Hell's Gate(42)
Wolff went on, shifting from a disarmingly calm tone of voice to distain: “Thinking always about the moon and Mars and not enough about our targets.” He continued writing in his log, speaking as he did so. “Well, I think I’ve come up with a way for you to do a bit less dreaming. You will begin serving sentry duty tonight.”
“But I’m needed here,” Voorhees protested, taking a step toward the colonel.
Sergeant Schr?dinger, who was standing immobile, uttered a menacing grunt.
Every German on the base knew it was unwise to cross Schr?dinger. His story was legendary—the first member of the SS to have been captured by the Americans, and then to have escaped from Italy back to Germany. The Aryan giant had been caught trying to blow up a floating supply bridge. He refused to answer any questions, or to provide his name—even after a frustrated American officer punched him full-force in his still-open bullet wound. According to the stories, Schr?dinger neither blinked nor winced, but merely returned the officer a half smile that sent an everlasting shiver through every man present. After his escape, he had walked all the way across the Alps from Italy, with a bullet in him—before removing it himself by making the necessary cuts and stitches, with no anesthetic.
His story had spread to the Allies as well. Their radio chatter was alive with it. “Do you think Hitler has many more like him?”
Maurice Voorhees knew there were more like him. Schr?dinger and the test pilot Hanna Reitsch and more than two million others had been carefully “civilized,” from earliest childhood and with assembly-line efficiency, on the doctrine of racial purity, and in the manifest destiny of the National Socialist Party and a new world order. The Hitler Youth had been spoon-fed, the many hundreds of thousands of them, on the furies of superior arrogance and unceasing anger, sweetened with the intoxicants of sheer sadistic pleasure, and spite for spite’s sake. Schr?dinger was the perfect end product of a meticulous program of indoctrination—a carefully manufactured instrument among millions of others within the Axis nations. He was but a single example of the most horrifying and widespread system of child abuse the world had yet seen.
“Oh, yes, there certainly were more like him,” Voorhees could tell his American adversaries. Enough of them happened to be right here, at Nostromo Base. And if asked, Voorhees could not honestly say that he was not one of them himself. He liked to think that he was basically a good man, standing above the gutter in which Kimura and Wolff were planning their bioweapons research. But while growing up, and while wondering what he might become—while asking his parents whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that he should join the Nazi Party, whether it would make them proud—he could not avoid looking back now to what his mother had always warned: “Show me the company you keep, and I’ll tell you what you are.”
Presently Voorhees tried to ignore the giant’s stare and to put away the thoughts and memories that refused to stop haunting him, until Wolff placed his logbook back into a desk drawer and locked it. The meeting or interrogation, or whatever it was, was definitely over. But instead of leaving, Colonel Wolff removed a carefully oiled and cared-for case from another compartment and from that case he withdrew a violin.
Dr. S?nger, who seemed to be working on a new record for keeping his mouth shut, chose that moment to make his escape from the hangar.
“Please close the door,” Wolff said, his voice having returned to its typical level of calm.
“Yes, of course,” S?nger called back, pulling the door quickly closed again. His escape aborted, he turned toward the towering SS sergeant. “The humidity. Of course the humidity is bad for his—”
Schr?dinger began to growl, and for the second time in as many minutes, Eugen S?nger was at a loss for words.
As the rocketeers watched, Wolff began playing. In fewer than three minutes, Voorhees and all of the rocket men had stopped what they were doing and started listening instead. The music grew louder and swooped steadily higher and faster, then swooped down again, mournfully beautiful. Voorhees looked around the room. Everyone appeared to have tears in his eyes, except for the SS giant.
The music seemed to intensify Voorhees’s ability to look beyond the Silverbirds, to the moon and the worlds that waited somewhere on the other side of this madness. “Better days are coming,” he had once told his life’s one true love. “We are, after all, the country of Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven.”
Unfortunately, his subconscious cried out to him, Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven are not running the Third Reich.
The music never did reach MacCready—at least, not the violin music.
When he opened his eyes again, Mac was unsure whether he was actually awake, or merely drifting through a concussion-induced nightmare. In either case, he was locked up in a dark cell that smelled like the receiving end of an outhouse. His arms were still bound behind his back, and he had the Headache from Hell. Then there was the man in the other cell. The annoying Boston accent had immediately pegged him as an American but the fact was, this fellow was definitely in rough shape.
“All gone, now,” the man moaned, sounding like someone who had just lost his entire family. “All except me . . . and the new guy.”
“Hey, buddy,” MacCready called out, keeping his voice as low as possible. His right temple felt as if it had been slammed by a bowling ball.
There was no reply so he tried again. “Name’s MacCready, R. J. MacCready. What’s your name?”