He turned out to be wrong again. The other fellow said, “How many Lizard panzers did we blow to hell and gone in Poland, you driving and me at the gun?”
No wonder the voice seemed as if he might have known it before. “Grillparzer,” he said in slow wonder. “Gunther Grillparzer. Christ, man, it’s been close to twenty years.”
“Too goddamn long,” agreed the gunner with whom Drucker had shared a Panther panzer through the most desperate fighting he’d ever known. “Well, we’ll make up for lost time, you and me. We’re going to be buddies again, damned if we’re not. Just like the old days, Hans-except maybe not quite.” His laugh was almost a giggle.
Drunk, all right, Drucker thought. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply. When Grillparzer didn’t answer right away, he found another, more innocuous, question: “What have you been doing since the fighting stopped?” Kathe was giving him a curious look. “Old army pal,” he mouthed, and she nodded and went away.
“What have I been doing?” Grillparzer echoed. “Oh, this and that, old son. Yeah, that’s about right-a little of this, a little of that, a little of something else now and again, too.”
Drucker sighed. That meant the panzer gunner was a bum or a petty criminal these days. Too bad. “So what can I do for you?” he asked. He owed Grillparzer his neck. He wouldn’t begrudge him five hundred or even a thousand marks. He could afford it, and Gunther was plainly down on his luck.
“Like I say, you’ve come up in the world,” the gunner said. “Me, I wasn’t so lucky.” His voice turned into a self-pitying whine.
“How much do you need?” Drucker asked patiently. “I’m not what you’d call rich-nobody with three kids is likely to be-but I’ll do what I can for you.”
He’d expected-he’d certainly hoped-Grillparzer would babble in sodden gratitude. That didn’t happen, either; it wasn’t his day for guessing right. Instead, the ex-gunner said, “Do you remember the night we went after those black-shirted pigdogs with our knives?”
Ice prickled up Drucker’s back. “Yes, I remember that,” he said. Toward the end of the fighting, the SS had arrested the regimental commander, Colonel Heinrich Jager, in whose panzer Drucker and Grillparzer had both served. The panzer crew had rescued him before he got taken away from the front, and had bundled him into the airplane of a Red Air Force senior lieutenant-a pretty woman, Drucker recalled-bound for Poland. No one but the panzer crew knew what had happened to those SS men. Drucker wanted to keep it that way. “Don’t talk about it on the phone. You never know who might be listening.”
“You’re right-I don’t,” Grillparzer agreed with good humor that struck Johannes Drucker as put on. “I might lose my meal ticket if people start hearing things before I want ’em to. Can’t have that, can we, Hans?” He laughed out loud.
Drucker was feeling anything but cheerful. “What do you want from me?” he asked, hoping against hope it wasn’t what he thought.
But it was. “Whatever you’ve got, and then another fifty pfennigs besides,” Grillparzer answered. “You’ve lived high on the hog these past twenty years. You’re an officer and everything, after all. Now it’ll be my turn.”
After a look around the living room to make sure nobody in his family could hear, Drucker pressed his mouth against the phone and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “My arse. If you bring me down, I’ll sure as hell take you with me. If you don’t think I’ll sing when they start working me over, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”
But Gunther Grillparzer laughed again. “Good luck,” he said. “You’re the first fellow who’s called me Gunther in a devil of a long time. Name got too hot for me to keep wearing it. The papers I’ve got with this one are damn good, too. All I have to do is write the Gestapo a letter. I don’t even have to sign it-you know how those things go.”
That Drucker did, only too well. The Reich ran on anonymous accusations. And he was already in a bad odor with the Gestapo and with his own higher-ups because of the accusations against Kathe. Regardless of whether there was any truth in Grillparzer’s letter, Drucker couldn’t stand another investigation. It would mean his neck, and no mistake-and probably his wife’s neck, too, after he couldn’t protect her any more.
He licked his lips. “How much do you want?” he whispered.
“Now you’re talking like a smart boy,” Grillparzer said with another nasty chuckle. “I like smart boys. Five thousand for starters. We’ll see where it goes from there.”
Drucker let out a silent sigh of relief. He could make the first payment. Maybe Grillparzer aimed to bleed him to death a little at a time, not all at once. After that first payment… He’d worry about that later. “How do I get you the money?” he asked.
“I’ll let you know,” the ex-gunner answered.
“I’m going up next week,” Drucker warned. “My wife doesn’t know anything about this, and I don’t want her to. Don’t mix her up in this, Grillparzer, or you’ll get trouble from me, not cash.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Hans old boy,” Grillparzer said, but that might not have been altogether true, for he went on, “All right, we’ll play that your way-for now. You’ll hear from me.” He hung up.
Kathe chose that moment to come into the living room. “And how is your old army buddy?” she asked indulgently.
“Fine,” Drucker answered, and the lie survived his wife’s long and intimate acquaintance with him. He nodded, ever so slightly. Now he had a little stretch of time in which to plan how best to commit a murder.
Ttomalss had been studying the Big Uglies ever since the conquest fleet came to Tosev 3. Sometimes he thought he understood this world’s strange inhabitants as well as anyone not hatched among them could. He certainly had that reputation among the Race. He was, after all, the only male who’d ever successfully reared a Tosevite hatchling from its earliest days to the approach of maturity. He was, so far as he knew, the only male addled enough even to try such a mad venture.
But, despite that success, despite endless other research, despite endless study of others’ research on the Big Uglies and even their research on themselves, he sometimes thought he didn’t understand them at all. He’d had a lot of those moments since coming to the Greater German Reich. Now he found himself facing another one.
A Big Ugly named Rascher, who called himself a physician-by Tosevite standards, maybe he was one, but Tosevite standards were low, low-spoke in the tones of calm reason that so often characterized officials of the Reich at their most outrageous: “Of course these individuals deserve death, Senior Researcher. They are a weakness in the fabric of the Aryan race, and so must be plucked from it without mercy.”
He used the language of the Race. As far as Ttomalss was concerned, that only made the horror underlying his words worse. The researcher said, “I do not understand the logic behind your statement.” I ought to learn that phrase in the language of the D
eutsche, Ttomalss thought. Spirits of Emperors past know I use it often enough.
“Is it not obvious?” Dr. Rascher said. “Does the Race not also punish males who mate with other males?”
Ttomalss shrugged; that was a gesture the Race and Tosevites shared. “I have heard of such matings happening among us,” he admitted. “During the mating season, we are apt to become rather frantic. But the occurrences are rare and accidental, so what point to making a fuss, let alone punishing the behavior?”
“It is not rare and accidental among us,” the Big Ugly said. “Some misguided males deliberately pursue it. They must be rooted out, exterminated, lest they pollute us with this unnatural behavior.”
“I do not understand,” Ttomalss said again. “If they mate among themselves, they cannot have hatchlings. This in itself eliminates them from your gene pool. Where is the need to root out and exterminate?”
“Mating among males is filthy and degenerate,” Dr. Rascher declared. “It corrupts the young in the Reich.”
“Even if what you say is true-and I have seen no evidence to that effect-do you not believe the problem to be self-correcting?” Ttomalss asked. “I repeat, these males are unlikely to breed, and so, except for new mutations-assuming this trait to be genetically induced, about which I have seen no evidence either for or against-will in the course of centuries gradually tend to diminish. You Deutsch Tosevites, if you will forgive me for saying so, have always struck the Race as being impatient even for your species.”