Jager shouted, “The metal is more real to you than the men who fell getting it.” He wanted to clout Heisenberg down from his cloud, make him glimpse, however distantly, the world beyond equations. He also wanted to kick him in the teeth.
“I tried to express to you a civil good day, Colonel Jager,” Heisenberg said in tones of ice. “That you’return it to me with such, such recriminations I can take only as the mark of an unbalanced mind. Believe me, Colonel, I shall trouble you no further.” The physicist stalked off.
Still steaming, Jager stalked, too, in the opposite direction. He jumped and almost grabbed for his sidearm when someone said, “Well, Colonel, what was that in aid of?”
“Dr. Diebner!” Jager said. “You startled me.” He took his hand away from the flap of his holster.
“I shall try not to do that again,” Kurt Diebner said. “I can see it might not be healthy for me.” Where Heisenberg looked like a professor, Diebner at first glance seemed more likely to be a farmer. He was in his thirties, with a broad, fleshy face and a receding hairline which he emphasized by slicking down his dark hair with grease and combing it straight back. He wore his baggy suit as if he’d been out walking the fields in it. Only the thick glasses that showed how nearsighted he was argued for a different interpretation of his character.
Jager said, “I had a-disagreement with your colleague.”
“I saw that, yes.” Behind the glasses, amusement glinted in Diebner’s eyes. “I don’t believe I have ever seen Dr. Heisenberg so provoked; he normally cultivates an Olympian imperturbability. I came round the corner only for the tail end of the-disagreement, you said? — and was wondering what touched it off.”
The panzer colonel hesitated, since his compliments for Diebner had helped set Heisenberg off. At last he said, “I was concerned that Professor Heisenberg did not, ah, fully realize the difficulties in getting this metal to you nuclear physicists so you could exploit it.”
“Ah.” Diebner turned his head, peered this way and that; unlike Jager and Heisenberg, he was careful about who heard him speak. His big thick spectacles and their dark rims gave him the air of a curious owl. “Sometimes, Colonel Jager,” he said when he was sure the coast was clear, “from the top of the ivory tower it is hard to see the men struggling down in the mud.”
“This may be so.” Jager studied Diebner. “And yet-forgive me, Herr Doktor Professor-it seems to me, a colonel of panzers admittedly ignorant of all matter pertaining to nuclear physics, that you, too, dwell in this ivory tower.”
“Oh, I do, without a doubt.” Diebner laughed; his plump cheeks shook. “But I do not dwell on the topmost floor. Before the war, before uranium and its behavior became so important to us all, Professor Heisenberg concerned himself almost exclusively with the mathematical analysis of matter and its behavior. You have perhaps heard of the Uncertainty Principle which bears his name?”
“I’m sorry, but no,” Jager said.
“Ah, well.” Diebner shrugged. “Put me in charge of a panzer and I would be quickly killed. We all have our areas of expertise. My gift is in physics, too, but in experimenting to see what the properties of matter actually are. Then the theoreticians, of whom Professor Heisenberg is among the best, use these data to develop their abstruse conclusions over what it all means?”
“Thank you. You have clarified that for me.” Jager meant it-now he understood why Heisenberg had sneeringly called Diebner a tinkerer. The difference was something like the one between himself and a colonel of the General Staff. Jager knew he didn’t have the broad strategic vision he’d need to succeed as a man with the Lampassen-the broad red stripes that marked a General Staff officer-on his trousers. On the other hand, a General Staff officer wasn’t likely to have acquired the nuts-and-bolts knowledge (often in the literal sense of the words) to run a panzer regiment.
Diebner said, “Do try to bear with us, Colonel. The difficulties we face are formidable, not least because we are under such desperate pressure of time and strategy.”
“I follow,” Jager said. “I wish I were back with my unit, so I could use what I have learned to help hold the Lizards out of the Reich and let you complete your work. I am badly out of place here.”
“If you advance our building of the uranium bomb, you will have done more for the Reich than you could possibly accomplish in the field. Believe me when I say this.” Now Diebner looked earnest, like a farmer solemnly explaining how excellent his beets were.
“If.” Jager remained unconvinced that he could do anything useful here at Hechingen: he was about as valuable as oars on a bicycle. He came up with a plan, though, one that made him smile. Diebner smiled back; he seemed a very decent fellow. Jager felt a little guilty at going against him, but only a little.
When he got back to his quarters, he drafted a request to be returned to active duty. On the space in the form that asked his reason for seeking the transfer, he wrote, I am of no use to the physicists here. If confirmation is required please inquire of Professor Heisenberg.
He sent the request off with a messenger and awaited results. They were not long in coming-the application got approved faster than he had thought possible. Diebner and a couple of the other physicists expressed regret that he was leaving. Professor Heisenberg said not a word. He’d no doubt had his say to the office who’d called or telegraphed about Jager.
Maybe he thought he’d had his revenge. As far as Jager was concerned, the distinguished professor had done him a favor.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Lodz constantly put Moishe Russie in mind of the Twenty-third Psalm, and of that valley. Lodz, though, had only walked into the valley, not through it. The shadow of death still lay over the town.
In Warsaw, thousands in the ghetto had died of starvation and disease before the Lizards came. Starvation and disease had walked the streets of Lodz, too. But the Nazis hadn’t let them work alone here. They’d started shipping Jews off to their murder factories. Maybe the memory of those death transports was what made Lodz still seem caught in the grip of a nightmare.
Russie walked southeast down Zgierska Street toward the Balut Market square to buy some potatoes for his family. Up the street toward him came a Jewish policeman of the Order Service. His red-and-white armband bore a six-pointed black star with a white circle in the center, marking him as an underofficer. He had a truncheon on his belt and a rifle across his back. He looked like a tough customer.
But when Russie tugged at the brim of his hat in salute, the Order Service man returned the gesture and kept on walking. Emboldened, Russie turned and called after him: “How are the potatoes today?”
The policeman stopped. “They’re not wonderful, but I’ve seen worse,” he answered. Pausing to spit in the gutter, he added, “We all saw worse last year.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Russie said. He headed on down to the market while the Order Service man resumed his beat.
More policemen roamed the Balut Market square, to keep down thievery, maintain order-and cadge what they could. Like the underofficer, they still wore the emblems of rank they’d got from the Nazis.
That helped make Lodz feel haunted to Russie. In Warsaw the Judenrat-the Jewish council that had administered the ghetto under German authority-collapsed even before the Lizards drove out the Nazis. Its police force had fallen with it. Jewish fighters, not the hated and discredited police, kept order there now. The same held true in most Polish towns.
Not in Lodz. Here, the walls of the buildings that fronted the market square were plastered with posters of balding, white-haired Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. Rumkowski had been Eldest-puppet ruler-of Lodz’s Jews under the Nazis. Somehow, he was still Eldest of the Jews under the Lizards.