Vivisepulture (28 page)

Ehrlichmann gazes down the mountain at Atlantis. Night has fallen and the city is a chequerboard of light, a grid of bright lines beside a moonlit platinum sea. There is something peaceful, idyllic, in the scene, despite the distant hammering of the city’s factories. This world is not at war: it has no Blitzkrieg, no fire-bombing by the British and Americans. North of here, on the steppes of northern Europe, Stone Age tribes are living in caves and hunting reindeer. Their lives are short and brutal… but are they so much shorter and more brutal than that of a Wehrmacht gefreiter on the Eastern Front?

Would the twentieth century be peaceful if Ehrlichmann allowed Maria to succeed in her plans? He is briefly tempted to let it happen. But that would mean failing the Führer and he has promised himself he will not do that. Ehrlichmann believes passionately in the Third Reich, he believes it will last one thousand years, he believes it must do so—for the good of the German people, for the good of Europe.

He has no choice. He must find a way to stop Maria.

As his gaze pans across the city, his eyes come to rest on the Tower of Babel. And the answer to his problem occurs to him:

The machine at the heart of the city, the machine beneath the tower…

It uses geo-thermal power, and he is familiar with the basics of such a system: a deep shaft to the molten rock below, into which is pumped water. This is heated to steam, and the steam, under pressure, is used to drive turbines. There should be, he thinks, ample possibilities for sabotage and, without electricity, Maria’s metropolis would be rendered powerless. It might only be a temporary setback, but it would give Ehrlichmann time to find a more permanent way to prevent her.

Ehrlichmann tries to imagine he is a member of SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny’s SS-Jäger-Bataillon. Sometimes, not so very long ago, while sitting at his desk and writing reports for Reichsminster Albert Speer, Ehrlichmann had envied the elite soldiers of the SS-Jäger-Batallion, envied them their daring missions, their very real contributions to the Fatherland’s victories. Now he has an opportunity to strike a blow of far more significance than any they might have done. It is not merely victory at stake, but the entire history of the Fatherland, of Hitler and the Reich. It is the very existence of Germany! Not even Skorzeny could boast so vital and consequential a mission.

Unfortunately, Ehrlichmann possesses neither the tactical skills of Skorzeny nor the weaponry issued to the SS-Jäger-Bataillon. His military training was long ago and he has forgotten much of it. Certainly he recalls nothing which would allow him to overpower the troopers guarding the entrance to the Tower of Babel…

He spends the night on the mountainside, stretched out beside the hollow figure of the æther-suit, lulled to sleep by the distant din of industry drifting up the slope, dreaming of ways and means to destroy Maria’s heart-machine…

When Ehrlichmann wakes, he is stiff and sore. The sun has only just risen above the horizon, and a path of light stretches from it across the ocean. The night was pleasantly warm, but already he feels the temperature beginning to rise. Though he does not feel entirely alert—he is hungry and thirsty, and still a little tired—while he slept a plan has formed in his mind. He must first be a spy, before he can be a saboteur. 

He must learn all he can of the heart-machine, and only then will he know how best to destroy it.

For a week, Ehrlichmann skulks about the city. He steals clothing—the worker’s uniform of suit of blue linen and black cap—the better to blend in, eats the free food provided in the automated restaurants with the Atlantean workers, sleeps in the dormitories, and slowly picks up enough of the local German-based language to understand those about him. He learns that the heart-machine is operated in shifts throughout the day and night, and though the restaurants may be automated, the heart-machine is not. Hundreds of workers toil beneath the Tower of Babel, overseeing the machine’s pipes and valves and meters and levers. Entrances to tunnels which lead to the machine’s chamber are located to the north, south, east and west of the tower. These are guarded by trios of troopers, but the soldiers do not check papers or identities.

Ehrlichmann, garbed as a worker, joins a shift as they troop in lines twelve abreast down the ramp and into the tunnel. After shuffling one hundred metres with the others along the concrete-walled passage, he finds himself on the lip of a great well, looking down onto the heart-machine. While the others pour down the metal stair-cases to the floor of the well, Ehrlichmann gazes at Maria’s great machine. At the core of it is a gargantuan tree of pipes, each a metre or more in diameter and festooned with heavy-duty valves, which disappears into a hole in the floor. Below him, lines of workers approach the heart-machine, to administer to its needs as it powers Atlantis. They pull levers and turn wheels, controlling the city’s unsleeping source of energy deep beneath the island.

Ehrlichmann descends the staircase, each step drawing him nearer to the heart-machine, each step moving him further into a world of heat and noise and toil. As he approaches the bottom of the stairs, he is reminded of his visit to the Mittelwerk, where the Reich’s V-Weapons are manufactured. But now he comes not to admire German efficiency, but to destroy Atlantean invention.

At the foot of the stairs, he peers out onto the floor of the well. The pipes leading down into the Earth are the key. The valves govern the passage of water down to the magma below, and the superheated steam which returns. Ignoring the workers busy at their levers and wheels, Ehrlichmann marches from his hiding place. He heads straight for the pipes, determining on a specific course of action as he draws closer. He reaches the tree of pipes, and can feel heat radiating from them. There is a gap of half a metre between the outermost ring of pipes and the lip of the hole in the floor. He peers into this gap, but cannot see any bottom to the shaft. Hot air rises from it and bathes his face. If he prevents the return of the steam, then pressure will build up below and rupture the pipes.

He chooses which valve to close and crosses to it. He gives it a turn, stops and looks about him warily. Some of the workers are gazing his way, but incuriously. No one moves to stop him. Maria, it seems, has so cowed these people they have become slaves to the machine.

Ehrlichmann spins the wheel with vigour. It grows stiffer as the valve within the pipe narrows the aperture through which the steam passes. Soon it takes all his strength to move it centimetres. He hangs from one of the wheel’s spokes, using his body-weight to supplement the strength of his arms and torso. The valve squeaks shut.

Ehrlichmann steps back. Nothing has changed. He gazes about him, but the workers are still busy at their tasks. There is a pressure gauge nearby. He sees the needle on the dial slowly begin to rise. The final quarter of the dial is marked in red, and the needle will reach it soon. He stays until it does so, then he leaves.

He climbs the stairs back up to the tunnel quickly. He crosses to the railing and looks down into the well. The heart-machine is shaking and vibrating as though in mechanical pain. The workers mill about in confusion; they point and gesticulate. Steam rises from the shaft down to the centre of the Earth and writhes spectrally about the pipes. More dials are now in the red. Indicator lights begin to flash.

Ehrlichmann turns and runs. Back above-ground, he turns towards the shore. He can feel the earth beneath him shaking. Light tremors ripple across the street. People stop and gaze down at their feet. A chthonian groan echoes across the city. Ehrlichmann reaches the beach while, behind him, a rain of masonry, architraves and trim from the skyscrapers, falls crashing to the street. The elevated railway writhes and twists, popping rivets and bending girders. Somewhere a train crashes to the ground, the noise it makes like a cataract of metal. People scream.

Ehrlichmann gazes at the metropolis. As he watches, one of the flying buttresses on the Tower of Babel detaches and falls, seemingly in slow motion. Great bergs of masonry calve from the building. Elsewhere, a skyscraper collapses, folding in on itself and sending up a great pillar of dust and smoke. The effect of Ehrlichmann’s sabotage has been more effective than he could have imagined.

Abruptly, Ehrlichmann remembers what Plato wrote of the fate of Atlantis…

As a thick column of ash and smoke erupts from the mountain’s peak—it is actually a volcano!—and molten rock writes hellish lines down its slopes, Ehrlichmann wonders if he has done the right thing. The ground trembles, stills briefly, and then quakes again more violently. Atlantis is doomed; the volcano will bury the city, the island will sink into the ocean. The world Maria and the Atlanteans would have created will never be.

Another earthquake throws Ehrlichmann to the sand. It occurs to him that Ultima Thule too will never be founded, will not be there to allow Ernst Schäfer’s expedition to discover it in 1938. Germany and the Führer will have to win the war without the Thulans’ help.

No matter. It will make victory for the Fatherland so much the sweeter.

FURTHER READING

Farrell, Joseph P:
The Reich of the Black Sun
(2004, Adventures Unlimited Press) • Farrell, Joseph P:
The SS Brotherhood of the Bell
(2006, Adventures Unlimited Press) • Ferry, Joe:
Women in Science: Maria Goeppert Mayer
(2003, Chelsea House) • Gill, Anton & Gary Hyland:
Last Talons of the Eagle
(1998, Headline) • Griehl, Manfred:
Luftwaffe X-Planes
(2004, Greenhill Books) • Hale, Christopher:
Himmler’s Crusade
(2003, Castle Books) • Harbinson, WA:
Projekt UFO
(1995, Boxtree) • Herwig, Dieter & Heinz Rode:
Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Strategic Bombers, 1939-1945
(2000, Midland Publishing) • Hyland, Gary:
Blue Fires
(2001, Headline) • Pennick, Nigel:
Hitler’s Secret Sciences
(1981, Neville Spearman) •
Timaeus
, Plato (360 BCE) • Seidler, Franz W & Dieter Ziegert:
Hitler’s Secret Headquarters
(2000, Greenhill Books) • Stevens, Henry:
Hitler’s Flying Saucers
(2003, Adventures Unlimited Press) • von Harbou, Thea:
Metropolis
(1927) • Witkowski, Igor:
The Truth About Wunderwaffe
(2003, European History Press)

METAmorphosis

by

STEVEN SAVILE

“You left us to burn,” the first man said. 

“Or rot. Or melt. Or fester. Or just f-f-fade away. It doesn’t matter what word you use for it. You abandoned us, Steve,” his partner said, shaking his head sadly. “You let us down.” He spread his hands wide. He had no lifeline on his palm. Indeed he had none of the crags and creases that marked my own hands. My mother – God rest her soul – would have said it looked as though he had never done a hard day’s work in his life – but then, she said that about me all the time and my own hands were leathery with age and pitted by the thousand cuts that had been the simple art of living my life. The arthritis didn’t help. It turned them into bird’s claws that curled in on themselves. Gone were the days I could stride continents and slay dragons or punch out villains with a single left hook. I was no longer the hero of my own story.

“I can’t believe you did that to us,” the first man said, planting a hand on my chest and pushing me back into the hall. 

I stumbled back a couple of steps, caught by surprise. I hadn’t done anything apart from pour myself a nice single malt and light up a cigar (hand rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins if my man was to be believed). It was my only ritual, but I’d done it ever since I finished writing
The Secret Life of Colours
when I was 21 and I had thought it was just what writers did. Though back then it had been a stringy liquorice-papered cigarillo not a big fat Cuban. It was the ritual that was important, not the smoke. It’s the little things like that that keep us in touch with the kids we’d been when we set out on this journey of ours, right? My friends joked that my cigar’s got an inch longer and thicker for every zero tacked onto the end of the advance. If only they knew. The bank account had plenty of zeroes but they were in the sort code and the international routing number, not the balance. 

“Inside,” the shorter of the two barked. He sounded like some sort of genetic cross between man and Pitbull. He looked like something else entirely. He was ugly. I mean really ugly. It took me a moment to realise he suffered from some sort of deformity and wasn’t just pig ugly. It was his skull. It was oversized and lumpen, as though bloated by elephantitis. I was struck by the ridiculous cartoon ‘super villain’ quality of it: the hunchbacked dwarf with a giant brain his skull can barely contain. If I’d written it, he would have been plotting to take over Metropolis whilst Clark Kent was tangled up in his telephone booth, or Gotham while Batman was tongue-tied with the delectable Ms. Vale. Let’s just say that my Spidey Senses weren’t just tingling, it was full-scale warning sirens, high alert, DefCon whatever the most worried/paranoid number is. Right then, as the dwarf pushed his way into the cabin it was off the charts.

Of all the most ridiculous things, I thought about the whiskey – a 21 year old single malt, my favourite tipple, not that I’ve ever been a drinker – on the reading table beside the copy of the latest manuscript and wondered if I’d get to drink it. And then, my second thought was simply: thank God I’d finished the manuscript. It wasn’t a book yet – I didn’t think of it that way until it came back from the publishers all bound and prettied up, right now it was still a raw manuscript. But it was finished. I’d emailed it away to my agent. The stack of papers here was purely symbolic. It made me feel good to have them printed out and piled up so I could look at all of those white A4 pages with a sense of achievement. I’d done it. Finished. I didn’t want to be the guy who died with his masterpiece unfinished and it was left to some hack like… well… like
me
to finish it.