Inside, the jagged lips of the bullet holes had been hammered down so they did not gouge a man’s back. The carrier smelled of leather, sweat, tobacco, smokeless powder, and exhaust fumes. It was crowded, all the more so with the two Indians added to its usual contingent. The motor’s roar when it started up challenged even Gandhi’s equanimity.
Not, he thought with uncharacteristic bitterness, that that equanimity had done him much good.
“THEY ARE HERE, sir,” Lasch told Model, then, as the field marshal’s blank look amplified: “Gandhi and Nehru.”
Model’s eyebrow came down toward his monocle. “I won’t bother with Nehru. Now that we have him, take him out and give him a noodle”—army slang for a bullet in the back of the neck—“but don’t waste my time over him. Gandhi, now, is interesting. Fetch him in.”
“Yes, sir,” the major sighed. Model smiled. Lasch did not find Gandhi interesting. Lasch would never carry a field marshal’s baton, not if he lived to be ninety.
Model waved away the soldiers who escorted Gandhi into his office. Either of them could have broken the little Indian like a stick. “Have a care,” Gandhi said. “If I am the desperate criminal bandit you have styled me, I may overpower you and escape.”
“If you do, you will have earned it,” Model retorted. “Sit, if you care to.”
“Thank you.” Gandhi sat. “They took Jawaharlal away. Why have you summoned me instead?”
“To talk for a while, before you join him.” Model saw that Gandhi knew what he meant, and that the old man remained unafraid. Not that that would change anything, Model thought, although he respected his opponent’s courage the more for his keeping it in the last extremity.
“I will talk, in the hope of persuading you to have mercy on my people. For myself I ask nothing.”
Model shrugged. “I was as merciful as the circumstances of war allowed, until you began your campaign against us. Since then, I have done what I needed to restore order. When it returns, I may be milder again.”
“You seem a decent man,” Gandhi said, puzzlement in his voice. “How can you so callously massacre people who have done you no harm?”
“I never would have, had you not urged them to folly.”
“Seeking freedom is not folly.”
“It is when you cannot gain it—and you cannot. Already your people are losing their stomach for—what do you call it? Passive resistance? A silly notion. A passive resister simply ends up dead, with no chance to hit back at his foe.”
That hit a nerve, Model thought. Gandhi’s voice was less detached as he answered, “Satyagraha strikes the oppressor’s soul, not his body. You must be without honor or conscience, to fail to feel your victims’ anguish.”
Nettled in turn, the field marshal snapped, “I have honor. I follow the oath of obedience I swore with the army to the Führer and through him to the Reich. I need consider nothing past that.”
Now Gandhi’s calm was gone. “But he is a madman! What has he done to the Jews of Europe?”
“Removed them,” Model said matter-of-factly; Einsatzgruppe B had followed Army Group Central to Moscow and beyond. “They were capitalists or Bolsheviks, and either way enemies of the Reich. When an enemy falls into a man’s hands, what else is there to do but destroy him, lest he revive to turn the tables one day?”
Gandhi had buried his face in his hands. Without looking at Model, he said, “Make him a friend.”
“Even the British knew better than that, or they would not have held India as long as they did,” the field marshal snorted. “They must have begun to forget, though, or your movement would have got what it deserves long ago. You first made the mistake of confusing us with them long ago, by the way.” He touched a fat dossier on his desk.
“When was that?” Gandhi asked indifferently. The man was beaten now, Model thought with a touch of pride: he had succeeded where a generation of degenerate, decadent Englishmen had failed. Of course, the field marshal told himself, he had beaten the British too.
He opened the dossier, riffled through it. “Here we are,” he said, nodding in satisfaction. “It was after Kristallnacht, eh, in 1938, when you urged the German Jews to play at the same game of passive resistance you were using here. Had they been fools enough to try it, we would have thanked you, you know: it would have let us bag the enemies of the Reich all the more easily.”
“Yes, I made a mistake,” Gandhi said. Now he was looking at the field marshal, looking at him with such fierceness that for a moment Model thought he would attack him despite advanced age and effete philosophy. But Gandhi only continued sorrowfully, “I made the mistake of thinking I faced a regime ruled by conscience, one that could at the very least be shamed into doing that which is right.”
Model refused to be baited. “We do what is right for our Volk, for our Reich. We are meant to rule, and rule we do—as you see.” The field marshal tapped the dossier again. “You could be sentenced to death for this earlier meddling in the affairs of the fatherland, you know, even without these later acts of insane defiance you have caused.”
“History will judge us,” Gandhi warned as the field marshal rose to have him taken away.
Model smiled then. “Winners write history.” He watched the two strapping German guards lead the old man off. “A very good morning’s work,” the field marshal told Lasch when Gandhi was gone. “What’s on the menu for lunch?”
“Blood sausage and sauerkraut, I believe.”
“Ah, good. Something to look forward to.” Model sat down. He went back to work.
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove first came to prominence as a writer of alternate world fantasy with The Misplaced Legion, the first novel in his multibook Videssos Cycle about the experiences of a Roman legion transferred to a world that runs on magic. Since then, he has explored the impact of altered historical events in a variety of works, including Agent of Byzantium, set in medieval times; the acclaimed The Guns of the South, in which time travelers manipulate a southern victory in the American Civil War; and the first two volumes of the Great War saga, American Front and Walk in Hell, which envisions an America in which the United States and the Confederate States support opposing sides in World War I. His ambitious Worldwar series—which includes In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Striking the Balance, and Upsetting the Balance—projects an alternate World War II in which an alien invasion forges alliances between Axis and Allied opponents. Turtledove has also coedited the anthology Alternate Generals. His many other works include the short-fiction collection Departures, the comic fantasy The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, and the linked novels Into the Darkness and Darkness Descending, epic tales of empire building set in a fantasy world where cataclysmic wars are fought with magic.
THE GAME OF RAT AND DRAGON
Cordwainer Smith
THE TABLE
PINLIGHTING IS A HELL of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn’t make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn’t appreciate what you did.
He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest and pulled the helmet down over his forehead.
As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully.