by Ted White
“I would offer you a cigarette, or permit you to smoke your own,” he began, in an almost apologetic tone. “I am afraid, however, that my lungs have never been able to bear the presence of tobacco smoke.”
I found myself saying, “It’s quite all right,” in spite of myself. I was a little numb, and unconsciously I put one hand to my head.
“Quite frankly, we know little about you, Mr. Archer,” Hitler went on. “We have discovered, however, that it is beyond question that you have come from some sort of . . . parallel Earth, in which the Angels did not invade, overthrowing legitimate governments and enslaving the world to their own perverted, bestial, and degraded purposes.”
Those words seemed grotesque coming from his lips. I felt charged with the irony of the situation.
“We know that you are a much sought-after man, Mr. Archer, so we sought you too. Considering the company in which we found you at last, it seems obvious that you have no love for the verdammt aliens.
“You and you alone, Mr. Archer, know what would have happened had the so-called Angels not enslaved us all. You are the only man who knows what the human race was capable of developing on its own without interference from interstellar freebooters.”
I noticed that the left side of his face twitched every time he referred to the Angels.
“You have been repeatedly treated with great brutality since arriving here some days ago—” He raised a hand to forestall any possible interruption from me. “At the hands of some of my own people too, I am aware of that. And I apologize for that. The man responsible for the . . . misinterpretation ... of my directive has been, I consider, sufficiently punished, since he and his men are at present enjoying the amenities of an Angel prison camp on Welfare Island.
“I wish to take a different approach, Mr. Archer. I should like to persuade you, ip all honesty, to help us, in whatever way you can. This evening I hope to have you present at a select gathering of people, a small party I am giving. I think you may be interested in talking to some of the people there. ...”
Two days before the Second World War was over, two buddies of mine had captured a wounded Oberleutnant forty miles west of Berlin. When the officer was close enough to them to be searched, he had pulled the pin on a potato-masher stuffed inside his shirt. All three had been killed.
A sergeant nearby had heard the kraut’s last words. “Heil Hitler!”
Cooperate? He had to be joking.
Suddenly he slumped in his chair and stared moodily at his hands, tented in front of his face.
‘The human race deserves the stars, you know, Mr. Archer. You may be the key. We do not need the contaminating help of inferior aliens—” His face twitched. “—whose only power lies in temporary technological superiority. You yourself may judge how temporary that superiority is. You saw what happened to the traitorous yellowjackets and their vaunted force-screens. Yes, we have solved that little puzzle, and a few more too. The day is coming. . . . Hm. Belz!”
The Colonel at the door came to attention.
“Will you see that Mr. Archer has a good meal, please? I am sure that he must be hungry after this morning’s busy work. And, Mr. Archer, can I have your assurance that you will remain with us till this evening? The little gathering of friends I have made in this country since my forced resignation from the leadership of the Third Reich may give you the opportunity to learn for yourself the sad state of affairs things have come to. And perhaps we may then talk about . . . things as they might have been.” He sounded almost wistful.
As I left in the company of Colonel Belz, I turned Hitler’s proposition over in my mind.
Item: This was not the Adolf Hitler of my world I’d been talking to. This man had dreamed mad dreams, but he was not the worldwide villain he’d become in my world.
Item: I owed the Angels nothing. This took some thinking, but it boiled down in the end to one simple fact: Human beings were second-class citizens here, on their own world. I was here, and I was a human being. Cogito ergo sum. Q.E.D. I’d met two Angels so far. One, Shama, left me with an aching feeling when I started thinking about her. It was easier not to think of her, to consign her as completely to my past as I’d been forced to do once before when I’d been foolish enough to fall in love. Besides, there was the second Angel, Kordamon. Him I could dislike easily—and he seemed more representative of the Angels, patronizing and contemptuous. I w&s a monkey, huh?
Think it through clearly. I am a human being. If sides are to be chosen, mine was chosen when I was born.
Was I being as racist as Kordamon? I prefer to think of myself as a realist.
Since I’d arrived in this world, I’d been the ball in a basketball game. Everyone wanted to score a goal with me. I’d been tossed back and forth, intercepted, and snatched. Everybody had his own story, but why was I so valuable that I had galvanized all these undercover human groups into rash actions and heedless exposure? If I understood things clearly—and obviously I didn’t— the Technocrats held the key to the puzzle. I Was extraneous, a by-product. Why me, then?
The only answer that made sense was that I knew something. Or, as likely, they all thought I knew something.
Okay, skip over that for the moment. What should I do?
There seemed to be two basic courses of action. And both were appealing. The first, and most obvious, would be to seek out the Technocrats again, and see if, with their help, I could return to my own world. There were a couple drawbacks there, though. The first was the problem of recontacting the Technocrats. They seemed a lot less given to strongarm tactics, and I couldn’t quite see them breaking in on this place to stage another rescue-cwm-capture. The second remained: what of my world? If the Technocrats held onto their gizmo, maybe nothing. But if the Commies got it, or Hitler, or the Angels—! I wouldn’t be much safer in the long run even on familiar territory.
'What else, then? Stay here. And here? Fight the Angels. Call it stupidity, call it the desire for revenge, call it what you like—I wanted to get my hands on that stringy Kordamon’s neck and slowly wring it, all the while booting his supercilious fellows the hell off the planet.
It seemed like a tossup; both ideas had their glaring weak points.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with the Colonel. At the moment there seemed no profit in snubbing Hitler’s invitation; here I was out of sight for the time being, and I could drift along until I got a better idea of what I could do.
Colonel Belz turned out to be interested in impressing me with his vast knowledge and understanding of the inner workings of the Nazi Party in this country.
It didn’t really amount to all that much. They were more popular than they were back where I’d come from, but a hundred thousand people out of almost two hundred million is not all that much to work with.
Most Americans, it looked like, had used the last twenty-five or so years to get completely used to the idea of being colonized. There just weren’t that many who thought that the Nazis would be any better, even among those who bothered to think about the Nazis at all.
But it was the Angels who were the evil unclean race now, Belz tried to convince me.
“What about your Herr Goebbels? I saw him in Union Square a few days ago. He sicked his storm troopers on a Jew in the crowd—or tried to.”
Colonel Belz appeared to be a bit uncomfortable. “Herr Goebbels holds firmly to the old line of thought. He has not been able to modify his views to take into account the new factors that have come to complicate the situation.”
“Then you accept the Jews back as part of the big happy human family, eh?”
Colonel Belz appeared even more uncomfortable. “It is in dispute. There is a faction which proposes that once mankind has reached the planets, the Jews can be deported and have a true land of their own, away from the rest of the human race. There is much argument on
the subject, which I hope you will permit me to change now.”
So we changed the subject.
And at something like six in the eve
ning, Belz led me, refurbished and resplendent after a good shower in a newly cleaned suit of clothes and a fresh.shirt, into a dining room for dinner.
It was an inner room, with no windows, and the lighting was artistically dim—the sort where you take the food on faith unless you’re enough of a boor to request a flashlight. I recalled that the room where Hitler had received me was similarly without windows, and I wondered what, if anything, this signified.
The room was done in exceedingly bad taste. Heavy drapes hung on the walls, with little ornate candelabra sticking out through the folds at intervals with dim, ten-watt bulbs which simulated candle flames, and almost flickered. A long polished table occupied the center of the room, and along the walls stood low plinths and pedestals supporting various works of statuary. It was of the Young Adonis variety. Some of the unclothed youths clutched staffs or a discus, but most—and there must’ve been over a dozen, all in dark bronze—were simply posturing. It gave me a better idea of Hitler’s character, anyway.
Large as it was, the room had a cluttered feel to it, and contributing to my claustrophobic reaction was the smell—the scent of sandalwood again—which overrode the faintly lingering odors of cooking food and made me wish for a good breath of fresh, sooty New York air, carcinogens and all.
Presently Hitler entered, followed by several men in Nazi uniforms; they arranged themselves around the table, standing at attention behind their respective chairs.
Hitler introduced them to me curtly; he seemed to have fallen into a depressed and irritated mood. As a consequence there was little conversation during the actual meal, as Hitler was not interested in leading it and the rest seemed unwilling to intrude upon his mood. And the extremely plain food completed the atmosphere of gloomy depression.
Eventually the meal was over, and Hitler arose, the signal for everyone else to get to his feet.
Hitler’s spirits seemed to have picked up. “Come now, 108
Mr. Archer, we will escort you to the little gathering I was speaking of. I continue your education!”
The “little gathering” turned out to be a penthouse ballroom full of people.
The windows were draped, as before, but a set of French doors opened onto a terrace, and across the terrace I could see the night lights of the city, a full moon hanging low on the horizon. Its color was a rich orange, and the view struck me almost immediately as I entered the vast room.
I was standing on a raised area just inside the doors, and with my added height it was easy to stare over the heads of the throng amassed below. Hitler was at my right, his short figure accented by the contrast.
“The moon,” I said. “That’s a harvest moon—but in the middle of summer?”
He mumbled something in German and ignored me. Colonel Belz leaned towards me and murmured, “A force-field, for weather control. The Angels. He hates to be reminded.”
Hitler strode forward to the edge of the raised area, and clapped his hands twice. Those nearest him turned and looked up, expectantly, but others, further away, did not seem to hear, or if they did, to care, and the murmur of chatter and the clink of ice in glasses continued as before.
The back of Adolfs neck began to flush angrily. Below, men in black dress uniforms began circulating quietly through the room, spreading silence in their wake.
Finally the room was hushed and waiting.
“Gentlemen,” said Hitler, grandly. “Gentlemen, and ladies, I am honored to have your presence here tonight. I am pleased to be with you. Is everything all right? Are the drinks good?”
In that moment he betrayed more obviously than he had before his Germanic origins. There was a polite murmur from the guests which was obviously meant as assent, and then Hitler nodded.
“Good. Then let the party continue!” He clapped his hands once more, and then stepped down onto the sunken main floor. As I followed down the three carpeted steps, I wondered what the point had been of that exchange. Apparently it was simply his way of making an entrance.
There were perhaps fifty people in the room. Along one side wall a bar was set up, and most had drinks in their hands. While modes of dress varied, I felt under-dressed again; once more I was an Arkie among the fashionable.
With the Colonel and myself in tow, Hitler headed for a group of older men. There were five of them, and while they were accompanied by women, I got the feeling that their women were strictly part of their dress; showpieces and little more. The youngest of the men had greying hair; the oldest of the women could not have been much over forty.
“Mr. Wainscott,” said my host, “allow me to introduce to you Mr. Archer. Mr. Wainscott,” he said to me, “is in heavy manufacturing. Mr. Archer is my special guest,” he added with a cheerful wink. “I expect he would be quite interested in your business, ah, relations.. . . with the Angels.”
Wainscott was a heavy man, jowly, who looked as though he’d be happier behind a cigar. There was no tobacco smoke in the air, I noticed.
I took his hand firmly, and shook it. Hitler stood by, obviously waiting for the ball to start rolling, and Wainscott seemed not at all interested in pursuing a conversation with me.
“Just what sort of manufacturing do you do?” I asked. It was the wrong question, of course.
A scowl crossed over Wainscott’s heavy brow. “Damned if I know,” he said. “Gadgets. Tinkertoys, for all I know. Maybe pieces for some goddamned Angel’s tricycle.”
A bald-headed man with the look of an accountant added, “It’s not like they bother to tell you what it is you’re producing. They just fork over the specs, and make their order. That’s it. Coss is my name,” he added, thrusting out a hand. “William Coss.” I shook his, hand. It was tired and limp. “I’m in data processing,” he added, “but it’s exactly the same. They feed me stuff and I feed it back to them, and I have no more idea what it all adds up to than Bob does,” He nodded at Wainscott.
“What do you get out of it then?” I asked. “Money?”
“Money,” Coss said, “sure.”
Wainscott snorted.
“I was running a large accounting company,” Coss elaborated. “It was a going, growing thing. I had several large companies for major clients. Bob’s, for one. Okay, in come the Angels, and I think, ‘there it goes. There it all goes—my life’s work!’
“But they’re canny, those Angels; you gotta give them that.” Wainscott snorted again, but Coss went on. “They saw what they could use, and they went right ahead. Some people, their businesses haven’t changed at all. Like, a lot of the service industries, food, like that. People still gotta eat, wear clothes. They’re all right. But us, we came into demand by the Angels.
“So one day in they come, with these machines, the calculators, no bigger than a portable typewriter, and start training us to use them like we were kindergarten kids. Which, I might add, we were, when it came to operating these little things. Damned things are almost intelligent, like if you ‘tell’ them something the right way, before you know it, they have the answer for you. They can handle thousands of pieces of data. Totally overhauled my bookkeeping, I can tell you. And Bob— the damned things all but run his business.”
“Inventions of the Devil,” Wainscott mumbled.
“Worse,” a third man put in. “Inventions of the Angels ”
They were talking about computers. The Angels used some advanced form of computer in their work—they’d have to, of course—and they’d introduced the. computer into this world something like ten years before it would otherwise have appeared. Even in my own world, some people were suspicious of the computer—put them in another era and they’d have been suspicious of the wheel —and here those suspicions were amplified by their natural hostility towards the Angels.
“Opened one up, once,” said the third man. He was small and thin, with dirty grey hair and a suit almost as conservative as my own. “Told them it had got dropped. Hell, I dropped it. That’s how I opened it. Know what’s in the damned things?”
Coss
had heard the story before, that was obvious. But he held his silence.
“You’d think gears and wheels, and lots of clockworks, right? Uh-uh. The thing didn’t have no moving pans at all. A lot of pieces that looked like mica, with silver lines all laid out neat on them, and some pieces of crystal. That’s all. Made no sense to me at all. But it works.”
Solid state. Printed circuits. And they knew nothing about such things.
Hitler had vanished; he’d drifted off during the conversation at some point when I hadn’t noticed. Belz was gone, too, but as I looked around, I saw him near the bar, talking with a young woman.
The businessmen were talking among themselves, now. They were arguing profit margins and the way in which the Angels had directed their business. I couldn’t quite get what was bugging them; by their own admissions, business was great—capacity, in fact. But it was “controlled,” and they had a hard time swallowing that.
“I figured I had the capital to add a new plant, increase production thirty per cent,” Wainscott was saying. “Well, you know how you gotta clear everything with your administrative office. I sent in the specs—had everything all drawn up, ready to go—and back comes this form, ‘Request denied.’ So I go myself, and this smiling Angel tells me, no expansion. He says I’m producing my full allotment, and that’s that.”
So Wainscott was piling his money up in the bank. My heart did not quite bleed for him.
There was a touch at my elbow.
“Mr. Archer?” It was the woman Belz had been talking to. She was a pert brunette in her late twenties. She was wearing a very fashionable dress; it bared one breast, toga fashion. I would’ve been more impressed if it had been a breast worth baring, but she was a little on the scrawny side, and it had been a mistake. I was polite, however, and overlooked it, in favor of the drink she was holding out.
“Jacob thought you might prefer a female escort this evening,” she said. “I’m Bettina. Just call me Betty.”
I tasted the drink. It was pretty good Scotch. I thanked her, and she asked me if I wanted to meet some of the others. I shrugged. What the hell; that was what I was here for.