‘I suppose you are pure of blood then, Lang, otherwise you would have met the same fate as our comrades,’ Blomberg said.
‘Your assumption is quite correct. I alone amongst the crew showed no traces of the foul blood which condemned the others to damnation,’ Lang proudly said. ‘And thus, I was given the great task by the Überführer. But I was hindered before I could complete my duty here in the sickbay.’
Mesler pressed his entire hand over Lang’s wound and pushed down deeply. The screams resounded loudly, their volume growing the deeper the officer pushed into the cauterized wound.
Mesler hissed. ‘You can consider this as a down-payment because I swear once this crisis has abated, I’m going to kill you.’
Blomberg pushed his comrade away. ‘That’s enough! I told you we’d get no sense from him.’
‘One last question. What about the spire?’ Mesler now asked. ‘Did the Überführer come from there?’
Lang ignored the officer.
‘Answer him…’ Blomberg said.
‘The Überführer is everywhere,’ Lang replied. ‘He is the land. He is the sky. He is the stars. He is the spire too!’
‘The sooner that damned tower is sealed off from the outside world the better,’ Mesler said. ‘That spire is the key to all the misfortunes that have befallen us here on this god-forsaken world.’
‘Haven’t we more pressing issues before you go back outside gallivanting around with grenades,’ Blomberg said. ‘Shouldn’t we consider giving our comrades a descent burial first? It sounds unseemly to be acting like heroes while they lie unburied. Their memories can be honoured after they’re laid to rest.’
‘You’re right,’ Mesler nodded after he considered his colleague‘s words.
Then at that moment, the lights in the entire sickbay flickered, then went out. The blue emergency lights immediately cut in. Nevertheless, Mesler still swore under his breath. ‘That’s all we need,’ he said.
‘It is work of the Überführer!’ Lang suddenly announced.
‘That may well be, but I haven’t got time to meet his holiness. I’ve an appointment with the reactor. No doubt the breakers have gone again.’ He turned to Blomberg. ‘In any case, finish tending his wound and then sedate him. I’ve had enough of his ravings for one day. We’ll tend to the bodies of the crew once I’ve finished.’
‘Jawohl, Herr Mesler,’ Blomberg replied.
‘And if you just happen to accidentally over-dose him with that sedative, you’ll personally receive the Iron Cross from me,’ Mesler said as he hurried from the isolation-room and towards the reactor.
Blomberg sat back down next to Lang and knitted together the last few millimetres of open flesh. As he did so, Lang gazed at the comatose Stahl outside in the sickbay.
‘Will Herr Stahl survive?’ Lang asked.
The question seemed to surprise Blomberg. After his previous religious ramblings, the normal and humane question seemed to be totally out of character and emanate from another person.
‘I don’t know at the moment,’ Blomberg answered. ‘But I think that the Sturmbannführer will eventually wake from his coma. All we can do for now is make him comfortable.’
‘I’ll pray for him.’
‘You do that, Lang,’ Blomberg said as he completed dressing the sealed wound. ‘And while you’re at it, pray for us all!’
He pushed himself away from the cot and crossed the room to place his soiled tools into a sonic-bath mounted in a bench-top. It hummed rhythmically filling the room with its gentle melody.
As Blomberg tended to his tools, behind him, Lang turned once again toward the slumbering Stahl. He strained at the restraints as he tried to peer closer at his fellow Nazi. ‘What would you have me do now?’
Beyond the thick glass partition that separated them, Stahl unsurprisingly remained silent.
Lang cocked his head as his listened to an unheard voice, but it was obvious that this unheard message emanated from the comatose officer. ‘I understand,’ he nodded.
He then settled back on the table and waited.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Konrad sat in front of the radio-set with his head cupped in his hands listening to the faint whistles that emanated from the circular speaker. The fizzing radio had obsessed Konrad ever since he, Ziegler and Elsa had returned reluctantly to the control room. Following Blomberg’s prudent advice, Mesler had instructed the prisoners to clear Lang’s victims away. Like the victims of the crash, the bodies were placed inside the air-lock, but taking the bodies here was the extent of the prisoner’s participation. From then on the Nazis took over. It was they who buried the bodies in the grave they had prepared at the foot of the mound, and it was they who prayed as the alien soil swallowed their colleagues. But it was ironic (an attitude Nazis seldom saw in themselves) that they still prayed to the same Überführer in whose name the crew had been murdered.
Being banished from the Nazi funeral allowed Konrad to seek out the source of the sounds he had heard as he moved the bodies. It was merely a whisper in the debris, an almost imperceptible voice, but nevertheless, the sound had instantly hooked him. At first, Konrad thought the voice may have belonged to a ghost of one of the murdered crew, or perhaps, it belonged to the wrecked ship itself. But his imagination soon gave way to his more rational side, and he quickly guessed that the indistinct voice emanated from some sort of radio-receiver. He looked at each overturned panel and each smashed station until eventually he found the still glowing radio-set. It was literally a diamond in the rough. But now that he had found his prize, the voice he had heard had frustratingly faded away into the ether. He had remained at the radio-set for hours continually twisting its dial back and forth in the hope of finding the enigmatic voice once again. A chorus of white-noise accompanied each turn.
Konrad still sat at the set, but he let his eyes wander around his new home. Mesler had allowed the prisoners to decamp to the control room. Given its spooky atmosphere with the blue emergency lighting and the open observation-deck with its view of the imposing spire, it was far from ideal. If he had been given a choice, Konrad would have rather stayed in the relative comfort of the sickbay with its comfortable beds and clean sheets, but the old hierarchy of Nazi and prisoner, master and slave, despite all the disasters that had befallen all of them, remained stubbornly in place. Ziegler meanwhile had taken advantage of the new situation and had managed to remain in the sickbay. He had volunteered to watch over Lang and the still comatose Stahl. At first, Konrad has assumed that this apparent act of duty was borne from a desire to remain in the cushy Nazi domain, but as he thought deeper, he slowly realised that maybe the reason Ziegler had volunteered was simply to be back with his own kind. The Nazi salute that Ziegler gave outside the module could now be seen as an unsubtle indication of his true nature.
To keep comfortable, the prisoners had scavenged mattresses, along with a small portable heater. It was a colony within a colony. Nevertheless, it remained the nearest to anything he could call home for a long time. However, the all-pervasive presence of the spire outside and the control room’s recent murderous history lent the space a morbid atmosphere. Elsa had fallen asleep following their meagre meal of ration-packs. A delicious combination of rehydrated stew, vegetables and ice-cream. Konrad had been tempted to remain in the den along with Elsa and the warm glow of the heater, but the draw of the radio was too much. He left them to clamber into the debris.
Without warning, the unremitting sea of static suddenly cleared, and much to his delight, Konrad could hear a stream of familiar earthly sounds. The sudden change from white noise to speech was startling. Imagine a deaf man suddenly being to able to hear the sound of his child laughing. The music that sang from the radio-speaker was unfamiliar to Konrad. It was foreign, and thankfully not the Nazi approved “muzak” he had grown up listening to. Instead, the music he heard was American jazz. The last time he had heard such music was when he was a child. Like now, he and his father had sat in the darkness around the radio-set in their sitting-room searching the airwaves for contraband signals such as The Voice of Freedom or Volksemfänger. The former was an American radio-station that transmitted, it was rumoured, from a fleet of ships anchored in the Atlantic, while the latter was a home-grown pirate radio-station that simply played banned music and sensibly cut out all the political propaganda and evangelical sermons that interspersed the American transmissions. As Konrad listened, other voices, other music, other sounds spoke to him. They were old, their sources long dead and gone. They spoke from a time before the Odin was built and launched, before Neu Magdeburg was colonised, even long before he was born. Since Konrad sat over fifty light years from Earth, the signals tantalisingly described a world not viewed through the prism of the Nazis. These ethereal transmissions were a mixture of languages such as French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and English, a babble of incomprehensible voices and sounds. The snatches of sentences or phrases that he could understand spoke of Allied armies, Western fronts, royal visits and Hollywood actors. He heard what he assumed were shows from British music-halls or heart-broken French crooners and Arabic calls to prayer. Konrad could have continued to listen to these captivating transmissions, but instead, he wanted a taste of the familiar, a taste of home. He fine-tuned the radio until more familiar German signals drifted from the galactic ether like ghosts emerging from the shadows of a haunted house. Like his furtive childhood searches, he tried to ignore the standard Nazi fare of martial music, Wagnerian operas and inane cookery programs that dominated the German radio-waves until he was rewarded with something that appealed to his sporting nature: a football match. The roar of the expectant crowd buzzed below the excited commentator’s voice as he described the action. The clubs who were taking part in the match, Bayern Munich and Borussia Monchengladbach, were well-known to Konrad, but unfamiliar players vied for the ball. Naturally drawn into the action of the long forgotten football match, the images of the players tackling, running and scoring filled his mind, and such was Konrad’s enthusiasm for the game that when Borussia scored he leapt from his seat and punched the air as if he was in the ground amongst the cheering fans. Eventually the excited commentator mentioned when the match was taking place – April 1950. And so all the players, the officials, the commentator, everybody in the crowd, old and young, were long gone. He was truly listening to ghosts. The football match soon faded away and something even more fascinating was heard.