“Dr. Arnold!”

I did not expect the head of the Führer’s top biological laboratory to come to meet me at the Flughafen. Nor did I not expect the conscious effort to mirror the Führer. The toothbrush mustache, slicked-back hair--they seem out of place on a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Science is above politics, is it not?

We step away from the stream of other passengers and into a corner. I look down at the floor and notice the tile is red and black--tiny Swastikas as reminders where and who we all are.

“I was very impressed by your work on the korn, Doctor,” Arnold comments, staring.

I follow his lead in English, and try to feel comfortable in it. “Minor, I’m sure.” Compared to his work, certainly.

“Not to the people of Götterdämmerung.”

“No,” I admit. But I lived in their rain-drenched cold for eleven years, and am glad to have earned the warmth of the south at last.

“The original strain wasn’t nearly hardy enough for northern regions of the Reich. I knew that when I developed it, but I thought the multiple harvesting cycles would create enough excess to make up for it.”

“They did, they did,” I hasten to assure him.

He grimaces, his mustache twitching. “At first.”

“Your strain has fed the Reich for years now. But with the stabilization of the Führer’s Außenpolitik . . .” He is nodding and I stop, feeling foolish. Of course, he knows already that the excess grain my strain produces will make it possible for exportation to begin, perhaps even to the rest of the former United States.

We take the U-bahn to the street, and I take my first look at Phönix. It is laid out in straight lines, as is the Reich’s capital in Salz Stadt. The buildings are very uniform--cement boxes with only the names out front to distinguish one from the other.

“You’ll have the rest of the day to settle in,” Arnold tells me at the door of my hostel room. “But I expect you to be at the staff meeting tomorrow morning at seven hundred hours. Introducing you is the main order of business.”

“I’ll be there,” I promise.

His steps echo through the floor for another minute. When they are finally gone, I turn back to face my two meter allotment of space. On my right side is my cot, a blanket I doubt I will need folded a top a pillow and case. Underneath is a bag of clothes. I peek in to see a white lab coat and uniform I might have brought with me from Götterdämmerung. A toothbrush, electric razor, and deodorant are in a small box to the side. A clock is fixed into the wall just above the bed. The alarm system will be automated for the whole building. Six hundred wake up, I am sure.

At the staff meeting, I see one familiar face besides Arnold’s. Viktor Rainert--I’ve worked with before, and he walks over to the laboratory with me.

“Recognize that?” he asks, handing me a slide.

I look at it under the microscope. “Korn I,” I tell him.

He nods and shows me another slide.

“Korn II,” I say.

A third one.

“Korn III.” What is the purpose of this? I can only wonder.

Rainert shows me a final slide.

“I’ve never seen it before,” I tell him. “Korn IV?”

He nods. “Exactly right. That’s what we’re working on right now.”

“I thought III was the last of them.”

He stares at me. “That’s what they said about korn II. And the first one, for that matter.”

I realize he is right. “Are the insects mutating that quickly?” Korn III has only been planted for two years. The original lasted for over ten.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” He doesn’t appear to be bothered by the information, but I am. Even if korn IV is ready for planting this year, what will happen the year after that? With the current rate of mutation, we’ll need a new version half-way through the cycle.

“How long have you been tracking this?” I ask.

“Me personally? About five years. But Arnold has records all the way back to the beginning.”

Twenty years, then. “And he hasn’t been able to stop it?”

Rainert shakes his head. “Not even the Führer can control Mother Nature.”

I get the impression the man is comforted by the fact that his superior is imperfect. I am not. The closer to perfection, the better, as far as I am concerned.

Rainert starts to put away the other three slides, but I stop him.

“Can I look at those?”

He shrugs. “Sure. I don’t mind. If Arnold catches you wasting your time, though--” he holds one arms up to the joint of the other, making a syringe with two fingers and pressing on it with his thumb. Death by injection, he means. The traditional fate of those the Führer becomes displeased with.

But of course, I don’t believe Arnold would do anything like that. Scientists are notorious for their blind political eyes, even in the Reich.

Still, I am fascinated by the project. The structure of korn I is so familiar to me that I could probably recreate the whole double helix in my sleep. I tried perhaps a thousand variations on it before I found the one that became my own m-korn.

I look through the new strands for the changes and find a few. It’s painstaking work, the kind of scutt stuff I normally assigned to juniors in the lab. Only now I am a junior again. It’s one disadvantage of working with Arnold I hadn’t fully thought through. In Götterdämmerung, at least I was my own boss.

“You looking for this?” Rainert asks me hours later.

I rub my eyes and look up at him.

He hands me a disk labeled “distinctions.”

When I bring it up on my computer, it shows helical models of all four versions next to each other, with the distinctions highlighted.

“Thanks,” I tell him.

He laughs shortly, without pleasure. The sound makes me wonder briefly if he is trying to copy Arnold. But why?

I focus on I and II, dismissing the others from my screen. The differences are really quite subtle. I expect to find changes in the protein and sugar strings, standard procedure for discouraging insect sampling. Instead, I discover the fruition cycles have been altered slightly. It makes some sense to me, attacking the problem from the other end. If done properly, the result should be the same. The only reason it hasn’t become popular is that it is so difficult to do properly. Much more extensive research on the feeding insects has to be done. But Arnold has never been a man to scrimp on detail. It’s only one of the reasons he is admired across the Reich--and far beyond.

I hear a bell in the distance, and Rainert touches my shoulder.

“Dinner,” he reminds me.

I wave him on, without any intention of following. Time passes. I am too involved to care how much.

“Ah, Metzger, I thought I might find you here.”

I look up to see Arnold. His hands are on his widening hips.

“Always at the grindstone, eh?” he quips, and leans over to see what I’m working on.

“The korn variations,” I explain.

“Yes, but you’re only looking at the old ones.”

“You object?” I remember what Rainert said about wasting my time. “I thought it would help me understand the direction you’re headed in with the new strain.”

“Of course, of course.” He waves his arms in an expansive gesture, but there is something in his eyes that makes me wonder how honest he is. A watchful look, worried. But I wonder what does the Arnold have to worry about?

“Tell me what you’ve found so far.”

I do.

“You’re wondering why I didn’t choose to alter the proteins.” He leans in closer than ever and I can smell his breath. It’s minty fresh, as if he has just gargled in mouthwash. Except that the only mouthwash that is issued standardly in the Reich is an herbal mixture. Arnold must have gotten his on the black market.

“A little,” I admit.

He frowns, squinting his eyes as he looks more closely at my screen. “Human consumption problems. Wouldn’t want to give the Führer any more gas, now, would we?” He claps me on the back and laughs again.

I find myself laughing along with him, though I feel no jocularity. Is this how Rainert’s laugh sounded to him? Is this why he learned to make it? It is an uncomfortable thought. But I tell myself it is foolish to be bothered by a small foible on Arnold’s part. If the man is not all-perfect, he is still the best scientist the Reich had to offer. I am very lucky to be with him.

“Your m-korn was a similar problem, actually,” Arnold says, ejecting the disk on korn distinctions and entering another. I notice he pockets Rainert’s disk rather than leaving it on my desk, but I say nothing about it.

“I was particularly interested in the way you piggybacked the cold resistance on to the enhanced photo-synethizers.” The model of my strain comes up on the screen and I spend a good deal of the rest of the evening showing off. It is difficult to be critical of another while basking in the light of his praise.

“Well, Metzger,” he says at last. “I think I know by now that you are a fine addition to my team. Why don’t you get some rest and tomorrow I’ll come by and set you to work on IV? There are a couple of details I haven’t worked out yet. I think you’ll find they’re right up your alley.”

I yawn at the mention of sleep and Arnold laughs again. “Just so, just so, my young man. No need to tire yourself out on your first night here. After all, tomorrow is another day.”

I nod at him and follow him out of the laboratory and to my own door.

“Good night, Metzger.”

“Good night.” It is only after I close the door that I count up the number of cliches he used. A sign of discomfort? Covering something up?

I sit on my cot, still dressed, and stare at the moonlight. And he never really answered my question about the changing fruition cycles, either. He just side-stepped it, making that canonical joke about the Führer’s problem with flatulence.

Outside in the hallway, there is the sound of laughter again. Arnold’s, mixed with someone else’s. Together, they are utterly disharmonious. One high and shaky, the other low and determined. No sound of merriment there. More like two wolves arguing over pack position.

After a few moments, the higher voice acquiesces. Arnold speaks on, then says farewell. He walks on, his position assured, and I stand up, go to the door and peek out. No one in the hallway.

Am I being ridiculous? I remember the first time I fell in love. It was years ago, right after I had landed my first job. Before the Reich was re-established, so I was actually considering marrying the girl. But I had some doubts about her. There were looks passed between her and my best friend, who was to be my best man at the wedding, and I thought they couldn’t possibly be wholly platonic. So after I said goodnight to her one evening, I followed her. Just as I suspected, she went to his apartment. I sat out in my car, growing gradually more furious. Thinking up all the ways I could tell her I knew the truth.

And then I decided--no time like the present. I would catch them in the act. I even had a camera in my pocket. It would thoroughly embarrass both of them, and that seemed exactly the kind of revenge I wanted. So I walked up the steps to his apartment. I put my ear to the door. There were voices, low and intimate. I took the camera out of its pack, made sure it had film in it. It was on picture number four. That detail sticks in my memory along with all the others. The smell of the hallway outside, cold and musty, from the wet newspapers sitting out on his porch to be recycled. The moon--it was full, just like tonight.

I opened the shutter, waited a moment for the flash to charge, then flung open the door and shot each corner of the room in angry succession.

“What the hell?” said Tom. He stood and came at me with his fist at the ready.

“It’s Alan!” shouted Lisa. “Don’t hurt him.”

In one horrifying moment I realized I had taken pictures of the two of them sitting on the couch with notebooks on their laps and pens in their hands. Both were fully clothed.

“What is this?” Tom asked. Then he saw the look in my eye, which was changing quickly from fury to sheepish embarrassment. “You thought we were doing it together, didn’t you, old Al?” And then he laughed. A real laugh, not like Arnold’s.

Neither Lisa nor I joined in.

“We were planning a surprise party for your birthday,” Lisa told me, her face as hard as the glacier her voice appeared to be.

It was the end of the engagement. Lisa claimed she couldn’t trust a man who didn’t trust her. The last irony was that I heard she married Tom a year later. I was never sure after that if I was right about the looks, or if I created the whole situation in my head.

Maybe it’s the same thing now with Arnold and the others. I consider the analog to that moment with Tom and Lisa. Getting caught in the laboratory after midnight, searching for secret files that don’t exist?

I hesitate a moment, and go back into my room. I take off my clothes and lie down on the cot, trying to sleep. But the moon is too bright, and I am too nervous and there are too many unanswered questions running around in my head. I can’t sleep. I have a suspicious nature. I admit it to myself. And there’s no cure for it but the truth. I only hope that it won’t be so costly as it was last time.

On the other hand, I think as I pull my pants back on, Lisa might have ended up marrying Tom anyway. And my too-timely intervention might have saved us all a lot of grief.

The lab is quiet when I get there. I sit down at my console and look at the m-korn model still turning on my screen. Arnold was too voluble in his applause, that is certain. Any one of his variations is the equal of mine. And why would the head of a lab do that to a junior team member? It isn’t just a matter of making a newcomer feel welcome. There has to be more to it than that.

I turn off the m-korn and go back to the slides Rainert had shown me. They are still next to the microscope. I look at them again, each in succession. Then I go back to the first two. Korn I is just like the model I saw on the computer, but II--I am sure it is different somehow. I wish desperately I had the two to compare. I close my eyes and try to bring back the image in my own computer--my mind. There it is. I open and look at the microscope.

It’s in the protein string, after all. Now why would Arnold want to hide that? It doesn’t make any sense. Does he think he has to do it differently to be respected by other scientists? A man of his international reputation? Impossible.

I check to see if there are any other differences from the computer model, but I can’t see any. I isolate the string in my head and concentrate, allowing it to dance with its near-twin. If the purpose is to avoid the mutated insects, then the change in fruition cycles is perfectly sufficient. The protein string change is superfluous. Or is it? Only if the purpose really is to avoid the mutated insects. What if there is another purpose?

I feel my mind leap in sudden expansion. My head aches with it, blossoming into pain like a flower opening its petals for the sun. I try to hold it in the darkness, reminding myself that there is no good reason for what I suspect. Richard Arnold is the man who saved the Reich, is he not? He is the genius who bio-engineered the korn in the first place. How can I suspect him of trying to sabotage it now?

There are facts I must check before I am sure. And I cannot do that tonight. It may take me months to discover excuses for looking at the different species of insects, cross-analyzing their mating seasons and nutritional needs with each new strain of korn. Even if they match, I am not sure I will know the truth. Mightn’t there be some other explanation? Am I assuming there is a conspiracy when accident is truly at fault? Could Arnold have made such an enormous mistake? An imperfect man cannot know everything, cannot anticipate every fold of the future’s cloth. Even a brilliant scientist is often severely lacking in other areas of life. The absent-minded professor syndrome could be the answer here. In which case, I have the duty to tell him what I suspect. To give him the opportunity to right his wrongs before they become deadly. For the whole Reich.

“Ah, Metzger. I thought I might find you back here.” Arnold’s voice echoes in the darkness.

I startle, feel my heart start to race. “I couldn’t sleep,” my shaky voice answers him with the beginnings of an excuse.

“No. I’m not surprised. It’s one of the reasons I asked for you to be placed here. You’ve too curious a mind. The mark of a good scientist.”

Was this flattery? At this moment? Surely there was no need for it now.

“You misunderstand me, I think, Metzger. After your work on m-korn, I knew you’d be studying my recent variations. Eventually, you’d have found out the same truth you discovered tonight. It would have taken you longer, I’m sure. Not having all the information immediately at your disposal. But you’d have found it just the same.”

He came close enough to me that I could see his face in the moonlight. It was moist with beads of sweat, and his several strands of carefully slicked hair were beginning to fly away. The absent-minded professor, after all?

“The truth?” I ask him.

I can see him nod. His mouth opens to show two rows of perfect teeth. It is a moment before I realize how unusual this is. The Reich is not backward in medicine as a general rule, but the Führer has always hated dentists. As a result, there are very few of them at large. Most adults are missing several teeth. And none have the perfect smile that Arnold shows me now.

“Indeed, the truth. The fact that my new strains are causing the very insect mutations that necessitate their replacement.” He pauses a moment, as if to let me take it in.

“I suspected,” I tell him. “But I was not sure. I still do not understand why.”

“No, of course you do not.” One of his hands moves back into the darkness behind him. When it returns, it holds a pistol, glinting in the half-light even more ominously that it would have in the full sun.

“You will listen to a story,” Arnold tells me.

I am hardly in a position to argue.

He waves me to a chair and I sit. Then he steps away, twirling the weapon by its trigger and whistling a little tune I recognize from the old days, before the Reich. It is McDonald’s “Big Mac tonight.”

“Brecht and Weil originally,” Arnold corrects me. “From Threepenny Opera. Ever heard of them?”

I shake my head. They sound German to me, but they must have been communists or the Führer would have included their names in the recommended readings lists he sends out periodically to encourage understanding of the grand Teutonic tradition.

“A gap in your education. But no remedying it now. Threepenny Opera was written early in Brecht’s career. His first success. But the man took a particular interest later in science, after it was discovered the role scientists played in the end of World War II.”

I nod. The Führer puts a different slant on this history than the one I learned as a boy, but the end result--the bombing of Hiroshima--was the same.

“It was then that he wrote a play called Galileo.”

My eyes widen.

“Yes, I can see that is a little more familiar to you. The story of the man who challenged the Catholic Church’s view of the universe. One of the fathers of modern science, yes?” He twirls the gun again. I am not comfortable enough with this behavior to nod at him. Immobility seems the best approach to his ease with weapons.

“And yet he recanted. You know this?” He holds the gun steady now and waits for me to respond.

“Yes,” I agree.

“He feared the Inquisitors.”

“As rightly he should,” I put in. “They would have killed him. Probably tortured him to death.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Arnold muses. “But he did not let them go that far. That is Brecht’s point in his play. The man was too fond of the pleasures of the flesh to sacrifice them. Even when they cost him his passion for the truth.”

“But he continued to work in secret,” I argue. Galileo was one of my heros in youth. A man smart enough to out think the idiots around him.

“Yes. He did. And yet at the end of his life, he saw himself for what he truly was. A weak man, consumed by his own mortality. A man who might have ended the dark ages a century earlier. If only he’d had the courage to proclaim the truth in open air rather than in secret alone. Or so writes Brecht.”

I wait, unsure what to say to this.

“You don’t see the similarities?” Arnold asks.

My mouth drops. “Between Galileo and yourself?” Did his egoism know no bounds?

“Of course. Both men of science. Both men of the flesh. Both men whose true genius is stifled by the strictures of the world they live in. The smallness of the rulers that decide life and death for those who work for truth.”

“You excuse yourself by blaming the Führer, then?” I do not see the immediate connection, but I begin to doubt Arnold’s sanity. Not the absent-minded professor, after all. The mad scientist instead.

He shakes his head, using the pistol end to scratch at his mustache. “You still don’t understand it, do you? The Führer is a jealous man.”

This is a well-known fact. Some might call him a control freak, even. But what had that to do with Arnold?

“You think he rejoiced when my korn saved the Reich?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” I object.

“Ah, the innocence of youth.” He looks to the sky just long enough for me to wonder if I could take him. Then he turns back and wags the pistol at me. “The Führer did not rejoice because it meant that there was someone in the Reich who rivaled him in power. He began that very day to think of ways to get rid of me.”

“What?” Madness indeed. Arnold had to be paranoid. “Why should the Führer want to get rid of you?”

“Because he refused to be dependent on me. You do not see?”

I shake my head again.

“Three times in that first year, there were attempts on my life. Three times, and each time it became clearer that it was the Führer who wanted me dead.”

Light begins to dawn. “And then you discovered the problems with the first strain.”

Arnold laughs again. “I created the problems with the first strain. And then made sure that the other problems were quick to appear in early stages.”

Was it possible? If so, the man was more of a genius than I had ever known. Mad, still. Criminally egoistic. But his mind!

“The Führer was grateful. He offered me many--pleasures of the flesh, shall we say.”

“So now what--?” I ask him.

Arnold smiles, then holds the pistol up, aims it, and pulls the trigger.

The force jerks me back. I look down, expecting to see a smoking hole, a profusion of blood. Then I realize there is no pain.

Arnold laughs, long and hard. I am afraid for long minutes that he will never stop. And yet, I cannot move.

“It was never loaded, my dear Metzger. You don’t think I’d ever do the dirty deed myself, do you? Oh, no. If you’re going to be killed, I’ll send someone else. But don’t forget I’m watching.” He pockets the gun again, and turns back to his Brecht tune.

“Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne,
Und die trägt er im Gesicht.
Und MacHeath, der hat ein Messer;
Doch das Messer sieht man nicht.”

“The knife one doesn’t see, eh?” I interpret the ditty.

Arnold nods, then winks at me and heads back out towards the cubicles, continuing to sing the German lyrics. At one point he stops and turns back. “Korn IV,” he says. “It’s too perfect still. Help find a way to make it fail. Not immediately, of course. But later. So we’re all needed again.”

I turn back to the slides, feeling like the gun is still cutting into my side like MacHeath’s knife. It is only a matter of doing as Arnold does, I think. Make myself needed. Needed, indeed.

Return to home page