by Christian A. Larsen
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\n\u201cJesus, Barranco, do you see this?\u201d asked Markevitch, peering through the solar visor of his pressure suit and waving his thick gloves as if to hail the pilot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m looking at the charts right now,\u201d answered Barranco from inside the lunar module’s descent stage cylinder. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever it is I’m looking at is not on any chart. Are we recording? Christ, how I wish we could transmit back to Houston from the far side of this rock.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWatch your mouth!\u201d scolded Barranco. \u201cShe’ll<\/em> hear you.\u201d<\/p>\n Markevitch rolled his eyes. Barranco could be so<\/em> superstitious\u2014and she was, referring to the moon as ‘Luna’ like she was a real person. Like she could<\/em> hear them. Damnit, Barranco<\/em>, he thought, now you have <\/em>me calling the moon a ‘she.’<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cSon \u2026 of \u2026 a \u2026 bitch,\u201d whispered Barranco, as if in answer. \u201cYou’re rolling, Marky. Can you talk me through what you’re seeing, though, just for the record?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSure, sure,\u201d said Markevitch, loping lightly over the lunar surface toward the structure\u2014a structure that had no business being there. The Russians had done the first flyover of the far side of the moon back in 1959, but Altair IV<\/em> was the first mission ever to make a ground exploration of that hemisphere. At least, that’s what everyone believed until now.<\/p>\n \u201cLooks like a metal cylinder, about ten by twenty.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat does it say there, next to that ‘X’? It says something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt says,\u201d said Markevitch, wiping the lunar dust off the metal sheeting. He sounded it out as the dust fell away like crematory ash. \u201cIt says Projekt Gesichtskreis<\/em>. And it’s not an ‘X’, Barranco. It’s every Jew’s worst nightmare\u2014burned into our collective consciousness deeper than the Roman occupation. Deeper than slavery in Egypt. That, friend,\u201d he said, pointing so the camera in his helmet captured his finger in the frame. \u201cIt’s the symbol of the Third Reich. A Nazi swastika.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo shit.\u201d Barranco hadn’t asked a question. \u201cAre you going in?\u201d That was<\/em> a question.<\/p>\n \u201cShould I?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou’re the commander. Until we’re back in radio contact\u2014and that won’t be until we go back up\u2014you’re judge, jury and executioner. You make the call and I’ll back you up every step of the way. So to speak.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEasy for you to say from Altair IV<\/em>,\u201d said Markevitch. \u201cI think I’d better try. We’re scheduled for ascent tomorrow, and with all the cutbacks, it might be another fifty years before we’re back on the moon. And we can’t exactly phone home for orders. Let me try the handle.\u201d<\/p>\n And that answered it. The door was locked, or fused, or just plain gunked up with electrically-charged regolith that stuck to everything it touched, and he didn’t dare force it without the proper equipment. There would be time. Another day and one more moon walk, in fact, before the ascent stage of the Altair IV<\/em> mission.<\/p>\n He came back to the descent module, took off his pressure suit, and rewatched everything that the camera in his helmet had recorded two and a half times before Barranco put a hand on his shoulder.<\/p>\n \u201cNot exactly the return of humankind to the moon that you expected, eh, Cap?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGot a joke for you\u2014a Jew and a lady Dago go to the moon and what do they find?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAn abandoned Nazi moon base.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAbandoned?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I suppose I can’t know for sure, Marky, but except for the wackaloon white party fringe, the Nazi party kinda fizzled out after the Second World War. Anybody in there that long would be about 150 years old, and that’s a helluva lot of freeze-dried wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut, even for one person. Besides, I’m not getting anything as far as power output coming from anyone but us on the lunar surface. Looks pretty abandoned to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Markevitch rubbed his chin.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are we going to do, Marky?\u201d asked Barranco.<\/p>\n \u201cNext moon walk, I’m going in.\u201d \u201cAre you reading me, Barranco?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLike a shot, Marky.\u201d<\/p>\n Markevitch lifted the oxy-welder and started cutting the lock mechanism. The persistent white glow from the welder swallowed up the light from his helmet, but he was glad he didn’t have to switch on his camera again, because the welder took both hands\u2014especially considering that a dropped welder could kill him in a matter of seconds if it gashed his oxygen tank, or cut open his pressure suit. The tension in his arms multiplied. Sweat crawled and rolled.<\/p>\n \u201cYou okay out there, Marky? The camera’s shaking a little.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlmost got it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHang in there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlmost there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou don’t have to do it all at once, Markevitch.\u201d<\/p>\n But he found that he did. The horror of the Nazi party wasn’t Hitler\u2014one man couldn’t be responsible for all that depraved carnage without a lot of help\u2014it was everyone involved that made the monster. Markevitch’s grandmother had survived Auschwitz, but was scarred, bar-coded, and orphaned by it, and now the last, untouched vestige of the Third Reich was in a Jew’s hands, the same hands that held a oxyacetylene torch. If he didn’t open the Projekt Gesichtskreis base all at once, he might not have the courage to walk in there later, even if he had the time.<\/p>\n Something inside the door mechanism clanged.<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s it, Barranco. I think it’s open.\u201d<\/p>\n He set the oxy-welder down and grabbed the skipper’s wheel in the center of the door and it swung slowly open without even needing a turn. Moon-dust swam like motes in the cone of light shooting out of Markevitch’s helmet, and he felt a little like he was in that Titanic documentary, and one thing was sure\u2014whatever footage and audio he laid down in the next hour or two would be part of an even bigger documentary, one that would change how people viewed World War II and the last hundred years.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you see, Marky?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJust what it looks like from the outside\u2014a metal tank about ten by fifteen. There’s a metal desk and chair and some clipboards and things hanging on the wall. They’re all in German, but I might be able to remember enough from high school and my grandmother’s pidgin to make it out. Looks like they’re charts and timetables, mostly. Shouldn’t be too hard, really.\u201d<\/p>\n And he was right, more or less. The hard part was picking them off the wall with his fat-fingered gloves. According to the paperwork, researchers at Peenem\u00fcnde Army Research Center delivered the outline for Projekt Gesichtskreis to the Wehrmacht just before the outbreak of the war. It was projected to cost more than 25 million Reichsmarks, and\u2014if Markevitch knew anything about government spending\u2014it probably cost twice as much. The V-2 moon launches began in earnest in 1944, about the time the Allies were invading Normandy and undoubtedly became far more important as Nazi Germany shriveled in the wake of the Allied advance.<\/p>\n \u201cBarranco, you still copying this?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah \u2026 Keep talking.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWant to take a stab at when the first manned mission was?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI’m afraid to guess.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cApril 1945.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Battle of Berlin,\u201d said Barranco. \u201cThe end of the war in Europe. Know what the initials are on the bottom of the log?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA.H.\u2014Adolf Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat else does it say?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s it,\u201d said Markevitch, but there was something tempting in his voice.<\/p>\n \u201cBut?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s another door.\u201d<\/p>\n Markevitch had no trouble opening the interior door. There was no oxidization, no regolith, and no impact damage to keep it from opening like an empty jar of pickles, but what Markevitch found inside looked more like beef jerky. One was covered in tan, brown and black fur, and while the muscle tissue had deteriorated to almost nothing, the unmistakable bone structure screamed \u201cGerman Shepherd,\u201d even to Barranco, who saw it through a mostly colorless and constantly tiling display.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is that tied around it’s neck, Marky?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLooks like a woman’s scarf.\u201d He tugged at the knot to pull it free, and the dog’s head crumbled from its shoulders, its sunken eyes staring at the far corner of the room with an almost accusatory expression.<\/p>\n Markevitch looked at that corner bringing his light and the camera in line and found a woman with red lipstick still visible, though applied sloppily. Her close-cropped blond hair was in disarray, but smoothed down, seemingly by hurried fingers and palms rather than a brush or comb. Her eyes were closed, and, if it weren’t for her shrunken flesh, she would have looked like she was just sleeping with her hands folded neatly under the mounds of her breasts. Captain Markevitch crouched and crawled toward her.<\/p>\n He knew he shouldn’t, but he wanted to touch her. Examine her. The dog had been strangled with one of her scarves, and Markevitch found it hard to believe that she died from natural causes. Space travel was only now becoming something that most people could handle without any kind of formal training. He wondered how rough the ride to the moon was in a Nazi V-2 with a cockpit. Probably life-threatening. But then, who killed the dog? And that’s when he saw the dent in her head that her rearranged hair had at first hidden.<\/p>\n \u201cWho is that?\u201d asked Barranco.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that’s Eva Braun\u2014Hitler’s wife. And the dog is Blondi. The Soviets thought they found their remains with Hitler’s after the Battle of Berlin, but there are a bunch of people who think they were only body doubles. I’m starting to think they’re right.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThen where’s Hitler?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRight there,\u201d answered Markevitch. \u201cDo you see him?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d whispered Barranco. \u201cOh God, this gives me the willies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy grandmother told me stories about how they killed the Jews at Auschwitz. The showers were legendary. The women, the children\u2014the Nazis would tell them they were going to be put to work according to their education and skills, but first they needed to take a shower. So they herded them into this giant, communal shower room, only the shower heads were fake and there was no water. Then they’d lock the doors and gas them. They say you could hear the screams for 15 or 20 minutes, even through the concrete walls with motorcycles revving.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s awful,\u201d said Barranco.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I think the worst way, at least how my grandmother told it, was that they would take individuals into these dark cells in the basement. They’d seal off the doors and windows and let them suffocate. Sometimes, the Nazis would put a candle in there, make it go a little faster, but if they were feeling really cruel, they would just let you die in there in the dark, all alone. How long would that take, do you think?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHours? Longer?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow long do you think it took for him?\u201d<\/p>\n Adolf Hitler, architect of the Third Reich and one of the greatest genocides in the history of humankind, sat with his back to the wall, his chin slumped on his brown military jacket. His arms weren’t laced over his belly like Braun’s, but had fallen to the floor, palms upward like he had been asking God ‘why?’ in the decades since his entombment. A crinkled piece of paper had long ago rolled out of one of his hands and blossomed into a final missive in Hitler’s fist-like handwriting. Markevitch couldn’t resist. He scooped it up with both hands.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is that?\u201d asked Barranco through his helmet.<\/p>\n Markevitch held up one finger as if to say ‘hold on’ and then realized she couldn’t see it if he couldn’t. \u201cOne sec. Let me finish reading it.\u201d His gloves were so big he had to shuffle the page in both hands to read the whole thing, and as a result, Barranco could monitor his deliberate progress from the Altair IV<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cChrist, are you almost done?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, it’s not exactly a suicide note,\u201d said Markevitch. \u201cHe talks about how if Otto von Bismarck had gotten rid of the Jews when he created the German Empire in 1871, the idea of the Third Reich would have worked. He says his own problem was that the Jewish ‘infestation,’ as he called it, was too complete by the time he took power. There were too many people in his own government, he said, that were tainted with Jewish blood.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHey, that’s kind of poetically true,\u201d said Barranco. \u201cBut not the way he meant it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJews, Jews everywhere,\u201d answered Markevitch, perverting a verse of Coleridge’s to fit the situation. \u201cBut I think he was a couple of thousand years off. After the Romans destroyed the Temple and Jews scattered across Europe and the Middle East, that kind of sealed the deal that people living in the 20th century were probably all<\/em> Jews, at least by degree, if genetics counts for anything.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOr eugenics\u2014and Hitler sure thought it did,\u201d said Barranco.<\/p>\n Markevitch shook the paper, refreshing his memory. \u201cProjekt Gesichtskreis was conceived as a military base, but he admits here that he picked this place as his final redoubt instead of holing up in Fortress Bavaria when the Red Army breached the German front in January 1945. He said, and I quote: ‘there are too many Jews in Bavaria to hold out hope.’ He said the moon, by contrast, would be free of Jewish pollution, and at least he and his wife and dog\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDog and wife?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe. Maybe they could rest in peace.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAn Aryan tomb. Wonderful. And there you stand, a Jewish man and a grandson of a holocaust survivor. What are you going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n Markevitch let the scrap of paper in his hand flutter to the ground, and in the moon’s low gravity, it took a very long time. by Christian A. Larsen \u201cJesus, Barranco, do you see this?\u201d asked Markevitch, peering through the solar visor of his pressure suit and waving his thick gloves as if to hail the pilot. \u201cI’m looking at the charts right now,\u201d answered … Continue reading
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\nMarkevitch carried nothing but a dual-tanked oxyacetylene welder. He was glad he didn’t have the ability to talk to mission control. If anyone other than Barranco knew, cutting into a Nazi moon base would have felt a lot more like Geraldo Rivera opening Capone’s vault\u2014and he didn’t even expect to find so much as an empty bottle of moonshine. The Nazis had built the base, sure, but assuming they had manned it was something else entirely.<\/p>\n
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\nCHRISTIAN A. LARSEN<\/strong> grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked as a high school English teacher, a radio personality, a newspaper reporter, a musician and songwriter, and a printer’s devil. His short story \u201cBast\u201d appears in the anthology What Fears Become: An Anthology from The Horror Zine<\/em>, available this fall from Imajin Books. He lives with his wife and two sons in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Visit him online at exlibrislarsen.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"