Fear of Strangers

by Dave Hutchinson

It’s a two-hour drive from Zakopane to Kraków, and for at least half of it we were stuck behind one of the big lorries that wind their way through the mountains between Poland and Slovakia, but I still managed to do the journey in an hour and forty minutes and drop Elzbieta at the hospital five minutes before her shift was due to start.

“If you ever drive like that with me in the car again, I’ll divorce you,” she told me.

“It wasn’t so bad,” I said.

“You’re a lunatic.”

“You say the sweetest things.”

She sighed. “All right. I’ll see you at home.” She leaned in through the open driver’s side window and kissed me on the top of the head. “Have a good day.”

“Monday’s always a slow day,” I told her.

“Go.” She straightened up and waved me away. “You’ll be late.”

“Nobody will notice,” I said, putting the car into gear. “Nobody ever notices.”

“And thank you. It was lovely.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was, wasn’t it?”

She looked very small and lonely in the rear-view mirror, standing in front of the hospital as I drove away.

The traffic in town hadn’t improved since Friday evening. A lorry had shed its load of sewer pipes, necessitating a detour which took me almost entirely around the center of Kraków. Three days earlier, I would have been seething with rage at this, and any driver behind me who honked his horn would have done so at his own risk.

This morning was different. It was a nice bright autumn morning, and a fresh breeze had blown away the worst of the caul of pollution that settles over Kraków on still days. At one point I found myself on the wrong side of the Vistula, having turned onto a bridge by mistake while trying to find my way back into the center of town, but I found that it didn’t matter very much. It was amazing how much difference two days could make. If this had happened to me on Friday I would probably have driven the car into the river out of pure spite.

It was nine o’clock before I reached the Ministry. It was harder than usual to find a parking space because there seemed to be more cars than usual parked outside. Did this bother Tomasz? Not this morning. This morning nothing could bother Tomasz. I drove around the corner and parked on the pavement. I immobilized the car with the Krooklok my cousin Dariusz sent me from Darlington, removed the radio and the wipers, took our rucksacks and camping gear out of the boot along with the car’s toolbox, and thus loaded made my way into the building.

“Morning, Mister Gombrowicz,” I said to old Marek as I went past the front desk in the foyer. “It was snowing in Zakopane when we left. Better wax up your skis.”

Marek was somewhere between two hundred and a thousand years old, a bent, wizened, seamed old gentleman whose shoulders were always snowdrifts of dandruff and who always wore on the breast pocket of his black suit the medal General Sikorski pinned on him, when he was eleven years of age and sabotaging Panzers for the Home Army. He had always been at the front desk at the Ministry of Tourism; some said we had moved into the building and found him already there, waiting at his desk and smelling of laundry-soap.

Some people were a little scared of him, but I liked him. Over the years we had evolved a little routine of banter which usually involved him commenting ruefully on my dress sense as I made my way to the lift, and me making some disparaging comment about the skiing championships he claimed to have won shortly after the War.

This morning, however, he said, “You have to show me your identification, Mister Kosinski.”

I stopped by the desk and looked around the pile of sleeping bags I was clasping to my chest. “My what?”

Marek looked different. His shoulders had been cleared of dandruff; his suit looked newly-cleaned. The few remaining strands of hair he possessed were neatly combed and stuck to his freckled scalp with gel. He looked proud. He was standing as close to attention as his natural posture would allow.

“Your identification, sir,” he said in a formal tone of voice.

“You’ve never asked me for my identification,” I said. “Not even when I first started here.” I saw a look of alarm cross his face. “You never ask anyone for their identification.”

Marek glanced nervously to my right, and from that direction I sensed an enormous displacement of air.

“If you’ll just comply with the man’s request, sir …?” a voice pitched somewhere below the rumble of an earthquake said in English.

I had to rearrange the bundle in my arms in order to turn my head and find the source of the vibration. Standing between me and the lift was a colossal black man dressed in the most beautifully-tailored suit I had ever seen.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“That isn’t important, sir,” he replied in almost-flawless Polish. His hair was cut very short and his head seemed to blend into his shoulders without the usual formality of a neck. He never took his eyes off me for a moment. “Just show us your identification.”

“What’s going on, Mister Gombrowicz?” I said.

Marek was growing more and more uncomfortable the longer this peculiar little pantomime went on. “It’s the Americans, Mister Kosinski.”

“The what?”

“They arrived an hour ago. Mister Pawluk says the Minister’s on his way as well.”

I looked at the American. “My name is Tomasz Kosinski. I’m Second Assistant Director.”

The black man was shaking his head. He had to move his entire upper body to do it, which made him look about to break into some peculiar dance. “ID, buddy, or you go no further.”

I thought about it. Then I dropped my bundle to the worn marble of the floor and reached into the inside pocket of my jacket. The black man tensed up so abruptly I thought he was about to burst the seams of his suit. I took out my identity card and showed it to him. While I showed it to Marek, the black man spoke quietly into his jacket cuff, then touched his right ear.

“Okay,” he said finally. “You pass. Clear up that stuff and get upstairs; they’re waiting for you.”

I stood looking at him. “You’re very rude, aren’t you.”

“That’s not at issue here, sir.”

“I think it probably is,” I said. At some point, we had both started speaking English. “I am a ministerial official and I have shown you my identification. Now I would like to see your identification.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” he said, and the way he said sir suggested that he would have been delighted to shoot me.

“I might be wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and I might not have shaved since Friday morning, but I’m still a ministerial official,” I told him. I leaned slightly towards him. “I understand your President favors jeans and sweatshirts; would you give him any less respect because of it?”

He sighed and took from his jacket pocket a little laminated card that identified him as a member of the United States Secret Service. The photograph on the card didn’t do him justice.

“Thank you, Agent O’Hara,” I said. “You see how smooth life can be if one is prepared to be flexible?”

O’Hara stared at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Good,” I said, starting to move towards the lift. “Now, if you’d help Mister Gombrowicz gather up my belongings and put them somewhere safe, I’d be most grateful. I would help, but apparently people are waiting to see me upstairs.” The lift doors opened when I pressed the button, which was unusual in itself; usually you had to wait a couple of minutes to get the lift’s attention. “Thank you.” I gave O’Hara and Marek one of my sunniest smiles, backed into the lift, and let the doors close on me.

· · · · ·

Marek must have phoned ahead, because Zosia, my secretary, was waiting for me when the lift doors opened on the fifth floor.

“They arrived at seven o’clock this morning,” she told me before I was even out of the lift. “Mister Pawluk got a message last night about it. We tried to get in touch with you but you didn’t leave a contact number.”

“I’m a Second Assistant with the Ministry of Tourism,” I told her. “The only time I need to leave a contact number is when the England football team come to play in Chorzów, and even that’s not really my responsibility. What’s going on? There’s an American Secret Service man in the foyer.”

“There are more of them.” Zosia was a delicately-gorgeous young woman who favored dowdy knitted dresses and thick tights and never wore make-up, which I always thought was a shame. “A party of fifteen, twelve of them bodyguards.”

“And the other three?”

“The American Ambassador and two aides. Mister Kaminski says the aides must be CIA.”

We were halfway down the corridor to my office. “Zofia,” I said, “did you just tell me that the American Ambassador is here?”

“It’s been a nightmare, Mister Kosinski. Marek has lost his mind. I had to show him my identification.”

I stopped, trying to think.

“Mister Pawluk was here yesterday,” said Zosia.

The world really had been jolted off its bearings; the idea of work interrupting my boss’s weekend was unthinkable.

“Tomasz,” a voice called down the corridor. Bartek Kaminski was bustling towards us at a very fast walk, his shoes squeaking on the uneven lino. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Zakopane,” I said. “Elzbieta and I went to Zakopane for the weekend. What’s going on? Zosia says the American Ambassador’s here.”

He finally reached us. “And two CIA men, and a dozen bodyguards. They’re in Pawluk’s office.”

“All of them?”

“Just the Ambassador and the CIA. The Secret Service men are all over the building.” He took off his spectacles and polished them on the hem of his sweater. “It’s an invasion.”

“What are they doing here?” I asked, mystified. “Do they need tourist information? Are they lost?”

The door to Pawluk’s office opened, and he looked out into the corridor. “Kaminski,” he snapped. “Kosinski. In here, now.”

“What about me?” said Zosia.

“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said.

There were only three chairs in Pawluk’s office. The one behind his desk was occupied by a little bald man who was almost engulfed by an immense cashmere overcoat. On the other two chairs, the hard uncomfortable ones Pawluk forced his visitors to sit on, were two nearly-identical bland-faced young men with expensive haircuts and beautifully-shined shoes. The little man was looking out of the window at the view of Wawel Hill and the Cathedral and Castle. The young men were chatting to each other in low, conspiratorial voices. All three looked up as Bartek and I stepped into the office. None of them, it has to be said, looked terribly impressed by what they saw.

“Gentlemen,” Pawluk said in his shaky English, “these are the men I told you about.”

The little man stood up behind the desk and held out his hand. “Andrew Bright,” he said in absolutely flawless Polish. “These gentlemen are Mister Hopkinson and Mister Ramius.”

Bartek looked at the young men while I shook the Ambassador’s hand. “Ramius,” he said in English. “That’s a Latvian name.”

“It’s a Wisconsin name,” said one of the young men defensively.

“You’ve caused quite a commotion here, Mister Ambassador,” I told Bright.

He nodded and sat down again, gathering the skirts of his coat around him. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s unavoidable. We didn’t have a lot of time.”

“For what?” I inquired as politely as my curiosity would allow.

Bright glanced at Hopkinson, who got up, let himself out of the office, and closed the door behind him. “Mister Hopkinson and Mister Ramius are consular officials at our Embassy in Warsaw,” Bright told us.

“CIA,” said Bartek.

“Kaminski,” Pawluk warned.

“No.” Bright smiled and raised a hand. “You’re quite right, Mister Kaminski. CIA.” He took a maroon leather case, about the size and shape of a paperback book, from his overcoat pocket and pulled gently on either end. It came apart in the middle, revealing a row of cigars. “This is a very delicate matter.” He selected a cigar and dipped into his pocket again for a silver cutter.

I sat down on the chair vacated by Mister Hopkinson. “An American tourist has done something awful in Kraków,” I said. It was the only possible explanation I could think of for his presence here. If something awful had been done to an American tourist, a lesser official would have been sent to tidy things up.

Bright never took his eyes off me while he cut the end off his cigar and lit it. It was an impressive maneuver; I would have cut the end off my finger if I had tried it.

Finally, he said, “You will, of course, have heard of the Lacertans?”

For a fraction of a second, I contemplated the possibility that the American Ambassador to the Polish Republic had chosen to visit Kraków and have a mental breakdown in my superior’s office.

“They have,” he continued, “expressed a desire to visit Poland.”

“Jesus Maria,” I heard Bartek murmur.

2

“Kaminski and Kosinski,” Hopkinson whispered to Ramius in English loudly enough for Bartek and me to hear him. “Wasn’t that an old vaudeville act?”

Ramius chuckled. “Still working the Catskills, I heard.”

“Hold me back,” Bartek told me in Polish. “I’m about to cause an international incident.”

“Help yourself,” I said, staring out of the window at the scarred expanse of concrete beyond. “I might even join in.”

Bartek turned to Ramius and smiled. “Your mother fucks dogs,” he told the American in Polish, still smiling.

Ramius smiled right back. “Great day, isn’t it?”

Bartek sighed and joined me at the window. “Well, either he has astounding impulse-control, or he doesn’t speak a word of Polish,” he said.

“Or his mother really does fuck dogs.”

Bartek glanced over his shoulder at the CIA men for a few moments. Then he shook his head.

The little VIP lounge at Kraków’s airport was full of people. There were anonymously-suited representatives of the EU, NATO, the United Nations and the Polish and American governments, and what appeared to be their entire families: wives, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and probably, somewhere, a number of family pets. Everyone wanted a chance to see the Lacertans, and, despite loud complaints from the Secret Service man, everyone was going to get that chance. There was a group of NASA scientists in jeans and polo-shirts and windbreakers, who had arrived forty minutes earlier aboard a little executive jet that was the cleanest aircraft I had ever seen. The President and Prime Minister of Poland were in attendance, but because they couldn’t stand the sight of each other they and their respective entourages had retired to separate side-rooms.

Outside, a platoon of soldiers was standing to attention in the bitter wind while their Colonel inspected them for the fiftieth or sixtieth time. A few hundred meters off to one side, the ranked cameras of the world’s press filmed the desolate scene from within a hurriedly-constructed enclosure which looked for all the world like an overcrowded cattle-pen. I looked at my watch. The flight was late.

“It would be ironic if they came all this way and then died in a plane crash, wouldn’t it,” said Bartek.

“Yes, it certainly would.”

Bartek made a little tsking sound. “You’re getting wound up.”

“No I’m not.”

“You’re becoming snappy. You always become snappy when you get wound up.”

I glared at him. He was wearing his best suit and shoes and had had his hair cut for the occasion, but he still looked as if he had just got out of bed after spending the previous night at a wedding reception. “You’re a disgrace,” I told him.

“I know,” he said. “Shall I smoke?”

We had all been told that, in deference to the sensitivities of the Americans, we were not to smoke in the lounge. Poles have never been very good at taking orders, and telling them not to smoke was like telling Americans they weren’t allowed to carry guns. I’d already established, by discreet observation, that both Ramius and Hopkinson were armed, and I presumed they weren’t the only ones.

There was a little commotion in the far corner of the lounge, and a general movement of bodies towards the windows. I looked out, and saw a tiny dark speck against the rushing clouds.

Elzbieta returned from the ladies’. “Have I missed anything?”

I pointed at the rapidly-expanding speck.

“There was some woman in there saying they won’t be able to land,” she told us. “She said the runway wasn’t long enough.”

Bartek chuckled. I felt a wave of panic rise around me.

“That’s not true, is it?” Elzbieta asked. The hospital had given her a day off to join her husband on his heroic mission, although it would have taken an act of absurd bravery to try and stop her. She looked at Bartek, then at me, and a concerned expression crossed her face. “They must know how much runway they need,” she said to us. “They wouldn’t even try to land otherwise. Would they?”

“A team of US Air Force engineers has been checking the runway every day for the past week,” I told her. Bartek made a rude noise and I elbowed him in the ribs. “They even brought in their own air traffic controller to handle the final approach. Everything is going to be fine.”

We all looked out of the window again. The dark speck had resolved itself into the shape of a dark-grey aircraft, growing larger and larger all the time. Even from so far away, we could tell it was huge. I watched it descend gracefully towards us from the southwest, and thought again about the itinerary I had been shown when I arrived at the airport this morning. I had been wondering why so much responsibility for the Lacertans’ visit had been put on my shoulders, but when I saw the itinerary everything became very clear. The Lacertans had not, it turned out, expressed an interest in visiting Poland. They had expressed an interest in visiting just one particular town in Poland.

· · · · ·

The USAF aircraft was enormous. It taxied up to the VIP stand like an ocean liner coming in to dock. We all filed out into the wind behind the President and Ambassador Bright. By virtue of the curse laid upon me, Bartek and Elzbieta and I went with them and their aides to the aircraft while everyone else hung back outside the VIP lounge.

A mobile stairway was brought into position and wheeled up against the side of the plane. An honor-guard of American airmen and Polish soldiers formed up on either side. A small pink hat bounced past us, blown across the concrete by the wind. I looked back at the crowd, but I couldn’t see who had lost their headgear. A rogue gust got under the hat and swept it neatly up into the aircraft’s landing-gear bay and out of sight.

At the top of the steps, a door opened in the side of the aircraft. An airman stepped out onto the platform, secured the door, then moved to one side, came to attention, and saluted.

A battered-looking metal sphere, about a meter and a half across, emerged from the aircraft’s door on four heavily-armored legs and paused for a moment on the platform.

“Oh God,” Elzbieta said beside me.

“Let’s hope not,” Bartek, standing on the other side of me, said.

The metal sphere walked to the edge of the platform. Its front legs bent at the knee and for a few seconds it seemed to be examining the stairs. Then it began to stump unhurriedly towards us. Behind it, more armored spheres were stepping out into the daylight.

The first sphere reached the bottom of the stairs. Four armored arms, terminating in complicated-looking claw arrangements, sprouted at equidistant intervals from its equator. Above each arm was a small glassy green cabochon, and there was a larger one on top of the sphere, like a green nipple. From where Elzbieta and I were standing, a couple of meters away, I could see that the surface of the sphere had been painted with a confusion of designs, some clearly much older and more faded than others.

This was what the briefing documents provided by the Americans had referred to as “the Lacertans’ presumed environment suits.” In other words, the Lacertans, unable to breathe our air, needed to wear spacesuits, like astronauts visiting the Moon. There had been a number of appendices regarding the designs painted on the suits, ascribing to them everything from religious to corporate significance. Personally, I thought the designs, most of them faded and scratched and chipped, spoke of attempts at customization by multiple owners, like the paint job on a second-or third-hand car.

They were not, the briefing documents said, actually from a star in the constellation of Lacerta. It had just happened that, when they unfurled their colossal solar sail to begin deceleration into the Solar System, they had been coming from the direction of Lacerta. The name had stuck, and the aliens had not bothered to correct anyone. They would not, it turned out, tell anyone where they originally came from.

Up at the head of the receiving line, Ambassador Bright was introducing the six Lacertans to the President. The President was making a speech which, thankfully, the wind blew away from us. Beside him, the Prime Minister was looking bored for the benefit of the cameras. He had already denounced the aliens’ visit as a cynical ploy by the President to divert public attention from Poland’s deep-seated social and economic problems, or words to that effect.

The briefing documents were a fount of fascinating information. Not so much in the broad sense, because the drama of First Contact with an alien species had been played out in the arena of the world’s media, but in the little details.

For instance, the Lacertans referred to their mother ship, now in orbit around the Moon, as Cordelia, a name obviously lifted from their monitoring of Earth’s radio and television broadcasts. Nobody knew the significance of this, although one NASA analyst had the charming theory that the aliens simply liked the sound of the name, and theorized that the colossal vessel might have had hundreds of names by which it had been known by the peoples of its ports of call.

In much the same way, the Lacertans referred to their landing-craft, floating in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar, as Classical Architecture. The names by which they chose to be known in Earth languages seemed similarly random.

They were, it seemed, merchants and travelers, explorers in the spirit of Columbus, seeking out new civilizations, new markets. It went without saying that most governments considered the Lacertans to be the luckiest thing to happen to Humanity since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The briefing documents suggested that, if the Lacertans had a hierarchical society, it was not organized to an easily-discernible pattern. They seemed to have no leader. It seemed rather obvious to me that if the aliens were sensible they would have left their senior officers on board Cordelia, safely out of reach, but if the little group making its way along the receiving line had a leader, I couldn’t spot them. They all stumped slowly along behind Bright in a tight group, pausing to be introduced to each dignitary.

When my turn came, Bright said, “And this Person is known as Tomasz Kosinski, and will be your guide.”

The nearest Lacertan made a noise. I should have been expecting it, because I had seen them on television and I knew from the briefing documents that they were using human speech-synthesis technology, but it was still a shock.

“Tomasz Kosinski,” said the alien. Because it was using human speech-synthesis technology, it sounded like Stephen Hawking. “Also known as Poor Bastard.”

I stared. Obviously the Lacertans had heard some of their human minders talking about me.

“Kosinski,” Bright murmured.

I stopped staring. “Right. Hello.” Without thinking I put out my hand, and to my horror the Lacertan took it in one chunky armored claw and squeezed gently. I managed to say, “Nice to meet you.”

“This Person,” it told me, “is known as Super Furry Animals.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

Bright shot me a look and stepped along the line. “And this Person is known as—”

But the walking spheres weren’t interested. One of the others said, “This Person is known as Lotus Esprit.” It had the same synthesized voice as Super Furry Animals. “Is this Person advised correctly? Is Poor Bastard expert in these Persons’ destination?”

I looked down at the Lacertans. They were all rocking gently from side to side in unison. I suddenly felt faint.

“This … ah … Poor Bastard will be these Persons’ local liaison,” Bright told the aliens. “This Person has all the data these Persons may require.”

My turn to shoot Bright a look, but he had already turned away to move on to Elzbieta, who seemed completely hypnotized by what was going on.

This time, some of the Lacertans moved with him. But one of them stayed behind. It flexed its rear legs and tilted its body until one of the equatorial cabochons was pointed in my direction. “I,” it announced in that same emotionless American-inflected computer voice, “am called Tricky Cats.” Then it straightened its legs and seemed to shake itself. “No, Skinhead,” it said, and I saw Bright wince, “this string is nonsense.” And it waddled off to join its friends.

Skinhead. I smiled at Bright. He didn’t smile back.

And so it went on, for over an hour, the Lacertans being introduced to each member of the receiving party. By the time it was over, the tarmac around the giant transport aircraft had filled up with an enormous number of vehicles. Humvees, military trucks, limousines of all kinds, and what appeared to be every single black Renault Espace in Europe. The crowd around the plane moved towards the vehicles. It was a bit of a scrum, and I got separated from Elzbieta. I saw Bright shepherding her towards an enormous Mercedes limo, along with half a dozen people I didn’t recognize.

Bartek and I wound up sitting in one of the Espaces. The rear set of seats had been removed, and a ramp had been installed to allow one of the Lacertans to climb up inside through the rear door. Bartek and I looked at each other as the alien clump-clumped up the ramp and settled itself directly behind us. Someone outside swung the door down and locked it. It might have been my imagination, but it suddenly seemed unusually cool in here. What was not my imagination, I was certain, was an ever-so-faint smell of hyacinths that wafted over us.

“Transport,” the Lacertan announced in that spooky Stephen Hawking voice. There were shuffling noises as it looked around the back of the Espace. “Quaint.”

“I think,” Bartek told me very quietly, “that I may be about to have a panic attack.”

“Hey, there’s no need to do that,” said a cheerful voice. “The little guys don’t mean us any harm.” The speaker was a tall young man standing by the open front-passenger door. He had sandy hair and he was wearing a brightly-patterned casual shirt and a Lincoln green windbreaker. He was smiling hugely at us and leaning into the Espace. “Hey, Lotus Esprit,” he called. “We ready to roll, fella?”

“Ready to roll,” the Lacertan agreed. “Absolutely. Transport this Person to its new coordinate.”

The young man chuckled and climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door. He nodded to the driver and we joined the long convoy that was making its way off the runway and out of the airport. I lost count of the number of cars and lorries and Hummers; we were going to cause chaos on the roads.

Once we were on our way, the young man half-turned in his seat and grinned at Bartek and me.

“I’m Frookie,” he said.

Bartek and I looked at him.

“That’s not my real name, of course,” he went on.

“One would obviously hope not,” Bartek said.

“My real name’s Tim.”

By this time, Bartek and I were staring.

“Look,” the American said finally. “I’m with the NASA/JPL liaison team, you’re with the Polish Government liaison team. I thought we should touch base.”

“Touch what?” Bartek asked.

“He thinks we should get to know each other,” I said.

Bartek snorted. “I am not going to touch his base. Or anything else.”

Frookie grinned at him. “Bartek Kaminski, right?”

Bartek crossed his arms and stared out through the windscreen.

“Hey, would it be okay if I called you Bart?” asked Frookie.

“It would not.”

“Okay.” Frookie’s grin only dimmed the merest fraction. “So what should I call you?”

“You shouldn’t,” Bartek said.

“You can call me Bart, if you want,” I said. Bartek guffawed.

Frookie’s grin almost went away. “Okay, guys,” he said. “Reality check.”

Bartek looked at him.

“This is not going to be one of those situations where the big boys from the City come out into the sticks and are outsmarted by the natives,” Frookie told us.

“Is it not?” I said.

“Oh no.” He shook his head. “My team are young, bright, professional, and self-motivated. All we want to do is cooperate.”

“Are you trying to tell me that my team is not young, bright, professional, and self-motivated also?” I asked.

Frookie shrugged. “Professional, maybe.”

“If I poked you in the eye,” said Bartek, “would that constitute an international incident?”

I looked over my shoulder at the Lacertan in the back of the Espace. “How much do they understand?” I said quietly.

“Well, that’s one of the sixty-four-thousand dollar questions, isn’t it?” Frookie said cheerfully.

“And is there a sixty-four-thousand dollar answer?” Bartek enquired.

Frookie grinned at him. I’d never met anyone who grinned quite so much. It was starting to get unnerving. “We just don’t know. We sold them databases for about a dozen of the world’s most common languages, along with the speech-processing hardware, so they can talk. Although we don’t think they’ve all quite figured out how to use the software properly yet. How much they actually understand, that’s anybody’s guess.”

“Forgive me for being a middle-aged, ignorant, and unmotivated Pole,” Bartek said, “but it seems that you don’t actually know very much about them.”

“Oh sure.” Frookie took a roll of mints from a pocket of his windbreaker and popped one into his mouth. “Actually, we have a kind of informal arrangement with all our liaisons, maybe you’d like to join in?”

“No,” said Bartek.

“Hey, it’s nothing heavy,” Frookie said. “It’s just that you’re going to be around the little guys quite a lot for the next few hours, they might say something that we might not hear.”

“Like what?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Like anything. In this situation, anything counts as intel. If they were to let slip where their home planet is, that would be good.”

“And you would then do what?” Bartek asked. “Go there?”

“It would be good to know,” Frookie told him evenly.

“You’re asking us to spy on them,” I said.

“Sure,” said Frookie. “They’re gathering intel on us, we’re gathering intel on them.” He shrugged. “Anything we can get for free.”

“I’m not going to spy on anyone,” said Bartek.

Frookie looked doubtful. “Hey, maybe spy was a little harsh.”

“It sounded accurate enough to me,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “Just think of it as … gossip.” He grinned at us again. “Yeah? Just stuff you’ve heard round the water cooler.”

Bartek looked at me. “We’re in the hands of madmen,” he said.

· · · · ·

There is Oswiecim the little Polish town a few kilometers from Kraków, which hardly anyone has ever heard of. And then there is Auschwitz the Nazi death machine, which practically everyone has heard of. And the tragedy is that they’re one and the same place.

My family had lived in Oswiecim for a long time. My great-grandmother could remember when it was Auschwitz, but she would never talk about that time. I was born there, and some of my family still lived there. I went to school there, and when I left school my father got me a job at the Auschwitz Museum.

On the face of it, it might appear cruel to send a sixteen-year-old to work in such a place, but at the time I showed no signs of the brilliant career my parents had hoped for me. At the time, to be honest, I showed very few signs of intelligence. So my father, who had been at school with one of the guides at the camp, put in a good word for me, and the next day I was standing in the car park looking at those gates that have the words Arbeit Macht Frei worked into them.

Twelve years later, I was still there. I had spent years studying the place and escorting tour groups. The Director of the Museum found a way to send me on a scholarship to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and study English. He packed me off to Warsaw for weeks at a time to take classes in tourism. I advanced from general dogsbody to guide to Assistant Director, and eventually, when the Director retired, I took his place.

And three months later a post came up at the Ministry of Tourism in Kraków and I grabbed it with both hands and virtually threw Elzbieta and our possessions into a van, determined that I was never, ever going back.

· · · · ·

“Must be just like coming home,” said Frookie as we pulled into the car park.

“It is his home,” said Bartek. “Tomek is from Oswiecim.”

“Yeah?” Frookie grinned at me. “Is that right? What are the restaurants like round here?”

I glared at him. “Are you serious?”

He thought about it. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess we won’t be hanging around here.”

“Good.” I opened my door and stepped out. The other official cars and people carriers and military vehicles had pulled in behind us, filling the car park and parking at the side of the road that ran by the camp.

I looked about me. It was at least five years since I had last seen Auschwitz. The camp itself still looked the same, of course, and just looking at it made me shiver. But my successor as Director had been busy; a brand-new museum complex had grown up on the site of the one I had, briefly, been in charge of. It was modern and understated and businesslike. It wasn’t there to look pretty; it was there to educate. I wondered if I would have had the strength of purpose to have this new museum built.

A large group of people was waiting by the gates. I saw my successor among them, and a number of town dignitaries, and my Aunt Stasia and Uncle Mirek. My Aunt and Uncle waved to me. I waved back halfheartedly.

When all the Lacertans had disembarked from their Espaces, and all the NATO and American and Polish soldiers had disembarked from their vehicles and taken up position, and all the dignitaries had disembarked from their limousines, we all moved as a group towards the gates and the waiting reception committee.

There were more introductions when we reached them. The NASA briefing documents had mentioned that the Lacertans seemed to enjoy the formalities of meeting people. Certainly the various dignitaries were enjoying it, which seemed rather beside the point.

Even if we had wanted to conceal some of the less savory aspects of human history, it would have been pointless. The Lacertans, Bright had told me, had studied our radio and television broadcasts as they made their way into the Solar System. By the time anyone knew they were coming, they already knew all about our history, all about our dirty secrets. They had watched scholarly documentaries about the Holocaust. They had watched Schindler’s List, although it was not at all clear whether they understood the distinction between documentary and drama—Super Furry Animals had expressed a desire to debate human and Lacertan business strategies with JR Ewing.

They had, according to Bright, requested that they be allowed to pay their respects to the dead of the Shoah. They had asked to come to Auschwitz.

I wasn’t sure what to think about this. A part of me found it rather humbling that an advanced spacefaring race would feel it necessary to do such a thing. Another part of me felt an awful aching shame that we were showing the Lacertans ourselves at our most disgusting. They might have known what had happened here; there was no need to give them a tour.

But what the Lacertans wanted, the Lacertans got. The Polish Government received a request—well, it was really a set of instructions—and the word went out: find a ministerial official capable of leading an alien tour group around Auschwitz without causing terminal embarrassment to Mankind. Finally, they found someone who fitted the first two criteria. Pawluk, in a meeting which had lasted almost two hours, had impressed on me the importance of fitting the third. Then Bright had managed to do much the same thing in about one-tenth of the time. I was to show the Lacertans Auschwitz, and I was not to screw up in any way.

It had been decided that only the Lacertans, their guards, and a few selected guests would take the tour. Everyone else would wait in the car park or the museum buildings until we returned. All the introductions over, about thirty of us passed through the gates and into the camp.

It was a long time since I had done this, and I found, somewhat to my distress, that I hadn’t forgotten anything. I’d decided that the only way to get through it was to treat the Lacertans as just another tour group, and I wandered along slightly ahead of them, reeling off the commentary as I had done hundreds of times before.

This was not like those other times, though. For one thing, no one asked a single question. Usually, someone asked at least one question. The Lacertans just plodded along in a little group, and everyone else just plodded along with them as I walked out in front of them describing what they were seeing and what had happened here. None of the humans in the group seemed terribly interested, which annoyed me. At one point, I looked round and saw Frookie and Elzbieta deep in conversation, which annoyed me even more.

It was like other tours in one respect, though. You can never keep a group of tourists together. They don’t all walk at the same pace. Some of them dawdle. Some of them wander off to look at some trivial thing and get left behind and have to break into a trot to catch up. Sometimes people just get lost, and you have to go back and find them.

No one got lost this time, but as the tour neared its end and we returned to the museum, the group became more and more strung out, until Global Warming and I were walking along almost side by side a couple of meters ahead of the others. At this point, just as we were about to turn the corner of one of the buildings, one of the other Lacertans stopped suddenly to look at something, bringing the rest of the group to a halt.

Consequently, Global Warming and I turned the corner together, and for a few moments we were quite alone. No NATO people, no UN people, no US Embassy people, no Polish people. Just me and a creature which had been born countless light-years away from Earth. I stopped and looked down at the Lacertan, just marvelling at the situation.

What happened next, I like to think, was an accident. You see it all the time with tourists. They manage to master a few words in your language, and all they want to do is talk. It’s actually rather flattering—particularly with a language like Polish, which I’m informed is not the easiest language in the world to learn—when someone takes the trouble.

Of all the Lacertans, Global Warming was the only one which seemed to have managed to get the hang of the language software NASA had sold them. It had been chattering all day, to anyone who seemed to be listening. Policemen, Secret Service men, Marines. Perhaps it saw me looking down at it and thought it should say something. Perhaps it just wanted to make conversation. With hindsight, it was an accident waiting to happen.

It said, “Most impressive, Poor Bastard. You should be properly proud.”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

Global Warming waved one arm in a gesture that was almost touchingly human. “This coordinate. Most impressive. Many millions of inferior human beings killed. You should be properly proud.”

I looked down at the Lacertan and my mouth dropped open.

“One wonders,” Global Warming went on, “why you stopped.”

At which point Bright and Frookie, who must have been hurrying to catch up just in case the Lacertan and I had taken the opportunity to swap military secrets with each other, came round the corner, saw the look on my face, and each took me gently but firmly by the elbow.

“Close your mouth, Tom,” Frookie murmured in my ear as they urged me towards the museum buildings. “You look stupid.”

I closed my mouth. Then I opened it again and said, “It said—”

“I think we can all guess what it said,” Bright said quietly. “Let’s go somewhere private where we can discuss this further, Mister Kosinski.”

We reached the museum. Bright opened the door, and without pausing for a moment Frookie ushered me inside and out of sight, by which time I was starting to get my wits back. I said, “You’ve been lying to me.”

Bright was trying office doors. He found one that opened, looked inside. “Okay,” he said. “In here.”

Frookie hustled me into the office with Bright and stayed outside to make sure we weren’t disturbed. Just to make sure, Bright closed the door and locked it. Then he looked at me. He looked at me for a very long time.

“What did it say to you?” he said finally.

I didn’t know what to say. I looked around the office. It was a nicer office than the one I’d had when I was Director here. There was a desk with a PC and a printer. There were some filing cabinets, on top of which were some dessicated-looking pot-plants. There was carpet on the floor, a little sofa along one wall, a couple of comfortable chairs.

Bright hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Kosinski?”

I said, “I think Global Warming just congratulated me for the Holocaust.”

Bright gave a little groan and rubbed his eyes.

“It asked me why we stopped,” I said. I tipped my head to one side. “Do I have the wrong end of the stick here, Mister Ambassador, or does Global Warming think the Holocaust was a good thing?”

He looked embarassed. As well he might. “It’s not just Global Warming,” he said. “It’s all of them.”

“Oh, Christ.”

Bright went over to the desk, pulled out the chair behind it, and sat down. “Even with their technology, the Lacertans can’t travel faster than light,” he told me. “They were forty light-years from our solar system when they detected signs of intelligent life here, and it’s taken them almost a century to get here.” He sat back in the chair and clasped his hands in his lap. “And for quite a lot of that time they’ve been studying our radio and television broadcasts. They know all about us.”

“We’re not talking about us here, Mister Ambassador,” I reminded him.

He nodded. “One of the first messages they sent us—they were still, oh, five years away—congratulated us on understanding the importance of removing inferior races from the collective gene pool. Their words, not mine,” he added hastily. “They said it proved that we were racially mature.”

My mouth dropped open again.

“It left us with something of a dilemma,” Bright admitted.

“I’ll bet,” I said in a small, weak voice.

“Some hard decisions had to be made,” he said. “Although really they weren’t decisions at all. The Lacertans were coming here anyway.”

“Mister Ambassador,” I said, “the Lacertans approve of Auschwitz.”

He nodded and looked down at his hands. “It came as a shock to me as well.”

“Well good!” I shouted. “Would you be more exercised if you had discovered they were Communists?”

“Mister Kosinski,” he said in that soothing tone of voice. “I am, in your words, exercised. I’m Jewish. My grandparents perished in Buchenwald. How do you think I feel?”

“I think you feel the way your government tells you to feel.”

He looked down at his hands again.

“Nobody else knows about this, do they,” I said.

“You are in a singular position,” he admitted. He looked up at me. “In a private audience at Camp David three months ago, Super Furry Animals told the President that it believed the solution to the problem of the urban underclass to be an organized program of euthanasia.”

I put my hands to my face.

“The current thinking is that we cannot impose human moral values on alien civilizations, any more than we should expect them to appreciate a Picasso,” said Bright. “They’re not humans. They have a different perspective. They see things differently.”

“That doesn’t make them right.”

“Of course it doesn’t. We have to humor them.”

I took my hands from my face and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

He shrugged.

I walked right up to the desk and leaned towards Bright. “The Nazis turned my country into a charnel house, Mister Ambassador. They set out to exterminate an appreciable percentage of the human race. The Lacertans appear to believe this was the right thing to do. And we have to go along with this, because the Lacertans are an advanced spacefaring race and they have things we want?” He started to speak, but I held up my hand to stop him. “Please correct me if I have understood this incorrectly.”

He sat there watching me for some time, his face calm. Finally, he said, “Are you finished, Mister Kosinski?” When I didn’t reply, he took out his cigar case and removed a Havana. “I hope you don’t think that the American Government likes the position it finds itself in, Mister Kosinski,” he said finally, rolling the cigar between his finger and thumb. “Clearly, the Lacertans’ moral standpoint is disgraceful. But I must reiterate my point: they are not human. If you knew some of their views on religion …” He shook his head.

I turned from the desk and walked over to the window. I closed my eyes and leaned forward until my forehead rested against the glass.

“Ask yourself a question, Mister Kosinski,” I heard Bright say. “Keeping in mind that we don’t contact alien civilizations every week, do we tell the Lacertans to go away and never darken our doorstep again? Or do we swallow our distaste and deal with them? You’re an intelligent man. You tell me.”

I opened my eyes and looked through the window. I could see a gravel path, some trees, a wall. Part of me was glad that I hadn’t had to make whatever decisions had been made. Another part of me was more disgusted than I could articulate that someone had made those decisions. And that everyone else had just gone along with them.

Bright got up from the desk and lit his cigar. “People are going to wonder where I am.”

“And we mustn’t have that, must we,” I said.

“You stay here and think about the situation you find yourself in, Mister Kosinski,” he said, going over to the door and unlocking it. “And ask yourself what you’re going to do next. Because, believe me, it’s the most important question you’ll ever ask yourself.”

I turned from the window and watched him step through the door. A moment later, Frookie stepped into the office, closed the door, and locked it.

“So,” he said cheerfully, “I guess you know that the little guys have a dirty little secret.”

“You bastard,” I said. “You knew all along.”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Well, we told the little guys not to say anything. Said people wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m afraid I understand all too well.”

“Yeah. Nazis from Outer Space.” He made a little sucking noise with his mouth. “Knee-jerk reaction, Tom, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“If you don’t stop patronizing me I’m going to punch you in the mouth.”

“Hey.” He held his hands in front of him, palms out. “Calm down. What did Bright say?”

I sat down on the sofa. “He said it was regrettable and asked me if I could handle the situation any better.”

“And could you?”

“It’s not my situation to handle,” I told him. “Personally, I think it’s disgusting.”

He shook his head wonderingly. “You know, we were ready for them?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, not for the little guys in particular, but we spent years thinking out scenarios for First Contact. We were always sure it was going to happen sometime, and we had to be ready. We had to have contingencies in case we didn’t recognize them as life forms, or in case they didn’t recognize us as life forms. All that science fiction stuff, you know?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“But the one scenario we never thought of was that we’d recognize them as life, and they’d recognize us as life, but their morals would be so …”

“Evil?” I suggested.

He shrugged. “Well, evil’s a strictly human concept, really, when you think about it.”

“I’m really beginning to dislike you, you know,” I told him. “This whole thing’s a farce. It’s not a pilgrimage at all. It’s not an homage. They’re loving every moment. It’s their equivalent of going to a foreign country and visiting an art gallery to look at pretty paintings.”

“Well,” he said, “we had to tell the media something. They wouldn’t understand the truth.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“Personally, I think it’s a pretty good story,” he said. “For something we thought up in a hurry.”

“It’s sick!” I yelled. “It’s disgusting!”

He regarded me for a few moments. Then he said, “There’s a theory going around. They’re calling it the Lost Tribe Theory.”

I stared at him. “The what?”

“The Lost Tribe Theory. Lost Tribe Theory says that in 1939, 1940, something like that, there’s this lost tribe in the depths of the Amazon rain forest, and one day a bunch of German explorers makes contact with them.”

“German explorers,” I said.

“Nazi explorers. Aryan stereotypes saturated with Nazi ideology and toting technology the Lost Tribe never dreamed of. Guns, mosquito repellent, the internal combustion engine, toilet paper. Like that.

“So, the Lost Tribe get talking to the Germans, and they start getting the feeling that there’s something not quite right about these blond-haired blue-eyed boys. They’re talking about racial purity, about Aryan superiority, the whole nine yards. The Lost Tribe don’t like this at all, but they go along with it because the Germans have things they want.”

“Guns,” I said. “Toilet paper.”

“Right. And they know that somewhere out there, beyond the forest, there are people who don’t think the way the Nazis do. So what the Lost Tribe do is, they milk the Germans for everything they can get, and one day they build their own airplane and they fly on out of there and make contact with some good ol’ American boys and everybody lives happily ever after.”

I sat back. “And this … insanity is masquerading as official policy?”

“You better believe it. We get what we want from the Lacertans, then we go looking for the good guys.”

“Staggering,” I said. Was the whole world being run by madmen?

“But—and here’s the kicker—only the chiefs of the Lost Tribe know about the Nazis’ unsavory worldview. And the rest of the tribe must never know, because—”

“Because if they did, they’d shoot the Nazis full of arrows, and then there would be no more toilet paper.”

Frookie smiled at me. “It would be really hard to spin the little guys if people knew some of the things they believe.”

“I can see how that might be a problem,” I agreed.

He positively beamed. “There,” he said. “I knew you’d get it eventually.”

“On the other hand,” I added, “it might also be a problem if it became common knowledge that you were knowingly dealing with people whose views make Ivan the Terrible look like Mother Teresa.”

“Oh, hey.” He waved a hand. “That’s no problem. Governments do that all the time.”

I knew that already, of course. And for some reason it still made me sad. “So what you’d like is the appearance of standing on the moral high ground, without actually knowing where precisely it’s located.”

“Hell, I don’t care where people think I’m standing, Tom. I’m only doing my job.” He rubbed his face. “Look, let’s go back outside, yeah? People are going to start wondering what’s going on.”

“People have a right to know what’s going on.”

“Sure they do, sure they do.” He made little placatory motions with his hands. “Look, I agree with you, Tom. You’re preaching to the converted here. But we have to keep this quiet, for everybody’s good.”

I just sat watching him.

“What do you say?” he asked. “Are you on board?”

I shrugged.

He grinned. “There you go,” he said. “Come on, Tom, let’s go back outside.”

“I don’t like this at all,” I told him.

“I know, I know. But at least we understand each other now, right?”

I doubted very much whether he understood me at all, but I understood him all too well. My country had been invaded by people like Frookie for centuries. They had come in after the soldiers had done their business. Bureaucrats. Clerks. Faceless little apparatchiks. Men who were only doing their job.

· · · · ·

We went back outside. The Lacertans were standing in a little group, almost surrounded by Marines and CIA and Secret Service men. All the aliens were rocking gently from side to side again. Elzbieta and Bartek and all the other dignitaries were standing a few meters to one side, with their own Marines and CIA and Secret Service men. Elzbieta caught my eye as I walked towards the Lacertans, but I just shook my head slightly.

“Poor Bastard,” said Global Warming as I reached them. “This Person has been informed of the faux pas it has committed.”

“Forget it,” I muttered.

“Very well,” said the alien. “Forgotten. Skinhead.”

Bright came up.

“These Persons have many other coordinates to visit,” Global Warming told the Ambassador. “Let’s roll.”

Bright looked at me and I looked at him for a few moments. Then I nodded and I saw him relax. “Very well,” he said. He looked at one of the Secret Service men. “Let’s go, Mike.”

The whole circus began to move through the main gate and out into the car park, Marines and security men and CIA men going on ahead to form a wide corridor between us and the people carriers. I walked beside the Lacertans; Elzbieta and the others were in a separate group behind us, but I was miles away. All I could think about was what Global Warming had said, and what Bright and Frookie had told me. If I’d been paying attention, I probably wouldn’t have reacted the way I did to what happened next.

All of a sudden, there was a commotion all around me. People screaming, running, shouting. And then there was silence, and in that moment of silence I heard the sound of a solid metal object hitting concrete.

I looked round for the source of the noise, and I saw a fist-sized dark object roll between two of Tricky Cats’s legs and come to rest under its environment suit.

More shouting and screaming, far far away.

The Lacertan leaned this way and that on its stumpy legs as if trying to see what had rolled underneath its body. Then it broke into a peculiar little dance on the spot, lifting its feet high and banging them down again in a fast rhythm.

Without really thinking about what I was doing, I walked over and got down on my knees, reached under the armored sphere, and picked up the metal object. The metal object was a hand grenade. I looked at it. Then I tried to throw it away, but my hand refused to release it.

I was still kneeling there, my hand held as far away from my body as possible, when the American security men reached me. They had to pry the grenade out of my hand a finger at a time. I didn’t stop screaming for fifteen minutes.

· · · · ·

It was Ramius, the CIA man with the Latvian name. Of course. Nobody else would have been allowed anywhere near the Lacertans with anything more dangerous than a cigarette lighter, but the CIA men were already armed and nobody had thought to check them for explosives. What happened to Ramius after the incident was anybody’s guess. He seemed simply to have evaporated.

“Ceased to exist,” Bartek said. “One asks about him, of course. ‘How is Mister Ramius?’ one asks. And the reply comes: ‘Who?’ He has become an unperson.” He sat back and put his feet up on his desk. “It’s almost like Stalin’s days. You won’t remember that, of course.”

“Neither do you,” I said.

He smiled. “Quite nostalgic, really.” He lit a cigarette. “They call themselves Sons of Earth, apparently.”

“Do they.”

He nodded and flicked ash on the floor. “Sons of Earth. Who thinks up these stupid names?”

“Are there many of them?”

“No one knows, apparently. According to Mike The Secret Service Man, the White House and the UN have been deluged with crank communications from various groups opposed to the Lacertans. Sons of Earth is just one of many.”

“I suppose it would have been too much to ask for the Americans to tell us about this.”

Bartek waved a hand. “No one takes them seriously,” he said.

“I bet they do now.”

The Lacertan roadshow had returned to Kraków and dropped us all off outside the Ministry building. Then it had gone on to places unknown, leaving us standing there in a rather bemused group, besieged by journalists and camaramen yelling questions. Bartek had spent much of the day cultivating various members of the Secret Service contingent, and with their help he had arranged for a group of rather sullen policemen to escort us into the building, where I was variously clapped on the back and congratulated for my act of bravery. Then I was mercilessly debriefed by Pawluk for about two hours, while Elzbieta was just as mercilessly, but rather more gently, debriefed by Zosia and the other secretaries over a meal in the Ministry’s dining room. No one, I noticed, had suggested that I might like to see a doctor.

I hadn’t told Pawluk about what Global Warming had termed its faux pas. Nor had I told him about my conversations with Bright and Frookie. I had excused my absence from the group by saying I had suddenly felt unwell, and hoped that it would not seem unusual to anyone that the American Ambassador and the NASA/JPL liaison had taken personal charge of my well-being.

“Are they still out there?” Bartek said.

I went over to the window and looked out. Most of the journalists had departed, but a couple of die-hard groups remained across the road. “There are still some there.”

“I hate journalists,” he said.

I turned from the window. “That’s hardly the attitude one would expect from someone whose job is to publicize the not inconsiderable charms of Kraków and its environs.”

He laughed. “Well that’s hardly going to be a problem from now on. We’re going to be deluged with people wanting to come to Kraków and its environs, just because the Lacertans came here. We’re going to have to extend the car park at Oswiecim to accommodate all the people who are going to want to visit.”

At any other time, the prospect of increased numbers of tourists would have gladdened my heart, but now I just felt a vague sense of dread.

“I’m going home,” I said.

“We did well today,” Bartek said. “That kind of excursion, at such short notice. It could have been a disaster.”

I was tempted to tell him that it had been a disaster, that we had spent our day wandering around Auschwitz with some of the Nazis’ biggest fans, but I remembered my promise to Frookie and I went to find Elzbieta instead.

· · · · ·

The ringing of the telephone on the bedside table woke me. I picked up the handset before it woke Elzbieta, and muttered something that sounded like my name.

“Great intel,” Frookie said. “Really really great.”

Beside me, Elzbieta sighed in her sleep and turned over. I looked at the bedside clock. It was half past four in the morning.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you that. But we’re still in Poland.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked.

“We sleep in shifts,” Frookie told me. I could hear shouting and singing on the other end of the phone, and some Nirvana song in the background. It sounded as if there was a party going on in his hotel room. “Not my turn.”

“Get some sleep,” I said. “For all our sakes.”

“What you really want to know is why it didn’t go off, isn’t it,” he said.

“It didn’t,” I said. “That will be sufficient for me.”

“We think they’ve got some kind of force field that suppresses chemical reactions,” he said. “Tricky Cats just stopped that thing exploding.”

“Go to sleep,” I said.

“I mean, whatever it is, it’s small enough for them to mount it inside their environment suits. Imagine if they’d sell it to us.”

“I’ve had a long day,” I told him. “Go away.” I put the phone down and lay back and stared at the ceiling. I was very tired but I didn’t feel remotely like sleeping. I wondered if I would ever stop feeling the shape of the grenade in my hand.

3

The Lacertans flew out of Kraków the next day, and I was glad to see them and their whole circus of diplomats and UN dignitaries and NASA hangers-on leaving my country. I wanted my life back, and I wanted it returned to me in a state as near as possible to the one it had been in before the aliens had decided to pay homage to the Final Solution.

It wasn’t to be, of course. I went back to work and everyone seemed to be looking at me differently. I tried to do my job, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the little bastards stomping admiringly around the camp at Oswiecim. Newspapers and television journalists from as far afield as Auckland and Dushanbe telephoned me to carry out interviews about my time in the company of the Lacertans, and while I found it personally interesting to discover that Dushanbe had television journalists, I told them all that I didn’t want to speak to them.

A number of British, American, French and German television channels offered me quite staggering sums for exclusives and I turned them all down, which occasioned a number of blazing arguments with Elzbieta. So I broke my promise to Frookie and told her everything. When I finished, she thought for a while and then said that, though she now understood my reluctance to give interviews, I should do just one for the money. We agreed, somewhat grudgingly, to differ.

One night, about a fortnight after the Lacertans left, I was woken around midnight by the phone ringing beside the bed.

I picked the phone up and the voice of Stephen Hawking said, “Is this Person addressing the Person known as Poor Bastard?”

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

The voice said again, “Is this Person addressing the Person known as Poor Bastard?”

“Which one of you is it?” I said.

There was a pause while the Lacertan consulted its language database. Then it said, “Is this Per—”

“Yes!” I shouted. “Who are you?”

“This Person is known as Tricky Cats,” said the Lacertan. “Is the health of Poor Bastard satisfactory?”

“How did you get my number?” I said.

“This Person consulted the Kraków telephone directory and contacted Persons listed as T Kosinski.”

I had a sudden startling image of Tricky Cats clutching the phone in one armored fist, holding the handset up against the side of its environment suit, and speed-dialing every T Kosinski in the phone book until it found me.

“What do you want?” I muttered, struggling against the pillows until I was sitting up in bed.

There was a pause, the Lacertan obviously reviewing some prearranged speech. “I want to thank you for saving my life,” it said. Then it said, “This string is just noise, Poor Bastard. This Person makes many apologies for this Person’s lack of facility with Poor Bastard’s language.”

I pressed the phone to the side of my head and wondered when this nightmare would ever end. “I didn’t save your life,” I said. “You’ve got that thing that stops explosions.”

“Poor Bastard believed this Person’s life was in jeopardy. Poor Bastard didn’t know about that thing that stops explosions.”

“No, that’s true, but—”

“Therefore Poor Bastard saved this Person’s life.”

The logic of this escaped me for the moment, so I just said, “Well, since you put it that way …”

“Therefore this Person …” The computer voice cut out, and I could swear I heard the tap-tap-tap of a metal foot hitting the floor in thought. “We owe you,” it said. Then a pause. “No, another nonsense string. This language makes no sense, Poor Bastard. These People were sold defective language processing software. This Person will demand a refund.”

I shook my head tiredly. “No, it makes sense. Maybe you just haven’t worked out how to use the language software yet. It’s just I, not We. Tricky Cats owes me. Not all Lacertans.” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation.

“Tricky Cats, all Lacertans, all one thing,” said the voice. “These People make no distinction.”

“Oh?”

“These People owe Poor Bastard.”

“Well, all right, buy me some flowers or something.”

“Perhaps Poor Bastard would like the technical specifications for that thing that stops explosions?”

“It’s a kind thought, but I can’t see me using it very often.”

Silence, on the other end of the phone.

“Although,” I said, a perfectly bizarre thought suddenly occurring to me out of absolutely nowhere, “there might be something you could do …”

· · · · ·

I hung up the phone and rubbed my ear. Looking at the bedside clock, I saw it was almost four o’clock in the morning. Beside me, Elzbieta—who had obviously become used to long rambling telephone calls at ludicrous hours of the morning—was snoring gently. I lay back and closed my eyes.

And someone started banging on the door.

“You can go and answer that,” said Elzbieta.

I opened my eyes. “I thought you were asleep.”

“With so much excitement going on around me?” More banging. “Just see who it is, Tomek.”

I got up, put on my slippers, and shuffled out of the bedroom, across the living room, and leaned my head against the front door. This brought the door-viewer right up to my eye, and with it a fish’s-eye-view of Frookie looking agitated. I wasn’t particularly surprised to see him, even though I’d presumed that he had flown back to America with the Lacertans.

I unlocked the door and opened it and said, “You should have called ahead. I’d have had a meal ready.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, brushing past me into the flat. “Only I couldn’t call ahead, could I, on account of your phone being engaged for the past three and a half hours.”

“Was it?” I shrugged. “Maybe there was a fault on the line.”

“No there wasn’t. I checked.” He stopped in the middle of the living room and turned to face me. “I thought we had a good working relationship, Tom.”

“We do,” I said. “When you can remember to stop calling me ‘Tom’.” I closed the door and locked it again.

“Tom,” he said. “Have I ever lied to you?”

I thought about it. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Unless we’re counting lies of omission, of course, in which case you’ve been lying to me more or less constantly since we first met.”

His customary smile was completely absent, and it wasn’t hard to guess why. He was glaring at me strongly enough to set me alight. I blinked wearily at him.

“Oh, it’s you, Tim,” said Elzbieta from the bedroom doorway. “I didn’t know you were back.”

“Go back to bed, Liz,” Frookie said without taking his eyes off me. “Tom and I have things to talk about.”

“How dare you speak to me like that?” she shouted, more from surprise than anything else. “Barging in here at—”

“Go back to bed,” I said gently.

“Tomek!”

“Just go, Elzbieta. Tim and I have some things to discuss.”

She glared at us, and I had to admit it was a far more scary glare than Frookie was capable of. “Shall I put my fingers in my ears as well?” she demanded archly. “Just in case I hear any of your secrets?”

“Can’t hurt,” Frookie said, still not looking at her.

“And my name’s not Liz!” she yelled. Until tonight, I would have said it was impossible for anyone to flounce anywhere in an ankle-length T-shirt, but Elzbieta made a pretty good job of it as she went back into the bedroom. She also slammed the door hard enough to knock one of her cousin Iwona’s ugly oil-paintings off the wall.

Which left Frookie and me standing in the middle of the living room staring at each other. I said, “You have two minutes and then I’m going to call the police.”

“You think I’m worried about the police?”

“We’ll find out in a couple of minutes.”

“Okay,” he said, “what were you talking about?”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

“You and the little guy,” he snapped. “Come on, I know one of them phoned you; which one was it? Tricky Cats? Super Furry Animals?”

“Tim, I’m shocked,” I said. “You mean you’re monitoring my telephone calls?”

“Don’t play stupid with me, Tomasz. What were you talking about?”

“If you have my telephone bugged,” I said, beginning to get angry, “why don’t you tell me?”

Frookie glared at me. This was a brand new side to his character, and under any other circumstances I would have found it fascinating. He said, “We can do this here or we can do it somewhere else, it’s nothing to me.”

I stood up. “That’s enough,” I told him. “It’s the middle of the night and I’m tired. Get out of my flat.”

“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh no. You’ve got no idea what you’re involved in, Tomasz. I can have you arrested right now and I can have you taken away and I can make you tell me.”

“No you can’t.”

“Look outside.”

“This is getting childish, Tim,” I said.

“Look outside, Tomasz.”

I went over and opened the door again. Standing outside in the hallway were two US Marines in full combat gear. Across the hallway, our neighbor Mister Rybczinski was standing in his own doorway. He was wearing pajamas and a threadbare blue toweling dressing gown, and on his feet were Winnie the Pooh slippers. Mister Rybczinski and I looked at each other and silently acknowledged the essentially comic nature of the Universe. I stepped back into the flat, closed my door, and turned my back on it.

“You’re not with NASA at all,” I told Frookie. “NASA doesn’t bug people’s telephones. You’re CIA.”

“No,” he said. He thought about it. “Yes.” He thought about it again. “No.” He waved a hand in the air angrily. “It’s a grey area, all right? Sometimes I’m CIA, sometimes I’m other things.” He saw the look on my face. “It’s the best way I can describe it, okay?”

“Your bugs don’t work, do they,” I said. “You know one of the Lacertans called me, but you’ve no idea what we said.”

Frookie glared at me a moment longer, then he turned away and wandered over to the window. “Little bastards,” he muttered.

I smiled. “Force fields that stop hand grenades exploding,” I said. “Something that disables telephone bugs. They are full of surprises, aren’t they?”

He turned to look at me again. “So what did it say?”

I sighed. “Tricky Cats phoned to thank me for saving its life.”

“But you didn’t,” Frookie pointed out. “That grenade was never going to go off. Tricky Cats knew that all along.”

“But I didn’t,” I said, starting to get angry again. “Tricky Cats said it appreciated my actions, which I took without knowing the grenade was never going to go off.”

He snorted. “You were on the phone for three and a half hours, Tom. You weren’t discussing Vistula’s chances against Manchester United in the UEFA Cup.”

“True,” I said. “That would probably have taken longer.” I rubbed my face. “How long do you have?”

“All the time in the world, Tom,” he said, taking a little digital recorder from his pocket and going over to the sofa. “All the time in the world. Just don’t leave anything out.”

· · · · ·

The Lacertans had no homeworld, at least none that they could remember. Their entire civilization, if it could be called a civilization, was made up of hundreds of thousands of trading ships sailing between the stars looking for exotica to trade with each other.

It was a very old society. Well over a million years old. Its scientific and technical progress had ground to a halt thousands of years ago, and the Lacertans simply carried on by repairing their existing technology over and over again. Cordelia, this group’s mother-ship, was nearly ten thousand years old, and while to our eyes it might look like a technological marvel, it was in fact a patched-together old bucket, an interstellar tramp steamer.

Lacertans did not reproduce. They were, to all intents and purposes, immortal. Their memories and personalities were constantly being recorded and updated, and when a Lacertan died its body was cloned and its personality and memories imprinted on the new body. But after living so long the more distant of those memories were becoming vague and misty and untrustworthy. And while memory transfer was almost foolproof, if you did it again and again for almost a million years the law of averages said that something would go wrong, sooner or later. It was easier just to edit out those untrustworthy memories, and all that editing mounted up, over the years. Much of the Lacertans’ history was a mystery, even to them.

Cordelia was not one of their flagships, that much was clear. The aliens gauged the importance of their individual ships by their onboard populations—a successful ship had a big crew. We had not been visited by a successful ship. The Lacertans on Earth comprised virtually the entire crew of Cordelia. You could hardly blame them, after creeping through space for God only knew how long, if they all wanted to go ashore at once. There were just two Lacertans left on board, in case of emergencies.

And in case of emergencies? Well, a long time ago, so far back in their history that there were no clear records of the event, the Lacertans had fought a civil war, ship against ship. Nobody now remembered exactly what it had been about, or who won, or who lost. All they had was a legacy of exotic weaponry, handed down the years. Cordelia, for instance, was equipped with a device which would project a gravitational lens to focus sunlight onto the surface of a planet in much the same way as a cruel child might use a magnifying glass on an anthill. Seas would boil, mountain ranges would melt. End of emergency.

I dictated all this, with minimal prompting, with my eyes closed and my head tipped back against the back of my chair. I had no idea whether Frookie believed any of it, and I was a considerable distance beyond caring.

“And Tricky Cats told you all this because it felt it owed you a favor?” he said.

“I know,” I said dully, glancing at the clock. It was almost six o’clock in the morning. “I should have asked for the cure for cancer or the secret of this gravity lens gun or whatever it is. I was tired, Frookie. I just asked the first thing that came into my head.”

“You asked it to tell you about itself.”

“And its people.” I yawned. “A typical tourist-guide reaction. I’m sorry.”

Frookie was looking at me with an awed expression on his face. “You managed to get more out of the Lacertans in three and a half hours than we’ve been able to get out of them in over a year.”

“All you have to do is get one of them to owe you a favor.” I shrugged. “There was one more thing, though.”

Frookie was checking the amount of space left on his digital recorder’s memory. “Yes?”

“I asked Tricky Cats where the good guys are.”

He looked up. “You did what?”

“I asked it about other intelligent races.”

“You’re kidding.” His smile had come back, by degrees, as I related my conversation with Tricky Cats. Now he grinned so widely I half-expected the entire top half of his head to spring up like the lid of a pedal-bin. “You’re just one surprise after another, Tom.”

“Well, since we were chatting …”

“And what did it say?”

“There aren’t any.”

His smile froze. “What?”

“There aren’t any good guys. There aren’t any other guys, in fact.”

For the first time since I’d met him, he was lost for words, and it was worth the loss of a night’s sleep to see the look on his face. “That’s … That’s ridiculous, Tom. There must be …”

I shook my head. “The Lacertans were travelling around the Galaxy when your ancestors and mine were trying to work out which end of a thighbone to hit each other with, and in all that time they’ve never found another intelligent species. Tricky Cats was very firm on this point, because it’s important for a trading civilization to remember where all its markets are. And there aren’t any. Oh, there are lots of plants and animals; the Galaxy’s absolutely crawling with life. But as far as the Lacertans know—and I’m prepared to believe that they know what they’re talking about—there are only two intelligent species. Them and us!” I was yelling at the top of my voice. “Now you tell me how this intel fits in with the Lost Tribe Theory! Go on! Tell me!”

“It was lying to you,” he said, too quickly.

“No it wasn’t,” I said, more quietly. “It owed me a favor and I asked it to tell me the truth, and it did. They’re not like us, Tim. They keep their promises. Tricky Cats told me the truth and I believe it. There’s only us and them. Now what are you going to do?”

Elzbieta came in from the bedroom. “It’s no use trying to keep things secret from me and then screaming like a madman,” she said to me. “Half the block must have heard you.”

Half the block would have suited me; I’d only been hoping the two Marines outside the front door would hear me. Soldiers love to gossip. I said to Frookie, “Get out of my home.”

He said, “Tom—”

“Out,” I said, standing up. “You’ve got what you wanted from me. Now go.”

He got up and slipped the recorder into a pocket of his combat jacket. “You’ll have to be debriefed properly.”

“You’ve had all the debriefing you’re going to have,” I told him. I made shooing motions with my hands. “Out. Go.”

He moved reluctantly towards the door. “This isn’t over yet, Tom.”

“Oh yes it is,” I said, herding him across the flat while Elzbieta watched us wide-eyed. “I’ve written down everything I know about the Lacertans and their disgusting beliefs and I’ve lodged it with a lawyer. On my instructions, or if anything happens to me or anyone I know, he’ll email what I’ve given him to the dozen biggest news agencies in the world.”

He smiled at me. “That kind of thing never works outside of thrillers, Tom.”

“I’ll count to ten,” I told him. “And then, if you’re still here, we can discover together whether or not this kind of thing never works outside of thrillers. One.”

“Tom.”

“Two.”

“Tom, this is so … so crazy.”

“Three.”

“Tom, I thought we were friends.”

“Four.”

“All right.” He held up his hands. “Okay, Tomasz.” He went over to the door and opened it. “You got the better of the guy from the big city after all. I just hope it made you feel good, that’s all.”

“It made me feel marvelous,” I said, and I closed the door on him.

Elzbieta and I looked at each other for a while after Frookie had gone. I believe I looked somewhat bashful.

Finally, she said, “Did you really write down everything you know about the Lacertans and send it to a lawyer?”

“No,” I said. “But I’d better do that right now, before it slips my mind.”

4

In Frookie’s shoes, I would have gone looking for corroboratory testimony from the Lacertans. And I really hope he got it, but he didn’t have long because four days after my conversation with Tricky Cats the aliens folded their tents and left town.

We watched it on television. It was spectacular, no doubt about that. One moment Classical Architecture was a huge lumpy grey whale-shape floating on the waves off the coast of Madagascar. The next moment the sea reared up in a solid column of fire reaching far out into the stratosphere, and at its tip was a white-hot pinpoint. The column of fire subsided quickly, but the white-hot pinpoint kept dwindling away into the sky.

Elzbieta looked at me and said, “Was this anything to do with you?”

I looked at her. “You should be working for NASA. Or the CIA.”

She laughed. “I’ve been married to you for too long. You’ve got that look you always have.”

“Do I have a look?”

“Oh yes. That one that says it’s my fault. My Mother spotted it the first time she met you. She said I’d never have any trouble knowing when you were feeling guilty about something.”

I smiled and looked at the television again. “I asked them to leave.”

“You did what?”

“Tricky Cats said it owed me a favor for saving its life, so I said, okay, go away and don’t come back, and tell all your friends not to come here.”

“But you didn’t save its life. You said it disarmed the hand grenade.”

“I didn’t know that, though. To Tricky Cats, that was the same as me saving its life.”

Elzbieta shook her head.

“They don’t think like us,” I told her. “To a Lacertan, if you save the life of one, you save the life of all of them. And if one of them owes you a favor, they all owe you a favor.” I hadn’t mentioned to Frookie that much of the Lacertans’ social structure was based on avoiding owing someone a favor, while at the same time trying to make sure they owed you one. The way Tricky Cats had explained it, everyday life among the Lacertans was an experience of unimaginably Byzantine complexity. They hadn’t told anyone else because, quite rightly, they had wanted to preserve the potential trading advantage until—with us owing them an enormous number of favors—they were going to spring it on us. At which point, of course, they would have discovered just how unlike us they were. And shortly afterward, they would probably have melted the Himalayas, just to remind us who was boss.

“So you just asked them to go, and they’ve …” She looked at the television. The little white speck that was Classical Architecture was almost invisibly tiny against the infinite blue of the Indian Ocean sky. “Oh, Tomasz.”

“They believe in racial purity. They believe in ethnic cleansing, selective culling as a means of strengthening a society. And we went along with it because they had things that we wanted. The Americans tried to keep it quiet, but the Lacertans were telling anyone who would listen. It would have got out sooner or later. What would it have done to us if an advanced spacefaring race told us the Holocaust was right? Have you any idea how many people would have believed them? We didn’t need them, no matter how technologically advanced they are.”

“I can’t believe what you’ve done,” she said in a stunned tone of voice. “What about all that stuff you told Tim? Did you make all that up?”

“No, that was all true. Tricky Cats and I chatted. You know how it is.”

“Jesus Maria,” she said. “Who elected you Leader of the World? Who said you had the right to do that?”

“I thought it was about time someone did it,” I said. “And I was hoping for a little more understanding from my wife.”

She snorted. “You’d better hope for a bit more than understanding if the United Nations ever finds out what you’ve done.”

“The only other people who know what I’ve done are on their way to pastures new,” I said. I pointed at the television. “Look, there they go. Wave them bye-bye.”

She looked at the screen, then at me. “But you said there are only two intelligent species in the Galaxy.”

“That the Lacertans know about, yes.”

“And they just left the only other known intelligent species in the Galaxy because you asked them to go?”

Elzbieta still didn’t appreciate the enormity of what Tricky Cats had agreed to. In their society, their ships were roughly comparable to cities, and their status was a direct consequence of their success as traders. In this scheme of things, Cordelia was little more than a hamlet. Gaining the sole trading rights to the only other known intelligent civilization in the Galaxy would have promoted it to the status of capital city, all in one go.

I smiled. The Lacertans were going to be in the Solar System for years, on a series of gravity slingshots, before their sail got them up to anything like solar escape velocity. And for all that time, while NASA and the UN and most of the individual governments of Earth sent messages imploring them to change their minds and come back, Tricky Cats was going to be kicking itself. Assuming it was physically possible for a Lacertan to kick itself; maybe the other members of the crew would do it.

“They never break a promise,” I said. “You just have to catch them in the right mood.”

“Wouldn’t they have told Tim why they were leaving?”

“I asked them not to.” And I believed they hadn’t.

Elzbieta shook her head. “What about the other Lacertan ships?”

“Tricky Cats said it would spread the word among whatever ships it could contact, tell them not to come here, but contact’s not an exact science. We could conceivably get a visit from another ship.”

“And then what will you do?”

Taking into account the size of the Galaxy, and the relative scarcity of Lacertan ships, it was fairly unlikely that we would be getting another visit any time soon, but as an old Uncle of mine was fond of saying, if an accident can happen once, it can happen again.

“It might be best,” I said, “if we don’t tell anybody else about this.”

The End

Table of Contents

Start