Astronomy (6 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
“The things in that book went beyond any imaginable definition of warfare. Even in the despair at the very end, we knew this went beyond anything that a sane man would use as a weapon.”
“Did you complete the translation?”
“No. Not entirely. We encountered problems.”
“You said it was early Arabic,” Susan pointed out. “What sort of problems would you have with that?”
“The translation was simple work. It was the material itself that proved unbearable—the uses to which a human body can be put, the hungers of certain entities we might meet. It began to play on our minds.
“I knew we were in trouble. Otto Bülle asked me three times to be excused from the project. I had to refuse him. The day after our last discussion, I received a box, the size of box you would put cuff links in.”
Leder had the box. He produced it for them, wrapped in a blood-soaked kerchief.
Susan picked the cloth apart, just enough to see a note scribbled in a barely legible hand.
“This note is from Bülle?” She tried to make it out, but the note wasn’t in German. “What does it say?”
“It is in Phrygian. He is begging my forgiveness for what he did to himself. The note says, ‘I cannot bear to read anymore.’ ”
“You mean—Oh, Jesus.” Susan set the box down. She looked for someplace to wipe her hands.
“I have never had the courage to open the box. You may take it with you if you wish.”
“We may come back for it at a later date,” Shrieve suggested with a polite smile.
Leder eyed the door. “Do you hear anything?”
“I know who’s out there. American soldiers are out there. You’re plenty safe.”
Leder listened, but whatever had caught his ear was gone.
“Without Bülle,” he continued, “we could never finish the project. We might unleash the forces of the
Necronomicon
, but we could never control them without his insights. And then, when Schlegel, when he—” Leder became emotional. He turned his face away. His shoulders went up and down. He made a sighing sound. “I found myself alone, you see. I told them they were unleashing forces they could not control. But of course, with the Russians advancing on Berlin, and the situation in the Ardennes collapsing, they were so desperate for results. In the end, they took what we had completed and set up an experimental station in the Franconian Wald. Some observatory on a lake in the backcountry there. I don’t know the name. I was ordered to assist in the operation of the plant, but I could bear no more contact with the powers of that hideous book.
“The night of the Grand Experiment—that awful night—I got a call as I was sitting down to supper. This young man, he sounded like a graduate student, berated me for not being present at the moment of Germany’s triumph over the Allies.
“Almost incidentally, he demanded to know the specific masses and energy potentials for each of the Great Old Ones, as named in the
Necronomicon
. I was eating my dinner, and I did not care for his tone, so I told him that I did not have that information and that the man who did had killed himself a few weeks earlier.”
“You were very masterful, Carl.”
“That’s telling him,” Bogen chimed in.
“Yes. Thank you. The young man swore at me and told me I would be visited by Major Malmagden’s personal guard.”
“Malmagden? Krzysztof Malmagden?” Susan felt her stomach flip, the way it did whenever she made a parachute drop.
Leder frowned. “Why yes. Do you know of Major Malmagden?”
“Just go on with your story,” she said.
“I must confess, I have heard rumors about Major Malmagden’s bodyguard, and I was not unafraid. It is said they are not even human. Are you quite all right, my dear? You look a bit pale.”
“Go on,” Susan said. “You told this kid to screw off.”
Leder had to place himself in the scene. “Yes,” he went on. “I finished eating and went for a walk to the post. About ten o’clock, I get a second call from this same young man—there has been a terrible accident; twelve people have died and it is all my fault.”
“Did they say what had occurred?”
Leder frowned. “It was hard to make out the words. Something was filling the phone line with static. I believe they wanted information on how to close an interdimensional portal from a distance; I’m not sure. He kept shouting something—
‘It’s coming. It’s coming through.’
“He demanded I provide him a way to shut down an elaborate Sigil of Transformation. Well, the solution should have been simple. Just erase the markings, yes? For some reason they could no longer go near the tower where the original summoning had taken place.
“I tried to give him a sturdy revocation involving candles and one of the Book’s most powerful spells, but apparently they could not get close enough to the disaster to effectively use the spell—the temperature at Site Y was so hot that candle wax melted immediately and ran within moments of their stepping outside of the bunker.”
Leder pressed his lips together. He looked down at his hands. “I told him to try the spell without the candles, but he could no longer read it from his copy of the Book. He told me no one at the site could read it.”
“What does that mean, ‘No one could read it’?”
Leder shook his head. “I have wondered that myself. This young man—this haughty young man—was practically in tears when he rang off.”
Leder was quiet for a moment before he went on. “I got one more call that night, about three in the morning. But the static on the line was roaring and the voice at the other end was barely capable of speech.”
“Were they still trying to control the experiment?”
Leder shook his head. “I believe that whatever he was calling for by this time, his reasons were deeply personal.”
“What was he saying?”
Leder laughed to himself. “ ‘God forgive me’? What do you suppose?”
Chapter Four
J
UST FOR SUSAN’S PEACE OF MIND,
they took one more look through the old wreck that had been the Four Winds Bar.
The three of them scoured the darkened room beneath the faintly fluorescing painted sky on the ceiling. They found the cluster of Angle Webs in the back room; they pulled out the “Heroes of the Olympiad” countertop, scratched their heads over the telescope mountings in front of each of the west-facing windows.
When they had looked everywhere and found nothing, Charley Shrieve offered to go through the Angle Web himself, just like he’d promised Carl Leder he would.
This was nonsense, of course. However little Susan knew about stepping through the Web, Shrieve knew even less. At least she would end up in a real location. Charley Shrieve would end up in some other dimension.
This was not to say she felt good about blazing this particular trail for the Allies’ counter-occult effort. The thought of stepping through the Angle Web to someplace nobody but old Nazis had been to, that just made her palms itch.
She nudged Bogen. “You still have that hand grenade in the glove box?”
“What? I don’t know . . .” That hand grenade must have been the cornerstone for Bogen’s whole postwar persona.
She slapped his arm. “I won’t break it.”
Bogen looked at Charley, who was up to here with Bogen and his hand grenade.
The kid gave the floor a sullen kick and then went to retrieve it. When he returned, he watched it sadly as he handed it over.
“Be waiting outside with the motor running,” Susan said. “Because I don’t know how long this is going to take, and I don’t know whether somebody might be following me out.”
Shrieve didn’t say thanks exactly. This was war, after all. Everybody had their job to do.
But he sure looked grateful.
Susan drew the Sigil of Transformation on the wall behind the counter. She drew the Angle Web beneath it. She took a couple of deep breaths, closed her eyes, and stepped through.
* * *
Charley called something out to her as she left. She turned to listen, and he was gone, along with Bogen, the Plymouth, the burned-out bar, Kiel . . .
She turned back to see nothing ahead of her but a fluorescing line, etched against a backdrop of immense darkness.
—Darkness, but not space. A smothering presence closed around her, clammy as moist clay. Claustrophobia seized her. She started to turn her shoulders to make room for herself against the suffocating dusk.
A sudden realization stilled her. Whatever was out there was not insensate. It was not quite aware of her—not yet. But the potential was there. Susan could sense it all around her, mindless as a housefly, and yet somehow
alive
.
And she was moving through its gut.
Could it feel the little twitches of her sudden panic? Could it sense her rising gorge by her sharpened breath? Susan lowered her shoulders. She made herself breathe slowly.
Speak the spell,
she told herself.
Make the signs. Look at nothing beyond the web of light.
She turned at the apex of an angle. An aperture of warmth opened ahead of her. The pressure in the darkness held her for just a moment, but she was unfamiliar stuff as yet, and therefore slippery as oil.
She felt rough wooden flooring beneath her feet, and stumbled forward into a room filled with light . . .
And music—a jazz band was playing Dixieland swing, loud enough to shake the picture of the Führer just over her head. She realized the music was coming through the walls. She was in some sort of alcove. The light overhead had been taken out, yet the room was bright as noon.
She was surrounded by Angle Webs.
She stepped out into a foyer. A hat-check girl looked askance at her daytime blouse and skirt but said nothing. A couple of men in black SS uniforms turned. One of them started to speak.
A roar overhead took his attention away. Susan looked out through the front door to see the tail of a giant airship swing past.
One of the men laughed and pointed. “Reichsmarshal Goering,” he said. “He must be here for the clock races.”
“I heard he lost five thousand Reichsmarks in an hour the last time he flew in.”
“What is that to him?” the other one laughed. “He’ll just print more.”
Susan realized where she was. A neon cloud just outside the door puffed up its cheeks and blew out the words “Four Winds Bar.”
But how had she found herself here?
One moment she had been in the gutted remains of the Four Winds Bar on Münterstrasse. Now she was in the place that the Four Winds Bar might have been at the height of the Reich, or might have been someday, had things turned out differently.
It didn’t help that the bar had just been darkened for the sake of the astronomers. The only lights left in the room other than an electric lantern at the bar were small red lamps like the ones Navy ships burn when they’re running convoy in the North Sea. Under the scattered pools of red light, people looked young and smooth-faced. Maybe a little flat of feature.
The ceiling was covered in fluorescent insignias. A cartoon cloud puffed up its cheeks and blew a flock of five-pointed stars from one wall to the next. At each corner of the room, another cloud blew them back. Between the four winds, the stars managed to arrange themselves into a garish zodiac.
Men leered at her and looked her up and down, yet no one spoke to her. One way or another, they were otherwise occupied.
Outside in the
biergarten
, sad-eyed Luftwaffe officers argued over the precise moment things went wrong, the irreversible decision, the subtle turning in the road that no one saw.
Their conversations verged between remorse and rage. They were the ones who sang the
Stukalied
with a catch in the throat. Susan figured them to be the most dangerous men in the bar; they made a big show of distancing themselves from Hitler, but Susan knew better. They were still tied into the martial romance of
Blut und Boden
. In their eyes, anything they did was forgivable.
Brown-shirted astronomers passed back and forth between the telescopes in the west-facing windows and the star-filled reflector in the center of the room. The small telescopes were used as spotters. The giant cauldron of mercury was the main event, but she gathered from their talk that it had to be opened and spun up judiciously, for the sake of the other patrons. Mercury vapors, after all, are extremely toxic.
Besides, opening the roof to the sky brought in the cold and made the girls cover themselves.
Along the bar lounged the Reich’s dispossessed royalty—officers still wearing black uniforms three months after the war, millionaire princes of the
Reichswerke
in camel-hair coats with gold rings more ostentatious than their girlfriends’.
These men showed a fascination for a peculiar affectation—ornately rendered pocket watches. A Gruppenführer dressed in red leather jodhpurs boasted that his watch could measure the speed of a hairline crack passing through the lip of a wine glass. He was challenged by a man in the coal black of the
Totenkopf
SS.
“You see my dogs?” The SS man controlled a pair of muscular Dobermans, sleek as sports cars. “I will put them up against your watch. What can you wager to match them?”
He had a young man with him with languid green eyes so bright they shone in the dark of the bar. The youth stood back from him a ways. As the older man proposed his wager, this kid smirked at everyone around the bar. He might have been laughing at them, or his friend. It may not have mattered.
“What can I wager?” said the man in red and then leaned forward to whisper in his ear. Susan felt their eyes turn in her direction. She felt herself displayed. She shifted in her chair, tried to look preoccupied, or indifferent. Out on the patio, a group of technicians prepared to bounce a flash of xenon light off of the moon. She pretended to study their work.
Some arrangement was reached; Susan couldn’t help wondering what. She felt under her jacket for the Walther PP. She flipped off the safety.
The two men began testing their instruments against each other in feats of chronometric prowess. They measured the velocity of bullets, the vibration of guitar strings, the cycle of an electric charge through the filament of a light bulb. They sliced time into fantastically minute segments—tenths, hundredths, thousandths, millionths of a second.
They measured fantastically large segments of time—the uplifting of the German Alps, the shifting of the continents, the decay of a single proton, the quantum tunneling of all the electrons in a man’s body from one side of a brick wall to the opposite side. Many of these events took longer than the lifetime of the universe, but the Four Winds Bar had seven windows. All these things were available for wagering if you looked out the right one.
Besides, it wasn’t like anyone here had anything pressing.
A barmaid passed by, loaded with two-story tankards of bitter Pilsner. She was a small woman with button eyes and a ready smile. She should have looked friendly. She did look well-rehearsed.
She asked Susan if a man waited for her. That seemed to be the inevitable question in a place like the Four Winds Bar.
Susan thought of lying, but she was a terrible liar. All of her OSS friends always groaned at the feeble way she rehearsed her cover stories. She couldn’t even explain what she was doing in the kitchen at two
A.M.
without looking guilty.
“I am trying to find a Herr Hartmann.” She looked around. “Conrad Hartmann?” She didn’t know if this was a wise or dangerous admission. She just knew lying would have made her look furtive.
The woman smiled, professionally. “Are you a friend of Herr Hartmann?”
“No,” Susan said. “I thought he might have something for me.”
The woman’s smile became more studied. She picked up her armload of beer steins. With her elbow, she pointed thataway, behind the bar. But she didn’t stick around. She was on her way out to the patio, to assuage the war wounds of the Luftwaffe pilots.
“He was here a day or so ago. He left something. He didn’t say who was to pick it up.” The woman was gone through the lace curtains to the back.
Susan licked her lips. She rubbed her palms. She told herself she could simply walk over behind the bar like she owned the place. That’s what her OSS friends would have told her.
But her OSS friends weren’t here. She felt the weight of every eye in the room upon her.
A warning was passed through the bar—they were launching the xenon signal in ten seconds. Everyone should look away. Among the rich patrons at the bar, blackened glasses were snapped from pockets, and unfolded with practiced ease. They held their chronometers at the ready, their thumbs waiting on their femtosecond timers. Others clamped their hands across their eyes, giggling nervously.
This game with the xenon lamp must have been a tradition at the Four Winds. The barmaids even had a drink they served for the occasion. Returning from her Luftwaffe pilots on the patio, the little button-eyed
bierfrau
asked Susan if she might care for a
Dresdenwasser.
“Excuse me?
Dresdenwasser?
”
The woman laughed at the horror on her face. “The drink is quite beautiful. You should see—peppermint schnapps and a drop of radium.”
“Radium.” Susan essayed a little smile. “Indeed.”
“Oh, just a little bit won’t hurt you.”
“Another time perhaps,” she promised.
The patrons banged rhythmically at the tabletop as the countdown hit five. A hundred shot glasses glowing pale green raised to the sky, while the men sang, “He’s here! Soon He is here! Time for the Renewal of Time!”
Susan ducked behind the bar as the countdown hit zero. An ashy-blue light coated every upturned surface in the room with bright violet icing. She found a manila envelope set between a bottle of Jagermeister and one of malt wine. Scrawled across the front in pencil were the words
Das Unternehmen
—“The Undertaking.”
People were laughing and catching their breaths as she stepped out. Susan figured her luck was holding: all eyes were locked on the red- and black-suited men out on the patio as they compared the accuracy of their plated instruments against the readings from a photovoltaic cell.
The crimson-suited paladin folded the cover over his watch. She heard the snap of a tiny latch. Without a backward glance, he made his way through the crowd for the night air. This was her chance. She had Hartmann’s package; she was just steps from the alcove she’d arrived through.
Laughter erupted behind her.
“You look like a schoolgirl sneaking out early from class.”
She turned to answer, and stopped.
Take the blackness of the night sky between the stars, pour it into the shape of a man. Give him a sardonic smile. Give him eyes of perfectly beaten gold. She started to say something. The image of the man took her words away.
“Don’t be alarmed, Fräulein. I am the proprietor of this establishment. Everyone knows me.”
She tried to smile, tried to think of some normal sort of reply. “Leave me alone,” she said.
Well, it was normal bar conversation for her.
The black man tittered effeminately into the tips of his fingers. “You have a terrible ear for chit-chat. I would have thought your OSS friends would have coached you on that. It hardly matters. I would give you my name, but it is ancient and Egyptian and difficult to pronounce. You do not need to learn it. In any case, it is you whom I am anxious to meet.”
Susan pushed past him for the door. His hand came up around her elbow. It was not a firm grip. She could have broken it without difficulty. Maybe that was the thing that lent it authority. People stopped for that hand. No further force had been needed in a very long time.
The Egyptian raised his chin to indicate the envelope in her hand. “Are you quite sure that belongs to you?”
“It’s a gift from a friend,” she said. “It’s what I came here for.”
“May I look inside?”
“I have . . .”—she turned her head toward the door—“people . . .”
The man smiled. He had a youthful, pleasant face. His smile seemed to come from somewhere deep inside. The light on his eyes gave away no depth. They were bright and hard as medallions.