In The Presence Of My Enemies

Walther Stutzman was a straight-thinking, rational man. He had to be, to make himself a success at the Zeiss computer works. Every so often, though, he found himself bemused by what he and a few others did-had to do-to keep themselves hidden from the all-too-nearly omniscient eye of the state.

Hitler had thundered that there was a Jewish conspiracy against the German Volk, against the Reich. At the time, he'd been talking through his hat. The Jews hadn't been plotting against Germany. Most of the Jewsin Germany had thought of themselves as being as German as anybody else. Now, on the other hand…

Now the handful of Jews remaining in Berlin, in Germany as a whole, had to conspire against the Reich if they wanted to go on breathing. Hitler's extermination camps had had the ironic effect of calling into being what hadn't existed when he started making speeches. Even now, it wasn't the sort of conspiracy he meant. It didn't aim to take over the Reich, just to hide the few surviving Jews from it. But a conspiracy it undoubtedly was.

Here sat Walther, controlling computer codes that would have earned him a bullet in the back of the neck if anyone knew he had them. Some of the codes erased his tracks after he'd used others, which made discovering him harder. Over at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Heinrich Gimpel kept his ear to the ground. There was a Jew in a fairly high place in the Foreign Ministry. There were even three or four in the SS. Walther had helped create false pedigrees for a couple of them. The others he just knew about; he wasn't sure how they'd established their bona fides. His own work there still worried him. If it unraveled, so much was liable to unravel with it. Several other important ministries also held a Jew or two.

When a Jew in one place heard something that might be important, others soon found out about it. A chief undersecretary or a deputy assistant minister could meet with a friend at dinner or telephone a colleague in another ministry-sometimes not a Jew himself, but someone who could be expected to spread the news to the Jew who needed to know it. Heinrich said the American phrase was a grapevine. That fit well enough.

And that chief undersecretary or deputy assistant minister sometimes got to propose a policy that-purely by chance, of course (of course!)-made things a little easier, a little safer, for the Jews. Or, bureaucracy being what it was, one of those functionaries could sometimes ignore or soften a directive that might have hurt his people. Very often, one bad scheme blocked was worth three good ones started.

A Jewish conspiracy at the heart of the Reich. Hitler would have had kittens. He would have ordered all the Jews killed, and made horrible examples of the Germans who'd missed them. Walther thought of knives and piano-wire nooses. Himmler would have killed the Jews and made examples of some Germans, too, but he would have got rid of them more humanely. Kurt Haldweim would have got rid of the Jews and reprimanded, maybe demoted, the Germans.

Heinz Buckliger? Walther scratched his head. He didn't know. He didn't dare find out. Who would dare, when the consequences for being wrong were so irrevocable? For the first time in his life, though, he could think of the Fuhrer without a shudder right afterwards.

"Hey, Walther! What are you doing in there?"

The booming voice jerked him out of his reverie. "Nothing much, boss," he answered honestly, hiding a start, too. "Just woolgathering, I'm afraid."

"You?" Gustav Priepke boomed laughter. "That'll be the day. Listen, something's come up, and I need you to take a shot at it."

Walther had told the truth, and Priepke hadn't believed him. That was what he got for having a reputation for working hard. If he'd had a name for doing nothing, he could have been working on six things at once and his boss wouldn't have believed that, either. He did his best to look bright and attentive, even if he didn't feel that way. "What is it?" he asked.

"The new operating system-what else?" Priepke answered. "We've got to make it work, or else." He didn't say or else what, but he didn't have to. The project was long overdue. That it was so long overdue made it harder, too.

"Well, there is one obvious answer we haven't tried yet," Walther said.

"What's that?" his boss asked. "I thought we'd done all the obvious things."

Walther shook his head. "No, there's one thing we haven't done that could save us a lot of time." Priepke let out an interrogative grunt. Walther said, "We could see how much Japanese code we can steal or adapt."

"Donnerwetter!" Gustav Priepke looked at him as if he'd suggested turning every Ratskeller in the Reich into a sushi bar. "What a bastardly idea! What the Japs know about real programming-"

"Is just what we need right now," Walther broke in.