Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

Then suddenly his guest appeared from between the shelves of packaged chips and sugary-salty grazing foods, a genial moon-faced bearded fellow in a double-breasted black leather coat with a ready smile and the proverbial piercing blue eyes and a cap pushed to the back of his head, black hair curling over his forehead. He wore what seemed to be a standard Army-surplus officer’s headgear, if lacking the horsehair ring that would stiffen it; and with a somewhat dirtied white cotton cover, as though he thought he was the commander of a U-boat. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “The door was open. Look, I found beer.”

And so he had. The man was carrying a six-pack canned, and had another tucked under his arm. First thing in the morning, but Charlie didn’t judge. For all he knew it was actually at the end of a long night. “That you have,” he said. “I keep the hard stuff behind the glass. If you’re in the market.”

He cocked his thumb back over his shoulder at his locked cabinet. It wasn’t that his prices were tempting: just that a pocket-flask of rye hid out in a man’s pocket that much more easily, and nobody could be faulted for having forgotten to pay, surely? Why, yes. Yes, they could. “Thank you, but no for now,” the man said. Charlie noticed his accent, slight but present. German. “Let me just put these on the counter. You have rooms? I have people.”

He unloaded his beers, and some packets of candied caramel corn as well. “And questions,” Charlie thought the man said, but under his voice, so that Charlie wasn’t really sure. His hearing was perfectly good for a man in his age: the doctor told him so every six months. Yet and still Charlie was sixty-five, and couldn’t be bothered to keep up on all the biological peripherals all of the time.

So, all right, things on the counter. “We have rooms, yeah,” Charlie said. “How many people, how many nights? We’re on winter rates for another ten days. And there are group discounts. Veteran’s discounts as well.”

This seemed to spark the man’s interest; he seemed to find it funny, in a mild way. Charlie hoped he wasn’t going to be one of those “veteran of the race wars” types: they’d been getting the white supremacists through the woods, in the past few years, perfectly law-abiding people by and large but Charlie didn’t like them. He’d been far too young for Korea and physically rejected for Viet Nam, but he knew how to respect a genuine soldier.

His father had been an officer, whether or not his mother had ever wanted to talk about it. Both of them, really, both of the men his mother had married, but Charlie’s genetic sire had been on the wrong side of the war.

Charlie’s widowed mother had married an American, and Charlie’s stepfather had been as good a dad as anyone could have asked for. Charlie had grown up hearing about other peoples’ fathers, so he knew. “We believe we may be veterans,” the man said. “But never mind that for now. There are fifty and some of us, but not all at once. And I understand there may be a family discount.”

Fifty-plus people? That was one heck of a family. A reunion of some sort, then, though why they’d elect to gather at a seen-better-days resort in the off season was anybody’s guess. “Big family,” he said, because surely that would be expected. “We can offer a ten percent additional credit for any booking of eight of our cabins or more. I’ll need a credit card. Your name?”

“I have no credit card.” And, strangely enough, the man didn’t seem to feel that was a problem. Charlie was starting to have his suspicions. He’d been taken for an Aryan sympathizer himself, more than once: just because he’d been blond, before he’d gotten grey. And blue eyes. His father’s eyes. “And I think you misunderstand about the family discount. My name is Lachs. Verricht Lachs. I spell—”

Wait, there had been that one peculiar contact, nearly a week ago now. Someone claiming to be U-818. There’d been people in high school who’d dug up his past, his mother’s past, and teased him about it. And the man was spelling out his name by tapping his finger on the counter, staccato bursts for the “dit,” finger pressed to the surface a little bit longer for the “dash,” as though the sealed wooden surface was a Morse code key. V-e-r-r-i-c-h-t L-a-c-h-s.

“You have my device up there, on your banner,” the man said, even while he continued to tap out Morse code against the counter-top. Verricht. Amherst. Heinrich. Stefan. Annamaria. Lachs. “You are not my son. But by tradition, you have declared yourself with our flag, and therefore we are your guests here, is it not so?”

What.

Charles fought to process the signals. Yes. There’d been the strange radio contact. Yes. He’d discounted it. Yes. That was his father’s name. Yes. He had the cartoon that had been painted on his father’s boat, his father’s personal artifice, his sigil, on the resort flag, flying on the dock along with the United States flag and that of the state of Michigan. No. This could not possibly in any rational sense be happening.

“Some joker made contact with me some days ago.” That much was not in question. “Claiming to be U-818. Which sank in 1945, with my father on it. You want to stay here, you give me a valid credit card. But I’m about thirty seconds from turning you away, credit card or no credit card.” He was getting angry. This went beyond pranking. His mother had mourned his father for all the days of her life; it had been only a part of her new life in America, but it had always been there.

“Some joker claimed he was the son of Verricht Lachs,” the man retorted, as though he were the one who was offended. “And that his name was Charlie. While I am in a position to know that the son of the Smoking Salmon was baptized Mattias Ulrich Pieter, among others. Pieter. What kind of a good German name is Charlie?”

Suddenly something had gone sideways. It was thinking of his mother, Charlie thought. His baby pictures were in her special box, tucked away; he’d only ever seen them once or twice, and never since he’d gone away to college. There was one of his mother sitting with him as a baby on her lap, and a man at her shoulder, dress uniform, proud happy smile. His natural father. His mother’s first husband. The man in front of him. Something about the eyes seemed suddenly, unfairly, provocatively familiar.

“So you’ve gone through the records. For some sick reasons of your own. Are you from the old country? Because I want nothing to do with any of those people, the way they treated my mother.”

That blow had struck home. It was what Charlie had said about his mother; that look of grief and sorrow was too real. But it went quickly—masked with deliberation and skill. “This is getting nowhere. I’m sorry about the beer.” Which meant nothing. And what the man said next, that should have put an end to this farce once and for all—it was certainly put to Charlie in what started out as a tone of considerable finality. “We will go elsewhere. But you may wish to reconsider whether you call yourself U-818 Lachs, does your mother know?”

“Why don’t we ask her?”

The words were out of his mouth before he realized what they were. And once they were said he could not un-say them. There was no questioning the sincerity of the emotion on the man’s face: and yet there was no explanation for it, either, absolutely none, no possible explanation, not within a rational world in which science ruled the physical universe and the stream of existence ran one way and cause led to effect in a chartable and reliable manner with logic and reason.

“My Papadum,” the man said. “My kaiserling. She is still alive?”

Charlie had no intention of letting this man anywhere near his mother. She was nearly eighty-five years old, no matter the health of her heart and her spirit. No manipulative schemer would be allowed to cross the threshold of her apartments: he would come up with some excuse why she could not take her turn around the garden, the daily exercise she insisted upon rain or shine. For as long as these people were here he would have to keep her closed away, somehow.