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“What the hell is going on up there?” he said, and leaned back in his chair as if he could stare through the ceiling and see not only the space station but Glen Johnson, too.
He hoped that fellow with the Southern accent had been telling the truth when he said Johnson was okay. Sam knew people didn’t stay in space longer than they were supposed to without some pretty important reason. If the man had said the weather in Kitty Hawk was lousy so Peregrine couldn’t come down on schedule, that would have been something else. But he hadn’t. He’d made it sound as if everything were routine. That worried Sam, who knew better.
After some thought, he fired up the U.S.-made computer on his desk. If he used it to ask questions about the space station, he’d trigger alarms. General LeMay’s visit had proved that. But if his security clearance wasn’t good enough to let him find out what was going on with Peregrine, he saw no point to having the miserable thing.
No, sure enough, nothing tried to keep him out of these records. But what he found there made him scratch his head all over again. Unless somebody was doing still more lying, Peregrine had landed right on schedule.
“Now what the hell does that mean?” he asked the computer. It didn’t answer. Facts it could handle. Meaning? He had to supply his own.
Was the screen lying to him? Or had Peregrine come down while Glen Johnson stayed up? If it had, how? Space wasn’t a good place for one driver to get out of a truck and another to hop in and take it on down the line.
“Space isn’t,” Sam said slowly. “But the space station is.” He looked up at and, in his mind’s eye, through the ceiling again. Some things he saw, or thought he saw, very clearly. Others still made no sense at all.
One evening, after Heinrich had gone to the cinema and the younger children were asleep, Kathe Drucker asked, “How long will you go on flying into space, Hans?”
Johannes Drucker looked at his wife in some surprise. “You never asked me that before, love,” he said. “Until they don’t want me to do it any more, I suppose, or…”
Or until I blow up, he’d started to say. He would have said it lightheartedly. Somehow, he didn’t think he could have said it lightheartedly enough to make Kathe appreciate it. Peenemunde already had too many monuments to fallen (or, more often, vaporized) heroes for that. He didn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t dwell on it and do his job. If he did go, he’d probably be dead before he knew it. That consoled him. It was unlikely to console his wife.
“Don’t you think you’ve given the Reich enough of your life?” she asked. By the look in her eye, the fallen heroes of Peenemunde were on her mind, sure enough.
“If I didn’t like what I was doing, I would say yes,” Drucker answered truthfully. “But since I do-”
Kathe sighed. “Since you do, I have to watch you go off and be unfaithful to me, and I have to hope your mistress decides to let you come back to my arms.”
“That’s not fair,” Drucker said, but he couldn’t have told her how it wasn’t. He did love-he dearly loved-riding an A-45 hundreds of kilometers into the sky. He did forsake his wife whenever he went into space. And an A-45 could indeed keep him from coming home to Kathe.
She sighed again. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “You will anyhow.”
“Let’s go to bed,” Drucker said. “Things will look better in the morning.”
After telling her no, he wondered if she’d want to have anything to do with him once they got under the covers together. But if he was willing to take chances every time he rode a pillar of fire up from Peenemunde, he was also willing to take them in the dark quiet of his own bedroom. And when, in an experimental way, he set a hand on Kathe’s hip, she turned toward him and slid out of her flannel nightgown faster than he’d imagined possible. She might have been so urgent on their honeymoon in the south of France; he wasn’t sure he could remember any time since to match this one.
“Whew!” he panted afterwards. “Call the ambulance. I think I need to go to the hospital-I’m all worn out.”
“To have your head examined, I think,” Kathe said, pressing her warm, soft length against him. “But then, you fly rocket ships, so I should have known that already.” She took him in hand. “Maybe I really can make you too tired to be able to fly. Shall I find out?”
He wasn’t sure he would rise to the occasion, but he managed. This time, he didn’t need to feign exhaustion when they finished. As he sank toward slumber, he remembered screwing himself silly in military brothels before dangerous missions against the Russians or the Lizards. Maybe Kathe was doing the same sort of thing, only worrying about his mission, not something she had to face herself.
He’d almost drifted off when he remembered something he would sooner have forgotten: a lot of the women drafted into these military brothels had been Jewesses. That hadn’t meant anything to him during his visits; they’d just been warm, available flesh back then. Once he’d buttoned his trousers and left, he hadn’t given them a second thought. Now, looking back over twenty years, he wondered how long they’d lasted in the brothels and what happened to them when they couldn’t go on any more. Nothing good-he was sure of that.
He didn’t fall asleep right away after all.
For all his doubts, for all its horrors, he still served the Reich. A few days after Kathe failed to persuade him to stop going into space, he sat in a briefing room at the Peenemunde rocket base, learning what the powers that be particularly wanted to learn from his latest missions.
“You will pay special attention to the American space station,” said Major Thomas Ehrhardt, the briefing officer: a fussily precise little man with a bright red Hitler-style mustache. “You are authorized to change your orbit for a close inspection, if you deem that appropriate.”
“Really?” Drucker raised an eyebrow. “I would love to do it-I will do it-but I have never had this sort of authorization before. Why have things changed?”
He wondered if Ehrhardt would invoke the great god Security and tell him that was none of his business. But the briefing officer answered candidly: “I will tell you why, Lieutenant Colonel. There has been unusual emission of radioactivity from the station over the past few weeks. We are still trying to learn the
reasons behind this emission. As yet, we have not succeeded. Perhaps yours will be the mission that finds out what we need to know.”
“I hope so,” Drucker said. “I’ll do everything I can.” He got to his feet and shot out his right forearm. “Heil Himmler!”
“Heil!” Ehrhardt returned the salute.
The A-45 on which Drucker rode into space carried strap-on motors attached to either side of the main rocket’s first stage. They boosted him into a higher orbit than the A-45 could have achieved by itself. Any deviation from the norm was bound to make the Lizards and the Americans suspicious (the Bolsheviks, he assumed, were always suspicious). But the Rocket Force Command must have warned the other spacefarers that he would be taking an unusual path, because the questions he got were curious, not hostile.
He enjoyed the new perspective he got on the world from a couple of hundred kilometers higher than usual. He’d seen nearly everything there was to see from the orbit Kathe normally took. The wider view was interesting. It made him feel almost godlike.
And he enjoyed the better view of the U.S. space station he got from this higher orbit. Even before he tried to approach it, his Zeiss binoculars gave him a closer look than he’d ever had. The only drawback to the situation was that, because he moved more slowly than he would have in a closer orbit, he didn’t come up to the station as often as he would have otherwise.
“Having fun, snoop?” the space station’s radioman asked as he did approach from behind.
“Of course,” Drucker answered easily. “I would even more fun have if you had pretty girls at every window undressing.”
“Don’t I wish!” the American said. “It’s supposed to be something special when you’re weightless, too, you know what I mean?”
“I have heard this, yes,” Drucker said. “I do not about it know in person.”
“Neither do I,” the radio operator said. “This is something that needs research, dammit!”
