For Metzger felt his Austrian blood more keenly than his Prussian. He was a useful servant of Hitler XVI chiefly because he had been reared in the AWS and never known directly any other concepts of life. But he knew himself for a misfit and groped faintly toward something else.
He had sometimes in the past sensed a similar groping in Captain Schweinspitzen, but no more. Not since his captain had become convinced of his identity with the pelagic young spark. Now, when he saw his dream of leadership approaching fulfillment, humanity dropped away from him like an outworn robe, and the naked body beneath it was strong and beautiful and cruel and masterful.
Metzger learned little of his plot to subvert the Blue Beast. The captain retained enough of his understanding of people to know that Metzger might want the destruction of Hitler XVI, but certainly not the instating of Felix Schweinspitzen as a new and greater Hitler.
Metzger gathered only the fringes of the plot, only enough to know that the crucial moment would come at the reception and State banquet which would be the ritual high point of the inspection tour.
And then he inadvertently contributed the key element to the pelagic plot. This came about on the day that he entered the office just in time to see the captain put a bullet coolly through the forehead of a man in the blue uniform of a personal messenger of the Führer.
Schweinspitzen showed no embarrassment at the presence of a witness. He said coldly, “He brought me bad news. This is how the great leaders of old have always rewarded such messengers.”
Metzger realized now how fully the madness of leadership had come to possess the man who had once been almost his friend. Quietly he said, “What news, Felix?”
“You said that the Blue Beast might be jealous of my success here. You’re a prophet yourself, Anton. He is. He has forbidden my presence at the banquet.”
Metzger felt something like relief. “It’s better this way, Felix. Such an attempt as you’ve been plotting is too dangerous. And if you must be guided by the American prophecy, remember its middle couplet:
“But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky.
“The State hasn’t executed a man by hanging for a hundred years, but the Hitler might very well reinstate the archaic punishment for a great traitor.”
“Am I afraid of your prophecy? Don’t be a fool.” But he looked perplexed and reflective for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers. “What are the names of those two paratransport planes we use for the outlying islands?”
“The Aries and the Leo.”
Captain Schweinspitzen laughed. “Very well, my dear Anton. Be sure to attend the feast. You’ll see me dangling on high all right. And what is the last line of your prophecy?’
“ And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast.’ ”
“Throw dice? Mete out justice by lot, it might mean. That will do. And the Cat— I picked up bits of American folklore in Des Moines, Anton. See if that clue enables you to decipher your prophecy.”
Felix Schweinspitzen had left the office before Anton Metzger placed the apposite bit of American folklore. Then at last he recalled the comic black figure in twentieth-century cartoons. Felix the Cat—
Metzger saw little more of the captain during the remaining few days before the banquet. Five natives were executed for the murder of the Führer’s messenger and possible leaderly wrath was averted.
But Captain Schweinspitzen not only accepted the banishment from the banquet, he refused even to appear at the reception and tour, and Metzger found himself as official guide and escort to the sixteenth Hitler.
“It is dull here,” the Führer protested. “Buildings of common steel and stone—no glass, no plastic. The telephone used almost exclusively without a visoscreen. Not a stereoscopic theater on the island. Old-model automobiles and no moving walks . . . why, one might as well be back in the twentieth century.”
“The Führer knows,” Metzger explained, “why this is so. This island exists solely so that a slave population may produce raw materials for the State. There is no need for any of the refinements of civilization here; we lead the crude life of pioneers.”
“It is dull,” Hitler XVI repeated with a yawn.
He was littler and plumper than his pictures indicated. There was the infinite refinement of boredom on the round bland face. Nothing of the captain’s dream of leadership here, nothing of whatever the magnetic power was which brought about the success of the man from whom the Aryan World State’s Führers took their title of Hitler.
The title descended now in fixed ranks of party precedence, and skill in party politics is not the sole prerequisite of the leader. Metzger thought of the decadence of the later Roman emperors. There was sense in Schweinspitzen’s notion of replacing this worn-out quasi-leader with the vigor of the real thing.
But was the leader-principle in itself humanly justifiable? Metzger was often glad that among the many refinements of civilization missing on the island were psychometrists; he hated to think what might happen if one of the skilled ones at home were to psych him and discover these hidden doubts.
The banquet was held out-of-doors in the warmth of a tropic night, and even outdoors it was evident that Hitler XVI found the vanity of his powder-blue uniform uncomfortably warm.
The first course, as was the traditional ritual at all formal State banquets, was an unpalatable and nameless ersatz, to remind men of what their forebears had suffered in order to establish the Aryan World State. Then followed a magnificent rijstafel, that noble fusion of unnumbered courses which was the sole survival of the one-time Dutch culture of the island.
With the rijstafel Hitler XVI for the first
