'I have a posting on the coast in Kent. Richborough. Five days.'
Heinz eyed Ernst. 'Is this your brother pulling strings again?' Even before his return from Stalingrad Heinz had always been a hugely suspicious soldier, endlessly perceiving favours done and postings manipulated. He got up unsteadily and lurched over to Irma at the range. 'Where's that blessed stew, woman?'
'Coming,' Irma said without emotion.
Seeing Ernst was leaving, Myrtle gurgled and raised her little arms to him. With his jacket slung over his shoulder, he squatted down. He picked up her Mickey Mouse gas-mask from where it sat on the floor and waggled it. When she grabbed for it he picked her up, his hands under her armpits. She laughed when he bounced her gently, and plucked at the buttons on his shirt. He could feel her ribs, her elbows and knees were lumps of bone, and he could make out the shape of her little skull as she smiled at him. He knew little about the development of children, but it seemed to him she was behind with her walking and talking. It was strange to think that this child had always been hungry, every minute of every day of her short life.
Heinz's shadow fell over him. And when he looked up, he saw Heinz's left hand, his good hand, rake upwards over Irma's hip and settle on her breast. She elbowed him away, with a nervous glance at Fred. Heinz just laughed and staggered back to the table.
Irma saw that Ernst had seen all this. She glanced again at Fred, and hissed, 'You won't tell him, will you? It's not what you think. I mean – it's just for the rations. Heinz brings me extra, you know, I need it for the child.'
He stood, keeping his face blank. 'I could have helped you. There was no need.'
She shook her head. 'I would never beg favours of you. I have my pride, Herr Obergefreiter.' She began to ladle out the stew.
II
14 May
Ben Kamen heard voices. Trojan, the monstrous woman Fiveash, another he did not recognise. He struggled to wake, to focus on their words.
'Vril,' Trojan was saying. 'Vril is the power which underlies the universe, Ernst. So it is written. And it is vril that has woven history. In the greatest age of Atlantis, the first building that ever stood upon the face of the earth housed a vril time lens. It was a calendar, but it did not record time; it created time. I believe my petty Loom is a poor imitation of that mighty lens – and yet it is surely vril essence that I have captured here!'
'You actually believe all this, don't you?' A young man's voice. 'And you, Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash?'
'Of course,' came Fiveash's silky, hateful tone, her German mildly accented with the tight vowels of the English. 'I would not work here at your brother's side without that faith, Obergefreiter. I would not have brought him the Loom technology from America otherwise.'
But she did not believe, Ben thought, lying there, eyes closed. She spouted this dreary hotchpotch rubbish merely to control the fool Trojan, for she, English-born, needed a German puppet to exert full influence within the SS. In Ben's opinion all Nazis were either fools or in the thrall of fools. But could none of them see what a menace this woman was?
Their voices murmured, meaningless, falling away. He listened, his eyes closed. He longed to be anywhere but this place. He longed even to be back in the solitary-confinement cell in which he had been kept for month after month, while Fiveash and Trojan rebuilt their devilish machinery, until they were ready to bring him back to this hell of drugs and artificial sleep. He longed even to escape into sleep, and yet he dreaded it for the damage his dreams might do.
Trojan was talking again, boasting to his brother. 'The new calculating equipment is remarkable, isn't it? Much of it is British, frankly; this is one technological area where they seem to be ahead of us. They are building powerful electronic machines, clearly intended for some such purpose as code-breaking, or command and control. We have raided a country house called Bletchley Park, for example, where they call their machine the Colossus". And the British Post Office has a research establishment at a place called Dollis Hill north-west of London. Such gadgets as this are manufactured there.'
'The Post Office?'
'They are used to handling this kind of equipment in their telephone exchanges. Look here, Ernst – see the valves, the glass tubes? We have over two thousand in this machine alone, each capable of switching from one state to another in just a millionth of a second. It is this speed of switching, you see, which enables the machine to carry through its computations so rapidly.'
'And how do you express your problems to it?'
'Ah, good question. You speak" to this beast in a physical language. It is a question of setting switches and plugging in cables, as if reordering its very brain. These are the most advanced thinking machines in the world! And with such devices the computation of Godel trajectories becomes trivial.'
'Trivial." You mean that in the academic sense, don't you? Not an intellectual challenge." But perhaps one should apply the word to your whole enterprise, Josef.'
Fiveash laughed. 'Your muddy foot-soldier of a brother has a brain in there, Josef.'
'Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash, yes, I am a muddy infantryman, and proud of it. That is the reality of the war to me. Mud and guns and blood, hunger and death. All this talk of ancient powers and time travel is so much claptrap. You already failed once – that nonsense over Hastings!'
'But we will not fail again.' And can you not see,' said Josef Trojan earnestly, 'that if we succeed we will transform the fortunes of the war at a stroke? For we will cut down our most powerful opponent-'
'America.'
'Yes. Cut it down at the root! Let the Americans shuffle their tanks and ships around the world; it will avail them nothing. We have a plan, you see, a new plan to do with Christopher Columbus, and the beginning of it all. Believe it or not, our historical research is taking longer than the technical. But we are making progress. And then we will see how it goes for the Reich, in a new and transformed world in which America does not exist at all.'
And nor would the Reich exist, Ben thought. You unimaginative fool.
The voices fell silent. Perhaps he had spoken aloud.
He opened his eyes. The lamps' glare dazzled him, and he blinked away tears. He could see the three of them standing just outside the glass wall of his chamber, two black SS uniforms, a uniform of the Wehrmacht. Ben tried to see the brother's face, Ernst's. He imagined himself as Ernst must see him. His skinny frame lying above the smoothed-out sheets. The shackles that bound his wrists and ankles and neck. The tubes that snaked under his striped prison-issue pyjamas and into veins in his arms and legs, into his penis and into his mouth. The metal cap that had been fixed to his scalp, attached with screws that had been tapped into the very bone of his skull.
Josef Trojan's face loomed like a moon. 'Good morning, little fellow. Or is it good afternoon? You never know, do you? Don't you have anything to say, Ernst? Remarkable sight, isn't he – a triumph for modern medical science. He never leaves his little glass room, save in the imagination, of course. He can't do anything. He can't even play with his own circumcised, cathetered cock, poor fellow. All he can do is sleep – and I control even that, for by turning this switch I can administer drugs to him at will, do you see? Sleep, and dream the dreams I command through the loudspeakers that surround his pillow. And as he sleeps he guides the teasings of the Loom of history, and by doing so he wins the war for Hitler. What do you think, Ernst? Even you must be impressed.'