INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1)

by W. A. Harbinson

  ‘Wilson.’

  ‘Right. How did you know that?’

  ‘I work for General Groves, director of the Manhattan atomic bomb project, and since we’re also keen to track down the German scientists, we got in touch with OSS and found out about Wilson. Naturally we then found out, through your filed records, that Gladys had also known him, which is how I came to know Gladys.’

  ‘Wilson appears to have a talent for introducing a lot of people to one another.’

  McArthur grinned at that, then turned serious again. ‘You want Wilson in particular?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any special reason?’

  ‘I have reason to believe he’s been working on projects far more advanced than the German rocket program.’

  ‘And you think he might be trying to complete it in time to use it against the Allies?’

  ‘I’m not too sure what his intentions are, but I sure in hell want to find him.’

  ‘So why aren’t you in Europe?’

  ‘According to my controller at SOE, I’m not allowed into Europe until the Germans have practically surrendered.’

  ‘By which time Wilson, as well as a good many rocket scientists, might have disappeared or been captured by the Russians.’

  ‘Or captured by the SOE, which is what my controller wants.’

  ‘Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King?’

  ‘Right.’

  McArthur was amused. ‘A regular British public schoolboy – and pretty smart with it. Yes, he’ll want the Brits to get there first. That’s why he’s holding you back.’

  ‘Can you do anything for him, Ryan?’ Gladys asked.

  ‘Sure.’ McArthur turned back to Bradley. ‘On behalf of the director of the Manhattan atomic bomb project, I’m sending a bunch of ALSOS agents into Europe, to stick with the advancing Allied troops and go all the way with them into Germany. When I say stick with the advancing troops, I mean just that: The ALSOS agents will be with the fighting troops, right in the thick of it, to ensure that they’re present when anyone of value to us, mainly scientists, is captured. Would you like to come with us?’

  ‘Damned right, I would, Major General.’

  ‘Okay. In this matter I happen to overrule the bright son of a bitch, so I’ll get in touch with Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King and tell him I’m grabbing you.’

  ‘Terrific. When do we leave?’

  ‘This Friday. Which gives you a couple of days to tidy up here. We’ll be in touch tomorrow with details of our departure, but right now, since you two are obviously keen to be alone, I’m off in search of debauchery.’ He stood up to take his leave. ‘I’ll see you on Friday, Bradley. As for you, Gladys, I’ll see you when I see you.’

  ‘In Paris.’

  ‘Let’s hope that’s the case,’ he replied, then touched his fingers to his peaked cap in a mock salute, grinned and then made his way out of the bar, through the packed, noisy revellers.

  The drunks near the bar were now singing the maudlin ‘We’ll Meet Again,’ made famous by the British forces’ favourite lady, Vera Lynn, who certainly sang it much better. Yet the words, which Bradley already knew, struck straight to his heart.

  Another lump came to his throat when he turned back to Gladys.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all, Mike. I don’t want you to go – I want you here – but I know how important this is to you.’ She shrugged forlornly. ‘So go.’

  ‘We still have a couple of days,’ he said.

  ‘Tonight and tomorrow night,’ she corrected him. ‘You’ll be leaving on Friday. Goddammit, I think I’m gonna cry. Goddamn you, Mike Bradley!’

  She pushed her chair back, stood up, and rushed out. Bradley followed her, forcing his way through a sea of bobbing heads and flushed faces, all of which were hazed in smoke and exuding aromas of alcohol. Gladys didn’t look back, but instead hurried across the lobby and straight up the stairs. Bradley went in hot pursuit, thinking of how familiar this great hotel must seem to her, as she had now lived in it for so long. It was an odd thing to think, but it was based on pure jealousy, for he also thought of all the men she had met here throughout the war years. He felt a spasm of pain, a flash of resentment for all those men, as he hurried up the stairs. He eventually caught her in the corridor, right outside her room, and tugged her around and into his arms as she was opening the door.

  Gladys Kinder was crying.

  Bradley kissed her tears away, surprised to find himself doing so, and rocked her trembling body in his arms and eased her into the room. He kicked the door closed behind him, licked her eyelids, kissed her cheeks, stroked her spine as he kissed her on the lips, and then held her away from him. She was shaking and the tears had streaked her cheeks and made her look a lot younger.

  It was a small room and the bed was right behind her, but he didn’t know what to do.

  ‘It’s been so long,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where to begin. I’m too old for this. I don’t have the knack. I hardly know where to start.’

  Gladys smiled through her tears, wiped the tears away with one hand, tried to control her heavy breathing, and said, ‘You’ve already started, Mike, and you did it well. For God’s sake, don’t stop now.’ And she put her hands on his shoulders and pulled him to her and kissed him, then let him press her back onto the bed where it would happen or not.

  Bradley lost his senses then. That was God’s blessing upon him. He somehow managed to strip Gladys and remove his own clothes and get under the sheets of the bed without thinking about it. When they made love, which came naturally as well, they were tuned into the cosmos – and Bradley, nearly fifty years old, was returned to his youth.

  Her bed felt like home to him.

  The next day, satiated with love, Bradley reported to SOE headquarters on Baker Street, where Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King frostily informed him that orders from above had removed him from the jurisdiction of SOE and were placing him under the command of the director of the Manhattan atomic bomb project, for which he would implement Operation Paperclip immediately.

  ‘Here are your marching orders,’ Wentworth-King said, pushing across a thick envelope. ‘Good-bye and good luck.’

  That night, all night, Bradley made love to Gladys in his bed in the small apartment in Shepherd Market while doodle-bugs rained from the sky and exploded all over the city. He found new life in the midst of death, saw the light of hope in darkness, slept the sleep of the blessed, and awakened just after dawn.

  The space beside him was empty. Gladys was gone. When he went into the bathroom, he saw her message on the mirror, scrawled in lipstick in a shaky, emotional hand.

  ‘I can’t bear the thought of seeing your eyes when we have to say goodbye, so I’m saying it now. I love you. I...’

  But the writing ended there, tapering off in a jagged line, and he knew that she had then started crying and hurried from the room. He put his hand out, gently touched the lipstick, traced the words with his fingers.

  ‘Take care,’ he whispered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Wilson awakened, as he had planned, at six in the evening and found himself thinking about himself. He had slept through the afternoon because the journey to Thuringia was going to be made under cover of darkness. Now, as he lay in bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and hearing the news on the radio in the living room, doubtless turned on by Greta, he wondered if this thinking about himself, which was unusual, had been caused by the temporary change in his sleeping habits.

  He hadn't thought about himself in many years and was very surprised. He had always looked outward, not inward, and this introspection was troubling.

  He was remembering Iowa, the days of his childhood, the parents whose decency he had always viewed strictly as weakness. Now, when he closed his eyes, he saw himself as a blond-haired boy, his skin bronzed from the sun, and the sun itself an immense, silvery orb in a dazzling blue sky. He had stood alone in the field of wheat, the stalks shoulder high
around him, and looked across that yellow sea to where green fields met blue sky, then squinted into the sun’s striations, which were silvery and ravishing. He had looked but not been ravished, been blinded but not dazzled, and responded to it, even at ten years old, with one simple question:

  When would the sun die?

  That single question had turned him into a scientist. His religion became the pursuit of knowledge. He realized that the sun would die eventually, taking with it Earth’s heat and light, and that long before it happened every form of life on Earth would be extinguished. Man’s time on Earth, then, would be short if he simply followed nature’s course. Still an animal, he would die off like the dinosaurs as his lifegiving sun died. Something had to be done.

  Thus Wilson, at ten years of age, had found something to live for: the changing of man’s destiny through science and, incidentally, the creation of a new kind of man as a means of continuance.

  He had never strayed from that path.

  Even then, as a boy and adolescent in Iowa, born of religious parents but unable to accept God, he had been convinced that mankind would eventually have to leave Earth and inhabit another, less endangered planet. To do so, he would have to create an extraordinary technology; he would also have to transcend his still-primitive nature and escape the physical limitations of his weak, mortal body.

  Man would have to turn himself into a Superman and then reach for the stars.

  Now, sixty-five years later, as he sat up in the bed in his apartment in Berlin, Wilson was made aware of his own frustrating mortality, but also reminded that he had at least begun the process of turning Man into Superman.

  He had the beginnings of the technology in the shape of his flying saucer, a protected base from which to operate in Neuschwabenland, Antarctica, and a demented ideology that, if not to his personal taste, could be used to give him the work force necessary for survival in an inhospitable terrain, isolated under the ground from the rest of mankind.

  He would use Himmler’s disillusioned followers to get him to the Antarctic and there, over the years, let science gradually transform them into his kind of people: neither dedicated soldiers nor fanatical mystics, but men ruled by the desire for knowledge as an end in itself, supported by a docile work force deprived of freedom and will, and all living together in perfect, enforced harmony, well away from the corrupting influences of a still-primitive, self-destructive mankind.

  And eventually, when the technology used for the Kugelblitz saucer had advanced enough, his successors would leave the dying earth behind and fly to the stars.

  Those chosen to make that epic voyage would have to be Supermen

  – but he, who had made it all possible, would not be one of them.

  He would die before that came to be.

  Mortality was what prevented men from becoming Supermen: life was too short for real achievement. Although Wilson had begun experiments on organ replacement, prosthetics, and general longevity, and had already delayed his own death with the recent operations on his heart and stomach, he knew that the medical and surgical experimentation begun in the camps would not be advanced far enough, soon enough, to prevent him from dying of old age. Nevertheless, his successor, whomever he might be, would benefit from the experiments, and eventually the more valued members of his Antarctic colony would have a much longer life span. Because of that, they would gain the time needed for their biological and mental transformation into Supermen.

  In that sense, Wilson thought as he stood up and stretched himself, my life will not have been wasted and my death will have meaning.

  From here he could hear the radio announcer blandly informing the citizens of the Third Reich that the Allied invasion of Europe, initiated sixteen days ago with a bloody assault along more than a hundred miles of the French coast, was being successfully resisted by the valiant soldiers of the Thousand Year Reich.

  The announcer did not mention the Allied liberation of Rome, the US bombing of the Japanese mainland, the loss of the Cotentin peninsula, the increasingly hopeless position of General von Schlieben’s surrounded troops, General de Gaulle’s triumphant return to the liberated areas of France after the capture of Bayeux, General Montgomery’s inexorable advance on Caen, or the fact that only yesterday the Allies had seized two German V-I launch sites on the Cherbourg peninsula and were closing in on the historic town itself. Nor did he mention that Berlin, suffering Allied bombing raids every night, was being razed to the ground.

  He was carefully silent on those facts.

  It will soon be over, Wilson thought, no matter what we’re told. No wonder we’re fleeing to the Harz Mountains. It’s just a matter of months now...

  Not wishing to face Greta until he was ready to leave, he went straight from the bedroom to the bathroom, had his bath, dried himself and put on his civilian clothing, then returned to the bedroom. He had packed his suitcase the previous evening, when Greta was out with friends; now he pulled it out from where he had hidden it under the bed. Then, feeling little emotion, he walked into the main room.

  Greta was anxiously turning the dial on the radio, trying to pick up a British station. She was smoking a cigarette, scratching her auburn hair with her free hand, and looking as worldly as ever, though she had aged greatly recently. Since the bombs had started dropping on Berlin she had not been the same.

  Looking up when he entered the room, she saw the suitcase.

  The news on the radio was replaced by Wagner as her eyes started widening.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Wilson said, anticipating her question, ‘and I probably won’t be coming back. The apartment is yours to keep.’

  ‘What?’

  He knew she had heard him but did not want to believe him. The average person’s unwillingness to face facts had never ceased to depress him.

  ‘You heard me,’ he said, setting the suitcase on the floor and noting the shocked light in her eyes. ‘I said I’m leaving and probably won’t be coming back. However, the SS always look after their own and in this case are treating you like my wife. In other words, you can keep the apartment and they’ll provide you with a decent monthly income. They’ll soon be in touch with you.’

  She was smoking a cigarette, a habit he despised, and this time, when she sucked in the smoke, she did so as if drowning.

  ‘I'm not sure I understand,’ she said, glancing at his suitcase and letting the smoke drift out between her lips. ‘I mean, we’ve been living together for so long, and now you just...’

  ‘You always knew this would come eventually,’ he said, as he had said to so many. ‘Our arrangement was always based on the knowledge that it would end sooner or later. Now that time’s come.’

  ‘Just like that? Without warning?’

  ‘I couldn’t give you any warning. The SS swore me to secrecy. I wasn’t allowed to tell you until I was leaving – and that’s just what I’m doing.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

  ‘Believe it. It’s the truth.’

  ‘You’re going to leave me here all alone?’

  ‘I’m being moved out, with the other scientists and engineers, but I can’t tell you where.’

  ‘Why can’t I come with you?’

  ‘It’s not permitted, that’s why.’

  ‘You mean, the others are all going without their wives? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. The others are taking their wives and children. But the others are Germans married to Germans, whereas I happen to be a foreigner here by their good graces and living with a woman not my wife. I asked if I could take you along, but they refused absolutely.’

  ‘I don't believe that either.’

  ‘It’s true. And who knows their motives? This war’s coming to an end, the Third Reich’s going to fall, and when that happens, they may decide to execute me. Maybe that’s why you can’t come with me.’

  It was a deliberate lie, offered simply to keep her calm, but he knew, when he saw her brig
htening gaze, that she hadn’t believed him. She was an experienced woman, after all, particularly wise in the ways of men, and what he now saw in her normally hard eyes was a mixture of rage and fear.

  ‘So I’m just being left here?’

  ‘I repeat: you have the apartment and will get an allowance. Believe me, you’ll be better off than most. I’d count my blessings, if I were you.’

  ‘Blessings?’ she retorted. ‘Being left here in Berlin? A city being bombed night and day, and soon to be conquered! What good’s this apartment if it’s bombed? What good’s the allowance when the war is lost? What happens to me if I manage to survive the bombings, but the Russians get here first?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll do fine,’ he said. ‘You’re not a child, after all.’

  He had said something similar to that other woman – Gladys Kinder? – about twelve years ago and now, as the memory of her passed briefly through his thoughts, thus reminding him of Goddard and those early rockets in the desert, Greta’s mounting fear and rage set fire to her eyes.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ she said, sounding strangled and shaky. ‘You owe me more than this! You just can’t pack up and walk out and leave me here in this hell. You’ve got to take me with you. You’ve got to! For God’s sake, don’t leave me here!’

  ‘You’re an experienced woman,’ Wilson replied, taking note of her rising hysteria and therefore picking up his suitcase. ‘You should manage okay.’

  But she jumped to her feet, grabbed his shoulders, shook him violently, crying, ‘No, Wilson! For the love of God! I’m too old now! The Russians might… Don’t leave me, Wilson!’

  Suddenly she looked old, her face ravaged by shock and dread, and he felt disgusted by her naked, primal emotions and pushed her away from him. She stumbled back into the fireplace, shaking her head, her gaze dazed. He left without saying another word, not looking back.

  An SS car had been assigned to take him to Kummersdorf, and the driver was waiting for him when he emerged. Darkness had fallen and when the car had moved off he gazed out the window, saw the dreadful ruins and hillocks of rubble silhouetted against a starlit sky, and knew, given the clarity of the night, that the Allied planes would soon be flying overhead to drop more bombs on the city.