Maybe Daddy knows,she thought as she scrambled aboard her school bus. Her father knew all sorts of strange things, many of them useless but most of them interesting or entertaining. If he didn't know these, she couldn't think of anyone who would.
Herr Kessler got on the bus. He counted the students to make sure nobody had been left behind, then grunted in satisfaction. 'Everyone present and accounted for,' he told the driver before returning his attention to the class. 'Out of respect for the memory of our beloved Fuhrer, you will be silent-completely silent-on the return journey to Stahnsdorf. If you are not silent, you will be very, very sorry. Do you understand me?' He sounded as if he looked forward to making someone, or several someones, very, very sorry.
Alicia didn't expect anyone to respond to what was obviously a rhetorical question, but a boy held up his hand and said, 'Herr Kessler!'
'Ja?' The teacher was taken aback, too.
'Herr Kessler, when will we have a new beloved Fuhrer?'
Kessler blinked. 'Why, when we do, of course,' he answered. Alicia had no trouble figuring out what that meant. It meant he didn't know, either.
Heinrich Gimpel suspected the highest authorities in the Reich would have suppressed the first edition of Mein Kampf if they'd thought they could get away with it. But plenty of old copies were still floating around, and word of the first Fuhrer 's startlingly subversive statements spread too wide and too fast for suppression to have any hope of success. That being so, those in high places simply sat tight, hoping the fuss would die down of its own accord.
'Who would have imagined Hitler wrote such a thing?' Heinrich said at work one morning. He didn't like talking about Hitler at all, but the first edition, despite official silence-maybe because of official silence-was so much on people's minds that not talking about it would have seemed odd. He didn't want to seem odd in any way.
'I know what it must have been,' Willi Dorsch said.
'Tell me, O sage of the age,' Heinrich said.
'He must have written the first edition before he got the Party fully into his hands,' Willi responded. 'As soon as he did, then the Fuhrerprinzip took over, and everything ran from the top down, the way it does now.'
'That…makes a certain amount of sense,' Heinrich said. In fact, it made more than a certain amount. Willi was shrewd, no doubt about it.
He was also smug. 'You bet it does,' he said. 'And, if you look at things the right way, it makes the first edition an antique, too, something that's not worth getting excited about.'
'Do you think that's the line they'll take?' Heinrich asked.
'I think they'll try,' Willi replied. 'Interesting to find out whether they can get away with it.'
'What do you think?'
Willi's grin wasn't quite pleasant. 'I could ask you the same question, but you've never much cared for sticking out your neck, have you?'
'Well, no.' Heinrich tried to sound sheepish, not cowardly. Feeling he needed to add something to his confession, he said, 'You don't have to answer if you don't want to.'
'Oh, I will. I can always run my mouth, or stick my foot in it, or stick my neck out for the chopper.' Willi sounded happy, almost gay. He could talk about sticking his neck out because he didn't really believe the chopper would come down on it. Heinrich knew full well the chopper would descend ifhe were discovered. Willi, meanwhile, went on, 'Sure, I'll tell you what I think. I think they have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. That's how things always work.'
'You're probably right.' Heinrich made sure he didn't sigh. He wouldn't have sworn his office was bugged, but he wouldn't have sworn it wasn't, either. If anyone was listening to him, he didn't want to do or say anything that could possibly be construed as disloyal to the Reich.
'If you bet that tomorrow will be just like today, you'll win more often than you lose,' Willi said. 'But you won'talways win, and you'll look more like a chump when you lose. We wouldn't have gone to Mars a few years ago if we'd thought things would stay the same all the time.'
'That's true.' Heinrich had been no less impressed than anyone else by live televisor pictures from another world. Men had been flying back and forth to the moon since he was a boy, and the observatory there had been a going concern for fifteen years. But Marsfelt different, even if there'd been not the slightest hint of Martians. The Ministry of Air and Space was talking about a manned mission to the moons of Jupiter. That would be something, if it ever got past the talking stage.
'So anyway,' Willi said, 'the people who go on about the first edition are the ones who don't have power, and the people who do have power don't give a damn about the first edition. That's the way it looks to me.'
'Seems reasonable,' Heinrich said, and so it did. Again, he refused to show he didn't like it, no matter how reasonable it seemed. Instead, he looked at his watch. 'Shall we head for the canteen and see what sort of experiment the cooks are serving for lunch?' Nobody ever got in trouble for complaining about the food here. Not even the Security Police could afford to arrest that many people.
Today's special included tongue sausage and a cabbage salad with chopped apples, oranges, and grapes in a mayonnaise-based dressing. The sausage wasn't half bad. The menu called the salad Swedish. After a couple of bites, Heinrich called it peculiar.
Willi looked down at his foam plate. His verdict was, 'I didn't know the Swedes hated us that much.'
Heinrich took another forkful. After crunching away, he said, 'It's probably very nutritious.'
'It would be,' Willi said.
Despite grumbles, they both kept eating. Heinrich sipped coffee from a foam cup. It wasn't especially good, either, but it was strong. He could feel his eyes opening wider. He wouldn't doze off at his desk this afternoon. He'd done that once or twice when he had a new baby in the house. He hadn't got in trouble. He mustn't have been the only one.
As he ate, he listened to the lunchroom chatter. Now it was official: the Americans would fall short on this year's assessment. Plenty of people at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht wondered what the Reich would do about it. Heinrich wondered himself. Someone a couple of tables over said, 'The Yankees are lucky bastards. If we had a Fuhrer in place, he'd have made them knuckle under, you bet.'
Willi Dorsch heard that, too. 'He's right,' he said, and got up to pour himself some more coffee. Heinrich nodded, though he couldn't help thinking that getting devastated by nuclear weapons and then spending the next forty years under German occupation wasn't precisely the kind of luck he most wanted to have.
On the other hand, most of the Americans remained alive. Aside from the war casualties, the conquerors had worked their usual horrors on Jews and Negroes. Even so, the population of the USA was only about a third lower than it had been before the war. Maybe the Americans as a wholewere lucky-if you compared them to such Untermenschen.
At another table not far from the one where Heinrich and Willi were sitting, a colonel growled, 'To hell with the first edition! This is all a bunch of claptrap, if anybody wants to know the truth.'
Heinrich took a bite of tongue sausage. Who would presume to argue with such an august personage? Willi looked smug as he came back with his refill. He must have heard the officer, too. He wagged a finger at Heinrich, as if to say,You see?
But two colonels sat at that table. The second one, a younger man, shook his head and said, 'I'm not so sure, Dietrich. I've been a good Party man for more than twenty years now. If there's a way to stay in the rules and let me help choose the new Fuhrer, I'm for it.'
'That's the leadership's job,' the first colonel-Dietrich-said.
'Well, yes,' the other colonel answered. 'But how do leaders get to be leaders? If the people under them don't want to follow, what have you got? A mess, that's what. Look at France in 1940.'
Dietrich snorted. 'Oh, go on, Paul. If the Reich ever comes to that, we can all stick our heads in the showers, because we'll be done for anyway.'
'I didn't say it would be that bad-we're not Frenchmen, after all,' Paul replied. 'But the principle is the same.'
Another snort from the first colonel. 'Principle? What's principle? Something losers talk about to explain why they've lost.'
'Oh, really? Are you saying the Party has no principles?' Paul's voice was silky with danger.
But Dietrich wouldn't fall into that trap. 'I'm saying victory is the first principle, and none of the others
