The one unbroken eye remained in sunlight, filled with tears that could not escape the well of tortured flesh around it. A low gurgling noise sounded in his throat. Brunner closed his eyes and shot.
The body fell partially across the entrance, so that they were obliged to move it. "This one at least, we bury." The words resounded with the hollowness of hell. They pushed past the right-hand door, and went inside.
After a time of searching for light and the terminal, Brunner at last sat before the fingerboard and smallish screen, trying to summon forth what was wanted, praying to the point of distraction for his wife, and for himself. He had asked the nurse to be alone for a time and she consented, was off looking elsewhere for any hard-copy documents that might be useful.
The man knew enough about computers to read the instruction codes and key out the information wanted, but the terminal kept fighting him. Several times he had entered, OCCUPATIONAL RECORDS OF RELOCATED PERSONNEL, sub-heading, DEMOCRATIC GERMAN, NON-MILITARY. But each time he did so the screen would read 'Pending', then flash one line at a time, at a reading pace, a dialogue from the Nuremburg Trials of 1945-46, and lock up at any attempt to clear it. He tried to bypass, used different keywords, but always the result was the same: he got the dialogues, or nothing at all. Close to frenzy he threw off the chair and paced wildly back and forth.
"I know all about the Holocaust and the Nuremburg trials! They have been required reading at the Academy for two hundred years!" He gradually calmed himself, if such words may be used, realizing there was nothing else for it. He set right the chair and keyed in the initial combination, only wishing that he could strap himself in place, denied all movement and all choice. The screen began again its silent dissertation, waiting after each six lines for him to verbally acknowledge.
Olaf Brunner read the following, trying to suppress the gasoline in his veins, the endless ache of his affliction, and the unnatural swelling of the diaphragm that made it difficult to remain still and digest the excrement before him.
COL. AMEN: You speak English pretty well.
VON RIBBENTROP: I spoke it well in the past and I think I speak it passably well today.
Col. Amen: Almost as well as you speak German?
VON RIBBENTROP: No, I would not say that, but in the past I spoke it nearly as well as German, although I have naturally forgotten a great deal in the course of the years and now it is more difficult for me.