Astronomy(20)
Susan realized where she was. A neon cloud just outside the door puffed up its cheeks and blew out the words “Four Winds Bar.”
But how had she found herself here?
One moment she had been in the gutted remains of the Four Winds Bar on Münterstrasse. Now she was in the place that the Four Winds Bar might have been at the height of the Reich, or might have been someday, had things turned out differently.
It didn’t help that the bar had just been darkened for the sake of the astronomers. The only lights left in the room other than an electric lantern at the bar were small red lamps like the ones Navy ships burn when they’re running convoy in the North Sea. Under the scattered pools of red light, people looked young and smooth-faced. Maybe a little flat of feature.
The ceiling was covered in fluorescent insignias. A cartoon cloud puffed up its cheeks and blew a flock of five-pointed stars from one wall to the next. At each corner of the room, another cloud blew them back. Between the four winds, the stars managed to arrange themselves into a garish zodiac.
Men leered at her and looked her up and down, yet no one spoke to her. One way or another, they were otherwise occupied.
Outside in the biergarten, sad-eyed Luftwaffe officers argued over the precise moment things went wrong, the irreversible decision, the subtle turning in the road that no one saw.
Their conversations verged between remorse and rage. They were the ones who sang the Stukalied with a catch in the throat. Susan figured them to be the most dangerous men in the bar; they made a big show of distancing themselves from Hitler, but Susan knew better. They were still tied into the martial romance of Blut und Boden. In their eyes, anything they did was forgivable.
Brown-shirted astronomers passed back and forth between the telescopes in the west-facing windows and the star-filled reflector in the center of the room. The small telescopes were used as spotters. The giant cauldron of mercury was the main event, but she gathered from their talk that it had to be opened and spun up judiciously, for the sake of the other patrons. Mercury vapors, after all, are extremely toxic.
Besides, opening the roof to the sky brought in the cold and made the girls cover themselves.
Along the bar lounged the Reich’s dispossessed royalty—officers still wearing black uniforms three months after the war, millionaire princes of the Reichswerke in camel-hair coats with gold rings more ostentatious than their girlfriends’.
These men showed a fascination for a peculiar affectation—ornately rendered pocket watches. A Gruppenführer dressed in red leather jodhpurs boasted that his watch could measure the speed of a hairline crack passing through the lip of a wine glass. He was challenged by a man in the coal black of the Totenkopf SS.
“You see my dogs?” The SS man controlled a pair of muscular Dobermans, sleek as sports cars. “I will put them up against your watch. What can you wager to match them?”
He had a young man with him with languid green eyes so bright they shone in the dark of the bar. The youth stood back from him a ways. As the older man proposed his wager, this kid smirked at everyone around the bar. He might have been laughing at them, or his friend. It may not have mattered.
“What can I wager?” said the man in red and then leaned forward to whisper in his ear. Susan felt their eyes turn in her direction. She felt herself displayed. She shifted in her chair, tried to look preoccupied, or indifferent. Out on the patio, a group of technicians prepared to bounce a flash of xenon light off of the moon. She pretended to study their work.
Some arrangement was reached; Susan couldn’t help wondering what. She felt under her jacket for the Walther PP. She flipped off the safety.
The two men began testing their instruments against each other in feats of chronometric prowess. They measured the velocity of bullets, the vibration of guitar strings, the cycle of an electric charge through the filament of a light bulb. They sliced time into fantastically minute segments—tenths, hundredths, thousandths, millionths of a second.
They measured fantastically large segments of time—the uplifting of the German Alps, the shifting of the continents, the decay of a single proton, the quantum tunneling of all the electrons in a man’s body from one side of a brick wall to the opposite side. Many of these events took longer than the lifetime of the universe, but the Four Winds Bar had seven windows. All these things were available for wagering if you looked out the right one.
Besides, it wasn’t like anyone here had anything pressing.
A barmaid passed by, loaded with two-story tankards of bitter Pilsner. She was a small woman with button eyes and a ready smile. She should have looked friendly. She did look well-rehearsed.