by Ted White
At this somewhere in the crowd a rehearsed cheering section broke in with another “Heil Hitler!”
The little man’s stare was venomous.
“—his final plans for the overthrow of the rule of the despised barbarian invaders who have enslaved us, their superiors!”
It was the same crap I’d heard before, in training films before they shipped us over to Europe; the films of Hitler ranting and raving about the destiny of the German people, and how superior they were to the “mongrel races”—like us. Only a few phrases had been changed. It seemed to me that it might be very pleasant indeed to simply pick up the little man with the glasses and wring his neck.
“Heil Hitler!** came the response.
“Gather to the cause! Gather now! Rally to the support of the glorious Nazi party and for the defense of Earth!”
“Big Fella!” It was a tense and explosive whisper. “Come on, fella!”
Goebbels was looking past me now, at my little Gentleman Joe, tugging impatiently at my arm. “Verdammte juden!** the little man snapped, interrupting his spiel and pointing past me, at Joe.
Joe shrank back, behind me. “Goddammit, fella!” he whined.
From behind Goebbels came five eager, grinning youths, ^armbands on their black leather jackets.
“Now you done it!” whined Joe.
But the punks didn’t see him; they saw me. They saw a big, seedy pile of what they must’ve assumed was a drunken bum. Just their speed.
As they came for me, the translator was shouting, still without inflection, “Act now! The Day is coming! Join the Party—”
The nearest of the punks—a kid of maybe twenty, wearing his black jacket over pink tights and high black boots—was almost on me now. I didn’t fall back. A kind of peace had settled over me, and I felt almost happy. I’d been running too much. It was tittle to stop running. It was time to vent my fears and my frustrations on something—and these little neo-Nazis would do just fine.
Then he swung his right arm out, and there was a two-foot length of chain in it.
Behind him, the other four were advancing quickly. I put one foot back and felt, without knowing, that Joe had faded away from behind me, that this would be my fight and mine alone.
The punk swung the chain.
I thrust out one arm, and caught the chain in midswing. It wrapped itself around my forearm, and I gave a sudden yank, pulling the chain from his grasp, and pulling him towards me, off his feet. I put my right hand in his face, and pushed his nose in. The kid fell bleeding and screaming to the pavement.
I kicked him out of the way and reached for the next two. I reached my arms out on each side of me, and then swept them together. I cracked two heads together.
The remaining two had backed off. Fear was in their young eyes. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Five against one was supposed to ensure their victory. There were no kicks in losing.
They broke, and ran.
I stopped and looked around. The crowd was scattering quickly; the two uniformed Nazis were gone.
“Geezus, fella, let’s get outta here!” came the urgent whine behind me. There was a reek of wine. I turned. It was Joe.
“Where were you?” I asked. My breathing was a little fast.
“Where d’ya think? Out of the way.” His glance flickered down to my left sleeve. “You sure can handle yourself, Big Fella,” he said admiringly. I shook the chain loose from my arm, and it fell with a clatter to the sidewalk, next to the three unconscious youths.
“The yellowjackets’ll be here any minute,” Joe said, his voice shrill.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
Two hours later, we were standing outside a sooty building front, a small wooden sign proclaiming it to be the site of “The United States Hotel—Transients—Overnight.” There had once been a storefront here, but a faint difference in the thickness of the grime betrayed the fact that the big window expanse had been bricked up, leaving only a sunken narrow doorway up two steps from the sidewalk.
Overhead the el clattered and roared by. It was heading uptown, and the bend where Third Avenue forks off the Bowery was marked by a sharp, thin screeching sound as the train’s wheels ground against the curve. Looking up through the open latticework of the ties of the el tracks I could see sparks arcing from a defective third-rail shoe.
The doorway held only a sagging screen door, a piece of cotton fastened in its center. Southern superstitions died hard.
‘This is it. This is Uncle’s,” said Joe, nervously.
“Uncle’s?” I said.
“Yeah, like, you know—Uncle Sam’s. The guy what runs it, he’s Sam Weiner, and, well . . .” His voice trailed off again. “It’s a joke, see?” He looked back at me again. “Everybody calls him ‘Uncle Sam.’ Look, it doesn’t look like much, but Uncle, he never has no trouble with the yellowjackets, and . . .”
“Okay,” I said. I’d bought him a pint of cheap wine with my fifty-cent piece, and he’d killed a good half of it already. But he’d also mentioned that this Uncle Sam might be able to get a good price for my useless scrip. “Okay.” I nodded, and followed him in.
We were in a dark hall. The plaster had fallen away in places, and there were dark water stains. The floor was wood, patched here and there with tin. The walls had been painted a dreary grey or green—it was impossible to tell, this long after the fact. Various odors fought against each other to assail my nose: the musty smell of slowly rotting wood, the fetid smell of urine, subtler odors that suggested a combination of garlic and burned electrical insulation, and, overriding them all, the powerful stink of disinfectant. My first few steps down the hall I found myself unconsciously holding my breath against it.
The hall led straight back the length of the building, without break. But in the rear it widened out into a small room. On my right wide sagging stairs led up, and around a turn. On the left, over half the room was fenced off by a floor-to-ceiling wire grid. My weight forced squeaks from every hoard down that long hall, and I felt sweat rolling down my neck. It was hot in here, hot as hell.
Behind the wire was a desk, with a small safe on it, a cot, a filing cabinet flaking rust, a bright bare overhead lightbulb, dangling from a frayed cord, a threadbare easy chair with an electric fan perched on its back, and, directly in its path on the cot and apparently asleep, a fat greasy little man dressed only in once-blue boxer shorts.
The fat man snorted and shook himself awake at the sound of our footsteps.
He watched us as we approached the cage, and slid open a small window in it. “Ahh, it’s you,” he said surlily to Joe. “Ain’t you a little early?”
Joe seemed to shrink. “It happens that me ’n’ the Big Fella have had a hard day,” he said with precarious dignity. Uncle laughed, unpleasantly.
“I didn’t take you for one of them types, Joey,” he said. “You getting pretty hard up, eh?”
“Hey, now, Uncle—it ain’t like that at all!” I could see Joe’s neck burning a deep red. “Look—” He dug into his pocket. “I’ll be down to talk to you pretty soon. Might have something you could use, you know?” He slapped my remaining coins on the small metal counter under the window.
Uncle nodded, jerked his thumb up the stairs, and then slammed the window shut and turned his back on us. As Joe led the way to the stairs, I saw him turn the handle on the little table safe and jerk it open. I wondered, idly, if he ever locked it.
Upstairs, we found it was so early that we had a good part of the third floor to ourselves and could get a pair of bunks near the filthy windows. The room was open, like a floor loft, and had crude partitions chest high which divided it into cubicles of four to six bunks.
The bunks were simple: metal frames with strap springs, and lumpy mattresses once filled with straw, or horsehair, or something, but now mostly with teeming vermin. I thumped mine once and five bugs of different ancestry scuttled out, momentarily startled. Sighing, I sat down on its edge and hoped it would not collapse.
Joe extended a battered pack of cigarettes to me, and we both lit up. Under the window was a crudely lettered sign which stated firmly, “SMOKING NOT ABSOLUTELY NOT PERMITTED—Violators Will Be Evicted And Thrown Out, No Refunds.”
“Okay, Big Fella,” Joe said, over his cigarette, “I see it this way. You don’t know Uncle, and I do. You pass me that funny money and I’ll go talk to the greasy bastard. I won’t tell him nothing about where it come from. If he doesn’t seem that interested, I know a couple places in the next block that might be. Right?”
In answer, I reached for my billfold and drew out all my cash. Face value, $27.00. Another dollar and forty-one cents in change; I noticed the only ones Joe was interested in had post-war dates on them, except for one 1943 steel penny that really took his fancy. That made me wonder just how much of the Second World War had taken place in this world—a world in which Goebbels still lived and was free to rant and rave in the middle of New York City. Once again, I felt a strong urge to visit a library, and spend about a month there.
After Joe had scuttled off with my money, I lay back on my bunk, stubbed out my cigarette on the floor, and wondered if I’d see the little guy again. I stared at the metal ceiling awhile, amusing myself by finding the seams amidst the textured patterns, and then shut my eyes. It felt good not to think about anything at all.
CHAPTER THREE
I was dozing, not fully asleep, and as I let my thoughts ramble, they began slipping into free-form patterns and I began to dream.
It’s what the psychologists call a waking dream. I was still vaguely conscious, and with that part of my mind I watched, an onlooker, as the dream took shape.
There were three figures, their faces indistinct at first, shrouded in white. As the dream became sharper, I could see they were dressed in Grecian mantles, standing on an open space, a pavilion of sorts, with empty pillars and columns arranged in random fashion nearby. There was the hint of green grass beyond the marble floor, and of blue sky and sunlight.
Their mouths were moving, but I could hear nothing. It was like TV, with the sound turned off. But somehow I knew they were talking about me.
I watched their mouths move and tried to read their lips. I began articulating to myself words that fit their lip movements. The words sounded gross to my own ear, real sounds contrasted with dream sounds—even though I knew I was not speaking aloud.
As I fitted the words to the lips of the three sages, it gradually became less an act of conscious volition, more a hearing of their speech. Finally I was listening to them.
They were wise, benevolent men. They were talking about me, from a vantage point long in the future; my present predicament was something they could regard with comfortable hindsight, and they discussed it as nostalgic generals might old battle campaigns. I tried to understand them. About all I could retain, after I woke up, was their fond regard for me, and their confidence in me. I was not wholly sure I shared it, but it was nice to know somebody was rooting for me.
I snapped awake again as the bed next to mine creaked. I sat up quickly, and then relaxed. It was Joe.
“Here,” he said, grinning. “Run your fingers barefoot through this stuff!”
I peeled a gummy rubber band off the roll of bills and fingered the money. In a way it reminded me of British money. Each denomination was a different color—and there were plenty of denominations. I counted up what Uncle had shelled out for the useless paper I’d passed over. There were one each in 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, and 50 dollar denominations. Ninety-three dollars. It seemed a lot more than my money was worth.
The light was fading outside, and the dim bulb hanging in the center of the room was a 36-watt bulb swiped from a subway station. I squinted at the bills. The designs were deceptively plain and simple, with a largp numeral occupying most of the face of each bill. But the remaining third of the face held an iridescent symbol which looked like an integral part of the paper and was the same on each bill. I turned one bill over., The symbol, mirror-image, was on the reverse side as well. This stuff couldn’t be counterfeited.
There was something else about the stuff—something vaguely familiar. I cursed to myself when I got my finger on it: it was like the money we’d used in post-war Europe. Occupation scrip.
“Hey, Joe,” I said, looking up. His eyes were shadowed, but he seemed to be staring intently at me. “How’s about something hard to drink?” I pulled the two-dollar bill loose from the roll.
He grinned again. “No sweat, Big Fella,” he said, and lifted a paper sack from the shadows at his side. “I just happened to think of that.”
I growled at him. “Spending my money already?”
“Aw, now . . .” he whined. “Did I even have to come back?”
I saw his point. It would’ve been as easy for him to leave me here, penniless. Ninety-some dollars would buy him a fair amount of booze.
“You want to go easy on this stuff, now,” he said, unwrapping a small, flat bottle. “It’s got happy-juice in it, and you know what that can do. ...”
“No, Joe,” I said. I leaned towards him. “Let’s say I got amnesia. Let’s just say that. I don’t know—I don’t know nothing. Let’s play that game, Joe.”
His face paled, the veins on his nose suddenly scarlet against paper-white, and he shrank back from me.
“Sure, Big Fella, sure. Wha-what d’ya want to know?”
“Everything, Joey—everything” I said.
His right shoulder twitching uncontrollably, a tic in one eye, mousy little Joey, Gentleman Joe, told me everything. He babbled at random, running through the demented corridors of his own fears, telling me much that didn’t matter to me, some that made no sense, and, for all of that, most of what I really wanted to know.
It was in 1938 that it happened. How it could happen —the way in which it happened, I don’t know. Were these two worlds, mine and this crazy place, a single world before that time? I saw a movie once, where a man traveled in time, and when he went back into the past, he changed something. When he came back to his own time, he found that he was in a new and different world: the result of that change. Was this the product of something like that? Not time-travel, but the idea of two alternate possibilities splitting into two?
In 1938, the Angels conquered Earth.
What had happened to Orson Welles? I wondered irrelevantly. In my world—my 1938—he had made that famous broadcast on the Mercury Theatre, the invasion of Martians that panicked his listeners all along the Atlantic seaboard. In this world’s 1938, there had been no phony broadcast. The Martians had landed.
Except, they weren’t Martians. They were the Angels: tall, impossibly beautiful people who wore halos and came to Earth to stop all war, all famine, to reduce disease and pestilence, and—some said—to announce the Second Coming.
They also set up an efficient dictatorship, working through puppet governments in each country, mobilizing the world as one huge, efficient production plant for their own uses.
The Angels: beneficiaries of an interstellar civilization; suppressors, exploiters of mankind. No human had ever been offworld; no human ever would be.
We came out of it better than the American Indians had. They didn’t want our land—only our produce.
Earth had been turned into one vast manufacturing and processing plant for offworld export. The Angels were the administrators. As such, they were primarily concerned with smooth-running production facilities. No wars. There’d been no wars of any sort—not even a boundary dispute—since 1938. World War II had never happened here. Their rule could be considered benign; many—perhaps the vast majority of humanity—had profited directly or indirectly. No wars, higher living standards, birth control introduced into the overpopulated areas, new medicines, more efficient crop control, weather control, increased life-spans for cultural entertainers (like baseball players?)—it sounded pretty good, until you remembered one thing: the velvet glove contained an iron fist. This was still a dictatorship. Humanity was now a second-class citi
zenry. Oppressed minorities had never had it so good, but the race as a whole had had the lid clamped on. No sputnik, no Explorer, no Mercury Program. No space-flight for us. We were pampered slaves for the .Angels.
I sipped at the bottle as Joey told me all this, not by any means in the straightforward way in which I’ve put it here, but rather circling around the salient facts as though he couldn’t quite accept the fact that I didn’t really know perfectly well what he was talking about.
I expected to feel a new sense of shock as he revealed at last to me the mad world into which I’d stepped. But I felt nothing—nothing but a vague euphoric glow. It was the stuff in the bottle: rotgut mixed with the Angels’ happiness drug. The Angels were no fools, I decided. They knew how to keep die populace contented: a ready supply of euphoric drugs. Brave New World—had that been published in 1938? No matter; the Angels knew how to run things smoothly. . . .
“Big Fella!"
I felt something pawing at me. I slapped it away.
“Big Fella! Wake up, now!”
I Opened my eyes. At first I saw nothing, but it didn’t bother me much. Then I saw that the room was dark, and a faint greyish light was filtering in through the window. There was someone bending over me. I could hear the labored rasping of his breath. And, beyond that, the sounds of other breathing, hacking, rasping breathing, snores, and somewhere on another side of the room, whimpering.
Then I was really awake, and staring up at the shadowed face of the slight figure bending over me. His breath was sour in my nostrils, and I averted my head. My mouth felt sweetish and gummy.
“I warned ya about that happy juice,” Joey said. “Come on, now. You gotta get up.”
“Why?”
“Things ain’t too safe here.”
“Whaddya mean?” I growled. “You brought me here.”
