Second Contact

But the British Empire was only a memory now. And the British Isles lacked the resources for a space program of their own. What resources they had, they’d put into landand submarine-based rockets with which they could make any invader-Lizards, Nazis, even Americans-pay a dreadful price.

And so Britain remained independent. But the continentbestriding powers-the USA, the USSR, the Greater German Reich — also strode beyond the planets, strode on the moon, on Mars, and even on the asteroids. As a boy, Goldfarb had dreamt of being the first man on the moon, of walking beside a Martian canal.

A Nazi had been the first man on the moon. There were no Martian canals. So the Lizards said, and they turned out to be right. They still couldn’t understand why men wanted to set foot on such a useless, worthless world.

Goldfarb understood it. But, even for the Yanks who’d gone to Mars and then come home again, it must have seemed like a consolation prize. Whatever people did in space, the Lizards had done it thousands of years before.

“If we could build a ship that would pay a call on Home, that would be something,” Goldfarb said dreamily.

“It’d be summat the Lizards didn’t fancy, and go ahead and try telling me I’m wrong, sir,” McKi

“So it would. They wouldn’t know what kind of call we aimed to pay them,” Goldfarb answered. He thought about it for a moment. “And I’m damned if I know what kind of call we ought to pay them, either. It would be nice if we could give them as much to think about as they’ve given us, wouldn’t it?”

McKi

“Somehow, I don’t think that would stop them from blaming us.” Goldfarb’s voice was dry. “What I’d like to do, though, is send ships to other planets in the Empire and see if we could free the Rabotevs and Hallessi. They can’t like the Lizards lording it over them, can they?”

But even as he said that, he wondered. The Lizards had ruled those other two worlds for a long time. Maybe the aliens on them really did take the Empire for granted. People didn’t work that way, but the Lizards didn’t work like people, so why should their subjects? And people hadn’t ruled other people for anywhere near that many thousand years. Maybe obedience, even acquiescence, had become ingrained into the natives of Halless 1 and Rabotev 2.

“Might be worth finding out,” McKi

“Workers of the worlds, unite!” Goldfarb said, gri

The joke should have gone over better than it did. McKi

It could have been worse. McKi

“Never mind,” Goldfarb said wearily. “Never bloody mind. That’ll teach me to try to be bloody fu

McKi

He looked at his watch. The luminous dots by the numbers and the hands told him the time in the darkened room. “Shift’s almost over,” he remarked in something close to his normal tone of voice. “Thank heaven.”

Jack McKi

At last, after what certainly seemed like forever, McKi

Shaking his head, Goldfarb got onto his bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as he could. Since everyone else in Belfast had got off at about the same time, that was not very fast. He hated traffic jams. Too many people in motorcars pretended they could not see the plebeians on bicycles. He had to swerve sharply a couple of times to keep from getting hit.

When he did get back to his flat in the married officers’ quarters, he was something a good deal less than his best. Normally patient with his children, he barked at them till they retreated in dismay. He barked at Naomi, too, something he scarcely ever did. She used a privilege denied the children and barked back. That brought him up short.

“Here,” she said with brisk practicality. “Drink this.” This was a couple of jiggers of neat whiskey poured into a glass. “Maybe it will make you decent company again. If it doesn’t, it will put you to sleep.”

“Maybe it will make me beat you,” he said, full of mock ferocity. Had there been the slightest likelihood he would actually do that, the words would never have passed his lips. But, while he might talk too much when he’d had a drop or two too many, he’d never yet turned mean.

“If you’re going to beat me, why don’t you wait till after supper?” Naomi suggested. “That way, I won’t be tempted to pour a pot of boiling potato soup in your lap.” She cocked her head to one side. “Well, not very tempted, anyhow.”

“No, eh?” he said, and knocked back the whiskey. “In that case, I’d better behave myself.”

He behaved himself to the extent of keeping quiet through the soup and through the roast chicken that followed. Then he plopped himself down in front of the televisor to watch the Cologne-Manchester football match. Most of the time, he had no use for the hooligans who came to the stadium to make trouble and to stomp anyone who showed signs of supporting the wrong team. He listened with benign approval as they cursed and booed and hissed the Germans.

“You’d better win,” a leather-lunged heckler bawled, “or it’s the gas chamber for the lot of you!”

Cologne did not win. Neither did they lose. The match ended in a 1–1 tie. Goldfarb scowled as he turned off the set. He wanted, he craved certainties, and the match, like life, offered nothing but ambiguity.

Although the Manchester coach spent several minutes explaining why the tie was really as good as a victory, he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself. Goldfarb was glad when he disappeared and the blandly handsome face of a BBC newsreader filled the screen.

“Another round of public fornication among the Lizards was observed in London today,” he remarked after touching on larger disasters. “Fortunately, in this day and age, there are few horses left to startle, and mere human beings have grown increasingly blase in the face of the Race’s continued randiness. In fashion news-”

Goldfarb snorted. He tremendously admired traditional British restraint, not least because he had so little of it in his own makeup. He’d once thought the Lizards similarly restrained, but ginger and the arrival of females had changed his mind there. With what ginger had done to his own life, he wished the Lizards had never heard of it.