“You have of course told them the sickness from which they are suffering is only temporary, and that they will make a full recovery,” Diebner said.
“Yes, I’ve told them?the first group, and then the ones who replaced them when they got too sick to work.” No one had argued with Jager when he spoke what he knew to be a lie. The thin, weary men just stared back at him. They didn’t believe a word he said. He didn’t blame them.
Diebner shifted uncomfortably. Like Jager, he was a fairly decent man in a nation whose regime did horrible things as a matter of course. If you weren’t directly involved in them, you could pretend they weren’t there. Even if you were directly involved, pretending not to see was one way of preserving in your own mind your sense of personal decency. Very fewWehrmacht officers admitted to knowing what the SS had done to Jews in Poland and Russia; Jager hadn’t admitted it to himself until a Russian Jew rubbed his nose in it.
Diebner said, “If we do not recover the nuclear material, Colonel Jager, we are all the more likely to lose the war against the Lizards, at which point all ethical arguments become irrelevant. Whatever we must do to get it back, we have to have it.”
Jager turned his back and walked several paces along the parapet. Arguments from military necessity were hard to refute, and losing the war against the Lizards would be disastrous not just for Germany but for mankind as a whole. And yet-Jager took the physicist by the arm. “When you say these things, Professor, you should know firsthand whereof you speak. Come along with me.”
Diebner was not a small man, nor a weak one. He hung back, protesting, “This is not my concern; it is why we had you brought here. My business is with the nuclear pile itself.”
Though a couple of centimeters shorter than the nuclear physicist, Jager was wider through the shoulders and better trained at wrestling. Not only that, his will burned hotter. He frog-marched the reluctant Diebner off the wall and down into the bowels of Schloss Hohentubingen.
The castle’s cellar was a different world from the light and fresh air of the wall. It was dank and gloomy; somewhere out of sight, water dripped continuously. A startled bat dropped from the roof and flew chittering between Jager and Diebner. The physicist jumped back with a startled oath. Jager wasn’t dragging him along any more, but he followed nonetheless; officers learned ways to get themselves obeyed.
In happier times, the cellar had contained a monster wine cask that held 300,000 liters of Burgundy. The cask was gone now, probably chopped into firewood. In its place were the miserable cots of the prisoners who got the uranium out of the pile at Hechingen.
“Faugh!” Diebner said, a noise of disgust.
Jager wrinkled his nose, too; the cellar stank, not least because the only sanitary arrangements were some buckets off in a corner. Not everything went into the buckets, either. Jager said, “One of the symptoms many of these people seem to have is diarrhea.”
“Yes, I knew of this in principle,” Diebner said in a small voice that suggested he was much more used to dealing with abstract principles than this reeking reality.
“Ah.” Jager clicked his heels in exquisite irony. “Are you also aware-in principle, of course-of the other symptoms this work brings with it?’
“Which ones do you mean?” the physicist asked. “The burns from actually handling the metal, the loss of hair, the bleeding gums and nausea? I am familiar with these, yes, and also with the cancer that is likely to result some years from now as a result of this exposure. I know these things, Colonel.”
“You know of them,” Jager said coldly. “Here-see what they do to real people who are not just abstracted principles.”
A man with a pink triangle on the front of his striped shirt was spooning cabbage soup into the mouth of a Jew who lay on a straw pallet, too sick to get up. When the Jew retched and coughed up the soup, the homosexual held his head so he would not foul himself too badly, then got a rag and put it on the patch of vomit. Then he started trying to feed the Jew again.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Jager insisted. “Maybe we do have to use condemned people, as you call them, for this work, but we don’t have to make their lot worse by treating them like beasts of burden.”
Diebner nodded to the several wooden platforms that had been built around the edges of the cellar-incongruously, they reminded Jager of the lifeguards’ stands by a lakeshore or along a popular stretch of riverbank. Each held, not a lifeguard in white tank top and colorful trunks, but a uniformed, helmeted guard who cradled a submachine gun. Quietly, the physicist said, “Without coercion, this work would not be done?and itmust be done. For that matter, neither the guards nor we are entirely safe.”
Jager looked at him sharply. “How do you mean?”
“How do you think, Colonel?” Diebner answered. “We, too-and the guards-are exposed to these radioactive materials, at lower levels than the prisoners, yes, but certainly exposed. What the long-term consequences of this may be, I cannot say with certainty, but I doubt they will be good. We have lined the roof of this cellar with lead to keep the Lizards from detecting the radioactivity gathered here; that we are close to Hechingen will help account for a higher level than might otherwise be expected, and gives us some added security.”
“I-see,” Jager said. He rubbed his chin, remembering the raid in which he, along with Russians and other Germans, had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards, and remembering riding across Poland with the German share of the explosive metal stowed in lead-lined saddle bags. He wondered what he’d done to himself in the service of theReich.
The classically trained part of him thought of Prometheus, who’d stolen fire from the gods and brought it down to mankind. Zeus had chained Prometheus to a rock, with a vulture gnawing at his liver. The gods weren’t much in the habit of manifesting themselves these days, but Jager wondered what might be gnawing at his own entrails.
Despairingly, Teerts turned his eye turrets toward the heavens. Those heavens remained empty, silent if they remained so much longer, he would either starve or be recaptured-or use the one shot he was sure he could fire from his Nipponese rifle.
He counted himself lucky not to have been recaptured already. So much of the train on which he’d been riding had gone up in flames. However savage and backwards they were, though, the Big Uglies were not stupid enough to take his demise for granted. A search would be mounted. Teerts was gloomily certain of that.
A little stream tinkled by the stand of brush where he was holed up; at night he could come out to drink. He’d caught a couple of crawling and scurrying things and eaten them raw, but hunger gained on him regardless. He did his best to remember how used to hunger he’d got while the Nipponese were mistreating him, but it wasn’t easy.
He hungered for ginger, too, all the way down to the depths of his spirit.
Every once in a while, when he saw no Tosevites around, he emerged from the shrubbery during daylight, to show himself for aircraft or satellites that might be passing overhead. If they’d spotted him, they’d certainly given no sign of it.
Now he lay curled up in a nest he’d made of branches and twigs and dry leaves. It was the sort of thing in which an animal might live, not a male of the Race. The Nipponese had done their best to make him into an animal, and failed. Now he was doing it to himself.
A noise in the sky-Teerts’ head came up, but only for a moment. Some of the flying creatures of Tosev 3 were noisy as they made their way through the air. His hearing diaphragms stretched tight with hope, he’d mistaken their wingbeats for the thutter of a rescue helicopter again and again. He couldn’t fool himself any more.