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Sheep
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The Hand of Sheep, the Hand of Death
Mar 2002
time: 15:29
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Heinrich Gimpel glanced at the report on his desk to see again how many Reichsmarks the United States was being assesed for the Wehrmacht bases at New York, Chicago and St.Louis. As he thought the figures were up from those of 2002. Well the Americans would pay - and in hard currency, too; none of their inflated dollars - or the panzer divisions would move out of their bases and collect what was owed the Germanic Empire. And if they collected some blood along with their pound of flesh, the prostate United States was hardly in a postion to complain.
Gimpel typed the new numbers into his computer, then saved the study on which he'd been working the last few days. The Zeiss disk drive purred smoothly as it swallowed the data. He turned off the machine, then got up and put on his uniform greatcoat: in Berlin's early March, winter still outblustered spring.
'Lets call it a day, Heinrich,' Willi Dorsch said. Willi shared the office with Gimpel. He shook his head as he donned his greatcoat. 'How long have you been here at the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht now?'
'Going on twelve years,' Gimpel answered, buttoning buttons. 'Why?'
His friend cheerfully sunk the barb: 'All that time at the high command, and a fancy unifrom, and you still don't look like a soldier.'
'I can't help it,' Gimpel retruned; he knew too well that Willi was right. A tall thin, balding man in his early forties, he had a tendacy to shamble instead of parading, and wore his greatcoat as if it were cut from English tweeds some professors still affected. He tried to set his high-crowned cap at a rakish angle, raised an eyebrow to get Dorsch's reactio. Willi shook his head, Gimpel shrugged, spread his hands.
'I suppose I will have to be marshall for both of us,' Dorsch exclaimed. His cap gave him a fine dashing air. 'Doing anythign for dinner tonight?' The two men lived not far from each other.
'As a matter of fact we are, I'm sorry. Lise invited a couple of friends over,' Gimpel replied. 'Let's get together soon, though.'
'We'd better,' Willi said. 'Erika's saying she misses you again. Me, I'm getting jealous.'
'Oh, quatsch,' Gimpel said, using the pungent Berliner word for rubbish. 'Maybe she needs to get her spectacles checked.' Willi was blond and ruddy and muscular, none of which desirable adjectives applied to Gimpel. 'Or maybe its my bridge game?'
Dorsch winced 'You know how to hurt a man don't you? Come on lets go.'
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Sheep
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The Hand of Sheep, the Hand of Death
Mar 2002
time: 15:29
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The wind outside the military headquaters had a bite to it. Gimpel shivered inside his greatcoat, He pointed off to the left of the Great Hall. 'The old timers say the bulk of that thing has messed up our weather.'
'Old timers always complain.' his friend answered. 'That's what makes them old-timers. But Willi's gaze followed Gimpel's finger. He saw the Great Hall every day, but seldom really looked at it. 'Its big all right, but is it big enough for that? I doubt it.' His voice though was doubtful, too.
'You ask me its damn near big enough for anything,' Gimpel said. The Great Hall, built sixty years earlier in the great flush of triumph after Britian and Russia had gone down before the guns and tanks of the Third Reich, boasted a dome that reached over two hundred and twenty metres into the sky and was more than two hundred and fifty metres across: sixteen St.Peter's Cathedrals might have fit within the enormous monument to the gradeur of the Aryan race. The wealth of a conquered continent ha brought it into being.
The dome itself, sheathed in weathered copper, caught the fading light like a great green hill. Atop it, in place of a cross, stood a gilded Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws. Atop the eagle, red light blinked on and off to warn away low-flying planes.
Willi Dorsch's shiver had only a little to do with the chilly weather. 'It makes me feel tiny.'
'Its a temple to the Reich and the Volk. Its supposed to make you feel tiny,' Gimpel answered. 'Set against the needs of the German race and state, and one man is tiny.'
'We serve them, not they us,' Willi agreed. He pointed accross the Adolf Hitler Platz toward the Fuhrer's palace on the far side of that immense square. 'When Speer ran that one up, he was worried that the size of the building would dwarf even our Leader himself.' And indeed the balacony above the tall entranceway looked like an architectual afterthought.
Gimpel's short laugh came out as a puff of steam. "not even Speer could look ahead to see what technology might do for him.'
'Better not let the security police hear you talk that way about one of the Reichsvatters.' Dorsch tried to laugh, too, but his chuckle ran hollow. the security police were somthing to be taken seriously.
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Sheep
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The Hand of Sheep, the Hand of Death
Mar 2002
time: 15:29
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Still Gimpel was right. When the Fuhrer's palace was erected, another huge Germanic eagle had summounted the balcony from where the Germanic Empire's leader might address his citizens. The eagle had been moved when he was a boy, to its present location on the roof. In its place was an enourmous televisor screen. Adolf Hitler Platz had been built to hold a million people. Now when the Fuhrer spoke, every one of them could get a proper view.
A bus purred along to the Oberkommado der Wehrmacht building. Gimpel and Dorsch filed aboard with the rest of the officals who greased the operation of the mightiest military machine the world had known. One by one the commuters stuck their account cards into the fare slot. The bus's computer debited each rider eighty-five pfennigs.
The bus rolled down the broard avenue toward South Station. Berlin's myriad bureaucrats made up the majority of passangers but not all. A fair number were tourists, come from all over the world to view the most wonderful and terrible boulevard the world boasted. Blase as any native, Gimpel normally paid but scant attention to the marvels of his home town. Today, though, the oohs and ahhs of those seeing them for the first time made him notice them also.
Sentries from the Gossdeutschland division in ceremonial uniform goose-stepped outside their barracks. Tourists on the sidewalk took photos of the Fuhrer's gaurds. Inside the barracks hall, where tourists would not see them, were other troops in buisnesslike camoflauge smocks, assault rifles in place of the ceremonial gaurd's obsolete Gewehr 98s, and enough armoured fighting vehicles to blast Berlin to rubble. Visistors from afar were encouraged not to think of them. Neither were most Berliners. But Gimpel reckoned up the Grossdeutschaland's budget every spring. He knew exactly what the barracks held.
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Sheep
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The Hand of Sheep, the Hand of Death
Mar 2002
time: 15:29
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Neon lightscame on in front of theaters and restraunts as the darkness deepened. Dark or light, the people swarmed in and out of the huge Roman- style building that held a heated undoor pool the size of a young lake. It was open all hours of the day and night for those who wished to exerxise, to relax, or simply ogle at attractive members of the opposite sex. Its Berlin nickname was the Heiratbad, the marriage baths, sometimes amended by the cynical to Heiratbett, the marriage bed.
Past the pool, the Soldiers' Hall and the Air and Space Ministry faced each other across the sreet. The Soldiers' Hall was a monument to the triumph of German arms. Along the exibits it so lovingly preserved were the railroad car in which Germany yielded to France in 1918 and France to Germany in 1940; the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin compund; one of the gliders to land troops in southern England; and behind thick leaded glass, the twisted remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philidelphia.
Old people in Berlin still called the Air and Space Ministry the Reichsmarschall's Office, in memory of Hermann Goring, the only man to ever to hold that exalted rank. Willi Dorsch used its mor ecommon name when he nudged Gimpel and said, 'I wonder whats happening in the Jungle these days.'
'Could be anything,' answered Gimpel. The both laughed. The roof of the ministry had been covered with four meters of earth, partly as a protection against aerial bombardment, and they planted, partly to please Goring's fancy (his private apartment was on the top floor). the old Reichsmarschall was almost half a century dead, but the orgies he'd put on amid the greenery remained a Berlin legend.
Willi said 'We aren't the men our grandfathers were. In those days they thought big and weren;t ashamed to be flamboyant.' he sighed the sigh of a man denied great deeds by the time in which he chanced to live.
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Sheep
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The Hand of Sheep, the Hand of Death
Mar 2002
time: 15:29
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'I envy your contentment here and now, Heinrich. I almost joined the Wehrmacht when I was just out of the Hitler Jugend. Sometimes I still think I should have. There's a diffrence between this uniform' - he ran a hand down the double breasted greatcoat - 'and the one real soldiers wear.'
'Is that your heart talking, or did you just all of a sudden remember you're not eighteen anymore?' Gimpel replied. His friend winced, acknowledging the hit. 'Me I'd fight if the fatherland needed me, but I am just as gald not to be carrying a gun'
'We're probably all safer because you don't,' Dorsch said.
'This is also true.' Gimpel took off his thick gold-framed glasses. In an instant, the street outside, the interior of the bus, even Willi beside him, grew blurry and indistinct. he blinked a couple of times, returned the glasses to the bridge of his nose. The world regained its sharp edges.
The neon brilliance of the street outside dimmed as the bus passed by the theaters and the shops and started to pick up passangers from the Ministries of the Interior, Transportation, Economics, and Food. More uniforms that don't have soldiers in them, Gimpel thought. The buildings from which the new riders came were shutting down for the day.
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Sheep
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The Hand of Sheep, the Hand of Death
Mar 2002
time: 15:29
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Two of those ministries, though, like the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, never slept. A new shift went into the Justice Ministry to replace the workers who left for home. German justice could not close its eyes, and woe betride the criminal or racial mongrel upon whom their omniscient gaze lighted. Himself a thoroughly law abiding man, Gimpel shivered a little every time he passed that marble-fronted hall.
The Colonial Ministry was similarily active. Much of the world, these days, fell under its perview: the agricultural towns of the Ukraine, the mining clonies in central Africa, the Indian tea plantations, the cattle herders on the plains of North America. As if picking that last thought from Gimpel's mind, Willi said 'How many Americans does it take to screw in a light bulb?'
'The Americans have always been in the dark' Gimpel answered. He chuckled sadly. 'Your father was telling me that one, Willi.'
'If he was, he sounded more relieved than I do. The Yankees might of been tough.'
'Might of beens don't count fortuantley.'
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Samuel Johnson
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Give it time, -scratch - Has anyone read Philip K. ****'s "Man in the Tall Castle" - he was doing alternative history before any of them and this one concerned what would have happened had the Germans and Japanese prevailed in WWII as well.
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Samuel Johnson
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Hee, hee, the program even censor's author's names. That's Philip K. D-i-c-k...
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PresidentMarcos
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Have some American freedom fighters detonanate a nuke in Berlin, and then have the US build a lot and bombard the Germans to kingdom come.
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10-07-2003 12:16
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