doorway, Saltwood could peer inside.
There still wasn’t much to see. Marvello the Magnificent had put up a better front in a canvas tent. By comparison with the Meditation Chamber of the Swami of the Celestial Realms, the place was stark and the decorations amateurish. There wasn’t even the inevitable portrait of Hitler on the wall—only a crimson swastika, seeming to burn somberly against the darkness. And yet... and yet...
The place raised the hackles on Tom’s neck.
On the black altar in the center stood the widget he’d last seen by candlelight in the locked bedroom in Berlin, the device he hadn’t paid much attention to, being in the process of getting ready to strangle its inventor. The grimy light from the hall must have caught odd reflections in those spheres of glass wound like bubbles in kelp among the strips of iron, for they had an odd glow that seemed to be answered from one portion of the heart of that fist-size lump of raw crystal. Even the rough iron and the other metal—brass or gold, though surely it couldn’t be gold—had a glitter that, through a trick of the shadows—maybe one of the guards behind him was moving—seemed to pulse like the beat of a heart.
Whatever was going on, Saltwood thought uneasily, backing away, it might not be magic, but it was pretty damn weird. Just what had he seen in his rearview mirror? How had von Rath been so sure his gun would jam?
Magnetic field? he wondered, trying to separate what little he knew of actual science from Einstein’s speculations and Flash Gordon serials. Something under the altar, maybe? It’s one for Mayfair’s boffins, if I can even get word of it back to them... Christ, they’re starting the invasion the day after tomorrow!
Leibnitz’ deep voice interrupted his thoughts. “I wonder how long it’s going to take Himmler—and Hitler, for that matter—to realize they’re playing Frankenstein to von Rath’s Adam.”
“And why not?” Baldur retorted hotly, his voice scaling up nearly an octave with excitement, his blue eyes glittering as if drugged. “Not the Adam of that stupid fable, not a monster against nature, but the culmination of nature, the New Adam of the Reich’s destiny. Why shouldn’t it be P-P-Paul? He can raise power! He can store it in talismans! And when he achieves the Spiracle Rhion stole from him, he’ll be able to use it against his enemies, outside the Reich and within it. The SS has always known the virtue of magic, so what better glory can they ask than magic itself?...”
The boy was working himself into a frenzy. Saltwood, feverishly calculating ways and means of escaping at least long enough to get hold of a radio and warn England, barely listened. But as Baldur turned to close and lock the “temple” doors and the guards led their prisoners away, he cast one glance back, and wondered why he had the impression, even as the shadows fell across it, that Rhion’s Resonator glowed more brightly in the dark.
“Now would you mind telling me,” Saltwood asked, crossing the bedroom to make sure the window bars were as firmly embedded in the concrete of the sill as they looked, “what the hell that was all about? You sounded like you knew that kid.” The bars were solid. They were lucky, he supposed, that the window wasn’t boarded over, as it had been quite recently by the look of the woodwork around it. It would have been nice had the heat in the rest of the house penetrated to this room, but one couldn’t expect everything.
The salt-white glare of the arclights in the yard—they were far out of range of even the most stray British bomber—turned Leibnitz’ long hair to silver as he sat wearily down on the bare mattress of the bed. “Oh, I do. Baldur Twisselpeck, one of von Rath’s tame wizards.”
“Baldur Twisselpeck?”
At the same time Sara, halting in her examination of the wooden walls, the floorboards, the ceiling for possible means of egress, turned to stare at her father. “That’s crazy! Baldur is that poor greasy shmendrik who followed von Rath everyplace...”
“That was him,” Leibnitz said and, when Sara stared at him in the dense pewter-colored gloom, “Wasn’t that his voice?”
She hesitated, thinking back. Then she shook her head, the tangle of her red-and-black hair swirling. “Papa, that’s insane! Baldur was a geek, a nuchshlepper! It couldn’t be a disguise; that kid’s six inches taller, the eyes weren’t the same color, and the face...” She hesitated again.
“It