They had little opportunity, during the airplane flight to Hamburg, to
exchange impressions or theories; they were constantly under the eyes
of two nondescript, expressionless men who sat unblinking, with hands
in the pockets of their civilian jackets.
Nor was it better after that; at Hamburg their watchdogs delivered them
to another pair apparently shelled from the same pod. One of the first
set passed the word laconically: "Two American spies. To be released in
Neuebersdorf, by order of Gestapoleiter Schwinzog." And the new guards
saw Manning and Dugan aboard a great transatlantic rocket.
It was from the rocket over Hamburg that they got their first real look
at a twenty-first century metropolis. Only from twenty miles high could
it be appreciated--the immense sweep of city in which straight-line
highways connected innumerable village-like centers interspersed
among the soft green of parks and woodlands, covering the broad plain
of the Elbe mouth and sprawling away to the eastward to join with
Lubeck across the base of the Danish peninsula. While they watched it,
spellbound, in the mirror-ports, the fairy city sank away and vanished
in the mist and shadow of evening; and the rocket ascended steadily and
almost soundlessly into thinning layers of stratosphere, and the sun
rose up in the west before it.
Manning fell covertly to studying the Germans who filled the seats of
the pressure-cabin. Most of them were civilians; they had the subdued
worried faces of suburban commuters on a train, and they looked quite
oblivious to the wonder of their age, even to the miracle of the
machine that was hurling them so swiftly and surely across the ocean.
They didn't look like a _Herrenvolk_. Here and there were the color
and brass gleam of uniforms, and with them went a tawdry arrogance,
an overconscious effort to dominate and impress directed at the
gray civilians and most of all, Manning observed, at the half-dozen
nondescript women in the compartment.
Had these people conquered the world and planted themselves atop it?
And if so, what had they done with the rest of it? With America,
for example--a German colony, Schwinzog had indicated.... Defeated,
enslaved....
Then Manning remembered that he had seen with his own eyes evidence
that America had not been wholly defeated, even after a hundred years;
that someone, somehow, was still fighting on. His heart leaped up.