Down to Earth (5 page)

Of course, that assumed she would be coming back. The glares the Nazis gave her made such an assumption look worse by the minute.

The Palais de Justice lay on the Rue Breteuil; she cycled past it every day. What the German occupiers meant by justice was liable to be different from what the builders of the Palais had in mind.

Her captors frogmarched her into the building, then shoved her at a trio of hard-faced blond women in field-gray. “Search her,” one of the men said in German, and the women did, with a thoroughness none of her doctors, not even her gynecologist, had ever come close to matching. They enjoyed probing her at least as much as men would have, and didn’t bother hiding it. She was smarting in more than one sensitive spot when they flung her into a cell.

Humiliated, terrified, she lay down on the hard, lumpy cot and dozed off. She was in the middle of a nightmare when another brilliant light pried her eyelids open. A couple of German troopers hauled her off the cot with effortless strength. “Time for questions now,” an SS man said cheerfully.

They sat her down and started grilling her. The questions were what she might have expected: about her brother, about his dealings with the Lizards, about the Lizard who’d tried to use her to reach him. Her chief interrogator grinned at her. “Your precious Pierre won’t be very happy when he hears we’ve nabbed you, will he?”

“I don’t know. He might not even care,” she answered. If the Germans were using her as a lever against her brother, they were liable to be disappointed. She hadn’t even known he was alive till Dieter Kuhn told her, and the milk of human kindness ran thin in his veins.

But her answer wasn’t what the German wanted to hear. “Lying bitch!” he snarled, and backhanded her across the face. Things rapidly went downhill from there.

She told the Germans everything they asked, everything she knew. It wasn’t enough to satisfy them. Nothing, she thought, would have been enough to satisfy them. At one point, she moaned, “At least let me telephone the university and let them know I won’t be in today.” Whatever happened to her, she—and her administrators—reckoned classes sacred.

Her interrogator didn’t. He slapped her again, and painfully squeezed her breast through the thin cotton of her nightgown. “I hope they fire you, whore,” he said with a laugh. “Then you can turn tricks for a living, the way you did with that kike of a Goldfarb. Who put him on to you, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He never told me.” That got her another slap.

After some endless time—long enough for Monique to piss herself, for they made her go through that humiliation rather than pausing long enough for her to use a toilet—they took her back to the cell, without food, without water, without anything worth having. She didn’t care. She was past caring. She lay down and fell asleep, or perhaps passed out.

And then, of course, someone shook her awake. Blearily, blurrily, she looked up (one eye was swollen nearly shut) and saw Dieter Kuhn standing over her.
“Bonsoir,
Monique,” the SS man said with a pleasant smile. “Would you care to take supper with me tomorrow night?”

She knew what she wanted to tell him. She almost did. But now she also knew what could happen to anyone who made the Germans unhappy. She’d thought she knew before, but now she understood the difference between academic knowledge and personal experience. Though she hated herself, what passed her bruised, dry lips was one croaked word: “Yes.”

Group Captain Burton Paston, the commander of the RAF radar station on the outskirts of Belfast, looked from the papers on his desk to Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb, who sat across the desk from him. “You truly wish to resign your commission in the Royal Air Force?” Paston sounded incredulous, as if Goldfarb were coming to him for permission to commit some particularly sordid crime.

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said firmly.

Paston scratched at his salt-and-pepper mustache. “And why, might I ask, do you seek to do such a thing?”

“It’s in the forms I filled out, sir,” David Goldfarb answered. Group Captain Paston should have read them. That he hadn’t was a bad sign. “My family and I have the opportunity to emigrate to Canada, but the Dominion won’t accept any serving officers in Her Majesty’s forces.”

“A policy of which I heartily approve, I might add.” Paston peered at Goldfarb through the top half of his bifocals. “Why would you want to emigrate, in any case?”

“Sir . . .” David stared at the station commander in dismay. Group Captain Paston hadn’t come along yesterday. He was no fool; Goldfarb knew as much. If he was deliberately acting obtuse, that had to mean trouble ahead. Taking a deep breath, Goldfarb laid it on the line: “Sir, you know I’m a Jew. And you have to know that things have been getting harder and harder for Jews in Britain the past few years . . . “

His voice trailed off again. His parents had fled to England from what was then Russian-held Poland to escape pogroms before the First World War. But now, with the United Kingdom shorn of its empire by the Lizards, with the Greater German
Reich
across the Channel, Britain was slowly accommodating herself to the masters of the Continent. That left little room for people like David Goldfarb and his family.

“And you want to get out while the getting is good, is that it?” Paston asked.

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid that is about it,” David answered.

“Caring nothing whatever for the service that took you out of East End London and made you into someone worthy of respect,” Group Captain Paston said.

Goldfarb’s cheeks and ears heated. “I’ll care for the RAF till my dying day. But I must say, sir, I haven’t always got whatever respect I may be worth from some RAF officers—not you, sir, I hasten to add. But there are some in this service who think one of Her Majesty’s officers has nothing better to do than help smuggle ginger, which is how I ended up in the Nazis’ gaol in Marseille.”

“If we can hurt the Lizards in no other way than with ginger for the time being, then ginger we must use,” Paston said. “I do admit, the line between official and unofficial can grow blurry in those circumstances, but—”

“Not half!” Goldfarb broke in. “Some of those blokes”—he had Group Captain Basil Roundbush, a former colleague and current oppressor, in mind—“have got themselves rich off the smuggling trade.”

“None of which has anything to do with you,” the group captain told him, his voice suddenly distant and chilly. “Nor can I in good conscience accept a resignation based on petty personal problems. Accordingly, your request is denied, and you will return to your normal duties at once.”

“What?” David yelped. “You can’t do that!”

“Not only can I, Flight Lieutenant, I just have,” Paston answered.

He was right—he could. Goldfarb hadn’t expected that he would, though. Paston had always been pretty decent, as far as commanding officers went. But Goldfarb had point-blank refused to do any more smuggling for Basil Roundbush, and Roundbush had promised he’d regret it. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve told you to keep me stuck in the service so I can’t leave the country!” He didn’t know exactly who
they
were, but he did know Roundbush had friends in high places.

“I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about,” Group Captain Paston said, but for the first time he spoke with something less than perfect self-assurance. “And I have given you quite enough of my time, too.”

“You want to be rid of me,” Goldfarb said. “Well, I want to be rid of the RAF I’ll do that any way I have to, believe me.”

“By a deliberate show of disobedience or incompetence, do you mean?” Paston asked, and David nodded. The radar-station commander gave him a thin, chilly smile. “If you try that, Flight Lieutenant, you will indeed leave the RAF. You will leave it with a bad-conduct discharge, I promise you. And you are welcome to see how well you do emigrating with that on your record.”

Goldfarb stared at him in dismay. He could have said several different things. Any one of them might have brought him the sort of discharge Group Captain Paston had mentioned. At last, after some effort, he managed, “I believe that’s most unjust, sir.”

“I’m sorry you think so,” Paston said. “But I have already told you I have no more time to listen to your complaints. You are dismissed.”

“Why, you—” Again, David Goldfarb bit back a response that would have landed him in trouble. Shaking, he got to his feet. As he turned to leave the group captain’s office, though, he couldn’t help adding, “They
have
got to you.”

Paston busied himself with the papers in his in basket. Goldfarb didn’t think he was going to answer, but he did: “We all have to do certain things for the sake of the service as a whole, Flight Lieutenant.”

“And I’m the pawn to be sacrificed, is that it?” Goldfarb said. This time, Group Captain Paston didn’t reply, but he didn’t really need to, either.

Still shaking his head in disgust, Goldfarb strode out of his office. He didn’t slam the door behind him, however much he wanted to. That would have been a petty revenge, and the revenge he wanted was anything but petty. How to get it without ending up in trouble much worse than a bad-conduct discharge was, unfortunately, another question altogether.

A couple of enlisted men saluted him as he walked out into the watery February sunshine that was the best Belfast had to offer. To them, his officer’s uniform spoke more loudly than his sallow skin, his beak of a nose, and his curly hair of a brown (now graying) not quite the right shade for one whose ancestors were respectably Anglo-Saxon or Celtic. Goldfarb snorted bitterly as he returned the salutes. He wished his superiors thought the same way.

What am I going to do?
he wondered. He knew he had to do something. Staying in a Britain slowly succumbing to the embrace of the
Reich
didn’t bear thinking about. His parents had seen the writing on the wall and escaped from Poland. His wife’s parents had got her out of Germany not long before the
Kristallnacht
spelled the beginning of the end for Jews there. Waiting for trouble to land wasn’t in his blood, or Naomi’s, either.

Without leaving the RAF, he couldn’t go to Canada, and he couldn’t get out of the RAF. He didn’t think he could go to the United States, either, though the secretary at the American consulate hadn’t been quite so definite about it. “Have to find out,” he muttered under his breath.

Suppose the Yanks said no? He didn’t want to suppose that. He wanted to suppose anything but that. The way his luck was running, though—the way Basil Roundbush and his pals were helping to make his luck run—he wouldn’t have bet on anything going his way.

“Where else can I go?” Another question, this one addressed to the washed-out, smoke-stained sky. The few bits of Europe the Germans didn’t occupy were far more subservient to the
Reich
than the United Kingdom. The Soviet Union? He snorted again. That would be jumping back into the frying pan his parents had fled. The Russians might want him for what he knew about radars, but that didn’t mean they’d treat him like anything but a damn Jew.

Goldfarb was about to climb aboard his bicycle to ride back to his flat in the officers’ housing and give Naomi the bad news when he paused. If all he wanted was to escape Britain, he was leaving more than half the world out of his calculations—the part the Lizards ran.

“Well, it’s no wonder I didn’t think of that straight off,” he said, as if someone had asserted the opposite. He’d fought the Lizards even harder than he’d fought the Nazis. He’d gone into a Polish prison carrying a Sten gun to get his cousin Moishe Russie out of there, and he’d fought with everything he could get his hands on when the Race invaded England.

And now he wanted to live under their rule?

He shook his head. He didn’t want to. Living under the rule of the Race was one of the last things he wanted to do. But staying in Britain any longer was the very last thing he wanted to do.

After a moment, he shook his head again. That wasn’t right. He might think it was when he was feeling down, but it wasn’t. Getting arrested in Marseille had been very instructive in that regard. He would much sooner have tried to spend the rest of his life in Britain than set foot in the Greater German
Reich
again for even ten minutes—which was about how long he thought he’d last.

“And I’ve even got wires to pull,” he murmured. These days, Moishe Russie, far from languishing in a Lizard prison, sometimes advised the fleetlord himself on how to deal with troublesome Tosevites. His cousin’s influence had got him out of that Nazi gaol. Maybe it could get him out of Britain, too.

He swung onto the bicycle and started to ride. As he did so, a new name welled up in his mind.
Palestine.
His cousin Moishe lived in Jerusalem. He’d gone there after the Nazis resentfully turned him loose. What would living in Palestine be like?

Next year in Jerusalem.
For how many centuries had that been a Jewish prayer? Could he make it come true?

An Austin-Healey almost ran him over. He shouted something unkind at the driver, who kept on going without a clue about the near miss. Goldfarb had had to make his way against the tide of anti-Semitism throughout his life. He’d conducted himself creditably in combat on the ground and in the air, and had the medal ribbons above his breast pocket to prove it. Against idiot drivers, though, the gods contended in vain.

After his brush with death, Goldfarb realized he’d asked himself the wrong question. He thought he had a good chance of being able to move his family to Palestine if he couldn’t get to Canada or the USA. Which counted for more, freedom or simple survival?

“How much freedom will I have ten years from now if I stay here?” he mused. “How much will my children have?” He didn’t like the answers he found for either of those questions. His parents had known enough to get out when the getting was good. So had Naomi’s. That made up his mind for him. If traffic didn’t do him in, he’d keep trying to escape, even if escape meant Palestine.

 
2

Little by little, Jerusalem began to settle down after the latest round of Arab rioting. Reuven Russie shook his head as he walked toward the medical college that bore his father’s name. It wasn’t so much that Jerusalem was settling down as that the riots had a few days between them now rather than coming one on the heels of another. When the Arabs erupted, they were as fierce as ever.

For the moment, they were quiet. An Arab woman in a long black dress with a black scarf on her head walked past Reuven. He nodded politely. So did she, though his clothes and his fair skin clearly said he was a Jew. Did something nasty gleam in her eyes despite the polite nod? Maybe, maybe not. The Arabs’ riots were aimed first and foremost at the Lizards, with the Jews being secondary targets because they got on with the Race better than their Arab neighbors did.

Reuven wondered if that woman had been screeching
“Allahu akbar!”
and breaking windows or throwing rocks or setting fires during the latest round of turmoil. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. The sour smell of old burning still clung to Jerusalem, even after a late-winter rainstorm. The rain hadn’t been able to wash away all the soot streaking the golden sandstone that was the most common local building material, either.

A razor-wire security perimeter surrounded the Moishe Russie Medical College. As Reuven approached, a Lizard in a sandbagged strongpoint waved an automatic rifle at him. “Show me your authorization for entry,” the Lizard snapped in his own language. No one who didn’t understand that language was likely to have authorization to pass through the perimeter.

“It shall be done,” Reuven said, also in the language of the Race. He handed the Lizard a plastic card with his photograph. The Lizard didn’t compare the photograph to his appearance. Even after more than twenty years on Earth, many males of the Race had trouble telling one human being from another. Instead, the soldier fed the card into an electronic gadget and waited to see what colored lights came on.

The result must have satisfied him, for he handed the card back to Russie when the machine spat it out. “Pass on,” he said, gesturing with the rifle.

“I thank you,” Reuven answered. The medical college had come under heavy attack during the fighting. He was glad the Race thought the school important enough not to be endangered so again.

He
certainly thought it was that important, though he would have admitted he was biased. Nowhere else on earth did the Lizards teach people what they knew of medicine, and their knowledge was generations ahead of what humanity had understood about the art before the Race came.

Learning some of what the Lizards knew had been Moishe Russie’s goal ever since the fighting stopped. Reuven was proud he’d been accepted to follow in his father’s footsteps. If he hadn’t passed the qualifying examinations, the name above the entrance to the block Lizard building wouldn’t have meant a thing.

He went inside. The Race had built doors and ceilings high enough to suit humans, and the seats in the halls fit Tosevite fundaments. Other than that, the Race had made few concessions. Reuven carried artificial fingerclaws in a little plastic case in his back pocket. Without them, he would have had a devil of a time using the computer terminals here.

More people than Lizards bustled through the halls on the way to one class or another. The people—most of them in their mid- to late twenties, like Reuven—were students, the Lizards instructors: physicians from the conquest fleet, now joined by a few from the colonization fleet as well.

Reuven and another student got to the door of their lecture hall at the same time. “I greet you, Ibrahim,” Reuven said in the language of the Race—the language of instruction at the college and the only one all the human students had in common.

“I greet you,” Ibrahim Nuqrashi replied. He was lean and dark, with a perpetually worried expression. Since he came from Baghdad, which was even more convulsed than Jerusalem, Reuven had a hard time blaming him.

They went in together, talking about biochemistry and gene-splicing. When they got inside, their eyes went in the same direction: to see if any seats were empty near Jane Archibald. Jane was blond and shapely, easily the prettiest girl at the college. No wonder, then, that she was already surrounded by male students this morning.

She smiled at Reuven and called “Good day!” in English—she was from Australia, though heaven only knew if she’d go back there once her studies were done. The Lizards were colonizing the island continent more thoroughly than anywhere else, except perhaps the deserts of Arabia and North Africa.

Nuqrashi sighed as he and Reuven sat down. “Maybe I should learn English,” he said, still in the language of the Race. English was the human language most widely shared among the students, but Reuven didn’t think that was why the Arab wanted to acquire it.

He didn’t get much of a chance to worry about it. Into the lecture hall came Shpaaka, the instructor. Along with the other students, Reuven sprang to his feet and folded himself into the best imitation of the Race’s posture of respect his human frame could manage. “I greet you, superior sir,” he chorused with his comrades.

“I greet you, students,” Shpaaka replied. “You may be seated.” Anyone who sat without permission landed in hot water; even more than most Lizards, Shpaaka was a stickler for protocol. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that as he surveyed the class. “I must say that, until I read through this latest set of examination papers, I had no idea there were so many ways to write my language incorrectly.”

Jane Archibald raised her hand. When Shpaaka recognized her, she asked, “Superior sir, is that not because we are all used to our own languages rather than to yours, so that our native grammar persists even when we use your vocabulary?”

“I think you may well be correct,” Shpaaka replied. “The Race has done some research on grammatical substrates, work occasioned by our conquests of the Rabotevs and Hallessi. Our ongoing experience with the multiplicity of languages here on Tosev 3 clearly shows more investigation will be needed.” His eye turrets surveyed the class once more. “Any further questions or comments? No? Very well: I begin.”

He lectured as if his human students were males and females of the Race, diluting nothing, slowing down not at all. Those who couldn’t stand the pace had to leave the medical college and pursue their training, if they pursued it, at a merely human university. Reuven scribbled frantically. He was lucky in that he’d already known Hebrew, English, Yiddish, and childhood pieces of Polish before tackling the Race’s language; after four tongues, adding a fifth wasn’t so bad. Students who’d spoken only their native language before tackling that of the Race were likelier to have a hard time.

After lecture, laboratory. After laboratory, more lecture. After that, more lab work, now concentrating on enzyme synthesis and suppression rather than genetic analysis. By the end of the day, Reuven felt as if his brain were a sponge soaked to the saturation point. By tomorrow morning, he would have to be ready to soak up just as much again.

Wringing his hand as he stuck his pen back in its case, he asked Jane, “Would you like to come to my house for supper tonight?”

She cocked her head to one side as she considered. “It’s bound to be better than the food in the dormitories—though your mother’s cooking deserves something nicer than that said about it,” she answered. “Your father is always interesting, and your sisters are cute . . .”

Reuven thought of the twins as unmitigated—well, occasionally mitigated—nuisances. “What about me?” he asked plaintively—she’d mentioned everyone else in the Russie household.

“Oh. You.” Her blue eyes twinkled. “I suppose I’ll come anyway.” She laughed at the look on his face, then went on, “If the riots start up again, I can always sleep on your sofa.”

“You could always sleep in my bed,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “You didn’t sleep in mine when you spent that night in the dormitory while the fighting in the city was so bad.” She wasn’t offended; she reached out and took his hand. “Come on. Let’s go. I’m getting hungry standing here talking.”

Several students gave Reuven jealous looks as he and Jane left the campus hand in hand. They made him feel three meters tall. In fact, he was a thoroughly ordinary one meter seventy-three centimeters—in absent moments, he thought of it as five feet eight—so when he and Jane looked into each other’s eyes, they did so on a level. Three or four Arab men whooped when they saw Jane. They approved of big blondes. She took no notice of them, which worked better than telling them where to go and how to get there. That only encouraged them.

“I’ve brought Jane home for supper,” Reuven called in Yiddish as he came inside.

“That’s fine, his mother answered from the kitchen in the same language. “There will be plenty.” Rivka Russie, Reuven was convinced, could feed an invading army as long as it gave her fifteen minutes’ notice.

His sisters came out and greeted Jane in halting English and in the language of the Race, which they were studying at school. Judith and Esther had just entered their teens; next to Jane’s ripe curves, they definitely seemed works in progress. She answered them in the bits and pieces of Hebrew she’d picked up since coming to Jerusalem. Reuven smiled to himself. Like most native English speakers, she couldn’t come out with a proper guttural to save her life.

Judith—he was pretty sure it was Judith, though the twins were identical and wore their hair the same way, not least for the sake of the confusion it caused—turned to him and said, “Cousin David’s having more troubles. Father’s doing what he can to fix things, but . . .” She shrugged.

“What now?” Reuven asked. “It’s not the Nazis again, is it?”

“No, but the English don’t want to let him leave,” his sister answered, “and things are getting scary for Jews over there.”

“Gevalt,”
he said, and then translated for Jane.

She nodded understanding. “It’s like being a human in Australia. The Lizards wish none of us were left. After what they did to our cities, it’s a wonder any of us are.” For her, dealing with oppression from outside had begun when she was a little girl. For Reuven, it had begun two thousand years before he was born. He didn’t make the comparison, not out loud.

His father came home a few minutes later. Moishe Russie looked like an older version of Reuven: he’d gone bald on top, and the hair he had left was iron gray. Reuven asked, “What’s this I hear about Cousin David?”

Moishe grimaced. “That could be a problem. The fleetlord doesn’t seem very interested in helping him out. It’s not as if he’s in jail or about to be executed. He’s just having a hard time. Atvar thinks plenty of Tosevites are having worse times, so he won’t do anything about it.”

He and Reuven had both spoken Hebrew, which Jane could follow after a fashion. In English, she said, “That’s terrible! What will he do if he can’t get out of England?”

English was Moishe Russie’s fourth language, after Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. He stuck to the latter: “He’ll have to do the best he can. Right now, I don’t know how I can give him a hand.”

From the kitchen, Rivka Russie called, “Supper’s ready. Everyone come to the table.” Reuven headed for the dining room, but discovered he’d lost some of his appetite.

The flat—they didn’t call them apartments down here—in which the Lizards had set up Rance Auerbach and Penny Summers was barely half the size of the one Rance had lived in by himself in Fort Worth, and that one had been none too large.

He limped to the refrigerator, which was also about half the size of the one he’d had up in the States. Even though the flat was tiny, he was panting by the time he got there. He’d never win a footrace, not after the Lizards had shot him in the leg and in the chest during the fighting in Colorado. He supposed he was lucky nobody’d amputated that leg. He would have been a lot more certain had keeping it not meant living in pain every day of his life since.

One way or another, he did what he could to ease that pain. He took a Lion Lager out of the icebox and popped off the lid with a churchkey. At the hiss, Penny called, “Bring me one of those, too, will you?”