The Other Foot (aka Mind Switch), page 7
‘Climb the house?’ the young man asked doubtfully.
‘Up to that balcony,’ Horst said, leaning forward to point with a dirty forefinger. ‘Can you do it?’
The young man looked at the picture again, noticing the stonework, the ledges and sills. He had never tried to climb a house, but it did not look especially difficult. ‘Yes, Herr Horst, I think so.’
‘All right. Now let me show you the layout.’ Horst stuck a cigarette into his mouth and talked around it as he drew papers out of the envelope, opened them and spread them out on the table.
One of the papers was covered with dotted lines and little squares drawn carefully in pencil. ‘Here’s the house,’ Horst said, pointing to one of the squares. ‘A certain gentleman owns it, I won’t mention his name right now. It happens that a friend of mine knows a girl that used to work there as a housemaid. Point is, besides being rich as a pig, this gentleman also knows good stuff when he sees it.’ Horst’s fingers and thumb worked sensuously together. ‘Now here’s an underground autobahn.’ He pointed to a straight dotted line. ‘Emergency exits here and here, but they all have alarm systems—the Wapo would be swarming over us in five minutes. What we have to do is to get into the area in daylight and hide—here.’ His forefinger pointed to a spot with crude pictures of trees drawn on it, to the left of the little square. Trudl had moved up beside him on the couch and was looking on, chin on one hand, her dark hair falling forward over her face. Her expression was one of polite boredom.
‘You’ll drive the van,’ said Horst, turning to her.
‘Naturally,’ she said in a drawling voice, but Horst did not seem to hear. He pointed to another dotted line. ‘This is where you park, halfway up the tunnel to the Ipolitov house. That’s empty; nobody uses the tunnel. Then when we go in, you pull around here—’ his finger traced the dotted line—‘to the junction, then up the Oberkeller tunnel, and you park right outside the barrier. Simple.’
‘Of course,’ said Trudl.
‘Now,’ Horst said briskly. He thrust the paper aside, pulled over another one. ‘Here’s the inside of the house.’
There were three pencilled boxes, with other boxes inside them. Horst pointed to the top one. ‘Second floor. You climb in here—through these two rooms—down the stairs. First floor.’ Horst tapped the second box briefly, then went on to the third. ‘Ground floor. You come around this way, through the game room and the salon, right to the foyer. You open the front door, we walk in, and then your job is over—we do the rest.’ He glanced up. ‘Understood?’
‘Yes, Herr Horst,’ said the young man without conviction. He had seen maps before, but not maps of houses, and the little boxes and lines meant nothing to him. But it sounded simple enough—one climbed in, went downstairs, opened the front door.
‘All right, then it’s agreed?’ Horst took the young man’s hand, shook it vigorously once and dropped it. ‘Good!’ He glanced quickly at his watch, tapped his teeth with his thumbnail. ‘No use waiting,’ he muttered, and sprang up, jamming his hands into his pockets. ‘I’m going to round up Georg and Otto,’ he said. ‘You stay here—-don’t let him go out, understand?’
‘You’re going to do it tonight?’ Trudl asked.
‘Yes, tonight. The longer one waits, the more chance that something goes wrong. I’ll arrange for the van and get everything lined up.’
The door clicked behind him; he was gone.
VI
The young man sneezed.
‘Be quiet!’ Georg hissed, turning his round head in the darkness.
‘I can’t help it,’ the young man whispered, astonished at himself. He had never sneezed before, and it was a remarkable experience. One’s chest squeezed itself in, the eyes closed and began to water, the head went back, there was an intolerable tickling in the nostrils, and then a kind of explosion, a spasm all over the body, which brought a wonderful relief. He was trying to decide whether it was pleasant or unpleasant to sneeze, when he felt the tickling begin again. His head went back. ‘Ah … ah …’
Leaves rustled as Georg crawled toward him. ‘Shut him up, for God’s sake!’ came Horst’s fierce whisper. The young man felt the sneeze gathering, tightening. … A sweaty, fat hand clamped itself over his mouth and nose. He struggled.
The sneeze came. It was like an explosion going off inside his head. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said indignantly, pushing Georg away.
Georg glared at him, wiping his hand on the side of his trousers. ‘Pig!’ he said.
Horst and Otto were glaring furiously at them both. ‘Sh! Sh! Stuff his damned nose with dirt if he does it again,’ Otto whispered. He was a pale, horse-faced man, with a lower lip that sagged away from brown-stained teeth.
The four of them lay in prickly weeds at the top of a small wooded hill. Below, the rolling lawns of Charlottenburg lay dim in the starlight, with the dark mass of the Griinewald behind them.
In the middle foreground, the crouched grey bulk of the house sprayed light from half a hundred windows. Farther away, on one of the curved narrow roads that wound among the coppices, the young man could make out the slowly moving twin yellow lamps of a horse-drawn carriage. The lake was invisible now in the gathering darkness, and anyhow all the people in the sailboats had gone home hours before.
The young man was bored and cold. They had been lying here for hours and hours, with no food but hard-boiled eggs from Otto’s knapsack, and nothing to drink but sour red wine. Here came another carriage, and then another. Otherwise there was nothing to see. It was not like the daytime, when there had been people playing tennis behind the screen of cypress, stableboys leading horses out for exercise, carriages coming and going. Once there had been an excitement, when Horst whispered suddenly, ‘Get down!’ and flattening himself in the leaves like the others, the young man had looked out and seen a drifting white machine with a helmeted man inside. The man had been looking sharply from one side to the other as his machine floated diagonally across the lawns, fifty feet in the air. He wore a uniform with white buttons and a cross-strap. He had looked straight toward them once, but apparently had not seen them under the trees, and his machine had gone on drifting out of sight.
As for the ride out from Berlin in die horse van, that had been interesting too, even though Horst would not let him look out the windows. The horse had not been in the van, as the young man had half expected when he heard about it, but his smell had been there. How brave people were to get close to such a large animal, with no bars in between! Why did they do it, when they could use motorcars instead?
The horse van had stopped, there had been a muttered word from the driver, then the doors were opening and the four of them were tumbling out with their bundles of coarse sacking—scrambling up the hill into the shelter of the trees, with the smell of dust and sunlight in their nostrils… .
He wished Trudl were here to answer questions. They had talked for quite a long time while Horst was away, until she had become suddenly so angry and had called him fool. She had told him that Kiel was a rotten place, that she liked to dance and play bezique, that she had once had a friend who was an armed robber but that it was a mug’s game. He went over these items carefully in his mind; one never knew what might come in handy.
It was too bad; she had seemed very friendly, had asked him not to call her Fraülein, and had sat close to him on the couch while they played with the doll, Ermingarde. Then she began to say things he did not understand; at first this seemed to amuse her, then she had lost her temper, and he still did not know why. It was too bad.
Down below, a row of lights in the rear part of the house went out; after a moment others in the front went dark. The young man tensed with interest and waited for something else to happen, but nothing did.
Here came another sneeze.
In the spacious ground-floor apartment at the rear of the Oberkeller mansion, Herr Heimatsrat Werner Oberkeller was sitting late at the bezique table, as he did nearly every night when he was in residence, with a few old friends. Under the light, the shiny red backs of the cards glittered like jewels against the green baize. Herr Oberkeller reached out a fat old hand, gathered them in with surprising delicacy. His face remained expressionless, florid from the cheekbones downward, pale above. There were strands of yellowish white in his grey, receding hair, but his heavy eyebrows were still dark, his bulbous nose purple-veined, his lips a purplish red. ‘Well, gentlemen, another hand?’
‘No, the devil take you,’ said Rene Capezius lazily around his cigar. He made an entry in a little gold notebook, shut it with a snap. He was nearly seventy, the same age as Oberkeller, but looked at once older and leaner, more vigorous. His waxy yellow skin was creased into sardonic folds; his faded blue eyes twinkled with amusement. ‘You’ve had quite enough from me for one evening. What about you, Plas?’
Joachim Plas was the youngest and shortest man at the table—dumpy and shapeless, a pudding of a man. In the dim reflected light, one saw his dark hair, black moustache, glasses; the rest seemed to be nothing but a featureless smear. ‘Disaster, as always,’ he grumbled. ‘You three are going to send me to the poorhouse.’
Rupolo, the fourth man, grinned widely, showing perfect dentures. He was as bald as an egg, his head all lumps and mounds of pink flesh. ‘But you didn’t feel so poor today, when you read the market quotations, eh, Plas?’
Plas smiled grudgingly. ‘Space Society went to 108,’ he said. ‘No, that’s not so bad. But it makes me nervous; it’s too high. What do you think, should I sell out?’
The chairs creaked as Oberkeller and Capezius leaned back, reaching for their glasses of port. ‘Nothing of the kind,’ Rupolo said. ‘In my opinion, anyone who sold space stocks now would be a fool.’
‘Maybe so, but what about all this clamour to nationalise the free companies? It makes me nervous.’ Oberkeller and Capezius, the two Council members, smiled knowledgeable smiles. ‘That’s all Christian Democrat propaganda,’ Capezius said. ‘Ullman has to make a noise for his constituents, that’s all—it means nothing.’
‘All the same,’ said Plas stubbornly, ‘a bubble can get only so big, then it bursts. How many of these interstellar projects are actually showing a profit? After fifteen years? If the companies should be nationalised—’
‘It will never happen,’ Oberkeller said heavily. The three faces turned to him expectantly, but he said no more. His old eyes were hooded; he raised his wineglass, pursed his lips, drank.
After a moment Plas resumed querulously, ‘I ask myself, where are the profits going to come from? What are we getting from Thiessen’s Planet, for example? A few precious stones, a few pets for the children—’
Rupolo leaned forward. ‘There you’re wrong, friend Plas. Thiessen’s has an enormous potential—simply enormous. No, no, I don’t mean the wog trade.’ His mouth pursed in disgust. ‘If you want to know, the fact is that the S.S. loses money on wogs. That is just window dressing—something to keep the public interested. After all, your small investor never sees beyond his nose. One must have a toy or two to dangle in front of him—see the pretty, see the pretty?’ His ogre face distorted itself into a hideous cajoling grin. ‘But imports will never pay for our investment in a planet like Thiessen’s, no, not for a century at least.’
‘What then?’ Plas demanded.
‘Real estate!’ said Rupolo. He picked a cigar out of the box beside him, bit off the end, spat it out. ‘Billions of hectares of absolutely virgin land.’
‘Which is good for nothing, because it costs a fortune to get there.’
Rupolo levelled a thick red finger at him. ‘Mark my words, in twenty years you can take your family to Thiessen’s for no more than it would cost you to go to Panama.’ There were approving nods from Capezius and Oberkeller. ‘Country retreats—game preserves—tourist resorts, industry, the whole lot.’ He stuck his cigar into the middle of his mouth, lit it with a fat gold lighter.
‘Yes, yes, no doubt you’re right,’ Plas said. ‘In twenty years, certainly. But in the meantime—’ He shook his head. ‘I say to myself, what if something happens that we don’t expect? What about those rumours of a planet with intelligent natives? Suppose we and the Sovs should lay claim to the same planet at once—like two dogs with a bone, eh? What then?’
Capezdus’s lean face lost its ironic humour. He bent forward. ‘These dirty rumours!’ he exclaimed. ‘The editors who print such rubbish should be shot!’
‘It’s completely absurd, in the first place,’ said Rupolo, nodding vigorously. ‘After all, Herr Professor Schloss-macher has definitely shown that the human race and the Germanic culture are a unique accident. There could not be an equal race in the universe—it is mathematically impossible.’
‘As to that,’ Oberkeller said, wagging his heavy head, ‘I can tell you something.’ He looked at each of them in turn. In the silence, the ticking of the big pendulum clock in the comer could be heard. Capezius sat back rather sulkily, adjusting the lace of one cuff with his long, well manicured fingers. Plas slouched in his chair, folding his hands over his round little belly.
‘No more than six months ago,’ Oberkeller resumed, ‘a Russian Cosmic Survey ship found a planet of what they call the “Z” class. That is, a planet with one moon, in the third orbital position of a G star system. Acting on instructions, they did not make a landing, but orbited the planet and took photographs, spectrographic readings and so on. The photographs showed moderate ice caps, three continental land masses with rivers, mountains, green vegetation.’ Oberkeller paused. ‘The photographs also showed a number of regular formations which could be interpreted as … cities.’
Capezius sat upright. ‘Ridiculous!’ he sputtered. ‘Do you mean to tell me—? They could have been crystal structures, natural formations of some kind—at most, the hives of some sort of communal insect!’
‘Quite right,’ said Oberkeller, closing his eyes in assent ‘But, my dear Capezius, think one step farther! If such photographs ever became public, what would be the result! You know, and I know, that natural formations they must be. But the English and the bleeding hearts would all shout “Intelligent life!” And then we should be in a devil of a mess.’
Capezius nodded unwillingly and sat back, fingers caressing his long chin. Plas said querulously, ‘But the Sovs are always saying they don’t mind if they find another advanced civilisation out there, because it will necessarily be socialist, and so on.’
Rupolo’s chair creaked as he leaned forward. ‘Well, what then?’ he demanded. ‘What did they do?’
‘They hushed it up,’ Oberkeller said deliberately. ‘The records were altered, the ship’s crew were put through psychic reorientation and reassigned … I don’t know where, but if I should guess, I would say Atlantica.’ He made a downward gesture with one forefinger.
‘May one ask,’ said Rupolo delicately, after a moment, ‘how you happen to know all this?’
Oberkeller smiled faintly. ‘I tell you, they are not fools. They came to us, with the photographs, charts —everything. The Ministry quietly put a ban on that whole region of space. They have done the same. Neither their ships nor ours will visit that planet again.’
The four were silent a moment, their eyes thoughtful. ‘Still, sooner or later …’ said Plas, as if to himself.
Oberkeller shrugged. ‘In twenty years, fifty years, there might be a need for re-examination, perhaps a—final solution. But for the immediate present, the matter has been settled. The Sovs are not anxious to have questions raised about some of their planets, any more than we about ours.’
‘They are realists, at least,’ said Rupolo with grudging approval. He looked at the inch-long ash on his cigar, and carefully deposited it in an ashtray.
The bottle went around. Plas sipped his absently, wiped his moustache with a folded handkerchief. ‘Yes, that was correct,’ he said. ‘And yet … just suppose they were not natural formations… .’
Capezius snorted, his good humour restored. ‘Nonsense, my good Plas. Other races are inferior, that’s all there is to it. The best we’ve found have the brains of a rabbit. There’s not one of them that even looks like a human being—except of course,’ he winked, ‘for the delightful females of Aldore’s World.’
Oberkeller permitted himself his second smile of the evening. ‘Speaking of that,’ he said, ‘I happen to have acquired some photographs—Open that little drawer under the table, will you, Rupolo?’
The bald man did so, and the four men bent their heads together over the pack of glossy stereo photographs he put on the table. There were exclamations of pleasure. Capezius smacked his lips. ‘Exquisite! Very tasty! Ah, the little darlings, they have fur like a pussycat!’ He bent an ironic gaze on Oberkeller. ‘Better not let your wife see these, eh, my friend?’
‘No, no, she is very moral—she would not understand!’ ‘How is dear Lorraine?’ Capezius asked politely. ‘We saw her so briefly at dinner.’
‘Oh, very well. She stays at home most of the time; she has her own interests—gardening, and so cm.’
‘Hi, look at this one,’ said Rupolo holding up another photograph. The other three stared at it, in silence, with glistening eyes.
The lights in the rear of the house had gone out hours ago, and the young man had watched as three horsedrawn carriages came up in turn from the stables; a man had got into each and had been driven away. After a time the light behind the porte-cochère had gone out, then a window on the first floor had been illuminated; then, after a long time, it had gone dark like the rest of the house.
Still Herr Horst did nothing, until what seemed like another hour had passed. Chilled to the bone, the young man wrapped his arms around himself in misery. Horst’s low voice roused him; he rolled over, opening his eyes. Horst was speaking into a little black instrument in his hand, and Trudl’s voice, tiny as a cricket’s, was answering. ‘All right, stay there, we’re going down now,’ said Horst, and put the instrument away. He beckoned; already the other two were scrambling to their feet, moving forward down the slope of the hill.
