“We, the Volk of the Reich, bring the accused traitor, Johannes Drucker, before the bar of justice here,” the major said.
Drucker wasn’t invited to sit down. He sat anyway. The guards growled. The major glowered, but didn’t say anything. Drucker did: “All I’ve ever wanted to do was find my family. That’s not treason. I haven’t done anything that is treason, either.”
One of his interrogators said, “A Lizard was doing you a favor. Why would the Lizards do you a favor if you weren’t a traitor?”
“We’ve been over this before,” Drucker said, as patiently as he could. “They knew who I am because I flew the upper stage of an A-45. They captured me in space, and held me till the fighting was over. I suppose they were helping me because the Fuhrer was my old commandant at Peenemunde. He was generous enough to send me that wire. I heard some of my family might be down in Neu Strelitz, so I asked the Lizards for a lift. I’d walked from Nuremberg to Greifswald. If I didn’t have to walk again, I didn’t want to. That’s all. It’s simple, really.”
It wasn’t so simple. He said not a word about Mordechai Anielewicz. If the holdouts learned he’d consorted with a Jew, he was a dead man.
By the hard-faced young major’s eyes, he was liable to be a dead man any which way. The officer-evidently the leader of this band of holdouts-said, “You were consorting with the enemy. No proper citizen of the Reich should have anything to do with the Lizards under any circumstances.”
Drucker glared at him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, not so patiently any more. Maybe losing his temper was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it. “I started out in the Wehrmacht when you were in short pants. I was a panzer driver. If I hadn’t been shooting up Lizard landcruisers then, you wouldn’t be here to call me a traitor now.”
“What you did in the past is gone.” The major snapped his fingers. “Gone like that. What you do now, with the Reich in peril-that is what matters. And you have not denied that you were captured in the company of a Lizard.”
“How could I deny it?” Drucker said. “I was sitting next to him when your men shot him. What I do deny is that my sitting next to him makes me disloyal to the Reich. I’m as loyal to the Fuhrer as any man here. Where’s your telegram from General Dornberger, Herr Major?”
That should have been a corker. Unfortunately, Drucker saw that it didn’t do as much corking as he’d hoped it would. Sure enough, the young major’s eyes might have come off an SS recruiting poster: they were gray-blue like ice, and every bit as cold. He said, “It is by no means certain that the Fuhrer is not a traitor to the Reich. He yielded to the Race too soon, and he yielded far too much in the terms for what he calls peace but is in fact only appeasement.”
More royal than the king, Drucker thought. Aloud, he said, “If he hadn’t yielded, every square millimeter of Germany would be covered with radioactive glass right now. You wouldn’t be alive to tell me this nonsense. I might still be alive, because I was out in space. But I wouldn’t have gone for a ride with that Lizard, because I would have known everybody in my family was dead.”
“If you support the Fuhrer’s spinelessness, you condemn yourself out of your own mouth,” the holdouts’ leader replied in a voice as frigid as his eyes.
Drucker felt like pounding his head against the table. “If you don’t follow the policies of your own Fuhrer, of the Reich’s Fuhrer, how can you call yourself soldiers of the Reich any more? You’re not soldiers. You’re just bandits.”
“We are soldiers of the true Reich, the pure Reich, the Reich we struggle to bring back into being, the Reich that will have a Fuhrer worthy of it, not a collaborationist.” By a slight change in tone, the major suggested the Reich might not have to look too far to find such a Fuhrer. And, by the faces of the two men who’d grilled Drucker before, they agreed with him.
As far as Drucker was concerned, they were all out of their minds. Of course, nine hundred ninety-nine people out of a thousand in Munich in 1921 would have said the same thing about Hitler and his handful of followers, too. But how many would-be Hitlers had there been in Germany then? Hundreds, surely. Thousands, more likely. What were the odds this fellow was the genuine article? Slim. Very, very slim.
Genuine article or not, he had the whip hand here. And he plainly intended to use it. “By the power vested in me as an officer of the Reich- the true Reich, the uncorrupted Reich- I now pass sentence on you for treason against that Reich,” he said. “The sentence will be-”
Before he could tell Drucker what it would be, one of his young bully-boys strode into the tobacconist’s back room with a package in his hand. The major paused. Drucker wondered why he bothered. He wondered why the major bothered with the whole rigmarole in the first place, when he’d plainly decided to execute Drucker in the name of what he called people’s justice.
His bully-boy sent Drucker a curious glance. The fellow was seventeen or eighteen, with the fuzzy beginnings of a beard. Drucker’s hand started to go to his own chin; in however long he’d been in captivity, he’d raised a thicker growth than that kid owned.
The hand froze halfway to his face. The kid was staring at him, too. “Heinrich?” Drucker whispered, at the same time as the bully-boy was saying, “Father?” Drucker sprang out of his chair, the hard-faced major and his own impending death sentence utterly forgotten. He and his son jumped into each other’s arms.
“What’s going on here?” the major demanded.
“What’s going on here, sir?” Heinrich Drucker demanded in return. “I knew we’d taken a prisoner, but I didn’t know who.” By the look on his face, he was ready to fight his commander and everyone else in the world. Drucker had been the same way at the same age. Danger in his voice, Heinrich went on, “Was this a treason trial?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Drucker said. He had to grab his son to keep him from going for the major’s throat.
“Perhaps,” the holdout leader said, “in the light of this new evidence-”
“Evidence, am I?” Heinrich growled.
“In the light of this new evidence,” the major repeated, “perhaps we can justify suspending sentence for the time being. Perhaps.” Considering what had been about to happen to him, Drucker didn’t even mind the qualifier.
Felless was glad to escape Cairo and return to Marseille. She’d never imagined she would think such a thing, but it remained a truth nonetheless. She’d seen for herself that she couldn’t get rid of her ginger habit. Creating another scandal right under the eye turrets of the fleetlord of the conquest fleet would undoubtedly have got her sent to a worse place than Marseille. That not-empire called Finland, newly under the Race’s influence, was supposed to have weather abominable even by Tosevite standards.
She let out a hiss of relief that she’d touched off only one small mating frenzy in Cairo, and that word of it hadn’t got back to Atvar. She had Ttomalss to thank for that. She didn’t like being indebted to the other psychological researcher, but knew full well that she was. If he wanted something from her one of these days, she didn’t see how she could keep from giving it to him.
At least she wasn’t gravid-or she didn’t think she was. That took away one worry pertaining to ginger-induced sexuality, anyhow. And so she peered out of the small windows of her aircraft at the blue water below-such a lot of water on this world-and waited to land at the field outside Marseille.