For the first time, Riedel’s chalky face pinched up. “It is well for you both, Madame, that Mueller does not speak English.” He added, “You may trust my honor or not, as you will. But it is not in our interests alone that we have been sent to you, nor in those alone of the country you represent. If we fail, Senator, there may well in a short time be no Aryan life remaining on Earth.”
His hand gestured Stone toward the door. “You will please precede us.”
Without hesitation or a backward glance, Stone brushed past the two Germans. Had he looked back he would have called attention to his wife, erect and dry-eyed in the hall. He had known enough killers while he was in service to realize that Mueller’s bloodlust was no pretense. The big man had been a finger’s pressure away from double murder, and they would not have been his first.
The outside door opened and dragged a gasp from Stone in the rush of warmed air. Instead of the clear night sky, a convex lens of metal roofed the clearing a dozen feet over Stone’s head. The size of the clearing gave the object dimension: it was a two-hundred-foot saucer resting on a central gondola and three pillar like legs spaced halfway between the center and the rim. Through the windows of the gondola could be seen other men, both seated and standing. An incandescent light flooded stairs which extended from the gondola to the ground, but the whole scene was lighted by the burnished iridescence of the saucer itself.
Behind Stone, the Nazi officer laughed. “It is not heat so much as the eddy currents from the electromagnetic motors that make the hull plates glow so handsomely. But walk ahead, please, Senator. She glows as much on the upper side as well and we—we do not wish to attract close attention while we are grounded.”
Stone’s carpet slippers brushed crisply through the ankle-high grass. The dew that should have gemmed the blades had evaporated under the hot metal lid. Stone always wore slippers and pajamas when he did not expect company, but it was one hell of an outfit in which to take the surrender of a batch of Nazi holdouts in a flying saucer.
Except that Stone knew inside him that men like Riedel were not about to surrender.
“This is Dora, the largest of our experimental models,” Riedel said with pride. “She is sheathed with impervium— chromium-vanadium alloy, you perhaps know. There is no limit, nearly, to the speeds at which she may be driven without losing the strength of her hull, even in the thickest of atmospheres.”
Closer to the gondola, Stone could see that it rested not on wheels but on inflated rubber cushions that must have been heavily reinforced to bear the weight of the craft.
There were small signs of age visible at a nearer glance, too—if Dora was experimental, it was an old experiment. The rectangular windows whose plane surfaces suggested glass or quartz instead of nonrefractive Plexiglas were fogged by tiny pits, and the stair runners appeared to be of several different materials as if there had been replacements over the years. All the men in the gondola were bald or as gray-haired as Mueller and Riedel. The colonel noticed Stone’s surprise and said, “Everyone volunteered for the mission, but we Old Fighters, of course, had preference. Everyone here was of my original crew.”
The man who reached through the hatch to hasten Stone up the last high step wore gray coveralls from which any insignia had long been removed, though his air of authority was evident. He was not even middle-aged. His hands were thin and gnarled, their hairs gleaming silvery against the age-dappled skin, and the bright lights within the gondola shadowed his wrinkles into a road map through eighty years. His exchange in German with Riedel was quick and querulous. The colonel did not translate for Stone’s benefit, but tones and the flash of irritation in the eyes of both men explained more than the bland, “Over-Engineer Tannenberg is anxious that we be under weigh. You will please come with me to the control room. We will have time to discuss matters fully after we have lifted off.”
All ice and darkness, the Nazi strode to one of the pair of latticework elevators in the center of the gondola. Flipping one of a bank of switches, toggles instead of buttons, he set the cage in smooth but squealing upward motion. Wholly fascinated, the senator stared around him.
A bell pinged each time the cage rose to another level. Through the sides, Stone saw identical masses of copper and silicon iron, suggesting the inside of a transformer rather than the computer room the craft’s gleaming exterior had left him to expect. Narrow gangways threaded into the mass, and twice Stone glimpsed aged men in stained coveralls intent on their hand-held meters. There was nothing subtle in the vessel’s layout. It reeked of enormous power as surely as it did of ozone and lubricant. There were eight levels above the gondola, each of them nearly identical to the others, before the cage pinged a ninth time and grated to a stop.
“Sit there, please,” Riedel directed, gesturing toward a frame-backed couch that looked unpleasantly like a catafalque. Stone obeyed without comment, his eyes working quickly. They had entered a circular room fifty feet across. Its eight-foot ceiling was soundproofed metal, but the whole circumference was open to the world through crystalline panels like those of the gondola. The saucer, domed with more of a curve on the upper side than the lower, was a fountain of pale iridescence against which the grim SS runes stood out like toppling tombstones.
A dozen preoccupied men shared the control room with Stone and Riedel. Sgt. Mueller was one of them, looking no less dangerous for having put aside his rifle. The others appeared to be officers or gray-suited engineers like Tannenberg. Three of the latter clustered in front of a console far more complex than those sprouting from the deck beside the other benches. One of the men spoke urgently into a throat mike while his companions followed the quivering motions of a hundred dials apiece.
Riedel stood, arms akimbo, and snapped out a brief series of orders. The heavyset man nearest him nodded and began flipping toggles. All three of the engineers were now speaking intently in low voices. Lights dimmed in the control room, and the air began to sing above the range of audibility.
Stone felt his weight shift. Trees climbing into the night slanted and suddenly shrank downward. Stone’s cabin was below, now, visible past the glowing dome of the saucer. Lone in the pool of the yard light stood Miriam, waving her clenched right fist. Then the disk tilted again and Stone was driven flat onto his bench by a vertical acceleration not experienced since he had reached the age limit and could no longer zoom-climb a Phantom during Reserve training. The sensation lasted for longer than Stone would have believed possible, and by the time it settled into the queasiness of steady forward motion, the sky had changed. It was black, but less from the absence of light than the utter lack of anything to reflect light.
Riedel was returning. “Not bad,” Stone said with a trace of false condescension, “but can you outrun a Nike Zeus?”
“The Russian equivalent, yes indeed, Senator,” replied the German, capping Stone’s gibe. “Each couch”—his gesture disclosed rubber lips edging the top of the bench— “can enfold a man like an oyster’s shell and hold him in a water suspension. For the strongest accelerations we use even a fluid breathing medium, though of course”—and Riedel frowned in concentration at the thought—“that requires time for preparation that we do not always have.”
He seated himself beside Stone. The American blinked, more incredulous than angry at what seemed an obvious lie. “You expect me to believe that this—my God, it must weigh a thousand tons! This could out accelerate an antimissile missile?”
Riedel nodded, delighted with the effect he had made. “Yes, yes, the power is here—is it not obvious? That was Schauberger’s work, almost entirely. But to make it usable for human beings took our Engineer Tannenberg.” The colonel chuckled before adding, “Have you noticed that when men of genius grow old, they become more like old women than even old women do? Tannenberg is afraid every moment we are not aloft that the Russians will catch us.