Harry Turtledove - Second Contact

“All right.” Mordechai stayed put by the lamp in the front room. “I’ll finish the newspaper, then I’ll come to bed, too.” If the children were asleep and Bertha still awake, who could say what might happen then?

Before he’d finished the paper, though, someone knocked on the door. He was frowning as he went to answer it; ten past ten was late for visitors. “Who’s there?” he asked, not opening the door.

“Is this the flat of Mordechai Anielewicz?” It was a man’s voice, speaking Polish with a palatal Russian accent.

“Yes. Who’s there?” Mordechai asked again, his hand on the doorknob but still not turning it-this was an especially odd time to be receiving strangers. His eyes went to the pistol on the table by the door.

After a moment’s silence out in the hallway, he heard a faint click. His body identified the sound before his mind could-it was a safety coming off. He threw himself to the floor an instant before a burst of submachine-gun fire tore through the door at chest to head height.

Behind him, windows and a vase on the table shattered. Through and after the roar of gunfire, he heard people shouting and screaming. He waited till bullets stopped flying over him, then grabbed the pistol and pulled the door open. If the assassin was waiting around out there, he’d get an unpleasant surprise.

But the hall stood empty-for a moment. Then people poured out, many of them also carrying pistols and rifles. Behind him, Bertha exclaimed in horror at what the gunfire had done to the flat, and then in relief that it hadn’t done anything to Mordechai.

“Why would anybody start shooting at you, Anielewicz?” asked a fellow who lived across the hall from him.

He laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such a stupid question. “Why? I’m a Jew. I’m a prominent Jew. Poles don’t like me. The Lizards don’t like me. The Nazis don’t like me. The Russians don’t like me.” He ticked the answers off on his fingers as he spoke them. “How many other reasons do you need? I can probably find some more.” His neighbor didn’t ask for them. Anielewicz shivered. Why somebody had started shooting didn’t worry him so much. Who, now, who’d started shooting was a different story.

As he walked along High Street, Little Rock’s Embassy Row, Sam Yeager paused and gave a colored kid a nickel for a copy of the Arkansas Gazette . “Thank you, Major,” the kid said.

“You’re welcome.” Sam tossed him a dime. “You didn’t see that.”

The kid grinned at him. “Didn’t see what, suh?” He stuck the dime in a back pocket of his faded blue jeans, where it wouldn’t get mixed up with the money his boss had to know about.

Yeager went on down the street reading the paper. The Lewis and Clark was still front-page news, but it wasn’t the banner headline it had been a couple of days before. Everything seemed to be going just the way it should; the space-station-turned-spaceship would reach the asteroid belt faster than seemed possible. An acceleration of.01g didn’t sound like much, but it added up.

“Acceleration adds up,” Yeager muttered to himself. “It’s about the only thing that does.” He still couldn’t figure out why his own government had kept the Lewis and Clark so secret for so long. Sure, it had an atomic engine. But there were a lot more untamed atoms running around loose up in orbit than the ones that were pushing the enormous ship out toward the asteroids. The Lizards wouldn’t have pitched a fit if President Warren had told them what the USA was up to. They thought people were out of their minds for wanting to explore the rockpile that was the rest of the solar system, but they didn’t think it made people dangerous to them.

He sighed. Nobody’d asked his opinion. Somebody should have. If he didn’t know about the Race, who did? He sighed again. Whoever’d been in charge of that project had decided secrecy was a better way to go. Secrecy so blatant it put everybody’s backs up, Lizards and Nazis and Reds? Evidently. It made no sense to Sam.

Still chewing on it-he wasn’t particularly quick-witted, but was as stubborn a man as was ever born (if eighteen years in the low and middle minors didn’t prove that, what would?)-he walked past the Arkansas State Capitol and on toward what newspapers called the White House, even if it was built of golden local sandstone. President Warren hadn’t given him any details about why he’d been ordered out of California. If it didn’t turn out to have something to do with the Lizards, though, he’d be surprised.

The president wants to know what I think, Sam thought. But some damnfool general doesn’t care. He wondered if he could get Curtis LeMay and whoever LeMay’s boss was in trouble. He rather hoped so.

At President Warren’s official residence, a guard checked his ID and passed him on to a secretary. The secretary said, “The president’s running a few minutes late. Why don’t you just sit down here and make yourself comfortable? He’ll see you as soon as he’s free, Major.”

“All right,” Sam said-he could hardly say no. A few minutes turned into three-quarters of an hour. He would have been more annoyed if he’d been more surprised.

In due course, the flunky did escort him into the president’s office. “Hello, Major,” Earl Warren said as they shook hands. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Yeager answered. He’d long since learned not to pick fights where it couldn’t do him any good.

“Sit down, sit down,” Warren said. “Would you like coffee or tea?” After Sam shook his head, the president went on, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you to hop on an airplane and pay me a call.”

“Well, yes, sir, a little bit,” Yeager agreed. “I suppose it has to do with settling the Lizards’ feathers after the Lewis and Clark got moving, though.”

“As a matter of fact, it doesn’t,” the president said. “It hasn’t got a single, solitary thing to do with that. From what I hear, you kept looking in that direction till you got your ears pinned back for you.”

“Uh, yes, Mr. President.” Sam had kept looking in that direction after he’d got his ears pinned back, too. President Warren didn’t seem to know that. A good thing, too, Sam thought. No, he wouldn’t get LeMay into hot water. He was lucky not to be in hot water himself.

“All right, then. We’ll say no more about it.” Warren sounded like the prosecutor he’d once been letting some petty criminal off with a warning because taking him to court would be more trouble than it was worth. “Now, then: are you even the least bit curious why I did ask you to come back East?”

Presidents didn’t ask; they ordered. But Sam could only answer, “Yes, sir. I sure am.” And that was the truth. He was even more curious now than he had been before. While he was coming out from California, he’d thought he knew what Warren had on his mind. Discovering he’d been wrong piqued his curiosity.

“Okay. I can take care of that.” Warren flicked the switch on an intercom, then bent low to speak into it: “Willy, would you bring the crate in, please?”

“Yes, sir,” answered someone on the other end of the line. The crate? Sam wondered. He didn’t ask. He simply waited, as he’d sat in the dugout and waited out any number of rain delays.

A side door to President Warren’s office opened. In came a blocky little man-Willy? — pushing what looked like a metal box on wheels. An electric cord trailed after it. As soon as the fellow stopped, he plugged the cord into the nearest outlet. At that point, Sam’s curiosity got the better of him. “Mr. President, what the he-uh, heck-is that thing?”