Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  But Dr. Pankraz Kahl burst out, “Wir sind keine Amerikaner! Wir—” including himself and Wolfgang with a sweep of the arm, “sind Deutsche!”

  Schwinzog regarded him expressionlessly. “And you?” he turned abruptly on Manning and Dugan.

  “We’re Americans,” said Manning steadily, in English. Schwinzog’s face did not change. But something in the look with which he had received Kahl’s statement had jangled an alarm in Manning’s brain. And he was still determined to keep his mouth shut and his ears open as much as possible.

  Immediately he knew he had been right; for Schwinzog turned again to Kahl. “You say you are German. Your citizen’s card, then.”

  The Herr Doktor started automatically to fumble at a pocket, then paused and made a wry face. “I—we have no such papers as you want. Naturally, since we—”

  “Since you are spies?” Schwinzog folded his arms and the fingers of his right hand caressed his swastika brassard.

  “That is ridiculous!” shouted Kahl. “I am trying to explain to you that we are visitors from your past! We come from a hundred years ago!”

  For the first time Schwinzog looked interested. “And how do you explain your presence in the year 2051 nach der Zeitwende?”

  The scientist was soothed. “I am Dr. Pankraz Kahl, member of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, inventor of the world’s first Zeitfahrer.”

  “A time traveler? A machine of some sort?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then where is this machine?”

  “Back there in the forest—the forest! The fire! It may have reached it—” Kahl plucked at Schwinzog’s coatsleeve. “You must save my invention—”

  The other shook him off. “When I see it I will save it.”

  “Come, then! Quick!”

  THE FIRE had rolled farther into the forest; everywhere the evergreens were burning like torches. Sparks rained down from overhead as they approached the time traveler’s resting place, and directly ahead the thicket was a sheet of flame. From Kahl came a wounded cry; he broke from the guards and dashed forward. Then he stopped as if he had run into a stone wall.

  The soldiers closed up, weapons thrusting.

  “But this is the place!” Kahl was muttering feverishly. “It was right there—” He pointed at the bare, smoldering grass.

  The ten-foot metal cube of the time traveler had burned to feathery ash and drifted away on the breeze—or it had in some no less unbelievable fashion vanished utterly.

  Schwinzog’s smile was not good to see. “Of course there is nothing there,” he nodded satisfiedly. “Lieutenant Kramer, arrest these men. They are American saboteurs, and will be tried as such tomorrow by the Volksgericht.”

  “We,” Eddie Dugan summed up the situation, “are up the creek without a paddle.”

  “And we don’t know where the creek is,” added Manning. “Only that this is 2051, and the Nazis evidently either won the war or staged a comeback somehow after losing. Neither idea seems possible, but here we are. Item, America is still fighting Nazism—at least, there are ‘American saboteurs.’ Item two, we landed smack in the middle of a wasp nest stirred up by those same saboteurs. They must have scored a success; did you see that building in the woods beyond that field?”

  “What building?”

  “I noticed it just as they were loading us into their armored paddy wagon. It had been a big place—already fallen in; the fire must have started there. And the boys that started it must have been the ones that German captain was talking about—the ones that wore Caps of Darkness and flew off in an invisible helicopter.”

  “I’m getting a headache,” groaned Dugan.

  “I’d like to meet them,” said Manning thoughtfully.

  They could not see each other, but they could talk, between the adjoining cells. Kahl was in the cell on the other side of Manning’s; he had raved most of the night at the guards and the equally responsive steel walls. The two Americans had slept long and refreshingly; they had long since learned to sleep under any and all conditions. There were no windows to show daylight, but they must have been there most of twenty-four hours.

  They hadn’t seen much of the world of the future, thought Manning ruefully; only the glimpse of a street filled with shiny silent automobiles and oddly garbed pedestrians, as they had been hustled from a rolling dungeon to a stationary one. But if the town was Freiburg, it had changed a lot since they had last seen it—a skeletonous waste of ruin, with nothing left standing that the American bombers had wanted to flatten.

  “We shouldn’t of let, that go. Kahl talk so much,” resumed Dugan gloomily.

  “How could we stop him? Anyway, I have a feeling he talked himself in even deeper than he did us.”

  Their discussion was ended by a clatter of boots, the arrival of a bristling escort. They were being honored with treatment as dangerous and important prisoners—a distinction less flattering than ominous.

  THE “People’s Court” before which they were being taken was obviously not the extralegal supreme court which Hitler had made into a bogey-man for scaring grown-up consciences to sleep; this was a local affair, in the same building that housed the jail. All four prisoners were herded into a rather small chamber, innocent of audience or jury. Opposite the entrance, beneath a huge hooked-cross banner, three men in black robes sat behind a desk. Two of them were old men who regarded the defendants with dull, incurious eyes; between them, his bulk dominating and shriveling them, sat Herr Schwinzog.

  Into the deathly silence a hoarse voice cried, “Heil Hitler!”

  It was Wolfgang, his conditioned reflexes spurred by sight of the swastika flag. The Americans stared at him; it was the first words they had heard him speak—perhaps they were the only ones he knew. Herr Schwinzog raised his eyebrows.

  “What did you say?”

  “Heil Hitler!” repeated Wolfgang mechanically.

  “What does ‘Hitler’ mean?” asked one of the old men curiously.

  “I don’t know,” said the other old man. “Perhaps he is feigning insanity.”

  Kahl found his voice. “But this is monstrous nonsense!” he shrilled. “Is this not the tausendjahrige Reich that Hitler promised us—”

  “Silence!” snapped Schwinzog, and the scientist quailed. “You are not here to plead or talk gibberish, but to hear sentence. Your case has been decided after thorough investigation.” He fixed all the prisoners with a frigid gaze. “You Americans are capable of more cunning than most Germans give you credit for; I know that well, for I was a colonial administrator in your country for ten years. Your attempt to masquerade as ‘time travelers’ shows originality in the conception and thoroughness in the execution. Needless to say, nothing directly incriminating was found among your effects. The experts report that even the metal identification tags found on the two who call themselves Ray Manning and Edward Dugan are authentic reproductions of those used by the American army at the time of the Conquest.

  “However, you made the mistake of using too much imagination in the effort to confuse. Your story is too preposterous to be taken seriously, especially since our best scientists have declared time travel impracticable. Accordingly, we could sentence you to death for unauthorized presence inside the Reich and for evident complicity in the attempted sabotage of a German experimental station.

  “In view of the absence of direct evidence of subversive actions, we have decided on leniency. The two prisoners, real names unknown, alias Pankraz Kahl and Wolfgang Muller—your claim to German citizenship has been checked with the central archive in Berlin and found to be false. Therefore I sentence you for the crime of imposture to five years in a concentration camp.”

  Kahl burst into a desperate, unheard babble of protest. At a wave of Schwinzog’s hand the guards closed in. The Herr Doktor was dragged away bodily, shouting disjointedly about the blindness of the Philistines and Hitler’s thousand years.

  “As for you two,” Schwinzog eyed Manning and Dugan with an oddly speculative ai
r, “since you have admitted American nationality, your punishment is limited to immediate deportation—back to America.”

  They were more staggered than they would have been if he had said they would be executed for failure to wear monocles.

  As the guards surrounded them, Schwinzog raised his hand, his face adorned by a mocking grin. “One more thing. You will be interested to know that the raid on the Black Forest experimental station missed its objective; the budding destroyed was an unimportant storehouse. The actual refining plant is nowhere in the vicinity. The project of which your organization seems to be so well informed goes on as before and will be completed inside a week. You may carry the message to America: One week to live.”

  III

  THEY HAD LITTLE opportunity, during the airplane flight to Hamburg, to exchange impressions or theories; they were constantly under the eyes of two nondescript, expressionless men who sat unblinking, with hands in the pockets of their civilian jackets.

  Nor was it better after that; at Hamburg their watchdogs delivered them to another pair apparently shelled from the same pod. One of the first set passed the word laconically: “Two American spies. To be released in Neuebersdorf, by order of Gestapoleiter Schwinzog.” And the new guards saw Manning and Dugan aboard a great transatlantic rocket.

  It was from the rocket over Hamburg that they got their first real look at a twenty-first century metropolis. Only from twenty miles high could it be appreciated—the immense sweep of city in which straight-line highways connected innumerable village-like centers interspersed among the soft green of parks and woodlands, covering the broad plain of the Elbe mouth and sprawling away to the eastward to join with Lubeck across the base of the Danish peninsula. While they watched it, spellbound, in the mirror-ports, the fairy city sank away and vanished in the mist and shadow of evening; and the rocket ascended steadily and almost soundlessly into thinning layers of stratosphere, and the sun rose up in the west before it.

  Manning fell covertly to studying the Germans who filled the seats of the pressure-cabin. Most of them were civilians; they had the subdued worried faces of suburban commuters on a train, and they looked quite oblivious to the wonder of their age, even to the miracle of the machine that was hurling them so swiftly and surely across the ocean. They didn’t look like a Herrenvolk. Here and there were the color and brass gleam of uniforms, and with them went a tawdry arrogance, an overconscious effort to dominate and impress directed at the gray civilians and most of all, Manning observed, at the half-dozen nondescript women in the compartment.

  Had these people conquered the world and planted themselves atop it?

  And if so, what had they done with the rest of it? With America, for example—a German colony, Schwinzog had indicated . . . Defeated, enslaved . . .

  Then Manning remembered that he had seen with his own eyes evidence that America had not been wholly defeated, even after a hundred years; that someone, somehow, was still fighting on. His heart leaped up.

  He addressed one of the guards for the first time: “Where are we bound?”

  “Neuebersdorf,” said the man curtly. He glanced at his watch, and in lieu of further explanation, leaned forward and twirled a knob beneath the port beside them; the scene mirrored in it shifted and swung to straight ahead, and they could see the coast line that had appeared in the west and was sweeping rapidly nearer. There was a great island and a sound, and at the latter’s narrowest point was concentrated a smudge of city, almost as vast as the Hamburg of this time, but dark and jumbled beneath the afternoon sun, lacking the German seaport’s ordered spaciousness.

  “Hey!” exclaimed Dugan. “That’s New York!”

  The Gestapoman looked at him in silent contempt.

  “It is—or was,” amended Manning sorrowfully. As the rocket plunged closer, they see that much of the city was in ruin. The downtown district, in particular, showed an unrelieved prospect of devastation, empty windows in walls standing or fallen, and fields of shattered blocks and debris, testifying to a tremendous destruction and an even greater neglect. Something had toppled the towers that had stood there, and no one had come to clear away their wreck.

  MANNING turned from the window.

  Later on he would be curious to learn more of what German rule had meant to America—for the moment a sick feeling in his stomach told him he had seen enough.

  On Long Island, however, where the ship landed, the desolation of New York was not in evidence; where Brooklyn had been was a German settlement, and there were fair dwellings, broad green lawns and trees, and smooth-paved streets along which shining traffic moved with the whisper of electric motors.

  They saw this last outpost of the master race briefly as they were whisked through in a chauffeured car that had met the rocket; their destination lay across the river, where eroded heaps caricatured the skyline of Manhattan. Guards with machine guns passed them onto a narrow span that had replaced the vanished Triborough Bridge; and inside five minutes the car halted on the American shore. It stood with motor running, and one of the Gestapomen ordered, “Get out.”

  Manning and Dugan got out, feeling numb in mind and body, and looked at the waterfront. From the air nothing had been visible except the colossal ruin of the world’s once greatest city; but from close by could be seen that which was far worse—the dwellings of its present inhabitants, sprung up among its rubble like the grass through the cracks of its pavements. The houses were less than peasant huts, built of stone and concrete fragments and rotting lumber, sometimes against the stillstanding wall of a shattered building.

  Some distance away a small crowd had collected and stood dumbly watching the activity about the gleaming vehicle that had come over the guarded bridge. Others peered from the doorways of the nearer huts. All were ragged and soiled and in their faces was the dull resignation of a beaten inferiority.

  Those were the American natives of Neuebersdorf, which had been New York, U.S.A.—magni nominis umbra . . . Manning wondered, with a surge of horror and pity, what made them grub here to construct their dens on the edge of the desolate city, whence they could look across the water and see the abodes of German pride and power and luxury—was it merely envy, or the need to nourish an undying hatred? The blankness of the watching faces gave no answer.

  The car door slammed. The machine swung about and purred swiftly away up the bridge approach.

  Dugan stared after it and said softly, “What the hell!” And when Manning failed to answer: “Well, Ray, what now?”

  The other passed a hand across his forehead. “I don’t know. But maybe we’d better start looking for invisible men.”

  “Fine,” said Dugan. “When I see one, I’ll yell.”

  Manning glanced toward the ragged crowd that had watched their arrival; it was already beginning silently to disperse, losing interest. Most of the two soldiers’ clothing had been given back to them, but minus such items as leggings and steel helmets their 1945 combat dress looked sufficiently unmilitary and nondescript.

  “No use just standing here,” said Manning. They started to walk, turning at random into a narrow street that crooked among the ruins. Then Manning began to talk in a lowered voice. “If I’m not badly off, we’re going to be followed and watched. Obviously the Germans have taken us for somebody else, and they didn’t ship us across like ambassadors out of the kindness of their hearts. They think we belong to an American underground, and what we do now—they figure—is lead them to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if—Uh huh.” He pulled a hand out of the pocket of his field jacket with a small bundle of paper—money. It was marks, stamped Ausland. “They even slipped us a stake to make sure we didn’t have any trouble in getting to underground headquarters—with the goon squad on our heels.”

  “Well, at least we can eat. And I guess we can wander around, looking as ignorant as we are, and lead them a wild goose chase . . . That sounds like a hell of a life,” Dugan appendixed glumly to his own description.

  “You and me both. Soon
er or later we’ve got to get in touch with whoever’s still carrying on the war. Because the war’s still going on, in spite of—this.” He didn’t gesture, and Dugan knew he meant more than the broken buildings around them—the broken look they had both seen in the eyes of the people.

  “Sure we’ve got to,” said Dugan fiercely. “But how?”

  MANNING shrugged. Their footsteps echoed, died away, echoed again in the deserted street, which here, in what must be the heart of the destruction, was hardly more than a tunnel between leaning walls where tons of masonry still hung in the twisted steel frames. From behind them the trick echoes brought briefly the sound of other footsteps. They were being followed, all right.

  “If the Gestapo just knew it,” muttered Dugan, “they’d come nearer what they’re looking for if that guy was leading us.” Manning nodded somberly; then he drew sharp breath and looked at his companion with kindling eyes. “Maybe that’s the answer to our problem, Eddie.”

  “What answer?”

  “Just an idea—maybe there’s nothing in it. But if I’m right, we’ll meet the underground—and soon!”

  “Okay,” said Dugan. “Anything you say. But what do we do?”

  “I think we can concentrate on digging up something to eat,” said Manning judiciously. “The sun’s still up here, but it’s been all of eight hours since we had dinner.”

  They emerged at last, tired and hungry, from the labyrinth of total devastation into a more populous district—a squalid village sprung up amid the ruin of New York. Along the edges of its dusty main street, where no lights were lit against the descending dusk, stood or squatted the people, talking listlessly in low voices or merely staring at the passers-by. Before one of the larger groups Manning halted.

  “There’s a joint down the street says ‘Eat’,” Dugan nudged him.

  “Wait.” Manning faced the bunch of idlers and raised his voice. “Were any of you folks ever in Germany? It’s a wonderful place. We just got back from there. They have beautiful cities with paved streets, millions of automobiles and helicopters and airplanes, with broadcast power to run them—”