Second Contact c-1

by Harry Turtledove

  “If I had a drink, I’d drink to that,” Auerbach said. Penny ran out to the kitchen to fix him one. And if that didn’t prove she had a point, he was damned if he knew what did.

  “Comrade General Secretary,” Vyacheslav Molotov’s secretary said, “the Lizards’ ambassador has arrived, along with his interpreter.”

  “I quiver with delight,” Molotov said, his features expressionless as usual. His secretary gave him an odd look. Good, he thought. I am not entirely predictable. “Send him-send them-in, Pyotr Maksimovich.”

  In came Queek. In with him came the Pole who did his translating. After the usual exchange of politely insincere greetings, the Lizard said, “We have struck at you, as we promised we would do. Remember, only our mercy and our uncertainty as to the degree of your guilt made the blow light. If we prove you were responsible for this outrage, we shall strike again, and heavily.”

  “Since we were not responsible, you cannot possibly prove we were,” Molotov replied. He was, for once, telling the truth (unless Beria had lied to him). He delivered it exactly as he delivered lies he knew to be lies. Consistency was the key. He could have shouted and blustered and got the same results, so long as he shouted and blustered the same way every time.

  “Your assertions have not always proved reliable,” Queek said: half a step short of calling Molotov a liar. The translator smiled as he turned the Lizard’s words into Russian. Sure as sure, he had some axe to grind against the Soviet Union.

  “Here is an assertion that is altogether reliable,” Molotov said: “If you presume to violate our territory again, we shall move in our own interest. This may include combat with the Race. It may include rethinking our position on your imperialist aspirations in China. And it may include rethinking our relationship with the Greater German Reich.”

  After the interpreter translated that, Queek spoke one word. Again, the interpreter smiled as he turned it into Russian: “Bluff.”

  “You know better,” Molotov said, addressing the fellow directly. “Remind your principal that the USSR and the Reich enjoyed a nonaggression pact for almost two years before coming to blows. We cooperated to some degree against the Race during the fighting. If we both see ourselves threatened, we can cooperate again.”

  Not smiling any more, the Pole spoke in the Lizards’ language. Queek listened intently, then said, “It is precisely the instability of your species that makes you so dangerous.”

  “We are not unstable,” Molotov said. “We are progressive.”

  “I cannot translate that,” the interpreter told him. “The language of the Race has no such word, no such concept.”

  “I believe it,” Molotov said, and then regretted wasting his time on a cut the interpreter would feel but the Lizard, even were it translated for him, would not. Reactionary that he was, he would take it for praise. Sighing, Molotov went on, “I reiterate: we have tolerated one blow because we are a peace-loving nation and are, in the words of the old superstition, willing to turn our cheek. Once. We are willing once. If you also strike at the cheek we have turned, only the devil’s grandfather knows where things will end.”

  Whenever Russians brought the devil’s kin into a conversation, they meant something had gone or would go dreadfully wrong somewhere. Molotov wondered how Queek’s interpreter was getting that across in the language of the Lizards. The ambassador said, “I have delivered my message. You have delivered yours, which I shall transmit to my superiors for their evaluation. Have we any further business?”

  “I think not,” Molotov answered. “We have threatened each other enough for a summer afternoon.” The interpreter gave him an odd look. He stared back, imperturbable as always. With a shrug that said the Pole couldn’t believe what he’d heard, the fellow translated for Queek.

  “Truth,” the ambassador said, one of the few words in his language Molotov understood. He and the interpreter left together.

  Molotov went into the chamber behind the office and changed clothes, then went into the other office onto which that chamber opened, the one no Lizard was allowed to enter. He spoke to the secretary there: “Summon Lavrenti Pavlovich, Andrei Andreyevich, and Georgi Konstantinovich to meet me here in an hour’s time.”

  “Yes, Comrade General Secretary,” the man said.

  What will they be thinking? Molotov wondered. What will be going through Beria’s mind? Through Gromyko’s? Through Zhukov’s? Molotov had always trembled inside when Stalin summoned him to a meeting-often in the wee hours of the morning. Did his summons make his chief lieutenants shiver? He doubted it. He was as ruthless as Stalin had ever been, but less showy about it. And Stalin had enjoyed, and let people know he enjoyed, issuing death sentences. Molotov did it as routinely as Stalin ever had, but got no great pleasure from it. Maybe that made him less frightening than his great predecessor. So long as he held plots at bay, he didn’t care.

  Marshal Zhukov arrived first, fifty-eight minutes after Molotov told the secretary to call him. Gromyko was a minute behind him. This time, Beria was late: he strolled into the office ten minutes after Gromyko. He did not excuse himself, but simply sat down. Molotov did not think he was making a display of his power-just an uncultured lout from the Caucasus with no sense of time.

  He did not make an issue of it. It would keep. Heading the NKVD did make Beria immensely powerful. But no chief of the secret police was ever loved. If Molotov decided to get rid of him, he would have the Party and the Red Army behind him, and a faction within the NKVD as well. So he did not worry about Beria… too much.

  Of course, no one in the Reich had worried about Himmler too much, either. Molotov wished he hadn’t had that thought.

  Shoving it aside, he said, “Now that we are all here”-as much of a dig at Beria as he would take-“let us discuss latest developments with the Lizards.” He summarized his conversation with Queek.

  “Comrade General Secretary, I want you to know we could have inflicted severe losses on the Lizards when they attacked our air base,” Zhukov said. “Only at your orders did we refrain from punishing the bandits.”

  “It is as well you did,” Molotov said. He did not glance over to Zhukov. He did not need to see the man who looked like a peasant and fought the way Wehrmacht field marshals wished they could to worry about him. Like Beria, Zhukov was able. Unlike Beria, the marshal was also popular. But he had had many chances to stage a coup, and had taken none of them. Molotov trusted him as far as he trusted any man, which was not far. He went on, “I do not know how harshly the Lizards would have retaliated had we struck at them, and I did not wish to discover this by expensive experiment.”

  “They are sons of bitches, nothing but sons of bitches,” said Zhukov, who could affect a peasant’s crudity to cloak his keen wits.

  “They are powerful sons of bitches,” Gromyko said, another self-evident truth. “Powerful sons of bitches have to be handled carefully.” He did glance over at Beria.

  Beria either did not notice or affected not to. He said, “The foreign commissar is right. And I can also tell you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, that the Lizards think we are powerful sons of bitches. Signals intercepts and reconnaissance satellite photos”-both provinces of the NKVD-“show their colonists are not settling close to the southern borders of the USSR. You told them they did not have our leave to do so, and they are taking your word seriously.”

  “That is good news,” Molotov said, and Zhukov and Gromyko both nodded. Molotov continued, “That the colonists are continuing to land anywhere on the surface of the world is not good news, however.”

  “From all I have learned, they will have a hard time making the colonists into soldiers,” Zhukov said, “a much harder time than we have in turning conscripts into fighting men. This works in our favor.”

  “So it does, Georgi Konstantinovich, but only so far,” Molotov replied. “They are landing many workers and many machines. Their industrial output will increase with more factories and more workers who do not seek to sabotage production. What sold
iers they have will be better equipped.”

  “They will also be able to exploit the resources of the territory they control more effectively than has been true up till now,” Gromyko added. In many ways, he thought very much like Molotov. Unlike Molotov, though, he seemed content with a subordinate role in affairs.

  Zhukov said, “If they train no more soldiers, they will run out sooner or later. How many weapons they make will not matter if they have no one who can fire them.”

  “Interesting,” Molotov murmured. “Perhaps very interesting.” Now he glanced over at Beria. “Inquire among our prisoners as to how rapidly Lizards reproduce and how long they need to be trained to become proper parts of their society.”

  “I will do that, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the NKVD chief said. “This is not information we needed before, and so we never tried to pull it out. Now that we see it might be useful, I expect we can get it.”

  “Good,” Molotov said. “Without the captives we took in the fighting, we would never have been able to move ahead in so many fields so fast. We have learned a great deal from them. And now that a new kind of knowledge becomes more valuable, as you say, we shall learn more.”

  Beria nodded. “I shall have the precise details for you very soon, even if it means testing a couple of Lizards to destruction, as the engineers say.” The electric lights overhead glinted from his spectacles, and perhaps from his eyes as well. He was no simple sadist, as were some of the men who worked for him, but he was not immune to the pleasures inherent in his job, either. Molotov had heard stories about a couple of young girls who’d vanished without a trace. He’d never tried to find out if they were true. It didn’t matter. If he ever decided to topple Beria, he’d trot out the stories whether they were true or not.

  “Comrade General Secretary, were you serious when you told Queek we might consider realigning ourselves with the Greater German Reich if pressure from the Lizards forced us in that direction?” Gromyko asked.

  “I was not jocular,” Molotov replied. Gromyko gave him a reproachful look. Ignoring it, he elaborated: “I shall act as circumstances force me to. If I judge the Lizards are a more dangerous threat than the Nazis, how in good conscience can I avoid seeking a rapprochement with Nuremberg?” The Germans had not rebuilt Berlin after the Lizards struck it with an atomic bomb, but left the city in ruins as a monument to the enemy’s depravity-showing, in Molotov’s view, a curious delicacy given their own habits.

  Nodding at his words, Gromyko said, “We have come through the first crisis since the arrival of the colonization fleet well enough-not perfectly, but well enough. May we likewise weather the storms ahead.”

  “We shall not merely weather them. We shall prevail,” Molotov said. “The dialectic demands it.” His colleagues solemnly nodded.

  7

  Just watching the way some of the newly defrosted colonists strolled around Basra made Fotsev’s scales itch. “By the Emperor, they are asking to get killed,” he burst out. “Some of them will get what they are asking for, too.”

  “Truth,” Gorppet said. “I do not know whether they think the Big Uglies are civilized, the way the Rabotevs and Hallessi are, or whether they just figure they are tame, like meat animals.”

  “Whatever they think, they are wrong,” Fotsev said. “I am just glad this ‘Allahu akbar!’ business has died down for the time being. If it had not, you would need to be addled to let colonists into Basra at all.”

  He watched and listened to a revived female dickering with a Tosevite over an ornately decorated but useless brass ornament. She had not the faintest idea how to bargain, and paid three times the going rate for such a trinket. Gorppet sighed and said, “Everything is going to get more expensive for all of us.”

  “So it is,” Fotsev agreed unhappily. “They do not know anything, do they?” One eye turret turned toward a male who was wandering around photographing everything he saw. Fotsev couldn’t imagine why; Basra wasn’t much, even by the minimal standards of Tosev 3.

  The male noticed him watching and called, “Is it always so chilly here?”

  “Does not know anything,” Fotsev repeated in a low voice. Aloud, he answered, “For Tosev 3, this is good weather. You will never see frozen water falling out of the sky here, for instance.”

  “They told us about that,” the colonist said. “I do not believe it.”

  “Have you see the videos?” Fotsev demanded.

  “I do not care about videos,” the newcomer said. “You can make a video look like anything. That does not mean it is true.” Off he went, camera in hand.

  “Ought to send him up to the SSSR,” Gorppet muttered. “He would learn something there-or else he would freeze to death. Either way, he would shut up.”

  “That is cruel.” Fotsev thought about it. His mouth fell open in a nasty laugh. “I do wonder how he would make out in that snow stuff up past his head, with the Big Uglies sliding along over it on boards. How would he like that? How much ginger do you suppose he would taste to keep himself from thinking about it?”

  “Enough to make him mutiny, by the Emperor,” Gorppet exclaimed.

  Fotsev eyed him warily. So did the other males in their small group. The last time he and Fotsev had spoken of mutiny, they’d been alone together. That was how males from the conquest fleet usually spoke of mutiny, when they spoke of it at all. Fotsev didn’t think there was a male who was ignorant of the mutinies some troops had raised against their superiors. Talking much about them was something else. Like a lot of things on Tosev 3-the death factories of the Deutsche sprang to mind-they were usually better ignored.

  Gorppet looked defiantly at his comrades. “They happened. We all know they happened.” But he lowered his voice before going on, “Would not surprise me a bit if some of the officers deserved what they got, too.”

  “Careful,” Fotsev said, and added an emphatic cough. “If you go around saying things like that, people will say you think like a Tosevite, and that will not do you any good.”

  “I do not think like a stinking Big Ugly,” Gorppet said. “I am no snoutcounter. Nobody whose brains are not in his cloaca is a snoutcounter. But I will tell you this: when I have officers over me, I want them to know what they are doing. Is that too much to ask?”

  “A lot of the ones who did not know what they were doing are dead now,” Fotsev said. “The Big Uglies took care of them. We did not need mutineers.” The word felt odd coming off his tongue. Back on Home, no one had used it in tens of thousands of years, not unless he was creating a drama about the distant times before the Empire was unified.

  Gorppet refused to spit it out and walk away from it. “Truth-the ones who did not know what they were doing are dead now. But how many perfectly good males went to meet the spirits of Emperors past because of their bungling?”

  Too many was the answer that hatched in Fotsev’s mind. He didn’t say it. He didn’t want to think about it. It, too, was better left unexamined.

  Before Gorppet could say anything more, a male from the colonization fleet came running toward the small group. In the years since coming to Tosev 3, Fotsev had fallen out of practice in reading civilians’ body paint. He thought this fellow was a mid-senior cook, but wasn’t quite sure.

  Whatever the male was, he was excited. “You soldiers!” he shouted. “To the rescue! I need you!”

  “For what?” Fotsev asked. Turning an eye turret in the direction from which the cook had come, he saw no Tosevites pounding after him with knives and pistols in their hands. By local standards, that meant things couldn’t be too bad.

  “For what?” the male from the colonization fleet cried. “For what? Why, back around that corner yonder, one of these native creatures, these untamed native creatures everyone keeps warning us about, is carrying a gun twice the size of the one you have there.”

  “Did he shoot you with it?” Gorppet asked. “Does not look that way, on account of you are still here.”

  “You do not understand!” the cook said. �
��A wild native is walking these filthy streets with a gun. Go take it away from him.”

  “Did he try to shoot you?” Fotsev asked.

  “No, but he could have,” the newly revived colonist answered. “What kind of world is this, anyhow?”

  All the males in the small group began to laugh. “This is Tosev 3, that’s what,” Fotsev said. “This is the kind of world where that Big Ugly probably will not try to shoot you unless you give him some sort of reason to want you dead. It’s also the kind of world where, if we try to take his rifle away, everybody in this town will be shrieking ‘Allahu akbar!’ and trying to kill us faster than you can flick your nictitating membrane across your eyeball.”

  “You are crazy,” the other male said. His eye turrets swung to look over the males who accompanied Fotsev. “You are all crazy. You have spent too much time with the horrible creatures that live here, and now you are as bad as they are.” Hissing in disgust, he stalked off, tailstump rigid with fury.

  “Tell you what,” Gorppet said. “If I had a choice, I would sooner act like a Big Ugly than like him.”

  No one argued with him. The patrol made its way through Basra. Fotsev turned at the corner around which the excitable cook had come. Sure enough, there stood a Big Ugly with a rifle on his back. He was eating some of the fruits that grew on the local trees that looked like dusting tools. When he saw the soldiers of the Race, he bobbed his head up and down in a Tosevite gesture of greeting. Fotsev showed his empty right hand, palm out. That motion, unlike most, meant about the same thing to the Big Uglies as it did to the Race.

  As Fotsev walked on, he did turn an eye turret back toward the Big Ugly to make sure he didn’t have anything treacherous in mind. The Tosevite went on eating the small brown fruits-they looked rather like turds, but tasted sweet-and spitting the seeds into the dust of the street.

  “Oh, he is dangerous, all right,” Gorppet said, and laughed again.