Part 3

Kane seemed to read his thoughts. "Working like we do, we can't compete with the Germans in things that call for a lot of resources and equipment. They have all the big weapons--the rockets and tanks and atomic bombs. For anything to be useful to us, it has to be something that can be invented and built in a cellar. So we've had to open up brand-new lines of development--and in fields like psychoelectronics we're miles ahead of the Germans, because they didn't have to.... Better pull over. We don't want to get rammed," he interrupted himself.

A blinding eye was bearing down on them across the water. In its stark glare Manning felt nakedly visible again. But they veered sharply toward the bank, and the launch went past in a swish of foam, still scanning river and shore ahead.

"Where we going?" Dugan asked practically.

"We're about there," answered Kane. "Easy now." He pointed to where a jumble of ruins projected like a pier into the stream, the ripples lapping and gurgling in the spaces between the great piled fragments. "In there--the only space big enough for the boat. Better duck." Their craft slid with scant clearance into an opening like the mouth of a cave. Kane produced a flashlight, and they saw that a timbered tunnel ran back into the bank at right angles to the entrance.

"Up to the end," ordered Kane. They poled with oar-thrusts against the tunnel sides for a score of yards, until the boat bumped against a wooden platform at the end of the shaft. Kane sprang ashore and made fast, and the others followed. The flashlight beam searched out a trapdoor; below it were stairs that led downward. At the bottom they trod on cement, and there was another door, on which Kane knocked in a deliberate pattern.

Presently a bolt was shot back, and the door swung open. The man who opened it was hooded and it was a little hard to keep him in sight, even for those likewise protected. When he saw Kane, however, he switched off his invisibility unit. The new arrivals did likewise, and all of them slipped off their stifling hoods with relief.

Jerry Kane had a surprisingly youthful and unlined face, topped with curly blond hair which women must have loved to run their fingers through. He didn't look much like an underground plotter. The man who had opened the door fitted the role better; he was gaunt, blue-jawed and dour.

The room they had entered had begun life as a basement; it was big, concrete-walled, ill-lit by an electric bulb dangling from the low ceiling, its furnishings a long table and a number of chairs which indicated its use as a gathering-place for a good many people. The only other person in it now was a massive man who sat at the table, an open book spread out before him, and stared unblinkingly at those who had come in.

"Most of our regular agents are out--looking for you," Kane remarked. He waved them to seats, and sat down himself on the table's end. "However, we have here Harry Clark"--the blue-jawed man--"and Igor Vzryvov, one of the Russian members."

Clark nodded noncommittally. The big Russian rumbled in faintly accented English: "Pleased to meet you. I have never met any time travelers before."

They stared at him. Manning turned on Kane: "You know about us?"

Kane grinned. "You told the Germans you came out of the past. At least, that's what was reported in the camera session of the court which passed on your case this morning. One of our friends happened to be there--and at your trial, later on."

"Was there an invisible man _there_?"

"No, he was visible and you saw him. Remember two elderly jurists who served as a sounding board for Gestapoleiter Schwinzog? One of them is a friend of ours. We have a good many, even inside Germany."

"He calls them friends," growled Igor Vzryvov. "I say no German can be a friend."

"So--" Manning was numbed by surprise. "So you've had your eye on us from the start."

"Just about."

"And you believe our story?"

"Since the Germans didn't, I'm inclined to," admitted Kane. "We know that more things are possible than German imagination can swallow; we've got several such things here. Of course, it's always just possible that you're German spies, using a crazy wheels-within-wheels stunt to get on the inside. I don't think so, though, and fortunately I don't have to guess." He turned to Vzryvov. "Got the apparatus set up?"

"Since an hour ago," said the Russian.

Kane slid off the table top. He became brusque. "If you'll just step into the next room, we'll read your minds and settle all doubts."

* * * * *

Fifteen minutes later, Igor Vzryvov switched off the psychoanalyzer. Manning glanced up under the spidery hemisphere of wire that gathered the faint broadcasts of the brain, and met Kane's warm smile. The underground leader tossed aside the graphs he had been studying, and extended a welcoming hand.

"You're genuine, all right. No need to examine your friend--your mind says he came with you out of the past, and that's enough and to spare."

"Swell!" said Dugan. "I didn't much like the idea of having that thing poking around inside my head."

Kane caressed the machine affectionately. "This is one of the best achievements of cellar science. Thanks to it, we've got the only leak-proof organization this sinful world has ever seen. The Nazi party is one of the tightest setups ever created without benefit of the psychoanalyzer, and we've got men inside it--but we _know_ that all our members are loyal and stable." His expression darkened. "Of course, if this and our other psychoelectronic developments got into German hands, we'd be sunk. With their resources, they could exploit the field a lot more thoroughly than we can. For example, Igor here has invented a death ray that kills by just convincing a man he's dead--but to make it an effective weapon would take a lot more power. We get a good deal of leakage here from the Long Island station, but we have to be careful about antennas."

The four of them sat around the table in the outer room. Harry Clark had disappeared--literally, and then gone out to pass the word to the agents scattered around New York that the men they sought had been found.

"Now," said Kane, "since you're really time travelers, I'm on fire to hear how you did it. A time machine might be a useful addition to our arsenal, though it sounds like a tricky thing to use...."

"I'm afraid we can't help on that score," said Manning, and related the whole story of their experience with Herr Doktor Kahl's _Zeitfahrer_.

Kane rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "So you're stranded in our time. I feel for you! At least the Germans didn't get the machine, either--though they have got the inventor. We may have to do something about that. And what about you? Have any plans?"

Manning met his eyes squarely. "A hundred years ago, we were fighting a war. It seems we lost it--how or why, I don't know. I don't think we lost it in the fighting, but probably before it ever began, when we were complacent and let the Germans get a head start in preparation and invention. Anyway, for us that's still unfinished business."

"And we'd like the chance to finish it!" stated Dugan bluntly.

Kane smiled with a touch of sadness. Vzryvov said explosively, "The end may be soon!" and his eyes burned.

In Manning's memory flashed the vision of a mocking face. He asked abruptly: "What did Schwinzog mean: 'A message for America--one week to live'?"

The shadow on Kane's face deepened, but he did not show surprise. "I guess he meant just that. That the Germans are about ready to do to America what they did to Russia fifty years ago.... But of course you don't know anything about the history of the last century. If you want to catch up on the missing chapters, I've got a fair-sized collection of books on the subject. All the ones dealing with events since the War of the Conquest are German, of course--English has just about stopped being a written language--and you'll probably find they don't even agree on what you know. You said, didn't you, that you were with an American army advancing into Germany?"

"That's right--and it was only one of several."

Kane grinned wryly. "The books don't even whisper that Germany was ever invaded in that war. They must have been a lot closer to defeat than they've ever admitted since. But--" he shrugged, "they won in the end, so what's the difference?"

"How could they win?" scowled Dugan. "Hell, we had them on the run!"

* * * * *

Kane gave him a pitying look. "You must have left some time before the Germans suddenly rose from the ashes and struck back at us. They attacked us with a new weapon--a radioactive dust, by-product of several big piles--atomic power plants--they had secretly got going by 1949. The occupation forces were wiped out--along with a million or so of their own people. In no time Western Europe was overrun again. The whole of Soviet Russia seems to have collapsed about the same time." He looked down at his hands, clasped on the table in front of him; his voice went on with the dispassionate recital of the dead past. "There was an attempt to defend England that folded up when London was dusted off the map. I haven't been able to find much information on the war in Asia, but I think they had a long tough fight putting down guerrilla resistance in Siberia and later on in China.

"Then came the attack on America, and for that they used the dust in combination with another ace in the hole--their own atomic bombs. The first one was dropped right here, on New York. It flattened five or six square miles and killed about half a million people. The defenses that we'd devised against the dust--inadequate as they must have been, because there isn't any real defense--were neutralized by the bomb. America fought for just one month, and after that there wasn't any United States--just a disorganized mob of survivors, dazed by the cities' destruction and the sterilization of big stretches of countryside.

"Germany proclaimed the New Order over the face of the whole Earth--humanity to submit to the leadership of the German Volk, its highest evolutionary type. Everywhere the nations surrendered without a fight.

"Since the Conquest there's been only one serious, organized rebellion in this country; that was in the year two thousand, fifty-one years ago. The Germans put it down with bombs and poison; a lot of innocent people were killed, and for a long time after that it was impossible to organize any resistance. Since our movement got started twenty years ago, we've been damn careful not to goad the Germans into making a wholesale slaughter. Now--" His face twisted in pain.

"They've decided to anyway?" asked Manning with studied calm.

"As a matter of policy, not revenge. You see, for a while after the Conquest they had a lot of use for slave labor, so the subject peoples were valuable to them; but now that they have plenty of atomic power, running nearly automatic factories and mechanized farms to supply all their needs and luxuries, the rest of the Earth's population looks to them like so much excess baggage. All they have use for is land, _Lebensraum_ for their own growing people. They've calculated that the whole Earth could be covered by Germans by 2500 A.D. As far as they're concerned the rest of us can rot or starve--and we do; but we don't die out! So--they murdered Russia fifty years ago--that was what touched off the rising here--and we're next!"

Manning said unbelievingly, "What do you mean--'murdered'?"

"The technical term is 'genocide.' They did it with guns and gas and, when necessary, the atomic dust. It's quite a job to wipe out a whole nation, and the Germans bungled Russia pretty badly and met a lot of stiffer resistance than they expected, and a lot of people--such as Igor's parents--got away to other countries. But since then they've made improvements in the method.

"Sometime soon, in a few days, maybe--a rocket will take off for somewhere in Germany and proceed to a point in space about fifty thousand miles from the Earth. There it will discharge fifteen hundred metric tons of radioactive dust--a new mixture of ingredients having a few days' half life, for initial devastating effect, and of others with a period of about a year--to take care of anybody that tries to sit it out underground. The dust will drift toward Earth in an expanding cloud, whose size and shape they've calculated down to the last decimal, and which, when it falls on Earth's surface, will cover an area a little larger than the United States. It will be spread thin by then--about one gram to the acre--but that will be enough."

* * * * *

Manning sat silent. The idea of these new ways of all-compassing destruction was too much for a mind that had learned to regard high explosives, machine guns and flame throwers as adequately murderous. And the plan for exterminating a nation was too monstrous to think about, unless in the same light as it must be seen by the minds that conceived it--as something like dusting a field of grain to kill off insects whose only crime is that they eat what men want to eat.

"And you've known about this, and haven't stopped it?" he asked at last.

"They've been busy making and refining the dust for a year now, and we've known about it almost that long. And we've tried to stop them.

"We've tried to assassinate the men responsible for the plan. But the ruling clique, like your acquaintance, Schwinzog, aren't under any illusions and they aren't going to yield any power. We've tried to get them and mostly failed.

"Finally, one of our men got inside the Reichministerium fur Raumschiffahrt and learned that the space ship _Siegfried_ had been assigned for conversion to the uses of the project. The raid you stumbled into was trying to locate and destroy it, but they didn't find it and blew up a building instead. That's our last chance even to gain time--if we can't wreck the dust ship, I don't know what we can do."

Igor Vzryvov broke his brooding silence. "You will do as we did," he proclaimed with flat conviction. "Save what you can of your organization by flight to other lands, whence you will carry on the fight--to the death, without the crippling reservations imposed by millions of hostages."

Kane looked at him with smoldering eyes. "What would be left to fight for?"

"Wait and see," insisted the Russian implacably. "You will really begin to fight when there is no more America to be saved, only Germany to be destroyed."

Manning put in hastily, "Your men didn't locate the--space ship. How do you know it's even in the Black Forest?"

Kane frowned, then shrugged. "We don't. But there's nowhere else it can be. We've checked every spaceport in the Reich."

"Maybe it's outside Germany."

"There aren't any ports in the subject countries. And if one had been built, and the _Siegfried_ landed there--well, it simply couldn't have been done inconspicuously. We have psychoelectronic communicators scattered over the whole world, and what's more important, the best grapevine connections. We'd have heard."

"What about the polar regions? Antarctica?"

"I guess it would be technically possible--though enormously difficult and expensive--to build a spaceport there. But it just isn't reasonable. They aren't that scared of our interference."

Manning bit his lip. "One little thing," he murmured, half to himself, "makes me think that ship isn't in the Schwarzwald at all. Herr Schwinzog gloated that your raid missed the refining plant; he must have forgotten for a moment that you're supposed to believe the space ship is there too...." Abruptly he raised his head. "Listen--maybe there's one part of Germany you didn't investigate."

"What do you mean?"

"Where Eddie and I were, just this afternoon. Long Island."

* * * * *

Kane and Vzryvov looked at him with wild surmise. "You might be right," Kane said jerkily. "There's a field there that would do. But a space ship landing would have been seen for hundreds of miles--" His eyes widened with a sudden idea. "They needn't have landed it there, though. They could have brought it down in the ocean, and towed it in!"

"Sure," said Manning, though he hadn't thought of that. "An amphibious operation. The island's well-guarded?"

"Suspiciously so, now that you mention it. We don't have a single agent there--we've been concentrating on the expeditionary force in Europe, of course, and we've supposed the additional Long Island defenses were merely installed in fear of an attack on the German colony, when the people hear--But that could be it! They could have hidden the ship under our noses!"

He sprang to his feet; he wore a look almost of gaiety, but his eyes held feverish lights. "If we could only start after it tonight! But this things calls for preparation. They'll be ready for anything, invisibility units included.... But we've got to try tomorrow night. If the ship is there--it may not be much longer."

Manning and Dugan exchanged glances. Manning said pointblank: "Are we in on this deal? We were soldiers in our own time, and--Americans...."

Reading Kane's face, he realized he hadn't needed to ask.

V

The boat slipped silently, impelled by muffled oars, toward the shore that lay dark and seemingly lifeless a furlong away. The underground in New York had a couple of motor launches--but there might be sound detectors on that shore, which would not be fooled by the powerful invisibility unit that purred quietly, clamped to athwart amidships. So they rowed.

The boat was laden with men, weapons, and explosives. The men were monstrous-headed shapes, for they wore gas masks under the featureless hoods; but the poised alertness of Kane's figure, upright in the bow as he scanned the black shore and called soft directions to Vzryvov at the steering oar, expressed all their eager anxiety on the threshold of decision. Manning and Dugan sat side by side; in front of the former was lanky Clark, and beside him a chemist named Larrabie, who clasped between his knees a box full of bombs of his own making--canisters of a versatile compound which with a detonator had the violence of TNT, without one was an excellent substitute for thermite.

Manning had to remember that he had once taken part in another landing on a conquered shore--Normandy in 1944, when the air had been full of planes and the sea of ships, and the invasion had rolled ashore like a resistless juggernaut.... If those millions had failed, what could six men in a rowboat do?

The night before, in the room Kane had given them, Manning had lain long sleepless, and passed the time turning through Kane's books of history--titles like _Aufstieg Deutschlands zur Weltherrschaft_, _Eroberung der Erde_, _Das deutsche Jahrhundert_.... One thing about the oddly twisted story they told had piqued his curiosity, and he had sought earnestly before he found mention--in a footnote--of the fact that one Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) had occupied the civic office of Reichskanzler (later abolished) at the time of the Conquest. But the leaders of that period, according to the histories, had been the generals and military men such as Rundstedt, Rommel, Keitel and Doenitz.

The future had obviously not gone according to anybody's plans made prior to 1949. A new factor had come in--the monstrous reality of atomic weapons, which had suddenly made it possible for a few men in one nation to hold the threat of death over all life on Earth. America had had them first and had used them to subdue Japan. But the German onslaught had been too swift; the combination of atomic dust and atomic bombs had paralyzed the U.S.A. before she could strike back.

"Up oars," whispered Kane. The boat glided forward the last few yards as the dripping oars rose over the water, then sand crunched under the keel.

Cautiously they sloshed ashore. Vzryvov knelt in the boat for half a minute, working with wires and one of Larrabie's compact bundles of death--booby-trapping the priceless invisibility unit against possible discovery.

Each man carried a slung automatic rifle, three bombs, and a long knife. An invisible man could kill with a knife in the midst of a crowd and walk away before anyone noticed.

They started moving without time wasted in consultation or casting about. All had studied the available maps of the area until their eyes smarted; and the moon was up, which for them was a special advantage.

* * * * *

This stretch of shore was occupied by the sea-side villas of the German masters; it was a good hour's walk from the main colony and the rocket port. The Germans could hardly have protected the whole coastline with automatic alarms.

As they topped the seaward slope, though, from not far distant, where a house bulked in the shadow, exploded the barking of a watchdog. The raiders froze; Kane swore perfunctorily and said shortly, "Push on. Dogs can see us, or at least scent us. That one doesn't seem to have raised anybody yet--"

They pushed on, tramping across meadows and through woods, steering clear of the roads that might be watched by electric eyes--as the rocket port must be without doubt, if the dust ship was there.

Half a mile from the German colony, in sight of its lights and their glimmering reflection in the water of the East River, a high fence barred their way. It was plain wire, stretching to right and left out of sight--probably across the whole island.

"That wasn't on the map," said Dugan.

"Of course not," responded Kane. "That's the first line of defense. Touch it, and you'd alert the whole place." He didn't look unhappy about it, judging by the flash of his grin in the moonlight. "Brother, I think we've come to the right address!"

Vzryvov remarked imperturbably, "The road must pass through it yonder." He gestured to where an occasional moving light picked out the highway.

"Right," said Kane. They set out along the fence, keeping at a respectful distance from the wire.

The highway entrance was floodlighted and visibly protected by movable arms like those used at grade crossings. These, together with the sleepy squad of German soldiers that stood guard beyond the fence, would not have given pause to the invisible men. But there had to be invisible defenses too.

They waited on the shoulder of the in-going traffic lane. Manning and Dugan could scarcely quell the jittery feeling of being exposed in plain view of the enemy, but the others were unconcerned.

"We've got to hitch a ride," explained Kane softly. "Just passing through behind a vehicle wouldn't be good enough, you can bet...."

A car came rushing out of the darkness and swooped to a stop with screaming tires. It was a gleaming pleasure machine, transparent plastic top flung back to let the night air cool the heated faces of three young couples that occupied it, evidently on their way to continue in town a party that had outgrown the facilities of the countryside.

"Get a good look at their admission procedure," said Kane.

The guards bestirred themselves; one operated the gate mechanism, the rest surrounded the car, grasping shining steel blades on long shafts, barbed like medieval halberds. They swung their archaic weapons around and over the car, hacking the air viciously. The girls in the car squealed and snuggled as the driver eased forward under an interlocked arch of steel.

Manning said, "They're watching for us, all right!"

Kane nodded, then tensed as another automobile rolled up and stopped. "This one's O.K.," he said aloud. "Quick, now--get inside it!"