TO ENTER THE CLUB BUNKER in Berlin, you first crossed the courtyard of a bombed out apartment block, its pathways littered with broken glass, flowerbeds trampled and torn. Sunk in the sandy soil were a jumble of artefacts from the Battle of 1945: Haubitzen (howizters) jutting out at odd angles, T-34 tanks, and shattered bicycles; from the lightpoles hung plastic kamikaze planes. Some of the weapons were intact, including artillery shells which might possibly be still live; others were only skeletons or chassis, rods and cranks that spoke of the horror and brutality of war. You could imagine the awful violence which occurred here, as blockades manned by grandfathers and Hitler Youth made their last stand against the Red Army. Whether this was the "real" Bunker or not was kind of beside the point; all of Berlin was a cauldron at that time.

According to Mr Catheter's inkgifs, Bäbel's grandfather had started his career at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin, where he worked with the likes of Richard Goldschmidt and Erwin Baur. Following the collapse of the Weimar Republic, he was seduced by the Nazis and became a protege of Josef Mengele. The Angel of Death had always been fascinated by the potential of DNA and the genetic code, and hoped that by manipulating it, he could create soldiers with superhuman strength and endurance, or even create entirely new species to do the Führer's bidding. Stormgarten was transferred to Auschwitz where Mengele was running a top-secret project to develop the ultimate weapon for the Third Reich.

Naturally, the project was codenamed Operation Übermensch.

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WAITING IN THE QUEUE to enter the Bunker, Croon pondered Bäbel's chutzpah in selecting this place as the venue for their date. Germans were generally ashamed of their Nazi heritage and Bäbel was more progressive than most. He was also mystified as to why Stormgarten's name didn't come up in any search engine. If the dude was such a monster, why hadn't he been liquidated decades ago? Mossad was ruthless when it came to revenge. - a cemetary of mechanical corpses which looked as if they might all start working again at any moment - magnetos, monophase transformers, turbines, convertors, steam engines, dynamos. these were once airplane engines. --- as if the progeny of Reason and the Enlightenment had been condemned to stand guard over the ultimate symbol of Tyranny and Horror. --In fact, nothing about this case made any sense..

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The moon was up as far as the church steeples; large vapoury clouds raced across the sky between us and her, and a strong, gusty wind, laden with big raindrops snarled angrily round corners and sighed in the parapets like strange voices talking about things not of human interest, probably Martian or from the UnderWorlds of Iceland. The atmosphere was moody, to say the least.

Into the entrance, Euros were exchanged for flourescent stamps, the crowd pushed on, and Croon found himself being carried downward. Presently, upon that slope, Pavel spied a huddle of squatting people, and a rather strange looking individual in a shellsuit and parachute lecturing them on the ethics of gravity and the inherent properties of falling bodies. Pavel moved on -- or rather, was pushed by the stream of clubbers behind. On and on pulsed the mass of bodies, of all genders and persuasions, or all the possible perversions. Suddenly giddy with the darkness and the smell of someone's cologne or a passing Ethiopian joint, Pavel found himself tripping on a piece of broken stair. He rolled over and over recklessly sheer into the arms of the gaping crowd below, dropping into a perfect mound of writhing forms and waving legs and arms. When he was done stumbling and spinning the mass disentangled itself and he was able to raise his head from the shoulder of someone on whom he had fallen, lifting him, or her -- which was it? -- into a dancing posture. All around, people were writhing like wheat-stalks in a hurricane, and the breakbeats sounded like irregular machine gun bursts, and the air was full with the roar of industrial implements and horns and the frenzied cries of a thousand birds. All around him, people were whirling like dervishes, and even the vast chamber itself seemed to spinning, rotating about a mysterious space within.

<<DOWN DOWN>> a deep reptilian voice was intoning, as if the Devil Himself had stepped up into the MC's booth. <<This is the way we go down.>>

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WHICH WAY DO YOU WANT TO GO: SECTION CASSIUS CROON (c)opyright Ral Millennia 1996-2023.