“And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” a male from the shuttlecraft port replied. “Your first assignment has come in.”
“I am prepared,” she answered-the only possible response from a pilot. “Where am I to go?”
“This continental mass, the eastern subregion known as China,” the male said. “Burn parameters and time are already in the shuttlecraft’s computer. Anticipated launch time is-” He named the moment.
“I shall be there,” Nesseref said. “Do I have a passenger, or will I fly this mission by myself?”
“You have a passenger,” the male at the port answered. “She is a physician named Selana. Her specialty is skin fungi: Tosevite bacteria and viruses do not trouble us, but some of these organisms find us tasty. This problem appears to be more severe in China than elsewhere.”
“Very well,” said Nesseref, who thanked the spirits of Emperors past that such fungi had never troubled her. She snatched up the small bag she always took on shuttlecraft flights-since she didn’t use cloth wrappings, her needs while on a journey were less than those a Big Ugly would have had in similar circumstances.
The jolt of acceleration, the weightlessness that followed, felt like old friends that had been away too long. Once weightlessness began, she had a chance to make small talk with Selana. “Why are these skin fungi so common in China, Senior Physician?” she asked.
“I believe it is the astonishing amount of excrement in everyday use there,” the other female answered. “The local Big Uglies use it for manure and fuel and sometimes, mixed with mud, as a building material as well. Facilities for disinfecting bodily waste, as you may imagine from that, are for all practical purposes nonexistent.”
“I am sorry I asked,” Nesseref said. Weightlessness did not nauseate members of the Race, as it sometimes did Tosevites, but disgust could do the job. Another thought occurred to her. “How do any Tosevites raised in such an environment survive? Their burden of disease must be far worse than ours.”
“It is, and a great many of them do not survive,” Selana said. “This takes me back to the most primitive days of the Race, at the very dawn of ancientest history. We once lived something like this, though the greater abundance of water in China creates a more unsanitary situation than we ever knew over such a wide area.”
Nesseref did not want to believe that the Race had ever lived in such close conjunction to filth. Such a thought would damage the sense of superiority she felt toward the Big Uglies. She said, “Spirits of Emperors past be praised that we do not live in such appalling conditions any more.”
“Truth,” Selana said, and added an emphatic cough. “But, here on Tosev 3, we are forced to do so because the natives do so. This creates difficulties of its own.”
“Senior Physician,” Nesseref said, “the Big Uglies do nothing but create difficulties.” Selana did not argue with her.
7
Having got to Greifswald, Johannes Drucker rather wished he hadn’t. The town where he and his family had lived hadn’t taken an explosive-metal bomb, but it had been heavily fought over. And nearby Peenemunde and Stralsund and Rostock had taken any number of hits from explosive-metal weapons, so the radioactivity level remained high.
Few people still dwelt among the ruins. The ones who did might have slipped back in time several hundred years. Instead of coal or gas, they burned wood from the wrecked buildings all around them. They had no running water. They stank, and so did the city.
The neighborhood where the Druckers had lived was even more ruinous than the rest of the town. No one seemed to live there these days; gangs of scavengers prowled through the wreckage, after whatever they could find. Nobody admitted to hearing of Drucker or his family.
“Try the Red Cross shelters, pal,” one heavily armed forager told him. “Maybe you’ll have some luck there.”
“Try the graveyards,” the forager’s sidekick added. “Plenty of new people staying there these days.” He laughed. So did his comrade.
Drucker wanted to kill them both. He had a pistol, too, a comforting weight on his right hip. But the ruffians looked very alert. He gave a curt nod and walked off through the rubble-strewn streets.
Checking the Red Cross shelters was actually a good idea. Drucker had done that every time he passed one on the long road up from Nuremberg. But, even having done so, he knew too well that he might have missed his family. He couldn’t go through the endless tents and huts one by one looking for Kathe and Heinrich and Claudia and Adolf. He had to rely on the records in each camp headquarters, and the records were in a most shocking state of disarray-anyone who expected the usual German efficiency, as he had, was out of luck.
It’s the war, he thought. At last-and for the first time since Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I unified Germany-the Reich had run into a catastrophe too large for it to cope with. Surviving from day to day took precedence over keeping the files that would have made administering the state over the long haul so much easier. Drucker understood that without liking it. It made his life too difficult for him to like it, even a little.
Checking the graveyards also wasn’t the worst idea in the world, he realized glumly. Or it wouldn’t have been, if so many bodies hadn’t been bulldozed or just flung into mass graves without headstones of any sort-and if so many others didn’t still lie under rubble, and if so many hadn’t simply been vaporized.
Someone rode past on a bicycle-the way things were now, a sign of prosperity. The man knew how valuable that bicycle was, too; he had an assault rifle slung on his back, and looked extremely ready to use it. Drucker called out to him: “Excuse me, but where is the Red Cross shelter closest to town?”
“North,” the man answered. “On the road to Stralsund, not quite halfway there, not far from the damned Lizards’ camp.” He started to pedal on, but then grudged a few more words: “I hope you find whoever you’re looking for.”
“Thanks,” Drucker said. “So do I.”
He trudged up the road. To his right, the gray, ugly Baltic rolled up the flat, muddy beach and then sullenly retreated again. He smelled salt water and stale seaweed and dead fish: the odors of home. And, when he got to the shelter in the late afternoon, he smelled ordure and unwashed humanity, the same stinks he’d known in every camp and in every town on his way up from Bavaria.
More Lizard troopers prowled around this Red Cross shelter than he’d seen at most of the others. They looked jumpier and more alert than the males he’d seen elsewhere, too. He came up to one of them and said, “I greet you,” in the language of the Race.
“And I greet you,” the Lizard answered. It wasn’t much of a greeting; the male looked ready to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. “What do you want?” His hissing voice was hard with suspicion.
“I am looking for my mate and hatchlings, from whom I am long separated,” Drucker said. The answer, and the fluency with which he used the Race’s language, made the Lizard relax a little. He went on, “And I am also curious why you watch the refugees in this particular camp so closely.”
“Why? I will tell you why,” the male said. “Because there are many Deutsch soldiers here, males against whom we fought in Poland. We do not trust them. We have no great reason to trust them.”
“I see,” Drucker said slowly. He nodded. He’d been running into occupation troops up till now: Lizards who’d come into the Reich after the surrender, and who hadn’t done any fighting beforehand. But the males here had been combat soldiers. No wonder they didn’t trust anything or anybody. Drucker risked one more question: “Where is the administrative center for this camp?”
“That way, where the flag flies,” the Lizard answered, pointing with the muzzle of his weapon. “You may proceed.”
“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker said. The Lizard didn’t wish him any sort of luck finding his family. Some of that, no doubt, was because Lizards didn’t think in terms of families. And the rest? He was an enemy. Why should a male of the Race waste any sympathy on him?
He was just coming up to the large tent above which the Red Cross flag flew when a man not far from his own age rode up on a bicycle. The fellow carried an impressive collection of lethal hardware. He swung down from the bicycle, grunted and stretched, and started to walk it into the tent.
A woman standing in the entranceway exclaimed, “You can’t do that! It is forbidden!”
“Too bad,” the man answered in German flavored by Polish and something else. “I’m not going to have it stolen. If you don’t like it, that’s rough.”
“He’s right,” Drucker said. “There’s no place to chain it up out here, and it’ll disappear without a trace if he just leaves it.”
“Most irregular,” the woman sniffed. She didn’t seem to see that things were different in the Reich nowadays. But, after another glance at the weaponry festooning the other fellow, she stopped arguing.
“Thanks, pal,” the stranger said to Drucker. “Appreciate it. Some people have trouble getting the idea that times have changed through their thick heads.”
After a moment, Drucker placed the man’s secondary accent. He’d heard it before, thicker, in Poland and the Soviet Union before the Lizards landed. Yiddish, that was it. “You’re a Jew,” he blurted.
With an ironic bow, the other man nodded. “And you’re a German. I love you, too,” he said. “Mordechai Anielewicz, at your service. I’m trying to find my family after some of you Nazi bastards hauled them out of Poland.”