeah, but if you’re a Lizard, the other question is, how big is too big if you’re already fighting the Nazis?” Johnson said. “The only answer I can think of is, if it’s big enough to blow up the planet, it’s probably too big. Otherwise, who knows?”

  Walter Stone looked at him. “You’re in a nice, cheerful mood today, aren’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t you be, the way things are now?” Glen Johnson returned. “Remember, you spent all the time before we left learning to fly the Lewis and Clark. I spend a lot of my duty time in orbit, watching the Race and the Nazis and the Russians. I know how fast things can go wrong. They almost did a few times.”

  “You tried to help make things go wrong, poking your nose in where it didn’t belong,” Stone said.

  “And look what it got me,” Johnson said. “I’m stuck for life with people like you.” Before Stone could answer, a bell chimed the hour. Johnson sighed. “And I’m stuck on an exercise bicycle for the next hour.”

  “Have fun,” Stone said. “I already did my bit today.”

  “Fun,” Johnson said, as if it were a four-letter word. But he didn’t have time to do any more complaining than that, not if he wanted to get to the gym on time. He didn’t give two whoops in hell about getting to the gym on time, but he didn’t want to listen to the lecture he’d get for missing some of his exercise period, either. And so he swung out of the control room and down the halls to the gymnasium. When he got there, he signed the sheet to log in, changed into sweat clothes in the little men’s room off the gym, and then got onto a bike and got to work.

  One of the main-engine technicians who’d started exercising before him grinned and said, “You sure you’re really here, sir?”

  “I think so, Bob,” Johnson answered, grinning back. “I look like I’m here, don’t I?”

  “You never can tell,” Bob said, and they both laughed. The joke was only funny if you looked at it the right way. Not very long before, the Lewis and Clark had gone through its first really juicy scandal. A good many people, including several of high rank, had got in the habit of signing their names on the sheet and then going off and doing something else instead of getting in their work. Brigadier General Healey had not been happy when word of what they were doing finally got to him. And when the commandant wasn’t happy, nobody else was happy, either.

  “One thing you’ve got to give Healey,” Bob said: “he’s fair. He came down on everybody, and who didn’t matter.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” Johnson’s considered opinion was that the commandant hated everybody impartially, and that the crew of the Lewis and Clark returned the favor. He realized he wasn’t objective, but he didn’t much care. As far as he was concerned, Healey didn’t rate objectivity.

  Johnson’s legs pumped hard as he did his best to keep calcium in his bones. He didn’t want to think about gravity, not any more. The idea of having weight, of moving his muscles against resistance, seemed alien and repugnant. He pedaled on anyhow. When his body was working hard, he could stop thinking about the troubles back on Earth and, indeed, about everything else. Exercise wasn’t as much fun as sex, but it did the job of distraction almost as well.

  Thinking about sex made him think about Lucy Vegetti—and thinking about her was certainly more enjoyable than not thinking about anythin
g at all. Trouble was, he couldn’t do anything but think about Lucy right now. She was down on Ceres, helping to set up a habitat there. He missed her. He hoped she missed him. If she didn’t, she could find plenty of guys to take his place.

  He wondered if she’d taken her bottle of Cutty down to the surface of the asteroid. A jolt of scotch was almost enough to tempt him into some breaking and entering—almost, but not quite.

  And then, before he let himself get more tempted than he should have, the intercom came to noisy life. “Lieutenant Colonel Johnson! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the commandant’s office immediately! Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson! Report to the—”

  “I’m coming,” Johnson muttered. “Keep your shirt on.” The intercom went right on bellowing.

  “Lucky son of a gun,” Bob said.

  “Going to see the commandant?” Johnson shook his head. “I’d sooner keep exercising.”

  He unhooked the belt that tethered him to the bicycle and pushed off toward the nearest handhold. He didn’t bother changing out of his exercise togs. If Healey wanted him immediately, that would be how the commandant got him. And if he was a little sweaty, a little smelly, what better proof he’d been doing his work like a good little boy?

  He sailed right past Brigadier General Healey’s adjutant and into the commandant’s office, catching himself on a handhold there. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting.

  “Yes.” Healey eyed him. “There are times when you find following orders to the letter more amusing than others, aren’t there, Lieutenant Colonel?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Johnson said with the air of a maiden whose virtue had been questioned.

  “Tell me another one,” Healey said. “I shanghaied you, and you’ve been trying to make me sorry ever since. Sometimes you’ve even done it. But not today. This doesn’t bother me, not a bit.”

  Johnson shrugged. “That’s the way it goes, sir.” If he was disappointed—and he was, a little—he’d be damned if he’d admit it. “Did you want me for anything else besides seeing how fast I could get here?”