"Come on," Ilsa said sweetly, "Get up."
"Perhaps Mr. D'Orr would like to freshen up," said the guttural voice of Ferris' nightmares. "A shower, perhaps?"
"No way!" screamed Ferris D'Orr. "I know what you people mean by showers."
"He is frightened after his long journey," said Konrad Blutsturz. "Let me speak with him, You start the oven."
"I'm not Jewish!" Ferris said, jumping to his feet.
The old man laughed. "You already told us that. Ilsa is merely going to start dinner. Do you have a preference?"
"Anything," said Ferris D'Orr, "as long as it's ham, pork roast, or pork chops."
"Any of those, Ilsa," the old man called as the girl left the room. "Come, sit by my side. You are a most peculiar young man, but then, you are a genius. All geniuses are peculiar."
"I want to go home," Ferris said, sitting in the chair with the same gingerly resignation of a death-row inmate settling into the electric chair. He suddenly, desperately, yearned for a lemon Coke, but they hadn't made them in years.
"Do not be frightened. You will be here only a short time. I need your expertise. And your nebulizer."
"It's yours. Just put me on a bus."
"Soon, within the week. Allow me to show you my plans."
Ferris watched as the old man unrolled a set of blueprints.
"Some of the parts are very delicate, as you can see, but we have the molds. Can your nebulizer cast such tiny parts?"
Ferris gave the blueprints a quick glance. "Easily. Can I go now?"
"After these parts are made and assembled."
"What are they going to be assembled into?"
"Me," said Konrad Blutsturz. "They are going to be assembled into me."
"But there are enough parts here to build a baby tank."
"Exactly."
All during that feverish night they brought in the molds and the chunks and billets of titanium. It was good-quality titanium. Ferris recognized the Titanic Titanium Technologies stamp on a few of the sections. They made Ferris melt the pieces into molds. When they were done, they had him weld the parts into mechanisms. The brown-suited soldiers took the finished components into the next room. Once, when the door opened wide enough, Ferris saw that it was an operating amphitheater.
He remembered his mother's stories of the grisly Nazi surgeries performed on conscious patients. Once he had seen in a book a photograph of two Nazi doctors. They stood with stupid pride over a sheet-covered body.
The body's legs stuck out from below the sheets and there wasn't enough flesh on the bones to satisfy a rat. Ferris D'Orr shuddered. He didn't know what he had become enmeshed in, but he knew that it was evil. And he understood for the first time why his mother was so determined to remember the holocaust.
It was happening again. Here, in America. And Ferris was a part of it.
"What's this all about?" Ferris asked Ilsa after he had finished casting the largest pieces of the mounting for a sicklelike blade of steel.
"It's about cleansing America," she said matter-of-factly. "Of what?"
"Jews, blacks, Asians, and icky people like that. Smiths, too. "
"Smiths?" asked Ferris, remembering the telephone-directory pages.
"Yes, they're worse than Jews or the others, much worse. A Smith put Herr Fuhrer Blutsturz into a wheelchair. But you will lift him out."
Ferris understood another thing. Hatred did not discriminate. All his life he had hidden his heritage from the world, half out of false shame and half out of fear. The evil that haunted his dreams had found him anyway. There was no escape from hatred.
"No one is safe," Ferris said.
"What, sweet thing?"
Ferris D'Orr stood up and shut off the nebulizer. A billet, beginning to liquefy, suddenly froze in its mold, only half-formed.
"That one's not done," Ilsa said.
"It is done," Ferris said firmly. "It's all done." He kicked over the nebulizer. It hit the floor with a mushy crack, and the projector tube bent. A panel popped off one side.
"Hey! Why'd you do that?"
"Because," said Ferris D'Orr proudly, "it's my historic duty. I am a Jew."
Ilsa made a face. "Oooh, too bad. We were going to let you live."
Konrad Blutsturz was beside himself. He raged. He flopped on the operating table. The doctors, frightened, tried to hold him down. It was a critical moment. "Herr Fuhrer, restrain yourself," the head surgeon pleaded. "If this is true, there is nothing we can do."
"He went bananas." Ilsa moaned, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I didn't know he was going to do anything crazy. How was I to know?"
"I must walk. I must."
"We may be able to proceed," the head surgeon said. Behind him, on a series of cork panels, the blueprints for the new Konrad Blutsturz were pinned up with thumbtacks. "We cannot stop. We have gone too far. We must proceed."
"And I must walk," said Konrad Blutsturz.
"We are taking stock of the unfinished components, Herr Fuhrer," the head surgeon said. "If necessary, we will build the incomplete portions of the mechanisms from aluminum or steel. Most of the critical titanium parts have been formed."
"The legs?" demanded Konrad Blutsturz. "They are being assembled now."
"Are they complete?"
"Nearly. Let me finish attaching the arm."
"Finish it, and bring that man to me."
"What man?"
"The traitor, D'Orr."
"Gotcha," said Ilsa.
The doctors had opened up the stump that was Konrad Blutsturz' left arm and inserted a titanium coupling into the bone marrow, as they had done with both leg stumps. The old steel hand lay in a corner. In its place they were attaching the bluish jointed arm that ended in a fully articulated hand. It possessed four fingers and that ultimate symbol of humanity, an opposable thumb. "No pain?" asked the doctor.
"This is a moment of rebirth," said Konrad Blutsturz. "The pain of birth is the pain of life. It is to be savored, not endured."
"I could put you under, if the local anesthetic is not enough."
"Only to stand erect will ease the pain. Only to take the throat of the man who put me in this position will be enough."
Ilsa brought in Ferris D'Orr at gunpoint.
Konrad Blutsturz had only one question: "Why?"
"I am the son of a Jew."
"And for that you would cheat me of my dream? Fool. I meant you no harm."
"Your kind has seared the conscience of the world."
"Fool! We Nazis did not hate the Jews, or anyone else. It was a political hatred. It was not real, not true. The Jews were just a focusing point, a scapegoat to rouse Germany out of the hell of inflation and defeat after the First World War. Had the Reich triumphed, we would have abolished the death camps. There would have been no need for them. We would have pardoned the Jews."
"And who would have pardoned you?" asked Ferris D'Orr.
"So you have placed yourself in this jeopardy because you wish to avoid a repetition of your holocaust. Correct?"
"Yes."
"Ilsa, make him kneel. On my left side, please."
Ilsa forced Ferris D'Orr to his knees and pulled back his hair until his eyes were stretched open.
Ferris D'Orr stared at the blue metal arm lying next to him. Parts of it he recognized; he had molded them. "The first years were the worst," intoned Konrad Blutsturz, his words as distantly angry as far thunder. "I could not move. I was in an iron coffin staring at the ceiling. I wanted to die, but they would not let me die. Later, I would not let myself die. I would not die because I wanted to kill."
The titanium hand clicked into a fist. Then it opened. It moved soundlessly, with a near-human animation that was as repulsively fascinating as watching a spider eat.
"I dreamed of this moment, Harold Smith." Konrad Blutsturz spoke to the ceiling. The operating lights blazed down upon his unformed body.
"Ilsa, place Smith's neck in my new hand. I wish to feel its strength."