Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even grins. They must not have heard it. 'Come again?' Shaftoe asks, proddingly, like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure-fire thigh- slapper.
'Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen,' von Hacklheber says, very slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice, three times at Shaftoe, then sits forward and says, brightly: 'Perhaps I should explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy, since it will help you all to understand my story.'
A BRIEF TRIP INTO HELL'S DEMO with HERR DOKTOR PROFESSOR RUDOLF VON HACKLHEBER ensues.
Shaftoe only hears the first couple of sentences. At about the point when von Hacklheber tears a sheet out of a notebook and begins to diagram the organizational tree of the Thousand-Year Reich, with 'Der Fuhrer' at the top, Shaftoe's eyes take on a heavy glaze, his body goes slack, he becomes deaf, and he accelerates up the throat of a nightmare, like the butt of a half-digested corn dog being reverse-peristalsed from the body of an addict. He has never been through this experience before, but he knows intuitively that this is how the trip to Hell works: no leisurely boat ride across the scenic Styx, no gradual descent into that trite tourist trap, Pluto's Cavern, no stops along the way to buy fishing licenses for the Lake of Fire.
Shaftoe is not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock-up slapped together from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house-to- house warfare during boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped with a sort of giddy queasiness that, he knows, is the most pleasant thing he will feel here. 'Morphine takes away the body's ability to experience pleasure,' says the booming voice of Enoch Root, his wry, annoying Virgil, who for purposes of this nightmare has adopted the voice and physical shape of Moe, the mean, dark-haired Stooge. 'It may be some time before you feel physically well.'
The organizational tree of this nightmare begins, like von Hacklheber's, with Der Fuhrer, but then branches out widely and crazily. There is an Asian branch, headed up by the General, and including, among other things, a Hauptgruppe of giant carnivorous lizards, a Referat of Chinese women holding up pale-eyed babies, and several Abteilungs of plastered Nips with swords. In the center of their domain is the city of Manila, where, in a tableau that Shaftoe would identify as Boschian if he had not spent his high school art class out behind the school leg- fucking cheerleaders, a heavily pregnant Glory Altamira is being forced to do blow jobs on syphilitic Nipponese troops.
The voice of Mr. Jaeger, his drafting teacher-the most boring man Shaftoe had ever known, until perhaps today-fades in for a moment with the words, 'but all of the organizational structures I have detailed to this point became obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities. The hierarchy was shuffled and several of the entities changed their names, as follows . . .' Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he sees is Mr. Jaeger tearing up a diagram of a table leg bracket that the young Bobby Shaftoe had spent a week drafting. Everything has been reorganized, General MacArthur is still very high in the tree, walking a brace of giant lizards on steel leashes, but now the hierarchy is filled with grinning Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen butchers, dead or doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole legion of pencil-necked Signals geeks, also in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their heads, wading through a blizzard of dollar bills printed on old Chinese newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.
'What are they saying?' Bobby says.
'Please, stop screaming,' says Enoch Root. 'Just for a little while.'
Bobby's lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish-shrapnel rains down and gets hung up in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off to make lutefisk in black steel drums.
Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out of the crack around its lid.
But he's not in the thatched hut anymore; he's inside a cold black metal phallus that has been probing around down below the surface of the nightmare: Bischoff's submarine. Depth charges are going off all over the place and it's filling up with sewage. Something clocks him on the side of the head: not a ham this time, but a human leg. The sub's lined with tubes that carry voices: in English, German, Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but confined and muffled in the plumbing so that they mingle together like the running of water. Then a pipe is ruptured by a near miss from a depth charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:
'The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse-grained treatment of the general organization of the Reich and particularly the military. Responsibility for cryptanalysis and cryptography is distributed among a large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of this structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture . . .'
Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the submarine by fetters of gold, feels one of his small, concealed handguns pressing into the small of his back, and wonders whether it would be bad form to shoot himself in the mouth. He paws wildly at the broken tube and manages to slap it down into the rising sewage; bubbles come out, and von Hacklheber's words are trapped in them, like word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and burst, it sounds like screaming.
Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box on his lap. He holds up his hand in a V for Victory, then levels it at Shaftoe's face and pokes him in the eyes. 'I cannot help you with your inability to find physical comfort-it is a problem of body chemistry,' he says. 'It poses interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies.'
A lot of the other speaking tubes have ruptured now, and screaming comes from most of them; Root has to lean close in order to shout into Bobby's ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for the cigar box, which contains the stuff he wants: not morphine. Something better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.
The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers his face. The salted and preserved body parts suspended from the ceiling tumble into his lap and begin to writhe, reaching out for other parts, assembling themselves into living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims his Vickers at the ceiling of the U-boat, and cuts an escape hatch. Instead of black water, golden light rushes through.
'What was your position in all this, then?' asks Root, and Shaftoe nearly jumps out of his chair, startled by the sound of a voice other than von Hacklheber's. Given what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked a question, this is heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von Hacklheber works his way down the chain of command.
Shaftoe doesn't care: he's on a rubber raft, along with various resurrected comrades from Guadalcanal and Detachment 2702. They are rowing across a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg lights in the sky. Standing behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent: 'My immediate supervisors, Wilhelm Fenner, from St. Petersburg, who headed all German military cryptanalysis from 1922 onwards, and his chief deputy, Professor Novopaschenny.'
All of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, 'A Russian?' Shaftoe is really coming around now, reemerging into the World. He sits up straight, and his body feels stiff, like it hasn't moved in a long time. He is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but since no one is looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees no reason to fill them in on what he's been doing these last few minutes.
'Professor Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches into the theoretical limits of security. I used tools from pure mathematics as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I looked at our own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses.'
'What did you find?' Bischoff asks.
'I found weaknesses everywhere,' von Hacklheber says. 'Most codes were designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying mathematics. It is really quite pitiable.'
'Including the Enigma?' Bischoff asks.
'Don't even talk to me of that shit,' von Hacklheber says. 'I dispensed with it almost immediately.'
'What do you mean, dispensed with it?' Root asks.
'Proved that it was shit,' von Hacklheber says.
'But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it,' Bischoff says.
Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. 'You expect them to throw all those
