Atlantis and Other Places

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sir,” I say, “why did the Feldgendarmerie bring me here to Lille, if not to solve a problem the local men had proved themselves incapable of dealing with? Here now I have the answer, I have the problem as good as solved, and what do I find? That no one—no one, not even you, sir!—will take me seriously. I might as well have stayed in Munich, where I could have visited my lovely and charming niece.” You see, my darling, even in my service to the kingdom you are always uppermost in my mind.

  Brigadier Engelhardt frowns like a schoolmaster when you give him an answer he does not expect. It may be a right answer—if you are clever enough to think of an answer the schoolmaster does not expect, it probably will be a right answer, as mine was obviously right here—but he has to pause to take it in. Sometimes he will beat you merely for having the nerve to think better and more quickly than he can. Brigadier Engelhardt, I will say, has not been one of that sort.

  At last, he says, “But Ade, do you not see? No one has spoken Doriot’s name. You do not know that he will be at Madame Léa’s.”

  “I know there will be some sort of subversion there,” I say. “And with Doriot in the city to spread his Red filth, what else could it be?”

  “Practically anything,” he replies. “Lille is not a town that loves the German Empire. It never has been. It never will be.”

  “It is Doriot!” I say—loudly. “It must be Doriot!” I lean forward. I pound my fist on the desk. His papers jump. So does a vase holding a single red rose.

  Brigadier Engelhardt catches it before it tips over. He looks at me for a long time. Then he says, “You go too far, Sergeant. You go much too far, as a matter of fact.”

  I say nothing. He wants me to say I am sorry. I am not sorry. I am right. I know I am right. My spirit is full of certainty.

  He drums his fingers on the desktop. Another pause follows. He sighs. “All right, Ade,” he says. “I will give you exactly what you say you want.”

  I spring to my feet! I salute! “Thank you, Brigadier! Hail victory!”

  “Wait.” He is dark, brooding. He might almost be a Frenchman, all so-called intellect, and not a proper German, a man of will, of action, of deed, at all. He points a finger at me. “I will give you exactly what you say you want,” he repeats. “You can take these men to this fortune-teller’s place. If you bring back Jacques Doriot, well and good. If you do not bring back Jacques Doriot . . . If you do not bring him back, I will make you very, very sorry for the trouble you have caused here. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir!” This is it! Victory or death! With my shield or on it!

  “Do you wish to change your mind?”

  “No, sir! Not in the slightest!” I fear nothing. My heart is firm. It pounds only with eagerness to vanquish the foes of the Reich, the foes of the Kaiser. Not a trace of fear. Nowhere at all a trace of fear, I swear it. Into battle I shall go.

  He sighs again. “Very well. Dismissed, Feldwebel.”

  Now I have merely to wait until the evening, to prepare the Feldgendarmerie men who shall surround Madame Léa’s establishment, and then to—to net my fish! You shall see. By this time tomorrow, Doriot will be in my pocket and I will be a famous man, or as famous as a man whose work must necessarily for the most part be done in secret can become.

  And once I am famous, what shall I do? Why, come home to my family—most especially to my loving and beloved niece!—and celebrate just as I hope. You are the perfect one to give a proper Hail victory! for your proud, your stern, your resolute—

  Uncle Alf

  30 May 1929

  My very dearest and most beloved sweet Geli,

  Hail victory! I kiss you and caress you here in my mind, as I bask in the triumph of my will! Strength and success, as I have always said, lie not in defense but in attack. Just as a hundred fools cannot replace a wise man, a heroic decision like mine will never come from a hundred cowards. If a plan is right in itself, and if thus armed it sets out on struggle in this world, it is invincible. Every persecution will only make it stronger. So it is with me today.

  After fifteen years of the work I have accomplished, as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower, I achieved last night a victory that confounded not only my superiors who summoned me to Lille but also the arrogant little manikins who, because they did not know what I could do or with whom they were dealing, anticipated my failure. All of them are today laughing out of the other side of their mouths, and you had best believe it!

  Let me tell you exactly how it happened.

  That fat and revolting sergeant had finally reached his post when I came out of Brigadier Engelhardt’s office. Laughing in my face, the swine, he says, “I bet the commandant told you where to head in—and just what you deserve, too.”

  “Not me,” I say. “The raid is on for tonight. I am in charge of it. After that, we’ll see who gloats.”

  He gaped at me, gross and disgustingly foolish. Such Untermenschen, even though allegedly German, are worse foes to the Kaiserreich than the French, perhaps even worse than the Jews themselves. They show the Volk can also poison itself and drown in a sewer tide of mediocrity. But I will not let that happen. I will not! It must not!

  Would you believe it, that lumpen-sergeant had the infernal and damnable gall to ask Brigadier Engelhardt—Brigadier Engelhardt, whom I protected with my own body during the war!—if I was telling the truth. That shameless badger!

  He came back looking crestfallen and exultant at the same time. “All right—we’ll play your stupid game,” says he. “We’ll play it—and then you’ll get it in the neck. Don’t come crying to me afterwards, either. It’ll do you no good.”

  “Just do your job,” I say. “That’s all I want from you. Just do your job.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says gruffly. As though he hadn’t given me cause enough for worry, God knows. But I only nodded. I would give him and his men the necessary orders. They had but to obey me. If they did as I commanded, all would be well. I could not be everywhere at once, however much I wanted to. I had discovered the foul Red plot; others would have to help snuff it out.

  When the time came that evening, I set out for Madame Léa’s. The Lille Feldgendarmerie would follow, I hoped not too noisily and not too obviously. That stinking sergeant could ruin the game simply by letting the vile Marxist conspirators spot him. I hoped he would not, but he could—and, because he was so disgustingly round, there was a great deal of him to spot.

  The church of Sts. Peter and Paul is lackluster architecturally, the house Madame Léa infests even more so. A sign in her window announced her as a LISEUSE DE PEN-SÉE, a thought-reader—and, for the benefit of German troops benighted enough to seek out her services, also as a WAHRSAGERIN, a lady soothsayer. Lies! Foolishness! To say nothing of espionage and treason!

  I knocked on the door. A challenge from within: “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I’m here for the lecture,” I answered.

  “You sound funny,” said the man behind the door—my accent proved a problem, as it does too often in France.

  “I’m from Antwerp,” I said, as I had at the pigeon-fanciers’ clubs.

  And then Lady Luck, who watched out for me on the battlefields of the war, reached out to protect me once again. If one’s destiny is to save the beloved Fatherland, one will not be allowed to fail. I was starting to explain how I had heard of the lecture at La Societé colombophile lilloise when one of the men with whom I had spoken there came up and said, “This Koppensteiner fellow’s all right. Knows his pigeons, he does. And if you think the Boches don’t screw over the Flemings, too, you’re daft.”

  That got them to open the door for me. I doffed my cap to the man who had vouched for me. “Merci beaucoup,” I said, resolving to thank him as he truly deserved once he was under arrest. But that could—would have to—wait.

  To my disappointment, I did not see Madame Léa there. Well, no matter. We can round her up in due course. But let me go on with the
story. Her living room, where I suppose she normally spins her web of falsehood and deceit, is quite large. The wages of sin may be death, but the wages of deceit, by all appearances, are very good. Twenty, perhaps even thirty, folding chairs of cheap manufacture—without a doubt produced in factories run by pestilential Jews, who care only for profit, not for quality—had been crammed into it for the evening’s festivities. About half were taken when I came in.

  And there, by the far wall, under a dingy print of a painting I suppose intended to be occult, stood Jacques Doriot. I recognized him immediately, from the photographs on file with the Feldgendarmerie. He is a Frenchman of the worst racial type, squat and swarthy, with thick spectacles perched on a pointed nose. His hair is crisp and curly and black, and shines with some strong-smelling grease I noticed from halfway across the room. I was right all along, you see. I had known it, and now I had proof. I wanted to shout for joy, but knew I had to keep silent.

  Several men, some of whom I had seen at one pigeon-fanciers’ club or another, went up to chat with him. I marked them in particular: they were likely to be the most dangerous customers in the room. Doriot took no special notice, though, of those who hung back, of whom I was one. Why should he have? Not everyone is a leader. Most men would sooner go behind, like so many sheep. It is true even amongst us Germans—how much more so amongst the mongrelized, degenerate French!

  More would-be rebels and traitors continued to come in, until the place was full. We all squeezed together, tight as sardines in a tin. One of the local men did not sit down right away. He said, “Here is Comrade Jacques, who will speak of some ways to get our own back against the Boches.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Doriot said, and his voice startled me. By his looks, he seemed a typical French ball of suet, and I had expected nothing much from him as a speaker. But as soon as he went on, “We can lick these German bastards,” I understood exactly why he has caused the Kaiserreich so much trouble over the years. Not only are his tones deep and resonant, demanding and deserving of attention, but he has the common touch that distinguishes the politician from the theoretician.

  No ivory-tower egghead he! He wasted no time on ideology. Every man has one, but how many care about it? It is like the spleen, necessary but undramatic. Theoreticians always fail to grasp this. Not Doriot! “We can make the Boche’s life hell,” he said with a wicked grin, “and I’ll show you just how to do it. Listen! Whenever you do something for those damned stiff-necked sons of bitches, do it wrong! If you drive a cab, let them off at the wrong address and drive away before they notice. If you wait tables, bring them something they didn’t order, then be very sorry—and bring them something else they didn’t ask for. If you work in a factory, let your machine get out of order and stand around like an idiot till it’s fixed. If it’s not working, what can you do? Not a thing, of course. If you’re in a foundry . . . But you’re all clever fellows. You get the picture, eh?”

  He grinned again. So did the Frenchmen listening to him. They got the picture, all right. The picture was treason and rebellion, pure and simple. I had plenty to arrest him right there for spouting such tripe, and them for listening to it. But I waited. I wanted more.

  And Doriot gave it to me. He went on, “The workers’ revolution almost came off in Russia after the war, but the forces of reaction, the forces of oppression, were too strong. It can come here. With councils of workers and peasants in the saddle, I tell you France can be a great nation once more. France will be a great nation once more!

  “And when she is”—theatrically, he lowered his voice—“when she is, I say, then we truly pay back the Boches. Then we don’t have to play stupid games with them any more. Then we rebuild our army, we rebuild our navy, we send swarms of airplanes into the sky, and we put revolution on the march all through Europe! Vive la France!”

  “Vive la France!” the audience cried.

  “Vive la révolution!” Doriot shouted.

  “Vive la révolution!” they echoed.

  “Vive la drapeau rouge!” he yelled.

  They called out for the red flag, too. They sprang to their feet. They beat their palms together. They were in a perfect frenzy of excitement. I also sprang to my feet. I also beat my palms together. I too was in a perfect frenzy of excitement. I drew forth my pistol and fired a shot into the ceiling.

  Men to either side of me sprang aside. There was no one behind me. I had made sure of that. To make sure no one could get behind me, I put my back against the wall, meanwhile pointing the pistol at Doriot. He has courage, I say so much for him. “Here, my friend, my comrade, what does this mean?” he asked me.

  I clicked my heels. “This means you are under arrest. This means I am the forces of reaction, the forces of oppression. À votre service, monsieur.” I gave him a bow a Parisian headwaiter would have envied, but the pistol never wavered from his chest.

  Indeed, Doriot has very considerable courage. I watched him thinking about whether to rush me, whether to order his fellow traitors to rush me. As I watched, I waited for the men of the Lille Feldgendarmerie post to break down the doors and storm in to seize those Frenchmen. My pistol shot should have brought them on the run. It should have, but where were they, the lazy swine?

  So I wondered. And I could see Doriot nerving himself to order that charge. I gestured with the pistol, saying, “You think, monsieur, this is an ordinary Luger, and that, if you tell your men to rush me, I can shoot at the most eight—seven, now—and the rest will drag me down and slay me. I regret to inform you, that is a mistake. I have here a Luger Parabellum, Artilleriemodel 08. It has a thirty-two-round drum. I may not get all of you, but it will be more than seven, I promise. And I will enjoy every bit of it—I promise you that, too.” I shifted the pistol’s barrel, just by a hair. “So—who will be first?”

  And, my sweet, do you want to hear the most delicious thing of all? I was lying! I held only an ordinary Luger. There is such a thing as the Artilleriemodel; it was developed after the war to give artillerymen a little extra fire-power if by some mischance they should find they had to defend themselves at close quarters against infantry. I have seen the weapon. The drum below the butt is quite prominent—as it must be, to accommodate thirty-two rounds of pistol ammunition.

  A close look—even a cursory look—would have shown the Frenchmen I was lying. But they stood frozen like mammoths in the ice of Russia, believing every word I said. Why? I will tell you why. The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one, that is why. And I told the biggest lie I could possibly tell just then.

  Nevertheless, I was beginning to wonder if more lies—or more gunshots—would be necessary when at last I heard the so-welcome sound of doors crashing down at the front and rear of Madame Léa’s establishment. In swarmed the Feldgendarmerie men! Now, now that I had done all the work, faced all the danger, they were as fierce as tigers. Their Alsatians bayed like the hounds of hell. They took the French criminals and plotters out into the night.

  That fat, arrogant Feldwebel stayed behind. His jowls jiggled like calves’-foot jelly as he asked me, “How did you know this? How did you hold them all, you alone, until we came?”

  “A man of iron will can do anything,” I declared, and he did not dare argue with me, for the result had proved me right. He walked away instead, shaking his stupid, empty head.

  And, when I return to Munich, I will show you exactly what a man with iron in his will—and elsewhere! oh, yes, and elsewhere!—can do. In the meantime, I remain, most fondly, your loving—

  Uncle Alf

  31 May 1929

  To my sweet and most delicious Geli,

  Hello, my darling. I wonder whether this letter will get to Munich ahead of me, for I have earned leave following the end of duty today. Nevertheless I must write, so full of triumph am I.

  Today I saw Brigadier Engelhardt once more. I wondered if I would. In fact, he made a point of summoning me to his office. He proved himself a true g
entleman, I must admit.

  When I came in, he made a production of lighting up his pipe. Only after he has it going to his satisfaction does he say, “Well, Ade, you were right all along.” A true gentleman, as I told you!

  “Yes, sir,” I reply. “I knew it from the start.”

  He blows out a cloud of smoke, then sighs. “Well, I will certainly write you a letter of commendation, for you’ve earned it. But I want to say one thing to you, man to man, under four eyes and no more.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say again. When dealing with officers, least said is always safest.

  He sighs again. “One of these days, Ade, that damned arrogance of yours will trip you up and let you down as badly as it’s helped you up till now. I don’t know where and I don’t know how, but it will. You’d do best to be more careful. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Do you understand even one word?”

  “No, sir,” I say, with all the truth in my heart.

  Yet another sigh from him. “Well, I didn’t think you would, but I knew I ought to make the effort. Today you’re a hero, no doubt about it. Enjoy the moment. But, as the slave used to whisper at a Roman triumph, ‘Remember, thou art mortal.’ Dismissed, Ade.”

  I saluted. I went out. I sat down to write this letter. I will be home soon. Wear a skirt that flips up easily, for I intend to show you just what a hero, just what a conqueror, is your iron-hard—

  Uncle Alf

  THE SCARLET BAND

  Here’s another tale of Atlantis for you. Any resemblance between Athelstan Helms and Sh*****k H****s is, of course, purely coincidental. I mean, it must be. This is an alternate world, one in which Sh*****k H****s never existed. There never was any such story as “A Study in Scarlet.” And there certainly wasn’t any such story as “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” C’mon. You read science fiction and fantasy, don’t you? Surely you can suspend that much disbelief—can’t you? Please? You’ve come this far. Give it a try.