Free In the Presence of Mine Enemies by Harry Turtledove

stood up, feeling foolish. As he hurried to get off the bus, he noted that Willi sounded much more like his usual self. And why? Because I’m acting like an idiot. I’ve never heard of the power of positive stupidity, but this must be it .
    The guards at the front of the building saw the two of them five mornings a week. Nonetheless, they held out their hands for identity cards. They not only matched photos, they also fed the cards, one after the other, into a machine reader. Only after a light on it glowed green twice in a row did they stand aside.
    â€œNice to know I’m me,” Willi said, sticking his card into his wallet again. He pointed at Heinrich. “Or maybe I’m you today, and you’re me. The machine didn’t say anything about that.” He laughed.
    So did Heinrich, relieved to see Willi acting like his usual silly self. But one of the guards scowled suspiciously at Willi. The other eyed the card reader, as if wondering if it could change a man’s true identity. Sometimes Heinrich worried about the younger generation’s brains, if any. But he knew people had been doing that since the days of the Pyramids, so he kept quiet about it.
    â€œPass on!” the second guard barked, still sending the machine a fishy stare.
    Once inside the building with Willi, Heinrich said, “He’s not going to trust that gadget for the next week. You’re a subversive, you know.”
    Willi drew himself up in mingled alarm and hauteur. “That’s a fine thing to call me in this place.” But he was joking again, and kept right on doing it: “Did you lay down the trail of bread crumbs last night? No? How the devil are we going to find the way to our desks, then?”
    Oberkommando der Wehrmacht was something of a maze, but not so bad as Willi made it out to be. Old-timers who remembered how things were before central Berlin got rebuilt said the old headquarters building really had been a nightmare to navigate. This one was just big, with lots of corridors and lots of rooms along each one. Even strangers—strangers with security clearances—found their way without too much trouble. Heinrich and Willi were in their places in a couple of minutes.
    As soon as Heinrich sat down, he turned on his computer and entered the password that gave him access to his files. He tapped the keyboard and looked over his shoulder at Willi, saying, “These things are the biggest change since I came to work here. Used to be only a few specialists had them. Now they’re everywhere, like toadstools after a rain.”
    â€œThey’re handy, all right.” Willi had his computer up and running, too. “Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge, though, us or the machines.”
    â€œI have a friend”—Heinrich didn’t name Walther Stutzman—“who says they could all be connected into one giant linked system.”
    â€œThere’s a hell of a difference between ‘could’ and ‘will,’” Willi said. “I don’t believe it’ll happen, not in a million years. Can you imagine the security nightmare with that kind of system? Anybody could put anything on it. Anybody could find anything on it. The Party’s got too much sense to let that sort of nonsense get started. You couldn’t stop it once it did; it’d be like unscrambling an egg.”
    â€œYou’re right,” Heinrich said. “It only stands to reason.” He knew he had more book smarts than Willi. But his friend was plenty shrewd, and understood the way the world—especially the part through which he moved—worked.
    â€œYou bet I’m right,” Willi said now. “Once security starts to slip, everything’s in trouble.”
    â€œJa,” Heinrich said absently. He was busy typing in another password, the one that gave him access to the Wehrmacht ’s information links. Thanks to Walther, he knew a lot more passwords