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Post By Destination delivered by... the Hooded Hood Sun Jun 20, 2004 at 05:58:33 pm EDT |
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Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Twenty-First: Berlin in Winter and the Axis Overlords | |
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| Part the Twenty-First: Berlin in Winter and the Axis Overlords Sir Mumphrey Wilton blinked up at the Brandenburg Gate. “Oh dear,” he muttered. “Oh dear?” Miss Canterbury wondered, clutching at his arm because that seemed the thing to do when teleported from the Moon by a mysterious cosmic Observer. “Where are we?” Then another nasty question crossed her mind. “Why are all these street signs in German?” “We’re in Berlin,” frowned the eccentric Englishman. “The Observer’s little joke. That’s the Platz der Republik, and that burned out shell is the Reichstag that Hitler took a dislike to. This is not good.” “Not good.” agreed the vicar’s daughter. “No papers, no money, no contacts, no way out, in the heart of the Axis empire.” “Best get off the streets,” suggested Mumphrey. “Curfew.” He hurried Miss Canterbury across the Plaza del 18 Marz and into the dark parkland beyond. The parade grounds were empty, but the unwitting invaders kept to the shadows until they found a groundskeeper’s hut. Mumph shifted the door forward thirty seconds in time so they could hide within. “What do we do?” Miss Canterbury asked, as they huddled together beneath an old blanket. “Could you… what you did with the radio code in Spain?” “Not here,” Sir Mumphrey admitted. “Even if we could get to an unguarded transmitter with the range we require, it’s a different prospect getting people out of Berlin than out of Valetta. If the allies could just send agents into the German capital so easily the war would be over by now. The Nazis have all kinds of precautions, military, covert, and even mystical to stop it.” A thought occurred to the vicar’s daughter. “Mumphrey, we’re in Berlin! Could we… I don’t know, blow up Hitler and his cronies? You could use your pocketwatch to get us in and… something.” “Actually, no I can’t,” admitted the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity. “I hold a responsibility with the pocketwatch, and there are rules. I’m not allowed to use it to change the grand course of history. I’d be prevented. Even my predecessor, mad bitch that she was, couldn’t use the Chronometer directly to further her schemes of world control.” “Then without the pocketwatch,” suggested Miss Canterbury. “Mumphrey, we have to do something.” Wilton shook his head sagely. “We’d be caught before we got within five hundred years of Adolf or Herman. Sorry. Best we concentrate on getting’ out of here and picking up the trail of Wertham and the Expediter.” “But you saw what I saw, Mumphrey. This place is bomb-damaged, but it’s not in ruins like London. We’re losing this war, and then those vile beasts will take over the whole of the world!” “Not beaten yet, m’dear, I assure you. We’ve taken lickings before and kept on fighting. Hitler and his bastards’ll fight hard because they are bastards. We’ll fight harder because we’re free people who’ll never give up doin’ what is right. You and I, Miss Canterbury, we just have to do our part, don’t you know. And our part is smiting the ungodly who are interested in the Bertram Diary.” Miss Canterbury sighed and admitted defeat. “From what you told me of Blanchford Bertram’s expedition, presumably the Nazis want to see if this Knifey did actually make a hole in the Black Dome?” “Yes. But they’ll also be wantin’ that amulet Bertram turned up with, the one he left with the monks at the lamasery. ” “We have to get after them!” “And in the morning we shall,” the eccentric Englishman promised. “Somehow.” Gerdhard Gesslau and his wife were walking past the Gestapo Building on Kiederkirchnerstrasse when the plain-clothes man came up to them. “Excuse me,” he said in Heidelburg-accented German. “I must ask you to come with me.” And he gestured to the sinister monolithic building draped in blood-red swastika flags. “This… there must be some mistake,” Gesslau stammered, going pale. His wife clutched at him. “No mistake. We know who you really are, Jew.” “No!” denied Gesslau, shying backwards but with frightened glances to the armed SS soldiers parading around the door of the Gestapo stronghold. “No, we are good pure Germans. Aryans.” “Your papers,” Mumphrey Wilton demanded of them. As they handed the documents to him he said curtly, “Very well. Go home and do not leave your house until you are sent for. If this is a misunderstanding you have nothing to fear. In the meantime speak to no-one… and perhaps you will survive.” Money was easier. Mumphrey time-shifted a wad of the new German currency from the pocket of the first army officer that strutted past him. Schönefeld Station was crowded, filled with milling soldiers hurrying to their trains, with commuters coming to their appointed places of work, pushing against each other on the busy platforms. The roof of the station was partially missing because of the efforts of the RAF, but the bustle continued unabated. Here the trains ran on time. There were guards everywhere, standing at checkpoint boxes by turnstiles at the civilian platforms. Mumphrey had to covertly resort to suspending time around one such sentinel so he and Miss Canterbury could slip past onto Platform Seben. This train was mostly a troop carrier. Long freight carriages had their sides let down to pack men aboard for the trip to the Russian front. Ahead of the converted cattle trucks a flatbed wagon carried an anti-aircraft gun. Right behind the engine and coal tender were two compartment carriages joined by a corridor to the forward guard’s van. Mumphrey led Miss C past the rank and file, arrogantly ignored the waiting porter, and helped his companion up onto the rearmost of the luxury carriages. They progressed down the train until they found a compartment where a man and a woman sat surrounded by their baggage. “Papers, bitte,” Mumphrey asked officiously. Oberst Wilfram handed his travel documents over with only mild irritation. The constant checks were commonplace habit now in war-pressed Berlin. Mumphrey quickly read the papers and saw that they would do. “You and your secretary are travelling to Kiev to supervise the supply lines?” “Yes. It says all that in the orders.” “Are you a party man, a trusted member?” “Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t be given such an assignment, would I?” Mumphrey nodded. “Thought as much. Just wanted to be sure.” He tipped his hat at Wilfram’s lady companion. “And I apologise in advance for any embarrassment, madam.” A click of the chronometer later and Wilfram and his assistant were shifted four days into the future, the best Mumphrey could do using a full temporal charge. But only Wolfram and his assistant went; their clothes and effects stayed behind. “Have a seat,” Mumphrey invited his own companion, “Frau Mehlinger.” The train pulled out of Schönefeld and passed through the Berlin suburbs, picking up speed as it went. Miss Canterbury found herself anxiously counting each clack over the railway lines, and had difficulty hiding her alarm when the guard came along to check her travel papers. Mumphrey sat back and smoked as if he was an old hand at masquerading as a German officer bound for the dangerous Russian front. “We did it!” the vicar’s daughter sighed when the compartment door closed again and the guard moved up the train. “I don’t believe it!” “And we’re heading in the right direction,” Mumphrey noted. “Poland, Slovakia, the Ukraine, then Russia itself, right to Kiev. From there we can head south to the Black Sea, down through Turkey and Persia, then Afghanistan. And so to Tibet.” “You make it sound so simple. A world war and most of that being hostile territory doesn’t daunt you?” Mumphrey couldn’t help but smile. “Keeps one from getting’ too bored, what?” “I suppose it does.” Miss Canterbury watched the German countryside streaming past. “I can’t believe we got clean away.” “Herr Baron, the temporal disturbance detectors have registered again. Definitely something happening around Berlin, but no way of tracing it now” “One way, Vishnar” considered Baron Heinrich Wilheim Wolfgang Groppler Zemo. “Set loose the Nightwraiths.” In our next exciting episode:You can’t have a series like this without the life and death struggle on the train, can you? So send in the Nightwraiths and see what happens next. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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