By now he dreamed of a Goring dynasty, one which would last a thousand years and forever impress his name in history. It was highly probable that Hitler would have no child, and he had named Goring as his successor. This dream was shattered when his only child, a girl, Edda, was born. Emmy was not going to have any more children, and it was unthinkable to him to divorce her and take a wife who might produce sons. Though he must have been intensely disappointed, he did not reveal it. He loved Edda, and she loved him to the end of her life.
Another aspect of his puzzling persona was demonstrated when he visited Italy on a diplomatic mission. The King and the Crown Prince took him on a deer hunt. The three stood on a high platform while hundreds of deer were herded past them. The royalty slaughtered them, the King killing one hundred and thirteen. Goring was so disgusted that he refused to shoot at all.
Nor did he want to invade Czechoslovakia and Austria, and he especially objected to the invasion of Poland. Thought of war depressed him; he had been in low spirits at the idea just before both World War I and II. Nevertheless, he went along with his beloved leader in this matter, just as he had not protested publicly against the persecution of the Jews. But at his wife's request, he saved dozens of Jews from imprisonment.
In 1939 Hitler promoted Hermann to Field Marshal and made him Economic Minister of the Reich. As Air Minister of the Luftwaffe he was also its commander-in-chief. He tried to get a stratobomber built which would attain a twenty-mile altitude and fly to America, but he did not succeed.
Despite his high positions, he had a tendency to turn away from realities. In 1939 he told the German public, "If any enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Goring. You can call me Meier." ("Meier" was a folk-joke name, indicating a mythical character who bumbled and numb-skulled his way through life.)
After a while, Goring was often called Meier by the Nazi Party bigwigs and by the public. But the affectionate feeling implicit in Der Dicke was missing in Meier. The British and American bombers were making a shambles of Germany. The Luftwaffe had failed to soften England for invasion, and now it was failing to turn back the hordes of metal birds dropping deadly eggs onto the Reich. Hitler blamed Goring for both, though it was Hitler's decision to bomb the English cities instead of first wiping out the Royal Air Force bases that was responsible for the Germans' plight. Just as Hitler's decision to attack neutral Russia before England was laid low was ultimately the cause of Germany's downfall.
As it was, Hitler had wanted to invade Sweden, too, when Norway was taken. But, Goring, loving Sweden, had threatened to resign if Sweden was attacked. He had also pleaded the advantages of a neutral Sweden to Hitler.
His health had been getting worse before the war. During the great conflicts, his sicknesses and his lessening prestige made him turn to drugs. He was anxious, nervous, and given to melancholia, on the skids, out of control, and no way to stop the descent. And his beloved country was heading toward the Gotterdammerung which horrified him but which, in a strange way, gratified Hitler.
With the Allies advancing across Germany on all fronts, Goring thought that it was time for him to take over the government. Der Fiihrer, instead, stripped him of all his titles and positions and expelled him from the Nazi Party. His worst enemy, Martin Hermann, ordered his arrest.
Near the end of the war, while trying to flee the Russians, he was taken into custody by an Army lieutenant, ironically, a Jew. During his trial at Nuremberg, he defended himself but with a lack of conviction. Despite what Hitler had done, he defended him, too, loyal to the end.
The verdict was inevitable. He was sentenced to be hanged. The day before his execution, October 15, 1946, he swallowed one of the cyanide capsules he had hidden in his cell and died. He was cremated, and the ashes were, according to one story, flung onto a refuse heap in Dachau. Another, with more authority, says that the ashes were dropped onto a muddy country road outside Munich.
That should have been the end. Goring was glad to die, glad to be rid of his sicknesses of body and soul, of the consciousness of his great failure, and of the stigma as a Nazi war criminal. The only thing he regretted about dying was that his Emma and little Edda would be left unprotected.
18
BUT IT WAS NOT THE END. LlKE IT OR NOT, HE HAD BEEN RESurrected on this planet. He was young in body again, a slender youth. How or why, he did not know. He was rid of his rheumatism, his swollen lymph glands, and the dependency on paracodeine.
He resolved to set out to look for Emma and Edda. Also, to find Karin. How he would be able to have both his wives was something he did not care to contemplate. The search would be long enough for thinking about this.
He never found them.
The old Hermann Goring, the highly ambitious and unscrupulous opportunist, still lived in him. He did many things of which he became deeply ashamed and remorseful when, after many adventures and much wandering,* he was converted to the Church of the Second Chance. This happened suddenly and dramatically, much like the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, and it took place in the small and sovereign state of Tamoancan. This was composed chiefly of tenth-century Nahuatl-speaking Mexicans and twentieth-century Navahos. Hermann lived in the newcomers' hall until he was thoroughly grounded in the tenets and disciplines of the Church.
He moved out then into a recently abandoned hut. After a while, a woman named Chopilotl was living with him. She, too, was a Chancer, but she insisted that they keep in their hut a soapstone idol. It was a hideous figure about thirty centimeters high, addressed as Xochiquetzal, the divine patroness *See To Your Scattered Bodies Go for the details. of sexual love and childbirth. Chopilotl's adoration of the goddess signified her passion for passion. She demanded that Hermann and she make love in front of the idol in the light of torches flanking it. Hermann did not mind that, but he did tire of the frequency of her insistence.
Also, it seemed to him that she shouldn't be allowed to worship a pagan divinity. He went to his bishop, a Navaho who had been a Mormon on Earth.
"Yes, I know she has that statue," Bishop Ch'agii said. "The Church doesn't countenance idolatry or polytheism, Hermann. You know that. But it does permit its members to keep idols, provided that the owner fully realizes that it is only a symbol. Admittedly, this is dangerous, since the worshiper too easily takes the symbol for the reality. This failing wasn't confined to the primitives, you know. Even the so-called civilized peoples were sucked into this psychological trap.
"Chopilotl is rather literal-minded, but she's a good person. If we got too stubborn about her idiosyncracy and demanded that she cast the idol out, she might backslide into a genuine polytheism. What we are doing might be called theological weaning. You have seen how many idols there are around here, haven't you? Most of them at one time had a multitude of worshipers. But we have gradually detached the religionists from them, achieving this through a patient and gentle instruction. Now the stone gods have become only objects d'art to most of their former worshipers.
"In time, Chopilotl will come to regard her goddess as such. I'm banking on you to assist her to get over her present regrettable attitude."
"You mean, give her a theological goose?" Hermann said.
The bishop looked surprised, then he laughed. "I had my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago," he said. "I do sound stuffy, don't I? Have a drink, my son, and tell me more about yourself."
At the end of a year, Hermann was baptised with many other naked shivering teeth-chattering neophytes. Afterward, he toweled off a woman while she dried him. Then all donned body-covering cloths, and the bishop hung around the neck of each a cord from which was suspended the spiral vertebra bone of a hornfish. They were not titled priests; each was simply called Instruisto, Teacher.