Down to Earth (10 page)

With the two of them in the front, and with Heinrich, Claudia, and Adolf squeezed into the back, the inside of the hydrogen-burning VW’s windows began to steam up. Drucker turned on the heater and vented the warm air up to the inside of the windshield. He wasn’t sure how much good it did, or if it did any good at all.

The light turned green. “Go, Father,” Heinrich said impatiently, even as Drucker put the auto into first gear. Heinrich was sixteen now, and learning to drive. Had he known half as much about the business as he thought he did, he would have known twice as much as he really did.

As the Volkswagen went through the intersection—no more slowly than anyone else—a great roar penetrated the drizzle and the windows. Peenemünde was only about thirty kilometers east of Greifswald. When a rocket went up, everybody in town knew about it.

“Who would that be, Father?” Adolf asked, sounding as excited as any eleven-year-old would have at the prospect of blasting into space.

“It’s Joachim’s—uh, Major Spitzler’s—turn in the rotation,” Drucker answered. “Unless he came down with food poisoning”—a euphemism for getting drunk, but Adolf didn’t need to know that—“last night, he’s heading for orbit right now.”

“When do you go up again?” Claudia sounded wistful, not excited. She enjoyed having her father down on the ground.

Drucker enjoyed it, too. But, as he had to be, he was intimately familiar with the duty roster. As the roar from the A-45 slowly faded, he said, “I’m scheduled for next Thursday.” Claudia sighed. So did Käthe. He glanced over at his wife. “It won’t be so bad.”

She sighed again. He prudently kept driving. She knew how much he loved going into space; he knew better than to rhapsodize about it. He even enjoyed weightlessness, which put him in a distinct minority. And coming back after being away gave him several honeymoons a year.
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,
he thought, cheerfully butchering Shakespeare—American spaceman had taught him the pun, which didn’t work in German.

When they got back to their neat, two-story home on the outskirts of Greifswald, the children hurried to the door and went inside. Drucker didn’t bother locking it unless everyone was going to be away longer than for an hour’s shopping. Greifswald had few thieves. Few people were rash enough to want to risk falling foul of the Ministry of Justice.

“Let’s get the packages out of the boot,” Käthe said.

“You have to wait for me—I’ve got the key,” Drucker reminded her. He pulled it from the ignition switch and walked up to the front of the car. As he walked, his mouth twisted. He, or rather Käthe, had fallen foul of the Ministry of Justice. They’d found out she had, or might have had, a Jewish grandmother—which, under the racial-purity laws of the
Reich,
made her a Jew, and liable to liquidation.

Because Drucker was a
Wehrmacht
officer, and one with important duties, he’d been able to pull strings. The
Gestapo
had set Käthe free, and given her a clean bill of racial health. But pulling those strings had cost him. He’d never rise above his present rank, not if he served his country till he was ninety. From what the commandant at Peenemünde said, he was lucky he hadn’t been thrown out of the service altogether.

He opened the boot. Käthe scooped up the bundles—clothes for the children, who outgrew them or, with the boys, wrecked them faster than he thought they had any business doing. He didn’t really want to think about clothes, though. He slipped an arm around his wife’s waist. Käthe smiled up at him. He leaned over and planted a quick kiss on her mouth. “Tonight . . .” he murmured.

“What about it?” By the smile in her voice, she knew just what he had in mind, and liked the idea, too.

Before he could answer, the telephone rang inside the house. He let out a snort of laughter. “We don’t have to worry about that. It’ll be Ilse calling Heinrich or else one of Claudia’s school friends. Nobody bothers with old folks like us.”

But he was wrong. Claudia came hurrying to the door, pig-tails flying. “It’s for you, Father—a man.”

“Did he say which man he was?” Drucker asked. Claudia shook her head. Drucker scratched his. That eliminated everyone military, and most of his civilian friends, too—though his daughter would have recognized their voices. Still scratching, he said, “All right, I’m coming.” He slammed down the Volkswagen’s boot lid and went inside.

He’d shed his overcoat by the time he got to the phone; the furnace kept the house toasty warm. Picking up the handset, he spoke briskly: “Johannes Drucker here.”

“Hello, Hans, you old son of a bitch,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “How the hell are you? Been a goddamn long time, hasn’t it?”

“Who is this?” Drucker demanded. Whoever he was, he sounded not only coarse but more than a little drunk. Drucker couldn’t place his voice, but couldn’t swear he’d never heard it before, either.

Harsh, raucous laughter dinned in his right ear. “That’s how it is, all right,” the—stranger?—said “People go up in the world, they forget their old pals. I didn’t think it would happen with you, but fuck me if I’m too surprised, either.”

“Who
is
this?” Drucker repeated. He was beginning to be sure this fellow was looking for some other Hans. Drucker had given his last name, but how often did drunks bother to listen?

He turned out to be wrong again. The other fellow said, “How many Lizard panzers did we blow to hell and gone in Poland, you driving and me at the gun?”

No wonder the voice seemed as if he might have known it before. “Grillparzer,” he said in slow wonder. “Gunther Grillparzer. Christ, man, it’s been close to twenty years.”

“Too goddamn long,” agreed the gunner with whom Drucker had shared a Panther panzer through the most desperate fighting he’d ever known. “Well, we’ll make up for lost time, you and me. We’re going to be buddies again, damned if we’re not. Just like the old days, Hans—except maybe not quite.” His laugh was almost a giggle.

Drunk, all right,
Drucker thought. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply. When Grillparzer didn’t answer right away, he found another, more innocuous, question: “What have you been doing since the fighting stopped?” Käthe was giving him a curious look. “Old army pal,” he mouthed, and she nodded and went away.

“What have I been doing?” Grillparzer echoed. “Oh, this and that, old son. Yeah, that’s about right—a little of this, a little of that, a little of something else now and again, too.”

Drucker sighed. That meant the panzer gunner was a bum or a petty criminal these days. Too bad. “So what can I do for you?” he asked. He owed Grillparzer his neck. He wouldn’t begrudge him five hundred or even a thousand marks. He could afford it, and Gunther was plainly down on his luck.

“Like I say, you’ve come up in the world,” the gunner said. “Me, I wasn’t so lucky.” His voice turned into a self-pitying whine.

“How much do you need?” Drucker asked patiently. “I’m not what you’d call rich—nobody with three kids is likely to be—but I’ll do what I can for you.”

He’d expected—he’d certainly hoped—Grillparzer would babble in sodden gratitude. That didn’t happen, either; it wasn’t his day for guessing right. Instead, the ex-gunner said, “Do you remember the night we went after those black-shirted pigdogs with our knives?”

Ice prickled up Drucker’s back. “Yes, I remember that,” he said. Toward the end of the fighting, the SS had arrested the regimental commander, Colonel Heinrich Jäger, in whose panzer Drucker and Grillparzer had both served. The panzer crew had rescued him before he got taken away from the front, and had bundled him into the airplane of a Red Air Force senior lieutenant—a pretty woman, Drucker recalled—bound for Poland. No one but the panzer crew knew what had happened to those SS men. Drucker wanted to keep it that way. “Don’t talk about it on the phone. You never know who might be listening.”

“You’re right—I don’t,” Grillparzer agreed with good humor that struck Johannes Drucker as put on. “I might lose my meal ticket if people start hearing things before I want ’em to. Can’t have that, can we, Hans?” He laughed out loud.

Drucker was feeling anything but cheerful. “What do you want from me?” he asked, hoping against hope it wasn’t what he thought.

But it was. “Whatever you’ve got, and then another fifty pfennigs besides,” Grillparzer answered. “You’ve lived high on the hog these past twenty years. You’re an officer and everything, after all. Now it’ll be my turn.”

After a look around the living room to make sure nobody in his family could hear, Drucker pressed his mouth against the phone and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “My arse. If you bring me down, I’ll sure as hell take you with me. If you don’t think I’ll sing when they start working me over, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

But Gunther Grillparzer laughed again. “Good luck,” he said. “You’re the first fellow who’s called me Gunther in a devil of a long time. Name got too hot for me to keep wearing it. The papers I’ve got with this one are damn good, too. All I have to do is write the
Gestapo
a letter. I don’t even have to sign it—you know how those things go.”

That Drucker did, only too well. The
Reich
ran on anonymous accusations. And he was already in a bad odor with the
Gestapo
and with his own higher-ups because of the accusations against Käthe. Regardless of whether there was any truth in Grillparzer’s letter, Drucker couldn’t stand another investigation. It would mean his neck, and no mistake—and probably his wife’s neck, too, after he couldn’t protect her any more.

He licked his lips. “How much do you want?” he whispered.

“Now you’re talking like a smart boy,” Grillparzer said with another nasty chuckle. “I like smart boys. Five thousand for starters. We’ll see where it goes from there.”

Drucker let out a silent sigh of relief. He could make the first payment. Maybe Grillparzer aimed to bleed him to death a little at a time, not all at once. After that first payment . . . He’d worry about that later. “How do I get you the money?” he asked.

“I’ll let you know,” the ex-gunner answered.

“I’m going up next week,” Drucker warned. “My wife doesn’t know anything about this, and I don’t want her to. Don’t mix her up in this, Grillparzer, or you’ll get trouble from me, not cash.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Hans old boy,” Grillparzer said, but that might not have been altogether true, for he went on, “All right, we’ll play that your way—for now. You’ll hear from me.” He hung up.

Käthe chose that moment to come into the living room. “And how is your old army buddy?” she asked indulgently.

“Fine,” Drucker answered, and the lie survived his wife’s long and intimate acquaintance with him. He nodded, ever so slightly. Now he had a little stretch of time in which to plan how best to commit a murder.

Ttomalss had been studying the Big Uglies ever since the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3. Sometimes he thought he understood this world’s strange inhabitants as well as anyone not hatched among them could. He certainly had that reputation among the Race. He was, after all, the only male who’d ever successfully reared a Tosevite hatchling from its earliest days to the approach of maturity. He was, so far as he knew, the only male addled enough even to try such a mad venture.

But, despite that success, despite endless other research, despite endless study of others’ research on the Big Uglies and even their research on themselves, he sometimes thought he didn’t understand them at all. He’d had a lot of those moments since coming to the Greater German
Reich.
Now he found himself facing another one.

A Big Ugly named Rascher, who called himself a physician—by Tosevite standards, maybe he was one, but Tosevite standards were low, low—spoke in the tones of calm reason that so often characterized officials of the
Reich
at their most outrageous: “Of course these individuals deserve death, Senior Researcher. They are a weakness in the fabric of the Aryan race, and so must be plucked from it without mercy.”

He used the language of the Race. As far as Ttomalss was concerned, that only made the horror underlying his words worse. The researcher said, “I do not understand the logic behind your statement.”
I ought to learn that phrase in the language of the Deutsche,
Ttomalss thought.
Spirits of Emperors past know I use it often enough.

“Is it not obvious?” Dr. Rascher said. “Does the Race not also punish males who mate with other males?”

Ttomalss shrugged; that was a gesture the Race and Tosevites shared. “I have heard of such matings happening among us,” he admitted. “During the mating season, we are apt to become rather frantic. But the occurrences are rare and accidental, so what point to making a fuss, let alone punishing the behavior?”

“It is not rare and accidental among us,” the Big Ugly said. “Some misguided males deliberately pursue it. They must be rooted out, exterminated, lest they pollute us with this unnatural behavior.”

“I do not understand,” Ttomalss said again. “If they mate among themselves, they cannot have hatchlings. This in itself eliminates them from your gene pool. Where is the need to root out and exterminate?”

“Mating among males is filthy and degenerate,” Dr. Rascher declared. “It corrupts the young in the
Reich
.”

“Even if what you say is true—and I have seen no evidence to that effect—do you not believe the problem to be self-correcting?” Ttomalss asked. “I repeat, these males are unlikely to breed, and so, except for new mutations—assuming this trait to be genetically induced, about which I have seen no evidence either for or against—will in the course of centuries gradually tend to diminish. You Deutsch Tosevites, if you will forgive me for saying so, have always struck the Race as being impatient even for your species.”

He had been around Big Uglies long enough to recognize Dr. Rascher’s glower for what it was. The Deutsch physician snapped, “And the Race has always struck us Aryans as being insanely tolerant. If you are daft enough to put up with degeneracy in your own kind for centuries or millennia on end, that is your affair. If we choose to take direct action in uprooting it, that is ours.”