Vivisepulture
Page 21
No one gives him a second look, despite the scrapes and bruises on his face, as he pushes his way through the crowd. Overhead, trains rattle along elevated railways, and aircraft buzz from skyscraper to skyscraper. Though the city thrums with industry, it feels strangely at peace. The world is locked in war, yet the citizens here seem unconcerned. Typical Americans, he thinks.
After walking several kilometres, Ehrlichmann is tired and hot and thirsty. Shops now line the street, selling a variety of goods. It takes a moment before he realises that all the signs are in German. He crosses to the lit window of restaurant, and stares in astonishment at the menu displayed upon it. German! He does not recognise the dishes, but he can read the words.
This is not an American city.
But nor is it a German one. Ehrlichmann knows of no place like this metropolis in the Fatherland.
So where is he?
Ahead, at the end of the road, bracketed between the skyscrapers to either side, he spies the tallest building yet, a great tower, one hundred storeys at least, and the only circular building he has seen so far, crowned with outswept buttresses at each of the four points of the compass. It must be important, he decides; he will head there.
He hurries forward, driven by a need to know the location of this city. His mind considers and rejects a number of possibilities. Ehrlichmann is not especially well-travelled, but he is highly educated. A city such as this could not be kept secret. Although Ultima Thule did not come out of hiding until 1938, its existence had been rumoured for centuries.
Eventually, he reaches the foot of the tower. He circles it until he finds the entrance, an enormous archway fully five metres across and ten metres high. It is flanked by a pair of female statues, heavily stylised, some six metres in height. It is also guarded by three trios of men in blue uniforms. On their upper left arms, the soldiers wear a gold sigil in the shape of a spiral; in their right hands, they each clutch short tridents, from which a cable leads to a pack on their back. If they belong to an army, it is one unknown to Ehrlichmann.
He turns to walk away, but someone shouts “Halt!” Frightened, Ehrlichmann glances back over his shoulder and sees three of the trident-carrying troopers hurrying towards him. He has moved no more than a handful of metres when he hears a sizzle and a sharp bang. Something hits him in the back and every muscle in his body suddenly locks. He crashes to the pavement. The soldiers run up, and two of them grab Ehrlichmann under his arms and haul him to his feet. He feels numb, unable to think clearly, as though everything he ever knew had been wiped from his mind in an instant.
One demands, “Who you? Where you from? What you do?”
Ehrlichmann shakes his head to clear it of the fog which seems to enfold its nooks and crannies. After a moment, knowledge—of himself, of his past, of his mission—slowly returns as the mistiness rolls back. He can just about comprehend the soldier’s speech, but he shakes his head and does not answer.
The trooper who is not restraining Ehrlichmann pulls a square metal box from his belt and talks rapidly into its face. There is evidently a response, though Ehrlichmann cannot hear it.
“Bring,” the soldier orders.
Ehrlichmann struggles but cannot escape. After being threatened with another blast from an electric trident, he reluctantly submits. He is marched into the tower, through a hall large enough to house a zeppelin, and into a side-corridor which could comfortably fit a locomotive and half a dozen carriages. Along one wall of the passage is a bank of elevator doors. One of these slides open as they approach and the four of them squeeze into the cabin, Ehrlichmann tight in the centre of the group. The elevator plummets, brakes abruptly, and the door snicks open. The corridor revealed is narrow, ill-lit and constructed of unadorned concrete. Ehrlichmann is taken to a cell and thrown into it.
How will he find Maria now? And where is this place? Those weapons carried by the soldiers: he has never seen their like before. He can testify to their effectiveness, but he suspects they would prove less useful on a battlefield. He leans back against the wall and guesses that for him the war is now over: he has failed Rotwang, he has failed the Führer.
Some time later, the strip-light above the door flickers and dies, plunging the cell into darkness. Ehrlichmann rolls onto his side and closes his eyes. He tries to sleep.
The elevator rockets skywards. After it has braked high up in the building, the doors slide open, and Ehrlichmann is marched along a wide corridor with floor and walls of pale polished marble. His escort halts at a pair of wooden doors. He has just enough time to register a design featuring a woman’s figure carved upon the wood before the doors swing open and he is herded within.
He has no idea what time it is, or for how long he has slept. The light flickered on, the cell-door opened, and three troopers entered. They fed him and now they have brought him here.
From the immense window at the other end of the room, Ehrlichmann sees he is on the top floor of the tower. And that it is morning, very early morning. The sun is low in a cloudless sky, the tops of the skyscrapers stippling the yellow orb’s lower edge. The room, which has floor and walls of pale polished marble like the corridor, is empty but for a single chair on a small dias set before the window. The three soldiers and Ehrlichmann wait before this throne. A door opens somewhere. It is followed by heavy footsteps which ring harshly upon the floor. Ehrlichmann turns to look and, startled, sees Maria approaching.
The metal which covers her has been polished to a buttery gleam, and she shines like an angel in the light of the sun falling through the window. She steps up onto the dias, turns about and looks down on Ehrlichmann, her metal mask perversely seraphic in its inexpressive blankness. As if her presence has triggered it, the room suddenly brightens, the sun now high enough for its light to reflect from the polished marble surfaces of walls and floor and ceiling. Everything is imbued with a golden aura, at its most incandescent in Maria’s person, as though she has stepped down from the sky. Slowly, she lowers herself regally onto the throne and the brightness dims. Once she is sitting down, hands on the chair’s arms, back straight, she speaks.
“I know you,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, with a mechanical burr to it.
“Maria?” Ehrlichmann tries to step forward, but is prevented by the men to either side of him.
“From where do I know you?” asks Maria.
“From the laboratory,” replies Ehrlichmann eagerly. “The Wencelas Mine. Rotwang. You went through the portal created by the Bell.”
Maria gazes at him, but her mask of a face is inscrutable. She says, “I remember now. It has been a long time.”
Ehrlichmann shakes his head. “No, a day only.”
“For you, but not for me.” She lifts a hand palm up as if bestowing the gift of knowledge. “It has been almost two centuries. When I arrived, this place was a simple village of fishermen. I have given them science! Soon I will make them masters of the world! Already we have subdued the savages of North Africa and Southern Europe.”
“You?” scoffs Ehrlichmann. “You were a slave-worker. How could you be responsible for all this?”
Maria rises from her throne. “Do you know who I was before the Gestapo arrested me?” she demands. “In 1930, I was awarded a doctorate by the University of Göttingen! I knew Fermi, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac! I was taught by Nobel laureates!”
She sits down heavily. “Then I married a Jew,” she says. “We tried to leave Germany for a new life in America, but we were refused. Later, the Gestapo came for us. Perhaps you know my name: Maria Goeppert Mayer.”
Ehrlichmann is shocked. He remembers Heisenberg mentioning Goeppert Mayer on several occasions. A gifted physicist, he had told Ehrlichmann; perhaps even a future Nobel prize winner. She disappeared shortly after the war began.
“It does not matter,” Maria continues. “This transformation Rotwang forced me to undergo means I will live—and rule!—for centuries. This is the pre-history of the Earth—did you think the Bell transported you only through
space and not time? In Egypt, they will not begin building the Pyramids for seven thousand years; and I have created an industrial empire on this island! My Atlantis will rule the Earth and change history. There will be no Germany and no Führer, no National Socialists and no Gestapo!”
She steps down from the dias and gestures imperiously for the soldiers to release Ehrlichmann. “Come,” she orders him.
He follows her across the throne-room toward an archway. They step through it and onto a deep balcony overlooking the city.
“See all that I have built,” Maria boasts. “Electricity, manufacturing, automation! I have given all this to Atlantis. Beneath this tower, my Tower of Babel, lies the heart of my city, a machine which uses the heat of molten rock to generate power. Clean and safe energy. While that oaf Hitler plays with atom bombs and jet-engines, I have tamed the power of the magma at the heart of the world!” She lifts her arms up, hands out to the morning sun. Light seems to gather in her palms, as though she has also conquered that furnace of seething energy in the sky. “Already we are millions. Soon we will expand and build a second city in the north—we have already found the perfect site, a large island near the Arctic Circle. We will control the land between the two cities and ensure Germany never comes into existence!”
Turning to him, she gazes at him with her eyes of burning white. She is, Ehrlichmann realises, balanced on the edge of madness. Whether it was her metamorphosis which caused it, or her two hundred years here in Atlantis, he cannot guess.
“You are a spy,” she tells Ehrlichmann. “You will be taken away and electrocuted.”
Numb, Ehrlichmann does not protest as he is led back into the throne-room, and then to the elevator. Earth’s pre-history! Millennia before the birth of Christ. And Atlantis a real place, after all. Plato’s account was not a fable. Ehrlichmann says nothing as the four of them squeeze back into the elevator cabin. They plummet downwards.
Maria’s brag that she will soon found a new metropolis in the north… Ultima Thule is said to be an offshoot of a southern kingdom, Ehrlichmann recalls; though that kingdom vanished thousands of years ago. Could it have been Atlantis? Are the Thulans the descendants of Maria’s Atlanteans? But Germany does exist: her plan to prevent the Fatherland’s creation must have failed. Perhaps there was a schism. Certainly the Thulans’ highly advanced science is now explainable: they had electricity more than ten thousand years before they admitted Ernst Schäfer to their hidden island.
When the elevator stops, the doors do not open on the bare concrete passage leading to the cells but on another marble corridor. Ehrlichmann is led along it. He must escape, he must escape and he must prevent Maria from conquering the Earth. He cannot allow her to prevent the creation of the world he knows, of Germany, of the Führer. Of, perhaps, even himself. Would he disappear, if she succeeded? Would he slowly fade from sight before these three Atlanteans, if Maria’s future came to pass?
The corridor ends in an arch, through which is a station on the city’s elevated railway. One of the soldiers heads for an office, perhaps to call for an official train to transport Ehrlichmann to a place of electrocution. The platform is deserted but for himself and his two guards. As is the platform on the other side of the tracks. He feels a wind approaching from the right and looks that way.
A train approaches. Ehrlichmann can hear the hum of its wheels on the rails but not the noise of its engines. Most likely it is driven by electricity—but he can see no cables for the current, either above the track or beside the rails. The train rushes nearer. Ehrlichmann hopes the rails are not electrified. This is his only chance.
He pushes against the men to either side of him and, as they stumble back, he darts forward. He leaps from the platform across the track, and feels a great blast of air behind him as the train draws braking into the station. He lands badly, and falls across one of the rails of the other track. Thankfully, it is inert steel. He scrambles to his feet. He can hear the shouts of his escort. He clambers onto the platform, and quickly spots an exit. It is a ramp, leading down into the tower. Ehrlichmann runs. His life depends upon it. The world he knows depends upon it.
He finds another elevator. He feverishly pushes the button to call the cabin, and waits impatiently for it to arrive. When the doors glide open, it is empty. He steps in and pushes down the controlling handle. The cabin drops at high speed. An indicator over the door flashes through descending numbers.
When he reaches the ground floor and the doors open, he is ready. He runs through the great hall—the rising sun has yet to fill it to the brim with light, and he hurries across its shadowed vastness to the blazing arch which leads out onto the street. No one appears to be following him. He runs out into the brightening streets.
Ehrlichmann’s first thought is to inform Rotwang of what he has discovered, to tell the future about the distant past they have inadvertently created. And so he makes his way out of the city and climbs the mountain to the location of the dimensional portal. It is late afternoon by the time he arrives at the point where he thinks he arrived in Atlantis, and early evening before he finds the discarded æther-suit. But of the Bell’s violet fog there is no sign. Rotwang has closed the dimensional portal. Ehrlichmann is trapped in pre-history …
He was, anyway—unless he could persuade an Atlantean to assist him in donning the æther-suit. But the point is now moot: the dimensional portal is closed. He slumps beside the suit’s brass torso and swears. He is on his own; he must find some way to stop Maria by himself, she must not be permitted to prevent the creation of the Reich. He must not fail, he cannot fail. But what can he do? He is a Ministry liaison officer, once a physicist; an officer of the SS in rank only. He is not an agent provocateur.
Ehrlichmann gazes down the mountain at Atlantis. Night has fallen and the city is a chequerboard of light, a grid of bright lines beside a moonlit platinum sea. There is something peaceful, idyllic, in the scene, despite the distant hammering of the city’s factories. This world is not at war: it has no Blitzkrieg, no fire-bombing by the British and Americans. North of here, on the steppes of northern Europe, Stone Age tribes are living in caves and hunting reindeer. Their lives are short and brutal… but are they so much shorter and more brutal than that of a Wehrmacht gefreiter on the Eastern Front?
Would the twentieth century be peaceful if Ehrlichmann allowed Maria to succeed in her plans? He is briefly tempted to let it happen. But that would mean failing the Führer and he has promised himself he will not do that. Ehrlichmann believes passionately in the Third Reich, he believes it will last one thousand years, he believes it must do so—for the good of the German people, for the good of Europe.
He has no choice. He must find a way to stop Maria.
As his gaze pans across the city, his eyes come to rest on the Tower of Babel. And the answer to his problem occurs to him:
The machine at the heart of the city, the machine beneath the tower…
It uses geo-thermal power, and he is familiar with the basics of such a system: a deep shaft to the molten rock below, into which is pumped water. This is heated to steam, and the steam, under pressure, is used to drive turbines. There should be, he thinks, ample possibilities for sabotage and, without electricity, Maria’s metropolis would be rendered powerless. It might only be a temporary setback, but it would give Ehrlichmann time to find a more permanent way to prevent her.
Ehrlichmann tries to imagine he is a member of SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny’s SS-Jäger-Bataillon. Sometimes, not so very long ago, while sitting at his desk and writing reports for Reichsminster Albert Speer, Ehrlichmann had envied the elite soldiers of the SS-Jäger-Batallion, envied them their daring missions, their very real contributions to the Fatherland’s victories. Now he has an opportunity to strike a blow of far more significance than any they might have done. It is not merely victory at stake, but the entire history of the Fatherland, of Hitler and the Reich. It is the very existence of Germany! Not even Skorzeny could boast so vital and consequential a
mission.
Unfortunately, Ehrlichmann possesses neither the tactical skills of Skorzeny nor the weaponry issued to the SS-Jäger-Bataillon. His military training was long ago and he has forgotten much of it. Certainly he recalls nothing which would allow him to overpower the troopers guarding the entrance to the Tower of Babel…
He spends the night on the mountainside, stretched out beside the hollow figure of the æther-suit, lulled to sleep by the distant din of industry drifting up the slope, dreaming of ways and means to destroy Maria’s heart-machine…
When Ehrlichmann wakes, he is stiff and sore. The sun has only just risen above the horizon, and a path of light stretches from it across the ocean. The night was pleasantly warm, but already he feels the temperature beginning to rise. Though he does not feel entirely alert—he is hungry and thirsty, and still a little tired—while he slept a plan has formed in his mind. He must first be a spy, before he can be a saboteur.
He must learn all he can of the heart-machine, and only then will he know how best to destroy it.
For a week, Ehrlichmann skulks about the city. He steals clothing—the worker’s uniform of suit of blue linen and black cap—the better to blend in, eats the free food provided in the automated restaurants with the Atlantean workers, sleeps in the dormitories, and slowly picks up enough of the local German-based language to understand those about him. He learns that the heart-machine is operated in shifts throughout the day and night, and though the restaurants may be automated, the heart-machine is not. Hundreds of workers toil beneath the Tower of Babel, overseeing the machine’s pipes and valves and meters and levers. Entrances to tunnels which lead to the machine’s chamber are located to the north, south, east and west of the tower. These are guarded by trios of troopers, but the soldiers do not check papers or identities.