"Hey! Why'd you do that?"
"Because," said Ferris D'Orr proudly, "it's my historic duty. I am a Jew."
Ilsa made a face. "Oooh, too bad. We were going to let you live."
Konrad Blutsturz was beside himself. He raged. He flopped on the operating table. The doctors, frightened, tried to hold him down. It was a critical moment. "Herr Fuhrer, restrain yourself," the head surgeon pleaded. "If this is true, there is nothing we can do."
"He went bananas." Ilsa moaned, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I didn't know he was going to do anything crazy. How was I to know?"
"I must walk. I must."
"We may be able to proceed," the head surgeon said. Behind him, on a series of cork panels, the blueprints for the new Konrad Blutsturz were pinned up with thumbtacks. "We cannot stop. We have gone too far. We must proceed."
"And I must walk," said Konrad Blutsturz.
"We are taking stock of the unfinished components, Herr Fuhrer," the head surgeon said. "If necessary, we will build the incomplete portions of the mechanisms from aluminum or steel. Most of the critical titanium parts have been formed."
"The legs?" demanded Konrad Blutsturz. "They are being assembled now."
"Are they complete?"
"Nearly. Let me finish attaching the arm."
"Finish it, and bring that man to me."
"What man?"
"The traitor, D'Orr."
"Gotcha," said Ilsa.
The doctors had opened up the stump that was Konrad Blutsturz' left arm and inserted a titanium coupling into the bone marrow, as they had done with both leg stumps. The old steel hand lay in a corner. In its place they were attaching the bluish jointed arm that ended in a fully articulated hand. It possessed four fingers and that ultimate symbol of humanity, an opposable thumb. "No pain?" asked the doctor.
"This is a moment of rebirth," said Konrad Blutsturz. "The pain of birth is the pain of life. It is to be savored, not endured."
"I could put you under, if the local anesthetic is not enough."
"Only to stand erect will ease the pain. Only to take the throat of the man who put me in this position will be enough."
Ilsa brought in Ferris D'Orr at gunpoint.
Konrad Blutsturz had only one question: "Why?"
"I am the son of a Jew."
"And for that you would cheat me of my dream? Fool. I meant you no harm."
"Your kind has seared the conscience of the world."
"Fool! We Nazis did not hate the Jews, or anyone else. It was a political hatred. It was not real, not true. The Jews were just a focusing point, a scapegoat to rouse Germany out of the hell of inflation and defeat after the First World War. Had the Reich triumphed, we would have abolished the death camps. There would have been no need for them. We would have pardoned the Jews."
"And who would have pardoned you?" asked Ferris D'Orr.
"So you have placed yourself in this jeopardy because you wish to avoid a repetition of your holocaust. Correct?"
"Yes."
"Ilsa, make him kneel. On my left side, please."
Ilsa forced Ferris D'Orr to his knees and pulled back his hair until his eyes were stretched open.
Ferris D'Orr stared at the blue metal arm lying next to him. Parts of it he recognized; he had molded them. "The first years were the worst," intoned Konrad Blutsturz, his words as distantly angry as far thunder. "I could not move. I was in an iron coffin staring at the ceiling. I wanted to die, but they would not let me die. Later, I would not let myself die. I would not die because I wanted to kill."
The titanium hand clicked into a fist. Then it opened. It moved soundlessly, with a near-human animation that was as repulsively fascinating as watching a spider eat.
"I dreamed of this moment, Harold Smith." Konrad Blutsturz spoke to the ceiling. The operating lights blazed down upon his unformed body.
"Ilsa, place Smith's neck in my new hand. I wish to feel its strength."
"Smith?" Ilsa asked blankly.
"Our prisoner."
"Oh." Ilsa obediently pushed Ferris D'Orr's head down onto the operating table.
The blue robot hand clenched Ferris' neck, digging in. Ferris D'Orr clutched at the edge of the steel operating table. He pushed against it. But his body would not move. The hand held his neck, his spine, his life. There was no escape. His breath caught and came hard.
"Did you think you could escape me, Harold Smith? No? Yes, you thought I was dead."
Ferris D'Orr choked, his face purpling.
"I was not dead. I was in hell, but I was not dead. I lived only to hold your neck in my one strong hand, Harold Smith," said Konrad Blutsturz, not looking at the struggling man in his hand, but at the ceiling, as he did in the early days when he could not move, lying in the iron lung.
Ferris D'Orr clawed at the unyielding stainless-steel table, and when that did no good, he clawed at the arm that acted with smooth, unfeeling life-the arm of titanium that he had helped to make. He clawed the way they had clawed the walls in the death camps, after the doors were shut and the gas was pumped in through the shower nozzles.
The others looked away. Except Ilsa. She bent down to get a better look at Ferris' blood-gorged face.
"Do their tongues always stick out like this?" she asked.
"Do you feel fear. Harold Smith?" Konrad Blutsturz' voice ground lower. "Anger? Remorse?"
But Ferris D'Orr did not feel anything. There was a sudden taste in his throat that he thought must be blood, but oddly, it tasted like lemon Coke. Then he was dead.
"I think you can let go now," Ilsa said.
The body of Ferris D'Orr slipped to the antiseptic floor in a heap of inert flesh.