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The years rolled by; the Earth lived on, even when a stricken and haunted mankind crept through the glorious ruins of an immense past.
Stars wheeled silently over an early summer sky, even though men had long ago forgotten to call such nights by the name of June.
Laird tried to watch the stars with his eyes closed. It was a ticklish and terrifying game for a telepath: at any moment he might feel the heavens opening up and might, as his mind touched the image of the nearer stars, plunge himself into a nightmare of perpetual falling. Whenever he had this sickening, shocking, ghastly, suffocating feeling of limitless fall, he had to close his mind against telepathy long enough to let his powers heal.
He was reaching with his mind for objects just above the Earth, burnt-out space stations which flitted in their multiplex orbits, spinning forever, left over from the wreckage of ancient atomic wars.
He found one.
Found one so ancient it had no surviving cryotronic controls. Its design was archaic beyond belief; chemical tubes had apparently once lifted it out of Earth's atmosphere.
He opened his eyes and promptly lost it.
Closing his eyes he groped again with his seeking mind until he found the ancient derelict. As his mind reached for it again the muscles of his jaw tightened. He sensed life within it, life as old as the archaic machine itself.
In an instant, he made contact with his friend Tong Computer.
He poured his knowledge into Tong's mind. Keenly interested, Tong shot back at him an orbit which would cut the mildly parabolic pattern of the old device and bring it back down into Earth's atmosphere.
Laird made a supreme effort.
Calling on his unseen friends to aid him, he searched once more through the rubbish that raced and twinkled unseen just above the sky. Finding the ancient machine, he managed to give it a push.
In this fashion, about sixteen thousand years after she left Hitler's Reich, Carlotta vom Acht began her return to the Earth of men.
In all those years, she had not changed.
Earth had.
The ancient rocket tipped. Four hours later it had begun to graze the stratosphere, and its ancient controls, preserved by cold and time against all change, went back into effect. As they thawed, they became activated.
The course flattened out.
Fifteen hours later, the rocket was seeking a destination.
Electronic controls which had really been dead for thousands of years, out in the changeless time of space itself, began to look for German territory, seeking the territory by feedbacks which selected characteristic Nazi patterns of electronic communications scramblers.
There were none.
How could the machine know this? The machine had left the town of Pardubice, on April 2, 1945, just as the last German hideouts were being mopped up by the Red Army. How could the machine know that there was no Hitler, no Reich, no Europe, no America, no nations? The machine was keyed to German codes. Only German codes.
This did not affect the feedback mechanisms.
They looked for German codes anyway. There were none. The electronic computer in the rocket began to go mildly neurotic. It chattered to itself like an angry monkey, rested, chattered again, and then headed the rocket for something which seemed to be vaguely electrical. The rocket descended and the girl awoke.
She knew she was in the box in which her daddy had placed her. She knew that she was not a cowardly swine like the Nazis whom her father despised. She was a good Prussian girl of noble military family. She had been ordered to stay in the box by her father. What daddy told her to do she had always done. That was the first kind of rule for her kind of girl, a sixteen-year-old of the Junker class. The noise increased.
The electronic chattering flared up into a wild medley of clicks.
She could smell something perfectly dreadful burning, something awful and rotten like flesh. She was afraid that it was herself, but she felt no pain.
"Vadi, Vadi, what is happening to me?" she cried to her father.
(Her father had been dead sixteen thousand and more years. Obviously enough, he did not answer.)
The rocket began to spin. The ancient leather harness holding her broke loose. Even though her section of the rocket was no bigger than a coffin, she was cruelly bruised.
She began to cry.
She vomited, even though very little came up. Then she slid in her own vomit and felt nasty and ashamed because of something which was a terribly simple human reaction.
The noises all met in a screaming, shrieking climax. The last thing she remembered was the firing of the forward decelerators. The metal had become fatigued so that the tubes not only fired forward; they blew themselves to pieces sidewise as well.
She was unconscious when the rocket crashed. Perhaps that saved her life, since the least muscular tension would have led to the ripping of muscle and the crack of bone.
His metals and plumes beamed in the moonlight as he scampered about the dark forest in his gorgeous uniform. The government of the world had long since been left to the Morons by the True Men, who had no interest in such things as politics or administration.
Carlotta's weight, not her conscious will, had tripped the escape handle.
Her body lay half in, half out of the rocket.
She had gotten a bad burn on her left arm where her skin touched the hot outer surface of the rocket.
The Moron parted the bushes and approached.
"I am the Lord High Administrator of Area Seventy-three," he said, identifying himself according to the rules.
The unconscious girl did not answer. He rose up close to the rocket, crouching low lest the dangers of the night devour him, and listened intently to the radiation counter built in under the skin of his skull behind his left ear. He lifted the girl dextrously, flung her gently over his shoulder, turned about, ran back into the bushes, made a right-angle turn, ran a few paces, looked about him undecidedly, and then ran (still uncertain, still rabbit-like) down to the brook.
He reached into his pocket and found a burn-balm. He applied a thick coating to the burn on her arm. It would stay, killing the pain and protecting the skin, until the burn was healed.
He splashed cool water on her face. She awakened.
"Wo bin ich?" said she in German.
On the other side of the world, Laird, the telepath, had forgotten for the moment about the rocket. He might have understood her, but he was not there. The forest was around her and the forest was full of life, fear, hate, and pitiless destruction.
The Moron babbled in his own language.
She looked at him and thought that he was a Russian.
Said she in German, "Are you a Russian? Are you a German? Are you part of General Vlasov's army? How far are we from Prague? You must treat me courteously. I am an important girl..."
The Moron stared at her.
His face began to grin with innocent and consummate lust. (The True Men had never felt it necessary to inhibit the breeding habits of Morons. It was hard for any kind of human being to stay alive between the Beasts, the Unforgiven, and the Menschenjägers. The True Men wanted the Morons to go on breeding, to carry reports, to gather up a few necessaries, and to distract the other inhabitants of the world enough to let the True Men have the quiet and contemplation which their exalted but weary temperaments demanded.)
This Moron was typical of his kind. To him food meant eat, water meant drink, woman meant lust.
He did not discriminate.
Weary, confused, and bruised though she was, Carlotta still recognized his expression.
Sixteen thousand years ago she had expected to be raped or murdered by the Russians. This soldier was a fantastic little man, plump and grinning, with enough medals for a Soviet colonel general. From what she could see in the moonlight, he was clean-shaven and pleasant, but he looked innocent and stupid to be so high-ranking an officer. Perhaps the Russians were all like that, she thought.
He reached for her.
Tired as she was, she slapped him.
The Moron was mixed up in his thoughts. He knew that he had the right to capture any Moron woman whom he might find. Yet he also knew that it was worse than death to touch any woman of the True Men. Which was this—this thing—this power—this entity who had descended from the stars?
Pity is as old and emotional as lust. As his lust receded, his elemental human pity took over. He reached in his jerkin pocket for a few scraps of food.
He held them out to her.
She ate, looking at him trustfully, very much the child.
Suddenly there was a crashing in the woods.
Carlotta wondered what had happened.
When she first saw him, his face had been full of concern. Then he had grinned and had talked. Later he had become lustful. Finally he had acted very much the gentleman. Now he looked blank, brain and bone and skin all concentrated into the act of listening—listening for something else, beyond the crashing, which she could not hear. He turned back to her.
"You must run. You must run. Get up and run. I tell you, run!"
She listened to his babble without comprehension.
Once again he crouched to listen.
He looked at her with blank horror on his face. Carlotta tried to understand what was the matter, but she could not riddle his meaning.
Three more strange little men dressed exactly like him came crashing out of the woods.
They ran like elk or deer before a forest fire. Their faces were blank with the exertion of running. Their eyes looked straight ahead so that they seemed almost blind. It was a wonder that they evaded the trees. They came crashing down the slope, scattering leaves as they ran. They splashed the waters of the brook as they stomped recklessly through it. With a half-animal cry Carlotta's Moron joined them.
The last she saw of him, he was running away into the woods, his plumes grinning ridiculously as his head nodded with the exertion of running.
From the direction from which the Morons had come, an unearthly creepy sound whistled through the woods. It was whistling, stealthy and low, accompanied by the very quiet sound of machinery.
The noise sounded like all the tanks in the world compressed into the living ghost of a tank, into the heart of a machine which survived its own destruction and, spiritlike, haunted the scenes of old battles.
As the sound approached Carlotta turned toward it. She tried to stand up and could not. She faced the danger. (All Prussian girls, destined to be the mothers of officers, were taught to face danger and never to turn their backs on it.) As the noise came close to her she could hear the high crazy inquiry of soft electronic chatter. It resembled the sonar she had once heard in her father's laboratory at the Reich's secret office's project Nordnacht.
The machine came out of the woods.
And it did look like a ghost.
Carlotta stared at the machine. It had legs like a grasshopper, a body like a ten-foot turtle, and three heads which moved restlessly in the moonlight.
From the forward edge of the top shell a hidden arm leapt forth, seeming to strike at her, deadlier than a cobra, quicker than a jaguar, more silent than a bat flitting across the face of the moon.
"Don't!" Carlotta screamed in German. The arm stopped suddenly in the moonlight.
The stop was so sudden that the metal twanged like the string of a bow.
The heads of the machine all turned toward her.
Something like surprise seemed to overtake the machine. The whistling dropped down to a soothing purr. The electronic chatter burst up to a crescendo and then stopped. The machine dropped to its knees.
Carlotta crawled over to it.
Said she in German, "What are you?"
"I am the death of all men who oppose the Sixth German Reich," said the machine in fluted singsong German. "If the Reichsangehoriger wishes to identify me, my model and number are written on my carapace."
The machine knelt at a height so low that Carlotta could seize one of the heads and look in the moonlight at the edge of the top shell. The head and neck, though made of metal, felt much more weak and brittle than she expected. There was about the machine an air of immense age.
"I can't see," wailed Carlotta. "I need a light."
There was the ache and grind of long-unused machinery. Another mechanical arm appeared, dropping flakes of near-crystallized dirt as it moved. The tip of the arm exuded light, blue, penetrating, and strange.
Brook, forest, small valley, machine, even herself, were all lit up by the soft penetrating blue light which did not hurt her eyes. The light even gave her a sense of well-being. With the light she could read. Traced on the carapace just above the three heads was this inscription:
WAFFENAMT DES SECHSTEN DEUTSCHEN REICHES
BURG EISENHOWER, A.D. 2495
And then below it in much larger Latin letters:
MENSCHENJÄGER MARK ELF
"What does 'Man-hunter, Model Eleven' mean?"
"That's me," whistled the machine. "How is it you don't know me if you are a German?"
"Of course, I'm a German, you fool!" said Carlotta. "Do I look like a Russian?"
"What is a Russian?" said the machine.
Carlotta stood in the blue light wondering, dreaming, dreading—dreading the unknown which had materialized around her.
When her father, Heinz Horst Ritter vom Acht, professor and doctor of mathematical physics at project Nordnacht, had fired her into the sky before he himself awaited a gruesome death at the hands of the Soviet soldiery, he had told her nothing about the Sixth Reich, nothing about what she might meet, nothing about the future. It came to her mind that perhaps the world was dead, that the strange little men were not near Prague, that she was in Heaven or Hell, herself being dead, or if herself alive, was in some other world, or her own world in the future, or things beyond all human ken, or problems which no mind could solve ...
She fainted again.
The Menschenjäger could not know that she was unconscious and addressed her in serious high-pitched singsong German. "German citizen, have confidence that I will protect you. I am built to identify German thoughts and to kill all men who do not have true German thoughts."
The machine hesitated. A loud chatter of electronic clicks echoed across the silent woods while the machine tried to compute its own mind. It was not easy to select from the long-unused store of words for so ancient and so new a situation. The machine stood in its own blue light. The only sound was the sound of the brook moving irresistibly about its gentle and unliving business. Even the birds in the trees and the insects round about were hushed into silence by the presence of the dreaded whistling machine.
To the sound-receptors of the Menschenjäger, the running of the Morons, by now some two miles distant, came as a very faint pitter-patter.
The machine was torn between two duties, the long-current and familiar duty of killing all men who were not German, and the ancient and forgotten duty of succoring all Germans, whoever they might be. After another period of electronic chatter, the machine began to speak again. Beneath the grind of its singsong German there was a curious warning, a reminder of the whistle which it made as it moved, a sound of immense mechanical and electronic effort.
Said the machine, "You are German. It has been long since there has been any German anywhere. I have gone around the world two thousand three hundred and twenty-eight times. I have killed seventeen thousand four hundred and sixty-nine enemies of the Sixth German Reich for sure, and I have probably killed forty-two thousand and seven additional ones. I have been back to the automatic restoration center eleven times. The enemies who call themselves the True Men always elude me. One of them I have not killed for more than three thousand years. The ordinary men whom some call the Unforgiven are the ones I kill most of all, but frequently I catch Morons and kill them, too. I am fighting for Germany, but I cannot find Germany anywhere. There are no Germans in Germany. There are no Germans anywhere. I accept orders from no one but a German. Yet there have been no Germans anywhere, no Germans anywhere, no Germans anywhere ..."
The machine seemed to get a catch in its electronic brain because it went on repeating no Germans anywhere three or four hundred times.
Carlotta came to as the machine was dreamily talking to itself, repeating with sad and lunatic intensity, no Germans anywhere.
Said she, "I'm a German."
"... no Germans anywhere, no Germans anywhere, except you, except you, except you."
The mechanical voice ended in a thin screech.
Carlotta tried to come to her feet.
At last the machine found words again. "What—do—I—do—now?"
"Help me," said Carlotta firmly.
This command seemed to tap an operable feedback in the ancient cybernetic assembly. "I cannot help you, member of the Sixth German Reich. For that you need a rescue machine. I am not a rescue machine. I am a hunter of men, designed to kill all the enemies of the German Reich."
"Get me a rescue machine then," said Carlotta.
The blue light went off, leaving Carlotta standing blinded in the dark. She was shaky on her legs. The voice of the Menschenjäger came to her.
"I am not a rescue machine. There are no rescue machines. There are no rescue machines anywhere. There is no Germany anywhere. There are no Germans anywhere, no Germans anywhere, no Germans anywhere, except you. You must ask a rescue machine. Now I go. I must kill men. Men who are enemies of the Sixth German Reich. That is all I can do. I can fight forever. I shall find a man and kill him. Then I shall find another man and kill him. I depart on the work of the Sixth German Reich."
The whistling and clicking resumed.
With incredible daintiness, the machine stepped as lightly as a cat across the brook. Carlotta listened intently in the darkness. Even the dry leaves of last year did not stir as the Menschenjäger moved through the shadow of the fresh leafy trees.
Abruptly there was silence.
Carlotta could hear the agonized clickety-clack of the computers in the Menschenjäger. The forest became a weird silhouette as the blue light went back on.
The machine returned.
Standing on the far side of the brook, it spoke to her in the dry, high-fluted singing German voice.
"Now that I have found a German I will report to you once every hundred years. That is correct. Perhaps that is correct. I do not know. I was built to report to officers. You are not an officer. Nevertheless you are a German. So I will report every hundred years. Meanwhile, watch out for the Kaskaskia Effect."
Carlotta, sitting again, was chewing some of the dry cubic food scraps which the Moron had left behind. They tasted like a mockery of chocolate. With her mouth full, she tried to shout to the Menschenjäger, "Was ist das?"
Apparently the machine understood, because it answered, "The Kaskaskia Effect is an American weapon. The Americans are all gone. There are no Americans anywhere, no Americans anywhere, no Americans anywhere—"
"Stop repeating yourself," said Carlotta. "What is that effect you are talking about?"
"The Kaskaskia Effect stops the Menschenjägers, stops the True Men, stops the Beasts. It can be sensed, but it cannot be seen or measured. It moves like a cloud. Only simple men with clean thoughts and happy lives can live inside it. Birds and ordinary beasts can live inside it, too. The Kaskaskia Effect moves about like clouds. There are more than twenty-one and less than thirty-four Kaskaskia Effects moving slowly about this planet Earth. I have carried other Menschenjägers back for restoration and rebuilding, but the restoration center can find no fault. The Kaskaskia Effect ruins us. Therefore, we run away ... even though the officers told us to run from nothing. If we did not run away, we would cease to exist. You are a German. I think the Kaskaskia Effect would kill you. Now I go to hunt a man. When I find him I will kill him."
The blue light went off.
The machine whistled and clicked its way into the dark silence of the wooded night.
Carlotta was completely adult.
She had left the screaming uproar of Hitler Germany as it fell to ruins in its Bohemian outposts. She had obeyed her father, the Ritter vom Acht, as he passed her and her sisters into missiles which had been designed as personnel and supply carriers for the First German National Socialist Moon Base.
He and his medical brother, Professor Doctor Joachim vom Acht, had harnessed the girls securely in their missiles.
Their uncle the Doctor had given them shots.
Karla had gone first, then Juli, and then Carlotta.
Then the barbed-wire fortress of Pardubice and the monotonous grind of Wehrmacht trucks trying to escape the air strikes of the Red Air Force and the American fighter-bombers died in the one night, and this mysterious "forest in the middle of nothing-at-all" was born in the next night.
Carlotta was completely dazed.
She found a smooth-looking place at the edge of the brook. The old leaves were heaped high here. Without regard for further danger, she slept.
She had not been asleep more than a few minutes before the bushes parted again.
This time it was a bear. The bear stood at the edge of the darkness and looked into the moonlit valley with the brook running through it. He could hear no sound of Morons, no whistle of manshonyagger, as he and his kind called the hunting machines. When he was sure all was safe, he twitched his claws and reached delicately into a leather bag which was hanging from his neck by a thong. Gently he took out a pair of spectacles and fitted them slowly and carefully in front of his tired old eyes.
He then sat down next to the girl and waited for her to wake up.
She did not wake until dawn.
Sunlight and birdsong awakened her.
(Could it have been the probing of Laird's mind, whose far-reaching senses told him that a woman had magically and mysteriously emerged from the archaic rocket and that there was a human being unlike all the other kinds of mankind waking at a brookside in a place which had once been called Maryland?)
Carlotta awoke, but she was sick.
She had a fever.
Her back ached.
Her eyelids were almost stuck together with foam. The world had had time to develop all sorts of new allergenic substances since she had last walked on the surface of the Earth. Four civilizations had come and vanished. They and their weapons were sure to leave membrane-inflaming residue behind.
Her skin itched.
Her stomach felt upset.
Her arm was numb and covered with some kind of sticky black. She did not know it was a burn covered by the salve which the Moron had given her the previous night.
Her clothes were dry and seemed to be falling off her in shreds.
She felt so bad that when she noticed the bear, she did not even have strength to run.
She just closed her eyes again.
Lying there with her eyes closed she wondered all over again where she was.
Said the bear in perfect German, "You are at the edge of the Unselfing Zone. You have been rescued by a Moron. You have stopped a Menschenjäger very mysteriously. For the first time in my own life I can see into a German mind and see that the word manshonyagger should really be Menschenjäger, a hunter of men. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Middle-Sized Bear who lives in these woods."
The voice not only spoke German, but it spoke exactly the right kind of German. The voice sounded like the German which Carlotta had heard throughout her life from her father. It was a masculine voice, confident, serious, reassuring. With her eyes still closed she realized that it was a bear who was doing the talking. With a start, she recalled that the bear had been wearing spectacles.
Said she, sitting up, "What do you want?"
"Nothing," said the bear mildly.
They looked at each other for a while.
Then said Carlotta, "Who are you? Where did you learn German? What's going to happen to me?"
"Does the Fraulein," asked the bear, "wish me to answer the questions in order?"
"Don't be silly," said Carlotta. "I don't care what order. Anyhow, I'm hungry. Do you have anything I could eat?"
The bear responded gently, "You wouldn't like hunting for insect grubs. I have learned German by reading your mind. Bears like me are friends of the True Men and we are good telepaths. The Morons are afraid of us, but we are afraid of the manshonyaggers. Anyhow, you don't have to worry very much because your husband is coming soon."
Carlotta had been walking down toward the brook to get a drink. His last words stopped her in her tracks.
"My husband?" she gasped.
"So probably that it is certain. There is a True Man named Laird who has brought you down. He already knows what you are thinking, and I can see his pleasure in finding a human being who is wild and strange, but not really wild and not really strange. At this moment he is thinking that you may have left the centuries to bring the gift of vitality back among mankind. He is thinking that you and he will have wonderful children. Now he is telling me not to tell you what I think he thinks, for fear that you will run away." The bear chuckled.
Carlotta stood, her mouth agape.
"You may sit in my chair," said the Middle-Sized Bear, "or you can wait here until Laird comes to get you. Either way you will be taken care of. Your sickness will heal. Your ailments will go away. You will be happy again. I know this because I am one of the wisest of all known bears."
Carlotta was angry, confused, frightened, and sick again. She started to run.
Something as solid as a blow hit her.
She knew without being told that it was the bear's mind reaching out and encompassing hers.
It hit—boom!—and that was all.
She had never before stopped to think of how comfortable a bear's mind was. It was like lying in a great big bed and having mother take care of one when one was a very little girl, glad to be petted and sure of getting well.
The anger poured out of her. The fear left her. The sickness began to lighten. The morning seemed beautiful.
She herself felt beautiful as she turned—
Out of the blue sky, dropping swiftly but gracefully, came the figure of a bronze young man. A happy thought pulsed against her mind. That is Laird, my beloved. He is coming. He is coming. 1 shall be happy forever after.
It was Laird.
And so she was.