Part 17 (1/2)

Steinmann restrained him. Instead, the older man asked simply, 'How can we lose this war?'

'Ah. Don't try to trick me.'

'It was a straight question. How can we possibly lose?

Are you suggesting that the British can ever beat us back to Berlin? They can't even stop us attacking their cities! The English are a mongrel race, corrupt, decadent, divided. You tell me of their ”stiff upper lip”, their ”quiet resolve”, their ”Blitz spirit”, their ”tradition of democracy”? Just look at Guernsey, my dear, see how long those things lasted here. Not a single shot was fired. There isn't any organized resistance. Don't fool yourself that the Channel Islands are a special case, or that London and Manchester would resist any more than Paris or Lyons did. The sun has already set on the British Empire.

'You ask me to look at Kitzel and Wolff. I am glad to.

Look at how tall Wolff his, how physically fit. Look at Kitzel's childbearing hips, her hourgla.s.s figure. Look at their clear complexions, their blue eyes, their golden hair. How can such a pure, such a beautiful race, possibly be defeated? I see two attractive young people, working for their country. They are my bloodline. Do you not see: the Reich unites us. It harnesses our skills, leads us to total victory. I am of the first n.a.z.i generation, but already the second is here, and they are stronger still. They, and the generation after that, learn in their schools of our science, our achievements. They learn of the failure of democracy. They learn to distrust the Jew, the Marxist, anyone who talks of equality while claiming to be set apart from lesser men. It is the twilight of the old age, elderly men like myself will soon give way to the ubermenschen ubermenschen, a glorious race of supermen. How can such people ever be defeated when the possibility of defeat does not even exist for them?

'That's why I know that you are lying, Summerfield. Not because you talk of men on the Moon and time travel. Not because you babble unscientific nonsense. These things you speak of are imaginative, but they are not impossible: half a century ago La.s.switz was writing about trips to Mars. Oberth and von Braun claimed ten years ago that they could build a ”Moon Rocket”. The Reich's scientists have already broken the sound barrier; I'm sure that we'll soon be travelling faster than light, and then even faster than time itself. I always knew that Einstein was a fraud. But so are you, my dear.'

Steinmann paused. 'You can't be from the future. We n.a.z.is are united by our heritage, and our destiny is in the stars! In the future, people such as you - the weak, the decadent, the liberal - have all been eradicated. Future history has already been written by men such as Hartung. Tomorrow belongs to us, not you. If you were really from the future, Miss Summerfield, you would be a n.a.z.i.'

Roz Forrester threw another piece of bacon fat into the midst of the flock of pigeons swarming across the gra.s.s near her bench. She had needed a break and a cigarette.

The birds circled round the stringy rind, waiting their turn for a meal. As the pigeon with the rind in its beak bit into it, it tossed its head from side to side, carelessly hurling little sc.r.a.ps into the air, which other birds eagerly pounded on as they landed. The pigeons maintained a strict pecking order.

Odd how that phrase had lasted in human language to her time, centuries after the last bird had become extinct. Every wild animal and plant species had disappeared from the Earth by the thirtieth century, except for humanity and the rat.

Here, a thousand years earlier, the ecosystem was virtually intact. This Earth teemed with life: there was moss between the paving stones, flowers sprang up in the rubble of the bombsites, little brown birds nested in the trees.

There was a sense of certainty here, too, a sense of order. This was a time when everyone knew their place, from the King right down to the smallest pigeon. Other people might find that restrictive, but Roz could see the attraction of such a rigid system. There was order, and a sense of discipline. There was crime here, but it was so small-scale: a protection racket here, a burglary there. The criminals and the police force had a gentlemen's agreement that they didn't carry guns. There didn't seem to be a drugs problem. There weren't any rogue combat robots or gangs of evil mutants roaming the streets. She had to remind herself that this was the Undertown, the place that no right-thinking human would ever go. The chattering cla.s.ses in her time kept asking: why not sterilize the whole area and start again from scratch? Half a dozen photon charges would do the trick. This past London was like a parallel world where the city was still beautiful, still proud of itself.

There were no monsters monsters here. Nothing deformed with a horned snout would lumber round the next corner and ask her the time in haltering English. No slimy, green-skinned blob would menace her for spare change. In the thirtieth century, down in the Undertown, there was an alien beggar in every doorway, an alien crime lord behind every door. They were all here. Nothing deformed with a horned snout would lumber round the next corner and ask her the time in haltering English. No slimy, green-skinned blob would menace her for spare change. In the thirtieth century, down in the Undertown, there was an alien beggar in every doorway, an alien crime lord behind every door. They were all immigrants immigrants, of course, they had come to Earth to take a human's job, or just to claim ILC allowance. Although there had been a number of incursions later on in this century, the first official, lasting, contact with an alien race wouldn't be made for one hundred and fifty years. Everyone here was purely human, with two eyes, one nose and one mouth, all in the correct place, and so it would remain for another century.

The Age of Legend was fast approaching, the time when her people overthrew their masters and went on to become examples of hope and justice for the entire world. A thousand years from now, South Africa was still there: a rock of stability in a chaotic world. Her family were still part of the ruling elite, their genetic material almost unchanged from the Xhosa in this century. The Forrester clan stood out in a world in which humanity had become racially h.o.m.ogenized. While other people's ancestors succ.u.mbed to cosmetic gene surgery, and the rest of the thirtieth century had been swept by the craze for body-beppling, she was pure pure.

The pigeons had finished feeding, and the whole flock were standing still, looking at her with their strange sideways glances. She threw her last piece of rind at them, stood and went back to work. It was beginning to rain.

'Have you seen the UFO?' Chris asked, checking his ammunition. They were nearing the exit of the accommodation block. They hadn't encountered any resistance.

'The what?' Two troops burst through the door in front of them, Sten guns blazing. The Doctor pulled his briefcase up, for cover, but Chris stood firm, oblivious to the bullets richocheting around him. Then he charged them.

' Banzai Banzai!' Chris whooped. He fired twice, hitting each of his targets in the chest. The Doctor ran over to them but could tell before he arrived that the men had died instantly.

'You killed them,' he whispered.

'Yeah,' grinned Chris, 'with my last two bullets. Neat, eh?'

The Doctor glared up at him. 'Those were people, Chris, this isn't a video game.'

'Look,' stammered Chris, 'I know that. But they would have killed us. This is war, Doctor.'

The Doctor laid his hand on Cwej's shoulder. 'Chris, I'm grateful that you came to rescue me. But there is always an alternative to violence. It's searching for that alternative that separates us from people like the n.a.z.is.'

As the Doctor was speaking, Chris was bending down, picking up a couple of stick grenades and one of the Sten guns. 'Sometimes we need to fight for what we believe. That was the motto of my Lodge at s.p.a.ceport Nine Overtown: ”Just fight for what's just”,' said Chris. All the same, he hesitated, and decided not to take the weapons.

An alarm bell started ringing. The Doctor's head snapped up. 'We need to leave.'

'We're boxed in here,' said Chris. 'We need to head for the main gate.'

'That's the one place we can't go. They'll be expecting us, and they'll have all their guards there. They don't know where we are yet.'

'This base is tiny. We could easily blast our...' Chris's voice trailed out. '...find an alternative,' he finished.

'Quite,' the Doctor said. He thought for a moment. 'When we get outside, we need to follow the stream,' he announced finally.

The Doctor went first, looking around the fake landscape for any sign of movement. A squad of guards was running for the hangars and another group were already posted along the track to the main gate by the concrete trees. Tentatively, the Doctor and Chris stepped from the accommodation bunker.

'Because there's no way out of the base, their priority is to protect the high security areas. They know that we're not going anywhere. My guess is that they'll call in reinforcements from Granville.' The Doctor was striding confidently towards the stream. Chris followed. In his uniform, guards might think twice before shooting at him, and that was all he needed. He still had his mission.

'Doctor, we have to get Hartung now we're here. That's why the SID sent me over.'

'I'm not entirely sure that he's here. He might be in Guernsey, or even back in Granville,' the Doctor said.

'Yeah, British intelligence has seen him in both those places. The British don't know anything about this base, though. What do we do?' They had reached the stream and were following its course.

'Well, I'd love to have a look in those hangars, but they've doubled the guard on them, and that's just what we can see. They'll have done the same around Hartung. We need a breathing s.p.a.ce, to work things out. We won't get it here, and we won't get it in Granville.'

'The farmhouse,' Chris realized. 'We could go to the Gerard farm. They looked after me last night.'

'We'd be putting them at risk,' the Doctor warned.

Chris shrugged. 'What else can we do?'

They had reached the fence. The stream vanished into a pipe, emerging on the other side of the barrier. Tantalizingly, fifty yards beyond was perfect cover: dense woodland. If they could reach that then they ought to be safe. The Doctor bent over.

'This drain is only six inches across; we can't get through.'

'The fence is electrified.'

The Doctor looked up at it. 'Yes, I thought it might be.'

'I've only got a knife. How do you get through an electric fence?'

'The traditional method involves a bicycle tyre, a partner and more than a little pot luck.'