The mood in Berlin that spring was jubilant. The army was driving toward Rostov and trying for Stalingrad. Sevastopol was about to fall to Germany. The use of the tote Männer could only be necessary as a last resort. A doomsday scenario. The Reich would never need it.
Personally, I felt the same. Still, I had no wish to help in canceling the project unless I could find better work. So I met with the Daimler-Benz mechanical engineers and utilized the I. G. Farben labs. I had brought with me a pair of tote Männer for testing purposes.
Not being a mechanical engineer, the problem of deployment was more difficult than I had initially imagined. Tote Männer were a curious mixture of toughness and fragility. You could shoot a toter Mann until he was merely chopped meat and he might continue to advance. Blowing apart his brain would kill the worms and stop him. But the tote Männer were so resilient and resistant to anoxia that they could still advance with their hearts shattered and their sluggish black blood pooled beneath their feet.
However, their flesh was soft enough and loosely enough attached to their bones that heavy acceleration, such as dropping them with parachutes, would cause them to come apart. Clearly, they had to be preserved long enough to reach their target.
The Daimler-Benz engineers were the best. On a chalk board, they drew up several ways of conveying them to enemy lines. The simplest idea was a cushioned cage dropped with a parachute. An impact charge would blow the doors off the cage and the tote Männer would be free. The engineers didn't like the idea. They said it lacked elegance and style.
I pointed out the tote Männer could tolerate significant time without ambient oxygen, operating as they did largely on a lactic acid metabolism. They tossed the cage idea with abandon and attacked the problem again, coming up with a sphere containing carefully restrained tote Männer. A compressed-air charge would open the doors and break loose the restraints. This had the advantage of being quiet.
I only donated a little knowledge here and there as needed, letting their minds fly unfettered. It is a grand thing to watch engineers create works of imagination with only the germ of a requirement, a bit of chalk, and some board to write on. When they found I had brought a couple of tote Männer for experiments, they were overjoyed. I tried to explain the danger but they did not listen until one of their own number, Hans Braun, was bitten. He and his friends laughed but stilled when I came over. Wearing surgical gloves and a mask I carefully examined the wound but I already knew what I would find.
"You are an idiot,” I said as I sat back.
"It is a small bite—"
"It is a fatal wound.” I gave him a pack of cigarettes. “You have been killed by that thing out there."
"But—"
"Shut up.” I couldn't look at him: tall, healthy, brown hair and a face in the habit of smiling. “You have been infected. By tomorrow, you will feel wonderful. You will want to kiss and fondle your friends out of love for them. Then, after a few days, you will—still enormously happy—feel an overpowering urge to sleep. Sleep will turn to coma. Then, after three days, you will be one of those things out there."
His hands trembled. “I didn't realize—"
"No."
Hans steadied himself. “There is no hope?"
"None."
He nodded and for a moment he stood straighter. Stronger. I was proud of him.
"Do you have a gun?"
"I do. Is there a furnace where we can dispose of the body?"
He nodded, shakily. “Will you accompany me?"
"I would be honored.” And I was.
After the funeral, realizing the power and speed of the tote Männer and the infection they harbored, the Daimler-Benz engineers were more careful.
In a couple of weeks, my part was done and I took the train to Krakow to have a long weekend reunion with my Elsa and Helmut. The following Monday, I drove to Birkenau to address the problem of tote Männer production.
* * * *
Elsa had mixed feelings about the rental. While she liked the apartment itself and the proximity of Park Jordana, she found the leftover debris and detritus disturbing. These were obviously Jewish artifacts and Elsa's excitement might have come from a mixture of womanly wariness of another female's territory combined with an aversion to having anything Jewish in the house. I assured her that the original owners would not be returning and she relaxed somewhat.
Helmut had no reservations about his new environment. Finding small objects of indeterminate origin covered with unfamiliar characters fastened in unexpected places gave mystery to the place. No doubt he observed I was more inclined to answer questions about this or that artifact than I was about the American bombers or air raid drills or what Father did at work. I protected my family as best I could from such things.
For the next several months we were collecting the breath and sweat of subjects into vials, injecting the vial contents into the mass spectrometer, and determining what was there. Then we concentrated the effluvia and tried it on the tote Männer themselves. Immediately, we found that the tote Männer were not attracted to merely any object smeared with the test substances, only when those attractants were applied to a possible host. Weber thought this quite exciting. It suggested that the tote Männer had a means of detecting a host other than smell.
In October of 1942, we hit on a combination of aldehydes and ketones the tote Männer found especially attractive. I synthesized it in the growing chemistry laboratory we had been using and applied it to a collection of test subjects. Control subjects who had no application of the test attractant were also present in the experiment and were ignored until the test subjects had been thoroughly mauled. At that point, the controls were attacked. We made careful note of this as it would strongly influence how troops would recover an infected area after the enemy succumbed.
We had proved our attractant in place by the end of October of 1942. But the war appeared to us to be going so well, our little military experiment would never be needed. We would win the Battle of Stalingrad in a month and concentrate on the western front.
That changed in November.
* * * *
The Battle of Stalingrad evolved into what I had feared: a siege over a Russian winter. The Red Army began their counteroffensive along with the winter. Like Napoleon, the German army was stuck.
The Germans lost ground in other places. Willem suggested if I could hurry up the program, I should.
We were in part saved by problems encountered by the Daimler-Benz engineering team. Developing a deployment methodology had been proved harder than the engineers had foreseen. They had broken the problem into three parts. The first, and most easily solved, was how to restrain and cushion the tote Männer until they could be released. The remaining two issues revolved around deploying on an advance and deploying on a retreat. In both cases, they resolved into two kinds of scenarios: how to deploy the first time and how to deploy after the first time. If secrecy was kept (and Willem assured us the enemy did not know what we were working on), then the first deployment would be relatively easy. Deploying on a retreat could be as simple as leaving sealed containers transported by trucks to the target zone to be opened pyrotechnically by remote control. Similar containers, with additional cushioning, could be released by parachute.
But once the secret was out and the Allies were looking for tote Männer delivery devices, we would need a means to overcome their resistance. This had stalled the Daimler-Benz engineers. I saw presentations of stealth night drops, blitzkrieg raids with tanks carrying large transport carts—one enterprising young man demonstrated a quarter-scale model trebuchet that could catapult a scale model container holding six tote Männer as much as three kilometers behind enemy lines. Not to be outdone, his work partner showed how bracing a toter Mann could enable it to be fired from cannon like a circus performer.
These issues so dwarfed our own minor problems that we were given, for the moment, no close scrutiny and I had the opportunity to address shortcomings in our own production.
* * * *
In February 1943, Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad. Willem warned us that we would have to expect to send tote Männer against Russian troops before long. I argued against it. It would be foolish to waste surprise in an attack that could not work. At least, it would not work until summer.
I went home and spent a week with Elsa and Helmut. Each morning I sat down and drew up production schedules, scrapped them, smoked cigarettes, and tried again. In the afternoon, I played with my son. It was cold in Krakow and with the war not going very well, heating fuel was hard to come by. I was able to requisition what we needed due to my position but even I couldn't get coal for the theater or the restaurants. Often, we spent intimate evenings together with just ourselves for company. I didn't mind. Elsa and Helmut were company enough.
All that spring Willem told us of defeat after defeat—I don't think we were supposed to know what he told us. I think we served as people in whom he could confide as his world crumbled. Germany retreated in Africa. The Warsaw uprising. The Russian advance.
I buried myself in my work. I resolved that if there were to be a failure in the program, it would not be where I had control. Production was, in my opinion, our weak point. Weber's approach to creating tote Männer was haphazard and labor intensive. I wanted something more robust and reliable. Something more industrial.
I came to the conclusion that our production schedule had to revolve around the progression of the disease. For three days there was a strong euphoria. Often, the new hosts tried to kiss anyone who came near them, presaging the biting activity of the fully infected toter Mann. Sometime on the third day, the host fell into a sleep that progressed rapidly into coma. Breathing decreased to almost nothing. The heartbeat reduced to a slow fraction of the uninfected. Body temperature dropped to nearly ambient though the infected were able to keep some warmth above room temperature.
The coma period lasted as long as five days, though we saw it end as soon as three. Arousal was sudden, so often precipitated by a nearby possible victim that I came to the conclusion that after three days, the toter Mann was ready to strike and merely waiting for the opportunity.
After that, a toter Mann was mobile for as much as ten weeks, though during the last weeks of infection the toter Mann showed significant deterioration.
Therefore, we required an incubation period of six days, minimum. Effectiveness could not be counted upon after eight weeks. This gave us a target window. If we wanted, for example, to deploy on June first we had to have infected our tote Männer no later than May twenty-fifth. This was the time domain of our military supply chain.
The first order of business was to synchronize the incubation period. I performed a series of experiments that showed that, as I suspected, once the coma period had been entered the toter Mann was ready to be used. However, there was unacceptable variation in the time between exposure and coma. We couldn't reliably produce tote Männer in six days.
The new Chief Medical Officer, Mengele, delivered the necessary insight. Zyklon B was the answer. Though the standard Zyklon B dose would kill the subject quickly, a reduced dose weakened the subject sufficiently to allow infection almost instantly. Commander Hoess was able to supply me with enough experimental data that I could proceed with my own tests. We introduced the gas, waited for ten minutes, then sprayed the subjects with an infecting agent. The remaining three days were sufficient for subjects to recover from the gas just in time to provide healthy hosts for the organisms. This method had the added bonus that the same production chambers could serve two purposes.
By November, when the march up Italy by the Allies had begun and Germany seemed to be losing on all fronts, we could incubate as many as a thousand at a time, six days after exposure. The trains supplying the rest of the camp came in full and left empty so by using the empty trains for transport, we could send tote Männer anywhere in Germany or Poland. Delivery to the deployment launch point would have to be by truck. We were ready. Now, it was up to the Daimler-Benz engineers to deliver our tote Männer the last kilometer to the enemy.
* * * *
Christmas 1943 was uneventful. Weber and I worked on various refinements to an already prepared system without damaging it too badly. My teachers back in Berlin had taught me the idea of schlimbesserung: an improvement that makes things worse. At that point, the natural tendency of idle minds and hands to improve a working system into uselessness was our only real enemy.
Given that, we resolutely turned our attention away from the weapons system we had devised to a different problem we had discussed a year before: why deliver tote Männer at all? The worm and virus were perfectly able to create tote Männer for us. Why did we have to supply the raw material?
Delivering a disease substance was perilously close to delivering a poison gas—something forbidden us from the previous war. However, we had already made some excursions into the territory with the production and delivery of tote Männer attractant—a colloid I had developed that would evaporate into the proper aldehyde and ketone mix the tote Männer found so irresistible. We had also attempted to deliver an infecting gas along with the Zyklon B but the attempt had failed. The worm succumbed to the Zyklon B before the subjects.
Creating an inhalant that carried both the worm and virus proved to be an interesting problem. The virus was stable when dry and the worm could be induced to encyst itself. However, it took time for the worm to decyst and by the time it did, the subject was fully infected with an undirected virus. Rabid humans made a poor host.
We went back to the colloid I devised for the attractant. Colloids are neither liquid nor solid but partake of the traits of both. Gelatin is a colloid. By adding nutrients to the colloid so that the worm could stay alive and not encyst, the virus could be delivered along with the worm when both were at their most infective stage. It was interesting work for a couple of months. Weber was quite elated with it. He called it the Todesluft.
* * * *
In May of 1944, Willem paid us another visit. This time, he took both Weber and myself aside and spoke to us privately.
"It is clear the Allies are preparing a counterinvasion. The likely location is somewhere across from England on the coast of France.” He held the cigarette to his lips thoughtfully.
"We're ready,” I said boldly. “We've been ready for months. What do the Daimler-Benz engineers say?"
Willem breathed out smoke. “They have made several methods available to us. Since this is to be the first deployment, we have chosen the retreat scenario. We will place the tote Männer in a bunker in the path of the Allies and detonate it when they come."
"Are we expecting to be overrun?"
Willem shook his head. “Of course not. The tote Männer are a backup plan only. We will deploy them behind our own lines and only release them if we are forced past them. If the front line holds, we will not release them at all."
I nodded. “How many?"
"We estimate six thousand."
I thought quickly. “It takes six days for each group. Six thousand will take us thirty-six days."
Willem smiled at me. “Did you know of the expansions of Birkenau commissioned early last year?"
"Of course,” said Weber. “They were a dreadful nuisance."
"They are about to pay for themselves,” retorted Willem. “I developed Max's original plans for Birkenau beyond his conception. The new facilities can serve as incubator."
"How many?"
"At least forty thousand at once. Six thousand should not be a problem.” He pulled from his briefcase a set of plans.
I looked them over. I was impressed with the innovations I saw. “This is better than I had hoped."
"I'm glad you are pleased. When can the first squad be ready?"
I looked over the plans again and did some figuring on a piece of paper. “May 12, if Daimler-Benz can provide the bunkers and the transportation."
"I've been assured this will not be a problem."
"Then we will
be ready to deploy."
Willem pulled a map from his briefcase. “Our sources say we will be struck here.” He pointed to the map. “Pas de Calais. That is where our defenses are located and just three kilometers behind them, our tote Männer. The Allies will not know what hit them."
This was by far the largest group of tote Männer we had ever attempted to create. Weber took a fatherly approach to them. When the hosts entered the euphoric stage and called to him with affection, he responded, calling them his “children” and other endearments. I found this unnerving. When the tote Männer were finally ready and installed into their transportation containers I was glad to see them go. Weber watched them leave with a tear in his eye. I went home to my wife and son.
* * * *
But, of course, the Allies did not strike at Pas de Calais but at Normandy, over three hundred kilometers to the southwest. The tote Männer were in their bunkers. The Daimler-Benz engineers had packed them like munitions. There was no way to extract them without releasing them.
It was terrible timing. All of the available tote Männer were in Calais and the next squad would not be ready for deployment until June 9: three days!
Willem conferred with his staff and said that if we could drop enough bunkers in the Cerisy Forest and fill them with tote Männer, we would let the Allies overrun the forest and open the bunker.
At this point the new squad was just entering the coma stage. We'd found the tote Männer were vulnerable to jostling during this period and had always transported them toward the end of the coma. But desperate times require desperate measures. Willem and I led the crew that took the newly comatose tote Männer, eight thousand strong, and trucked them to the forest. Meanwhile, three large prefabricated bunkers were erected on the sites. I barely had time to phone Elsa to say I would not be home that night. Weber, affectionate to the tote Männer as before, elected to stay and incubate the next squad. I was just as glad not to have him along.
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