He sounded very sure of himself, like a missionary spreading the word of God to the benighted heathen. And, the longer Goldfarb thought about it, the more convinced he was that the brash young engineer had a point. Britain had been a garrison state, arming itself to the teeth against the Lizards—and, incidentally, to make sure the Reich stayed friendly ally and mentor, not conqueror. Canada was different. Shielded by the USA from danger at the hands of the Race, Canadians could, as Devereaux said, have fun with the new technology. They could, and they did.
Sitting there at a drawing board with bins of electronic parts all around for him to play with, Goldfarb had to work at the notion that having fun was all right, that he wasn’t betraying mankind by not working on some weapon that would make every Lizard on Earth shrivel up and turn purple. Designing a little plastic top that lit up and played music when you spun it struck him as absurdly frivolous.
When he said as much, Hal Walsh gave him an odd look and asked, “Are you sure you’re not a Protestant?”
Goldfarb snorted. “I’m not sure of a great many things, but that’s one of them.”
“Well, okay.” His boss laughed. “But look at it from a different angle. Suppose you took that top you’re working on back to your radar station in 1940. Suppose you spun it on the floor there and it did what it’s supposed to do. What would your chums have thought of it? What would you have thought of it back then?”
“Hmm.” Goldfarb rubbed his chin. “The battery would have been impossible. The sound square would have been impossible. The light and the plastic would just have been improbable. Offhand, I’d say we’d have thought the Martians had landed.”
“You wouldn’t have been so far wrong, either, would you?” Walsh laughed some more. “Now suppose you gave it to your father when he was a little boy. What would his mother and father have thought?”
“Back in Warsaw before the turn of the century?” Goldfarb thought about that. “Jews don’t burn people at the stake for witchcraft, but that’s about the only thing that would have kept me in one piece.” He got another chuckle from Walsh, but he hadn’t been joking.
His boss was about to say something more when the telephone by Goldfarb’s table rang. Walsh waved and went off. Goldfarb picked up the phone. Before he could even say hello, the fellow on the other end of the line announced, “It’s not over yet. You may think it’s over, but it’s not.”
“What?” Goldfarb said. “Who is this?”
“Who do you suppose?” the caller answered. “We don’t forget. We do get even. You’ll find out.” The line went dead.
Goldfarb stared at the phone for a moment, then put the handset back in its cradle. “Who was that?” Walsh asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Maybe I did,” Goldfarb said.
He waited for his boss to ask more questions, but Walsh surprised him by doing nothing of the kind, but turning away and going back to his own work. An Englishman might have done that, but Goldfarb hadn’t expected it on this side of the Atlantic. From all the American films he’d seen, people over here were a lot more brash about sticking their noses into other people’s business.
After a moment, he realized American films came out of the United States, not Canada. The Canadians who’d grilled him had done it out of duty, not because they were personally nosy. The reserve wasn’t quite so strong as the notorious British stiff upper lip, but it was there.
He got back to work waiting all the while for the phone to ring again. That was how these things worked, wasn’t it? The bad eggs played on their victim’s fear, and sometimes managed to drive him round the bend without even doing anything to him.
And, sure as the devil, the phone did ring again half an hour later. When Goldfarb picked it up, all he heard on the other end was silence. He listened for a little while, then hung up. Nobody’d drive him round the bend, by God, but someone had made a good start on getting his goat.
Somebody . . . He had no idea who, though whoever it was had to be a Canadian pal of Basil Roundbush’s. Suddenly, he grinned and turned to Hal Walsh. “Mr. Widget, sir!”
Walsh grinned back. “At your service, Mr. Goldfarb. And what can I do for you today?”
“You’re in the widget business,” Goldfarb said. “Can you tell me if anyone’s ever invented a widget that shows the number a telephone call is made from?”
“A fast and easy kind of tracer, you mean?” Walsh asked. “Something better than the police and the telephone company use?”
Goldfarb nodded. “That’s what I’m talking about. Shouldn’t be too hard, not if we put some of the Lizards’ information-processing gadgets on the job. Suppose you could see at a glance it was your brother-in-law on the other end of the line, and you didn’t want to talk to him because you owed him twenty quid—uh, fifty dollars. It’d be handy.”
“You’re right. It would.” If Walsh was wondering why Goldfarb chose this exact moment to ask about that invention, he didn’t let on. “And no, I don’t think anything like that is on sale now, and yes, I can see how it might be popular.” He looked past Goldfarb, or maybe through him. “I can see how you might do it, too.”
“So can I,” Goldfarb said, excitement kindling in him. Roundbush’s nasty friends might have thought they were putting a scare in him, but, with a little luck, they’d just gone a long way toward making him a rich man. He started bouncing ideas off his boss, who also had some good ones of his own. Goldfarb was a tinkerer, and largely self-taught; Hal Walsh understood more about theory than he would if he lived to be ninety.
Both men started scribbling notes after the first couple of minutes. After half an hour, Goldfarb was hoping the nasty boys would call back again, and do it soon. Once he had their telephone number, he could pass it on to the police. Then they’d be out of his hair for good. From an office full of people who thought the same way he did, everything looked very simple.
When the telephone rang, Käthe Drucker answered it. After a moment, she turned and said, “It’s for you, Hans.”
“Who?” Johannes Drucker asked, setting down his newspaper and getting to his feet. His wife shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t anybody she knew. Drucker tried to hide his worries as he walked to the phone. If that damned Gunther Grillparzer was raising more trouble . . . If Grillparzer was doing that, he’d just have to deal with it as best he could. He took the phone from Käthe. “Drucker here.”
“Your leave is canceled,” said a crisp voice on the other end of the line. “All leaves are canceled, by order of the Committee of Eight. Report to your duty station at Peenemünde immediately.”
“Jawohl!” Drucker said, fighting the urge to come to attention. The line went dead. He hung up the telephone.
“What is it?” Käthe asked—she could see it was something. When he told her, her eyes went wide. “Does that mean what I’m afraid it means?”
“That the balloon’s going up on account of Poland?” he asked, and she nodded. He answered the only way he could: with a shrug. “I don’t know. No one tells me anything. I’ll say this—I hope not. But whether it is or not, I have to report in.” He raised his voice: “Heinrich!”
“What is it, Father?” His elder son’s reply floated down from upstairs.
“Keep an eye on your brother and sister for a while. I have to report to the base, and your mother will come along so she can drive the car back here. Have you got that?”
“Yes, Father,” Heinrich said, and then asked essentially the same question Käthe had: “Will it be war?” The difference was, he sounded excited, not afraid.
He’s too young to know better, Drucker thought, remembering how enthusiastic a Hitler Youth he’d made at the same age. Not much later, he’d gone into the Wehrmacht, and he’d been there ever since. Did that mean he didn’t know better, either? Maybe it did. He had no time to worry about it now.
Reliable no matter how ugly it was, the Volkswagen roared to life right away. Drucker didn’t want to think about what he would have d
one if it hadn’t started. Called for a taxi, he supposed—an order to report immediately meant that and nothing else. No one cared about excuses; the idea was that there shouldn’t be any.
Drucker drove out of Greifswald and east across the flat, muddy ground toward Peenemünde. He cursed every car that got in his way. At the barbed-wire perimeter around the base, he showed the sentries his identification card. They shot out their arms in salute and let him by.
He stopped in front of the barracks where he spent almost as much time as he did with his family. When he jumped out of the Volkswagen, he started to take the keys with him. Käthe coughed reproachfully. Feeling foolish, Drucker left the keys alone. His wife got out, too, to come around to the driver’s side. He took her in his arms and kissed her. He wasn’t the only soldier doing such things; the road in front of the barracks was clogged with stopped cars and men saying goodbye to wives and sweethearts.
Käthe got back into the VW and drove away. Drucker hurried into the barracks and threw on the uniform that hung in the closet. “What’s up?” he called to another space flier who was dressing with as much frantic haste as he.
“Damned if I know,” his comrade answered. “Whatever it is, though, it can’t be good. I’d bet on that.”
“Not with me, you wouldn’t, because I think you’re right,” Drucker told him.
They hurried toward the administrative center. Drucker looked at his wristwatch. Less than half an hour had gone by since the telephone rang. He couldn’t get in trouble for being late, not when he’d had to come from Greifswald . . . could he? He resolved to raise a big stink if anyone complained.
No one did. He checked off his name on the duty roster and hurried into the auditorium to which soldiers in military-police metal gorgets were directing people. The auditorium was already almost full; even though he’d done everything as fast as he could, he remained a latecomer. He slid into a chair near the back of the hall and shot disapproving glances at the men who came in after him.
General Dornberger stepped up onto the stage. Even from his distant seat, Drucker thought the commandant at Peenemünde looked worried. He couldn’t have been the only man who thought so, either; the buzz in the hail rose abruptly, then died as Dornberger held up his hand for quiet.
“Soldiers of the Reich, our beloved fatherland is in danger,” Dornberger said into that silence. “In their arrogance, the Lizards in Poland have attempted to impose limits on our sovereignty, the first step toward bringing the Reich under their rule. The Committee of Eight has warned them that their demands are intolerable to a free and independent people, but they have paid no attention to our just and proper protests.”
He building up toward a declaration of war, Drucker thought. Ice ran through him. He knew the Reich could hurt the Race. But, probably better than any man who’d never been into space, he also know what the Race could do to the Reich. He felt like a dead man walking. The only hope he had for his family’s survival was the wind blowing the fallout from Peenemünde out to sea or toward Poland rather than onto Greifswald. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“No state of war as yet exists between the Greater German Reich and the Race,” Dornberger went on, “but we must show the Lizards that we are not to be intimidated by their threats and impositions. Accordingly, the Reich is now formally placed on a footing of Kriegsgefahr. Because of this war danger order, the armed forces are being brought to a maximum alert—which is why you are here.”
It won’t happen right this minute, then, Drucker thought. Thank God for so much. His wasn’t the only soft sigh of relief in the auditorium.
“If the worst should befall, we shall not stand alone,” General Dornberger said. “The governments of Hungary and Romania and Slovakia stand foursquare behind us, as loyal allies should. And we have also received an expression of support and best wishes from the British government.”
That mixed good news and bad. Of course the allies stood by the Reich: if they didn’t, they’d fall over, and in a hurry, too. If England really was supporting Germany, that was good news, very good indeed. The English were bastards, but they were tough bastards, no two ways about it.
But Dornberger hadn’t said a word about Finland and Sweden. What were they doing? Sitting on their hands, Drucker thought. Hoping that when the axe falls, it doesn’t land on their necks.
Sitting where they were, he might have done the same thing. That didn’t mean he was happy they were staying quiet—far from it. But they had a better chance of coming through an all-out exchange between the Race and the Reich in one piece than a place like Greifswald did. Damn them.
“We are going to put as many men into space as fast as we can,” the commandant said. “Once up there, they will await orders or await developments. If we down here fall, they shall avenge us. Heil—” He broke off, looking confused for a moment. He couldn’t say “Heil Himmler!” any more, and “Heil the Committee of Eight!” sounded absurd. But he found a way around the difficulty: “Heil the Reich!”
“Heil!” Along with everyone else in the hall, Drucker gave back the acclamation. And, no doubt along with everyone else, he wondered what would happen next.
The enormous roar of an A-45 blasting off penetrated the auditorium’s soundprooflng. Sure enough, the Reich wasn’t wasting any time getting its pieces on the board so it could play them. Those upper stages wouldn’t do Germany any good if they got destroyed on the ground.
“Have we got a schedule yet for who’s going into orbit when?” Drucker asked, hoping someone around him would know.
A couple of people said, “No.” A couple of others laughed. Somebody remarked, “The way things are right now, we’re damned lucky we know which side we’re on.” That brought a couple of more laughs, and told Drucker everything he needed to know. He wondered why everyone had been summoned so urgently if things were no better organized than this. We might as well be Frenchmen, he thought scornfully.
Major Neufeld pushed through the crowd toward him. General Dornberger’s adjutant looked dyspeptic even when he was happy. When he wasn’t, as now, he looked as if he belonged in the hospital. “Drucker!” he called urgently.
Drucker waved to show he’d heard. “What is it?” he asked. Whatever it was, he would have bet it wasn’t anything good. Had it been good, Neufeld would have left him alone to do his job, just as the dour major was doing with everyone else.
Sure enough, Neufeld said, “The commandant wants to see you in his office right this minute.”
“Jawohl!” Drucker obeyed without asking why. That was the Army way. Asking why wouldn’t have done him any good, anyhow. He knew that only too well. Several people gave him curious looks as he left the auditorium. Hardly anyone knew why he’d had run-ins with higher-ups, but practically everyone knew that he’d had them.
“Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said when he got to Dornberger’s office.
“Come in, Drucker.” Walter Dornberger took a puff on one of the fat cigars he favored, then set it in the ashtray. “Sit down, if you care to.”
“Thank you, sir.” As Drucker sat, he wondered if the commandant was going to offer him a blindfold and a cigarette next. Dornberger was usually brusque. Today he seemed almost courtly. Drucker asked, “What’s up, sir?” He’d been asking that since he got to Peenemünde. If anyone knew, if anyone would tell him, the commandant was the man.
Dornberger picked up the cigar, looked at it, and set it down without putting it in his mouth. In conversational tones, he remarked, “I wish Field Marshal Manstein were as good a politician as he is a soldier.”
“Do you?” Drucker asked, nothing at all in his voice. He didn’t need a road map to see where that led. “The SS is in charge of the Committee of Eight?”
“And the Party, and Goebbels’ lapdogs,” General Dornberger answered. “Manstein knows better than to provoke the Lizards, or I assume he does. This—this is madness. We can defend ourselves against the Race, yes, certainly. But win an offensive struggle? Anyone who ha
s dealt with them knows better.”
“Yes, sir,” Drucker said. Why was the commandant telling him this? Most likely because no one in authority trusted him, which, in an odd sort of way, made him safe. “Anyone who’s been in space knows what they’ve got up there, that’s for sure.”
“Of course.” Dornberger’s nod was jerky. “Yes. Of course. And that brings me to the main reason I called you here, Lieutenant Colonel. Changes in the alignment of the Committee of Eight affect more than the broad foreign policy of the Reich. I must tell you that you will not be allowed into space during this crisis. I am sorry, but you are reckoned to be politically unreliable.”
Drucker supposed he should have expected that, but it hit like a blow in the belly even so. Bitterly, he asked, “Why bother calling me here, then? I might as well have stayed at home with my family.” We could all die together then, ran through his mind.
“Why? Because I am still working to get the restriction lifted. I know what a good man you are in space, regardless of your troubles on the ground,” Dornberger answered. “Meanwhile . . . You may be lucky, you know.”
“If we’re all lucky, none of this will matter. We’d better be.” Drucker got up and walked out without bothering to ask for permission. Normally, that was as close to lese majesty as made no difference. Today, General Dornberger said not a word.
“They are serious!” Vyacheslav Molotov sounded indignant. That, in its own way, was a prodigy. Andrei Gromyko knew as much. His shaggy eyebrows twitched in astonishment. Molotov was so agitated, he hardly noticed. “The Germans are serious, I tell you, Andrei Andreyevich.”
“So it would seem,” the foreign commissar answered. “You already told them we wanted no part of this madness. Past that, what can we do?”
“Prepare as best we can to have the western regions of the Soviet Union devastated by radioactive fallout,” Molotov answered. “Past that, we can do nothing. We are one of the four greatest powers on the face of the Earth and above it, and we can do nothing. Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.”
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