“Glad you think so,” he said. “Now I have to make extra sure not to let any little rocks bounce off us, or anything stupid like that.”
Dome 22 had been set up on an asteroid about half a mile across at its thickest point. “This is the one they’re going to use as a test, isn’t that right?” Chris Harper asked as they drew near the drifting chunk of rock and metal.
“Yeah, I think so,” he answered. “That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? For a last look to make sure everything goes the way it should?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Dr. Harper agreed. “Do you suppose the Lizards will notice when we do test?”
“Everyone’s assuming they will, or at least that they’ll notice the beginning,” he said. “Of course, they may stop paying any attention to this asteroid once we shut down the dome and take everybody off. We’re hoping that’s what they do, but don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose on it.”
“Fair enough,” she said briskly, and then, to his surprise, tapped him on the shoulder. “I know you said it was against the rules to tip the driver, but I’ve got something for you, if you want it.”
He wondered what she had in mind. The cockpit of a scooter wasn’t the ideal place for some of the things that leaped into his mind, especially not when they’d come so close to the dome. “Well, sure,” he said in tones as neutral as he could make them. He might have been wrong, after all.
And he was. She said, “Here, then,” and handed him a couple of things. They were small enough for both of them to fit in the palm of his hand: a roll of Lifesavers and a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. They weren’t her reasonably fair white body, but he exclaimed, “Thank you!” just the same.
“You’re welcome,” Dr. Harper answered. “My guess was that you people had probably run out of things like that a while ago.”
“And you’re right, too,” he said. “As far as teeth and such go, we’re probably better off on account of it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the hell out of these. Cherry Lifesavers… Jesus.”
He was close enough to the asteroid now to let him see all the construction that had gone on alongside of Dome 22. He clenched the candy and gum. In a way, that was what the construction was all about: so the USA could go right on making such frivolous things. He laughed at himself. If you don’t sound like something out of a recruiting film, what does?
“Hydrogen, oxygen-who needs anything else?” he said, and then, as a concession to his passenger, “A little alien engineering doesn’t hurt, either.”
“Thank you so much,” Chris Harper said. They both laughed.
Stargard was one of the towns of northeastern Germany that the Wehrmacht and the Volkssturm had defended to the last man and the last bullet. The Lizards hadn’t expended an explosive-metal bomb on it; they’d smashed it with armor and with strikes from the air, and then gone on to larger, more important centers of resistance. Once the Reich yielded, they hadn’t bothered putting a garrison in the town between Greifswald and Neu Strelitz.
Johannes Drucker didn’t blame the Lizards for that. In their shoes, he wouldn’t have garrisoned Stargard, either. What point to it? Before war rolled through the little city, it might have held forty or fifty thousand people-about as many as Greifswald. These days? These days, he would have been astonished if even a quarter of that number tried to scratch out a living here. He knew for a fact that ruins and empty houses far outnumbered inhabited ones.
All that made Stargard a perfect place for holdouts. Drucker wondered how many other smashed-up towns throughout the Reich held company- to battalion-sized units of Wehrmacht men or brigands-sometimes the line between them wasn’t easy to draw-who would sometimes sneak out and do what they could against the occupiers of the Reich.
He doubted he’d ever find out the answer to that. He did know Stargard held such a unit. And, at the moment, the holdouts were holding him. The Lizard who’d been driving him down to Neu Strelitz was no longer among the living. Had a couple of bullets from the machine-gun burst that wrecked the motorcar and killed the driver gone a few centimeters to the left or right of their actual courses, Drucker wouldn’t have been among the living any more, either.
As things were, he remained unsure how long he’d stay among the living. The holdouts kept him in the cellar whose second story had taken a couple of direct hits from a landcruiser’s cannon. It hadn’t burned, but nobody would want to live up there, either.
With a screech of rusty hinges, the cellar door opened. Two guards came down the stairs. One carried a kerosene lamp to shed more light than the candles the holdouts gave Drucker. The other had an assault rifle. He pointed it at Drucker’s midriff. “Come with us,” he said.
“All right.” Drucker got off the cot where he’d been lying. The alternative, plainly, was being shot on the spot. “Where are we going?” he asked. They’d taken him out for questioning a couple of times, which had let him see a little of Stargard, not that there was much worth seeing.
But the fellow with the lamp had a different answer today: “To the People’s Court, that’s where. They’ll give you what you deserve, you lousy traitor.”
“I’m not a traitor.” Drucker had been saying the same thing ever since they captured him. Had the holdouts believed him, they would have let him go. Had they thoroughly disbelieved him, they would have shot him when they killed his driver. They almost had. “What do you mean, People’s Court?” he asked as he approached the stairs.
The guards both backed up. They weren’t about to let him get close enough to grab either the rifle or the lantern. The one holding the rifle said, “The People’s Court, to give out justice for the Volk.”
“To give collaborators what they deserve,” the other fellow added.
Wearily, Drucker said, “I’m not a collaborator, either.” He’d been saying that over and over, too. Had he just been saying it, it would have done him no good. But he’d also had in his wallet the telegram from Walter Dornberger. A personal message from the Fuhrer had given even the holdouts pause.
When Drucker came out onto the street, he was surprised to see it was early morning. Down in the windowless cellar, he’d lost track of day and night. He’d lost track of which day it was, too. He thought he’d been a prisoner for a couple of weeks, but he could have been off by several days either way.
Only a few people were out and about so early. None of them seemed to find the sight of a man marched along at gunpoint in any way remarkable. Drucker wondered what would happen if he shouted for help. Actually, he didn’t wonder; he had a pretty good idea. Nobody would do anything for him, and the youngster with the assault rifle would fill him full of holes. He kept quiet.
“In here,” said the fellow with the lantern. In daylight, even the murky, cloudy daylight of Stargard, it was useless.
Here had been a tobacconist’s. The plate-glass window at the front of the shop had been smashed. Drucker was morally certain not a gram of tobacco remained inside. He’d lost the craving up on the Lizards’ starship, and had never had it too strongly-smoking in the upper stage of an A-45 while in Earth orbit was severely impractical. But for the shattered window, though, the tobacconist’s looked pretty much intact.
The back room had probably kept the stock that wasn’t on display. Now it held a table and eight or ten chairs that didn’t match one another. Three men sat along one side of the table. Drucker had seen two of them before. They’d interrogated him. The third, who sat in the middle, wore a Wehrmacht major’s tunic. He was young, but had a face like a steel trap: all sharp edges and angles, without humor, without mercy. Drucker wondered why he hadn’t served in the SS rather than the Army. Whatever the reason, he feared he wouldn’t get much of a fair trial here.