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Rather to his own surprise, Drucker nodded. “That’s true, sir. Only a consolation prize, though.”
“Yes, I understand as much,” Dornberger said. “But there are people in Nuremberg who are not at all fond of you. That you have come away with a consolation prize is in a way a victory. It is for you now as it was for the Reich and the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of the fighting: we kept what we had, but had to yield what we were not directly holding.”
“And we have been plotting ever since to see what sort of changes to that arrangement we can make,” Drucker said. “Very well, sir, I will accept this for now-but if you think I will stop trying to change it, you are mistaken.”
“I understand. I wish you all good fortune,” Major General Dornberger said. “You may even succeed, though I confess it would surprise me.”
“Yes, sir. May I please have the report back?” Drucker said. Dornberger pushed it across the desk to him. Drucker took a pen from his breast pocket and filled out the space on the form reserved for the evaluated officer’s comments with a summary of the reasons he thought the report inadequate. Nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that section of the form stayed blank even on the worst fitness reports. It was universally regarded as being the space where an officer could give his superiors more rope with which to hang him. Having already been hanged, Drucker did not see that he had anything left to lose.
When he finished, he passed the report back to Major General Dornberger. The base commandant read Drucker’s impassioned protest, then scrawled one sentence below it. He held up the sheet so the A-45 pilot could see: I endorse the accuracy of the above. W.R.D.
That took nerve, especially in view of the pressure to which he’d partially yielded when he wrote the fitness report. “Thank you, sir,” Drucker said. “Of course, most likely the report will go straight into my dossier with no one ever reading it again.”
“Yes, and that may be just as well, too,” Dornberger said. “But now you are on the record, and so am I.” He glanced toward a framed photograph of his wife and children on his desk, then added, “I wish I could have gone further for you, Drucker.”
He said no more, but Drucker understood what he meant. If he hadn’t yielded to at least some of the pressure, he might never have seen his family again. Even major generals could prove little more than pawns in the game of power within the Reich. Drucker sighed again. “It shouldn’t be this way, sir.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t, but it is. Sometimes we do what we can, not what we want.” Dornberger took out another cigar. “Dismissed.”
“Heil Himmler!” Drucker said as he rose. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth. He saluted and left the commandant’s office.
Outside the office, outside the administration building, Peenemunde bustled on as it had for the past twenty years and more. A breeze blew in from the Baltic, full of the odors of mud and slowly spoiling seaweed. Somewhere along the barbed-wire perimeter of the base, a guard dog yelped excitedly. It was, Drucker knew, more likely to have seen a stray cat than a spy.
Everything at Peenemunde was camouflaged as well as German ingenuity could devise, not so much against spies on the ground as against satellite reconnaissance. Many of the buildings weren’t buildings at all, but dummies of cloth and boards. Some of those even had heaters burning inside, to make them appear as they should to infrared detectors. And all the real buildings were elaborately disguised to seem like nothing but pieces of landscape overhead.
In a way, all that ingenuity was wasted. If the Lizards-or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks or the Americans-ever decided to attack Peenemunde, they weren’t likely to be clinical about it. An explosive-metal bomb would wreck camouflaged and uncamouflaged alike… although some of the reinforced-concrete installations underground would stand up to anything but a hit right on top of them.
Drucker shook his head. Everything here was as it had been. Only he’d changed. No, even he hadn’t changed. It was only that the Reich had just told him his adult lifetime of service to his country didn’t amount to a pile of potatoes. That hurt. He’d never dreamt how much it would hurt.
Officers of junior grade and enlisted men still stiffened to attention and saluted as he went past. They didn’t notice any changes: as far as they were concerned, a lieutenant colonel remained a figure of godlike authority. His mouth twisted. Eventually, he would be saluting some of them, for his place in the firmament was fixed now, while they might keep on rising.
Drizzle started falling, which perfectly suited his mood. He strode on through the base. A couple of A-45s stood at their gantries, in different stages of preparation for launch. Drucker nodded toward them. They were, in a way, the only friends he had left at Peenemunde. Major General Dornberger’s fitness report, as the commandant pointed out, did leave him clear to keep going into space. That was something: less than he would have liked, but something.
He gave the immense rockets another nod. In an odd way, they looked less futuristic than the old A-10s-vengeance weapons, Hitler had called them. A-10s had had the sharp noses and graceful curves everyone in the pre-Lizard days had thought necessary for rocket ships. The A-45s were simple cylinders, the upper stages as blunt-nosed as Bavarians. Blunt noses had more area with which to absorb the heat of atmospheric friction; cylinders were easier and cheaper to manufacture than the fancier chunks of sheet metal that had flown in the early days.
Drucker sighed. Here as elsewhere, reality proved less romantic than dreamers had thought it would be. He shook his head. Maybe things would have been better had the Lizards never come. With the Russians beaten and rolled back across the Urals, the Reich would have had all the Lebensraum it needed to show what it could do in Europe. Maybe he and Kathe and the children, instead of living near here, would be growing wheat or maize on the boundless plains of the Ukraine today.
A moment later, the daydream turned to nightmare. The SS could have plucked her off the plains of the Ukraine as readily as from Greifswald. As a simple farmer, he wouldn’t have had friends in high places. They’d have shot her or thrown her in a gas chamber. He’d kept that from happening in the real world. If he was upset at the fitness report’s wrecking his chances for further promotion, how would he have felt with Kathe liquidated?
That thought spawned another one, a blacker one. Liquidating Kathe for having a Jewish grandmother struck Drucker as outrageously unjust, but that was because he knew her and loved her. What about other people with one Jewish grandparent? Was liquidating them just? What about people with two Jewish grandparents? What about people with three? With four? What about people who were out-and-out Jews?
Where did you draw the line?
The Reich drew it at one Jewish grandparent. That left Kathe in danger and her children safe. Drucker hadn’t been able to see the sense in it. Would there have been more sense in drawing it at two Jewish grandparents? That would have left Kathe safe, but… Was there any sense in liquidating anybody because he was Jewish or partly Jewish?
The Reich thought so. Up till the trouble over Kathe, Drucker hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. Now… Now he remembered that Colonel Heinrich Jager, for whom his elder son was named, for whom he’d helped murder a couple of SS Schweinhunde, had never had anything good to say about such massacres.
He’d helped Jager disappear into Poland with that pretty Russian pilot, and never heard of or from him since. Now, solemnly, he turned to the east-the southeast, actually-and saluted. “Colonel,” he said, “I think you may have been smarter than I was.”
Fotsev strode into the administrative offices of his barracks complex. A clerk looked up from his computer screen. “Name and pay number?” the male asked. “Purpose for coming here?”
“Purpose for coming here is to report before commencing three days’ leave, superior sir.” Fotsev put what was uppermost in his mind first. That done, he gave the clerk his name and the number that separated him from every other Fotsev ever hatched.
After entering the name and pay number into the computer, the male gave the affirmative hand gesture. “Your leave is confirmed: three days,” he said. “Will you be going into the new town?”
“Of course, superior sir,” Fotsev answered. “I have been away from Home, and from the way life was on Home, for a very long time now. I look forward to being reminded of it. From what other males have said, the new town is the best antidote possible for the mud and the stinks and the mad Tosevites of Basra.”
“I have heard the same,” the clerk said. “My leave time has not yet come, but it is approaching. When it arrives, I too shall go to the new town.” He pointed out the door. “The shuttle bus leaves from there. It should arrive very soon.”
“I thank you.” Fotsev knew where the shuttle bus left. He knew when, too. With barracks cleverness, he had timed the beginning of his leave to spend as little time as he could manage waiting for transportation.
As usual, the bus rolled up on time. Had it been late, he would have suspected Tosevite terrorism. Being late through inefficiency was a failing of the Big Uglies, not the Race. Fotsev and a small knot of similarly canny males waited for the fellows returning from leave to descend, then filed aboard.
With a rumble, the bus-of Tosevite manufacture, and so noisy and smelly and none too comfortable-rolled off down the new highway leading southwest. Big Ugly farmers grubbing in their fields would sometimes look up as it passed. Before long, though, it left the region river water irrigated and entered more barren country that put Fotsev in mind of Home. The plants that did grow here were different from the ones he’d known before going into cold sleep, but not all that different, not from the window of a bus.
He twisted, trying to find as comfortable a position as he could. After a while, he wrestled a window open, and sighed with pleasure as the mild breeze blew across his scales. This was the weather the Race was made for. With the Big Uglies and their noxious city and their even more noxious habits and superstitions fading behind him, he was ready to enjoy himself until he had to return to unpleasant, mundane duty.
