Despite my college classes, I didn’t read German very well. Lack of practice, for one thing. I knew a few technical words, newspaper terms like blitzkreig, but the grammar defeated me, as well as those incredible compound words that just balloon into monstrous collections of meaningless letters. German and English are pretty close in some ways, though, so I could puzzle out words such as Nordeuropa and Arktischer. By and large the meaning of the documents escaped me. It was apparent that I would need some translation assistance. And just as apparent that I didn’t dare show these papers to anyone.
“Floyd,” I called. “I’m going to the library.”
“Okay,” he shouted from somewhere above me.
“And I am not driving that infernal tractor back into town.”
I could hear him laughing almost all the way back to the parked Willys.
Augusta is like any other rural town with high hopes and a small budget — two- and three-story commercial buildings downtown, railway depot a little bit bigger than it really needed, public school a little bit too small. It was nice to see business booming now that rationing was going away and the boys were home. There had been more weddings in the past few months than in the whole year before. That meant more people spending money at Lungford’s Furniture, that meant the land office kept busy. The war had been kind to Kansas, at least after the fact.
I went by my boarding house and dropped off the Bellamys’ truck for my Hudson. I was tired of the Willys’ shuddering, bouncy ride, and the truck’s balky shifter. Driving downtown, I parked on State Street and headed around the corner for the library. The car wallowed a little bit. I’d have to remember to check the air in the tires.
The public library was about what you might expect in a town like Augusta. It was upstairs from the police and fire stations in the city building, which also held City Hall and the Municipal Court. Three rooms plus an office, brick-walled with oak wainscoting and big oak shelves and some fairly nice Middle Eastern carpets on the floor. Part of the collection had pride of place in glass-doored cabinets near the circulation desk, while a few wingback chairs and set of study carrels stood along the north wall by the tall double-hung windows. Old gas lighting still hung on the ceiling, electric wires wrapped around the fixtures from the flickering bulbs.
The library was stocked with a few magazine subscriptions, an Encyclopedia Britannica from the turn of the century, and a couple thousand books in the stacks, mostly classics and general literature. It made me miss the Hale Library at Kansas State, but it really wasn’t a bad little place.
I didn’t have a library card, of course. You had to be a property owner to have a library card in Augusta, and I rented. I guess I could have asked Dad to get me a card, but then he would have expected something in return. That wasn’t worth the trouble. So when I needed to use the library, I just did my reading inside the building.
The small reference section actually had a German-English dictionary. It was printed in 1892, so I didn’t figure on getting much in the way of aeronautical vocabulary. But it might help me puzzle out the sense of what I had. The technical stuff I could probably pick up from cognate words and borrowings — I was well aware that the United States shared an academic and research tradition with Germany.
I grabbed one of the study carrels by the window and spread my papers out. The cover letter from the envelope looked like an ordinary business letter — I could probably translate it without the dictionary. Instead I went to work on the table of contents of the bound report.
The title translated as something like “Report on the Arctic Expedition for Secret Contact.” It was pretty weird. Some of the section headings had titles like “Science and the Supernatural” and “The Hollow Earth.” Puzzling through this stuff in my bad translation was like reading Charles Fort. Backwards. In a mirror.
Taking a break from the dictionary and the headache it was inducing, I looked at the foldout map bound into the main report. It showed a dotted line, which I assumed to be the route of the “Arctic Expedition for Secret Contact.” The path left Tromso, Norway, headed up to Nord Kap, over the frozen seas to Svalbard, an ice-locked island in the Arctic Ocean, then described a circular path across the Arctic ice cap before returning to Svalbard. There were circles with citation numbers marking two points on the ice cap and a spot on the north coast of Svalbard. Dates and times noted along the path indicated that the expedition had taken place in the spring and early summer of 1943.
I flipped through the report, looking at photographs and diagrams. I had an uncomfortable suspicion about what I was going to find. First, there were smiling men in Arctic survival gear waving at the camera. Then there was a picture of a convoy of half-tracks and dog sleds, obviously the expedition’s main body, with a zeppelin hanging distant in the bright sky. There were several pictures of camp sites. There were pictures of bone fragments being dug out of the ice, with a whole chapter devoted to discussing them. I kept looking.
The kicker was the first picture I found of the aircraft, my aircraft. It was in the ice, at the bottom of a freshly-dug hole. Part of the machine was still embedded in the ice beneath it, surrounded by a dark stain. Two smiling Germans leaned against the side of the aircraft, waving at the camera. It looked like nothing so much as a rounded-off flying wing, something the Germans had been developing since the 1930s. I’d seen pictures in a Dutch aviation magazine called Vliegwereld.
How long would it take for an airplane to become embedded in ice, I wondered? If you landed a DC-3 on the Greenland ice cap and just walked away, how many years before it lay ten or fifteen feet below the surface? Ten years? A hundred? A thousand? I got queasy just asking myself the question. I was afraid of how the answer would make me feel.
Something that old was impossible.
Inhuman.
Impossible.
Trying to put that last thought out of my mind, I walked back into the reference section, wondering where I was going to find information about the rate of deposition of ice caps in the Arctic region. I might have to call a friend from my time at Kansas State who now did graduate meteorology work back East. I didn’t know what I would say when Freddie asked me why I was interested in such a strange topic.
The assistant librarian, Marion Weeks according to the nameplate I had seen on her desk when I first came in, approached me. “Mr. Dunham?” she whispered. She was young, but not pretty. “Are you Vernon Dunham?”
I froze, skin prickling. How had she known my name? The library didn’t have a sign-in policy.
“Yes,” I whispered back after that brief moment of panic. “Why are we whispering?”
She gave me a look that would freeze diesel fuel. “It’s a library Mr. Dunham.” Even in low and quiet, her voice was finicky, the words over-enunciated. “People whisper in libraries.”
I felt foolish, so I smiled at her. I was no Floyd, but I could be charming enough when the need arose. “Sorry. I was trying to be funny.”
“Yes, well,” she sniffed. “You have a telephone call.” Her look made it clear to me that this was most irregular. I thought it was too — outside of work, I didn’t get three or four telephone calls a year. Mrs. Swenson charged her boarders a dime a call, which tended to discourage conversation.