The courier smiled. “So astrologer-san also possesses a short-wave radio? Adolf Hitler has died today. The rest of your prophecy is, of course, a clever deduction from the rise of the White American party and a knowledge of the shrewdness of the German military aristocracy. But I shall report it as prophecy to the Son of Heaven. And has astrologer-san yet deciphered the American prophecy?”
“It is difficult. The court will understand that the complexities of the perverse American methods of magical calculation—”
“The Son of Heaven will understand that he needs a new astrologer, and that old astrologers know too much to remain alive.” He smiled again.
The court astrologer used the same ritual dagger as his thirteen predecessors since Sergeant Marks’ death.
A.D. 1951:
Adolf Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself. His carefully faked death had deluded the United Nations into a sense of false security and enabled Germany to conclude an armistice and obtain a much-needed breathing spell. When her enemies were engaged in the final struggle in the East, it had been easy to overthrow the necessarily small army of occupation and hasten to the rescue of Japan.
Destroying Japan in the inevitable German-Japanese war that followed their joint victory had not been so easy. It had not been possible to fool the Japanese with organizations like the White American party or the British Empire League.
But it had been accomplished, and now Adolf Hitler, secure at last and already beginning to find security uncomfortable, was free to devote himself to such pleasing minor problems as the exquisitely painted tablet before him.
“I found it myself, mein Führer,” explained Reinhardt Heydrich, now resurrected from that earlier fake death which had served as a test of Anglo-Saxon credulity. “It was in a hidden inner shrine in an obscure temple in Tokyo. No one has seen it save my late interpreter. I cannot understand how what is obviously a prophecy in a Japanese shrine comes to be written in English; there is doubtless some symbolic significance. The Japanese characters at the top read American prophecy.’ The rough translation runs—”
He paraphrased the limerick.
Adolf Hitler listened, nodding slowly, and a mystical film spread over his eyes. It was as though he were listening to music.
When he spoke at last, he said: “We hold the world too securely for any more great events to happen in our days. We shall not see the fulfillment of this prophecy. But treasure it carefully. It shall be invaluable to one of my successors, even as Nostradamus was to me. For did he not write: ‘The Holy Empire will come to Germany,’ and again ‘Near the Rhine of the Nordic Alps a Great One will be born’?”
157 N.H. (A.D. 2045):
Captain Felix Schweinspitzen mopped tropical sweat from his Nordic brow and moaned, “Hang it, Anton, I was born at the wrong time.”
Anton Metzger looked up from the meaningless series of letters which he had been jotting down. “We’re all born into a pattern, Felix. We can’t make the design ourselves.”
“Not now, no. That’s just what I mean. There have been times when we could. Look at Napoleon or the first Hitler. They made their own ciesigns. And I keep feeling that in the right world I could, too. I can lead men. That’s demonstrated fact. Look what I’ve done with the natives here in Java.”
“Too much maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Führer was a little jealous on his inspection visit.”
“I can lead men. I could lead the men of the world—I feel it, I know it. But what chance have I? While he rules by virtue of the organization and the rules of succession and—”
“Would you want his job in view of all we’ve been hearing of the Tyrannicides?” Captain Schweinspitzen laughed. “We destroyed Canada and America almost a century ago. What have we to fear from a little handful of desperate men?”
“Little handfuls of desperate men did great things in the death struggles of those nations. I remember my grandfather telling stories of demons called Commandos and Rangers.”
“The Tyrannicides are futile. Tyrant killers, indeed, when all they’ve accomplished so far is the death of a couple of subordinates no more important than you, Anton. Now if someone were to attempt the life of Hitler XVI himself— What are you working on there?”
Metzger smiled. “The American prophecy.”
“Wotan! Why waste your time with foolish—”
“The job of being your interpreter in Dutch and Javanese is hardly an all-absorbing one, Felix. I have to have some interest. And I got a very curious lead today. I heard some natives talking about the coming inspection visit. And you know what they call the Führer?”
“No.”
“They’ve been seeing photochromes of him in those powder-blue uniforms he’s so devoted to. And they call him the Blue Beast.”
Captain Schweinspitzen tore off a string of oaths. “The subversive traitors! They can’t talk that way about him. I’ll have them— Give me their names.”
“I’m afraid I don’t remember who they were. And is this precisely a consistent attitude when you were just speaking of his assassination?”
“That’s different. I’m as Aryan as he is. But these natives— Oh, well. How does that traitorous nickname help you?”
“The Blue Beast is one of the personages in the prophecy. They’ve been speculating for a hundred years on his identity. Now there’s a clue, and if I can figure out the rest—”
“How does the whole thing go?” the captain asked idly.
Metzger recited it:
“Pelagic young spark of the East
Shall plot to subvert the Blue Beast,
But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky,
And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast!”
The captain nodded. “The English I picked up when I was Gauleiter in Des Moines seems to be good enough to handle that. Only what does pelagic mean?”
“That’s the word that bothers me. It means ‘oceanic.’ Now ‘oceanic young spark’ doesn’t make any obvious sense —if anything, it’s a contradiction in terms. But it makes just as good meter as ‘pelagic,’ so why was the exceedingly uncommon word used instead of the obvious one? That’s why I’m hunting for an anagram in it. I’ve been rearranging letters and I can’t get anything better than—” His voice stopped dead. He stared at the captain, at his paper, and back at the captain.
“Well!” Captain Schweinspitzen barked. “What is it?”
“The best I can get,” Metzger repeated, “is ‘pig lace.’ ”
“And ‘pig lace,’ captain, means ‘Schweinspitzen.’ ”
The officer stared. The interpreter went on hastily, as details clicked into formation: “You are of the East, have been here in Java for years. You were a telecast operator once, weren’t you? Well, ‘spark’—or was it ‘sparks’?—meant wireless operator in twentieth-century American dialect. “Pelagic young spark of the East—’ ”
“ ‘—shall plot to subvert the Blue Beast’,” the captain continued the quotation. “In other words, Schweinspitzen, the ex-telecaster of Java, shall plot to subvert Hitler XVI.” He smiled craftily to himself. “Well, Anton, we are all part of a design, aren’t we? We can’t very well refuse to fulfill the prophecy, can we?”
Lyman Harding wrung out his dripping garments. You didn’t need clothes anyway, here in the damp heat of the jungle. But they’d need these clothes later; they were of bullet-deflecting soteron, and stealing that textile from the closely guarded plastic factory had been the most perilous step in the plot—so far.
“The natives are with us,” Girdy reported to him. “They hate him and his rule over them. Call him the Blue Beast.”
“If only we had planes—” Harding sighed. “Think how directly we could act instead of this swimming in from a mile offshore and lurking in jungles and—”
“We’ll have planes soon enough,” Girdy said confidently.
“If it all comes off according to schedule. If our other men all over the world mana
ge to dispose of his followers according to the rule of succession. Then there’ll be complete chaos in the Party, and those who still love freedom can strike.”
“But ours is the biggest job.” Girdy’s wide ugly face was alight with pride. “When we knock off the Hitler himself— Only have you figured yet how we can crash this inspection reception?”
“I’ve only got a rough plan—” Lyman Harding began.
Anton Metzger did not like the changes that were evident in Captain Schweinspitzen after that momentous discussion of the American prophecy.
The captain had previously seemed unusually intelligent and unusually human for the post which he held. Oh, he was given to ranting about his stifled abilities as a leader of men, but he was a friend and companion. He understood the arts, even in their neglected or forbidden aspects, and he understood people, even tolerating Metzger when he talked in a tone that did not jibe perfectly with the tenets of the Aryan World State.
For Metzger felt his Austrian blood more keenly than his Prussian. He was a useful servant of Hitler XVI chiefly because he had been reared in the AWS and never known directly any other concepts of life. But he knew himself for a misfit and groped faintly toward something else.
He had sometimes in the past sensed a similar groping in Captain Schweinspitzen, but no more. Not since his captain had become convinced of his identity with the pelagic young spark. Now, when he saw his dream of leadership approaching fulfillment, humanity dropped away from him like an outworn robe, and the naked body beneath it was strong and beautiful and cruel and masterful.
Metzger learned little of his plot to subvert the Blue Beast. The captain retained enough of his understanding of people to know that Metzger might want the destruction of Hitler XVI, but certainly not the instating of Felix Schweinspitzen as a new and greater Hitler.
Metzger gathered only the fringes of the plot, only enough to know that the crucial moment would come at the reception and State banquet which would be the ritual high point of the inspection tour.
And then he inadvertently contributed the key element to the pelagic plot. This came about on the day that he entered the office just in time to see the captain put a bullet coolly through the forehead of a man in the blue uniform of a personal messenger of the Führer.
Schweinspitzen showed no embarrassment at the presence of a witness. He said coldly, “He brought me bad news. This is how the great leaders of old have always rewarded such messengers.”
Metzger realized now how fully the madness of leadership had come to possess the man who had once been almost his friend. Quietly he said, “What news, Felix?”
“You said that the Blue Beast might be jealous of my success here. You’re a prophet yourself, Anton. He is. He has forbidden my presence at the banquet.”
Metzger felt something like relief. “It’s better this way, Felix. Such an attempt as you’ve been plotting is too dangerous. And if you must be guided by the American prophecy, remember its middle couplet:
“But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky.
“The State hasn’t executed a man by hanging for a hundred years, but the Hitler might very well reinstate the archaic punishment for a great traitor.”
“Am I afraid of your prophecy? Don’t be a fool.” But he looked perplexed and reflective for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers. “What are the names of those two paratransport planes we use for the outlying islands?”
“The Aries and the Leo.”
Captain Schweinspitzen laughed. “Very well, my dear Anton. Be sure to attend the feast. You’ll see me dangling on high all right. And what is the last line of your prophecy?’
“ And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast.’ ”
“Throw dice? Mete out justice by lot, it might mean. That will do. And the Cat— I picked up bits of American folklore in Des Moines, Anton. See if that clue enables you to decipher your prophecy.”
Felix Schweinspitzen had left the office before Anton Metzger placed the apposite bit of American folklore. Then at last he recalled the comic black figure in twentieth-century cartoons. Felix the Cat—
Metzger saw little more of the captain during the remaining few days before the banquet. Five natives were executed for the murder of the Führer’s messenger and possible leaderly wrath was averted.
But Captain Schweinspitzen not only accepted the banishment from the banquet, he refused even to appear at the reception and tour, and Metzger found himself as official guide and escort to the sixteenth Hitler.
“It is dull here,” the Führer protested. “Buildings of common steel and stone—no glass, no plastic. The telephone used almost exclusively without a visoscreen. Not a stereoscopic theater on the island. Old-model automobiles and no moving walks . . . why, one might as well be back in the twentieth century.”
“The Führer knows,” Metzger explained, “why this is so. This island exists solely so that a slave population may produce raw materials for the State. There is no need for any of the refinements of civilization here; we lead the crude life of pioneers.”
“It is dull,” Hitler XVI repeated with a yawn.
He was littler and plumper than his pictures indicated. There was the infinite refinement of boredom on the round bland face. Nothing of the captain’s dream of leadership here, nothing of whatever the magnetic power was which brought about the success of the man from whom the Aryan World State’s Führers took their title of Hitler.
The title descended now in fixed ranks of party precedence, and skill in party politics is not the sole prerequisite of the leader. Metzger thought of the decadence of the later Roman emperors. There was sense in Schweinspitzen’s notion of replacing this worn-out quasi-leader with the vigor of the real thing.
But was the leader-principle in itself humanly justifiable? Metzger was often glad that among the many refinements of civilization missing on the island were psychometrists; he hated to think what might happen if one of the skilled ones at home were to psych him and discover these hidden doubts.
The banquet was held out-of-doors in the warmth of a tropic night, and even outdoors it was evident that Hitler XVI found the vanity of his powder-blue uniform uncomfortably warm.
The first course, as was the traditional ritual at all formal State banquets, was an unpalatable and nameless ersatz, to remind men of what their forebears had suffered in order to establish the Aryan World State. Then followed a magnificent rijstafel, that noble fusion of unnumbered courses which was the sole survival of the one-time Dutch culture of the island.
With the rijstafel Hitler XVI for the first time displayed an enthusiastic interest in his colonial outpost. He aicked it away prodigiously, with pious ejaculations of praise, while Anton Metzger hardly bothered to conceal his smile of quiet contempt.
Seeing and guiding the Führer had at last fully brought home to Metzger the loss of human dignity brought about by the Aryan World State. That man should submit to the totalitarian rule of this stupid and decadent dynasty was unthinkable—and equally unthinkable that man should tolerate the institution of just such another rule even under the fresh and vigorous aegis of a Captain Felix Schweinspitzen. Only with what the captain had called the little handfuls of desperate men lay the hope of the future. If Metzger could ever somehow establish contact with one of those handfuls—
Tyrannicide Lyman Harding set the curried chicken in front of the voracious Hitler XVI. A pinch of native poison in the chicken could have turned the trick in safety; but the tyrant needed a more open and sensational removal to arouse the world.
The carefully applied body stain made him and his fellow Tyrannicides indistinguishable from the native servants to the casual glance; and what proudly self-confident Aryan would bestow more than a casual glance on his colored slaves? But he could not quite obtain the unobtrusive skilled movements of the natives. There was an American angularity to his serving, and once he was so awkward as to spill a drop of hot sauce on the neck of one of the Führer’s
aides.
For a moment he feared that his slip was the end of the adventure. The aid’s hand rested on his automatic. Harding thought of the many stories of slaves butchered in cold blood for even less grievous offenses. But the officer finally let out a snarling laugh and said something indubitably insulting in German. Then he picked up the outsize glass of brandy that he had been swilling with his food and hurled it in the servant’s face.
Harding’s eyes stung with the pain of the alcohol. He bowed servilely and scurried off. The next course was the shoat stewed in coconut milk, and with that course—
Anton Metzger heard the motors of a plane passing over the open-air banquet. The Führer did not look up from his gorging. Why should he? Strict care was always taken to enforce the regulation that no armed planes could be aloft during his tour of inspection.
This could only be an unarmed transport, Metzger thought, though he wondered why it seemed to be slowing down and circling overhead. It must be the Leo or the Aries—
The Aries! Aries, the Ram! The prophecy—
Suddenly Anton Metzger understood the subversive plot of the pelagic young spark, Captain Schweinspitzen.
Lyman Harding checked with his eye the position of his fellows and of the natives that were helping them. All O.K. On his silver tray lay the knife—the knife that looked like any serving knife which any servant might carry. Only the keenest eye could tell the excellence of its steel or the fineness of its whetted edge.
He took a bowl of shoat from the tray and set it before an Aryan diner. Then as he looked down at the polished silver, he saw his face mirrored in the space left by that bowl. And his face was recognizably white.
The alcohol in that contemptuously thrown brandy had attacked his skin stain. So far the diners were too absorbed in the rijstafel to have noticed him. But that luck could not last. He was in the middle of the tables now. It would take him at least a minute to work his way either to the Hitler’s table or to the protective outer darkness. A minute. Sixty seconds, in every one of which he took the almost certain chance of being recognized for a spy, of being killed—which is not an agreeable thought even to the most venturesome—and—what was far worse—of seeing his whole plan collapse.
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