“No,” Fiore said, half bowed so he looked down into the murky water and didn’t show much of his face. “They eastern devils, I think. Me good Chinese man.”
The Lizard hissed again, then went off to ask questions of somebody else. Bobby Fiore didn’t move until all the males got back into the half-tracks and rolled away.
“Jesus,” he said when they were gone. “I lived through it.” He scrambled up out of the rice paddy and reclaimed the weapons he’d stashed. He’d started to feel naked without a pistol, even if it wasn’t any good against armor-and having a grenade around made you warm and comfortable, too.
He wasn’t the only one scuttling for guns, either. The Japs were all communing with their ancestors, but most of the Chinese Reds had played possum the same way he had. Now they came splashing from the paddies and grabbed their rifles and pistols and submachine guns.
They searched the corpses of the Japanese, too, but added little to what they already had. Nieh Ho-T’ing made a sour face as he walked over to Fiore. “Scaly devils are good soldiers,” he said disappointedly. “They don’t leave guns around for just anybody to pick up. Too bad.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Fiore echoed. Water dripped from his pants and formed little puddles and streams by his feet. Whenever he moved, the wet cotton made shlup-shlup noises right out of an animated cartoon.
Nieh nodded to him. “You did well. Unlike these imperialists”-he pointed to a couple of dead Japs not far away-“you understand that in guerrilla war the fighter is but one fish in a vast school of peasants. When danger too great to oppose confronts him, he disappears into the school. He does not call attention to himself.”
Fiore didn’t understand all of that, but he got the gist. “Look like farmer, they not shoot me,” he said.
“That’s what I was talking about,” Nieh answered impatiently. Bobby Fiore gave an absentminded emphatic cough to show he understood. Nieh had started to go off; his soaked pants went shlup-shlup, too. He spun back around, spraying small drops of water as he did so. “You speak the language of the little scaly devils?” he demanded.
“A bit.” Bobby held his hand close together to show how small a bit it was. “Speak more Chinese.” And if that wouldn’t make my mama fall over in a faint, what would? he thought, and then, She’s gonna have a half-Chinese grandkid eveniIf she doesn’t know it. That oughta do the job.
Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t care about grandkids. “You speak some, though?” he persisted. “And you understand more than you speak?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Fiore said in English. Feeling himself flush, he did his best to turn it into Chinese.
Nieh nodded-he got the idea. He patted Bobby on the back. “Oh, yes, we will gladly take you to Shanghai. You will be very useful there. We do not have many who can follow what the little devils say.”
“Good,” Bobby answered, smiling to show how happy he was. And he was happy, too-the Reds could just as easily have shot him and left him here by the side of the road to make sure he didn’t make a nuisance of himself later on. But since he made a good tool, they’d keep him around and use him. Just like Lo, Nieh Ho-T’ing hadn’t asked how he felt about any of that. He had the feeling the Reds weren’t good at asking-they just took.
He started to laugh. Nieh gave him a curious look. He waved the Red away: it wasn’t a joke he knew how to translate into Chinese. But of all the things he’d never expected, getting shanghaied to Shanghai was right up at the top of the list.
“Exalted Fleetlord, here is a report that will please you,” the shiplord Kirel said as he summoned a new document onto the screen.
Atvar read intently for a little while, then stopped and stared at Kirel. “Major release of radioactivity in Deutschland” he said. “This is supposed to please me? It means the Big Uglies there are a short step away from a nuclear bomb.”
“But they do not know how to take that next step,” Kirel replied. “If you please, Exalted Fleetlord, examine the analysis.”
Atvar did as his subordinate asked. As he read, his mouth fell open in a great chortle of glee. “Idiots, fools, maniacs! They achieved a self sustaining pile without proper damping?”
“From the radiation that has been-is being-released, they seem to have done just that,” Kirel answered, also gleefully. “And it’s melted down on them, and contaminated the whole area, and, with any luck at all, killed off a whole great slew of their best scientists.”
“If these are their best-” Atvar’s hiss was full of amazement. “They’ve done almost as much damage to themselves as we did to them when we dropped the nuclear bomb on Berlin.”
“No doubt you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “One of the main characteristics of the Tosevites is their tendency to leap headlong into any new technology which comes within their capabilities. Where we would study consequences first, they simply charge ahead. Because of that, no doubt, they went in the flick of an eye turret from spear-flinging savages to-”
“Industrialized savages,” Atvar put in.
“Exactly so,” Kirel agreed. “This time, though, in leaping they fell and smashed their snouts. Not all ventures into new technology come without risks.”
“Something went right,” Atvar said happily. “Ever since we came to Tosev 3, we’ve been nibbled to pieces here: two killercraft lost in one place, five landcruisers in another, deceitful diplomacy from the Big Uglies, the allies we’ve made among them who betrayed us-”
“That male in Poland who embarrassed us by recanting his friendship is back in our claws,” Kirel said.
“So he is. I’d forgotten that,” Atvar said. “We’ll have to determine the most expedient means of punishing him, too: find some way to remind the Tosevites who have joined us that they would do well to remember who gives them their meat. No hurry there. He is not going anyplace save by our leave.”
“No indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “We also need to consider the effect of stepping up our pressure on Deutschland in light of their failure with the atomic pile. We may find them discouraged and demoralized. Computer models suggest as much, at any rate.”
“Let me see.” Atvar punched up detail maps of the northwestern section of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. He hissed as he checked them. “The guerrillas in Italia give us as much trouble as armies elsewhere… and though the local king and his males loudly swear they are loyal to us, they do cooperate with the rebels. Our drives in eastern France have bogged down again-not surprising, when half the local landcruiser crews cared more about tasting ginger than fighting. We’re still reorganizing there. But from the east-something might be done.”
“I have taken the liberty of analyzing the forces we have available as well as those with which the Deutsche could oppose us,” Kirel said. “I believe we are in a position to make significant gains there, and perhaps, if all goes well, to come close to knocking the Deutsche out of the fight against us.”
“That would be excellent,” Atvar said. “Forcing them into submission would improve our logistics against both Britain and the SSSR-and they are dangerous in their own right. Their missiles, their jet planes, their new landcruisers are all variables I would like to see removed from the equation.”
“They are dangerous in more ways than that, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said quietly. “More even than the emperor-slayers in the SSSR, they have industrialized murder. Eliminating them might also eliminate that idea from the planet.”
Atvar remembered the images and reports from the camp called Treblinka, and from the bigger one, just going into operation when the Race overran it, called Auschwitz. The Race had never invented any places like those. Neither had the Hallessi or the Rabotevs. So many things about Tosev 3 were unique; that was one piece of uniqueness he wished to the tip of his tailstump that the Big Uglies had not come up with.
He said, “When we are through here, the Tosevites will not be able to do that to one another. And we will have no need to do it to them, for they will be our subjects. In o
bedience to the will of the Emperor, this shall be done.”
Along with Atvar, Kirel cast down his eyes. “So it shall. I hope two things, Exalted Fleetlord: that the other Big Uglies working toward nuclear weapons make the same error as the Deutsche, and that the disaster permanently ended the Deutsch nuclear program. Given their viciousness, I would not want to see them of all Tosevites armed with atomic bombs.”
“Nor I,” Atvar said.
XIV
Heinrich Jager gave his interrogator a dirty look. “I have told you over and over, Major, I don’t know one damned thing about nuclear physics and I wasn’t within a good many kilometers of Haigerloch when whatever happened there happened. How you expect to get any information out of me under those circumstances is a mystery.”
The Gestapo man said, “What happened at Haigerloch is a mystery, Colonel Jager. We are interviewing everyone at all involved with that project in an effort to learn what went wrong. And you will not deny that you were involved.” He pointed to the German Cross in gold that Jager wore.
Jager had donned the garishly ugly medal when he was summoned to Berchtesgaden, to remind people like this needle nosed snoop that the Fuhrer had given it to him with his own hands: anyone who dared think him a traitor had better think again. Now he wished he’d left the miserable thing in its case.
He said, “I could better serve the Reich if I were returned to my combat unit. Professor Heisenberg was of the same opinion, and endorsed my application for transfer from Haigerloch months before this incident.”
“Professor Heisenberg is dead,” the Gestapo man said in a flat voice. Jager winced, nobody had told him that before. Seeing the wince, the man on the safe side of the desk nodded. “You begin to understand the magnitude of the-problem now, perhaps?”
“Perhaps I do,” Jager answered; unless he missed his guess, the interrogator had been on the point of saying something like “disaster,” but choked it back just in time. The fellow had a point. If Heisenberg was dead, the bomb program was a disaster.
“If you do understand, why are you not cooperating with us?” the Gestapo man demanded.
The brief sympathy Jager had felt for him melted away like a panzer battalion under heavy Russian attack in the middle of winter. “Do you speak German?” he demanded. “I don’t know anything. How am I supposed to tell you something I don’t know?”
The secret policeman took that in stride. Jager wondered what sort of interrogations he’d carried out, how many desperate denials, truer and untrue, he’d heard. In a way, innocence might have been worse than guilt. If you were guilty, at least you had something to reveal at last, to make things stop. If you were innocent, they’d just keep coming after you.
Because he was a Wehrmacht colonel with his share and more of tin plate on his chest, Jager didn’t face the full battery of techniques the Gestapo might have lavished on a Soviet officer, say, or a Jew. He had some notion of what those techniques were, and counted himself lucky not to make their intimate acquaintance.
“Very well, Colonel Jager,” the Gestapo major said with a sigh; maybe he regretted not being able to use such forceful persuasion on someone from his own side, or maybe he just didn’t think he was as good an interrogator without it. “You may go, although you are not yet dismissed back to your unit. We may have more questions for you as we make progress on other related investigations.”
“Thank you so much.” Jager rose from his chair He feared irony was lost on the Gestapo man, who looked to prefer the bludgeon to the rapier, but made the effort nonetheless. The bludgeon is for Russians; he thought.
Waiting in the antechamber to the interrogation room-as if the Gestapo man inside were a dentist rather than a thug-sat Professor Kurt Diebner, leafing through a Signals old enough to show only Germany’s human foes. He nodded to Jager. “So they have vacuumed you up, too, Colonel?”
“So they have.” He looked curiously at Diebner. “I would not have expected you-” He paused, unable to think of a tactful way to go on.
The physicist didn’t bother with tact. “To be among the living? Only the luck of the draw, which does make a man thoughtful. Heisenberg chose to take the pile over critical when I was away visiting my sister. Maybe not all luck, after all-he might not have wanted me around to share in his moment of fame.”
Jager suspected Diebner was right. Heisenberg had shown nothing but scorn for him at Haigerloch, though to the panzer colonel’s admittedly limited perspective, Diebner was accomplishing as much as anyone else and more than most people. Jager said, “The Lizards must have ways to keep things from going wrong when they make explosive metal.”
Diebner ran a hand through his thinning, slicked-back hair. “They have also been doing it rather longer than we have, Colonel. Haste was our undoing. You know the phrase festina lente?”
“Make haste slowly.” In his Gymnasium days, Jager had done his share of Latin.
“Just so. It’s generally good advice, but not advice we can afford at this stage of the war. We must have those bombs to fight the Lizards. The hope was that, if the reaction got out of hand, throwing a lump of cadmium metal into the heavy water of the pile would bring it back under control. This evidently proved too optimistic. And also, if I remember the engineering drawings correctly, there was no plug to drain the heavy water out of the pile and so shut down the reaction that way. Most unfortunate.”
“Especially to everyone who was working on the pile at the time,” Jager said. “If you know all this Dr. Diebner, and you’ve told it to the authorities, why are they still questioning everyone else, too?”
“First, I suppose, to confirm what I say-and I do not know everything that led up to the disaster, because I was out of town. And also, more likely than not, to find someone on whom to lay the blame.”
That made sense to Jager; after all, he’d been trying to escape being that someone. The Wehrmacht played games with assigning responsibility for maneuvers that didn’t work, too. Another old saying crossed his mind: “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” That wasn’t true any more; these days, the powers that be launched a paternity suit to pin a failure on somebody. The results weren’t always just, but he suspected they weren’t supposed to be.
The Gestapo major came out, probably to find out why Diebner hadn’t gone in. He scowled to discover two of his subjects talking with each other. Jager felt guilty, then angry at the secret policeman for intimidating him. He stomped out of the waiting room-and almost bumped into a big man who was just coming in. “Skorzeny!” he exclaimed.
“So they dragged you into the net, too, did they?” the scar-faced SS colonel said. “They’re going to rake me over the coals even though, as far as I know, I’ve never been within a hundred kilometers of the little pissant town where the screw-up happened. Some major’s supposed to grill me in five minutes.”
“He’s running late,” Jager, said. “He just got done with me and started in on one of the physicists. Want to go someplace and drink some schnapps? Nothing much else to do around here.”
Skorzeny slapped him on the back. “First good idea I’ve heard since they hauled me back here, by God! Let’s go-even if the schnapps they’re making these days tastes like it’s cooked from potato peelings, it’ll put fire in your belly. And I was hoping I’d run into you, as a matter of fact. I’m working on a scheme where you just might fit in very nicely.”
“Really?” Jager raised an eyebrow. “How generous of the SS to look kindly on a poor but honest Wehrmacht man-”
“Oh, can the shit,” Skorzeny said. “You happen to know things that would be useful to me. Now let’s go get those drinks you were talking about. After I ply you with liquor, I’ll try seducing you.” He leered at Jager.
“Ahh, you only want me for my body,” the panzer man said.
“No, it’s your mind I crave,” Skorzeny, insisted.
Laughing, the two men found a tavern down the street from Gestapo headquarters. The fellow behind the bar wore unif
orm, as did just about everyone in Berchtesgaden these days. “Even the whores here are all kitted out with field-gray panties,” Skorzeny grumbled as he and Jager took a table in the dimly lit cave. He raised his snifter in salute, knocked back his schnapps, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s vile.”
Jager also took a healthy nip. “It is, isn’t it?” But warmth did spread out from his belly. “It’s got the old antifreeze in it, though, no doubt about that.” He leaned forward. “Before you jump on me, I’m going to pick your brain: what sort of goodies are they fishing out of that tank you stole? I want to pretend I’m still a panzer man, you see, not a physicist or a bandit like you.”
Skorzeny chuckled. “Flattery gets you nowhere. But I’ll talk-why the hell not? Half of it I don’t understand. Half of it nobody understands, which is part of the problem: the Lizards build machines that are smarter than the people we have trying to figure out what they do. But there’ll be new ammunition coming down the line by and by, and new armor, too-layers of steel and ceramic bonded together the devil’s uncle only knows how.”
“You served on the Russian front, all right,” Jager said. “New ammunition, new armor-that’s not bad. One day I may even get to use them. Probably not one day soon, though, eh?” Skorzeny did not deny it. Jager sighed, finished his shot, went back to the bar for another round, and returned to the table Skorzeny pounced on the fresh drink like a tiger. Jager sat down, then asked, “So what is this scheme you have that involves me?”
“Ah, that. You were going to be an archaeologist before the first war sucked you into the Army, right?”
“You’ve been poking through my records,” Jager said without much malice. He drank more schnapps. It didn’t seem so bad now-maybe the first shot had stunned his taste buds. “What the devil does archaeology have to do with the price of potatoes?”
“You know the Lizards have Italy,” Skorzeny said. “They’re not as happy there as they used to be, and the Italians aren’t so happy with them, either. I had a little something to do with that, getting Mussolini out of the old castle where they’d tucked him away for safekeeping.” He looked smug. He’d earned the right, too.
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