Astronomy, page 7
The woman’s smile became more studied. She picked up her armload of beer steins. With her elbow, she pointed thataway, behind the bar. But she didn’t stick around. She was on her way out to the patio, to assuage the war wounds of the Luftwaffe pilots.
“He was here a day or so ago. He left something. He didn’t say who was to pick it up.” The woman was gone through the lace curtains to the back.
Susan licked her lips. She rubbed her palms. She told herself she could simply walk over behind the bar like she owned the place. That’s what her OSS friends would have told her.
But her OSS friends weren’t here. She felt the weight of every eye in the room upon her.
A warning was passed through the bar—they were launching the xenon signal in ten seconds. Everyone should look away. Among the rich patrons at the bar, blackened glasses were snapped from pockets, and unfolded with practiced ease. They held their chronometers at the ready, their thumbs waiting on their femtosecond timers. Others clamped their hands across their eyes, giggling nervously.
This game with the xenon lamp must have been a tradition at the Four Winds. The barmaids even had a drink they served for the occasion. Returning from her Luftwaffe pilots on the patio, the little button-eyed bierfrau asked Susan if she might care for a Dresdenwasser.
“Excuse me? Dresdenwasser?”
The woman laughed at the horror on her face. “The drink is quite beautiful. You should see—peppermint schnapps and a drop of radium.”
“Radium.” Susan essayed a little smile. “Indeed.”
“Oh, just a little bit won’t hurt you.”
“Another time perhaps,” she promised.
The patrons banged rhythmically at the tabletop as the countdown hit five. A hundred shot glasses glowing pale green raised to the sky, while the men sang, “He’s here! Soon He is here! Time for the Renewal of Time!”
Susan ducked behind the bar as the countdown hit zero. An ashy-blue light coated every upturned surface in the room with bright violet icing. She found a manila envelope set between a bottle of Jagermeister and one of malt wine. Scrawled across the front in pencil were the words Das Unternehmen—“The Undertaking.”
People were laughing and catching their breaths as she stepped out. Susan figured her luck was holding: all eyes were locked on the red- and black-suited men out on the patio as they compared the accuracy of their plated instruments against the readings from a photovoltaic cell.
The crimson-suited paladin folded the cover over his watch. She heard the snap of a tiny latch. Without a backward glance, he made his way through the crowd for the night air. This was her chance. She had Hartmann’s package; she was just steps from the alcove she’d arrived through.
Laughter erupted behind her.
“You look like a schoolgirl sneaking out early from class.”
She turned to answer, and stopped.
Take the blackness of the night sky between the stars, pour it into the shape of a man. Give him a sardonic smile. Give him eyes of perfectly beaten gold. She started to say something. The image of the man took her words away.
“Don’t be alarmed, Fräulein. I am the proprietor of this establishment. Everyone knows me.”
She tried to smile, tried to think of some normal sort of reply. “Leave me alone,” she said.
Well, it was normal bar conversation for her.
The black man tittered effeminately into the tips of his fingers. “You have a terrible ear for chit-chat. I would have thought your OSS friends would have coached you on that. It hardly matters. I would give you my name, but it is ancient and Egyptian and difficult to pronounce. You do not need to learn it. In any case, it is you whom I am anxious to meet.”
Susan pushed past him for the door. His hand came up around her elbow. It was not a firm grip. She could have broken it without difficulty. Maybe that was the thing that lent it authority. People stopped for that hand. No further force had been needed in a very long time.
The Egyptian raised his chin to indicate the envelope in her hand. “Are you quite sure that belongs to you?”
“It’s a gift from a friend,” she said. “It’s what I came here for.”
“May I look inside?”
“I have . . .”—she turned her head toward the door—“people . . .”
The man smiled. He had a youthful, pleasant face. His smile seemed to come from somewhere deep inside. The light on his eyes gave away no depth. They were bright and hard as medallions.
“The two gentlemen in the American car. Yes. The one in the passenger’s seat seems especially concerned for you. Why is that?”
She looked the man full in the face. “I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else.”
The black man looked genuinely pained. “How can he care for you?” He leaned close enough she could see the disappointment in his empty golden eyes. “He doesn’t even know what hurts you.”
Susan glanced back at the alcove. It glowed a pale green—bright with Angle Webs. One of them had to get her back to her own world. All she had to do was reach it.
“If you are planning to go home the way you arrived,” the black man said, “allow me to advise against it.” It was a suggestion, as one would give to a friend putting money down on a gimpy horse. “Some men have become aware of your presence. They are waiting for you in the alcove. I fear their intentions toward you.”
Susan looked toward the end of the bar. A pair of SS men were eyeing her with a certain ferocious candor. One of them smiled to her.
She tried to tell him there had been some mistake. The black man waved her objections aside with a sigh. “Really,” he sounded peevish. “You are so bad at lying, it grates a bit, you know? Why don’t you just stay here awhile with us?”
Susan noticed something in the alcove—a pair of shadows. In case she got past the two jokers at the end of the bar, they had a backup. She’d run right into their arms.
“Here’s another idea,” she said. “How about I turn this place of yours into a distressed property?”
The black man looked interested. “Can you do that?”
She pulled Bogen’s grenade from her pocket and, with a finger extended from the envelope in her other hand, jerked out the pin. “You ever see what one of these can do to a dump like the Four Winds Bar?”
“Really.” The black man did his best to look interested. “And what do you suppose it would do to Herr Kriene’s telescope?”
“I tell you the truth, I don’t know. Let’s say we find out.” She raised the pineapple a little higher, her hand white-knuckled over the lever.
The black man grinned. “We quail before such heedless fury. Very well.” He nodded toward the front door. A little portal appeared, like the portal on a luxury steamer. Through the portal, she saw the squat, beautiful little hump that was Charley Shrieve’s Plymouth staff car.
“Under normal circumstances, you would have to return to your world by the same means you left it. Rules of the house, you understand. But,” the black man raised his hands in an equitable gesture, “as it is my house, I make the rules. This one time, you may forgo the dangers of the Angle Web. You may return to your realm through the front door.”
Susan hesitated. “How do I know it’s real?”
The black man laughed. He had a generous laugh. Susan could almost trust a laugh like that. “I like you,” he said. “These gentlemen you see represent death, horror, apocalypse. They think they pay me in the coin of my realm. But my interest is not in destruction for its own sake, but in chaos. And you—” He looked into the back of her eyes and smiled. “You represent that in good measure.”
“You don’t know what I represent.”
The black man threw his head back and roared. “Just so,” he managed. “Just as you say.”
Somehow, she realized, she had made his very point. She pulled back from him. If he follows me . . . she said to herself, but the thought remained incomplete. Something in her ears was marching up and down like an Armistice Day parade. Clutching Hartmann’s envelope to her chest, she fumbled the pin back into the grenade, and made herself walk out deliberately.
The Plymouth swung around in the center of the street. It pulled up in front of her, smooth as a Dillinger bank job. Bogen was grinning at her from the driver’s seat. “What’s a dish like you doing in a dump like this?”
“You’ve been watching Cary Grant movies. We approve.” The back door was open, but she opened the front to toss the grenade next to Bogen, who pulled away with a choked cry. “Keep the strings tied on your carryall,” she advised him. She closed the door and got in back with Charley Shrieve. She didn’t feel like conversation.
Only Shrieve’s flaring nostrils betrayed his discomfiture; after swallowing deliberately, he asked if she were all right. She said nothing. She waited till the car pulled away to glance back.
The Four Winds Bar was shuttered and dark. The entire stretch of Münterstrasse from the warehouse district to Blauerwasser Bridge looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. Only as they turned the corner did she hear a heavy-lipped German chanteuse singing “My Special Girlfriend.”
She cracked the rear window to hear more clearly. The buttery smell of American cigarettes filled the car.
The fog over the ocean parted in big chunks, like puzzle pieces. And there in the reflected light of the crossed searchlights was the ribbed, silver belly of a great airship, a zeppelin.
She stared as the giant dirigible slid into the gap between two cloud banks, turned northeast toward the Baltic, and faded from this world.
Chapter Five
SHRIEVE WAS UNEASY LEAVING HER ALONE in her apartment for the night. Maybe he was feeling guilty about letting her try the Angle Web. Maybe he was simply worried about Hartmann’s package. Susan couldn’t tell.
He offered to bring her in tonight. They had a room waiting for her at the safe house on Berendstrasse. Susan thanked him, no. She could just see going through this stuff with fifteen post-graduate OSS kids bouncing around till two A.M.
“I’ve been okay for the last three months,” she said. “I’ll be okay one more night.” If she was going to piece this mass of bureaucratic debris into a seamless whole, she needed time to sit in her dilapidated bay window and smoke and think.
“I’ll have a squad of OSS men down here,” he promised her.
“I’ll put up my blackout drapes,” she said.
Shrieve watched her all the way up the stairs. He waited while she fumbled with her keys and then while she got up to her apartment. Susan looked out the bay window to see him frowning at her, ignoring Bogen, who was punching his shoulder, going, Come on.
Susan had inherited her apartment from a girlfriend who had departed for an assignment in Washington. The arrangement was supposed to last a week, just till the Navy could find suitable digs for all its Spookworks. Here she was, three months later.
She put a kettle to boil on the stove. She had an old teapot, salvaged from the collapsed apartment building across the street. She filled it with something the U.S. Army referred to as “Tea, Earl Grey,” and moved her pile of documents over to the window.
She opened it carefully, with a little respect. Whatever was in here had cost the lives of twenty-three scientists and soldiers at Faulkenberg Reservoir—more than that if one included the members of Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group. Maybe these were Germans. It still bothered her—every smiling face in every photograph belonged to a ghost. Every person she saw had died horribly.
Some of this stuff was mystifying—a travel permit from Heinrich Himmler, dated from mid-June, 1942. The big fella had closed the Mittelland Canal—the most important east-west waterway in Germany—for three days during the height of the war. Nobody did that. What could have been more important than moving munitions bound for Russia? And then there was the requisition for 200 kilos of toothpaste. Toothpaste. She just put that one aside.
Some of it was intriguing in its implications. Here was a mathematical treatise from the Opal Group, detailing certain non-Euclidean metrics that had proved successful in the summoning of “Lesser Entities.” No explanation what “Lesser Entities” referred to, but there was an entire subset of figures devoted to sending them back in a hurry should the experimenter grow uneasy about their intentions.
Here were architectural blueprints from the Theodolyte Group, used in the reconstruction of an observatory and ceremonial tower. The designs were credited to a Charles Dexter Ward, late of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. The blueprints were accompanied by a folder stuffed with photographs. These were dated from 1943 into early 1944.
Susan took them to be some sort of contractor’s proofs. They followed the conversion of a disused reservoir in the Franconian Wald into something sinister. Over the course of the photographs, the shore was subsumed by metal scaffolding, watchtowers, and searchlights.
Near the center rose the jewel-turreted ceremonial tower of Charles Dexter Ward. Susan remembered the original from her Watermark slide show. No one had quite figured out Charles Ward’s tower, except to note that researchers went in periodically, and did not always come back out.
Did that make the tower a weapon to turn around the war? That depended, she supposed, on how many Allied soldiers they thought they could entice inside it.
She found a picture taken from inside the construction area. It showed the tower just as it was finished, and beside it, a squat, turnip-shaped building with a sliding aperture—an astronomical observatory? That at least would explain the requisition for 200 kilos of toothpaste: polishing medium, to buff out precision optical gear.
But this photo presented a deeper mystery. Beyond tower and observatory lurked something so large she presumed it to be the shadow of some mountain beyond the camera’s vantage. But the light angles were all wrong. One picture was taken at midday, yet this one shadow continued to cross it in the background.
Susan’s photographer’s loupe was not much help. All the photos from Faulkenberg Reservoir were grainy and vaguely fogged, as if they had suffered some microwave penetration. The shadow appeared blurry even when the foreground was clear.
She shuffled through Hartmann’s paperwork for anything that might allude to the giant thing in the distance. Nothing did, save a single note dated in the spring of 1938. This was a geologist’s report of the rock being excavated on the shore to uncover an artifact of unknown age and origin.
The rock it was embedded in was 160 million years old. They had been digging it up with tons of dynamite, and were in fact asking for more. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t made of leaded crystal. She tagged it with a paper clip and moved on.
At the bottom of the stack, there was a note tossed in, apparently as an afterthought. Her eyes were burning by this time, and her bladder was full of tea.
One more little bit, she promised herself, and then you can dump this all on Charley Shrieve in the morning.
She thought at first she was reading a personal note. It was handwritten, in an elegant and self-conscious penmanship. In fact, it was a directive to Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group. Leder was to increase the daily total of translated pages from the Kufic source manuscript into modern German. Special emphasis was to be placed on cataloguing the attributes of the Great Old Ones—their estimated mass, physical size, and surface temperature.
The note threatened “consumption” if Leder’s group failed. Susan felt a little prickle down the back of her neck as she read this.
She saw crimson eyes gleaming from just beyond a battered doorway. She swallowed something as hard as a stone. She heard a rattling sound, like a wasp batting at a window—surprise, it was the paper in her hand. Imagine that.
In the kitchen, the last tea water of the evening was coming to a boil. She thought to go take it off the stove, but something told her that if she got up now, she would never finish this particular note.
It took all her strength to read down to the bottom. It took more to read the eloquent hand that finished it off. It was the signature of a movie star, a man who wrote with an eye toward archivists a hundred years from now.
Yours Truly, it read, Stürmbannführer Krzysztof Malmagden.
Chapter Six
SHE STUMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS, still full of dreams of Russian Rockets. She almost didn’t see the two guys Shrieve had left across the street from her.
A car door opened up. She heard someone call out to her. “Hey, Green Eyes.” It was Dale Bogen, of course. Determined to be annoying. Perhaps using his hand grenade had gone a bit far? She walked on down the street as he tried out Sue, and then Suzy (Suzy! Oh, God). She’d never had a little brother. Even though he meant to be annoying, she found the experience rather novel. Was this what her girlfriends complained about? The car crept along behind her while Bogen worked his way up through “Princess.”
About the time he got around to “Miss,” she climbed in.
The Watermark group worked out of a two-story walk-up on Berendtstrasse. It was not a safe house in the classic sense. It had no false floors to kick out in case of a Gestapo raid. The wireless was on the kitchen table, rather than hidden away in a closet. Even this was going away as soon as telephone service was restored in Kiel’s waterfront district.
But it smelled right—that combination of homemade soup and gun oil and perfume and old socks. Every time Susan walked in, she closed her eyes and remembered all the little houses she had passed through during the last two years, the people she had known, the ones she would not see again.
The kitchen was in its mealtime hubbub. A couple of kids younger than Susan were arguing about how much garlic went into the communal omelet they were cooking.
The omelet filled a warped cookie pan from side to side. Pete DeLeone was scraping a mound of crushed cloves into the center of the morass. Young Betty Sharpe, his mentor and his tormentor, was offering the opinion that garlic was not, strictly speaking, a noontime sort of herb.
“I’ve got an appointment with a British Rear Admiral at two,” she said. “We’re going to be driving around the waterfront for most of the afternoon, in the back seat of a Very Small British Staff Car.” She leaned over his shoulder, just so there was no missing her serious eye contact.
