by Ted White
What next? Welfare Island for me. There’s no telling what that may mean. But nothing pleasant. Probably total brain stripping. They have the techniques.
And Sharna? Pray she is safe. Don’t expect you’ll ever see her again—that’s not the pattern of your life, buddy— but pray for her, you atheistic bastard, that she’ll find refuge among her friends with as little dishonor as possible.
Damn, that cute little tail of hers . . •
We came to rest at the foot of the shaft in a brightly lit, cavernous room. The light came from glowing panels set in the ceiling, and was soft and glare-free, but it made the room seem almost daylit, and there were few shadows, despite the fact that most of the floor was occupied by rank upon rank of parked cars.
These were all identical: long, low things with black and yellow paint jobs that reminded me first of a fleet of cabs. Then I looked closer.
The cars had no hoods, but were snub-nosed, with the front doors just ahead of the front wheels. A second door was set in the middle of the car, and the roofline tapered back into a sort of teardrop tail. Somehow the whole appearance of these cars was very familiar, but at first I couldn’t place it. Then I did: the concept of futuristic streamlining they had back in the thirties. I seemed to recall seeing an experimental car on display once which seemed almost the direct antecedent of these cars: a teardrop-styled car by one of those modem designers, Buckminster Fuller. I wondered if the similarity was a coincidence.
Yellowjackets swarmed all over the big garage, and cars seemed to move mysteriously in and out from other portions of the vast basement. Yet, there was very little noise. I found out why when Blacksleeves gestured me into a nearby vehicle.
He pulled open the back door, and ushered me into the interior.
There were two bench seats, facing each other. I sat down in the back one, facing forward, flanked by two of the yellowjackets. Blacksleeves climbed in after us, and pulled the door shut. He sat down facing me, his back to the front seat, where the remaining two had taken their places.
There was a slight vibration from behind me, and then we were moving soundlessly forward, up a ramp, and towards the doors. A moment later we were out on the busy, sunlit street.
Sixth Avenue was clogged with cars. It seemed the Angels hadn’t done any better with New York traffic than Barnes had, back “home.” At least it made it look as if business were pretty good even under the Angels’ rule.
Indicating the traffic, the driver looked back at us, and asked, “Shall I give ’em the whistle?” raising his arm to a button over the center of the windshield.
“What’s our hurry,” asked Blacksleeves. “Kordamon didn’t give us orders to get him there in two minutes, did he? They’ll only give us another detail when we get there, anyway.”
We drove slowly up Sixth Avenue towards Central Park. It was hot. There wasn’t much of a breeze getting through the skyscrapers today. The .yellowjackets still had their force-fields on, and they looked like they were sweating more than I was.
It was unsettling to see Sixth still as dingy as it had been ten years ago where I had come from. No fancy new hotels and office buildings, no bright new look of steel and glass and plazas, no new marble fountains, no carefully manicured shrubbery set in tubs around the white new concrete pillars.
Old five-story buildings, grimy with ten more years of filth. There was an occasional gaudy alien storefront with incomprehensible signs in squiggles that didn’t even bother with an English version, with huge windows covered with what looked like translucent plaid, windows that rippled as if in the breeze. But they were obviously made of glass; perfect reflections were visible in them.
Traffic piled up even heavier when we turned onto 59th Street and headed east for the bridge.
“Hell,” said one of the yellowjackets beside me, “this is ridiculous. We’ll be here for an hour, and it’s like a stove in here. Give ’em the goddam whistle, Joey. That’ll shake ’em up.”
Getting a nod from Blacksleeves, the driver reached for the button over the windshield, and an eerie whining sound filled the block.
Then I saw that the driver had paused, finger inches away from the button he hadn’t pushed.
“What the—” said Blacksleeves, and cursed, opening the door to see what was happening.
The whining grew piercingly-louder, and the air seemed to coalesce.
Suddenly the yellowjackets’ personal force-fields begafn to glow and spark.
The man on my left screamed. I felt the interior of the car fill with heat and the odor of ozone. The one who had screamed slumped towards me, and as his sputtering field brushed against me, I felt the fabric of my coat singe. I jumped forward, towards the vacated facing seat. Both of the yellowjackets in the back seat were writhing, and I paid no attention to the two in front. I pushed through the open door, and almost stumbled over the body of the one who’d jumped out. Blacksleeves was a black and smoldering mass, no longer more than the rough, charred outline of a human being.
The eerie whine was still climbing up and down the scale just below inaudibility, and I saw people staring, gape-mouthed, at me and the dead yellowjacket on the street.
The front car door opened beside me, and one of the other yellowjackets, his halo gone, climbed shakily out. Then there was a muffled report from somewhere close by, and he fell, the right side of his cheek missing.
At the corner, parked facing downtown, was a large delivery truck. On its roof was what looked at first like a set of PA speakers, the kind they use at election time to disturb the peace with campaign slogans.
A blond youth who looked vaguely uncomfortable in civvies angled through the traffic towards us. I took him at first for a gawker, and then he edged up against me, prodded me with something hard, and said, “There is little time. Hurry—to the corner!”
“And just who are you with, brother?” I asked without moving.
“The truck—on the comer!” he repeated. “You fool, we staged this all for you!”
The delivery truck, its speaker apparatus dropped down inside, pulled up behind an imposing building on Riverside Drive half an hour later, and the blond kid climbed from his seat beside me on the packing case in the crowded interior of the van, and opened one of the back doors. He’d holstered his gun, and now waved me out.
I’d gotten little from him on the ride. The light from the dirt-spattered rear windows showed little of the machinery that took up most of the truck’s payload, and no expression upon the kid’s face. “Your questions will be answered in due time,” was all he would say, and I had to be content with that and the meager view of the streets we’d passed through for the duration of the jolting trip.
Now he pulled a black band from his pocket and slipped it up his sleeve. Another swastika.
“Well, thanks for the ride, friend,” I said, and I hit him with a well-placed rabbit chop on the side of his neck. He crumpled to the cobblestones, and I’d started over him when something crashed down on my head.
The impact drove me to my knees. I was getting tired of this. I was getting kicked around a little too much. I was going to have to do something about that. Any day now.
I shook my head,, but couldn’t seem to get back up to my feet. I felt, suddenly, very tired. I was thinking about lying down for a bit of sleep, when a voice spoke, a long way off, behind me.
“My regrets, Mr. Archer, but after all the trouble we went to on your behalf, we can’t have you running out now.” Then I did go to sleep.
It wasn’t complete. I never fully lost consciousness. I have vague memories of being picked up and manhandled in through a hallway, garbage cans clanging and clattering as the men moving me pushed past them. Then I was slumped in a chair, and someone was washing my head, and something began stinging my scalp. I remember that fairly well, because the pain brought me closer to consciousness. Then I began slipping away again, and someone waved strong spirits of ammonia under my nose.
I came awake, finally, to see a man squa
tting in front of me. He was gazing intently into my face. He was wearing a uniform, and the insignia of a German full colonel. I was not surprised. I had lost my capacity for surprise.
“My deepest regrets, Herr Archer,” he said with an accented voice. “I was most unhappy to learn of the steps taken with you by my subordinates. Twice now they have bungled, and I cannot blame you for any resentment you may feel. Still, I hope ypu will have the kindness to hear us out. It is our desire to enlist you as a friend. You are a fellow white, Aryan, human being, and I believe we can be of mutual benefit.”
“Yeah?” I let myself appear groggier than I was, and shook my head slowly. Violent nausea gripped me for a moment, then passed. “Let me smell that stuff again.”
A better grip on myself, I sat up. “What’s your interest in me, Colonel? Why the elaborate charade?”
“I am not at liberty to disclose our full intentions, Herr Archer,” he answered precisely, yet surprisingly warmly. “But I can tell you that the week’s activities in this city have not caught us napping. We were aware of the interest you generated among our friends, the Technocrats, and the Communists, and when the yellowjackets and the Angels took a hand in things, we found ourselves irresistibly drawn into the situation. We lost an entire carload of men on our first sortie, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was there.”
“Well, yes. I must apologize for my adjutant. I am sorry. My assistant, true, acting on my orders, but he was only a bungler. He had no knowledge of what he was getting into, and he acted without his wits. It was entirely his fault you fell into the hands of those despised Polizei, the yellowjackets. And it was entirely because he so thoroughly bungled his responsibilities towards you that we felt obligated to mount a special rescue for you.” He smiled deprecatingly. “We were forced to tip our hands a bit; it was not our intention to reveal our knowledge of a machine that circumvents the force-fields they use.” “So now you’ve got me. Just what do you have in mind?”
“I should like for you to meet and talk with our leader, who is now here, in this city—in this very building, for that express purpose.”
We took an elevator to one of the upper floors. It appeared I was in an old luxury apartment building, one of the many which line Riverside Drive for much ofv its length. In my world these buildings were falling into decay, the neighborhoods becoming poorer as the great suites of apartments were chopped into one, two, and three room “efficiency” apartments and attracted more and more tenants from nearby Spanish Harlem.
This building betrayed none of this gradual decay. The sandalwood panelling was kept polished to a fine luster, the pervasive scent filling the elevator’s narrow confines. I rode up alone with the Colonel, who wore no visible weapon. His nose wrinkled at the smell, though, and I mentally agreed with him. The air of the building was a bit rich for my tastes.
“We own the entire building,” he suddenly explained. “It has been kept to our leader’s expressed desire. I am only an old Wehrmacht man; my tastes are more Spartan.”
The elevator rocked gently from side to side, as the floors crept past. Then it stopped, and the door slid open on a corridor thick with atmosphere.
A heavy black carpet covered the floor, and gilt-edged paintings lined the walls in both directions. They were somber-hued paintings in golden browns and rich blacks; Dutch-master-type things. The one directly opposite was of a golden haired young boy lying on his side on the floor in a Victorian drawing room, looking at a book. I shook my head. “A funny place you people have here. Your leader must be some kind of a nut.”
“Please, please!” he said in a sharp whisper. He tried on a smile. “Please observe all courtesy here. You and I —we are not perhaps accustomed to such surroundings. But now we are in the presence of greatness.”
“OK, Mac, lead on. Relax. I’ll talk with your local George Lincoln Rockwell.”
The smile broadened, but the man seemed faintly puzzled at my remark. “George Lincoln—? We have a group commander Rockwell down in Virginia, but he’s a bit of a thorn in our sides, these days—a bit of a radical, you might say. Ah, well, come along then, Mr. Archer, we really are delaying things a bit too much. Important to get off on the right foot, you know!”
I shrugged, and followed him. Certainly about the last thing I was worried about at this point was making a good impression.
I was escorted into a sort of anteroom for a moment while the Colonel went through an archway to another room beyond.
I heard him click his heels and say something unintelligible. Then he reappeared.
“This way, Herr Archer,” he said.
I walked through the archway between two rigid guards and stopped dead in my tracks. A huge bare oaken desk commanded the room, behind which was a figure facing away from me as if in thought. There were a number of large comfortable chairs. The rug was lusher than the one in the hallway, soft and sensuous and decadent. It was wine red and black, a theme echoed throughout the room’s decor.
But the walls! Three sides of the room were tapestried with huge floor-to-ceiling flags, a gaudy nightmare out of prewar Germany—the black swastika in the white circle, on the huge red banner, the almost overpowering display of that bright symbol of total power and total hate, selected with psychological shrewdness by Hitler himself to represent the ultimate might of the Third Reich.
Only the fourth wall, the one behind the desk, was virtually bare. Centered behind and above the chair that was precisely centered behind the desk was a small, regulation-size Nazi flag, the original for the claustrophobic bunting on the other walls.
The two guards remained a step behind me, respectfully, and the Colonel remained in the archway.
The room was completely silent.
The figure behind the desk did not move.
I wondered if the man were really aware of our presence.
Then he turned around slowly, and leaned over the desk, his hands resting on it in a familiar pose.
“Well, sieg heil,” I breathed quietly.
It was Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER NINE
Three pairs of heels clicked arrogantly behind me. I turned and saw the arms fly upward in the Nazi salute, and “Heil Hitler” rang out in harsh enthusiastic fanaticism.
I’d seen him do it countless times in newsreels shown during and after the war, but there Hitler was, flipping his forearm up limply in that familiar gesture, holding it there for a moment, and then letting it drop to the desk with a thump.
“Kommen Sie hier—come here, Mr. Archer, if you please, and sit down. You will find the chair is quite comfortable.”
I stared intently at him as I groped my way into the indicated chair, an overstuffed, oversquare thing covered with black leather and white armrests, each embossed at the end with a gold eagle-and-swastika right where the palms of your hand would normally rest. I felt like I was entering the clutches of a giant panda.
Hitler. His hair was noticeably greyed, almost silver at the temples, and brushed straight back, the characteristic cowlick missing. But the little toothbrush moustache was still there, still defiantly black.
The rest of him was somewhat less defiant. This was an old man, and I had to remind myself forcibly that he was not the man who had started World War U, not the man who ran his tanks into Poland, ruthlessly exterminating not only six million Jews in the course of his demented quest, but countless Poles and Russians, by the village, in wholesale slaughter. This was Adolf Hitler, but a curiously castrated Hitler—a man whose paranoiac dreams had been mercifully nipped in the bud. . . .
But his voice—it was that same harsh voice that had had such a strange hypnotic power on the Germans. He was speaking English now, and it was good English at that, except for the accent that all Germans seem to bring into other languages. So many of them seem unwilling to make that final effort to capture the sound of a different tongue, no matter how educated they are. It is as if they feel it beneath them to try—like the British, I remembered.
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I thought for the first time in many years of a patrol I’d been on in Sicily, with a stray Tommy who claimed he could speak German like a native. It almost got us killed when I let him pretend he was a German lying wounded in the ditch; I should have taken the decoy job myself, I’d learned the language from my mother as a boy.
“You are not a prisoner, Mr. Archer,” said Adolf Hitler as he sat down in the high-backed, austere chair behind the empty desk.
“That’s a switch,” I said, and leaned forward, as if preparing to rise and leave.
A hint of a smile crossed his lips. “Please, Mr. Archer, you are a free man now. I only ask that you remain with us until this evening. I hope that you will hear me out.”
He gestured at the two guards in imitation SS uniforms who had remained by the archway. They saluted smartly and went into the anteroom. The Colonel remained at the archway, as if to act only as an aide. It was obvious; I was being told to relax.
I had to give the man one thing—I almost found myself relaxing. He had a way about him. I’d heard his speeches in German, and though I had no trouble understanding them, I’d never been able to figure out why his shrill voice had the effect it did. But here he spoke English well, and he somehow had control over it. He pitched it to center attention upon him and on what he was saying.
There was a movie I’d seen once—Olivier, playing Richard III. This was like talking to that magnificent villain, sitting across from Adolf Hitler, a rather slight and almost tired-looking man. His face was seamed with age, and a ruddy tan only seemed to accent the incongruity of his confronting me, alive, here in this world. When he talked, he got that same fascinating richness in his voice that almost made you like him even though you considered him a complete swine.