by Неизвестный
She gasped, and the pain exploded through her chest. The damned screwdriver. She tried to breathe but couldn’t get more than a sip of air. She tasted blood. I’m drowning, she thought. I was supposed to drown when the plane came down, and now it’s caught up to me.
She stared up at the sky. It pressed down on her like the ocean. The last days were all a dream, she thought. I’m dead.
Off to her left, Noonan wandered through her campsite. Goddamned tears ran down her face and into her ears for the second time in as many days. Damn it. Failed.
Not yet, Meeley. Look.
Her mother’s voice. And for once, Amelia obeyed. Even though her head felt light, a circus balloon pulling at its string, it took most of her strength to turn it toward Noonan.
He faced her from the far side of the roaring campfire, cheery flames flick-ering on his chest and shoulders. Damn it, she thought. What are you waiting for?
Then it came to her. She hadn’t made a sound since she fell. He couldn’t find her.
“Fred,” she said, but it was barely more than a whisper. She tried to force more air into her lungs, but it hurt too much. She tried to move her cold, numb arms. They didn’t respond. Already dead.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.
She closed her eyes. That was it. She could only hope Noonan rotted away before anyone came to this god-forsaken rock.
Hope.
She thought of G.P. “You are the thing with feathers.” She used to think he’d been calling her a bird.
She gritted her teeth and breathed in. With every ounce of strength left to her she reared up, then dropped back down, driving the screwdriver deeper into her back.
A ragged, groaning, scream hurtled at the sky. Noonan jerked toward her. His feet stumbled over the burning logs of the fire. He fell to his knees. The fire hit his bourbon-soaked clothes. He didn’t scream. He didn’t thrash. But he burned.
Amelia hiccuped. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth. Her pain faded. It was done.
Birds flew over, their silent vigil over. When the search plane didn’t see her, she’d compared the sky to a giant bowl trapping her here. But now she saw it wasn’t a bowl. It was endless. And she was ready.
The Crocodiles
Steven Popkes
I could not make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. But I went over the data again to see if I could find a tiny tatter of bright thread in the otherwise disappointing results. There had to be a better use of a well-educated chemical engineer than cannon fodder. Willem, my wife’s uncle, called me.
“Max,” he said, a happy disembodied voice over the phone. “Very sorry about your work and all that. How was it going?”
It didn’t surprise me he already knew. “We didn’t get the results we’d hoped for,” I said. “But there are other areas in the war effort where fuel filtration research would be entirely applicable. Aircraft engines, for instance—”
“No doubt,” he said, chuckling. “However, by an astonishing coincidence I was planning to call you anyway. I have a good use for your skills.”
“Oh, really?” I said with a sinking feeling. I had no desire to work for the Gestapo. Uncomfortable work at the very least.
“Yes. There’s a Doctor Otto Weber doing some very interesting biological work in Buchenwald. He can use your help.”
“What sort of work?”
“I’m sure I’d be the wrong person to discuss it with you, not being a scientist or an engineer. I’ll work out the details of the transfer and send round the papers and tickets.”
“I really ought to find out how I can be of service—”
“There’s always the regular army. I’m sure a man of your caliber—”
“I’ll be looking for your messenger.”
“Fine. Oh, and Max?”
“Yes?”
“Weekly reports. On everything and everybody. All right?”
“Of course,” I said.
You don’t argue with the Gestapo. Even my Elsa’s uncle.
Otto Weber was a thin, elderly gentleman. Once he had been quite tall. He was now stooped with age. His eyes were washed out and watery, like blue glass underwater. But his hands were steady as he first lit my cigarette, then his own.
Weber called them tote Männer. Once he showed me their decomposing condition and single-minded hunger, I thought the term apt.
Weber was brought the first host in 1938 and had to keep the disease alive with new hosts from the Gestapo—which they were always willing to supply, though in small lots so he never had more than a few laboratory subjects at a time. He was never told where that first host came from but he surmised South America. Later, in 1940 when the laboratory was at Buchenwald, the Gestapo supplied him with a slow but steady trickle of Gypsies.
What he had discovered when I joined the project in 1941 was that infection was only successful by fluid transport from the infected host, infection was in two phases, and there were at least two components to the disease.
In one experiment, Weber took fluid from a toter Männ and filtered three samples, one through a 100 micron filter, one through a 50 micron filter, and one through a Chamberland filter. The 100 micron wash caused full infection. The 50 micron also caused a partial infection involving quick and sudden pain, followed by an inevitably fatal stroke. He called this partial infection type I-A. The Chamberland wash caused a particularly quick and virulent form of rabies—Weber referred to that as type I-B. Hence, Weber’s hypothesis of two components for a full infection, one large and the other the rabies virus. He had isolated a worm as the possible large component in that, when collected and washed of any contaminants, it seemed to cause an I-A infection similar to the infection caused by the 50 micron wash. When the Chamberland wash was recombined with the worm, full infection ensued.
Weber had even characterized the partial infections and the stages of the full infection. I found it interesting that the partial infections were both dismal, painful affairs, while the full infection showed up first as euphoria, followed by sleepiness and coma. The subject awoke in a few days as a toter Männ.
Even so, I was surprised that there hadn’t been more discovered in four years. After all, Weber had the tote Männer themselves and their inherent ability to infect others. The Gestapo was willing to provide a constant, if limited, supply of hosts. But Weber’s horror of contagion was so strong that every step had to be examined minutely until he had determined to his satisfaction that he could properly protect himself and his staff. Dissection was a long and tedious process; vivisection was almost impossible. I suppose I could not blame him. Even a partial infection would be fatal and full infection always resulted in another toter Männ. No one wanted to risk that.
Thus, my first task was the design and construction of a dissection and histology laboratory where Weber could disassemble the subjects in safety. It was not a difficult task. I came to Buchenwald in July. By the end of the month I had the design and began construction. Weber dissected his first wriggling subject by the first of September.
My fuel work had been much more interesting. It was exacting, exciting work with great applications. Here, I was barely more than a foreman. The war in Russia seemed to be going well and I wondered if I should have protested more to Willem.
But Elsa and our son Helmut loved Weimar. The city was pretty in a storybook way. It didn’t hurt that the bombers left Weimar largely undisturbed, instead striking in Germany proper. It lent the city a relative calm. Several young couples had taken over the empty housing. This was early in the war and food and petrol, though rationed, were still plentiful.
I didn’t work weekends and the three of us spent many summer days in the Park on the Ilm. It occurred to me, during those pleasant hours watching Helmut playing in front of Goethe’s House, that this was, perhaps, a better use of my time than the factory or the lab.
Within a week of opening the new facilities, Weber made some astonishing discoveries. Histological examination of the brain tissue of the tote Män
ner showed how the worms nested deep in the higher functioning brain—clearly explaining why there were only tote Männer and not tote rats and tote cats. He speculated that there could be tote gorillas and tote chimpanzees and went so far as to request animals from the Berlin Zoo. The Zoo was not cooperative. Weber reconsidered his New World origin of the disease and attributed it to Africa or Indonesia where the great apes lived. It stood to reason that a complex disease found suddenly in humans would require a similar host in which to evolve prior to human infection.
However, the worms were only one half of the disease. The virus followed the nervous system through the body, enabling worm entry into the brain but also enabling the growth of strong cords throughout the body. This was further proof of the two-component infection model Weber had developed. In the case of partial infections of the worm or the virus, the process only went so far. Forced by the absence of the virus to remain within the body’s major cavities, the worm caused fevers and paralysis, blocking blood vessels mechanically, causing a heart attack or stroke. The virus enabled the worm to penetrate directly into the brain, leaving the heart and circulatory system intact—at least for a while. Without the worm, the virus merely crippled the nervous system, causing fevers, seizures, and great pain. The cords only appeared when both were present. Weber was convinced by the pathology of the disease that the tote Männer virus was a variant of rabies, but the biological history of the virus, the worm, and the virus-worm combination was mysteriously speculative.
I dutifully reported this to Willem, along with descriptions of Weber, his assistant, Brung, and his mistress, Josephine, whom we had met at dinner in Weimar earlier in the summer. Unsure whether Willem’s desire for detail extended to the subjects, I included the names of the last couple of Gypsy hosts left from the Buchenwald experiments and the newer Jews we had appropriated from the main population of the camp. Weber was curiously reluctant to use the handicapped and mentally deficient and he hated using Poles. Perhaps this stemmed from some event in his past of which I was unaware.
Willem paid his niece a Christmas visit, visiting our laboratory only coincidentally. He was impressed with our progress. “With the tote Männer we will crush Russia,” he said over drinks that evening.
Weber paled. “There will be problems using the tote Männer in winter,” he said obliquely.
“Eh?” Willem looked at me. “Speak plainly.”
“The tote Männer cannot thermoregulate. This doesn’t show up in laboratory conditions but below ten degrees Celsius the worms do not function properly. By freezing they die and the host dies with them.”
Willem considered that. “We can clothe them.”
Weber grew excited. “They do not generate enough heat. Humans maintain temperature. Cats maintain temperature. Crocodiles do not. They do not eat—the hunger for brains is no more than the desire of the disease to perpetuate the infection—the way horsehair worms cause crickets to drown themselves. They do not consume what they put in their mouths. Metabolism keeps the body temperature above ambient somewhat like large lizards. Clothing lizards would have no more effect than clothing tote Männer.”
“I see,” Willem said. He patted down his vest until he located his cigarettes and lighter. “I’m going out on the porch for a smoke. Max, will you join me?”
Weber looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon. He rose as if to join us but Willem waved him back. “Don’t bother. This gives Max and me a chance to exchange a little gossip.”
Outside, we lit our cigarettes and watched the snow fall.
“It’s true what Weber said? We can’t use them as soldiers?”
I thought for a moment before answering. “Comparing them to crocodiles is apt. You can’t make a soldier out of an animal. And it’s too cold for them in the east.”
“Then what good are they? Is this all for nothing?”
“I did not say they could not be a weapon.”
“Tell me.”
“The crocodile simile is better than you know. They are very fast and very strong. There is so little to their metabolism that they are hard to kill. And they are terrifying—you’ve seen them. You know. We must be able to make some use of them.” I shook my head. “I don’t know enough yet. I need to perform some experiments. Weber has discovered the basic science. Now it is time to apply some German engineering.”
Willem nodded. “I’ll do what I can.” He grimaced. “Two weeks ago the Japanese attacked the Americans. The Americans declared war on Japan. We declared war on each other. They allied themselves with the British, which brings them into the war in Europe.”
“The Americans are too far away. They don’t have the strength of mind to make much difference.”
“So we thought in the last war. The point is I may not have much time to give.”
The goal was to deploy tote Männer to a suitable front and have them wreak havoc on the enemy while leaving our own troops alone. The tote Männer would terrify and demoralize the enemy. Our troops would march in behind them, clearing the area of enemy soldiers and tote Männer alike. Simple.
Only, we did not have a means by which we could create a large number of tote Männer simultaneously or a means by which we could be sure they would discriminate between our soldiers and the enemy.
Weber attacked the discrimination problem while I considered issues of scale.
Buchenwald was too small and low volume to be useful to us. Auschwitz was more appropriate to our needs. However, Auschwitz was already overwhelmed with the volume of its operation.
In October, the Birkenau expansion of Auschwitz had begun. It was scheduled to be complete in the spring. Willem had shown me copies of the plans. It was clear that only minor modifications to the Birkenau plans would accommodate our needs much more easily than building an addition to Buchenwald or moving to Auschwitz proper.
In January of 1942 I kissed Elsa and Helmut good-bye and boarded the train to Krakow. From there, I took a car west. It was beautiful country, full of gently rising mountains over flat valleys. Curiously unspoiled either by industry or by the war.
Auschwitz was a complex, not a single camp like Buchenwald. There were several smaller camps near the headquarters. Birkenau was farther west. Here, construction was going on apace in spite of the winter weather.
The foundations for gas chambers and crematoria had already been laid. But that didn’t matter as far as I was concerned. The addition of some larger chambers and holding areas was an insignificant change to a well-managed engineering project. I went over the modifications in detail with the chief engineer, a man named Tilly. Willem had sent me with a certificate of authority. That gave me the full support of Tilly and the chief of the camps, Rudolf Hoess, even though they did not know the reason for the modifications. I finished working out the details in two weeks.
I spent a few days in Krakow. I planned to move Elsa and Helmut into an apartment in Krakow and then travel to work by automobile. It was not far and the roads were good. If that proved impractical in a hard winter—something difficult for me to predict as the weather was now mild—I could just stay in the camp for a few days or come home on weekends.
When I returned, I found I had been gone just long enough for both Elsa and Helmut to miss me terribly. It made for a sweet homecoming.
Weber was reluctant to plan the move but saw my logic. He was preoccupied with the discrimination problem. Since the tote Männer were attracted to normal humans as hosts, he had reasoned that it was easier to attract them to a particular prey rather than repel them from a particular prey. He had performed several experiments with different hosts to see if there was any preference for differing types, such as racial subtype, diet, or other variables he could control.
I looked over the data and noticed that there was a marked difference in attack percentages not according to his typing but to the time the subjects arrived at the camp. Those subjects that were at the camp the longest were the most attractive to the tote Männer. I showed my figures to Weber. H
e instantly grasped the significance in ways I could not. The older inmates at Buchenwald were considerably thinner than the newer inmates since the rations were short. Fat utilization caused excretory products to be exuded by the skin and from the lungs. Weber reasoned these were what attracted the tote Männer.
Immediately, he called Willem for a mass spectrometer and a technician to run it.
We were all very tired but elated at this new direction. We decided to take a few days off. Elsa, Helmut, and I went for a trip into the mountains.
Birkenau opened in March of 1942. Weber and I stopped work on the subjects, except to keep an incubating strain alive, and took the month to pack up the laboratory for the move. In May, we moved the equipment, materials, and tote Männer to Birkenau. Once the planning for the move was complete, Weber supervised the staff and aides Willem had supplied. Elsa and Helmut traveled down to Krakow by train and took up residence in the apartment I had leased for them. As for myself, I left Buchenwald and returned to Berlin for meetings with representatives of Daimler-Benz and I. G. Farben. The delivery mechanism for the tote Männer still had to be devised.
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.