Sergeant Marks said, “What am I doing here? Don’t tell me you boys are starting a home for disabled veterans?”
“Just for you, sergeant. You’re teacher’s pet.”
“Tell teacher I’ll send him a nice shiny pineapple first chance I get.”
The little man with the medals asked a question, and the youth answered. Marks grinned. “I’ll bet tea won’t give you an A on that translation. You the only one here speaks English?”
“English hell,” said the interpreter. “I talk American.”
“O.K., you hind end of a Trojan horse. Why am I here? What’s the picture? Shoot the photo to me, Moto.”
The officer went off again, and not in a pleasant mood.
“We’ll have cross-fire gags some other time, sergeant.” The interpreter said. “Right now the colonel wants to know what this is.” He handed over a bloodstained piece of paper.
Sergeant Marks’ brain did nip-ups. He got the picture now, all in a flash. Somebody had found this clipping on his unconscious body, failed to interpret it, and decided it was some momentous secret inscription. He’d been nursed back to consciousness especially so that he could interpret it. And if he told the truth—
He could see in advance the dumb disbelief of his enemies. He could foresee the cool ingenuity with which they would try to wrest further statements from him. He could—
He opened his mouth and heard inspired words coming out in the voice which he was beginning to accept as his. “Oh, that? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m very grateful for what you’ve done for me, and in return— That’s our secret prophecy.”
“Nuts,” said the interpreter.
“I’m serious,” said Sergeant Marks, and managed to look and sound so. “You didn’t know that Roosevelt had his private astrologer, did you? Just like Hirohito and Hitler. We’ve kept it pretty secret. But this is the masterpiece of Astro the Great. We don’t know what it means, but all have to carry it so we can take advantage of it if it begins to come true. We’re supposed to swallow it if dying or captured; I’m afraid I slipped up there.”
The interpreter said, “Do you expect us to feed the colonel a line of tripe like that?”
“But it’s true. I’m just trying to save myself. I—”
The fierce little colonel burst into another tirade. The interpreter answered protestingly. The colonel insisted.
Then the nurse who had been making the next bed turned around and addressed a long speech to the colonel. Slowly his fierceness faded into a sort of mystical exaltation. He replied excitedly to the nurse, and added one short sentence to the interpreter.
As the three men left the room, the interpreter spat one epithet at Marks.
“Why, Moto!” the sergeant grinned. “Where did you learn that word?”
“I know rittre Engrish,” the nurse explained proudly. “When interpreter won’t talk, I say to kerner your story. Kerner very much preased. He send prophecy now to emperor. Emperor’s star-men, they study it.”
“Thanks, baby. Nice work. And what happens to my pal Peter Lorre for refusing to translate?”
“Him? Oh, they shoot him same time as you.”
One less Jap, one less Marine—“Well”—Sergeant Marks forced a grin—“we’re holding our own.”
A.D. 1945:
The Imperial courier asked, “Has astrologer-san any prophetic discoveries that I may report today to the Son of Heaven?”
The court astrologer said, “Indeed I have, and though the word of the stars seems black to us, yet will the rays of the Rising Sun dispel that blackness. Adolf Hitler will die today. The Yankees and the British will conclude a separate peace with Germany and will concentrate their attacks upon the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere.”
The courier smiled. “So astrologer-san also possesses a short-wave radio? Adolf Hitler has died today. The rest of your prophecy is, of course, a clever deduction from the rise of the White American party and a knowledge of the shrewdness of the German military aristocracy. But I shall report it as prophecy to the Son of Heaven. And has astrologer-san yet deciphered the American prophecy?”
“It is difficult. The court will understand that the complexities of the perverse American methods of magical calculation—”
“The Son of Heaven will understand that he needs a new astrologer, and that old astrologers know too much to remain alive.” He smiled again.
The court astrologer used the same ritual dagger as his thirteen predecessors since Sergeant Marks’ death.
A.D. 1951:
Adolf Hitler had reason to feel pleased with himself. His carefully faked death had deluded the United Nations into a sense of false security and enabled Germany to conclude an armistice and obtain a much-needed breathing spell. When her enemies were engaged in the final struggle in the East, it had been easy to overthrow the necessarily small army of occupation and hasten to the rescue of Japan.
Destroying Japan in the inevitable German-Japanese war that followed their joint victory had not been so easy. It had not been possible to fool the Japanese with organizations like the White American party or the British Empire League.
But it had been accomplished, and now Adolf Hitler, secure at last and already beginning to find security uncomfortable, was free to devote himself to such pleasing minor problems as the exquisitely painted tablet before him.
“I found it myself, mein Führer,” explained Reinhardt Heydrich, now resurrected from that earlier fake death which had served as a test of Anglo-Saxon credulity. “It was in a hidden inner shrine in an obscure temple in Tokyo. No one has seen it save my late interpreter. I cannot understand how what is obviously a prophecy in a Japanese shrine comes to be written in English; there is doubtless some symbolic significance. The Japanese characters at the top read American prophecy.’ The rough translation runs—”
He paraphrased the limerick.
Adolf Hitler listened, nodding slowly, and a mystical film spread over his eyes. It was as though he were listening to music.
When he spoke at last, he said: “We hold the world too securely for any more great events to happen in our days. We shall not see the fulfillment of this prophecy.
