Free Astronomy by Richard Wadholm

rising gorge by her sharpened breath? Susan lowered her shoulders. She made herself breathe slowly. Speak the spell, she told herself. Make the signs. Look at nothing beyond the web of light.
    She turned at the apex of an angle. An aperture of warmth opened ahead of her. The pressure in the darkness held her for just a moment, but she was unfamiliar stuff as yet, and therefore slippery as oil.
    She felt rough wooden flooring beneath her feet, and stumbled forward into a room filled with light . . .
    And music—a jazz band was playing Dixieland swing, loud enough to shake the picture of the Führer just over her head. She realized the music was coming through the walls. She was in some sort of alcove. The light overhead had been taken out, yet the room was bright as noon.
    She was surrounded by Angle Webs.
    She stepped out into a foyer. A hat-check girl looked askance at her daytime blouse and skirt but said nothing. A couple of men in black SS uniforms turned. One of them started to speak.
    A roar overhead took his attention away. Susan looked out through the front door to see the tail of a giant airship swing past.
    One of the men laughed and pointed. “Reichsmarshal Goering,” he said. “He must be here for the clock races.”
    “I heard he lost five thousand Reichsmarks in an hour the last time he flew in.”
    “What is that to him?” the other one laughed. “He’ll just print more.”
    Susan realized where she was. A neon cloud just outside the door puffed up its cheeks and blew out the words “Four Winds Bar.”
    But how had she found herself here?
    One moment she had been in the gutted remains of the Four Winds Bar on Münterstrasse. Now she was in the place that the Four Winds Bar might have been at the height of the Reich, or might have been someday, had things turned out differently.
    It didn’t help that the bar had just been darkened for the sake of the astronomers. The only lights left in the room other than an electric lantern at the bar were small red lamps like the ones Navy ships burn when they’re running convoy in the North Sea. Under the scattered pools of red light, people looked young and smooth-faced. Maybe a little flat of feature.
    The ceiling was covered in fluorescent insignias. A cartoon cloud puffed up its cheeks and blew a flock of five-pointed stars from one wall to the next. At each corner of the room, another cloud blew them back. Between the four winds, the stars managed to arrange themselves into a garish zodiac.
    Men leered at her and looked her up and down, yet no one spoke to her. One way or another, they were otherwise occupied.
    Outside in the biergarten , sad-eyed Luftwaffe officers argued over the precise moment things went wrong, the irreversible decision, the subtle turning in the road that no one saw.
    Their conversations verged between remorse and rage. They were the ones who sang the Stukalied with a catch in the throat. Susan figured them to be the most dangerous men in the bar; they made a big show of distancing themselves from Hitler, but Susan knew better. They were still tied into the martial romance of Blut und Boden . In their eyes, anything they did was forgivable.
    Brown-shirted astronomers passed back and forth between the telescopes in the west-facing windows and the star-filled reflector in the center of the room. The small telescopes were used as spotters. The giant cauldron of mercury was the main event, but she gathered from their talk that it had to be opened and spun up judiciously, for the sake of the other patrons. Mercury vapors, after all, are extremely toxic.
    Besides, opening the roof to the sky brought in the cold and made the girls cover themselves.
    Along the bar lounged the Reich’s dispossessed royalty—officers still wearing black uniforms three months after the war, millionaire princes of the Reichswerke in camel-hair coats with gold rings more ostentatious than their girlfriends’.
    These men showed a fascination for a peculiar