Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the loudspeaker in the mess hall blared out his name: “Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker! Report to the base commandant’s office! You are ordered to report to the base commandant’s office!”

Drucker took a last bite of blood sausage. It might really be the last bite I ever take, he thought as he got to his feet. Most of the men in the hall looked down at their own mess trays. Sure enough, they thought political unreliability was contagious. A few stared avidly. They wanted him to get a noodle in the back of the neck.

He hurried to General Dornberger’s office, wondering if a couple of hulking fellows in SS black would be waiting for him in the antechamber. If they were-well, he still had his service pistol on his hip. But what would they do to his family if he made them kill him fast instead of taking him away to do a lingering, nasty job?

With such thoughts going through his mind, he wondered why he kept heading toward the commandant’s office instead of running. Because you know damn well they’d catch you, that’s why. And maybe he wasn’t in a whole lot of trouble. He laughed. Fat chance.

When he got to the antechamber, he saw no bully boys in black shirts, only Dornberger’s dyspeptic adjutant. Shooting out his arm in salute, he said, “Reporting as ordered.”

“Yes.” Major Neufeld eyed him. “I rather wondered if you would. The general expected you, though. Go on in.”

“Reporting as ordered,” Drucker said again after he’d saluted General Dornberger.

Dornberger puffed on his cigar, then set it in the glass ashtray on his desk. He now had a photo of Dr. Kaltenbrunner in his office, too. “Drucker, you are a man who does his duty,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Drucker said.

“In spite of everything,” Dornberger went on, and then waved a hand to show Drucker didn’t need to answer that. The base commandant drew on the cigar again. “I have an A-45 on the gantry, fueled and ready for launch. Are you prepared to go into space within the hour?”

“Jawohl!” Drucker saluted again. Then he went from military automaton to honestly confused human being. “Sir, am I allowed? Has my grounding been rescinded?”

Instead of answering, General Dornberger picked up a flimsy sheet of yellow paper. “I have here an order for your immediate arrest and incarceration. I got it half an hour ago. I have spent that half hour documenting how I ordered your launch last night because of shortages of pilots. I will finish the documentation in the time remaining until the rocket goes up. Then, of course, just too late, I will receive this telegram. How unfortunate that I could not obey the order, don’t you agree?”

Try as he would, Drucker couldn’t hold his stiff brace. His knees sagged. He stared at Walter Dornberger. “My God, sir,” he breathed. “Won’t they put your head on the block instead of mine?”

“Not a chance,” Dornberger said calmly. “They haven’t got anyone else who can run Peenemunde even a quarter as well, and they bloody well know it. They’ll yell at me and tell me I was a naughty boy, and I’ll go on about my business for as long as I can go on about it.”

“For as long as you can go on about it,” Drucker echoed. “What about me? What do I do if they order me to land?”

“Ignore them,” General Dornberger told him. “You’re carrying two missiles with explosive-metal bombs. They can’t argue too hard-or they’d better not.”

“But I can’t stay up forever, even so,” Drucker said. “What do I do when I run low on oxygen?”

“Maybe I can fix things by then,” Dornberger replied. “if you hear the phrase ‘served with honor’ in any communication, you will know I have done it. If you do not hear that phrase, you would do better to land somewhere outside the Greater German Reich .”

Drucker gulped. What would they do to his family if he did that?

Before he could speak, Dornberger held up a hand. “I do not expect any of this to matter, Lieutenant Colonel. When you go up there, I think you will have every opportunity to make yourself a hero for the Vaterland .”

That could mean only one thing. In a small voice, Drucker said, “The balloon is going up?”

“With him at the helm?” Dornberger jerked a contemptuous thumb at the new color photograph on the wall behind him. “Yes, the balloon is going up. If he weren’t the Fuhrer , he’d make a good butcher’s assistant. But he is, and we must obey.” He might have been speaking more to himself than to Drucker. Then he grew brisk once more. “A motorcar will be waiting outside. It will take you to the gantry. And Drucker-”

“Yes, sir?”

“If we must go down, let the Lizards know they’ve been in a brawl.”

“Yes, sir!” Drucker saluted, spun on his heel, and marched out of the office. He saluted Major Neufeld, too, even though he outranked the commandant’s adjutant.

The Volkswagen was there. The driver said, “To the gantry sir?” Drucker nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Air-cooled engine roaring flatulently, the VW sped off.

At the gantry the crew had Drucker’s pressure suit, tailored to his measure, ready and waiting. The upper stage of the A-45 there wasn’t Kathe ; he could tell that at a glance. Someone else had his baby. This upper stage looked older, more battered, almost of an earlier generation. In the crisis, the Reich was using anything that could fly.

A couple of the technicians gave Drucker curious or hostile looks as they helped him into his pressure suit. His fellow pilots weren’t the only ones who knew about his troubles with the higher-ups, of course. But then one of the techs said, “Good to see you cleared for launch again, sir.”

“Thanks, Helmut,” Drucker answered. “I’ve been away too long. Going back will feel good.” It will certainly feel a hell of a lot better than getting thrown in the guardhouse and handed over to the blackshirts for interrogation.

But, as he rode the elevator to the upper stage of the A-45, he wondered about that. If the new Fuhrer really was crazy enough to go to war with the Lizards over Poland, how long would the German spacecraft in Earth orbit last? For that matter, how much longer would the Hermann Goring last, out in the asteroid belt?

He shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about that. And if the Race blew him out of orbit, odds were he’d be dead before he knew it. He wouldn’t be able to say that if the SS got its hooks into him.

Hans-Ulrich’s Bus. That was the name painted on the upper stage’s flank. When Drucker climbed into the bus, he discovered it had seen better days. Everything looked worn, shabby; he half expected to find cigarette butts under the leather-covered acceleration couch. But, as he went through the checks, he found everything in working order. A good thing, too, because they were going to launch him any which way. A technician slammed the entry port shut. Drucker dogged it. Conversations with the launch crew were quicker, more perfunctory, than they had been before the crisis. They wanted to get him out there, and only some obviously looming disaster would keep them from doing it.

It would be a disaster for me if they aborted, all right, Drucker thought.

But they didn’t. The last numbers of the countdown sounded in his earphones, and then the great thunder of the A-45’s main engine sounded in every fiber of his body. Acceleration slammed him back into the seat. He wondered whether Hans Ulrich’s Bus had an old-model seat, or if it was simply that he hadn’t gone up for a while. Whichever it was, the kick in the pants seemed harder than usual.