Down to Earth (73 page)

“You’re welcome, Comrade General Secretary,” the marshal answered. “Here, for the sake of the
rodina
, the motherland, we have to pull together.”

When the Nazis invaded, Stalin had said the same thing. He’d practiced what he preached, too. He’d even cozied up to the Russian Orthodox Church after beating it about the head and shoulders for almost twenty years. In an emergency, he’d been willing to jettison a lot of ideology. And hadn’t Lenin done the same when he’d instituted the New Economic Policy to keep the country from starving after the end of the civil war?

“Yes, we all have to pull together. We all have to do everything we can,” Molotov agreed. And then, because he could speak as frankly to Zhukov as to anyone save possibly Gromyko, he added, “For the life of me, though, I don’t know how much good it will do, or if it will do any good whatever.” He hung up without waiting for a reply.

When Johannes Drucker strolled into the mess hall at Peenemünde, he discovered that the powers that be had wasted little time. Here it was, only two days after Ernst Kaltenbrunner had been named
Führer,
and a color photograph of him now occupied the frame that had held Heinrich Himmler’s picture for years.

Drucker wasn’t the only man studying it. From behind him, somebody said, “He looks like a tough son of a bitch. We need one of those right now.”

That struck Drucker as a pretty fair assessment, though he was less sure about the need. Kaltenbrunner was in his vigorous early sixties, with a big head and heavy features. He was leaning forward, so that he seemed to stare out through the camera lens at whoever was looking at him. Even with the advantage of twenty years, Drucker wouldn’t have cared to meet him in a dark alley.

Till Himmler’s death and even afterwards, Drucker hadn’t paid Kaltenbrunner much attention. Himmler kept his strength by not letting anyone around him be strong; the man who now led the Greater German
Reich
had been just another official in a fancy uniform standing at the old
Führer
’s back in Party rallies and state functions. Now the whole world would find out what sort of man had been inhabiting that uniform.

Grabbing a mess tray, Drucker got into line. Cooks’ helpers spooned sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, and blood sausage onto the tray. Another helper gave him a small mug of beer. He carried the full tray to a table and sat down to eat.

Nobody sat near him. He’d got used to that. He knew he suffered from political unreliability, a disease always dangerous and often fatal—and highly contagious. He’d stayed away from men with such an illness in the days before the SS got curious about Käthe’s racial purity, and before Gunther Grillparzer had tried blaming him for the murders during the fighting of which he was, unfortunately, guilty. No one had proved anything—he was still here, still breathing. Even so . . .

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the loudspeaker in the mess hall blared out his name: “Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Report to the base commandant’s office! You are ordered to report to the base commandant’s office!”

Drucker took a last bite of blood sausage.
It might really be the last bite I ever take,
he thought as he got to his feet. Most of the men in the hall looked down at their own mess trays. Sure enough, they thought political unreliability was contagious. A few stared avidly. They
wanted
him to get a noodle in the back of the neck.

He hurried to General Dornberger’s office, wondering if a couple of hulking fellows in SS black would be waiting for him in the antechamber. If they were—well, he still had his service pistol on his hip. But what would they do to his family if he made them kill him fast instead of taking him away to do a lingering, nasty job?

With such thoughts going through his mind, he wondered why he kept heading toward the commandant’s office instead of running.
Because you know damn well they’d catch you, that’s why.
And maybe he wasn’t in a whole lot of trouble. He laughed. Fat chance.

When he got to the antechamber, he saw no bully boys in black shirts, only Dornberger’s dyspeptic adjutant. Shooting out his arm in salute, he said, “Reporting as ordered.”

“Yes.” Major Neufeld eyed him. “I rather wondered if you would. The general expected you, though. Go on in.”

“Reporting as ordered,” Drucker said again after he’d saluted General Dornberger.

Dornberger puffed on his cigar, then set it in the glass ashtray on his desk. He now had a photo of Dr. Kaltenbrunner in his office, too. “Drucker, you are a man who does his duty,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Drucker said.

“In spite of everything,” Dornberger went on, and then waved a hand to show Drucker didn’t need to answer that. The base commandant drew on the cigar again. “I have an A-45 on the gantry, fueled and ready for launch. Are you prepared to go into space within the hour?”

“Jawohl!”
Drucker saluted again. Then he went from military automaton to honestly confused human being. “Sir, am I allowed? Has my grounding been rescinded?”

Instead of answering, General Dornberger picked up a flimsy sheet of yellow paper. “I have here an order for your immediate arrest and incarceration. I got it half an hour ago. I have spent that half hour documenting how I ordered your launch last night because of shortages of pilots. I will finish the documentation in the time remaining until the rocket goes up. Then, of course, just too late, I will receive this telegram. How unfortunate that I could not obey the order, don’t you agree?”

Try as he would, Drucker couldn’t hold his stiff brace. His knees sagged. He stared at Walter Dornberger. “My God, sir,” he breathed. “Won’t they put your head on the block instead of mine?”

“Not a chance,” Dornberger said calmly. “They haven’t got anyone else who can run Peenemünde even a quarter as well, and they bloody well know it. They’ll yell at me and tell me I was a naughty boy, and I’ll go on about my business for as long as I can go on about it.”

“For as long as you can go on about it,” Drucker echoed. “What about me? What do I do if they order me to land?”

“Ignore them,” General Dornberger told him. “You’re carrying two missiles with explosive-metal bombs. They can’t argue too hard—or they’d better not.”

“But I can’t stay up forever, even so,” Drucker said. “What do I do when I run low on oxygen?”

“Maybe I can fix things by then,” Dornberger replied. “if you hear the phrase ‘served with honor’ in any communication, you will know I have done it. If you do not hear that phrase, you would do better to land somewhere outside the Greater German
Reich
.”

Drucker gulped. What would they do to his family if he did that?

Before he could speak, Dornberger held up a hand. “I do not expect any of this to matter, Lieutenant Colonel. When you go up there, I think you will have every opportunity to make yourself a hero for the
Vaterland
.”

That could mean only one thing. In a small voice, Drucker said, “The balloon is going up?”

“With him at the helm?” Dornberger jerked a contemptuous thumb at the new color photograph on the wall behind him. “Yes, the balloon is going up. If he weren’t the
Führer
, he’d make a good butcher’s assistant. But he is, and we must obey.” He might have been speaking more to himself than to Drucker. Then he grew brisk once more. “A motorcar will be waiting outside. It will take you to the gantry. And Drucker—”

“Yes, sir?”

“If we must go down, let the Lizards know they’ve been in a brawl.”

“Yes, sir!” Drucker saluted, spun on his heel, and marched out of the office. He saluted Major Neufeld, too, even though he outranked the commandant’s adjutant.

The Volkswagen was there. The driver said, “To the gantry sir?” Drucker nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Air-cooled engine roaring flatulently, the VW sped off.

At the gantry the crew had Drucker’s pressure suit, tailored to his measure, ready and waiting. The upper stage of the A-45 there wasn’t
Käthe
; he could tell that at a glance. Someone else had his baby. This upper stage looked older, more battered, almost of an earlier generation. In the crisis, the Reich was using anything that could fly.

A couple of the technicians gave Drucker curious or hostile looks as they helped him into his pressure suit. His fellow pilots weren’t the only ones who knew about his troubles with the higher-ups, of course. But then one of the techs said, “Good to see you cleared for launch again, sir.”

“Thanks, Helmut,” Drucker answered. “I’ve been away too long. Going back will feel good.”
It will certainly feel a hell of a lot better than getting thrown in the guardhouse and handed over to the blackshirts for interrogation.

But, as he rode the elevator to the upper stage of the A-45, he wondered about that. If the new
Führer
really was crazy enough to go to war with the Lizards over Poland, how long would the German spacecraft in Earth orbit last? For that matter, how much longer would the
Hermann Göring
last, out in the asteroid belt?

He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about that. And if the Race blew him out of orbit, odds were he’d be dead before he knew it. He wouldn’t be able to say that if the SS got its hooks into him.

Hans-Ulrich’s Bus.
That was the name painted on the upper stage’s flank. When Drucker climbed into the bus, he discovered it had seen better days. Everything looked worn, shabby; he half expected to find cigarette butts under the leather-covered acceleration couch. But, as he went through the checks, he found everything in working order. A good thing, too, because they were going to launch him any which way. A technician slammed the entry port shut. Drucker dogged it. Conversations with the launch crew were quicker, more perfunctory, than they had been before the crisis. They wanted to get him out there, and only some obviously looming disaster would keep them from doing it.

It would be a disaster for me if they aborted, all right,
Drucker thought.

But they didn’t. The last numbers of the countdown sounded in his earphones, and then the great thunder of the A-45’s main engine sounded in every fiber of his body. Acceleration slammed him back into the seat. He wondered whether
Hans Ulrich’s Bus
had an old-model seat, or if it was simply that he hadn’t gone up for a while. Whichever it was, the kick in the pants seemed harder than usual.

All the instruments read as they should have. As far as they could judge, the flight was perfect. When acceleration cut off, with the upper stage in its proper orbit, Drucker’s stomach lurched a couple of times before settling down.
I’ve been away too long,
he thought with something approaching horror. He was normally one of the minority who enjoyed weightlessness.

And then, as he’d known it would, the radio squawked into life: “Lieutenant Colonel Drucker! Lieutenant Colonel Drucker! Do you read me, Lieutenant Colonel Drucker?”

“Not very well—your signal is breaking up,” he lied.

It didn’t matter. The radio operator on the other end of the circuit went right on talking: “You are to land your upper stage immediately, Lieutenant Colonel. Ground telemetry has discovered an oxygen-line leak. Your safety is endangered.”

In normal times, that would have got him down in a hurry. Now he smiled and said, “My instruments say everything is normal. The
Reich
needs me here. I’ll take the chance and stay.”

“Your patriotism is appreciated”—I’ll
bet,
Drucker thought—“but we cannot take the risk. You are ordered to return to Earth as soon as possible.”

“For the sake of the
Vaterland
, I must disobey this order.” Drucker’s smile got bigger. Two hypocrites were trying to outlie each other.

The radioman cajoled. He talked about the blemish on Drucker’s sterling service record. He talked about disciplinary action after Drucker did land. Before very long, he faded out of range. Another one would pick up the thread soon. Drucker was sure of it. But that didn’t matter. They couldn’t talk him down. He didn’t think they’d have another flier in an upper stage try to shoot him down. His smile slipped then. No, they’d save that for the Lizards—and the Lizards were all too likely to be able to pull it off.

 
19

Jonathan Yeager’s voice broke in exasperation, something that hadn’t happened to him in a couple of years. “But, Mom!” he cried.

“No,” his mother repeated. “N-O. No. You are not going up there while the Race and the Germans are liable to start throwing things at each other any minute now, and that’s final.”

“Your mother’s right,” his father said. “It’s just too dangerous right now. Let’s wait and see how things work out. Kassquit’s not going anywhere.”

“It’s not just Kassquit,” Jonathan said. “It’s the chance to do all this stuff, to go up there, to talk with the Lizards.” He felt his ears getting hot just the same. It wasn’t just Kassquit, but a lot of it was.

His father shook his head. “Wait,” he said. “After things settle down—if things settle down—the invitation will still be open.”

“Dad . . .” Jonathan took a deep breath. “Dad, the invitation was for
me,
you know. If the Lizards want me up there, if they’ll take me up there, I can go.”

“You can,” his mother said. “You can, but you may not. You do not have our permission.”

Another deep breath—and then one more for luck. “I’d like your permission, sure, but I don’t have to have it. I’m twenty-one now. If they’ll take me, I’m going to go, and that’s flat.”

“You’re doing no such thing,” his mother said through clenched teeth.

“Barbara—” his father said in a tone of voice that made his mother look as if she’d been stabbed in the back. His father took a deep breath of his own, then went on, “I was eighteen when I left the farm, you know.”

“You weren’t heading off to places where the world could blow up any minute, though,” Jonathan’s mother said.

“No, but I might have if I’d been a little older,” his father answered. “Plenty of boys Jonathan’s age couldn’t get off the farm fast enough to go fight in the trenches. And I tried to join the Army after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t have me.” He opened his mouth and tapped one of the front teeth on his upper plate. “They took me after the Lizards landed, but they took anybody who was breathing then.”

If they’d taken him earlier I wouldn’t be here, because he never would have met Mom,
Jonathan thought. His mind shied away from things like that. Dealing with what was seemed hard enough; might-have-beens were a lot worse.

“Let him go, Barbara,” his father said. “It’s what he wants to do—and the Lizards have a lot of ships out there. Even if the worst happens, odds are he’ll be fine.”

“Odds!” His mother made it into the filthiest word in the language. She turned on her heel and walked back to the bedroom with long, furious strides. She slammed the door after her when she went in there. Jonathan couldn’t remember her ever doing that before.

“Congratulations,” his father said. “You’ve won. Go pack a bag. Your mom’s right about this much: you may be up there longer than you expect.”

“Okay. Jesus, Dad, thanks!” Jonathan bounced to his feet. He started to hurry off to his own room, then stopped and turned back. Hesitantly, he asked, “How much trouble will you get into for this?”

“As long as you come home safe, nothing that won’t blow over.” His father hesitated, too. “If anything happens to you, I’ll be in too much trouble with myself to worry about what your mother does.”

Jonathan didn’t care to think about that, so he didn’t. He hurried into his bedroom and packed shorts and underwear and socks, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a razor and a pack of blades. He wasn’t worried about food; if the Lizards had fed Kassquit all these years, they could take care of him, too. And he packed something he’d bought at a drugstore he didn’t usually go to: a box of Trojans.

His father took care of the arrangements with the Race and with his own superiors. At supper that evening—as brittle a meal as Jonathan had ever eaten—his dad said, “Launch from the Race’s shuttlecraft is a little past four tomorrow afternoon. I’ll drive you to the airport.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said. By his mother’s closed expression, she didn’t think it was anywhere close to okay. His dad didn’t look convinced, either. Neither one of them contradicted him out loud, though.

He thought about calling Karen. In the end, he didn’t. What could he say, considering why he was going into space? Either nothing or a pack of lies. Nothing seemed better.

He took care of Mickey and Donald the next day, knowing he wouldn’t for a while. He waved to them. “I’m going away, but I’ll come back pretty soon. Bye-bye.” They waved back. Mickey made a noise that might have been bye-bye, but it might not have, too. He and Donald talked more than baby Lizards had any business doing, but less than baby people.

His father took him up to the airport. Cops—no, they were soldiers—escorted the car to the shuttlecraft’s landing area. “Thanks, Dad,” Jonathan said as he got out.

“I’m not so sure you’re welcome,” his father answered, but then he stuck out his hand. Jonathan leaned back in to shake it.

Down came the shuttlecraft, its braking rocket roaring louder than any jet engine Jonathan had ever heard. When the entry hatch opened, he climbed the ladder—awkwardly, with his bag—and got inside.

“Get in. Strap down. As soon as we are refueled, we shall depart,” the shuttlecraft pilot said.

“It shall be done, superior sir.” Jonathan hoped he’d guessed right. The pilot didn’t contradict him, so he supposed he had.

Having gone into space twice before, Jonathan found the third launch routine, which was probably a testimony to the shuttlecraft pilot’s skill. The male tended to the craft all the way through the flight, and said a lot less than the female named Nesseref had on his previous trip to the starship. Jonathan wondered what the male would have done if he’d been sick from weightlessness. He was glad he didn’t have to find out.

As soon as he left the shuttlecraft and entered the starship, a Lizard seized his bag from him, declaring, “We shall search this.” After he had searched it—he opened the toothpaste tube to see what was inside and asked what the razor was for—he gave it back. “Nothing useful in sabotaging the ship. Come along.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Jonathan said once more. Sabotaging the ship was the last thing he wanted to do.
The Race is worried,
he thought.
And I’m not even a German. I wonder if they really understand how different different countries are.

As he had before, he got heavier the farther he went from the starship’s hub. At last, when he was close to his proper weight, the Lizard escorting him said, “This is the chamber holding the female Kassquit.”

Heart thumping, more sweat on his forehead than the heat could account for, Jonathan went inside. “I greet you, superior female,” he said, and bent into the posture of respect.

“I greet you,” Kassquit replied, and returned the gesture. To one side of the chamber stood something he hadn’t expected to see in a starship: an army cot, from whose army he wasn’t sure. The Lizards had done some research, then, and hadn’t got everything wrong.

Jonathan was acutely conscious of being alone in a room with an attractive young woman not wearing any clothes. He was even more acutely conscious of Lizards walking along the corridor outside and every so often swiveling an eye turret toward the chamber to see what was going on. He said, “Can you shut that door?”

Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She touched a button by the doorway. The door silently slid shut. “Is that better?” she asked. Now Jonathan used the gesture. Kassquit asked, “You prefer privacy, then? Among the Race, from what I have seen, it matters very little.”

“It matters for Tosevites.” Jonathan tacked on an emphatic cough.

“You may have less than you expect, but I suppose expectations count, too,” Kassquit said. While Jonathan was still trying to untangle that, she added, “You understand, then, that you have come up here for the purpose of mating.”

She didn’t beat around the bush at all. Jonathan stopped worrying about the first part of what she’d said; the second demanded every bit of his attention. “Yes,” he said carefully. “I understand that.”

“Very well.” Kassquit started to say something, then stopped. When she spoke again, he would have bet it wasn’t what she’d first intended to say. It was, instead, an almost plaintive question: “Are you nervous?”

“Yes,” he repeated, and used another emphatic cough.

“Good,” she said. “So am I. This is very strange for me. Being a Tosevite at all is strange for me. Being one in this way . . . it is something I have not done before, and had not imagined I would want to do before.”

“I understand—I hope I understand,” he said. He wondered if so much had ever ridden on a man and a woman’s lying down together. He had his doubts. “I will do my best to please you.”

“I thank you,” Kassquit replied gravely. “I will do the same for you.” Without missing a beat, she went on, “If we are to do this, should you not remove your wrappings?”

“I suppose so.” Jonathan knew he sounded sheepish. He hadn’t expected her to be quite so matter-of-fact. In one quick gesture, he pulled off his shorts and the jockeys he wore beneath them.

Kassquit studied him.
She never seen a naked man before,
he realized. He knew a certain amount of pride in rising to the occasion. She came up to him and asked, “May I touch you?” He nodded, then remembered to use the gesture she understood. She wrapped her palm around him. Then, to his astonishment, she dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth.

“How . . . do you know to do that?” he spluttered.

“I watched videos,” she answered seriously. “I wanted to be prepared. Am I doing it correctly?” She sounded anxious.

“Yes,” he said with another emphatic cough, wondering where on Earth—or off it—she could have got stag movies. “Oh, yes.” But as she bent toward him again, he said, “Wait.” She looked up at him. Her face didn’t, couldn’t, show anything. Had it, he thought it would have shown puzzlement. He pointed toward the cot. “If you lie there, I will try to please you.”

She got to her feet. As she walked to the cot, she remarked, “I do not think anyone has ever tried to please me.” The resigned way she said it made tears come to Jonathan’s eyes. It also made him all the more resolved to do everything he could for her.

She didn’t get kissing. He found that out at once, when he knelt on the metal floor by the cot. But when his mouth went to her breasts instead of her lips, she let out a soft, surprised sigh. The one bit of advice he’d had from his father was,
Don’t hurry.
He tried to remember that now, when hurrying was what he most wanted to do. He stroked-her all over before he let his hand slip between her legs. She was already wet. He moved his head down a little later. He’d done that only a couple of times with Karen, and didn’t know how good he was. Kassquit’s being shaved made things easier, or at least less distracting. And the unrestrained noises Kassquit made left him with no doubt he’d done well enough.

He went back to his bag and took out the box of Trojans. Kassquit reached under the cot and held out-an identical box. They both laughed, Kassquit first in the Race’s fashion and then noisily, like a human.

Jonathan put on a rubber. He’d practiced at home; he hadn’t wanted to make a botch of it. He was about to get down on the cot between Kassquit’s legs when a horrible wordless hissing broke out from a speaker overhead. Kassquit sprang up in alarm. Words, words in the language of the Race, followed: “Emergency stations! We are under attack. Emergency stations at once! We are under attack!”

Kassquit ran past the wild Big Ugly to the door. When she hit the button, it slid open. “Come with me.” she said to Jonathan Yeager. “You have no proper emergency station, so come to my compartment.”

“It shall be done.” He tossed the box of elastic sheaths into his satchel, which he picked up. Then he realized he was still wearing a sheath himself. He peeled it off and threw it on the floor. Kassquit disapproved of such untidiness. As he followed her out into the corridor, he asked, “Is it the Deutsche?”

“I do not know what else it could be,” Kassquit answered. “Hurry!” The emergency warning echoed through the ship.