The Man In The High Castle

That evening, just after the dinner meal, a police officer came to Frank Frink’s cell, unlocked the door, and told him to go pick up his possessions at the desk.

Shortly, he found himself out on the sidewalk before the Kearny Street Station, among the many passers-by hurrying along, the buses and honking cars and yelling pedecab drivers. The air was cold. Long shadows lay before each building. Frank Frink stood a moment and then he fell automatically in with a group of people crossing the street at the crosswalk zone.

Arrested for no real reason, he thought. No purpose. And then they let me go the same way.

They had not told him anything, had simply given him back his sack of clothes, wallet, watch, glasses, personal articles, and turned to their next business, an elderly drunk brought in off the street.

Miracle, he thought. That they let me go. Fluke of some kind. By rights I should be on a plane heading for Germany, for extermination.

He could still not believe it. Either part, the arrest and now this. Unreal. He wandered along past the closed-up shops, stepping over debris blown by the wind.

New life, he thought. Like being reborn. Like, hell. Is.

Who do I thank? Pray, maybe?

Pray to what?

I wish I understood, he said to himself as he moved along the busy evening sidewalk, by the neon signs, the blaring bar doorways of Grant Avenue. I want to comprehend. I have to.

But he knew he never would.

Just be glad, he thought. And keep moving.

A bit of his mind declared, And then back to Ed. I have to find my way back to the workshop, down there in that basement. Pick up where I left off, making the jewelry, using my hands. Working and not thinking, not looking up or trying to understand. I must keep busy. I must turn the pieces out.

Block by block he hurried through the darkening city. Struggling to get back as soon as possible to the fixed, comprehensible place he had been.

When he got there he found Ed McCarthy seated at the bench, eating his dinner. Two sandwiches, a thermos of tea, a banana, several cookies. Frank Frink stood in the doorway, gasping.

At last Ed heard him and turned around. “I had the impression you were dead,” he said. He chewed, swallowed rhythmically, took another bite.

By the bench, Ed had their little electric heater going; Frank went over to it and crouched down, warming his hands.

“Good to see you back,” Ed said. He banged Frank twice on the back, then returned to his sandwich. He said nothing more; the only sounds were the whirr of the heater fan and Ed’s chewing.

Laying his coat over a chair, Frank collected a handful of half-completed silver segments and carried them to the arbor. He screwed a wool buffing wheel onto the spindle, started up the motor; he dressed the wheel with bobbing compound, put on the mask to protect his eyes, and then seated on a stool began removing the fire scale from the segments, one by one.





FIFTEEN


Captain Rudolf Wegener, at the moment traveling under the cover name Conrad Goltz, a dealer in medical supplies on a wholesale basis, peered through the window of the Lufthansa ME9-E rocket ship. Europe ahead. How quickly, he thought. We will be landing at Tempelhofer Feld in approximately seven minutes.

I wonder what I accomplished, he thought as he watched the land mass grow. It is up to General Tedeki, now. Whatever he can do in the Home Islands. But at least we got the information to them. We did what we could.

He thought, But there is no reason to be optimistic. Probably the Japanese can do nothing to change the course of German internal politics. The Goebbels Government is in power, and probably will stand. After it is consolidated, it will turn once more to the notion of Dandelion. And another major section of the planet will be destroyed, with its population, for a deranged, fanatic ideal.

Suppose eventually they, the Nazis, destroy it all? Leave it a sterile ash? They could; they have the hydrogen bomb. And no doubt they would; their thinking tends toward that G?tterd?mmerung. They may well crave it, be actively seeking it, a final holocaust for everyone.

And what will that leave, that Third World Insanity? Will that put an end to all life, of every kind, everywhere? When our planet becomes a dead planet, by our own hands?

He could not believe that. Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive.

Even though I can’t prove that, even though it isn’t logical—I believe it, he said to himself.

A loudspeaker said, “Meine Damen und Herren. Achtung, bitte.”

We are approaching the moment of landing, Captain Wegener said to himself. I will almost surely be met by the Sicherheitsdienst. The question is: Which faction of policy will be represented? The Goebbels? Or the Heydrich? Assuming that SS General Heydrich is still alive. While I have been aboard this ship, he could have been rounded up and shot. Things happen fast, during the time of transition in a totalitarian society. There have been, in Nazi Germany, tattered lists of names over which men have pored before.…

Several minutes later, when the rocket ship had landed, he found himself on his feet, moving toward the exit with his overcoat over his arm. Behind him and ahead of him, anxious passengers. No young Nazi artist this time, he reflected. No Lotze to badger me at the last with his moronic viewpoint.

An airlines uniformed official—dressed, Wegener observed, like the Reichs Marshal himself—assisted them all down the ramp, one by one, to the field. There, by the concourse, stood a small knot of blackshirts. For me? Wegener began to walk slowly from the parked rocket ship. Over at another spot men and women waiting, waving, calling…even some children.

One of the blackshirts, a flat-faced unwinking blond fellow wearing the Waffen-SS insignia, stepped smartly up to Wegener, clicked the heels of his jackboots together and saluted. “Ich bitte mich zu entschuldigen. Sind Sie nicht Kapitan Rudolf Wegener, von der Abwehr?”

“Sorry,” Wegener answered. “I am Conrad Goltz. Representing A. G. Chemikalien medical supplies.” He started on past.

Two other blackshirts, also Waffen-SS, came toward him. The three of them fell in beside him, so that although he continued on at his own pace, in his own direction, he was quite abruptly and effectively under custody. Two of the Waffen-SS men had submachine guns under their greatcoats.

“You are Wegener,” one of them said as they entered the building.

He said nothing.

“We have a car,” the Waffen-SS man continued. “We are instructed to meet your rocket ship, contact you, and take you immediately to SS General Heydrich, who is with Sepp Dietrich at the OKW of the Leibstandarte Division. In particular we are not to permit you to be approached by Wehrmacht or Partei persons.”

Then I will not be shot, Wegener said to himself. Heydrich is alive, and in a safe location, and trying to strengthen his position against the Goebbels Government.

Maybe the Goebbels Government will fall after all, he thought as he was ushered into the waiting SS Daimler staff sedan. A detachment of Waffen-SS suddenly shifted at night; guards at the Reichskanzlei relieved, replaced. The Berlin police stations suddenly spewing forth armed SD men in every direction—radio stations and power cut off, Tempelhofer closed. Rumble of heavy guns in the darkness, along main streets.

But what does it matter? Even if Doctor Goebbels is deposed and Operation Dandelion is canceled? They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus.

No wonder Mr. Tagomi could not go on, he thought. The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same…

Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

He thought, We can only hope. And try.

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.

The Daimler started with Captain Wegener in the back, a blackshirt on each side, machine gun on lap. Blackshirt behind the wheel.

Suppose it is a deception even now, Wegener thought as the sedan moved at high speed through Berlin traffic. They are not taking me to SS General Heydrich at the Leibstandarte Division OKW; they are taking me to a Partei jail, there to maim me and finally kill me. But I have chosen; I chose to return to Germany; I chose to risk capture before I could reach Abwehr people and protection.

Death at each moment, one avenue which is open to us at any point. And eventually we choose it, in spite of ourselves. Or we give up and take it deliberately. He watched the Berlin houses pass. My own Volk, he thought; you and I, again together.

To the three SS men he said, “How are things? Any recent developments in the political situation? I’ve been away for several weeks, before Bormann’s death, in fact.”

The man to his right answered, “There’s naturally plenty of hysterical mob support for the Little Doctor. It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it’s unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they’ll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.”

“I see,” Wegener said.

It goes on, he thought. The internecine hate. Perhaps the seeds are there, in that. They will eat one another at last, and leave the rest of us here and there in the world, still alive. Still enough of us once more to build and hope and make a few simple plans.



At one o’clock in the afternoon, Juliana Frink reached Cheyenne, Wyoming. In the downtown business section, across from the enormous old train depot, she stopped at a cigar store and bought two afternoon newspapers. Parked at the curb she searched until she at last found the item.

VACATION ENDS IN FATAL SLASHING



Sought for questioning concerning the fatal slashing of her husband in their swank rooms at the President Garner Hotel in Denver, Mrs. Joe Cinnadella of Canon City, according to hotel employees, left immediately after what must have been the tragic climax of a marital quarrel. Razor blades found in the room, ironically supplied as a convenience by the hotel to its guests, apparently were used by Mrs. Cinnadella, described as dark, attractive, well-dressed and slender, about thirty, to slash the throat of her husband, whose body was found by Theodore Ferris, hotel employee who had picked up shirts from Cinnadella just half an hour earlier and was returning them as instructed, only to come onto the grisly scene. The hotel suite, police said, showed signs of struggle, suggesting that a violent argument had…



So he’s dead, Juliana thought as she folded up the newspaper. And not only that, they don’t have my name right; they don’t know who I am or anything about me.

Much less anxious now, she drove on until she found a suitable motel; there she made arrangements for a room and carried her possessions in from the car. From now on I don’t have to hurry, she said to herself. I can even wait until evening to go to the Abendsens’; that way I’ll be able to wear my new dress. It wouldn’t do to show up during the day with it on—you just don’t wear a formal dress like that before dinner.

And I can finish reading the book.

She made herself comfortable in the motel room, turning on the radio, getting coffee from the motel lunch counter; she propped herself up on the neatly made bed with the new unread clean copy of The Grasshopper which she had bought at the hotel bookshop in Denver.

At six-fifteen in the evening she finished the book. I wonder if Joe got to the end of it? she wondered. There’s so much more in it than he understood. What is it Abendsen wanted to say? Nothing about his make-believe world. Am I the only one who knows? I’ll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me—they just imagine they do.

Still a little shaky, she put it away in her suitcase and then put on her coat and left the motel room to search for a place to eat dinner. The air smelled good and the signs and lights of Cheyenne seemed particularly exciting. In front of a bar two pretty, black-eyed Indian prostitutes quarreling—she slowed to watch. Many cars, shiny ones, coasted up and down the streets; the entire spectacle had an aura of brightness and expectancy, of looking ahead to some happy and important event, rather than back…back, she thought, to the stale and the dreary, the used-up and thrown-away.

At an expensive French restaurant—where a man in a white coat parked customers’ cars, and each table had a candle burning in a huge wine goblet, and the butter was served not in squares but whipped into round pale marbles—she ate a dinner which she enjoyed, and then, with plenty of time to spare, strolled back toward her motel. The Reichs-bank notes were almost gone, but she did not care; it had no importance. He told us about our own world, she thought as she unlocked the door to her motel room. This, what’s around us now. In the room, she again switched on the radio. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment.

Taking the blue Italian dress from its carton, she laid it out scrupulously on the bed. It had undergone no damage; all it needed, at most, was a thorough brushing to remove the lint. But when she opened the other parcels she discovered that she had not brought any of the new half-bras from Denver.

“God damn it,” she said, sinking down in a chair. She lit a cigarette and sat smoking for a time.

Maybe she could wear it with a regular bra. She slipped off her blouse and skirt and tried the dress on. But the straps of the bra showed and so did the upper part of each cup, so that would not do. Or maybe, she thought, I can go with no bra at all…it had been years since she had tried that…it recalled to her the old days in high school when she had had a very small bust; she had even worried about it, then. But now further maturity and her judo had made her a size thirty-eight. However, she tried it without the bra, standing on a chair in the bathroom to view herself in the medicine cabinet mirror.

The dress displayed itself stunningly, but good lord, it was too risky. All she had to do was bend over to put out a cigarette or pick up a drink—and disaster.

A pin! She could wear the dress with no bra and collect the front. Dumping the contents of her jewelry box onto the bed, she spread out the pins, relics which she had owned for years, given her by Frank or by other men before their marriage, and the new one which Joe had gotten her in Denver. Yes, a small horse-shaped silver pin from Mexico would do; she found the exact spot. So she could wear the dress after all.

I’m glad to get anything now, she thought to herself. So much had gone wrong; so little remained anyhow of the wonderful plans.

She did an extensive brushing job on her hair so that it crackled and shone, and that left only the need of a choice of shoes and earrings. And then she put on her new coat, got her new handmade leather purse, and set out.

Instead of driving the old Studebaker, she had the motel owner phone for a taxi. While she waited in the motel office she suddenly had the notion to call Frank. Why it had come to her she could not fathom, but there the idea was. Why not? she asked herself. She could reverse the charges; he would be overwhelmed to hear from her and glad to pay.

Standing behind the desk in the office, she held the phone receiver to her ear, listening delightedly to the long-distance operators talk back and forth trying to make the connection for her. She could hear the San Francisco operator, far off, getting San Francisco information for the number, then many pops and crackles in her ear, and at last the ringing noise itself. As she waited she watched for the taxi; it should be along any time, she thought. But it won’t mind waiting; they expect it.

“Your party does not answer,” the Cheyenne operator told her at last. “We will put the call through again later and—”

“No,” Juliana said, shaking her head. It had been just a whim anyhow. “I won’t be here. Thank you.” She hung up—the motel owner had been standing nearby to see that nothing would be mistakenly charged to him—and walked quickly out of the office, onto the cool, dark sidewalk, to stand and wait there.

From the traffic a gleaming new cab coasted up to the curb and halted; the door opened and the driver hopped out to hurry around.

A moment later, Juliana was on her way, riding in luxury in the rear of the cab, across Cheyenne to the Abendsens’.