Not so, however, to Lies Incorporated — an ironic sobriquet, in view of the absolutely verified nature of the data now before its owner.
It was harsh reading. Even for him.
The year of Horst Bertold's birth: 1964. Slightly before the Space Age had begun; like Matson Glazer-Holliday, Horst was a remnant of the old world when all that had been glimpsed in the sky were "flying saucers," a misnomer for a U.S. Air Force antimissile weapon which had, in the brief confrontation of 1992, proved ineffectual. Horst had been born to middle-class Berlin — West Berlin, it had then been called, because, and this was difficult to remember, Germany had in those days been divided — parents: his father had owned a meat market... rather fitting, Matson reflected, in that Horst's father had been an S.S. officer and former member of an Einsatzgruppe which had murdered thousands of innocent persons of Slavic and Jewish ancestry... although this had not interfered with Johann Bertold's meat market business in the 1960s and '70s. And then, in 1982, at the age of eighteen, young Horst himself had entered the spotlight (needless to say, the statute of limitations had run out on his father, who had never been prosecuted by the West German legal apparatus for his crimes of the '40s, and had, in addition, evaded the commando squads from Israel who, by 1980, had closed up shop, given up the task of tracking down the former mass murderers). Horst, in 1982, had been a leader in the Reinholt Jugend.
Ernst Reinholt, from Hamburg, had headed a party which had striven to unify Germany once more; the deal would be that as a military and economic power she would be neutral between East and West. It had taken ten more years, but in the fracas of 1992 he had obtained from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. what he wanted: a united, free Germany, called by its present name, and just chuck full of vim and Macht.