Child of the Journey (15 page)

"Go to hell!" Sol waved his hands, pleased at being able to muster the strength to react. The canteen, its cap unscrewed, slipped from him. He lunged...clutched darkness, fell into the muck, struggled to right himself.

"Pardon me," he gasped as he crawled back onto the wood. "My mistake.
Welcome
to Hell!"

"
W
elcome to the world of the dead
!" the voice replied.

A stench like that of Limburger cheese. A burst of light. A round of soft applause.

Sol lost interest in the canteen and turned toward the sound, for a blue glow told him a vision had come to divert him----

----
A bulb in a metal collar hangs garishly from a slatted-board ceiling.
A tall man dressed in a surgical gown and gloves hits his head on the bulb and sets it in motion. The increased circle of light reveals Emanuel, legs spread, naked, strapped into a chair.

"Let us hope the world of death will place us on the path to immortality," the tall man says. He reaches up to stop the motion. Then he bows slightly, in deference to the applause of a semi-circle of SS officers wearing white gloves and dress swords, their faces made amorphous by the shadows.

"I apologize for the odor." He looks amused. "We doctors are immune to it, but some of you, those who are not physicians, may be less used to the smell of death than others. It is not always quite this putrid, gentlemen...
lady!"

He emphasizes the last word and holds out a hand--a magician introducing his assistant. Judith Bielmann-O'Hearn, wearing an apron similar to the doctor's, emerges from the shadows. She is pushing a cart laden with surgical equipment. She does not look at him as she rolls a gurney from the corner, over beside Emanuel. The gurney is rigged with gutters on both sides, and at its foot is a large sink with a faucet, to which Judith attaches a long rubber hose.

The doctor adjusts the light so it shines down directly on the table and the mummified body that lies on it. "Take a look, gentlemen. A century of lying entombed, and the elder-of-elders you see here--disinterred by kind permission of that man in the chair--is more alive than many of my patients. Jews, you know, are forbidden to embalm their dead, a religious law the Elephantine Jews chose to ignore." He wrinkles up his nose. "If you think he smells bad now, you should have been around yesterday when he was exhumed!"

His humor is rewarded by uncomfortable chuckles. Though the body on the table is slippery with gravewax and the limbs look like sweet-potato tubers, the head is graced with a full head of hair.

"In a moment," the doctor goes on, "we will begin the autopsy. Keep in mind that embalming does not preserve the organs, so to examine
those
we must use our living specimen."

Emanuel strains against the straps that hold him down; Judith begins to cry audibly.

"Stop sniveling," the doctor tells her. "You got what you wanted. Your boatload of Jews is en route to the new homeland of Madagascar. However, the ship
can
be turned back. I suggest you co-operate."

"But, Herr Doktor Mengele, I did not know--"

"Nor, they say, did Judas. Did you think we carried the latest scientific equipment all the way here to Addis Ababa merely to see Ethiopia?" In an aside to the officers he says, "With the help of X-ray crystallography, we will be able to examine the unique, recently discovered subspecies of Jew, the Elephantines, and compare an ancient, though remarkably preserved, specimen to its modern counterpart--a living black prince!" He makes a sweeping gesture toward Emanuel as though introducing a trapeze artist.

"Please," Judith begs. "If this--this
demonstration
--must be performed, use me."

Mengele frowns. "Of what possible use could a flabby flat-chested Irish Jewess be to the cause of science? You have your boatloads. I suggest you adhere to your promise."

"But you said you would only need the Elephantines'
blood
!"

"And what good is blood if the vessel is not taken into account as a major variable? Be serious, woman! I'll vivisect every member of the tribe if need be! Now, silence! I will have silence!"

Judith steps back into the shadows, her face dark with pain.

"Herr Doktor Mengele." A voice from the crowd. "Why do you feel this subspecies of Black Jew is such a good candidate for your experiment?"

Mengele smiles. "Black Jews represent two races rather than one. We considered that alone to be worthy of study, which is why we turned our attention to the Cushitic Falashas. Now, thanks to the efforts of Frau O'Hearn here, we found the perfect subjects, the Elephantines, as they've come to be called."

Obviously conscious of his stage presence, he moves around the gurney to be closer to the audience. "Analysis reveals that even though they have been separated from the mainstream of the Jewish species for twenty-four hundred years, these Elephantines have a genetic anomaly corresponding to similar anomalies observed among various other relatively isolated Jew-subsects. After identifying that gene and placing it in mice, we found that, regardless of overcrowding in the cages, those mice carrying the gene appeared to experience
far
less distress when subjected to such living conditions, as compared to our control mice. In fact, some of the genetically altered mice appeared to
thrive
in such an atmosphere."

"Ghetto conditions?" the voice asks.

"Exactly." Mengele adjusts his monocle, thrusts out his hand.

Eyes filled with hate, Judith steps into the light, holding a scalpel. It looks as if she might stab the doctor, but instead she slaps the instrument into his glove.

"Any further questions before we begin?" he asks the audience.

"Yes, Herr Doktor," a squat SS colonel says. "Do you really believe it possible to isolate the enzyme--or gene, or whatever you call it--which contains this...this
collective unconscious
we've heard about? The
thing
that supposedly could enable you scientists to combine the natural cunning of the panther with the conniving of the Jew?"

"Anything the mind can conceive is possible, Standartenführer."

The doctor casually slices around the corpse's head and pulls the scalp down, opening it like a coconut shell. Judith turns her head and looks away.

"We have been working with dried blood serum for a decade," Mengele continues. "Now we are beginning to make rapid progress. Recently, for instance, Americans isolated the pituitary hormone. The real question is, how many ancient Elephantines will we have to exhume and compare with their living relatives before our results prove conclusive or the hypothesis proves false."

Straining slightly, he slices the body from the base of the throat down. Judith removes disintegrated grey matter from inside the corpse. A wavery vapor seems to arise, as if the spirit of the man has cried out against the violation. Emanuel moans softly but does not avert his eyes.

"These Elephantine Black Jews are remarkably resourceful and tenacious," Mengele says, "particularly when one considers the cowardice and physical ineptitude of other Jews. The specimen in the chair, for example, fought the Italians for years even after the liberation was formally declared. We could have used a few more like him when we marched on Cairo."

The testy murmuring his last comment provokes apparently pleases Mengele, for he smiles wryly before continuing.

"Enough conjecture. Let's begin at the beginning. Following the performance of the athlete Jesse Owens, the Führer personally instructed the scientific community to undertake a study of the musculature of African athletes. It seemed to the Führer that each subspecies might have physical characteristics which in some way could enhance the superior characteristics of our German youth."
 

The colonel again raises his hand. "We are here because your work, and that of Doktor Schmidt at Sachsenhausen, has enormous potential for bolstering performance on the
battlefield,
not the athletic field. I wish to know about morale. Would not surgically realigned soldiers, as you have called them, feel racially impure? Grafting musculature from Negroid subspecies onto our brave boys...I don't know, Herr Doktor." The colonel shakes his head uncertainly. "I doubt the men would stand for it...or if I could bring myself to lead troops that are not one-hundred percent...
German.
It would seem an affront to..."

"God?" Mengele gives the officer a patronizing smile. "To create the perfect Aryan, we are forced to contemplate the idea that perhaps we have been too narrow-minded. We might consider the possibility of creating, by combining natural selection and modern science, men and women of
inferior
mental, moral, and racial stock who nonetheless possess enhanced strength, speed, and endurance. These traits would enable them to serve the Fatherland equally well on the battlefield...or in the barnyard."

He lifts his hands palms out, silently begging forbearance. "I am the first to agree that this poses a moral question. Is it in our best interest to transform inferior humans into soldier-workers--non-Aryan
drones
--in order to reduce the loss of German blood on the battlefield and loss of time spent performing menial tasks?"

Mengele eyes the audience with a look of satisfaction, then turns to Emanuel and pushes aside the swatch of torn blanket that covers the naked man's groin.

"I remind you that I am a physician, not a philosopher. I leave moral choices to gods and dogs." A ripple of relieved laughter answers him. "Please, observe closely." He holds up the scalpel, glinting in the light. "The muscle fiber of most Negroes uses oxygen inefficiently. This results in explosive bursts of speed--witness Jesse Owens--but poor endurance. In other words, natural selection produced Africans that ran
away from
large animals, not ran them down." More chuckles. "In other parts of the world--Europe for instance, among some North American Indians, and in a few places here in Africa, such as among the Ethiopians," he lays the side of the scalpel on Emanuel's inner left thigh; the black man quivers and squeezes shut his eyes, "conditions were such that long-distance running was required."

Replacing the monocle, Mengele bends over his subject and cuts a careful incision from the groin to the knee. Sweat shines on Emanuel's blue-black skin and his body arches. Mengele cuts perpendicularly at each end of the incision and carefully peels back the epidermis, exposing tissue. Blood wells in the wound and streams down the leg. Emanuel twists his head from side to side and his features scream silently with pain, but he does not utter a sound. Judith stands immobilized. When Mengele orders her to sponge the area, her hand trembles convulsively.

"They say sprinters are born, not made. This is because sprinters' muscles, unlike those of distance runners, cannot be developed regardless of the amount of athletic training." Mengele draws the scalpel toward himself through the tissue as though exquisitely filleting a trout. The black man's mouth, turned toward the ceiling, opens. He still makes no sound. "However, we have found that a few select runners, a very select few," Mengele lifts an index finger for emphasis, "have a high proportion of muscle similar to those of sprinters...
but still maintain the efficient use of oxygen characteristic of the long-distance runner.
Put another way: they can run very fast--very far. Or vice versa." He breaks into a boyish grin.

Rising, he drops the monocle expertly into his free hand and, balancing the reddish-pink tissue across the scalpel, transfers it to the gurney. He skins off a tiny slice and, using tweezers, places it in a specimen jar.

"We have found evidence of all this in many Ethiopians--also in Kenyans, I might add, though subjects available for analysis have been harder to obtain in that nation. Here we can rely on our Italian friends. So! Many Ethiopians possess this rare combination of sprinters' muscle and oxygen efficiency. They are slender, from a high-altitude country, and raised in a culture where long-distance running for communication and hunting was necessitated. Mark my words, gentlemen--even without the benefit of modern training methods, an Ethiopian such as Prinz Zaehev Emanuel here could win," sarcasm surfaced in his voice, "an Olympic marathon."

With a showman's skill he gestures toward his star performer. Everyone laughs. Emanuel is unconscious, his head tipped against his left shoulder, blood meandering down his leg and pooling on the floor. Judith is on her knees, sponging the linoleum.

Mengele scrapes tissue from the mummified corpse into a second jar. "Imagine a future," he tells the officers, "in which human drones who thrive in extremely crowded conditions are capable of working at great speed and with tremendous endurance! Imagine how well we could use the assets and abilities of the lesser races, for the benefit of the Fatherland...and with minimal impact upon German
Lebensraum!"

The officers look at one another. Heads nod; eyebrows raise in affirmation.

"Frau
Doktor
." Mengele labels the specimen jars and places them in a box. "Take these to the laboratory. When the film has been developed, bring it back."

Judith gets up from her knees, takes the box with a distasteful look. She almost drops it, and makes a sound. What emerges is a gurgle----

Solomon awakened into the sound, but it was not Judith's; it was his own. He tried to shift an arm. A leg.