“Certifiable lunatics, criminals, sociopaths were allowed to roam at will, to breed as they wished, perpetuating their unsavory kind; mankind employed selective breeding on his livestock, but seemed to consider his own species not worthy of such effort, and any person or group who suggested such a rational practice was slandered, libeled, vilified endlessly.
“Weil, friend Milo, the death of a high degree of civilization has ended that ruinous phase of mankind’s history, at least. We can be certain that only the very strongest, least genetically tainted specimens of humanity survived the plagues and hunger of the period immediately following the War, and the hordes of mental and physical defectives were most likely the first ones to die.
“Now there no longer are softheaded bureaucrats to force those few doctors or midwives as remain to expend heroic efforts to keepalive infants better off dead. And in our existing world, at the level of human culture to which that catastrophic war has reduced us, there is scant chance of any save the mentally and physically sound surviving to the age of breeding, so we will be spared the generations after generations of genetically crippled and feebleminded and diseased which so disastrously afflicted the previous civilization.
“With careful safeguards and controls, we now have the God-sent opportunity, my friend, of overseeing the beginning of the birth of a true Herrenvolk—a race that will one day be capable of conquering the world and fitted to rule it, as well.”
“Sieg Heil!” said Milo dryly. “You sound like a 1930s recording of Adolf Hitler, Doctor. Are you sure you weren’t yourself a Nazi, before the War?”
Watching the physician more closely than usual, Milo thought to see a start and a forced nonchalance in the reply.
“Friend Milo, National Socialism died in the streets of Berlin in 1945, close to a century ago now. So how could I have been, eh? I was not born until 1956. Though it must have been a very exciting time to be alive … for a German, that is.”
“Who proceeded to make times even more exciting,” added Milo, “for the Czechs, the Poles, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Norwegians and one hell of a lot of other nationalities, Doctor.”
Bookerman sighed and slowly shook his head, saying, “Ah, friend Milo, it was but another in a progression of European wars that had been fought since time immemorial, for land, for religion and, later, for politics. America really had no place in it, no reason to get involved at all. It was strictly a war by Europeans against other Europeans and none of the proper concern of the Amis. Had not the then American president Herr Rosenfeld, been so very much enamored of that Communist butcher, Herr Stalin, and pushed his nation into a position from which war against Germany was inevitable, you know, it is quite possible that the War and the subsequent near-extirpation of most of mankind would never have taken place. The Christian Bible says something about the sins of the fathers, I believe.
“Besides, few of you Americans ever were allowed to truly understand the aims of the National Socialist German Workers Party—”
“Six million dead Jews and gypsies, Doctor, are damned hard to misunderstand,” Milo interrupted coldly.
Bookerman’s smile resembled a supercilious sneer. “Oh, come now, friend Milo, surely a man as intelligent, as rational as you have proved yourself to be did not’ swallow that prize bit of Zionist propaganda entire? If so many were killed during the period of World War Two, then from whence came the hordes of Jews who suddenly appeared in Palestine, in America, in Britain and in Australia?
“No, if you want monsters, look not to Germany and our Fuhrer, look rather at your former president’s great friend and ally. Do you know that Josef Stalin had between thirty and fifty million of his own people murdered in less than fifteen years? And America’s more recent ally, Communist China, under Mao Tse-tung, exterminated close to one hundred millions of Chinese and Tibetans between 1949 and 1967, These figures, of course, pale in comparison with that which was done, worldwide it would appear, thirty-odd years ago. And had Rosenfeld and Churchill and the rest of the meddlers allowed us to do that which was so necessary—scour the world clean of the Communists, the Untermenschen—none of this would ever have happened, for there would have been existing no Empire of Soviets to do it, to so destroy all of Western civilization.”
“No, Doctor, there would instead have been the hegemony of Shickelgruber’s thousand-year Reich, most likely, with all its many and severe faults. It would have been akin to letting a pack of vicious, hungry wolves into the house to protect it from a prowling bear; the price was just considered too steep to pay.”
“I am most sorry to have to say it, friend Milo, but you speak the words of a fool, a silly, soft, sentimental fool, not the realist I had taken you to be throughout all we two had experienced together these past years.” The physician looked to truly be sorrowful. “I had, indeed, hoped that after all the decades of frustration, I had at last found a man of kindred philosophy and belief who might be my associate in the beginning and who might then assume my mantle of … oh, ahh, of Fuhrerschaft, to carry on with the supervision of our folk and to our grand design of a reascension of the West. But you are only another humanistic, egalitarian fool, aren’t you? Your baseless slanders against die Dritten Deutschen Reich reveal the truth: at your core of being, you are but yet another of a seemingly endless succession of narrow, visionless men, so hidebound in outmoded dogma as to be unable, unwilling to see that nothing of any importance has ever been accomplished in this world without effort, without sacrifice of the few for the future good of the many, without the sacrifice of the individuals for the good of the state and without the sacrifice of the present for the future.
“Although it pains me to say it, I overestimated you, Milo Moray. I, who had thought that so many long years of life and experience had honed my judgment of men to near-infallibility, was wrong in your case.”
“If you’d thought that I was going to play Goring to your Hitler, Doctor, you sure as hell were wrong!” said Milo, in a blunt, no-nonsense tone. “A lot of those people you’re thinking about breeding like so many dumb cattle are my people, kids I’ve known all of their lives. You try to impose any of that hideous Nazi crap on them, Doctor, and I’ll kill you, that is a promise!
“Are you sure you’re not a good deal older than you say you are? Nazism died a richly deserved death at least ten years before you claim to have been born, so how you came to be so thoroughly inculcated with its savage, barbaric tenets bothers me more than a little … and when things bother me that much, then I make it my business to get to the bottom of them sooner or later, preferably sooner. Perhaps I should take you on as an urgent project, Dr. Bookerman, for my peace of mind and for the future safety of those who depend upon me, for from what you have averred here, this night, I see you as a major threat to the common liberty, if not the very survival, of these few remaining Americans.”
After that night, Milo set himself to watch the doings of Dr. Bookerman very closely, but found nothing that seemed at all out of the ordinary. The physician, his co-leader, behaved as if the conversation on that night had never occurred, treating Milo with the same respect or bonhomie as he had since they had been together. Nor was there anything new in his treatment of the second-echelon commanders—Harry Krueger, Jim Olsen and the rest—or his behavior around the lesser folk.
The caravan of wagons, carts, riders, walkers and herds moved on slowly eastward along or closely paralleling the ancient highway. They halted often to rest the herds or to loot the empty towns, now and again setting up Olsen’s forge to do necessary repairs, reshoe horses and draft oxen and mules, or where the materials were available, construct new carts to bear away the quantities of scavenged artifacts they were finding. They were in no hurry to arrive at any destination now, or to be somewhere by a certain time of the year.