The Cusanus Game

  The pack leader watched him with a smile. He was not a tall man, but unusually slender, and the tight black uniform with the silver fists on the collar patches made him look taller. The uniform jacket he wore unbuttoned over the black shirt. In his waistband he had an old handgun with which explosive ammunition could be fired. He’s proud of that vulgar SS image, Fingerhut said to himself, that cliché of a Nazi henchman we’ve provided him from Hollywood.

  In front of a nearby shed stood the yellow-painted bulldozer with which they had excavated the mass grave. The building was the only one that had not yet been burned down, but the thatched roof was already smoldering. From inside screams could be heard. So they haven’t killed everyone after all, Fingerhut said to himself. Perhaps they’ve spared a few of the children.

  “Are they not yet done with them in there?” called the pack leader.

  There was anger and contempt in his voice; he made a dismissive hand gesture. “Bring them out already and finish up!” And turning to Fingerhut he said: “Young wolves sometimes have to be given flesh to tear, or else they’ll lose their natural instincts.”

  Three young men pulled two girls outside. The clothes had been torn from their bodies. Blood stuck to their thighs. They dragged the girls over to the edge of the mass grave. Both of them were too weakened and dazed to grasp what was happening to them.

  Fingerhut was trembling all over.

  “Don’t do it!” he cried with a sob. “Please, don’t do it! I’ll turn off the cameras. Dear God, don’t do it!”

  No one paid attention to his protest. Two of the young men held the girls while the third unblinkingly pumped the LasGun, held it to the back of their heads, and pulled the trigger. First the one, then the other. The skull seemed to glow from within before it exploded in a fan-shaped rush of steam and the beheaded body plunged into the pit.

  The stink of burnt hair reached Fingerhut’s nose. His stomach rebelled. He clenched his teeth but could not prevent vomit from pouring out of his mouth and soiling his instrument collar. He wiped it away with his hand and swallowed convulsively. He was in danger of fainting. Staggering, he turned around and noticed that the pack leader was eyeing him with a smile.

  “You forgot to turn off your cameras, Fingerhut,” he said sarcastically, the corners of his mouth turned down. “I see that you too fulfill your duty with … passion.”

  “I abhor you, Commandant. And I abhor deeply what your people have done here. I hope that you are caught, brought to The Hague, and put on trial by the International Court of Justice. Half a billion viewers all over the world are tuned in to my satellites. All of them are witnesses to these two murders, this appalling bloody deed, and they will testify against you. For that reason—and for that reason alone—I haven’t turned off the cameras…”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Fingerhut! That’s not the reason you kept your cameras running, but because you know well that you might now be able to reckon with a billion viewers. And the same goes for me. Of course, you have to act outraged now in front of your viewers. But you understand nothing, Fingerhut. Do you seriously believe that this bloody business is fun for us? It’s a disgusting and dirty duty!”

  The gloves, thought Fingerhut. He wears elegant, soft, dove gray suede gloves. Clean and immaculate.

  The pack leader put his arm around him in a friendly manner.

  “Fingerhut,” he said. “A strange name.”

  “You mean … funny?”

  “I mean … Jewish.”

  “My ancestors were Germans.”

  The pack leader squeezed him tighter and murmured, “Amazing what passes for German these days.”

  And he led him to the edge of the mass grave. Fingerhut could not prevent himself from trembling uncontrollably in the man’s embrace.

  “You wanted to know what message I have for the world? Here, Fingerhut, zoom in on the faces—to the extent they even still have any. How many viewers, did you say?”

  “Half a billion worldwide.”

  “Wonderful. Maybe there are already two billion by now. Show them this! Show them what awaits them if they come here! And show them who awaits them! This is our message.”

  And with his immaculate glove the pack leader gestured all around.

  A mass grave full of corpses. Burning huts in the background. In front of them, young men, practically children. A wretched bunch, dressed up in martial garb, aping pathetic clichés. The terrible banality of violence.

  “This is our message,” repeated the pack leader, pulling his pistol out of his waistband and shooting Fingerhut in the back of the head. The explosive bullet exited at the right temple and tore a fist-sized breach. He held Fingerhut by the instrument collar. The green LEDs indicated that the lenses and the transmitting computer were still working, while the body of the reporter danced two or three steps in place and then went limp.

  The pack leader shoved the pistol back into his waistband and with his fingers pulled the steering implant out of the reporter’s temple wound. It seemed to want to escape back into the protective cavity of the skull. The pack leader yanked out the object. Silver tentacles moved, winding around his wrist. He sniffed it, hurled it with disgust to the ground, and trampled it with the heel of his boot. The indicator lights on the instrument collar, which had turned red, went out. The pack leader let go of Fingerhut, and the reporter’s body plunged headfirst into the pit.

  The camera drone, which up to that point had been working soundlessly at a height of about ten yards, seemed to suddenly have trouble controlling its gyroscope. With a dangling lens it buzzed back and forth like a furious hornet until it finally plummeted with a shrill screech and buried itself in the heap of corpses.

  A few of the young men laughed. Then they threw wood, straw, and broken furniture into the pit and set the heap on fire with a few laser shots. Dark smoke welled up. The pack leader held his blood-smeared glove over his mouth and nose and ordered a withdrawal.

  The police did not appear until an hour later. Although a wide perimeter around the area had been closed off, the ASEN commando managed to escape. Long before the arrival of the police, curious onlookers and a few journalists had come; they had followed the murder of the well-known TV reporter on television via satellite. They made holos and videos of the ruins of the village and the half-incinerated corpses and greeted the police with whistles, jeers, and laughter as the squads jumped out of the helicopters in radiation suits, drove back the onlookers, and cordoned off the area with red and white plastic tape. Shortly thereafter, four fire trucks arrived; the firemen unrolled their hoses and sprayed the last smoking beams with water. The collection of evidence had to be broken off when darkness fell.

  When the collection of evidence was completed the next day, a special commando recovered the corpses and packed them in gray plastic bags, which were brought with a helicopter to the forensic institute in Magdeburg. Not much was left of Fingerhut, but his mortal remains could be identified on the basis of the instrument collar of his TV equipment. In the late afternoon two trucks with loading arms appeared and collected the cadavers of the killed camels. They were brought to the rendering plant in Dessau, where they were cremated.

  Neither the police and forensics officers nor the men from the relief agency noticed the young man who had been surveying the site since morning, taking precise measurements of the various crime scenes, and by means of a Wristtop constructing an exact outline of the course of the massacre. And it would have been hard to notice him, for he was an octopus. He wore a camouflage suit of the special response force from the Amsterdam tunnel, clothing coated with optical microelements that had been developed by the NNTR laboratories in Kobe. They automatically took on in color and structure the appearance of the background against which their wearer stood. He could have been in front of a house wall, a tree, or a fence two yards away from a passerby who was looking in his direction, and he would have been completely invisible—except for his eyes, of course, which had to remain uncovered for his
orientation. But who is on the lookout for eyes in the plaster of a house wall, the bark of a tree, or the posts of a fence? If he had moved rapidly, an attentive observer would have noticed a sort of streaking effect, a minimal blurring of edges in the form of a wandering wave, caused by a tiny delay during the image construction in the simulation of the background by the optical system.

  Because the men of the task force from the AT could work exclusively alone, this camouflage was indispensable. Completely on their own and frequently confronted with a well-armed and numerically superior enemy, they had to be able to strike practically out of nowhere. They had the additional advantage of knowing exactly their enemy’s intentions. That was the case, of course, only for the first move, the gambit, for the second already took place in a changed world, an alternative world that had come into being as a result of their intervention. Therefore, the gambit had to be planned meticulously and the first strike had to be carried out as decisively and precisely as the first cut with a scalpel in a surgical procedure.

  Old Dorit van Waalen at the Hendrik Casimir Institute for Brane Studies called these activities “Uitborstelen,” “brushing out,” “grooming”—brushing history against the fur, “tegen de haren instrijken.” That sounded almost tender and corresponded only rarely to the reality. Most of the time, it was an invasive operation, during which blood usually flowed immediately.

  Hla Thilawuntha himself had proposed these short-term interventions in the past before he returned to his native country. Most of the scientists at the CIA had been skeptical that under such circumstances transitions would open up at all. Let’s just try, Thilawuntha had suggested, and they had tried. It had turned out that interventions in the immediate past, when they were prepared with sufficient exactness, could be carried out more easily than those in the more distant past.

  The boundary layer theorists at the CIA saw an explanation in the fact that the membranes between parallel worlds that had not yet diverged widely were more permeable than those between worlds that had existed for a longer time side by side or had already diverged more widely. And those who were more inclined to think in botanical categories, such as Dirk Straets, said, “Clearly, a fresh shoot can be clipped more easily than a full-grown bough.”

  So the response force of octopuses was formed.

  * * *

  “IF YOU WANT to cut off a new growth, you first have to take a close look at the branch,” his teacher Dirk Straets had impressed on him during his training, “and indeed from all sides. Then you have to determine where to cut. Take your time with that. Time is absolutely not an issue for us, only the right point in time. That’s the decisive factor. And the right place, of course. The right spatiotemporal point. Then you prepare, calmly and coolly, and then—boldly and resolutely: snip! That’s how it’s done.”

  So the octopus took his time with the development of his plan. He thoroughly studied Fingerhut’s recordings: stop, play, slow motion, rewind—over and over again; above all the wide shots the reporter had taken with his camera drone. Then he set to work developing his strategy and an exact timetable.

  A month later he submitted his outline to the commission for review. Another month later he was summoned. His plan was explained in detail; objections were raised, improvements suggested, and finally his proposal was approved. The prospects for a transition were judged to be favorable.

  The fortified village had been taken because the residents had been tricked by a simple ruse. The ASEN commando had ambushed three girls; after lunch break they had returned without armed escort to their work in the greenhouses, where they were to prepare seedlings for transport south by caravan. Two of the girls were killed, the third had been allowed to escape, and she had as expected run back to the village. The enraged farmers had then set off, armed, toward the greenhouses, leaving the village unprotected. The pack had attacked the mostly unarmed residents who had remained home—women, children, and old people—and massacred them. Hearing the noise, the farmers had turned around and hurried back. But then they fell victim to an ambush.

  The octopus’s actions thus had to be deployed in a synchronized fashion over an extensive area. The first step was to save the girls from death, thwarting the ASEN commando’s plans, without their knowing exactly why their operation did not go according to plan. He then had to take advantage of the moment of uncertainty and regrouping and eliminate the pack leader. Finally, with the help of the alerted village residents, the rest of the pack would have to be subdued. To avoid being seen by the time-natives, he had—in addition to his personal operation—to take control of the incident in order to redirect the course of events.

  And then—snip!

  * * *

  “NO ASEN PACK has passed through here!” the pilot shouted over the rotor noise.

  “How do you know?” Fingerhut shouted back.

  “Those strange creatures there,” the pilot replied, pointing down below. “They would have done them all in.”

  Fingerhut looked down. On a meadow along the bank of the stream, shaggy dark brown camels nibbled on the dry grass from the previous year. Along a hedge hay had been scattered for them, because they could find barely any fresh food, but they preferred to scavenge in the brown tufts for fresh shoots.

  “Why would they kill those animals?” asked Fingerhut.

  The pilot turned to him and replied, “Those are animals that don’t belong here. They say that they’re unnatural, completely degenerate animals.”

  “Do you believe that too?” asked Fingerhut.

  The pilot shrugged.

  “The guys who do that are sick,” he remarked tersely.

  Fingerhut checked on the monitor in front of his left eye whether the free-flying camera drone following them had a good view of the grazing camels. He grabbed his steering collar and zoomed in on one of the animals.

  “So they seriously kill those camels because they don’t belong here? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “And their owners right along with them,” the pilot added with a laugh. “Listen, mister, I’ll drop you off now somewhere around here.”

  “You will fly me to the meeting point,” Fingerhut replied firmly. “When we receive the arranged signal, we will land. That’s the deal.”

  “Just a second! There was mention of Wettin, just beyond the autobahn between Löbejün and Lettewitz,” the pilot countered. “The autobahn is the border for helicopter flights. Meanwhile we have passed the Saale and are almost within range of Eisleben. There in the south I already see Lake Süßer. I’m not permitted to fly farther west. Besides, it hasn’t rained for weeks. The rotor is whipping up so much radioactivity that the Geiger counters between Oslo and Helsinki are ticking. I’m not crazy!”

  “I’ve paid you a lot of money to take me to this area,” Fingerhut said threateningly.

  “Money! Money!” moaned the pilot in a Saxon singsong. “I’m risking my license, mister. I can’t afford that.”

  Fingerhut flicked the microphone in front of his mouth.

  “Dear viewers, you’ve heard it for yourselves. We’re now flying over a heavily radioactively contaminated area. We’re in the so-called death zone. The pilot refuses to penetrate deeper into the restricted area; it’s too risky for him. He doesn’t want to jeopardize his health. He’s young. He wants to father healthy children. That’s an argument that we can understand and that we should respect.”

  “I only said that I don’t want to jeopardize my license. I didn’t say anything about health,” the pilot protested crossly.

  But Fingerhut had turned down the external mike so far that the objection could not be understood, and went on: “Nonetheless, tens of thousands of people are living in this area by now, refugees from Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, from countries whose coastal regions were destroyed in recent years by the rising oceans—from Micronesia and from the Maldives, which have in the meantime sunk in the sea. They have volunteered to come to Central Europe in order to fight here against the radio
activity and defeat it. They’ve knowingly taken the radiation risk and have dared to brave the cold climate of this region, unfamiliar as it is to them. As I have already shown you, my viewers, these courageous people cope astonishingly well with these challenges. The worst enemy opposing them here, however, is neither the cold nor the radioactivity, but people with extreme racist attitudes, who take intensely brutal action against them…”

  The pilot flew in circles and strained to keep a lookout down below.

  “If everything goes according to plan, you, dear viewers, will get to know some of these defenders of their fatherland and possibly witness a conversation with one of their leaders.”

  “No ASEN have passed through here!” shouted the pilot. “Everything looks completely peaceful. No smoke, nothing.”

  “Are we really in the right area?” Fingerhut asked with chagrin.

  “What do you take me for, mister?”

  “Hm.”

  This was turning out to be a flop—and he had been making big announcements about the report for days. Damn it!

  “Are you still not getting any signal?”

  “No, I’m not getting any signal. But something seems to be going on in the village over there.”

  “What do you mean? What do you see?” asked Fingerhut.

  “The farmers aren’t doing their work, but are standing around in the road. And there are a few figures lying on the ground, maybe injured or dead people. Something must have happened there. I recognize a helicopter from the rescue service that has landed on the village square.”

  “Then fly me there already, for heaven’s sake!” shouted Fingerhut. “Land on the village square or somewhere nearby. Hurry up!”

  When the helicopter landed, it was instantly surrounded by half a dozen dark-skinned young men. Shotguns and drawn crossbows were aimed at the cockpit. The people all seemed to be very upset and were all shouting at once. The village elder—as a sign of his status he bore a long, carved staff—gestured to the pilot to stop the engine.