Next morning he was awakened by another of them. He had to tell her all about his deeds of heroism at Voronezh. She wanted to see his scars and he got so scared that he started kissing her just to put an end to her inquisitiveness. This one was a flaxen blonde and a bit fatter.
“The Führer is certainly looking on us now ... it will be the Führer’s child. Siegfried Hitler . . .” she said piously, and tripped out as if in a trance. Hutzvalek began to fear he would not last a fortnight at this pace, and nipped her bottle of brandy off her as she left. All day he drank alone in his cell with the naked beauties on the walls, until in the evening he threw the empty bottle at one of them and broke it.
“Are you homesick for your handgrenades?” asked the third woman, who did not even bother to come in a dressing gown. “You can keep your hand in here, in the factory; we often practice on the prisoners with live grenades. . . .” and she placed herself on the bed with the matter-of-fact calm and lack of allure of a patient getting ready for gynecological examination. Hutzvalek started hitting her and she thanked him delightedly.
They kept him occupied like this for a week.
“I want to see the secret weapon,” he said every day. “I was sent for in order to test the secret weapon. My comrades are sacrificing their lives at the front and I am wasting my time here with you. What did you bring me here for?” They just laughed at him, and he could not get out. There was a guard stationed in the corridor day and night, and he did not even know where the passage led. For seven days they did not let him out for a breath of fresh air.
On the eighth evening a man appeared for the first time. He brought no brandy, either. It was Dr. Müller, or at ‘east that was how he introduced himself; his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses and the lower half of his face was covered with a white mask as though he had just come from an operation.
“Thank you. You have been most successful. I shall inform the Führer personally. . . .”
“What about?” Hutzvalek could not make head or tail of the business.
“Within a week you will have a detachment of the most dependable fighters, men you can depend on in every detail. We shall bring our last secret weapon into play. .. .” Müller laughed so much that his mask puffed out. “You will receive a high military decoration.”
“What ever for? Why? What is our last secret weapon?” and the pharmacist took good care to say “our.” In a few words Müller explained everything. The research workers had discovered a way to speed up the maturing of the human foetus. An adult man could be produced seven days after conception.
“Don’t you see the enormous possibilities of the thing? A year ago this discovery could have turned the war in our favor. We could have sacrificed all the living to the front and brought to maturity those who were still in their mother’s womb. Now at least we can be sure of winning the peace. There is little time and little material left; we have to economize with our discovery. I have arranged for the most reliable bitches—I mean loyal German women—to be sent here from the Lebensborn division, which as you know has been providing the Führer with babies since the beginning of the war. They are coupled with the best of our warriors from the front and the home front. Each of you will get your own detachment of soldiers after your own heart; they won’t be young whippersnappers from the Hitlerjugend who turn tail at the first shot or let any softsoap parson talk them round. They will be like you in every respect, because they have just been born into the world. They will be capable of everything, like you. ‘Heil Herod’ can begin. Nobody will try to put it off now. Our last secret weapon has proved its worth.”
He shook Hutzvalek by the hand, barked out a Heil! and disappeared.
* * * *
He went away in the company of Leni, the only woman he had not been forced to sleep with while he was there. They drove in a darkened car for about four hours and at last stopped in front of a big white building. Leni took him inside.
“This is where they will be waiting,” she pointed. “The mothers will put them here, they will be given an injection, and then the dead bodies will be burnt over there. We shall deal immediately with any attempt to resist. An epidemic will be started in the city, to support the assumption that we want to inoculate all the children. An entire generation will be lost to them. Then if there’s another spot of trouble in fifteen years’ time they will have no men to mobilize. . . .” She smiled dreamily. “When the campaign is completed, we shall blow the whole place sky high.” As she spoke she pointed to a lever near the door. It looked like the main switch on an electric light meter. ...
“We’ll wipe out all the brats in the place,” she said as they went out again. Hutzvalek was still in a daze. Looking round, he saw the outline of the Castle on the horizon. So the place was Prague. He was to kill his own children.
Leni drove him to Holešovice, and as she opened the door and helped him out of his coat without a trace of ceremony, he remembered that Yeschke’s wife was called Leni. So it was his own wife who was to keep guard over him in the Nazi breeding stables. The flat they entered was not at all homely, but in all the rooms there were stacks of weapons, as if they were expecting a siege. “We’ll have to hurry,” said Leni, cleaning the barrel of a light machinegun as lovingly as other women clean their silver. “The Führer fell yesterday. . .”
Hutzvalek dashed out of the house as he was, without his coat. People jumped out of his way and everything in uniform sprang to attention and saluted. Discipline had lasted longer than victory, it seemed. He had to try the third telephone booth before he got one that worked. He dialled Borovetz’s number and listened anxiously to the thing ringing at the other end. It was his last hope. Now he understood why they needed cutthroats. Now he understood why even the most loyal of Hitlerjugend lads did not want to carry out these orders. He had discovered information nobody had ever guessed at. The phone was ringing in vain. He drove out to the wood where they had taken him that first day. It was a strange sight, a high-rank officer of the SS crashing through the undergrowth. Of course he failed to find the hunting lodge. He was sick with fear. Now he was worried for his own children, who had stayed in Prague; now he was really afraid. His hand trembled as he put his note into the hiding place as arranged. He knew it was too late, it was all in vain, everything he was doing was useless because his news could no longer save anyone. He tried desperately to think whom he could warn, what he could do, but everything seemed so fantastic; he was the prisoner of his own uniform.
The least he could do was to go home. There he found three families from East Prussia; their horses were grazing in front of the house. They had no idea where the Hutzvaleks had got to; most likely to the suburbs somewhere. Their Heils were enthusiastic, though, because they recognized Yeschke, who had murdered all the Jews in Estonia. Yeschke the hero of the Aryan East. He slammed the door in their faces. How could he find his family? What was he to do? He went back to Holešovice; it was almost entirely a German quarter, now; the Czechs had been moved out and they called it Little Berlin. It was no surprise to see a big black limousine in front of the door, with the swastika flying on it. Leni opened the door to him in a dirndl skirt. She hurriedly straightened his uniform; General Kopfenpursch was sitting waiting in the dining room to present the front-line hero Yeschke with the Iron Cross with the diamond bar.
“Dr. Müller managed to complete his experiment at the last moment. I have brought your lads along for you. You can carry out the Führer’s last order now,” he said as he pinned another decoration on Hutzvalek, this time with a diamond bar. And he added softly: “Brother!” It was Borovetz and not Kopfenpursch. He had got the news through in time, then. He thanked Hutzvalek with a warm glance, at least, and took a brusque farewell of his “wife.” Why did he not release Hutzvalek? What was the man to do now? What did he think he was doing? The pharmacist ran out after him and shouted his questions in at the car window, speaking Czech. The car moved off.
“Disappear to Berne. That’s what you wanted to d
o, isn’t it? There’s a check folded up inside the Iron Cross. . . .” The answer was in German, and the car was gone. Hutzvalek was alone in the street. Then he realized that facing him on the opposite pavement stood four new SS recruits, each as tall and as well-built as the next, and each with his features. They were smiling at him politely and obsequiously, just the way Hutzvalek himself always smiled at his customers. He thought they were horrid.
* * * *
Later, when the Hutzvalek detachment were earnestly sorting out test tubes in the suburban laboratory, checking up on their weapons and the dynamite charge beneath the building, he shouted at them impatiently:
“There’s no need to pretend with me. I know you’re not the Yeschke detachment, you’re my own lot. And this murderous business is revolting to me, I hate Nazism and I am fighting against it. We’re going over to the other side now!” and he pressed his revolver into Leni Yeschke’s back to prevent her calling for help. His sons were confused and afraid, they looked at each other helplessly. After a while the first in the row came up to him and said as he held his automatic at the ready:
“I don’t know what you are talking about; we don’t feel too happy about this job we’ve got to do, either, to tell the truth. Murdering little kids. But we were promised, they said that was the only way we could get into the special force of heroes that was going to work in Switzerland after the war.”
“To hell with Switzerland! To hell with my life—what I care about are my real children; they won’t just be caricatures of me, they’ll have the chance to do things better than I did, they’ll be able to learn from my mistakes. What I care about are the lives of all the others.” And that was the moment, it seems, when he realized that he had completely changed from the moment he knew what “Heil Herod” was all about. He was not the old Hutzvalek any more, the conscientious SS pharmacist he could see before him in four replicas, threatening him from the barrels of four automatics. The fourth Hutzvalek, by the window, had even turned the light machinegun on him. He realized he would have to destroy his own Hutzvalek, he would have to kill that conscientious counter-jumper who was threatening the whole city and the whole of a generation. He was not capable of changing as other people were, after some experience, some profound emotion, the advice or example of others. He had to shoot at himself, protect himself against himself, smash his own skulls, as though he were a fairy-tale dragon, until at last, wounded in several places, he reached the lever that looked like the main switch on an electric meter. At one turn of the lever he buried the whole Heil Herod business. Three days later the rising broke out in Prague. The doctor fell silent and watched us for a while.
“Rather incredible, the whole story,” I said sceptically. “Sounds like a madman’s dream.”
“It was in the madhouse that I met Hutzvalek, last year,” the narrator smiled again. “Or rather, in a home for nervous cases. He had been there several times before. When Prague was liberated, he was found under the debris of a ruined building in one of the suburbs. He was unconscious for weeks. He had the remains of a German uniform on, true enough, but everybody in the Revolutionary Guard had something of the sort. It was assumed that he had escaped from the Gestapo prison in Pankrac during the fighting that May, and been wounded. He did not talk much about his experiences himself and agreed that it sounded incredible. The fits of unconsciousness kept on coming back; he was operated several times, brain operations, and then for a time a specific infection was treated at a sanatorium in the Tatras. It was fifteen years after the war before he really got back to normal life. That was when his nervous troubles really started. His son, young Hutzvalek, worked in a nationalized chemist’s shop and had been arrested on a charge of stealing from the shop; his daughter ran away when she was sixteen, crossed the frontier illegally, and sent no good news home of herself, either. She was not in Berne, it was true. In the weeks that followed, the pharmacist began attacking passersby whenever he thought they wore their scarves suspiciously high across their faces, or whenever they seemed to be hiding behind dark glasses.
“ ‘You are Dr. Müller!’ he would shout, and call a policeman. The policeman usually brought him straight round to us. He even attacked a former factory owner that way, a man who lived in Hanspaulka and was in fact called Müller; he started a fight with the local Youth Club leader in Hodkovičky, whose name was luckily Vytiska; and he almost blinded a history teacher who had to wear dark glasses because he suffered from conjunctivitis, I can’t remember the man’s name now.
“ ‘What do you do it for?’ I asked him. ‘Why do you think your Dr. Müller is in hiding in our midst? How could he go on with his experiments?’
“ ‘Just look round you,’ he replied. ‘Look at my family, the family I sacrificed myself for. They are just like I used to be, the boy and the girl, as if nothing had happened, as if those millions of dead hadn’t fallen in between their youth and mine. He took away from them our common experience. They did not change as I wanted them to. I fought myself in vain. I sacrificed myself for nothing.’ He went on talking for a while and then started laughing in embarrassment. We sent him home after a few days, and that was the last I heard of him.”
* * * *
“From what has been said it is clear,” said the doctor, “that an experiment on human beings really was performed, one which could solve your problem. In the case we have described, the pharmacist really did change as a result of his own experience; he became a new and different person, as it were, ready to shoot at the likeness of himself as he was; he even wanted to change all those round him. That could be taken as proof of our theory.”
“What do you think?” I could not contain myself any longer and asked the blonde girl opposite outright. “What do you believe in?”
She started. “I beg your pardon?” Then she yawned, and I realized she had been fast asleep all the time. She pulled a small transistor radio out of her bag and lit a cigarette. She was a real beauty of a girl. The first bars of music. Jazz. But she did not answer my question.
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* * * *
“When Darwin and Wallace propounded the theory of evolution in the middle of the last century, it was explicitly stated that man is no longer subject to evolutionary processes. ... I do not think that we control the future at all, and I do not think that we are in any way free from, the evolutionary process.”
The quotation is from Of Men and Galaxies by cosmologist (and SF writer) Fred Hoyle, who argues that human evolution is no longer determined by the physical environment, but by “the things we know and the things we believe. ... We cannot think outside the patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or to be more accurate, we can think only a little outside, and then only if we are very original.” And, “New concepts are like genetic mutations . . . most of them turn out badly. But without mutations there can be no evolution.”
If there is a Significance to science fiction—a capital-S sort of thing—I think it lies in this area. Not only does it provide a platform for speculation and prophecy, but by giving voice to what Hoyle calls the “very original,” it attracts other original minds—both as readers and writers.
The “mutant concepts” then fall on the most favorable soil; if they are viable, they will grow and multiply. More important, perhaps, is the chain-reaction effect that sets in (to create a sort of environment within the environment) as the new concepts of original minds become a part of the “conditioning” of others—who are thus freed a bit more for more original thinking.
The first generation of what might be called the “science-fiction community” (beginning in the twenties) did much of the “mutant” thinking that energized the development of atomic power and space flight. The present generation is dealing with concepts in very different areas—and one clue to the “mutation” process is the identity of the new writers.
I have mentioned the newsmen. Dr. Nesvadba (with Romain Gary, Frank Roberts, José Gironella, Isaac B. Singer) represents another trend. A promi
nent Czechoslovak psychiatrist, he is also a widely published journalist and short-story writer. His work, he writes, is in “psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, and artetherapy; hobby is literature.” He has published five books of SF (only one Vampires, Ltd., in English); three of his stories have been made into Czech films, and “Last Secret” (which has also been translated into German, French, Russian, Polish, Serbocroatian, Yugoslav, and Hungarian) is now being filmed for TV.
I met Dr. Nesvadba at a science-fiction convention in 1964 (and can report that he is charming, witty, and devastatingly Continental). It was, I believe, his first trip to this country. The last night, he spent some hours with John Brunner, Fritz Leiber, and myself.
“I recollect perfectly that evening and morning. Although we have so quite different backgrounds and case histories, as we say in medicine, our outlook seems to be roughly the same, our problems seem to be the same, and perhaps it is not so bad with our world after all, when this is possible.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology] Page 16