Page 43 of Second Contact (Colonization 1)

As he dried the last couple of pots and pans, Yeager listened for the sounds of Teutonic gutturals coming out of Jonathan’s bedroom. He heard them, which meant he kept on drying. Studying with a girl with the door closed was against house rules. Remembering himself at Jonathan’s age, he knew he might have tried to get away with things even with the door open.

“You have an evil mind, Sam,” Barbara said, but he noticed she was cocking her head in the direction of Jonathan’s room every now and then, too.

“Takes one to know one,” he told her, and she stuck out her tongue at him again.

After the dishes were done and put away, he went into the study, turned on the radio, and tuned it to a band the Lizards used. The Race didn’t reveal the details of its plans on public programs, any more than human governments did. But attitudes mattered, too; what they were telling their own people gave some clues about how they would respond to humans.

This was a sort of Lizard-in-the-street program. The interviewer asked, “And what do you think of the Tosevites here in Mexico?”

“They are not so bad. They are not quite so big or so ugly as the males from the conquest fleet made me think they would be,” replied the Lizard he was interviewing, evidently a newly revived colonist. He went on, “They seem friendly enough, too.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said the interviewer, who was as gooey with a microphone in his hand as any human ever born. “And now-”

But the colonist interrupted: “It still seems pretty strange, though: waking up and finding out the Race only owns half this planet, I mean. We ought to do something about that. It is not the way things were supposed to be in the plan, and the plan has to work.”

“Well, of course it does,” the interviewer said, “and of course it will, even if it takes a while longer than we thought it would. Now I shall turn things over to Kekkefu in Australia, who will…”

Sam listened for a while longer, now and then jotting a note. He wondered if the notion that the plan from Home would work but needed more time, which was repeated several times, was intended to get the colonists used to the way things really were by easy stages, or if it reflected the Lizard brass’ true beliefs. If the former, well and good. If the latter, there’d be more trouble ahead. He scribbled a new note.

Karen stuck her head in the door. “Good night, Mr. Yeager.”

He looked up, then looked at his watch. How had it got so late? “Oh. Good night, Karen. I hope you and Jonathan ace that test.”

Had she acted as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, he would have figured she and Jonathan had been studying something other than German-biology, most likely. But she grinned and nodded and headed for the door, so he gave them the benefit of the doubt.

As the pilot opened the hatch to the shuttlecraft, Felless said, “I never imagined my dealings with Tosevites would include dealings with those who have not yet submitted to the Race.”

“If you want to get along with the Deutsche, you will not even think about that yet, superior female,” said the pilot, who was a veteran of the conquest fleet. “As far as they are concerned, they are the biggest and best around. They even call themselves the Master Race sometimes.”

Felless’ mouth opened in a great chortle of mirth. “The impudence!” she exclaimed. “The arrogance!”

But, after she got down out of the shuttlecraft, the Deutsche seemed less impudent, even if she still got a strong impression of how arrogant they were. Their males, wrapped in gray cloth, steel helmets on their heads, automatic rifles in their hands, towered over her, so much so that she wondered if they were specially chosen for height. A couple of Deutsch landcruisers aimed their weapons at the shuttlecraft. They were recognizably the descendants of the machines the Reich had used during the fighting. They were also recognizably more formidable. Not being a soldier, she could not tell if they were a match for those the Race built. If they weren’t, though, they couldn’t have missed by much.

A male in civilian costume-white and black cloth, with a cloth headgear-came up and spoke in the language of the Race: “You are Senior Researcher Felless?”

“I am,” she answered: her first words with a wild Big Ugly.

“I am Franz Eberlein, of the Foreign Ministry,” he said. “You are to present your credentials to me before you may be permitted to enter Nuremberg.”

She had been briefed to expect such a demand. “It shall be done,” she said, knowing it was for form’s sake only. The sheet she gave him was written in both the language of the Race and in the odd, angular characters the Deutsche used to write their language. “Is all in order?” Felless asked, also for form’s sake.

Eberlein seemed to have been reading the document in her tongue, not in his own. “Alles gut,” he said, and then, in the language of the Race, “Everything is good.” He nodded to the soldiers, who, without moving, contrived to look less menacing. Then he turned and waved to the edge of the great concrete slab on which the shuttlecraft had landed. A motor vehicle of Tosevite manufacture approached. “Here is your transport to the embassy of the Race.”

It had, she was glad to see, a male of the Race steering. The Big Ugly from the Foreign Ministry opened the rear door when the vehicle stopped. As Felless went past him, he clicked his heels together and bent at the waist. That was, she had learned, a Tosevite equivalent to the posture of respect.

“Welcome to Nuremberg, Senior Researcher,” the driver said. “I hope you will forgive me for a lack of conversation as we go. This vehicle has no automatic control, so I must pay attention to the road and to the Big Uglies using it. If I cause a crash, the Race is liable for damages.”

“Which Tosevites are liable for damages from the destruction of the ships from the colonization fleet?” Felless asked. The male did not answer, perhaps because he was minding the road, perhaps because the question, as yet, had no good answer.

Big Uglies stared at Felless and her driver as they went into the capital of the Greater German Reich. She stared, too, at what had to be the most bombastic architecture she’d ever seen. The Race, for the most part, built for reasons purely practical. It had not always been so, not quite, but even the very slow change the Empire knew had long since made other styles extinct.

Not here. When the Deutsche put up buildings, they seemed to want to boast about how splendid they were. The driver explained what some of the buildings were: “That is the congress hall of the leading political faction here, the Nazis. It can hold fifty thousand. That sports palace holds four hundred thousand, though few are close enough to see well. This open area with the stands on either side is for ritualistic rallies. The Nazis have turned their ideology almost into a sort of emperor-worship. And now, as we go farther north, we come to the grand avenue, where our embassy and those of other Tosevite not-empires are located.”

Felless was not sure what made the avenue so grand. It was much wider than it needed to be, which sparked a thought. “These Big Uglies seem to equate size and grandeur,” she said.

“Truth,” the driver agreed. Looking ahead, Felless saw a familiar, functional cube of a building in the middle of the absurdly ornate structures all around. The male pointed to it. “There is our embassy. By the Tosevites’ usages, it is reckoned part of the Empire. Our males guard it, not Big Uglies.”

“This is a surprisingly sophisticated concept,” Felless said.

“They insist on reciprocity, however,”

the driver said in disparaging tones as he pulled to a halt in front of the building. “The soldiers of the independent not-empires protect their embassies in Cairo.”

As far as Felless was concerned, that showed almost intolerable arrogance on the Big Uglies’ part. She got out of the motorcar, which was heated to a level she found comfortable, and hurried inside the embassy. The males of the conquest fleet had dusted off a most archaic word there: the Race had had no need for embassies since the Empire unified Home.

Ambassador was a similarly obsolete term that turned out to be useful on Tosev 3. The Race’s ambassador to the Reich, a male named Veffani, soon summoned Felless to his office. “I greet you, Senior Researcher,” he said politely.

“I greet you.” Felless eyed him with no small curiosity. “Tell me, superior sir, if you will-is that the body paint ambassadors wore in ancient days, or were you compelled to devise something new?”

Pride rang in Veffani’s voice: “It is authentic. Research provided an image of an ambassador from long, long ago, and my body paint matches his in every particular.”

“Excellent! I am glad to hear it,” Felless said. With some reluctance, she pulled her mind away from the distant past of Home and toward here and now on Tosev 3. “My thanks for giving me this opportunity to sit in on your meeting with the not-emperor of the Deutsche tomorrow. The experience I gain should be valuable.”

“I hope that may be so, Senior Researcher,” Veffani said. “The interview will be at his residence, and conducted through a Tosevite interpreter. The one Himmler uses is reasonably fluent in our language; you should have no difficulty following what both sides say.”

“Again, I thank you, superior sir,” Felless said. “What should I look for in this-Hitler, was that the name?”

“No. Himmler. Hitler was his predecessor. Hitler was the most willful intelligent being I have ever met or, indeed, ever imagined. Himmler followed him after arcane political maneuverings no one of the Race fully understands. Before, he was in charge of the Deutsch secret police-and, in fact, he still is. He is less flamboyant, less strident, and also, I believe, less intelligent than Hitler. The one thing he is not is less stubborn. This, you will find, is a common factor among Tosevite leaders. The British Big Ugly named Churchill…” Veffani made distressed noises.

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