The jolt of acceleration, the weightlessness that followed, felt like old friends that had been away too long. Once weightlessness began, she had a chance to make small talk with Selana. “Why are these skin fungi so common in China, Senior Physician?” she asked.
“I believe it is the astonishing amount of excrement in everyday use there,” the other female answered. “The local Big Uglies use it for manure and fuel and sometimes, mixed with mud, as a building material as well. Facilities for disinfecting bodily waste, as you may imagine from that, are for all practical purposes nonexistent.”
“I am sorry I asked,” Nesseref said. Weightlessness did not nauseate members of the Race, as it sometimes did Tosevites, but disgust could do the job. Another thought occurred to her. “How do any Tosevites raised in such an environment survive? Their burden of disease must be far worse than ours.”
“It is, and a great many of them do not survive,” Selana said. “This takes me back to the most primitive days of the Race, at the very dawn of ancientest history. We once lived something like this, though the greater abundance of water in China creates a more unsanitary situation than we ever knew over such a wide area.”
Nesseref did not want to believe that the Race had ever lived in such close conjunction to filth. Such a thought would damage the sense of superiority she felt toward the Big Uglies. She said, “Spirits of Emperors past be praised that we do not live in such appalling conditions any more.”
“Truth,” Selana said, and added an emphatic cough. “But, here on Tosev 3, we are forced to do so because the natives do so. This creates difficulties of its own.”
“Senior Physician,” Nesseref said, “the Big Uglies do nothing but create difficulties.” Selana did not argue with her.
7
Having got to Greifswald, Johannes Drucker rather wished he hadn’t. The town where he and his family had lived hadn’t taken an explosive-metal bomb, but it had been heavily fought over. And nearby Peenemünde and Stralsund and Rostock had taken any number of hits from explosive-metal weapons, so the radioactivity level remained high.
Few people still dwelt among the ruins. The ones who did might have slipped back in time several hundred years. Instead of coal or gas, they burned wood from the wrecked buildings all around them. They had no running water. They stank, and so did the city.
The neighborhood where the Druckers had lived was even more ruinous than the rest of the town. No one seemed to live there these days; gangs of scavengers prowled through the wreckage, after whatever they could find. Nobody admitted to hearing of Drucker or his family.
“Try the Red Cross shelters, pal,” one heavily armed forager told him. “Maybe you’ll have some luck there.”
“Try the graveyards,” the forager’s sidekick added. “Plenty of new people staying there these days.” He laughed. So did his comrade.
Drucker wanted to kill them both. He had a pistol, too, a comforting weight on his right hip. But the ruffians looked very alert. He gave a curt nod and walked off through the rubble-strewn streets.
Checking the Red Cross shelters was actually a good idea. Drucker had done that every time he passed one on the long road up from Nuremberg. But, even having done so, he knew too well that he might have missed his family. He couldn’t go through the endless tents and huts one by one looking for Käthe and Heinrich and Claudia and Adolf. He had to rely on the records in each camp headquarters, and the records were in a most shocking state of disarray—anyone who expected the usual German efficiency, as he had, was out of luck.
It’s the war, he thought. At last—and for the first time since Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I unified Germany—the Reich had run into a catastrophe too large for it to cope with. Surviving from day to day took precedence over keeping the files that would have made administering the state over the long haul so much easier. Drucker understood that without liking it. It made his life too difficult for him to like it, even a little.
Checking the graveyards also wasn’t the worst idea in the world, he realized glumly. Or it wouldn’t have been, if so many bodies hadn’t been bulldozed or just flung into mass graves without headstones of any sort—and if so many others didn’t still lie under rubble, and if so many hadn’t simply been vaporized.
Someone rode past on a bicycle—the way things were now, a sign of prosperity. The man knew how valuable that bicycle was, too; he had an assault rifle slung on his back, and looked extremely ready to use it. Drucker called out to him: “Excuse me, but where is the Red Cross shelter closest to town?”
“North,” the man answered. “On the road to Stralsund, not quite halfway there, not far from the damned Lizards’ camp.” He started to pedal on, but then grudged a few more words: “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”
“Thanks,” Drucker said. “So do I.”
He trudged up the road. To his right, the gray, ugly Baltic rolled up the flat, muddy beach and then sullenly retreated again. He smelled salt water and stale seaweed and dead fish: the odors of home. And, when he got to the shelter in the late afternoon, he smelled ordure and unwashed humanity, the same stinks he’d known in every camp and in every town on his way up from Bavaria.
More Lizard troopers prowled around this Red Cross shelter than he’d seen at most of the others. They looked jumpier and more alert than the males he’d seen elsewhere, too. He came up to one of them and said, “I greet you,” in the language of the Race.
“And I greet you,” the Lizard answered. It wasn’t much of a greeting; the male looked ready to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. “What do you want?” His hissing voice was hard with suspicion.
“I am looking for my mate and hatchlings, from whom I am long separated,” Drucker said. The answer, and the fluency with which he used the Race’s language, made the Lizard relax a little. He went on, “And I am also curious why you watch the refugees in this particular camp so closely.”
“Why? I will tell you why,” the male said. “Because there are many Deutsch soldiers here, males against whom we fought in Poland. We do not trust them. We have no great reason to trust them.”
“I see,” Drucker said slowly. He nodded. He’d been running into occupation troops up till now: Lizards who’d come into the Reich after the surrender, and who hadn’t done any fighting beforehand. But the males here had been combat soldiers. No wonder they didn’t trust anything or anybody. Drucker risked one more question: “Where is the administrative center for this camp?”
“That way, where the flag flies,” the Lizard answered, pointing with the muzzle of his weapon. “You may proceed.”
“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker said. The Lizard didn’t wish him any sort of luck finding his family. Some of that, no doubt, was because Lizards didn’t think in terms of families. And the rest? He was an enemy. Why should a male of the Race waste any sympathy on him?
He was just coming up to the large tent above which the Red Cross flag flew when a man not far from his own age rode up on a bicycle. The fellow carried an impressive collection of lethal hardware. He swung down from the bicycle, grunted and stretched, and started to walk it into the tent.
A woman standing in the entranceway exclaimed, “You can’t do that! It is forbidden!”
“Too bad,” the man answered in German flavored by Polish and something else. “I’m not going to have it stolen. If you don’t like it, that’s rough.”
“He’s right,” Drucker said. “There’s no place to chain it up out here, and it’ll disappear without a trace if he just leaves it.”
“Most irregular,” the woman sniffed. She didn’t seem to see that things were different in the Reich nowadays. But, after another glance at the weaponry festooning the other fellow, she stopped arguing.
“Thanks, pal,” the stranger said to Drucker. “Appreciate it. Some people have trouble getting the idea that times have changed through their thick heads.”
After a moment, Drucker placed the man’s secondary accent. He’d heard i
t before, thicker, in Poland and the Soviet Union before the Lizards landed. Yiddish, that was it. “You’re a Jew,” he blurted.
With an ironic bow, the other man nodded. “And you’re a German. I love you, too,” he said. “Mordechai Anielewicz, at your service. I’m trying to find my family after some of you Nazi bastards hauled them out of Poland.”
All Drucker said was, “I’m trying to find my family, too. They were in Greifswald, but they aren’t any more, and not much of the town is left.” He paused, staring at the other man. “Mordechai Anielewicz? Jesus: I know you. A million years ago”—actually, back in the first round of fighting against the Race—“I was Colonel Heinrich Jäger’s panzer driver.” He gave his own name.
“Were you?” Anielewicz’s eyes narrowed. “Gottenyu, maybe you were. And if you were, maybe you’re not quite a Nazi bastard after all. Maybe. My younger son is named for Heinrich Jäger.”
“My older son is,” Drucker said. “What happened to him after that Russian pilot took him off to Poland?” He didn’t mention how he and his fellow tank crewmen had killed several SS men to make Jäger’s escape possible.
“He married her,” the Jew answered. “He’s dead now. You know the explosive-metal bomb Skorzeny tried to set off inside Lodz? We stopped that, he and Ludmila and I. We all breathed in some nerve gas doing it, too. It hit him hardest; he was never quite right afterwards, and he died twelve, thirteen years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Drucker said, “but thanks for telling me. He was a good man—one of the best officers I ever served under—and I always wondered what happened to him once he got away.”
“He was one of the best.” Mordechai Anielewicz eyed Drucker. “You drove a panzer then. What have you been doing since?”
“I stayed in the Wehrmacht,” Drucker replied. “I ended up in the upper stage of an A-45. The Lizards captured me after I shot two missiles at one of their starships. If they hadn’t knocked both of them down, I don’t suppose they would have bothered taking me alive, but they did. Eventually, they set me down in Nuremberg. I had a devil of a time getting here, but I managed. Now if I could manage to find my wife and kids . . .”
Anielewicz looked at him as if he’d failed a test. “You served under Heinrich Jäger, and you stayed in the Wehrmacht? He had the sense to get away.”
“Don’t get high and mighty with me,” Drucker snapped. “I know something about what the Reich was doing to Jews. I didn’t do any of that. I had it done to me, in fact.”
“You had it done to you?” Anielewicz snarled. “You son of a bitch, you”—he cursed in Yiddish and Polish—“what do you know about it?” He looked ready to grab one of his weapons and start shooting. Drucker had thought him a dangerous man a generation before, and saw no reason to change his mind now. He slid his legs into a position from which he could better open fire, too.
But, instead of grabbing for his pistol, he answered Anielewicz in a low, urgent voice: “I’ll tell you what I know about it. The SS grabbed my wife because they got wind she had a Jewish grandmother, that’s what.” He’d never thought he would tell that to anyone, but who in the Reich ever imagined talking with a Jew?
And it worked. Mordechai Anielewicz relaxed, suddenly and completely. “All right, then,” he said. “You do know something.” He cocked his head to one side. “From what you’ve said, you got her back. How’d you manage that? I know a thing or two about the SS.”
“How?” Drucker chuckled mirthlessly. “I told you—I was an A-45 pilot. I had connections. My CO was General Dornberger—he’s Führer now, wherever the devil he is. I had enough pull to bring it off. Officially, Käthe got a clean pedigree.”
“If you have pull, you should use it,” Anielewicz agreed. His face clouded again. “Back in the 1940s, there were an awful lot of Jews who didn’t have any.”
Drucker didn’t know how to reply to that. All he could do was nod. He hadn’t thought much about Jews, or had much use for them, before Käthe got in trouble with the blackshirts. At last, he said, “The only thing I want to do now is find out if my family is alive, and get them back if they are.”
“Fair enough. We’re in the same boat there, no matter how we got dropped into it.” Anielewicz pointed at Drucker. “If you know the Führer, why aren’t you using your pull now to have him help you look for your kin?”
“Two main reasons, I suppose,” Drucker answered after a little thought. “I wanted to do it myself, and . . . I’m not sure there’s anyone to find.”
“Yes, knowing they’re dead would be pretty final, wouldn’t it?” Anielewicz’s voice was grim. “Still and all, if you’ve got a card left to play, don’t you think it’s time to play it?”
Drucker considered, then slowly nodded. He raised an eyebrow. “And if I try to find out for myself, maybe I should try to find out for you, too?”
“That thought did cross my mind,” Mordechai Anielewicz allowed. “I’ve got pull with the Lizards, myself. Shall we trade?” Drucker considered again, but not for long. He stuck out his hand. Anielewicz shook it.
Sam Yeager had never imagined that a jail could be so comfortable. His place of confinement didn’t look like a jail. It looked like, and was, a farmhouse somewhere in . . . nobody had told him exactly where he was, but it had to be Colorado or New Mexico. He could watch television, though no station came in real well. He could read Denver and Albuquerque papers. He could do almost anything he wanted—except go outside or write a letter or use a computer. His guards were very polite but very firm.
“Why are you keeping me here?” he demanded of them one morning, for about the five hundredth time.
“Orders,” replied the one who answered to Fred.
Yeager had heard that about five hundred times, too. “You can’t keep me forever,” he said, though he had no evidence that that was true. “What will you do with me?”
“Whatever we get told to do,” answered the one called John. “So far, nobody’s told us to do anything except keep you on ice.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you ought to count your blessings about that, Lieutenant Colonel.”
By which he no doubt meant they could have buried Yeager in the yard behind the house without anyone’s being the wiser. That was probably—no, that was certainly—true. “But I haven’t done anything,” Sam said, knowing full well he was lying. “And you haven’t even tried to find out whether I’ve done anything,” which was the God’s truth.
Fred looked at John. John looked at the one named Charlie, who hardly ever said anything. He didn’t say anything now, either—he only shrugged. John, who seemed to be the boss, answered, “We haven’t had any orders to interrogate you, either. Maybe they don’t want us knowing whatever you know. I don’t ask questions. I just do what I’m told.”
“But I don’t know anything,” Sam protested, another great, thumping lie.
Fred chuckled. “Maybe they don’t want us catching ignorance, then.” Of the three there that day, and of the other three who spelled them in weekly shifts, he was the only one with even a vestigial sense of humor. He pointed at Sam’s empty cup. “You want some more coffee there?”
“Sure,” Yeager answered, and the—agent?—poured the cup full again. After a couple of sips, Sam tried a question he hadn’t asked before: “By whose orders are you keeping me here? I’m an officer in the U.S. Army, after all.”
He didn’t really expect to get an answer. Charlie just sat there looking sour. Fred shrugged, as if to say he was pretending he hadn’t heard the question. But John said, “Whose orders? I’ll tell you. Why the hell not? You’re here on the orders of the president of the United States, Mister Officer in the U.S. Army.”
“The president?” Sam yelped. “What the dickens does President Warren care about me? I haven’t done anything.”
“He must think you did,” John said. “And if the president thinks you did something, buddy, you did it.”
That, unfortunately, was likely to be correct. And Sam knew only too well wha
t Earl Warren was liable to think he’d done. He’d done it, too, even if these goons didn’t know, or want to know, that. He had to keep up a bold front, though. If he didn’t, he was ruined. And so he said, “Tell the president that I want to talk to him about it, man to man. Tell him it’s important that I do. Not just for me. For the country.” He remembered the papers he’d given Straha and the things he’d told Barbara and Jonathan. It was important, all right.
“Crap,” Charlie said—from him, an oration.
John said the same thing in a different way: “President Warren’s a busy man. Why should he want to talk to one not particularly important lieutenant colonel?”
“Why should he want to make one not particularly important lieutenant colonel disappear?” Sam returned.
“That’s not for us to worry about,” John answered. “We got told to put you on ice and keep you on ice, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Yeager didn’t say anything. He just sat there and smiled his most unpleasant smile.
Charlie didn’t get it. Yeager hadn’t expected anything else. John didn’t get it, either. That disappointed Yeager. After a few seconds’ silence, Fred said, “Uh, John, I think he’s saying the big boss might want to see him for the same reason he had him put on ice, whatever the hell that is.”
“Bingo,” Sam said happily.
John didn’t sound or look happy. “Like I care what he’s saying.” He sent Sam an unpleasant look of his own. “Other thing he’s been saying all along is that he doesn’t know why he got nabbed. If he’s lying about that, who knows what else he’s been lying about?”
What that translated to was, Who knows what we’re liable to have to try to squeeze out of him? Back in his baseball days, Sam had known a fair number of small-time, small-town hoodlums, men who thought of themselves as tough guys. It had been a good many years, but the breed didn’t seem to have changed much, even if these fellows got their money from a much more important boss.
Aftershocks Page 23
