Mr. Ito looked at Royland and slapped his face hard. Royland, by the insanity of sheer reflex, cocked his fist as a red-blooded boy should, but the German’s reflexes operated also. He had a pistol in his hand and pressed against Royland’s ribs before he could throw the punch.
“All right,” Royland said, and put down his hand.
Mr. Ito laughed. “You are at least partly right, Major Kappel; he certainly is not from one of our camps! But do not let me delay you further. May I hope for a report on the outcome of this?”
“Of course, Mr. Ito,” said the German. He holstered his pistol and walked on, trailed by the scientist. Royland heard him grumble something that sounded like “Damned extraterritoriality!”
They descended to a basement level where all the door signs were in German, and in an office labeled WISSENSCHAFT-SLICHESICHERHEITSLIAISON Royland finally told his story. His audience was the major, a fat officer deferentially addressed as Colonel Biederman, and a bearded old civilian, a Dr. Piqueron, called in from another office. Royland suppressed only the matter of bomb research, and did it easily with the old security habit. His improvised cover story made the Los Alamos Laboratory a research center only for the generation of electricity.
The three heard him out in silence. Finally, in an amused voice, the colonel asked: “Who was this Hitler you mentioned?”
For that Royland was not prepared. His jaw dropped.
Major Kappel said: “Oddly enough, he struck on a name which does figure, somewhat infamously, in the annals of the Third Reich. One Adolf Hitler was an early Party agitator, but as I recall it he intrigued against the Leader during the War of Triumph and was executed.”
“An ingenious madman,” the colonel said. “Sterilized, of course?”
“Why, I don’t know. I suppose so. Doctor, would you—?”
Dr. Piqueron quickly examined Royland and found him all there, which astonished them. Then they thought of looking for his camp tattoo number on the left bicep, and found none. Then, thoroughly upset, they discovered that he had no birth number above his left nipple either.
“And,” Dr. Piqueron stammered, “his shoes are odd, sir—I just noticed. Sir, how long since you’ve seen sewn shoes and braided laces?”
“You must be hungry,” the colonel suddenly said. “Doctor, have my aide get something to eat for—for the doctor.”
“Major,” said Royland, “I hope no harm will come to the fellow who picked me up. You told him to report himself.”
“Have no fear, er, doctor,” said the major. “Such humanity! You are of German blood?”
“Not that I know of; it may be.”
“It must be!” said the colonel.
A platter of hash and a glass of beer arrived on a tray. Royland postponed everything. At last he demanded: “Now. Do you believe me? There must be fingerprints to prove my story still in existence.”
“I feel like a fool,” the major said. “You still could be hoaxing us. Dr. Piqueron, did not a German scientist establish that nuclear power is a theoretical and practical impossibility, that one always must put more into it than one can take out?”
Piqueron nodded and said reverently: “Heisenberg. Nineteen fifty-three, during the War of Triumph. His group was then assigned to electrical weapons research and produced the blinding bomb. But this fact does not invalidate the doctor’s story; he says only that his group was attempting to produce nuclear power.”
“We’ve got to research this,” said the colonel. “Dr. Piqueron, entertain this man, whatever he is, in your laboratory.”
Piqueron’s laboratory down the hall was a place of astounding simplicity, even crudeness. The sinks, reagents, and balance were capable only of simple qualitative and quantitative analyses; various works in progress testified that they were not even strained to their modest limits. Samples of sulfur and its compounds were analyzed here. It hardly seemed to call for a “doctor” of anything, and hardly even for a human being. Machinery should be continuously testing the products as they flowed out; variations should be scribed mechanically on a moving tape; automatic controls should at least stop the processes and signal an alarm when variation went beyond limits; at most it might correct whatever was going wrong. But here sat Piqueron every day, titrating, precipitating, and weighing, entering results by hand in a ledger and telephoning them to the works!
Piqueron looked about proudly. “As a physicist you wouldn’t understand all this, of course,” he said. “Shall I explain?”
“Perhaps later, doctor, if you’d be good enough. If you’d first help me orient myself—”
So Piqueron told him about the War of Triumph (1940-1955) and what came after.
V
In 1940 the realm of der Fuehrer (Herr Goebbels, of course—that strapping blond fellow with the heroic jaw and eagle’s eye whom you can see in the picture there) was simultaneously and treacherously invaded by the misguided French, the sub-human Slavs, and the perfidious British. The attack, for which the shocked Germans coined the name blitzkrieg, was timed to coincide with an internal eruption of sabotage, well-poisoning, and assassination by the Zigeunerjuden, or Jewpsies, of whom little is now known; there seem to be none left.
By Nature’s ineluctable law, the Germans had necessarily to be tested to the utmost so that they might fully respond. Therefore Germany was overrun from East and West, and Holy Berlin itself was taken; but Goebbels and his court withdrew like Barbarossa into the mountain fastnesses to await their day. It came unexpectedly soon. The deluded Americans launched a million-man amphibious attack on the homeland of the Japanese in 1945. The Japanese resisted with almost Teutonic courage. Not one American in twenty reached shore alive, and not one in a hundred got a mile inland. Particularly lethal were the women and children, who lay in camouflaged pits hugging artillery shells and aircraft bombs, which they detonated when enough invaders drew near to make it worthwhile.
The second invasion attempt, a month later, was made up of second-line troops scraped up from everywhere, including occupation duty in Germany.
“Literally,” Piqueron said, “the Japanese did not know how to surrender, so they did not. They could not conquer, but they could and did continue suicidal resistance, consuming manpower of the allies and their own womanpower and childpower—a shrewd bargain for the Japanese! The Russians refused to become involved in the Japanese war; they watched with apish delight while two future enemies, as they supposed, were engaged in mutual destruction.
“A third assault wave broke on Kyushu and gained the island at last. What lay ahead? Only another assault on Honshu, the main island, home of the Emperor and the principal shrines. It was 1946; the volatile, child-like Americans were war-weary and mutinous; the best of them were gone by then. In desperation the Anglo-American leaders offered the Russians an economic sphere embracing the China coast and Japan as the price of participation.”
The Russians grinned and assented; they would take that—at least that. They mounted a huge assault for the spring of 1947; they would take Korea and leap off from there for northern Honshu while the Anglo-American forces struck in the south. Surely this would provide at last a symbol before which the Japanese might without shame bow down and admit defeat!
And then, from the mountain fastnesses, came the radio voice: “Germans! Your Leader calls upon you again!” Followed the Hundred Days of Glory during which the German Army reconstituted itself and expelled the occupation troops—by then, children without combat experience, and leavened by not-quite-disabled veterans. Followed the seizure of the airfields; the Luftwaffe in business again. Followed the drive, almost a dress parade, to the Channel Coast, gobbling up immense munition dumps awaiting shipment to the Pacific Theater, millions of warm uniforms, good boots, mountains of rations, piles of shells and explosives that lined the French roads for, scores of miles, thousands of two-and-a-half-ton trucks, and lakes of gasoline to fuel them. The shipyards of Europe, from Hamburg to Toulon, had been turning out, furiously, invasion barges for
the Pacific. In April of 1947 they sailed against England in their thousands.
Halfway around the world, the British Navy was pounding Tokyo, Nagasaki, Kobe, Hiroshima, Nara. Three quarters of the way across Asia the Russian Army marched stolidly on; let the decadent British pickle their own fish; the glorious motherland at last was gaining her long-sought, long-denied, warm-water seacoast. The British, tired women without their men, children fatherless these eight years, old folks deathly weary, deathly worried about their sons, were brave but they were not insane. They accepted honorable peace terms; they capitulated.
With the Western front secure for the first time in history, the ancient Drive to the East was resumed; the immemorial struggle of Teuton against Slav went on.
His spectacles glittering with rapture, Dr. Piqueron said: “We were worthy in those days of the Teutonic Knights who seized Prussia from the sub-men! On the ever-glorious Twenty-first of May, Moscow was ours!”
Moscow and the monolithic state machinery it controlled, and all the roads and rail lines and communication wires which led only to—and from—Moscow. Detroit-built tanks and trucks sped along those roads in the fine, bracing spring weather; the Red Army turned one hundred and eighty degrees at last and countermarched halfway across the Eurasian landmass, and at Kazan it broke exhausted against the Frederik Line.
Europe at last was One and German. Beyond Europe lay the dark and swarming masses of Asia, mysterious and repulsive folk whom it would be better to handle through the non-German, but chivalrous, Japanese. The Japanese were reinforced with shipping from Birkenhead, artillery from the Putilov Works, jet fighters from Chateauroux, steel from the Ruhr, rice from the Po valley, herring from Norway, timber from Sweden, oil from Romania, laborers from India. The American forces were driven from Kyushu in the winter of 1948, and bloodily back across their chain of island steppingstones that followed.
Surrender they would not; it was a monstrous affront that shield-shaped North America dared to lie there between the German Atlantic and the Japanese Pacific threatening both. The affront was wiped out in 1955.
For one hundred and fifty years now the Germans and the Japanese had uneasily eyed each other across the banks of the Mississippi. Their orators were fond of referring to that river as a vast frontier unblemished by a single fortification. There was even some interpenetration; a Japanese colony fished out of Nova Scotia on the very rim of German America; a sulfur mine which was part of the Farben system lay in New Mexico, the very heart of Japanese America—this was where Dr. Edward Royland found himself, being lectured to by Dr. Piqueron, Dr. Gaston Pierre Piqueron, true-blue German.
VI
“Here, of course,” Dr. Piqueron said gloomily, “we are so damned provincial. Little ceremony and less manners. Well, it would be too much to expect them to assign German Germans to this dreary outpost, so we French Germans must endure it somehow.”
“You’re all French?” Royland asked, startled.
“French Germans,” Piqueron stiffly corrected him. “Colonel Biederman happens to be a French German also; Major Kappel is—hrrmph—an Italian German.” He sniffed to show what he thought of that.
The Italian German entered at that point, not in time to shut off the question: “And you all come from Europe?”
They looked at him in bafflement. “My grandfather did,” Dr. Piqueron said. Royland remembered; so Roman legions used to guard their empire—Romans born and raised in Britain, or on the Danube, Romans who would never in their lives see Italy or Rome.
Major Kappel said affably: “Well, this needn’t concern us. I’m afraid, my dear fellow, that your little hoax has not succeeded.” He clapped Royland merrily on the back. “I admit you’ve tricked us all nicely; now may we have the facts?”
Piqueron said, surprised: “His story is false? The shoes? The missing geburtsnummer? And he appears to understand some chemistry!”
“Ah-h-h—but he said his specialty was physics, doctor! Suspicious in itself!”
“Quite so. A discrepancy. But the rest—?”
“As to his birth number, who knows? As to his shoes, who cares? I took some inconspicuous notes while he was entertaining us and have checked thoroughly. There was no Manhattan Engineering District. There was no Dr. Oppenheimer, or Fermi, or Bohr. There is no theory of relativity, or equivalence of mass and energy. Uranium has one use only—coloring glass a pretty orange. There is such a thing as an isotope but it has nothing to do with chemistry; it is the name used in Race Science for a permissible variation within a subrace. And what have you to say to that, my dear fellow?”
Royland wondered first, such was the positiveness with which Major Kappel spoke, whether he had slipped into a universe of different physical properties and history entirely, one in which Julius Caesar discovered Peru and the oxygen molecule was lighter than the hydrogen atom. He managed to speak. “How did you find all that out, major?”
“Oh, don’t think I did a skimpy job,” Kappel smiled. “I looked it all up in the big encyclopedia.”
Dr. Piqueron, chemist, nodded grave approval of the major’s diligence and thorough grasp of the scientific method.
“You still don’t want to tell us?” Major Kappel asked coaxingly.
“I can only stand by what I said.”
Kappel shrugged. “It’s not my job to persuade you; I wouldn’t know how to begin. But I can and will ship you off forthwith to a work camp.”
“What—is a work camp?” Royland unsteadily asked.
“Good heavens, man, a camp where one works! You’re obviously an ungleichgeschaltling and you’ve got to be gleichgeschaltet.” He did not speak these words as if they were foreign; they were obviously part of the everyday American working vocabulary. Gleichgeschaltet meant to Royland something like “coordinated, brought into tune with.” So he would be brought into tune—with what, and how?
The Major went on: “You’ll get your clothes and your bunk and your chow, and you’ll work, and eventually your irregular vagabondish habits will disappear and you’ll be turned loose on the labor market. And you’ll be damned glad we took the trouble with you.” His face fell. “By the way, I was too late with your friend the Paymaster. I’m sorry. I sent a messenger to Disciplinary Control with a stop order. After all, if you took us in for an hour, why should you not have fooled a Pay-Seventh?”
“Too late? He’s dead? For picking up a hitchhiker?”
“I don’t know what that last word means,” said the Major. “If it’s dialect for ‘vagabond,’ the answer is ordinarily ‘yes.’ The man, after all, was a Pay-Seventh; he could read. Either you’re keeping up your hoax with remarkable fidelity or you’ve been living in isolation. Could that be it? Is there a tribe of you somewhere? Well, the interrogators will find out; that’s their job.”
“The Dogpatch legend!” Dr. Piqueron burst out, thunderstruck. “He may be an Abnerite!”
“By Heaven,” Major Kappel said slowly, “that might be it. What a feather in my cap to find a living Abnerite.”
“Whose cap?” demanded Dr. Piqueron coldly.
“I think I’ll look the Dogpatch legend up,” said Kappel, heading for the door and probably the big encyclopedia.
“So will I,” Dr. Piqueron announced firmly. The last Royland saw of them they were racing down the corridor, neck and neck.
Very funny. And they had killed simple-minded Paymaster Martfield for picking up a hitchhiker. The Nazis always had been pretty funny—fat Hermann pretending he was young Seigfried. As blond as Hitler, as slim as Goering, and as tall as Goebbels. Immature guttersnipes who hadn’t been able to hang a convincing frame on Dimitrov for the Reichstag fire; the world had roared at their bungling. Huge, corny party rallies with let’s-play-detectives nonsense like touching the local flags to that hallowed banner on which the martyred Horst Wessel had had a nosebleed. And they had rolled over Europe, and they killed people . . .
One thing was certain: life in the work camp would at least bore him to death. He was supp
osed to be an illiterate simpleton, so things were excused him which were not excused an exalted Pay-Seventh. He poked through a closet in the corner of the laboratory—he and Piqueron were the same size. He found a natty change of uniform and what must be a civilian suit: somewhat baggy pants and a sort of tunic with the neat, sensible Russian collar. Obviously it would be all right to wear it because here it was; just as obviously, it was all wrong for him to be dressed in chinos and a flannel shirt. He did not know exactly what this made him, but Martfield had been done to death for picking up a man in chinos and a flannel shirt. Royland changed into the civilian suit, stuffed his own shirt and pants far back on the top shelf of the closet; this was probably concealment enough from those murderous clowns. He walked out, and up the stairs, and through the busy lobby, and into the industrial complex. Nobody saluted him and he saluted nobody. He knew where he was going—to a good, sound Japanese laboratory where there were no Germans.
Royland had known Japanese students at the University and admired them beyond words. Their brains, frugality, doggedness, and good humor made them, as far as he was concerned, the most sensible people he had ever known. Tojo and his warlords were not, as far as Royland was concerned, essentially Japanese but just more damn-fool soldiers and politicians. The real Japanese would courteously listen to him, calmly check against available facts. He rubbed his cheek and remembered Mr. Ito and his slap in the face. Well, presumably Mr. Ito was a damnfool soldier and politician—and demonstrating for the German’s benefit in a touchy border area full of jurisdictional questions.
At any rate, he would not go to a labor camp and bust rocks or refinish furniture until those imbeciles decided he was gleichgeschaltet; he would go mad in a month.
Royland walked to the Solvay towers and followed the glass pipes containing their output of sulfuric acid along the ground until he came to a bottling shed where beetle-browed men worked silently filling great wicker-basketed carboys and heaving them outside. He followed other men who levered them up onto hand trucks and rolled them in one door of a storage shed. Out the door at the other end more men loaded them onto enclosed trucks which were driven up from time to time.
Collected Short Fiction Page 261