The fife was presented to a small municipal museum named in honor of a German grand duchess. It occupied case No. 34 of the Dorotheum and lay there for another fifty-one years.
IV
The B-29s had gone. They had roared off in the direction of Rastatt.
Wolfgang Huene climbed out of the ditch. He hated himself, he hated the Allies, and he almost hated Hitler. A Hitler youth, he was handsome, blond, tall, craggy. He was also brave, sharp, cruel, and clever. He was a Nazi. Only in a Nazi world could he hope to exist. His parents, he knew, were soft rubbish. When his father had been killed in a bombing, Wolfgang did not mind. When his mother, half-starved, died of influenza, he did not worry about her. She was old and did not matter. Germany mattered.
Now the Germany which mattered to him was coming apart, ripped by explosions, punctured by shock waves, and fractured by the endless assault of Allied air power.
Wolfgang as a young Nazi did not know fear, but he did know bewilderment.
In an animal, instinctive way, he knew—without thinking about it—that if Hitlerism did not survive he himself would not survive either. He even knew that he was doing his best, what little best there was still left to do. He was looking for spies while reporting the weak-hearted ones who complained against the Führer or the war. He was helping to organize the Volkssturm and he had hopes of becoming a Nazi guerrilla even if the Allies did cross the Rhine. Like an animal, but like a very intelligent animal, he knew he had to fight, while at the same time, he realized that the fight might go against him.
He stood in the street watching the dust settle after the bombing.
The moonlight was clear on the broken pavement.
This was a quiet part of the city. He could hear the fires downtown making a crunching sound, like the familiar noise of his father eating lettuce. Near himself he could hear nothing; he seemed to be all alone, under the moon, in a tiny forgotten corner of the world.
He looked around.
His eyes widened in astonishment: the Dorotheum museum had been blasted open.
Idly, he walked over to the ruin. He stood in the dark doorway.
Looking back at the street and then up at the sky to make sure that it was safe to show a light, he then flashed on his pocket electric light and cast the beam around the display room. Cases were broken; in most of them glass had fallen in on the exhibits. Window glass looked like puddles of ice in the cold moonlight as it lay broken on the old stone floors.
Immediately in front of him a display case sagged crazily.
He cast his flashlight beam on it. The light picked up a short tube which looked something like the barrel of an antique pistol. Wolfgang reached for the tube. He had played in a band and he knew what it was. It was a fife.
He held it in his hand a moment and then stuck it in his jacket. He cast the beam of his light once more around the museum and then went out in the street. It was no use letting the police argue.
He could now hear the laboring engines of trucks as they coughed, sputtering with their poor fuel, climbing up the hill toward him.
He put his light in his pocket. Feeling the fife, he took it out.
Instinctively, the way that any human being would, he put his fingers over all four of the touch holes before he began to blow. The fife was stopped up.
He applied force.
He blew hard.
The fife sounded.
A sweet note, golden beyond imagination, softer and wilder than the most thrilling notes of the finest symphony in the world, sounded in his ears.
He felt different, relieved, happy.
His soul, which he did not know he had, achieved a condition of peace which he had never before experienced. In that moment a small religion was born. It was a small religion because it was confined to the mind of a single brutal adolescent, but it was a true religion, nevertheless, because it had the complete message of hope, comfort, and fulfillment of an order beyond the limits of this life. Love, and the tremendous meaning of love, poured through his mind. Love relaxed the muscles of his back and even let his aching eyelids drop over his eyes in the first honest fatigue he had admitted for many weeks.
The Nazi in him had been drained off. The call to holiness, trapped in the forgotten magic of Bodidharma’s fife, had sounded even to him. Then he made his mistake, a mortal one.
The fife had no more malice than a gun before it is fired, no more hate than a river before it swallows a human body, no more anger than a height from which a man may slip; the fife had its own power, partly in sound itself, but mostly in the mechano-psionic linkage which the unusual alloy and shape had given the Harappa goldsmith forgotten centuries before.
Wolfgang Huene blew again, holding the fife between two fingers, with none of the stops closed. This time the note was wild. In a terrible and wholly convincing moment of vision he reincarnated in himself all the false resolutions, the venomous patriotism, the poisonous bravery of Hitler’s Reich. He was once again a Hitler youth, consummately a Nordic man. His eyes gleamed with a message he felt pouring out of himself.
He blew again.
This third note was the perfecting note—the note which had protected Bodidharma the Blessed One fifteen hundred and fifty years before in the frozen desert north of Tibet.
Huene became even more Nazi. No longer the boy, no longer the human being. He was the magnification of himself. He became all fighter, but he had forgotten who he was or what it was that he was fighting for.
The blacked-out trucks came up the hill. His blind eyes looked at them. Fife in hand, he snarled at them.
A crazy thought went through his mind. “Allied tanks…”
He ran wildly toward the leading truck. The driver did not see more than a shadow and jammed on the brakes too late. The front bumper burst a soft obstruction.
The front wheel covered the body of the boy. When the truck stopped the boy was dead and the fife, half crushed, was pressed against the rock of a German road.
V
Hagen von Grün was one of the German rocket scientists who worked at Huntsville, Alabama. He had gone on down to Cape Canaveral to take part in the fifth series of American launchings. This included in the third shot of the series a radio transmitter designed to hit standard wave radios immediately beneath the satellite. The purpose was to allow ordinary listeners throughout the world to take part in the tracking of the satellite. This particular satellite was designed to have a relatively short life. With good luck it would last as long as five weeks, not longer.
The miniaturized transmitter was designed to pick up the sounds, minute though they might be, produced by the heating and cooling of the shell and to transmit a sound pattern reflecting the heat of cosmic rays and also to a certain degree to relay the visual images in terms of a sound pattern.
Hagen von Grün was present at the final assembly. A small part of the assembly consisted of inserting a tube which would serve the double function of a resonating chamber between the outer skin of the satellite and a tiny microphone half the size of a sweet pea which would then translate the sound made by the outer shell into radio signals which amateurs on the Earth surface fifteen hundred miles below could follow.
Von Grün no longer smoked. He had stopped smoking that fearful night in which Allied planes bombed the truck convoy carrying his colleagues and himself to safety. Though he had managed to scrounge cigarettes throughout the war he had even given up carrying his cigarette holder. He carried instead an odd old copper fife he had found in the highway and had put back into shape. Superstitious at his luck in living, and grateful that the fife reminded him not to smoke, he never bothered to clean it out and blow it. He had weighed it, found its specific gravity, measured it, like the good German that he was, down to the last millimeter and milligram but he kept it in his pocket though it was a little clumsy to carry.
Just as they put the last part of the nose cone together, the strut broke.
It could not break, but it did.
It would h
ave taken five minutes and a ride down the elevator to find a new tube to serve as a strut.
Acting on an odd impulse, Hagen von Grün remembered that his lucky fife was within a millimeter of the length required, and was of precisely the right diameter. The holes did not matter. He picked up a file, filed the old fife, and inserted it.
They closed the skin of the satellite. They sealed the cone.
Seven hours later the message rocket took off, the first one capable of reaching every standard wave radio on earth. As Hagen von Grün watched the great rocket climb he wondered to himself, “Does it make any difference whether those stops were opened or closed?”
Angerhelm
Funny funny funny. It’s sort of funny funny funny to think without a brain—it is really something like a trick but not a trick to think without a brain. Talking is even harder but it can be done.
I still remember the way that phrase came ringing through when we finally got hold of old Nelson Angerhelm and sat him down with the buzzing tape.
The story began a long time before that. I never knew the beginnings.
My job is an assistant to Mr. Spatz, and Spatz has been shooting holes in budgets now for eighteen years. He is the man who approves, on behalf of the Director of the Budget, all requests for special liaison between the Department of the Army and the intelligence community.
He is very good at his job. More people have shown up asking for money and have ended up with about one-tenth of what they asked than you could line up in any one corridor of the Pentagon. That is saying a lot.
The case began to break some months ago after the Russians started to get back those odd little recording capsules. The capsules came out of their Sputniks. We didn’t know what was in the capsules as they returned from upper space. All we knew was that there was something in them.
The capsules descended in such a way that we could track them by radar. Unfortunately they all fell into Russian territory except for a single capsule which landed in the Atlantic. At the seven-million-dollar point we gave up trying to find it.
The Commander of the Atlantic fleet had been told by his intelligence officer that they might have a chance of finding it if they kept on looking. The Commander referred the matter to Washington, and the budget people saw the request. That stopped it, for a while.
The case began to break from about four separate directions at once. Khrushchev himself said something very funny to the Secretary of State. They had met in London after all.
Khrushchev said at the end of a meeting, “You play jokes sometimes, Mr. Secretary?”
The Secretary looked very surprised when he heard the translation.
“Jokes, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of jokes?”
“Jokes about apparatus.”
“Jokes about machinery don’t sit very well,” said the American.
They went on talking back and forth as to whether it was a good idea to play practical jokes when each one had a serious job of espionage to do.
The Russian leader insisted that he had no espionage, never heard of espionage, and that his espionage worked well enough so that he knew damn well that he didn’t have any espionage.
To this display of heat, the Secretary replied that he didn’t have any espionage either and that we knew nothing whatever that occurred in Russia. Furthermore not only did we not know anything about Russia but we knew we didn’t know it and we made sure of that. After this exchange both leaders parted, each one wondering what the other had been talking about.
The whole matter was referred back to Washington. I was somewhere down on the list to see it.
At that time I had “Galactic” clearance. Galactic clearance came a little bit after universal clearance. It wasn’t very strong but it amounted to something. I was supposed to see those special papers in connection with my job of assisting Mr. Spatz in liaison. Actually it didn’t do any good except to fill in the time when I wasn’t working out budgets for him.
The second lead came from some of the boys over in the Valley. We never called the place by any other name and we don’t even like to see it in the federal budget. We know as much as we need to about it and then we stop thinking.
It is much safer to stop thinking. It is not our business to think about what other people are doing, particularly if they are spending several million dollars of Uncle Sam’s money every day, trying to find out what they think and most of the time ending up with nothing conclusive.
Later we were to find out that the boys in the Valley had practically every security agent in the country rushing off to Minneapolis to look for a man named Angerhelm. Nelson Angerhelm.
The name didn’t mean anything then but before we got through it ended up as the largest story of the twentieth century. If they ever turn it loose it is going to be the biggest story in two thousand years.
The third part of the story came along a little later.
Colonel Plugg was over in G-2. He called up Mr. Spatz and he couldn’t get Mr. Spatz so he called me.
He said, “What’s the matter with your boss? Isn’t he ever in his room?”
“Not if I can help it. I don’t run him, he runs me. What do you want. Colonel?” I said.
The colonel snarled.
“Look, I am supposed to get money out of you for liaison purposes. I don’t know how far I am going to have to go to liaise or if it is any of my business. I asked my old man what I ought to do about it and he doesn’t know. Perhaps we ought to get out and just let the Intelligence boys handle it. Or we ought to send it to State. You spend half your life telling me whether I can have liaison or not and then giving me the money for it. Why don’t you come on over and take a little responsibility for a change?”
I rushed over to Plugg’s office. It was an Army problem.
These are the facts.
The Soviet Assistant Military Attaché, a certain Lieutenant Colonel Potariskov, asked for an interview. When he came over he brought nothing with him. This time he didn’t even bring a translator. He spoke very funny English but it worked.
The essence of Potariskov’s story was that he didn’t think it was very sporting of the American military to interfere in solemn weather reporting by introducing practical jokes in Soviet radar. If the American army didn’t have anything else better to do would they please play jokes on each other but not on the Soviet forces?
This didn’t make much sense.
Colonel Plugg tried to find out what the man was talking about. The Russian sounded crazy and kept talking about jokes.
It finally turned out that Potariskov had a piece of paper in his pocket. He took it out and Plugg looked at it.
On it there was an address. Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.
It turned out that Hopkins, Minnesota, was a suburb of Minneapolis. That didn’t take long to find out.
This meant nothing to Colonel Plugg and he asked if there was anything that Potariskov really wanted.
Potariskov asked if the Colonel would confess to the Angerhelm joke.
Potariskov said that in Intelligence they never tell you about the jokes they play with the Signal Corps. Plugg still insisted that he didn’t know. He said he would try to find out and let Potariskov know later on. Potariskov went away.
Plugg called up the Signal Corps, and by the time he got through calling he had a lead back into the Valley. The Valley people heard about it and they immediately sent a man over.
It was about this time that I came in. He couldn’t get hold of Mr. Spatz and there was real trouble.
The point is that all three of them led together. The Valley people had picked up the name (and it is not up to me to tell you how they got hold of it). The name Angerhelm had been running all over the Soviet communications system. Practically every Russian official in the world had been asked if he knew anything about Nelson Angerhelm and almost every official, at least as far as the boys in the Valley could tell, had replied
that he didn’t know what it was all about.
Some reference back to Mr. Khrushchev’s conversation with the Secretary of State suggested that the Angerhelm inquiry might have tied in with this. We pursued it a little further. Angerhelm was apparently the right reference. The Valley people already had something about him. They had checked with the F.B.I.
The F.B.I. had said that Nelson Angerhelm was a 62-year-old retired poultry farmer. He had served in World War I.
His service had been rather brief. He had gotten as far as Plattsburg, New York, broken an ankle, stayed four months in a hospital, and the injury had developed complications. He had been drawing a Veterans Administration allowance ever since. He had never visited outside the United States, never joined a subversive organization, never married, and never spent a nickel. So far as the F.B.I. could discover, his life was not worth living.
This left the matter up in the air. There was nothing whatever to connect him with the Soviet Union.
It turned out that I wasn’t needed after all. Spatz came into the office and said that a conference had been called for the whole Intelligence community, people from State were sitting in, and there was a special representative from OCBM from the White House to watch what they were doing.
The question arose, “Who was Nelson Angerhelm? And what were we to do about him?”
An additional report had been made out by an agent who specialized in pretending to be an Internal Revenue man.
The “Internal Revenue agent” was one of the best people in the F.B.I. for checking on subversive activities. He was a real expert on espionage and he knew all about bad connections. He could smell a conspirator two miles off on a clear day. And by sitting in a room for a little while he could tell whether anybody had an illegal meeting there for the previous three years. Maybe I am exaggerating a little bit but I am not exaggerating much.
This fellow, who was a real artist at smelling out Commies and anything that even faintly resembles a Commie, came back with a completely blank ticket on Angerhelm.
The Rediscovery of Man - The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Illustrated Page 86
