Down to Earth (79 page)

Pierre wasn’t worried. After stubbing out the cigarette, he said, “Go on, Monique. Go shopping. Spend my money on whatever you want. After the Lizards finish the Nazis, they will still need people to buy and sell for them. We will be waiting. And if the Germans come back in another twenty years”—he shrugged—“they will need people to buy and sell for them, too. And we will still be waiting.”

That
wasn’t a classical Roman attitude, but she had no doubt the inhabitants of ancient Massilia had shared it. And they would have had reason to do so. But not even Caesar’s sack of the ancient city would have wrecked it anywhere near so thoroughly as one explosive-metal bomb could. Monique wasn’t sure how well Pierre understood that.

She found another question to ask her brother: “How long can you hold out if the Lizards don’t come into Marseille to buy what you have to sell?”

He chuckled again. “Oh, twenty or thirty years, I would say. They make me extra money. I don’t deny that. But I do most of my business with people, anyhow. I can go right on doing that. Whether there is a war or not, plenty of things come into the Old Port. There aren’t enough Germans in the world to look through all the little boats that sail in from Spain and from Italy and from Greece and from Turkey.”

“Ah, Turkey,” Lucie said rapturously. “The business we do with Turkey, all by itself, could keep us afloat.”

“Poppies, I suppose,” Monique said, and her brother and his lover nodded. Monique had visions of opium dens and other sinister things. She didn’t know any details. She didn’t want to know any details. She shook her head. “Sordid.”

“It could be.” Pierre shrugged. “In fact, I suppose it is. You do not see Lucie or me using these things, do you? But there is a great deal of money to be had, from the Lizards and from the Nazis and from—” He broke off.

From the French,
he’d been about to say. Monique knew it. Her brother wasn’t too proud to take his profits wherever he could find them. And she’d been living off his largesse ever since escaping Dieter Kuhn. She hadn’t thought till now about how filthy the bargain was. Maybe she hadn’t let herself think about it.

She took a deep breath, getting ready to tell him in great detail what she thought of him for doing what he did. Before she could speak, though, sirens all through Marseille started to scream. She sprang to her feet. “That is the attack warning!”

“It can’t be!” Pierre and Lucie said it together. But it was. The way they leaped up from their seats, the sudden horrid fear on their faces, said they knew it was, too.

Monique wasted no time arguing with them. “To the shelter, and pray God we aren’t too late.” With that, she was out the door and rushing down the stairs. Her brother and Lucie didn’t argue with her, either. They followed.

“How soon?” Lucie moaned. Even terrified, she sounded sexy. Monique wondered if that was worth admiring. But she also wondered, much more, about the question. If the Lizards had launched a missile from Spain, it would be in before she got to the basement of the block of flats, and that would be that. If it came from farther away, she had more time—but not much.

Down, down, down. The sirens kept screaming. Monique felt like screaming, too. Farther behind her, people with slower reactions
were
screaming, screaming with the dreadful fear that they might be too late, too late. She knew that fear. She clamped down on it till she tasted blood and realized she was also clamping down on the inside of her lower lip.

And there was the door to the cellar.
“Merci, mon cher Dieu,”
she gasped as she rushed inside: the most sincere prayer she’d sent up in many years. Oh, she’d wished Dieter Kuhn dead, but wishing that turned out to be far more pallid than wishing that she herself should stay alive.

Pierre and Lucie came in right behind her. Pierre started to slam the door, but a big, burly man almost trampled him. Monique grabbed her brother. Cursing, he said, “You’re going to kill us all.”

She had no good answer to that, not after her prayer of a moment before. The discovery that there were circumstances under which she would rather not stay alive was as astonishing as the discovery of how much she wanted to live.

More people crowded into the shelter. And then came a roar like the end of the world—
just like the end of the world,
Monique thought—and the lights went out. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake. It knocked Monique off her feet. She thought she was dead then.

Someone—maybe the burly man—did slam the door. After that, the darkness should have been complete, absolute, stygian. But it wasn’t, not quite. A light brighter than summer sunshine at its hottest showed all around the cracks between the door and its frame. Ever so slowly, it faded and reddened. Then it
was
black. Monique didn’t think the light itself had vanished quite so abruptly. She judged it much more likely that the block of flats had fallen down and cut off the view.

People—men and women both—were screaming about being buried alive. In the pitch blackness, Monique understood the fear, not least because she felt it herself. And then her brother flicked a flame from a cigarette lighter. “Ahh,” everyone in the shelter said together.

Pierre held up the lighter like a sacred talisman. “There will be candles,” he said in a voice of great certainty. “Hurry and find them.”

There were several boxes. They’d fallen off their shelf, but a woman brought one to him. He lit it and closed his lighter with a snap. The candle flame was pallid, but ever so much better than being stuck in the dark. Monique was still afraid, but much less than she had been.

Pierre went right on speaking with authority: “Now we wait. We wait as long as we have air and food and water—or, better, wine—and even this little light. The longer we wait, the safer it will be when we have to come out. I do not know if it will be safe—we will be taking a chance, of that there is no doubt—but it will be safer.”

From everything Monique knew about explosive-metal weapons, he was speaking the gospel truth. Even now, radiation would be entering the shelter, but she didn’t know what she could do about that. Or rather, she did know: nothing. She turned to—turned on—her brother and snarled, “No, they won’t bomb Marseille. You have friends in high places. You know these things.”

From the way the candlelight filled the lines of his face with shadow, he looked to have aged twenty years. He said, “I was wrong. Shall I tell you I was right? I have some hope. If we had been closer to where the bomb burst, we would already be dead.”

Out of the darkness where the candlelight didn’t reach, someone said, “Now we have to see whether radiation sickness kills us in the next day or two. If it doesn’t kill us, we have to see how many years it takes off our lives.”

“Shut up,” Monique said fiercely. She didn’t want to think about that; she wanted to remember she’d stayed alive so far. “We have to see how much there is to eat, and how much to drink, as my brother said. And we have to see how many buckets and pails we can find.” Her nose wrinkled. The shelter would be a nasty place before long. Something else occurred to her. “And we’ll need shovels and poles and picks, if there are any, to dig our way out when we can’t stay here any more. If there aren’t, we’ll have to do it with our bare hands.”
If we can.
She didn’t want to think about that, about being entombed here forever. And she didn’t want to think about what they would find when they did—if they did—dig themselves out. She stood there in the cellar, and stared and stared at the candle. With her classical training, the flickering flame put her in mind of her own life. But if the candle went out, they could light another. If she went out . . .

One more thing she didn’t want to think about.

Johannes Drucker had done everything he could with
Hans-Ulrich’s Bus,
but he wasn’t going to be able to stay in space much longer. He’d managed to make the air purifier go a lot further than it was designed to, but he’d be eating his underwear before too long—though by now, after four mortal weeks, it was far too filthy to be appetizing.

He knew why he was still alive, when most if not all of his comrades up here had died: he’d never got orders to attack the Lizards. After a while, the
Reich
had stopped ordering him to land. But no one down on the ground had included him in the assault on the Race. Maybe the powers that be had thought him too unreliable to be trusted in the fight. Maybe, too, they’d just forgotten about him by now. He wasn’t sure who, if anybody, was in charge down on the ground these days.

Maybe I should have done what I could to hurt the Lizards, even without orders,
he thought, for about the five hundredth time. But the war was madness. As far as he was concerned, Poland wasn’t worth having. He’d fought there, and did not hold the place in high esteem. But Himmler and then Kaltenbrunner had thought otherwise, and the new
Führer
threw the
Wehrmacht
over the border, as Hitler had in 1939.

“We did better then,” Drucker muttered. The Poles hadn’t been able to fight worth a damn, no matter how brave they were. The Race, on the other hand . . .

The Race, he realized, had decided to use the
Reich
’s attack as an excuse to smash Germany. The Lizards had warned they would do just that, but nobody in authority seemed to have listened to them. They hadn’t been kidding.

“German upper stage!” The radio crackled to life—in English. “Anybody home in there, German upper stage? Over.”

“Am I an idiot, that I’m going to answer you?” Drucker asked. He’d maintained radio silence ever since the slugging started. If he started transmitting, the Lizards would get a fix on him and blow him out of the sky. He’d known Americans were naive, but this struck him as excessive.

“German upper stage! German upper stage! If you’re alive in there, you might as well give up,” the American flier said. “What’s the point to you ending up dead, and maybe more Lizards, too? You aren’t going to win the war all by yourself.” Silence for a few seconds, then, “Over and out.”

Silence returned. Drucker grimaced. He scratched his chin. He’d grown quite a beard this past month. The American made good sense, in a way—but only in a way. As a soldier, he was supposed to strike at the enemy, wasn’t he?

Then why haven’t you?
He pondered that, as he had so often before. He came up with the same answers he had before, too: “Nobody gave me any orders. And it’s a goddamn stupid war, too.”

He glanced down toward the Earth. He was approaching Europe, though clouds hid much of the continent. Even if they hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to see much. From 350 kilometers up, even massive devastation was invisible. But he’d seen bombs blazing like suns as they burst at night. And he knew there had been many more he hadn’t seen.

Every time he passed above the wreckage of the
Reich,
he wondered if he would get orders at last, though by now he’d almost given up on it. If he did get them, this would be the place—the only place. The Lizards had knocked out all the German relay ships. It had taken them a while: longer than it should have, even if the delay worked to the
Reich
’s advantage. They never had paid as much attention to the seas as they should have. But they’d finally got round to it.

Did the
Reich
have any working radars these days? If not, his superiors wouldn’t even know he was up here. Of course, all his superiors might well be dead. His family all too likely was. He’d cried himself sick about that the day the missiles started flying. He blamed Kaltenbrunner much more than the Lizards. The Race had been content with the status quo. The
Führer
hadn’t.

“He should have been, damn him,” Drucker said. He’d cursed himself sick that first day, too.

A burst of static came from the radio. “Spacecraft of the Greater German
Reich
! All spacecraft of the Greater German
Reich
! The fight for justice in Europe continues,” a voice said in clear German. “Punish the Lizard aggressors however and wherever you may. Your sacrifice will not be in vain!”

When the message finished, it began repeating. As far as Drucker could tell, it was identical the second time around. A recording? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Was anyone alive down there to give orders to the remaining German spacecraft? Could anybody down there be alive at all?

Millions, tens of millions, of people down there were surely dead. But what about the high command? He had to admit that he wasn’t sure. Party and military leadership had known for a long time that a war with the Race might be coming. They would have done everything they could to make sure they could go on fighting it.

In the middle of the recorded message’s third repetition, it suddenly broke off. A different voice came on the air, one that sounded both military and tired unto death: “Be it known that all charges against Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker are rescinded and that he is raised in grade to colonel. By order of Walter Dornberger, acting
Führer
of the Greater German
Reich
.”

Drucker stared at the radio receiver. His boss at Peenemünde was running whatever was left of the
Reich?
How had that happened? When had it happened? Why hadn’t Dornberger started broadcasting sooner?

And, even more to the point, if Dornberger
was
running the
Reich,
why in hell wasn’t he surrendering just as fast as he could? He’d thought the idea of war against the Race utter madness, as Drucker had. It had proved to be utter madness, too. Why wasn’t he giving up, then?

Did he think he could win? Had the Race refused to accept his surrender? Was he trying to prove he could still hurt the Lizards after they’d done their worst to Western and Central Europe?

Did any of that matter? Reluctantly, Drucker decided it didn’t. An order that included all German spacecraft certainly included him. And, he had to admit, Dornberger was a
Führer
he could respect. If he was going to go out, he would go out in a blaze of glory.

For the first time in quite a while, he looked out through the canopy with a view to sizing up targets. The points of light that moved against the stars were in Earth orbit, as he was. Some of them, the bright ones, shone more brilliant than Venus. Those would be the starships of the conquest and colonization fleets, the ships the Lizards couldn’t afford to lose.