Mass liquid cooing, damped in white fluff, greets them as they slip in a side entrance to the castle. Floors are dirty and littered with bottles and scraps of papers. Some of the papers are stamped with the magenta GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE. Birds fly in and out of broken windows. Thin beams of light come in from chinks and erosions. Dust motes, fanned by the doves’ wings, never stop billowing here. Walls are hung with dim portraits of nobles in big white Frederick the Great hairdos, ladies with smooth faces and oval eyes in low-necked dresses whose yards of silk spill out into the dust and wingbeats of the dark rooms. There is dove shit all over the place.

By contrast, Zwitter’s laboratory upstairs is brightly lit, well-ordered, crammed with blown glass, work tables, lights of many colors, speckled boxes, green folders—a mad Nazi scientist lab! Plasticman, where are you?

There’s only Zwitter: stocky, dark hair parted down the middle, eyeglass lenses thick as the windows of a bathysphere, the fluorescent hydras, eels, and rays of control equations swimming seas behind them… .

But when they see Slothrop, there is immediate clearing there, and glazed barriers come down. Hmm, T.S., what’s this? Who are these people? What’s happened to the apples in old Glimpf’s cheeks? What’s a Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence at Garmisch, with his lab intact?

OH… thur’s…

Nazis in the woodwork,

Fascists in the walls,

Little Japs with bucktooth grins

A-gonna grab yew bah th’ balls.

Whin this war is over,

How happy Ah will be,

Gearin’ up fer thim Rooskies

And Go-round Number Three… .

□ □ □ □ □ □ □

In the days when the white engineers were disputing the attributes of the feeder system that was to be, one of them came to Enzian of Bleicheröde and said, “We cannot agree on the chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pressure of 40 atü would be the most desirable. But all the data we know of are grouped around a value of only some 10 atü.”

“Then clearly,” replied the Nguarorerue, “you must listen to the data.”

“But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value,” protested the German.

“Proud man,” said the Nguarorerue. “What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket’s own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value.”

—from Tales of the Schwarzkommando,
collected by Steve Edelman

In the mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicheröde, down in abandoned mine shafts, live the Schwarzkommando. These days it’s no longer a military title: they are a people now, Zone-Hereros, in exile for two generations from South-West Africa. Early Rhenish missionaries began to bring them back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens of a possibly doomed race. They were gently experimented with: exposed to cathedrals, Wagnerian soirées, Jaeger underwear, trying to get them interested in their souls. Others were taken back to Germany as servants, by soldiers who went to put down the great Herero rising of 1904–1906. But only after 1933 did most of the present-day leadership arrive, as part of a scheme—never openly admitted by the Nazi party—for setting up black juntas, shadow-states for the eventual takeover of British and French colonies in black Africa, on the model of Germany’s plan for the Maghreb. Südwest by then was a protectorate administered by the Union of South Africa, but the real power was still with the old German colonial families, and they cooperated.