As Konrad pushed the limp bag into the growing pile to make room for the other bags carried by his fellow prisoners, a sound emanated from the airlock’s sealed hatch. It intruded upon the deathly silence like a sombre chorus. Konrad could hear the faint whistle of the wind outside the capsule. Its howls and groans hinted at the cruel world that lay beyond the metal hatch. It also proved to Konrad, once again, how vulnerable they were inside this vessel. The wind clawed and scrapped at the hatch as it searched for a way inside like a ravenous creature. At the same time, the sound brought back childhood memories of nightmarish nights clinging to his bed-covers as a winter storm tore past his bedroom window. Undaunted by the hellish sounds, Konrad drew nearer to the hatch and its triangular port-hole. He squinted through the thick glass. All he saw was the night-time scene of swirling dust. He angled his head to look further into the gloom, and as he looked something caught his eye – a wall.
Within a few seconds the dust smudged Konrad’s view once again and the wall disappeared from view.
Ziegler joined him at the port-hole. But he, unlike Konrad, only saw the gloom.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve seen something out there?’ Ziegler asked.
Konrad stepped away from the hatch and started to return to the control room for another body. ‘No. I must have only seen shapes in the storm outside. Just my imagination playing tricks on me.’
But as he turned back to the passageway, he ran straight into Stahl.
‘I believe you were admiring the view outside, my curious friend,’ Stahl said.
Konrad, along with Ziegler and Klein, stopped dead as Stahl passed by them toward the hatch. Alongside him were Mesler and a couple of soldiers. One of the troops wore a bloody bandage around his head like a Dickensian corpse. He deliberately positioned himself between the prisoners and the group of Nazis.
‘Well?’ Stahl asked Konrad. ‘Did you see anything interesting on this new piece of the Reich?’
Konrad shook his head.
Stahl looked out again. ‘I thought not. You lack the imagination. I, however, see so many possibilities.’
Mesler approached the port-hole too and gazed at the unforgiving view. ‘I wished I shared your enthusiasm,’ he said gloomily. ‘It’s not exactly the paradise we were told we were coming to back on Earth. Endless grasslands. Lush vegetation. A world fit for colonization. All the navigational data is correct, so something has gone spectacularly wrong.’
‘Appearances can be deceptive, Mesler,’ Stahl replied. ‘Once the sun rises we’ll have a better idea of what our new home really looks like.’
‘But I still don’t understand your urgency to step out there,’ Mesler sighed. ‘With all due respect, I feel we have greater concerns in here inside this module, rather than out there. The atmosphere-scrubber needs to be repaired and there’s the food situation. I’m sure I could list tens of other problems that should take precedence over a jaunt on the surface.’
Stahl turned to face Mesler. ‘You have no sense of history about you,’ he said. ‘Like so many others, you simply occupy the mundane.’
Mesler quashed his temper. If he was a braver man he would have attempted to wrest control from the SS officer. Deep down, he knew that Stahl had murdered the Admiral. There was no way he could prove it, but he knew full well that the Admiral was alive when he left him. But a combination of his lack of nerve and the brutal fact that the Waffen-SS troops were loyal to Stahl, and would remain so unto death, prevented any sort of action. ‘It’s mundane issues that should rule us now given our current circumstances,’ he said. ‘The most obvious being whether the atmosphere is breathable? Everything about this planet we’ve discovered so far has been wrong.’
‘And that’s why we are down here,’ Stahl said. ‘I may have been called reckless in the past, but even I’m not stupid enough to simply walk out there and plant the flag without knowing whether we can breath the air. I believe there is a testing facility in this airlock?’
Mesler headed to a panel of instruments. He twisted a dial and a column of lights blinked. The lights remained forlornly at the lower end of the scale before a bright red indicator started to flash.
Frustrated, Mesler slapped the panel. ‘Damn it!’ he cried.
‘What’s the problem?’ Stahl asked.
‘Does nothing in this damn capsule work?’ Mesler stated with obvious frustration. ‘The atmosphere detector can now be added to the inventory of damaged equipment. I’m afraid that we have no means of ascertaining what the atmosphere is like.’
Stahl shook his head. ‘Your lack of faith really disappoints me, Mesler. I thought you would have learnt by now that there’s always ways and means to achieve anything.’
‘In that case,’ said Mesler as he pointed to the panel, ‘you will have to enlighten me to these ways and means.’
Stahl cocked his head slightly in the direction of the prisoners. ‘An intrepid volunteer from this group here will help us. He will answer our questions about the planet’s atmosphere with the minimum of fuss.’
Mesler raised his eyebrows in surprise to Stahl’s brutal proposal, but he didn’t protest. ‘As you wish, Herr Stahl.’ He then abruptly left the chamber.
‘Aren’t you staying to witness my experiment?’
‘I’d rather not,’ Mesler said as he hesitated at the exit. ‘I believe there are other, more critical, tasks for me, and the air down here makes me feels nauseous.’ He disappeared into the module.
Stahl pursed his lips as he dismissed Mesler’s thinly-veiled insult. He would have to keep an eye on the Executive officer. His small notes of disloyalty could be tolerated for now, but if the man persisted, and if they grew and started to infect others, Stahl knew he would have to deal with him too. Moving on, he now pondered which prisoner he was going to select for the test. He stood motionless, the only movement coming from his eyes as they darted between Konrad and the others. He considered the obvious choice of selecting Konrad, but Stahl quickly dismissed this notion. He had developed a certain fondness for this prisoner, like that for a pet. So, he would spare him.
The next prisoner, was strangely familiar to Stahl. For a time, the prisoner’s face nagged at his memory until he finally realised who the prisoner was – he was the former Gauleiter of Berlin, Gustav Ziegler. He always wondered what had become of the disgraced official. Stahl always assumed he had been executed for his appalling crimes against the Party and the Führer, and it was a surprise to see him still alive. But it wasn’t the numerous official images of Ziegler that Stahl remembered, no, it was the time when the still powerful Gauleiter had visited his SS academy at Wewelsburg. For days before the visit, the teenage Stahl and his fellow pupils had cleaned and scrubbed every nook and cranny of their barracks and the castle’s halls and corridors. It was also one of the few times during his childhood that Stahl could remember meeting normal German civilians. Normally, he and his fellow students were safely separated from the population, lest they were influenced or even contaminated with their weaknesses. Even though they were taught that the German people ruled the world and were superior in every way to every other race on the planet, the SS men and boys were taught that they were even superior to them. A master race within a master race. So, it was quite a novelty to see the families who gathered in the castle’s courtyard to cheer the Gauleiter with their little swastika flags in their hands. Like the civilians, he had stood in line too, his black uniform pressed as sharp as a knife, his face eager and expectant. The Gauleiter appeared in the hall with a phalanx of officials and propaganda cameramen. But as the Gauleiter approached, the young Stahl saw that the official’s face looked bored and uninterested. He inspected the lines of pupils, including Stahl, and shook hands and performed numerous Nazi-salutes, but his crushing lack of interest was painfully obvious. All the school’s efforts, indeed, all Stahl’s efforts had been wasted upon him. The memory of that day brought a wry smile to his face because then Ziegler had possessed all the trappings of power, but now, all he possessed was a limp body-bag in his hands. And at this moment in time, Stahl’s power over Ziegler was infinitely more deadly. He possessed the power of life and death over the ex-Gauleiter, and so he felt the need to prolong this sense of power and for this reason he disqualified Ziegler from the selection process.