Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Immediately, he heard a familiar name:

“ Berlin announced today that Polish authorities were continuing to expel German citizens. The official Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter reported two men killed near Stettin this afternoon. Both were German citizens, and were said to have been fleeing a Polish mob when they ran out onto a highway, where they were struck by a bus.

“ Chancellor Hitler, speaking at a party meeting in Munich, labeled the incident quote yet another provocation by anti-German leftists in the Polish government unquote. He called on President Moscicki to intervene, and warned that German patience is not without its limits.

“ Closer to home…. ”

Martin, of course, knew Hitler, the twentieth-century warlord and nutcase.

The newscast went on to describe a quarrel in Congress over the Neutrality Act, a bungled attempt at an armored car holdup, and an argument at a schoolboard meeting. Tomorrow would be sunny and hot. The current heat wave was going into its sixth day. And there were some baseball scores.

Martin hadn’t realized that baseball was so old. Some of the teams were the same, but it must be a strange version of the game in which you only scored three or four runs.

He slept that night with the shields up, though he knew, really knew , they were unnecessary.

He tried to pick up “Our Gal Sunday” again next day, but failed to take into account the two-hour-plus time differential resulting from the longer day. But there were other shows. “Stella Dallas” and “Just Plain Bill.” He listened with interest: the problems faced by the characters were of a personal nature, rather than social struggles. These were people for whom there might have been no outside world, but merely the melodramatic mix of love and lust.

He passed a sizable part of his afternoon with Xavier Cugat and the Boys in “the Green Room of the beautiful Grant Park Hotel in downtown New York.” Between songs, behind the announcer’s voice, Martin heard the low murmur of conversation, the clink of china: fragile place of glass and laughter.

Berlin announced that two unarmed German passenger planes had been fired on by Polish fighters near Danzig. One had crashed in a field, killing all on board. The other had carried a cargo of dead and wounded back into German territory. Hitler was said to be furious.

There were also reports of an attack on a German border station.

The Poles denied it all.

Martin understood that these events were not real, that the people in the Green Room, sipping their martinis and drifting into the coming carnage, were long since gone to dust. He might as well have been listening to an account of the Third Crusade. Yet….

Warfare had been a common enough occurrence over the centuries, but to Martin it was part of a barbaric past, relegated to dusty tomes in libraries. Unthinkable.

Next day he returned to the beach. He even walked briefly into the forest that afternoon. There was nothing here to fear. No predators.

When the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, Martin was lying on the sand, naked, tanned, reading Byron. He listened to appeals from Britain and France, from the White House and the Vatican. After sundown, when the first battle reports came in (both sides were claiming victories), he looked out at the dark, quiet hills, trying to imagine ponderous tanks clanking toward him, Heinkels crossing his western mountains to drop explosives on his head.

The Germans bombed Cracow. Martin listened to an eyewitness description, heavy accent, heavy static, muted blasts, children fleeing the stuttering stukas, Nazi tanks sighted west of the city, everything on fire….

Emory Michael, of the Blue Network, got through from a small town whose name he couldn’t get straight. The townspeople, mostly women and children, had gathered in a pasture on the west side of the city, watching the Nazi planes circling. Watching the bombs drop.

Michael found a woman who spoke English, and asked where her husband was. “With the cavalry,” she said, with a heavy accent. “They will cut the Boche to pieces!”

Horses, thought Martin. After a long while, he strode off, walking at the edge of the incoming tide, listening to the unhurried roar of the sea. From here, the war seemed so distant. (He smiled at that.)

Rain clouds were building in the west.

What was remarkable: These people bombed and strafed—how many would die during the conflagration?—and it would all pass, leaving only a few ripples on the tide, the wreckage washed out to sea. His generation barely knew of World War II. It was something in the history books.

A fine drizzle began to fall.

He turned into the forest. The ground was thick with leaves. He ducked under a floater that had tethered itself to a low branch. Something small, with fur, stopped to watch.

He came to Patricia’s grave and said hello, aloud. There was no marker, other than three rough stones. Eventually, soon, he would correct that.

He sat down. It was a beautiful, leafy glade, a place for children, or lovers. He cradled his chin against his knees, and mourned all those, down the long years, whose lives had been cut short, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, victims of greed, folly, or plain bad luck: Patricia, the children of Cracow, the woman whose husband was in the cavalry, the Roman farmers in the path of the Vandals. Here’s to everybody. There’s room here, on Amity, and welcome.

The rain was falling harder, becoming a downpour. Above him, on a branch, something stirred.

There was some good news: A woman named Myers was reunited with her mother after 43 years; Lepke turned himself over to a newsman named Winchell; and Martin discovered Fibber McGee. McGee was unlike anything he had encountered before, an engaging mixture of pomposity, naive dishonesty, and scrambling insecurity. McGee’s world of goodhearted bumblers seemed untouched by the savagery in the newscasts.

Martin’s first experience with fictional psychotics and madmen came with “The Shadow.” It was a series which would not have been allowed in his own time. His society frowned on mindless mayhem. But week after week, the invisible, slightly schizophrenic hero tracked down and eliminated mass murderers and insane physicians in the most delicious manner. Martin loved it.

Despite the global disaster, there was a warmth to the programming, good humor, a sense of purpose and community that extended beyond time and space to Martin’s beachfront property. He strolled the tree-lined streets of Philadelphia, dined in some of Chicago’s better restaurants. He became addicted to “Amos ’n’ Andy,” followed Captain Midnight into exotic jungle locales, explored the temple of vampires with Jack, Doc, and Reggie. He was a regular visitor in the Little Theater off Times Square.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies swept all opposition aside. President Roosevelt appeared frequently in informal broadcasts, discussing the economy and the war, assuring his audience that America would stay out of the fighting.

Although he could not recall the course of the struggle (he was not even certain yet which President Roosevelt he was listening to), Martin knew that, in the end, the Western Allies would win. Had won. But it was difficult, in the summer of 1940, to see how such an outcome might develop. Britain, bloody, desperate, stood alone. And Churchill’s regal voice rang defiance across the light years.

Martin listened with sorrow to Edward R. Murrow in London, as the Nazis pounded the city. A year later, he was at a football game between the Redskins and the Eagles when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He fought with the garrison on Luzon, watched the aerial battle over Midway, rode in the desert with Montgomery.