The Furies

VAN DE GRAFF GENERATOR: MAY 1944

You have to see it from the director's point of view, I tell them. We were struggling for the Fatherland, racing desperately against the incoming Russian tide. What was Hess to tell Goering? Sorry, Fat Hermann, I've just lost you the Second World War. The Reich is about to go down and you're going down with it. Our wonder weapon was sabotaged, you see. What would Fat Hermann say to that? I quite understand, Hess, think nothing of it? They're pretty tired, the young ones, and they seem tense about something, but they manage to smile. Hess wasn't smiling in those days. Hess only smiled when he had you by the balls and he was squeezing.

"You have something to tell me, Krafft." Hess's tone was a blend of murder and despair. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, Kurt, when you have to face Goering. And sabotage or not, he had mentally transferred the blame for the explosion onto me.

Four hundred years of Christian holiness surrounded us, seeping out of the gray pillars. The Virgin Mary was recessed into a wall. Some clown had made her a headscarf from a swastika flag, tied in a knot under her chin. Hess and I were walking slowly in step through the chapel. Daylight streaming through the stained-glass windows made multicolored strips on the flagstones, and the click of our heels echoed from the hard dolomite limestone around us.

"I can do it. We can recover from this."

Hess stopped in midstride. "What are you talking about?"

I rubbed my arms. It wasn't much warmer in here than outside. "The high-pressure gun was always dangerous."

"It was sabotage, Krafft, not mechanical failure. Sabotage of a device for which you carried responsibility."

We resumed our slow walk, the hostility between us almost tangible. "I awoke in the early hours with an idea. It just hit me. Dr. Hess, we don't need high-pressure guns or steel chambers. We can get straight into the hypervelocity regime with a completely different approach. And we can do it soon."

Hess, the drowning man, snatched at the lifeline. "You owe me this. What is this great idea, Krafft?"

"We go for a Van de Graff accelerator."

"You'd better explain that."

Now we were at the Crusader's tomb, Eduardo de Clari. The man was on his back, arms folded across his chest, sword at his side, an expression of piety on his bearded, white-marble face. I wondered about him: Why the piety? A high slaughter-count of Muslims? If we win the war, will we have St. Adolf in a hundred years?

"Krafft?"

"Sorry."

"How?"

"You tip a little thimbleful of fine, electrically charged dust into an evacuated tube. There's a set of metal rings surrounding the tube. You put a huge pulse of electricity into the rings, creating a massive magnetic field. The dust is accelerated along the tube. Daniela's done the calculations, and we think you could get fantastic speeds out of this with a high-enough voltage. Maybe three or four kilometers a second inside a tube just a meter long."

"Time scale?" Hess snapped. Herr Director was taking over again.

"These accelerators already exist. I believe there's one in Leiden University. But we'd need to modify it. If we work like maniacs I could have one up and running inside six weeks."

"I want you to do it in three."

NATZWEILER THE VOSGES

My heart gave a little jump as I walked into the refectory. Daniela was there, alone, with her back to me. The rest of the refectory was filled with workshop staff and technicians and noise and chatter. The place had an odor of bratwurst and cabbage and coffee. I sat down across from her.

"Hello, Max." She gave me a wan smile. No Heil Hitler this time. She was hollow-eyed and looked exhausted.

"Hello. Have you ordered?" We were having to raise our voices over the babble and the clatter of cutlery and plates.

"Just coffee."

"I think we're almost there with the survival rates."

The Van de Graff accelerator had turned up at the convent within a couple of days. Accompanying it were its entire operating staff from Leiden University, half a dozen men ranging from a senior professor to a sixteen-year-old technician; a surgical team tending a patient. I shared their humiliation when they were assigned to the laundry. Colleagues and equals, sharing straw bales with kitchen staff and chambermaids — forced labor from Poland and Russia! I shared their embarrassment when they turned up in the chapel under guard, unkempt, smelling and shivering with cold. They were sullen and uncooperative and I couldn't blame them. But there was a war on and I needed the accelerator to work. It wouldn't. It would not perform, it was just one big problem. The accelerator hissed and buzzed. The air crackled and stank with ozone. Long spidery arcs of electricity kept spreading into the far corners of the chapel, to the ill-disguised glee of the Dutchmen and the alarm of the guards.

Oberlin found the solution on the third day. A hanging.

He marched into the chapel with four guards and hauled out the young technician. The beams in the entrance hall of the convent were high, and it took several throws before the SS sergeant got the rope over it. Daniela had disappeared and reappeared minutes later, breathless and distraught, with Hess in tow. The Dutch professor told the director in anguished tones that the technician was vital to the operation of the machine. Hess didn't believe him. The argument raged back and forth while the boy sobbed, his arms held by two of Oberlin's men and his life in the balance. Hess finally ordered him hanged, ignoring the professor's frantic pleas. The boy kicked as the sergeant hauled on the rope. The Dutchmen watched this demonstration of German authority with expressions that told me we had better not lose the war. Daniela took the director aside, spoke to him quietly and urgently. Whatever she said, Hess nodded curtly, waved the now unconscious boy down, and strode off. After that, work had proceeded at miraculous speed, the machine covering in days what Willi Webber and I had taken months to achieve. Within three weeks — two of them waiting in frustration while the agar plates incubated — we had all the raw experimental data we needed for anthrax spores.

The next step was the dreaded sarin. For this another scientist had been co-opted, an Otto Klein from an IG Farben works, code-named Hochwerk, somewhere near the Polish Protectorate. He was a burly, bearded Nazi absolutely devoid of humor. He came with half a dozen white protective suits, which we had to wear in the presence of the scary chemical. A shower room had to be improvised in the chapel, which involved heavy drilling through the massive stone walls. It took nearly a day just to clear the dust. But he worked efficiently, and in another week we had what we needed for sarin, too, and nobody had died.

Now we just had to analyze the data and develop a weapon to end the war.

"That's terrific, Max, and so quick! So, should we get started on the analysis?"

"I'll bring the figures along to your office after breakfast."

"I've a much better idea. Why don't we get some sandwiches and coffee, have Myers saddle up horses, and do our work in the meadow? It's a lovely morning and we can have a picnic. Just the two of us."

For a second, I thought I was hearing things. I stood up, trying to look nonchalant while wanting to dance on the table. "Good idea. You order some breakfast stuff and I'll collect the data."

No question, a high-speed crash was bad for bugs. Daniela sat on a log, slim ankles poking under her long skirt, a light breeze ruffling her hair. I read out numbers while she calculated and plotted points on a graph.

The vital thing, it turned out, was the shock the bugs experienced when they came to a halt, the momentary slam of driving into a steel plate at huge speed. She calculated the peak shock pressure for each slam of the accelerator. At a third of a kilometer per second, about one in ten thousand bacteria survived the impact. At 1.3 km/second, the number was nearer one in a hundred thousand. At an incredible 5 km/sec, the highest speed we got from the Leiden machine, the tremendous slam yielded a survival rate down to one in ten million, depending on the bug. Daniela used a slide rule and plotted everything out on a logarithmic scale, and everything fit beautifully onto a straight line. Our airgun pellet trials, with bugs moving at snail speed and getting soft parachute landings on plasticine, belonged to the Stone Age.

^{*From Plasticine Age. All else Van de Graff. Bacillus subtilis spores used for 5.4 km/s shot.}

The spores were tougher. But still, at five kilometers a second, about the travel speed of a shock through high explosive, only one in ten thousand spores survived.

"Meaning that if we explode an artillery shell loaded with anthrax spores, we kill nearly all of them." Daniela looked at me meditatively. "That doesn't sound like a convincing weapon, does it?"

Something like relief in her voice? No, impossible. "Never underestimate a good engineer. But yes, we have a problem."

"The sarin's destroyed more easily than the spores."

"I suppose that's because the spores have evolved to protect themselves when the environment gets tough. They just curl up and wait for better times. They'll live more or less forever unless they're blown to bits." Is there something between you and Hess, Daniela? I've seen the way he looks at you and the way you look back. Can you possibly be interested in that worm? "We've reached a key point. I suppose the next thing is to find some way around this, and find out what the lethal dosages are for these horrors."

Daniela stood up and brushed crumbs from her skirt. "We should be getting back. Report to the others."

This close, the urge to grab her and kiss her was almost beyond my power to resist. I blurted out, "What is it between you and Hess? I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked. None of my business."

She kissed me lightly on the lips, a hand on my chest. She must have felt my heart hammering. "Dear Max. I know you like me a lot. But keep your distance from me, darling. There are things about me you don't know and I can't tell."

The Dutchmen disappeared a couple of days later, along with the Van de Graff accelerator. Bosch mentioned that he'd seen them going down the hill as they had come up it, in the back of a truck, under escort from SS men. They can't be returned to the university, knowing what they now know, I said. Where will they be taken?

Not our problem, Bosch said.

I agreed. Not our problem. Neither is Sister Lucy.

Bosch gave me a puzzled look but something told him not to pursue the matter.

A plume of ocher dust shot into the air and the deep whump! of the explosion reached us seconds later. The dust began to drift downwind, and the noise echoed back from a score of mountains before settling down into a decaying, rolling thunder.

"What are you playing with? Anthrax spores?" Hess wanted to know as we jumped into the little Kugelwagen.

"Rhodococcus erythropolis," I said. "Among other soil bacteria. All quite harmless, you needn't worry about turning blue or foaming at the mouth. Schnell. I need to get there quickly, while the microorganisms are still alive."

"What are you doing with them?" Hess adopted a snappy tone to show that he didn't approve of my lack of deference, my man-to-man attitude. I had it nicely calculated: not quite insubordinate, but neither showing the respectful tone Hess felt he was due.

I slammed into gear and accelerated away even before Herr Director had pulled the truck door shut. "This is a final check, Kurt. Lab results against a field trial. If the figures match, we're ready for the next stage." The truck hurtled at an angle down a steep meadowy slope, the grass slippery with rain, toward a track skirting a gorge. Hess gripped the dashboard with white hands.

"Hey, easy!" Hess called out in alarm as the truck hammered into a pothole near the edge of the road. I caught him glimpsing down at a fast, tumbling Alpine stream about fifty meters below us.

Edith was already scrambling into the bomb crater, followed by a couple of khaki-clad soldiers. As the truck slowed, Hess said, "Krafft, how would you like a weekend in Strasbourg?"

"Strasbourg? In the Vosges? I'd love that. I might get some climbing in. And it'll get me out of this nuthouse. I assume there's a catch."

"Don't be so cynical, you're too young."

"It's the Russian front. It puts years on you."

"It's your own fault for letting it get to you. You have to retain your vision. ‘The trick is to do hard things and yet remain a decent fellow.' Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS."

I switched off the engine. "I know what you're getting at. ‘We all have our feet in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' "

"That's the spirit." Hess stuck his jaw out, Mussolini-style. We jumped out and marched toward the smoking crater. The grass around it was flattened outward from the blast.

"Oscar Wilde, English homosexual."

"You're not as smart as you think, Krafft. I happen to know he was Irish. Well, hurry up and collect your soil. We're booked into the Swissotel in Strasbourg and we have a flight laid on. Just Edith, you, and me."

"I haven't climbed for years."

"I have a big treat for you, and it's not going up and down mountains." Hess gave an unpleasant grin that left me with a vague sense of unease.

The entrance gate was a high wooden scaffolding, over which was a simple notice: NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF. A double ring of low, barbed-wire fences stretched around a few acres of sloping ground. Outside the fences were a grass meadow, then trees, and beyond that, in the distance, hills poking through a morning mist. Gray-painted wooden watchtowers were spaced at intervals just outside the fence. Inside were closely packed rows of broad, squat buildings, green-roofed. Hundreds of prisoners of both sexes stood or sat huddled in groups, in blue-and-white-striped tunics, breaths steaming in the freezing air. I began to feel my skin creep without being sure why. I spotted, in an open area that I assumed was for roll calls, a wooden gallows. Scheisse.

"The place is quiet just now," the SS officer said, offering chairs with a wave of the hand. A stove was burning warmly in the hut. He looked as if he was fresh from university, smartly dressed, but the shine on his boots was marred by smears of something. "Most of the inmates are used by DEST…"

"DEST?" Hess asked, warming his hands at the stove.

"The SS Materials Company," the officer explained. "We have a granite quarry nearby. It makes sense to get something useful out of the flotsam they send to us. They'll be back late tonight." He smiled knowingly. "Those who make it through the day, that is. But we have no problems with labor supply. They just keep coming."

"What sort of people do you have here?"

"Several hundred NN prisoners." He smiled again. "There I go, more acronyms. Nacht und Nebel."

"Night and Fog. You mean…"

"Enemies of the state. People who just disappear, taken by the Gestapo in the night."

"Naturally families and friends wonder where they have gone."

"And naturally they never find out. The midnight knock, all part of the rich tapestry of control. Well, lady and gentlemen, for you the mystery of Night and Fog is solved. This is where the disappeared end up."

The officer stood up and walked over to the window. Frost had melted on the glass, and he wiped the condensation away with a handkerchief. "We also have quite a few partisans, Norwegians, French, Belgians, and Dutch. Four English saboteurs awaiting special treatment, all female, and we have a steady supply of Gypsies."

Hess turned his head to the window. "It's a beautiful setting."

"And isolated. Tucked away in the mountains. That's one of its great attractions. Nobody knows about this place, even less about what goes on here. Obviously the prisoners can't send any correspondence."

"And yet you're only forty minutes from Strasbourg."

"The university's medical faculty finds it convenient. Our laboratory attracts a steady stream of researchers. Professor Hirt travels to someplace in Poland and brings back prisoners with interesting skeletal structures for the university. I'm told they have one of the finest collections in Europe."

"He brings them in alive?" I asked.

The SS man blinked in surprise. "Naturally. We deflesh the skeletons here. The university has a fine anatomical display of skulls. And Professor von Haagen does excellent work here on wound infection, mustard gas symptoms, typhus, smallpox, diphtheria, and cholera. Rest assured we have the necessary facilities to meet your requirements. Are you all right?"

The question was directed at me. "Just a little light-headed. It's been a long trip."

"You needn't have any qualms about using the prisoners for your own purposes, you know. They all come into the category of lives not worth living, or already condemned."

Hess stood up. "We should get busy. There's a tight deadline on our project. And poor Max looks as if he needs some fresh air."

"Of course. I've asked our camp doctor, Werner Rohde, to show you the laboratory and the gas chamber. You have full use of them for the next two days. The chamber is just outside the wire. It's small but useful for fast turnaround. Beyond that — well, there is pressure from other groups, you know." He laughed lightly.

"Two days will suffice. Thank you very much."

"Glad to help. I'll get a few of my men and you can just take a stroll around the camp. Select as you go, that's what they're here for. How many do you need?"

The question was directed at Hess, who said, "We'll need calibration curves for a wide range of body weights. Also we want to know the time taken to die as a function of dosage." He turned to me: "Krafft? How many?"

How many prisoners? I felt my face going pale. I stood up. "I need some air. I'm not very good on winding roads." I was conscious of Hess, Edith, and the SS officer's eyes following me to the door. Edith was full of matronly disapproval, Hess was tight-lipped and angry. The SS man seemed puzzled.

I stood in the mud and breathed in the air. It was cold and clear but carried a smell of something — something unpleasant. I couldn't identify it.

How did I get into this?

The others emerged from the hut. The SS officer was pulling on gloves. He and Hess marched off chattering in the direction of a low, whitewashed building with a long metal chimney projecting horizontally from a wall before turning skyward. Hess threw me a glance that didn't bode well for my future. Edith joined me, offering a wartime cigarette. I shook my head.

"You're shivering," she said, cupping her hands around a match. She nodded toward the gallows, about a hundred meters away. "It looks like there's less shit round about there."

"I don't suppose it's a popular meeting place. It's not exactly the Tiergarten." We walked slowly toward the gallows.

And how am I going to get out of it?

Edith took in a lungful of smoke, breathed it out through her nostrils. "You're not giving a good impression, Max. How did you imagine we were going to find the lethal dosage?"

"Never gave it a thought."

"You're a liar. You must have guessed."

"I'm just an engineer. If you'd asked me, I'd have said animals."

"All this condemned human material, assembled here for experimentation, and you want to use animals? I've never heard anything so stupid! Some things just have to be done, that's all. We've just got to win this war. Do you want the Bolsheviks in your precious Tiergarten? We're fighting for the survival of the Reich. No, we're fighting for the Aryan race itself. Our work can save us."

I nodded in the direction of a huddled group. "There are children here."

Edith puffed sharply at her cigarette. "Oh, snap out of it, for Christ's sake. Medical research with these types is perfectly legal. It's been authorized by Himmler himself. You're going to help us choose suitable subjects whether you like it or not. It's your plain duty. Now, what are your requirements?"

"I won't do it."

"God in Heaven. Don't say that to Hess. He'd put you inside here, it's just the sort of bizarre joke that would appeal to him."

"The possibility has occurred to me."

"If you thought of it, and I thought of it, even an idiot like Hess will think of it. What's the matter with you? Look, Max, you're one of the brightest people I know but you're also one of the most stupid. Have you thought about the consequences if you refuse?"

"For the war effort?"

"For Max Krafft."

I frowned, but stayed silent. We'd reached the gallows, which was suddenly acquiring a very personal significance.

"Hess doesn't like you, Max, all he needs is an excuse. Look, I can't tell you not to have a conscience about this. But I can ask whether you're going to put your personal feelings above your duty to your country."

I closed my eyes, breathed in the stench. Edith waited until I'd opened them again. "I don't like it, either, but someone has to do it. Are you going to stand back feeling all righteous and superior while the rest of us do your dirty work for you? Hey you! Come here! Over here! And you!"

Reluctantly, a Gypsy boy of about fourteen shambled toward us, followed by a large, heavily built man. The boy's face was filthy, and insects were crawling around his hair. He was skinny and trembling. The man removed his blue-and-white cap deferentially. "They must feed you well, with a belly like that," said Edith. "How long have you been here?"

"Two days, madame." The accent was foreign, perhaps Dutch.

Edith turned to me. "There, I've got you a couple already. Two people at the extreme ends of the mass spectrum. Tell you what, I'll select them, you won't even have to choose them. All you have to do is weigh them, measure the dosage they get, and see how long they last. Put crosses on a piece of paper, that's all that's being asked of you."

I said, "What's your name, little one?"

Edith, sharply: "Don't speak to them that way."

"Bleeker, sir." The boy had understood German; his voice was weak and shaky.

"And you? What do you do?"

"Kloppman, sir. I'm a baker from Leiden." The man's eyes were brimming with dread.

"Clear off, the pair of you."

Edith dropped the stub of her cigarette, looked as if she was going to grind it into the frozen ground, then changed her mind. "Even easier for you, Max. Just fetch the vials from the back of the car and bring them over to the laboratory. That will keep you nice and detached from the process, won't it? Your conscience can run to that? Just fetch the vials. In exchange, we'll keep your skull out of Dr. Hirt's fine collection."

The three-point rule. Three points of contact, three limbs holding on. Toes wedged in; left fist, red and raw, jammed in a crack. Right hand exploring.

I ease myself along the limestone face. Sleet is falling and the cold is marrow-deep, penetrating, ferocious. I welcome it, love the pain. The cliff face curves. The tree line is now below me and I look down at the jagged limestone slabs three hundred meters below. On my own; no ropes; light fading; rock beginning to overhang: I think maybe I've lost my mind.

Chimney now visible. Easing into it, spread-eagled, groping at the limit. Cheek against hard icy wet slippery rock. Taking big gulps of breath — exertion, fear, rage, whatever. Insanity. The grass and rock on the traverse behind me will now be ice-coated: can't go back. But now I see that the chimney flares upward, a wedge ascent won't work: can't go up, either. Stuck, well and truly stuck.

Now I spot a crack on the far wall of the chimney, finger-thick. Would have to break the three-point rule, leap across the gap like a monkey.

Three hundred meters below, my grave, waiting. Cloud drifts over it. Solid cloud, made from big hunks of cotton wool, it'll catch me if I fall, I'll float gently down.

Fuck the three-point rule. Fuck the Reich. Fuck the Führer and his gang of midgets.

I tense up, take a deep breath, and leap for the crack.

THE SUPERMEN: CONVENT WINE CELLAR

"The origin of the Aryan race lies in outer space. We entered the atmosphere as tiny shoots encased in ice. Our leaders are descended from the Vikings, and our homeland was a huge empty territory of mountains and forests. We conquered that wilderness, we were huge and strong and fierce, and we intermarried with no other race. Blut und Boden. That is our cosmic inheritance."

"Blood and soil, right. Raise you a Médoc." My speech was slurred and my mouth felt numb. I was freezing, even in the greatcoat with its collar pulled up. I corkscrewed the bottle open and slid it across the oak table. It cleared a path through a century of dust.

Otto Klein, the man from IG Farben, was too busy pontificating to notice the cold. "Your problem, Max, is that you have no feel for history. No understanding of the forces that have molded us. You know of Hoerbiger's Cosmic Ice?"

"Two pairs, you win. I've heard of it — some rubbish." The cellar smelled old and musty and was lined with racks of wine. The far end was lost in gloom apart from a crucifix on the wall, its silver reflecting light from a few candles on the table. Half a dozen wine bottles stood open between us. It was well after midnight, and the candles were beginning to gutter. We were trying to get drunk as quickly as possible.

Oberlin's men had discovered the secret cellar only that morning. A low, heavy oak door, its key long missing, had given away to a few blows with a sledgehammer. The origin of the wine cellar was a mystery. Edith guessed the wine was to provide hospitality to visiting bishops and the like.

Klein sniffed at it, then poured a quarter of the bottle into a cup and gulped back a mouthful. He belched, wiped his lips with his sleeve, and said, "Wonderful. One of the grand crus. It takes forever to develop but when it's ready!"

"You were saying. Ice."

"The Greek epic tales did not originate under soft Mediterranean skies, but in the cold Baltic. They were brought south by our ancestors and handed down through the generations. The heroic tales they tell are theirs. We came from ice, we grew powerful in ice."

"I get you. Troy was really in Norway."

"And it has taken an Austrian, Hans Hoerbiger, an engineer like you, to put the Jewish scientists in place just as the Führer has cleansed the nation of the Jewish infection."

"Your call."

"Once upon a time a star exploded. The water from this star condensed into blocks of ice in interstellar space. A ring of this ice formed our solar system, with many planets, only a few of which still exist. Our earth had several moons."

"At the risk of sounding stupid, where did these moons go, Otto?"

"One by one they spiraled down to earth, disintegrating as they fell. The last such falling moon is remembered by our early ancestors. They recorded them in myth whose meaning has all but vanished. Note how the Greeks, and before them the Babylonians, describe gods battling it out in the sky, hurling weapons to earth that flatten forests, set the land on fire, and create giant tidal waves. Note how the Midgard serpent straddles the sky, burning up everything below it, destroying whole kingdoms. These are tales of real events, Krafft, handed down through the ages until the reality is forgotten and today we think they are just fairy tales."

"They're not?"

"One day our moon, too, will spiral down to the earth, breaking into pieces and plunging us into another ice age, like the one from which our ancestors emerged."

"I'm sure you're right. And it's your call."

But Klein had the face of a drunken evangelist; there was no stopping him. "As the ice age passed, our race became soft. We gradually lost our roots, we dwindled into modernity. It has taken a genius like Adolf Hitler to gather up once again all the peoples of Germania and return us to the path of strength, communion with nature, and racial purity."

"I said your call."

Klein waved cigar smoke away from his eyes and leaned back. His jacket was unbuttoned, and there was a red wine stain on his shirt. He fanned out his cards and looked speculatively over them at me.

"I know things about you, Krafft."

"I suspect Oberlin has asked you to spy on me. Any defeatist talk, lack of enthusiasm for the war, or similar tendencies."

"Landed family, old money. Connected with the duchess of Sachsen-Anhalt and the Hanfstaengls, all of you financial supporters of our Führer in the early days. You have plenty of society friends…"

"Spoken with a sneer, my dear Otto. You sound like our director."

"… but you're not a club man. Entitled to use the von prefix but for some reason you choose not to do so. Catholic; no Jews in your ancestry at least as far back as the Thirty Years' War. Nominally a party member but in fact you're disappointingly apolitical. Too good for us, are you?"

"Two pairs again. So what are you going to report?"

"A failure to embrace the National Socialist cause with enthusiasm. A dangerous individualism. A tendency toward insubordination. But basically a good German and an invaluable member of the team."

"I'm grateful."

"You're not drinking. Did you know, Max, that the ancestors of our race lived on a great northern island, Atlantis? Also known as Thule? Even you know that Atlantis sank below the waves in a great cataclysm. After it sank, there was a diaspora of the survivors. We spread to northern Europe and the Middle East." The man's face was flushed, and his eyes were shining.

I half filled an enamel mug and took a sip. It could probably have done with another couple of years. Where are the nuns? That question again; Catholic saint struggling with SS sinner. "Your deal," I reminded Klein.

He gulped back the wine as if he were at some Bierfest. Some dribbled unnoticed down from the corner of his mouth. He shuffled the deck clumsily, cigar in hand, dealt the cards, and held his close to his face, concentrating. "Ancient Germany preserved that Atlantean civilization. They kept our race strong and pure through a program of eugenics. They preserved the strong and rejected the weak."

"Rejected the weak? What does that mean in plain language?"

Klein adopted a one must be hard expression over the top of his cards. "Lebensunwertes, life unworthy of life. Conditions were too harsh to support the unsupportable. Read Germania, by Tacitus — in the Latin, of course, unless you're illiterate. There you will learn something else: We were free from all taint of racial intermarriage. Tacitus notes that we were a distinct, unmixed race, unlike any others. That is how we lived then and how we will live again."

"Painting ourselves with woad?"

"Mankind is a rabble led by an elite. We need supermen and super-races. Do you think life has evolved by cooperation? No, it has progressed by the struggle to survive, by the strong eradicating the weak, the intelligent eradicating the stupid, the superior eradicating the inferior. Without this process we would never have emerged from a prehuman state at all. We would indeed still be painting ourselves with woad, Max. That is why our Aryan race must conquer the inferior ones. That is why we must remain strong and uncontaminated. We owe the strength and purity we have now to our ancient pagan culture, kept alive by the Armenschaft. Just one card?"

"This gets more bizarre by the minute. The who?" "A secret order. The knowledge of our Atlantean civilization was encoded and given to the Rabbis in the form of the Kabbalah."

"The Rabbis, I see."

"Did you know that Jesus was an Aryan? Raise you the last bottle."

"Mein Gott, Otto, how much of this drivel do you believe?"

"All of it. The Jews would not have killed one of their own. And medieval Europe, with its Knights Templar and its monasteries" — Klein waved the wine bottle around — "preserved the ancient, Aryan way of life."

"So when did the rot set in?"

"Your tone is noted, but luckily for you I am drinking Château Margaux. Had it been some cheap Languedoc…" Klein made a throat-cutting gesture. "The rot, as you call it, set in with the spread of modern liberal ideas. Nietzsche, Gobineau, Haeckel, all foresaw the dangers of racial contamination with inferiors such as Indians and Negroes, reminded us of the superiority of the Germanic peoples. Look at your skull."

"Sorry?"

"It's Nordic. As are those of Daniela, Edith, and Hess. What our scientists call dolichocephalic. You are all plainly Aryan and plainly superior human beings. Bosch I'm not so sure about. His skull is more rounded, more Homo alpinus. I suspect his bloodline has Jewish contamination somewhere up the line. The Jews and the Slavs, they are brachycephalic" — Klein slurred the word — "short and broad. These are the untermenschen, the inferior races who threaten to dilute our Germanic genius." Wreaths of cigar smoke were scattering the candelight and half hiding the Farben chemist's face.

"I was facing these Slavs on the battlefield not long ago. The word inferior didn't spring to mind."

Klein paused to refresh his dried throat straight from the bottle. "But through it all, despite the corrupting liberalism of the Habsburg Empire, despite the rise of Bolshevism, our old ways were secretly preserved. The Armenschaft evolved into several lodges, and by the early twentieth century the chief among these was the Thule Society. I have heard rumors" — he tapped the side of his nose knowingly — "that they created the German Workers Party to attract a mass membership. It was the Führer who took this party and molded it into the German National Socialist Movement. And it was the Führer who has taken our defeated and betrayed country from the North Cape to Africa, from Calais to the Caucasus. We are privileged to be present at the delivery of … Ach!" I'd laid out a flush, but my stomach was beginning to revolt, and I declined the offered wine.

A couple of candles had died, and the others were under way. The dying light, thrown upward on his face and the smoke, was giving Klein a demonic look. It reminded me of some image of Faust I'd seen — where, where? In the Berlin Opera House? No, it was an old Fritz Lang movie starring Max Schreck, and it wasn't Faust, it was Nosferatu. "So you see, Max, there is an unbroken line of descent from our Atlantis heritage to our National Socialist Movement. The Führer, and Reichsführer-SS Himmler, are reestablishing our ancient values, purifying our Germanic race, restoring it to its true place at the pinnacle of evolution."

I threw my cards down. "This is what the Macaronis call a fiasco. I've had enough. I'm off to bed."

"What's the matter, Max? You look nervous." Another candle died, and Klein stood up unsteadily. He staggered, knocked his chair over, and gave a high-pitched laugh. "You're not scared of the dark, are you?"

"Not the dark, Otto. The Dark Age. The one we're creating."

THE FLYING CIRCUS: DANIELA'S STUDY

I endured a sweaty, sleepless night, embroiled in damp sheets, the long wakeful periods interspersed by brief, frightening dreams. A bloodstained meat hook kept recurring, and an Alsatian, and a terrified boy — a weird hybrid between Bleeker and a blond-haired Hitler Youth. The images were so lurid that I wondered if I'd inhaled a tiny quantity of the nerve gas. At one point I awoke choking, panicking, and gasping for breath. I groped for my watch and the light switch — it was three in the morning. Daniela was still playing, chords of Chopin just audible through the open window. But at last, with the sky growing light through a chink in the blackout curtain, exhaustion drove me to sleep.

Half an hour later an army orderly knocked stiffly on my door. A red-faced young subaltern, buttons shiny on his tunic; I'd seen him in the canteen. "Standartenführer Dr. Hess requests that you have breakfast promptly this morning. He has something to announce in Dr. Bauer's office at eight o'clock." I listened to the soldier receding down the corridor, march-march, knock-knock, the message being repeated word for word in a loud, strident voice; the embodiment of Prussian military virtue: no brain necessary, just a well-trained spinal cord.

Hess made his theatrical entrance at three minutes past eight. I'd brought in a cup of black coffee and put it with shaky hands on a table. I was nursing a monstrous headache — was it the wine, or a whiff of nerve gas? — and my throat was raw from the night's choking. Klein had the complexion of a man hovering between life and death. He caught my eye and managed a bleak smile.

The director marched importantly into the room and dumped sheets of paper on the desk in front of the blackboard. "Heil Hitler! I have the lethal dosage for tabun 146, and it's wonderful." His eyes were shining. Bosch rubbed a hand tensely over his mouth. "Shut the door, Dr. Zimmer-mann. Let's keep this among the six of us."

Edith closed the door, and Hess continued. "A raindrop. That's all it takes, a raindrop. A one-millimeter sphere of our nerve agent. Put a single drop on your skin, and you die."

Bosch blinked. "Unbelievable. How did you find that out?"

I snapped, "Don't ask stupid questions." I was suddenly gripped by an insane desire to kill all of them.

Hess turned a chair backward and straddled it; they did this in American movies. "Ignore Max, our heroic SS man has a weak stomach. And it goes by body weight. The calibration is a hundredth of a milligram for each kilogram of body weight — can you believe that?" He held up a piece of graph paper showing about a dozen crosses scattered about a thick straight line, ran a nicotine-stained finger along the line.

The bottom cross, that would be little Bleeker. The top one would be the baker. Had Hess needed all the crosses for the straight line? Couldn't he have skimped on one or two? Maybe sacrificed a decimal place in exchange for three lives? The nightmares flickered at the back of my mind, threatening my sanity. I sensed something just on the edge of my vision, caught Daniela giving me the briefest glance, her dark eyes full of expression. But meaning what? Disapproval? A warning, Keep yourself under control? But why should she warn me? Confused, I looked away quickly.

Hess, straddling the chair backward, was in his element. "What we have to do now is match scenarios of destruction of military interest to a practical weapon. Krafft, you're the munitions man. Here you are, summoned to the Eagle's Nest. You are bringing the Führer a beautiful birthday present, a big weapon to gladden his heart. What would you like to bring him?"

"I have a big weapon?" There was an outburst of ribald laughter from the men. Edith put a hand over her mouth.

Hess flushed. "This is not a subject for stupid humor. I can tell you this. We can tap into the industrial might of the Reich. If we wish, we can ask for hundreds of tons to be created."

I felt myself going pale. "Did I hear you say hundreds of tons?" Does this idiot want to wipe out the human race?

Daniela was smiling. "We could turn London into a giant cemetery."

"Only if we can deliver it." Hess was still red-faced in the morning sun streaming through the big windows. He scowled. "Think of something, a present for the Führer."

"Smuggle a big one into Trafalgar Square and set it off."

I'd intended it as an absurdity. But to my horror, Hess was nodding his approval. "Now, that's what I call thinking big. Let's get a handle on this. Daniela, use your mathematics. What would it take to destroy a city? Even London? Show us the theoretical possibilities. Then we can back off and look at the real-world prospects."

I watched her all the way to the blackboard, the slim waist, the slight, unconscious sway of her hips; it was enough to drive a monk mad. I watched her as she paced up and down for a minute, unconsciously tapping her teeth with a piece of chalk. Then she glanced up and said, "If we could carpet an area ten kilometers long by five wide with our magic gas, we'd take out the Churchill gang, the English War Office, the whole British government. We'd decapitate England."

Hess stood up. This was the kind of talk he was wanting to hear, and anyway, straddling the chair backward was beginning to strain his thighs. He stood at the other end of the blackboard from Daniela. Encouragement flowed out of him telepathically. "An act that, if threatened against other English cities, would finish the war in the west. And then we could turn it against the Bolsheviks in the east. Result, victory!"

Klein was shaking his skull-like head. "If only."

Hess turned to Daniela. "How would you do it?"

Daniela narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, and seemed to be talking half to herself. "Rain, Kurt. A drizzle so light that just a single raindrop hits each Londoner. We'd have to get liquid sarin high up and disperse it as a fine mist. Let it drift with the wind and settle down over the city like a blanket." She began to scribble on the blackboard. "Say we have a mild breeze, maybe ten meters a second. What's the falling speed of a tiny raindrop, say a tenth of a millimeter across?"

"How would I know something like that?" Hess asked.

Edith said, "I'd guess a millimeter a second."

Daniela said, "It's a question of balancing forces. The weight of the drop is balanced by the resistance of the air it's falling through." She turned to the blackboard, scribbled equations.

"Don't give me abstract mathematics. What are you, a white Jew? Give me real numbers," Hess demanded. "Krafft, what's the density of air?"

"At sea level? A thousand times down on sarin."

Bosch said, "So it's down to the size of the droplets?"

Daniela completed her scribbling. "Yes. If your lethal raindrop is a tenth of a millimeter in radius, it'll fall at four-tenths of a millimeter per second. You weren't far off, Edith."

Hess asked, "Say our raindrop is falling at four-tenths of a millimeter per second and being blown along in the wind at ten meters a second. How high do we have to start it, say we want to blanket ten kilometers?"

I said, "Ten meters up."

"Rubbish, Krafft. You have to start it higher than the rooftops. At least a hundred meters up." I nodded, irritated by the fact that the humorless Nazi was right.

Daniela scribbled some more. "A blanket ten kilometers long, five wide, and say a hundred meters deep has a volume of — "

"Five cubic kilometers," Edith interrupted.

"Right again," Daniela said. "Now think of a barrel of air. Say a good English citizen in a breeze is exposed to a hundred barrels of air in ten seconds."

"In ten seconds the raindrop falls so much." Edith held a finger horizontally.

"Exactly. We just need one drop of sarin in those hundred cubic meters, which means, for blanketing London to a depth of a hundred meters" — scribble scribble, the chalk giving a nerve-jarring squeak — "five hundred million drops. We need to blanket London in a fine mist, invisibly fine." In this male-dominated company, the women seemed to be running the discussion.

Hess said, "I told you the lethal dose is half a milligram for an average human. That's the weight of your raindrop, half a milligram."

"So that works out at" — scribble scribble again — "half a ton. If this stuff has the same density as water, we could put that in a sphere — "

Edith was clapping her hands. "A meter across. We can wipe out London with a bomb a meter across! Oh joy, oh Jerusalem!"

"What a present!" Hess's eyes were shining. "But could we do it? Could we make something to match Daniela's figures?"

Bosch was pacing up and down at the back of the room like a restless lion. "Dispersal. That's the big issue. How to disperse that amount of material over a city. What's the actual mechanism of death?"

Hess was still on a high. "You should have seen it. At sublethal doses the victim got a runny nose, headache, hallucinations, and ended up foaming at the mouth, like a rabid dog. A bit higher and they had problems breathing, then they would go into these spectacular convulsions. Soon they would lose consciousness and die. But the super-lethal doses, they were amazing. The prisoners went into huge convulsions within seconds. They choked to death, whether from the stuff foaming out of their mouths or from loss of control of breathing I don't know and I don't care."

I said, "There was a reduction in something called cholinesterase. It seems this stuff controls muscles, and the nerve gas destroys it. Meaning your brain can't control your body. You just can't function and you can't stop shaking." I'm one of you. Create that impression.

Christ, I am one of you.

Daniela had been calculating some more on the board. Now she turned to me. "Max, you're our deliveryman. What do you think of a one-ton bomb? Could you explode it at height, let the wind carry the aerosol over London?"

Bosch said, "You would just get a thin stream. It would be useless."

"We're forgetting something. Willi Webber and I found that the shock from high explosive destroys nearly everything, bacteria, spores, sarin."

Klein was pacing up and down. "You know this for a fact?"

"I've just spent months proving it."

Bosch's tone was challenging. "You're the clever engineer, Max. Think of something that will disperse without destroying, like carrying the bugs along on a plume, or spraying them. What about something like an American crop duster, crisscrossing London?"

Hess laughed. "Carrying a ton? We'd need lots of them, a regular flying circus, weaving around the barrage balloons as they sprayed. I can't go to Hermann Goering with that."

Edith was pacing up and down, too, her hands on top of her head. "Anyway, you'd need extremely fine nozzles, and I don't know if these even exist. Even if they do, they'd take forever to disperse the lethal dosage."

Hess said, "The English won't allow our Luftwaffe to fly up and down as if they were spraying a field, and that's that. No further discussion of that notion."

Klein looked across at me. "The Führer has been bombarding London with vengeance rockets. They must carry a ton of warhead. What about it, Max? Could we disperse anthrax from the warheads a kilometer up?"

Daniela said, "These things must come in at two or three kilometers a second. Anything you did in that line would just give local dispersion, not citywide."

"Come up with something." Hess gave a ghoulish grin. "And don't forget anthrax, the spores thereof. I'm hoping that Daniela will tell us we could kill a million Londoners with it. I want the stench from the corpses to reach France."

"What's the lethal dosage?" Edith wanted to know.

"It's high," Hess admitted. "Ten thousand spores."

"They have to be breathed in?" Daniela asked.

"They have to be breathed in. They're about five microns across, just the right size for getting stuck in your lungs. Any smaller and you'd breathe them back out, much bigger and they'd get trapped in your throat, where they're less effective."

"Okay, we can work on that. Say we take in half a liter of air every time we breathe, and say we take a breath every five seconds. If we can create a mist that will hang in the air for, say, five minutes, then our Londoners are breathing in" — she counted on her fingers — "thirty liters of London air."

"That comes out at a lethal dose of three spores per cubic centimeter," Bosch said. "Completely invisible! Wonderful, wonderful. Multiply that by five cubic kilometers to get the number of spores …"

Bosch was writing on paper, racing Daniela on her blackboard. He looked up and said, "Seven and a half tons," just as she was writing the number on the board.

"Useless." Bosch crumpled his paper. "Where do we get that amount of spores?"

"No, not useless." Hess was shaking his head. "We could get that amount. I've been speaking to people in Spandau. They can produce huge amounts from liquid cultures. You should have seen their vat, just like a huge beer fermentation vat. They'll make twenty of them if we want. If anthrax is desiccated and kept out of sunlight, it will last for centuries. It's a natural for a weapon. And I don't believe your seven and a half tons. All we need to do is create an anthrax mist that lingers for an hour over London. If we can do that, we do the job. Think of it! An invisible miasma spreading over London, like a medieval plague."

"What are the symptoms?" That question again. This time Daniela was asking. I thought there was a trace of unsteadiness in her voice, but dismissed it as imagination. God, I need to sleep.

"It takes a day or two to get a hold. It begins like flu, but the fever just keeps rising. Soon you can hardly breathe. Then you go into shock, then a coma. Mortality is eighty percent, better even than smallpox."

"Sounds like a dream," Bosch said. "I agree with you, Kurt, we should pursue the anthrax option also."

"How do we get the fine mist? The invisible miasma? That's the brick wall. How to disperse our magic potions without destroying them? High explosives are out. Crop dusters are out. What's left? I want you people to tell me." Hess sat down and put his feet up on a desk, steepling his hands and narrowing his eyes. I suddenly realized that the man, having no ideas of his own, was fishing in the intellectual pond around him. And if we gave him any ideas, he would no doubt collect the credit when he transmitted them to Goering.

The director, having done his deep-thinker pose, stood up and marched toward the door. He turned. "You will give me the design for a working weapon. You will do so within five days." He waited until the howls of protest had died down. "This has been a wonderful morning." He clicked his heels and gave the fascist salute. "Heil Hitler!"

"Heil Hitler," I chanted with the others. Arschloch.