Down to Earth by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

getting was good. So had Naomi’s. That made up his mind for him. If traffic didn’t do him in, he’d keep trying to escape, even if escape meant Palestine.

 
      2
     
    Little by little, Jerusalem began to settle down after the latest round of Arab rioting. Reuven Russie shook his head as he walked toward the medical college that bore his father’s name. It wasn’t so much that Jerusalem was settling down as that the riots had a few days between them now rather than coming one on the heels of another. When the Arabs erupted, they were as fierce as ever.
    For the moment, they were quiet. An Arab woman in a long black dress with a black scarf on her head walked past Reuven. He nodded politely. So did she, though his clothes and his fair skin clearly said he was a Jew. Did something nasty gleam in her eyes despite the polite nod? Maybe, maybe not. The Arabs’ riots were aimed first and foremost at the Lizards, with the Jews being secondary targets because they got on with the Race better than their Arab neighbors did.
    Reuven wondered if that woman had been screeching
“Allahu akbar!”
and breaking windows or throwing rocks or setting fires during the latest round of turmoil. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. The sour smell of old burning still clung to Jerusalem, even after a late-winter rainstorm. The rain hadn’t been able to wash away all the soot streaking the golden sandstone that was the most common local building material, either.
    A razor-wire security perimeter surrounded the Moishe Russie Medical College. As Reuven approached, a Lizard in a sandbagged strongpoint waved an automatic rifle at him. “Show me your authorization for entry,” the Lizard snapped in his own language. No one who didn’t understand that language was likely to have authorization to pass through the perimeter.
    “It shall be done,” Reuven said, also in the language of the Race. He handed the Lizard a plastic card with his photograph. The Lizard didn’t compare the photograph to his appearance. Even after more than twenty years on Earth, many males of the Race had trouble telling one human being from another. Instead, the soldier fed the card into an electronic gadget and waited to see what colored lights came on.
    The result must have satisfied him, for he handed the card back to Russie when the machine spat it out. “Pass on,” he said, gesturing with the rifle.
    “I thank you,” Reuven answered. The medical college had come under heavy attack during the fighting. He was glad the Race thought the school important enough not to be endangered so again.
    He
certainly thought it was that important, though he would have admitted he was biased. Nowhere else on earth did the Lizards teach people what they knew of medicine, and their knowledge was generations ahead of what humanity had understood about the art before the Race came.
    Learning some of what the Lizards knew had been Moishe Russie’s goal ever since the fighting stopped. Reuven was proud he’d been accepted to follow in his father’s footsteps. If he hadn’t passed the qualifying examinations, the name above the entrance to the block Lizard building wouldn’t have meant a thing.
    He went inside. The Race had built doors and ceilings high enough to suit humans, and the seats in the halls fit Tosevite fundaments. Other than that, the Race had made few concessions. Reuven carried artificial fingerclaws in a little plastic case in his back pocket. Without them, he would have had a devil of a time using the computer terminals here.
    More people than Lizards bustled through the halls on the way to one class or another. The people—most of them in their mid- to late twenties, like Reuven—were students, the Lizards instructors: physicians from the conquest fleet, now joined by a few from the colonization fleet as well.
    Reuven and another student got to the door of their lecture hall at the same time. “I greet you, Ibrahim,” Reuven said in the language of