The Best Alternate History Stories Of The Twentieth Century Part 41

So completely absorbed was I in thoughts of a sudden reprieve that I barely noticed the distant explosion. Someone behind me said, "What was that?" I heard Kaufmann calling from the ground but his words were lost in a louder explosion that occurred nearby.

A manic voice called out: "We must finish the rite!" It was Helmuth. He pushed me into empty s.p.a.ce. I fell on Hitler's corpse, and grabbed at the torso to keep from falling into an opening, beneath which raged the personal executioner.

"Too soon," one of my son's comrades was saying. "The fire isn't high enough. You'll have to shoot him or..."

Already I was rolling onto the other side of Hitler's body as I heard a gunshot. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Helmuth clutching his stomach as he fell into the red flames.

Shouts. Gunfire. More explosions. An army was climbing over the wall of the courtyard. A helicopter was zooming in overhead. My first thought was that it must be the German army come to save me. I was too delighted to care how that was possible.

The conflagration below was growing hotly near. Smoke filling my eyes and lungs was about to choke me to death. I was contemplating a jump from the top-a risky proposition at best-when I was given a better chance by a break in the billowing fumes. The men had cleared the ramp for being ill protected against artillery.

Once again I threw myself over Hitler's body and hit the metal ramp with a thud. What kept me from falling off was the body of a dead SS man, whose leg I was able to grasp as I started to bounce back. Then I lifted myself and ran as swiftly as I could, tripping a quarter of the way from the ground and rolling bruisedly the rest of the way. The whizzing bullets missed me. I lay hugging the dirt, for fear of being shot if I rose.

Even from that limited position I could evaluate certain aspects of the encounter. The Burgundians had temporarily given up their penchant for fighting with swords and were making do with machine guns instead. (The one exception was Thor, who ran forward in a berserker rage, wielding an ax. The bullets tore him to ribbons.) The battle seemed to be going badly for them.

Then I heard the greatest explosion of my life. It was as if the castle had been converted into one of Von Braun's rockets as a sheet of flame erupted from underneath it and the whole building quaked with the vibrations. The laboratory must have been destroyed instantly.

"It's Goebbels," a voice sang out. "Is he alive?"

"If he is, we'll soon remedy that."

"No," said the first voice. "Let's find out."

Rough hands turned me over... and I expected to look once more into faces of SS men. These were young men, all right, but there was something disturbingly familiar about them. I realized that they might be Jews! The thought, even then, that my life had been saved by Jews was too much to bear. But those faces, like the faces that I've thought about too many times to count.

"Blindfold him," one said. It was done, and I was being pushed through the courtyard blind, the noises of battle echoing all around. Once we stopped and crouched behind something. There was an exchange of shots. Then we were running and I was pulled into a conveyance of some sort. The whirring sound identified it instantly as a helicopter revving up; and we were off the ground, and we were flying away from that d.a.m.ned castle. A thin, high whistling sound went by-someone must have still been firing at us. And then the fight faded away in the distance.

An hour later we had landed. I was still blindfolded. Low voices were speaking in German. Suddenly I heard a sc.r.a.p of Russian. This in turn was followed by a comment in Yiddish; and there was a sentence in what I took to be Hebrew. The different conversations were interrupted by a deep voice speaking in French announcing the arrival of an important person. After a few more whisperings-in German again-my blindfold was removed.

Standing in front of me was Hilda, dressed in battle fatigues. "Tell me what has happened," I said, adding as an afterthought-"if you will."

"Father, you have been rescued from Burgundy by a military operation of combined forces."

"You were only incidental," added a lean, dark-haired man by her side.

"Allow me to introduce this officer," she said, putting her hand on his arm. "We won't use names, but this man is with the Zionist Liberation Army. My involvement was sponsored by the guerrilla arm of the German Freedom League. Since your abduction the rest of the organization has gone underground. We are also receiving an influx of Russians into our ranks."

If everything else that had happened seemed improbable, this was sufficient to convince me that I had finally lost my sanity and was enmeshed in the impossible. "There is no Zionist Liberation Army," I said. "I would have heard of it."

"You're not the only one privy to secrets," was her smug reply.

"Are you a Zionist now?" I asked my daughter, thinking that nothing else would astound me. I was wrong again.

"No," she answered. "I don't support statism of any kind. I'm an anarchist."

What next? Her admission stunned me to the core. A large Negro with a beard spoke: "There is only one requirement to be in this army, n.a.z.i. You must oppose National Socialism, German or Burgundian."

"We have communists as well, Father," my daughter went on. "The small wars. .h.i.tler kept waging well into the 1950s, always pushing deeper into Russia, made more converts to Marx than you realize."

"But you hate communism, daughter. You've told me so over and over." In retrospect it was not prudent for me to say this in such a company, but I no longer cared. I was emotionally exhausted, numb, empty.

She took the bait. "I hate all dictatorships. In the battle of the moment I must take what comrades I can get. You taught me that."

I could not stop myself talking, despite the risk. I sensed that this was the last chance I would have to reach my daughter. "The Bolsheviks were worse statists than we ever were. Surely the War Crimes Trials we held at the end of hostilities taught you that, even if you wouldn't learn it from your own father."

She raised her voice: "I know the evil that was done. What else would you expect from your darling straight-A princess than I can still recite the names of the Russian death camps: Vorkuta, Karaganda, Dal-stroi, Magadan, Norilsk, Bamlag, and Solovki. But it has only lately dawned on me that there is something hypocritical about the victors trying the vanquished. You didn't even try to find judges from neutral countries."

"What do you expect from n.a.z.is?" added the Negro.

My daughter reminded me of myself, as she continued to lecture all of us, captors and captives alike: "The first step on the road to anarchy is to realize that all war is a crime; and that the cause is statism." Before I could get in a word edgewise, other members of the group began arguing among themselves; and I knew that I was in the hands of real radicals. The early days of the Party were like this. And whether Hilda was an anarchist or not, it was clear that the leader of this ad-hoc army-enough of a state for me-was the thin, dark-haired Jew.

He leaned into my face, and vomited up the following: "Your daughter's personal loyalty prevents her from accepting the evidence we have gathered about your involvement in the ma.s.s murder of Jews. You're as bad as Stalin."

My dear, sweet daughter. Reaching out to embrace her, I not only caused several guns to be leveled on my person, but received a rebuff from her. She slapped me! Her words were acid as she said, "Fealty only goes so far. Whatever your part in the killing of innocent civilians, the rest of your career is an open book. You are an evil man. I can't lie to myself about it any longer."

There was no room for anger. No room left for anything but a hunger for security. I was ready to happily consign my entire family to Hitler's funeral pyre, if by so doing I could return home to New Berlin. The demeanor of these freelance soldiers told me that they bore me no will that was good.

Hilda must have read my thoughts. "They are going to let you go, this time, as a favor to me. We agreed in advance that Burgundy was the priority. Everything else had to take a back seat, including waking up about my... parents."

"When may I leave?"

"We're near the Burgundian border. My friends will disappear, until a later date when you may see them again. As for me, I'm leaving Europe for good."

"Where will you go?" I didn't expect an answer to that.

"To the American Republic. My radical credentials are an a.s.set over there."

"America," I said listlessly. "Why?"

"Just make believe you are concocting another of your ideological speeches. Do this one about individual rights and you'll have your answer. They may not be an anarchist utopia, but they are paradise compared with your Europe. Goodbye, Father. And farewell to Hitler's ghost."

I was blindfolded again. Despite mixed feelings I was grateful to be alive. They released me at the great oak tree I had observed when flying into Burgundy. As I removed the blindfold, I heard the helicopter take off behind me. My eyes focused on the plaque nailed to the tree that showed how SS men had ripped up the railway and transplanted this tremendous oak to block that evidence of the modern world. It had taken a lot of manpower.

How easily manpower can be reduced to dead flesh.

Turning around, I saw the flowing green hills of a world I had never fully understood stretched out to the horizon. With a shudder I looked away, walked around the tree, and began following the rusty track on the other side. It would lead me to the old station where I would put in a call to home... to what I thought was home.

POSTSCRIPT by HILDA GOEBBELS Spirit Station (The Charles A. Lindbergh Experimental Orbital Community) JANUARY 1, 2000.

From this point on my father's diaries become incoherent. He must have recorded his Burgundian experiences shortly after returning to New Berlin. However much he had been the public demagogue he was surprisingly frank in his diaries. It must have been galling to him when they a.s.signed psychiatric help. They knew what had happened. They sent in a full strike force to clean out Burgundy. They also came down on the underground shortly after I escaped. What a time that was. When the dust settled, Father had lost his influence.

Sometimes I try to decode Father's final entries, scrawled out in the last year of his life. He was a broken man in 1970, unhinged by the Burgundian affair, afraid of reprisals by the underground, unable to fathom why his favorite child hated him so. One consistent pattern of his last writings is that his recurring nightmare of Teutonic Knights had been displaced by a Jewish terror: an army of Golems concocted by Dr. Mabuse, who, after all, would work for anyone. Although there was no reason to believe that Dietrich survived our attack that afternoon, Father went to his grave believing the man to be immortal.

Images that crop up in these sad pages include a landscape of broken buildings, empty mausoleums, bones, and other wreckage that shows he never got over his obsession with The War. As for Mother leaving him at long last, he makes no comment but das Nichts. Even at the end he retained the habits of a literary German. One moment he is taking pleasure from the "heart attack" suffered by Himmler on the eve of Father's return-and there are comments here about how Rosenberg has finally been avenged. This material is interspersed with grocery bills from the days of the Great Inflation, problems he had with raising money for the Party in the mid-thirties, and a tirade against Horbiger. Before I can make heads or tails of this, he's off on a tangent about n.a.z.is who believed in the hollow earth, and pages of minute details about Hitler's diet.

Those of my critics who believe I am suppressing material are welcome to these pages any time they ask. The only material of value was made available in the first appendix to Final Entries; to wit, Father's realization that they had subst.i.tuted another body in Hitler's tomb-hotly denied by New Berliners to this day.

After all these years it is a strange feeling to look at the diary pages again. He accurately described me as the young and headstrong girl I was, although I wonder if he realized that I was firmly in the underground by the time I was warning him about Burgundy. If he could only see the crotchety old woman I have become.

I would have enjoyed speaking to him on his deathbed, as he did with Hitler. The main question I would have asked would be how he thought Reich officials would ever allow his diaries, from 1965 on, to appear in Europe? The early, famous entries, from 1933 to 1963, had been published as part of the official German record. The entries beginning with 1965 would have to be buried, and buried deep, by any dictatorship. Father's idea that no censorship applied to the privileged cla.s.s-of his supposedly cla.s.sless society-did not take into account sensitive state doc.u.ments, such as his record of the Burgundy affair, or his highly sensitive discussion with Hitler. If the real Final Entries had not been smuggled out of Europe as one of the last acts of the underground, and delivered to me in New York, I never would have been in a position to come to terms with memories of my Father. Nor would I have had the book that launched my career. Americans love hearing of n.a.z.i secrets.

Now as I begin a new life of semiretirement up here in America's first s.p.a.ce city, haunted by equal portions of earthlight and moonlight, I wish to reconsider this period of history. Besides, if I don't write a new book, I believe I will go out of my mind.

Yesterday they had me speak to an audience of five hundred about my life as a writer. They wanted to know how much research I had put into the series about postwar j.a.pan and China. They wanted to know how I deal with writer's block. But most of all they wanted to hear about n.a.z.is, n.a.z.is, n.a.z.is.

A handsome young j.a.panese boy saved me by asking what I considered the greatest moment of my life. I told him it was that I had been a successful thief. Once the audience of dedicated free-enterprisers had stopped gasping like fish out of water, I explained. Back in the eighties, the specter of cancer was finally put to rest, thanks to new work derived from original research by Dr. Richard Dietrich. Yes, the most pleasant irony I've ever tasted was that "Mabuse's" final achievement was for life instead of death; I made it possible. It was I who delivered his papers into the hands of American scientists.

I must take repeated breaks in writing this addendum. My back gives me nothing but trouble, and I spend at least three times a day in zero-g therapy. How Hitler would have loved that. After the last bomb attempt on him his central concern became the damage to his Sieg Heiling arm, and his most characteristic feature-his a.s.s. To think my Father literally worshiped that man! I guess if Napoleon had succeeded in unifying Europe he'd be just as popular.

Now I'm reclining on a yellow couch in Observation 10A. There is a breathtaking view of Europe spread out to my right, although I can't make out Germany. The Fatherland is hidden beneath a patch of clouds. What I can see of the continent is cleaner than any map: there are no borderlines.

Who could have predicted the ultimate consequence of Hitler's war? Certainly not myself. I recognized what n.a.z.i Germany was, because I grew up there. It was an organization in the most modern meaning of the word. It was a conveyor belt. Hitler's ideology was the excuse for operating the controls, but that mechanism had a life of its own. Horrors were born of that machine; but so were fruits. Medals and barbed wire; diplomas and death sentences-they were all the same to the machine. The monster seemed unstoppable. In the belly of such a state it was easy to become an anarchist. The next step was just as easy-join a gang of your own, to fight the gang you hate. None of us on any side, not the Burgundians, not the underground, not the Reich itself, could see what was really happening. Only a few pacifists grasped the point.

Adolf Hitler achieved the exact opposite of all his long-term goals, and he did this by winning World War II. Economic reality subverted National Socialism.

The average German used to defend Hitler by saying that he got us out of the Depression, without bothering to note that the way the glorious Fuhrer paid off all the cla.s.ses of Germany was by looting foreigners. This was not the friendliest method of undoing the harm of Versailles. But as Europe began to remove age-old barriers to commerce, economic benefits began to spread. A thriving black market ensured that all would benefit from the new plenty, and ideology be d.a.m.ned. While the Burgundians actually tried to implement Hitlerian ideas, the rest of Europe enjoyed the new prosperity.

Father was intelligent enough to notice this trend, but he carefully avoided drawing the obvious conclusion: n.a.z.i Germany was becoming less National Socialist with every pa.s.sing decade. For all the talk of Race Destiny, it was the technical mind of Albert Speer that ran the German Empire. Our sideshow bigots provided the decoration. Hitler was going to achieve permanent race segregation; his New Order lasted only long enough to knock down the barriers to racial separation, and economics did the rest. There is more racial intermarriage today than ever, thanks to Adolf Hitler.

Today Germany is seeing a flowering of historical revisionists who are debunking the Hitler myth. They are showing his feet of clay. They are asking why Germany used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population, while President Dewey restricted his atomic bombs to j.a.panese military targets in the open sea. Even a thick-headed German may get the point after a while. The Reich's youth protests against the treatment of Russians by Rosenberg's Cultural Bureaus, and they are no longer shot, no longer arrested... and who knows but that they may accomplish something? If this keeps up, maybe my books, including Final Entries of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, will become available in the open market, instead of merely being black-market bestsellers already. America is still the only uncensored society.

More than anything else I am encouraged by what happens when German and American scientists and engineers work together. The magnificent new autobahns of Africa demonstrate this. But nothing is more beautiful than the s.p.a.ce cities-the American and German complexes, the j.a.panese one, and finally, Israel. I've received an invitation to visit. I'm looking forward to setting foot inside a colony that proves Der Jude could not be stopped by a mere Fuhrer. They have returned to their Holy Land, but at an unexpected alt.i.tude.

What would Father make of this sane new world? His final testament was the torment of a soul that had seen his victory become something alien and unconcerned with its architects. His life was melodrama, but his death a cheap farce. They didn't even know what to say at his funeral, he, the great orator of National Socialism. Without his guiding hand, they could not give him a Wagnerian exit.

The final joke is on him, and its pract.i.tioner is Dr. Mabuse. Father sincerely believed that in Adolf Hitler, long-awaited Zarathustra, the new man, had descended from the mountain. This, above all others, was the greatest lie of Joseph Goebbels's life.

The new man will ascend from the test tube. I pray that he will be wiser than his parents.

Hilda Goebbels

Paul Joseph Goebbels Born October 29, 1897 Died March 15, 1970

PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

"The Lucky Strike" by Kim Stanley Robinson. Copyright 1984 by K. S. Robinson. First published in Universe 14, ed. by Terry Carr. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Winterberry" by Nicholas A. DiChario. Copyright 1992 by Nicholas A. DiChario. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Islands in the Sea" by Harry Turtledove, Alternities, ed. by Robert Adams and Pamela Crippin Adams, 1989. Copyright 1989 by Harry Turtledove. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Suppose They Gave a Peace" by Susan Shwartz. Copyright 2000 by Susan Shwartz. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"All the Myriad Ways" by Larry Niven, from What Might Have Been, ed. by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg. Copyright 1989 by Larry Niven. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Through Road No Whither" by Greg Bear. Copyright 1985 by Greg Bear. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Mana.s.sas, Again" by Gregory Benford. Copyright 1991 by Abbenford a.s.sociates. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Dance Band on the t.i.tanic" by Jack L. Chalker. Copyright 1979, 1997 by Jack L. Chalker. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Undiscovered" by William Sanders. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 1997. Copyright 1997 by William Sanders. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Bring the Jubilee" by Ward Moore. Copyright 1952, 1980 by the Estate of Ward Moore. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate and the Estate's agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

"Eutopia" by Poul Anderson. Copyright 1967 by Poul Anderson. First published in Dangerous Visions (Doubleday 1967). Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. First appeared in Omni, September 1985. Copyright 1985 by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. Reprinted by permission of the authors.