What he had not told Schriever, and was not about to, was that he knew how to solve the problem of the boundary layer: by using a kind of porous metal similar to that which he had created so many years ago. Undeterred by the previous disaster and now with vast technical and human resources he had not had before, he knew that he would soon meet with success. Tentatively named Luftschwamm, or aero-sponge, and essentially a combination of magnesium and aluminium, his unique metal was being created under his personal guidance in the research plants of distant Gottingen and Volkenrode. When completed, it would be used only for the flying saucer that he intended to construct without Schriever’s knowledge. As for Schriever’s Feuerball and flying saucer, they would fly well enough to keep him and Himmler happy – but that's all they would do.
Approaching the outskirts of Berlin, he looked into the evening darkness and was surprised to see a red glow in the sky above the rooftops of different areas of the city. The glowing pulsated and shifted, here and there obscured by smoke, became a deepening, eerie crimson as he came closer to it. The city’s in flames, he thought, rolling his window down, smelling smoke. As he drove on toward home, he realized that it was the Kürhessen district, where he now lived, that was aflame.
He heard the breaking of glass, screams and shouts, then more glass breaking and raining upon stone, obviously the pavements.
Shop windows were being smashed.
Instantly alert, he drove into the Kürhessen district and was surprised, at this late hour, to see the streets packed with people. A nearby synagogue was on fire, and the crimson and yellow light of the flames illuminated a nightmare. Fashionable, middle-class people were clapping and cheering as roaming gangs of youths beat Jews senseless with lead piping, smashed the windows of their shops, and strewed their possessions along the gutters, while Storm Troopers looked on smiling, when not actually joining in. Broken glass was everywhere, glittering in moonlight and crimson glare, splashed with the deeper crimson of human blood, spreading over the road. Another Jew screamed and was beaten down by swinging lead pipes as more women applauded.
Wilson kept driving.
It was a hellish, dangerous business, with violence and destruction all around him. He drove past more burning synagogues, more gangs of youths in pursuit of Jews, was waved on by exultant Storm Troopers. The air was filled with thickening black smoke, illuminated by flames, rang with desperate cries. He heard gunshots, more smashing glass, screams and oaths. As he turned off the main road, away from a blazing shopfront, he passed a gang of youths who were beating a bearded old man with wooden poles. Women were wailing as their husbands and children were kicked and battered. Then eventually he found himself outside the apartment building where he lived quietly with Greta.
He climbed out, locked the door of the car, and noticed that a black SS car was parked a few doors farther along. He also noticed that a lot of neighbors were talking excitedly to one another. He hurried inside as another gang of youths came running along the street, filled with blood lust and bawling excitedly.
Animals, Wilson thought. Civilization is a sham. We are still protecting our caves. Thank God, in whom I do not believe, that science will change all this.
When he let himself into his apartment, Greta was gazing down through the window.
Beside her was the recently promoted SS Captain Ernst Stoll, also gazing down at the street below, his face handsome and solemn.
They both turned to look at Wilson, then Greta hurried forward, kissed him on the cheek, and stepped back again.
‘Thank God you weren’t hurt,’ she said. ‘We were worried about you.’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m fine... But what’s going on?’
‘I believe it was – ’
‘The recent murder of Counselor Ernst von Rath,’ Stoll explained, ‘has led to anti-Jewish riots here and in the Magdeburg-Anhalt district.’
Wilson was surprised to find Stoll there, as he hadn’t seen the captain for many months. Obviously the recent assassination of the German Foreign Office official in Paris by a demented young Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, had been used as yet another excuse to arouse more anti-Semitic feelings. Wilson said, ‘I suspected that Rath’s death would lead to trouble, but these riots seem...’
‘Yes,’ Stoll said with a thin smile, ‘organized. With the assistance of the Storm Troopers and SA – since our beloved Führer has declared that the riots, now spreading throughout the country, should not be discouraged. Taking the Führer at his word, Goebbels has ordered a pogrom, and right now, with the aid of the SD, SA, and SS, hundreds of Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues throughout Germany are being set to the torch and the Jews themselves, after public humiliation and abuse, are being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. A night to remember, yes?’
Ignoring Stoll’s dry mockery, Wilson went to the window and looked down on the street where, in the lamplight, an unfortunate Jew was being tugged by his beard along the road by a laughing Storm Trooper while a gang of youths spat upon him, kicked him, and took punches at him.
Wilson, though feeling nothing for the Jew, had no respect for the youths.
‘Animals,’ he said, putting his thoughts into words. ‘We’re still as mindless as savages.’
‘You see cruelty down there, Herr Wilson?’
‘I just see wasted energy.’
When he turned away from the window, Stoll was smiling sardonically. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘you have no time for human emotions. You prefer the intellect, the calmly reasoning mind, the cold light of pure thought.’
‘That’s correct,’ Wilson said, ignoring Stoll’s soft sarcasm. ‘Most human emotions are primitive impulses. I prefer science, unimpeded by human weakness.’
‘You love science — and love is an emotion.’
‘No, Captain Stoll, I don't love science. In fact, I respect it. Only science can lead us away from the caves and into our destiny.’
‘Which is?’
‘Knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The evolution of reason.’
‘Naturally,’ Stoll said. ‘You’re the most ruthless man I’ve ever met
– and I’ve met a few. You are made of ice, Wilson.’
So Stoll, though no longer shocked by the gross behaviour of his military friends, nevertheless could still be shocked by his unyielding single-mindedness. Wilson recognized that far from being the cynic he pretended, Stoll was in fact a disillusioned romantic of the most impressionable kind.
This one I can use, he thought. ‘I haven’t seen you for a long time,’ he said. ‘Not since you were shipped to the Antarctic. What are you doing here?’
‘Because of my services in the Antarctic, I’ve been placed in charge of your research institute at Kummersdorf. In future, therefore, you will report directly to me, since I, and not Flugkapitän Schriever, will act as your channel to Himmler.’
Secretly pleased to hear this, Wilson took care not to show it, and simply said, ‘You didn’t come here to tell me that, so why did you come?’
‘I want to show you the state of Germany,’ Stoll said. ‘The country you work for. I want to know what you think of it. Are you willing to come with me?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that an order?’
‘This is the night of breaking glass, Herr Wilson, and I want you to see it. No, it’s not an order – it's a suggestion. This is a night to remember.’
Wilson grinned, knowing he was being tested, then nodded agreement. ‘All right, I’ll come.’
‘I want to come as well,’ Greta said. ‘I don’t want to be left here.’
There were screams and shouts from outside, then the sounds of more breaking glass. Wilson glanced at the window, then at Greta, and saw the excitement in her hard eyes.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Why miss such an experience? Let’s all go right now.’
The gang of violent youths had disappeared from the street, leaving the bloody man groaning in the gutter. Many stolid ci
tizens stared on from their doorways without coming forward to assist him. As Stoll stepped out of the doorway, the black SS car that Wilson had noticed earlier pulled up to them and stopped to let them get inside. When they were seated, with Stoll up front beside the driver, the car moved off smoothly.
It was a journey through hell.
Stoll made the driver take them through the riot-torn city, first through their own district, which was burning and wreathed in smoke, then to the Magdeburg-Anhalt district where the broken glass glittered in the moonlight around a great many broken, bloody bodies and the debris from looted shops. The assaults were continuing. People ran to and fro, some laughing, others screaming. Applause drowned out cries of terror. The synagogues they passed were on fire and collapsing in showers of sparks. From there they drove to the train station and went inside. Stoll led them to the platforms where hundreds of frightened Jews were being herded onto the trains that would take them away.
‘To where?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘The concentration camps,’ Wilson said.
‘Correct,’ Stoll said. ‘The concentration camps. Now let’s see something else.’
He was like a man obsessed, wanting to plumb the depths of horror, but Wilson saw where the real horror lay – not outside, but within. He saw it in Greta’s excitement when she watched the beatings and humiliations, in the revulsion that Stoll could not hide when he saw the same sights, in the dread that started filling Stoll’s gaze when he saw Wilson's indifference.
Finally, in the SS hospital on the outskirts of Berlin, in the laboratories and operating theatres where the human experiments were conducted, Wilson saw Stoll looking at him, trying to search for a weakness. He merely nodded, quite deliberately, in his most thoughtful manner, and said, while casting his gaze over the tortured people on the tables, ‘It’s good that there are many more where these came from. The experiments on longevity and other matters will take lots of time.’
Stoll practically stepped away from him, as if touched by scorching heat. ‘And that’s all you see here, Wilson? This is nothing but meat?’
‘We are merely the creatures of evolution,’ Wilson said, ‘and as such, we each have our part to play. Life is nature’s experiment. The whole world is nature’s laboratory. Those who will be used, will be used – and those, such as myself, who must use them, can do so without guilt. This human flesh is the material of evolution, like burnished steel and gunpowder. It is here to be used.’
Stoll didn’t reply. He simply glanced at the silent Greta and saw the excited gleam in her whore’s eyes. Then he drove them back to Berlin, through the now eerily deserted and smoke-filled streets of K
ü rhessen, with its broken windows and looted shops and burned synagogues and crumpled, dead Jews. Only then, just before Wilson entered his apartment, did Stoll blurt out, ‘You’re a monster!’
‘No,’ Wilson replied, knowing that he had won and that he would be able to manipulate Stoll in the future. ‘I’m just a man with a mission.’
Then he closed the door and turned into Greta.
‘More semen,’ he whispered.
CHAPTER NINETEEN The three troop trucks rumbled through the streets of Cracow, Poland, just before midnight. Sitting up front in the second truck, watching its headlights illuminating the falling snow and the helmeted heads of the soldiers in the truck ahead, Ernst was suffering from his familiar mingling of excitement and angst. The white streets were deserted, like those in a troubling dream, and the headlights of the trucks were beaming off the closed doors and shuttered windows of the houses in this old part of the city. Ernst thought of the residents cowering inside, praying that the roaring trucks would not stop outside their own homes. The thought made him smile grimly.
‘If this keeps up,’ he said, ‘Cracow will soon be a ghost town.’ ‘I doubt it,’ Lieutenant Franck Ritter replied, moving the automatic weapon propped up between his knees and adjusting his black SS jacket. ‘The damned Jews breed like lice and replace themselves as fast as we can get rid of them. We could be doing this forever, Captain, and there’d still be too many left.’
‘But we’re not after the Jews tonight,’ the more concerned Lieutenant Willi Brandt said behind them. ‘This area we’re cleaning out is inhabited by ordinary Poles.’
‘They’re all vermin to me,’ Ritter replied with a humourless, wolfish grin, ‘so I’ll enjoy what I’m doing.’
‘You always do,’ Ernst said dryly.
Ritter was about to make a retort, but was distracted when the trucks ground to a halt with a squealing of brakes. Familiar with the routine, Ernst’s troops jumped out of the back without waiting for his command and were already spreading out along the lamplit street and hammering noisily on the doors of the houses with the butts of their rifles when Ernst jumped down to the road, followed immediately by the enthusiastic Ritter.
Shocked by the sudden cold, Ernst cursed softly to himself, then hurried along the road, barking orders at his men and reminding them that no violence was to be used unless resistance was offered. His men were bawling at those inside and still drumming on the doors with their rifle butts, then someone remembered to turn on the trucks’ sirens. That ghastly noise, added to the rest of it, made the bedlam more frightening.
Lights came on behind many windows, the wooden doors creaked open, then wails of protest merged with the bawling of the troops as they entered the buildings.
When the door of his chosen apartment block had been opened, Ernst, with a reluctant Willi Brandt and grinning Franck Ritter, followed his troops inside.
This raid was on a street located near the university and containing select residential buildings, so Ernst was not surprised to find himself in an elegant hallway, with deep carpeting on the floor and what looked like antique paintings on the walls. The door had been opened by the residents of the nearest ground-floor apartment: an elderly couple, both wearing expensive dressing gowns and looking frightened. When the soldiers had parted to let Ernst walk through, he stopped in front of the couple, gave the Nazi salute and ‘Heil Hitler!’, then said, ‘We are requisitioning this building in the name of the Third Reich. Please pack whatever belongings you can fit into one suitcase each and then enter one of the trucks parked outside. The soldiers at the door will assign you to a truck and you’ll come to no harm if you don’t resist. Now please do as you're told.’
The old woman burst into tears. Her husband looked stunned. ‘You cannot – ’ he began, trying to rally his senses. ‘I will not permit – ’
Ritter stepped forward and smartly slapped the man across the face. ‘You’ll do as you’re damned well told,’ he said grimly, raising his submachine gun, ‘or pay the price, you old goat. Now go and fetch your suitcases.’
The woman sobbed even louder, but tugged her husband back into the room while the soldiers, at a nod from Ernst, hurried up the stairs to force the other residents out. Hearing the drumming of rifle butts on doors, the soldiers bawling, women shrieking and sobbing, Ernst stepped up to Ritter, stared grimly at him, and said, ‘Don’t you ever dare do anything like that again without my permission!’
Ritter flushed with anger. About to make an angry retort, he glanced blindly at the embarrassed Willi Brandt, but then changed his mind and grinned crookedly instead..
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, clicking his boot heels in mock obedience.
Ernst turned away from him, went back outside, and saw that residents of the other two buildings were already being led out into the road. Most were carrying suitcases. The men looked shocked and confused, some women sobbed, the children seemed dazed, as all were urged up into the back of the trucks. Satisfied that the operation was proceeding in an orderly fashion, he went back inside just as Willi Brandt, who would never make a good soldier, walked into the first ground-floor apartment, looking pale and distraught. Ernst went to the doorway, looked in, and saw that Willi had stopped in front of the two old people. Instead of packing, they were holding one another on the sofa, the man t
rying to comfort his wife as she sobbed into his shoulder.
‘You’re not in danger,’ Willi was saying. ‘You won’t be harmed, I promise you. You’ve committed no offence and are simply being rehoused. Wherever you go, you will not be harmed. It’s unfortunate, but at least you’re in no danger, I can promise you that. Now, please, before you make someone angry, pack your suitcases.’
Ernst wanted to laugh at Willi’s naive assertion that the old people would not be harmed, for he knew that they were merely another two of the estimated one million Poles who had so far been expelled from their homes to make way for the Germans from the Baltic and outlying regions of Poland. True enough, they would not necessarily be killed outright; but it was from such unfortunates that Ernst would be selecting the men, women, and children who would be used as slave labour in the underground weapons research factories of the Third Reich, as guinea pigs in the so-called anthropological medical experiments that Himmler and the icy American, Wilson, were hoping would lead to the secrets of longevity, or as prisoners branded fit enough to be shipped secretly to Neuschwabenland in the Antarctic where, under the most appalling conditions, they would help construct Himmler's SS base under the ice and snow.
However, as this particular couple were too old to be of much use in any way, they would almost certainly end up in a concentration camp, which they would be unlikely to survive.
Still, Brandt's well-intentioned remarks did the trick. Upon hearing them, the old woman actually managed to stop sobbing long enough to whisper, ‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ and then lead her husband into the bedroom to start packing their suitcases.
‘You’re too kind for your own good, Lieutenant Brandt,’ Ernst said laconically, thus making an embarrassed Brandt turn around to face him. ‘Some day that kindness will be misconstrued as weakness – and you might pay the price for that.’
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 21
