“I do not know,” Ttomalss said. “The Deutsche, like other Tosevites, have a habit of ignoring such requests. They would doubtless want something from us in exchange for acting otherwise, and might well want something we do not care to yield to them.”
“Still, the notion might be worth considering,” Felless said. Ttomalss had studied Kassquit for a long time. He knew her expressions as well as anyone of a different species could. This was, he thought, the first approval Felless had won from her.
Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker looked from his fitness report to Major General Walter Dornberger’s face. “Sir, if you can explain to me why my marks have slipped from ‘excellent’ to ‘adequate’ in the past year, I would appreciate it.”
That that was all he said, that he didn’t scream at Dornberger about highway robbery struck him as restraint above and beyond the call of duty. He was, he knew perfectly well, one of the best and most experienced pilots at Peenemunde. A fitness report like this said he’d stay a lieutenant colonel till age ninety-two, no matter how good he was.
Dornberger didn’t answer at once, pausing instead to light a cigar. When the base commandant leaned back in his chair, it squeaked. Unlike some-unlike many-in high authority in the Reich, he hadn’t used his position to aggrandize himself. That chair, his desk, and the chair in front of it in which Drucker sat were all ordinary service issue. The only ornaments on the walls were photographs of Hitler and Himmler and of the A-10, the A-45’s great-grandfather, ascending to the heavens on a pillar of fire, soon to come down on the Lizards’ heads.
After a couple of puffs and a sharp cough, Major General Dornberger said, “You should know, Lieutenant Colonel, that I was strongly urged to rate you as ‘inadequate’ straight down the line and drum you out of the Wehrmacht.”
“Sir?” Drucker coughed, too, without the excuse of tobacco smoke in his lungs. “For the love of God, why, sir?”
“Yes, for the love of God,” Dornberger said, as if in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. “If you think along those lines for a moment, a possible explanation will come to you.”
A moment was all Drucker needed. “Kathe,” he said grimly, and Dornberger nodded. Drucker threw his hands in the air. “But she was cleared of those ridiculous charges!” They weren’t so ridiculous, as he knew better than he would have liked. He chose a different avenue of attack: “And it was thanks to your good offices that she was cleared, too.”
“So it was,” the commandant at Peenemunde said. “And I called in a lot of markers to do the job. I had enough pull left to keep from throwing you out in the street, but not enough to let you keep rising as you should. I’m sorry, old man, but if you haven’t learned by now that life isn’t always fair, you’re a luckier fellow than most your age.”
One of the things Drucker had on his record-the one he bore in his head and heart, fortunately not the one that went down on paper-was joining with the rest of his panzer crew in murdering a couple of SS men in a forest near the Polish-German border to let their colonel and commander go free. As long as that old crime remained undiscovered, he was ahead of the game. That made the present injustice easier to tolerate, though not much.
With a sigh, he said, “I suppose you’re right, sir, but it still seems dreadfully unfair. I’m not that old, and I had hoped to advance in the service of the Reich.” That was true. Considering what the Reich had done to him and tried to do to his family, though, he wondered why it should be true.
If it weren’t for the Reich, we would all be the Lizards’ slaves today. That was also likely to be true. So what? Drucker wondered. He’d always set the personal and immediate ahead of the broad and general. Maybe, because he’d done that, he didn’t deserve to make brigadier, or even colonel. But that would have been a real reason, not the put-up job Dornberger was forcing on him.
“I can give you a consolation prize, if you like,” the base commandant said. Drucker raised a skeptical eyebrow. Dornberger said, “You will fly more this way than you would have had you gone on to promotion.”
Rather to his own surprise, Drucker nodded. “That’s true, sir. Only a consolation prize, though.”
“Yes, I understand as much,” Dornberger said. “But there are people in Nuremberg who are not at all fond of you. That you have come away with a consolation prize is in a way a victory. It is for you now as it was for the Reich and the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of the fighting: we kept what we had, but had to yield what we were not directly holding.”
“And we have been plotting ever since to see what sort of changes to that arrangement we can make,” Drucker said. “Very well, sir, I will accept this for now-but if you think I will stop trying to change it, you are mistaken.”
“I understand. I wish you all good fortune,” Major General Dornberger said. “You may even succeed, though I confess it would surprise me.”
“Yes, sir. May I please have the report back?” Drucker said. Dornberger pushed it across the desk to him. Drucker took a pen from his breast pocket and filled out the space on the form reserved for the evaluated officer’s comments with a summary of the reasons he thought the report inadequate. Nine times out of ten, ninety-nine out of a hundred, that section of the form stayed blank even on the worst fitness reports. It was universally regarded as being the space where an officer could give his superiors more rope with which to hang him. Having already been hanged, Drucker did not see that he had anything left to lose.
When he finished, he passed the report back to Major General Dornberger. The base commandant read Drucker’s impassioned protest, then scrawled one sentence below it. He held up the sheet so the A-45 pilot could see: I endorse the accuracy of the above. W.R.D.
That took nerve, especially in view of the pressure to which he’d partially yielded when he wrote the fitness report. “Thank you, sir,” Drucker said. “Of course, most likely the report will go straight into my dossier with no one ever reading it again.”
“Yes, and that may be just as well, too,” Dornberger said. “But now you are on the record, and so am I.” He glanced toward a framed photograph of his wife and children on his desk, then added, “I wish I could have gone further for you, Drucker.”
He said no more, but Drucker understood what he meant. If he hadn’t yielded to at least some of the pressure, he might never have seen his family again. Even major generals could prove little more than pawns in the game of power within the Reich. Drucker sighed again. “It shouldn’t be this way, sir.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t, but it is. Sometimes we do what we can, not what we want.” Dornberger took out another cigar. “Dismissed.”
“Heil Himmler!” Drucker said as he rose. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth. He saluted and left the commandant’s office.
Outside the office, outside the administration building, Peenemunde bustled on as it had for the past twenty years and more. A breeze blew in from the Baltic, full of the odors of mud and slowly spoiling seaweed. Somewhere along the barbed-wire perimeter of the base, a guard dog yelped excitedly. It was, Drucker knew, more likely to have seen a stray cat than a spy.
Everything at Peenemunde was camouflaged as well as German ingenuity could devise, not so much against spies on the ground as against satellite reconnaissance. Many of the buildings weren’t buildings at all, but dummies of cloth and boards. Some of those even had heaters burning inside, to make them appear as they should to infrared detectors. And all the real buildings were elaborately disguised to seem like nothing but pieces of landscape overhead.