Vivisepulture
Page 20
Ehrlichmann rises to his feet. “Professor Doctor,” he says. “I am—”
Rotwang gestures dismissively. “SS-Sturmbannführer Günter Ehrlichmann, from the Ministry for Armaments and Munitions: yes, yes, I know. I am Rotwang. You are here to see the Bell.”
The scientist yanks open the door and exits. “Follow me!” he calls out imperiously. Ehrlichmann hurries to join him. Rotwang heads deeper into the mountain, along corridors as bleak as mausoleums. Ehrlichmann remembers a visit to the Mittelwerk the year before. The contrast could not be greater: that underground factory was alive, full of the noise of industry, of people and machinery busy at work building rockets for the Reich.
After twenty minutes of walking, they reach a steel hatch set in the tunnel wall. Rotwang turns the wheel in its centre with vigour, and then pulls open the hatch. He beckons for Ehrlichmann to follow him. After carefully sealing the hatch behind them, Rotwang tackles the hatch on the opposite wall. It is an airlock, realises Ehrlichmann. Is Rotwang working on chemical weapons? biological weapons? Both are banned under Geneva Protocols. Besides, the Fatherland has the Vergeltungswaffe, the Flugschrieben, all the other marvels of German—and Thulan—science and industry. And Himmler’s magic too, of course. Germs and gases are not necessary.
Once through the airlock, Ehrlichmann finds himself in a passage with windows along one wall. These look into a large chamber containing a square pool of water. In the centre of the pool is a plinth, into which many thick cables are plugged. On the plinth sits a strange device: cylindrical with a domed top, some five metres high, and around three metres across at the base. The device is black and entirely featureless; it vaguely resembles a bell.
Rotwang approaches a door at the end of the passage. He gestures impatiently, and Ehrlichmann joins him. The room through the door is clearly the scientist’s office. There are two desks, the tops of both carpetted with folders and loose papers. An IBM tabulating machine sits in one corner. Another door is slightly ajar, and through it can be heard murmured conversation, and the clink and knock and fizzle of laboratory equipment. To Ehrlichmann’s right, another large window looks into the Bell’s chamber.
“What does it do?” Ehrlichmann asks.
“Do?” replies Rotwang. “I shall show you!” He crosses to the door into the laboratory, yanks it open, bellows “Grot!”, and then gestures bossily at the person he has just addressed. Returning to Ehrlichmann, he explains, “The Bell contains two cylinders of beryllium peroxide suspended in a bath of Xerum-525. They rotate at high speeds, tens of thousands of revolutions per second! As they spin, they generate a vortex, which is in turn compressed. Through the vortex we fire thorium ions under very high voltage. The effect…” Rotwang beams manically and throws his arms wide. “You will see the effect! It is astonishing! It will win the war!”
“The Bell is Thulan science?” asks Ehrlichmann. This is not the physics he learnt at the University of Munich, this is not the science the Uranverein has been using to build an atom bomb.
Rotwang’s brow lowers in anger. “It is my science,” he snaps. “Mine! I have discovered this effect, I have built the Bell.” He gestures dismissively. “Do not speak to me of the Thulans; I will not have them in my laboratory!”
“I am sorry.” Ehrlichmann bows his head. “So tell me,” he continues, “how your Bell will win the war. You have not said what it actually does.”
“Oh,” Rotwang says. He visibly shrugs off his anger. “Well. You must watch.” He gestures at the window. “See, it begins!”
The Bell glows with an eldritch violet light. Rotwang points to a table beside the pool of water in which the device sits. On the table Ehrlichmann can see a cage containing mice. “Watch them,” Rotwang says.
The light spreads sluggishly throughout the room. It slides over the water like an early morning sea-mist, creeps towards the table and up its legs, and seeps across the polished metal surface towards the cage. The mice within begin to run about frantically. As Ehrlichmann watches, the violet fog envelops one side of the cage and causes the metal bars to scintillate. The mice have backed up to the other side, as far from the purple mist as they can get; they are climbing over each other in terror. The purple touches one mouse…
Its flesh begins to dissolve. As each mouse takes on a violet hue, so it too begins to slough fur and red flesh.
“How is this useful?” Ehrlichmann demands, horrified by what he is seeing. The atom bomb will kill people, true; but it will be quick. Except, of course, for those who are poisoned by the radiation. This slow creeping violet and clearly agonising death is no wonder weapon.
“Pah! That is just a side-effect,” Rotwang says. “It is interesting, yes? But it is not what the Bell will do.” He pauses, and a feverish light enters his eyes. “The Bell is… a dimensional portal. With it, we can transport equipment, people—yes, even your atom bombs!—to anywhere. In an eye-blink!”
“But the light will kill them! Or are you telling me those mice have been transported?”
“No, they are dead.” Rotwang adopts a mocking sad face.
“You have used the Bell to transport matériel?”
“Perhaps.” Rotwang shrugs. “We have yet to determine how to aim the portal, to calculate where it will send things to. But.” He holds up a finger. “We have discovered a way to safeguard a person from the violet fog, and we are about to send someone through the portal. They will tell us where they land!”
Rotwang strides across his office. “Come,” he orders.
Ehrlichmann follows the scientist into the laboratory. A workbench runs down the centre of the room, its top burdened with Siemens and AEG electrical equipment. Two men in white coats are busy at a large console. As he moves further into the laboratory, Ehrlichmann spots a woman standing beside a piece of machinery at the far end. No, not beside it: within it. Two poles, constructed of brightly-polished hoops and balls like those of a van der Graff generator, frame her. She appears frightened and, he sees, she has been secured in place with leather restraints.
She is also naked.
“From the work camp,” says Rotwang dismissively.
Ehrlichmann approaches the woman, but halts at the edge of the dias on which the machinery which imprisons her sits. Her hair has been shorn to a stubble. She is thin, malnourished—her ribs stark lines against the pale flesh of her torso, pelvic girdle sharp beneath the taut flesh of her hips; her furred groin sunken, and her breasts like two pendulous flaps of skin. She gazes at him with dim puzzlement, and Ehrlichmann surmises she has been drugged.
At Rotwang’s signal, the two assistants begin flicking switches and turning rheostat pots. A blue glow emanates from the machine, and it emits a loud electrical buzzing. The woman’s mouth opens in a scream but no sound can be heard. She writhes in pain; the muscles of her arms and legs and neck stand out like ropes. Blue hoops of light move up and down her body. As they pass, her skin begins to adopt a brassy lustre, its imperfections replaced by a smooth metallic surface. Ehrlichmann cannot look away. Slowly, the flesh of the woman—who is in great agony—is replaced with metal by some near-magical property of the light. At the very last, her head becomes a mask, its crown a burnished brass dome, with glowing eyes and a sketch of a face fixed in an emotionless expression. The blue light dissipates, the glowing hoops vanish. The metal woman lifts her hands, and her restraints crumble to dust; then she steps slowly, heavily, forward. Perversely, the transformation has given her the curves and bust that maltreatment had taken from her. Ehrlichmann is both horrified and strangely excited.
“Now the violet light will not harm her,” Rotwang declares.
The metal woman—her name, Ehrlichmann has been told, is Maria—shuffles across a gangplank laid across the pool to the Bell. She trails a R/T cable, which is plugged into a socket on the side of her head. As she enters the violet fog, she seems to blur, and then slowly fade from view. Ehrlichmann squints, but there is no sign of her. Has she been dissolved, disintegrated, as the mice were
? Or is she elsewhere, as Rotwang claims?
The R/T cable still describes an arc along the length of the gangplank. So Maria must still exist, must still be standing upright… somewhere.
Josaphat, one of Rotwang’s assistants, begins fiddling with the radio-set, trying to elicit a response from Maria. The rest of the room falls silent. It is several long moments before a voice, blurred by static, responds, “What do you want?”
“Report!” orders Josaphat. “What do you see? Where are you? Report!”
“I see…” She falls silent.
Everyone turns towards the radio-set.
“I see a town. I am on the side of a mountain and there is a small town below me.”
Rotwang grunts in satisfaction. So the Bell has worked.
“And the sea,” she continues. “A blue sea, as far as the eye can see.”
“What town is it?” demands Josaphat. “Do you recognise it?”
“No,” Maria replies. “It looks… Greek. Mediterranean. Low buildings, painted white, flat roofs.”
“Perhaps it is an island in the Aegean?” suggests Grot, the other laboratory assistant.
The R/T cable suddenly goes taut. “I will go look,” Maria says. There is a click from the speaker, and the cable abruptly falls to the gangplank.
Rotwang swears.
Josaphat insistently repeats Maria’s name, but there is no response. “She is gone,” he tells Rotwang sadly.
“She may return,” Ehrlichmann points out, wondering why he feels a need to say so.
Rotwang shakes his head. “No, she will run away. She is a slave-worker. It is a risk I took.” He shrugs his massive shoulders. “To be honest, I did not expect her to survive the trip through the dimensional portal. But,” he adds, visibly cheering up, “she has proven that protection from the violet light is possible.”
Maria’s desertion has paradoxically fired Rotwang’s enthusiasm. The process which made her impervious to the Bell’s killing light, he tells Ehrlichmann, was fit only for slave workers. No true son of the Fatherland would willingly submit to such an agonising and permanent transformation. However, the fact that Maria passed unharmed through the dimensional portal has indicated her metamorphosis did indeed protect her. Before Rotwang invented the process which Maria was forced to undergo, Grot and Josaphat had constructed a suit based upon the same principles. They could find no volunteer to test it, and they were not prepared to lose the protective suit by sending a slave-worker through the portal wearing it. Rotwang shows the suit to Ehrlichmann.
“I call it an æther-suit,” he tells the SS-Sturmbannführer. “It is very heavy and very expensive. That is why…” He gestures vaguely at the machinery with its Van der Graff poles occupying the far end of the laboratory.
The æther-suit resembles both a diving-suit and a suit of armour. It is made of the same brass-coloured metal as Maria after her metamorphosis. The helmet is a great globe dotted with small portholes of thick gold-tinted glass. Four cylindrical tanks on the back provide air for the wearer.
“Are you sure you wish to do this?” asks Rotwang.
Ehrlichmann nods. If the Bell, as Maria seems to have proven, is indeed a dimensional portal, then the Reich needs it. Once they have learned to control the Bell’s portal, they will be able to take the war to America, to plant atom bombs directly into American cities! It will be the decisive victory the Führer desires. And Ehrlichmann will be the man to deliver it to him. To refuse to wear the æther-suit would be to fail the Führer, and he has promised himself he will not do that. Further, the longer they wait, the greater the likelihood Maria will vanish for good. Ehrlichmann is also an educated man, he is much more likely to identify the mysterious Aegean town to which the portal leads.
Now that he has made the decision, Ehrlichmann feels no fear. Maria survived, he tells himself; he will do the same. He will not suffer the same fate as the mice. The æther-suit will protect him. It will armour his body and soul; when he dresses in it, he will put on the courage he needs.
“I shall demand the Führer awards you an Iron Cross!” Rotwang declares grandly. “With Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds!”
Ehrlichmann does not reply. He unbuckles his belt and hands it to Grot.
Ehrlichmann’s breath is loud in his ears; the helmet of the æther-suit amplifies the sound. He walks towards the violet fog, and feels fear for the first time. He thinks of the Führer and it calms him. He will do this for Hitler, he will not disappoint him. His boots clang on the metal gangplank. The æther-suit is indeed very heavy, and Ehrlichmann is sweating from the exertion. He is now only a few metres from the Bell. A high-pitched hum fills the suit, transmitted up through his boots from the gangplank. The fog-like light washes over the helmet, and the view through its many tiny portholes takes on a purplish hue. Ehrlichmann stops and waits a moment. If the æther-suit does not work, would he feel a burning pain as the flesh of his fingers liquified? He holds up one hand until he can see it through the portholes. The golden gauntlet appears whole and untarnished; he feels no pain.
The suit works.
He continues forward, gasping now, his arms and legs feeling leaden. He can still see the Bell, a dark shape looming through the purple fog. He takes another clanging step forward. The Bell’s shape wavers… Another step. He pants. He shakes his head to dislodge the sweat gathering on his brow. He peers forward: the Bell has vanished. Now he sees only a formless lilac mist. Surely by now he should have reached the side of the Bell? He steps forward—
There is nothing beneath his foot.
He topples forward. The æther-suit is too heavy; he cannot stay upright. He yells, tries to bring up his arms. Before he can do so, the helmet hits the ground, and his face bounces off the inside front. The rims of the portholes gouge into his cheeks and brow and chin. He cries out in pain.
He can see nothing. The portholes are dark; it is because he is lying on his front. He begins rocking from side to side in an attempt to roll onto his back. It is hard work, and painful, as he bashes his limbs and torso, but, after several minutes, he succeeds. Immediately, he is blinded by bright light. It is a moment before his eyes adjust and he realises it is sunlight. A cloudless blue sky, in fact.
Using his arms, he levers himself into a sitting position, and looks about him. He is, he discovers, on the side of a mountain overlooking a great city of tall buildings. It is most certainly not the Aegean town described by Maria. Yet it sprawls beside a sea, and blue water stretches to the horizon.
Where has the Bell brought him to? This city appears too industrial, too advanced, for any nation bordering the Mediterranean. There is no place such as this in Greece, Spain, or the Levant. Italy, perhaps; but the city appears too modern—almost… American.
Is that where he is? The landscape about him is scrubby and pale, with solitary twisted trees and serpentine banks of shrubs low to the ground. Perhaps it is one of the more southerly states of the USA. He grins. The Führer will be delighted. A dimensional portal aimed directly at one of the American centres of industry.
Plainly, Maria lied. But who could trust a slave worker?
A burst of static suddenly echoes around the interior of the helmet. Ehrlichmann winces at the volume. “Are you there?” demands a loud voice. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes,” snaps Ehrlichmann. “Not so loud.”
“Tell me what you see!” orders the voice. It is not Josaphat, Ehrlichmann realises, but Rotwang himself.
“A city,” he explains. “A very modern city. I think it is American.”
“American! My God, but this is fantastic!”
A hurried conversation takes place at the other end of the R/T cable but Ehrlichmann hears only snatches and can make no sense of it.
“Where is Maria?” asks Rotwang. “You can see her?”
“No, no: I cannot see her.”
“You must find her, you must bring her back. The Americans cannot know about the Bell!”
Ehrlichmann sighs. He u
nderstands what Rotwang is pointedly not saying. He cannot look for the absconded metal woman while clad in the æther-suit. It alone could provide too much of a clue to the American scientists. “Very well,” he says reluctantly.
He turns laboriously about and sadly regards the bank of eldritch purple mist which floats, impervious to gusts of wind, on the slope. It is impossible to dress in the æther-suit alone, so he cannot return via the Bell’s portal. Unless, perhaps, he finds Maria, and she assists him. No matter. The Reich has secret agents scattered throughout the USA. He need only identify himself to one, and he will be smuggled back to the Fatherland. His English is good enough to pass. (He will claim to be Swiss.)
Ehrlichmann reaches up and begins unscrewing the bolts which keep the helmet secured to the neck-ring. It is difficult in the heavy metal gloves, but he perseveres; and is eventually rewarded with a hiss as the seal is broken. He lifts the helmet from his head and lays it down beside him on the yellow fractured rock.
Now he can hear the thud and hammer of the city below: the beat of its factories, the hum of modern life. Ehrlichmann breathes in deeply. The air smells of brine and burnt metal and smoke. He wipes the sweat from his brow but it returns quickly: it is hot beneath this bright sun. Glancing at his hand he sees no blood upon it, though he can feel a wound upon his brow. The same is true of the skin scraped and bruised on his cheeks and chin by the helmet when he fell.
He leaves the æther-suit dismembered on the mountainside and descends the slope towards the city. It is steep going, and he estimates it will be hours before he reaches the city outskirts. There are belts of thin forest stretched across the mountainside and, as he scrambles over boulders and narrow fallen trunks, it occurs to him the trees are neither as large nor as verdant as he had expected. North America is surely greener than this?
He shrugs off his doubts. He is a physicist, not a botanist.
The sun is setting somewhere at sea, spraying orange and pink across the sky, and lowering black shadows into the great canyons between skyscrapers of forty, fifty or sixty storeys tall. Though the streets are lit, not even the brightest of electric light can entirely dispel the gloom. The roads are busy with whizzing cars and the pavements thronged with a glum but silent population. Ehrlichmann had expected more cheer; these Americans are surprisingly dour.