Schwinzog's smile was not good to see. "Of course there is nothing there," he nodded satisfiedly. "Lieutenant Kramer, arrest these men. They are American saboteurs, and will be tried as such tomorrow by the Volksgericht."
"We," Eddie Dugan summed up the situation, "are up the creek without a paddle."
"And we don't know where the creek is," added Manning. "Only that this is 2051, and the Nazis evidently either won the war or staged a comeback somehow after losing. Neither idea seems possible, but here we are. Item, America is still fighting Nazism—at least, there are 'American saboteurs.' Item two, we landed smack in the middle of a wasp nest stirred up by those same saboteurs. They must have scored a success; did you see that building in the woods beyond that field?"
"What building?"
"I noticed it just as they were loading us into their armored paddy wagon. It had been a big place—already fallen in; the fire must have started there. And the boys that started it must have been the ones that German captain was talking about—the ones that wore Caps of Darkness and flew off in an invisible helicopter."
"I'm getting a headache," groaned Dugan.
"I'd like to meet them," said Manning thoughtfully.
They could not see each other, but they could talk between the adjoining cells. Kahl was in the cell on the other side of Manning's; he had raved most of the night at the guards and the equally responsive steel walls. The two Americans had slept long and refreshingly; they had long since learned to sleep under any and all conditions. There were no windows to show daylight, but they must have been there most of twenty-four hours.
They hadn't seen much of the world of the future, thought Manning ruefully; only the glimpse of a street filled with shiny silent automobiles and oddly garbed pedestrians, as they had been hustled from a rolling dungeon to a stationary one. But if the town was Freiburg, it had changed a lot since they had last seen it—a skeletonous waste of ruin, with nothing left standing that the American bombers had wanted to flatten.
"We shouldn't of let that Kahl talk so much," resumed Dugan gloomily.