philip_k_dick_-_the_man_in_the_high_castle

I have my routine duties, he decided. I don't have time for any of these harebrained adventures,
this sending of Einsatzkommandos after Abendsen. My hands are full greeting German sailors and
answering coded radiograms; let someone higher up initiate a project of that sort — it's their
business.
Anyhow, he decided, if I instigated it and it backfired, one can imagine where I'd be: in
Protective Custody in Eastern General Gouvernement, if not in a chamber being squirted with
Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas.
Reaching out, he carefully scratched the notation on his pad out of existence, then burned the
paper itself in the ceramic ashtray.
There was a knock, and his office door opened. His secretary entered with a large handful of
papers. 'Doctor Goebbels' speech. In its entirety.' Pferdehuf put the sheets down on the desk. 'You
must read it. Quite good; one of his best.'
Lighting another Simon Arzt Number 70 cigarette, Reiss began to read Doctor Goebbels' speech.
9
After two weeks of nearly constant work, Edfrank Custom Jewelry had produced its first finished
batch. There the pieces lay, on two boards covered with black velvet, all of which went into a
square wicker basket of Japanese origin. And Ed McCarthy and Frank Frink had made business
cards. They had used an artgun eraser carved out to form their name; they printed in red from this,
and then completed the cards with a children's toy rotary printing set. The effect — they had used a
high-quality Christmas-card colored heavy paper — was striking.
In every aspect of their work they had been professional. Surveying their jewelry, cards, and
display, they could see no indication of the amateur. Why should there be? Frank Frink thought.
We're both pros; not in jewelry making, but in shopwork in general.
The display boards held a good variety. Cuff bracelets made of brass, copper, bronze, and even
hot-forged black iron. Pendants, mostly of brass, with a little silver ornamentation. Earrings of
silver. Pins of silver or brass. The silver had cost them a good deal; even silver solder had set them
back. They had bought a few semiprecious stones, too, for mounting in the pins: baroque pearls,
spinneis, jade, slivers of fire opal. And, if things went well, they would try gold and possibly fiveor
six-point diamonds.
It was gold that would make them a real profit. They had already begun searching into sources of
scrap gold, melted-down antique pieces of no artistic value — much cheaper to buy than new gold.
But even so, an enormous expense was involved. And yet, one gold pin sold would bring more than
forty brass pins. They could get almost any price on the retail market for a really well-designed and
executed gold pin . . . assuming, as Frink had pointed out, that their stuff went over at all.
At this point they had not yet tried to sell. They had solved what seemed to be their basic
technical problems; they had their bench with motors, flex-cable machine, arbor of grinding and
polishing wheels. They had in fact a complete range of finishing tools, ranging from the coarse wire
brushes through brass brushes and Cratex wheels, to finer polishing buffs of cotton, linen, leather,
chamois, which could be coated with compounds ranging from emery and pumice to the most
delicate rouges. And of course they had their oxyacetylene welding outfit, their tanks, guages,
hoses, tips, masks.
And superb jewelers' tools. Pliers from Germany and France, micrometers, diamond drills, saws,
tongs, tweezers, third-hand structures for soldering, vises, polishing cloths, shears, hand-forged tiny