Targoff smiled and said, 'I never heard of it until Ruach brought it to my attention. Your actions speak for themselves. Besides, Ruach is very sensitive about such things. Not that you can really blame him after what he went through. But I do not think that you would behave as you did if you were what he said you are. I think you’re a good man, the type we need. So…'
Days and nights of hard work and short rations followed. Burton learned through the grapevine about the women. Wilfreda and Fatima were in Campbell’s apartment. Loghu was with Tullius. Alice had been kept by Goring for a week, then had been turned over to a lieutenant, a Manfred Von Kreyscharft. Rumor was that Goring had complained of her coldness and had wanted to give her to his bodyguards to do with as they pleased. But Von Kreyscharft had asked for her.
Burton was in agony. He could not endure the mental images of her with Goring and Von Kreyscharft. He had to stop these beasts or at least die trying. Late that night, he crawled from the big hut he occupied with twenty-five men into Targoff’s hut and woke him up.
'You said you knew that I must be on your side,' he whispered. 'When are you going to take me into your confidence? I might as well warn you now that, if you don’t do so at once, I intend to foment a break among my own group and anybody else who will join us.'
'Roach has told me more about you,' Targoff said. 'I didn’t understand, really, what he was talking about. Could a Jew trust anyone who wrote such a book? Or could such a man be trusted not to turn on them after the common enemy has been defeated?'
Burton opened his mouth to speak angrily, then closed it. For a moment, he was silent. When he spoke, he did so calmly. 'In the first place, my actions on Earth speak louder than any of my printed words. I was the friend and protector of many Jews; I had many Jewish friends.'
'That last statement is always a preface to an attack on the Jews,' Targoff said.
'Perhaps. However, even if what Roach claims were true, the Richard Burton you see before you in this valley is not the Burton who lived on Earth. I think every man has been changed somewhat by his experience here. If he hasn’t, he is incapable of change. He would be better off dead.
'During the four hundred and seventy-six days that I have lived on this River, I have learned much. I am not incapable of changing my mind. I listened to Roach and Frigate. I argued frequently and passionately with them. And though I did not want to admit it at the time, I thought much about what they said.'
'Jew-hate is something bred into the child,' Targoff said. 'It becomes part of the nerve. No act of will can get rid of it, unless it is not very deeply embedded or the will is extraordinarily strong. The bell rings, and Pavlov’s dog salivates. Mention the word Jew, and the nervous system storms the citadel of the mind of the Gentile Just as the word Arab storms mine. But I have a realistic basis for hating all Arabs.'
'I have pled enough,' Burton said. 'You will either accept me or reject me. In either case, you know what I will do.'
'I accept,' Targoff said. 'If you can change your mind, I can change mine. I’ve worked with you, eaten bread with you. I like to think I’m a good judge of character. Tell me, if you were planning this, what would you do?' Targoff listened carefully. At the end of Burton’s explanation, Targoff nodded. 'Much like my plan. Now…'
16
The next day, shortly after breakfast, several guards came for Burton and Frigate. Targoff looked hard at Burton, who knew what Targoff was thinking. Nothing could be done except to march off to Goring’s 'palace.' He was seated in a big wooden chair and smoking a pipe. He asked them to sit down and offered them cigars and wine.
'Every once in a while,' he said, 'I like to relax and talk with somebody besides my colleagues, who are not overly bright. I like especially to talk with somebody who lived after I died. And to men who were famous in their time. I’ve few of either type, so far.'
'Many of your Israeli prisoners lived after you,' Frigate said.
'Ah, the Jews!' Goring airily waved his pipe. 'That is the trouble. They know me too well. They are sullen when I try to talk to them, and too many have tried to kill me for me to feel comfortable around them. Not that I have anything against them. I don’t particularly like Jews, but I had many Jewish friends. . ' Burton reddened.
Goring, after sucking on his pipe, continued, Der Fuehrer was a great man, but he had some idiocies. One of them was his attitude toward Jews. Myself, I cared less. But the Germany of my time was anti-Jewish, and a man must go with the Zeitgeist if he wants to get any place in life. Enough of that. Even here, a man cannot get away from them.' He chattered on for a while, then asked Frigate many questions concerning the fate of his, contemporaries and the history of post-war Germany.
'If you Americans had had any political sense, you would have declared war on Russia as soon as we surrendered. We would have fought with you against the Bolshevik, and we would have crushed them.' Frigate did not reply. Goring then told several 'funny,' very obscene stories. He asked Burton to tell him about the strange experience he had had before being resurrected in the valley.
Burton was surprised. Had Goring learned about this from Kazz or was there an informer among the slaves? He told in full detail everything that had happened between the time he opened his eyes to find himself in the place of floating bodies to the instant when the man in the aerial canoe pointed the metal tube at him.
'The extra-Terrestrial, Monat, has a theory that some beings, — call them Whoever or X — have been observing mankind since he ceased to be an ape. For at least two million years. These super-beings have, in some manner, recorded every cell of every human being that ever lived from the moment of conception, probably, to the moment of death. This seems a staggering concept, but it is no more staggering than the resurrection of all humanity and the reshaping of this planet into one Rivervalley. The recordings may have been made when the recordees were living. Or it may be that these super-beings detected vibrations from the past, just as we on Earth saw the light of stars, as they had been a thousand years before. .
'Monat, however, inclines to the former theory. He does not believe in time travel even in a limited sense.
'Monat believes that the X’s stored these recordings. How, he does not know. But this planet was then reshaped for us. It is obviously one great Riverworld. During our journey up River, we’ve talked to dozens whose descriptions leave no doubt that they come from widely scattered parts, from all over. One was from far up in the northern hemisphere; another, far down in the southern. All the descriptions fall together to make a picture of a world that has been reworked into one zigzagging Rivervalley.
'The people we talked to were killed or died by accident here and were resurrected again in the areas we happened to be traveling through. Monat says that we resurrectees are still being recorded. And when one of us dies again, the up-to-the-minute recordings are being placed somewhere — maybe under, the surface of this planet — and played into energy-matter converters. The bodies were reproduced as they were at the moment of death and then the rejuvenating devices restored the sleeping bodies. Probably in that same chamber in which I awoke. After this, the bodies, young and whole again, were recorded and then destroyed. And the recordings were played out again, this time through devices under the ground. Once more, energy-matter converters, probably using the heat of this planet’s molten core as energy, reproduced us above the ground, near the grailstones. I do not know why they are not resurrected a second time in — the same spot where they died. But then I don’t know why all our hairs were shaven off or why men’s facial hairs don’t grow or why men were circumcised and women made virgins again. Or why we were resurrected. For what purpose? Whoever put us here has not shown up to tell us why.'
'The thing is,' Frigate said, 'the thing is, we are not the same people we were on Earth. I died. Burton died. You died, Hermann Goring. Everybody died. And we cannot be brought back to life!'
Goring sucked on his pipe noisily, stared at Frigate, and then said, 'Why not? I am living again. Do you deny that?'
'Yes! I do deny that — in a sense. You are living. But you are not the Hermann Goring who was born in Marienbad Sanatorium at Rosenheim in Bavaria on January 12, 1893. You are not the Hermann Goring whose godfather was Dr. Hermann Eppenstein; a Jew converted to Christianity. You are not the Goring who succeeded Von Richthofen after his death and continued to lead his fliers against the Allies even after the war ended. You are not the Reichsmarschal of Hitler’s Germany nor the refugee arrested by Lieutenant Jerome N. Shapiro. Eppenstein and Shapiro, hah! And you are not the Hermann Goring who took his life by swallowing potassium cyanide during his trial for his crimes against humanity!'
Goring tamped his pipe with tobacco and said; mildly, 'You certainly know much about me. I should be flattered, I suppose. At least, I was not forgotten.'
'Generally, you were,' Frigate said. 'You did have a long-lived reputation as a sinister clown, a failure, and a toady.' Burton was surprised. He had not known that the fellow would stand up to someone who had power of life and death over him or who had treated him so painfully. But then perhaps Frigate hoped to be killed.
It was probable that he was banking on Goring’s curiosity.
Goring said, 'Explain your statement. Not about my reputation. Every man of importance expects to be reviled and misunderstood by the brainless masses. Explain why I am not the same man.'
Frigate smiled slightly and said, 'You are the product, the hybrid, of a recording and an energy-matter converter. You were made with all the memories of the dead man Hermann Goring and with every cell of his body a duplicate. You have everything he had. So you think you are Goring. But you are not! You are a duplication, and that is all! The original Herman Goring is nothing but molecules that have been absorbed into the soil and the air and so into plants and back into the flesh of beasts and men and out again as excrement, und so wieter!
'But you, here before me, are not the original, any more than the recording on a disc or a tape is the original voice, the vibrations issuing from the mouth of a man and detected and converted by an electronic device and then replayed.' Burton understood the reference, since he had seen an Edison phonograph in Paris in 1888. He felt outraged, actually violated, at Frigate’s assertions.
Goring’s wide-open eyes and reddening face indicated that he, too, felt threatened down to the core of his being.
After stuttering, Goring said, 'And why would these beings go to all this trouble just to make duplicates?'
Frigate shrugged and said, 'I don’t know.' Goring heaved up from his chair and pointed the stem of his pipe at Frigate.
'You lie!' he screamed in German. 'You lie, scheisshund!'
Frigate quivered as if he expected to be struck over the kidneys again, but he said, 'I must be right. Of course, you don’t have to believe what I say. I can’t prove anything. And I understand exactly how you feel. I know that I am Peter Jairus Frigate, born 1918, died A.D. 2008. But I also must believe, because logic tells me so, that I am only, really, a being who has the memories of that Frigate who will never rise from the dead. In a sense, I am the son of that Frigate who can never exist again. Not flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, but mind of his mind. I am not the man who was born of a woman on that lost world of Earth. I am the byblow of science and a machine. Unless…'
Goring said, 'Yes? Unless what?'
'Unless there is some entity attached to the human body, an entity which is the human being. I mean, it contains all that makes the individual what he is, and
