“Forward march, boys,” she shrilled at them. “Wouldn’t y’all just like to follow me?” Seductive smile and a wiggle of the rump; a Judas ewe. She strutted off in time to the music; she must have been wearing earstopples. They shuffled after her. At the airport gate they dropped their blue-coated Luftwaffe boys and picked up a waiting escort of a dozen black-coats with skulls on their high-peaked caps.
They walked in time to the music, hypnotized by it, through Cicero. Cicero had been bombed to hell and not rebuilt. To his surprise Royland felt a pang for the vanished Poles and Slovaks of Al’s old bailiwick. There were German Germans, French Germans, and even Italian Germans, but he knew in his bones that there were no Polish or Slovakian Germans . . . And Bloom had been right all along.
Deathly weary after two hours of marching (the majorette was indefatigable) Royland looked up from the broken pavement to see a cockeyed wonder before him. It was a Castle; it was a Nightmare; it was the Chicago Parteihof. The thing abutted Lake Michigan; it covered perhaps sixteen city blocks. It frowned down on the lake at the east and at the tumbled acres of bombed-out Chicago at the north, west, and south. It was made of steel-reinforced concrete grained and grooved to look like medieval masonry. It was walled, moated, portcullis-ed, towered, ramparted, crenellated. The death’s-head guards looked at it reverently and the prisoners with fright. Royland wanted only to laugh wildly. It was a Disney production. It was as funny as Hermann Goering in full fig, and probably as deadly.
With a mumbo-jumbo of passwords, heils, and salutes they were admitted, and the majorette went away, no doubt to take off her boots and groan.
The most bedecked of the death’s-head lined them up and said affably: “Hot dinner and your beds presently, my boys; first a selection. Some of you, I’m afraid, aren’t well and should be in sick bay. Who’s sick? Raise your hands, please.”
A few hands crept up. Stooped old men.
“That’s right. Step forward, please.” Then he went down the line tapping a man here and there—one fellow with glaucoma, another with terrible varicose sores visible through the tattered pants he wore. Mutely they stepped forward. Royland he looked thoughtfully over. “You’re thin, my boy,” he observed. “Stomach pains? Vomit blood? Tarry stools in the morning?”
“Nossir!” Royland barked. The man laughed and continued down the line. The “sick bay” detail was marched off. Most of them were weeping silently; they knew. Everybody knew; everybody pretended that the terrible thing would not, might not, happen. It was much more complex than Royland had realized.
“Now,” said the death’s-head affably, “we require some competent cement workers—”
The line of remaining men went mad. They surged forward almost touching the officer but never stepping over an invisible line surrounding him. “Me!” some yelled. “Me! Me!” Another cried: “I’m good with my hands, I can learn, I’m a machinist too, I’m strong and young, I can learn!” A heavy middle-aged one waved his hands in the air and boomed: “Grouting and tile-setting! Grouting and tile-setting!” Royland stood alone, horrified. They knew. They knew this was an offer of real work that would keep them alive for a while.
He knew suddenly how to live in a world of lies.
The officer lost his patience in a moment or two, and whips came out. Men with their faces bleeding struggled back into line. “Raise your hands, you cement people, and no lying, please. But you wouldn’t lie, would you?” He picked half a dozen volunteers after questioning them briefly, and one of his men marched them off.
Among them was the grouting-and-tile man, who looked pompously pleased with himself; such was the reward of diligence and virtue, he seemed to be proclaiming; pooh to those grasshoppers back there who neglected to learn A Trade.
“Now,” said the officer casually, “we require some laboratory assistants.” The chill of death stole down the line of prisoners. Each one seemed to shrivel into himself, become poker-faced, imply that he wasn’t really involved in all this.
Royland raised his hand. The officer looked at him in stupefaction and then covered up quickly. “Splendid,” he said. “Step forward, my boy. You,” he pointed at another man. “You have an intelligent forehead; you look as if you’d make a fine laboratory assistant. Step forward.”
“Please, no!” the man begged. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands in supplication. “Please no!” The officer took out his whip meditatively; the man groaned, scrambled to his feet, and quickly stood beside Royland.
When there were four more chosen, they were marched off across the concrete yard into one of the absurd towers, and up a spiral staircase and down a corridor, and through the promenade at the back of an auditorium where a woman screamed German from the stage at an audience of women. And through a tunnel and down the corridor of an elementary school with empty classrooms full of small desks on either side. And into a hospital area where the fake-masonry walls yielded to scrubbed white tile and the fake flagstones underfoot to composition flooring and the fake pinewood torches in bronze brackets that had lighted their way to fluorescent tubes.
At the door marked rassenwissenschaft the guard rapped and a frosty-faced man in a laboratory coat opened up. “You requisitioned a demonstrator, Dr. Kalten,” the guard said. “Pick any one of these.”
Dr. Kalten looked them qver. “Oh, this one, I suppose,” he said. Royland. “Come in, fellow.”
The Race Science Laboratory of Dr. Kajten proved to be a decent medical setup with an operating table, intricate charts of the races of men and their anatomical, mental, and moral makeups. There was also a phrenological head diagram and a horoscope on the wall, and an arrangement of glittering crystals on wire which Royland recognized. It was a model of one Hans Hoerbiger’s crackpot theory of planetary formation, the Welteislehre.
“Sit there,” the doctor said, pointing to a stool. “First I’ve got to take your pedigree. By the way, you might as well know that you’re going to end up dissected for my demonstration in Race Science III for the Medical School, and your degree of cooperation will determine whether the dissection is performed under anaesthesia or not. Clear?”
“Clear, doctor.”
“Curious—no panic. I’ll wager we find you’re a proto-Hamitoidal hemi-Nordic of at least degree five . . . but let’s get on. Name?”
“Edward Royland.”
“Birthdate?”
“July second, nineteen twenty-three.”
The doctor threw down his pencil. “If my previous explanation was inadequate,” he shouted, “let me add that if you continue to be difficult I may turn you over to my good friend Dr. Herzbrenner. Dr. Herzbrenner happens to teach interrogation technique at the Gestapo School. Do—you—now—understand?”
“Yes, doctor. I’m sorry I cannot withdraw my answer.”
Dr. Kalten turned elaborately sarcastic. “How then do you account for your remarkable state of preservation at your age of approximately a hundred and eighty years?”
“Doctor, I am twenty-three years old. I have traveled through time.”
“Indeed?” Kalten was amused. “And how was this accomplished?”
Royland said steadily. “A spell was put on me by a satanic Jewish magician. It involved the ritual murder and desanguination of seven beautiful Nordic virgins.”
Dr. Kalten gaped for a moment. Then he picked up his pencil and said firmly: “You will understand that my doubts were logical under the circumstances. Why did you not give me the sound scientific basis for your surprising claim at once? Go ahead; tell me all about it.”
XII
He was Dr. Kalten’s prize; he was Dr. Kalten’s treasure. His peculiarities of speech, his otherwise-inexplicable absence of a birth number over his left nipple, when they got around to it the gold filling in one of his teeth, his uncanny knowledge of Old America, all now had a simple scientific explanation. He was from 1944. What was so hard to grasp about that? Any sound specialist knew about the lost Jewish Cabala magic, golems and such.
His story was that he had been a student Race Scientist under the pioneering master William D. Fully. (A noisy whack who used to barnstorm the chaw-and-gallus belt with the backing of Deutches Neues Euro; sure enough they found him in Volume VII of the standard Introduction to a Historical Handbook of Race Science.) The Jewish fiends had attempted to ambush his master on a lonely road; Royland persuaded him to switch hats and coats; in the darkness the substitution was not noticed. Later in their stronghold he was identified, but the Nordic virgins had already been ritually murdered and drained of their blood, and it wouldn’t keep. The dire fate destined for the master had been visited upon the disciple.
Dr. Kalten loved that bit. It tickled him pink that the sub-men’s “revenge” on their enemy had been to precipitate him into a world purged of the sub-men entirely, where a Nordic might breathe freely!
Kalten, except for discreet consultations with such people as Old America specialists, a dentist who was stupefied by the gold filling, and a dermatologist who established that there was not and never had been a geburtsnummer on the subject examined, was playing Royland close to his vest. After a week it became apparent that he was reserving Royland for a grand unveiling which would climax the reading of a paper. Royland did not want to be unveiled; there were too many holes in his story. He talked with animation about the beauties of Mexico in the spring, its fair mesas, cactus, and mushrooms. Could they make a short trip there? Dr. Kalten said they could not. Royland was becoming restless? Let him study, learn, profit by the matchless arsenal of the sciences available here in Chicago Parteihof. Dear old Chicago boasted distinguished exponents of the World Ice Theory, the Hollow World Theory, Dowsing, Homeopathic Medicine, Curative Folk Botany—
This last did sound interesting. Dr. Kalten was pleased to take his prize to the Medical School and introduce him as a protege to Professor Albiani, of Folk Botany.
Albiani was a bearded gnome out of the Arthur Rackham illustrations for Das Rheingold. He loved his subject. “Mother Nature, the all-bounteous one! Wander the fields, young man, and with a seeing eye in an hour’s stroll you will find the ergot that aborts, the dill that cools fever, the tansy that strengthens the old, the poppy that soothes the fretful teething babe!”
“Do you have any hallucinogenic Mexican mushrooms?” Royland demanded.
“We may,” Albiani said, surprised. They browsed through the Folk Botany museum and pored over dried vegetation under glass. From Mexico there were peyote, the buttons and the root, and there was marihuana, root, stem, seed, and stalk. No mushrooms.
“They may be in the storeroom,” Albiani muttered.
All the rest of the day Royland mucked through the storeroom where specimens were waiting for exhibit space on some rotation plan. He went to Albiani and said, a little wild-eyed: “They’re not there.”
Albiani had been interested enough to look up the mushrooms in question in the reference books. “See?” he said happily, pointing to a handsome color plate of the mushroom: growing, mature, sporing, and dried. He read: “ ‘. . . superstitiously called God Food,’ ” and twinkled through his beard at the joke.
“They’re not there,” Royland said.
The professor, annoyed at last, said: “There might be some uncatalogued in the basement. Really, we don’t have room for everything in our limited display space—just the interesting items.”
Royland pulled himself together and charmed the location of the department’s basement storage space out of him, together with permission to inspect it. And, left alone for a moment, ripped the color plate from the professor’s book and stowed it away.
That night Royland and Dr. Kalten walked out on one of the innumerable tower-tops for a final cigar. The moon was high and full; its light turned the cratered terrain that had been Chicago into another moon. The sage and his disciple from another day leaned their elbows on a crenellated rampart two hundred feet above Lake Michigan.
“Edward,” said Dr. Kalten, “I shall read my paper tomorrow before the Chicago Academy of Race Science.” The words were a challenge; something was wrong. He went on: “I shall expect you to be in the wings of the auditorium, and to appear at my command to answer a few questions from me and, if time permits, from our audience.”
“I wish it could be postponed,” Royland said.
“No doubt.”
“Would you explain your unfriendly tone of voice, doctor?” Royland demanded. “I think I’ve been completely cooperative and have opened the way for you to win undying fame in the annals of Race Science.”
“Cooperative, yes. Candid—I wonder? You see, Edward, a dreadful thought struck me today. I have always thought it amusing that the Jewish attack on Reverend Fully should have been for the purpose of precipitating him into the future and that it should have misfired.” He took something out of his pocket: a small pistol. He armed it casually at Royland. “Today I began to wonder why they should have done so. Why did they not simply murder him, as they did thousands, and dispose of him in their secret crematoria, and permit no mention in their controlled newspapers and magazines of the disappearance?
“Now, the blood of seven Nordic virgins can have been no cheap commodity. One pictures with ease Nordic men patrolling their precious enclaves of humanity, eyes roving over every passing face, noting who bears the stigmata of the sub-men, and following those who do most carefully indeed lest race-defilement be committed with a look or an ‘accidental’ touch in a crowded street. Nevertheless the thing was done; your presence here is proof of it. It must have been done at enormous cost; hired Slavs and Negroes must have been employed to kidnap the virgins, and many of them must have fallen before Nordic rage.
“This merely to silence one small voice crying in the wilderness? I—think—not. I think, Edward Royland, or whatever your real name may be, that Jewish arrogance sent you, a Jew yourself, into the future as a greeting from the Jewry of that day to what it foolishly thought would be the triumphant Jewry of this. At any rate, the public questioning tomorrow will be conducted by my friend Dr. Herz-brenner, whom I have mentioned to you. If you have any little secrets, they will not remain secrets long. No, no! Do not move toward me. I shall shoot you disablingly in the knee if you do.”
Royland moved toward him and the gun went off; there was an agonizing hammer blow high on his left shin. He picked up Kalten and hurled him, screaming, over the parapet two hundred feet into the water. And collapsed. The pain was horrible. His shinbone was badly cracked if not broken through. There was not much bleeding; maybe there would be later. He need not fear that the shot and scream would rouse the castle. Such sounds were not rare in the Medical Wing.
He dragged himself, injured leg trailing, to the doorway of Kalten’s living quarters; he heaved himself into a chair by the signal bell and threw a rug over his legs. He rang for the diener and told him very quietly: “Go to the medical storeroom for a leg U-brace and whatever is necessary for a cast, please. Dr. Kalten has an interesting idea he wishes to work out.”
He should have asked for a syringe of morphine—no he shouldn’t. It might affect the time distortion.
When the man came back he thanked him and told him to turn in for the night.
He almost screamed getting his shoe off; his trouser leg he cut away. The gauze had arrived just in time; the wound was beginning to bleed more copiously. Pressure seemed to stop it. He constructed a sloppy walking cast on his leg. The directions on the several five-pound cans of plaster helped.
His leg was getting numb; good. His cast probably pinched some major nerve, and a week in it would cause permanent paralysis; who cared about that?
He tried it out and found he could get across the floor inefficiently. With a strong-enough bannister he could get downstairs but not, he thought, up them. That was all right. He was going to the basement.
God-damning the medieval Nazis and their cornball castle every inch of the way, he went to the basement; there he had a windfall. A dozen drunken SS men were living it up in a corner far f
rom the censorious eyes of their company commander; they were playing a game which might have been called Spin the Corporal. They saw Royland limping and wept sentimental tears for poor old man with a bum leg; they carried him two winding miles to the storeroom he wanted, and shot the lock off for him. They departed, begging him to call on Company K any time, bes’ fellas in Chicago, doc. Ol’ Bruno here can tear the arm off a Latvik shirker with his bare hands, honest, doc! Jus’ the way you twist a drumstick off a turkey. You wan’ us to get a Latvik an’ show you?
He got rid of them at last, clicked on the light, and began his search. His leg was now ice cold, painfully so. He rummaged through the uncatalogued botanicals and found after what seemed like hours a crate shipped from Jalasca. Royland opened it by beating its corners against the concrete floor. It yielded and spilled plastic envelopes; through the clear material of one he saw the wrinkled black things. He did not even compare them with the color plate in his pocket. He tore the envelope open and crammed them into his mouth, and chewed and swallowed.
Maybe there had to be a Hopi dancing and chanting, maybe there didn’t have to be. Maybe one had to be calm, if bitter, and fresh from a day of hard work at differential equations which approximated the Hopi mode of thought. Maybe you only had to fix your mind savagely on what you desired, as his was fixed now. Last time he had hated and shunned the Bomb; what he wanted was a world without the Bomb. He had got it, all right!
. . . his tongue was thick and the fireballs were beginning to dance around him, the circling circles . . .
XIII
Charles Miller Nahataspe whispered: “Close. Close. I was so frightened.”
Royland lay on the floor of the hut, his leg unsplinted, unfractured, but aching horribly. Drowsily he felt his ribs; he was merely slender now, no longer gaunt. He mumbled: “You were working to pull me back from this side?”
“Yes. You, you were there?”
“I was there. God, let me sleep.”
Collected Short Fiction Page 264