“I might have known you were going to say that,” Rance remarked. “Hell, I did know you were going to say it. But it doesn’t help right now, you know?”
Penny set her hands on her hips and exhaled an angry cloud of smoke. “Okay, hotshot, you’re so goddamn smart, you keep thinking up reasons why we can’t do this, that, or the other thing-what do you figure we ought to do?”
“If I had my druthers, I’d go back to the States,” Auerbach said slowly. “I’ve got a little pension waiting for me, and-”
Penny laughed a flaying, scornful laugh. “Oh, yeah. Hell of a life you were living back there. You just bet it was, Rance.”
His ears heated. He’d had that miserable little apartment in Fort Worth, and he’d been drinking himself to death an inch at a time there. For excitement, he’d go down to the veterans’ hall and play poker with the other fellows who’d been left wrecked but not quite dead. They’d all heard one another’s stories endless times: often enough to keep a straight face while pretending to believe the juiciest parts of the lies the other fellows told.
If he went back, he’d fall into that same rut again. He knew it. That was how he’d lived for a long time. Life with Penny Summers was a great many things, but a rut never. A roller coaster, perhaps-Christ, a roller coaster certainly-but not a rut.
“Tahiti just won’t be the same,” he said mournfully. “No matter what happens, it won’t be the same. And our gold won’t stretch as far as we hoped it would.” Down in Cape Town, he’d almost got killed on account of that gold. But it wasn’t enough, no matter how much blood had been spilled over it.
“What does that leave, then?” Penny said. “England’s too close to the Nazis to be comfortable, and the same people do business in Canada as in the USA.”
He pointed an accusing finger at her. “I know what’s up. You want to go back to France, and you don’t give a good goddamn how stupid it is.”
For once, he caught Penny without a snappy comeback, from which he concluded he was dead right. His girlfriend did laugh again, this time ruefully. “If you were younger and dumber, I’d take you to bed with me, and by the time I was through you’d swear going back there was your idea.”
“If I was younger and dumber, I’d be a lot happier. Either that or dead, one.” Rance drank the last beer in the bottle. “You want to take me to bed anyhow? Who knows how dumb I’ll be afterwards?”
Penny reached up to the back of her neck and undid the halter top she was wearing. She pulled down her white linen shorts, kicked them off to one side, and stood there naked. Her body had yielded very little to time. “Why the hell not?” she said. “Come here, guy.”
Afterwards, they lay side by side, sweaty and sated. Auerbach reached out with a lazy hand and tweaked her nipple. “What the hell,” he said. “You talked me into it.”
“How about that?” Penny answered. “And I didn’t even have to say anything. I must not know what a persuasive gal I am.”
That made Rance laugh. “Every woman ever born is persuasive that way, if she feels like using it. Of course”-he watched Penny cloud up, and hastened to amend his words-“some are more persuasive than others.”
The clouds went away. Penny turned practicaclass="underline" “We shouldn’t have much trouble getting into France, and our papers probably won’t have to be too good. The Frenchies’ll take a while to figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. We should make quite a killing.”
“Terrific,” Rance said. “Once we do it, we can retire to Tahiti.” Penny poked him in the ribs, and he supposed he deserved it.
Felless was perfectly happy to leave the eggs she’d laid-the second clutch from ginger-inspired matings-in the local hatching room. She hoped she would soon be able to leave the new town in the Arabian peninsula herself. As was her way, she made no secret of what she hoped.
One of the locals said, “You could have stayed in Marseille. That, at least, would have shut you up when a bomb burst there.”
“Who addled your egg?” Felless retorted. “A bomb bursting here would have been the best thing that could happen to this place.”
That made all the locals in the luggage shop where Felless was trying to find something she liked hiss with derision. She didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, the new town was nothing but a small town back on Home dropped onto the surface of Tosev 3. Its males and females certainly struck her as provincial and clannish. They shouldn’t have; they’d come from all over the homeworld of the Race. But only a few years on Tosev 3 had united them against the world outside the borders of their settlement.
One of them said, “You do not know what you are talking about. Several bombs have burst not far from here. My friend was right. One of those bombs should have burst on you.” His tailstump quivered in fury.
His friend, a female, added, “Look at her body paint. She does research on the Big Uglies. That must mean she likes them. And if liking Big Uglies does not prove she is addled, what would?”
Males and females spoke up in loud agreement. Familiarity with the Tosevites had bred only contempt for them in Felless. To these members of the Race, though, she didn’t want to admit that. She said, “They are here. There are more of them than we thought there would be, and they know more than we thought they would. We have to deal with them as they are, worse luck.”
“We ought to get rid of all of them, as we got rid of the Deutsche,” a male said. “Then we could make this world into something worth having.”
“Not all the Deutsche are destroyed,” Felless said. “And they got rid of too many of us. How long did you fear this town would be under attack from explosive-metal bombs, as your neighbors were?”
“If you like Big Uglies so much, you are welcome to them,” a female said angrily.
There they were, again accusing Felless of something of which she was emphatically not guilty. With such dignity as she could muster, she said, “Since you will not listen to me, what point is there to my even talking to you?” Out she went, accompanied by the jeers of the locals.
The building in which she’d been housed was so overcrowded, it boasted only a few computer terminals rather than one for every male and female of the Race. She had to line up to get her own electronic messages and to send any to the rest of the Race on Tosev 3. And, having stood in line, she discovered that the messages waiting for her were not worth having.
She’d just turned away in disappointment when a ceiling-mounted loudspeaker called her name: “Senior Researcher Felless! Senior Researcher Felless! Report to the unit manager’s office immediately!”
Fuming, Felless went. If one of the idiot locals had complained about her because of the argument, someone was going to hear about it. She had every intention of being loud and obnoxious in her rebuttal. When she buzzed the door, the manager opened it. “What now?” Felless snapped.
“Superior female, you have a telephone call here. The caller did not want to route it into the dormitory, but sent it here for the sake of privacy,” the manager replied.
“Oh.” Some of Felless’ anger evaporated. Grudgingly, she said, “I thank you.”
“Here is the telephone.” The unit manager pointed. “I hope the news is good for you, superior female.”
When Felless saw who waited for her on the screen, her eye turrets twitched in surprise. “Ambassador Veffani!” she exclaimed. “I greet you, superior sir. I had no idea you-” She broke off.
“Were not communing in person with the spirits of Emperors past?” Veffani suggested. “When the Race bombed Nuremberg, I thought I would be, but the shelter we built proved better than that of the Deutsch not-emperor. If you think this disappointed me, you are mistaken. Of course, we were also trying harder to dispose of him than of me-or I hope we were, at any rate.”
“I am glad to see you well, superior sir,” Felless said, though she would not have been too sad to learn Veffani had perished in the war. He was a strict male, and had punished her severely for using ginger. Still, hypocrisy lubricated the wheels of social interaction. “What are your present duties? Are you still ambassador to the Reich? ”
Veffani made the negative hand gesture. “A military commissioner will deal with the Deutsche for the indefinite future. Since, however, I have considerable experience in the northwestern region of the main continental mass, I have been assigned as ambassador to the newly reconstituted not-empire of France.”
“Congratulations, superior sir,” Felless said with fulsome insincerity.
“I thank you. You are gracious.” Veffani knew a good deal about fulsome insincerity himself. He went on, “And, with your own experience in the Reich and in France, you would make a valuable addition to my team here. I have put in a requisition for your services, and it has been accepted.”
Felless knew she should have been furious at such high-handed treatment. Somehow, she wasn’t. If anything, she was relieved. “I thank you, superior sir,” she said. “Doing something useful to the Race will be a relief, especially after confinement in this refugee center and among the provincials who make up the bulk of the local population.”
“Do you know, Senior Researcher, I hoped you would say something like that,” Veffani told her. “You are a talented female. You have done good work. I am going to give you only one warning.”