In The Presence Of My Enemies

He was also smug. "You bet it does," he said. "And, if you look at things the right way, it makes the first edition an antique, too, something that's not worth getting excited about."

"Do you think that's the line they'll take?" Heinrich asked.

"I think they'll try," Willi replied. "Interesting to find out whether they can get away with it."

"What do you think?"

Willi's grin wasn't quite pleasant. "I could ask you the same question, but you've never much cared for sticking out your neck, have you?"

"Well, no." Heinrich tried to sound sheepish, not cowardly. Feeling he needed to add something to his confession, he said, "You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"Oh, I will. I can always run my mouth, or stick my foot in it, or stick my neck out for the chopper." Willi sounded happy, almost gay. He could talk about sticking his neck out because he didn't really believe the chopper would come down on it. Heinrich knew full well the chopper would descend ifhe were discovered. Willi, meanwhile, went on, "Sure, I'll tell you what I think. I think they have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. That's how things always work."

"You're probably right." Heinrich made sure he didn't sigh. He wouldn't have sworn his office was bugged, but he wouldn't have sworn it wasn't, either. If anyone was listening to him, he didn't want to do or say anything that could possibly be construed as disloyal to the Reich.

"If you bet that tomorrow will be just like today, you'll win more often than you lose," Willi said. "But you won'talways win, and you'll look more like a chump when you lose. We wouldn't have gone to Mars a few years ago if we'd thought things would stay the same all the time."

"That's true." Heinrich had been no less impressed than anyone else by live televisor pictures from another world. Men had been flying back and forth to the moon since he was a boy, and the observatory there had been a going concern for fifteen years. But Marsfelt different, even if there'd been not the slightest hint of Martians. The Ministry of Air and Space was talking about a manned mission to the moons of Jupiter. That would be something, if it ever got past the talking stage.

"So anyway," Willi said, "the people who go on about the first edition are the ones who don't have power, and the people who do have power don't give a damn about the first edition. That's the way it looks to me."

"Seems reasonable," Heinrich said, and so it did. Again, he refused to show he didn't like it, no matter how reasonable it seemed. Instead, he looked at his watch. "Shall we head for the canteen and see what sort of experiment the cooks are serving for lunch?" Nobody ever got in trouble for complaining about the food here. Not even the Security Police could afford to arrest that many people.

Today's special included tongue sausage and a cabbage salad with chopped apples, oranges, and grapes in a mayonnaise-based dressing. The sausage wasn't half bad. The menu called the salad Swedish. After a couple of bites, Heinrich called it peculiar.

Willi looked down at his foam plate. His verdict was, "I didn't know the Swedes hated us that much."

Heinrich took another forkful. After crunching away, he said, "It's probably very nutritious."

"It would be," Willi said.

Despite grumbles, they both kept eating. Heinrich sipped coffee from a foam cup. It wasn't especially good, either, but it was strong. He could feel his eyes opening wider. He wouldn't doze off at his desk this afternoon. He'd done that once or twice when he had a new baby in the house. He hadn't got in trouble. He mustn't have been the only one.

As he ate, he listened to the lunchroom chatter. Now it was official: the Americans would fall short on this year's assessment. Plenty of people at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht wondered what the Reich would do about it. Heinrich wondered himself. Someone a couple of tables over said, "The Yankees are lucky bastards. If we had a Fuhrer in place, he'd have made them knuckle under, you bet."

Willi Dorsch heard that, too. "He's right," he said, and got up to pour himself some more coffee. Heinrich nodded, though he couldn't help thinking that getting devastated by nuclear weapons and then spending the next forty years under German occupation wasn't precisely the kind of luck he most wanted to have.

On the other hand, most of the Americans remained alive. Aside from the war casualties, the conquerors had worked their usual horrors on Jews and Negroes. Even so, the population of the USA was only about a third lower than it had been before the war. Maybe the Americans as a wholewere lucky-if you compared them to such Untermenschen.

At another table not far from the one where Heinrich and Willi were sitting, a colonel growled, "To hell with the first edition! This is all a bunch of claptrap, if anybody wants to know the truth."