The earlier name had snagged Stone’s attention. “Schauberger?” he repeated. “Sure, I remember him. In the fifties he was touting an implosion motor or some damned thing. I remember a major from Wright-Patterson telling me about it. But then nothing came of it.”
“But then your FBI questioned poor Viktor with, shall we say, a little too much enthusiasm,” Riedel corrected with a tolerant smile, “and he was reported beaten to death by Chicago hoodlums. The implosion motor was only a smokescreen, though, for the electromagnetic engine he had already developed for his Fuhrer. Think of it, this craft and these mighty engines that you see filling it—able to draw fuel from the Earth, from the very fabric of space itself!”
“If that were true,” Stone said carefully, “I frankly don’t see why you would need me.” He chose his words to deny what he reared, that the story was as solid as the steel floor beneath his feet. To admit that aloud would gratify this colonel whose arrogance only slightly increased the disgust Stone already felt for his uniform.
The implied question reminded the Nazi sickeningly of his mission. He sighed, wondering how much to tell the fellow now. Stone was the only man short of his unapproachable president who had enough power with military and political leaders to act with the necessary swiftness. Without his willing cooperation, more than the whole Plan was a ruin. “At first we were based at Kertl,” Riedel began, “where the airframe had been fabricated.” He was avoiding a direct answer partly in hope that it would somehow become unnecessary if he explained the background. Riedel owned to few superiors, but there was One—and of late, with age and the pressure He bore most of all of them, that One had displayed an ever-lowering acceptance of failure. “The engines arrived by train, at last, from Obersalzberg, and we worked all night to unload them before the bombers came.”
Riedel laid his service cap beside him and scrabbled the fingers of his left hand through hair that for thirty-seven years had been cropped to between five and ten millimeters’ length. While everything else had changed, that precision had not. “There was no time to do what was required—you have seen the engines—but we did it anyway. It was like shifting mountains with a spoon to emplace them in the airframe using the equipment we had, and all the work underground as well. But in those days the impossible was normal, and we were Waffen-SS. The time that we had was being bought for us with the lives of our comrades on the front lines, fighting tanks with hand grenades.”
Of the men in the control room, only Sgt. Mueller was openly watching Stone and Riedel; but the inattention of the others was the studied sort, that of jackals waiting for lions to end their meal. Ail of the crew understood the importance of their mission.
“The final order came by courier from Berlin, an SS major with an attaché case in the sidecar of his motorcycle. It had been chained to his right wrist, he told us, but the shell that killed his driver had taken that arm off at the elbow. With teeth and one hand he had tourniqueted himself before retrieving the case. The orders were not those we expected, but in the face of such dedication we could not have refused them.”
“You ran,” Stone interjected flatly, knowing that truth would twist the edged words deeper than any emphasis he could give them.
“We took off in three hours,” the German said, his face a block of gray iron. “It was the first time, as soon as final engine hookups had been made. All of us were aboard, even the kitchen staff. Everything worked. I could not believe it—five years of design and construction, and then no flaws. But again, there was no choice. From the air we could see British tanks already within three kilometers and nothing but the forest itself to slow them. Had we left fifteen minutes later, they might have captured our base before the demolition charges exploded.”
“What you seem to be afraid to admit,” Stone pressed, “is that a single plane—saucer, whatever—isn’t worth a damn no matter how advanced it is.” He stood, a commanding presence again now that he had recovered his poise. The mass and smooth power of the vessel made its speed a matter of only conscious awareness. “It’s only a bargaining chip, to be sold to one side or the other since you can’t develop it yourself. And we and the Russians both will soon have equipment in the air that will match it, so you’re running out of time to deal.”
“You are incorrect to assume we are alone,” Riedel said, as careful as the American to avoid theatrical emphasis that would only give truth a false patina. “We escaped alone, but there were fifty-three submarines of Type XXI—no, I do not exaggerate—that could run submerged all around the world with their snorkels. They carried above 3,000 persons, couples and young people, out before the Russians captured Danzig; and in Norway they picked up … some who had flown by jet out of Tempelhof just at the end.”
Stone licked dry lips but his voice was firm as he insisted, “Even then they couldn’t go anywhere. I’ve heard about the money Himmler was spreading around in South America, but even so there wasn’t a country there that could have hidden such a fleet without word leaking out. A fleet needs a base.”
“It has one.” It was time for the final hammerblow of truth. “In New Swabia, where we met them.”
“Huh?” grunted Stone, surprised and uncomprehending.
“Imbecile!” snarled the Nazi, seeing all his preparation threatened by his listener’s ignorance. “In Antarctica, Queen Maud Land as you and your Allies call it! Kapitan Ritscher explored it in 1937 and we have held the interior since, no matter what color the coast is painted on a pretty map. And there is one other place we have been for twenty years, my good Senator,” Riedel said, loudly now and wagging his finger like a pedant’s pointer, “though others seem to believe they were the first there.”
He paused, breathing very rapidly. “This vessel is not limited to the atmosphere, Senator; indeed, we are above it now to all intents and purposes. We have a base on the Moon where we have manufactured a hundred ships of this design!”
But as Stone’s jaw worked in stunned silence, Riedel’s pride too dissolved in despair. “We had a hundred, yes,” he repeated, “but the Russians have a thousand, and they are destroying us. You must help us fight them, or Aryan man is doomed.”
The sky was an emptiness that would have been violet if it had color. Pits on the crystal windows prevented the stars from gaining any real body, but a slight course correction brought the Moon in sight to port. It was gibbous and the gray of fresh-cut lead. “I don’t believe that,” Stone insisted. “I’ve made it my business over the years to know about Russian strength. Our intelligence people trust me. They aren’t lying to me, and notwithstanding all the nonsense my colleagues and the media like to spout, the Russians aren’t fooling our people either. Besides, if the Reds had a whole fleet like this, we’d have learned about it the hard way long since. Unless there’s more to detente than I’ve ever believed.”
Riedel shrugged. “‘When one has eliminated the impossible… ,’” he quoted, then paused to consider how he should continue. Stone’s logic was impeccable, its only flaw being Russia‘s unfathomable, senseless subtlety in not showing an apparently pat hand. Riedel had not believed it at first, either, but facts were facts. “At the first report in 1947, we thought rumors of our Dora, here, were being retailed in garbled form,” he explained. “At that time, we had only the one ship—no others had been completed before the final holocaust, and the Antarctic base was not suitable for manufactures this major. It was not until we could process aluminum on the Moon that we could expand, and that was five years later.