Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

“Oh, a plague!” Atvar cried. “That makes resupplying Poland all the more difficult.” He turned both eye turrets back to Henry Cabot Lodge. “You see, Ambassador, that the Deutsche do not yet believe the war to be over. If they do not, I cannot, either. Goodbye.” For a wonder, Lodge left without another word.

Not for the first time, Sam Yeager spoke reassuringly to his wife: “He’s all right, hon. There’s the message.” He pointed to the computer monitor. “Read it yourself-he’s fine. Nothing bad has happened to him.” As a matter of fact, he’s probably screwing himself silly and having the time of his life. He didn’t say that to Barbara.

She wasn’t reassured, either. “He shouldn’t be up there in the first place,” she said. “He ought to be down here in L.A., where it’s safe.”

Yeager sighed. Barbara was probably right. “I really didn’t think the Germans would be dumb enough to start a war with the Lizards. Honest, I didn’t.”

“Well, you should have,” Barbara said. “And you should have put your foot down and kept him from going, especially since you know the main thing he was going up there to do.”

“It’s one way to get to know somebody. Sometimes it’s the fastest way to get to know somebody.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “It worked like that for us, if you want to think back about it.”

Barbara turned red. All she cared to remember these days was that she was respectably married, and had been for a long time. She didn’t like remembering that she’d started sleeping with Sam during the fighting, when she’d thought her then-husband dead. She especially didn’t like remembering that she’d married Sam not long before finding out her then-husband remained very much alive. Maybe the marriage wasn’t so perfectly respectable after all.

If she hadn’t got pregnant right away, she would have gone back to Jens Larssen in a red-hot minute, too, Sam thought. He’d heard Larssen had come to a hard, bad end later on. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if Barbara had gone back to Jens. Would the physicist not have gone off the deep end? No way to tell. No way to know. Sam was pretty sure he would have been a lot less happy had she chosen the other way, though.

Barbara said, “What on earth are we going to tell Karen?”

“The only thing I’m going to tell her is that Jonathan’s fine,” Sam answered. “I’ve already told her that. I hope to heaven that’s the only thing you’re going to tell her, too. If Jonathan wants to tell her anything else, that’s his business. Not yours. Not mine. His. His girlfriend is his problem. He’s twenty-one.”

“So he kept telling us.” Barbara hardly bothered hiding her bitterness “But he’s living under our roof-”

“Not at the moment,” Sam put in.

“And whose fault is that?” his wife demanded. “He couldn’t have gone if you hadn’t let him.”

“It would have been harder,” Yeager admitted. “But I think he would have managed it. And if we had put our feet down, he’d be mad at us for years. When would this chance have come along again?”

“This chance for what?” Barbara asked. “To go into space, or to go into…?” She broke off, grimacing. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”

“Sooner or later, the Nazis will run out of upper stages and orbiting bombs,” Sam said. “Then it’ll be safe for the Lizards to let Jonathan come home.”

“In the meantime, I’ll go out of my mind worrying,” Barbara said.

“He’s fine,” Yeager said. “He’ll be fine.” He’d been saying that all along. Sometimes, on good days, he managed to convince himself for a little while. Most of the time, he was as nearly out of his mind with worry as his wife was. Long training in the minor leagues and in the Army had taught him not to show whether or not things were going his way at any given moment. That didn’t mean he lacked feelings, only that he kept them inside more than Barbara did.

“He never should have gone up there.” Barbara glanced at the message-the very reassuring message-on the computer screen, shook her head, and strode out of the study.

Yeager left the connection to the Race’s electronic network and went back to review messages he’d received in the past. The one he’d got from Straha a little before the Germans attacked Poland stuck in his mind. He examined it yet again, trying to extract fresh meaning from the shiplord’s oracular phrases.

He had no great luck. He’d been wondering for some time whether his own superiors had it in for him. He had to wonder, since none of the people who’d tried to do bad things to his family and him suffered any great punishment. Some of those people hadn’t suffered anything at all that he knew of-the fellow with the Molotov cocktail, for instance.

And how had Straha got wind of this? Probably from the hard-nosed fellow who did his errands for him. Sam wouldn’t have wanted to wind up on that guy’s bad side, not even a little he wouldn’t.

The next interesting question was, how much did the Lizard’s man Friday know about such things? Sam realized he might know a great deal. To work for Straha, he had to have a pretty high security clearance. He also had to know a good deal about the Race. Put those together, and the odds were that he knew quite a bit about Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yeager.

“How can I find out what he knows?” Yeager muttered. Inviting the fellow over and pumping him while they drank beer didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He didn’t think it would do any good, and it would make the man suspicious. Of that Sam had no doubt whatever. Anybody who did what Straha’s factotum did was bound to be suspicious for a living.

I’ll have to operate through Straha, Yeager realized. He started to telephone the defector, but then checked himself. Straha hadn’t phoned him, but had used the Race’s electronic network to pass on the message. Did that mean Straha thought his own phone was tapped, or did he worry about Yeager’s? Sam didn’t know, and didn’t care for either alternative.

He reconnected to the Lizards’ network and asked, Did you learn of my difficulties with my superiors from your driver?

He stared at the screen, as if expecting the answer to appear immediately. As a matter of fact, he had expected the answer to appear immediately, and felt foolish because of it. Straha had a right to be doing something other than sitting around waiting for a message from a Big Ugly named Sam Yeager.

As long as Yeager was hooked up to the Race’s electronic network, he checked the news feeds the Lizards were giving one another. By what they were saying, they’d squashed Germany flat, and everything was over but for the mopping up. Scattered Deutsch units still refuse to acknowledge their inevitable defeat, but their resistance must soon come to an end.

That wasn’t the song the Nazis were singing. The Race hadn’t been able to knock out all their radio transmitters. They claimed they were still advancing in Poland. They also claimed to have smashed the ground attacks the Lizards had made into southern France. Since the Lizards had stopped talking about those attacks a couple of days before, Yeager suspected German radio was telling the truth there.

It probably didn’t matter, though. A map came up on the screen, showing where the Lizards had tossed explosive-metal bombs at the Reich. Showing where the Race hadn’t sent them probably would have resulted in fewer marks on the display. Germany and its European puppets were going to glow in the dark for a long time to come. Before long, the Nazis would have to run out of men and equipment… wouldn’t they?

The Race didn’t show maps of where German explosive-metal bombs had hit. With his connections, Sam had seen some: rather more accurate versions than the papers were printing. Poland was wrecked, of course, but the Germans’ submarines had managed surprisingly heavy blows against the new cities that had sprung up in Australia and the Arabian peninsula and North Africa-with the strong German presence in the Mediterranean, those last had been hit repeatedly. Without a doubt, the Reich had suffered and was suffering worse, but the Lizards had taken a pounding.