One Thousand Years (9 page)

The
lifeboat interior was more spherical, but tapered at the opposite
end. Almost every available square foot contained a cushioned seat
with a feed for a seat belt and shoulder harness. But McHenry didn't
take time for a close examination of the seating arrangements. He
followed the handholds to the controls at the front of the cabin.
There were two rows of blank buttons at each pilot's seat, but only
one control stick. Yesterday's piloting lesson would be useful here.
It wasn't like the Tiger's wraparound cockpit dome, but the main
panel looked familiar enough. The blank view screen reminded him of
the wall in his quarters.

“Rechner,
Fenster
.”
It displayed a view similar to the one he had from his room
but from a different section of the sky.

He
ignored the seat belt. There wasn't time, and Vinson had said there
would be no sense of motion from the reactionless drive. If this
worked at all, he could strap himself in later. He set one hand on
the stick and scanned the panel for anything familiar. He spotted
the engine controls, albeit only one bank of engines.
Close
enough
, he thought.

Without
a second thought, he pressed the control on the panel, hoping for
something, any movement at all. But an “X” appeared with
an unfamiliar German word beside it. He scanned the panel further.
Then he remembered chocks, the wooden blocks used to keep a parked
aircraft from rolling out of place. He must be locked by the
Göring
.
Frustratingly, it only made sense. They wouldn't have allowed him
to go off on his own if they didn't think it safe.

Undaunted,
he tried again. And again, scrolling through options on the panel,
some in German words and symbols he recognized from yesterday, and
some he couldn't even guess at. Nothing changed the power levels.

They
can't have thought of everything.

McHenry
would not stop thinking. Both hands on the panel, he went through
every option available. Engine functions, instruments, something he
thought might be beacons, which he imagined could be useful, and then
he spotted the radios. There were many options he had never heard of
— frequencies off the scale, and a variety of modulation
methods — but he saw one band he had used every day. That, he
realized, was his next best option. He looked at the screen ahead to
verify he had a direct line of sight for a transmission to Cercola,
Italy.
Someone at the 99th would recognize my voice.

“The
radios won't work here,” said a feminine voice behind him.

He
turned around to face a woman floating at the entranceway. She had
fair skin and short raven-black hair. Yet, she had a black SS
uniform similar to what the men wore. And she smiled, looking at him
like the mother of a little boy who had been caught with his hand in
a cookie jar.

“And
you'll need someone ranking higher than me to authorize a launch.”
She had been speaking in a distinctly American dialect. She tugged
on the railing and pushed herself forward.

McHenry
frowned. “If you're here to arrest me, you're too late. I'm
not going anywhere yet.”

“No,”
she laughed. “Our security is absolutely solid. We wouldn't
let you run loose through the ship if escape wasn't impossible.”
She grabbed the seat beside him and gracefully pulled her long legs
into a sitting position. “But to tell you the truth, we would
have been a little disappointed if you didn't try to escape. I,
myself, would have been very disappointed.”

She
was studying him in an imperious manner. “You might have
gotten away if this ship was on a regular mission. I don't know if
the Luftwaffe ordinarily locks the escape pods. But this mission is
different. We'd all prefer to die here in orbit rather than risk
contaminating history.”

“It
wouldn't bother me a bit either,” McHenry remarked.

“That's
not very nice,” she laughed, apparently brushing off his anger.
She reached over to shake his hand. “My name is Kathy Dale.
I was on the flight to recover you.”

Startled,
McHenry understood who this was.
This
must be the woman Vinson was smitten with.
Now he understood why. She may be over one hundred years old, but
she had the perpetual youth and vitality shared by everyone he had
seen. She was truly beautiful, and exhibited a confident attitude.
But, beautiful as she was, there was that hideous pitch-black Nazi
uniform... He took her hand cautiously, and shook it firmly.

“
Oberführer
Mtubo asked me to look in on you today,” she continued. “He
thought you might appreciate meeting someone from North America. I
was born and raised in Chicago.”

“Then
what's a nice lady like you doing in a uniform like that?”
Nothing he had seen, not even a black Nazi, had prepared him for speaking
with an American in that uniform. And a lady at that.

“Oh,
I know all this must be very disorienting. One day Germany is your
enemy, and then you wake up and everything's different.”

“It's not different at all.” McHenry gestured toward the planet below them on the view screen. “The war is still going on, isn't it?”

“I'm
sorry, Sam,” Dale said. “This is old history for us.
And it's over for you, too. It ended for you the moment your plane
sank into the sea. You must accept this. Be glad you're
still alive! You've lived to see that America will recover from its
defeat, and the American racism you and your ancestors have suffered
through will be defeated as well.”

“I'm a soldier,” he reminded her.
“I swore an oath.”

But it was even more than that. Much more. Black troops were often
relegated to non-combat positions in this war. The men in his own
squadron had to prove themselves time and time again. The
right
to fight
was something that
he, his friends, and those before them had all worked hard for. He
couldn't let them down. Then there were the squadron commander, and
even a few of the white officers who had supported their training.
He couldn't let any of them down. He just wouldn't.

“You
fought to the best of your ability,” Dale responded. “History
remembers you that way. And even if you returned, what could you do
to change the outcome? Germany will still win the war, and the
United States will still accept peace. The Great Depression will
resume. Did you ever realize how deeply mired in debt your President
Roosevelt has put the country to fight his immoral war? Believe me,
you don't need to go back to that. You'd be just another unemployed
black man in an America where hypocrisy and unfairness are
commonplace.”

“Don't
tell me Nazis outlawed unfairness,” he scoffed.

“Who else could?”

“You mean, it takes a dictator.”

“No, it takes a reordering of society.
Just as war is a cause that can discipline a society,
military values can advance society in peaceful ways.
We take the direction of a society out of the hands of
the oligarchs of wealth, and channel it into more
productive purposes for the whole nation.”

She paused, but only for a moment before continuing.
“I will concede that the National Socialist Party of this time,
that which is down there now,” she gestured
toward the image of the Earth outside, “regards its own form of
nationalism as confined to the German-speaking race. But they have
always been reaching out to new allies, not just the Italians and
other Europeans, but South America, the Arabs, and of course, Japan.
The Reich broadcasts radio news around the world in twelve languages.
Surely, you must know that, right now, there are SS troops forming
from countries all over Europe, not just Germany. And that's just a
start, today, in the national socialism of 1944.”

“Wait
a second,” said McHenry, pondering her idealistic lecture.
“How can a world state call itself nationalist?”

“It
was an evolution. You call yourself an American but the first
several generations of Americans thought of themselves first as
citizens of their separate states. They formed the nation only when
they thought it necessary to close ranks. Today, in this
twentieth-century, bonds are already forming among the foreign SS
corps. Most of the Waffen-SS is currently non-German even here, now,
in 1944. They have many French and Scandinavian SS troops, as well
as Bosnian Muslims. After the war, they will serve their own
nations, following the customs learned from the SS.”

“And
black Nazis?” he demanded.

“Sam,” she sighed. “If you're going to try to get along here, you should at least get one thing straight:
We don't call ourselves ‘Nazis.’
The critics did. Some followers in other nations did, but the main party never did. We are
national socialists.
”

“Very
well then, I'm sorry,” he said, barely concealing a smirk.
“Then what about black
national socialists
? How long
have they been around?”

She
smiled again. “There is one in America right now, after a
fashion.”

He
raised an eyebrow.

“Have
you heard of Lawrence Dennis?”

The
name sounded vaguely familiar — then he remembered reading it
in the papers. “You mean the isolationist? That anti-war
nut-case? He's not white?”

“He's
a
nationalist
,” she corrected. “He's not a member
of the Party, of course, being an American, but he is associated with
the cause. He's been to Germany before the war and visited high
party officials.

He
stared.

“And
yes,” she said. “In case you're wondering, his mother
was black.”

“It
doesn't count if he's been passing for white,” McHenry
shrugged.

“That's
only today. There will be more. A lot can happen in a thousand
years, Sam.” She allowed that to sink in.

He
knew that much was true. A lot
can
happen in a thousand years. But this was still 1944. He couldn't
stop glancing down at the swastika on her arm. It was a long time
before McHenry spoke. “Okay, then. What are SS officers doing
here on this ship? I thought you people were state security and
secret police.”

“The
SS started that way, back in the 1920s, when it was a small unit that
guarded the Party leaders. The name, ‘
Schutzstaffel
,’
means ‘defense corps.’ But they quickly expanded after
Adolf Hitler came to power, and then expanded further still when the
war started. But we've always been, primarily, the hand of the
Führer
. As such, the SS works in many scientific fields.
That's why we're here. This is a scientific expedition.”

“I
believe everything up to where you said this is about science.”

“Nothing
new about that, Sam. Even in your time, the SS has doctors expanding
the frontiers of medical research.”

“Yeah,
I'll bet.”

“We
are all beneficiaries of that science — including you, in your
resuscitation.”

“Apparently
so,” he slowly acknowledged, but really wanting only to change
the subject. “Well then, how soon does Germany take over the
United States?”

“It's
not Germany by itself. It's the Reich that grows and attracts people
of like minds. It becomes much more than just Germany during the
next century. The United States doesn't join for over a hundred
years, and then, initially, as a pact member. When it happens, it
will do so willingly.

“As
you said, we started as, and in some sense still are, a nationalist
movement. You know that Italy was an ally; Japan still is; and Spain
is a friend. These are nationalist countries, each distinct peoples
with similar national ideologies. After the war, more will become
like that. Nationalist movements will bloom all over the world,
holding down the capitalists and kicking out the Bolsheviks. People
in South America and the Middle East are preparing to do that now.

“The
United States will follow behind them, but not right away. Your
economic depression will resume first. The country wasted so much
money on this immoral war. Unfortunately, America will lose its will
to succeed, and with that, the technological edge it had in recent
decades. It will become weak economically and militarily. That can
only last for so long before the people react, just as they did in
Germany. Eventually, Americans will look to the Reich for hope and
inspiration, and they will find it. Once the entire world is working
the same way, it is only natural that we start working together.”

McHenry
didn't buy her story. It was apparent to him that the country was
out of the Depression. He didn't think it was going to reverse the
process but he wasn't going to argue any of it yet.

“And
the war?” he asked.

Her
voice became tender. “For Japan, which Americans should have
considered the real war, that war goes on for another year. The war
in Europe ends this year. Roosevelt will die of a stroke.”

McHenry
shook his head, first shocked at the loss of the President, and then
startled by his own reaction. He loved President Roosevelt. His
whole squadron did. But the war must come first, he resolved
silently. “No,” he said. “We would never give up
that fast or that easily.”

“They will,” said Dale firmly. “Don't argue with me, Sam.
Look where you are. You're on a Luftwaffe starship. I assure you,
the United States gives up on the war.”

“I wasn't arguing that,” he said,
trying to hold off the regret in his voice.

The tenderness in her voice resumed. “Sam, your own effort in
the war was profound. Don't ever forget that. But that was only one
part of it. There is so much more to this war than the Italian
campaign. The invasion of France ends on the beaches. That will be
the major catastrophe that turns the war. Thousands are killed with
nothing to show for it.”

“We've
lost battles before,” he said, thinking of the initial setback
in Cassino.