The truck passed the observatory and circled up against the second tower. Gerhard passed his rope down the line of soldiers. Silently, they clipped themselves into place, like mountain climbers ascending the Eiger.
The blind one held the rope up to her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m assigned to . . .” She looked back at the line of vans pulling up around them—mobile showers. She suddenly realized what they were. “I’m assigned to the sacrificial unit,” she said.
They looked at her as if she joked about something unspeakable. She looked away embarrassed. Christ, she said to herself, you can’t even win when they believe your lies.
The rear gate came down. An officer in black Totenkopf SS uniform shooed everyone into the tower. He had an MP-38 machine gun and a pair of Dobermans. The Dobermans sensed the shifting wind from space. They spun around the length of their short leash. They leaped at a certain star low in the western horizon, and snapped at it as if to drag it down.
“Hurry along,” the officer said. His voice was a throaty growl. “The time for the renewal of time is at hand.”
He wavered a little. Susan realized the man had been drinking. A half-empty bottle of brandy trailed from his hand. She started to say something, caught hold of herself—she recognized the bottle from her days among the Back Bay rich. It was Napoleon Brandy, one hundred thirty years old. Who knew where he had stolen it from, but he was enjoying it now.
Susan marveled at this. She had been treated to really good brandy just once, at Christmas, in the home of a University Benefactor. At the bottom of the cut-crystal glass had been maybe a teaspoonful of stuff that went up her nose before she ever got close enough to drink it.
This man was getting black-out drunk. The gall.
The battalion followed an elevated catwalk around the interior of the tower, and then down to the open floor. Susan found herself staring way up the inside of a long, opened interior. She had seen grain silos like this on her Uncle Mern’s farm in Pennsylvania. Except this one had a crystal cap at the top, and odd-shaped windows all around.
And then there was the odd effect of the lighting. Straight overhead, the sky was black with evening. Yet through each of the ornately portaled windows, light gleamed through—not the red-eyed lamplight from the power plant, but wan sunlight, coming in from a dozen different angles, as if each window looked out on a different world.
She found herself in a company of soldiers, all tethered into rows and formed up on each side by a blind executioner. An SS Colonel came out of an upper-level control room as they assembled. He waved his hand at the quatrefoils in the chamber over their heads. “Those windows served as portals,” he said, “so that our scientists could gauge the environment of distant and unseen worlds. As our undertaking is about to come to fruition, those windows now become a soft point where certain . . . things might enter.”
The Colonel went on to describe their duties. The men tied into the climbing ropes were to seal the windows with twenty-centimeter steel plate. They were further instructed to avert their eyes as they worked over the windows. “Curiosity is an occupational hazard in an endeavor such as this,” the Colonel admonished them. “And insanity is a contagious disease. Anyone showing signs of insanity will be shot.”
The Colonel had another bit of business of a more honorary nature. He stepped back from the railing to make room for a tiny little man bent over in a wheelchair. A blanket had been wrapped over his legs, and extended over some outboard device.
“You men of the Reich,” the little man croaked, “are entrusted with the second most important task of Das Unternehmen. At this moment, a blood sacrifice of three hundred untermenschen is being prepared as an offering to the embodiment of chaos, Great Azathoth. Azathoth comes to us this night to wipe the world clean of the deluge of race mixing and weak will that threatens to drown the Aryan race. It is your task to preserve what was best of the World Before as a monument to the World to Come.”
Susan wondered what exactly he was talking about. The only things down here were stacks of boxes. She saw one close to hand and peeled back the lid a bit, expecting the looted art treasures of Europe.
Inside the box were a set of small watercolor landscapes of a dreary and exacting hand. She could not imagine anyone sealing off a building like this to preserve such twee little exercises.
Something burred against the crystal dome above, as loud and angry as a P-51 trapped in a bottle.
“Pay no attention,” ordered the man in the wheelchair. “Our esteemed visitor is accompanied by certain . . . attendants. They are useless to us and interfere with the primary mission of this facility. They will be dealt with.”