The Children's War (112 page)

40

“O
H, BUGGER!”
Olek swore, throwing his pen across the room.

“What’s the problem?” Peter asked without even bothering to look up. He already knew the answer. It was the data. They had no trouble translating it all using Rattenhuber’s program, but there was still the messy business of interpreting it. And it was a mess!

“I thought I had this perfect, line after line made sense,” Olek moaned, “but now it’s all crap. A two-hundred-fifty-year-old man, a one-hundred-seventythreeyear-old woman. Shit! Shit, shit, shit!”

Barbara looked up at him and smiled bemusedly.“Don’t worry, I’ve got some good stuff here. I’m not done yet, but I think we’ve finally found some human subjects!” She held up an annotated file. “Look. I’m not sure how they’re numbered, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.

It took Peter a moment to notice that Barbara and Olek had started whispering. He turned and leaned out of his chair so that he could see the papers Barbara had been holding under Olek’s gaze.

She snapped them back out of his reach. “It’s all right, Olek and I sorted it out already.”

“Let me see them anyway,” he said, extending his hand in her direction.

She casually pitched the papers onto her laden desk. “Really, there’s no need to waste your time!”

“Barbara?” he asked, confused. “Come on.” He motioned for her to hand him the papers. She did, but it was a different set.

“The other set, those there.” He pointed.

Still she hesitated, then finally handed him the papers. It was a printout of one of the innumerable decrypted data files, and as usual, it consisted of a few words and a tedious series of numbers. Barbara had attached a page of notes with a heading and had organized the numbers into a matrix with various assumed category headings.

“My interpretation could be entirely wrong, you know,” she said worriedly. “After all, they’re just numbers.”

He perused the conjectures she had scribbled along the sides. If she was correct in her assumptions, then it was a good find: the experimental subjects,
though numbered, were almost certainly human—the ages and location would not really match anything else. “It looks good to me. I think we’re talking about real people here, the poor sods. If you’re right, then this will be excellent proof of our claims.” He smiled as he started to hand the papers back to her, but then he stopped and took another look.

Berlin, about two years ago. Numbered subjects injected two years ago in and around Berlin. His hands shook as he scanned the list. Barbara and Olek exchanged a surreptitious glance. Peter’s eyes found what they were looking for: 1314708. There it was, just a number, a seemingly meaningless number. In the column next to it, according to Barbara’s translation, was an indication that the subject had been tested. Then his age and gender, and next to that an address zone; he recognized the postcode for the Vogels’ suburb. The next column was an assessment of the subject’s general health on a scale of one to five. After that was a column that indicated follow-up diagnosis, but there was none for that particular subject.

Not a test vaccine. It was not a test vaccine after all. He looked up from the list of anonymous, involuntary test subjects; from a list of subjects of a medical experiment on inducing infertility; from a list that he was on. Barbara and Olek were staring at him. He did not see them, did not see the walls of the office surrounding them. He saw the white-coated technicians, the quick conversation with Elspeth, the way he had been dismissed from the room. He saw her signing papers he could not read, he felt the tourniquet, the quick injection, and then they were gone. Not a word of explanation, nothing. He was not a human, he had no rights, no feelings, no opinions, no future. The law said so; how could it be otherwise?

“Are you all right?” Barbara asked, concerned.

His mouth moved, but no words came out. He was shaking so hard she must have been able to see. Not a vaccine at all. It was April already and Zosia still wasn’t pregnant.

“Is that you?” Olek asked much less subtly.

“Are you all right?” Barbara repeated.

He shook his head, stood, and headed toward the door. In the corridor, before he managed to walk two meters, he retched and was sick. Barbara and Olek rushed over to him as he slid down the wall into a kneeling position, and they stood helplessly nearby as he curled over himself, vomiting. He remained that way for a long time, long after he had finished being sick.

Olek made a move to help him up, but then changed his mind. Barbara stooped down next to Peter, asking softly, “Captain Halifax, are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

He shook his head, still not raising himself from his fetal position. If only they would go away and leave him in peace. All of them! Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? What had he done that they could toy with his life, destroy every hope and murder every dream he had ever had? Why would they never leave him alone? What had
he
done?

The words he had hissed at Ulrike came back to him:
Do you think the people I’ve been talking about weren’t real? Do you think the mass murders of the forties and fifties were for a reason? That babies and toddlers did something?
He had really been talking to himself then, he had actually believed that somehow he was not one of them, that they were a group apart: the victims, the innocents who had known intuitively from birth what their fate was. He was not one of them. He was immune.

“Captain?”

He looked up to see Barbara stooping down next to him. He saw the pity in her eyes. Pity and her own immunity. Had it been that way for all of them? Had each and every one of the millions thought that they were special, that they would be exempt, that it was someone else’s fate to die? As the poison gas had filtered into the showers, had even one person thought, yes, this was my fate from birth? As the babies died in their mothers’ arms, had even one mother thought, Yes, this is why I gave birth to this child, so it could die meaninglessly?

He answered the question in Barbara’s eyes with a brief smile, said in a shaky voice, “Would you please get me something to clean this mess up with?”

She nodded, glad for something useful to do, and went to fetch some cleaning supplies. He watched her disappear down the hall, looked around, and noticed Olek standing a short distance away, as if guarding him. During the time he had been kneeling there, he had been aware that one or two people had wandered down the hall but had been shooed away. He closed his eyes and felt the sweat trickle down his face. He felt incredibly ill, sick to his bones. What, he wondered, had they done to him to leave him so vulnerable? What poison had they injected into his soul?

Barbara returned with the bucket and some rags and began to clean up the mess he had made. He insisted that he do it, and they debated briefly until they compromised and both cleaned the floor. As Barbara wrung out her rag and did a last swipe over the concrete, she asked without looking at him, “Do you remember them doing it?”

“Yeah. I had no idea what it was about. We all got injected—all the
Zwangsarbeiter
that is. None of us knew what it was.”

“Do you think they . . . it had any effect?”

“I hope not. Now that I think about it, both men and women were injected, so I’m not sure what they were looking for. Maybe just testing to see if it would kill us or cause long-term damage of an unexpected sort. Maybe it was just a base compound and not actually a test.”

Or maybe they didn’t care what happened and they had injected women as part of their camouflage for causing chemical castration in men. Was his ability to have sex proof that nothing had been done? Or had they hoped to achieve infertility such that it would be essentially unnoticed except for an inability to make babies? And how, he wondered, were they planning to do a follow-up study? They did not test him beforehand, so how could they know what changes
had been wrought? What sort of science was it that tested arbitrary, unknown subjects?

Lousy science, careless science, inhuman science that wasted lives as if driven to do so. Nazi science.

“I’m sorry,” Barbara said, finally looking directly at him.

“Yeah, so am I. My life wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said, more to himself-than to her.

She looked confused but did not question his statement. Then shyly she asked, “Do you want children?”

“Very much so.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe nothing will come of it.”

They were still on their knees in the hall. Several more people had been sent away by Olek, and Peter decided they really should move back into the office. “Maybe,” he agreed as he offered his arm to Barbara and they stood together. “In any case,” he continued as he picked up the bucket to carry it to the nearest toilet, “what’s done is done.”

But what, exactly, had been done?

When he returned, Barbara made him a cup of tea and the three of them settled back into the office. Peter did not feel like discussing anything, but he also did not feel well enough to leave the office. Luckily, Olek and Barbara seemed to sense his mood, and they conversed between themselves about trivialities while he stared absently at the stacks of papers and books and ran his fingers along the hot surface of his cup. When should he tell Zosia? What should he tell her? That she had received damaged goods? Would she want to annul the marriage? Was it considered acceptable grounds for an annulment? Would she do that to him? She really wanted to have another child, and that had clearly been one of her reasons for marrying him. Had it been the only one?

“What a fucked-up mess,” he sighed, unaware that he had spoken aloud until both Barbara and Olek turned toward him. Seeing their surprised looks, he pointed at the piece of paper that contained his number and added rather sardonically, “There’s the real obscenity.”

“We weren’t offended, sir,” Barbara said rather more formally than usual. “It’s just that we want to help, but we don’t know how. I wish I knew what to say.”

Olek nodded his agreement. “Do you want us to leave?”

Peter shook his head. “Not unless you want to. I guess I’ll take the rest of the day off though. I don’t think I’ll be much good here.” He did not move, however; he didn’t know what to do—he did not want to be alone with his thoughts.

Barbara seemed to understand his hesitation and said tentatively, “If you like, I’ll go with you. We can go for a walk. We don’t have to talk about anything. You know, just walk.”

They grabbed their coats and headed outside into the gloomy day. A tent was set up but they ignored that and walked off into the woods. It had been raining for days, and piles of melting snow and wet leaves made the paths slippery.
Eventually they abandoned the well-traveled routes and crossed over unmelted snows heading ever upward away from everyone. The steep climb hurt his legs, but the pain felt reassuringly familiar. He slipped and fell several times. Each time Barbara helped him to his feet and held on to him for a few steps. She made it seem as though she were seeking his protection rather than guiding his steps and in this way assuaged his already battered ego.

After a while she noticed he was panting with the pain, so they took shelter in a copse and sat on a fallen log. The leaden skies promised more rain, and as they sat there, a few drops soaked through the wool of their coats. They were silent for a few moments, surrounded by the hushed sounds of woods. Despite the thaw, the dampness made everything seem colder. He noticed she had leaned against him and seemed to be trembling, so he asked, “Are you cold?”

She nodded and he put his arm around her to warm them both. He thought about Emma, or Jacqueline, or whatever she was called nowadays. She would be just a bit younger than Barbara now; a young woman grown to maturity in slavery. He wondered if she had been taken by anybody yet, wondered if she had slept voluntarily with a man, wondered if perhaps she was pregnant. He pushed the thought of children away. If that route had been denied him, he was going to have to accept it, he could not let this last straw destroy everything that had been reconstructed over the past year and a half. There was too much to lose.