A Century of Progress (26 page)

Inside the cabin of the Vega, under the concealing camouflage wrap, Holly helped Norlund finish testing the intercom. Then she looked over his shoulder as his equipment brought to the little screen an image of the
Graf
, now locatable over Lake Erie and heading east. According to the latest reports from regular radio news, the zeppelin was now intending to bypass the naval airship facility at Akron, and come more or less straight on to Chicago. The weather at Chicago was reported good, and the World’s Fair presented a prime target for the German propaganda effort.

Norlund also showed Holly the other images now crossing his screen, faint poisonous-looking blurs that came and went like distant heat lightning. “There. And there.”

“What are they?”

“Hitler’s angels. I told you about them. The things that are going to try to kill us when we go up after him.”

She stared at the screen. “You’ll be able to cope with them, though?”

“I hope to hell I can. With all this stuff. I’ve spent some time in learning how to use it.”

The images seemed to fascinate Holly more than they frightened her. “Whyever should anyone in the future be that keen on defending him?”

Norlund shrugged. “I’ve not been told any definite reason for that. One idea we kick around is that eventually they mean to bring him to their time, to establish him there somehow. In the time of our grandchildren. Nice to think about, hey?”

Holly had no words with which to answer that. But it was the first time Norlund had seen her looking really ill.

Their talk necessarily soon moved on to tactics, and Norlund reiterated the obstacles before them. “Remember, just trying to ram the gasbag isn’t likely to work. There’ll be something to stop us. Even if we were ready to kill ourselves to get him.”

And Holly replied, “I remembered to bring parachutes.”

In his private car aboard the special train that was hurrying him west to Chicago, “Cactus Jack” Garner,

Vice President of the United States, was holding forth, surrounded by cigar smoke and a small crowd of his favorite reporters.

The laughter from a joke had just died down, when one of the reporters toward the rear of the huddle ventured a question: “Sir, do you think that the President is now making an attempt to avoid or delay meeting with the Chancellor?” The phrasing of the question suggested the reporter’s hope—it could not have been a very large hope—that the question would be answered with some degree of seriousness.

Garner, small blue eyes twinkling from under white brows in his preserved-red-apple face, looked at the reporter sharply. “There’s a regular meeting scheduled for next week in Washington. Don’t you boys read your own papers?”

“Yes sir, but don’t you think that perhaps the President now wishes that he hadn’t invited the Chancellor over here at all?”

“I don’t wish to speculate on the President’s thoughts in this matter, son, not even off the record.” Garner paused for thought. “Off the record, I will say that after all, Mr. Roosevelt is confined to a wheelchair. And he is very busy, and he can’t go runnin’ off all over the country after a dirigible when we don’t know for sure when or where the damned thing is going to come down. Anyway, I think this planned welcome in Chicago will certainly be diplomatically adequate, and you can quote me on that. Yours truly will be there, for whatever that may be worth. And some State Department people, and I understand Governor Homer of Illinois.”

“Unless he finds a way to get out of it,” someone mumbled. “Maybe send the Lieutenant Governor.”

That comment, if heard by the Vice President, was ignored. “And Mayor Kelly of Chicago . . .”

A reporter muttered: “
He
probably just hopes no one opens fire.” There was cynical laughter; Kelly’s predecessor as mayor had died in a burst of gunfire from a crazed assassin, while standing close to Roosevelt. Garner made a brisk gesture, declining a passing hip flask. “Boys, we can hope that the wind keeps blowin’, and carries the son of a bitch on across the country and out to sea again. And I’ll thank you for not quoting me on that!” His Texas laugh went up, leading the chorus.

In the small galley located well forward in the passenger gondola of the
Graf Zeppelin
, a young steward named Fritz was filling insulated metal jugs, one with coffee and one with hot chocolate, for a last serving to the crew before the announced landing in Chicago. The platform of the airborne
Graf
was as steady as the deck of an ocean liner in a calm sea, and the liquids poured without a splash.

Jugs filled, Fritz had to collect some mugs and put them as well on the compartmented tray. Not for the crew the fine Bavarian porcelain bearing the LZ initials of the
Luftschiffbau
Zeppelin
, from which the passengers ate and drank. These were more serviceable mugs of enameled metal, stackable so ten or a dozen could be readily carried on the tray.

Fritz in his white jacket and steward’s bow tie was only seventeen, chosen for this voyage as an exemplary specimen of Hitler Youth. Still, his hands were shaking just a little as they moved the tray. The last three or four days had been overwhelming. Not only to have crossed the ocean, but to have done so as a member of the crew of the
Graf Zeppelin
, and above all in the personal service of the Fuhrer himself . . . even now there were moments in which Fritz wondered if he was dreaming.

When the compartmented tray was ready, Fritz carried it out of the galley into a short and narrow corridor. To his left was only one door, closed now and leading outside. Through it the passengers ordinarily boarded and left the airship at the beginning and end of a voyage. Facing the steward and slightly to his right was the closed door of the passengers’ lounge-dining room, from behind which now came the murmur of voices and a burst of laughter. Shortly Fritz would be needed again in there, but right now he passed that door, turned right, and entered the radio room.

One of the two operators on watch asked for coffee, one for chocolate. The one who had his earphones on said in German: “Hey, Fritz, what do you think? I’ve got a Chicago news broadcast. Dillinger has just been shot, by the American government agents.” Everyone on board the
Graf
knew who Dillinger was, after two days of listening to American news.

Fritz paused, holding the tray. “In Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, not a bit. They shot him on the street, just as he was coming out of a movie house with his lady friend. He’s dead.” The man was smiling, but Fritz no longer thought that he was making the story up.

“And we’re going to that city,” the other operator murmured, leaning back in his chair with his headphones down around his neck. He smacked his lips a little, and the others knew that he was yearning for a cigarette. Not that there was any question of having one. Even if there hadn’t been millions of cubic feet of gaseous fuel and lifting hydrogen aboard, with the omnipresent danger of insidious leaks, the Fuhrer’s personal aversion to tobacco smoke of any kind was well known to be comparably explosive.

Out in the little corridor again, Fritz paused to listen. This far forward of the engines, the
Graf
was fairly quiet. Taking note of the muted, endless waterfall-roar of the huge twelve-cylinder Maybachs, he decided on the basis of several days’ experience that one engine was probably down for maintenance again. Still, even with only four propellors turning, the
Graf
might be able to make fifty or sixty miles an hour, given a minimum of luck with regard to wind. Fritz fully intended to be an engineer one day, and in the last few days he had chosen an engineering job on a dirigible as his ultimate goal.

The door to the chart room was only a step farther forward, and Fritz bore his tray in there. The men bent over the wide tables growled, and muttered that they were too busy to be interested in coffee. And don’t spill any of that stuff in here!

In the middle of the forward bulkhead of the chart room, another door led forward to the control car. This, on the
Graf
, was not a separate car at all. It was simply the front compartment of the single ninety-foot-long gondola that clung to the lower front curve of the enormous hull, and housed the ship’s key control functions as well as the entire passenger quarters.

The man at the wheel wanted coffee. His companion, manning the engine telegraphs, asked for chocolate. Beyond the glass panels that made up the whole curving front of the control car, the sky was sunset, with broken and scattered clouds at the level of the dirigible and higher, in several layers. They were flying at about five thousand feet, and Fritz could see yet another of the Great Lakes—this one Lake Michigan, he knew—ahead. He didn’t know whether to pass on the news about Dillinger or not, or whether these men might already have heard it. Finally he decided it would be unseemly for a Hitler Youth to appear overly excited about these foreign gangster matters, and said nothing.

Now the crew members farther aft who were not too busy had to be served as well. Fritz stopped in the galley to restock his tray, then headed aft. The commonly used way lay straight through the passengers’ dining room. He entered the dining room and would have traversed it as unobtrusively as possible, but someone called to him: “The Fuhrer would like a refill.”

Even after days of approaching Hitler closely, it was still a pulse-quickening experience. The Fuhrer was sitting now at one of the small tables in front of the portside red-curtained windows of the dining room, empty cup in front of him and sunset sky behind. Hitler wore his Bavarian sports coat of light blue linen and a yellow tie. His unique gold Party pin was prominent on his jacket.

As usual, Hitler himself was dominating table conversation. “Civilian informality is definitely best on an occasion like this,” he was saying to his companions as Fritz approached. “The Doctor”—Fritz knew that this meant Herr Doktor Goebbels—”agrees with me. Especially as we are arriving at a fair. And especially in America—ah, chocolate is here.”

As Hitler’s cup was being filled, he smiled lightly and raised his blue eyes to the steward’s face. “Thank you,” the Fuhrer said in English. He was obviously practicing a phrase for use during his visit.

Fritz spoke some English, and understood more—it was one of the things that had been taken into consideration in the selection process for the crew. He replied now in that language, as best he could: “You are velcome, my—my Leader.”

Paul Schmidt, the English-language interpreter, who was seated now at Hitler’s table, corrected the vee sound, pursing his lips and going www. Everyone at the two occupied tables had a small chuckle, except perhaps for Sepp Dietrich, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, who was looking nervous as the time for landing drew near. Sitting near Dietrich were a couple of SS adjutants who on this trip were doubling as his assistants. They looked uncomfortable in the civilian clothes that they had put on within the last hour or so. Heinrich Hoffman, the photographer, was holding his camera before him on the table, ready for a chance at an informal shot. Albert Speer, the young architect and favorite confidant of Hitler, was in conversation with Baur, the airplane pilot.

As Fritz moved away, going on about his tasks, he heard the talk behind him start up again. In German, but about America.

Passing through the remaining width of the dining room—it was only sixteen feet square in all—Fritz stepped aside for a fellow steward hurrying through the other way. Then Fritz left the room by the aft door, leading to the central passage that ran aft through the rest of the gondola’s length. This hallway too was narrow, conserving space, and lined on both sides with narrow doors. There were five small passenger cabins on each side, the Fuhrer’s being first in line on the starboard. The forward cabins were minutely larger. Toward the rear of the gondola were the washroom doors.

From inside the crew washroom at the very end of the corridor, Fritz climbed into another passage that ran back through the keel for virtually the entire length of the ship. Here the enclosure of the walkway was no more than skeletal, a spidery work of duralumin structural members. Here and there an electric light shone on cloth curtains, and on the very walls of the great cell bags of fabric and goldbeater’s skin that contained the lifting hydrogen and the gaseous engine fuel. The full length of this passage was more than seven hundred feet. But this time Fritz was going only two hundred feet or so, to the crew mess, where he set down his tray on a plain, lightweight table.

He was on his way back carrying another tray, this one loaded with dirty dishes and miscellaneous garbage, when he stopped for a small personal detour. A cramped side passage, used by men who had to go out in flight to work on a particular engine, led to a glass-windowed small door. Inside this door Fritz crouched, pressing his face against the cool glass, looking out at the curve of hull and the engine pod outlined against a darkening sky. The pod, reached by a spidery catwalk, was mounted on long struts that held it some yards from the hull, giving the long propellor—idle now—plenty of room to spin. He couldn’t see the man working inside the pod, but the small hatch on the side of it was open. Fritz looked forward to being allowed out there some day.

Below was all water now, the ocean-like expanse of Lake Michigan sinking into the shades of night. Above, the great round of the dirigible’s hull cut off the higher sky. Along the curve of silvery-gray fabric Fritz could ‘see only a fringe of the uppermost layer of broken clouds on which the sun still shone.

What wonderful things, he thought, I am going to be able to write in my next letter home. And when I get home again, what things I will have to tell . . . He thought for a long moment about a certain girl, and about the long time that he was going to arrange, one way or another, to spend with her when he got home.

How marvelous, Fritz thought, is the world. Especially, above all, now in the New Age to which the Fuhrer leads us . . .

Not far ahead now, though still invisible, lay Chicago. He hoped for some time off in which to see the Fair, and the great and mysterious and dangerous city. In large part it must be a mixture of inferior races. And of course a city of gangsters, but they were never to say that to anyone, of course, while they were there. Even if Dillinger . . .