Second Contact

“Thanks, Sorviss,” Yeager said. “Maybe we’ll have to come up with a new name for me, or something like that.” Whatever they had to do, he wanted it taken care of. He couldn’t begin to do his job without the fullest possible access to what the Lizards were thinking and saying.

When the phone rang half an hour later, Sam sprang on it like a cat onto a mouse. It was Sorviss, all right, but he didn’t sound happy. “Restoring your access will not be easy or quick,” he said. “The Race has installed new security filters on the lines leading into the consulate here. I am not certain I will be able to find a way around them: they are well made.”

“Then Straha is liable to be cut off from the network, too, isn’t he?” Yeager asked.

“He is,” Sorviss agreed.

“He won’t like that,” Sam predicted.

“I think you are right,” the Lizard said. “I also think this is not something I can control. If the shiplord starts biting his arms”-a Lizard idiom translated literally into English, a sin whose reverse Yeager sometimes committed-“I can only say, ‘Oh, what a pity.’ ”

“Is that all you can say?” Yeager chuckled. A good many of the Lizards who’d chosen to stay in the USA after the fighting stopped had turned into confirmed democrats. They wanted nothing to do with the multilayered society in which they’d grown up, not any more they didn’t. Ristin and Ullhass, the males he’d known longest, were like that, too, though they stayed polite when dealing with their own kind.

“No, I could say some other things,” Sorviss answered. “But Straha would not be happy if they got back to his hearing diaphragms.”

“You’re right about that, I bet,” Sam said. “But I sure hope you can put me back on the network before too long. Without it, I’m like a man trying to do his job half blind. That’s not good.”

“I understand,” Sorviss said. “But you must understand that I will have to evade many traps to restore you without drawing the notice of the Race. Maybe this can be done; I am a male of skill. But I ca

“Okay, Sorviss. Please do everything you can. So long.” Yeager hung up, deeply discontented. He’d got along without the computer network for years. He supposed he could get along without it again for however long Sorviss needed to restore his access. That didn’t mean he was happy about it, any more than he would have been happy about having to write everything out by hand because his typewriter broke down.

He went back and entered the network in his own proper persona once more. As long as he was recognized as a Big Ugly-and restricted because he was recognized-everything went fine. The only problem was, he couldn’t find out even a quarter of the things he wanted to know. The Lizards didn’t talk about the American space station, for instance, in any discussion area to which Sam Yeager, Tosevite, had access.

“Dammit, they know more about what’s going on than we do,” he grumbled.

He wondered if he ought to call Kitty Hawk again. If he did, Lieutenant General LeMay was liable to come down on him like a ton of bricks. But if he didn’t, he’d stay altogether in the dark. A Lizard would have had better sense than to bring LeMay down on him in the first place, and would have obeyed without question after getting in trouble. “Hell with that,” Yeager muttered. “I ain’t no Lizard.” Barbara, fortunately, couldn’t hear him.

He picked up the phone and dialed the Kitty Hawk BOQ. If anybody had any good notions of what was going on up there, Glen Johnson would be the man. Sam nodded to himself as the telephone rang on the other side of the country. Back in the old days, he’d have had to go through an operator and give her Johnson’s name. Now he could just call, and leave no trace of himself behind.

Somebody picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“I’d like to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, please,” Yeager answered. Whoever that was over there in Kitty Hawk, it wasn’t Glen Johnson. This fellow had a drawl thick enough to slice, one that turned hello into a three-syllable word.

After a couple of seconds’ pause, the Southerner said, “Afraid you can’t do that, sir. He’s up in space right now. Who’s calling, please? I’ll leave a message.”

He sounded very helpful-too helpful, after that little pause. Maybe, maybe not, but Sam wasn’t inclined to take chances, not after the trouble he’d just had from the Lizards. He didn’t give his name, but said, “Really? I thought he’d be down by now.” From what Johnson had told him, he knew damn well that the Marine was supposed to be down by now. “Is he all right?”

“Oh, yes, sir, he’s fine,” the man back in North Carolina answered. “You want to leave your name and a number where he can get hold of you, I reckon he’d be right glad to have ’em. I’m sure he’ll get back to you as soon as he can.”

Very gently, Yeager laid the telephone handset back in its cradle. Sure as hell, alarm bells were going off in the back of his mind. He didn’t think this fellow would have been so eager to get his name and number if they were tracing his call (and, thanks to Sorviss, his calls were hard, maybe impossible, for anyone with merely human equipment to trace), but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

He sat at his desk scratching his head, wondering what the devil to do next. He wondered if there was anything he could do next. The Lizards had shut him off from whatever they knew about the space station, and his best-Jesus, his only-American source had just fallen off the map, too.

“What the hell is going on up there?” he said, and leaned back in his chair as if he could stare through the ceiling and see not only the space station but Glen Johnson, too.

He hoped that fellow with the Southern accent had been telling the truth when he said Johnson was okay. Sam knew people didn’t stay in space longer than they were supposed to without some pretty important reason. If the man had said the weather in Kitty Hawk was lousy so Peregrine couldn’t come down on schedule, that would have been something else. But he hadn’t. He’d made it sound as if everything were routine. That worried Sam, who knew better.

After some thought, he fired up the U.S.-made computer on his desk. If he used it to ask questions about the space station, he’d trigger alarms. General LeMay’s visit had proved that. But if his security clearance wasn’t good enough to let him find out what was going on with Peregrine, he saw no point to having the miserable thing.

No, sure enough, nothing tried to keep him out of these records. But what he found there made him scratch his head all over again. Unless somebody was doing still more lying, Peregrine had landed right on schedule.

“Now what the hell does that mean?” he asked the computer. It didn’t answer. Facts it could handle. Meaning? He had to supply his own.

Was the screen lying to him? Or had Peregrine come down while Glen Johnson stayed up? If it had, how? Space wasn’t a good place for one driver to get out of a truck and another to hop in and take it on down the line.

“Space isn’t,” Sam said slowly. “But the space station is.” He looked up at and, in his mind’s eye, through the ceiling again. Some things he saw, or thought he saw, very clearly. Others still made no sense at all.

One evening, after Heinrich had gone to the cinema and the younger children were asleep, Kathe Drucker asked, “How long will you go on flying into space, Hans?”

Joha

Or until I blow up, he’d started to say. He would have said it lightheartedly. Somehow, he didn’t think he could have said it lightheartedly enough to make Kathe appreciate it. Peenemunde already had too many monuments to fallen (or, more often, vaporized) heroes for that. He didn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t dwell on it and do his job. If he did go, he’d probably be dead before he knew it. That consoled him. It was unlikely to console his wife.