The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,117
hands. “That gets us exactly nowhere.”
“You’ve got to remember Rhion believes it himself.” She swung around at the sudden throb of engines in the driveway below. Tom was already halfway to the window to look—she scrambled leggily down and followed. Shoulder to shoulder, they watched through the bars as Storm Troopers and Luftwaffe bodyguards clambered into cars and truck and mounted the phalanx of motorcycles. Foreshortened almost directly below them, von Rath exchanged crisp Heil Hitlers with Goering and Himmler on the gravel of the drive.
“You heard about the new system of National Socialist weights and measurements?” Sara asked absently. “A ‘goering’ is the maximum amount of tin a man can pin to his chest without falling over on his face. God knows what’s really going on.” She turned her head to look up at Saltwood, pale noon sunlight glinting in her coffee-black eyes. “What happened to us could have been nothing more than posthypnotic suggestion...”
“I was never hypnotized!”
“The hell you weren’t.” She stepped back a pace from the glass and regarded him, hands on hips. “They could have hypnotized you and told you not to remember it—that’s one of the oldest ones in the book.”
Tom was silent a moment, considering that. He could remember everything clearly, except for a certain patchiness in his recollections immediately preceding Rhion smashing him over the head with the lab stool. At least he thought he could remember everything. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “If von Rath was supposedly sending those—those hallucinations—from his h.q. on the other side of town, I suppose Goering’s instructions could have been transmitted here by some kind of code words over the phone, the way the carney magicians do. But what would be the point, if they couldn’t repeat it in a combat situation? And that invasion starts Wednesday—the day after tomorrow...”
Sara swore in Polish. “You sure?”
“I heard Goering talking about it in the next room. He and von Rath are cutting a deal of some kind. Von Rath claims he can give Goering four days’ clear weather, which is a hell of a promise over the English Channel this time of year, plus this hallucination thing, and God knows what else. You don’t...” He paused, uncertain. “This is going to sound stupid, but you don’t think there’s some kind of—of thought-amplification device involved, do you?”
“What the hell do you think magic is supposed to be, if not the action of thought waves on the material world? But I’m here to tell you, cowboy, in four years of analytical chemistry, I have yet to see anybody circumvent the law of conservation of energy, or make two things like hydrogen and ethylene combine without throwing in some platinum as a catalyst. It just doesn’t work that way.” She frowned. “What scares me is that there obviously is something going on. It doesn’t hook up with any of the stuff Heisenberg and Einstein have been doing—or at least not with anything they’ve published—but once you get unpicking atomic structure, who knows? But there’s got to be instrumentality of some kind. Anything else is like trying to change gears without a clutch. And whatever the hell Rhion did come up with—whatever he thought he was doing—von Rath’s going to be able to use it.”
“I was with the Eleventh Commandos when they hit Boulogne in July,” Saltwood said quietly. “I saw the landing barges the Germans have ready. And whatever’s going on, I have to get the hell out of here and let London know the balloon’s about to go up.”
Sara started to reply, but before she could, boots thudded outside the door. Another woman might have edged closer to him, for the illusion of protection if for nothing else; she only set her fragile jaw, but he saw the fear in her eyes.
The door banged open. Von Rath stood framed against a black wall of Storm Troopers, gun muzzles bristling around him. A moment later, guards entered the room, keeping the two prisoners covered. As Sara had said, the German was fingering the Spiracle on its silver chain, absently and yet lovingly, his head tilted a little as if listening for sounds no human should hear. “It is time,” he said, “for the second part of our—ah—psychological tests.”
Sara folded her arms. “Does that mean I get my room back?”
The opal glance touched her without a shred of humanity. “You are welcome to it for the remainder of the day,” he said in his soft, well-bred voice. “But by tonight the question will be