Aftershocks

by Harry Turtledove

  Johnson ate another mouthful of beans and diced peppers. The peppers provided essential vitamins. They were also hot enough to make his eyes cross. In a way, that was a welcome change from the blandness of most of what he ate aboard the spaceship. In another, more immediate, way, though, it made him drink from his plastic bottle of water before he could speak. When he did, he said, “Winners write history, sure enough.”

  Flynn had another question: “What do you think of the fellow who let the Lizards know what we’d done?”

  “That’s a funny thing,” Johnson said. “I watched those ships blow up. I don’t know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Lizards were in them. They never had a chance. They never even knew they died, because they never woke up out of cold sleep. If I’d known whether the Germans or the Russians launched on them, I’d’ve told the Race in a red-hot minute. I wouldn’t have felt bad about it. I’d have figured the bad guys were getting what they deserved.”

  “It’s different when the shoe is on your own foot,” Dr. Rosen observed.

  “Ain’t it the truth!” Johnson’s agreement was wholehearted if ungrammatical.

  “If I had to guess—” Flynn began.

  Johnson cut him off: “If I know you, Mickey, that means you’ve analyzed it seventeen ways from Sunday.”

  “Not this time,” the second pilot said with dignity. “Not enough data. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, if I had to guess, I’d say Warren took the Race by surprise when he gave them Indianapolis instead of everything out here and everything in Earth orbit.”

  “Congratulations,” Miriam Rosen said. “Second-guessing a dead man from a couple of hundred million miles away isn’t just a world record. If it’s not a solar system record, it’s got to be in the running.”

  Flynn gravely inclined his head, which, since he floated perpendicular to the doctor, made him look absurd. “Thank you kindly. I’m honored to have such a distinguished judge. Now I shall elucidate.”

  “That means explain, right?” Johnson asked—more harassing fire.

  But Flynn gave better than he got, remarking, “Only a Marine would need an explanation of an explanation. Now if I may go on?” When Johnson, licking his wounds, didn’t rise to that, the second pilot did continue: “On the surface, giving up the installations is the easy, obvious choice. It costs no lives, it costs no money—in the short term, it looks better. And the Race is convinced we Tosevites live in the short term.”

  “But in the long term, it would ruin the United States,” Johnson said. “It would put us at the Lizards’ mercy.”

  “Exactly.” Flynn nodded again. “Whereas losing Indianapolis does us very little harm in the long run—unless, of course, one is unfortunate enough to live in Indianapolis. The Fleetlord probably threw in the destruction of a city as a goad to make us do what he really wanted. But when President Warren took him up on it, he had no choice this side of war but to accept, and the United States is and will be a going concern for some time to come. That’s why I say President Warren has a decent chance of being remembered kindly.”

  “All that makes a good deal of sense,” Dr. Rosen said. “What do you think, Glen?”

  “The last time you asked me that, Mickey got up on his soapbox,” Johnson replied, at which Flynn sent him an injured stare. Ignoring it, Johnson found himself nodding. “But I think it makes sense, too. Warren took a big chance, he got caught, and he paid the price that hurt the country least. Going on living after that . . . I guess I can see how he wouldn’t have wanted to.”

  “He’d have been impeached and convicted as soon as the story broke,” Dr. Rosen said. “I wonder if we would have handed him over to the Lizards after that. Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have to find out.”

  “Probably,” Flynn said.

  Johnson couldn’t quarrel with that, either. He said, “When we did give him to the Lizards, he’d have been covered with tar and feathers. He almost screwed up everything he’d been building—everything we’ve been building—for years and years.”

  “And yet . . .” Flynn said in the thoughtful tones he used whenever he was going to go against conventional wisdom. “And yet, I wonder whether that one blow he got in against the colonization fleet before the Lizards were expecting anything hurt them more than losing Indianapolis hurt us. Five hundred years from now, historians will be arguing about that—but will they be our historians or males and females of the Race?”

  “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Dr. Rosen said.

  “I wasn’t joking, Miriam,” Mickey Flynn said.

  “Neither was I,” she answered.

  Slowly, Johnson said, “By doing what he did, Warren made sure the Lewis and Clark and now the Columbus would stay out here. He made sure we wouldn’t lose whatever space stations we build in Earth orbit and the weapons we’ve already got there. The Race still has to take us seriously. That’s not the smallest thing in the world. Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, it’s liable to be the biggest thing in the world. Five hundred years from now, it’s liable to say who’s writing the history books.” He raised his water bottle in salute. “Here’s to Earl Warren—I think.”

  Flynn and Dr. Rosen also drank, with much the same hesitation he’d shown in proposing the toast. The PA system chimed the hour. As if he couldn’t believe it, Johnson’s eyes went to his wristwatch. It said the same thing the chime did.

  He said something, too: “I’m late. Walt’s not going to be very happy with me.”

  “An understatement I would be proud to claim,” Flynn said. “I am also late—for my rest period. To sleep, perchance to dream . . .”

  “Perchance to soak your head,” Johnson said over his shoulder as he pushed off to deposit his dishes in their boxes before heading for the control room. He thought he saw Flynn and the doctor leaving together by another exit, but was in too much of a hurry to escape the chief pilot’s wrath to be sure.

  “So good of you to join me, Lieutenant Colonel,” Stone said in frigid tones when Glen did fly into the control room. “It would have been even better, of course, had you joined me four minutes and, ah, twenty-seven seconds ago.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Johnson said. Then he broke a cardinal military rule: never offer an excuse to atone for a failure. “Mickey and Miriam and I were trying to figure out what the devil’s going on back on Earth, and I just didn’t pay any attention to the time.”

  And, for a wonder, it worked. Walter Stone leaned forward in his seat and asked, “Any conclusions?”

  “Either Earl Warren is a hero or a bum, but nobody’s going to know for sure for the next five hundred years,” Johnson answered; that seemed to sum up a lunch’s worth of conversation in a sentence. He added a comment of his own: “Only God or the spirits of Emperors past can tell now, anyhow.”

  Stone grunted laughter and said, “Truth,” in the Lizards’ language, tacking on an emphatic cough for good measure. After a couple of seconds of silence, he fell back into English: “He may be a hero for what he did, if you look at things that way. He may be. But I’ll tell you one thing, Glen—he’s the biggest bum since Benedict Arnold for letting himself get caught. If he was going to give those orders, every one of them should have been oral. If anybody did write anything down, he should have burned it the second the launch happened. Then there wouldn’t have been anything for Nosy Parkers later on. Am I right, or am I wrong?”

  “Oh, you’re right, sir. No doubt about it. Nosy Parkers . . .” Johnson’s voice faded.

  Stone thought he knew why, and laughed at the junior pilot. “You don’t think that’s so funny, because you were a Nosy Parker yourself, and look what it got you.”

  “Yeah.” But Johnson remained abstracted. He’d known another Nosy Parker, a fellow named Yeager out in California who’d been as curious about what the hell was going on with the space station that became the Lewis and Clark as he was himself. And Yeager was a hotshot expert on the Race, too. If he’d been snoopi
ng, and if he’d found stuff that would have been better off gone, who was more likely to run and tell stories to the Lizards? Johnson almost spoke up, but he didn’t know anything, not for sure, and so he kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “There’s almost always a paper trail in that kind of business. There shouldn’t be, but there is.”

  “Well, I won’t say you’re wrong, because you’re not,” Stone said. “Even so, you’d think they’d be more careful with something that important. We’re goddamn lucky we didn’t have to pay anything more than Indianapolis.”

  “Yeah,” Johnson said again. “It’s not like we lost an important town.” The two men eyed each other in perfect understanding. They were both from Ohio, where Indianapolis was often known as Indian-no-place.

  Stone said, “The one thing I do give Warren high marks for is keeping us in space. You know the concept of a fleet in being?”

  “Sure.” Johnson nodded. “We’ve got enough stuff that they have to pay attention to us whether we do anything or not.”

  “That’s it,” Stone agreed. “If we’d had to give up everything, what would we be? An oversized New Zealand, that’s what.”

  “But now we get to go on,” Johnson said. “It cost us. It cost us like hell. But we’re still in business. And one of these days . . .” He looked out through the glare-resistant glass at the seemingly countless stars.

  “One of these days.” Like him, Walter Stone spoke the words as if they were a complete sentence.

  “I wonder what kind of funeral they’ve got planned for Warren,” Johnson said. “A big fancy one, or just toss him in a trash can with his feet sticking out?”

  “Me, I’d take the second one, and some hobo could steal his shoes,” Stone said. “But he was the president, so odds are they’ll do it up brown.” He paused. “Dammit.”

  The last place on Earth Vyacheslav Molotov wanted to be was in Little Rock, Arkansas, for a state funeral. He hated flying, but Earl Warren wasn’t going to keep till he could cross the Atlantic by ship. He’d had a measure of revenge by ordering Andrei Gromyko to come with him.

  To his annoyance, the foreign commissar was reacting philosophically rather than with annoyance of his own. “Things could be worse,” he said as he and Molotov met in the Soviet embassy before heading for the gathering procession.

  “How?” Molotov was irritable enough to let his irritation show. He hadn’t slept at all on the airplane that brought him to America, and even a long night in bed at the embassy left his body uncertain of what time it was supposed to be.

  “If this had happened a couple of months ago, it would be forty degrees centigrade outside, with humidity fit to swim in,” the foreign commissar answered. “Washington was bad in the summertime. Little Rock is worse.”

  “Bozhemoi!” Molotov said. Good Communists weren’t supposed to mention God, but old habits were hand to break. The general secretary went on, “I am given to understand Dornberger came in person to represent the Reich, and Eden from England. Is Tojo here also?”

  “Yes,” Gromyko answered. “If the Lizards wanted to hurt all the leading human states, they could throw a missile at Little Rock.”

  “Heh,” Molotov said. “Losing Eden would probably help England. And Doriot, I notice, is conspicuous by his absence. He collaborated with the Germans so long and so well, he had no trouble collaborating with the Lizards when they became the leading foreigners in France.”

  Gromyko clucked. “Such cynicism, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Officially, the government of the Race has sent its condolences to the government of the United States, so everything is correct on that score.”

  “Correct!” Molotov turned and twisted, trying to help his back recover from sitting in the airliner seat for what felt like a month. He wasn’t a young man any more. He seldom felt his three-quarters of a century back in Moscow; thanks to iron routine, one day usually went by much like another. But when he was jerked out of his routine, he took much longer recovering than he would have twenty years before. He had to pause and remember what he’d just said before continuing, “Relations are at their most correct just before the shooting starts.”

  “Warren seems to have avoided that,” Gromyko said. In a lower voice, he added, “For which we may all be thankful.”

  “Yes.” Molotov nodded emphatically. “That would have been a pretty choice, wouldn’t it? We could have joined the United States in a losing war against the Race, or we could have waited for the Race to finish devouring the USA, and then faced a losing war against the Lizards.”

  “By putting things off, and by keeping the USA in the game, humanity has gained a chance.” By Gromyko’s tone, he didn’t think it a very good chance.

  Molotov’s private opinion was much the same, but he wouldn’t have told himself his private opinion if he could have avoided it. He kept up a bold front to Gromyko: “Moscow seemed on the point of falling first to the Germans and then to the Lizards. But the hammer and sickle still fly above it.”

  Since that was nothing but the truth, the foreign commissar couldn’t very well disagree with it. Before he had the chance, the protocol officer came in and said, “Comrades, the limousine is waiting to take you to the Gray House.”

  “Thank you, Mikhail Sergeyevich.” Molotov had made a point of learning the young man’s name and patronymic; by all reports, he was able, even if inclined to put form ahead of substance. Well, if ever there was a protocol officer’s failing, that was it.

  The limousine was a Cadillac. Seeing as much, Molotov raised an eyebrow. Gromyko said, “Impossibly expensive to import our own motorcars to all our embassies. In the Reich, we use—used—a Mercedes. I don’t know what we’re doing there now.”

  “Did we?” Molotov hadn’t concerned himself with the point before. He shrugged as he got inside. If he was going to worry about it, he’d worry after he got back to Moscow. For the time being, he would simply relax. The automobile was comfortable. But he wouldn’t let it lull him into a false sense of security. To Gromyko, he said, “No substantive conversations here. Who can tell who might be listening?”

  “Well, of course, Comrade General Secretary.” The foreign commissar sounded offended. “I am not a blushing virgin, you know.”

  “All right, Andrei Andreyevich.” Molotov spoke soothingly. “Better to speak and not need than to need and not speak.”

  Before Gromyko could reply, the limousine started to roll. The Soviet embassy was only a few blocks from the Gray House. One thing that struck Molotov was how small a city Little Rock really was, and how new all the important buildings were. Before the Lizard invasion, before it succeeded Washington as a national capital, it had been nothing to speak of, a sleepy provincial town like Kaluga or Kuibishev.

  Well, had the Nazis or the Lizards broken through, Kuibishev would have had greatness thrust on it, too. “This place seems pleasant enough,” Molotov said: about as much praise as he would give any town.

  “Oh, indeed—pleasant enough, barring summer,” Gromyko said. “And with air conditioning, even that is a smaller problem than it would have been twenty years ago.” Almost silently, the car pulled to a stop. The foreign commissar pointed. “There is Stassen—President Stassen, now—speaking with General Dornberger.”

  “Thank you for pointing him out,” Molotov answered. “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have recognized him.” Like Dornberger, Stassen was bald. But the American was a younger man—probably still on the sunny side of sixty—and looked to have been formed in a softer school. He might not have had any trouble in his life from the end of the first round of fighting to Earl Warren’s suicide. Well, he would have troubles now.

  The driver opened the door to let out the Russian leaders. “Shall I introduce you?” Gromyko asked. “I speak enough English for that.”

  His English was actually quite good, though he preferred not to show it off. Molotov nodded. “If you would. I have never met Dornberger, either. Does he speak English?”

  “I don’t know,” Gromyko
said. “I’ve never had to deal with him. But we can find out.”

  He and Molotov approached the American and German leaders. Stassen turned away from Dornberger and toward them. He spoke in English. “Purely conventional,” Gromyko said. “He thanks you for your presence and says it is a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Tell him the same,” Molotov answered. “Express my condolences and the condolences of the Soviet people.” As Gromyko spoke in English, Molotov extended his hand. The new president of the United States shook it. His grip, firm but brief, said nothing about him save that he’d shaken a lot of hands before.

  Stassen spoke in English. Gromyko translated again: “He hopes we can live in peace among ourselves and with the Race. He says staying strong will help in this.”

  “Good. He is not altogether a fool, then,” Molotov said. “Translate that last into something friendly and agreeable.”

  As the foreign commissar did so, the new German Führer came up and waited to be noticed. He was a poor man waiting for rich men to deign to see him: not a familiar position for a German leader these past ninety-five years. When Dornberger spoke, it was in English. “He says he is pleased to meet you,” Gromyko reported.

  “Tell him the same.” Molotov shook hands with the Germans, too. “Tell him I am happier to meet him now that the Reich no longer has missiles aimed at the USSR.”

  Through Gromyko, Dornberger replied, “We had those, yes, but we had more aimed at the Race.”

  “Much good they did you,” Molotov said. After the Reich’s misfortunes, he didn’t have to worry so much about diplomacy.

  Dornberger shrugged. “I did not make the war. All I did was fight it as well as I could once the people set above me made it. When no people set above me were left alive, I ended it as fast as I could.”

  “That was wise. Not starting it would have been wiser.” Molotov wished more Russian generals showed the disinclination of their German counterparts to meddle in politics. Zhukov came close. But even Zhukov, though he didn’t want the title, wanted at least some of the power that went with it.