Two Fronts by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

always would be a losing fight. The only way to do the trick would be to melt the submarine down to raw steel and start over. Even then, cleanliness would last only until the first clumsy sailor spilled something into the bilges.
    In due course, Gerhart Beilharz emerged from the smelly steel tube. “I relieve you, Skipper,” the engineering officer said. He smiled broadly as he inhaled. “My turn to breathe the good stuff for a while.”
    “Well, so it is. Enjoy it,” Lemp said. “You get to take off your Stahlhelm , too.”
    Beilharz’s grin got wider yet. “I sure do!” He was two meters tall. He didn’t fit well into a U-boat’s cramped confines. Men shorter than he was banged their noggins on overhead pipes and valves and spigots.
    With a sigh, Julius Lemp descended. It was twilight outside, and twilight in the pressure hull as well. The bulbs in here were dim and orange, to help keep light from leaking out when the hatches were open at night. And the smell was … what it was. It didn’t make Lemp’s stomach want to turn over, the way it did with some men.
    “Beast behaving, Paul?” he asked the helmsman.
    “No worries, Skipper,” the senior rating said.
    “Good. That’s what I want to hear,” Lemp said. If Paul wasn’t worried, there was nothing to worry about.
    Lemp’s tiny cabin held—barely—a desk, a steel chair, a cot, and the safe where he stashed codebooks and other secure publications. That made it far and away the roomiest accommodation on the boat. With the canvas curtain pulled shut, he had as much privacy as anyone here could: which is to say, not a great deal.
    He filled his fountain pen and wrote in the log. His script was small, even cramped, and very precise. There wasn’t a lot to record: course, speed, fuel consumed. No ships or airplanes sighted, either from his own side or the enemy. No disciplinary problems among his men, either, nor had there been since the patrol began. The crew weren’t rowdies while on the job, and they weren’t especially rowdy in any port even halfway equipped to show off-duty sailors a good time.
    Would any of that matter to his superiors? The U-30’s sailors had torn Narvik to pieces twice now. Things wouldn’t go well for them if they tried it a third time. And they were liable to, as Lemp knew full well.
    He could listen to what went on in the boat without drawing notice to himself: another advantage of the curtain. Even when he couldn’t make out conversations, he could pick up tone. Everything sounded the way it should. If the men were plotting anything, they were doing it out of his earshot—and there weren’t many places out of his earshot in the U-boat.
    After Lieutenant Beilharz came off his watch, he paused outside the tiny cabin and said, “Talk to you for a minute or two, Skipper?”
    “Sure. Come on in,” Lemp answered.
    Beilharz did, ducking under the curtain rod. He had the Stahlhelm on again. Lemp waved for him to sit down on the cot. Had something gone wrong with the Schnorkel ? They were surfaced in the gloom, so they didn’t need the gadget now. But when Beilharz spoke in a low voice, what he said had nothing to do with his specialty: “Sir, what do we do when the politics start boiling over again?”
    That wasn’t what Lemp wanted to hear, even if it was a damn good question. Plenty of high-ranking officers couldn’t be happy to watch the Reich pulled into a full-scale war on two fronts. Some of them had already tried more than once to overthrow the Führer . The ones who had were mostly dead now, which might not stop their successors from taking another shot at it.
    “Best thing we can do,” Lemp said slowly, “is hope we’re out on patrol when the boiling starts.”
    “ Ja ,” Beilharz agreed. “But if we’re not?”
    Now Lemp spoke as firmly as he could: “I’m not going to borrow trouble. I’m going to do my job for the Reich . You do the same. Now get the hell out of here.”
    Gerhart Beilharz got.