Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

“ Quatsch! ” Lemp retorted. “If I leave Nehring ashore, I’ll have to put to sea with some half-assed Dummkopf on his first patrol. And that kind of numbskull is liable to get me sunk. So you can explain or you can go fuck yourself.”

When the Gestapo man blinked this time, it was in amazement, and not nearly so mannered as usual. “I could kill you for that, and I would not even have to fill out a report,” he said, in a voice even more frigid than usual.

He was trying to put Lemp in fear. He needed to try harder. Lemp laughed at him. “Listen to me, man. The ocean can kill me. My own lousy boat can kill me. The enemy can kill me. So why the devil should I worry about you? If you don’t level with me, I’m damned if I’ll pay any attention to you.”

“Notes on this conversation will go into your promotion jacket.” Lick.

Lemp laughed again, raucously. “Like I care!” He hadn’t expected to make lieutenant commander. He knew he’d never see commander. Blink. “You are being difficult.”

“You should talk! If you don’t give me some halfway decent reason for leaving Nehring ashore, I’m going to take him with me, and you can pound sand up your ass. He’s that good.”

Maybe the Gestapo man wasn’t used to running into somebody who didn’t turn to gelatin around him. He licked his lips once more, this time in what looked like real distress. “Oh, very well. He is engaged in correspondence of questionable loyalty with his family in Munster.” By the way the blackshirt said it, Munster was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah as a den of iniquity, and Nehring a nastier deviant than someone who snatched little girls off the sidewalk and did horrible things to them.

“What’s the big deal about Munster?” Lemp asked.

“In Munster, they have twice made insurrection against the Reich .” Blink. “Twice!”

“Was Nehring involved in any of this?”

“No, but”-lick-“his letters clearly show his awareness. He cannot be relied upon to serve the Fuhrer as he should.”

“I’ve relied on him to serve Germany for two or three years now,” Lemp said. “He’s done it, too, and done it damn well.”

“They are not the same thing.” Blink. The Gestapo man sounded sure.

“Of course they are!” So did Lemp.

“If you allow this man aboard your ship, I can-I will-have you fired upon as you leave the harbor. I serve the Fuhrer !” Blink.

“But not Germany?” Lemp suggested.

The wall lizard’s pale cheeks gained a little color. “I serve the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich , the one and only legitimate German government. I have its authority behind me when I tell you you may not use this politically unreliable individual.”

“But-” Lemp tried once more, but broke off before he was well begun. The Gestapo man was implacable. Lemp gave up: “Have it your way. You will anyhow, won’t you?”

“ Reich security demands it,” the wall lizard said smugly. Lick.

“ Wunderbar .” Lemp turned away in disgust. He did fire a Parthian shot: “If some jerk of an electrician’s mate comes aboard instead of Nehring and we get sunk on account of that, do you think it does Reich security one hell of a lot of good?”

Blink. “If the Kriegsmarine allows incompetents to fill these important roles, then it is the entity impairing Reich security. In due course, perhaps we shall examine that more closely.”

Defeated, despising himself for not having the balls to tell the wall lizard where to head in, Lemp stormed away. As the Gestapo man had warned, Nehring was not among the ratings who boarded the U-30. A newcomer was, an inoffensive little man whose name, Lemp saw when he examined the fellow’s papers, turned out to be Martin Priller.

As soon as Lemp got the chance, he summoned Priller to his tiny cabin. The new electrician’s mate saluted. “Reporting as ordered, Captain!”

“Oh, belay that spit-and-polish crap,” Lemp said wearily. “Save it for the surface navy-don’t waste my time with it. Did they tell you why you were supposed to report here?”

“They said your boat needed an electrician’s mate.” Priller visibly suppressed a sir . “I am one, so they sent me.”

“Did they tell you why we needed one?” Lemp asked.

“ Nein .” Another obvious swallowed sir. “I figured your fellow didn’t come back from leave or came down sick or whatever the hell.”

“ Whatever the hell is about the size of it.” Lemp grilled Martin Priller on what he knew about U-boat batteries. The new man wasn’t a Dummkopf . He also wasn’t afraid to admit he didn’t know something. He wouldn’t be so good as Nehring, not till he had a few patrols under his belt, but with a little luck he wouldn’t be hopeless, either, which was what Lemp had feared most. Grudgingly, the U-boat skipper said, “All right, go on back to the engine room. Do the best you can, and yell if you need help.”

“I’ll do that.” Bobbing his head in a little nod, Priller pulled aside the cabin’s curtain so he could escape into the corridor. He closed the curtain behind him as he hurried aft.

“ Scheisse .” Lemp said it very softly. He still wished he had Eberhard Nehring there in his familiar slot. No matter what the wall lizard said, Nehring was about as political as a halibut, and if Munster was up in arms about the way things were going, whose fault was that? Nehring’s? Not likely! Wasn’t it the government’s, for screwing up the war and the economy to the point where even uncomplaining Germans started showing they could take only so much?

Lemp had never cared much for politics. He didn’t think they were fitting for a Kriegsmarine officer. But he wasn’t a blind man. If he wrote anyone a letter with those thoughts in it, would the Gestapo let him take the U-boat out on its next patrol?

No. They’d sit him in a black room, shine blinding lights in his face, and hurt him till he told them who all his treasonous friends were. If he had no treasonous friends, they’d keep hurting him till he named some names anyhow. Then they’d grab those people and start in on them .

Was that any way to run a war? Or a country? Even the apolitical Lemp couldn’t make himself believe it. But that was the war and the country and the government he had.

Peggy Druce waited nervously in the foyer. She stubbed out a cigarette and lit another one. She didn’t chain-smoke very often, but she did now. Behind her, a clock in the living room started to chime six.

Where the devil was Herb? She blew an angry stream of smoke toward the ceiling. You could always set your watch by him. Or you could have, until …

He knocked on the front door as the living-room clock bonged for the fifth time. Peggy had all kinds of reasons for being mad at him. Try as she would, she couldn’t fault him for being late.

She opened the door. There he stood, as solid and familiar as if things between them had never soured. “Hi,” he said, and then, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” Her voice might have come from Greenland. They’d talked on the phone since he’d come back from Nevada, but this was the first time they’d set eyes on each other. She’d made a point of not being home when he came by to retrieve clothes and books and golf clubs and fishing gear and whatever else he’d taken.

He grimaced. “You don’t have to do this at all, you know.”

“I am trying to be civilized, just like you,” Peggy answered.

“Okay.” He didn’t sound as if things were okay. He sounded as if he’d been ordered to charge a German machine-gun nest in France in 1918. With the same kind of bleak courage he might have shown then, he nodded and said, “Well, come on, then.” As he led her out to his car by the curb, he chuckled in faint-or not so faint-embarrassment. “Fine set of wheels, huh?”