Astronomy (5 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
She looked at him, going,
What? What was that?
“I need your help.” He steadied the giant key in its gearbox. He pressed his shoulder beneath the lever to show her what he required of her. “This is too much for one person alone.”
Susan started up the stairs for daylight. She didn’t even think about it. Malmagden was strong, but she was quick. She figured she’d be gone while he was still thinking it over. She reached the grate and pushed. It gave easily. She glanced back once, just to see where he was.
Malmagden stood down by the water locks, where she’d left him. “I am not going to chase you,” he said. “If you wish to leave”—he flung his hand up at the surface—“go.”
That was all the encouragement she needed.
“One thing?
Bitte?
”
He nodded for her to look out into the tunnel. A series of bridges branched off from the elevated walkway. Next bridge over, she saw Malmagden’s guard. No mistaking them out here. When they stretched to their full height, they must’ve been over seven feet tall. Three of them were bearing packages. They held their loads high overhead, so that she could see them clearly.
“You need to understand,” Malmagden said. “From an intellectual viewpoint as well as an emotional one.”
“What is that? What are you doing?”
She found herself coming down the stairs. Some little voice inside her told her she was making a mistake. She had no doubt it was right.
“We operated our
Totenstürm
program for a year with little success,” he said. “However, as the Russians closed in on Berlin, one of Zentralbund’s scientists began reviving our dead heroes with a new necrolophagic agent. This last batch spreads logarithmically, through direct contact. Do you understand? One dead man kills a living man, and then you have two walking dead. And so on. It received limited battlefield exposure, but the results were spectacular. Spectacular and dreadful. If this particular
Totenstürm
group actually reach the surface of Berlin, they could sweep across Europe like a new plague.”
She hardly heard what he was saying. Her eyes were on Malmagden’s guard. “What have they got in their hands?” she demanded. Somehow though, she already knew. Schopenhauer was holding one of her
Volksstürm
guards over his head, like a squirming, crying bag of kittens.
He waited just long enough to draw the attention of a hundred dull eyes. The crowd of zombies converged directly below the bridge. Susan remembered ants at a picnic finding a droplet of Coca Cola drying in the sun.
Schopenhauer walked up and down the bridge with his pathetic load, teasing the bloodlust of the dead into high frenzy. When they were leaping and swiping their hands at him, Schopenhauer flung the boy into their midst. The one she called Crosby went right after him.
Alexander Schoenberg had just enough life in him to grab at the handrail as he fell past. It took a moment of prying and biting before Hegel got his hand loose.
Susan saw the darkness come to life around the three of them. She saw small, unidentifiable body parts appear momentarily, and then swirl away on the sea of arms.
A long wail of excruciation preceded a loop of intestine. It spurted up through the heads, caught about necks, wrapped over shoulders. The screaming stepped up a notch, and then another.
Malmagden stepped aside to let her leave. “Go,” he said. “Make your way back home.”
“You son of a bitch! I swear to Christ, I’ll find you—”
“All those children and old people down here—this is how they will die. This is how many of them are dying at this moment. Help me now. Before this horror is compounded a thousandfold.”
The screaming went on and on. Susan thought they would die within a few moments, but the dead were hungry, or clumsy, or too stupid to know they were eating the flesh of live human beings.
One of her former guards was saying something—pleading in a loud voice. He was begging for one of them to find a gun.
“Bastard,” she wept.
“Bastard.”
Malmagden wedged his shoulder close to the head of the wrench. He put a hand over it, to steady the drive as they both leaned into it.
The screaming became a chorus. She recognized the voice of Schoenberg. She took her place behind Malmagden. She could hardly see for the tears in her eyes.
The valve looked untouched and rusted over, but no—she rammed her shoulder into it once, twice, and water began roaring beneath her feet. It turned with surprising ease.
How many thousands of gallons per second? It spread in a wide green wall that washed all the horror down the sewer, out of sight.
Abruptly, the screaming ceased. The lowing of the dead went on another moment or two, and then they disappeared into the darkness.
Malmagden looked on as his army was swept off into the sewer system. He shook his head in amazement. “They don’t even know they’re drowning,” he said.
“What makes you sure they are drowning?” It occurred to her to ask—just how does one kill a dead man?
“Oh, they don’t like water,” Malmagden assured her. “Don’t like water at all.” He shook his head. He smiled a wistful smile. “They would have made a fantastic weapon of defense. Unlike Herr Kriene and his astronomical phantoms, my dead would have been simple and cheap. Perhaps they lacked something in fine controllability, but if we’d had time . . .” Malmagden sighed. “If only we’d had time.”
He stepped out from under the key. It slipped easily toward its shutoff position.
Susan found herself staring. He had to pull the key out of the gearbox before it slumped all the way down and closed off the valve.
Malmagden looked at her. He frowned, as if surprised she should notice anything wrong. She pressed her thumb against the gear where the key had just been. It moved easily to the pressure of her thumb.
She removed her thumb, and it was covered in fresh grease.
A sick, cold feeling gripped the bottom of her stomach. She looked at Malmagden. She couldn’t even ask—what is this?
What have you involved me with?
Malmagden had lost some of that silken demeanor. He would not meet her gaze. That worried her.
“I did not lie to you about the most important thing,” he said. “The dead would have multiplied in horrendous fashion. Had they reached the surface, the world would have been transformed.”
“And you would have been to blame.”
“You and I performed a terribly cruel responsibility. You should take some comfort in that.”
“
‘You and I,’
” she said. “You talk like we’re partners.”
“Oh, but we are. Ask any prosecutor at the coming war crimes tribunal. They would tell you as much.”
She reached for the key. Malmagden danced away with it. He flung it into the green murk, out of her reach.
Susan pulled herself over the top of the rail. She had some idea she would follow it down. Malmagden took her by the shoulders and hauled her up the ladder.
“Suicide,” he chided. “That is the one crime God cannot forgive. Would you spend all eternity in Hell?”
Spend all eternity in Hell? God forbid, certainly. Susan had never been one to spend an afternoon with a toothache, let alone all eternity in Hell.
The water had filled the cavernous room halfway up by now. She could no longer hear the rushing of it. That turgid lick on the surface was the only sign that a river was sweeping away hundreds of lives.
She turned to see Malmagden drawing something on the wall behind her. It glowed faintly in the darkness even as he finished it.
“This is where we part company,” he apologized. “The Angle Web works one at a time, or else I would take you along with me.” He laughed at an old memory. “You should have seen some of the horrendous accidents when we tried to use it as a troop transport—arms poking out of each other, heads poking out of stomachs.” He waved his hands, What a mess. “You will be all right,” he promised. “You are a pretty American. The Soviets will present you like a birthday present to your General Eisenhower.”
“Where are you going?”
She had some idea of tracking him down. Malmagden saw the burning in her eyes. He would have smiled if he could have. He looked away instead.
“There is a little beer hall, not quite here and not quite there, you know? The maidens are pretty and sympathetic. They sing a sad song to make one weep. The beer is good, like wine. Maybe we will meet there sometime, yes?”
“Count on it,” she promised him.
Malmagden looked away at the line of smoke from a nearby rocket impact. He seemed suddenly unable to leave. “Do you know what my philosophers taught me about moral ambiguity? Moral ambiguity is the opiate of the starving class.
Auf wiedersehen
, Fräulein Berne.”
* * *
As for Susan Gilbert, she was found by a brigade of Soviet construction engineers. She had been stuck on the surface of Berlin for two days while the city collapsed around her. She had seen more people die—lots more.
She was dehydrated and delirious, babbling in American English crazy stories about drowning German children to keep them from being eaten by the living dead.
In her own mind, she was simply doing the right thing. Malmagden would not blackmail her into silence, no matter what happened to her as a result of her confession. Of course, she may not have thought how this sounded to her various confessors.
A Russian captain listened to her story in a field hospital. He smiled in amazed good humor and decided his American counterpart had to hear this. The two of them sat quiet as she described how she had helped drown hundreds of Germans to keep the undead from reaching the surface world.
They shook their heads at each other. The American, a captain named Turknell, mouthed the word, “Shock?” with a raised eyebrow for a question mark.
The Russian whispered, “Gestapo!” and made a dreadful face.
“Gestapo, no. You don’t understand.” She held up Schoenberg’s crumpled cigarette pack. “They were nice,” she said.
“She’s just a bit cross-eyed,” noted Turknell. “Did they do that to her as well?”
The Russian shrugged. The Gestapo were animals, certainly.
Captain Turknell patted her arm: poor dear.
“When you get better, maybe we can talk about your interrogation, you know, a bit more in-depth.”
Delirious or not, she marked something entirely too sweaty about Captain Turknell. He had this sort of lurid sympathy that made her bunch up her collar anytime he looked her way.
She didn’t talk to him again. Eventually, she told most of her story to Walter Foley. She even mentioned her complicity in the flooding of the sewers—let him bring charges, she thought. Berlin had been his idea in the first place.
She never told Foley about Alexander Schoenberg or the two
Volksstürm
kids. Their memories were a private affair, just between herself and the man who had murdered them.
Until they met again, that’s how she wanted to keep it.
Chapter Three
C
HARLEY SHRIEVE FOUND HER OUT IN THE ALLEY
behind the warehouse. She was leaning against the hood of the Plymouth, taking in the stimulating mix of brine and diesel exhaust from the docks a few blocks to the west.
“Walter Foley sent me out here to collect you,” he said. “He thinks our visitor’s going to come back and catch you here all unaware.”
“What do you think?” She took another cigarette from him.
“Me? I think you’re waiting for it.”
Susan smiled. This Charley Shrieve knew his agents.
“You got some kind of special grudge against this character? You should see yourself. You look like the cruise director for the USS
Arizona
.”
“Don’t mind me. This stuff just brings back old times.”
Dale Bogen appeared out of the shadows. Walter Foley jogged after him, huffing out directions to the Agnes Dei Catholic Hospital, where Carl Leder was being held in a private mental ward under twenty-four-hour military guard. Leder was going to look at the note on Hartmann’s napkin.
Bogen slid in behind the wheel of the Plymouth. “Mount up, Boys!” he cried as he cranked the ignition. “Let’s ride!”
Susan was still closing the door when acceleration threw her into the back seat.
Shrieve turned a couple bad looks the kid’s way. “Watch it, Junior. Don’t make me take the keys away.”
Bogen said, “Sorry,” and then after a thoughtful pause, he looked into the rearview mirror at Susan and said, “I’ve got my own hand grenade!” He nudged Charley. “Did you show her the hand grenade?”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
“Here. Let me.” He had it in the glove compartment. He offered it over the seat for Susan to admire.
Susan smiled politely. “That’s very nice.” She backed into the seat and put her hand on the door. “We’re a little close-quartered for hand grenades, aren’t we?” Trying to keep her voice from rising precipitously. She had no little brother of her own, but her friends all had one. Susan knew better than to show any signs of weakness.
No matter. Bogen was utterly oblivious. “I’m taking it home with me,” he said proudly. “I’m going fishing.”
“Fishing.” Susan peered close to see if he was kidding.
“Gotta beat cheese balls all to hell.”
“Bogen,” she said. “Fishing?”
Charley had his thumb and forefinger up under his glasses. A little headache? He took the hand grenade away. “Just drive,” Charley said.
Bogen cranked the wheel hard as they came up on the Four Winds Bar. He burned rubber all the way down Münterstrasse.
Shrieve bit back his irritation. Carefully, he spread Conrad Hartmann’s napkin on the back of the passenger’s seat.
“You think Carl Leder can tell us how this works?”
“He knows,” she said. “It’s just a question of getting it out of him.”
Leder had given her a thumbnail discourse on the workings of the Angle Web. They’d been waiting on a plane out of occupied Denmark at the time; Susan had her eye out for German patrols. She hadn’t particularly believed him. God, she wished she’d taken notes.
“If this Angle Web can take you anywhere, how come Leder needed you to come pull him out of Denmark?”
“I gathered it was not so easy as that. He said that traveling through the Web is mentally devastating. Carl Leder is not up to a whole lot of mental demands.” She did not elaborate. Shrieve, she figured, would meet Leder soon enough.
* * *
A couple of MPs met them at the curb. The three-story facade of the Agnes Dei Catholic Hospital loomed up behind them, as imposing in the darkness as an ocean liner appearing out of the fog.
Shrieve showed them a ream of permits from the office of General Eisenhower. They read down till they saw the name “Carl Leder,” and then they smiled.
“You’ll want to come this way.”
They wouldn’t explain what was funny. “You’ll see,” they promised.
They passed under a bas-relief from the 14th century—saints and martyrs, smiling at each other enigmatically. Susan heard the voice of one of her demolition instructors: “I love these old European buildings. The castles on the Rhine, the beautiful churches, the gracious hotels. Twenty thousand tons of unreinforced masonry and overhanging stone. Put a little fulminate of mercury at this keystone, a little plastique at that support structure, you can take out a whole platoon of Kraut soldiers and never fire a shot. . . .”
She clamped her eyes shut till colors blossomed behind her eyelids. Charley Shrieve asked her if she were all right. She told him she had a little headache.
They passed down corridor after corridor of empty rooms. The place had an eerie quiet that seemed to extend all the way from basement to penthouse suite.
“What happened to all the other patients?” Susan said. “You didn’t clear them all out for security reasons, did you?” She hoped not. She’d sat with Carl Leder for six hours beside that field in Denmark—knocked his hand off her knee a few times. Leder didn’t seem worth this sort of effort.
Their host and guide, a Sergeant Cardero of Patterson, New Jersey, shrugged a little deeper into his jacket. “Place was empty when we arrived,” he said. “There’s supposed to be three hundred mental patients here. Who knows what the Krauts did with them.”
In silence, they reached the basement high-security ward. This is where Susan realized what all the snickering had been about.
Leder’s door had been replaced with 100-millimeter armor plate off of a Tiger II tank. An array of locks went up the side of the wall, meshing with more armor plate scavenged from a German half-track, an American B-24 Liberator, and a British destroyer.
Paint crews were scheduled to come in and smooth over the kill stickers and competing decals and mismatched camouflage with a nice institutional shade of mint, but they were as backed up as everyone else. Meanwhile, Carl Leder was holed-up in a bunker designed by George Patton and Groucho Marx.
“Ike says to give him what he wants.” Cardero patted an armored ball turret that had come off the same B-24 that had provided the plating for the door. “This is what he wants.”
A face peered up through the glass. Susan jumped in surprise. “Jesus Christ,” she said. The face disappeared back into the gloom.
Cardero laughed. “He gets in there and swings that thing around, scares the crap out of people late at night. He asked to keep the twin .50s.”
“You didn’t—”
“He was pissed off when we said no.”
Leder was as she remembered him, at once pensive and frantic. He had a downcast gaze that only occasionally came up over his bifocals.
He waited stiffly as Cardero shot the bolts back in place and turned the keys in the double-locked door. Something inside him was vibrating.
He went to the ball turret to sweep the hallway for signs of God-knows-what. When he returned to his place on the edge of the bed, he was apologetic. But he had an ear cocked toward the hallway. Someone beyond the door asked Cardero for a smoke, and Leder waited for them to walk away before speaking.
“It has to be this way,” he said. “I have made enemies with my work. I have brought attention to myself from . . . certain areas.”
Susan frowned, dubious. “Those locks outside are your idea?”
Leder looked away. “The intruders I am most worried about lack the understanding of lock and key. I do confess, it is a mystery why the staff have not moved more quickly to reverse the locks to this side of the door. If only for convenience sake, you understand.”
Susan found herself nodding sympathetically. “Perhaps they will,” she suggested, “once they get around to cleaning this place up a bit from the war.”
Leder leaned close to her, inspecting her in a critical way.
“You have not done well,” he said. “Peace has not treated you kindly.”
She started to laugh; she started to say, “What?” like she had no idea what he was talking about. But Leder was speaking from knowledge. What he lacked in a sense of boundaries, he made up for with insight.
“I have dreams,” she admitted.
He nodded. “Good,” he said. “You have seen ghastly things. I would not trust you if you didn’t suffer dreams. I will speak with you.”
He pointed at Bogen. “This one has no understanding whatsoever. And this one”—his finger went to Shrieve—“this one smells of the telescope. Have you harvested in the vineyard of stars?”
Wide-eyed, Shrieve swore he had not.
“Liar!” Leder looked triumphant. “I know you by the light of the Dog Star. You cannot hide it. The light emanates from your every pore.”
Leder turned to Susan. “I will not go anywhere with him. Do I look like such a fool? He has the stink of astronomy. He has seen the Gibbering Behemoth. He has seen the Mindless Leviathan, the Blind Vortex of Light. Azathoth sees. Azathoth is. Azathoth will be—”
Susan calmed him with a hand to his arm. Leder became silent. He turned away. After a moment, she realized he was weeping.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not myself lately.”
“It’s all right.” She squeezed his arm. “It’s all right.”
“Look at me,” Leder sobbed. “Look what they’ve made of me.”
“We’ll get you out of here. We’ll get you back to the United States. People can help you there.”
Leder laughed bitterly, sadly. He shook his head. “I will never see America.”
“We can take you with us this evening,” she offered. “Help us out with a few questions, we’ll escort you to a plane to America.”
She didn’t know if any planes were leaving for America, but then she wasn’t sure Leder would cooperate either.
She produced Conrad Hartmann’s napkin. Leder looked at the logo on the front for a long moment. He smiled slightly. A tear welled up at the corner of his eye.
“We were heroes, then. All of us. And such good friends. And there was this Egyptian gentleman who tended the bar. What times we had in this place.”
He flipped it over to the formula on the back, snorted derisively. He took barely a moment with it. “You are not planning to go to this place, are you?”
“Why not?” Charley asked innocently. Leder ignored him; Shrieve had the mark of the astronomer.
“Why not?” Susan asked, as if translating between the two of them.
“It leads to a little bar down in the waterfront area—at least it does in this universe. But then, one must ask why use the Angle Web for someplace one can reach by hailing a cab, yes?”
Shrieve said, “Can you give us the spell to get us there?”
Carl Leder looked at Shrieve in an accusing way. “I will if he’s the one who is going.”
This was a stipulation Shrieve readily agreed to. Who knows, he may have been quite sincere. Leder wrote a series of words on a sheet of legal paper. He handed it to Shrieve.
“Is this
Das Unternehmen
?” Shrieve asked.
Leder said nothing to Shrieve, but the alarm in his eyes said plenty.
To Susan, he said, “Whatever I worked on during the war, it is all finished now. Do you understand? It is all finished now. Everyone is dead.”
“You’re afraid, Carl. If it is all finished, then why are you so afraid?”
She nodded down at his cigarette. The cherry at the end was an oscilloscope that measured the tremor in Leder’s arm. Right now, it was pegging off the meter.
Leder looked uneasy. He mashed it out on the corner of his nightstand, as if burying the evidence of a crime. “I have told your Army investigators all about the literary group. We turned all of our notes over to Reichsführer Himmler. You must have them.”
“There are several tons of notes recovered from the ‘Reichsführer Himmler for Your Eyes Only’ vaults,” Susan said. “We’ll be going through this stuff into the 1970s. Why don’t you help us out?”
Leder became alarmed. His eyes came back from the door.
“Who is going through it? You are?”
“We have people. Archivists.”
“Watch them. Keep them unarmed. Keep them away from young children. Schlegel had such a beautiful daughter. She made me a card for my birthday. She drew a picture of the Führer wishing a happy birthday to Carl Leder.”
His lip trembled even as he smiled.
“Dr. Leder.” She leaned close. Establish rapport, she told herself. Let him smell the perfume. She dug her last Marlboro out of her purse, lit it for him.
Leder noted the red filter. “To hide the lipstick,” he guessed. “You Americans.” He shook his head in fond amazement.
“Dr. Leder,” she said. “We need your help. This is what I risked my life to bring you out for.”
Leder lowered his eyes. “I heard you were arrested in Berlin,” he said. “I heard it went badly for you.”
“I—” She felt the color rise in her cheeks. “Let’s never mind about that now,” she said. She noticed Shrieve was watching her out of the corner of his eye. Dale Bogen was studiously looking away.
“Tell me about your work with the Sparrow Group,” Shrieve said. “Tell me what you did for
Das Unternehmen
.”
And this time Leder needed no translation from Susan.
* * *
“There were three of us. Myself, Otto Bülle, who lectured in ancient Near Eastern languages, and Albert Schlegel, a professor of Indo-European root languages.
“We were brought together at the order of Reichsführer Himmler to translate an early Kufic Arabic text of a rather common pedigree. I remember Schlegel being utterly contemptuous of the task. We were all of the opinion this was work for a graduate student.”
Leder turned away to laugh. “Such arrogance! I marvel at it now. Our only excuse for the tragedy that followed was our ignorance. We were scholars, not sorcerers. How could we know what we risked to translate the
Necronomicon
into modern German?”
Shrieve put down his notepad.
Necronomicon
. That rarest and most cursed of books, written by a mad Arab sorcerer, described strange, godlike monsters: Azathoth, mindless churning chaos at the center of the universe; its night-black avatar Nyarlathotep; Yog Sothoth, which existed beyond time and space. “You translated the
Necronomicon
? To what purpose?”
“Spells, summonations. Evocations. They thought they could control the powers of that cursed book.”
“Himmler was looking through the
Necronomicon
for weapons? Something to turn the war around?”