Last Orders

by Harry Turtledove

  Saul supposed it spoke well for the German people, or at least for the clout of German zookeepers, that the animals got what they needed even when people went hungry. What the beasts ate wouldn’t have fed that many more human mouths.

  An elephant pulled hay out of a manger with its trunk. That might mean some horses somewhere weren’t getting full rations, but it didn’t have anything to do with people. When people got hungry enough, they ate all kinds of strange things, but nobody ate hay.

  A pretty girl was watching the elephant eat lunch, too. She smiled at Saul and at Theo. Theo had always been shy around women. Saul hadn’t, but he wondered what this one would say if she found out he was circumcised. She wasn’t so very pretty that his trouser snake thought he had to find out.

  Around the corner from the elephant, some chamois nimbly jumped here and there in a rocky enclosure. They paused every so often to eat hay, too. Next to them were some kangaroos. A couple of the females had joeys’ heads sticking out of their pouches. When you could get your animals to breed in a zoo, you knew you’d made them feel at home.

  Another pretty girl was standing in front of the kangaroos and watching them hop about. That was Saul’s first thought. Then he did a double take. The girl did one at the same time as she recognized him, too. “Well, hello!” she said. “I didn’t know whether I’d ever see you again or not.”

  “Hello, Sarah.” Saul hadn’t known whether he’d see her again or not, either. He turned to Theo. “Theo, this is my sister, Sarah. Sarah, Theo Hossbach is the radioman in my panzer.”

  “Hello,” Theo said, and sketched a salute.

  “Hi,” Sarah answered. She looked a question at Saul.

  He knew which question it was, too. “Theo’s all right,” he said quickly. “He’s better than all right, in fact. He knows. He’s known for a long time. He’s never said boo.”

  “Boo,” Theo said.

  They all laughed. Sarah said “Hello” again, this time in a different tone of voice, as if Theo was someone she might like. Then she said, “It’s good to be able to come to the zoo. We couldn’t even do that for a long time.” A few bits of thread were sticking up from the left breast of her blouse. She must have missed them when she removed the yellow star.

  “Well, come on, then,” Saul said. “Do you think a couple of panzer men can keep you safe from the animals in the cages—and from the animals outside of them?”

  “I’ve never worried about the ones in there.” Sarah pointed to the kangaroos.

  “Those aren’t dangerous. All they do is hop,” Theo said. “Did you see the leopard back there? He’s eating about half a horse.”

  “No, I was coming from the other direction,” Sarah answered. “Anyway, the really dangerous animals aren’t the ones that live in the cages. Like Saul said, they’re the ones that build the cages.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Theo said. He looked over at Saul. “Saul?” Saul looked back at him. “Saul.” He nodded. That wasn’t the only reason he eyed his crewmate, though. He hadn’t heard Theo talk so much in quite a while.

  Sarah, meanwhile, glanced from one of them to the other. “Oops,” she said. “I should have said Adalbert.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Saul told her. “Theo doesn’t say anything to anybody. Most of the time he doesn’t, anyway.”

  “Who, me?” Theo said. “Let him who is without sin cast the first aspersion.”

  “Ouch!” Saul said. He turned to his sister and spread his hands in apology. “I didn’t know he had that in him.”

  “Maybe he can get it removed,” Sarah said. “But I don’t mind silly talk. It feels good. If somebody talks silly talk at you, he thinks you’re a human being. Nobody seemed to think we were for a long time.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Saul said. She’d gone through more anti-Semitism than he had. What they did to civilian Jews got worse after he escaped into the Wehrmacht. He didn’t want to think about that, so he didn’t. He pointed to the aviary. “Let’s go see the birds.”

  They saw the birds, or some of them. Bomb fragments had torn open the wire mesh more than once during the war. There’d been some escapes. Saul wondered if hornbills or cocks of the rock were trying to make a living in bushes around the town.

  A snack-seller had a tray of pretzels. Saul got some. “You people saved Germany!” said the old man with the tray. He wouldn’t take Saul’s money.

  “Thank you very much,” Saul said.

  After the old man was out of earshot, Theo said, “These taste like salt and sawdust. Who knows what was in the dough?”

  “Who cares?” Sarah said. Theo shook his head to show he didn’t. They ambled through the zoo, chatting and laughing.

  “Pass me the centimeter wrench, would you?” Adi Stoss was messing around inside the Panzer IV’s engine compartment.

  Saul. His name is Saul, Theo Hossbach reminded himself as he handed him the wrench. But when you’d been thinking of somebody by one name for several years, adjusting to another wasn’t easy. It especially wasn’t easy when the other fellow plainly wanted to hang on to the name he’d been using, the name the Wehrmacht knew him by.

  Theo looked around. Nobody else was close to them. He wouldn’t have worried about Lothar or Kurt—not very much, anyway. Claus Valentiner was another story. Theo hadn’t known him long enough to be easy around him. With Theo, long enough was usually a long time.

  Usually. Not always. Since the coast was clear, he said, “Your sister’s nice.”

  That got Adi out of the panzer’s engine. He had a grease smear under one eye. He looked more like a Saul than an Adalbert, grease smear or no grease smear. “Is she?” he said. “I haven’t seen enough of her lately to know. Hell, till I went back at the house I had no idea she’d been married and widowed since I, ah, left.”

  “She had?” Theo said. Sarah hadn’t mentioned that at all at the zoo. “What happened?”

  “British bombing raid. Got her husband and his folks. Would have got her, too, only she wasn’t home for some reason.”

  “Oh,” Theo said. “Too bad.” He was spending more words than he did most of the time. But he couldn’t remember when he’d talked as much as he had at the zoo.

  He could hardly remember the last time he’d spent so long in a pretty girl’s company, either, even if her brother was along, too. He’d had a few leaves in Breslau, but he hadn’t taken advantage of them that way. He wondered why not—it wasn’t as if he didn’t get the itch like any other young man. Getting it and scratching it, though, were two different things. To scratch it, he’d have to talk to a girl first, to show her what a good fellow he was. To him, that seemed somehow more intimate than lying down with her in bed.

  Or it did most of the time, anyhow. “Sarah’s easy to talk to, too,” he said.

  “I don’t hardly know about that, either. You were banging your gums pretty good there, though.” Adi looked at him sidewise. “So am I going to have a Hossbach in the family? My old man would like it—I’ll tell you that.”

  “He would? Why? I’m a gentile.” Theo was surprised into more words yet.

  “He wouldn’t care. You’re named Theodosios. Pop would care about that. You bet he would.”

  He’d said that his father was a professor of ancient history. Theo hadn’t kept that in the top drawer of his mind—it had been a while ago now. But he remembered when something jogged him, sure enough. “He really wouldn’t care?” Theo asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Adi said. “Although he may feel more Volkisch now, on account of everything that’s happened lately.” He used the word so beloved of the Nazis with a sardonic twist all his own.

  Theo thought that over. If people despised you because of what you believed, what would that make you do? It might make you drop your beliefs and try to seem as much like everybody else as you could. Or it might make you cling to them all the tighter. He could see going either way. If your ancestors had hung on to their beliefs in a line stretching back
three thousand years, wouldn’t you be more inclined to cling tighter? Theo thought so.

  “I wouldn’t blame him if he did,” Theo said. “Or Sarah.” She hadn’t acted as if she wanted to spit in his eye because he wasn’t Jewish. She might just have been polite with her brother’s Kamerad, though. How could you tell with women? Theo had enough trouble telling with men.

  “Big of you,” Adi said, which made Theo’s ears heat. Adi went on, “Stick your head in here with me, will you? Something’s still screwed up with this fan linkage, but I can’t see what.”

  Before long, Theo found the trouble. Machinery gave him much less trouble than people did. Machines were more predictable and less complicated. They did the same things again and again unless they broke. Then you fixed them, and they did those things some more.

  People … Who could tell what people would do next? Half the time, they didn’t know themselves till they did it. A lot of the time, they didn’t know what they’d done or why, even afterwards. That was how things looked to Theo, anyway.

  “Good job. Thanks,” Adi told him once he’d got the linkage back in order. “Two heads were better than one. Or yours was better than mine.”

  Still uncommonly talkative, Theo said, “You’re making a good panzer commander.”

  “Am I? I’m glad you think so. How come?”

  “You give other people credit. Hermann did that, too.”

  “He sure did. I’m trying to act like him. Not so easy—he had more patience than I do. But I am trying, and I’m trying not to be too trying, too.” Adi loosened the props and let the armored, louvered decking slam down over the engine compartment. “I’ll tell you something else, since I know damn well you don’t flap your gums too much. If I never take a panzer into combat again for the rest of my life, I’ll be the happiest guy in the world. What do you think of that?”

  “Sounds good.” Theo held up his left hand to show off the finger that wasn’t there. He mimed getting shot. “Once is plenty.”

  “Once is twice too often,” Adi said. Theo nodded. Adi went on, “Bad enough when we were fighting foreigners. Our own people …?” He scowled and muttered under his breath. “Yes, I know they were Nazis. Yes, I know they would have done horrible things to me if they got the chance. But they were Germans, dammit, and this isn’t exactly a Russian uniform I’m wearing.”

  “Nope.” Theo couldn’t argue with that.

  Adi’s chuckle would have curdled milk. “Funny, isn’t it? My father and I don’t see eye-to-eye about all kinds of things. He thinks I’m a jerk because I don’t care about the old-time stuff he’s interested in. And he couldn’t care less about football or anything like that. But we’ve both always wanted to be Germans, and to hell with the Germans who didn’t want to let us.”

  “You can be now.” Theo paused and decided he needed to revise that: “Maybe you can.”

  “Maybe. Uh-huh. That’s about it.” Adi didn’t sound gloomy, though. “I’ll tell you something, man. It’s a hell of a lot better deal than all the shit Hitler dumped on us.”

  Theo didn’t know what to say: again, he couldn’t very well disagree. So he did what he usually did when he didn’t know what to say about something—he didn’t say anything about it. He had something else on his mind, anyway. “Adi?… Um, Saul?”

  “Adi, please. We’re both more used to it. What’s up?”

  “Where do you live, Adi?” Theo blurted. Open mouth, insert foot—the Hossbach way of doing things.

  Except Adi didn’t start laughing at him. Adi didn’t even smile, or not very much. He didn’t go So you want to pay a call on my sister, do you? He just told Theo where the family house was and gave detailed directions for how to get there.

  “Thank you,” Theo said when he finished, as much for what he hadn’t said as for what he had.

  “No worries, Theo. You’re aces in my book,” Adi said. “And that and half a Reichsmark will buy you a seidel of beer.”

  “Heh.” Theo acknowledged the attempt at a joke.

  “Is that any way to talk to your panzer commander?”

  “Heh, Herr Panzer Commander!” Theo sprang to attention as he might have on the parade ground and saluted as if Adi were a field marshal. They both laughed for real then. Why not? It didn’t look as if they’d have to go to war again for a while, anyhow, against their own folk or anyone else.

  Peggy Druce had just hauled the vacuum cleaner out of the closet when somebody knocked on the front door. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet on a Saturday morning: early for a traveling salesman. Whatever the guy was flogging, he was damn lucky she hadn’t plugged the Hoover in yet. While it was running, she never would have heard that shy little knock.

  Any excuse not to vacuum for a while seemed like a good one. She hardly ever spent money with drummers, but listening to the fellow’s spiel might be entertaining. If it wasn’t, she could tell him to take a hike. She hurried to the door and threw it open.

  Albert Einstein stood on her front porch.

  No, she wasn’t dreaming. The mournful face, the bushy gray mustache, the flyaway hair … He was as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Harpo Marx. “I am looking for Mr. Herbert Druce,” he said, his voice quiet and accented. “You would perhaps be Mrs. Druce?”

  “That’s right,” she said, which might or might not have been technically true—but how often did Einstein land on your porch? She stepped aside. “Please—won’t you come in?”

  “Thank you so much,” he said, and he did. A taxi sat out by the curb. The driver was reading some kind of pulp. As Peggy shut the door, Einstein went on, “Is Mr. Herbert Druce at home?”

  “No, he’s not here right now,” Peggy answered, which was certainly true and just as certainly misleading. “This has to be about the big, fancy bomb, doesn’t it?”

  Einstein looked at her in a new way. “You know about this? He spoke to you of this?” He took on the expression of an unhappy bloodhound.

  “Not any of the technical stuff,” Peggy said. That, for once, was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “But that nobody was sure you could make it work at all, and that even if you could it would take years and years and wouldn’t be worth the money and work you’d have to sink into it.”

  “It is this last part that I would like with him to discuss,” Einstein said.

  “Don’t stand there in the front hall,” Peggy told him. “Come on into the living room, for heaven’s sake. Can I get you some coffee? What do you take in it?”

  “Cream and sugar, please. Again, I thank you so much.” He let her lead him in there and sit him down in the comfy chair that had been Herb’s. Seeing cigarette butts in the ashtrays, he got out his pipe and lit it.

  She quickly heated up the coffee that was sitting on the stove. When she brought him a cup, she asked, “Why do you need to talk with Herb about that? Why didn’t you do it a while ago now?”

  “I needed some work to learn who had recommended to kill the project,” Einstein answered. “For clear—for obvious—reasons, this is not made known. Also, and more important, the political situation has changed.”

  “How do you mean?” Peggy said.

  “In Germany, they have no longer the Nazis running things,” Einstein said, sending unreadable smoke signals up from the pipe. “The Nazis, the Nazis were most of them very ignorant people. With the men now in charge there, this is not so. Many physicists had to leave Germany—”

  “Because they were Jewish,” Peggy broke in.

  That big, shaggy head bobbed up and down in a nod. “You are right. But not all German physicists Jews are. Some able men, some fine men, stayed there. If they build this bomb, if their government helps them this bomb to build, it is bad for every country that is not Germany.”

  He sounded a hundred percent sure. He made sense, too. If there was or could be one of these super-duper bombs, the country that had it would be like a brigade of Tommy gunners squaring off against a Roman legion. It would be a fight, but not a fai
r fight.

  “I say this to you. I will to your husband say it,” Einstein cautioned. “It is not a public thing, you understand.”

  “Of course,” Peggy said quickly. “But what do you want Herb to do about it?”

  “If I can make him see this is wichtig, ah, important—”

  “Ich verstehe,” she put in.

  Even his smile seemed sad. “Ah, so you do! That is good. Where was I? Ja … If I can make him see how important this is, I can perhaps persuade him to reconsider his report and to change it. This may return to the project the money and the momentum it needs.”

  If anyone in the world could make Herb change his mind once he’d made it up, Albert Einstein might well be the man. But whether anyone could was a whole different question. Having known Herb her whole adult life, Peggy was inclined to doubt it.

  Still, Einstein deserved the chance. “Let me tell you where to find him,” Peggy said. “In fact, here—I’ll write it down for you.” She scribbled his new address and his telephone number on a sheet from a scratch pad. “You can use the phone here to make sure he’s home if you want to.”

  “Home?” Einstein asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Peggy said unhappily. “We … got divorced not too long ago.”

  “I did this also. It is something that happens. A pity, but it does.” Einstein stuck Herb’s address and number into a jacket pocket. “I think I will not telephone. A phone call is easy not to believe. If he is out …” The physicist shrugged. “I will another time come back. I am in Princeton, in New Jersey. It is not a long trip to make.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Peggy agreed. Princeton wasn’t more than forty miles northeast of Philadelphia. An hour by train, more or less, plus whatever time you needed to travel in town.

  Einstein stood up. “I am pleased to meet you, Mrs. Druce, and I thank you for the good coffee.” Something glinted in his eyes. Amusement? Chances were he wouldn’t have said so much to her had he known she and Herb weren’t married any more. She’d tricked it out of him just by holding her cards close to her chest. Coughing, he added, “Please do not spread word of our little talk here.”