Second Contact

“Don’t you think you’ve given the Reich enough of your life?” she asked. By the look in her eye, the fallen heroes of Peenemunde were on her mind, sure enough.

“If I didn’t like what I was doing, I would say yes,” Drucker answered truthfully. “But since I do-”

Kathe sighed. “Since you do, I have to watch you go off and be unfaithful to me, and I have to hope your mistress decides to let you come back to my arms.”

“That’s not fair,” Drucker said, but he couldn’t have told her how it wasn’t. He did love-he dearly loved-riding an A-45 hundreds of kilometers into the sky. He did forsake his wife whenever he went into space. And an A-45 could indeed keep him from coming home to Kathe.

She sighed again. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “You will anyhow.”

“Let’s go to bed,” Drucker said. “Things will look better in the morning.”

After telling her no, he wondered if she’d want to have anything to do with him once they got under the covers together. But if he was willing to take chances every time he rode a pillar of fire up from Peenemunde, he was also willing to take them in the dark quiet of his own bedroom. And when, in an experimental way, he set a hand on Kathe’s hip, she turned toward him and slid out of her fla

“Whew!” he panted afterwards. “Call the ambulance. I think I need to go to the hospital-I’m all worn out.”

“To have your head examined, I think,” Kathe said, pressing her warm, soft length against him. “But then, you fly rocket ships, so I should have known that already.” She took him in hand. “Maybe I really can make you too tired to be able to fly. Shall I find out?”

He wasn’t sure he would rise to the occasion, but he managed. This time, he didn’t need to feign exhaustion when they finished. As he sank toward slumber, he remembered screwing himself silly in military brothels before dangerous missions against the Russians or the Lizards. Maybe Kathe was doing the same sort of thing, only worrying about his mission, not something she had to face herself.

He’d almost drifted off when he remembered something he would sooner have forgotten: a lot of the women drafted into these military brothels had been Jewesses. That hadn’t meant anything to him during his visits; they’d just been warm, available flesh back then. Once he’d buttoned his trousers and left, he hadn’t given them a second thought. Now, looking back over twenty years, he wondered how long they’d lasted in the brothels and what happened to them when they couldn’t go on any more. Nothing good-he was sure of that.

He didn’t fall asleep right away after all.

For all his doubts, for all its horrors, he still served the Reich. A few days after Kathe failed to persuade him to stop going into space, he sat in a briefing room at the Peenemunde rocket base, learning what the powers that be particularly wanted to learn from his latest missions.

“You will pay special attention to the American space station,” said Major Thomas Ehrhardt, the briefing officer: a fussily precise little man with a bright red Hitler-style mustache. “You are authorized to change your orbit for a close inspection, if you deem that appropriate.”

“Really?” Drucker raised an eyebrow. “I would love to do it-I will do it-but I have never had this sort of authorization before. Why have things changed?”

He wondered if Ehrhardt would invoke the great god Security and tell him that was none of his business. But the briefing officer answered candidly: “I will tell you why, Lieutenant Colonel. There has been unusual emission of radioactivity from the station over the past few weeks. We are still trying to learn the reasons behind this emission. As yet, we have not succeeded. Perhaps yours will be the mission that finds out what we need to know.”

“I hope so,” Drucker said. “I’ll do everything I can.” He got to his feet and shot out his right forearm. “Heil Himmler!”

“Heil!” Ehrhardt returned the salute.

The A-45 on which Drucker rode into space carried strap-on motors attached to either side of the main rocket’s first stage. They boosted him into a higher orbit than the A-45 could have achieved by itself. Any deviation from the norm was bound to make the Lizards and the Americans suspicious (the Bolsheviks, he assumed, were always suspicious). But the Rocket Force Command must have warned the other spacefarers that he would be taking an unusual path, because the questions he got were curious, not hostile.

He enjoyed the new perspective he got on the world from a couple of hundred kilometers higher than usual. He’d seen nearly everything there was to see from the orbit Kathe normally took. The wider view was interesting. It made him feel almost godlike.

And he enjoyed the better view of the U.S. space station he got from this higher orbit. Even before he tried to approach it, his Zeiss binoculars gave him a closer look than he’d ever had. The only drawback to the situation was that, because he moved more slowly than he would have in a closer orbit, he didn’t come up to the station as often as he would have otherwise.

“Having fun, snoop?” the space station’s radioman asked as he did approach from behind.

“Of course,” Drucker answered easily. “I would even more fun have if you had pretty girls at every window undressing.”

“Don’t I wish!” the American said. “It’s supposed to be something special when you’re weightless, too, you know what I mean?”

“I have heard this, yes,” Drucker said. “I do not about it know in person.”

“Neither do I,” the radio operator said. “This is something that needs research, dammit!”

Drucker tried to imagine such goings-on at the Reich ’s space station. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Had Goring become Fuhrer after Hitler died… then, maybe. No-then, certainly. Goring would have had himself flown up there to make the first experiment. But the Fat Boy had disgraced himself instead, and gray, cold Himmler frowned on fooling around for its own sake-all he thought it was good for was making more Germans. With a small mental sigh, Drucker swung back from sex to espionage: “With so much room, you Americans should try to find out.”

“Not enough gals up here,” the radioman said in disgusted tones.

That was interesting. Drucker hadn’t known the American space station held any women at all. He wasn’t sure anyone in the Greater German Reich knew the Americans were sending women into space. The Russians had done it a couple of times, but Drucker didn’t much care what the Russians did. Their pilots were just along to push buttons; ground control did all the real work. Unless war suddenly broke out, a well-trained dog could handle a Russian spacecraft.

“Maybe your women don’t like the radiation,” Drucker said. American radiomen liked to run their mouths; maybe he could get this one to talk out of turn.

He couldn’t. The fellow not only didn’t say anything about radiation, he clammed up altogether. After a while, Drucker passed out of radio range. He muttered in frustration. He’d learned something that might be important, but it wasn’t what he’d come upstairs to learn.

He made some calculations, then radioed down to the ground to make sure he-and Kathe ’s computer-hadn’t dropped a deci-mal point anywhere. Once satisfied he had everything straight, he waited till the calculated time, then fired up the motor on the upper stage of the A-45 for a burn that would change his orbit to one passing close to the American space station.

When he came into radar range of the station, the radio operator jeered at him: “Not just a snoop, a goddamn Peeping Tom.”