A Century of Progress

by Fred Saberhagen

  Fritz in his white jacket and steward’s bow tie was only seventeen, chosen for this voyage as an exemplary specimen of Hitler Youth. Still, his hands were shaking just a little as they moved the tray. The last three or four days had been overwhelming. Not only to have crossed the ocean, but to have done so as a member of the crew of the Graf Zeppelin, and above all in the personal service of the Fuhrer himself . . . even now there were moments in which Fritz wondered if he was dreaming.

  When the compartmented tray was ready, Fritz carried it out of the galley into a short and narrow corridor. To his left was only one door, closed now and leading outside. Through it the passengers ordinarily boarded and left the airship at the beginning and end of a voyage. Facing the steward and slightly to his right was the closed door of the passengers’ lounge-dining room, from behind which now came the murmur of voices and a burst of laughter. Shortly Fritz would be needed again in there, but right now he passed that door, turned right, and entered the radio room.

  One of the two operators on watch asked for coffee, one for chocolate. The one who had his earphones on said in German: “Hey, Fritz, what do you think? I’ve got a Chicago news broadcast. Dillinger has just been shot, by the American government agents.” Everyone on board the Graf knew who Dillinger was, after two days of listening to American news.

  Fritz paused, holding the tray. “In Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, not a bit. They shot him on the street, just as he was coming out of a movie house with his lady friend. He’s dead.” The man was smiling, but Fritz no longer thought that he was making the story up.

  “And we’re going to that city,” the other operator murmured, leaning back in his chair with his headphones down around his neck. He smacked his lips a little, and the others knew that he was yearning for a cigarette. Not that there was any question of having one. Even if there hadn’t been millions of cubic feet of gaseous fuel and lifting hydrogen aboard, with the omnipresent danger of insidious leaks, the Fuhrer’s personal aversion to tobacco smoke of any kind was well known to be comparably explosive.

  Out in the little corridor again, Fritz paused to listen. This far forward of the engines, the Graf was fairly quiet. Taking note of the muted, endless waterfall-roar of the huge twelve-cylinder Maybachs, he decided on the basis of several days’ experience that one engine was probably down for maintenance again. Still, even with only four propellors turning, the Graf might be able to make fifty or sixty miles an hour, given a minimum of luck with regard to wind. Fritz fully intended to be an engineer one day, and in the last few days he had chosen an engineering job on a dirigible as his ultimate goal.

  The door to the chart room was only a step farther forward, and Fritz bore his tray in there. The men bent over the wide tables growled, and muttered that they were too busy to be interested in coffee. And don’t spill any of that stuff in here!

  In the middle of the forward bulkhead of the chart room, another door led forward to the control car. This, on the Graf, was not a separate car at all. It was simply the front compartment of the single ninety-foot-long gondola that clung to the lower front curve of the enormous hull, and housed the ship’s key control functions as well as the entire passenger quarters.

  The man at the wheel wanted coffee. His companion, manning the engine telegraphs, asked for chocolate. Beyond the glass panels that made up the whole curving front of the control car, the sky was sunset, with broken and scattered clouds at the level of the dirigible and higher, in several layers. They were flying at about five thousand feet, and Fritz could see yet another of the Great Lakes—this one Lake Michigan, he knew—ahead. He didn’t know whether to pass on the news about Dillinger or not, or whether these men might already have heard it. Finally he decided it would be unseemly for a Hitler Youth to appear overly excited about these foreign gangster matters, and said nothing.

  Now the crew members farther aft who were not too busy had to be served as well. Fritz stopped in the galley to restock his tray, then headed aft. The commonly used way lay straight through the passengers’ dining room. He entered the dining room and would have traversed it as unobtrusively as possible, but someone called to him: “The Fuhrer would like a refill.”

  Even after days of approaching Hitler closely, it was still a pulse-quickening experience. The Fuhrer was sitting now at one of the small tables in front of the portside red-curtained windows of the dining room, empty cup in front of him and sunset sky behind. Hitler wore his Bavarian sports coat of light blue linen and a yellow tie. His unique gold Party pin was prominent on his jacket.

  As usual, Hitler himself was dominating table conversation. “Civilian informality is definitely best on an occasion like this,” he was saying to his companions as Fritz approached. “The Doctor”—Fritz knew that this meant Herr Doktor Goebbels—”agrees with me. Especially as we are arriving at a fair. And especially in America—ah, chocolate is here.”

  As Hitler’s cup was being filled, he smiled lightly and raised his blue eyes to the steward’s face. “Thank you,” the Fuhrer said in English. He was obviously practicing a phrase for use during his visit.

  Fritz spoke some English, and understood more—it was one of the things that had been taken into consideration in the selection process for the crew. He replied now in that language, as best he could: “You are velcome, my—my Leader.”

  Paul Schmidt, the English-language interpreter, who was seated now at Hitler’s table, corrected the vee sound, pursing his lips and going www. Everyone at the two occupied tables had a small chuckle, except perhaps for Sepp Dietrich, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, who was looking nervous as the time for landing drew near. Sitting near Dietrich were a couple of SS adjutants who on this trip were doubling as his assistants. They looked uncomfortable in the civilian clothes that they had put on within the last hour or so. Heinrich Hoffman, the photographer, was holding his camera before him on the table, ready for a chance at an informal shot. Albert Speer, the young architect and favorite confidant of Hitler, was in conversation with Baur, the airplane pilot.

  As Fritz moved away, going on about his tasks, he heard the talk behind him start up again. In German, but about America.

  Passing through the remaining width of the dining room—it was only sixteen feet square in all—Fritz stepped aside for a fellow steward hurrying through the other way. Then Fritz left the room by the aft door, leading to the central passage that ran aft through the rest of the gondola’s length. This hallway too was narrow, conserving space, and lined on both sides with narrow doors. There were five small passenger cabins on each side, the Fuhrer’s being first in line on the starboard. The forward cabins were minutely larger. Toward the rear of the gondola were the washroom doors.

  From inside the crew washroom at the very end of the corridor, Fritz climbed into another passage that ran back through the keel for virtually the entire length of the ship. Here the enclosure of the walkway was no more than skeletal, a spidery work of duralumin structural members. Here and there an electric light shone on cloth curtains, and on the very walls of the great cell bags of fabric and goldbeater’s skin that contained the lifting hydrogen and the gaseous engine fuel. The full length of this passage was more than seven hundred feet. But this time Fritz was going only two hundred feet or so, to the crew mess, where he set down his tray on a plain, lightweight table.

  He was on his way back carrying another tray, this one loaded with dirty dishes and miscellaneous garbage, when he stopped for a small personal detour. A cramped side passage, used by men who had to go out in flight to work on a particular engine, led to a glass-windowed small door. Inside this door Fritz crouched, pressing his face against the cool glass, looking out at the curve of hull and the engine pod outlined against a darkening sky. The pod, reached by a spidery catwalk, was mounted on long struts that held it some yards from the hull, giving the long propellor—idle now—plenty of room to spin. He couldn’t see the man working inside
the pod, but the small hatch on the side of it was open. Fritz looked forward to being allowed out there some day.

  Below was all water now, the ocean-like expanse of Lake Michigan sinking into the shades of night. Above, the great round of the dirigible’s hull cut off the higher sky. Along the curve of silvery-gray fabric Fritz could ‘see only a fringe of the uppermost layer of broken clouds on which the sun still shone.

  What wonderful things, he thought, I am going to be able to write in my next letter home. And when I get home again, what things I will have to tell . . . He thought for a long moment about a certain girl, and about the long time that he was going to arrange, one way or another, to spend with her when he got home.

  How marvelous, Fritz thought, is the world. Especially, above all, now in the New Age to which the Fuhrer leads us . . .

  Not far ahead now, though still invisible, lay Chicago. He hoped for some time off in which to see the Fair, and the great and mysterious and dangerous city. In large part it must be a mixture of inferior races. And of course a city of gangsters, but they were never to say that to anyone, of course, while they were there. Even if Dillinger . . .

  Someone was calling after him from the direction of the main passage. Had all the coffee been put away?

  Yet the steward lingered at the window for a moment longer, hoping to see the beacon that was called the Lindbergh Light.

  He thought that he could see strange shapes of light flicker past him through the darkening clouds.

  As soon as the Vega took off from the concealed strip, the enemy was able to locate it again. As it climbed into the sunset sky it was the target of quick and intense attack. Norlund was strapped into his cabin seat, wearing a metallic headband that wirelessly connected his brain’s alpha waves with the ship’s weapons—the projectors that looked out of the cabin windows on either side. Norlund’s hands, like any human hands too slow by far to man these guns, lay clenched or folded in his lap, or gripped the seat’s armrests. As he watched the screen, his very thought was melded with computer output to establish a priority of targets and select the type of beam to be projected.

  The first attacks came in quick succession, one on either side, and were beaten off. Without, as far as Norlund could tell, any substantial damage sustained on either side.

  Now Holly’s voice came to him, over the newly-installed intercom: “Got it in sight ahead, at about four thousand feet.” She was talking of course about the Graf, and they had timed their interception effort well. She might well be still unaware of the skirmish already fought, so swift and silent and nearly invisible had that clash been.

  They were still some miles east of Chicago, over the great plain of water. On his screens Norlund could watch the Graf descending gradually toward the distant lakefront Fairgrounds that its crew could probably not see yet. He could see that one engine of the Graf was for some reason idle. That would slow her down somewhat, all to the good. But the four remaining engines propelled it easily on into the mild breeze, into what looked like perfect weather conditions for a landing.

  At a relative speed of about a hundred miles an hour, the Vega overtook the dirigible swiftly. Within a very few minutes after takeoff, at a range of about half a mile, as had been planned, Norlund beamed off his first broadside at the airship. It was a heterodyned mixture of rays and particles, calculated to be difficult for Brandi’s people to block.

  But block it they did, successfully, somehow, though they probably had no gear mounted on the dirigible itself. The Graf flew on, unharmed and unaware of an attack.

  Norlund ordered Holly to turn back for another pass, this one from closer range. But this one, too, was ineffective, though the projected ray was changed. Demonstrating an aptitude for fighter tactics, Holly broke off the pass into a twisting dive that carried them right beneath the Graf. In the light of the airship’s own running lights, and the now-visible reflected beacons of the still-distant Fair, the gray hull looked faintly shiny, the hanging seaplane dark and small. The shape passed above Norlund at a hundred miles an hour, like some elongated planet. There was the gondola where Hitler rode, and Norlund had been unable to so much as scratch its paint.

  And that last pass, Norlund thought, was probably our last free one. Hitler’s angels were back on his screen now, materializing and closing fast.

  “Once more, and closer!” he ordered on the intercom, not knowing if they would have the time.

  Halfway up the eastern tower of the Skyride, exposed to the mild night on a half-open service platform, Geoffrey Holborn was listening to Hajo Brandi swear. Jeff could tell from the tone of voice that the man was swearing, though the language was as strange to Jeff as Hindustani. Brandi was speaking over a small communicating device he had pulled out of his pocket, apparently an unbelievably tiny two-way radio of some kind. Jeff, privileged to see this artifact of the future, stared at it in fascination.

  Brandi had chosen this platform as his temporary command post. For the past several hours he and Jeff, along with a crew of men that Brandi had called up from somewhere, had been secretly searching the Fairgrounds and particularly the towers for evidence of sabotage—specifically, for ceramic devices of the kind that Jeff himself had once been induced to put in place around the Empire State Building. Every time Jeff recalled how the Red aliens had duped and forced him into that, his rage flared up anew—

  But now time, even for rage, was running short. The Graf was coming on. By now it must be only minutes away, out in the darkness over the lake.

  Nearby, elevator cables whirred. Perhaps more engineers, local security people, airship experts, all going up to the top of the tower three hundred feet above, where the actual mooring was to be accomplished. The Navy’s Macon had been here twice in the past month for practice moorings, and it had been proven that the new Holborn system worked.

  Brandi continued to look out over the fairyland of electric light that sprawled below, while he swore monotonously and incomprehensibly into his communicator. At intervals he paused, listening to unsatisfactory answers that Holborn could not hear. Brandi until tonight had kept the communicator hidden from Jeff; that Jeff was now allowed to see it reassured him that he was finally completely trusted.

  But time was passing mercilessly; the Graf was coming in . . .

  “Hank!” Jeff called sharply now, trying to get the other man’s attention. For some days now, Brandi had been asking Jeff to go on a first-name basis and call him Hank. It was part of what seemed to be a calculated but somewhat clumsy effort on Brandi’s part to appear as just one of the fellows in American society of the Thirties. Jeff—rarely just one of the fellows himself—had mixed feelings about the effort, feeling sympathetic and at the same time in some way repelled by it.

  Hank or not, Brandi now continued to pay him no attention.

  Jeff was beginning to feel truly desperate. There were between fifty and a hundred men on that dirigible, and if there was real danger of sabotage the docking must be stopped. He looked round him almost frantically, as if some forgotten source of help might be available. From this high vantage point he could pick out the horizontal cables of the Skyride itself, running a hundred feet below him and still twenty stories or so above the paved Fairgrounds and the lagoon those cables crossed. Of course the cable cars were not running now; their activity, like that of most of the Fair, had been interrupted for tonight’s great event. A truly vast crowd of spectators had showed up to see that, and now filled most of the open space within the grounds, except for the roped-off acres around the east tower, above which the docking maneuvers would take place.

  Down there, on the cleared picnic grounds, some four hundred men were waiting, most of them Navy people with experience in landing a dirigible. Jeff had serious doubts about how useful they were going to be, even in an emergency, when actual docking was going to take place six hundred feet above their heads. But there they were, organized into squads, ready to catch dropped mooring lines and do what they could.

  And now a
vast, oceanic murmur was rising from the extended crowd. Out over the lake, the Graf, approaching head-on, had become visible. There were its running lights. And there, a flash of gray, caught for a moment in the edge of the Lindbergh beacon’s revolving gleam.

  Something had to be done now.

  Jeff caught Brandi by the arm, forcing the wiry man to turn round. “Hank! If there are any sabotage-units here on the tower, we haven’t been able to find them. It’s time to call in the authorities and get them to call the landing off.”

  For a moment Brandi only glared at him, not even appearing to understand what Jeff was talking about. Then, bringing his attention to Jeff with an effort, he shook his head decisively. “No! I keep telling you, Jeff, we must handle this in our own way. What evidence have we that the authorities here are going to accept?”

  “They’ll listen to me, if I tell them that something is seriously wrong.”

  “And afterwards, when you still can produce no proof?”

  Jeff shook his head violently. He was having trouble believing this argument. He waved his arms in desperation. “My God, man, at least we’ll have saved lives!”

  “Jeff.” Brandi had his bland mask fully in place now, and he was trying to be soothing. “Hitler can get off the Graf safely, with his seaplane and his pilot; in fact I’ve sent word to our man on the dirigible to get him to do just that.”

  “Hitler?” Jeff was aghast. “Who gives a . . . what about the others? The crew, the . . .”

  “There is a great deal more at stake here, Jeff, than the lives of a few individuals. It is the Lawgiver’s wish.” He nodded at Jeff solemnly. “I know you cannot understand that now. But trust me.”

  “Trust you.” Jeff’s echoing voice was low. Once he had trusted those others, too, who had brought healing with them and then turned out to be assassins. “This is madness,” he said loudly. “I’m going to stop it.”