white lab coat was as good as an officer’s collar tabs. If somebody wearing one gave him orders, he had to follow them.
An officer would knock you around at the slightest suspicion of reluctance. The scientists were friendlier than that, or maybe just more naive. Dr. Tsuruo Yamamura was a nice guy. Sometimes he even said please when he told people what to do, a courtesy no officer would ever show. He did it now: “We have a new shipment of maruta coming in by train this afternoon. Please take a squad of guards and meet them at half past three, then take them to the new compound-is it number twenty-seven?”
“Yes, sir. Compound twenty-seven.” Fujita tore off a parade-ground salute.
“Be gentle with them unless they try to escape,” Yamamura said. “They are important to the war effort.”
“Yes, sir!” the sergeant repeated. But then he risked a questioning “Sir?” He wasn’t used to orders like the ones he’d just got.
Dr. Yamamura was willing, even eager, to explain, where an officer would have either snarled or hauled off and belted Fujita for his gall. “These are American Marines captured in Peking and Shanghai,” the bacteriologist said. “Their reactions to our experiments will help show how Americans and Englishmen differ from Chinese and Japanese, and will let us make more effective weapons to use against them.”
“I see,” Fujita said slowly. He’d talked to more than a few soldiers who’d served in one or another of the major Chinese cities. From what they said, American Marines were very bad news: big, tough, clever fighters who backed away from nobody. If they were as tough as all that, though, why did they let themselves be taken prisoner instead of killing themselves or making their foes finish them?
That wasn’t a sergeant’s worry. Being at the railroad siding with a squad well before 3:30 was. Fujita made sure he and his men were in place. The train down from Harbin, naturally, ran late. That also wasn’t his worry-or anything close to a surprise.
More than a hundred Americans stumbled off the train when it finally showed up. They’d been packed in like rice grains jammed into a sack. Close to half of them wore dirty bandages that showed they’d been wounded. They jabbered in incomprehensible English.
Shouts and gestures with bayoneted rifles got them moving in the right direction. Most of the time, the Japanese soldiers would have clouted some of them with rifle butts to speed things along. But Fujita had spelled out Dr. Yamamura’s orders, so his men took it easy.
Compound 27 had a barracks hall with a central stove inside the barbed wire. The prisoners wouldn’t be too crowded. They could recover from whatever they’d gone through on the train. Fujita thought they were almost living in a hotel. By the way his men rolled their eyes, they also figured the Americans had it soft. But they were only soldiers. The officers and scientists set over them didn’t care a sen’s worth what they thought.
Somewhere or other, Adam Pfaff had got his hands on a pair of field glasses. They were such an obviously useful thing for an infantryman to have, not even Awful Arno complained about them. And Baatz complained about everything. He’d sure pissed and moaned about the gray paint Pfaff had slapped on his rifle’s woodwork. Somehow, though, the nonregulation Mauser hadn’t made the world come to an end or handed the war to the Ivans on a silver platter. Baatz was used to the piece by now. Willi Dernen wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started ordering other people to paint theirs the same way.
Had Willi owned binoculars, he would have used them for something practical, like ogling girls getting into or out of clothes from ranges where they couldn’t catch him at it. His buddy didn’t do that-or, if Pfaff did, he didn’t brag about it or share the field glasses when he spotted something juicy the way most guys would have. Instead, when he wasn’t using them to search out male Ivans with rifles, he pointed them up into the sky. He tended to mumble to himself when he did that.
“What do you see up there? Bombers?” Willi asked one evening at sunset when he caught Pfaff doing it. He didn’t hear aircraft engines, but that might not signify. Sometimes the Ivans flew so high, you couldn’t hear them. And spotting planes against the darkening sky was a bitch. Again, binoculars would clearly come in handy.
But the other Gefreiter shook his head without lowering the field glasses. “Heavenly bodies,” he answered.
That made Willi think of naked women again. He wasn’t as big a cockhound as some of the guys, but he wasn’t a priest, either. Nowhere close. He looked up into the sky himself. He didn’t see any naked girls up there, only the first-quarter moon and a growing number of stars. He said so.
This time, Pfaff did lower the binoculars. He shook his head again in some annoyance. “Not that kind of heavenly bodies,” he said. It wasn’t that he had anything against women, either.
“Well, what, then?” Willi inquired. He was getting annoyed himself.
“If you really want to know, I was looking at the moon.”
Willi eyed it himself. There it was, up in the sky. It looked like half a coin. The straight line that ran from top to bottom wasn’t quite straight. It seemed ever so slightly chewed, which made it different from the rest of the moon’s outline. It still wasn’t very exciting, or even interesting. Again, Willi didn’t hesitate to say so.
Pfaff handed him the field glasses. “Have a look through these. You know how to adjust them for your eyes?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve used ’em before.” Willi aimed at the moon. It wasn’t very far out of focus even before he carefully twisted each eyepiece in turn to sharpen things up. His buddy’s vision couldn’t have been too different from his own. But once he got the image as clear as he could… “Wow,” he breathed, hardly even realizing he was making a noise.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Pfaff spoke with quiet pride, as if, instead of Galileo, he were the first one ever to see the heavens close up.
That pride was wasted on Willi, who didn’t even hear him. The moon hung there, seeming close enough to reach out and touch if he took one hand away from the field glasses. It wasn’t just a light in the sky any more. It was a world, a world out there in space. The faint gray patches you could make out with the naked eye (and Willi didn’t so much as think of naked women, the truest proof of how fascinated he was) swelled into plains that had to be hundreds of kilometers across. Craters pocked them and filled the brighter, whiter areas of the moon.
Shadows stretched across the craters closest to the straight line. The others, under higher sunlight, showed less contrast. “What made them?” Willi asked. “Volcanoes?”
Adam Pfaff understood what he was talking about right away. “Nobody knows for sure. We’ve never been there, after all,” he answered. “But that’s one of the best guesses.”
“Wow,” Willi said again, staring and staring.
“You see the three craters, one above the next, near the sunrise line-the terminator, they call it?” Pfaff said.
Willi peered again, then nodded. “I see ’em.”
“They’re called Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, and Azrachel.”
“All the shit on the moon has names?” That had never occurred to Willi before. You could make maps of what was up there, the same as you could down here. It really was another world.
“You think they look impressive through these, you should see ’em through a telescope,” Pfaff said. “Back home, I’ve got an eight-centimeter refractor. It’s little and pretty cheap, but it’ll let you magnify a hundred times, not just seven. Then you can really start to get an idea of how much there is to see.”
Willi tried to imagine the moon appearing that much bigger and closer than it did even through binoculars. He felt himself failing. After you’d started playing with yourself, you could try to imagine what a girl would be like, but you wouldn’t know what counted till one let you get lucky.
“What else can you show me here?” he asked.
“Well, you see those two bright stars close together, a little west of the moon?” Pfaff asked. Willi nodded once more. One of them was the brightest star in the sky; the other, the more easterly one, was fainter and more yellow. His friend went on, “You can take a look at them if you want. The bright one is Jupiter. Maybe you’ll see a couple of its moons if you hold the binoculars real steady. The other one’s Saturn.”
“Rings!” Willi exclaimed, remembering from school.
“Rings,” Adam agreed, “only the binoculars won’t show them. Through a telescope, they’ve got to be the most beautiful thing in the sky. You think they can’t possibly be real.”
If they were more beautiful than the magnified moon, Willi wished he had a telescope. Through the field
